One of the most beloved, bewitching, misunderstood, and eventually disappointing bands in recent history, Belle & Sebastian did the near-impossible in ...

Belle and Sebastian: Dear Catastrophe Waitress

Dear Catastrophe Waitress

One of the most beloved, bewitching, misunderstood, and eventually disappointing bands in recent history, Belle & Sebastian did the near-impossible in the Internet era: They seemed to appear out of nowhere. Admittedly, there was also a time (recently, in fact) when I'd wished they'd have mysteriously vanished as well, exorcising the dark spots of their post-1998 output in order to keep their reputation-- or at least Stuart Murdoch's-- in respectable shape.
From their inauspicious beginnings in 1995, the collective emerged from Scotland with wistful, nostalgia-laden indie pop that examined sexual frustration, shiftlessness, loneliness, and isolation. Murdoch's songs-- often punctuated by proper and place names-- painted expressionist, detail-oriented worlds that, when they connected with a listener, often left an indelible, deep impression. What went wrong is typically chalked up to a split in songwriting duties, a practice that made their third and fourth albums, The Boy With the Arab Strap and Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant, disjointed, frustrating listens. The band's choice to democratize, allowing a fair number of songs from each band member, negated the singularity of Murdoch's vision, often at the cost of his wit and charm. This all-inclusive measure also resulted in the band drifting toward a pastiche of too-familiar touchstones: 60s baroque pop, Northern Soul/Motown, and folk-rock.
On their fifth proper album, Dear Catastrophe Waitress, Belle & Sebastian continue their exploration of pastiche, diversifying their sonic palate to include 70s soft-rock, the irreverent pop of 10cc and Squeeze, and bubblegum. Here, the band's once-misguided ambition is tailored and cut by famed producer (and founder of notorious 1980s art-pop groups The Buggles and The Art of Noise), Trevor Horn, who aids the band in making a complete 180-degree turn from wry, wistful folk-pop to sophisticated, tight, sometimes-complex arrangements with a keen attention to detail. Horn's touch is most effective on "Stay Loose" and "I'm a Cuckoo", two ambitious classic AM pop gems that-- like the best of his past production work-- threaten to spill over into the absurd but instead remain delightfully audacious.
Ironically, with a new-found ability to rectify their once at-odds musical interests, Belle & Sebastian have emerged as shiny happy people, becoming that of which they were always falsely accused: t*ee. That label was always more appropriate to the infantilism-obsessed, Sanrio-loving element in their fanbase, while the band itself traded in innuendo, sinisterism, anxiety, and sketches of unfulfilled childhoods. But here, songs such as "Roy Walker", "You Don't Send Me", and the semi-creepy Godspellian "If You Find Yourself Caught in Love" are so bubblegum they could have been staples of any number of early 70s TV families, from the Bradys to the Osmonds to the Partridges.
That may sound dreadful but Belle & Sebastian manage to do a lot of things right-- including "You Don't Send Me", whose strength lies in its effective application of aesthetic. "Piazza, New York Catcher" manages to come off like a woozy, drunken version of the Murdoch demo "Rhoda", and it's his most lyrically complex work here, reminiscent of highlights from the past couple of albums such as "Sleep the Clock Around", "The Boy With the Arab Strap", "The Model", and "There's Too Much Love". Certain tracks do flirt with reminders of Belle & Sebastian Mk I-- namely "Lord Anthony", finally given a proper release years after it was written, and "Wrapped Up in Books"-- but these throwbacks are temporary, bones tossed to diehards unable to cope with the band's decision to trade their bedsit infamy for bouncy, pogo-pop.
On one hand, Dear Catastrophe Waitress ranks as one of the most delightful surprises of the year, although that's primarily because I'd completely given up on them. On the other hand, it's a very flawed record that at its quirky worst features harmonies so brow-furringly cheery they'd be comfortable amidst a cruise-ship revue or one of Up With People's halftime routines. It's not at all what one might call a "return to form"; rather, it's a large step toward a new, more appealing direction than the band had otherwise been heading. At present, they're almost a new entity entirely, which makes this the Belle & Sebastian album for people who never really liked Belle & Sebastian.
I realize that for a large portion of Belle & Sebastian fans-- most of them young and American-- lots of elements of the band's past matter little. The myth, the shambolic performances, the radio sessions, the dubbed cassettes of Tigermilk, the band's refusal to talk to the press, releasing only non-LP tracks as singles, not featuring the band on its sleeves, Murdoch's place in a songwriting lineage that includes early Orange Juice, The Smiths, and Felt-- it's now all ancient history. If that's indicative to you of what's become problematic with the band, you may want to approach this album with caution. If, however, "Legal Man" is among your favorite Belle & Sebastian songs, buy this immediately.


Cruising at her habitual 160 beats per minute, the rising London DJ mixes old-school jungle techno, acid rave, breakbeat hardcore, and footwork into an exhilarating 75-minute set.

fabric presents SHERELLE

When running on a treadmill, it’s advised to slow the thing down in stages before you get off. If you don’t—if, instead, you hop off and go from full tilt to a standstill—there’s a good chance the floor will still feel like it’s moving, your brain and legs won’t communicate quickly enough, and your teeth will meet the carpet. Breakneck London DJ Sherelle Thomas is the personal trainer who stands next to the machine, edging the speed dial up, grinning as your legs burn into a blur. Jump off if you dare.
It was a raucous, viral Boiler Room set in 2019 that put a rocket up SHERELLE’s career. She’s made plenty of the limelight since, beaming out from magazine covers, launching two labels (one solo, one alongside fellow Reprezent Radio alum Naina), and working on her own productions—one of which, piano banger “JUNGLE TEKNAH,” crops up on this mix. When lockdown hit in 2020 and the UK’s clubs closed for the foreseeable future, she ended up on the BBC’s flagship news show arguing in favor of more support for the sector. Recording a mix for Fabric, the London meat store-turned-clubbing institution, could be just another notch on a well-worn belt, but SHERELLE takes it as an opportunity to hammer time into a flat circle, fusing her own dance music history (she’s described Caspa & Rusko’s foundational FabricLive.37 as her entry point into clubbing) with elements of hardcore rave from the early ’90s up to the present day.
SHERELLE’s contribution to the series, which was relaunched as fabric presents in 2019, arrives at a moment when, in the UK (and on TikTok), breakbeats are back in vogue. It’s a stretch to credit SHERELLE alone with this resurgence, but her teeming enthusiasm has certainly been a factor, and it’s on unbridled display here. She kicks off with Cloud 9’s already-speedy slice of classic 1993 hardcore, “You Got Me Burnin’,” but, this being SHERELLE, the tempo has been upped a couple notches. It feels like a statement; she’s said in the past that she favors “anything at or above 160 [beats per minute],” and clearly won’t settle for less here. But there’s no time to ponder. She’s already into the rapid patter of fellow breaks wizard Tim Reaper’s “Globex Corp, Vol 1. A1” collab with Darlington junglist Dwarde, and the set continues thus. She blisters through 27 songs in 75 minutes, compressing decades of dancing to tightly woven two- and three-minute segments. There’s jungle techno, acid rave, hardcore, and lots of warped footwork repping old- and new-schoolers alike, from Rashad and RP Boo to AceMo and Kush Jones.
fabric presents SHERELLE is a survey of fast music past and (mostly) present that’s as exhilarating (and, sometimes, exhausting) as the Boiler Room show that shot the North Londoner to acclaim. It catalogs a moment in which a new generation is grasping and reshaping a raving past that’s too distant for them to remember. It is not, however, for the delicate of heart, pummelling away beyond 160 BPM for all but the briefest of moments. Some might desire more respite—there’s little calm beyond LCY’s trippy “Bite Off The Hand That Feeds You,” the splash of X-Files pads joining Response’s “Sanity Melting” with Tim Reaper and Worldwide Epidemic’s “Losing Control—but you don’t hire SHERELLE if you don’t like the taste of sweat. Lace up.

Buy: Rough Trade
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French artist Cécile Schott wrote her new LP as Colleen—an electronic reflection on mortality—in the wake of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. Despite the heavy themes, her sound is lighter than ever.

A flame my love, a frequency

“The world had nearly ended yet the sky was blue, and I came home with a fistful of fear,” remembers electronic composer Cécile Schott on “Winter Dawn,” a line that captures all the weighty preoccupations of her seventh album as Colleen. Written in the aftermath of the 2015 terror attack in Paris, “Winter Dawn” is cold and hard as a snowglobe, a compact container of chaos. It’s also the explanatory anchor of A flame my love, a frequency, a quietly devastating album defined by Schott’s enviable economy of expression.
Since her earliest release in 2002, the French multi-instrumentalist and singer has sounded more like herself with each new project, despite continual efforts to disrupt her own working process. In the first act of her career, Schott’s albums on the Leaf label manufactured ethereal loopscapes from old music boxes and 19th-century glass harmonicons, reinventing forgotten instruments and charging them with a percussive energy rooted in minimalism, gamelan, and other non-Western musical traditions. Shortly before her lengthy hiatus in 2007, Schott fell in love with another obscure instrument: the viola da gamba, a 15th century antecedent of the cello, which allows players to perform both chord and melody, handy for a solitary composer. By sloughing off historical context, Schott has been able to perceive all her instruments as generators of raw sound, opening up unexpected possibilities in genre and mood; it’s an approach that aligns her with her musical hero, Arthur Russell, whose disregard for classical tradition turned his cello into a spartan rhythm section.
Schott was in Paris on the day of the terror attack in 2015; she’d decided to stay a night in her former home to take her viola bow for repair, and had spent the afternoon strolling past the busy cafés that would be devastated a few hours later. A flame my love, a frequency emerged in the weeks after the attack as she considered “the inescapable fact that life and death always walk hand in hand.” Yet despite the heavy themes, Schott’s music sounds lighter than ever. A flame my love, a frequency is her first wholly electronic album, leaving behind the viola da gamba—but while the instrument is gone, its delicate, softly percussive timbre echoes through the album’s undulating textures.
After submerging herself in watery echo and dubbed out basslines on 2015’s Captain of None, bass is virtually absent here, as if her foundations have crumbled beneath her; melodies bubble and bob, airborne and untethered. Without an acoustic instrument, Schott instead locates her essential Colleen-ness in a range of small Critter & Guitari synths: colorful, wood-trimmed instruments with a fluttering, mercurial quality that feels distinctly organic. With these and a few Moog pedals, Schott achieves lift-off; everything is air and light. Again, Arthur Russell feels like a spirit guide.
Hinging on “Winter Dawn,” the album is a meditation on death from the vantage point of someone who’s more comfortable surrounded by birds and bats than boulevards and banlieues. “Be like the bat that nearly flew into my room,” she pleads on “Summer Night (Bat Song).” “You’re hunting so close I hear your wings beating.” In a whisper-quiet voice, she contemplates her proximity to the hunt—and to violent death—with the understanding that death is an inevitable part of life. On “The Stars Vs Creatures,” she steps back to consider her own mortality on a cosmic scale: “The stars will have the last word and outshine us."
Though looping arpeggios form the backbone of Schott's technique, it’s hard to feel like these knobbled surfaces were created with electronics; her undulating landscapes seem naturally occurring, as if they were simply breathed into being when she flicked a switch. It’s an effect that’s compounded by her recording method, capturing live takes with minimal edits and no vocal overdubs. Several tracks are just synth instrumentals, but they teem with life; the watery “Another World” could be the perfect soundtrack to one of Jacques Cousteau’s underwater documentaries, or some time-lapse recording of bacteria multiplying under a microscope. By feeding her perceptions of a vast, uncaring universe through these tiny, delicate sounds, Schott comes closer than most to capturing our vulnerability as living creatures—animal or human—and the senselessness of suffering.


A decade after their last album together, the Norwegian space-disco producers pick up where they left off, bringing new emphasis on structure and rhythm to their heady, atmospheric vibes.

III

In the decade since Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas released their last album, the revelatory space-disco voyage II, electronic dance music underwent several shape-shifting transformations: the explosion and fizzle of mass-market EDM, a U-turn toward classic house and cerebral techno, and fusions of ambient and jazz with global rhythms. It’s a testament to the Norwegian pair’s steadfast, forward-thinking style that their third album, III, picks up right where II left off and still sounds remarkably current. It’s as if Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Thomas Moen Hermansen had been waiting for the perfect moment to re-enter the conversation and found it inside 2020’s strange collective pause.
A joyride of heady, prog-infused atmospheres and downtempo house music, the album curves, twists, and undulates like a slow-moving river. Drifting through a series of mood-based sketches—French space pop, beach-gazing Balearia, and winding, loungey kosmische—it’s easy to lose yourself in syncopated melodies and swirling polyrhythms that, in another context, could easily have sounded like chaos. Instead, there are moments when III might double as a mood record—soothing, silky, perfectly synthetic—with infectious rhythms and enveloping arrangements that bely its compositional complexity. This is where the duo really shines; in their skilled hands, cosmic disco isn’t so much a gimmick or a goal but a technique, a way to prioritize atmosphere without sacrificing musicality. Their music doesn’t demand close listening, but it sure rewards it. It can take four or five spins to hear everything that’s going on in a song.
These tracks are less kaleidoscopic than the duo’s prior joint releases, with fewer improvisational excursions and a stricter adherence to structure and rhythm. But what’s lacking in funky, free-wheeling jamming is made up in concrete, beat-driven vibe. These are grooves you’re meant to lock into. Even “Oranges”—easily the project’s most far-out number, with coiling synths and skewed melodies that whiz and whirl past like space debris—has a steady, laid-back beat that brings it back down to earth. “The tracks that Lindstrøm sent me were almost like standard house tracks,” Prins Thomas has said, alluding to the project’s club roots. “I already had an idea of what I wanted to do, so I forced those tracks into new shoes and dresses.”
In the end, nothing about these songs is standard, from their dizzying, kitschy synths to their warped minor-major oscillations. Most of the album’s tracks push the bounds of what is considered dance music, a space that neither producer has ever fully committed to. “Martin 5000” has the most forward momentum—if there’s one track you might someday hear at a smoky after-hours, it’s this one—but retreats into meandering electric guitar and soft, tinkering piano that give it a floaty, aimless feel. “Harmonia” turns a gentle pendulum bassline into a serious, physical groove, but resists the urge to build past the half-way point. Occasionally, this hesitation can feel like a cop-out; you get the sense that there’s a little more to be explored. But there’s something psychedelic about the way these tracks avoid propulsion or release, opting instead to get lost inside themselves. Playful but intense, bite-sized yet jammy, these are inner-expedition songs best absorbed through a pair of thick headphones.
As is typical when Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas join forces, some of the project’s most exciting moments are snuck in the back door, laced into a dazzling breakdown or deep, hypnotic groove. The many jazzy layers of “Small Stream” come together so patiently and fluidly that it’s easy to miss the intricately cascading synth arpeggios. On “Birdstrik,” they transform a lighthearted, free-form piano solo into a dense and probing spell with muffled future-garage beats that shuffle underneath. It’s one of the only songs that briefly departs from its core rhythm, as the shuffle suddenly dissolves into chords, arpeggios, and air. When it does, it’s exquisite—a brief, gorgeous inhalation that feels physical and relieving, and that would surely get lost in the action of a dance floor. Seconds later, the synths return and the drumbeat reconnects, and the song spins back into orbit.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Perhaps I'm missing something. The sixth LP from Lambchop, everyone's favorite Nashville-based quatuordectet (fourteen members-- look it up ...

Is a Woman

Perhaps I'm missing something. The sixth LP from Lambchop, everyone's favorite Nashville-based quatuordectet (fourteen members-- look it up!), has been released to generally positive murmuring from the bespectacled intelli-rock crowd. To me, this indicates that Kurt Wagner and his Nashville friends have joined that exclusive herd of sacred musical cows, alongside their pals in Yo La Tengo. In the eyes of critics the world over, they seem to have been deemed untouchable.
Which is why I feel like I'm going to have my Music Critics Union (Local #462) card revoked when I say Is a Woman is a disappointment. But before you lay down your harsh punishment, oh wise union magistrates, allow me to present the evidence for the album's underwhelming effect upon your humble supplicant.
I generally like Lambchop quite a bit. Their last two albums of new stuff, 2000's Nixon and 1998's What Another Man Spills, collected genres like baseball cards and created an easy listening sound that soothed the soul without triggering the gag reflex. As the band's makeshift orchestra performed horn and string swoops worthy of a Vegas-style lounge revue, Wagner's lyrics and off-kilter vocals provided just enough of a wink to indicate we were all in on the joke, and that it was okay to enjoy the music of our grandmothers. (Hey, remember irony?)
But from the Vince Guaraldi-like instrumental intro of Is a Women's opening track, "The Daily Growl," it's apparent that the keyword for this outing is "sparse." Fourteen people (twenty, if you count guests) have never sounded so quiet; throughout the album, Lambchop sounds less like the orchestra from "Name That Tune," and more like a piano jazz group whose drummer took the night off. Gone, for the most part, is the genre-hopping, the falsetto, the lushness, and the cornet. Dear God, why the cornet?!
Dangerously, the new sound would indicate that Wagner is taking himself a whole lot more seriously this time around, to less entertaining effect. While his lyrics still have the ability to provoke many a double-take (by the second song, he's already name-dropped Chicken of the Sea, Intel, and Sherwin-Williams), the delivery is considerably more straightforward: less faux-crooner than actual crooner. Wagner's aspirations to being the Dean Martin or Bing Crosby of indie rock have never been more obvious, and it's further made clear by the disturbingly high prominence of his voice in the mix (think Mark Kozelek on Old Ramon or Bridge).
The rest of the band, meanwhile, is largely relegated to the background or the occasional flourish, with the exception of Tony Crow's frequently front-and-center piano. Admittedly, the sparing use of Lambchop's formerly characteristic orchestral sound is often striking: the honking baritone sax sprinkled into portions of "The New Cobweb Summer," the softly resonating vibes and quivering Moog of "Caterpillar." Also nice is the variously filtered angelic chorus answering Wagner's na-na's on "I Can Hardly Spell My Name," and the sudden drop into lite-reggae halfway through the album-closing title track.
But the listener has to work through a great deal of less stimulating material before reaching these worthwhile moments, with most of the eleven tracks running at least five minutes. Furthermore, the almost complete absence of significant drumming or percussion until the album's eighth track stretches the prolonged lull of "My Blue Wave" and "The Old Matchbook Trick" even longer. With little rhythm to anchor songs of such epic length, they much too easily float off into the atmosphere.
Most tragic, though, is the startling uniformity of the album. Save the stop/start strut of "D. Scott Parsley," Lambchop has stripped away much of the country and soul influence that made previous work so hard to categorize. What's left is a polished and subtle jazz-based sound that's hardly bad, but hardly good for more than intense bedroom headphone sessions or wine-and-cheese parties.
A small ass-covering caveat: Is a Woman sounds threateningly like a "grower" album, the kind that suddenly clicks on the 108th listen as genius on the par of Pet Sounds, Loveless, or apparently, that new Trail of Dead album. If this is indeed the case, I'm sure I'll soon be run out of Criticsville by a torch-bearing mob, this embarrassingly short-sighted review preserved for all eternity in the Pitchfork archives. Until that day, however, I throw myself upon the mercy of the court.


Featuring several collaborations with the Weeknd, the superproducer’s latest solo album explores the ways humanity may prevail over technology—too bad it’s drab and soulless.

4:23

“Once Upon a Time,” the intro track to Mike Dean’s latest album, 4:23, addresses the raging debate over artificial intelligence’s place in music with all the urgency of the first draft of an abandoned Tron sequel. In a story narrated by a disembodied voice somewhere between Laurel Dann’s interludes from A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders and Cortana from Halo, we learn that AI has evolved to create art “just as well as humans.” In response, humans organize a contest to prove that the machines can’t and won’t replace them. Mankind prevails in the exact way you’d expect: “While A.I. may be able to create perfect works of art and music/It will never be able to capture the spirit of what makes those creations unquestionably great: the human touch.” That epic scale and narrative window dressing, however, don’t do the music any favors because most of 4:23 is as drab and soulless as a wall of code.
This is a strange disappointment, considering the trajectory of the self-proclaimed Synth God’s solo career, not to mention his collaborative work for rap legends like Scarface and superstars like Beyoncé. Dean’s 2020 instrumental album, 4:20, and its sequel, 4:22, were spaces for him to veer away from his characteristic role as a producer and lean fully into groovy, drugged-out synths for the sake of it—neither album had a single guest feature. 4:23 sets its sights a bit higher: The album is co-executive produced by longtime collaborator the Weeknd, who appears on four songs that were recorded over the course of the week following their appearances at this year’s Coachella. “No throw aways,” Dean recently promised a fan on Twitter.
But for all the pomp and circumstance of the intro, it’s often difficult to pinpoint the human touch behind either the lyrics or the production. Take “Defame Moi,” which is all vague gestures at haters lacking the passion and vitriol of even the Weeknd’s most numbed out ballads. On “More Coke!!,” his voice doesn’t even sound like his. Suffice it to say, the six repeated words (“The cocaine fluctuates my weight/Scarface”) don’t make a case for the pinnacle of human creativity, instead dissolving into a silly Super Duper Flow digitally altered into anonymity. If the point was for his voice to become another instrument in Dean’s synthetic sea, they did their job too well. “Artificial Intelligence” is the closest the duo comes to the promise of their Instagram Live sessions, the Weeknd’s cries for a paramour he left behind on tour elevating Dean’s generic synths and drums with a shot of melodrama.
Left to his own devices, Dean futzes with sounds that trail and flicker on the most basic and boring ideas imaginable. That’s fine when you’re making a project that’s being sold as a low-stakes idea dump for hardcore fans, but less so on a project with a narrative throughline, never mind one executive produced by one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. There are droning synth marches (“Music for the Future”) and bids for the brand of minimal atmospheric flair that dots the scores for Blade Runner and Stranger Things. The two-song suite of “Goodbye Earth” and “Hello Space” is supposed to play up the contrast of leaving behind the old for the new but melts together into a mass of indistinguishable keyboard runs. Closing track “Electric Sheep,” an homage to the short story that inspired Blade Runner, is nothing more than two minutes of grating white noise, aiming for a sweeping and thoughtful sci-fi climax he hasn’t earned. Instead, 4:23 just feels adrift in space.


This urgent instrumental album welds the power of black metal, sludge metal, and grindcore to the structures and orders of post-rock and post-punk.

Known Flood

Sannhet isn’t looking to get famous. In a February interview with the cannily named blog The Sludgelord, the Brooklyn trio’s guitarist, John Refano, confessed that he and his bandmates were all working stiffs, using music as an aggressive outlet but not as an alternate income inlet. “I don’t have any real aspirations to make a living off Sannhet,” he said, “simply to spread our vision to as many like-minded people as possible.” Chances are, most musicians issuing debut albums this year-- as Sannhet has done with the excellent nine-song browbeater, Known Flood-- won’t turn their music into money, either, whether or not that’s a stated goal. Making music a sustainable profession has long been a high-stakes, low-chances gamble, dependent on variables generally beyond prediction, much less control. Saying that your new band isn’t intended to be your new job, then, borders on redundancy.
But Refano’s admission is an important one, because that attitude seems directly related to Known Flood’s twin senses of purpose and economy. This is an urgent instrumental album that welds the power of black metal, sludge metal, and grindcore to the structures and orders of post-rock and post-punk. That might sound tedious, but Sannhet bypasses the extravagance and indulgence that such a blend has largely come to imply. Instead, they operate with a workmanlike efficiency that gets these pieces to and around the point with thrilling dependability. Refano and company don’t show off or linger. Though Sannhet comprises strong instrumentalists, none of them deserve to be feted individually here. Rather, the guitar, drums, bass and a litany of samples cooperate constantly. They play this stuff hard and fast, like dudes with jobs to do and families to tend to when practice is over. Known Flood lasts for about 47 minutes, but unless you’re watching the clock, it’ll take some repeats for you to notice. It seems to flash by in half that time.
To that end, variability serves Sannhet well. Their gambit, “Absecon Isle”, rips open with black metal menace and streaks by in white-hot arcs. Its chaser, “Safe Passage”, lessens the rumble into a chug that’s heavy like Bastro or even Shellac, phosphorescence emerging from electric wallop. “Moral” uses its front half to ratchet tension with a riff that wraps back into itself; for the piece’s back half, though, Sannhet obliterates that tension, each member slashing at the them as though they’re trying to tenderize it. Each of these songs clock in at less than four minutes, a testament to Sannhet’s Cincinnatian interest in making one statement and summarily moving to the next one. That quality recalls last year’s excellent debut EP from New Hampshire’s Vattnet Viskar, a band that delivers similarly melodramatic metal with punk-like concision.
Sannhet doesn’t merely feign concision simply by writing short pieces. No, nearly half of these tracks break the five-minute mark. But each of the longer numbers roll several themes and transitions into a relatively compact framework, again avoiding boredom by a bustle of activity. “Slow Ruin,” one of two that makes it past seven minutes, volleys from field recordings to Touch and Go throb, from post-millennial blackened grandeur to an expansive noise fadeaway. These swivels don’t sound restless, as though Sannhet can’t decide what to do with itself or how it would like to be perceived. Instead, they just sound like the work of a band that understands that a job well done is its own reward, so why wait around for something more?


Pearl Jam on record have essentially been reduced to the rock ‘n’ roll version of wearing sweatpants: they’ve given up trying to impress anyone, so they may as well be comfortable. Their first studio album in four years continues the trend.

Lightning Bolt

It’s been four years since the release of Pearl Jam’s last studio record, but it’s not like they’ve been far from view. In the interim, we’ve seen reissues of their two best albums (1993’s Vs. and 1994’s Vitalogy), three live collections, a slew of side-project activity, and a 20th-anniversary world tour capped by the release of Cameron Crowe’s documentary Pearl Jam Twenty. As that film illustrated, this band has much to be proud of, having survived sudden success and the attendant media scrutiny, a risky (at the time) rejection of MTV, grueling court battles with Ticketmaster over fair practices, fan backlash over the band’s more politicized gestures, horrible tragedies, and the overall collapse of the music industry with their arena-filling acumen intact.
And yet, even an exhaustive documentary produced by a super-fan like Crowe doesn’t have much to say about the band’s post-millennial output—because there’s really not a lot to say. Pearl Jam ceased long ago to be a band that makes records with any sense of occasion to them: no intriguing backstory, no conceptual constructs to shape the album’s identity, no new contemporary influences that might push them in an unexpected direction. You just get another nine to 13 Pearl Jam songs that—as per the quiet/loud division of 2004 anthology *Rearviewmirror—*can be easily slotted into one of two categories. (Even the tracklist sequences are invariably similar: the second song will be a no-fuss rocker that serves as the single, and the album will inevitably close with a wistfully earnest ballad.) Pearl Jam are arguably the only modern rock band of note that consciously moved away from its formative, hit-making sound—in the period spanning Vitalogy through to 2000’s *Binaural—*but came out the other side an even more traditional, predictable band.
So if you’ve been paying any attention to Pearl Jam’s activities over the past decade, you already know what to expect from Lightning Bolt (and it’s certainly not a tribute to the Rhode Island avant-metal duo of the same name; heck, even the Pink Floyd comparisons bandied about in pre-release interviews seem offbase, unless your conception of Pink Floyd begins and ends with “Mother”). Like 2009’s Backspacer before it (and 2006’s Pearl Jam before it, and 2002’s Riot Act before it), Lightning Bolt begins with a spirited sprint before sputtering out and winding up in dullsville. The feeling of déjà vu is compounded by the strip-mined subject matter, as Eddie Vedder explores familiar themes of family strife and domestic unrest while once again celebrating the therapeutic powers of surfing and listening to music on vinyl.
If Pearl Jam can no longer recapture the sort of hot-wired intensity that once had Vedder stage-diving off festival scaffolding, they can at least still raise an inspired ruckus when the mood strikes: “Mind Your Manners”—a.k.a. “Spin the Black Circle Some More”—reformulates the original grunge cocktail recipe of mid-1970s hard rock and early 80s hardcore, with a chooglin’ intro reminiscent of early KISS deep cut “Parasite” that gets mowed down by a boot-stomping blitzkrieg, which in turn is blindsided by a sublimely melodic middle-eight. And “My Father’s Son” is the rare latter-day Pearl Jam rave-up to put the spotlight on bassist Jeff Ament, whose sense of groove—once the cornerstone of the band’s sound—has been deemphasized by band’s ever-growing propensity for straight-ahead, chug-a-lug rockers.
Despite their punk-schooled principles, Pearl Jam have never been shy about their debt to classic rock, but it’s usually good classic rock: The Who, Crazy Horse, the Stones. And while the upward-arced anthemery of the title track and “Swallowed Whole” continue to dutifully honor this holy trinity, Lightning Bolt also betrays the long-term diluting effects of spending too much time hanging on the right of the dial. “Let the Records Play” is boilerplate, bad-to-the-bone blooze, while the album’s centerpiece ballads tread on odious Lite-FM territory and forcefully tip the scales from poignant to maudlin, whether it’s the Goo Goo Dolls sheen of “Sirens” or the Hornsby-esque piano rolls of the closing “Future Days” (definitely not a Can cover) that made the song a natural fit for the closing sequence of last week’s "Grey’s Anatomy". (By contrast, the countrified lament “Sleeping By Myself” benefits from a lighter touch, thanks to a gleaming George Harrison-style guitar refrain that draws the cheekiness out of the song’s woe-is-me sentiments.) The Pearl Jam mythos as it exists today is undeniably wrapped up in their notoriously epic live shows, wherein the band is famous for loosening up and stretching out, but for whatever reason, that adventurous ethos rarely translates to their increasingly mannered albums. Pearl Jam on record have essentially been reduced to the rock ‘n’ roll version of wearing sweatpants: they’ve given up trying to impress anyone, so they may as well be comfortable.


The Austin band aims to rectify indie backlash and mainstream indifference with this elaborately orchestrated and structured new album.

...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: So Divided

So Divided

In the four years since the release of their monumental Source Tags and Codes, …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead have suffered both indie backlash and mainstream indifference. On their follow-up to Source Tags, 2004's rightfully panned Worlds Apart, the unflinching confidence and frenetic energy that made the band's previous albums so convincing suddenly disappeared, leaving little more than a batch of subpar radio-ready modern rock songs. Worlds Apart's slick, overcompressed sound brought forth all the cries of "sellout" that Source Tags had effectively stifled.
As was the case with its predecessor, the aesthetic faux-pas on So Divided can be cringe-inducing.  It's not pretty. But there's a much bigger problem at hand: Trail of Dead don't even sound like a rock band any more. So Divided is even more elaborately orchestrated and structured than Source Tags and Codes, but its complexity seems inorganic and clumsy, revealing the weakness of the source material rather than elevating and enhancing it. There's certainly nothing wrong with forgoing traditional rock instrumentation in favor of lavish arrangements and studio trickery, but the bells and whistles here don't even begin to fill the void created by a complete dissipation of the group's energy. Even when the dizzyingly disparate pieces of the album do fall into place, it seems like the work of some external hand; the band achieves crystalline structural vistas, but it's never quite clear how they got there, or why.
Indeed, the least sophisticated parts of So Divided are often its most memorable. Opener "Stand in Silence" could be easily written off as mallpunk, but at the very least it sounds forceful and passionate.  It would be easy to accuse the band of pandering to radio and MTV, but even their commercial instincts seen to be faltering here, as punchy two-minute pop songs are needlessly stretched into disjointed epics.  This kind of misdirection plagues So Divided: "Naked Sun" begins as an embarrassing "Bad to the Bone" pastiche and segues incongruously into yet another two-minute orchestral swell, and closer "Sunken Dreams" can't seem to figure out whether it's vintage Peter Gabriel or a late-90s cell phone commercial.
There are a few moments when such disunity works to the band's advantage. The percussion-heavy "Wasted State of Mind" buzzes and shakes nervously through a handful of memorable hooks. A cover of Guided by Voices' "The Gold Heart Mountaintop Queen Directory" fulfills the imaginary grandeur of Robert Pollard's original, but lands a bit on the syrupy side. The opening bars of "Life" effectively incorporate the album's sonic fragmentation into the fabric of the song itself, but it quickly separates out into a subpar tune and unnecessary embellishment.
This kind of separation prevents So Divided from building any momentum over its deceptively brief 46 minutes. While the band once pushed forward with a strength that seemed to surprise even them, So Divided ultimately feels scattered and flaccid.  Throughout the last two Trail of Dead albums, singer Conrad Keely has obsessed over themes of distance and division. Whether it's a matter of unfortunate irony or frustrated artistic self-awareness, these are the very issues preventing the band from making good records. For the time being, Trail of Dead can't even seem to capture the fervor of their own ambivalence.


Stuttgart's Danilo Plessow gathers three 12"'s (and three exclusives) that often sound like dance created by and for people who love dusty, 1990s hip-hop.

Motor City Drum Ensemble: Raw Cuts, Vol. 1

Raw Cuts, Vol. 1

Everyone more or less agrees on the basic building blocks of house music-- soul-pop vocals, R&B keyboards, disco rhythms-- but it seems the genre's leading lights practice it in the abstract: DJ Sprinkles' dubby ambience, Omar-S's solar funk, Moodymann's jazz loops. It's in this context that Motor City Drum Ensemble's Raw Cuts, Vol. 1 sounds so refreshing: It is straightforward, effusive dance music spun from the most basic of elements, and done very, very well.
A showcase for MCDE's eponymous label, Raw Cuts, Vol. 1 compiles three Raw Cuts 12"'s, labelmate Jayson Brothers' debut single, and three exclusive tracks. Clearly indebted to the dance music developed in Chicago and Detroit since the mid-1980s, MCDE (Danilo Plessow, from Stuttgart, Germany) aligns himself with electronic musicians deadly serious about placing music before image. Fortunately, Plessow's music isn't concerned with evasion. Open and melodic, Raw Cuts overflows with warm electric keys and cracking rhythms. Tension is massed then resolved with big, descending chords and wily guitar. Looped vocals roam in and out of the mix like shouts from the other side of the floor.
Plessow, though, isn't just toying with 1980s dance nostalgia. Raw Cuts often sounds like dance music constructed by and for people who grew up listening to dusty, 1990s hip-hop. His sliced-up funk and interlocking slogans make "Raw Cuts #3" sound like a dissertation-length exploration of a J Dilla beat. "Raw Cuts #2" could be a clear-headed, taking-their-medicine Avalanches jam. We associate madcap samplers like those with a certain skittishness, but Plessow's sounds are thrillingly, ingenuously focused.
Brothers' contributions nearly split the album in two, both through their placement and their lingering funk. "Monster Box" is still electronic music, but its brawny shuffle sounds like it could be the product of a particularly amped backing band. "All My Life"'s sunken steps provide a base for the symphonic-soul strings.
The source material ensures that Raw Cuts never veers into giddy, Technicolor party music, and there are times when these tracks feel like a really great party viewed in sepia tones. Take that as you will, but a slightly muted great party is still a great party. Raw Cuts is your first opportunity to hear the young, ultra-talented Plessow on disc. His warm, everyman house music is as sturdy and lived-in as his adopted hometown.


Australia’s Bob Nekrasov fuses black metal’s gravelly aesthetic with heavy riffs and gloriously over-the-top imagery; it’s a celebration of the very contradictions that make metal so thrilling.

Rebel Wizard: Voluptuous Worship of Rapture and Response

The Australian musician Bob Nekrasov’s work as Nekrasov exists on black metal’s fringes, noisy and frayed. His other project, Rebel Wizard, gives that black metal a heavily NWOBHM bent. The combination of influences seems simple—make black metal more palatable by adding traditional (discernible, even) riffs and melodies—yet through this project, he’s unlocked a deeper wisdom. He connects the deliberate solitude of one-man black metal with metal’s own status as mass music for alienated loners. Rebel Wizard invokes both complementary spirits—the antisocial isolationist and the eternal teenage loner who finds solace in a crowd of like-minded outcasts—on his second full length, Voluptuous Worship of Rapture and Response.
Nekrasov has said he “would rather shove a watermelon into the eye of my penis” than increase the fidelity of his records. Though he is a devotee of second-wave buzz, his songcraft, informed by metal’s formative texts, aspires beyond the subterranean sound. Such high treble lends well to Nekrasov’s lead work, which veers from piercing shredding to candlelit tenderness and thrashy gallops with a mutant, shapeshifting ease. “High Mastery of the Woeful Arts” blazes through all those modes, like if Frank Frazetta had control over 2001: A Space Odyssey’s solitary cosmic voyage. Though rooted in tradition, he’s versatile, dizzying without flash.
The intro to “Exhaustive Glory” sounds like Iron Maiden from the nosebleeds, tinny and distant without extinguishing triumph. Maiden’s “Hallowed Be Thy Name,” a grim tale of awaiting execution that’s become one of their most popular songs, proves to be a template for Nekrasov here, as many of his songs feel plucked from any number of “Hallowed”’s passages. “The Poor and Ridiculous Alchemy of Christ and Lucifer and Us All” would be a straight-up heavy-metal song were it not for Nekrasov howling in static. It begins like Thin Lizzy kicking a couple out and ends like Viking-era Bathory, a spiritual influence on the way that Rebel Wizard’s might transcends its raw sound. Nekrasov’s appreciation for metal’s timeless foundational qualities is how he’s able to wring such liveliness out of a cold, unforgiving tone; in lesser hands, his fusion would be novelty. He’s got riffs that, even with a black-metal aesthetic, a mainstream metal audience would obsess over—Tobias Forge should be sliding in his DMs begging for a collab.
Back in February, Rebel Wizard put out the EP Great Addictions to a Blindingly Dark, Worldly Life, which pushed the blistering black-metal aspects and melancholic extremes of his sound. While it was a huge leap in his songwriting, considering how prolific he’s been since Rebel Wizard’s first demo, in 2013, it didn’t have the same jubilance as his other records. Some of Addictions’ Gary Moore necromancy still finds a place here: “Glory” and “Mother Nature, Oh My Sweet Mistress, Showed Me the Other Worlds and It Was Just Fallacy” are centered on mid-paced stomps and drawn out, sorrowful leads. Solo black metal is often in the depressive vein—take Xasthur, Leviathan, and pre-prison Burzum, for example—yet even though he terms his music “negative wizard metal,” Rebel Wizard is downright exhilarating. Voluptuous is the discipline of Addictions with the crooked smirk that’s always been present, the smile of damning humanity to another night in with Angel Witch’s self-titled.
Rebel Wizard finds seduction in NWOBHM’s more romantic ends, and that is no more evident than in “Drunk on the Wizdom of Unicorn Semen.” Hang on—it’s really a beautiful song, a black metal take on a brooding, Melissa-esque ballad. Should you take a song called “Drunk on the Wizdom of Unicorn Semen” seriously? Absolutely: Metal is serious music rife with the ridiculous, the two don’t cancel each other out. You have to embrace, or at least respect, Manowar’s loincloths, King Diamond’s falsetto, Venom making a 20-minute track about battling Satan—anything that is deliberately over the top and unintentionally comical (yet totally ruling)—to really appreciate metal. Rebel Wizard made a song with the words “Unicorn Semen” and still ended up with one of the year’s best metal records, because in reveling in the absurdity at metal’s core, he embraces what’s great about it. His work as Nekrasov has gone on for longer, but it's clear that Rebel Wizard is how he will carve his identity.


The Brooklyn-based rock quartet’s mild, uptempo debut coasts on good vibes but won’t convince anyone they’re living dangerously.

Endeavor

There’s rock that does whippets on its lunch break and rock that hasn’t called out sick in two years, and the line between a blasphemous song and one that’ll sell a car is thinner than it might seem. It’s a boundary defined by the pretense of danger. The Muckers, a Brooklyn outfit fronted by Iranian émigré Emir Mohseni, fall on the buttoned-up end of that spectrum. Endeavor, the group’s debut, is a wide-eyed paean to the comforts of ’80s radio rock, a mild and uptempo album that revels in Quaalude choruses and room-temperature licks.
Each of these 10 sunny songs plays clean, save for a bit of fuzz. “Roll the Dice” has the sheen and charm of “Jesse’s Girl,” with insistent guitars and a melody that begs for an arm out the window on the turnpike, a smokestack spewing in the background. Anthony Azarmgin’s bass rumbles underneath “Suspended” like a fist pumping to a Springsteen song. “Thunderstorm” and “That’s All I Want” showcase the group’s nimble guitar work, swerving seamlessly between structure and embellishment to flesh out what would otherwise be a series of plodding power chords. Like a Budweiser ad on an old VHS tape, the whole thing has a sense of winsome, all-American nostalgia.
In terms of delivery, it’s hard not to draw comparisons to New York proto-retro-rockers the Strokes, whose lyrics are barely more incisive but worlds more convincing. The words on Endeavor are magnetic poetry collages of feelings, classic rock motifs so universal as to be anonymous. “Daydreams are over/Now I must find my way/My days are numbered/I’m running out of time,” Mohseni sings on standout track “Suspended,” without any palpable sense of urgency. The song’s amiable, anthemic chorus would make an excellent jukebox selection (“Take it as a sign, take it as a sign/Something good will happen soon”), not unlike Big Star’s “In the Street,” but a close read comes up empty. Chic-lite disco outlier “So Far Away” suffers from a similiar excitement deficit, even when it explicitly mentions sex and weed, and while the less funky tracks can coast on good vibes and riffs, this bassline feels limp.
Not every rock record needs to cause liver damage, but instruments of debauchery—electric guitars, snares that hit like water on a hot stove—feel oddly matched against the Muckers’ tame affect, a not-quite-saturated imitation of passion. Where’s the beef? The composite parts are sometimes remarkable, but in aggregate, Endeavor fades as easily as an oldies station on the far edge of town.

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Dev Hynes’ new mixtape feels light and loose, a pre-production sketchbook presented as a charmingly finished product with the help of several key guests.

Angel’s Pulse

Recording a perfect cassette mixtape from the radio requires careful tuning, commercial dodging, and the technical dexterity of leaping to your radio’s speaker to catch a beloved song midair. The playback of this now dated practice can be disarming by today’s standards, each song carrying the specific atmosphere of the room it was recorded in, songs cut off or captured in media res, wrenched from their contexts, an incohesive whole. On his new Blood Orange release, Angel’s Pulse, British singer, songwriter, producer, and composer Dev Hynes returns to the snapshot aesthetics of the cassette mixtape age, presenting his sketchbook as the product itself.
On previous albums, Hynes used the disarming, suggestive power of abrupt transitions to join together contrasting musical textures and moods. But while 2016’s Freetown Sound and 2018’s Negro Swan are cinematic both in their production and overarching themes, Angel’s Pulse, Blood Orange’s shortest collection of songs, feels like scanning radio stations in a lovingly nostalgic memory straight from the ’90s and early ’00s. The synth and drum machine-driven minimalism of “Baby Florence (Figure)” juts up against gauzy low-fi Southern hip-hop track “Gold Teeth” featuring Memphis legends Project Pat and Gangsta Boo. Low-key dance song “Dark and Handsome” featuring Toro Y Moi, turns chopped and screwed before giving way to the ’80s pop-tinted “Benzo.” There’s a joyful lightness to it all, helped in part by the fact Angel’s Pulse comes less than a year after the heavy but bracing survey of black queer alienation on Negro Swan.
In a statement about Angel’s Pulse, Hynes explained that he has a habit of collecting random songs and material from album recording sessions and giving them informally to friends and strangers, if he shares them at all. Angel’s Pulse, one of those collections that he instead chose to release widely, is an exercise in testing the weight labels, listeners, and artists in particular put on what they choose to share with the world. Is art only worthwhile when honed and ordered in service to a monumental statement or purpose? Hynes makes a convincing argument for the preciousness of fragments, one-offs, leftovers, and what they evoke when arrayed with care and passion.
Angel’s Pulse shimmers like a soundtrack to a fun if slightly melancholy summer day, but the anxieties, insights, and political convictions that Hynes has explored on previous albums still shine through. Gospel snippet “Birmingham” featuring singers Kelsey Lu and Ian Isiah lifting their voices heavenward on a stirring verse and outro, seems to center a mother whose daughter died in the 1963 Birmingham church bombings, a white supremacist terrorist act that killed four black girls. Meanwhile, “Tuesday Feeling (Choose to Stay)” is a sultry R&B lament for someone sucked into a destructive lifestyle, circling a similar theme that runs through Freetown Sound with the haunting leitmotif, “You chose to fade away with him.” Though the tracks explore the reaches of Hynes’ musical influences, they are united by his belief in what builds his communities up and tears them down. Artistic intentions aren’t conceived in a vacuum but rather run through everything that the artist creates.
Even in its moodboard looseness and nostalgia, Angel’s Pulse has all the charm and careful attention to detail of Blood Orange’s last two magnum opuses. Whereas most of the songs are precisely sliced to end before reaching silence, the last guitar strum on “Good for You” merges seamlessly with the sirens and revving sounds opening the following song, “Baby Florence (Figure).” Throughout, Hynes shows off his penchant for unexpected collaborations, pairing Isiah with electropop project Porches or Skye with producer Arca and BROCKHAMPTON’s Joba. Though it doesn’ carry a central message, the mixtape acts as a rare artifact that captures a particular place, time, and moment of wonder in the eyes of its creator.


You know what I miss? I miss political rock music. Probably it's out there and I'm looking in ...

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Yanqui U.X.O.

Yanqui U.X.O.

You know what I miss? I miss political rock music. Probably it's out there and I'm looking in all the wrong places. But I know this: Indie rock, always one of the great dissenting voices of American (and British) underground media, has gone virtually silent. In the 1980s, this music was rife with anti-government sentiment, from Black Flag to The Minutemen to Gang of Four to The Dead Kennedys to Elvis Costello. But with the ushering in of ambivalent slacker-rock, political messages became passé and we grew steadily more tolerant of Washington's silent plots. Conspiracy theories soon became kitsch, and now, in the aftermath of X-Files geekdom and September 11th pacifism, there are few better ways to get hipster eyes rolling than by questioning authority. What perfect timing: We've lethargically accepted that Washington is brutally malevolent just as our most wicked administration yet has come to power.
Yay, the most political rock band going right now is Canadian! Thanks, America. Granted, their message is pretty ham-fisted, what with those didactic, overbearing manifestos and ominous woodcuts of skull-faced forefathers chopping off peoples' hands. But Godspeed is at least putting forth some kind of an effort, which is more than can be said for most. I mean, I dig a lot of music, and songs about our girlfriends and our scenes and hating our parents are fine-- sometimes great, even transcendent. But when that's all there is, we have a problem.
So, upfront, that's why I respect Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I just wish their approach was more effective. For one, they're an instrumental band whose political message is carried out through vague and overwrought packaging which merely hints at a greater "something." And their latest offering, Yanqui U.X.O., is vague as ever. We're told that "09-15-00", one of the album's song titles, "is ariel sharon surrounded by 1,000 israeli soldiers marching on al-haram ash-sharif& provoking another intifada." How? The music is simple atmospheric orchestration with no agenda of its own, and as easily reflects a DMV waitroom as Palestinian uprising. And on the back of the sleeve, we're treated to a six-degrees-of-bomb-makers, where Tomahawk cruise missile manufacturers Raytheon Industries are traced, through a twisted labyrinth of corporations to the recording industry's major labels. Briefly: Just because you have a friend who knows an auto mechanic who worked on a car owned by a guy who was the gaffer on the set of She's Having a Baby does not mean you know Kevin Bacon.
Unfortunately, Yanqui's tenebrous finger-pointing isn't its only shortcoming. The band has taken its naysayers' gripes to heart and done away with those moody vocal snippets that not only hinted at deeper protest, but also jolted you awake just as your mind began to wander. And where the hell is the undercurrent? The two discs of 2000's Lift Your Skinny Fists used Godspeed's sweeping, emotional übersuites as a basic centerpiece to the bizarre ambient textures and noise projects which backed them. Meanwhile, Yanqui U.X.O. strips the group to their essentials which, as it just so happens, are not quite essential enough. Ideas are scarce, too-- where Skinny Fists would erupt without warning into a scorching Satriani-esque solo ("Cancer Towers on Holy Road Hi-Way"), the tracks on Yanqui are content to continue building to bored, satiated endings we can see coming 20 minutes in advance. Couldn't we have some venting? Are we frustrated or just dramatic?
Worse: The record is consumed by a painfully glacial pace. Each song plods endlessly onward toward an inevitable conclusion with no revelation in store for the poor listener, who can only endure these disc-filling five tracks in the hopes that, maybe, just maybe, that one glorious moment will arrive and redeem the interminable wait with a display of power so towering and majestic that it in itself will be a $12 experience. It doesn't. Once, at the end of "Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls," the band comes close with a triumphant burst of cinematic melody and Efrim's wailing screwdriver'd guitar. The quarter-hour denouement that precedes it is a long road to travel, though, and with this record's production difficulties, you're slogging through the mud every step of the way.
See, the importance of strong production on a record like this cannot be exaggerated, and I place much of the blame for Yanqui failure to impact on Steve Albini's shoulders. Last year, he turned Mogwai's similar-minded My Father, My King into a raging, five-headed superbeast with precision micing and mixing that brought the music's strongest elements to the fore, resulting in a speaker-rattling detonation of pristine strength. Yanqui is no recreation, or even approximation, of that tunneling force. Here, perhaps because of the number of instruments at hand, or maybe because of the insane over-reverbing, all of the instruments (save the ever-present martial drums) blend together into a kind of murky concordance, often making distinguishing the guitars from the violins an impossibility.
What we're left with, then, is the skeleton of an incredibly original band whose once-driving conviction and determination has been sapped by sluggishness and a lack of invention. It doesn't help that they've spawned countless imitators and saturated the market with uniform side projects. Or that their radical politics, which could be such a defining attribute, are relegated to cardboard inserts. Or that they just keep doing the same thing over and over and over and over again, hoping for a different result. Someone tell Godspeed that orchestras play all kinds of music and that uprising can take other forms in music than apexes conveying abandonment, loss or apocalypse. Revolt, as I see it, is a beautiful thing, but not this beautiful.


This six-track debut album from the Brooklyn-based producer Bryce Hackford might look like an EP on the surface, but it explores the trancey side of house music at great length, creatively mixing in rock dynamics along the way.

Fair

Bryce Hackford likes to stretch out. This six-track debut album from the Brooklyn-based producer may look more like an extended EP on the surface, but the one-hour-17-minute runtime puts it far in excess of most standard LPs. Hackford is naturally drawn to the trancey side of house music, where repeating motifs circle across vast dimensions of time. He's also interested in rock dynamics, sometimes veering toward krautrock and the blissful velocity of Spacemen 3's landmark Playing with Fire. Some of the material on Fair orbits various paths taken by artists on the L.I.E.S. label, especially as Hackford roots his sound in house traditions, noise, and choppy production values. Dusting the overall sound with a grainy texture is a wise move, creating a sense of unity in an album that fractures in many directions.
Something Hackford doesn't lack is ambition, even if it is executed in a manner that makes his music feel purposefully small. On "Slow Emotion" he channels the kind of wide open spaces Panda Bear likes to cover, although the general tone is closely aligned to the fuzzy haze-pop of Flying Saucer Attack. Still, Fair has the same air of exploration as Person Pitch, matching the way it can grind the life out of three-second loops without losing any intensity. Hackford isn’t as stylistically cohesive as Noah Lennox, instead dropping low-rent club bangers with a debt to the initial IDM boom ("Another Fantasy") then taking a wayward turn into the twilight feel of Nite Jewel's Good Evening ("Heart to Beat"). It makes sense that Hackford has played with Arp and Delia Gonzalez, who have both taken a similarly zoned-out approach to electronics.
The structurally sound work in the first half of Fair is let go in its back end, with Hackford ending the album via two songs in excess of 20 minutes per piece. It's here that Hackford loosens his brain, with the 22-minute "Run-On Cirrus" approaching the masterful build his former charge Gonzalez worked out with Gavin Russom on the minor DFA classic "El Monte". The difference here is that "Run-On Cirrus" digs deeper into an ambient tradition, drifting into sheets of synth that resemble Vangelis channeling the Orb's U.F.Orb. He takes a step further into the calm on the following 27-minute piece "Modern Propeller Music", almost losing all sense of self entirely in its echoing guitar figures. Here, Hackford demonstrates a knack for knowing when not to play, removing the compression from his work but retaining the mesmeric force from his more compact structures.
Fair latches onto sounds that are emerging elsewhere at present, including traces of the ultra-compact work of the the Black Dog's Bytes on Laurel Halo's excellent Chance of Rain, the lingering influence of vintage sci-fi soundtracks, and the loosening of borders between noise and techno. Hackford's inevitably going to be aligned with the mini boom in scruffy house, but there's enough scope here to suggest he can survive when the walls come tumbling down, especially as he's been at this since 2007 and has branched out to work on projects such as Rhys Chatham's A Crimson Grail. That recording, as part of 200-strong guitar orchestra assembled by Chatham, taps into the same kind of audacity Hackford gets caught up in as he goes deeper into Fair. There are strict limitations and open-ended thinking here, on a work that's more interested in the constant process of evolution than finding a place to comfortably land.


Celestial Shore singer-guitarist Sam Owens puts his own actions and desires under a microscope on a gentle, sunny, yet boldly honest solo album.

You, Forever

The term “soft-rock” has pejorative connotations. It brings to mind purgatorial waiting rooms and melodies that are almost offensive in their calculated inoffensiveness. On You, Forever, his second record as Sam Evian, Celestial Shore singer and guitarist Sam Owens offers rock songs about vulnerability and desire that are gentle and sweet but avoid the most saccharine tendencies of soft rock. It’s a delicate balancing act, and one he pulls off with aplomb.
A balmy spirit unites the 11 songs on the album. The silky, electric-guitar-driven instrumentation is consistently sunny, beginning with opener “IDGAF,” which burbles along on a bed of punchy bass and scritchy shaker. Its refrain, “I don’t care, I don’t have to care anymore,” isn’t a kiss-off so much as a celebration of being relieved of a burden.
Owens keeps his simple songs interesting by adding occasional adornments. He wears his 1960s influences unabashedly, stirring in flecks of light psychedelia. A squealing saxophone and chugging guitars at the end of “Health Machine” imbue the song with energy. Similar fanfares mark the closing passages of “Now I Feel It” and the record’s groovy title track.
But the real appeal of You, Forever lies in Owens’ pensive lyrics and gentle vocals. He spends much of the record investigating his own worries and insecurities. “Who will look out for me? Who knows my name? Is there anyone out there who knows my kind of pain in this country?” he wonders on “Anybody.” “Next to You” finds him reckoning with a codependent urge to stick close to a person who makes him feel safe: “I don’t feel so fucked up as long as I’m next to you,” he confesses. Owen chases that track with “Summer Day,” an appreciation of small moments (“Sometimes I forget the beautiful things/You show me figures strange and sweet”) that also finds him taking stock of his personal growth.
Only “Country” interrupts the record’s charming languor. Its backbone is a goofy, giddy-up bassline and a percussive guitar effect that recalls the patter of horse hooves. Those quirky touches are more cloying than cute, derailing an otherwise lovely song about figuring out where you fit in the world and finding your way home.
Despite the vulnerability Owens displays in his lyrics, he rarely sounds as though he’s reaching for outside validation of his feelings or seeking catharsis for its own sake. Instead, his songs come across as earnest attempts to connect with listeners. They’re invitations to introspection, not sounding boards for issues better dissected in the privacy of a therapist’s office.
A guiding principle behind the album was Owens’ determination to accept responsibility for his actions and understand how they affect his own life and the people around him. In doing so, he creates intimacy within what could have been a bloodless manifesto, bathing his blunt self-appraisal in the warm glow of human connection. There’s bravery in that willingness to make yourself vulnerable. You, Forever isn’t a soft-rock record, but it is a record that reframes a certain kind of softness as strength.


Though the project oozes affection for Biggie, it’s yet another gangly, recycled posthumous album of verses we’ve all heard before—a painful tour through rap’s emptiest vault.

Faith Evans / The Notorious B.I.G.: The King & I

The King & I

If nothing else, The King & I isn’t as cynical as the posthumous Notorious B.I.G. albums that came before it. Granted, that’s a low bar: 1999’s stingy Born Again stretched a hambone of unreleased material into an album’s worth of split-pea soup, while 2005’s Duets: The Final Chapter resorted to even more shameful recycling tactics. The world didn’t need another tour of rap’s emptiest vault, but at least this one’s guided by his widow, singer Faith Evans, whose intentions are ostensibly beyond reproach. Compared to its Diddy-helmed predecessors, The King & I oozes affection for its subject, celebrating him not as an icon or a cash cow, but as a loved one. Instead of packing the album with of-the-moment features designed to move units, Evans limits the guest list to Big’s pals and peers. No Korn collaborations here; this is a family tribute.
But good intentions aren’t enough to salvage bad ideas, and King & I commits to a truly awful one: an entire 72-minute album of duets between Evans and her long-dead husband, with barely a scrap of unheard audio to justify the endeavor. Never mind how distracting it is to hear some of these verses for a third time—and it’s never not distracting—the project was doomed from a purely technical level. Recording fidelity has evolved considerably in the 20 years since Biggie’s death, making it even harder than before to pass off his leftover audio scraps as new; it’s like trying to splice grainy ’80s VHS footage into an HD broadcast and hoping nobody notices. No matter how hard you squint, there’s never any illusion these two were in the same studio together. Even at its best, The King & I sounds like Evans is dueting with a Notorious B.I.G. soundboard app.
The King & I is simultaneously too stingy and too indiscriminate with its star attraction, denying fans new verses yet projecting his hologram raps over every song until the reflexive thrill of hearing one of rap’s greatest voices is extinguished. Each verse becomes a reminder of his absence—he’s never sounded more like a relic of the distant past than when “Tryna Get By” rehashes his 20-year-old “Sky’s the Limit” boast about owning a mobile phone. This is the last way anybody wants to remember him.
It’s doubly cruel that Evans committed so fully to the album’s misguided premise since, reused Biggie footage aside, this is some of her strongest work in years. Her voice has a lived grit and she radiates passion as she works through decades-old grief. She agonizes over the mystery of his murder on “Somebody Knows”—one of several sharp boom-bap/New Jack Swing throwbacks produced with Salaam Remi—then laments that her husband never had the chance to watch their son grow up on “One in the Same.” “I tried my best to explain/Why did you go/But the child don’t understand,” she sings, her voice flushed with anguish. Songs about Biggie’s death have become a kind of subgenre unto themselves, but few have felt this personal.
The muse is solid, and there’s something sweet about the idea that after all these years, Biggie still brings out the best in Evans. Now if only his reconstituted raps weren’t plastered over every inch of the record. Here’s a compromise that might have worked: a Biggie-inspired album, one that honors her late husband and maybe even samples him periodically, but frees itself from the burden of slotting his old recordings onto every song. Sometimes less is more, and that’s especially true when so little remains.


All-acoustic interpretations of pieces by Aphex Twin.

Acoustica

It's tempting to look for an angle when ostensibly "traditional" artists re-interpret music originally conceived for an entirely different context. You wonder if they're making a statement first and thinking about the music second. It can seem as though the artist with a stronger connection to high culture is either extending a hand down to welcome the other half into the club. Or, perhaps they're just having a laugh. A string quartet is playing Metallica songs, see, because Metallica are actually interesting composers. See also Sebastian Cabot, Actor/Bob Dylan, Poet.
New music ensemble Alarm Will Sound decided to follow its album of Steve Reich compositions with a record of all-acoustic interpretations of pieces by the Aphex Twin, but nothing about the project suggests condescension. Based on the music and presentation this seems more like an ambitious collective on the hunt for challenging projects, and the idea of scoring and arranging pieces that have lived their entire lives inside a computer was too tempting to pass up. In a sense Richard D. James seems the natural choice for such a tribute, both because of his surpassing melodic sense and that he's already penetrated the serious world through collaboration with Philip Glass. A large assortment of hoses, whistles, shop hardware, and piano treatments were gathered for timbral approximations, after the tracks were selected (curiously, most are from most from Drukqs) and notated, and this is the result.
Though it never sounds to me like a gimmick, Acoustica remains oddly distant and difficult to inhabit. This music, often geared toward atmosphere and sound for sound's sake, is difficult to absorb when scored for traditional instruments and easily slips into the background. Generally, the better and more exciting the original track, the more the Alarm Will Sound version pales by comparison. On tracks like "Meltphace 6" where the distinctive rolling drums serve as the lead instrument, Alarm Will Sound sounds overly restrained, with its conservatory roots at the Eastman School of Music in full view. That they would even attempt to record something like "Cock/Ver 10" live with acoustic instruments is impressive, certainly, but the music itself doesn't quite survive the translation and loses its sense of purpose.
Better are the tracks that were in their initial form more open-ended. The short industrial percussion ditty "Prep Gwarlek 3B" finds new life with live instrumentation, and its unusual rhythm and texture easier becomes easier to digest. The digital gamelan "Jynweythek Ylow" loses a pang of longing without the sound of James's music box, but Alarm Will Sound find the melodic core at the piece's center. Still, though Acoustica is an interesting album and not unpleasant to listen to, but nowhere does it capture James's energy or musical wit. It reminds me of when Derrick May did an Invisible Jukebox session for the UK experimental music magazine The Wire and the interviewer played him a brass band version of "Strings of Life". His strong initial excitement quickly dissipated and he groaned, "Oh, I wish it were better."


Tangerine Dream: Electronic Meditation/Alpha Centauri

Electronic Meditation/Alpha Centauri

Psychedelic music spawned so many fragmented genres of rock in the late 60s, it's easy to forget that at one point, most of the bands were trying to accomplish the same, basic thing: To change the world with music. Failing that, they might have settled for freaking themselves out, but exploration into the unknown was the key. Peace and love? Sure, sometimes. Surreal visions of the beyond? Check. Crazy backwards guitar solos? Extra nice. This kind of faith in a better tomorrow through experimentation (or at least the aping of experimentation, in the hopes of stumbling over a little second-hand wisdom) is one of the aspects of late-60s music culture that makes it so unique, and consequently why, in many ways, it was the last time rock was free of its own self-conscious ambition.
American and British bands were quick to establish national schools of psychedelia, but continental European bands evolved differently. Countries like Germany and Sweden, far from the epicenters of pop and rock flourish, got their news via weekend radio shows and imported LPs. German guitarist Edgar Froese, playing with a beat combo The Ones, had already formed a long-distance attachment to Jimi Hendrix when he met Salvador Dali, and was inspired to form the earliest version of Tangerine Dream (named after a lyric in The Beatles' "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds") in 1967. Froese met Berlin club owner Conrad Schnitzler, himself a student of avant-garde sculpture and music (via his former teacher Karlheinz Stockhausen), and later, drummer Klaus Schulze. Along with organist Jimmy Jackson, they formed the version of TD that produced their first LP, Electronic Meditation.
TD oozes their way out of the gate with the primordial muck of "Genesis": A short, but telling introduction to a world apart from your mom's wholesome rock and roll. Fuzzy guitar flutter and Schulze's rin-tin-tinny cymbal rattle the stage clear for Schnitzler's basso profundo cello moan. That moan, for better or for worse, is the "melody" here, and I suppose that makes the quivering electro-effects a counterpoint. Flautist Thomas Keyserling (uncredited on the original release) bubbles here and offers a glissando there; at the height of synergetic convergence, Shulze drops a caveman stomp on the toms. If this was hippie music, it was borne of the most sincerely gone magick available.
The two epics (a compositional preference Froese never abandoned) are "Cold Smoke" and "Journey Through A Burning Brain", both of which sound much more in tune with music Shulze and Schnitzler would go on to create than anything TD became famous for. In fact, parts of "Journey" remind me of each of Schnitzler's Kluster LPs, with unidentified sound effects and a hard-line approach to free improvisation: Any melodies are purely coincidental, and should not detract from the generally horrific vibe. The band does lapse into prototypical krautrock beat-mantra midway through, but makes sure to mix in sufficiently atonal flute soloing, and Froese's boundless, rhythmless guitar stylings. "Cold Smoke" begins with a different strategy, one much closer to what most folks think of when TD is mentioned: Keyboard-dominated atmospherics. That strategy lasts for exactly one minute before Shulze's cymbals rip apart the solemn organ chords; the organ tries to come back, and Shulze destroys it again. In the end, things end up fairly similar to the previous tune, though the seeds of a gentler TD have been planted.
"Ashes to Ashes" takes the organ from "Cold Smoke" and adds some Doors-ish cocktail-rock drumming, and of course, more free guitar and flute. On Electronic Meditation, this tune is as close to rock as the group played, and in places is not unlike concurrent Grateful Dead (or more accurately, Amon Duul II). "Resurrection" tidies up the biblical concept with church organ and a backwards sermon (devilish!), and a return of the gooey acid-ballet of the opening song (hereby allowing TD to corner the market on psychedelic, freeform biblical concept albums from Germany). It was a far cry from the mystical impressionism of their mid-70s LPs (with only Froese remaining from this trio), and anyone who thinks the band is good for little more than New Age background moods will be surprised by this music.
Shulze left the band before Electronic Meditation was released, and Schnitzler stayed on only long enough to see the induction of 16-year old drummer Chris Franke into the band. Schnitzler's replacement was the rambunctious organist Steve Shroyder (himself a member for only one album). The trio of Froese, Franke and Shroyder (along with two guest musicians) recorded TD's second record, Alpha Centauri, and had little difficulty living up to the freaky promise of the Dream's debut. Pieces like "Sunrise In the Third System" (an organ-led mystic processional) and the single (!) "Ultima Thule Part 1" (with a very non-TD rock thud) proved the band were learning how to pour maximum mood into more compact structures.
That said, the centerpiece is the massive title-track: Not only does this piece take up the bulk of Alpha Centauri, it's an almost perfect summation of everything they'd accomplished up to that point. Beginning with distant flute, and gigantic cymbal swells, the track (like many before) takes a while to get off the ground, but when Froese's brand new VCS3 synthesizer makes with the siren calls, the outer limits are within reach. Even at this early point, Froese was fascinated with the possibility of the synthesizer, though he hadn't quite mastered its range. Flautist Udo Dennebourg plays a starring role for much of the piece, adding melodic, if flighty, direction to an otherwise malleable form. Dennebourg begins announcing something at the close of the piece, and wordless, choral backing vocals deliver the dark finale.
Each of these records (as well as 1972's Zeit and 1973's Atem) were originally released on Ralf-Ulrich Kaiser's legendary Ohr imprint, also home to the first recordings of Ash Ra Temple, Popol Vuh and Amon Duul. Over the years, Tangerine Dream has undergone a number of personnel changes, and Froese gradually transformed the chaotic Technicolor of his band's first recordings into an altogether different trip. However, as products of the psychedelic era (and the budding German experimental rock scene later dubbed "krautrock"), these albums are fine nuggets indeed, even if the best was yet to come.


While fitting comfortably into their discography of slinky slow jams, Living finds the Los Angeles R&B duo unsure of how to connect to the vital essence of the genre.

Living EP

When the Los Angeles-based brothers Andrew and Daniel Aged first started making chill R&B together, they went by the name Teen Inc., then simply inc., and finally inc. no world. It’s not unusual for a band to change its name as its aesthetic evolves, but it’s interesting to note that only two albums and two EPs into their career, the Ageds have so frequently felt the need to rebrand. While their newest release, the five-song EP Living, fits comfortably into their discography of slinky slow jams, a sense of self-doubt is threaded throughout. It probably doesn’t help that we are currently in the midst of a pop-R&B boom to rival that of the mid-1990s, making it all the more difficult for groups like inc. no world to carve out their own niche. After building upon their sound with last year’s solid As Light as Light, Living ends up tempering that momentum with tracks that sometimes verge upon the monotone.
Former session and touring musicians for the likes of John Legend, Raphael Saadiq, and Kelela, inc. no world boast undeniable chops. These are not kids playing at some hipster version of blue-eyed soul—their playing demonstrates a true understanding of the inner workings of R&B. The EP’s eponymous opening track sends electric piano tumbling slowly over a simple breakbeat before Andrew’s restrained lead vocals cut through, conveying the understated cool that’s essential to the duo’s laid-back brand of downtempo. Andrew’s voice is right at home within the song’s grooves—particularly in the chorus, where he coasts across gentle guitar licks and Daniel’s supporting harmonies.
Capable of flitting from a dewy falsetto to a lush, vibrato baritone, his voice sounds more powerful and more confident than on previous records, making the group’s claim to the contemporary American R&B scene more than credible. But in an era where Frank Ocean, Solange, Childish Gambino, and countless others are turning out nu-funk masterpieces faster than we can roll joints to them, is there space for inc. no world’s super-focused minimalism, or does it get lost in the fray?
There is an air of soul-searching on Living, a sense that the brothers are trying to hit a mark while staying true to the sound that has gotten them this far. A part of them—perhaps the part that has spent so much time playing with extremely famous musicians in front of crowds of thousands—clearly wants to create something popular and enduring. You can imagine a blissed-out festival crowd singing along to a song like “Complete,” vibing along with the wah-wah guitars and echoing snares. But inc. no world also push against their pop tendencies, with mixed results. The instrumental “Sent” is a good example of excellent musicianship (when was the last time anyone successfully utilized a jazz flute?), but it does little to help tie the EP together.
In the end, Living might have fared better as an album, where it could have given the band space to work out these disparate ideas. It’s clear that inc. no world are trying to sustain a mood throughout the record, but sometimes “ambient” can quickly become “background,” and the EP consistently wavers between the two. At its peaks, you’ll find sketches of songs on par with the fantastic R&B on the airwaves right now; at its lows, it skims across the surface of a sound that runs much deeper. For all its potential, Living strives to connect to the genre’s soul.

No World / Quality Time / Handsome Dad / Big Oil


The minimalist composer-performer’s slow, patient works demand and reward close attention; give them time, and their secrets will rise slowly to the surface.

Cantus, Descant

In the December 1960 issue of Arts and Architecture, the critic Dore Ashton described the peculiar experience of encountering Ad Reinhardt’s “black paintings”—a series of 60 x 60” canvases that appear monochrome, but that reveal subtle, multicolored geometries upon close inspection. She suggested that they actively slowed the process of interpretation; you have to stare, hard, to find hints of color in the black. “How singular color can be when so proposed!” wrote Ashton. “How much more inexplicably moving the hue when it is magically coaxed out after long contemplation.”
The same could be said for the minimal drones of Sarah Davachi’s new album Cantus, Descant, which, on first blush, scans as her most imposing work to date. Clocking in at 81 minutes and 17 tracks, it’s the first release from Davachi’s new label, Late Music (a partner of Warp), and features recordings from no less than six different organs scattered across North America and Europe. These are long, sinewy pieces, carved from just a few components. They favor slow chord changes and arcane tonalities, and unlike Reinhardt’s paintings, they’re fundamentally durational; like it or not, they demand a fixed amount of time. But there are also secrets lurking just under the surface, and a degree of complexity that’s part and parcel of the music’s stark appearance, like colors coaxed from the black.
The entry points shift across the album, but there’s always a way in. The chug of the reed organ on tracks like “Oldgrowth” and “Badlands” generates a persistent background rumble, evoking gentle motion, and the wispy “Passing Bell” folds in faint bells; “Ruminant,” one of the album’s most plainly inviting pieces, puts swells of violin at the fore, which offer an early reprieve. The pipe organ played on the “Stations” series uses meantone temperament, a tuning system typically associated with Renaissance music, lending it a veneer of familiarity, and conjuring images of sprawling, imagined cathedrals. “I like to think of sounds as these worlds that you enter into,” said Davachi in a 2015 interview. “Not as a form of escapism, but rather as an act of emotional or aesthetic disclosure.” Her brand of slow-moving minimalism is still mostly inscrutable, but these sorts of textural variations can feel like a form of disclosure—the vaguest suggestions, guiding us through—and make Cantus, Descant a deceptively generous project.
Davachi opens up even further on “Play The Ghost” and “Canyon Walls,” both of which feature her own vocals. In their delicate constitution and emphasis on individual syllables (they can feel like ASMR, at times), they’re reminiscent of Julia Holter, another LA-based composer with a soft spot for Renaissance music. And though her lyrics aren’t quite as finely wrought as Holter’s, Davachi has a knack for simple evocative language. There’s a lovely line on “Canyon Walls” about “a longing to keep those birds/in their deep ruin green”; the meaning is elusive, but the undertones reverberate.
Davachi has been putting out music in this vein for the past few years, insisting on slowness and careful rumination across a range of instruments and electroacoustic modes. She’s scarily prolific (she’s released three EPs already this year), but with Cantus, Descant, Davachi has arrived at maybe her purest distillation of those ideals. The attention to detail is itself a kind of time warp; in its patient hold, the music becomes something entirely new.

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This Barsuk reissue features some ho-hum selections from Death Cab's first live show and a Smiths cover, but its real draw is the chance to re-evaluate a band that for many is still considered a dealbreaker.

Death Cab for Cutie: Something About Airplanes

Something About Airplanes

It took six albums, three EPs, countless singles, four or five record labels, a much-loved side project, numerous guest productions, and a thoroughly boring solo LP to get to this point, but Death Cab for Cutie will end 2008 as a big-font festival band. And yet, though their sound has grown increasingly muscular, and their outdoor sets tend to only reach as far back as "We Laugh Indoors", they still seem ill-suited to wide-open spaces. As I watched two high-out-of-their mind, shirtless, thirtysomething acid casualties make out during Coachella while a rickety version of "Soul Meets Body" played in the distance, it just seemed to go against everything Death Cab has come to stand for. In other words, they still manage to carry themselves like a small band from a tiny Washington college town.
Upon re-release, the most striking aspects about Death Cab's debut, Something About Airplanes, were how modest it sounded and how removed it was from the Modest Mouse/Built to Spill template of the Pacific Northwest. If there was any resemblance to their regional forefathers, it was in their ability to create a sonic blueprint that's subtly innovative. Few were writing lyrics-- formed almost as complete sentences and melodically structured the same-- like Death Cab's Ben Gibbard at the time. The bridge of "President of What?" sounds like it's taking the wrong step with each chord turn, moving in an opposite direction to the melody, but the resolution makes complete sense: "Nothing hurts like nothing at all/ When imagination takes full control."
In a strikingly candid interview with Paste magazine, Gibbard admitted that he goes back to this record and rarely has any idea what he was talking about. While it's typical for a lyricist to embrace straightforwardness in his later years, recent tracks like "You Can Do Better Than Me" are no more rewarding for their directness. Something About Airplanes instead sounds like a private affair, which is one reason it's so treasured amongst diehards. Like so many other fledgling songwriters, Gibbard cloaked his voice in reverb and occasional distortion (even on the sweet and sour harmonies of "Pictures in an Exhibition") and danced around sentiment. For a band inextricably linked with heart-on-sleeve emoting, Death Cab could be delectably difficult to parse.
You can also hear how naturally and incrementally the group progressed from a fully formed blueprint. Regardless of Narrow Stairs' heavy-handed addition of new textures, you can trace a straight line to that point from the carefully considered guitar lattices of Airplanes' "Your Bruise". "Sleep Spent" is a direct descendent of mid-90s slowcore with better hooks. "Amputations", the most full-bodied track, features rumbling and almost mockingly chiming guitar hooks that sugarcoat the lyric "he's unresponsive 'cause you're irresponsible"-- a stronger precursor to their more recent theater sing-along lines like "you are beautiful, but you don't mean a thing to me."
While the deluxe package does include selections from their nervous first live show in Seattle and a cover of the Smiths' "Sweet and Tender Hooligan" featuring Harvey Danger's Sean Nelson, the real draw here is the chance to re-evaluate the band itself, often underrated or deemed as a group people "used to like" before getting into harder and more challenging music. And yet, while most of the indie crowd now embraces pop music in all its forms, something about dudes like Death Cab, who hit a little close to home but aren't considered "cool," is still considered a dealbreaker.
Certainly, Something About Airplanes isn't Death Cab's best album-- in retrospect, it sounds like a dry run for 2000's We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes, where the lyrics got more pointed, the hooks more emphatic, and the dirges more steely and purposeful. The studio tricks would become more sympathetic as well: In addition to the dated samples that adorn "President of What?", "Amputations" closes with a snippet of a motivational record called "You Can Better Your Best" that proclaims "if everybody's making fun of you or criticizing, you know you're on the right track." Granted, the song itself is about the futility of becoming someone you're not to win someone over, but the line unwittingly serves as a mission statement for a band that went Gold while rarely answering to anyone but itself.


Southern Lord gathers together the tapes from the drone metal band's aborted first album, recorded in 1990, which include a contribution from Kurt Cobain.

Earth: A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction

A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction gathers all of the music drone metal progenitors Earth recorded in October 1990, during their earliest sessions at Portland's Smegma Studios. Earth, featuring soon-to-be Melvin Joe Preston in its second lineup, intended for those seven tracks to serve as its debut. Record label decisions interfered. Three of those tracks were released a year later via Sub Pop, on the out-of-print EP Extra-Capsular Extraction; four more were released a decade later via No Quarter, as an addendum to the also out-of-print reissue of the live disc Sunn Amps and Smashed Guitars. Aside from message board bootlegs, this new Southern Lord collection marks the debut of this material as an uninterrupted whole, as it was originally intended. Not limited to riffs stretched like steel over minimal, militant percussion, A Bureaucratic Desire-- Earth's first EP plus two grueling mid-tempo blasts, a quasi-ballad featuring Kurt Cobain, and an oppressive closer-- now showcases the breadth of Dylan Carlson's vision from the start.
Doubtlessly, 1993's Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version will forever remain a sea change moment for both Earth as a band and heavy metal as a form. Over three colossal tracks, Carlson and Dave Harwell treated riff and tone like mutual life forces, using one to explore the other. Earth 2 is an unapologetic, overpowering statement. Even almost 20 years later, even after inspiring legions of better-selling followers and spawning the bulk of a genre, that album still feels utterly vibrant and odd. Without booming drums, lacerated vocals, or dark-side imagery, opener "Seven Angels" is as suffocating as the best black metal, as moving as Carlson's idols in Black Sabbath.
But A Bureaucratic Desire persuasively argues for a reconsideration of what Earth accomplished-- or, more specifically, just how early: It took Justin Broadrick's Godflesh the better [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| part of another decade to make industrial metal with a drum machine that's as compelling as "Geometry of Murder" and "German Dental Work". Though loud and lumbering, both tracks maneuver with finesse and agility, two basses and a guitar sliding through the big beats. Especially at the start, "Divine and Bright" displays an undercurrent of prettiness and radiance. Earth would touch upon the idea again with 1995's Phase 3: Thrones and Dominions and finally explore fully a decade later when Carlson reformed the band as an elegant tortoise-like vehicle for slow blues. Even as Kurt Cobain hums and Kelly Canary howls above the mid-tempo riff, there's a certain redemption to the music, as if this all this doom eventually lifts like a fog. That feeling won't last too long, though: Closer "Dissolution 1" is a sluggish, grim march that grinds through one riff over and over again, the drum machine beating against the changes like a whip. It's quintessential nihilistic doom metal-- no hope except an end.
Those wary of investing again in music they already own should pay special attention to the credits here. Mell Dettmer remastered these tapes, which got little such attention the first time they were released. Dettmer has worked not only on recent Southern Lord albums by Sunn O))) and Wolves in the Throne Room, but also on music by Sleep, Zoroaster, and Eyvind Kang. Her mastering job here is warm, loud and careful, adding a glow to the massive tidal sweeps of "Ouroboros Is Broken" and emphasizing the drone that hums beneath the whole thing (something also emphasized by the reformed Earth in 2006, thanks to Steve Moore's organ work on Hibernaculum.) "A Bureaucratic Desire for Revenge, Parts 1 and 2" clamp down harder, too, the percussion pushing through the guitars with more gusto, every edge of every riff feeling more like a new rupture. If it's been years since you've listened to these songs, as it had been for me when this reissue arrived, you might believe you're hearing them for the first time. And if you've never heard Earth this early, get ready to change your conceptions: The fountainheads of drone metal have been surprisingly versatile from the start.