In 2012, Beck published a book of sheet music called Song Reader. This collection features versions of those songs by artists including Jack White, Norah Jones, Jeff Tweedy, and Jarvis Cocker, and the set was executive produced by Wes Anderson music supervisor Randall Poster.

Beck Song Reader

At every stage, Beck's music has reflected Los Angeles: The hodgepodge jigsaw of Odelay and Mellow Gold; the temperate melancholy of Sea Change and Morning Phase; the posthuman decadence of Midnite Vultures; and the all-purpose sunshine of The Information and Modern Guilt, which convey joy in the muted way only Southern California can. He is ratty palm trees and rolling hills; he is five-dollar coffee and hand-stitched fedoras; he is a Burbank strip mall jammed with sundry and outdated business catering to everyone and no one at the same time.
Warby Parker Presents Beck Song Reader is part of his showbiz phase; a laid-back benefit album that if nothing else reminds you that Beck may have started as an outsider but has long since become part of the establishment. Executive produced by Wes Anderson music supervisor Randall Poster, it features 20 interpretations of songs written for his Song Reader project, which was originally released as a book of sheet music by the indie publishing cottage McSweeney's. Contributors include alt-Grammy types like Jack White and Norah Jones; budding national treasures like Jeff Tweedy and Jarvis Cocker; and curiosities like Swamp Dogg and Sparks, who skirted the mainstream but never quite assimilated to it.
Then there's Warby Parker, as in Warby Parker Presents Beck Song Reader, a sunglasses company whose chunky, bohemian frames look like the kind of things an Upper West Side intellectual might have worn during the 1960s or '70s. Proceeds from the album go to 826 National, a nationwide nonprofit committed to helping school-aged kids with creative and expository writing, co-founded by Dave Eggers, who, is also the founder of McSweeney's. At some point describing the project becomes a Russian nesting doll of branding and attribution, brought to you by someone in conjunction with someone else for the benefit of yet someone else. Between Parker, McSweeney's, and the album's lineup itself, Song Reader crystallizes the maturation of the white indie set to the new ruling class—an arc traced by Beck's own career. This is a world of people who are mellow, organized, emotive within reason, a little retro and graced with just a zest of modernity.
Of course, there's no point in giving numerical grades to charities or sociological phenomena. Though the cause behind Song Reader is vital, the album is mealy, governed by some strange centripetal force that manages to pull a group of otherwise interesting artists toward a mean of midtempo Americana and light roots music. If you'd never realized how much fun. could sound like Jeff Tweedy or Norah Jones like Laura Marling, you soon will. Instead of highlighting the differences between its contributors, Song Reader makes them all feel roughly the same.
Speaking of fun., they emerge sounding inspired, shedding the Kevlar of their White Triumph routine for something more vulnerable. Same goes for Bob Forrest, who manages to capture the rooty, mahogany implications of the music better than just about anyone here. Most striking is Swamp Dogg's "America, Here's My Boy", in part because it's hard to imagine it being written by Beck. A gutted, funereal ballad built on piano and voice, it plays like a black hole in a wide swatch of beige—the kind of transformation of source material to final product that makes a prospect like Song Reader exciting in the first place. It reminded me of the first time I heard Johnny Cash sing "Rowboat", a modest country song from 1994's Stereopathetic Soulmanure. Not only did it suit Cash's talents, but also it revealed in Beck a capacity for music people hadn't yet expected from him. Both came out looking good.
Beck's last five or six years have been rife with experiment. Most of these experiments don't lie in the music, but how it's made. His Record Club projects gathered loose groups of interesting people to cover entire albums in single days; his dedication to the maverick composer Harry Partch was written in Partch's own 43-tone scale; and his contribution to the Philip Glass remix album ended up being a sprawling, 20-minute dream consisting of passages of Glass' music with Beck drifting in and out over top.
And, of course, there's Song Reader, a project that pushes against the instantaneity of how we consume art in the digital world. On the one hand, nothing is as old-fashioned, or in particular a songbook, which speaks to ideals of music as something generated between live human beings around parlors and campfires. On the other, no digital stream could ever be as ephemeral as something that was never recorded in the first place. The idea is clever, and very Beck: a mix of the modern and the antiquated so fluid that you start to see how they're not that different to begin with. The execution feels out of his hands, and really, out of everyone's—just another project whose purpose seems lost in the labyrinth of production.


Revenge of the Dreamers II, the new nine-song compilation from J. Cole's Interscope imprint, Dreamville Records, has the same problems as much of Cole's solo catalog: In his desperation to be canonized beside his idols, he shies away from the risks they took to earn those spots.

Various Artists: Dreamville II: Revenge of the Dreamers

Dreamville II: Revenge of the Dreamers

If nothing else, J. Cole has made it abundantly clear that he wants to be judged alongside rap's all-time greats. So let's do that: Revenge of the Dreamers II, the new nine-song compilation from his Interscope imprint, Dreamville Records, is not The *Dynasty—*it doesn't have the color, the heart-wrenching personal asides, the 1-900 numbers that teach you how to sell crack. Nor does it have the slick condescension of any Bad Boy collaboration, the virtuosity of Soundbombing, the knowing sneer of anything the Diplomats made on their worst day.
The problem with Revenge of the Dreamers II, beyond the absence of a "This Can't Be Life" or a "Dipset Anthem," is the same as the problem with much of Cole's solo catalog: In his desperation to be canonized beside his idols, he shies away from the risks they took to earn those spots. His performance on a song-by-song basis from his debut, Cole World: The Sideline Story, to last December's 2014 Forest Hills Drive oscillates wildly, but never shakes the feeling that it's checking boxes, doing X because Kanye did and Y because Pac did.
Take the opener, "Folgers Crystals," where Cole compares himself to Bob Marley and Nat Turner in the first handful of bars. In many ways, his background is remarkable; the Fayetteville, N.C. native has detailed his experiences in schools with various socioeconomic makeups, including his time at St. John's University in New York. (As always, his rapping on Revenge owes more to the latter locale.) His plan to turn his childhood home—on Forest Hills Drive—into a shelter where single mothers can live rent-free is not just admirable, but is a sincere, inspired way to alleviate the conditions he grew up in and around. But in Cole's more serious writing, most of that personal touch is filtered out, replaced by blunt aphorisms: "'Cause still I rise, it's ill-advised to bet against him/ Raised in hell but heaven sent him/ Let 'em diss him."
That kind of toothless penmanship might slide if it weren't delivered so deliberately. Cole's always been at his best when the stakes are low, or at least self-contained; when he's rapping for its own sake, or reveling in the fact that he signed his friends ("Night Job"), he can be a well above-average technician. (To be fair, that song is nearly derailed when he says he's "Horny like that Coltrane album," one of a handful of sex-centric bars that he and his Queens-bred signee Bas inexplicably cling to.) But when he's moralizing or getting somber, it's robotic, as with "Caged Bird"'s refrain, "Freedom's just an illusion/ That's my conclusion." On "Crystals," he punctuates a particularly intense, clumsy passage with, "So you can take my cock and chew on it," a line that needs a wink or some levity to redeem itself, but is given neither.
Fumbled legacy-building though it is, Dreamers is not without its bright spots. The tape introduces the label's two newest signees: the Washington, D.C.-bred singer Ari Lennox and lute, a rapper from Charlotte who joins Cole in representing North Carolina. Each artist contributes one song here, both of which are among the best on the tape; lute's Dilla-cribbing "Still Slummin" in particular is superb, throwing you immediately into his world ("Took off my work badge, realized I'm back in the hood") and dispensing plaintive, delightfully un-cinematic notes: "Lost more friends to bullshit than a bullet."
Lennox's introduction comes in the form of "Backseat," a song that racked up tens of thousands of plays between its October 2014 release and when it was scrubbed from the Internet last month. It's a knowing, slinking cut that succeeds on almost every front: fun, warm, a little sleazy. Cozz, the Los Angeles rapper who inked his Dreamville deal last year, updates the single with an uncharacteristically flat verse; fortunately, his later contributions to the tape, "Tabs" and especially the introspective closer "Grow," are excellent. (His pre-Interscope singles "Dreams" and "I Need That" remain two of the most delightfully menacing street rap songs of the past several years.)
Bas—whose braying "Housewives" is the weakest cut by a country mile—is joined in Dreamville's relative old guard by Omen, a Chicago native. He and Cole mostly sleepwalk through "Caged Bird," but his headlining song, the Donnie Trumpet-assisted "48 Laws," is a welcome contrast; Omen finds the kind of pocket that always seems to elude his more famous partner, and it makes for a sleek, collected track that feels immediately more vibrant than any of the tape's weightier material. And that, in many respects, is Revenge of the Dreamers II: compelling when its focus is at its most narrow, leaden and impersonal when it reaches for the Very Serious and Very Important. It's like Bleek said: "The strong move quiet, the weak start riots/ We know you got a brick but sell 'em 20s 'til they tired."


Daryl Groetsch’s style is distinguished by its deeply expressive sensibility. Few ambient composers can fit quite as much feeling into such a small curlicue of tone.

Swirlings

At a recent performance in Portland, Oregon, Pulse Emitter’s Daryl Groetsch sat behind a low table coaxing otherworldly noises out of a handful of devices. A few were pretty humdrum: dented guitar pedals, a Sony Walkman, a Roland Space Echo from the 1970s. Then there was an odd, homemade contraption that looked a little like a cribbage board fitted with phono jacks; stranger still was a wood plank with three long springs screwed to it, the kind you might find affixed to a screen door. While it was hard to figure out exactly how Groetsch was generating such a cosmic swirl with his little boxes, there was no mistaking the sound of those springs: They cut through the mix like the thunder you might hear in a horror film, or a nightmare.
Pulse Emitter’s Swirlings is a more placid affair, and a world away from the steampunk hodgepodge strewn across his gear table. If the murky turbulence of his live set suggested a bumpy ride through an asteroid belt in a battered escape pod, the new album—the latest in a discography more than 80 records deep and his first solo album on Hausu Mountain—evokes more blissful and hi-tech vistas, like gazing through the portholes of a gleaming spacecraft at the sweep of the Milky Way.
It’s easy to fall back on science-fiction metaphors when discussing Pulse Emitter’s music. His rippling arpeggios and buoyant pads are part of a cosmic-music tradition that stretches back through new age and prog to stargazing synthesists like Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, and Vangelis. These aren’t uncommon reference points; they’ve been dominant modes in left-field electronic music since the late ’00s, popularized by artists like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never. But Pulse Emitter easily holds his own against his better-known peers. Since 2002, he has developed a style that’s distinguished by its deeply expressive sensibility.
That instinct is at the center of the opening “Electron Central,” in which tumbling arpeggios spin against a beatific backdrop of held tones. There’s not much to the track, just a bright, glassy FM synth lead and those fizzy background pads, but the way Groetsch teases the balance between the two, fading elements in and out, lends an almost narrative shape to its seven-minute run. Throughout the album, the tension between form and formlessness keeps things engaging. In both “Fairy Tree” and “Cloud Refuge,” minimalist pulses and rain-stick gurgle alternate with heartstring-tugging chord changes—a tactic that invites zoning out and then sneakily brings you back to the here and now, like a hypnotist snapping his fingers.
At their best, Pulse Emitter’s tracks trade ambient music’s aimless drift for deep compositional structure. The dark, droning harmonies and flashes of dissonance in “Space Frost” recall the most desolate moments of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, yet the twisting of his whale-song melody is sketched with a calligrapher’s grace. Few ambient composers can fit quite as much feeling into such a small, off-handed curlicue of tone. “Ripples,” which sets a shape-shifting mallet and harpsichord-like melodies against characteristically bucolic chords, is even more affecting, paced to periodically deliver a tidy dopamine hit every time it lands upon a particularly plangent chord. In moments like these, Pulse Emitter feels less like a noise tinkerer or an ambient musician and more like a bona fide songwriter—just one working with some rather unconventional tools.


The Connecticut quintet’s debut is the work of pop-punk professionals, modeled after the genre’s mainstream breakthroughs in the early 2000s.

Little Green House

Anxious have been variously described as hardcore, pop-punk, and emo, but they’re also rooted in the classic rock of their parents’ generation: “My dad would play me a lot of early aughts power pop/indie music…like Fountains of Wayne and Death Cab for Cutie,” 19-year-old guitarist Dante Melucci revealed in a recent interview. It’s a frankly mind-blowing statement until some quick math confirms that “Radiation Vibe” and “A Movie Script Ending” are equidistant from today as they are from Led Zeppelin IV and The Wall. Even if none of the bands that Melucci and the rest of Anxious grew up on are liable to crack any 4th of July marathon rock block, “classic rock” still feels like an accurate appraisal of the influences on their debut, Little Green House: Their heroes can be found in the back catalog of their new label Run for Cover, but the bands that cracked MTV2 are gods.
The quintet threw themselves in “the next Title Fight” royal rumble with 2019’s Never Better, an EP of emotive, melodic, and slyly ambitious hardcore. But they have since cleared the lane for One Step Closer, the Wilkes-Barre straight edge crew that shares two members with Anxious and likewise followed the Triple B-to-Run for Cover pipeline. OSC frontman Ryan Savitski and rhythm guitarist Grady Allen trade roles on Little Green House, and Anxious wisely cater toward Allen’s cleaner, more approachable vocals, creating as much distinction as possible between the two acts without turning them into incompatible touring partners.
As opposed to the raw, point-and-shout melodic hardcore of Never Better, Little Green House is the work of pop-punk professionals, craft and sophistication smuggled in through unexpected countermelodies and actual harmonies—not just two vocalists singing in vaguely related overtones. The band gives most of the credit on that front to Melucci, who’s legitimately born for this shit: At 14, he performed on Broadway as Freddy Hamilton in School of Rock: The Musical. There’s a little vocal melisma at the end of “Growing Up Song” that’s kind of a throwaway joke but also kind of stunning within a pop-punk track called “Growing Up Song.” Put it together with the wholesome “In April” video, and it’s not far-fetched to think of them as a boy band.
Chris Teti of the World is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die produces, as Mark Trombino might have in 2001—a post-hardcore veteran sympathetic to bands reaching toward the mainstream. Tambourines linger deep in the mix, and acoustic guitars emerge during the bridges: evidence of Anxious working with a budget and seeing Little Green House as something distinct from their live show. It’s sleek but not slick—as with TWIABP, Teti cranks the rhythm section, emphasizing a velocity and propulsion that becomes integral to the songwriting. “In April” or “Call From You” would probably hold up if they were covered in any other genre, but Anxious’ strident urgency reminds why people gravitate towards this style of music for melodic thrills.
By “this style of music,” think Jimmy Eat World’s Bleed American: a paragon of well-proportioned, immaculately sequenced emo records that could pass for pure pop-rock. Little Green House seems to explicitly follow their model: Start at a full sprint, alternate jangling chords with palm-muted chunk, throw in just enough screaming to come across as both bashful and brash. In their brief existence as a touring band, Anxious have opened for both Boston hardcore titans Have Heart and pop-punk defenders Knuckle Puck, and “Your One Way Street” ensures that they’ll win over either crowd from the jump. From that point, Anxious deescalate toward the mid-album acoustic ballad, immediately reestablish momentum with the thrashiest songs, and come down with a five-minute power ballad with a featured guest vocalist.
That power ballad, the closing duet “You When You’re Gone,” might be better described as “Stella Branstool ft. Anxious.” After the breathtaking Side B medley that aligns their backgrounds in pop-punk and musical theater, Anxious spend five minutes in a complete remodel: The tempo is dialed down to a mall-walking pace, Allen’s vocals are relegated to textural trimming, and the guitars glimmer, twist, and turn. It’s an interesting show of range within the context of Little Green House, but in the broader scope of indie rock, Anxious have transformed into a solid band among many that have taken a poppier approach to templates set by Snail Mail and Soccer Mommy. Ironically, if Anxious truly wanted to have a Bleed American-type success in 2022, all of Little Green House would’ve sounded like “You When You’re Gone.”
That may very well happen on LP2: Anxious have anointed “You When You’re Gone” as the best song on Little Green House, which gives more insight into their view of growth than the one literally titled “Growing Up Song.” Like many albums of this age, Little Green House is finally seeing release after being completed for nearly a year and a half, an eternity for a pop-punk band with actual teens in it. Even before “You When You’re Gone,” their enthusiasm for melodic hardcore has been tempered by a belief that more exists beyond its quintessential lyrical themes: wishing some friends could stay the same, wishing some friends could be more than friends, wishing some friends would just fade out of view. Anxious may get there in time; for now, they’re in the middle of the ride.

Buy: Rough Trade


CHOOSE LIFE. (Again.)

Various Artists: T2 Trainspotting: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

“Nostalgia: that’s why you’re here. You’re a tourist in your own youth.” When Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) sneers this midway through T2 Trainspotting—his bleached-blond tufts thinner since we last saw him, his pretty brooding more intractably carved at the temples—he’s lashing out at his estranged mate Renton (Ewan McGregor) and the two grim decades that have passed since they parted. He’s gazing ruefully across the same desolate, outer-Edinburgh moors that mirrored their youths in the original Trainspotting, where they bemoaned their lots as needle-pocked nihilists, subpar grifters, and residents of Scotland (not necessarily in that order). But really, he’s breaking the fourth wall, all but short of winking into the camera and waggling a cigar, Groucho Marx-style—because T2 knows exactly why its audience has returned, and what we want from it.
Happily, the film delivers: T2 rings true to the spirit of the original—the grubby lad humor, the graphic wastrel extracurriculars, the creeping desperation of consciously inert lives—with an unhurried fondness that still raises stakes for its heroes. (It’s also not shy about embracing Trainspotting’s most zeitgeist moments, slotting in copious footage from the original.) T2 is a best-case scenario for nostalgia, bowing to the diehards while squaring up to present—and its soundtrack fares similarly, offering a loose-limbed mash of callback remixes and fervent young upstarts that echoes the glee of the original without laboring to eclipse it.
The 1996 Trainspotting soundtrack has been rightly celebrated for merging the Britpop bests of the era (Pulp, Elastica, Blur) with big-beat rave (Leftfield, Underworld). Championing dance music, especially in the power-ballad techno of Underworld’s “Born Slippy,” introduced it to new audiences while it was edging up from the underground stateside. Proto-punk was the other bloodline, Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” the de facto theme, all joyous and seductive id; the wistful, near-sarcastic flow of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” under Renton’s overdose scene, leant pathos.
T2’s mix stokes these moments as merrily as Renton, Sick Boy, and Spud (poor, hapless Spud) slide back into degeneracy. Underworld debuts “Slow Slippy,” a canter update to “Born Slippy”’s sprint; splintered mutters replace the prior’s yelps for “lager lager lager lager,” but when those same gentle, sunrise synths nudge to the fore, they are a pensive homecoming. “Lust for Life” gets a gnarled remix from the Prodigy, slicing a peppy group yelp between Pop’s brays, though the scuzzy synth thrum tapers off into a curious shrug of a conclusion. Underworld’s Rick Smith, T2’s composer and soundtrack curator, also offers “Eventually But (Spud’s Letter to Gail),” a lovely, glacial runoff of an ambient ballad that folds in somber film dialogue; Blondie gets a return of sorts in “Dreaming,” after their “Atomic” was covered by Sleeper in the original. (“Perfect Day” earns a piano reprise in the film that’s not included here.)
T2’s soundtrack doesn’t just smack of the past, though; it gets a timely revamp alongside that seminal “choose life” speech. Edinburgh’s Young Fathers appear three times, magnetic in their scrappy ardor; despite winning the 2014 Mercury Prize for their debut, Dead, the Scottish-Liberian-Nigerian trio remain undersung for their high-velocity, socially astute experimental hip-hop. Director Danny Boyle has called their new track here, “Only God Knows,” the “Born Slippy”-style “heartbeat” of T2; it shares that adrenaline, their own rough-and-tumble abandon (“Only God knows that the people are cheating/Only God knows you don’t need him”) merging smoothly with a gospel choir.
In fact, hip-hop—absent from Trainspotting—scores the best scene in T2. As Renton accidentally reunites with the homicidal Begbie in a club bathroom (one of T2’s many winking callbacks to toilets), Jason Nevins’ rattling remix of Run-D.M.C.’s “It’s Like That” thumps with palpable humidity, unyielding in four-to-the-floor rigor. (The 1997 track, a UK hit at the time, feels singularly like a return to roots for Boyle; his last film soundtracks have been tempered affairs, anchored by Bob Dylan and the Maccabees, Moby and Unkle, and Bill Withers and A.R. Rahman.) Elsewhere, the Welsh drum’n’bass DJ High Contrast whips up a fatalistic film opener in “Shotgun Mouthwash;” the acidic staccato mimics the drums of “Lust for Life” and abets a series of fitting poor-bastard asides. (The bleakest: “Last night I dreamt I went to Woodstock but I only saw Sha-Na-Na.”) The dusky London shoegazers Wolf Alice, the British surf-rockers Fat White Family, and the bawdy Irish comedy duo the Rubberbandits round out the new class ably.
The success of T2’s soundtrack, and the film itself, lies in its sense of contentment; it doesn’t lobby to be seminal again. It’s as exuberant as its predecessor, with some honest grit flaking against the more mannered sentimentality; it keeps a popular hearth warm and has a kicking, striving spine. To paraphrase an old friend: T2’s still got a great fucking personality.


Even when Bruce sticks to the script in a playhouse, he can deliver a ranging and intimate performance full of the history and emotion befitting his long career.

Bruce Springsteen: Springsteen on Broadway

Springsteen on Broadway

Before the Boss hit the boards at the Walter Kerr theater in October of 2017, no one really knew what to expect. While Springsteen has toured solo acoustic before, such as for 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad or 2005’s Devils and Dust, those were still concerts, within the established framework for such. And even though he has a reputation for storytelling even within E Street Band shows, the concept of what he intended—“My show is just me, the guitar, the piano, and the words and music. Some of the show is spoken, some of it is sung. It loosely follows the arc of my life and my work,” as he stated in the press release for the Broadway run—wasn’t clear until opening night.
Springsteen on Broadway meets all the criteria of a traditional Broadway show, or at least one that could have potentially qualified for a Tony award: It’s staged in a theater, its run was of sufficient length, and the show was scripted, e.g., there was a “book” which was the same night after night. The latter might seem like a pejorative, especially in the context of Bruce Springsteen, whose live shows are well-known for their spontaneity and unpredictability.
But a large portion of the impact of Springsteen on Broadway comes from the juxtaposition of the script and Springsteen’s delivery of the material, combined with the quality and depth of the emotion in the musical performances. Intimacy isn’t simply a function of size and proximity; it’s about connection, about vulnerability and the ability to effectively tell a story. For Bruce, it’s both a talent and a learned skill. (Or as he tells us twice in the course of the evening, “That’s how good I am.”) All of that comes through like an electrical charge if you were fortunate enough to witness Springsteen on Broadway live, but it also transmits in a similarly visceral way on record.
The setlist of the Broadway production changed very little over the course of the stand. Some of the songs, like “Thunder Road,” or “The Promised Land,” are delivered uninterrupted, others are used as active vehicles to support the story, like “Growin’ Up” or “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” “Born in the USA” is preceded by a story that artfully takes you from the song’s genesis to an elegy for Springsteen’s friends who were killed in action in Vietnam; unsurprisingly, the performance that follows is angry, bitter, and every bit as powerful as a full band version would be.
As she has through the run of the show, Patti Scialfa joins her husband for “Tougher Than the Rest” and “Brilliant Disguise,” but the impact of her appearance is slightly muted on the audio artifact as her contribution is limited to acoustic guitar and vocals; the glow the two emit when side by side, and Bruce’s smile as she walks onstage, isn’t something that comes through as well on album.
On a similar note is how Springsteen interacts with the physical space of the theater. He moves between center stage and a standing microphone, or the piano, with a similarly stationary microphone. But the size of the theater and its acoustics are such that, combined with the physics of projection, allow Springsteen to step away from the microphone and still be completely audible, though lower in volume and not directly amplified. This is something that’s not going to be immediately obvious to the listener who hasn’t seen the show and takes a bit of getting used to on this recording, as it initially comes across as a glitch in the recording, rather than a deliberate device.
The recording is slightly longer than the Broadway show with the inclusion of “Long Time Comin’” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” which were originally substituted for the husband-and-wife duet towards the end of 2017 when Patti was under the weather and couldn’t appear. The former is responsible for a deeply emotive passage about Bruce’s father, where he is audibly moved to tears for what feels like forever, but is only a minute or two. Understandably, Springsteen is also somewhat misty earlier in the set, when speaking movingly about his friendship with the late Clarence Clemons; “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” is, as it has been since the Big Man’s passing, here both elegy and celebration.
When you view the tracklist for Springsteen on Broadway and evaluate it from the perspective of one night’s performance, it’s an impressive list of songs. But when you look at it as representative of a body of work spanning four decades—which this production decidedly cannot escape representing—it is a more than suitable tribute to what Springsteen himself refers to as both his service and his “long and noisy prayer.” Amen to that.


Mildly captivating, occasionally repetitive, and frequently ridiculous, the 13th studio album from the fabulous sulk turned red-pill pharmacist is Moz’s vision of radical truth-telling.

I Am Not a Dog On a Chain

The intoxicating, mostly-celibate, square-jawed Steven Patrick Morrissey carries on. Crotchety and vegetarian, and here on the release of his 13th studio album, Moz remains a bitchy, fabulous sulk turned something of a red-pill pharmacist, dealing anyone within earshot a long list of forces to be wary of. Across the past few decades, these include, but aren’t limited to: Muslims, Britain’s immigration policy writ large, the editorial staff of The Guardian, global safety precautions surrounding COVID-19, allegiance toward political parties other than one headed by someone with the “guts to be honest about Islam,” et cetera, et cetera.
Once known for perverting pop music by way of a beautiful, excessive and unsmiling universe of both art and devotee, Morrissey’s vistas have since shrunk. His present fanbase is survived by the morose, the nostalgic, the unaware, a large number of Latinxs, and those who have actively chosen to forgo Morrissey (the man) for Morrissey (the feeling). It’s the heaven you might find in misery, the forgiveness the heartbroken feels for the heartbreaker, the mental calculus one undergoes when realizing the hero who once made you cry and perhaps saved your life might, at some fundamental level, find your existence repugnant. “Imagine,” finishes a breathless review of a concert in late 2019, “being hit by the world’s most beautiful fist.”
That fist, pink-knuckled and beefy, sails across I Am Not a Dog on a Chain, starting at its title and traveling across its tracklist. (You see, the dog is Morrissey and the chain is society.) As with all documents by obsessives fixated on their targets, the album can be frequently ridiculous, mildly captivating, and occasionally repetitive, pocked by moments of goofiness that come from the runoff of a man eager to chase old miseries and find new ones to berate.
As if he could be anyone else, Morrissey is entirely Morrissey across the piece—relishing in characteristically aggro songwriting, taking decadent, hairpin turns from caustic to maudlin, and lyric sheets as funny and belligerent as the mind from which they flow. “Jim Jim Falls,” for instance, an electroclashy anthem about living life full-assed, climaxes sweetly with, “If you're gonna kill yourself, then for God's sake, just kill yourself.”
Moz regularly points out what he dislikes in the world, much of it tinted with a contemporariness that somehow already feels stale. In “What Kind of People Live in These Houses?”—a track posed as a rhetorical question, a favorite Moz device—we find a “duckface in a duplex,” those who “look at television thinking it's their window to the world,” and those who “don't know how to change.” Elsewhere, as in the hammy “Knockabout World,” the tone swerves from an invective on how big and irritating society can be into a standard-issue Morrissean plunge into deliciously saccharine romance: “Congratulations, you’re still OK. I’d kiss your lips off any day.” The effect is, after all these years, still charming.
Morrissey spends his time at odds with himself, unsure whether he is a decadent Wildean type, a devious free-thinker, or a shock dispensary here to alert the masses that their world is ugly, misshapen, and obscene. Nothing tires as quickly as shock. Some bits are wonderfully embarrassing: “Oh, maybe I'll be skinned alive...because of my views,” goes the title track, warningly, wincingly, waggingly. “Listen out for what’s not shown to you. And there you’ll find the truth.” Most songwriters dodge these tropes out of either decorum or boredom, but this is Moz’s vision of radical truth-telling.
Victim to the inner rash that grows in many writerly men over a certain age and of a certain mind, Moz’s existential chafe against the world is not without good company. “I’ve grown entirely comfortable in being both liked and disliked, adored and despised,” author Bret Easton Ellis writes halfway through White, a book-length treatise that asserts how much he doesn’t care about his public perception in the wake of tedious, performative, and inflammatory claims. Or, it’s like Michel Houellebecq, French enfant terrible and bestselling writer whose novels veer indefatigably provocative and more than a little Islamophobic. “If I am notorious,” he notes, “it is because other people have decided that this is how I should be.”
The three men—American, French, and English—are kin in their infamy for one reason.  It is an attitude that’s absolute, ancient, and marked by a peculiar, helpless assertiveness. The stuff of one who might, in any language, but in the same universally-understood shrug, note that they are “just being honest.”
But “just being honest” is both an indulgent and tendentious idea. In reality, Morrissey would like you to know that he is still here, that his lifelong bile has not yet settled, and that his refusal to fall into wimpish modern orthodoxies remains unscathed. One has the right to nag—it’s part of the unspoken artistic birthright to provoke—and bitterness isn’t even necessarily unattractive. But Morrissey’s bitterness is firm and stolid, an adamance to self-righteousness that creates a moral and aesthetic compass by which to navigate a system that—as he wails in “Knockabout World,” the second single—turned him “into a public target.”
In his fat, florid autobiography—hilariously published directly on Penguin Classics, a literary imprint that doesn’t normally canonize living authors—Moz describes a passion for the early punk band the New York Dolls as an ultimate and totalizing sum of everything he wanted to embody, both as performer and as a body. “Their eyes are indifferent,” he writes. “They have left the order of this world." His admiration comes from their strange way of floating out of space, out of time, out of care—a freedom to exist entirely on their own terms. Morrissey, whose eyes are far from indifferent, has managed to achieve the total opposite: He has become exceptionally of this world.

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The experimental D.C. duo’s latest album is made up of slabs of textured noise and decayed vocals, but they use their DIY chaos as a radical force against all hierarchies.

One Year

Model Home’s music would blend right in with a dystopia. The deteriorating sounds of Patrick Cain’s electronics would be impossible to distinguish from the constant construction that is the score of any contemporary city; NappyNappa’s enigmatic missives would be lost in the roar of public service announcements, personalized advertisements, and omnipresent sirens. Of course, the experimental duo is from Washington D.C., which has always produced bands that reflect the inherent paradox of fighting for freedom in a city pockmarked with monuments to the slave trade. Model Home’s One Year mirrors this conflict; NappyNappa’s urgent spoken word breaks through the waves of Patrick Cain’s synthetic distortion. Built on the edifice of dub sound systems and DIY basement clatter, this monument to a year-long experiment in collective improvisation is made up of slabs of textured noise and decayed vocals.
On the world-weary “Faultfinder,” a woozy number that sounds like it was recorded on a warped tape, Nappy’s vocals expand and shrink to a steady drumbeat. His voice buzzes and squeaks through the haze of a merry-go-round-like melody, yet the fuzz clears when he finds it necessary to deliver a pointed statement of contempt: “Ain’t no equality/Inequality only leveraged to disperse.” Heard through the warbled drum loops, his observations are like futurist road signs. On “Push Thru,” Nappa narrates a series of thoughts he has while riding a bus route in a deranged Auto-Tune: “Just got to have faith in my surroundings/I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.” He manipulates his voice to match the acceleration and deceleration of the percussion; Cain will cut his voice up, slow it down, and hollow it out till it sounds like a voicemail.
This creates the illusion that you are hearing Nappa shout on a soapbox in a city full of automatons, mixing prophetic judgements with dispassionate inquiry in an attempt to wake the dead. On “Grip” Nappa shouts, “Processed prescriptions, polluted perceptions/Dirty lenses makes for a cruddy vision,” balancing biting critique with quotidian observation. His calls for self-actualization are jammed between corrupted drums and satellite blips. You hear his voice attempting to break through the insipid chatter of a digitally distracted society, filled with people convinced that they are communicating through “social media,” while they numb themselves and proudly declare that they are unable to concentrate.
To reduce fuzz around the words would provide a clarity that rings false in an increasingly obfuscated world. So they surround Nappa’s words with clutter, noise, trash. Take “Baya Style,” an ESG-influenced caper lying in the middle of the album; its pots ’n’ pans rhythm and Mantronix production are ’80s boombox material. Feedback propels Nappa’s testimonial—“Buy now, buy now/1-800-Buy Now”—to blurry heights; the squeals his keyboards make cut through Nappa’s words, which are slowly blunted by reverb. The two musicians mutually agree to disappear the false boundary between producer and speaker.
“No Barcode & Boundless” is the final word from this conflict-prone alliance, fusing two songs that appeared on separate mixtapes. “Boundless” comes first, built on a sound that mimics a revving car and Nappa’s mutterings. In the next section, Cain creates a horrorcore atmosphere by lengthening wind-chime notes and dividing them with a snare that comes in at the oddest of intervals, while Nappa swerves from lines about destroying your foes to respecting your mother. In this muck, he delivers his most clear statement of ethics: “No barcode you can’t buy me/I don’t even write cursive so you can’t sign me.” This selection of songs from their catalog is an edited transcript of a vital dialogue. Their music is messy and intoxicating because it was forged in this fire of equity. It’s not possible to ditch long-held identities without conflict and without conversation; often, the latter leads to the former. What NappyNappa and Patrick Cain say is that we should embrace rupture if we ever want to truly partner with each other.

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Once considered too weird for the folk crowd and too pastoral for the rock crowd, this obscure 1972 masterpiece gets a long-overdue reissue—a testament to its creators’ faith, perseverance, and genius.

Bright Phoebus

If you’ve never heard Bright Phoebus—or never even heard of Lal and Mike Waterson, the British sister and brother who recorded the obscure masterpiece with contemporary folk royalty in 1972—its opening will still feel immediately familiar. “I’m the leader of the Rubber Band,” a choir proclaims as a trumpet dances in the distance. “It’s the finest band around/The best band in the land/Isn’t it grand?” The ebullient beat, the harmonies, the bold pronouncement: It is nothing less than a reprise of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” delivered half a decade later, complete with a jaw-harp-and-cornet tangent in the middle. “Rubber Band,” like its predecessor, functions like a set of brightly decorated gates standing before one of the most musically imaginative and emotionally sophisticated albums ever made. That’s right: Bright Phoebus deserves canonical status, and perhaps a new reissue from Domino will get it there.
The Watersons—properly, orphaned siblings Lal, Mike, and Norma and a rotating coterie of collaborators—emerged under various names in the early ’60s as part of the great British folk revival. They sang old songs in eccentric fashion, and their unaccompanied interpretations soon pushed the group into their scene’s vanguard. But a life of touring Europe’s assorted dens for, at best, modest pay and attention proved unsustainable. The Watersons split just as their star seemed to be rising. They started families and careers.
Lal and Mike began writing original songs separately, though, and soon realized that they missed singing together. They collaborated in sporadic sessions at home, finding fun in making music once again. That casual setup changed when Martin Carthy, an old friend who had found recent success solo and in Steeleye Span, heard Lal’s songs during a visit. He helped recruit a top-tier cast, including Fairport Convention cofounder Ashley Hutchings, who in turn contacted guitarist Richard Thompson, to transform the musings of two singers who had rarely played with instrumentalists into full-band arrangements. Lal’s idiosyncratic approach to the guitar, for instance, had to be translated into a system that the rest of the band could actually understand.
Recorded in a week in what sounds like a convivial, communal fever dream, Bright Phoebus distills lessons learned from centuries of British folk into deeply personal songs that sound only vaguely like their predecessors. Too weird for the folk crowd and too pastoral for the rock crowd, the album flopped. Only 1,000 copies were sold. Still, its reputation grew, especially among fellow musicians, from Jarvis Cocker and Billy Bragg to Hiss Golden Messenger and Arcade Fire, who may have recognized the risks the Watersons took in an oft-conservative field. For decades an expensive collector’s item, it steadily gained new disciples through bad bootlegs and YouTube streams. Domino’s long-overdue reissue should help to spread Bright Phoebus’ renown. The remastered voices spring from the speakers, while extended liner notes from the journalist Pete Paphides provide both historical clarity and modern context. And 12 bonus tracks offer low-key demos, intimate laughs between Lal and Mike, and a few songs that never made it into the album’s basement sessions.
Mostly, there’s the original album itself. In 12 tracks, Bright Phoebus side-winds from playful psychedelia (“Rubber Band”) to moribund folk balladry (“The Scarecrow”), from country-rock kickers (“Danny Rose”) to keening acoustic laments (“Child Among the Weeds”). There are shout-along tunes worthy of the Summer of Love and moments of quiet brooding fit for Nick Drake. The Watersons and their all-star band tweak each of these forms just so, cracking the conventional structures they’d spent a lifetime learning with revelatory nuance. It’s hard to imagine a more vocally versatile pair than Lal and Mike, whose interplay adds depth to all of these moods. Norma’s guest turn on “Red Wine Promises,” a perfectly balanced pendulum of drunken self-pity and self-confidence, is stoic and staggering.
What’s most remarkable about Bright Phoebus, however, is the way in which it’s striated with all sorts of sadness. “Winifer Odd” portrays a lifetime of disappointment through a child who was born waiting for events that never came; it’s devastating. “To Make You Stay” perfectly captures the bile that bad love can produce. Innocence disappears forever in “Never the Same,” a cello-chased lament of the atomic age. In Lal’s dystopian vision of dead birds, murderous priests, and a drooping sun, children are too sick to play. “If we live another day,” she sings in a perfect deadpan, “we’ll never be the same again.”
Still, there is a glowing sense of optimism. During the indomitable country-rock rollick “Shady Lady,” which sounds like a Neil Young holdover from his Buffalo Springfield days, the Watersons implore the subject to live a bit more freely, to “get yourself some sunshine while you can.” The sun rises again in the title track and closer, a graceful anthem of individual redemption shared with friends. At first, only Mike sings of his bright awakening: “Today, Bright Phoebus, she smiled down on me for the very first time.” Lal joins for the next round. And then, after the drums drop in and Richard Thompson’s electric guitar restates the theme, everyone in the room seems to join the choir impulsively. It’s a celebration of shared friendship, devotion, creation, and, true to the Watersons’ lifelong bond, singing one’s way through hardship. For a record whose sheer existence seemed so unlikely, it’s a beaming testament to faith and perseverance.
Indeed, almost half a century after Bright Phoebus’ release, its reintroduction at this moment offers a few urgent takeaways, especially for artists struggling to eke out a livable income in an economy of streaming media and short-term gigs. It remains relevant—awe-inspiring, really—because the Watersons weren’t beholden to careers, orthodoxy, or fitting in with a scene they helped shape. They had taken a break and come back with the realization that they had more to contribute to the songbook than a bold interpretative language. The move cost them fans and sales, but it allowed for a record that, so many decades later, is the figurative needle in a haystack: a singular piece of innovation from a cadre that was too often compelled only to preserve the past. Hearing Bright Phoebus, it’s hard not to think of Dylan becoming “Judas,” Radiohead becoming “pretentious,” or any other artist who boldly shrugged off expectations to leave us with something worthy of outlasting their own lives. Lal Waterson died in 1998, Mike in 2011. But Bright Phoebus, now thankfully back in print, deserves to last forever.


The Floridian emo band channels a sense of boundless possibility on their new LP, which has the heft of a manifesto despite its compact length.

I Became Birds

Throughout 2020, punk bands and fans wondered how anyone could generate and sustain a wave of excitement without the usual dues-paying opening slots, five-band gigs or breakout Fest sets. The brash Floridians in Home Is Where might still do that eventually, but they’ve excelled in the compact spaces that serve as proving grounds in 2021: TikTok, Twitter, and 18-minute albums. On their bracing first official LP I Became Birds, Home Is Where talk a big game—about power structures, trans rights, and especially about fifth-wave emo. Brandon MacDonald mostly expresses themselves in uncanny bursts of imagery, so the few times they are direct are rare enough to quote in full: “cops are flammable, if you try,” “Look at all the dogs/I wanna pet every puppy I see,” “How long has it been since a president got assassinated?” (mind you, “The Scientific Classification of Stingrays” was initially released in October 2020). These lines don’t represent contradictory impulses so much as poles on a moral continuum, a coherent worldview of good and evil that lends I Became Birds the heft of a manifesto despite the length of an EP.
I Became Birds is often simple enough to be performed as folk or punk, but please don’t call it “folk-punk.” “The Scientific Classification of Stingrays” repeats a two-bar melody over a single teeth-clenched riff, its urgency modulated by MacDonald’s howls about being immersed in an ocean of splinters and a “uniform of gasoline.” “Assisted Harakiri” achieves perpetual motion despite repeating the same two chords at the same speed; during its four and a half minutes, a simple lead octave fissions into a flurry of tapped notes, MacDonald’s lysergic lyrics visions escalated by a runner’s high. With its strings, its so-called “puppy petter choir” (ID’ed as such in the credits) and mid-song screamo break, “Sewn Together From the Membrane of the Great Sea Cucumber” is an outlier, and also the album’s centerpiece. It’s the most immediately impressive thing on I Became Birds, perhaps because it’s the only song that immediately recalls the most ambitious revival-era bands.
A list of consecutive Bandcamp tags on their 2019 debut our mouths to smile reads “bob dylan worship” and “emo,” and they mean it—witness their @bobdylansmells Twitter handle and our mouths to smile’s “Dob Bylan,” where he’s MacDonald’s best friend, leader, savior, dealer, comrade, mom and dad. MacDonald sees Dylan as part of a lineage that includes more traditional emo influences like Tim Kinsella and Jeff Mangum—singers with unconventional voices and a surrealist take on the way our bodies have minds of their own. “Oh! The treachery of anatomy,” MacDonald screams on “Assisted Harakiri.” Though MacDonald favors language as much for its phonic impact as its literal meaning, they never equivocate. MacDonald renders history, memory and the sweltering atmosphere of Palm Coast, Florida with tactile, ripe imagery (“Preservative sun showers trickle down,” “Sunday school in a bug spray June”). But they convey the most meaning through their unhinged delivery— when they yell “hey Samantha!” throughout “Long Distance Conjoined Twins,” it carries the same ecclesiastical fervor as “I love you Jesus Christ!”
No matter how abstract MacDonald gets with their imagery, the title of I Became Birds is the decoder key—they’ve described the album as the retelling of their gender transition and, perhaps not coincidentally, it evokes ANOHNI’s I Am a Bird Now, which explored similar themes of heartache and deliverance in a completely different style of music. “Let’s trespass vacant properties we claim are our bodies,” MacDonald howls, comparing their heart to an unused power grid waiting to be activated; a fitting image for a song that makes honking harmonica over acoustic guitars still sound like the most electrifying music of 2021. Even if they’ve bristled at comparisons to Joyce Manor or the Hotelier, this is who I hear when I listen to I Became Birds. It’s not because Home Is Where sound much like them; it’s because they channel the same sense of boundless possibility, of horizons expanding in real time. With Home Is Where, it’s all about feel, and I Became Birds feels like emo once again flipping the switch on its eternal energy source.

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Reintroducing her band as a solo project, Alicia Bognanno follows the tried-and-true: sticky hooks, shoutalong lyrics, and walloping, caffeinated riffs.

SUGAREGG

At 29, Bully’s Alicia Bognanno could teach a master class in grunge rock. She knows how to write hooks that grab you like a rip current, she was a star intern at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio, and her raspy howl could pierce metal. She’s got such a firm grasp on the part that director Alex Ross Perry asked her to write the music for the fictional ’90s rock band led by Elisabeth Moss in his 2019 film Her Smell. But Bognanno knew that something was off, that there was a block in the system, and before embarking on her third record, SUGAREGG, she addressed the personal issues that shadowed her last album, 2017’s Losing.
Her fresh start was both professional and personal. She parted ways with her bandmates and landed on the right treatment for her bipolar II, which she credits for SUGAREGG’s groundedness. Liberated from some anxiety and feelings of imposter syndrome, she was able to take a step back. SUGAREGG is the first Bully album to be engineered by someone other than Bognanno, in this case John Congleton (known for his work with Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten, and Moses Sumney). It’s essentially Bully’s re-introduction as a solo project, and these 12 songs capture the invigorating energy of the band’s 2015 debut.
For the most part, SUGAREGG sticks to the tried-and-true: sticky hooks, shoutalong lyrics, and walloping, caffeinated riffs. (“Oh yeah, I just wanted to pick up the tempo,” Bognanno ad-libs at the beginning of one song.) It’s the sort of album that can inject a jolt of adrenaline into even the most spudly couch potato. Unlike its predecessor, SUGARGEGG has moments of genuine musical levity, even if the subject matter retains its heaviness. The lethargic “Prism” is a sun-streaked daydream tinged by lingering memories of pain; “Where to Start” turns frustration with a partner into jangly rocket fuel. (Bognanno told Rolling Stone that the melody was inspired by Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping.”)
Bognanno’s songwriting has always been personal, but here she digs deeper. On “Like Fire,” she illustrates the ups and downs of bipolar disorder, especially the overwhelming, disruptive bouts of euphoria. The bouncy “Every Tradition” rejects the biological and social roles (parenthood, marriage) impressed upon women, describing these expectations as dissociative. “Something’s off, you’re wrong about the dream/And I’ve been fucking up/Wasting my time second-guessing what I need,” she proclaims over a blast of noise. The thoughts that run through her mind in the bass-heavy “Stuck in Your Head” are earnest in their desire for clarity: “I wanna be in touch/Feel a little less disconnected/Without the crutch.”
Uncertainty reappears over and over on SUGAREGG; “I don’t know where to start,” “I don’t know what I wanted,” and “don’t know what you wanted” are common refrains. But whether she is addressing an absent parent or giving up on the exhausting emotional rollercoaster of a relationship, by acknowledging that she doesn’t know all the answers or reasons, Bognanno learns to loosen her grip. “I’m not angry anymore,” she sings on the smoldering “Hours and Hours.” “I’m not holding on to that.”
Midway through the album, on “Come Down,” Bognanno offers loving advice, maybe to herself, maybe to someone else: “I hope you come to realize your worth/Tired devotion, passion is a curse.” Delivered over a mid-tempo melody and punctuated by the barking of her dog, Mezzi, there’s little noise to distract from the message: Self-love can be life-changing. SUGAREGG’s confidence and candor suggest that Bognanno is taking those words to heart.

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Following on the heels of last year's O.K., the indie-pop outfit Eskimeaux releases a sweet little gem of an EP, fraught with indecision and insecurity.

Year of the Rabbit

Listening to Year of the Rabbit is like stumbling across a cache of hidden journals that Gabrielle Smith wrote five years ago, hid in a box, and recently rediscovered. It trails on the heels of 2015’s O.K., and the declarative agency found on that album has been swapped for a heavy barrage of indecision. The title track drills a series of repeat phrases into your head; "Are you mad?" and, "Are you home?", and "I don’t know" layering over one another, replacing the absolute knockout precision of lines like, "And everything I said, spewed like sparklers from my mouth/ they looked pretty as they flew, but now they’re useless and burnt out," from O.K.’s "I Admit I’m Scared." On "WTF," Smith continues to ask, "What the fuck is a kiss anyway?/ What the fuck is this feeling?" which are the type of unanswerable questions that – if you choose to dwell on them long enough – could cause your sense of humanity to unravel.
She’s always been one to thread anxiety through her work, but her keen ability to size up the situation, quickly and decisively, kept the songs razor-sharp. Year of the Rabbit is lacking in determination, and its hesitancy– all fuzzy around the edges – eventually becomes draining. With a running time of just over 15 minutes, it’s a sweet little gem of an EP, but pop a valium if you play it several times in a row.
However, there’s still a great deal of merit buried amongst Year of the Rabbit’s insecurities. Smith’s voice returns to the hushed intimacy of her earliest recordings. Even if she’s too timid to raise it and ask the questions, the overall sound is lush and warm and soothing. She’s cut back on the synths in favor of a rawer feeling of intimacy. You’re not listening to a studio recording, you’re locked in her bedroom, watching her pen the tracks.
Overall, the EP is strewn with enough tiny, beautiful moments to satisfy. By far, the sweetest and most relatable recollection occurs right at the end of "Drunk" as the music cuts out and Smith’s voice dangles on the track with a lone bass note before gearing up again. "See you at Myrtle Broadway/ I’m shy and keep walking/ Your eyes as sad as tree stumps/ A nose just like a ski jump/ I don’t just wanna fuck/ I wanna show you love," she sings. It’s a powerful snapshot of desire and lust, a reminder that in order to stay with any one person for an extended period of time, you need to rediscover things about them you thought you already knew.
It’s important to note that the title is a reference to 2011, the last Year of the Rabbit and the year Smith and her friends formed the Epoch collective—the Brooklyn-based community of artists which includes artists such as Florist, Told Slant, and Bellows .(The EP was recorded with fellow Epoch collective members Emily Sprague of Florist and returning drummer Felix Walworth—who also plays in Florist and is the frontperson for Told Slant.) Smith’s descriptions of long-distance relationships and lengthy separations, of shaky stops and starts, of "trying to be open to whatever," mark that year as an intense period of personal growth. Taking the time frame into consideration, Year of the Rabbit can be viewed as a retrospective, an artist piecing together bits of her past to gain further clarity and insight into whatever comes next.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we offer a first-hand account of the brilliant chaos of PiL’s The Flowers of Romance.

Public Image Ltd: The Flowers of Romance

The Flowers of Romance

The saga that led up to the recording of Public Image Ltd’s third studio album, 1981’s The Flowers of Romance, was as lurid as a telenovela. It was hailed as a defiant tour de force, a pivotal forerunner of techno and industrial music, one that set the bar for post-punk, and all of “uneasy listening” to come. Making the record was an exercise in alienation, more painful than getting and removing the same tattoo in one afternoon.
The sickly-sweet irony of The Flowers of Romance hid a time bomb. In its thunderous, distorted drums, hear PiL tick towards their own explosion. If you feel at odds with the world, know there’s a better way, but no one will listen to you—put The Flowers of Romance on repeat. It may not soothe your soul, but it will make you feel you’re not alone in your angst or your need to keep going.
Incidentally, Public Image Ltd were actually an incorporated company. This professionalism was a big fuck-off to punk’s chaos that had camouflaged how lead singer John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten, the former lead singer of the Sex Pistols) was being ripped off by the Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren, financially and emotionally. PiL was to be a fresh concept, one based on trust, non-hierarchical, primed to supply the 360-degree needs of a music industry adjusting to videos and CDs.
Along with Lydon, PiL’s Directors included Dave Crowe, one of his old North London mates; the anguished, gaunt guitarist Keith Levene, who had helped start the Clash; and, in a brilliant stroke of Lydon’s, sparky Jeannette Lee as a non-specific band member. Witty and level-headed, Lee was the glue, the friendly face, responsible for just about everything except actually writing and playing, and even then, her savvy imprint was palpable. The petite heartthrob had previously run Acme Attractions, a progressive style and culture stall/salon in King’s Road, Chelsea’s Antiquarius market with her then-boyfriend, filmmaker Don Letts. She thought of re-purposing the name, The Flowers of Romance; Lydon had suggested it for a short-lived band of Sid Vicious, future Slits members Palmolive and Viviane Albertine. Lee would quit the band in 1982, while PiL goes on, still compelling today; but her tenure is immortalized on the LP cover. A red flower between her teeth à la Carmen, she appears to be about to bash the photographer with a blunt object—actually the pestle from then Vivienne Westwood stylist, Yvonne Gold’s kitchen. The hectic glamour that the über-stylish Lee projected stopped PiL from being perceived as all grumpy white boys—and never forget that even a pestle can hurt. Today, Lee is one of the music industry’s most powerful women, as co-owner of Rough Trade Records.
For two weeks in the fall of 1980, these hardcore Londoners were off to the exotic Oxfordshire countryside. The stately neo-Elizabethan 17th-century home that Virgin’s Richard Branson had converted into an unusually grand studio was a readymade stage for breakdown/breakthroughs both artistic and mystic; it came complete with a ghost, whose visitations were yet another good reason to put off recording. The cast of this musical mystery experience included myself for some days; drummer Martin Atkins, younger, less tormented than Lydon and Levene, his bouncing presence let some air in; and a slight charmer nicknamed Shooz, aka the late guitarist Steve New. Years later, Shooz said he had been hiding from his transvestism; but then he shared Levene’s career-stunting fondness for smack, contributing to the general tension.
The waking hours, which mostly happened at night, were a tug-of-war between everyone’s chosen stimulants or deadeners. In those times, cocaine was non-existent and weed had not yet been genetically modified into its current monster testosterone THC; so we can blame the paranoia on the speed. Among other things. Lydon was well known for being paranoid; but then, sometimes they are out to get you, as life had shown him. That uncomfortable knowledge crawls through every bar of The Flowers of Romance. Has any other LP been dragged from its makers so slowly? The album is a breech delivery that needed forceps to scream its way into the world, those indentations on the skull, that bruising—you can hear it all.
Lydon’s Pistols experience was always tainted by the contempt of coulda-been father figure McLaren. Naturally, Lydon had been impressed at first with the worldly older man’s naughty charisma. Convinced that he had not only assembled the group, (which, in fairness, he had), McLaren also thought he had invented Lydon’s creativity. Wrong answer! Actually, McLaren had lucked out but did not appreciate Lydon, who was a true untapped performer and poet with his own concept of sound. This dismissiveness had caused Lydon to retrench and seek to surround himself with those he knew and trusted, in the new, equitable PiL model.
The old Pistols construct had become its own sort of prison, one which Sid Vicious had not escaped alive. The loss of Sid, known as Beverley when he befriended Lydon at college, could never really heal. And now, another key figure was also missing— banished, in fact: amiable bass player Jah Wobble, another longtime friend, whom Lydon had talked into learning to play because he wanted him around. Who knows what was in Wobble’s mind, but he felt entitled to use some PiL tapes for his own recordings, without discussion. Off with his head!
There was a garrison mentality. You were pro-PiL or not. If punk meant a tabula rasa, a clean slate, Lydon now found it necessary to re-make the slate. Without Wobble, a solution had to be found, and the fewer people that were let into the besieged inner decision-making core, the better.
Frankly, I benefited from their creative scramble. As a rock scribe, I had often covered Lydon, but having been an original Flying Lizard, the early ’80s experimental new-wavers, I was now invited to use PiL “down time.” (In the hours when the studio was not in use, I recorded my own indie 45, “Launderette/Private Armies,” which Lydon and Levene co-produced with me.) Did Lydon already suspect that the studio would often lie idle?
Lydon and I had first bonded over a shared passion for reggae bass. Bob Marley called the rickety liaison between the music of two oppressed tribes, black youth and white punks, the Punky Reggae Party. With the Rastas’ numbering of corrupt, controlling capitalist systems as Babylon, and Jamaican dub remixes shattering predictable reality, reggae was our religion.
Back then, I was a music journalist, often covering reggae. My interviews with artists like Big Youth and Dennis Brown sometimes happened at Lydon’s terrace house in Fulham’s Gunter Grove, where dub pumped through giant speakers and the session never stopped, a playground run on vampire hours. Apart from work, and even then, people mostly stirred when day bled into night. I doubt any of us had ever had that much space to cavort in before. For a while, we took over the asylum.
Hence my presence at The Manor. We lived in a topsy-turvy twilight zone. Rather than milking every precious moment of studio time, there was a lot of sulking and/or deep thinking going on with everyone alone in their bedrooms. Result being, for me anyway, that the glorious moment when I laid down my vocals for “Private Armies,” (on which both Levene and Shooz play,) was somewhat marred by the engineers’ annoyance. Having waited for hours—days?—for PiL, they were underwhelmed at Lydon thrusting me upon them. (It all worked out OK in the end!)
But bit by bit, The Flowers of Romance’s confrontational, epic tracks assembled, despite it all. A musician would wander in, play a riff, amble off, and another would show up, add another dimension to the fragment and so on. Lydon had reams of notes and could scribble down and deliver a new song fast, if the track moved him. Thus, the nine songs were assembled, a bit like a big communal jigsaw left out in the living-room. But two weeks at The Manor only produced one finished track: the ambient instrumental, “Hymie’s Him.” The rest of the rhythms were taken back to the city and molded at Virgin’s Townhouse Studios, in a somewhat more disciplined fashion
Yet even while PiL members were brooding alone in their rooms at The Manor, subconscious work had been done, wrestling with a metaphysical question: when your entire aesthetic has been rooted in bass culture, how to even make sound without it?  Those still newfangled synthesizers were part of the answer when the album was completed. Levene almost invented the jagged, jangly post-punk guitar sound. Now he was testing digitized music, with his cumbersome Prophet synthesizer. When it came to music, Levene was fervent, obsessive. The key to The Flowers of Romance lies in his anguished cry, so loud I could hear it in the early hours in my bedroom next door, “I only want to make music like no-one has ever heard before! Or I can’t be fucked.”
Of course, that epic ambition has always meant tempting the gods, and Greek-wise, Levene—who left the band in 1983—was Sisyphus, doomed to keep pushing, not a boulder up a mountain, but a guitar or synthesizer’s sound, till the new is no longer novel and the cycle starts again.
Doom and how to deal with it is the message of The Flowers of Romance, which unsettles from the start: an itchy insect sound is swatted down with a harsh swipe of one drum, making the listener the mosquito, followed by Lydon’s startling muezzin-like wail. Disillusion and rejection infuse the title track, caught in this exquisite banality: “I sent you flowers/You wanted chocolates instead.” Attraction keeps tussling with repulsion, especially at women’s bodies in the primal scream of “Track 8.” Repulsion wins on “Go Back,” when PiL tackles the Babylon system that tries to make us all trot down one narrow track forever, led by debt and doubt :”Left/Right/Left/Right/Don’t look back/Take second best/Number one, protect self-interest/Here every day is a Monday…”
But the overall effect is not rage or despair. The music is on the attack. This was PiL fighting for existence, collective back against the wall. No wonder they felt almost paralyzed. How to top yourself, if your first band had become a global, culture-busting sensation; your own band’s first two studio albums—1978’s Public Image: First Issue and 1979’s Metal Box—were hailed as game-changers, crashing through the primitivism of punk to deepen the template for post-punk’s angular experimentation. Then the live official bootleg album from 1980, Paris Au Printemps, album got a severe backlashing from the press. PiL had to get its groove back.
The Flowers of Romance spat at their critics with intensity and twisted clarity. In “Phenagen,” Lydon stubbornly intones, “Empty promises help to forget/No more, no more/Repair the damages you made/Amen, amen, amen, amen.” He massacres the Mass as only a Catholic can, and the record’s pain might be a form of expiation, cathartic confession of damage done.
It’s an album that itches in its skin, restless for oblivion. Rather like punk’s perverse mode of communication—insult your best mates the most—Lydon’s lyrics at first appear misanthropic, certainly suspicious of other humanoids. But a doubly perverse flash of humanism nonetheless illuminates the work. To mess with our heads, Lydon offers us just enough light.
The remorseless “Banging the Door” shows this duality. It starts out curmudgeonly: “What do you want? You’re irritating, go away/It’s not my fault that you’re lonely.” Then Lydon bracingly concludes, “Why worry now? You’re not dead yet/You’ve got a whole lifetime to correct it/You’re wasting, admiring hating…”
The track reads more autobiographical than the rest. Against the world, PiL and cohorts would often ignore people pounding. With no security cameras or minders, they were wary. Lydon had often been beaten up in the street. More than once, he came home to find his apartment ransacked by the police Special Branch. He was a subversive rabble-rouser with Irish roots; IRA bombs were a regular menace; perhaps inevitably, some people and authorities projected their racism and/or security fears onto Lydon’s anti-leadership.
But for those that were there, “Banging the Door” will always be associated with the tempestuous early courtship between Lydon and his wife, the striking blonde German scene-maker, Nora Forster, mother of the late Ari Up, singer of the Slits. In retrospect, Lydon, who was quite a shy guy, might not have wanted to be seen as slushy in front of our fiercely cynical, free-thinking coterie. After all, “This Is Not a Love Song,” would be one of the band’s biggest hits two years later, in 1983. Yet the barbed bouquet of their stormy young relationship has lasted for almost half a century.
Which is a metaphor for the continued meaning of The Flowers of Romance today, for the mood of survival despite betrayal that it has bequeathed us. Come to that, it captures where we find ourselves now: all lurching through dark Babylon towards an uncertain future. But there is some light ahead, if we keep banging away.


David Cohn, aka Serengeti, and Open Mike Eagle have recorded a brief-but-deep hip-hop album under the name Cavanaugh. On it, "Mike and Dave" are resident handymen who schlep from residence to residence in a Florida mixed-income project, glimpsing other people's lives while doing what they can to keep the same systems functioning for the rich and the broke alike.

Time & Materials

Michael Eagle and David Cohn knew each other years back as a couple fellow Southern Illinois University students. Both were interested in doing nervy hip-hop that rendered personal neuroses into allusive, bittersweet comedy (and vice-versa). They know each other now as transplanted Angelenos with deep mutual respect, a faithful cult fanbase, and a creativity-stoking environment of collective support—but those neuroses can still be hard to shake. They keep finding successful ways to exorcise those frustrations, cracking jokes and facades at the same time. Naturally, they'd have a lot to ricochet off each other, something that sporadic teamups only hinted at.
Time & Materials gives that dynamic a shot over the course of 26 short minutes, proving more than anything that there's more depth still left unexplored. The album's recorded under the name Cavanaugh, and the setting of this brief-but-deep album is intriguing, in a J.G. Ballard-via-The Coup kind of way: the inhabitants and social structures of a Florida mixed-income project featuring units for both luxury condos and subsidized housing tenants. "Mike and Dave" are resident handymen who schlep from residence to residence, glimpsing other people's lives while doing what they can to keep the same systems functioning for the rich and the broke alike. And in the process, they channel the residents' class-war conflicts into their own combative moods, fueling their own stress over money, relationships, and an uncertain future that keeps them from being the assertive successes they want to be.
Time & Materials tackles sociological themes that would be sledgehammer-obvious in less-nuanced hands. But the duo draws you in by skimping on or misdirecting details. Serengeti disappears deeper into his lyrical role than Mike does—understandable from an MC who's been known to do half a live set in the guise of a cranky, bellowing 50-year-old. But for his first full-length production job, Mike sets a tone as raw-nerved and abrasively contemplative as the concept demands. A soupy drone on "Typecast" evokes the stress and sweat of the escape-seeking protagonists, including guest turns by P.O.S., Busdriver, and Future Islands' Sam Herring in his purposefully-awkward rap alter ego Hemlock Ernst. The creaking sludge of opening track "Zorak" underscores the TV-casualty free association of the lyrics.
The big drawback of the production's distorted, synthwave-on-codeine atmosphere is that it threatens to muffle the rewind-demanding intricacies of both MCs—Serengeti's motormouthed turns of run-on worldbuilding in particular get trickier to grasp. It's also not always clear whether the characters Mike and Serengeti inhabit are the maintenance guys or the people they cross paths with and intrude on by necessity. Of course, the larger question is whether they're really inhabiting or observing outside characters at all—"I" heavily outnumbers "you" and "they" in the whole narrative pronoun department, and the fraying seams of their own mind states stand out no matter who's being profiled.


The influential singer-songwriter returns after many years with a powerful album that mixes spoken word, folk, and blues over roughed-up sonics.

I'm New Here

There were few voices that articulated the anxious, fractured state of America in the 1970s and early 80s as well as the clear baritone of Gil Scott-Heron. As a spoken-word artist and poet, he could pinpoint the fissures in the American dream and exorcise them with a wit that blended righteous anger and arch sarcasm. As a singer he could envelop those same uncomfortable confrontations in a rich, emotional tone that brought out the empathetic face of unrest. Yet except for a chorus cameo on Blackalicious' "First in Flight" and a memorable shout-out on LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge", he was rarely heard or cited in the early years of America's great post-traumatic decade, even if his pained depiction of "a nation that just can't stand much more" in "Winter in America" rang as true in 2002 as it did in 1975.
Instead, Scott-Heron spent much of the 00s in and out of prison on drug charges, adding onto a long hiatus that saw him turn away from the record industry in favor of live performance and writing. Between 1983 and 2009, he released only one studio album, 1994's Spirits, so issuing his first in 16 years could've been rife with potential for a pent-up analysis of everything that's happened in the process of race relations and American culture over the last couple decades. Yet I'm New Here sees an incisive political voice turning inwards, not protesting the doings of the greater world but crafting a frank confessional over the state of his own. He does this allusively, through cover songs and short soundbite interludes and original compositions that feel like sparse flashes of a deep, once-dormant creative impulse. Yet it still feels honest, like something said out of necessity instead of opportunity, and the result is an album that engages with the idea of loneliness in exceptional ways.
I'm New Here is bookended with a two-part spoken-word track that sounds like a metatextual stunt: the quintessential hip-hop prototype discussing his upbringing over a loop of the intro to Kanye West's "Flashing Lights", returning the nod towards "Home Is Where the Hatred Is" that underpinned Late Registration's "My Way Home". But "On Coming From a Broken Home" is a powerful mission of purpose that sets the tone for the rest of the album, a reflection of his upbringing that made him the man he is today. "Broken Home" pays homage to the women in his family and the strengths they passed on to him; other interludes hint at darkly comic acknowledgements of wrongdoing, modest but defiant statements of enduring survival, and an admission that even his less desirable personality traits are an inseparable part of his identity.
Those brief interstitial statements link pieces of brain-wracked guilt and anxiety that rank as truly haunting moments: "Where Did the Night Go", a study in lonely insomnia and the inability to communicate with someone he loves, and the confession in "New York Is Killing Me" that the city that held him in an alienating grasp for so long-- "eight million people, and I didn't have a single friend"-- only makes him long for the home in Tennessee he left at 13 after his grandmother died. It's an interesting contrast to the sentiment of his 1976 song "New York City", where he sang of a metropolis he loved because it reminded him of himself. Either the personalities of the man and the city have diverged too much, or they've gotten too close for comfort.
But the most noticeable thing about Scott-Heron on this album to anyone familiar with his work is how worn his voice sounds. It's raspier and age-weathered, less agile, and occasionally prone to letting words slur and melt into each other instead of leaping out as they did back in the 70s. But Richard Russell, the album's producer and owner of XL Recordings, hit on the idea of recasting a man who came up through soul-jazz as a grizzled blues performer, and setting Scott-Heron against sandblasted folk and heavy, borderline-industrial beats augments the rawness of his voice well. Three songs reveal him as an adept interpreter of three generations' worth of roots music: Robert Johnson's "Me and the Devil" rendered as vintage Massive Attack, a minimalist, piano-driven orchestral reworking of the Brook Benton-written Bobby "Blue" Bland classic "I'll Take Care of You", and the unexpected but deftly claimed title track, sourced from Smog. And two spare, static-textured cuts late in the album, "Running" and "The Crutch", give his equally-gritty voice a fitting place in the post-Burial strain of bass music.
For an album that comes so far after its creator's last trip to the studio, it's a bit of a relief that the only cause for disappointment is its brief length. I'm New Here is less than half an hour, though in that short span it does the impressive job of reviving an artist that's been out of the spotlight far too long and setting him up for a new incarnation as an elder statesman of modern roots music. Comparisons have been made to what Rick Rubin did for Johnny Cash in the 90s, and the parallels are there: I'm New Here and American Recordings are both cover-heavy, starkly-produced releases where rebellious icons become reflective as they hit their sixties. If Gil Scott-Heron's creative resurgence continues after this reintroduction to his poignantly aging voice, we could be looking at one of the most memorably resurrected careers of our time-- a man renewed.


On his latest album, None Shall Pass, Aesop Rock's most distinguishable characteristic, his relentless verbosity, shows no signs of slowing for anyone-- be it the mainstream, the uninitiated, or even fans who couldn't keep up with Bazooka Tooth.

None Shall Pass

Aesop Rock's most distinguishable characteristic, his relentless verbosity, shows no signs of slowing-- for the mainstream, the uninitiated, or even fans who couldn't keep up with Bazooka Tooth. If anything, his lyrics are harder to follow now, and even with the 80-page lyric booklet from his last EP or the transcription of "Citronella" on his myspace, having the words spelled out for you doesn't mean it's going to be easy. When you've got a delivery this dense, all that's left for the confused or the impatient is the tracks, and the Definitive Jux roster has often (if not always) served particular tastes on that front. Luckily, Aesop Rock's latest album, None Shall Pass, is a diverse collection of beats-- from his classical-sampling comfort zone courtesy of the invaluable Blockhead, to looser more traditional hip-hop, to more than a few things we haven't heard him try before. None Shall Pass even throws in some laid-back rock riffs, some futuristic funk, a generous dash of psychedelia, and, of course, Aes' favorite ingredient: paranoia.
That isn't to say Aesop Rock has become impenetrable; that would imply he's no fun. He's got enthusiasm, enunciation, and even hooks this time: The "how alive/too alive" call-and-response from opener "Keep off the Lawn" is custom built for audience participation, and "Catacomb Kids" begs listeners to follow the bouncing ball even if you can't make out every young, suburban misadventure he wedges into the lyrics. The title track quickly steals the show here, however, a stunning shake-up in both beat and delivery in Aesop Rock's oeuvre.
"None Shall Pass" itself slides past on a near-disco beat layered with eerie, broken children's keyboards and ominous clean guitar that Aes wraps his words around nimbly and capably in a way old-school nods like "11:35" only hinted at. The atmosphere is grim, certainly, but with generous bounce and a wry grimace, and it's a microcosm for the vibe of the whole record in addition to being its best track. I often miss the Aesop Rock who strolled through the grimy back alleys of his city just looking for a story to tell on old tracks like "6B Panorama" and "Skip Town" (both from Float) but "None Shall Pass" is like a quick drive through the same city years later when it's become too dangerous for anything more than a glance out the window.
Abstraction is an easy screen, however, and you may not notice the dark co-dependency tale of "Fumes" move over the line from frank slice-of-drug-life narrative to insensitive and bitter through the hissing wet consonants of his delivery. Thankfully, it's overshadowed by songs that are straight-up playful: The bongo-augmented beat to "Bring Black Pluto" is a return to what Aesop and Blockhead do best, and while the connection between demoting Pluto as a planet and Pee Wee's Big Adventure are tenuous to me right now, anyone who fits in a reference to Large Marge and the eye of Cerberus in the same song surely earns extra points in heaven. Of course, there's guest spots from the Def Jux roster, and while Cage talks about his fucked-up childhood and El-P talks about his fucked-up adulthood, the former absolutely tears it over the irrepressible drumbeat of "Getaway Car", and El-P is still potent when he's just shouting a few choice words for a hook on "39 Thieves" and elevating"Gun for the Whole Family" amongst the record's often sluggish second half.*
*
None Shall Pass is a little longer than it needs to be; much as I like his slippery but assured flow on "Five Fingers", cutting everything from acidic groove of "Citronella" straight to closing track "Coffee" would have made the point just as easily. That final track is the biggest jump for Aes, with what's basically a live-band track of slippery bass and chiming guitar with shades of the Fixx, which he bounces merrily over. This is the one John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats guests on, and he serves as the sort of fat lady of the record: he speak-sings his strangely evocative verse in his pinched and equally distinctive voice, and then it's over. I applaud Aes' willing to experiment and his taste in songwriters, but it ends the record on an uncertain note, and sort of the wrong foot... that is, until you get to the hidden track, another seeming live track of gutbucket slide-guitar funk, once again darting sideways in the face of expectation.
What you can glean from a surface listening is an Aes who's still paranoid but almost loving it, grown somewhat bemused at the looming apocalypse. Part of the shine for None Shall Pass stems from goodwill earned by earlier albums that were more quotable and more focused, but another very large part is his artistic restlessness and his adaptable flow-- you know, the part that makes you want to listen to a record more than once. Beats-first, lyrics-second people have enough here to return to, and lyric freaks know there's plenty here to unpack. None Shall Pass is not a case to make him famous, but more a hyper-speed revision of what makes him worth following. Neophytes start elsewhere, but make sure to catch up at some point.


On the UK trio’s first LP for Kill Rock Stars, the band fleshes out its riot-grrrl-meets-girl-group sound with electronics and strings while singing of strength and vulnerability.

Back Home

UK trio Big Joanie make music that doubles as an act of resistance, drawing on riot grrrl’s raucous energy and ’60s girl-group harmonies to carve out space for Black feminist punks in London and beyond. Following the release of their debut, 2018’s fortifying Sistahs, vocalist and guitarist Stephanie Phillips, bassist Estella Adeyeri, and drummer Chardine Taylor-Stone signed to Kill Rock Stars in an ideal alignment of the planets; the influential Washington label’s catalog of underground punk rock is a lodestar for Big Joanie’s sparse, fuzzed-out style and DIY ethos. On Back Home, their first LP for the label, the band expands its palette with electronics and strings while focusing its lyrics on gaining strength through vulnerability, making for some of the trio’s best songwriting to date.
Back Home revolves around conceptions of home, whether in a domestic or psychological sense. The lilting ballad “Count to 10” loops tinkling Casio keys as Phillips sweetly weighs the pros and cons of nesting with someone: “I would like to come home with you/I know that you might be untrue,” she sings; “Take a chance/What else should I do?” On the grungy bruiser “Happier Still,” Phillips zeroes in on a way to get through the worst depressive episodes: “I feel happier/Happier/Happier still,” she repeats against pummeling power chords; “There’ll be no fear/No fear/No fear here.” The bellowed mantra grows increasingly invigorating as she wills herself toward peace of mind.
Once again working with producer Margo Broom, Big Joanie have augmented their sound for bigger stages, accompanying muscular riffs with modulating synths and atmospheric instrumentation. On the late-album standout “I Will,” Phillips aims piercingly for the heart over an electronic organ: “You build a house, you build a roof, you build a happy home,” she chants, keeping pace with Adeyeri’s melodic bassline. “You make it bigger, make it stronger for another soul/And if it doesn’t make it better it’ll fill a hole.” The band circles around Phillips’ voice, evoking a similar slow-burning build to its stripped-back 2020 cover of Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky.” The stuttering “Sainted,” meanwhile, pulls from darkly alluring ’80s synth pop; the unsteady drum machine beneath Phillips’ voice patters like a nervous heartbeat, giving the song a delectably gothic tinge.
Back Home’s lyrics are wry and loaded with self-reflection. “I always make the same mistakes/Don’t tell me I should learn from them,” chirp the backing vocals on the chugging “Taut.” The trio carries the same thread on “Today,” where swooning backing harmonies and violin (played by No Home’s Charlotte Valentine) bolster Phillips’ crooning, bittersweet appeals to know where she stands in a relationship. “Just let me know if I’m in the way,” she begs, lending further weight to an emotional haymaker.
On the dreamy centerpiece “In My Arms,” Big Joanie reach an anthemic high. “I’ve compromised too many times in my life,” Phillips insists, surrounded by backing harmonies and surf-rock guitar, “One day I’ll make the great escape/And send another you away/But now I dream/Of only you in my arms.” On the song’s reprise, the group slows the song down to a crawl with a thudding, Ronettes-style backbeat and feedback-heavy guitar, cushioning each yearning word in echo. Back Home provides heart-rending moments alongside its punk grit, expanding on Big Joanie’s sound without loosening their bite.

Daydream Library Series  / Kill Rock Stars


After a four-year absence, U2 are once again re-applying for the position of World's Biggest Rock Band with their brash, grungy 11th proper full-length (and 14th overall).

How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb

U2 has been crowned the biggest band in the world so many times that, at least conceptually, they've finally managed to transcend themselves, ditching their earthly digs and assuming cartoonish proportions. And that might be why the four silhouettes currently twitching across America's TV screens, jerkily promoting U2-branded iPods over big, neon expanses, seem so eerily apropos: the flesh and blood members of U2 have been reduced to signifiers, mock-ups, representatives. They are bigger than their band.
Produced by arena-guru Steve Lillywhite (with help from longtime twiddlers Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, and Flood), U2's 11th LP, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, is brash, grungy, and loud-- everything R.E.M. tried (and failed) to be on Monster, and everything U2 opted out of being on 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind. Still, Atomic Bomb is not an especially surprising record. It's a classic mix of colossal ballads and jerky rockers-- part-The Unforgettable Fire, part-Achtung Baby. Theoretically, Atomic Bomb weds classic U2 (echoing guitars, big sound, soaring vocals) with nu-U2 (experimental tweaks, electronic flourishes) but, high aspirations aside, the only marriage the record ultimately achieves is the union of good U2 and bad U2. So take a deep breath and prepare for a tiny handful of outstanding tracks and a whole mess of schmaltzy filler.
U2 may be a staunchly democratic machine (ask Eno), but Bono is still singularly responsible for propelling U2-as-uber-group forward, leering out from behind oversized yellow goggles, crusading righteously to reduce Third World debt, campaigning against AIDS, spitting post-Beat induction speeches from Jann Wenner's Hall of Fame podium, bobbing stupidly for Apple, talking and talking and talking about himself. Publicly, U2 are overblown and decadent, sporting silly, abstract monikers and booking colossal stadium tours, calling presidents, wearing sunglasses in the dark, anchoring the Super Bowl, pushing products. Bono is 43 years old, boasts remarkable sway both inside and outside the pop culture sphere, and fronts one of the most universally recognizable rock bands of all time: He is a neo-superstar-- global, important, impossibly entertaining, and forever tiptoeing the line between wholly extraordinary and idiotically self-obsessed.
Despite a deliberately leading album title-- and one lone, overtly suggestive song title ("Love and Peace Or Else")-- How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb is a curiously apolitical record, more about love and loyalty (and the 2001 death of Bono's father) than impending global doom. The decision to sidestep bold politicking and instead highlight feelings-and-guitars is a particularly compelling one right now, given the super-charged months preceding the record's release (and the melange of global conflicts now escalating to new levels of absurdity). Listeners are left wondering if Bono's elbows-deep international activism has somehow turned him off to the (comparably nebulous) effort of writing protest songs-- has all the dirt under his fingernails made the act of emoting into a microphone seem a little less urgent? "Saving the world is now a daily chore," Bono joked to The New York Times-- even in jest, it's a completely ridiculous thing to say. And yet?
Deliberately or not, Bono-as-bespectacled-celebrity-crusader seeps into nearly everything U2 does, sometimes to significant aesthetic effect: When Bono starts cawing urgently about a place called "Vertigo", declaring it "everything I wish I didn't know," it's possible that he's talking about girls or his father or his band-- or Bono might be squealing about something far worse, something awful, something most of us are lucky enough to have never witnessed. The problem is that it's extraordinarily difficult to ever really know exactly what Bono is talking about. Almost without exception, Bono yowls vague, cliched observations, his sentiments always awkwardly bombastic or hopelessly maudlin (check "Miracle Drug," where we are invited to ponder how "Freedom has a scent/ Like the top of a newborn baby's head," or "A Man and A Woman", where we contemplate "the mysterious distance between a man and a woman," or even just repeated-- seriously!-- "Where is the love?" demands.)
Loads of listeners have already noted that opener "Vertigo" bears an odd resemblance to The Supremes' gorgeously desperate "You Keep Me Hanging On", except "Vertigo" is framed by a classic punk shout-down where-- get this!-- Bono's totally singing in Spanish! Wait, he said catorce! It's a classic U2 moment: worldly, frantic, irritatingly deliberate. But when the Edge slams into his guitar, hollering a smirky "Hola!" to Bono's quasi-confrontational "Hello, hello!" it's awfully easy to forgive: "Vertigo" is hopelessly appealing, somehow growing less stupid and more compelling with each listen.
"Vertigo" is followed by a pair of swirly half-ballads, the plodding, overblown "Miracle Drug" and the super-sappy "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own", before we're mercifully handed "Love and Peace Or Else", a snarly, throbbing bit of solace. "Love and Peace" opens with a platter of ominous noise, shaky guitar grumbles rubbing up against high-pitched whines. Drums rumble, and Bono lodges his best semi-seductive demand: "Lay down, lay down." "Love and Peace" is chased by the equally exhilarating "City of Blinding Lights", an earnest and galactic fight song, and the sort of track that's best enjoyed in cars and airplanes, simply because it encites so much giddy movement. But "City of Blinding Lights" is the record's climax, and How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb begins its gnawing descent almost immediately, culminating with disastrous closer "Yahweh", a whiny, monotonous mess that's easily one of the worst songs U2 have ever recorded.
Maybe the biggest problem with Atomic Bomb is just that it sounds so much like U2, and their semi-absurd, totally unparalleled ubiquity has left all of us just a tiny bit tired of listening to things that sound like U2. This isn't completely their fault-- they tried to change (see the questionable Zooropa or the disastrous Pop), and we didn't like that, either. Bono has talked publicly about U2's longevity and quasi-diversity, crediting their shape-shifting to his band's unbreakable internal bonds-- U2 can afford to mess around, because the "spirit" of the band is so strong, so infinitely recognizable. But maybe U2's immortality is also their biggest curse-- and now they're forced to wallow in superstardom, forever perpetuating their own colossal myth.