Pairing blown-out trap beats and industrial noise with deadpan stream-of-consciousness lyrics, Gordon’s second solo album revels in the broken and the mundane.

The Collective

Kim Gordon, like everyone, is addicted to her phone. Her vicious and brilliant second solo album, The Collective, shares its name with a painting she exhibited at New York’s 303 Gallery last year; 27 iPhone-sized holes had been punched out the canvas, each gap a cute little reminder of every synapse you’ve fried watching parkour clips or chasing the infinite scroll. The album itself is even less subtle: Powered by ear-splitting trap beats and churning industrial guitar, anchored by lyrics in which Gordon recites packing lists or mutters about driving in Los Angeles, The Collective is a maelstrom of mundane thoughts and funny asides and flashes of pure rage whipped into a heavy, unnerving fog. It sounds how TikTok brain feels.
It’s a provocative but fitting new mode for Gordon, who, for over 40 years, has intermingled caustic experimental art with a mordant curiosity about mainstream culture. For every obtusely confrontational side project like Free Kitten, there is a Ciccone Youth, the Sonic Youth alter-ego dedicated to reinterpreting radio confections like “Into the Groove” and “Addicted to Love.” She holds down Body/Head, an elliptical guitar drone project with Bill Nace, yet also serenaded Rufus Humphrey and Lily van der Woodsen at their wedding on Gossip Girl. On The Collective, she lays her trademark breathy sprechgesang over what can only be described as Ken Carson-type beats, diving fully into the trap experiments she first tried on 2019’s No Home Record; sometimes, as on opening track “BYE BYE,” she genuinely sounds like a SoundCloud rapper, nonchalantly distending the names of luxury clothing brands: “Bella Freud, Y-S-L, Eck-haus-Lat-ta.”
No Home Record, Gordon’s first solo album after making music in bands for 38 years, was thematically oblique, but on songs like “Earthquake” and “Murdered Out,” her stoic visage slipped, revealing lyrics that sounded like stinging, unapologetic rebukes to a persona non grata in Gordon’s life. The Collective, made once again with alt-pop producer Justin Raisen (Sky Ferreira, Charli XCX), puts aside the score-settling in favor of fractured, stream-of-consciousness lyrics that mostly eschew poetry or diarism. The unrelentingly noisy vibe is appealingly impulsive and lizard-brained, like you’re hearing someone remind themself to form thoughts: She mumbles about buying overpriced potatoes and leaving out money for the cleaner, stretches the phrase “bowling trophies” into the album’s closest approximation of a melody, and wails something that sounds like a religious prophecy on “The Believers.” While recording, Raisen encouraged Gordon to bring her “abstract poetry shit,” and the resulting album feels simultaneously dense and invigorating; on “I Don’t Miss My Mind,” asides about home furnishings brush up against a goblin-voiced call to “suck it up/fuck it up” and a hazy memory of “crying in the subway.” There’s no lyric sheet, and many songs feel like Rorschach tests asking whether you hear resilience or brokenness, sex or violence, mundanity or surrealism. Often, it’s hard to tell the difference.
Despite the album’s almost dreamlike glaze, it’s easy to discern themes that have interested Gordon for the entirety of her career. Her fascination with the performance of masculinity, which she wrote about in the early ’80s, recurs on the blistering, formless “I’m a Man,” where she puffs out her chest like a drag king and adopts the pose of a slimy playboy: “So what if I like the big truck?/Giddy up, giddy up/Don’t call me toxic/Just cause I like your butt!” “BYE BYE” and “Psychedelic Orgasm,” both essentially interior monologues of someone going about their day, feel only a few steps removed from Design Office, her long-running art project exploring the links between architecture, real estate, domestic life, and fine art. On The Collective, she presents these ideas at their most stretched-out and free-associative—like they’re being read from a note that she typed at 3 a.m.
Some fragments of The Collective sound remarkably current. Raisen’s influence was clear on No Home Record, but here it sounds as if he and Gordon are actively trying to place their work in conversation with pop music more broadly. Toward the end of “The Candy House,” a lo-fi trap-pop track that grinds like heavy machinery, Raisen contorts Gordon’s voice into a garbled, formant-shifted knot that recalls the demonic asides of FKA twigs’ M3LL155X; on “It’s Dark Inside,” she shouts out Pussy Riot and her old collaborator Julie Cafritz’s band Pussy Galore, before caddishly chanting “Pussy pussy pussy!” like Kendrick Lamar on “Doves in the Wind.” There are wounded Auto-Tune trills on “Trophies” that feel drawn from the work of Farrah Abraham or Pop 2-era Charli. None of these moments are given much room to breathe—by the time Gordon introduces one idea, musical or thematic, she’s moved on to the next.
Gordon has said that she was initially introduced to social media by a friend who said it would help her “feel less alone”—an idea that, at this point, feels woefully naive. The Collective, at its most alienated, is hauntingly lonely and solipsistic, to the point that the faltering industrial dirge “Shelf Warmer” ostensibly begins as a come-on but quickly veers into musings on a gift receipt and then into outright conflict (“That’s what you want/That’s not what I want”). The song calls into question the ways our desires have been reshaped by digital dopamine triggers: Is it really sex you’re looking for? Or will any quick hit of interaction, positive or negative, do just fine? If records by 100 gecs and PinkPantheress reflect the feeling of being online in the 2020s, the cacophonous, vexing, endlessly fascinating The Collective represents the experience of logging off and finding that your perception of the real world has been forever altered. Few are better equipped than Gordon—who, at 70, is still cooler, smarter, and more fearless than most—to guide us through.


This expanded and re-ordered set collects three albums of early material from Daniel Lopatin's synth-based project. He successfully liberates synth sounds from their conventional trappings, placing them in less familiar contexts and coaxing you to hear them in new ways.

Rifts

"Timbral fascism sucks," said Daniel Lopatin in a 2009 interview with The Wire. His point was it's wrong to reject specific sounds-- in this case, the synth tones used in 1980s new age-- simply out of disdain for the genre they're associated with. In one sense, Lopatin's solo project Oneohtrix Point Never is an ongoing battle against timbral fascism. He's tried to liberate synth sounds from their conventional trappings, placing them in less familiar contexts and coaxing you to hear them in new ways.
This laid-back battle began with Lopatin's first album, 2007's Betrayed in the Octagon, which he called "a stoned space epic about one really bad day in the life of an astronaut." His astronaut landed on a strange planet in 2009's Russian Mind and wrote the score to his own death in 2009's Zones Without People. But more interesting than that inscrutable tale was the way that, throughout this trilogy, Lopatin re-imagined synth music for the current era, injecting tension into something normally soft and cheesy. New age got a bad rep because it became too light to resonate, simplifying emotion instead of creating it. But even Lopatin's most beatific arpeggios and most soothing drones avoid sentimentality and easy-listening ambience.
That became clearer when New York noise label No Fun packaged those first three albums together-- along with tracks from smaller-run releases-- into the 2009 double CD Rifts. Listen to one track here or there and it can be tough to hear how lighter moments differ from the saccharine cloud of incidental mood music. But immerse yourself for long stretches, and Rifts sounds more like the hypnotic marathons of Terry Riley than something playing in a store that sells candles and crystals. In that sense, the set was greater than the sum of its original albums. Absorbing all two and a half hours revealed commonalities between Lopatin's disparate constructions-- the kind that aren't apparent when you take OPN in small doses.
The immersion opportunities are even greater on Lopatin's new version of Rifts, issued on his own label Software. This lavish 5xLP/ 3xCD set includes six more tracks from previous releases, stretching it past the three-hour mark. Revisiting Rifts in this expanded (and reordered) form, I've found its stoic sadness even more impressive. Lopatin finds poignancy in wavering tones and rippling notes, conveying a sense of loss mixed with stiff-lipped acceptance. Even the set's one curveball-- an acoustic guitar song called "I Know It's Taking Pictures From Another Plane (Inside Your Sun)"-- carries this tone, and sounds logical squeezed in between synth-scapes.
The rich moods of Rifts persist in the tracks Lopatin adds to this version. Take the hymn-like despondency in the trebly voices of "Memory Vague." Or the slow lurch of "The Trouble With Being Born", which sounds like a defeated army returning home, dejected enough to hang their heads but prideful enough to march in step. Such complex sentiments have marked Lopatin's work even as he's moved to the noisier drones of 2010's Returnal and the glitchier loops of 2011's Replica.
So in retrospect, the path OPN has traveled makes sense. But when I first got Betrayed in the Octagon from No Fun in 2007, it was a bit of a shock. At that point the noise underground was still in an upswing, and the harsher sounds of Carlos Giffoni's label (and festival) led the charge. There was diversity inside the No Fun umbrella, but nothing there sounded like Betrayed in the Octagon. It turns out that Giffoni and Lopatin were prescient, or at least observant, because soon many other underground artists began mining new age styles.
That trend may be less in vogue a couple of years later, but it survives. Just in the past two months, excellent forays into new age-tinted synth have come from noise-leaning types such as Joseph Raglani, Robert Beatty, and M. Geddes Gengras. All of which makes Rifts look like an important touchstone, and it should. The way Lopatin discovered fresh ideas inside of a worn-out genre is an inspiring story for the present age.


Warpaint’s new album is said to be informed by recent hip-hop and R&B but it ultimately hews closely to the moody downtempo rock they’re known for.

Heads Up

There’s a difference between sleepy-eyed music and music that just puts you to sleep. If Warpaint have made a career out of walking the fine line between the two, your enjoyment of the band naturally depends on which side of that line you see them. Does the L.A. quartet’s anesthetizing approach to downtempo rock create tension out of restraint or does it simply lack enough friction to generate heat? Heads Up, the band’s third full-length, probably won’t change whatever opinion you already have.
When we last heard from Warpaint on their 2014 self-titled album, they were tucking the cerebral distance of post-rock into tight pop songs. But if that album staked out a middle ground between, say Tortoise and Broken Bells, Heads Up leans more heavily in a pop direction, veering ever closer to the tuneful but overly polite hum of acts like Coldplay. Warpaint have recently name-dropped Q-Tip, Erykah Badu, OutKast, and Kendrick Lamar as influences on this new material. But the album as a whole is more suited for seated, solitary brooding than for anything as lively as moving your body. When Heads Up does increase its heart rate slightly, as on “New Song,” the band actually loses power with a vanilla hook, couched in a typical modern production sheen that has “sync opportunity” stamped all over it. Mood-wise, Warpaint have essentially remained in the same gear since day one.
But Warpaint can slyly rope you in when guitarist/vocalists Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman drop lyrical hints about romantic malaise. Kokal and Wayman express vague indignation without quite lowering their guard enough to come out and tell you how hurt they feel. As such, they rely on the listener’s sense of intuition and empathy to do the work in filling in the blanks, which has a certain effectiveness. You can’t help but apply Warpaint’s elliptical lyrics to your own most recent memories of relational disengagement. The cloudy musical atmospheres that have become their trademark allow the words to attach themselves to a range of sensations from sullen to wistful to yearning. And as much as Warpaint’s songs often address dark figures with questionable intentions, the music never adopts a defeated or victimized posture.
That said, do verses like “Did you come undone?/Did you become someone unknown?” or “I will not be defined/Don’t wanna define myself” give us enough to put ourselves into the shoes of the characters in these songs? Or do they function more as stage lighting without any real action unfolding onstage? Adapting the meaning of music to fit one’s own feelings has its rewards, but it begins to feel cheap when the songs don’t necessarily push you to care about the people in them. “Can’t you tell me all your secrets?/I’ll tell you mine” goes a verse on “So Good.” At this point, though, after enticing listeners to lean in closer for a glimpse at those secrets, we might have to question whether Warpaint have any to tell.


Kevin Morby (Woods, Babies) recalls singer/songwriters of the '60s and '70s in his solo work, particularly Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and Singing Saw is his strongest album.

Singing Saw

Kevin Morby speaks the language of records. His spare acoustic sound pulls from the late ’60s and early ’70s, particularly Bob Dylan in baroque country mode, Songs of Leonard Cohen, and Lee Hazlewood. But where the well-read novelist Cohen was comparing mythologies and Hazelwood held forth like a wizened industry cynic, Morby’s earlier work refracted meaning through the lens of his record collection. His debut album, Harlem River, featured one song about a slow train, another about walking on the wild side, and a third with a line about going down to the station with a ticket in your hand, as if were still possible to buy paper tickets ahead of time. But connecting directly to the real world isn’t exactly Morby’s point. His music comes from another place, one where you try and piece together meaning by tapping into a kind of collective unconscious, using whatever tools you have at your disposal. And his references add up to something more than their parts and when paired with his unerring feel for arrangement and style.
Morby’s own albums keep getting better, and some of this we can chalk up to experience. Though he’s not yet 30, he’s been involved with a lot of records—two in his band the Babies with Cassie Ramone from Vivian Girls, four as a bass player in Woods (Morby is to Woods what Kurt Vile is to War on Drugs: a kindred spirit musically whose quirky vision needed more room than a band could provide), and now three as a solo artist. Singing Saw is his strongest album because it shows a process of refinement, and because Morby’s songwriting has become less referential and more grounded. The basic ingredients haven’t changed, but Morby is figuring out how to retain and amplify his strongest points—his weary and wise voice, his understanding of how the musical pieces fit together—and leave everything else behind.
On his debut, Morby’s voice cracked in places, suggesting effort that transcended ability, but Singing Saw finds him cool and controlled at every turn, fully aware of his limitations but confident in what he can accomplish within them. His singing is simultaneously intimate and distant, part conversation and part stylized monologue. He’s got a nasally diction with a tendency to stretch vowels that didn’t exist in the world until Dylan first gazed at the Nashville skyline and a fondness for short, direct statements that could have been written a century ago. The most contemporary piece of technology mentioned on the album is a Ferris wheel; the songs feature gardens and earth and shadows and fire and tears whose prevailing downward trajectory, yes, brings to mind rain. Single lines don’t really stand out, but Morby’s commitment to such elemental concerns has a cumulative effect, and the album’s lack of specificity becomes a strength.
That confidence extends to musical choices, including Morby’s tendency to let the small details of the sound do the work—he would never play five notes if four could get the meaning across. And while the core elements of his aesthetic—his deep voice with just the right halo of reverb, gently plucked acoustic guitar— are a constant, subtle instrumental variety abounds, which Morby sometimes takes great joy in pointing out. On "Dorothy," he sings "I could hear that piano play, it'd go like…" and the buzzing uptempo arrangement falls away leaving a beautiful tumble of keyboard notes, and he follows it a bar later with a paean to a trumpet player that a horn player answers. "Singing Saw" seems to say something about how a single tool can be used either creatively or destructively, and features the titular instrument prominently (and very beautifully).
For Morby, any day-to-day situation or mundane observation could spark something for his next album, and sometimes being that tuned-in can be a curse. "Got a song book in my head," he sings on the album’s title track, and he climbs a hill past the houses to find somewhere quiet where he can leave them behind. He claims in press notes that he wrote the song about his neighborhood in Los Angeles, and his first album, Harlem River, was in part about his stint living in New York. But while many people in L.A. notice the traffic and the food and the sunlight and the celebrity culture, Morby hears the coyotes and sees the moon.


With heaps of classic samples and pop culture references, the Michigan rap crew keeps things breezy and showcases their tight-knit power.

Trifecta 2

Part of the distinct energy of the Michigan rap scene is not just the speed or intensity, but the humor—from Rio da Yung OG’s gross-out punchlines to Bfb Da Packman’s outright comedy rap. But there’s probably no one from the Detroit metropolitan area as consistently funny—or as gleefully delightful—as ShittyBoyz, the trio consisting of half-court jesters BabyTron, StanWill, and TrDee. They can go pound for pound and bar for bar with the likes of Icewear Vezzo and Band Gang Lonnie Bands, but the self-described scam rappers are more transparently goofy than many of their peers, as the name might indicate.
Their new album, Trifecta 2, comes in the middle of a triumphant year for the group, which has included the first Trifecta album and BabyTron solo project MegaTron. BabyTron has experienced the most solo success thus far, including a slot in this year’s XXL Freshman Class, but ShittyBoyz form a tight-knit unit with effortless chemistry. At times, their flows can be difficult to distinguish, but not because they sound alike; each member is so in sync with the others that the back and forth form a collective Voltron. And despite the pounds of runtz and zaza they brag about inhaling, ShittyBoyz never run out of breath.
The fat synths and pounding 808s of “Win or Lose” are pure Detroit, but listening to an entire ShittyBoyz album front to back makes for a high-energy DJ set, with unpredictable sounds that swerve into one another. On “Zeke & Luther,” ShittyBoyz hold their ground over a chaotic piano line, while “Cheers B!tch” approaches acid house. Mixed in with the hi-hats and thumping bass of Drakeo the Ruler type beats like “Going Hyphy” are the wailing quiet storm saxophone of “Getaway” and the tropical guitar of “Most Wanted.” ShittyBoyz don’t make dance music per se, but frequently draw from it, with sampled snatches of ’80s R&B, Miami bass, and freestyle deep cuts, like the interpolation of Cynthia’s “If I Had the Chance” on closing track “GGG.” You could make a dangerous drinking game out of every time the 808 cowbell hits.
No matter what beat is thrown their way, the ShittyBoyz still maintain an impressive number of words per minute—it’s less that ShittyBoyz dabble in different styles, and more that they contort different styles to fit into their own distinctive universe. “Video Games” is the album’s most adventurous piece of plunderphonics, an epic mega-mix that veers through multiple game soundtracks, like a restless kid who can’t settle on which one he wants to play. As the Boyz spit relentless bars, the beat behind them switches from the familiar loading screen music for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to the scores from Donkey Kong Country, Luigi’s Mansion, Ratchet and Clank, and Def Jam: Vendetta. The choice of GTA is especially fitting, as listening to ShittyBoyz’ sped-up throwback samples often evokes flipping through radio stations in Vice City.
Even when the ShittyBoyz aren’t pilfering pop culture for potential beats, they’re referencing it, especially pro wrestling; in fact, the depth and breadth of their wrestling fandom is probably only rivaled in today’s rap game by Westside Gunn. On “WWE,” ShittyBoyz run through an encyclopedia of wrestling superstars, from Rick Rude and the Sandman to Mick Foley and John Morrison—at the end of the song, every line with a wrestler name-drop is repeated and highlighted, just in case you didn’t catch it the first time.
In many ways, ShittyBoyz share something with the wrestlers they idolize, as expertly skilled craftsmen who achieve maximum entertainment value. Like the best sports entertainers, ShittyBoyz are master technicians who don’t show the seams. Their flows are so effortless that you can’t even tell they’re working, the delivery so precise that it never feels practiced or rehearsed.


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 debut from the B-52s, a bastion of provocative post-punk unlike anything else.

The B-52’s

As the B-52’s singer and keyboardist Kate Pierson tells it, guitarist Ricky Wilson introduced the riff for “Rock Lobster” by saying, “I’ve just written the stupidest guitar line you’ve ever heard.” Yet another bit of proof that in rock’n’roll, just because you’re being stupid doesn’t mean you aren’t a genius.
This quintet of mostly gay, party-loving, college-town dropouts—which included Wilson’s sister Cindy on percussion and vocals, vocalist Fred Schneider, and drummer Keith Strickland—had plenty of time in Athens, Georgia to put together weird party outfits and draw from Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies during jam sessions. They absorbed the lean styles of punk and post-punk—a music of provocation, antagonism, anger—and subverted it with color, American postwar iconography, and a gleeful refusal to be anything but who they were. Drawing on the cinematic soundtracks of Morricone and Mancini and the experimentation of Yoko Ono and Captain Beefheart, their 1979 debut, The B-52’s, is a 39-minute transmission from the past, present, and future.
“Rock Lobster” and their 1989 hit “Love Shack” are widely what the B-52’s are known for. Those massive singles, along with the band’s retro-Atomic look, have defined them in the public eye. But they’re so much more than their own tagline, the “world’s best party band.” They’re a band that went almost immediately from playing house parties in Athens to being peers of Talking Heads and Blondie. John Lennon famously told Rolling Stone shortly before his death that “Rock Lobster” inspired his return to music because in it, he heard evidence that popular music had caught up with Ono.
In old interviews, the band says they’d only played a couple of ad-hoc house shows in Athens before trying their luck in Manhattan, driving up and back to play gigs for a few bucks and exposure. They were a live hit almost immediately, drawing fans to Max’s Kansas City and CBGB and getting the dourest post-punk scenesters to at least bob their heads along. Live videos and recordings from those first couple of years convey a wild energy propelled along with precise rhythms and an astounding amount of confidence. When the B-52’s showed up, it was a great party that could go way off the rails.
That was the theme of “Rock Lobster,” which they decided to release as a single to help book more shows and broaden their reach. Danny Beard, the owner of Atlanta’s Wax’n’Facts record store, created DB Records for the purpose and recorded and released the single in April 1978. It sold 20,000 copies and launched DB as a critical part of Georgia’s indie ecosystem that would release albums by Pylon, the Jody Grind, and Love Tractor. By June, they’d gotten their own story in The New York Times. They were irresistible interview subjects, this group of friendly and kind Southern people who told stories about their day jobs as waiters (Fred) and renting land on a farm to keep goats (Kate).
In 1979, they signed to Warner Brothers in the U.S. and Island in the UK, and went to the Bahamas to record their debut at Compass Point Studios with Chris Blackwell. Armed already with a monster single, the band consciously held back a few live hits for their second album, the more slickly produced Wild Planet in 1980. The B-52’s came out sounding raw and live because Blackwell wanted to accurately capture their electric sound in the rock clubs, which had won rabid fans with its danceability and maximal minimalism. It got them mentioned in the same breath as post-punk heavyweights Devo and Wire as art-punk on its release. That rawness worried the band at first, who found it “sterile,” Strickland said much later, but it served the songs well.
It was their performances that really turned fans rabid, and their look almost demanded they go on television immediately. A legendary performance on “Saturday Night Live” reached innumerable young Gen X musicians who were captivated by this outlandish dance band that was a perfect introduction to art rock for children: “Rock Lobster” could both get played on Dr. Demento and make young ears receptive to experimentation.
On opposite sides of the country, pre-adolescents Dave Grohl and Kurt Cobain both watched the band play “Rock Lobster” and “Dance This Mess Around.” They would later refer to the B-52’s as formative music and style influences, and point to the debut as an example of a great album on a major label, since, in 1991, the ability of a major label to release a good record was actually a subject broached in interviews.
Major label or no, it’s still one of the most outright bizarre albums to sell over a million copies. From the opening Morse-code beeps of “Planet Claire,” the band’s interstellar obsession is foregrounded. Its “Peter Gunn” riff, Pierson’s keyboards, and wordless vocals make up the first two and a half minutes of the song before Schneider starts singing. It’s about their willingness to let tension build to the edges of discomfort, to startle a listener who might have thought this was going to be an instrumental only to start yelling at them about a planet where all the trees are red and no one ever dies or has a head. “52 Girls” follows that with as close to a straightforward punk song as anything they’d record with its frantic beat. Cindy Wilson goes from breathy seduction to howling menace within seconds in “Dance This Mess Around,” which then returns to a list format, this time dances instead of girls’ names.
Side A concludes with “Rock Lobster,” which remains the world’s unlikeliest novelty party song. It’s constructed like prog rock, sounds like the avant-garde, has surreal lyrics and one of pop’s most memorable guitar riffs. Several distinct sections make up the song’s nearly seven minutes. After that stupid guitar kicks things off, Pierson and Cindy Wilson chime in with “skee-do-be-dop” and Schneider starts telling the story of this beach party where someone finds a rock lobster. Don’t ask him why, but things are going to get weird because of that. At the point where the song might end if it were a straightforward tribute to beach movies and surf rock, a key change takes it to Yoko-land, where Schneider’s lyrics become more and more surreal and his calls are answered with guttural wails and the sounds made by marine life as processed by a malfunctioning See ’n Say. Those sounds were a conscious tribute to Ono, the ones that caught Lennon’s attention.
Second only to “Rock Lobster” in influence is the band’s intense paean to fandom-as-cannibalism and perhaps the first Riot Grrrl song ever sung, “Hero Worship.” “God give me his soul,” wails Cindy Wilson about her idol, who she intends to devour. Wilson croons and screams her way through this beautifully subversive anthem. The lyrics, far darker than anything else on the record, were written by friend of the band Robert Waldrop who would later pen the words for Cosmic Thing’s inspirational “Roam.” That’s a pretty and touching song, but “Hero Worship” is a raw and primal vocal performance on par with “Gloria” or “Rid of Me.”
To say that one particular singing performance stands out on this album is to really say something. The band’s vocals alone would have created an inimitable audio signature with the acidity of Schneider’s irritated nasal deadpan speech surrounded by the sweetness of Pierson and Cindy Wilson’s earthy belting and unearthly harmonies. But in addition to three frontpeople, the B-52’s were blessed with a guitarist of singular talent. Ricky Wilson’s practice of removing his guitar’s middle strings and using two strings for the low notes and two for the high continues to fascinate and influence guitarists who puzzle over his tunings in YouTube videos and on message boards.
I was 11 years old when I first heard Wilson, after a friend said to me, “You like weird stuff, you should listen to this tape my big sister likes.” She played me “Quiche Lorraine” off of Wild Planet and my life was ruined instantly. I immediately bought every record of theirs I could find over at the local Camelot. At the time, Bouncing off the Satellites was filling up cutout bins and it seemed like they were a band of the past, as this was a couple of years before “Love Shack” and Cosmic Thing served as both comeback releases and the extra security of their place in the canon. My first concert was one of their medium-venue tour dates for that album and I stood there at the front of the stage hypnotized by Pierson’s fringed dress, hair up in a home-dyed beehive that would require an emergency visit to the hair salon the next day for un-teasing, memorizing the sequence of the set list. That show cemented my conviction that bands with both boys and girls in them were always superior to bands that only had boys in them.
Finding out that the other world this album is transmitting from is actually accessible on this earth is key to the joy radiating from it, especially for the young misfit listener who realizes that planet is not in another galaxy but in a sweaty, dancing crowd. It feels like they took to heart the overt message of disco, which said that there’s a place for everyone at this party, and joined it with punk’s lack of care for the straight world’s opinion. That musical and ideological pairing created songs that could light up a dance floor and stir up a pit. It’s the most wonderful thing, the ability to be arty and dancey and have killer riffs. Their peers in Pylon managed to do the same thing. Imagine being Danny Beard, and having your label’s first two singles be “Rock Lobster” and “Cool”!
No one has ever felt not-cool-enough for the B-52’s. That is part of their dance music legacy, possibly: Where underground music was about not being like everybody else, about purposefully staying outside of mainstream society, disco was about welcoming everyone to the party. It’s also part of their queer legacy. The band’s legendary heartbreak was the loss of Ricky Wilson in 1985; suffering from AIDS-related illnesses, Wilson concealed his diagnosis from his friends and family and his death was a shock. His was one of the first AIDS deaths in music at a time when the disease was highly stigmatized and poorly understood and was sometimes reported as being the result of “lymph cancer.”
Until the early 1990s, the B-52’s talked more about their vegetarianism than their sexual orientation. With four queer members out of the founding five, they chose to present themselves as if it were a foregone conclusion, so normal or obvious that it wasn’t worth mentioning. While the conversation around outness has developed since then, their matter-of-factness was a beacon for young and questioning queer people at the time. Writer Clifford Chase used the album as a frame for his struggles with acknowledging his own sexuality in his essay “Am I Getting Warmer?” He found the lack of overt explanation made him feel safe: “In ’There’s a Moon in the Sky,’ Fred assured me that if I felt like a misfit, there were, in fact, ’thousands of others like you! Others like you!’ and since he didn’t specify what those others were, I didn’t have to be afraid.”
With the exception of perhaps the Fall, there’s not another post-punk band that can claim such a consistently positive track record in terms of who they’ve inspired. Steve Albini and Madonna claim them as an influence. “Hero Worship” is all over Sleater-Kinney, who also forego bass guitar and have complementary vocalists, and who recorded a song with Fred Schneider for a 2003 Hedwig and the Angry Inch tribute record and covered “Rock Lobster” (with Fred Armisen) in their live shows.
As both cutting-edge innovators and authors of unkillable party hits, their career resembles a smaller-scale version of those of other artists who’ve been held in both high artistic and commercial esteem, and yet their trashy and flashy visual branding and biggest hits have contributed to a less integrated place in the canon where they’ll forever be the beehive-wearing, cowbell-banging, “TIN ROOF! RUSTED,” “Flintstones”-soundtracking screamers of their biggest hits.
The band has said that their retro wardrobe was a simple matter of cheap access to old clothes and a desire to put together fun and attention-getting party outfits. It’s hardly the worst fate to be known for an iconic look and a couple of huge hit singles, but it’s a shame if the two are seen as a distraction from the greatness of their early output. The fuck-it, let’s-have-fun attitude that drew Fred Schneider to base his early stage look—an undershirt, pencil-thin mustache, and polyester slacks—on a conceptual “hangover” costume, or that got Kate and Cindy to wear fake fur purses as wigs, is part of the same approach that made for such unique music and the ability to synthesize experimentation with pop without judging either to be superior or more or less necessary. Just because you’re dressed like the court jester doesn’t mean you’re not royalty.


The officially licensed chill comp meets the underground's current fascination with yacht rock, space disco, pastoral prog, Pacific Coast synth-pop, fairy folk, and perennially feted Krautrock on Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's new edition of the popular Late Night Tales series, which features tracks from Sly Stone, Dusty Springfield, Todd Rundgren, and Pitchfork's Dominique Leone.

Late Night Tales

Provided you don't find the idea icky, the quality of a chill out compilation is all about the execution. A good chill comp is like a featherweight mixtape from a friend with an ear for laidback grooves; a bad chill mix is just muzak that's been tagged "eclectic" in iTunes. Likewise the recent trendlet where rockers and ravers have been scraping the layer of mold off of forgotten hunks of 1970s and 80s mellow gold can sometimes feel like trying to dress up cheesy listening and weak beats as "lost gems." But mp3 blog scavengers (and producer/artists like the Studio, Quiet Village Project, Map of Africa, and others) have also managed to unearth singles that were unforgivably banished to the bargain bins when punk and new wave trimmed rock back to pop and house shaved away disco's hairy excesses.
The officially licensed chill comp meets the underground's current fascination with yacht rock, space disco, pastoral prog, Pacific Coast synth-pop, fairy folk, and perennially feted Krautrock on Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's new edition of the popular LateNightTales series. Even the tracks recorded a few months ago sound like they could have been heard floating from the window of a young German's flat in 1975--or maybe 1985. As a producer and DJ, Lindstrøm is known for his ProTool-ed upgrades on the cosmic swooshes of Italo disco and the regimented bliss of Giorgio Mororder's mechanistic funk. Though little on his Late Night Tales reaches house's 120 bpm tempo, it's still of a piece with his vision of a world where kids hung Vangelis posters in their lockers and Ralf und Florian got mobbed by Tiger Beat readers.
Hell, Lindstrøm's taste in African-American soul, here represented Sly Stone's "In Time", also burbles to a drum machine beat. Other Yankee inclusions range from the ludicrously slick electronic skank of Carly Simon's "Why" (love the proto-house piano and multi-tracked big harmonies that indelibly date stamp it "mid-'80s") to an electro-disco hoedown from Dusty Springfield (hambone rhythms meet the spotless production of a Donna Summer record). Two future shock novelty tunes from Todd Rundgren and George Benson treat synthesizers like the space age instruments they once were, sounding like a cardboard UFO strafing a small town in a '50s B-movie soundtrack and a slightly new age-y sound FX record respectively. And we should point out that Lindstrom also includes a track from Pitchfork's own Dominique Leone which, even accounting for nepotism, ranks as the compilation's prettiest moment, a fuzzed-out lullaby where Brian Wilson invites Roedelius over for a play date to splash around in his sandbox.
But mostly this Late Night Tales is a European show, whether Lindstrøm is drawing from relics of the era of arpeggiated basslines or young bucks attempting to ape their style. Usually the relics come out ahead. The cod cinematic grandeur of Klaus Schulze associate Rainer Bloss' moistly melancholy synth strings, "Chariots of Fire" piano, and hissing '80s gated drums will bring a tear to anyone of a certain age with warm memories of the era's synth schlock, but the wheedling harmonica (or its computer equivalent) and lite-funk rhythm of Terje and Thomas' "Regnbagn" just sounds like the limp instrumental/dub b-side to a Lionel Richie single.
It's uncomfortable realizations like that where you suddenly remember that much of this era's castoffs were not necessarily forgotten by accident. It also makes you question why modern producers like Terje and Thomas would want to imitate or pay homage to such toothless fare. Unlike Rub-N-Tug's sour riposte to the chill out market, Better With a Spoonful of Leather, where the New York duo slowed down and processed the same sort of raw material that Lindstrøm is working with until it turned downright eerie, Late Night Tales is a straightforward trawl through laidback/featherweight music that often edges too close to muzak. Lindstrøm's ear gets the balance right about half the time, but he's occasionally too proud of showing off his taste in records that should have been left in dad's basement.


Heron Oblivion features members of Comets on Fire and Meg Baird, formerly of Philadelphia folk collective Espers. Their self-titled debut LP triggers nostalgia for the mid-'00s moment when bands like Six Organs of Admittance, Dead Meadow, and OM were ascendant, drawing both from underground American noise music and vintage psychedelic rock.

Heron Oblivion

If you follow loud guitar music or psychedelic rock with any attention, Heron Oblivion’s self-titled debut LP might trigger a bit of nostalgia for the mid '00s—specifically, the era of Arthur magazine and New Weird America, when Sonic Youth name checked Fleetwood Mac and independent music seemed, however briefly, to become more attuned to old-school cosmic energies.
At the time, bands like Comets on Fire, Six Organs of Admittance, Dead Meadow, and OM were ascendant, drawing both from underground American noise music and vintage psychedelic rock. The music was familiar, but strange and extreme—drawing from the past, but not overly reverential of it. And then it just sort of passed out of view, with true believers continuing to plug away in a slightly diminished spotlight.
The members of Heron Oblivion made heavy creative contributions to that scene. Singer and drummer Meg Baird performed in Philadelphia-based folk collective Espers and released three solo records via Drag City. Ethan Miller and guitarist Noel Von Harmonson both played in Comets on Fire, while Miller also lead the breezier Comets offshoot, Howlin Rain. Second guitarist Charlie Saufley played in San Francisco’s Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound. In other words, their pedigree in this small world is without parallel.
Though there’s plenty of common ground, Heron Oblivion is, in a way, an unlikely alignment of talents. Baird’s previous projects were hushed and pastoral, while Comets were unhinged and explosive. It’s the ability to navigate between these two extremes that makes the quartet’s debut compelling. The songs slip easily between dynamics—harmony to dissonance, quiet to loud. Baird’s stripped-down drumming style prevents Miller—a guitarist, here relegated to bass duties in an effort to keep things fresh—from veering into choogling territory. A shared yen for searing fuzz tones keeps extended zone-outs lively.
Between Kurt Vile, Solar Motel, Endless Boogie, and Steve Gunn, there’s no shortage of excellent cosmic-sounding guitar music at the moment. But Heron Oblivion is an outlier— louder, spookier, and less optimistic. The songs are moody and dark, with clear moments of guitar solo-driven catharsis. In that regard, Heron Oblivion feel more indebted to the the original wave of cosmic guitar rock, the one that crested during the political ferment of the '60s. A long guitar solo, at that time, implied a certain spiritual heft, a yearning for transformation. There's a moment at the end of album closer "Your Hollows" where Baird's voice ascends and hovers on a single note, blurring into what sounds like a sustained guitar tone or delay trail. The sound is organic, but unnatural in its timbre and length. It’s a howl that slips seamlessly from the earthly into the supernatural.


Watkins Family Hour is an eponymous album born from the decade-plus monthly residency hosted by siblings (and ex-Nickel Creek members) Sean and Sara Watkins at Los Angeles’ Largo. The crystalline covers collection features their takes on the Grateful Dead and country and Americana standards, along with a compelling Fiona Apple guest spot.

Watkins Family Hour: Watkins Family Hour

Watkins Family Hour

Most people think of "records" as discrete objects, collections of smaller pieces strung together into a whole. But rarely do we think of records as records: documents of specific places, times, people, ideas. Watkins Family Hour accurately falls under both of those definitions. It’s an eponymous album born out of the monthly residency hosted by siblings Sean and Sara Watkins at Los Angeles’ Largo for more than a decade. Now, with this record, those of us outside L.A. can finally get a peek at what they’ve been up to each month.
The Watkins were best known in the early 2000s for their band Nickel Creek, a progressively minded roots trio that took tradition and imbued it with new energy that earned them a Grammy and a large international following. The band’s frontman and mandolin player Chris Thile has gone on to earn more acclaim than his bandmates in the decade since they called it quits (save for a record and reunion tour last year), but the Watkins are no slouches: guitarist Sean remains a tremendously skilled flatpicker, while Sara’s songwriting and fiddling has always been sharp. They’ve both put these chops front and center on the solo records they’ve released over the years.
Watkins Family Hour, an 11-track LP comprised entirely of cover songs, feels like it could’ve been a live recording at any one of the group’s Largo conventions. They begin with Robert Earl Keen’s "Feelin’ Good Again", a mellow celebration of finding unexpected moments of joy. It’s an appropriate opening for a record that feels analogous to a live experience: it’s the obligatory "Hey, welcome everyone, we’re so happy to be here." From there, Watkins Family Hour arcs across toe-tapping numbers—some faster, some slower—before closing with the "fare thee well" reprises in the Grateful Dead’s "Brokedown Palace". All that’s missing is stage banter and some between-song tuning.
While the Watkins siblings lend their name to the marquee, the Watkins Family Hour has always operated under an open-ended definition of "family." Fiona Apple is perhaps the brightest star of the fold on the album, though she never eclipses her cohorts. It’s a pleasant surprise to hear Apple flex her vocal might in a genre outside her usual realm with "Where I Ought to Be", and her execution is immensely satisfying. Where Skeeter Davis leaned more toward self-pity on her original 1961 recording, Apple’s vocals streak the song with anger and hurt, breaking the record’s overall complacent tone. "Hop High", with Sara Watkins taking the vocal lead, injects the back half of the album with more intrigue as a cautious introduction yields to fiery fiddle licks.
Elsewhere, Watkins Family Hour hits a number of country and Americana sweet spots: there’s the plaintive ballad "She Thinks I Still Care", the mournful drinking tune "King of the Twelve Oz. Bottles". And while they also include a Roger Miller song, they made an unexpected choice from his catalog: "Not in Nottingham" is from Disney’s 1973 movie Robin Hood. Greg Leisz’s pedal steel buoys the record throughout—that instrument can help songs soar with a twangy breeziness or damn them to goofy "Hyuck, howdy-y’all!" hell. Similarly, Benmont Tench’s honky-tonk organ and piano contributions are welcome additions to the arrangements.
When bands we like cover songs we love, our best hope to relive those special moments is usually through sideways videos recorded on cell phones and uploaded to YouTube. But with this crystalline collection, Watkins Family Hour offers a more compelling insight.


The prodigal trailblazers of Boston hardcore have reunited, returned, and evolved with their first album in 15 years.

American Nightmare

A hardcore record is almost always a dress rehearsal, a set of stage directions that prepare the listener for the physical movements they’re expected to undertake when the songs actually come to life at the live show. It’s a means of internalizing the music through repetition until the muscle memory response is effortless and instinctual. And at its best, as on the self-titled release from prodigal Boston hardcore trailblazers American Nightmare, the listener can visualize it in their mind: Here, during this riff, I’ll fling my body just so into the crowd; I’ll shout on this gang vocal prompt. On this breakdown, I’m gonna punch a motherfucker in the teeth.
Fans of American Nightmare have indeed been clenching their fists now for almost 15 years. This record is their first since 2003’s We're Down Til We're Underground, released when the band was known as Give Up the Ghost. After a legal dispute with another American Nightmare, they’ve since reclaimed their name, and reformed their 2004 lineup of guitarist Brian Masek, bassist Josh Holden, frontman Wes Eisold, and drummer Alex Garcia-Rivera. The latter recorded the 19-minute album to 2-inch tape in his Mystic Valley Recording Studio in Boston, where the band traces its roots as an undisputed inductee into the city’s hardcore hall of fame.
Their prior two LPs fit snugly into the archetypical Boston hardcore sound in the tradition of bands like SSD and Ten Yard Fight: each element—vocals, guitars, and drums—coalesces into a singular punishing tumult, then falls out one piece at a time, then comes crashing back together. For American Nightmare, particularly on We’re Down, that formula came with enough moments of musical transcendence that alluded to the band’s self-professed affinity for post-punk, Bauhaus, Joy Division, and The Smiths.
Here there are songs that feel like nods to hardcore tradition intertwined with more melodically expansive diversions. “American Death” is two minutes of riffs and shouting, drum-centric and furious, while “Dream” is a mere 36 seconds of dashed off chaos. Little wonder it’s so short, the intensity would be near physically impossible to maintain much longer. Lead single “The World Is Blue” has it both ways, with relentless snare in a race to the finish all-out sprint, but it’s broken up by introducing hints of disparate song parts: a bass-led breakdown, pulling back the hurtling riff to slower swipes, and the introduction of a lead line that suggests another direction the song might’ve headed were it any longer. “Lower Than Life” still manages to transform halfway through, unclenching like a bloodied fist into a slowed down motif that ends up far from where the song began.
At their best, the band teases at the edges of what hardcore can be, particularly on “War” and “Gloom Forever.” Both songs, standouts here, feature foregrounded guitar leads that provide a musical through-line that hovers over the chaos of the rhythm section below. It’s a fitting tumult for the imagery at work in Eisold’s lyrics, preoccupied with suffering, both bodily and existential in nature. “All my life I’ve dreamed about death,” is the entirety of the lyrics on the quick-hitting “Dream,” but it could pass as a summary of his overarching mindset, with frequent detours into the abyss throughout. “Hell is hot but I'm keeping cool,” he screams on “The World Is Blue.” “I’m in the thorns of the garden with you. I’m in the flames of the fire with you. I’m so alive in the valley of death with you,” he lashes out on “War,” alternating between anger and succor for those who’ve either betrayed him or stood by him.
It’s doesn’t quite have the explicitly new wave-indebted synth punk of Cold Cave—Eisold’s project in the intervening years between American Nightmare records—or the overt romanticism of the Smiths. But the distance between the downright danceable “Gloom Forever” and  1986 song “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” isn’t too far off. The musical flourishes and pitch-black noir that run like a current underneath American Nightmare bring the album into a wider world. Every hardcore record gives you instructions on how to listen to it, the better ones give you something to think about while your body is instinctively preparing for the show.


The L.A.-based Sprague steps away from her indie pop trio Florist for rippling, patient, and redemptive ambient drone works for modular synthesizers.

Emily A. Sprague: Water Memory / Mount Vision

Water Memory / Mount Vision

When Los Angeles-based musician Emily Sprague steps away from her folky indie pop trio Florist to make music with modular synthesizers, her music becomes a tool for perception. Listening to it, you start to notice things. Not just about what’s unfolding in the music itself, but also about what’s going on in the room where it plays, and maybe even what happens when the music stops.
Water Memory/Mount Vision collects two tapes of Sprague’s ambient music, both of which were created in the last two years, and frames them with brief spoken-word pieces. Along with artists like Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Sprague is part of a wave of artists returning ambient music to its spiritual roots, which is to say it’s not afraid of being called new age. Artists like Sprague often use old tools—modular synths instead of computers—and create spaces for relaxation and contemplation.
Sprague is more or less a minimalist, but her work also carries hints of tension. She’s especially adept at taking two compelling elements and exploring how they interact, finding a third “thing” that ultimately becomes the piece. “A Lake,” a slowly unwinding drone consisting of a throbbing bass tone at the bottom and shimmers of high-pitched tones at the top, uncannily evokes the body of water in its title, hinting at lights on a rippling surface and an invisible world spreading out beneath. Its beauty brings to mind the lyricism of Takagi Masakatsu, but Sprague composes with more patience, content to let held tones linger in place for minutes at a time. The primary motif in “Water Memory 1” is a rising and repeating synth tone. Set against a sound that recalls a French horn, it vaguely suggests an orchestrated waltz that got stuck in place, not unlike William Basinki’s Disintegration Loops, but hopeful rather than forlorn.
The Mount Vision half is a shade darker, and also finds Sprague incorporating acoustic sounds. “Synth 1” and “Synth 2” are more focused and intense and also a touch more psychedelic, their fat drones bringing to mind outer space instead of the natural world. The bubbling “Huckleberry” is suggestive of Suzanne Ciani, demonstrating how in the right hands electricity moving through a modular set-up can sound uncannily alive.
“Piano 1” sounds like a recording of the instrument falling apart in slow motion, as Sprague takes a repeating keyboard phrase and pulls it apart taffy, finding a sense of wonder through subtle shifts in tempo and EQ. A variation of the track, “Piano 2,” closes the set, and features the piano sounds mixing with recordings of birds and insects. As it unfolds, a second recording of the piano part appears, slightly out of phase with the first, and the gaps in the notes become longer and it takes on an oblong gait, like a limp. These small, subtle changes define this music. When you return to silence after it’s over, you start to think about what else you might be missing.


The Brooklyn duo's logic-defying new album threads anticapitalist critique, stoner humor, and a hazy undercurrent of fatalism into art-pop so mesmerizing it'll give you a contact high.

Water From Your Eyes: Everyone’s Crushed

Everyone’s Crushed

Among rock’s underclassmen, Water From Your Eyes’ Rachel Brown and Nate Amos present like back-of-classroom slackers with drool stains on their hoodie sleeves, their minds too clogged with Vine compilations to pay attention to World History. Alongside putzing around the bowling alley and getting their minds blown by Ween, the Brooklyn art-rock duo’s primary activity seems to be smoking a gargantuan amount of weed: “There was not a single drop of work done in the recording, editing, or mixing process that was not preceded by a spliff,” Amos said of their breakout 2021 album Structure. The way they talk about their latest record, Everyone’s Crushed, makes it sound as though they fished it out from their underwear drawer: culled from pre-existing material with only a few weeks of polishing, made from a “broken $100 interface and a dying computer,” their shittiest equipment yet. They purportedly tossed it to their label with no intention of taking edits.
Misdirection is a Water From Your Eyes forte though, and behind Brown and Amos’ oafish exterior is a slanted and singular ingenuity. Their closest contemporaries are the oddball virtuosos Jockstrap, with whom they share a proclivity for audacious sonic contrasts, silver-screen sentimentality, and snipped, inscrutable writing. Structure was a beguiling experiment in form, intricate and patterned as origami: The album split into matching halves—first a pastoral tearjerker, then a dubby basement experiment, then a garbled poem—with recurring motifs. Beyond its clever design, the music itself was mesmerizing, specifically the macerated noise freakout “Quotations” and its inverse, the beautiful stained-glass reverie ““Quotations.”” Structure led them to opening slots with Pavement, Spoon, and Interpol and a record deal with Matador. “Yeah we don’t even smoke weed anymore,” Brown says. “We have meetings now…a lot of meetings.”
Even a packed calendar can’t stop the duo from a good gag. So Everyone’s Crushed launches with a prelude called—they had to do it to ’em—“Structure,” which reappropriates a snippet not, in fact, from Structure but 2020’s 33:44. As if guided by a medieval jester, the song begins with vigorous twiddles of what sounds like a lute, until Brown’s bittersweet voice softens the mood: “I just wanted to pray for the rain/Wishful thinking for sunny days.” The couplet originates from a sound collage where Brown drones bleakly about the squeal of emergency sirens and children growing up to hostile futures—a despair that extends into Everyone’s Crushed, written amid struggles with substance abuse, depression, and pandemic-era hopelessness. “I guess lyrically [the album] is just us thinking about how fucked up things were,” Brown has said.
Nowhere is their fatalism more overt than on the acrid post-punk closer “Buy My Product,” a mock corporate ditty about the endless production of insecurity under late capitalism. “There are no happy endings/There are only things that happen,” Brown announces. “Buy my product.” But their disquiet tends to come through more obliquely, as in the nauseated orchestral loops of “14,” where Brown repeatedly declares intent to “throw you up” but never quite achieves relief. Or the elliptical title track, where almost no matter how you scramble it, “everything hurts.” On the latter, Brown mumbles feebly like a child with a tummy ache, while the doomy, disjointed production foreshadows the arrival of something worse: The synths creep like carbon monoxide, the guitar hobbles on broken legs, and the drums incite mangled bleats as though you’re next up at the slaughterhouse.
Ultimately, it’s not the hazy discontent that makes Everyone’s Crushed indelible but its livewire sound. You can interpret the deadpan counting in “Barley” as a slog through business hours—“another long day at the not killing myself factory,” according to one meme—but the song’s erratic whirl of movement and texture evokes glass shards trapped in a tornado, intersecting with the flat, 2D stitching of Brown’s voice, the up-down scratch of shakers, and the jagged slope of a rock’n’roll guitar riff. Amos has cited color field painter Mark Rothko as inspiration, but his capricious production more directly evokes the transgressive, action-oriented approaches of other Abstract Expressionists, who staged upon the canvas “not a picture but an event.” Likewise, Water From Your Eyes are always thrusting you into the middle of a grand saga you can’t quite grasp: On “Out There,” peals of tropical-sounding synths disappear into mist, the paradise breeze interrupted by a subterranean rumble; midway through, the song screeches like hot-wired car pulling a U-turn. This is music that resists logic, that invites questions like: Where am I? What the fuck is going on?
Who knows, but let me offer another example. “True Life” opens with skronking guitar blasts in alternating tones, like construction workers wreaking havoc on opposite sides of the road. Brown struts, sunglasses on, through the chaos. “You don’t even grasp the zipper/You won’t even ask the question,” they accuse, whatever that means, while the song tumbles and thumps like an off-balance laundry machine. Then Brown begins to plead, “Neil, let me sing your song,” which the band explains in interviews with a long backstory about hoping to interpolate Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” but not being able to get past his lawyers. It’s a highdea if I’ve ever heard one: singing a song about not singing somebody else’s song—Somebody Else’s Song also being the title of one of their past albums, not to be confused with their covers collection, Somebody Else’s Songs—and the whole thing is dizzyingly obtuse and borderline incomprehensible. But in the end who cares, because the music sounds awesome. Neil, give ’em a call.


On her Tri Angle debut, sound designer and producer-turned-musician Katie Gately twists odd, outré samples into big pop shapes.

Color

The valences of “pop” and “weird” have become increasingly compatible in the last half a decade—Miley Cyrus eschewed her post-“Hannah Montana” trend-hopping for an album co-written by Wayne Coyne, PC Music traded in their outsider art status for an imprint deal with Columbia, and member Danny L Harle released a track featuring vocals by Carly Rae Jepsen. But the mainstream has always cherry-picked from the underground and alternative artists have always had pop proclivities. (Remember The Whitey Album, Sonic Youth’s tribute to Madonna?) Nothing about this overlap is particularly shocking or rebellious anymore—from albums to playlists and beyond, the monoculture always finds a way, and everyone will someday inspire Kanye West.
Sound designer and producer-turned-musician Katie Gately falls into the Avant-Garde Goes Pop category. She works with found sounds and meshes those odd samples with pristine vocals to create more than just tokens of her findings. Her debut full-length Color, out on premiere outré label Tri Angle Records, is certainly exploratory pop but adheres to certain sounds of the mainstream at its core. Gately’s work may not be mistakable with Katy Perry’s, but what sets her apart from the avant-pop pack is that her constructions have the sublime polish of Top 40. Her songs are infectious the way pop should be but without perfunctory lyrics, and they stick to you because what Gately creates ends up sounding just so very big.
Gately benefits from sound design know-how from her film production MFA studies at USC and her professional experience. This skill set benefits the intricacies of her beat constructions—harmonies built on tweaked vocal samples to bolster her own voice (“Sift”); cello and garbage-can percussion eloquently melding to make something reminiscent of grunge, but still reflective of current electronic trends at its core (“Frisk”). But Gately’s work is more in line with Lady Gaga’s theater-kid tendencies than, say, Grimes. Her work is likely to be compared to Holly Herndon and Björk, particularly because of the Haxan Cloak’s involvement with Vulnicura, but its forebear is really Madonna’s Ray of Light (save its sugarcoated title track). That album may not sound particularly revolutionary in 2016, but in 1998, the meshing of ambient, trance and electronica for a massive mainstream audience has helped pave the path for the last 20 years of pop music. Gately, working alone, somehow takes the dark tones of that album, bolds the colors and makes it sound even more expensive.
It’s both something old and something new for Tri Angle. Despite having previously housed artists like How to Dress Well and AlunaGeorge, the label’s name tends to evoke abrasiveness —the deconstructed club destruction of Rabit; Lotic’s silvery violence or the blistering funeral procession led by the Haxan Cloak. Its recent signees, R&B-classical hybridist serpentwithfeet alongside Gately, signal a push away from the acerbic that is still able to straddle the label’s interest in anxiety.
This is what makes Color so remarkable. It boasts the sort of large-scale electronic compositions that can often feel monolithically lonely, and she does it all by herself. And yet the album sounds and feels collaborative, as if it were the product of multiple viewpoints and inputs. It seethes with so many sounds and ideas that it sounds like a conversation, rather than a monologue.
You hear that particularly on tracks like “Sift” and the album’s lead single “Tuck,” as it twists through global influences—some of which are maybe a little bit questionably appropriative, similarly to Madonna’s exploration of celebrity-style Buddhism—that invoke the presence of others. Sometimes those shifts don't always land; “Sire” climaxes with too much distortion, and “Rive” utilizes an orchestra that sounds more demented than inventive.
Tri Angle releases tend to point toward the future, and with Gately’s album, it means that lo-fi pop is bounding for more gloss. But the ultimate takeaway from Color is not just another unconventional vision of what’s to come, it’s circling back to the label’s origins. Despite the gloom or brutality of Roly Porter or Evian Christ, it still has a Lindsay Lohan tribute album in its history. Granted, that mixtape, 2010’s Let Me Shine for You, is comprised of erstwhile witch-house covers and remixes by the likes of Laurel Halo and Oneohtrix Point Never, but it portended so much of the composite dance music to come. Gately’s effort is not just a blockbuster of a debut, it is the next stage in Tri Angle’s obsession with pop music as an influence—and the first that is primed to have the world pop world return the favor.


The debut solo album from the Daughters vocalist is a left turn: an eerie, improvised collection of industrial music that places you deep in the heart of the abyss.

Alexis Marshall: House of Lull . House of When

House of Lull . House of When

Terror is a key player in all of Alexis Marshall’s music. In the high-throated screams of his early aughts project As the Sun Sets and the gravelly death-and-resurrection of the Rhode Island outfit Daughters, Marshall’s work is melodic but never benign. For his debut solo album, House of Lull . House of When, the vocalist and songwriter takes a left turn with improvisatory drones and religious spoken-word. Balanced between spontaneity and self-flagellation, the record’s experimental, industrial sound places you deep in the heart of the abyss, exploring a cataclysmic kind of desolation.
House of Lull. House of When follows the same chaotic principles of Daughters’ catalog, shedding the band’s melodic structure for a foreboding atmosphere that suggests more dreadful horrors pulsing just below the surface. Marshall works like a mad scientist of grindcore, ornamenting the spoken-word recitations with clogged air vents, crunching paintbrushes, and rumbling padlocks. In “Drink From the Oceans . Nothing Can Harm You,” he bellows the words over a blown-out piano; it sounds as if he is swimming through grime, paddling furiously to keep himself from sinking.
In the lyrics, Marshall questions authoritative patterns, evoking images of confusion, paranoia, and rapture. On “It Just Doesn’t Feel Good Anymore,” he alludes to pandemic anxiety and isolation: “Don’t get up/Don’t go out/Don’t touch anything/Don’t touch anyone,” he howls against pounding percussion and screaming horns, his voice full of worry. In moments like these, it is easy to imagine Marshall, dressed in all black, delivering his lines at a particularly morbid poetry reading.
The peak of the album arrives halfway through with a pair of interconnected tracks. On “Youth as Religion .,” Marshall opens up slowly, as calm pianos and guitars keep pace with his quiet prophecies. “God finds you in such places/Tempest truly knows you,” he sings over thick, swelling drones. The atmosphere leads directly into the factory-hollowed anger of “Religion as Leader,” where Marshall, backed by the writhing vocals of Lingua Ignota’s Kristin Hayter, returns to his heightened rasp, following the thread of the previous song.
With its improvised arrangements—abrasive guitars, junkyard percussion, rotted piano keys—House of Lull. House of When sometimes feels like Aphex Twin leading a Sunday Service inside a locked trash incinerator. The sound is reckless yet attentive, and Marshall’s delivery arrives with operatic bravado. Though you’re not likely to find yourself humming any of these songs after the record ends, the sinister mood lingers. “The past is like an anchor,” Marshall repeats early in the album. Even so, he sounds refreshingly unmoored, in search of new visions to induce the same fear.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Power pop band the Necessaries are best remembered for counting Arthur Russell and Modern Lovers’ Ernie Brooks as members. But there’s more to the story, as their newly reissued 1982 LP shows.

Event Horizon

One could be forgiven for mistakenly thinking of the Necessaries as an Arthur Russell side project. Posthumous interest in the many disparate corners of Russell’s back catalog—not to mention one semi-tall-tale about the infamously temperamental musician quitting the band by hopping out of their van in the Holland Tunnel while en route to a gig, cello in hand—have been instrumental in digging the art-pop quartet out of relative obscurity. And for a newer generation of Russell completists, this music is, at its surface, an easy extension of the heartfelt jangle on the 2008 compilation Love Is Overtaking Me.
There is, of course, more to the story. The Necessaries were founded in 1978 by Ed Tomney of downtown punk band Harry Toledo and the Rockets. Tomney had received encouraging feedback on a solo demo by John Cale, and he assembled a group that included Jesse Chamberlain (a drummer who had played with Mayo Thompson in his late-1970s UK reboot of the Red Crayola, and also the son of sculptor John Chamberlain) and Modern Lovers bassist Ernie Brooks, already a Russell collaborator in the Flying Hearts. Rounding out the original lineup was singer Randy Gun, who soon departed to work on his own material. After stints with Chris Spedding and as a trio, Brooks recruited Russell.
An initial full-length release with this final lineup, 1981’s Big Sky, was made up of what the band understood to be demos and hustled out by Sire without their final approval. The following year, Event Horizon, a significantly more coherent offering, was released featuring reworked versions of six of the same tracks. The band called it quits not long after Russell’s departure, and this album is the best expression of the short-lived project’s energetic and loose sound, which provides a hinge between the arty leanings of the New York downtown scene and something new that’s both more everyday and more ecstatic.
Songs such as the opener “Rage” and “Like No Other” deliver outright bouncy power-pop, classic in a way that befits teen-movie opening credits or a summer drive through the suburbs with the windows down. But there’s a density of ideas in the way such tracks are built, bright guitar lines fraying at the edge and Russell’s cello winding a somewhat alien texture throughout. The Russell-and-Brooks-penned track “Driving and Talking at the Same Time” is colored in with associative synths that wouldn’t be out of place in one of his disco hits. He and Brooks’ traded vocals meander in and out of conversation; something in their plaintive delivery seems to foreshadow shades of college alt-rock by the likes of R.E.M. (who they played a handful of shows with in 1982). Though they benefit here and there from unruly snarls of punk-rock energy, these songs are also grounded by a willingness to steady themselves, as with the deadpan pacing on “AEIOU” or “Paceways.”
With its self-conscious emulation of radio-friendly sounds and heart-on-its-sleeve emotional bent, Event Horizon is probably not the coolest record of any of these musicians’ careers. Its avant-garde leanings are tucked between earnest moves: side B in particular trades off between straightforward new wave, as with the not-not-goofy geography lesson that is “Europe,” and nostalgic ballads like “Detroit Tonight,” whose all-American guitar licks are complicated by the off-kilter yearning poetics of Russell’s lyrics.
On “More Real,” the best song on Event Horizon, this style provides a structure that makes a specific kind of hopeful vulnerability possible. Over a twangy repeated guitar hook, Russell sings, “She’ll come back I know/Cause our love is more real/I tripped or fell down, but I found myself/In a patch of new grass.” He’s joined by a chorus of his bandmates, and they sing together about experiencing a small, maybe blind faith while looking at the sky from where you’ve fallen to the ground. In that spirit, what makes Event Horizon feel essential is not just the history it collects, but the way one can hear these musicians, wide-ranging as their influences may be, believing in a form. It’s guitar-pop mobilized to its best ends: easy, sweet, and true.


Unlike the wiry, anxious music his brother Jonah writes with the Massachusetts band Krill, Ezra Furman's music hides little behind metaphor or enigma. Perpetual Motion People is a playful, hefty romp through folk, blues, and plain old rock'n'roll.

Perpetual Motion People

Nothing about Ezra Furman holds still. He loads his albums with frantic energy and watches them burn down to embers. Unlike the wiry, anxious music his brother Jonah writes with the Massachusetts band Krill, Furman's music hides little behind metaphor or enigma. He'd rather spit out all his problems than wrap them up into something oblique. He's kind of a projectile singer, firing off barb after barb as soon as they come to him.
A playful, hefty romp through folk, blues, and plain old rock'n'roll, Perpetual Motion People marks Furman's first release with London imprint Bella Union. It's his third solo LP, but it matches tempos more closely with Mysterious Power, his 2011 release with his old band the Harpoons. Throughout his catalog, Furman has penned plenty of songs about his struggles with mental illness and self-destruction, and Perpetual Motion People continues that theme with tracks like "Haunted Head" and "Can I Sleep in Your Brain?". It also breaches identity and politics and love and loneliness, and the inherent instability of each.
Furman indulges a couple saloon-ready crooners, like the loose piano jam "Hour of Deepest Need", but Perpetual Motion People shines when it's at its most kinetic. On "Lousy Connection", Furman bemoans the emotional vacancy of a life that moves at lightspeed over doo-wop backing vocals and swinging saxophones; he promises his "undying affection" to whoever will listen, though he's worried that the whole world is caught up in "a game of worldwide karaoke". But Furman is a clever enough lyricist to hit home that paradoxical feeling of manic isolation in just a few words: "There's nothing happening, it's happening too fast."
More than anything else, Perpetual Motion People feels like a rallying cry against boredom. "I'm sick of this record already," he sings on "Ordinary Life". "Let's wreck all the preconceived notions we bring to it." Furman, who publicly identifies as queer and genderfluid, sets ablaze traditional Americana frameworks with a yearning to be seen and heard the same way he feels. The friction between his sources and the direction in which he points them sets sparks flying throughout the album. He calls out for bodily autonomy and self-love on "Body Was Made", while on "Tip of a Match" he barks about never admitting defeat, even in the face of a long overdue apocalypse.
Perpetual Motion People can never sit right in its own skin, and that's largely where its charm comes from. Furman is the kind of singer who seems to have crammed so many ideas into his head he can hardly decide which ones should fly out of his mouth first. While he's deeply indebted to traditional sounds and familiar structures, he comes alive most when he's sewing fissures into the forms he knows so well. Perpetual Motion People comes with its share of misbehavior, but there's still more room left for Furman to thrash.


Steve Gunn's latest record is the fully formed pinnacle of his career. With a full band and plenty of instrumentation behind him, the care he puts into every nook and cranny of a song is evident. It’s lush but without lacquer, detailed without being dense.

Way Out Weather

Say what you will about the hyper-speed of modern life—it doesn’t matter to Steve Gunn. He plays his guitar with a traditional precision, his eyes gazing at the neck, his fingers moving limberly around the frets, a thumb pick doing the most economical work. He’s austere as someone with no need to go anywhere anytime soon. His songs stretch and loom like a dust storm. Time, it seems, bows to him.
Gunn’s career shows a similar sense of patience: zoomed out, it looks like a 9-year crescendo, whose highlights include his earliest limited-run solo guitar improvisations, his work as a duo with drummer John Truscinski, a sideman in Kurt Vile’s band, the spine of the psych-folk supergroup Black Dirt Oak, on up to last year’s Time Off. That last record was a statement, casting Gunn as not just an instrumentalist, but a damn fine songwriter, too, as ambling, cyclical guitars loped and folded among verses, choruses, bridges, and his doleful baritone. They were simple songs, produced with plenty of dust and hiss all over the tracks, and Time Off was Gunn squinting at something big on the horizon.
His latest, Way Out Weather, is the fully formed pinnacle of his career. With a full band and plenty of instrumentation behind him, the care he puts into every nook and cranny of a song is evident. It’s lush but without lacquer, detailed without being dense. These songs live in hollowed out holes of America’s past; it’s as easy to imagine him playing in front of a disused gas station off an Oklahoma highway as it is to hear his band booming out of a roadhouse on the Mississippi Delta. At times, there’s so many guitar tracks it it feels like in the middle of a pickup jam session with Jerry Garcia, Duane Allman, and John Fahey.
Among the strides Gunn has made on Way Out Weather is his singing voice. His baritone has a perfect character to it, somewhere between Lou Reed circa Loaded and a toothless barfly who occasionally breaks into song. He falls off the ends of notes as if the energy to sing them is out of reach, yet he avoids the kind of droll, wondering vocal style used so liberally and effectively by his contemporaries Adam Granduciel and Vile. Instead, Gunn hones in on every pitch, like on the the lilting waltz of “Shadow Bros", which is the closest thing you'd call a traditional folk song here.
There's so much space inside these songs: the opening title track is a six-minute stroll through tendrils of guitars—a lap steel in the background, a strummed acoustic just beside it, a picked acoustic just in ahead of that, and a clean Fender lead right up front. Even when these sounds aren't washing over you, like the simple country blues riff that runs through “Wildwood”, hearing these melodies is a delight. He sings of private rivers, slowly moving light, fast nights, long days, and moving inside dreams.
It’s not all swaths of guitars and natural nostalgia, though: Gunn turns it up with “Drifter”, a balled up and electric stomper, and Way Out Weather closes with an excellent climax, “Tommy’s Congo”, a swirl of psych, krautrock, Malian folk, and a slight nod to Bob Dylan’s cadence on “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”. Gunn may have been more experimental-leaning on Cantos de Lisboa, his collaboration with Mike Cooper, but this song gathers up all his improvisational tendencies and eclectic influences, bringing unheard textures to his music that are somehow still cut from the same cloth. He closes the album in a voice that's never sounded more certain: “Steady eyes on the crowd to see what’s going down/ Never once looked down at what they’re playin'/ Never look down at what you need to do.” His eyes are trained far somewhere far in the distance, waiting for what’s next.


The Tuareg musician’s first full-band studio album is an incandescent set of guitar music with a spontaneous, celebratory air—and a latent urgency reflecting the region’s very real difficulties.

Ilana (The Creator)

Whether it’s stories about African-American legends reared on plantations in rural Mississippi or the apocryphal tale of a young Jimi Hendrix carrying around a broom until his family could afford a real guitar, blues and rock aficionados love a hardscrabble creation story. So it makes sense that in the discourse around one of the year’s most incandescent examples of guitar music, much ado is made about Mdou Moctar’s first instrument. The Tuareg guitarist was raised in northern Niger by a deeply religious family where music was verboten. He made his first guitar from a piece of wood strung with brake wires from an old bicycle, his many hours of practice kept clandestine.
Moctar’s path to the West has been a peculiar one. He began to make his name playing weddings; his first album (2008’s Anar) featured bits of Auto-Tune and made the rounds via Bluetooth swaps between mobile phones. After one of his songs was included on the Sahel Sounds compilation Music From Saharan Cellphones, label boss Christopher Kirkley set out to track down the young musician. When he did, he cast him in a bizarro remake of Purple Rain entitled Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai, the first feature film in the Tuareg language. The project would be heavy lifting for an artist without the instant magnetism and dazzling chops of Moctar, who easily filled the Purple One’s shoes.
From the opening lick of “Kamane Tarhanin,” Ilana (The Creator) elucidates just why our ears would draw a line from 20th-century blues and rock to another continent and a distinct style of guitar playing known as assouf. His first full-band studio album, it finds Moctar in the lineage of fellow Tuareg artists Tinariwen and Bombino. It also posits him as heir apparent to the mesmeric one-chord boogie of John Lee Hooker and ZZ Top circa Tres Hombres. Despite those antecedents, you can hear Moctar pushing further and higher at almost every turn, as when, around the song’s 4:15 mark, he enters with a streaking, white-hot comet of a guitar solo.
There’s a sense that the West pays attention to Tuareg artists dependent on how many other Westerners pitch in on the proceedings. Tinariwen have been visited by the likes of TV on the Radio and Kurt Vile in the studio, while Bombino has had both a Black Key and a Dirty Projector produce him. But outside of recording engineer Chris Koltay and bassist Michael Coltun, Moctar mostly plays off his fellow countrymen, rhythm guitarist Ahmoudou Madassane and drummer Aboubacar Mazawadje. Most of the songs were jammed out in the studio, and the feel throughout is spontaneous and celebratory, as when the tantalizing but far-too-brief “Inizgam” fades into the galloping chords of “Anna.”
While the band is holed up in a studio, it feels as if they’re playing out in the Sahara, space stretching out around every note. The hushed, dreamy “Tumastin” seems like it’s reverberating off of sand dunes. During the seven-minute centerpiece “Tarhatazed,” Moctar’s daredevil of a solo (bringing to mind Eddie Van Halen’s hammer-on majesty and eliciting background hoots) corkscrews higher and higher, as if he might disappear up into the night sky.
I won’t pretend that I can understand Tuareg, but in interviews Moctar says the songs are both positive-minded but also highly critical of Niger’s former colonists, the French. As he told The Guardian in no uncertain terms: “We are modern slaves,” especially in the way the European power exploits the African country for its uranium and natural resources. There’s a latent urgency and furor in the title track when he sings, in Tuareg, “Our heritage is taken by the people of France/Occupying the valley of our ancestor.”
While Ilana will scan for most listeners as rock, there’s little of the style’s machismo. If anything, Moctar wants to draw attention to the plight of the women in his country. “I want the world to understand that the women of the desert need help,” he told Stereogum. “They don’t have water to drink, there’s no medicine in the hospitals.” It’s neither bootstrapping origin stories nor rock’n’roll fantasies so much as the grim realities facing Moctar and millions of others around the world that give Ilana its considerable power.


The debut from Auckland indie rockers is just really impressive—hook-filled songs filled with energy and attitude, written with depth and played masterfully.

Future Hates Me

Elizabeth Stokes isn’t what you would call an optimist. The songwriter, lead singer, and guitarist fronting Auckland, New Zealand indie-rockers the Beths told Rolling Stone that she typically writes her lyrics “most when I’m upset” before stating on her own wordsmith prowess: “A lot of it’s terrible.” In a stroke of anticipatory self-disappointment, the Beths’ debut album is titled Future Me Hates Me, the hand-painted cover art displaying a woman who can’t bear to look at her own reflection; on the title track, Stokes states “Sometimes I think I’m doing fine/I think I’m pretty smart” over crunchy guitars, before later conceding, “Then the walls become thin and/Somebody gets in/I’m defenseless.” The album’s brightest, catchiest sing-along? It’s titled “Whatever,” naturally.
Future Me Hates Me is one of the most impressive indie-rock debuts of the year, delivering on the promise of the Beths’ Warm Blood EP from 2016. It’s the kind of record you expect to come from a band’s third or fourth attempt: tight, hook-filled songwriting filled with energy and attitude, paired with lyrics that cut to the bone and a sense of confidence that betrays the record’s at-times slackened vibe. Future Me Hates Me is also but the latest notable guitar-based record in the last 12 months to come from the Zealandia region, joining Alex Lahey’s sugary and delightful 2017 debut I Love You Like a Brother and Camp Cope’s raw, astounding How to Socialise & Make Friends from earlier this year.
In the past, New Zealand indie-rock bands have typically been credited for possessing a distinctively jangly, drone-flecked sound dating back to the collegiate “Dunedin sound” established by 1980s-and-90s indie bands like the Clean and the Chills. You can hear a little bit of that legacy carried on in Future Me Hates Me—especially on “Uptown Girl,” which marries the soft charge of Dunedin classics like the Chills’ “I Love My Leather Jacket” with the melodic tang of Vancouver kindred spirits and Flying Nun signees the Courtneys. Otherwise, the Beths’ reference points aren’t bound to geographical placement; Glasgow indie-pop heroes Camera Obscura are frequently recalled, particularly in Stokes’ occasional vocal resemblance to that band’s frontperson Tracyanne Campbell, as well as the passionate burn of more mature strains of emo and pop-punk.
The type of music the Beths make—specifically, indie-pop possessing the type of easily apprehendable melodies that get stuck in your head all day—is often critically tagged as “deceptively simple,” which seems unfair. The ten songs on Future Me Hates Me are packed with obvious depth beyond Stokes’ evocative lyrics about the fresh smack of love and all the self-doubt that’s attached to it. “Not Running” begins as with brooding guitar before drummer Ivan Luketina-Johnston’s fills rip the song structure wide open to include miles of chugging riffage; “You Wouldn’t Like Me” switches between a handclap-dotted sway of a melody and a building shout-along chorus with the effortlessness of flicking on a light switch.
Prior to forming the band, all four members studied jazz at the University of Auckland, and their well-bound musicality is certainly evidence that they took their studies seriously. Until earlier this year, Stokes taught trumpet to children in Auckland, a job she ditched to focus on the Beths full-time: “The Beths is almost reactionary to jazz school and trumpet,” she told Rolling Stone. “It’s a guitar band. We make guitar music. I like it that way.” Future Me Hates Me is more than proof that she and her bandmates made the right choice on refocusing their musical concerns—and it’s an absolute thrill to think about where this young band will take their talent next.


The new comp from Skrillex’s label is their brash take on house music, a wide-ranging collection of misses with some hits in between.

HOWSLA

In just five or six years, Skrillex has gone from being a dance music underdog to a decoder ring through which, for many Americans, electronic music finally makes sense. Once our prince of dubstep, now he’s one of pop culture’s savviest tastemakers—the rare figure capable of collaborating with Korn and Rick Ross and Justin Bieber—and an equally savvy entrepreneur, thanks to his prolific OWSLA label. Not unlike his onetime collaborator Chance the Rapper, he’s a self-actualized model for the 21st-century music industry.
Part of his upstart appeal has meant standing apart from old sounds like house and techno—vestiges of the fuddy-duddy old school compared to Skrillex’s brash cadre of iconoclasts. But house music’s four-to-the-floor thump has been creeping its way into his sets: At Burning Man’s Robot Heart party last year, he played nearly an hour’s worth of pitter-pat beats from artists like Psychemagik and Four Tet, opting for gradual blends over his usual slash-and-burn style. Now HOWSLA, as its title punningly makes clear, represents his label’s attempt to tackle house music.
So far, so good. There is, after all, room for everyone in house music; house, as Chuck Roberts established way back in 1987, is a feeling. Developed in the mid-1980s as an offshoot of disco, largely in Chicago and Detroit and New York, house music has spread around the world in its three decades on the planet, morphing all the way. Acid, deep house, minimal, kwaito, garage, 2-step, ghetto house, Baltimore club, tech-house, tribal, dirty Dutch—all these subgenres tweak the boom-ticking rhythmic cadence that makes house as sturdily versatile a musical form as you’ll find.
Skrillex’s compilation presents a focused take that’s largely modeled on bassline house, a style from the northern UK that’s distinguished by greasy low-end melodies, hard-thwacked drums, and a slippery, skippy sense of swing. That makes sense: Bassline’s design is in keeping with Skrillex’s own dental-drill sonics, and on HOWSLA, the hi-def low end is the center of attention throughout. Here it’s a doddering bumblebee; there it’s a caffeinated foghorn. The bass on nearly all the tracks is actually two sounds in one: a glowering, ultra-low frequency with a needling high-end counterpoint. They are thunderheads ringed with silver, or elephants dipped in glitter, and their legato settings send them slipping and sliding up and down the scale in seasick fits.
Atop those woozy figures, the compilation’s tracks stitch together a patchwork of dance-music signifiers: disco’s string vamps, garage’s shuffling syncopations, B-more club’s skipping kick drums, and progressive house’s vertiginous drum crescendos, rising in pitch to punctuate each subsequent drop. Roman Flügel’s “Geht’s Noch?” and Mr. Oizo’s “Flat Beat” are distant forebears of HOWSLA’s elastic jack tracks; a closer relation is Claude VonStroke’s Dirtybird label, whose West Coast vibes permeate Alex Metric’s slinky “Freeek” and Skrillex & Habstrakt’s wriggly, good-natured “Chicken Soup.” The garish style of EDM known as “dirty Dutch,” meanwhile, holds sway over the comp’s more beat-you-over-the-head moments, like the rushing snare rolls and blaring police siren of Marc Spence’s “On Air.”
Many of these songs are essentially just one idea mapped to a beat: “On Air” uses its loping drum groove as the vehicle for a single blast of bass; “Lasers” sets up its titular zaps with a spoken-word snippet about the same. Sometimes it works: Wiwek’s lean “Run,” the comp’s most hypnotic track, is a modern-day take on tribal house, complete with a rainforest's worth of squawks and ululations. But too often, the songs rely on gimmicky vocal hooks to keep the listener interested. The quirky nonsense rhymes of “Chicken Soup” are engaging enough, but Dances With White Girls’ hook on Chris Lake’s “Operator (Ring Ring)” wears its Green Velvet influence a little too visibly on its sleeve, while the heavy-breathing come-ons of Lake’s “I Want You” just sound thirsty. And on JOYRYDE's "New Breed," it's hard to escape the impression that the former psy-trance child prodigy is relying on the rapper Darnell Williams’ hardboiled references to lend his music a street patina.
Still, OWSLA fans will probably thrill to the music’s mixture of stonking bass, cracking beats, and hip-hop swagger. Longtime househeads may not; to anyone who prizes the deeper end of house, HOWSLA’s hard surfaces and chatty vocals will be exhausting. The main problem here is the material here doesn’t meet the goal OWSLA set for itself. “MISSION STATEMENT,” reads a block of text in the album’s press materials: “To push the timeless genre of house music forward for a younger generation by showcasing a new breed of producers pushing the boundaries of the genre in every direction.” If he really wants to represent house music’s vanguard, Skrillex and co-curator Chris Lake—whose biggest solo hit is just cornball commercial house with “indie” guitars —might have selected a different crop of artists. But house music doesn’t need pushing forward; it’s moving along just fine on its own. And the house revival has been a thoroughly mainstream phenomenon for years now, ever since Disclosure, Duke Dumont, and even Calvin Harris helped tip the charts away from big-tent EDM and toward house music’s cozier vibe. For the first time in his career, Skrillex feels behind the curve.