The British rockers’ third album peels away from the talky post-punk pack, emphasizing melody, ramshackle piano, and reflections on friendship.

Food for Worms

It’s unlikely that the executives at Adderall manufacturer Teva Pharmaceuticals keep tabs on the UK’s vibrant post-punk scene, but they’ll probably be hearing about Shame soon enough. The South London band’s third and finest album, Food for Worms, reaches an emotional apex on a song called “Adderall,” a wrenching tune about watching a friend “pop and slip away,” consumed by their addiction to prescription drugs. In the bridge, lead singer Charlie Steen’s gruff bark blooms into a hoarse plea fraught with helplessness: “I know it’s not a choice/You open up the doors/Then you hear another voice.” It’s the closest thing to a power ballad these young Brits have made, fueled by a reserve of empathy and catharsis that only fleetingly bubbled to the surface on their previous albums.
Five years ago, Steen and his bandmates were barely out of their teens when the youthful rage of their debut, Songs of Praise, made them darlings of the UK music press. With 2021’s Drunk Tank Pink, they embraced a knottier post-punk sound: spiky rhythms, sprechgesang, free-associative road poems, the works. “We were trying to be too clever,” drummer Charlie Forbes recently reflected. The band was classified with a restless new wave of (mostly) British and Irish post-punk weirdos who talk more than they sing and have cryptic names that sound like military codes—Black Country, New Road; Dry Cleaning; Fontaines D.C.; Squid—but Shame never quite felt a part of that crowd. Their songs had choruses. They chafed at the “post-punk” label; Steen was more influenced by Bob Dylan than Public Image Ltd.
Now, on Food for Worms, their heart-on-sleeve earnestness further distinguishes this band from the detached non-sequiturs of Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw or the agitated hysteria of Squid’s Ollie Judge. Recorded live in the studio to better capture their festival-stage energy, the album has a rousing, communal spirit that melts shards of icy post-punk into warmer forms, like the wah-wah psych-rock euphoria of “Six-Pack,” or the roiling frustration of “Yankees,” a sour ballad in which Steen exorcises a deeply toxic relationship (“When you’re down, you bring me down/And that is love, so you say”). “Fingers of Steel,” with its ramshackle piano and tales of twentysomething malaise, is like the Hold Steady for disaffected Brits who like wonky tunings.
The songwriting is the group’s sharpest to date. They can still whip up the staccato panic-attack special (see: “Alibis”), but that’s no longer the main attraction, nor the most compelling material. “Adderall” is the centerpiece of Shame’s newfound spirit of generosity: It doesn’t snuff out the band’s prior intensity, just nudges it in a new direction.
As it happens, “Adderall” is also emblematic of the record’s loose theme: friendship and its discontents. Steen was chatting with a pal after a show when it occurred to him that popular music mostly centers around love, heartbreak, or the self. “There isn’t much about your mates,” he realized. Food for Worms is a corrective, mired in the mid-twenties realization that you can’t always get through to a friend who needs help. “Fingers of Steel” wrings anthemic pain out of this predicament, toggling between empathy and aggravation over a friend’s depression, while “Different Person” evokes the anxiety of watching someone close to you morph beyond recognition. “You say you’re different, but you’re still the same!” Steen yelps, as though desperately trying to convince himself.
Speaking of different, Steen’s vocals have evolved. He barked and talk-sang his way through Drunk Tank Pink, an approach that worked, but which he admitted was borne out of an insecurity with his lack of training. This time, Steen tries something revolutionary: He sings. He hired a vocal coach, who encouraged him to channel vulnerability instead of detachment. So we get surprising standouts like “Orchid,” a stirring, waltz-time ballad in which Steen croons in a dry tenor that’s half Matt Berninger and half Bernard Sumner. It’s another grief-flecked tune that summons the weight of a boyhood friendship grown distant: “I know you hide behind yourself,” Steen repeats. “But I want you back to me.” Food for Worms acutely captures the feeling of taking stock of interpersonal detritus from your formative years and realizing that the relationships you expected to last forever often fade.
If the disaffected talk-singing of the band’s contemporaries evokes isolation—an abstract poet muttering to herself about hot dogs, say—Shame’s new songs are defined by an intrinsic sense of togetherness. Songs like “Fingers of Steel” and “Adderall” are heightened by swelling, call-and-response vocal parts. The LP staggers to a close with the Pogues-like “All the People,” a six-minute singalong of brotherly love. It’s fitting that an album so steeped in the joys and agonies of friendship captures its sounds, too. Food for Worms finishes with a cheerful snippet of studio chatter. Isn’t that the youthful promise of joining a band in the first place—to be surrounded by your best mates day and night; to hope your shared love and creativity never fade?


Gucci Mane is conservative when it comes to change, and it takes a few spins through Trap God before the differences between it and past records come into focus. But once they do, they cohere into a portrait of an artist in the midst of an aesthetic metamorphosis.

Trap God

It isn't until the 20th and final song on Gucci Mane's third mixtape of the year, Trap God, that you run into a verse based around Gucci making car noises with his mouth. This may seem like an insignificant detail, but in Gucci terms, this marks a major evolutionary event. Facial tattoos notwithstanding, he's cautious and conservative when it comes to change, and it takes a few spins through Trap God before the differences between it and past records come into focus. But once they do, they cohere into a portrait of an artist in the midst of an aesthetic metamorphosis.
Gucci isn't prone to the kind of daring innovations that have made Kanye the rap-game Apple Inc., a market-dominating behemoth who drops a zeitgeist-altering product about once a year. He's more like a niche company that builds devices for hardcore gamers, and offers a larger selection of goods that differ from each other only incrementally, but which aim at satisfying the needs of a more specialist crowd.
And if anything, Gucci's been almost too consistently good at delivering. Ever since he first started getting attention on a national scale in 2009, during an especially prolific period where he put out eight LPs' worth of material in a 12-month span, he could be counted on to release albums, mixtapes, and guest verses at such a blinding rate and that so reliably hit all of the marks his audience has come to expect-- the car noises, the "s'Gucci" ad libs, the good-but-not-incredible lyrics peppered with the requisite number of punchlines-- that they tend to blur together.
Trap God has the lyrics and the punchline frequency (as well as the nasally congested, marble-mouthed flow), but it's short on the trademark Gucci vocal tics. In fact, sometimes it seems like there isn't enough Gucci in general-- not counting the brief "Intro", there are only four tracks that don't feature a guest rapper or singer, and three of them come in the back half of the record. And on some of the tracks he doesn't feel completely present, an effect that's exacerbated when he teams up with Meek Mill, Rick Ross, and his former protégé Waka Flocka Flame, three artists with outsize personalities who are currently at the top of their respective games. And the tracks where he comes out unambiguously on top-- including the handful alongside newly signed 1017 Brick Squad second-stringer Young Scooter-- the matchups feel lopsided.
The bright side is that Trap God's best songs are among the best in Gucci's catalog. Probably not coincidentally they also tend to be the ones where Gucci challenges himself the most. On the chiptune-inflected "Suckaz" (produced by Shawty Redd) and "Act Up" (produced by T-Pain, who also provides a killer vocal on the chorus), he sounds energetic and loose, hovering weightlessly over the beat. And when he squares off with Waka Flocka and internet mixtape sensation Kirko Bangz on the 808 Mafia-produced ode to no-strings-attached sex, "Fawk Something", he comes through with a remarkably profane verse that includes a brief and totally hilarious swing at impersonating a dancehall rapper.
When Gucci puts his mind to writing a chorus these days, he's coming up with better stuff than he ever has before. "Rolly Up" may have the most irritatingly unshakeable hook this side of Jibbs' "Chain Hang Low", but the back-to-back cuts "Money Habits" and "Crazy" are spiked with eccentrically catchy, off-key candy pop passages that suggest he might be the spiritual heir to Ol' Dirty Bastard at his karaoke-crooner best. Still, while Gucci Mane's recently been stuck in a particularly enjoyable rut, a rut is still a rut. It's good to see him start to pull himself out of it, even if it's slow going, inch by inch.


My initial thought was that, with Point, Cornelius had made an album not\n\ of songs but of machines: twittering ...

Point

My initial thought was that, with Point, Cornelius had made an album not of songs but of machines: twittering little trinkets and gewgaws, clockwork formalist tricks, hooks, and grooves, tiny snazzy robots covered with push-buttons and blinking lights. I was mostly wrong about this. But back when I didn't know that, I was all set to talk about Cornelius's Other Half-- Takako Minekawa-- and, more importantly, her collaborators in Dymaxion, who are, by my estimation, past masters of the sonic trinketry, the clever formalist motorik grooves, and the whole concept of "songs" as basically Rube Goldberg devices-- these things where you watch Tab A snap ingeniously and unexpectedly into Slot B, and then watch the whole machine teeter back and forth. The trick is that while everyone was trying to meld rock genres and dance genres by throwing blippy textures and drum loops under crunchy guitars, some people decided to use the tools of rock but organize them using the structures of dance or IDM.
Point isn't really as like that as I thought, but let's pretend-- just for a second-- that it is: you couldn't possibly ask for anyone to do that stuff better than Cornelius does. Like him or not, he's pretty much the master of this sort of thing-- evidence is littered from his late-period albums with Flipper's Guitar to solo records like 96/69 to tracks like "Mic Check" and "Magoo Opening" from Fantasma, his more "proper song"-oriented U.S. breakthrough. Evidence is abundant on Point, as well: one need look no further than the moment where "Bird Watching at Inner Forest," a sweet, jaunty samba, suddenly and masterfully disintegrates into "I Hate Hate," a whirlwind of sliced-and-diced cartoon prog that sounds like Aphex Twin making mincemeat of a track by the Fucking Champs. If you're going to talk about someone who can produce-- someone who can slap together shimmery organic instruments with the same agility as the world's best glitchmeisters and laptop guys-- Cornelius really should be mentioned.
And he's gotten a lot better at this than he was on Fantasma, a record that, in retrospect, sounds a little too eager to please-- all the tinny, busy layering and the near-constant bells and whistles now look a little like a hyperactive fourth-grader given free reign at the school talent show. Point backs off. It's more efficient, and thus more minimal: Cornelius has learned where a couple instruments and a couple tricks can do the work of ten of each. It's also a lot smoother and more languid-- the bulk of it actually qualifies to be called "subdued." The cleverness, technical mastery and ping-pong stereo effects are all there in spades, but this time they're all much more mellow than you'd think. Listen right and you'll hardly notice them, because you'll be wrapped up by the thing I initially completely missed-- some of these tracks are just plain lovely as songs.
That's right: you could very satisfyingly listen to Point while casting Cornelius as some kind of modern-day Esquivel, a master of arrangement and studio technologically and virtually everything that makes you cup your hands over your headphones and be just plain wowed by the stuff that's coming out of them. But the thing is that Point, like the IDM records it shares some of its formalist leanings with, gradually reveals itself to contain some song forms that are, without qualification, quite beautiful and expressive, and in completely non-trinkety ways. It sounds as if he's been listening to more bossa nova-- subtle acoustic guitar rhythms are all over this record. It sounds as if he's made a conscious effort to turn his vocal harmonies from chirpy amazements to swooning, dreamy soft-touches. It sounds as if he's basically loosened up, and figured out where subtly funky flows and immersive, bubbly drifts are way more agreeable than hyperactive flashes and non-stop banging. He has, in many senses, mellowed out.
And there's what's good about Point. Cornelius comes across as some sort of über-hipster from the glossy fashion mags, a cultural curator, a buzzy Japanese pastiche guy making music that feels like Bandai pocket games-- I've no doubt that a lot of you will hear Point somewhere and be turned off by precisely this quality, and I'll admit that before throwing Point on I sort of feared that it might be just another totally mid-90s reiteration of that heavily explored model. But Point isn't all about playing with trinkets and baubles. "Point of View Point" develops from an airy bounce into some delicious, dynamic, sweeping chord changes. "Drop" teases you by offering and then withholding a beautiful groove that sounds like Antonio Carlos Jobim taking a stab at writing funk, and then "Another View Point" finishes the job. "Tone Twilight Zone" is the equivalent of a Boards of Canada pastoral played live. "Brazil" applies singing-Macintosh software to a gorgeous laid-back ode with an oddly country-and-western chorus breakdown, and "Fly" is a flat-out prog single, in the best possible way.
Cornelius has done well, and he's done it subtly and unassumingly. If you've spent the last six months feeling inclined to listen solely to alt-country records, this may be Officially Not Your Bag. But it's a handsome little bag, and undoubtedly, some people will take great, great pride in wearing it out.


Reports didn't exactly come flooding in, but apparently Vogel's field research for Busca Invisibles took place in discotheques ...

Busca Invisibles

Reports didn't exactly come flooding in, but apparently Vogel's field research for Busca Invisibles took place in discotheques and salubrious Brighton boites. Vogel actually left his studio and went out and danced! As a member of the Cabbage Head Collective (founding member Si Begg aka Buckfunk 3000), Vogel's early forays into musical self-expression were tape loop weirdness and Beat-inspired cut ups. But if you've ever been to Vogel's hometown of Leamington Spa in the British Midlands, you'd know what a disturbing effect such a place can have on a growing lad.
So, with his parietal lobe ringing with his neo-Stockhausen ditties, Vogel abandoned being a Cabbage Head and headed south to the seedy coastal resort of Brighton, home of the cheeky wink, donkey rides across the beach, and shameless one- night- stands with skanks from all over the United Kingdom. Vogel probably told his folks that he was moving to Brighton to get a degree in 20th-century music; not to soak up the low-rent sleaze of his new home and fall in with a no-good bunch of twisted techno heads.
Six months after handing over his first cup- a- noodle- bespattered rent check to his landlord, then-unknown local DJ Luke Slater picked up on Vogel's experimental sound and spread the word around to such an extent that abstract dance maven Colin Dale was soon dropping Vogel's "Aux Culture" DAT into his sets. Dave Clarke followed by signing Vogel to his Magnetic North label and the pair combined Clarke's jazz-imbued rhythm programming with Vogel's passion for outlandish analog noise. By 1994, Europe's techno big boys noticed dear Cristian, and the Frankfurt-based, Gilles Deleuze-worshipping, Mille Plateaux label, known for the abstract experimentalism (and Germanness) of its techno releases, released the superb Beginning to Understand and the disorientating live and improvised knob tweak-a-thon Specific Momentum.
And once Mille Plateux had him, Berlin's mighty club-friendly Tresor label had to have him, too. Vogel's albums for Tresor are geared towards the dance floor, a prerogative that doesn't always bring out the best in Vogel, and Busca Invisibles bears out this criticism. Vogel excels when he generates warped, mechanical tones from his analog equipment and when he complements these alien shrieks and snarls with downtempo dub percussion. Beginning to Understand's "Scuba Dub" is the paramount example of Vogel's skill: it begins a dark blob of sound which uncoils into a squirming slug of a track, which leaves indelible slime trails. But nothing on Busca Invisibles matches it. See, in order to get the kids dancing, Mr. DJ can't offer them weird-ass noises plucked from the patch cords of some twentysomething Morton Subotnik. Vogel's unique when he's concentrating on contorting sine waves, and on Busca Invisibles he showcases this talent. Just not to the extent that he does on his albums for Mille Plateux.
Don't get the impression that Busca Invisbles is a stinker of a dance record. Just as Neil Landstrumm's Bedrooms and Cities release took on the champagne and Versace sounds of speed garage and unfashioned them into raw machine music, Busca Invisibles throttles nu electro and should remind Warp Records that the future and present of electronic music is not Jimi Tenor's lounge porn. Given the choice between the Venga Boys and "Sarcastically Tempered Powers," I know which I'd hurl myself around a club to.
The opening to "Shoe Renouncing Soul" teases with untainted tones before Vogel lets loose his greasy beats and a severely spiked bass line. He starts "Slices of Sink" by aping Underworld's "Bruce Lee" before stomping his hallmark analogia all over the twitching spread; all the while it sounds like he's having tons of fun putting these tracks together. For this reason, Busca Invisbles is a lighter listen not only than his other albums, but also than the output of his Brighton buddies, Justin Berkovi and Jamie Lidell. As the album's title indicates, Vogel may still be seeking the invisible, but you get the impression he got a clear idea where to continue looking.


Night Beds' debut Country Sleep was a modestly successful, kindly received batch of folk-friendly indie rock. Winston Yellen has followed it with a 65-minute opus where he sounds like the Weeknd in Dixie, and it’s a free-fall captured in painful slow-mo.

Ivywild

Don't let that score up there fool you—Ivywild is a must-listen, invigorating in the ways albums can be when they're so daring you can hardly believe what you're hearing. Really, when was the last time you encountered a record that took legitimate, potentially career-altering risks? Most of the time, an artist's "bold new direction" manifests in well-placed interview quotes and imperceptible effects on their actual music. Or, "challenging art" will come from outsiders of whom such abrasiveness is expected. Or, it'll be a hard left from a pop star or critical darling who gets the benefit of the doubt and is assumed to be one step ahead of the game.
Winston Yellen is none of those things: his Night Beds debut Country Sleep was a modestly successful and kindly received batch of folk-friendly indie rock that figured to set him on the path of quietly successful, critically acclaimed labelmates such as Phosphorescent or Bowerbirds or the Tallest Man on Earth. He's followed it with a 65-minute opus where he sounds like a Weeknd in Dixie approximately 85% of the time and becomes the first guy to actually earn the distinction of "PBR&B." We often talk of artists switching lanes or taking a leap of faith—Ivywild is a guy skydiving without a parachute, firmly believing he can stick the landing if he just times it right.
It's a free-fall captured in painful slow-mo, perversely gripping in the way it allows you to share Yellen's tunnel vision; there are many times where you might also think, "yeah, I can totally see how he might've pulled this off." He flexed raw skill and potential on Country Sleep, particularly a rangy, chameleonic voice—in a dusky lower register, he sounded like Ryan Adams, he could also channel makeout music mystics like Jeff Buckley or Devendra Banhart and when it went straight up alt-country, well, he also sounded like Ryan Adams. But he nonetheless possessed a rare assertiveness that puts him in a position to succeed when taking on pop and R&B.
He's also been blessed with legitimate inspiration. Yellen endured a hard breakup, the subsequent, requisite heat-seeking tailspin, and an artistic course correction that found him being more honest about his tastes. In addition to the Weeknd, he's gone heavy on James Blake, Burial, D'Angelo, Kanye West, Flying Lotus, Dilla—no one should act surprised, let alone outraged that any 26-year old is seeking inspiration from these acts.
Whatever the temptation may be to question an alt-country dude from Nashville about appropriation, put it aside because the major flaw of Yellen's planning stage is more simple. Pop, hip-hop, R&B, and electronic music have an expectation of being contemporary and even futuristic forms, whereas Night Beds works on a two-year album cycle. Notice that his frame of reference more or less cuts off at 2013—even if Ivywild were a flawless integration of his influences, it likely would have sounded dated mere months after Country Sleep. Moreover, all of the aforementioned have styles that are so distinct and proprietary, any slight deviation could be taken as parody.
And Yellen emerges from his immersive listening having integrated the most easily parodied aspects, mostly those of Abel Tesfaye—toggling between a wounded moan and a needy yelp at tempos which progress with the excruciating stubbornness of a hangover, utilizing drug metaphors which would've been better off as similes or just direct references. And, of course, any trace of levity can only be provided by the listener, a humor derived from Ivywild's utter lack of humor. More deadening than the suffocating arrangements and production or the nonexistent hooks is a tiresome perspective that goes beyond the Weeknd and connects to a celebrated lineage of male authors who assume an inherent profundity in treating a psychosexual crisis of mid-twenties masculinity as miserably as possible. Maybe it's meant to accurately mirror Yellen's state of mind during its creation, maybe the utter lack of catharsis or even sensuality is meant to drive home the destitution of it all.
Either way, Yellen still takes it upon himself to express Ivywild's conquests as burdens; drink and drugs must take on overwrought, sacramental connotation ("Five quarts won't harm us/ But these lines always cross us"). Elsewhere, the pillow talk fails on a fundamental level. For example, delivering "If I give all my time/ Can I live in your thighs?" in a Thom Yorke-ian whimper should make everyone who criticized Radiohead's lack of carnality apologize for their position. Or, Yellen emphasizing his isolation on "Sway(ve)", which slow-grinds with two left feet; there was no one who either could or would talk him out of not only making a song called "Sway(ve)", or using that incompatible portmanteau as a hook. That's also the only way to explain the chorus of "Eve A", which either scans as "E A I O U" or "Eve A, I fuck you" and it's actually both. There's nearly a half hour left after that. What more do you need to know really?
Ivywild wasn't created in seclusion—more than 25 people contributed, including Yellen's brother Abe, a YouTube find, and whoever's responsible for the strings, horns, samples, and harmonies that clutter the admirably confrontational, six-minute opening gauntlet of "Finished". Regardless of the help, Yellen has been granted the leeway of not just an auteur, but a genius. In the context of Night Beds' previous work and Yellen's twang, the concept of Ivywild itself is alluring, promising an actual midnight in the garden of good and evil—a mysterious, verdant sprawl suffused with the palpable humidity of the American South, hot-blooded backsliders battling against the repression of self, of religion and social mores. Or, "Ivywild" could just as easily be the name of a college bar in Yellen's part-time home of Nashville—whatever its aim, this album reminds you that Vanderbilt frat bros are probably dry-humping to "Can't Feel My Face" as we speak.


Andrew Bird's latest release is his third album of pop originals since getting married and having a son, and a happy domesticity informs it.

Are You Serious

At the bottom of a canyon, most men would howl. Isolated in the wilderness, unshackled from the pretense of civility, a yelp of primal kinship is supposed to rumble deep within, an exulting return to base instinct. Unless Jack London novels and Reese Witherspoon movies have lied to us, anyway.
But when Andrew Bird went native last year, he didn’t so much as whisper. Instead, he clambered down into Utah’s Coyote Gulch and recorded Echolocations: Canyon, an instrumental folk-classical song cycle that scarcely rose above a purr. In an atmosphere where every sound carried magnitudes, the Chicago singer-songwriter remained slight; it was some of his most experimental and ruminative work, in a dense catalogue that has folded in chamber-pop, rustic Americana, swing and Romani rock. (Not to mention, Echolocations boasted some pinnacle twee titlework: "The Canyon Wants to Hear C Sharp" is a hairsbreadth from a Zach Braff script note.)
Since releasing his first album in 1996, Bird has been a consistently gentle hand that belies a fitful mind, his sharp-edged intellect making invariably lovely inlets. This is a classically trained multi-instrumentalist who devotes equal attention to his violin and guitar onstage, a voluble and arcane lyricist who whistles full solos with the blithe, pitch-perfect clarity of a damn angel’s piccolo. But while Bird could putter along on smug displays of his technical prowess, the sort he nodded to in his earliest records, he only grows more inclusive with age. Like Punch Brothers and Sufjan Stevens, he slots his conservatory chops into increasingly accessible pop melodies, aiming for kinship over virtuosity.
Are You Serious is Bird’s first traditional album since 2012’s Hands of Glory—save Echolocations and a Handsome Family covers disc, and the lolling I Want To See Pulaski at Night EP. It’s deceptively straightforward at first, unfolding genially as more guitar-driven rock than he’s attempted before, almost a sidestep of ambition with freewheeling frayed ends. But it’s still got all of Bird’s standby elements—the esoteric wordplay, the many stratas of strings—subtly edited into economy. "Capsized," the opening track and lead single, is a bit of a red herring, vigorous and barnburning; it’s no ear-shredder by any means, but next to the tranquility of Bird’s most recent fare, it’s My Bloody Valentine. Guitars corrode Bird’s lamenting voice, which adds a nü-country hitch to his grousing; guest Moses Sumney sands the edges with sweet harmonizing. (The excellent guitarist Blake Mills also sits in with Bird’s band throughout.) "Saints Preservus" is one of scant instances of Bird’s whistling; it’s an eerie, light flourish here, capping pizzicato strings.
This is also Bird’s third album of pop originals since getting married and having a son, and a happy domesticity informs it. But Bird’s hectic mind, which once likened love to "assured asphyxiation," still can’t leave well alone; in "Valleys of the Young," a brawny power ballad, he opens with the cerebral skirmish, "Do you need a reason we should commit treason/ And bring into this world a son?" Crashing guitars offer the resolution, an openhearted expanse that nods to Pulaski at Night. In "Bellevue," a lovely, swooning ballad and the album closer, he is thunderstruck—"Now I found someone who can slake my thirst/ In a land beset by drought"—but it’s forebodingly titled, sharing a name with one of the country’s most infamous psychiatric hospitals.
The album’s most curious track is "Left Handed Kisses," a thorny duet with Fiona Apple. It posits Bird as the jaded bard and Apple the sentimental muse, albeit one sapped by his cynicism; she addresses it directly in lyrics that only grow more self-referential. "The point your song here misses is that if you really loved me/ You'd risk more than a few 50-cent words in your backhanded love song," she warbles, delivering that mouthful with improbable serenity. By the time the coda kicks in, appendaged with his cry, "Now it's time for a handsome little bookend," the meta musings have become a wearying knot. It’s an example of Bird’s puppyish energy—why write a mere love ditty when you can slam through its fourth wall like the Kool-Aid Man? – and one of two times on Are You Serious that Bird gets a bit self-congratulatory in his cleverness. The other is the title track, which jostles spaghetti western-leaning strings with Bird’s drawls of, "You used to be so willfully obtuse/ Or is the word abstruse?/ Semantics like a noose/ Get out your dictionary." The accuser manages to be a healthy amount of both in that quatrain, an irony that likely doesn’t escape him.
The album’s best melody lies in the violin crests of "Roma Fade," conduits of real wonder; Bird opens giddily, then interrupts himself with a tourettic burst of creepiness: "You may not know me but you feel my stare," he intones, as even the guitars shudder to an apprehensive stop. Then he backtracks to the slightly more tender notion, "If she sees you, it changes you/ Rearranges your molecules." For a fastidious artist who once explained his fairly hippie-dip songwriting strategy as "Does the universe need to hear this again?" it’s a telling line. Still curious, still appraising, Bird offers an intellect remarkably porous to change.


Tim Cohen, frontman of the Fresh & Onlys, is at his most modest and self-effacing here, building quiet, quirky songs out of acoustic guitars, soft percussion, and accents of piano and synth.

Luck Man

Tim Cohen is something like the West Coast Robert Pollard. Cohen’s songwriting is earthier and darker than the work of the Guided by Voices frontman, but it is a useful comparison: Both are hugely prolific, fiercely independent rock ’n’ roll lifers—bedroom auteurs with a taste for tape hiss and eccentric pop songs. If you know Cohen at all, you likely know him as the frontman for the Fresh & Onlys—a band that, along with Thee Oh Sees, Sonny and the Sunsets, Ty Segall, and others, defined the San Francisco garage-psych explosion of a few years back. But, as is true with Pollard and GBV, Cohen’s main project can’t keep up with his bounding creative urges, so he funnels his songwriting into side bands, notably Magic Trick, which has released around four records in the last five years, and his solo work.
Luck Man is Cohen’s fourth LP under his own name (if you count 2011’s Tim Cohen’s Magic Trick), and the most polished and most mature of the bunch. But compared to the wide-angle jangle pop of the last two Fresh & Onlys records—2014’s House of Spirits and 2012’s excellent Long Slow Dance—Luck Man is a decidedly bare-bones affair. Cohen is at his most modest and self-effacing here, building quiet, quirky songs out of acoustic guitars, soft percussion, and accents of piano and synth. The touchstones are early Belle and Sebastian (minus the preciousness), early Van Morrison, Smog, and the self-titled Velvet Underground record.
Musically, Luck Man has its moments—the stark fingerpicking on “Bedfellows,” the harmonies (courtesy of Magic Trick’s Noelle Cahill) on the chorus of “John Hughes,” the bittersweet piano riff that slowly closes out the record. But ultimately the music is little more than a delivery system for Cohen’s words and ideas—as is his flat, affectless baritone. It’s Cohen’s distinct blend of whimsy, black humor, and wisdom—and his refusal to take himself too seriously—that make the record work. (Cass McCombs, it should be noted, uses similar tools to equally great affect.)
Cohen is an expert at pairing genuine longing with absurdist humor, such that you can’t entirely tell the difference between the two. “I Need a Wife” is a gorgeous little ballad about love’s uncertainties—before it explodes with Cohen’s manic recitations of the song’s title: “Now I need a wife! I need a wife! I need a wife!” Does the guy actually need a wife? No idea. Does he like the way the jarring echo effect on his vocals makes his words spiral out into infinity? Most definitely.
Cohen is obsessed with death, its inevitability and consistency; he knows the dirt will cover us all. But he delivers that message with levity and wit—he doesn’t want to scare us away. “Breathe and die, is all you have to do,” he reminds us on the jaunty “Breathe and Die,” hoping that we’ll take solace in such straightforward tasks. The record is suffused with the surreal and otherworldly (“I dream in melody,” Cohen told an interviewer last year). On “Wall About a Window,” Cohen hopes to escape to the “bridge of limbs” and the “forest of palms”; On “Sunshine,” he’s “throwing airplanes at the moon” against a “velvet-covered night.” Cohen suggests that a wild imagination is one of our best defenses against mortality and the ravages of time. (Pollard, age 59, would surely agree.)
Darkness and anxiety threaten to overwhelm Cohen throughout. On “Meat Is Murder” he describes waking up in the middle of the night crying, his hands covered in blood. But in the end, Luck Man shows us how we can survive life’s countless indignities by reminding ourselves of its many small (and not so small) pleasures: a cloudless sky, a lazy morning, a long walk with a good friend. And the way “love can free the laughter from within [our] lungs.”


Retaining all of the light-hearted surreality that made its first two records so bewitching, the UK synth-pop duo makes the sound of grief and joy glimmer on the dancefloor.

Two Ribbons

Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton have spoken candidly about how the cracks in their lifelong friendship formed the basis of Two Ribbons, their new album as Let’s Eat Grandma. The pair have been close since they were small children, but while touring their second album together—2018’s I’m All Ears—they started to feel pulled in separate directions. Hollingworth, who also experienced a devastating loss when her boyfriend, musician Billy Clayton, passed away from a rare form of cancer in 2019, told The Guardian that she felt they were “fundamentally misunderstanding each other in some way.” Like the title song's core image—of two fraying ribbons, distinct yet tied tightly together—they wrote the album’s songs separately, for the first time in their collaboration.
But despite this individual process, the result is their most cohesive project yet. They have evolved dramatically since they emerged in 2016 when they were still teenagers. Their debut, I, Gemini, was an intriguing, deliberate mishmash of grunge-y psychedelia and disarming nonsense rhymes, with their higher, softer voices leaning into each other in such a way that made them indistinguishable. On I’m All Ears, their sound took a more forceful shape through a collaboration with the producer SOPHIE, and they moved beyond oblique, nonsense lyricism towards a vivid impressionistic style.
Two Ribbons retains all of the light-hearted surreality that made their first two records so bewitching, but out of necessity, the songwriting is braver. This is not an “ordinary pain,” as Walton sings bitterly on the dramatic ballad “Insect Loop,” but a feeling of being yanked apart. Even when the album is ostensibly upbeat, there’s angst between the synth stabs; on “Levitation,” Walton sings of breaking down in the bathroom, then going out dancing to forget about her “catastrophic Saturday” in a frank, diaristic style that avoids the cliché of simple misery. On the glimmering, joyful crush song “Hall of Mirrors,” there are gloomy images that linger: shivering on the London Overground, writing secrets on bathroom walls, watching the rain in an airport boarding lounge.
The record is punctuated by similar mentions of movement, transition, and turbulent weather. Walton opens the gently rolling, new age song “Sunday” with the declaration, “We took the long way ’round the mountain” before depicting an epic journey under moonbeams and an endless sky, only to discover that she feels further away than ever from her traveling partner. On the spare, guitar-driven title track, Hollingworth delicately compares the movement of relationships in her life to the “the rains that come down in October.” Like these rains, and the fields and rivers that dominate the visual landscape of this album, there's nothing more natural than the inevitable ebb and flow of people in and out of our lives.
Dual-process theory, a model of grief counseling, claims that grief doesn't follow a logical trajectory of five stages—it’s an ocean that comes in waves, a process of “oscillation.” Grievers are constantly thrown between periods of feeling OK, even hopeful, and periods of acutely feeling the loss of the past. As Joan Didion wrote in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, “in the version of grief we imagine, the model will be ‘healing.’ A certain forward movement will prevail.” In reality, grief is an “unending absence,” a “relentless succession of moments.” Walton and Hollingworth's take on grief and growth is exactly this: a sequence of moments, bright and bleak and powerful.
Nothing is tied up neatly, but in everything, there’s an immense sense of space. A breeze blows through wind chimes in the background of “Sunday,” birds chirp throughout the interlude “In the Cemetery,” and fireworks blow “Happy New Year” wide open. Instead of a more trite narrative of healing, Let’s Eat Grandma give us folk-rock howls and transcendent disco that’s spiked with sadness, all bearing a glimmer of hope.


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 Björk’s second album, the foundation for one of the most consequential careers in pop history.

Post

Inspecting the inner mechanics of her television set, Björk’s face lit up with wonder. “It looks like a little model of a city, all the houses and trees, and here are the wires, they really take care of all the electrons…” It was 1988, and Björk was two years removed from the dissolution of her gothy post-punk band KUKL, which released music on the UK punk label Crass. But as the lead singer of art-rock tricksters the Sugarcubes, she still looked the part. In the interview clip, Björk explains that an Icelandic poet once made her painfully afraid of her television—a TV program can hypnotize you, the poet said, going “directly into your brain and you stop judging if it’s right or not, you just swallow and swallow.” When she read the scientific truth about television in a Danish book, she was much more calm. As the segment concludes, Björk looks into the camera: “You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.”
Not unlike the music Björk would proceed to make—going solo with 1993’s Debut—the effect of this footage is a little bemusing, quite soothing, entirely spellbinding. Björk is fearless, funny, slyly political, absurd. She is drawing an unlikely intersection of technology and intimacy, embodying what would become her eternal promise: It is possible to be both weird and understood.
By her second record, 1995’s Post, Björk had become well-acquainted with the bustling cosmopolitan energy of cities. She had relocated from Iceland to London in the early 1990s as a 27-year-old mother of a 6-year-old son, but her Arctic home was always with her. Björk attended music school in Reykjavík from ages 5 to 14—her precocious introduction to experimental electronic composers such as Stockhausen and John Cage—and released her first album at 11; her “hardcore hippie” mother did the psychedelic cover art.
But nature was her ultimate teacher. Björk said Iceland itself, not other singers, shaped her voice. It is an extreme landscape of glaciers and volcanoes, of barrenness and eruptions, endless daylight in summer and mostly darkness in winter. Walking 40 minutes to school, a young Björk entertained herself by singing: sneaking down to the moss on the ground to whisper a verse, running up a hill to unleash a chorus loudly against the wind. Björk absorbed the peaks and valleys, light and dark, twists and turns of her reality, arriving nowhere conventional. When she sang in accordance to the moss and the hills, perhaps it was a result of studying Cage in school: music was everywhere.
Instinct became Björk’s personal law, and boundlessness became her key. Maybe it was the punk-surrealist in her, saying doors are only locked if you believe them to be, that what exists inside your mind is already real. “I’m going hunting for mysteries [...] I’m going to prove the impossible really exists,” Bjork sings on Post’s austere “Cover Me,” each note aglow with a sense of discovery.
Björk saw Debut and Post “like twins, the first and second born,” as Rolling Stone reported in ’95, and she said both were “a celebration of the unpredictability of life,” like a “greatest hits of [her] musical passions” to that point. They could together be called The London Years, existing in the historical lineage of art reflecting the experiences of women in cities, seeking adventures: Björk called the protagonist of Post “that wide-eyed girl from the country, but she’s been in the city for a while… she’s consuming the city and the city is consuming her.” Having previously played with rock bands—the Sugarcubes toured with U2 and Public Image Ltd—Björk found “there was absolutely no creativity in rock venues.” Yearning to meet artists pushing sound to reflect the moment, she ventured into rapt underground London dance clubs, where she found collaborators in Nellee Hooper, Graham Massey of 808 State, Howie B, and Tricky of the Massive Attack milieu. Björk fused the abstracted atmospherics of this avant-dance zeitgeist—IDM, trip-hop, techno, house—with all the parts of herself: the episodic melodies of late-’70s Joni Mitchell, the guttural edges of Meredith Monk’s extended vocal techniques, a voice on par with the supreme emotional greats of history, Edith Piaf on ecstasy.
The Post sessions began at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas. There, Björk could sing outside the way she did as a child: snaking the long wires of her microphone and headphones down to the ocean, into caves, or under a bush beneath the stars. Electricity communed with Earth. “I was crying my eyes out with joy,” Björk once said of the Bahamas sessions. “It was completely outrageous.” Upon returning to London, Bjork went on her own mission to “bring the album alive,” adding bagpipes, trumpet, saxophones, dulcimers, harp, an orchestra, and a brass band to the productions, re-recording some songs entirely.
She wanted every song to be a shock, to work in wildly contrasting styles. “My musical heart was scattered at the time,” Björk once said, “and I wanted the album to show that.” Post is far greater than the sum of its parts—the sensory rush of dance music meeting pop storytelling, spontaneity mixed with ambition. Björk explodes her interior world into the role of the extrovert. If you took the “punk” out of “post-punk” that Björk previously made, but retained its ethos of eclecticism; if you left the “modern” off “postmodern,” but kept its spirit of bricolage; you arrive here: Björk, singular, Post. Maybe the only appropriate modifier is an absence of one, a Cagean blank space, a gesture towards possibility.
Although Post contains some old-fashioned heartache, its defining romance is an unconventional one: a pure love for music. The somnambulant dream song, Post’s closer “Headphones,” chronicles in real time all the ways music can rearrange a person—in its lyrics as well as in the euphoric fracturing of its dubby production by Tricky, who was especially close to the “headphone” music of his Bristol hometown (à la Massive Attack, Portishead). “I like this resonance/It elevates me/I don’t recognize myself/This is very interesting,” Björk intones. “My headphones/They saved my life.” Björk wrote “Headphones” about falling asleep to mixtapes from her collaborator, Graham Massey; she pulled the words from her diary.
This uncanny passion for sound is felt everywhere on Post. It’s in the scorched industrial march of “Enjoy,” in the grandeur of the strings on “You’ve Been Flirting Again.” It’s in the crackling trip-hop melancholy of “Possibly Maybe,” in the cool free jazz that rustles beneath “The Modern Things,” in the gleaming harpsichord of “Cover Me” (the vocals of which were recorded in a cave full of bats). And it’s especially present in the deliriously fun big-band blast of “It’s Oh So Quiet”—Björk’s madcap cover of the wartime tune from Hollywood star Betty Hutton, which she recorded with a 20-piece orchestra, manifesting her deep-rooted love for musicals. In a 1995 “AOL Chat” interview, a fan asked Björk where the idea for “It’s Oh So Quiet” came from, and she said that her live music director Guy Sigsworth “found it in a truck stop”—on a cassette comp—“and it became the tour anthem of last tour. Turned us on before the gigs.” It’s a cover that only a true pop maniac would go through with and only a pop maestro could pull off. The song explodes from Björk’s pin-drop whispers to throat-shredding wails—alongside blaring brass, the sheer loudness of Björk’s singing is a visceral delight. “Oh, what’s the use of falling in love?” Björk sings on the comedown, before raving up with an answer again.
Björk has called her work “modern folk songs,” and each one tells a story. This idea keeps in the Icelandic tradition of sagas. “Isobel” is one of Björk’s most epic tales, gesturing towards introspection and self-knowledge. The folkloric lyrics—“My name Isobel/Married to myself”—were written with Björk’s frequent collaborator, the Icelandic poet Sjón, a man who was inspired to refine his English to better understand David Bowie’s lyrics. In the documentary Inside Björk, she describes the titular Isobel—named so to echo “isolation”—as a force of a woman who retreats completely from the muchness of the world. Growing up in a forest, she comes to see that “the pebbles on the forest floor were actually baby skyscrapers.” As Isobel becomes a woman, she finds herself in the big city, where she clashes with civilization and returns to the forest. “There she would collect moths and train them to send out her message [...] a message of instinct,” Björk said. The moths flew before the faces of people “functioning with too much logic [...] and go, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no’ til people click out of this state of being sensible.”
Of course, Björk’s music is a testament to what is possible when logic and practical sense are not guiding principles. But she hardly withdrew. Björk said she had a total of three days off in 1993 and 1994 combined—she had become a legitimate star. In the face of the chaos of fame, “Army of Me” summons resilience, as if Björk knew exactly what she would be up against in the years to come. (In 1996, a fan tried to mail a bomb to her house.) She said “Army of Me” was written as an ultimatum to her own brother, to regain control of his life, lest he “meet an army of me.” Björk scratches at the depths of her voice, and the industrial backbone of the song, the crashes and shrapnel, fortify the task. “Army of Me” is proof that being the most obvious misfit in the room often requires being the toughest, too.
The double-time techno of “Hyperballad” begins with a glint. But it hones its strength. It’s a work of surrealism, narrating the tale of a woman who wakes up early at the top of a mountain, and throws “car parts, bottles, and cutlery” off its edge. She wonders what it would be like to throw herself off, too, her body slamming against the rocks, her eyes open all along—as a kind of catharsis, an emotional purging, in order to deal with people later: “I go through all this/Before you wake up/So I can feel happier/To be safe up here with you.” Her melody rises and tumbles, a slow spiral; the suspended rapture of the beat catches her in air.
If Debut’s “Human Behavior” was an ultimate outcast anthem—“If you ever get close to a human and human behavior, be ready, be ready to get confused”—then “Hyperballad” feels like a triumphant appeal to exist cooperatively alongside other people. Björk did this not only in her hyper-collaborative albums but in her entire project of making pop music, trying to reach all kinds of people at once. “Everything’s geared toward self-sufficiency. Fuck that,” Björk told punk historian Jon Savage in Interview. “For me, the target is to learn how to communicate with other people, which is the hardest thing, after all. What you should be doing is learning how to live with other human beings.” Car parts, bottles, cutlery, technology, and political superpowers are no match against this outreaching feeling, this ethos of interconnectedness that lives inside “Hyperballad,” inside of Björk in general, and it is an instinct inherent, ever crucially, in the survival of humanity.
“All the modern things/Like cars and such/Have always existed,” Björk sings on “The Modern Things.” “They’ve just been waiting in a mountain/For the right moment.” Not unlike the 23-year-old who dissected a television with love and awe, there’s a fantastic tinge of hope to this idea and to the whole of Post, an invitation into her profound exploration of places not yet traveled, to acknowledge the magic in the fact that there are sounds you might love that you can’t currently fathom. Twenty-five years later, you don’t need to scroll far through Björk’s Instagram feed to find the most audacious young popular artists alive, the likes of Arca and Rosalía, heeding that call, crowning her “queen.”
With Post, Björk set the bionic foundation for one of the most consequential careers in pop history. Here is where Björk became a perennial gateway drug, not to one sound but to the unknown, which is to say the future. She would soon leave London for the south of Spain and then New York, recording her two towering masterpieces—1997’s Homogenic, which Missy Elliott once gleefully likened to “Mozart at a rap show,” and the introverted microbeats of 2001’s Vespertine—crystallizing the totality of her vision. What other artist could successively collaborate with Wu-Tang Clan, interview Estonian minimalist legend Arvo Pärt, and appear on “MTV Unplugged” accompanied by a man playing a table of drinking glasses? In another era, maybe Bowie, which is just right—it was Bowie, after all, who inspired Björk’s immortal swan dress. By the end of the ’90s, the world would know the only answer: Björk.


The Korean DJ’s contribution to the storied mix series looks beyond the dancefloor, offering a tantalizing peek at her influences.

DJ-Kicks

The histories of fashion and techno are frequently intertwined—just ask Raf Simons, who debuted his Spring/Summer 2020 collection at Paris Fashion Week with pieces that paid tribute to the legendary R&S Records—and that’s especially true for the DJ and producer Peggy Gou. Born in South Korea and now based in Berlin, Gou cut her teeth studying at London College of Fashion before turning to dance music. Fashion school is rooted in learning history before adding your own spin, and Gou brings that wisdom to her music. Her tracks are extremely reverent to foundational elements of techno, house, and electro, but she pivots each one into her own point of view.
She traces that lineage with her contribution to !K7’s vaunted DJ-Kicks series. Instead of replicating her party-turning abilities, Gou uses the space to create something more like a scrapbook of her loves and influences. The usual suspects of her sets, like Pearson Sound and Kyle Hall, make the tracklist, but certain choices feel like more pointed looks into her taste. Hyperdub founder and bass-music mastermind Kode9 doesn’t seem like a natural fit for Gou’s sunny, melodic style, but his droney “Magnetic City,” a b-side from a 2007 Soul Jazz split, finds a home among the crunchiness of Sweden’s Dorisburg and British rave luminaries Shades of Rhythm. IDM mainstay Aphex Twin also makes an appearance, but it’s with the squelchy Drukqs track “Vordhosbn”—one of the few choices that deviates from the steady heartbeat of bassline hypnosis and minimalism that bumps throughout the mix.
The most revealing artifact from Gou’s biography comes in the form of her sole contribution to the tracklisting, a cross-continental joint-loosener called “Hungboo,” the first song that Gou ever produced. Crafted in the style of pansori, a traditional South Korean style of storytelling performed by a singer and a drummer, “Hungboo” emphasizes Gou’s interest in reinterpreting deeply entrenched forms. The same goes for the title, which references Hungbu and Nolbu, a Korean folktale that teaches empathy and generosity. The moral is mirrored with inclusions like “Epirus,” a warmer from up-and-comer Deniro, as well as “Pert,” from Italian duo Hiver, which debuts on the mix, and JRMS’ “3,” a recent staple of Gou’s sets that will be released later this year via her new imprint Gudu.
The label is just another of Gou’s prodigious accomplishments. Since 2016, she has become the first Korean woman to DJ Berlin techno institution Berghain and the first Korean to be tapped for a BBC Essentials Mix. With her DJ-Kicks, she becomes the first Korean person at the helm of another benchmark in dance music. But it’s not just these distinctions that makes the mix an achievement. Here, Gou’s studied craftsmanship coalesces with her tastemaking abilities. It’s most meditative in its unwavering commitment to methodical bass. Gou has always appeared to have an old soul and with this endeavor, it’s on full display.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


The Minneapolis synth-pop band teams up with a Berlin-based orchestra in an attempt to reckon with the trials of our time.

Poliça / s t a r g a z e: Music for the Long Emergency

Music for the Long Emergency

You have to admire Poliça’s willingness to break their own mold. In 2016, with two albums’ worth of hazy breakup songs under their belts, the Minneapolis five-piece abruptly pivoted into political consciousness and traded some of their rock instincts in for a smattering of pop motifs. The resulting album, United Crushers, faltered at times, but it was a good-faith effort to engage with the national mood. Poliça read the room and responded accordingly.
Poliça’s latest album is the product of another reinvention. In merging with s t a r g a z e, the Berlin-based orchestral collective led by conductor André de Ridder, they’ve more than doubled their lineup. With all those extra bodies in the room, the deep, dark chasms that fractured their earlier work, separating singer Channy Leaneagh’s voice from producer Ryan Olson’s rumbling synths, begin to fill in. The resulting sound feels new, to be sure, but mostly in the sense that it’s not fully ripe. Though challenging and, in its best moments, quite exciting, Music for the Long Emergency ultimately resembles a first draft. Its most compelling ideas are knotted up with its worst, and the whole thing could use a thorough edit.
Like its predecessor, Music for the Long Emergency postures as a political album. Its title nods to the turmoil of the Trump era, and its lead single, “How Is This Happening,” is a ten-minute dirge that Leaneagh wrote the day after the 2016 election. On the album, it’s sequenced towards the end, and it delivers some vivid moments, largely courtesy of s t a r g a z e’s string section. They brood, first hovering on single, sustained notes as if unsure how to proceed, then sinking into snarling cluster chords as panic sets in. Leaneagh, meanwhile, repeats the titular question that occupied many minds that November, and issues an elegant call for resistance. The song’s lengthy outro heaves and shudders in time with militant percussion. It’s an effective portrait of dystopian paranoia.
Its closest thematic analog on the record is “Cursed,” the song that immediately precedes it, and easily the most jarring track of the bunch. With its thrashing percussion and invective against unnamed political overlords, delivered via a guest turn from Minnesota rapper Crescent Moon, “Cursed” steers far into Rage Against the Machine territory—just with dramatic guitar subbed out for dramatic strings. The song feels outdated and clumsy, and some of Leaneagh’s lyrics are so vague as to be meaningless (“Cursed with a cure/Cured with a curse”). This is reinvention in the extreme. The song is unrecognizable as Poliça’s, to the extent that you might wonder if it’s there by accident.
What’s even more perturbing is that “How Is This Happening” and “Cursed” constitute a blip in an album that’s actually, by and large, devoid of politics. Opener and standout “Fake Like” is an airy ode to a crush who plays hard to get, embellished with chirping pizzicato strings. “Marrow” could be a stormy come-on or a conflicted kiss-off—it’s hard to tell—and it contains one of Leaneagh’s most forceful vocal performances, though it’s undermined by the laughable literality of the lyrics (“Marrow/I can feel you in my bones”). On “Speaking of Ghost,” Leaneagh reaches for bygone love in a brass-infused séance. Nowhere in this sequence does Poliça’s claim that the album reflects on “the strange and sudden darkening of our times” feel particularly true.
In the same statement, Leaneagh seemed interested in exploring the implications of this personal/political contrast: “You can be going through tragedy, never-ending wars, but you still also are dealing with human relationships and love and romantic troubles.” She isn’t wrong, and if Poliça had spent more time thinking through that conflict, Long Emergency might have been a more coherent album. But as the group continuously ping-pongs between sounds and ideas, it becomes difficult to tell which of the tensions that manifest—between electronic and acoustic, between varied vocal styles, between the depth of the sound and shallowness of the lyrics—are intentional pieces of a conceptual framework, and which are the unexpected byproducts of Poliça and s t a r g a z e’s experimental mode of writing.
One of the most tangled songs on the record is its closer and title track, another epic that stretches toward the ten-minute mark. For a song that purports to respond to emergency, it lands remarkably lightly. Leaneagh sings about being “seeped in deep/My madness,” but her delivery is carefree, and the song’s grandiose piano chords suggest triumph, not crisis. This uncertain resolution raises all sorts of questions: What, actually, is the long emergency? Is it over? Were these songs meant to be curative? Moments later, Leaneagh begins repeating the words “Lost as I am/Lost as I can be.” As a last word for this album, it’s all too apt.

Totally Gross National Product / Transgressive


The third album from the trio is far and away their best. Intimate, multidimensional, and wide-ranging, the songwriting shines with personality and a great curiosity for melody and style.

Women in Music Pt. III

It’s well known that the only three people who take long walks through the streets of Los Angeles are Haim. The image of the trio striding or line-dancing their way around the city is indelibly linked to their music: cool, confident, full of momentum. The videos to accompany their third album, Women in Music Part III, nod to the strolls of the past and add in a few new twists. In “Now I’m in It,” directed again by Paul Thomas Anderson, bassist Este and guitarist Alana carry Danielle (lead vocals, production, guitar) on a stretcher; when Danielle is revived and joins her sisters for their signature walk, she casts a knowing glance straight to camera. In another video, they’re trailed by a gloomy saxophonist; in another, they stand rooted to the spot. These videos show the evolution of Haim, whose songwriting on WIMPIII is likewise more nuanced, more self-aware, and frequently darker than ever before.
The biting satire of the album’s title is something of a red herring for its explicitly personal content. In interviews, each sister has described a personal trauma that she brought to the studio. Alana has spoken of the grief she suffered when a best friend passed away at age 20, and Este has talked about the low points of living with Type 1 diabetes. Most felt is Danielle’s deep depression; she traces its origin to when her partner (and co-producer) Ariel Rechtshaid was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 2015.
Historically, Haim’s lyrics have been conversational and straightforward: emotionally incisive, sure, but usually vague enough that you could easily place yourself inside them. On WIMPIII, though, Danielle writes in vivid scenes, pulling you inside her personal depression fog. She blinks awake and finds herself at the wheel of her car; she watches TV and stares at the ceiling; she goes to the boulevard and can’t stop crying. On the stomping country-rock of “I’ve Been Down,” she sings about taping up the windows of her house, adding sardonically, “But I ain’t dead yet.” Elsewhere, the sisters cut and paste the most offensive interview questions they’ve faced from music journalists (“Do you make the same faces in bed?”) into a candid folk song that channels the spirit of Joni Mitchell.
Danielle was also inspired by André 3000’s solo album The Love Below, an exploratory record that sewed together disparate genres with uninhibited slapstick humor. While WIMPIII is more theatrical than Haim have been before—there’s the gasp that opens the underwater rock song “Up From a Dream,” the “you up?” voicemail skits on “3 AM”—the most obvious similarity is in the band’s newfound musical fluidity. With signature production touches from Rostam throughout, these songs shift gears, often eschewing Haim's usual summery rock to find the right genre for the mood, sometimes containing different shades within the same track. “All That Ever Mattered” peppers Danielle’s vocals with distorted screams and a mumbled interjection of “fuck no,” before pirouetting away into a glam-rock guitar solo. “3 AM” and “Another Try” flirt with falsetto-driven funk and R&B, and “I Know Alone,” a song about depression-scrolling and sleeping through the day, contains dusty echoes of UK garage.
Not every song feels like a pioneering event. “Don’t Wanna” could have lived on any of Haim’s three albums: a tight pop-rock song built around an irrepressible guitar lick and an oblique story of a relationship in trouble. But their most exciting trips go off the beaten path, like the crystalline sad banger “Now I’m in It”—a song that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Taylor Swift’s Lover. This may be the first Haim album that steps out of its retro groove long enough to draw parallels with other contemporary pop music, specifically Rechtshaid and Danielle’s recent work with Vampire Weekend. Having long since proven their chops when it comes to writing a breezy 1970s-style rock song, they now sound comfortable enough within their niche to push beyond it.
WIMPIII is bookended by two songs about L.A., both featuring a saxophone and wistful “doot-do-do” backing vocals. On the first, “Los Angeles,” Danielle describes falling out of love with her hometown. But in the final song, “Summer Girl”—while its melody hits a similarly melancholic vein—she interpolates Lou Reed as she sings about the relief of coming home to L.A. from tour to be with her partner. She’s anguished when she sings that she’s “thinking ’bout leaving” the city, but hushed and reverent on a later line when she reflects on how much she misses it: “L.A. on my mind, I can’t breathe.” Placed beside each other, the two songs take on new dimensions. It’s Haim as we haven’t quite heard them before: not just eminently proficient musicians, entertainers, and “women in music,” but full of flaws and contradictions, becoming something much greater.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review omitted the production work of Rostam.


Most of the songs on this four-track EP are just fine. One is a boorish, boring misfire that should have stayed in the vault.

The Chocolate Box EP

Jeremih has spent nearly a decade working hard to exceed his own limitations. After breaking out in 2009 with the catchy but formulaic hit “Birthday Sex,” the Chicago R&B singer followed a fairly typical release schedule for a few years. Then, in 2012, he dropped Late Nights with Jeremih—a lush, filthy gamble whose best moments, like the smooth, Mike WiLL-produced “733-Love” and the spectral Skype sex song “Fuck U All the Time,” proved that he was more than an above-average pop-R&B singer, raising expectations that he’s still trying to live up to.
He’s since chased the success of that self-released mixtape to varying results. His 2014 collaborative EP with Shlohmo, his Late Nights studio album from the following year, and his 2016 holiday tape with Chance the Rapper are the bright lights in Jeremih’s career. On those releases, he’s shown an open mind and an adventurous spirit in a time when many of his peers would rather tether themselves to trends. But there are also entries in Jeremih’s discography that are a little sloppy, like Late Nights: Europe, a mixtape with scattershot studio mixing, inconsistent sound quality, and a tedious Lothario tone that hasn’t aged well in the past two years. The Chocolate Box, a four-track EP he’s released in anticipation of a new full-length, is another one that could have stayed in the vault.
The songs here are just fine, mostly. Opener “Cards Right” is slick and sweet, and “Forever I’m Ready” is a de rigueur rap-singing cut, à la Tory Lanez or Travis Scott, with inoffensive but eye-rolly lyrics about how his paramour is a “bad girl like RiRi.” “Nympho” offers a reprisal of the ghostly textures of Late Nights with Jeremih, but not enough of a future-facing evolution of the sound to make it exciting. All of these failings, though, are minor compared to the EP’s true blemish, an ode to midnight blow jobs called “SMTS.” This is an acronym for “suck me to sleep,” which you will know well by the end of the song, because the entire falsetto hook is Jeremih repeating the line over and over again: “She must’ve sucked me to sleep/Bad bitch suck me to sleep/Savage, suck me to sleep… Had to make a song how she suck me to sleep.” Did he? His boorish and almost bored delivery suggests that “SMTS” would have been better left as a studio in-joke.
There is a lot of room in modern pop for explicitly pervy music that doesn’t alienate its audience. Ty Dolla $ign, for instance, can make a lyric like “I used to love these hoes, but now I love this money” sound tender because of his husky, romantic delivery. But if you’re going to turn “locker room talk” into balladry, your technique needs to involve something more appealing than desperate falsetto chirping.
With a little gruffness, or even a more Migos-informed style of delivery, “SMTS” could have been a salacious, blush-worthy party cut. Instead, it’s just awkward—and there’s far too much competition for the king of Filthy Sex Jam Mountain these days for Jeremih to get over with something like this. When his projects are well-considered, or made with hyper-focused collaborators, he can be the most enchanting man in the room, which is reason to look forward to MihTy, his upcoming duet tape with Ty Dolla $ign. With The Chocolate Box, Jeremih just underscores the fact that some ideas are better kept to yourself.


The Lisbon producer’s solo debut takes the spiky, polyrhythmic sound of Portuguese batida and bends it toward a sleek dancefloor sensibility, making for Príncipe’s most accessible release yet.

Paz & Amor EP

In dance music, small and localized scenes rarely stay intact for long. The favela sound of funk carioca, once picked up by Diplo, spread well beyond Rio; moombahton quickly left DC and grew into a worldwide sound; and after decades  underground, Chicago footwork became a global force. That Lisbon’s Príncipe label has nurtured the vibrant and febrile batida scene rising from the city’s African immigrant community for over seven years while keeping its rhythmic sensibilities intact—and undiluted—is remarkable. Providing a nexus where African rhythms like kuduro, batida, kizomba, funaná, and tarraxinha can intermingle with house and techno, they’ve made plenty of fans: Thom Yorke has repped for DJ Nigga Fox, labels like Warp and Lit City Trax have put out batida records, and last year Nídia produced the frenetic “IDK About You” for Fever Ray’s Plunge. This sound remains as wildly innovative and compelling as it was at the start, with the label’s roster having been allowed to mature and evolve without any pressure from the outside world. That isolation can be a double-edged sword: The music’s spikiness can seem baffling to outsiders and casual listeners. But Paz & Amor, the label’s 23rd release, might be one of the best gateways it has opened yet for newcomers to explore this peculiar Afro-European sound.
Of Cape Verdean descent, DJ Lilocox has been affiliated with the Príncipe imprint since 2013, both as part of the Piquenos DJs Do Guetto collective and the duo Casa Da Mãe Produções, but Paz & Amor marks his first proper solo release. The five-track EP presents the most formidable iteration of batida to date; it’s a release that retains all the show-stopping muscle and grace of DJ Nigga Fox’s Crânio from a few months ago with a streamlined approach that might be more readily embraced in house, bass, and techno circles. In just a handful of tracks, Lilocox shows off a wide array of styles, revealing how thrilling batida can be when melded to modern dancefloor sensibilities, without losing one iota of its livewire energy.
“Vozes Ricas” puts Lilocox’s rollercoaster polyrhythms front and center, a tumble of shakers, rattles, claves, and barrel-sized toms topped by pressure-ratcheting tympanum rolls. Lurking behind all these thundering beats are the title’s “rich voices,” a dark and tumultuous choir that Lilocox slides and stretches around an array of shifting rhythmic patterns.
That push and pull—between tension, drama, heightened emotion, and rhythmic release—is dance music’s métier, but batida’s dizzying beats can sometimes obscure that sense of play. It takes the steeliest of DJs to slip the music of Nigga Fox or DJ Firmeza into a set, as most of their productions move as predictably as spilled BBs on a dancefloor. Lilocox is well versed in tricky styles like funaná and tarraxinha, but Paz showcases his ability to pull also from tribal house, South African gqom, even Brazilian samba, and make them all cohere. The tough and skeletal “Ritmos e Melodias” has the fidgety buzz of gqom and the slipperiness of UK funky, but Lilocox makes it yield to his syncopated thwacks. “Fronteiras”—with its glowing synth chords, flecks of piano, and crackling percussion—rides a house groove that brings to mind Ron Trent’s classic Prescription sides: sensuous, contented, and deep.
“Samba,” per its title, builds itself up from a nimble samba pattern. But soon Lilocox fusses with it, detonating dubby drums and claps alongside a nervy bit of acoustic guitar; for the first half, he entirely forgoes the kick and the bassline. And while almost all artists on Príncipe watermark their music in some manner, branding the beat with their names in a fashion akin to DJ Mustard or DJ Khaled, Lilocox doesn’t shout out his own name until two-thirds of the way through the EP, punctuating the track before letting all the fidgeting drums take over. It’s as if to suggest that Lilocox’s batida is so distinct, so wholly his own beat, that it’s impossible to mistake him for anyone else.


The third album from indie/psych/folk quartet Quilt offers a rebuttal to all those people who argue that every artist steals. Some, like Quilt, know the difference between stealing from and honoring their influences.

Plaza

When a band reaches into its box of old demos on hitting the third-album mark, that’s usually a sign that either the ideas have started to run low or that the musicians are no longer getting together to write songs as often as they once did. Likewise, groups of songs spanning several years often fail to hang together as a coherent whole. The third album from indie/psych/folk quartet Quilt might come from old demos, but it bucks these common trends by showing that disparity can serve as a creative asset.
Like a kind of musical Bermuda quadrangle, the convergence of pop-leaning indie rock, psychedelia, vintage British folk, and Americana has lulled many a band to sink into generic facelessness. Not so here. The only times Plaza comes across as less than convincing are the moments where Shane Butler and company tip their hand a tad too heavily, such as on closing number "Own Ways," which falls just short of featuring faux English accents and sounds like Quilt’s musical answer to a '60s mod costume party.
Elsewhere, though, they steer clear of slavish recreation, cleverly revealing new wrinkles in the arrangements from one song to the next. When Anna Fox Rochinski and Butler throw in a key shift on opener "Passerby" that evokes a sitar-like, resonator guitar tone, it’s as if they hit the whammy bar on the song itself during playback. It’s a trick they manage several times throughout this new set, where the entire band, which also includes drummer John Andrews and new bassist Keven Lareau, will suddenly go slack before the arrangement as a whole automatically snaps back like a guitar returning to its default string tension. At these times, usually the band will be cruising along at a pleasant pace before swerving toward a jagged, seemingly out-of-place chord or element, and the overall effect is like a friend suddenly tousling your hair.
On "Roller," Quilt re-reappropriates Elastica’s appropriation of Wire, but instead of returning the angular guitar riff to its rightful owner, tosses it into a dreamlike backdrop of keyboards and Rochinski vocals that smudge out in trails of thickening reverb, simulating our semi-conscious day-to-day train of thought as it focuses on banal tasks then blurs into daydreams until those nagging bits of reality pull our attention back down to Earth. If you were to stop and take stock of how many times your mind does this in the course of a single day, you’d likely be surprised because the process unfolds so smoothly that you mostly don’t even register that it’s happening. Quilt executes these transitions with similar ease.
On the chorus of "Your Island," for example, Rochinski’s reverb-drenched vocals scrape the upper stratosphere of shoegaze—only without typical shoegaze instrumentation. It’s as if the band stripped a Lush tune of its vocals and transplanted them in a stripped-down, downtempo song that could have been written by the Duke Spirit. "O’Connor’s Barn" marries Whip-Smart-era Liz Phair’s cottony impressionism with the slightest touch of a Pavement-styled guitar hook circa Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. "Padova" excavates the experimental streak that seemed so promising about Gomez before that band surrendered to slick pop, while "Hissing My Plea" emulates the strings that Beck stole from Funkadelic’s "If You Don’t Like the Effects, Don’t Produce the Cause." Elsewhere, jangly nods to Fairport Convention and barebones Americana rear their heads as well.
In all of these cases, though, Quilt either significantly expands on or reframes these references, bringing substance, character and a modern production sheen to older ideas. They have always been a quietly stylish band, with diligently crafted songs, savvy arrangement instincts, and a discreet, almost unassuming way of asserting their own voice while embracing influences. Without even trying, Plaza offers a rebuttal to all those people who argue that every artist steals. Wrong—some, like Quilt, know the difference between stealing and honoring.


The idealistic, politically-minded Scottish indie-pop band gloss up their sound on album three.

The Spook School: Could It Be Different?

Could It Be Different?

In 2015, Scottish quartet the Spook School met with Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace to discuss the realities facing transgender artists in the music industry. Spook School singer/guitarist Nye Todd, who had come out as transgender about a year earlier, was eager to ask Grace how fans reacted to her 2012 revelation. “People have been very supportive of me in general,” Grace said. It was a crucial conversation: For Nye, whose Twitter bio notes that he “writes songs about gender and being v queer,” the politics of the marginalized are inseparable from the music he makes. The rest of Spook School, comprising guitarist/vocalist Adam Todd (Nye’s brother), singer/bassist Anna Cory, and drummer Niall McCamley, accepts this as a shared cause. At another point in the video, McCamley insists that when attempting to understand members of the trans community, “the most important thing is to listen... to let these people have a voice.”
The Spook School take that mission literally. Their 2013 debut, Dress Up, and their 2015 follow-up, Try to Be Hopeful, were full of similarly progressive dialogues about LGBTQ hardships. And while the music on those albums felt optimistic, the production retained enough grit to balance their rose-tinted melodies. They were frill-free and raw records, allowing the Spook School’s songwriting to sparkle through the scuzz. The production on the group’s third LP, Could It Be Different?—the band’s second collaboration with producer Matthew Johnson of Hookworms—buffs out that grit, leaving a record so shiny it’s blinding.
Opening track “Still Alive” starts the LP off with cloying guitar riffs and squealing feedback that sound borrowed from Epitaph Records’ back catalog. Even with the Spook School’s sloppy charm scrubbed away, though, the songwriting holds up: “Still Alive” is a feisty anthem taking aim at haters, particularly the bigots that want to make you “feel small.” It’s criminally catchy, and if it doesn’t make your brain sing “Fuck you, I’m still alive!” for days, your hippocampus may be in need of a tune-up.
The Spook School excel at crafting irresistible power-pop moments like this. “Less Than Perfect” and “I Hope She Loves You” could inspire even the most rigid crowd to pogo as one. The latter song opens with a drumroll before bursting directly into its sing-along chorus (“And I hope she loves you/Like I couldn’t do”). The bizarre “Best of Intentions” winks at the Buzzcocks and XTC, with a tangy lead guitar part and Nye’s pitchy, half-spoken delivery providing one of the few times on this album that the band’s delightful quirks aren’t shellacked beyond recognition. Occasionally, the Spook School’s influences are too on-the-nose—like when the record gets tangled up in “High School” and “teenage hopes.” Singing about adolescence may have worked for the Undertones 40 years ago (as it worked for Nirvana and Blink 182 in later decades), but in 2018, coming from musicians in their mid-twenties, it feels hackneyed.
As lyricists, the Spook School are most effective when they tackle the bleak and routine. On the glum ballad “Alright (Sometimes),” Nye offers self-imposed ignorance as a coping mechanism for reality. “I said let’s pretend the world’s all right/Let’s pretend we’re doing fine,” he suggests before (almost) finding comfort in a companion: “But with you I feel all right/Sometimes.” It’s one of the record’s most candid moments, and yet the song itself is bit of a snoozer, following a verse/chorus/bridge/coda recipe with little energy or improvisation. A similar problem plagues “Bad Year,” which does a fine job of verbally rendering despondence; unfortunately, the melody sounds worn out, too. “I admire your optimism/But sometimes I just need to feel it,” Nye shrugs, his words floating atop a diluted indie slow dance. These few duds are missing both the honesty and the dynamite hooks of the band’s best work, like the trans-positive “Body,” where the brothers Todd get personal: “Do you like the way you look naked?/I don’t know if any of us do/And I still hate my body/But I’m learning to love what it can do.”
The Spook School are idealists at heart. Their inclusive lyrics and perky guitar pop mirror the change they hope to summon in the world. Adam Todd has said that Could It Be Different? was written “from a place of feeling like everything definitely isn’t alright now.” Perhaps they figured dark times call for bright music, but this overly polished record often feels like a missed opportunity.


After the hard left turn of Oxnard, Paak sinks back into the bubbly smooth grooves that got him noticed.

Ventura

Last year’s Oxnard was  Anderson .Paak’s first hard left turn. Working more closely with Dr. Dre, who gave him his original career boost on his own 2015 Compton, he jettisoned his warm, ingratiating funk in favor of sexed-up self-indulgence, hot-buttered excess, and hard-edged rapping. The project sold well but sparked such lingering criticism among fans that even his mom had to clap back at haters. After spending nearly three years working on his Malibu follow up, he took less than a year to redress it with Ventura. The soothing soul palette is back, this time coloring love songs and their sweet nothings, and Paak settles into his old polished grooves in search of comfort.
Unlike the Internet, whose genre hybrids are seamless, or Smino, whose future-funk and soulful raps are effortlessly malleable, Paak’s songs can be traced directly back to their sources: the funk rock of Parliament-Funkadelic, the smooth, gliding strokes of Frankie Beverly & Maze, the glowing visions of Stevie Wonder, lush Dre-era G-Funk, the eclectic neo-soul of Sa-Ra. The Oxnard native is constantly showing his work, for better and worse. He is capable of imitation, if not flattery, in the form of a patchwork reimaginations. But he traces sounds of the past so finely that his own work disappears.
Malibu got over on its earnest, introspective writing, which anchored its wide-ranging soul in something idiosyncratic and personal. Ventura doesn’t have as sharp of a perspective, but his generous personality still shines through from time to time. The gorgeous “Yada Yada” ponders the end of the world before settling somewhere this side of YOLO: “Our days are numbered, I’d rather count what I earn.” On “Good Heels,” Jazmine Sullivan plays a side chick who locked her things in Paak’s apartment. His girlfriend’s on her way there and he’s off in the Palisades with the key. His solution: She has to climb up the fire escape and break in. It’s an amusing and charming little vignette.
Then, there’s “King James,” Paak's ode to black resistance and political action. “What we built here is godly/They can’t gentrify the heart of kings,” Paak sings. He follows the threads of activism in professional sports to community organizing, and a salute to service becomes a call to action. “We couldn’t stand to see our children shot dead in the streets/But when I finally took a knee, them crackers took me out the league/Now I’m not much for games but I play for keeps/And we salute King James for using his change/To create some equal opportunities.” It’s in these spaces that his songs come alive and become more than serviceable soul cosplay.
Despite featuring several prominent rap producers, Malibu was like a hip-hop sampler with soul at its center. Oxnard hewed closer to rap in form and function, and suffered for it. Betting bigger on Paak’s abilities as a rapper proved risky; where his raspy squawk of a singing voice always communicates fervor, he strains as a rapper. Ventura seems acutely aware of this and rebalances accordingly. The leisurely grooves of “Winners Circle” and opener “Come Home” provide ample room for Paak and the chorus fleshing out his harmonies to breathe.
The raps here, including the André 3000 verse, appear largely in the form of breakdowns or sections all to themselves. These moments often come as pleasant surprises, usually delivering statements of purpose (on “Chosen One,” a song otherwise about finding a perfect partner, he takes a second to offer: “To label me as The One, debatable/But second to none, that suit me like a tailored suit”) and they foreground him as a soul singer and bandleader first and foremost.
Those who were hoping for a “return to form” from Anderson Paak will likely be delighted by Ventura, which bears inside it all the hallmarks of his breakthrough. This tune-up album, at the very least, restores the underlying feeling of his signature stuff. But there, too, lies its flaw: it’s a hollow effort lacking in any real distinguishing characteristics. The album never becomes more than the sum of its sounds.


Toronto's Lindi Ortega is a country outlier in a city better known for indie rock. She toured as a back-up singer for Brandon Flowers and eventually signed with Last Gang Records, releasing solo albums to a slow-growing audience. Her latest, Faded Gloryville, may be her biggest yet. These songs highlight her innate ability to peel back the layers of country convention and find weird new emotions underneath.

Faded Gloryville

On her sixth album in 15 years, Toronto native Lindi Ortega sounds like she’s been through the industry wringer. After laboring for years as a country outlier in a city better known for indie rock, she self-released two albums and a handful of EPs in the 2000s, weathered one ill-fated major-label signing, then toured as a back-up singer for Brandon Flowers. At the beginning of this decade, she signed with Last Gang Records, releasing two well-reviewed albums that introduced her studiously forlorn vocals and twang-goth sound to a slowly growing audience. And yet, on her latest album, she sounds like she knows the best part is behind and now she’s living in a lonely place called Faded Gloryville.
Ironically, Faded Gloryville might be Ortega's biggest record yet, one that feels well timed amid a boom of semi-traditionalist female country singer-songwriters. She's never quite as witty as Kacey Musgraves or as bold as Nikki Lane, and she doesn't have the ability to immediately shatter your heart the way Ashley Monroe can. Instead, she has a shrewd, quiet self-awareness: "I ain't the girl you're looking for... I ain't the girl for you," she sings sweetly on "I Ain't the Girl". Even though the song is sung to a clean-cut, buttoned up would-be suitor, you get the sense that she might be speaking directly to you, the listener, and wondering why the hell you're even bothering with her.
That's not low self-esteem or fake humility. Instead, one suspects that it has more to do with always being on the edges of the country industry. Ortega is a Canadian with Irish-Mexican blood and a sartorial style that's more Stevie Nicks than Loretta Lynn. Rather than small towns, she sings about big cities, especially on the standout "Run-Down Neighborhood", which finds a sturdy friendship taking shape in the sort of neighborhood where people drive through without stopping at red lights. "Hey, you can have some of my weed if I can smoke your cigarette/ I might be running low, but I ain't out just yet," she sings brightly.
Most of the time Ortega sounds spry, even excitable, singing with a knowing wink underscoring the fatalism of the songs. Even the grim details of a hard-luck life can't keep her down. "Run Amuck" begins as a typical lament about an unfaithful guy, but the second verse reveals that her man is chasing something besides skirts: "Uppers and downers, coffee and cocaine," she sings, then adds, "Egg in a frying pan, this is your brain." In just a few words and a clever rhyme, Ortega stages an intervention and nods at the hokey inadequacy of interventions.
There's more than a little rage driving that song, just as there's more than a little sadness nipping at the edges of "Ain't the Girl". Even if this isn't her most cohesive or inventive album (that would be 2012's Cigarettes & Truckstops), these songs highlight her innate ability to peel back the layers of country convention and find weird new emotions underneath. Ultimately, she makes Faded Gloryville sound not so much like a place of diminished opportunity, but endless possibility.


Tamaryn's new album moves from the denser shoegaze thickets of Tender New Signs and The Waves into a pure, sugary dream-pop world. No longer competing for sonic space with a heavy wash of guitar, her voice, even drenched in reverb, becomes the focus.

Cranekiss

Tamaryn’s Cranekiss is a big step for the project, a move out of the denser shoegaze thickets of Tender New Signs and The Waves into a pure, sugary dream-pop world. It features the kind of glossy production made popular in the 1980s and '90s by John Fryer of This Mortal Coil in his myriad productions for 4AD, Mute, and Beggars Banquet—Cocteau Twins, Xmal Deutschland, Clan of Xymox, Chapterhouse. Tamaryn herself is the only constant between her past two albums and this one, changing instrumental personnel (here she works with Shaun Durkan of Weekend) and production credits (Jorge Elbrecht of Violens, who has also worked with Ariel Pink and No Joy) from her previous incarnation.
No longer competing for sonic space with a heavy wash of guitar, Tamaryn’s voice, even drenched in reverb, becomes the focus. There are serious pop hooks on this record—opener "Cranekiss" has a chorus that will alight inside your skull, flutter its wings a bit, and set to making a nest—and her voice sounds much less constrained, more ebullient and full, than on previous recordings. Many of the songs on Cranekiss are about uncompromising female desire from varying perspectives (the first single "Hands All Over Me" and "Softcore", which samples both porn simulacra of female orgasms and the peep show scene from Paris, Texas, stand out), a joyous thing in and of itself, and the theme of Cranekiss overall seems to be freedom, expansion, exploration.
There are moments when Cranekiss seems a little too hewn to the '80s and '90s ethereal/goth sound it’s an obvious homage to—the sonic Cocteau Twins references throughout the first half of the record can sound a little heavy-handed, and any of the tracks would have fit in seamlessly on the classic Hyperium Records Heavenly Voices compilation. There is value in exploring the particular styles that made you fall head-over-heels for music in the first place, though, and while Cranekiss hardly breaks new ground it has a sense of playfulness to it, a sort of sparkling and infectious enthusiasm. Tamaryn has said that making this album was a "very, very pleasurable, inspiring, fun experience unlike anything I’ve ever done before," and that’s palpable upon hearing it.
Amid all the swirl and shimmer, there are some tracks that feel more rooted—"Fade Away Slow", a goth taffy-pull of a song near the close of the album, probably has the most low end on an album that likes to pull away from the earth overall. It unwinds deliciously, unpeeling layers of itself to nearly break down before spinning into a lovely bridge and a recall chorus. Because some of the tracks are so airy, a call down to close out the record, like closing out a ritual, seems like a necessary respite.
Cranekiss firmly establishes Tamaryn’s pop songwriting chops. It also indicates a willingness to play with new instrumentation—the synths, drum triggers, and sampling are all new to Tamaryn's palette—and a willingness to play with established style and form. It's a beautiful, heavily textured, highly sensual record, heady sugar on the tongue.


The rapper’s new album is a poignant meditation on embracing the present moment, showcasing his labyrinthine flows and deep reverence for the craft of hip-hop.

Different Type Time

Somewhere in Brooklyn, New Orleans, or Oakland, there’s a corner apartment with a window propped open. A slight breeze gently pushes the curtains aside to let the sunshine in, noises from the street below sneaking behind it. Thin ribbons of smoke from a smoldering cone, either weed or incense (but probably both), perfume the room while a gust of wind flutters notebook pages full of long-forgotten observations. There’s an undeniable wisdom that lives in moments like these, cultivated through the simplicity of attuning to the sights, smells, and space around you. If you tap into that energy, you might even bridge the past and present, connecting with something larger than yourself.
That sense of spirituality permeates Different Type Time, Cavalier’s sumptuous and sublime new album. It’s in the record’s hushed mysticism: Characters perform honey jar spells or clutch copies of the Circle 7 Koran to their chest; some form of God is always present in the margins of songs, appearing as a Black woman, a mother, or the buds of a cannabis plant. It’s in the warm, beatific production Cavalier chooses, every gossamer string, lilting guitar, or sparkling piano loosely orbiting around crisp, unobtrusive drums. On “Pears,” he raps, “It’s vibrational, ain’t it” four times, using repetition to tune in to higher frequencies. Throughout the album, Cavalier constantly harmonizes with the cosmos to ground himself within the chaos.
Cav is originally from Brooklyn, but landed in New Orleans about a decade ago. He and his frequent collaborators Quelle Chris and Iman Omari were previously bicoastal, convening to work on music in New York, Omari’s hometown of Los Angeles, or whatever West Coast enclave Quelle was living in at the moment. Cav and Omari eventually settled in NOLA, where the pair made 2015’s LemOnade EP and 2018’s Private Stock, the latter of which has become something of a minor cult classic among contemplative underground rap fans. Those records reflected the pair’s new Southern home, including Omari’s take on warm jazz and Cav’s ruminations on NOLA’s struggles with gentrification and police brutality. For Different Type Time, Cav recruits a new slate of producers, expanding his palette but retaining his previous works’ humid thrum. He’s still concerned with his surroundings but turns further inward, the record playing like conversations between different eras of himself.
It’s hard to catch the depth of Cav’s writing upon first listen, as he frequently employs double entendres and clever innuendos, burying them in thickets of labyrinthine flows. It can be outright dizzying, like the brain-frying wordplay in the middle of “Doodoo Damien:” “Flex on the rest of you bitches and that ain’t gender ‘pacific’/That’s all coast, almost kings—Edward, King James, not Olmos/That’s American me, where Eric B. for President set precedence with me.” He finds the connective tissue between disparate thoughts, his verses resembling a heat map visualization of the brain’s firing synapses. Over the slow-motion calypso rhythms of “Come Proper,” Cav invokes the writer bell hooks, wishes his exes well, and stubs out a joint in an overflowing ashtray—all within the first eight bars.
On the Quelle Chris-produced “Flourish,” amidst a flurry of self-confident boasts about his skills and wardrobe, Cav takes a moment to contemplate the difference between optimism and hope, noting: “My granny cops new lotto tickets while the doom clock’s ticking.” He’ll often interrupt his own knotty stanzas with calming images, as if he’s reminding himself to drop his shoulders and unclench his jaw. By the end of “Can’t Leave It Alone,” when he’s worked himself into a tizzy debating the internal pressures of his perceived potential, he pauses to prune a bonsai tree. In between pondering death and sex on “Yeah Boiii,” he peels a Satsuma orange.
Throughout the album, Cav grounds himself in the craft. He’s a self-professed hip-hop nerd, peppering verses with allusions to Cooley High and Bob James’ perpetually sampled “Nautilus,” or repurposing lines from Ol’ Dirty Bastard, A Tribe Called Quest, or Jay-Z songs. The backlit boom-bap beat that producer foushou. provides for the mid-album highlight “Told You” prompts Cav to find a pocket like a young Nas, creating an introverted, alternate-dimension version of “The World Is Yours.” Though he’s undeniably a student of the ’90s golden era, Cav shows clear reverence for that sound without overtly trying to recreate it. When he does have the rare wistful old head moment, it comes off as charming, never scolding.
The only two guest rappers, credited as Unhoused Brothers in the liner notes, are men Cav met serendipitously while traveling to cities where his producers lived. One has his own song, “Baby I’m Home,” while the other appears at the end of “Told You” and “Axiom / My Gawd.” Both of these encounters occurred on the same day—the first moments before Cav left Detroit, the second shortly after he landed in Dallas. Cav has said in interviews that he made Different Type Time as a reaction to the breathless oversaturation and mindless overconsumption of the streaming age. The inclusion of these recordings on an album six years in the making solidifies Different Type Time as a poignant meditation on presence: The world moves too quickly, and there’s too much to process at any given time, but if you’re able to slow down—even for just a moment—you’ll find insight to gain and beauty to experience, folding into the cosmic energy that surrounds us all.