Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the auspicious debut that sent a 23-year-old guitarist into the stratosphere.

Room for Squares

John Mayer has always been something of a critical bête noir. His gentle, mawkish songwriting juxtaposed against his caddish, clownish behavior has created a friction that is at best unappealing and at worst artistically dishonest. At the height of his fame in the mid- to late-’00s, as the guitar virtuoso and singer-songwriter was vacuuming up Grammys for harmless pablum like “Daughters” and “Say,” he became known for a notorious string of celebrity exes, from Jennifer Aniston to Jessica Simpson to Taylor Swift. Once a dependable source of amusing copy, he beat a forced retreat from the Hollywood media sphere after his increasingly incendiary interviews culminated in the use of a racial slur, followed by his tearful onstage apology during a February 2010 show in Nashville.
Yet since Mayer has stepped out of the spotlight, he has entered an unlikely career renaissance. His three solo albums since his self-induced purgatory have been understated, exploratory; his mind expanding according to the size of his hat. His work when he is not billed under his own name, especially, has been fascinating to behold. Mayer blazes an uncredited guitar solo on one of the best songs on one of the 2010s’ greatest albums, Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, and since 2015, he has been touring, with Dead & Co., as the de facto leader for what remains of the Grateful Dead. To replace Jerry Garcia and be warmly accepted into the Deadhead community is not something you could have predicted from the guy who once donned a Borat-inspired lime-green “mankini” on a festival cruise ship called the Mayer Carrier.
But at the start of the millennium, Mayer was just a nobody with a website, exploiting his wide-eyed lyrical clarity and chopsy musicianship to capture a teen audience readied by the college-quad strums of Dave Matthews Band and David Gray. “Welcome to the real world,” he sings at the start of Room for Squares. The giveaway is that he’s attributing these words not to himself, but to an unspecified authority figure. His major-label debut, released when he was 23 but largely written when he was at least a couple of years younger, is not the real world. Its opening track, “No Such Thing,” denies that one even exists, “just a lie you have to rise above.”
Room for Squares offers a willfully innocent fantasy. Life can be as safe, as self-consciously cute, as broadly appealing as a really popular sitcom. The Crayola-bright soundtrack echoes the music of the protagonist’s childhood, particularly early MTV hits by the Police and Elvis Costello. He wins over audiences with sincerity and admitting his faults; the music is smooth because people are not. What Mayer describes on the album as a “quarter-life crisis” is also a privileged space, a temporary sanctuary from becoming an adult. This is a place where it’s OK to make yourself vulnerable as you figure out who you’re going to become.
As a kid in suburban Connecticut, Mayer wanted to play the guitar after watching Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. A neighbor passed him a tape by Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1990, the year Mayer turned 13, and he grew worryingly obsessed. “Everyone else had Nirvana, and I was skipping class, reading the Buddy Guy biography Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues, cutting out the pictures when I was done,” he has said. A few years later, when he was 17, Mayer told his mother and father—an English teacher and a high school principal, respectively—he wanted to skip college and become a musician. They did not react well. Mayer began to suffer from panic attacks. He dreaded landing in a mental hospital.
After graduating from high school in 1995, Mayer worked for two years at a gas station and played in blues clubs at night. When he realized that his “dreams of staying in Connecticut and becoming a star from home,” as he once put it, weren’t going to happen, he briefly enrolled in Boston’s Berklee School of Music. It wasn’t a fit, and, wanting to be “listenable,” he moved to Atlanta, where he and co-songwriter Clay Cook, later of the Zac Brown Band, won an open-mic contest as a short-lived duo, Lo-Fi Masters. Mayer self-released a coffeehouse-tinged solo EP, Inside Wants Out, in 1999. By the fall of 2000, anyone could hear early versions of several Room for Squares songs via his page on MP3.com, which acted like MySpace, SoundCloud, or Bandcamp for unknown artists right before the dotcom bust. In a nod toward the jam band scene, Mayer also encouraged fans to tape his live shows and circulate the recordings.
If Mayer initially gravitated toward the blues, he escaped whatever was on his trail through his accessibility and relentless eagerness to please. (You can picture the genre’s fabled hellhound walking away thinking, “What a nice young man.”) Room for Squares shares a producer, in John Alagia, with Dave Matthews Band, who came up a lot as a comparison for Mayer’s percussive acoustic guitar playing and slightly congested vocals. But the album feels more polished than that. “I was trying to make the most mature-sounding immature record in the world,” Mayer once said, adding later, “It’s almost a concept album about being really shamelessly melodic.” His ambitions leaned toward pop. The title, which happens to be flipped from jazz great Hank Mobley’s 1963 album No Room for Squares, is Mayer laying out a welcome mat. It’s as if to say: No prerequisites to your enjoyment here.
The most all-around shameless track on Room for Squares is its mid-tempo slow jam, “Your Body Is a Wonderland.” Squint hard enough, and you can almost see the sun peeking between dorm-room window curtains. Like everything on the album, it’s a bit much—“Your skin like porcelain” is an objectively bad lyric, and “bubblegum tongue” is just ridiculous. But if you grew up listening to ’90s R&B, it isn’t that much more ridiculous than Hi-Five smooching and telling on “I Like the Way (The Kissing Game),” or Shai asking to be your “Comforter.” Mayer himself quipped, during a video-streamed 2000 gig, that “Wonderland” should start with a husky spoken-word intro: “...And in the morning, girl, I’m gonna pour you a bowl of Count Chocula, and I’m gonna pull some of the oat pieces out so it tastes like there’s just more marshmallow.” As bubblegum-tongue afternoon delights go, it’s an endearingly silly ode, both tender and curious. If Lady Bird could rescue “Crash Into Me,” maybe there’s hope for “Wonderland” yet.
Mayer is at his most affecting here when he’s singing about feeling lost and scared. The soaring chorus of “Why Georgia” nails a particular youthful anxiety that’s quite different from what critics usually mean by “angst,” and maybe a bit more sheltered, too: “I wonder sometimes about the outcome of a still-verdictless life/Am I living it right?” On “Not Myself,” more like an early Coldplay song with its lyrical economy and sweeping, open chords, Mayer trusts a friend to wait him out if “I lose my worried mind”: “Suppose I said, you’re my saving grace,” he booms, as much as Mayer ever booms. When you’re in a crowd of people mouthing these words back alongside you, you might feel a little less lost and scared yourself.
He would soon be routinely touted as a “heartthrob,” but these are the songs of a young person who has spent a lot of solitary hours in their bedroom. On “83,” which makes plain the early MTV influence by shouting out the Police’s “Wrapped Around Your Finger,” Mayer longs “to be 6 again,” and the Peter Pan syndrome is intensely vivid: “That’s my plastic in the dirt,” he sings, a Lost Boy wryly alerting future homeowners to lost toys. “Great Indoors” uses blocks of electric guitar and more Mayer wordplay to empathize with a TV-gazing shut-in. “Love Song for No One” is one of those ditties you can’t believe hadn’t been written yet. Here, again, the perspective is curiously childlike: “I could’ve met you in a sandbox,” he claims. “Back to You” has a gentle groove distantly reminiscent of Jeff Buckley’s “Everybody Here Wants You”—it struts, as much as Mayer here ever struts—but his lover is just a silhouette, who wouldn’t even smile in their final photo.
When Mayer steps out of the bedroom, he’s still awkward. On the bouncy “My Stupid Mouth,” with its goofy false ending, he’s as winsome about ruining a date as he is about engaging in foreplay on “Wonderland.” On “Neon,” the object of the narrator’s affection is out soaking up Atlanta’s nightlife, and why shouldn’t she be? Mayer was a non-punk straight-edge guy; the song is mainly a fine showcase for his irksomely giant-thumbed guitar flash. Mayer gets in more licks on “City Love,” a blues-drizzled love letter to New York romance where he unforgettably humblebrags, “She keeps her toothbrush at my place/As if I had the extra space.” Listening back, you can sort of sense his ego about to balloon.
Critics have long been averse to this record’s charms because, at its best, Room for Squares is an antidote to exclusion. It’s a coming-of-age album that refuses to pose as rebellious, a guilty pleasure that challenges the idea there should be guilt in pleasure. Arriving when assembly-line teen-pop and aggro nu-metal still ruled the airwaves, the album proved that pop could be delivered by the precocious boy with the guitar next door. The confident vulnerability of early Drake and the sharp-eyed clarity of early Taylor Swift, but also the man-child strums of Ed Sheeran, Shawn Mendes, and the Jonas Brothers, all have precursors here. Teenagers screamed. Elton John raved.
Room for Squares is also a time capsule. Columbia issued the album a week after the attacks of September 11. Nostalgic reassurance was in high demand, and it’s possible that only children of sanitized ’80s America would recognize the music’s cozy solace. Mayer’s big-tent pop now feels like the last gasp of the old monoculture in the face of digital fragmentation, but it also reminds me of all those movies where the straight, white, middle-class, and (cis) male is presented as the default perspective; the fans were a diverse bunch (including the Roots’ Questlove), but the women in his songs are faceless. And while sincerity was Mayer’s stock-in-trade—he wields it “like a pitchfork,” Time’s Josh Tyrangiel later wrote—he has turned out to be more of a scoundrel, or perhaps an enigma, than some doe-eyed romantic. John Mayer is constantly performing “John Mayer,” whether he wants to or not.
I’m not sure the music we loved when we were younger becomes less valuable just because we no longer need what it has to offer. Over the years, I’ve adored plenty of albums that reflect the richly varied ways we are each different, individual, weird. I listened to Room for Squares the most when I wanted to feel normal. Not “normcore”: Just normal. A little less alone; a little more accepted. “You will know what all this time was for,” Mayer promises as “No Such Thing” rings to a conclusion. I just know that expressing what’s true, for yourself or for a group of people, can make a bigger difference than anyone realizes in the moment. Room for Squares, for all of its baggage, remains a little guitar-pop utopia where it’s OK to keep discovering ourselves as we go along.


Absurdity is the guiding principle of the new EP from the Australian post-punk band. This delightfully bizarre release distills Total Control’s gnashing, dazzling appeal.

Total Control: Laughing at the System EP

Laughing at the System EP

In the face of this nauseating existence, there is a long history of pranksterism as an art form and survival mechanism. Who doesn’t like some mischief every now and again? Total Control see this, smirk at it, and invite us along. “Laughing at the system! Laughing at the system!” Dan Stewart, aka DX, endears repeatedly on the bizarre new EP from his surrealist Australian post-punk band. Among the delightful rattle of galactic synths and industrial clatter, DX punctuates each snarling syllable with the exactitude of a metronome. His cast-out sentiment is echoed on almost every track of Laughing at the System. “Laughing at the meat machine,” DX lackadaisically taunts on a later track. “Ha ha ha/As the threads come loose,” goes another.
Total Control began in 2008 after DX read Nietzsche for the first time and his “life fell apart.” With two excellent LPs—2011’s Henge Beat and 2014’s Typical System—and countless affiliated projects, Total Control have become a countercultural force of consequence for underground punk fans. On Laughing at the System, the five-piece continue to draw on the dour stylings of 1980s synth-pop and death rock with thrilling tactility and deft language: DX’s dystopian flair feels increasingly and despairingly salient. The band calls Laughing at the System a companion to Typical System in the vein of anarcho-punk originators Crass’ bonus disc to 1982’s Christ the Album. Like Crass, Total Control stare “systematic death” in the eye—and it would be impossible not to in 2017, a year that has unveiled systemic failures to the masses almost daily. Still, absurdity is Laughing at the System’s guiding principle. “We are a stupid band from a stupid country,” Total Control recently said, or as DX put it in 2015: “[Australians] are frying under a horrible sun on inhospitable land and we have a queen that lives on the other side of the world… It just doesn’t make sense. We need a great sense of humor.”
Not surprisingly for a group with hardcore roots, Total Control flourish in the context of a 21-minute, eight-song EP: Laughing at the System neatly distills their gnashing, dazzling appeal. Limitations can be freeing, and here Total Control sound sharper and more spirited than ever. A fitting bit of levity invigorates their typically dense productions, even as this EP makes gleefully bonkers gestures: mad-scientist clankering, antagonizing circus music, abrupt shifts abound. The title track appears twice, and a sample of an instructional for making cheese disrupts a tricked-out head-scratcher of a psychedelic pop tune (“Future Crème”) that might otherwise recall Beck. Adding to the humor is DX’s general commitment to an arched-brow vocal delivery.
With “Future Crème,” though, he muses chipperly on “the taste of silicon/Fresh as cream,” narrating the dangers of everyday life, the chemicals in food that slowly destroy us. It feels like a modern response to the twisted Captain Beefheart conceit Safe as Milk. On “Vanity,” DX chants, “You never think! You never think!” among a swarm of guitar noise and lopsided drums. (His rolled Rs and shout-out to “Woody Mellor” are subtle nods to punk history.) The droning “Vote Cops” sounds just as hollowed and void-like as it should with a sad name like that.
Even the aspects of this EP that initially seem ridiculous or out of place reveal themselves to be neither wrong nor misplaced. The penultimate “Cathie and Marg” is a lovely Expanding Universe-style drone reverie—a little something to comfort us, perhaps? Maybe Total Control have been listening to ambient master Laraaji and investigating his laughter meditation workshops. The sing-song “Luxury Vacuum” cheerily narrates the unraveling order of things. And then there is the maniacal carnival music of “Her Majesty, Budgie,” which sounds like a tormenting merry-go-round ride in hell or a very odd monologue for the stage: “Enchanting plagues/Disturbing vaccines/Hyper sedate/The nice machine.” The first time I heard “Her Majesty, Budgie,” I misheard the lyric “laughing at the meat machine” as “laughing at the meme machine” (it would be Psycho Jazz, of course). It felt an appropriate mistake. Total Control make an EP of curveballs sound puzzlingly coherent thanks in no small part to their fine craftsmanship.
Permutations of the phrase “laughing at the system” reprise so persistently throughout this EP that it comes to feel like a concept piece. Of the two versions of “Laughing at the System”—one at the beginning and one at the end, both with the same apocalyptic detail—the closing take is superior: sped-up, severe and brutalized, the trash-compactor thrasher you could imagine on a Killed by Death comp. It is perhaps what DX had in mind earlier this year, in an interview about his 13-year-old hardcore band Straightjacket Nation: “Ultimately, a band is a group of people with a common taste in songs, and maybe a song is just a way to get a bunch of instruments laughing at the system.” He called it “malicious, cruel laughter.”
Laughing at the System is a punk parable: a clangoring meditation on the illusion of safety, on consumerism, on authority and on death, the fraying seams of life on Earth. The economy of language guiding its title track(s) stacks up alongside similarly aphoristic punk philosophies—“No Future,” “What We Do Is Secret,” et al—and it is at once critical and refreshingly uncynical. Total Control take things seriously enough to know when we could use a joke.


After fifty years and nearly twenty solo albums, the low-key guitar god finds new ways to renew old sentiments as a singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist on what may be his best album this century.

13 Rivers

Richard Thompson penned “Rattle Within” for the new 13 Rivers, but the song’s worries suggest it could just as easily have been written during the Black Plague as in our own plagued time. Over the racket of rattletrap percussion, Thompson excoriates the quackery of religious leaders, contemplates a dark self that’s “living right there inside your skin,” and poses this nervous question: “Who’s going to save you from the rattle within?” He then launches into a jagged and ominous solo, serrated as though he were unspooling barbed wire. Thompson’s playing retains a stomping folk-dance quality reminiscent of his innovations in Fairport Convention fifty years ago. By the end, though, he collapses into a din that has more in common with the punk rock he was already too old for by the late ’70s.
Talking about a guitar player’s chops feels odd and even old-fashioned in 2018, especially when that guitar player is an old white guy whose career predates Woodstock. But Thompson was a folk descendant, not a blues rocker, a lineage that sometimes excluded him from being cited as a guitar god or celebrated with the same reverence as his note-bending peers. But here he is, a half-century after debuting with Fairport, still making records of incisive originals while developing as a guitarist, undistracted by reunion rumors and holiday baubles. Now in his late sixties, he remains a distinctive singer with a low burr, as capable of a sly joke as a sincere prayer. He is a songwriter of remarkable insight who can burrow into a metaphor and renew a familiar sentiment. And he remains a deft and inventive instrumentalist who, even after nearly twenty solo records (not including his sterling decade with Linda), finds new ways to play the same notes.
If 13 Rivers is Thompson’s best album of the 2010s and perhaps his best of the 21st century, it’s not because he emphasizes those three elements equally. Rather, it’s because he puts those aspects into a strange, spirited conversation. For 13 Rivers, he assembled a tight, versatile rock combo—the rhythm section of bassist Taras Prodaniuk and drummer Michael Jerome, along with guitarist Bobby Eichorn, who makes the most of a very redundant job. Pondering life and death, happiness and despair, movement and stagnation, Thompson writes as someone who knows he has more years behind him than ahead, though he sings with an arched eyebrow and an appreciation for the irony in trading youth for wisdom. On “O Cinderella,” he sounds as surprised as anybody else that he might want to settle down and don an apron: “I’m not very house-trained, it’s true/But I want to make cupcakes with you.” There’s something lusty and chagrined in the way he exclaims “cupcakes,” allowing the line to double as a good joke and sincere wish.
And then there is Thompson’s guitar, which rambles or cavorts through every song, underscoring some sentiments and undercutting others, jostling against the melodies like a gremlin in the mix. Thompson has been in acoustic mode for most of the 2010s, with two collections of new acoustic versions of old electric songs surrounding a mostly unplugged, Jeff Tweedy-helmed album. Thompson is an amazing acoustic player, but he’s even better when plugged in, where he toggles gracefully between rhythm and lead, texture and melody. “Bones of Gilead” opens with a mathematical staccato riff, as though mimicking the countdown clock to Armageddon; by the time he rolls into a rambling solo, there’s no dread, just a kind of gee-whiz excitement. During closer “Shaking the Gates,” he plays like he’s scoring a film, careful to stay out of the way while weaving notes around the melody. “I’m shaking, I’m shaking,” he sings, as though genuflecting before some deity. Then he amends the statement: “Im shaking the gates.” Thompson’s getting along in years, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to sound old.


These unruly British punks sound like hardcore kids playing pub rock, and their debut comes alive with liberating energy.

Speed Kills

The Jimmie Rodgers Snow speech that opens Chubby and the Gang’s Speed Kills is famous for its sanctimony, linking the liberating qualities of rock ‘n’ roll to juvenile delinquency: “I know the evil feeling that you feel when you sing it, I know the lost position that you get into,” he exhorts. But Snow, a legacy country singer who hobnobbed with famous musicians but walked away from a recording contract with RCA to preach the evils of rock ‘n’ roll, understood one thing about it better than most: Before a word is sung or a riff is strummed, it’s the beat that moves you.
And Charlie Manning-Walker, aka Charlie Fresh aka Chubby Charles, the decidedly not-chubby frontman of Chubby and the Gang, seems to have taken Snow’s words to heart. Speed Kills, the band’s debut LP, is infused with youthful energy, full of songs championing the very lawless chaos that Snow warned of. At its heart is a rhythm section that, from its first rumbling strokes, constantly feels half a beat away from tripping over itself but nonetheless keep rolling right along.
Chubby and the Gang emerged from a promising wave of early-’10s British hardcore; Charles himself did time with Crown Court, Arms Race, and Violent Reaction, and the gang’s other members—Ethan Stahl, Joe McMahon, and Luke Austin—have all played in Brighton’s Gutter Knife, among other bands. The record was produced by Fucked Up’s Jonah Falco, and while it may be difficult to directly pinpoint his influence, he seems to understand their music on an intuitive level.
The album projects a firm sense of place, and it’s not just because Charles’ accent is prevalent whether he’s talking, singing, or shouting. This is an English band, with English influences singing about English places—specifically, London. And Chubby’s London is proudly debaucherous, evidenced by the record’s artwork, an R. Crumb-does-Steamboat Willie masterpiece by the artist Spoiler. Speed Kills leads a pub crawl through the seedy side of the English capital, traversing main thoroughfares (“All Along the Uxbridge Road”), avoiding Tottenham tough guys (“Bruce Grove Bullies”), and lamenting the tragic horror of government malfeasance (“Grenfell Forever”).
Much of Speed Kills sounds stuck in the late ’70s, channeling the crunchy lo-fi brattiness of the Kids and the Damned and the pummeling swiftness of early Motörhead. They sound like hardcore kids playing pub rock, with oi gang vocals that pair well with both sloshing pint glasses and mosh-pit spin kicks. But it also offers a welcome change of pace; smack in the middle of its whirlwind 26-minute runtime lies “Trouble,” a Hammond organ-driven Buddy Holly bop that effortlessly shifts between twinkling sock-hop guitar and mercilessly crashing cymbals.
In another hard left turn, Chubby and the Gang choose to end a record full of raucous rippers on a solemn note, an ode to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire. “An odd light flickers in the tower blocks/The old man singing songs in the bottom of the glass,” Charles sings on “Grenfell Forever,” acknowledging the pub as not just a place for rowdy singalongs, but also somber reflection. Rather than killing the vibe, it deepens the mood, revealing traces of both Billy Bragg and Archy Marshall in their DNA.
Punk-band lifespans, like punk albums, tend to be short, and the unruly energy on display here rarely burns for long. If the rest of the scene that Chubby and the Gang emerged from is any indication, there’s no telling how long this particular gang stays together. Until then, you can likely find them in the pub, riffing and rioting and reminding everyone that rock ‘n’ roll is supposed to be revitalizing and fun.


The Manchester quartet’s debut album fuses dance rhythms, corroded guitars, and seething vocals into a transfixing blend of violence and transcendence.

i’ve seen a way

Mandy, Indiana don’t make sense. Three Mancunians and a Parisian came together under a name inspired by Gary, Indiana—a Rust Belt symbol of post-industrial American decline—to make a sound that thrashes like an angry Hydra. Every time you think you have Mandy, Indiana cornered, they mutate again. You could call their music post-punk, electronic, or noise, but no single genre signifier satisfactorily conveys what they do. This is by design. Mandy, Indiana trade in chaos and severe contrasts. Their startling debut album, i’ve seen a way, is an unsettling catalog of societal ills that takes the form of a churning maelstrom.
Mandy, Indiana’s origins go back to 2016, when vocalist Valentine Caulfield and Mandy mastermind Scott Fair met at a Manchester club; the lineup is now rounded out by Simon Catling on synths and Alex Macdougall on drums. From the beginning—early singles like “Berlin,” or “Bottle Episode,” a standout from 2021’s … EP—their sound was a transfixing blend of violence and transcendence: dance rhythms knocked askew, corroded guitars and synths fed into the gears of malfunctioning machinery, Caulfield seething in her native French. i’ve seen a way partially aligns with the recent crop of adventurous guitar bands from England and Ireland, many of whom Mandy, Indiana have opened for, like Idles, Squid, and Gilla Band. (The latter’s Daniel Fox mixed half of i’ve seen a way, with Giant Swan’s Robin Stewart taking over the other.) Yet i’ve seen a way feels both more extreme and more accessible than some of their immediate progenitors.
Visual influences—Blade Runner 2049, the video game BioShock, the films of Leos Carax and Gaspar Noé—play an important role in the band’s music, and i’ve seen a way begins with a similarly filmic instrumental, “Love Theme (4K VHS),” a gorgeous piece of starlit arpeggiated synth. Like the best opening tracks, it feels like a curtain rising, but it isn’t long before the quartet sets up the first plot twist: The dreamlike song lures you into a nightmare world. At the very end of “Love Theme,” a beat gurgles to life, recalling the muffled reverberations you can hear while waiting to enter a club, and pivots into “Drag [Crashed],” a song that takes dancefloor catharsis and rewires it into an anxious hurtle headlong into crashing distortion and horror-movie drones.
Mandy, Indiana pull off similar tricks across the album, nodding to dance traditions but structuring rhythms too discomfiting for simple release. While the record’s underwater synths are often beguiling, its percussive backdrops are ferocious—between electronics and Macdougall’s drumming, songs like “Pinking Shears” clatter and heave as if trying to destroy everything in their path. “Injury Detail” flirts with a more direct groove, but it chokes and sputters. Within a single song, the band can seamlessly combine dissimilar moods and registers. “The Driving Rain (18)” is a neon-lit city cruise riding a robotic bassline, Caulfield rendered an Auto-Tuned alien above it, while “2 Stripe” uses haunting, distant screeches to bookend an emotive reprise of the “Love Theme” synths.
Across the album, Mandy, Indiana deploy terrifying, uneasy sounds—a palette they developed by utilizing field recordings and unusual approaches like tracking drums in a cave or capturing Caulfield’s screams in a Bristol shopping mall. “This is an album where heads butt and things clash,” Fair has said. “It’s supposed to be nasty, and to not work.”
And yet, it does. The various textures and shifts of i’ve seen a way are mesmerizing—down to the way that Caulfield presents herself more like another instrument than a typical frontwoman, leaning on her operatic training to produce vocals with an intensely textural heft. She sing-speaks, she murmurs, she hisses. Her approach often emphasizes the dichotomies of Mandy, Indiana’s music: “Peach Fuzz” is already a sideways, smeared take on dance music, and her punk yelps accentuate its visceral pulse.
You seldom need to know the actual content of Caulfield’s lyrics for them to resonate. Even if you don’t realize that “Drag [Crashed]” is about sexism and objectification, you can sense her fear and anger. Many of her lyrics deal with bleak themes—the climate crisis, or the West’s slide into fascism. Even a fairytale setting like “2 Stripe” looks toward revolution: The song’s final words translate to “Always remember/There are more of us than them.” In the end, on “Sensitivity Training,” the band gets there. While past songs like “Bottle Episode” used militaristic drums to depict oppression or war, the ragged march of “Sensitivity Training” ends the album with an uprising.
i’ve seen a way is a purposefully disorienting album: an idiosyncratic collision of familiar elements that blurs genres and defamiliarizes language. Yet it also settles into an unexpected balance. The music is abrasive, but in its most shocking moments, the band allows beauty to shine through the grime and static. In the album’s penultimate song, the whimsically named “(ノ>ω<)ノ :。・:*:・゚’★,。・:*:♪・゚’☆ (Crystal Aura Redux),” the rage and distortion fall away, allowing Caulfield’s voice and synths to peacefully float, as if ghosts were surveying the rubble left in their wake. i’ve seen a way might be the sound of someone sifting through ashes, but only in search of signs of a new world.


Former Sunny Day Real Estate leader shows a new taste for restraint on his latest solo album, which, like the recent Guillemots effort, is sophisticated adult pop with some prog kicking around the edges.

World Waits

The grand gesture has always been a friend of Jeremy Enigk. His former band Sunny Day Real Estate squeezed every ounce of available drama into its songs and his vocals would push at the edge of their range as if hoping to find some other form of expression just on the other side. These days he seems more comfortable with restraint, and he sounds more in command when he hits the occasional John Anderson high note, but he still opens his second solo album (his first was almost 10 years ago, when SDRE were still a thing) with about as grand and dramatic a moment as he's ever committed to tape.
"A New Beginning" is just a minute-and-a-half intro track, but it's stuffed to the gills with strings, ringing bells, and cymbal crashes that make the title seem right. It certainly signals a break with his old band-- going back 14 years to the first SDRE album, it's an entirely different animal, a crashing, thudding rock album where this new one is basically sophisticated adult pop with some prog kicking around the edges.
That description is never truer than when he opens "City Tonight" by asking, "Am I late to the Kingdom of Love?" The song has a synth-pop undercurrent ballasting the verses, but it's all sweeping rock after the first few minutes, with Enigk multi-tracking himself and casting his voice into a well of reverb. Enigk's vocals get their biggest workout on "Damien Dreams", an interesting modal song full of hanging phrases that never feel resolved. He conjures up a hell of a growl in the middle of the song without sounding strained, but the track's most engaging moment comes when he provides a strange vocal harmony for himself on just one line-- an inventive technique to draw your attention to the lyric.
The orchestral grandeur of the album intro sloshes to the surface throughout the album, poking up most prominently in the drifting title track. "Dare a Smile" opens with an acoustic guitar playing a chord sequence you've heard in at least a couple of hundred songs, touched with a bit of mandolin, and as the string pads come in it starts to sound like some sort of alternate universe James Bond theme.
World Waits is a naturally big-sounding album from a guy who's spent a career trying different ways to make something this assured. It's an overwhelmingly agreeable record, if one that's not always gripping-- with few exceptions I feel like Enigk is performing with a net here, falling back on big production when the composition isn't all the way there. But this does mean he never really falls too flat, and the craft is certainly there in most of these songs. I get the sense from listening that it's exactly the record he wanted to make, and it's likely all of his old SDRE fans who graduated from their emo phases along with him will feel right at home.


On their second album, the Brooklyn post-hardcore band Big Ups place a greater emphasis on quiet moments, on gradual buildups.

Before a Million Universes

Brooklyn quartet Big Ups have been referred as a post-hardcore band, an umbrella term meant to tell us that that they blend the pummel of straight-up hardcore with tension and seemingly bucolic moments. While this was a fair description of their discordant and vicious 2014 debut, Eighteen Hours of Static, each note feeling like it was being forced ruthlessly into the mosh pit typical at most Big Ups shows, it is even more accurate for their sophomore record Before a Million Universes. While these lapses into chaos are still very much present, Big Ups place a greater emphasis on quiet moments, on gradual buildups, which of course then allow the instrumental fits of Brendan Finn (drums), Amar Lal (guitar), and Carlos Salguero (bass) to feel even more explosive by contrast. Every phrase Galarraga screams, every phrase that he does not, every burst of noise within a track’s connective fiber are carefully calculated tabs on their audience’s emotional pulse.
Eighteen Hours of Static spent a lot of time deep in the thick of things, questioning and distrusting society with relentless fury ("Everybody says it’s getting better all the time / But it’s bad still bad"). Before a Million Universes focuses on "dissecting" their problems, as singer Joe Galarraga explained in an interview. Accordingly, they spend less time directly confronting bureaucratic bullshit (One glaring exception is the seething "Capitalized" with its sardonic query, "Tell me what you’re worth/Salary, two weeks off from work?/Call them benefits and perks") and instead focus on how the macrocosm affects the individual. "Why live in the moment/If the moment is broken? There could be hope for someone/If we fix it," Galarraga asks on "Hope for Someone."
Their political ideologies, meanwhile, have simmered below the surface of the music, expressing themselves in the song’s unpredictable dynamics. "Meet Where We Are" is largely muted, growing a little more manic for each repetition of the title and only releasing the tension at the end with an electric jolt.  "Negative"’s moments of peace are designated for its brief intro before the chaos rolls in via sharp, punctuated shouts and rolling guitar s. "So Much You" hits hardest with its simplicity, its sullen comment that "I haven’t been with myself at all." None of these songs would have the same effect if rushed, which is what set Big Ups apart from many of their peers.
Before a Million Universes borrows its title from section 48 of Walt Whitman’s "Song of Myself" from Leaves of Grass: "And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes." Although the quote is never spoken verbatim on the record, Big Ups clearly understand their place within the cosmos. When their time to stand before a million universes arrives, they will approach the unknown with confidence and calmness, like the shadowy figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog."
Nowhere is this so apparent than on "National Parks," which lies unobtrusively in the later half of the record and is perhaps the standout track. The song is a meditation on the financial difficulties faced by a woman metaphorically meant to reflect Galarraga’s own upbringing. The song concludes with the subject and narrator traveling together: "We got on a plane and flew across the country/And saw the biggest trees /Bigger than the ones that lined her streets/Bigger than she'd ever seen/Bigger than one could think to exist/I think I saw her say to herself-/"This is everything I've missed." It is in this moment, with an aerial perspective of the vast world, that Big Ups open themselves to a million universes and accept the sublime.

Tough Love / Exploding in Sound / Brace Yourself


Rising Atlanta rapper and Migos affiliate Rich the Kid drops a bubbly, if not uninspired new tape with features from Young Thug, Desiigner, Migos, and Jeremih.

Keep Flexin

The afternoon before releasing Keep Flexin, Rich the Kid posted a video of himself dancing to the opening track, “I Don’t Care,” while puffing on a cigar and counting a stack of crisp hundred dollar bills. The video ends abruptly when a fire alarm goes off in the room—Rich freezes and drops his jaw with cartoonish flair before blurting, “Oh shit!” Staged or not, the video more or less sums up Rich the Kid’s playful charm: Here’s a guy who seems perpetually bemused by his own success even as he performs it.
Rich the Kid has been a prolific presence in Atlanta rap for a few years now; Keep Flexin marks his seventh solo mixtape since 2013 and that’s not counting his numerous collaborative tapes with Migos, Makonnen, and his Rich Forever label signees. His sound is fairly straightforward by contemporary standards, especially when compared to that of his more distinctive peers like Lil Yachty or Lil Uzi Vert. Still, he’s mastered the fundamentals of Atlanta rap: an ear for melody, a hook better than most, and triplets like he’s the fourth Migo.
In keeping with its title, Keep Flexin largely concerns itself with the trappings of wealth and stardom. Aesthetically speaking, Rich’s music can be called street rap, even if these songs feel far removed from the streets. These are light, bubbly anthems, befitting their shallow subject matter. “You hear that? That’s ice,” Rich explains at the outset of “Doors Up,” as he fidgets with his chains over a glimmering synth arpeggio. Airless lead single “Don’t Want Her” is nominally about the dispensability with which Rich views women (see the caustic refrain, “I throw out that bitch ‘cause she garbage”) but even here, he can’t help but boast, “Flexin’ I’m making them vomit/The rollie is water, it came out the faucet.” On “Liar Liar,” he jumps on the increasingly crowded bandwagon of Future impersonators, though as always, his outlook remains sunny (“I took a trip to the jeweler/I drop my wrist the in cooler”), in contrast to the song’s darker hue.
Keep Flexin boasts an impressive roster of guests and for the most part, Rich puts them to good use. Jeremih smooths out the jerky “Greedy” with his gooey hook while matching his host’s braggadocio (“I count paper, don’t read it/Call me Mister Big Shot”). “Dat Way” finds Migos in prime form (“Pick up the phone and call Kanye,” Quavo instructs, alluding to Migos’ recent management deal with G.O.O.D. Music) over a twitchy, string-heavy beat. “Going” is essentially just one big Desiigner hook—your mileage here will vary depending on your personal tolerance for unintelligible gurgling and “Brrrrrah!” ad-libs. Disappointingly, Young Thug sounds pretty unengaged on “Ran It Up,” coloring inside the melodic lines that Rich establishes. Still, Thug manages to offer a brief window into his life (“Recording on the back of the bus and I’m po’d up”), evoking a devastating image of his idol from the documentary film The Carter: drugged-out, working feverishly, very much alone.
This sort of tension is sorely missing from most of Keep Flexin, a record that’s happy to catalog the perks of being an ascendant rapper while turning a blind eye to the costs. While previous Rich the Kid releases like Trap Talk contrasted the street life that Rich had known with his current plush lifestyle, Keep Flexin offers few such juxtapositions. He does briefly acknowledge previous struggles on “Doors Up,” (“I was just hustling, I wanted a chance”) and on “Blessings,” he stops to take stock of how far he’s come: “I had to learn a lesson/Lose it all in a second/I made it here that’s a blessing/Get the money not stressing/You better count your blessings.” Rich the Kid certainly seems to live by that mantra, though he’ll need to dig deeper if he wants others to relate to his journey.


First album in five years from the Japanese experimental pop eccentric isn't quite the departure that 2002's Point was from Fantasma, but it feels like a natural next step.

Sensuous

The 1997 Matador release of the still-great Fantasma established Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada) as the far-East posterboy for indie-rock globalization. As the most recognizable representative of downtown Tokyo's Shibuya-Kei movement (also responsible for Pizzicato Five, Buffalo Daughter and Fantastic Plastic Machine), Oyamada’s Beck-like star potential and wildly creative imagination led to a stateside buzz all-too-rare for Japanese musicians. But a release schedule that includes five-year windows between albums isn't the best way to maintain hype. It was 2002 before the follow-up Point boiled Fantasma down to its essence: a wonderful fusion of rubbery, acoustic micro-house rhythms. With another five years now having passed, Sensous represents yet another step forward for Oyamada’s unique headphone pop. It’s not quite the departure that Point was from Fantasma, but it feels like a natural next step.
Sensuous opens with Oyamada revisiting one of Point's main techniques: composing songs with the individual sounds kept clearly separate. His fascination with the hi-fi stereophonic demonstration records of the 1950s and 60s-- the ones that presented the full range of the stereo spectrum through whirring, buzzing sound experiments-- finds its full and rewarding realization here, but in function more than form. Often on Sensous, as on Point, it often feels as though Oyamada starts by writing normal songs, but then inserts sounds into the places where there are none, erases the original melody, and keeps the music's negative.
The title track is a meditative series of plucked guitar strings-- not completely unlike something you'd hear on Four Tet's Rounds-- phased between the left and right channels. But this initial sense of serenity quickly gives way to the more recognizable bustle of "Fit Song". It replaces the sonorous acoustic with the muted, clipped strum of an electric guitar, which provides the rhythmic bed for the first minute of the song, as bass drums and hi-hats bounce around with Oyamada’s single-word incantations ("just," "fit," "click"). The song feels like a stylized metropolitan soundtrack, but its video (which is included on the disc) suggests a more modest milieu that reflects the song's senses of humor and wonder. Syncing the movements of typically inanimate objects to the music, the video, like the album, is indulgent and geometric: sugarcubes form steps for a pair of spoons to climb, toothbrushes dance in a circle, the contents of a coin purse form a floating infinity symbol.
"Fit" also marks the record's first appearance of Oyamada's favorite instrument of late (and, it should be noted, a point of friction for many listeners): a spacy, sonorant synthesizer that provides a soft and windy counterpoint to the skipping stones all around it. Later on the irresistable "Beep It", the synth serves a new-wavier rhythmic purpose, with Oyamada's monosyllabic mojo more resembling the sounds of a retro-futuristic aerobics class, and "Music" gradually introduces the instrument into its melange of chirping guitars and melismatic vocals, lending the song a fluffy, space-age buoyancy.
Sequenced after the copy-machine-sampling "Toner", "Watadori" feels like an extended fever-dream from a nap under an office desk. Multiple layers of soft-jazz guitar tick off and ascend higher and higher, coalescing into busy-but-gentle treble-buzz, the equivalent of twenty different CTI-label records played at the same time. Oyamada's newfound predilection for the oft-criticized and elevatored music is most fully realized on Breezin'", an inventive interpolation of the jazz-pop standard made famous by Gabor Szabo and later, George Benson. The song feels like perfect source material for Oyamada to work with, and while he thoroughly launders it of its core melodic structure, he manages to maintain its, well, breeziness. Like an installation piece on a constant loop, ascending three-note synth runs and chimes provide a chilly melodicism as the song works its way, over and over, to a surprisingly lilting payoff. Its doppelganger, "Gum", emerges later, with his vocals ping-ponging over a punk-metal guitar drone previously explored on Point's "I Hate Hate".
Sensuous ends with a second, even less-expected cover: a faithful update of the Rat Pack standard "Sleep Warm", on which Oyamada augments Frankie and Dean’s maudlin sentimentality with his own vocodered vocals and loud, trilling synth flourishes. While this version certainly would be tough to fall asleep to, its album-closing position makes it feel more like a film-closing credit roll, similar to The White Album’s "Good Night". Now, apparently, we just have to wait five more years for the sequel.


The third installment in an ongoing series of live recordings contains some of the krautrock titans’ most unbridled moments yet, but the whittled-down highlights preclude any sense of flow.

Live in Cuxhaven 1976

Can were the most flexible act of the so-called krautrock explosion, equally as mesmerizing in short, ecstatic art-rock bursts as they were in epic, sprawling, 20-minute jams. The Cologne-based group deftly matched the jammy psychedelic rock of Amon Düül, the hypnotic motorik of Neu!, and the electronic meditations of Tangerine Dream, and that’s before the mid 1970s, when the band infused its sound with funk and Afrobeat. For Can, capturing a specific sound was secondary to the idea of music as a kinetic expression of freedom.
Onstage, they were even more unbound, both in their confidence as psychic improvisers and in the knowledge that transfixed audiences would stick around for a second set if the first one honked. That much is apparent from the first two releases in the mid-’70s Can live series, Live in Stuttgart 1975 and Live in Brighton 1975. Recorded in the wake of Damo Suzuki’s departure two years earlier, both are expansive documents from the pioneering kosmische outfit just figuring shit out in real time, skronking the light fantastic, kicking ass and blowing minds across six LP sides.
Which makes it particularly puzzling that the third entry in the series, Live in Cuxhaven 1976, takes an approach so at odds with an actual Can live set. None of its four tracks—untitled and simply numbered, as before, in German—are longer than eight and a half minutes in length. The vast stretches of audacious, sometimes uncomfortable, interplay are absent. There’s no fat here, but that’s precisely what ardent carnivores insist makes the rib eye delicious.
It even begins in medias res, “Eins” fading in with Can mid-groove. The funky interplay between human metronome Jaki Liebezeit and guitarist Michael Karoli, dispensing quick, chunky wah-wah strums, is a bridge to that year’s yet-to-be-recorded Flow Motion. That album, which introduced reggae and disco rhythms to a (mostly) unsatisfied cadre of critics and fans, is a clear departure, and here, it’s fascinating to witness the band shedding its skin. But without the context of what preceded this stretch of the show, it’s as if we’ve purchased a ticket with a partially obstructed view.
What’s most compelling about live Can recordings from this period is the way the band constructs an improvised jam from the ground up. On “Drei,” Can lays out a ragged framework of Soon Over Babaluma opener “Dizzy Dizzy,” even featuring rare (for this era) snippets of vocals from bassist Holger Czukay. As the rhythm section locks in, Karoli wails, droning and arpeggiating on his guitar before briefly dropping out, about three minutes in. He returns with fury, unfurling a demonic guitar from out of nowhere, which sends “Drei” spiraling into another dimension. Karoli spends the rest of the jam winding around the melody, approaching it from every angle: playfully funky riffs, proto-shoegaze walls of sound, squeaky jazz fusion runs. Satisfying as it is, “Drei” also gestures to the Can vault—filled, no doubt, with further explorations, unheard and thick with dust.
Moments like this are what inspired Can founder and keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, credited as curator of the series, to structure the live albums as a selection of highlights from a given concert, rather than cobbling together choice bits from various dates. His reasoning, he told The New York Times last year, was to convey “how the flow was going, the feeling of a real concert.” On Live in Cuxhaven 1976, that feeling of flow is all too brief—like snapping awake from a vivid dream too soon.
It’s baffling, for this reason, that Schmidt—the only surviving member of the group from this period—allowed the show to be edited with a chainsaw. Perhaps it’s listener fatigue. Maybe the $50 price point for a triple album scared off all but the most devoted of motorik heads curious enough to see if the group will cross the 30-minute threshold on a “Bel Air” jam. Can called its stretched-out improvisations “Godzillas,” massive and Earth-shattering as they were. In the name of brevity and thriftiness, Live in Cuxhaven gives us a few sketches of Minilla, the kaiju’s juvenile son.
What’s here, across 30 minutes, is a worthy and incomplete document that contains some of the most unrestrained live Can moments yet available. What it’s missing are the doldrums, the drawn-out experiments, and that feeling that Schmidt hopes to convey: that we’re trapped in Lower Saxony with the mighty Can, spinning out of control for as long as it takes to reach our shared destination.


The London drill rapper ventures beyond his chosen style in order to offer a fuller picture of what he’s gone through.

Loski: A Drill Story: Music, Trial & Trauma

A Drill Story: Music, Trial & Trauma

Surveillance is the backbone of drill, and this is doubly true of Loski’s music. His 2018 song “Drill” began with a reporter blaming social media for the rise of gang violence—a ludicrous suggestion that Loski followed with his version of events: “Let me tell you how my animals move/Step in the cut, designer shoes, done it in Canada Goose.” Real Gs move in geese fleece. Loski is hyper-aware of the commentary around drill; his music feels like meta-drill. On his latest, Music, Trial & Trauma: A Drill Story, he tells a common story in a monumental way: You make music about all the bad shit you’ve seen, you get targeted because of the bad shit, and then you go to jail for the bad shit, which leaves you with more trauma. To tell this fairly sprawling tale of the constant loop of Black experience, Loski leaves drill behind in order to give a fuller picture of what he’s gone through.
When it goes, there’s no substitute. Loski has never had to prove himself, and he runs laps around the almost unadorned beats on these albums, climbing their skeletal vibrations as if he was on an obstacle course. The verve of a typical drill song is the perfect trampoline for tossed-off lines where he bounces through his disaffection, popping off like he’s just been handed the aux. The hooks can be as simple as, “I got honeys on me/I got hunnies on me, couple hunnid on me,” on “On Me,” where he just swerves. The problem is that he’s taken on too much in trying to make Music, Trial & Trauma be more than just a collection of drill bangers. That’s fine; who said the Croydon rapper couldn’t be versatile? A song like “Forrest Gump” showed that Loski could make a party jam with a hook—no problem. Unfortunately, the album has the feeling of being focus-group-tested to the point of dilution. With the exception of “Flavour,” featuring Stormzy, the party songs seem tossed off, as if Loski knew he had to have a formless Afrobeat number (“Naija Man,” featuring Davido) and a dance track with two stars (Popcaan and Fredo guest on “Avengers”) in order to reach the new audiences some marketer was drooling over.
It didn’t have to be this way. The singles Loski put out this year have been flitting around the internet, racking up YouTube views with the force of their realness. The cavernous loosie “Allegedly” threw a middle finger up at all comers while making it clear that what we think we know about Loski is actually very little. “Anglo Saxon” proved that the rapper could be cocky, self-referential, and witty all at once. There are glimpses of that Loski here. He launches himself off the grimacing guitar and demented organ of “Captain Hook” and flies to the outer reaches of shit-talking (“Rap for the hood but we know he’s timid (Timid)/I don't wanna look like them/Whatever I do or say they mimic”).
On “Black,” the man gets personal. Here Loski’s sound is muted. The synthetic trumpets seem smaller, wafting through the wind. The looped sub-bass and ticking-clock snare provide the percussive backing for Loski’s tribulations. He talks about the death of his brother, mourning both him and the loss of childhood his passing entailed. Though it may be easy to laugh at a lyric about loving Black women the way he loves black Mercedes, that levity is what allows Loski to delve into the tragedy of his personal life (“Gang signs turn to prayer hands/When you're locked in a cell and can't leave”). The turn from violence to religion occurs with surprising swiftness, but that is the nature of oppression. Losing one’s freedom can turn a sinner to a saint in an instant.
Music, Trial & Trauma is several albums at once: drill bangers, party tunes, and a series of reflections on Black tragedy. It doesn’t always cohere, but the effect is still rather startling. Loski illuminates the darkened corners of his mind in order to reveal the society that gives power to the demons inside.

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A short but resonant compilation from the indie rock duo navigates life’s gray areas with gentle instrumentation and hard-earned serenity.

Every Day Like the Last

When Jenn Wasner wrote “Every Day Like the Last,” she wanted the title to be open-ended: “[It] could mean every day like the day that came before, or it could mean every day like the last day that you get,” she explained. Lyrically, the song wrestles with accepting companionship: “It might be easier for me if not for you/I might be free/To live a life of some prolonged tranquility/Alone with my thoughts.” But as Wassner evokes the title in a final, gorgeous refrain, coasting upward on humid flashes of pedal steel, it’s unclear where she lands.
This song opens Wye Oak’s new collection, Every Day Like the Last, which compiles six standalone tracks from between 2019 and 2023 alongside three new songs. The process of releasing those singles soon after completion, with no aim for a larger project, resulted in a sense of creative liberation, and the music collected here speaks to Wasner and Andy Stack’s willingness to experiment with how they present their work. While the individual tracks were often striking and inventive, they fare better as a complete project: Every Day Like the Last hangs together not as a batch of unrelated loosies but effectively a new Wye Oak album, built by breadcrumb trail in the five years since their last proper full-length, The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs.
Wye Oak have long abandoned the volatile dynamics that were once their trademark, and these songs emerge from the same period in which Wasner rebooted her solo project Flock of Dimes with a more sparse, reflective sound. Like her masterful 2021 album, Head of Roses, Every Day Like the Last is subtle and steady-handed even in its most dramatic upheavals. Although it returns to a more guitar-oriented aesthetic after the groove-driven pivot that began with 2014’s Shriek, the band now works with a hard-earned serenity. Stack no longer wallops his drums but brushes and coaxes; Wasner’s guitar has descended from volcanic eruptions or skyward soars to flickering embers floating in the air. The gentler instrumentation allows Wasner’s voice, long the band’s secret weapon, to shine. Again and again—in the weaving melody of “TNT,” the gliding layers of “Evergreen,” or the cascading chorus in “Fear of Heights”—her melodies are mysterious and intoxicating, moving with the arc of a river.
Wye Oak spend as much time in gray areas as ever, cataloging moments of strife with restraint. The lyrics are personal and unspecific but mostly gesture towards wrestling with relationships, trying to locate acceptance in discomfort. A new song called “Repeat (If You Remind Me)” closes the album—a moment of relative peace in which Wasner resolves to find meaning in a fragile and fleeting existence. Wye Oak’s music has often been evocative for its malleability: Their songs could take place in spring or autumn, at rebirth or encroaching decay. As the duo navigates these in-between states—both in their personal lives and the trajectory of the band—Every Day Like the Last coheres into a short but resonant whole: a series of snapshots taken over a turbulent stretch of years.


The Compton rapper’s debut is smart, technically dazzling, and thoroughly sullen.

Everything’s for Sale

Boogie’s music always carries a sadness beneath the technically polished flows and glitzy, sullen beats. Life sucks, we suffer, the future is in trouble. He is rap’s Droopy, the eternally sad cartoon dog. This isn’t a slight because, yes, conscious rap deals with existential melancholy (cf. J. Cole) but it’s usually bookended with optimism through last-minute revelations or faith in the future. Not Boogie, and certainly not Everything’s for Sale, his debut album for Eminem’s Shady Records. It exists in a cloud of gloom that consumes the album. And yet, there’s something endearing about Boogie’s honesty, his commitment to the established mood, and his charming vocals to go along with his rap abilities.
Boogie doesn’t believe that people want to hear “that conscious shit.” That probably speaks to his feverish approach to introspection; there aren’t any lessons given or learned here, only what he’s thinking in his darkest hours and how those thoughts beget more darkness. On “Tired/Reflections” he raps, “I’m tired of working at myself, I want to be perfect already/I’m tired of the dating process, I want to know what’s certain already,” and you can hear forfeiture in his tone. He’s far from whining, he’s just exhausted. The track begins with a wish for death, then the police come to investigate and reporters crowd the scene. The death becomes just another event in the day’s schedule. Maybe that’s Boogie’s biggest fear, not mattering in the grand scheme of things.
Even though Everything’s for Sale is so gloomy, it sure does sound sexy. Its slow-churning, soulful hymns take the edge off the darker subjects. “Live 95” slinks along, its rich jazz atmosphere invites you to close your eyes and nod off while Boogie waxes about his insecurities. Elements of soul crop up throughout, culminating in the sultry closer, “Time.” What sounds like a hazy, sex-imbued dream is actually about a man confronted over his lack of commitment with a partner. Even when it sounds like it ends in something genuinely moving, Boogie dekes in the opposite direction.
Everything’s for Sale steps up the melodies, devoting the lion’s share of choruses and bars to what amounts to humming with words. It’s not quite Kid Cudi with the harmonies, but definitely not Bryson Tiller, either. This mix works because the pain in his voice creates a metallic hum that’s almost audible, like he’s either just cleared his throat or he needs to. “Time” showcases this wounded vocal marvelously, with his drawn-out lines simulating a man pleading for intimacy. Both “Skydive” and “Skydive II” devote their runtimes to Boogie’s melodic side as he sings about insecurities in love.
Boogie is at his worst when he deviates from the gloomy atmosphere. “Rainy Days” has the distinction of being the worst song on the album and having one of the most trying Eminem verses on it (“Like a shepherd havin’ sex with his sheep/Fuck what you heard,” goes one unforgettable line). The boilerplate trap beat makes Boogie sound lost. Similarly, “Self Destruction” tries to channel its darkness into a party record, but its mix of self-awareness and half-commitment just makes the whole idea land sideways. With an album this obsessed with pure sadness, Everything’s for Sale embraces that mood utterly. The few times it deviates from it, it crashes. It’s a project that sees Boogie working on the balance of comfort and experimentation, of seeing the world through more than the same dark tint.


One-time dancepunk contenders ditch the DFA for Astralwerks to turn out one of the year's most humiliating misfires.

Stealing of a Nation

Brooklyn's Radio 4 seem to have stopped caring about music midway through the recording of 2002's Gotham!. Through 2000's debut, The New Song and Dance LP and 2001's "Dance to the Underground" 12-inch, Radio 4 followed their neo-Clash/Gang of Four tendencies into a more indie-danceable context, and it just about worked. Meshies dropped "Radio 4" in the same breath as The Rapture and !!!, and none of them were shocked when the band asked the DFA to produce their sophomore effort. The first half of Gotham! showcased the band's live energy with smart but spare embellishments, and preserved the grassroots vitriol that gave at least some credence to their incendiary political lyrics. The second half, however, felt like an afterthought: Its production is noticeably heavier on what are infinitely less compelling songs, as the DFA frantically lipstick and sunglass Bernie Lomax to conceal the album's rigor mortis.
Despite it all, Astralwerks signed the band in 2003. Most would think Radio 4 would use this budget upgrade to trudge up some fresh material-- by now it had been two years since the band recorded Gotham!-- but they still couldn't muster the energy. Instead, we got the Electrify EP, which included a barely distinctive re-recording of 2001's "Dance to the Underground", and 6 consistently awful remixes. Radio 4 had written itself in water: That quickly, they'd become has-beens, and from there, any headway made would go toward reclaiming lost ground.
Stealing of a Nation is the polar opposite of monumental. Its 12 songs brutally follow the modus operandi of Electrify, in that all are simply thinly disguised re-recordings of "Dance to the Underground"-- each more obscene than the next. What's worse, the band doesn't have the indie-dance acumen of James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy to fall back on anymore: Instead, there's Martin "Max" Heyes, whose dated Primal Screamisms drown out the band's already feeble melodies and political agenda. Radio 4 can be commended for at least trying to move past the purposeful lo-fi of Gotham! and into fresher territory, but there's no bell or whistle in the world that could energize the utterly impotent songs at the core of Stealing of a Nation.
While Radio 4 whine about bands moving to New York for the wrong reasons (The Scene!) on album single and opener "Party Crashers", the band crashes a party themselves-- the pilled 'n' thrilled, screamadelic one across the pond that's been shut down for 13 years. The change of direction is not at all accidental-- even the title Stealing of a Nation aligns the band with New Order (who recorded both "State of the Nation" and "Shame of the Nation") and all of Manchester's post-New Order antics-- but come on, does every song after "Party Crashers" have to rip Happy Mondays' "God's Cop" and Primal Scream's "Don't Fight It, Feel It", too?
Of course, the similarities between Radio 4 and producer Max Heyes' previous clients would be a less pressing issue if the band had any charisma whatsoever. It's difficult enough for frontman Anthony Roman to convincingly rally the troops against The Man and The Machine on "(Give Me All of Your) Money" and when his voice is swaddled in the purple robes of high-gloss production, but his lazy three-note melodies couldn't even start a lunchroom food fight. Meanwhile, guitarist Tommy Williams and keyboardist Gerard Garone trade equally malnourished riffs on 9/11-by-numbers "State of Alert", and Heyes' insistence on the drum machine on "Transmission" and "The Death of American Radio" keeps live drummer Greg Collins from contributing anything more than a credit in the liners.
Two songs that Radio 4 intended as clear homage to their influences only further indict Stealing of a Nation. "Nation", which the band openly modeled in sound, political agenda, and track placement (right in the middle) after The Clash's "Straight to Hell" on Combat Rock, neatly reiterates all of Stealing of a Nation's shortcomings, from Heyes' outmoded soundboards to Roman's unconvincing, merely observational politics to the entire band's inability to write remotely compelling melodies.
And then, right before the aptly titled closer "Coming Up Empty", Radio 4 dub-stomps with unusual swagger through "Dismiss the Sound" with unmistakable similarity to "Albatross" by Public Image, Ltd., from whose song ("Radio 4") the band takes its name. But of course, Roman hardly skims the depth of Johnny Lydon's conviction, and Radio 4 sells off PiL's atonal confession for glitzy and insubstantial chorus effects. Like the rest of the album, the song's slickly produced fancy face also becomes its muzzle, robbing Radio 4 of any bite it could have had. Stealing of a Nation truly has nothing to offer musically, nor does Radio 4 urge anything of note politically, sticking to the trite "America Is Fucked!" hogwash that any seventh grader with a blog and a dial-up could piss out in an afternoon. Never has a band been so undeserving of its own name.


More like a eulogy for what was lost than a new chapter, Allison Crutchfield and Kyle Gilbride reunite for songs that document their lives since their breakup—and possibly chart a path forward.

Fall Into the Sun

While promoting her solo debut, Tourist in This Town, last year, Allison Crutchfield predicted Swearin’ would never play another show. Although she and cofounder Kyle Gilbride had tried to keep their Philly band together after they ended their romantic relationship, they ultimately recognized the untenability of pretending nothing had changed. Tourist in This Town documented their souring status and her profound displacement after their collapse. “We’re pretty far away from Philadelphia, and that’s fine/’Cause I’m really starting to hate you and, anyways, I’m looking to move,” she sang. She soon made good on the threat, relocating to Los Angeles.
What a difference a little break can make. Swearin’ credits breathing room for allowing them to regroup for their third album, Fall Into the Sun, a candid record that plays less like a new chapter than a eulogy for what used to be. “We are both older now/But you still let the music determine how you feel any given night,” Crutchfield sings over blustery, Blue Album guitars on the opener “Big Change,” a song that doubles as her farewell to Philadelphia and the punk scene of her youth.
We already know bits and pieces of this story from Tourist in This Town, which previewed the diaristic, nakedly autobiographical songwriting approach Crutchfield wears like a glove here. The key difference is that, in Swearin’, she splits the lead with Gilbride. On Fall Into the Sun, they alternate tunes, pivoting perspectives from the one who left to the one who stayed and back again. While Crutchfield’s journey required a lot of distance and soul searching, Gilbride’s was more aimless. “By pure dumb luck, I’ve gotten where I’m going,” he sings on “Dogpile,” his dazed warble dwarfed by a hefty riff.
On the surface, Fall Into the Sun sounds like Swearin’ as you remember them—bright, hooky, lovable. After revisiting their earlier LPs, you hear how much has changed. The production is far cleaner, a hi-fi approximation of how lo-fi music feels. Even its fuzziest guitars have luster. Crutchfield and Gilbride’s styles have diverged, especially their pacing. The two used to mirror each other’s rhythms, but now Crutchfield’s songs dash like they have somewhere else to be, as if she’s still trying to put as many miles between herself and her subject as possible. Gilbride’s tunes wallow and amble.
The album requires sacrifice from both writers. Crutchfield has to dial back some of the range she demonstrated on Tourist in This Town, from radiant synths to teases of Americana. She’s so in her element over these roiling tempos, it seems like a fair trade. Only once does she deliver two consecutive tracks, but “Grow Into a Ghost” and “Margaret” are rippers, providing the album’s early peak. Gilbride, meanwhile, risks playing the supporting role to the rising star. (One can only imagine how he must rue comparisons to Rilo Kiley’s Blake Sennett). He’s not nearly as magnetic as Crutchfield, but he holds his own. His “Treading” and “Future Hell” are knockouts and personal bests. The chemistry between Crutchfield and Gilbride has changed, of course, but they still complement each other.
This story of separation and reconciliation is so vivid that it wouldn’t take much to rework it into a movie script. Despite the forgive-and-forget, time-heals-all-wounds outlook, the album falls short of a happy ending. Swearin’ has announced tour dates into 2019, but you have to wonder how much of a future the band really has once this album cycle ends. These songs suggest the baggage may be too heavy to cart around very long. “It never would have worked out, anyway,” Crutchfield concludes on her intimate final number. For an album cast as a fresh start, Fall Into the Sun mostly feels like closure.


An eccentric, vocoder-building electronic forefather gets the reissue treatment from the fanatics at Stones Throw.

Farad: The Electric Voice

Reissue releases usually oversell the now-clichéd story of a misunderstood musical genius. Farad, Stones Throw's retrospective of electronic music eccentric Bruce Haack, does peddle that tale to a certain degree, much like the 2004 documentary Haack: The King of Techno. But the real pleasure of the disc, covering music released during the later part of his career from 1970-82, is that it doesn't try too hard to define Haack's compositions and philosophy or spend extensive time wondering, "What if?" It instead exposes the raw components of his odd career, an improbable, colorful circuit board resembling the wiring to some Rube Goldberg device.
A musical prodigy from a Canadian mining town, Haack was all-encompassing in his approach. He had composed far-out children's music and pop songs, experimented with classical/synthesizer hybrids, and hand-crafted a studio's worth of electronic instruments (including a proto-vocoder, Farad, named after inventor Michael Faraday) by the end of the 60s. Few can claim to have demoed electronic instruments for Fred Rogers and written a song covered by Beck ("Funky Little Song", not included on this album). But his scattered biography goes a long way toward explaining the playful weirdness and the philosophical underpinnings that made Haack so refreshing. Even on his psychedelic excursions or the stone cold electro funk of "Stand Up Lazarus", there's a sense of wonder and play, and he doesn't stay perpetually plugged-in, letting folk and country twang find its way into his music.
The tone of his tracks veered from suspended, bubbly escapes ("Rain of Earth") and silly sing-alongs ("Maybe This Song") to a Kraftwerk-worthy electro jam with a pre-Def Jam Russell Simmons (1982's "Party Machine") or the Byrds-like tinge of "National Anthem to the Moon", one of a handful of tracks on the comp taken from his 1970 album The Electric Lucifer. Haack took to the vocoder like Jim Henson took to felt, imitating a guttural monster on "Noon Day Sun" and bending his voice into that of a cheesy lovelorn cyborg on "Rita". On the jaunty, "Electric to Me Turn", Haack gets philosophical over steam organ synths, declaring, "Electric to me turn this night/ Reflecting universal light/ All I knew that should be true/ Is reality in you." Hindsight may render some of these tracks a bit silly or indulgent, but this patchwork of music showcases a true believer and a talent that deserves recognition among his early synthesizer peers.


PJ Harvey fans have waited a long time for this: a near-exhaustive collection of the singer’s non-album tracks and orphaned gems, many of which rival her classic album cuts.

B-Sides, Demos & Rarities

You used to have to work so hard to be a stan: joining fan clubs, tracking down early EPs, downloading suspicious Megaupload links from message-board threads. Rarities were called that for a reason; they weren’t just served to you on a streaming platter. PJ Harvey, who long shied away from compilations and career retrospectives, never made it easy. Some of her best, most bracing material was exiled from her studio albums, but unless you were scouring eBay for the “C’mon Billy” CD single or seeking out the limited-edition Is This Desire? bonus disc, how would you have known?
PJ Harvey fans have waited a long time for this: a centralized meeting point for the singer’s many non-album tracks and orphaned gems. Spanning from her early days, fiddling with a 4-track machine that mentor John Parish taught her to use, to her post-’90s reinventions as a pop-rock shapeshifter, antiwar provocateur-slash-autoharp connoisseur, and television composer, this remarkable, 59-song, six-LP compilation doubles as a shadow history of Harvey’s career, charting her metamorphoses through the songs that didn’t make the cut.
It also reveals the one constant—an unswerving intensity that distinguished Harvey from her imitators. On her early, blues-punk demos (there are just five Rid of Me demos here, presumably because the others already appeared on 1993’s 4-Track Demos), that intensity was channeled through Harvey’s voice, a searing, guttural moan of biblical proportions. Hear her weave in and out of falsetto on the wailing chorus of “Dry - Demo” or deadpan the sinister nursery-rhyme coda to “Man-Size - Demo,” and it’s clear that Harvey was a compelling solo artist well before her eponymous trio dissolved in 1993.
To Bring You My Love, Harvey’s extraordinary 1995 commercial breakthrough, was her first proper solo album. On its B-sides, you can hear the singer reveling in her new freedom and pushing to the outer limits of her sound. The hazily menacing “Lying in the Sun” and deeply eerie “Darling Be There” are studies in minimalism, pointing the way to Is This Desire? “Maniac,” meanwhile, plays like a “Down by the Water” understudy: theatrical and violent. Its distorted organ and drum loop represent one of Harvey’s first excursions into sheer groove, while its roaring vocal proves Harvey is the only Gen-X rocker who can yowl come-ons like “I neeeeeed a man/To make me moan/To make me bad” without the faintest wink of irony.
Around 1997, while demoing “My Beautiful Leah,” an exhausted Harvey recoiled in shock at the grotesque darkness of her own writing. She fell into crisis, and considered abandoning music to become a nurse. Instead, after seeking therapy, she completed 1998’s Is This Desire?, her most goth album, a masterpiece of mood if you approach it in the right space. On Desire, Harvey channeled her isolation into noirish trip-hop, ghostly minimalism, and third-person character studies; its paradox has always been that this is Harvey’s most character-driven work, an album populated by lost, broken women with names like Joy, Catherine, or Leah, and yet she has described it as being “about myself.”
Nocturnal and haunted, these B-sides rank among the most stunning of her career. “The Northwood” is a macabre vignette chiseled from warped, deliberately out-of-sync vocal takes, perhaps a nod to Harvey’s Captain Beefheart obsession. “Sweeter Than Anything” is yearning and nostalgic, a lost-love story whose details, like the flickering guitar layers, are an impressionistic blur of sadness.
Is This Desire? was a stark departure from Harvey’s prior work, but would have been even more so had the keening reverie “Nina in Ecstasy 2” made the cut (producer John Parish wishes it were track one). Sung in a girlish falsetto, with just the gentle hum of a Yamaha QY20 sequencer for accompaniment, the song both hints at Harvey’s White Chalk-era vocal shift and encapsulates the lonely desperation of Desire: “‘Nina in Ecstasy’ sounds like a porn film, maybe it was, but my Nina is also a lovely, sad, lost lady looking for her mum,” Harvey has explained.
If Is This Desire? left you (ahem) dry, chances are you found comfort in the lovestruck glamour of 2000’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, probably the best New York album ever made by a Brit. On this widely hailed, platinum-selling release, the singer does not groan or shriek; she glides and floats, and swoons over the sensual pleasures of watching a lover undress. Harvey, now channeling Chrissie Hynde more than Captain Beefheart, never sounded happier, or more suited to your parents’ five-disc changer.
In this case, the B-sides complicate the popular narrative, revealing that the same sessions yielded plenty of depressive downers that Harvey discarded in pursuit of a (relatively) upbeat pop album. The ominous “This Wicked Tongue” is a slow-burning explosion, while “Memphis” is a stirring tribute to Jeff Buckley. Harvey had received a happy letter from the singer the week before his death and wrote the song in response to the tragic news: “Oh, what a way to go/I know that you’re smiling,” she sings hopefully.
Buckley was 30 when he died. Harvey was the same age when she recorded Stories, and penned a cryptic reflection in the form of “30.” If “Memphis” retains some of the lush production of Stories—jangling guitar, soaring backing vocals—the same cannot be said of “30,” which is brooding and spare; the song recalls the unsettled quiet of Is This Desire?, while “Kick It to the Ground” hearkens back to the bleeding, raw vocal takes of her early demos. You can understand why these tracks were orphaned from their parent album.
Harvey was uninterested in pandering to new fans wooed by Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea’s impression of a radio-friendly rock star. It would be nearly four years before a follow-up arrived; eventually, the singer emerged with Uh Huh Her, her most insular and haphazard record, and the only one she produced entirely herself. Though Harvey is mum about her private life, Uh Huh Her is also her most overt breakup album, journeying from bitterness (“The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth”) to melancholy acceptance (“The Darker Days of Me & Him”).
Once frustrated by its demo-like sketchiness, I’ve grown to love the album’s ragged intimacy and subtle shifts in mood. But the B-sides—previously collected on a limited-edition 2004 compilation—are considerably weaker, veering toward self-pity. “The Phone Song” and “Stone” particularly rank among Harvey’s most plodding and heavy-handed compositions, while demo versions of “Cat on the Wall” and “You Come Through” are too similar to their album equivalents to justify inclusion. On the bright side, we get the fuzzed-up “97º” (a reworking of the “Cat on the Wall” riff), the Dylan-quoting “Dance,” and the gnarled “Uh Huh Her.” Orphaned from the album of the same name, it became an incendiary standout on her 2004 tour, Harvey’s moans of “Reeee-jection!” snuffing out the last flickering embers of Stories’ infatuation.
That tour was the last hurrah for PJ Harvey, alt-rock queen. On 2007’s White Chalk—one of her most overlooked albums—she swore off electric guitar and yowling blues entirely. Ghostly and gothic, its spare sound centered around childlike piano figures, White Chalk divided fans. In retrospect, it’s the album that ushered in the fourth era of Harvey’s career, a period defined by nontraditional instrumentation, a high, keening vocal register, and lyrics that emphasize literary or sociopolitical concerns.
Even on this compilation, White Chalk is a kind of ghost: its presence sensed but unheard. That’s because the White Chalk era produced mysteriously few non-album tracks. Instead, Harvey issued long-stowed-away material from her earliest recording sessions: “Wait” (“one of my first songs ever written”) and “Heaven,” both recorded in 1988, when Harvey was a teenager in the group Automatic Dlamini. Both are pleasant, uncharacteristically chirpy English folk tunes, with little hint of the powerful erotic charge to come on Dry and Rid of Me. Their non-chronological inclusion here may bewilder fans who assume them to have been recorded circa 2007.
Yet a certain disregard for chronology suits Harvey. As the new century wore on, her muse seemed to drift almost a hundred years into the past, to World War I. As peers like Björk and Nick Cave embraced icy synths and ambient electronica, Harvey was drawn to autoharps and zithers, saxophones and trombones. Once again, she threw away her established tools. The result was 2011’s Let England Shake, one of the more peculiar antiwar albums, and a successful one, earning the singer her second Mercury Prize.
So distinctive is Let England Shake in sound and approach that “The Big Guns Called Me Back Again” and “The Nightingale” could have come from no other corner of Harvey’s discography. The odd, ringing thwack of the autoharp; the ambling rhythms; the communal tapestry of backing vocals—these are the giveaways. That, of course, and the lyrics, which contrast war’s pageantry with its brutality. In “The Nightingale,” Harvey embodies the naiveté of a soldier seduced by the glory of his mission and comforted by a nightingale’s call: “Every one of us will go to Paradise/He sang to the soldiers day and night.”
While Let England Shake surveyed the conflicts that shaped England in the 20th century, The Hope Six Demolition Project found Harvey—now working as a kind of journalist/poet—turning her gaze to the violence and unrest of the present. Drawing heavily on research trips to Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Washington, D.C., she created a travelogue album, pulling England’s eclectic instrumentation into a bluesy rock fusion. Often criticized for its noncommittal remove, the 2016 album is not one of Harvey’s best; songs like “The Community of Hope” enumerate notebook observations of poverty and economic neglect, but offer little in the way of conclusion or emotional catharsis. There’s an unshakeable “Ok, and?” quality to the writing.
Alas, as this compilation reveals, Harvey omitted some of her most purposeful protest songs from the album proper. The deceptively jaunty “Guilty” indicts the judgment of a drone operator squinting at suspects on a screen, all of whom “must be guilty,” Harvey repeats, as handclaps and saxophone blurts cheer on the spectacle of remote-controlled death. “The Camp,” a stirring 2017 collaboration with Egyptian singer Ramy Essam, is equally topical: an evocative plea for children displaced by the refugee crisis in Lebanon.
B-Sides, Demos & Rarities loses some of its urgency towards the end. Since 2017, Harvey has retreated from the album and touring cycle, focusing on scoring for television and stage and publishing a book-length poem called Orlam. The last five songs here chronicle her scoring work. There’s an eerie cover of the folk traditional “An Acre of Land”; several piano demos of songs Harvey wrote for the 2019 stage adaptation of All About Eve, which she scored; and, from the Peaky Blinders soundtrack, a surprisingly milquetoast cover of a certain song by Harvey’s most famous ex. All curiosities of interest to hardcore fans, but nothing that summons the fire or spikiness of her own records.
The box set ends here, but, happily, Harvey’s career does not. According to a Guardian interview, Harvey will release a new studio album—her first in seven years—in 2023. I can think of no presently active major-label artist whose fans have less of an idea what her new album will sound like or what dark obsessions it will entail. That may be a function of Harvey’s propensity for secrecy, but it also reflects how profoundly her career has been shaped by surprising left turns. When we speak of pop chameleons—David Bowie, Beck—why not PJ Harvey?
Harvey has never settled. She has never released a staid or unsurprising album in her life. She has always favored uncompromising gestures. Like the tormented narrator of “To Bring You My Love,” she has lain with the devil and cursed God above. And here, scattered across these six LPs, is a surplus of proof.


Harsh noise figurehead builds new tracks by sampling punk rock recordings-- crowd cheers, drum rolls, drumstick counts-- and inserting them on top and inside of his own.

Soft Punk

Soft Punk is the first full-length album released by California harsh noise and parasympathetic drone aesthete John Wiese on New Jersey's Troubleman Unlimited, an eager imprint that's been treading the turbulent waters between sonic abstraction and punk aggression for a decade. Through TMU's small-batch/good-records approach, bands like Growing and Double Leopards share shelves with Meneguar and Panthers (not to mention Glass Candy, Tussle and The Walkmen), meeting somewhere near the fuck-all eruptions of Wolf Eyes and now in the careful and meticulous, feverish and intoxicating noise of Wiese. Recorded between 2002 and 2005, Soft Punk is a zenithal intersection of everything Wiese has done right for the past decade: Collagist tendencies meet drone hyper-abilities; assaulting glitches and glissandos come buried between near silence and hair-raising volume; beauty is refracted through sonic brutality.
The title Soft Punk seems to have two functions, then: Like its brilliant cover art by Kaz Oshiro-- three bright pink Marshall amplifiers that are, as the back cover shows, simply stretched-canvas, three-dimensional paintings of such fantasy gear-- Soft Punk suggests looking and listening again, of rethinking that ugly noise/punk divide. Just when you think you have a handle on Wiese, he's onto something else. There's always a next level here. No, this isn't punk, and it's not soft. But it's not simple sheets of harsh noise, either. Wiese's constant push and pull and his eventual acquiescence to let things build and burn are capable of rock's epiphany and articulation, even if it's "just a bunch of god damned noise" in the end.
Soft Punk is a statement of process, too. Under the name Sissy Spacek-- which he uses for both solo work and collaborations-- Wiese manipulates and processes his own recordings and spews them back as ultra-damaged, something-like-punk, more-like-noise spasms. Here, he's sampling his punk rock friends again, stacking those sounds-- crowd cheers, drum rolls, drumstick counts-- on top and inside of his own. During "Snow Pit", Wiese concentrates on snippets from Olympia trio Die Monitor Bats, using a live set's beginnings, ends, and screaming innards as heavy construction paper and bright crayons. He drops drumstick counts into the mix four times, sprinting in wildly different directions after each. It's either "One, two, three, four, NEAR SILENCE" or "One, two, three four, OH SHIT! LOUD!" Take your chances, sucker.
Much like Japanese electronic composer Ryoji Ikeda, Wiese excels in making clean, precise cuts between drastically different sounds, building a drop-dead dynamic capable of stepping from almost-absent rumbles and hums to furious noise bursts. This is apparent on "PS2", where Wiese uses bait-and-switch, build-and-kill mechanics as his chief compositional tool. He buries valleys into peaks and somehow finds peaks that are higher and more rugged with uncanny persistence. A machine-gun rhythm reverses into a glitchy spasm, then settles into a pressurized monotone before ducking into near-nothingness. None of these sounds lasts for more than three seconds, but such vacillations never seem rushed with Wiese. He's always in control, the master of a sonic domain that reaches far-and-wide, high-and-low with enthusiasm and magnetism. It's as though he collects a world of sound and spits it out piecemeal-- methodically, dramatically, emphatically-- through a morphing matrix designed for ricochets. Falling in love with a sliver of sound only to be slapped senselessly by something totally unrelated? It's as maddening as it is exhilarating.
But the proof is in Soft Punk's center: During a three-track, mid-album stretch, Wiese eases into a neon pink drone, a beautiful sound that he just won't leave alone. He bends and shocks it, reshapes it, piles drums on top of it, overdrives it, and eventually altogether destroys it. When the track expires with a blitz of malformed waves, Wiese builds a perfect, long-tone aubade reminiscent of Jason Lescalleet's work on "The Pilgrim". For those who haven't heard it, "The Pilgrim" was Lescalleet's gorgeous 74-minute farewell to his deceased father, all gentle tones fanfaring gradually into outer space. For three minutes, Wiese sings a similar sigh, perhaps letting the body of the punk rock he's setting on fire burn away at the midpoint. And then, as he should, Wiese thrusts all of his weight into "New Wave Dust", perhaps the album's most chaotic, relentless, damaging track.
Power electronics? Oh my. Punk rock? If only.


In 1998, Squarepusher Tom Jenkinson realized that his time-tested drill-n-bass\n\ formula wasn't cutting it anymore. \xB5-Ziq and the ...

Go Plastic

In 1998, Squarepusher Tom Jenkinson realized that his time-tested drill-n-bass formula wasn't cutting it anymore. \xB5-Ziq and the Ninja Tune roster had caught onto the brain-twisting beauty of unclockable bpms and soft melodic tones. He knew that to leave his mark on this world, he had to do something different. Something so different it would transcend the term "electronic" entirely, and endow him with the megastar status he knew he rightly deserved. So he recorded Music is Rotted One Note, a brilliant fusion-powered flashback that gave nods to both electric Miles and the dawn of the digital age.
After unanimous critical hallelujahs, the only challenge facing Jenkinson was how to follow such a tough act. The three EPs that followed, Budakhan Mindphone, Maximum Priest and Selection Sixteen, offered variations on the album's theme, but rarely equaled the sweet inspiration of Rotted One Note's fiery jam-sessions and dark discordance. Would he continue tracking the ghost of post-60's African spirituality or give birth to something even more abstract and outlandish?
The sad fact is, either of these options would have produced better results than the one he ultimately chose: rehashing. On Go Plastic, Jenkinson picks up where his Big Loada EP left off, almost as if Music is Rotted One Note had never existed. Go Plastic exhumes the corpse of stuttering, fast-paced percussion and arbitrary programming that was bled dry and buried in a time when the Y2K bug still signified economic collapse and nuclear meltdowns.
For what it's worth, Jenkinson does at least attempt to update the outdated. The problem is, he draws on all the wrong elements. Rather than resurrecting the elaborate analog melodies he once seemed to harvest off trees, he focuses on the goddamned breakbeats. Why? Aren't we past this? Electronic music has mutated so drastically over the past three years. It's currently some of the most creatively fertile soil the music world has to offer. Has he just not bothered to learn the new software?
These questions are unanswerable. Only Jenkinson knows why he reverted to such an exhausted form. But speculation says he's grown comfortable. After a hard day's work, nothing comes easier than lethargy, a curse all too apparent on the album's major offenders, "Go! Spastic" and "Greenways Trajectory." The appeal of complete randomness was limited even before Autechre broke the freshness seal; now it's just irritating.
Jenkinson does occasionally acknowledge Music is Rotted One Note, as on the sparse 2\xBD minutes that open "The Exploding Psychology," and the foreboding, reverb-laden "My Fucking Sound" (the title itself is a reference to One Note's standout, "My Sound"). But even these tracks would have been relegated to one of that record's numerous EPs and 12-inches.
Only a few tracks can justify Go Plastic's existence, and not surprisingly, they're the ones that sound the least like Jenkinson's past material. "Metteng Excuske v1.2" is a tense collage of dark ambience, punctuated by metallic bursts and digital manipulations of plucked piano strings that swells into rumbling electronic malfunctions and derailing train noises before ending with an abrupt, glassy ping. Sadly, the track lasts just over a minute from start to finish. "Tommib" suffers a similar fate-- a beautiful echo of the majestic synthtones and hopeful melodies of Big Loada, sans percussion, is given a runtime of 1:19.
The closing "Plaistow Flex Out" is Go Plastic's true triumph. It blends some of the jazzy weirdness of Rotted One Note with the eerie warehouse tension of Photek's Modus Operandi. 4-bit Pong blips reverberate under a relaxed hip-hop bass and snare. Sporadically, a keyboard riff pops up, so stretched and contorted that its original melody disappears completely, leaving only an oddly catchy series of slurred non-notes.
And of course, there's "My Red Hot Car," which has thankfully been slightly remixed from its single version. My feelings on this song are conflicted. On one hand, the tune is sweetly infectious; on the other, the sentiment is disturbing at best, and would be better suited for the master of electronic gross-out, Richard D. James. Regardless, you can't let this song deceive you. It stands out awkwardly, the only track of its kind, on an album of generic misfires and done-to-death jungle cliches.
Even assuming I fully enjoyed "My Red Hot Car" (which would be a terrible overstatement), it only adds up to 12 genuinely entertaining minutes on an album that nears the 50-minute mark. There is, as always, hope that he'll again equal, or maybe even surpass the timelessness of Music is Rotted One Note, but he's not going to get there by coasting.