After signing to the Weeknd’s label XO, Toronto rapper-producer Navraj Goraya is releasing a full-length collaboration with Atlanta producer Metro Boomin. He sounds as lyrically hollow as ever.

Perfect Timing

In the 2003 remake of the British heist thriller The Italian Job, Edward Norton plays a villain who triumphs in a discernibly boring way. After he’s stolen all his friends’ gold, Norton isn’t creative enough to know what to do with it. So he and his heist crew steal their wish lists, too: an extravagant stereo, an Aston Martin Vanquish, a gaudy mansion—just all this stuff that he knows other people want. The Toronto rapper-producer Navraj Goraya is a bit like that, too. Nav has jacked his favorite artists’ shopping lists and thinks that reciting the purchases back to you might build some character. But no matter how many pairs of Gucci shoes Nav buys or pints of lean he cascades, he still sounds like a tryhard wannabe.
Nav didn’t steal anyone’s thunder, though, as much as he’s manufactured his own. In 2015, he co-produced Drake’s Meek Mill diss “Back to Back”; last year, he conspicuously featured on Travis Scott’s “biebs in the trap.” After signing to the Weeknd’s XO label earlier this year, Nav has spent the last several months reasoning that he might be his own star. He has a SoundCloud track record and a handful of co-signs to back him up, but there’s nothing yet in his music that can justify Nav’s potential spot in a prolonged spotlight.
He has halfway apologized for his first album, tweeting about the shabbiness of his cheap microphone. He also promises that he’s done saying the N-word in his music, a blunder worth unpacking considering the Punjabi-Canadian is spearheading a rare representation in hip-hop—a lonely trailblazer who deserves no forgiveness for extending the racism in an endearment that doesn’t belong to him. (Nav recently offered an interviewer an “I’m sorry people were offended” type statement that lacked any semblance of critical self-awareness, but he has stayed true to his word.)
All of this casts Perfect Timing, his full-length collaboration with of-the-moment Atlanta producer Metro Boomin, as Nav’s mainstream crossover. The record might have cost him more in-studio time and stretched his network, but it’s no less hollow and ugly than Nav’s previous music. If anything, now that he can live up to his narcissistic materialism, Perfect Timing confirms that Nav is as empty as he ever was, lyrically especially.
Nav’s delivery—a thin-singing rap style that never strays from a couple of basic, oscillating melodies—does little to appease his shallowness. “Smoke a lot, got a permanent cough/Popping them pills again/Used to think you was my dog, now you are not my friend,” he drones on “Hit.” That last line is the type that consumes Nav throughout Perfect Timing. Now that he’s rich, he’s bent on proving it to it everyone and corralling the doubters. Instead of the triumphant revenge he’s aiming for, Nav sounds smarmy and petty. And when he’s trying to sound smugly cool, he just ends up corny. “You say you’ve got a party, I might pop up there/You a cub, your main bitch fuck me like I’m Papa Bear,” he raps on “Minute” before getting embarrassingly upstaged by a pattering Offset.
That’s not the first or last time a guest steals Nav’s show. Gucci Mane and Belly each show up on their own tracks, punching quick verses that spice up a dead party. Even 21 Savage, the quietly sinister Atlanta emcee who has charted his own rise alongside Metro Boomin and usually sucks the air out of a room, overshadows Nav with an extended whisper on “Both Sides.” The beats—brooding, soft-synthed trap—would be in familiar and more capable hands if the guests were alone with them, but they aren’t enough of a saving grace.
If anything, the precious industry commodity of Metro Boomin’s production—all of it here featuring contributions from Nav himself—has a simplicity that begs for and rewards easy showmanship. Nav doesn’t have that, and instead wastes the spread by dousing it in the same unenthusiastic flow for just under an hour. It’s not just that he doesn’t have anything to say, it’s that he sounds so bored, tallying up the trophies of someone else’s fantasies. No matter how many diamonds or women adorn him, he postures like a lifeless mannequin, and you can tell he’s straining to perfect the pose.


On Pantha du Prince’s sixth album, the organic tumult is so thick that electronic tones and rhythms bend and buckle around it.

Garden Gaia

Pantha du Prince’s catalog plays like a time-lapse of techno being reclaimed by nature. The German producer born Hendrik Weber had a Neuschwanstein-sized Romantic streak from the beginning, and his production style was always indifferent to the associations conjured by techno’s name. He prefers instruments to synthetic sounds when possible, collaborating on his 2010s albums Black Noise and The Triad with musicians like bassist Tyler Pope and drummer Bendik HK. His work this decade has skewed increasingly new age, with 2020’s Conference of Trees leaning so uncompromisingly into its wild talking-trees concept as to halfway convince the listener that plants might actually sound like this when they communicate. Surrounding nearly everything he makes is a thick cloud of bells and percussion that seems to have a mind of its own, inescapably following his music around like a tenacious swarm of bees.
On Garden Gaia, Weber’s sixth album as Pantha du Prince, the organic tumult is so thick that everything else seems to bend and buckle around it. The sound design is familiar from the first ding-a-ling on “Open Day,” but the generosity with which it’s applied is not. Every empty space in the mix is filled not just with bells but also recordings of birds and rushing water that form part of the music’s fabric, rather than simply lapping at its margins. It takes more than a minute for the beat to assemble itself on “Open Day,” and it’s not a four-on-the-floor rhythm but a burdened half-time lope. Pantha’s drums have always been a bit flimsy, performing the bare minimum duty of driving the music forward rather than targeting the listener’s head with sonic or rhythmic trickery. Here they resemble snapping twigs, often paired with woody creaks and rustles that sound as if Weber is clearing the overgrowth from his music in real time.
The sense of momentum that thrives in Pantha’s music is de-emphasized here, and while Black Noise and Conference of Trees felt like journeys along a linear path, Garden Gaia is more like staring into nine individual thickets of climbing vines, hoping to make sense of the overwhelming growth. The tracks are shorter than usual, all hovering around four to five minutes, and the division between rhythmic tracks and more ambient ones keeps the album from generating any sense of forward motion. Some of the techno tracks seem to hurtle toward dead ends; “Crystal Volcano” and “Blume” take their time to emerge from the ether but waste none retreating back into it. Gaia sounds best when it commits fully to atmospheric sound design, as during the eerie bass-and-hand-drums invocation “Mother” and the sumptuous, string-drenched closer “Golden Galactic.”
Pantha’s 2020s are shaping up to be his most eclectic and experimental decade yet, and the ecologically conscious concepts and hand-crafted sound of his recent music serve him well. Yet he seems reluctant to stray too far from the bread and butter of his sound. “Liquid Lights” devotes crucial climactic running time to a simple chord progression and a rudimentary beat underlined by the usual bells, and it sounds so much like Pantha-by-numbers that we might find ourselves scanning old tracklists to see if it isn’t an edit of something from Black Noise or The Triad. The music on Garden Gaia is inspired by the idea of Earth as a self-regulating system, and it’s heartening in that context to hear Weber let his machines fall into disrepair. But Garden Gaia sounds best when they’re swallowed up entirely.


The French duo-- who have received hilariously horrified reactions from some in the dance music community-- take French dance and blows it out by embracing 21st-century stadium-rock production, filtering heavy rock through disco until it sounds more Judas Priest circa 1983 than Stardust circa 1998.

Everyone should be wary of pulling out the following two statements, but they fit Justice like a pair of $500 jeans: 1) If it's too loud, you're too old, and 2) Age ain't nothin' but a number. Given the hilariously horrified reaction that many in the dance music community have when confronted with the music of French duo Justice, you'd think they were two 300-pound rampaging Huns who sacked Berlin's Panorama Bar and made off with Ricardo Villalobos and Ellen Allien over their shoulders. Instead, Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay-- high school kids when Daft Punk's Homework dropped over a decade ago-- grew up, like many a young Parisian, filtering hard rock (never a French strong suit) through disco until it sounded more Judas Priest circa 1983 than Stardust circa 1998. Their "new French touch," as the genre's being termed, actually feels like the caress of a sledgehammer.
Throughout †, Justice's long-awaited debut album, Augé and de Rosnay genuflect again and again in front of the Stations of French Dance Music: The metallic ripples of Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo's Crydamoure label, which once sizzled your ear hairs; Thomas Bangalter's Roulé imprint, and its champagne kisses and Chaka Khan dreams; the coke-mirror reflections of idealized 80s keyboards in Alan Braxe and Fred Falke's work; the tongue-lolling hip-hop buffoonery of TTC; Mr. Oizo's spritzing-sphincter bass and convulsing keyboards; and Jackson's OCD vocal edits. Listen to the Cassius-esque disco-twang of "Genesis" and tell me these guys are somehow dance-ignorant. But like two naughty schoolboys, they've got their fingers crossed behind their backs the whole time; one thing the duo is not is reverent.
Justice takes this history of the French rave era and blows it out by embracing 21st-century stadium-rock production. They squeeze everything into a mid-range frequency band so loud that the riffs on tracks like "Let There Be Light" and "Stress" practically cock-slap you in the face. ("Stress" in particular sounds like a disco-era string arranger came to an in-house orchestra with the injunction "make it sound like Emergency Broadcast System.") The drums on "Let There Be Light" and their big breakthrough single "Waters of Nazareth" are the rat-a-tat rhythms of electro scraping like Freddie Krueger's fingertips along the slimy walls of some basement dungeon. That's it-- engorged electronic riffs, dizzying astringent strings, vocal samples torqued to all hell, and nasty metallic drums. It's astoundingly unsubtle stuff and bracing as fuck, a decade's worth of French electronic music stripped down like a Peugeot parked overnight in a bad neighborhood.
Of course, if that's all † was, it would be unbearable for a full hour, and Justice's critics might have half a point. But the album's more varied than most folks will give it credit for. (Unfortunately, that variety also includes "The Party", featuring Ed Banger's abhorrent in-house female rapper Uffie.) "D.A.N.C.E."-- the album's slightly incongruous, Schoolhouse Rock-esque filter-disco track-- is Justice's only obvious stab at a capital-p pop crossover hit and you'll certainly be humming "Do the D-A-N-C-E, 1-2-3-4-5" whether you want to or not after hearing it. But like Homework, † is a harsh and mostly instrumental set that nonetheless plays like the ideal crossover electronic-pop record. Justice knows how to sequence a dance album to avoid drag and boredom, a skill more suited to hook-friendly architects than a putative demolition crew. The wistful instrumental vignette "Valentine", coming after the one-two slap of "Phantom Pt. 1" and "Phantom Pt. 2", is like a sour, palate-cleansing appetizer between fat-rich courses in big ol' French meal.
But well-sequenced or not, † is also a sensation-for-sensation's-sake record, something French house has always excelled out-- even when it's been more classy than crass. Cheekily disregarding so many things that good dance music is "supposed" to have-- especially, you know, bass-- and in a post-microhouse era where "quality sound design" is a fetishistic obsession, Justice's digital distortion, 128kb-grade hyper-compression, and sometimes aggressively un-funky house sprays good taste with its pissed-up, pissed-off 3 a.m. musk. They've somehow managed to split dance music into a brother-against-brother battle, turning message boards into minefields and blog posts into mini-manifestos. There's no mystery to Justice tracks, true. But whether it's deep house revelers out of their heads on jacked-up gospel or folks in German basements getting down to their own form of minimalized riffing, club rats all over the world are just trying to have a good time. Even if Justice is more about throwing devil horns than doing the hustle, well, we're all still in the same gang.


Stretching their signature sound to its abstract extremes, the Montreal doomers construct chilly, majestic settings for classic poetry and original lyrics.

A Chaos of Flowers

Over the past decade, Montreal trio BIG|BRAVE have released albums through both Southern Lord and Thrill Jockey, a track record that speaks to their fluency in both bone-shaking doom metal and post-rock experimentation. But their first language was folk music. In the years leading up to their tremorous 2014 debut, Feral Verdure, BIG|BRAVE founders Robin Wattie and Mathieu Ball performed early gigs as an acoustic-oriented duo. Even as they transitioned to electric instrumentation and loaded up on percussive firepower to become one of the most punishing and prolific bands in the contemporary avant-metal landscape, BIG|BRAVE’s emotional core has remained largely intact—in their hands, noise is simply a megaphone to amplify the unrest embedded in their songs from day one.
But while their official discography has turned both more expansive and abrasive—culminating in the throat-shredding epics of 2023’s Nature Morte— BIG|BRAVE also took a detour back to their folk-song roots with 2021’s Leaving None But Small Birds, a rustic retreat with Rhode Island metal mutants the Body that was ultimately less Earth than earthy, complete with revamps of dustbowl standards like “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” and “Once I Had a Sweetheart.” You could say that A Chaos of Flowers is another collaborative archival project that reanimates ancient texts. In this case, the key contributors are summoned from the grave.
The majority of tracks on A Chaos of Flowers take their lyrics or inspiration from poets spanning countries, cultures, and eras—from American icon Emily Dickinson to British-Parisian lesbian raconteur Renne Vivien to Japanese proto-feminist Yosano Akiko to Mohawk poet E. Pauline Johnson aka Tekahionwake. (A true tortured poets’ department, as it were.) But they find their point of intersection in Wattie’s identity as a queer woman of mixed heritage living in a bilingual city. If Leaving None But Small Birds journeyed through the past to reconnect with storytelling tradition, then A Chaos of Flowers is more about recontextualizing old wisdom as premonitions of our current condition.
As such, the album sounds less like a loud rock band mellowing out than a loud rock band sculpting their squall with all the craft and care of folk music. This isn’t so much doom metal as doomed metal—like 1,000-foot-high sand castles, these songs feel majestic yet ephemeral, as if they could dissolve into the ocean at any moment. In the past, the band might’ve used the sinister riff of “Not Speaking of the Ways” as the foundation for a monstrous march—and the presence of guest guitarist Tashi Dorji and saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi certainly intensifies its nauseous grandeur. But drummer Tasy Hudson lays off the kick pedal and floor tom to tap out a tentative rhythm on her cymbals, allowing the song to float instead of crush. It’s a treatment that perfectly mirrors Akiko’s source verse, a freeze-frame portrait of a love so strong, it has the power to stop time and provide momentary sanctuary.
For all of their brute force, BIG|BRAVE’s most powerful weapon has always been Wattie’s voice, whose natural radiance cuts through the sludge to foreground an expressiveness rarely heard in a doom context. On A Chaos of Flowers, she’s not so much trying to overpower the storm as stake out the calm within it. The album’s chilling opener, “I felt a funeral,” is based on Dickinson’s 1861 poem “I felt a funeral, in my brain,” a vivid rumination on the precarity of sanity, depicted here as a showdown between Wattie’s trembling but resolute melody—which suggests a goth-blues spin on “House of the Rising Sun”—and the slow-motion waves of fuzz that threaten to swallow her whole. On the album’s dark, droning centerpiece, “theft,” the dynamic is reversed: As Wattie recites Esther Popel’s namesake poem about an old woman cruelly beaten down by the elements in the dead of winter, her tone almost feels conspiratorial, as if she’s summoning the thick sheets of feedback that close in from all sides.
Wattie’s own songwriting contributions feel of a piece with her muses: the ashen-skied ballad “canon: in canon” (featuring the deceptively tranquil fretwork of Thrill Jockey stablemate Marisa Anderson) weaves similar thematic connections between nature, mental health, and survival, while “quotidian : solemnity” reinforces the lyrical focus by doing away with percussion completely to let Wattie’s scabrous soliloquy hover inside a thick thundercloud of distortion. In these meditative moments, BIG|BRAVE boldly stretch their signature sound to its abstract extremes while retaining its doom-metal essence, and in doing so, they affirm that this album’s symbiotic relationship with its predecessor goes beyond a shared floral motif: If Nature Morte was a Richter scale-busting apocalypse of a record, A Chaos of Flowers is the ominous aftershock, an extended reverberation that accrues its own awesome, unsettling force. On the closing interpretation of Tekahionwake’s “Moonset,” Wattie declares, “I may not all your meaning understand/But I have touched your soul in shadow-land.” On A Chaos of Flowers, the heaviness has much to do with the weight of the words as the intensity of the sound.


Heavy on filler even though it's only 11 tracks long, Rihanna's sixth album feels not only slight but muddled, an assortment of half-baked ideas that never bloom.

Talk That Talk

"We found love in a hopeless place." Over a frantic, Calvin Harris-produced, Guetta-meets-"Sandstorm" beat on her sixth record's lead-off single, Rihanna repeats these words almost 20 times. "We Found Love" ranks among Ri's best singles because it recognizes that there's not much more that needs to be said: in three and a half minutes, the line moves from being a great pop lyric to a triumphant mantra to something suggestive of a whole spectrum of unspoken emotion. The best pop music transports you to somewhere beyond words, and Rihanna's strongest singles all seem to be in on this secret. Need I remind you of some of her most powerful hooks: Ella-ella-ella-ay. Oh-na-na. Ay-ayy-ay-ayy-ay-ayy.
But as anyone with a Twitter handle will tell you, these are chatty times, and in 2011, the pop landscape's fittingly caught between two maximalist extremes: the winking theatricality of Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, and Katy Perry, and the dribbling confessional-pop of Drake, Kanye West, and (yes, they're more alike than they'd like to believe) Taylor Swift. Barbados-born, millions-selling, armfuls-of-awards-winning Rihanna has found staggering success (23 years old; eleven #1 singles and rising) borrowing a little bit from each of these tendencies. Her recent music videos have dabbled in trendy pop artifice (check out her neon-hued, irresistibly smiley turn in Guetta’s "Who’s That Chick?" or the David LaChapelle-aping-- literally-- "S&M"), while her brooding and personal 2009 album Rated R commented-- however obliquely-- on her public struggles. Rihanna seems more comfortable flitting between these two extremes than settling on either, but her past two albums have at least had some thematic cohesion. The same can't be said of Talk That Talk: Heavy on filler though it's only 11 tracks long, it feels not only slight but muddled, an assortment of half-baked ideas that never bloom. A stitched-together collection of club bangers, sleaze-pop missteps, and mid-tempo inspirational ballads, Talk That Talk feels at times like three different records, only one of which might have been any good.
Of course, what we're supposed to be talking is about how this is Rihanna's "dirtiest" album yet. Early blog chatter reported to lots of critics blushing in preview listening sessions and making questionably bold declarations ("The dirtiest pop album since Madonna's Erotica!") that suggested that they listen to very little pop radio, or that they have never been to an R. Kelly concert. Talk That Talk's raunchier moments should surprise no one: Rihanna's always been singing about sex-- she's just never shown such an unfortunate proclivity for cheesy lyrics and dessert metaphors. "Suck my cockiness/ Lick my persuasion," Ri commands on the embarrassingly literal "Cockiness (I Love It)", hoping the boldness of the delivery will distract you from thinking about what a clunky line it is (it won't, though Bangladesh's beats might). The Esther Dean-penned "Drunk on Love" features a weak chorus lyric and vocal whose bombast feels out of place in the track's laid back, xx-sampling atmosphere. Clocking in at a puzzling-yet-merciful one minute and 18 seconds, The-Dream co-produced "Birthday Cake" is even more heavy-handed (lots of icing puns). There are flickers of empowerment here, but mostly it proves little more than the fact that a female artist can be responsible for Jeremih-grade cheese, too. A Rihanna album has never been without the occasional lyrical misfire ("Sex in the air/ I don't care/ I love the smell of it" comes to mind), but at least on a track like "S&M" she sounds like she's having fun. For a record so preoccupied with passion and pleasure, most of Talk That Talk feels unsuitably robotic.
At least things start out strong. Talk That Talk's saving grace is its first stretch of tracks: the blithe and tropical "You Da One", "We Found Love", and the album's other Harris track "Where Have You Been", which doesn't stray much from the single's winning formula, a simple lyric of romantic longing that explodes into a club-ready beat. And though it's no "Umbrella", the Jay-Z reunion "Talk That Talk" is one of the more playful moments here, though I'll say that the patented H.O.V.-giggle doesn't feel entirely earned following a line like: "Had it by a bladder/ She like 'oh I gotta pee'."
I've read some comment-section conspiracy theorists who believe Rihanna is in single-minded pursuit of Hot 100 domination, and the rate at which she's pumping out albums (roughly one a year since 2005) is an attempt to populate the singles chart until the end of time. There might be some truth to this (her singles collection is going to be killer), and with "Death of the Album" prophecies ever looming it's worth wondering whether or not that's such a crime. But 2011 found plenty of pop artists still breathing new life into the format: Beyonce's 4 and Lady Gaga's Born This Way were probably the most solid examples-- two bombastic records that also explore the nuance of their respective artists' personas. Talk That Talk tries too hard to send a more one-dimensional message and ends up falling flat: Rihanna's obviously going for sexy here, but her music's at its most alluring when she's blissed out in her own reverie, not taking the time to spell it all out for us.


Opeth formed more than 15 years ago, but didn't manage to release an album until five years later, when Candlelight issued their debut, *Orchid*, in 1994. Gradually building an ever-loyal following, the Swedes flirted with semi-mainstream success around the time of the concurrently-recorded *Deliverance*, released in 2002, and *Damnation*, which came out a year later. The first found the band in heavy mode; the second was a set of deathless '70s rock. Blending those two strands excellently, the band's eighth album, 2005's *Ghost Reveries**\--* now reissued in a deluxe edition with bonus tracks, a surround sound mix, and a documentary--

Ghost Reveries [Special Edition]

Opeth formed more than 15 years ago, but didn't manage to release an album until five years later, when Candlelight issued their debut, Orchid, in 1994. Gradually building an ever-loyal following, the Swedes flirted with semi-mainstream success around the time of the concurrently-recorded Deliverance, released in 2002, and Damnation, which came out a year later. The first found the band in heavy mode; the second was a set of deathless '70s rock. Blending those two strands excellently, the band's eighth album, 2005's Ghost Reveries*--* now reissued in a deluxe edition with bonus tracks, a surround sound mix, and a documentary-- sealed the deal. A carefully crafted set of melodic progressive death-tinged metal, the record made Opeth's past releases feel like tiny sketchbooks for the present.
Much of Opeth's success is due to their charismatic vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter Mikael Åkerfeldt, whose well-documented idolization of both David Coverdale and Morbid Angel icon Steve Tucker translates surprisingly well to his own music: He can do melody and/or suffocated growls; he's Deep Purple expressive and also raging death dude. In Beyond Ghost Reveries, the documentary included with this reissue, Åkerfeldt says that after years of honing and experimentation, he once feared he'd become a "pussy" who could no longer manage his "evil" growls. Naturally, he was thrilled to discover that, when needed, he could still conjure that exquisite blackness. And, in fact, even when shifting from folksy hymns to distorted mayhem, the overall feeling of the music remains dark with a few flickering streaks of light.
Instrumentally, in addition to the usual double-bassdrum action, Opeth blend prog, jazz, stoner haze, blues-rock, Indian raga, pastoral tips, and acid-tinged freakers. Newest, sage member Per Wiberg contributes textures, stuffing his sounds-- a Moog solo here, a Gregorian hum there-- into different corners using Mellotron, Hammond, and piano. All those keys sometimes create a slight distance, but then the guitars hit the same rhythm as a jazz organ and shape-shift on a dime: The band lulls, then explodes. Unlike a number of other tech wizards embraced by the metal community, Opeth make the most of their skills, playing complexly and expressively. The music is poppier and more sumptuously recorded than Katatonia or Agalloch, but maintains an edge, banging to Amon Düül II. At times you may even be reminded of Japanese psych folk-rockers, Ghost.
Opener "Ghost of Perdition" starts with gentle guitar, lasting all of four seconds, before Åkerfeldt begins his hemlock snarl. The next move, before the 1:30 minute mark, is a soulful fusion moment: "Devil cracked the earthly shell/ Foretold she was the one/ Blew hope into the room and said:/ 'You have to live before you die young.'" A creepy organ death-dances in the background, facing off a pastoral moment lined with angelic traditional folksy harmonies before an aching solo guitar steps aside for more of the brutal stuff. Ghost Reveries' lyrics never stray far from these makeshift death pyres. The landscape is feverish, filled with rotting trees ("roots sucking, thieving from my source"), fog, and darkness. Protagonists dodge the sun, fear dying alone, and carry their pale flesh through ashen alien lands.
A complaint could be made that Opeth pack songs-- particularly the opener or fabulously epic "Reverie/Harlequin Forest"-- with too many changes. (Dudes, are you trying to get a silver star from Musician magazine?) But each move feels like it's going somewhere, not simply treading water to showcase chops, and this ADD factor ups the emotional power: Half of Ghost Reveries' eight tracks clock in at over ten minutes, but the word "lag" never comes to mind.
Preaching to the converted? If you already own the original, you won't need this reissue unless you want the smooth cover of Deep Purple's "Soldier of Fortune". Other extras include an embossed cover, added artwork, and pep rally-style liner notes from Åkerfeldt. There's also a second disc with a 5.1 mix of the album and the "director's cut" video for "The Grand Conjuration", where a snake sucks a Tawny Kitaen-looking girl down a toilet and a hooded bully tortures an old guy and douses him with gasoline. And then there's the 30-something-minute documentary, with standard fare like live footage, interviews, studio shots, food sculptures, Opeth swimming in a pool, lap cats, reminiscences, "sex, drugs, and e-mail," lots of talk of the "rock-n-roll dream," and new tattoos.
At one point in the documentary Åkerfeldt says, revealingly, that what Opeth's doing is "more than metal." That depends, of course, on your definition of metal. People often stress the idea of "transcending genre" in relation to the band, but while forward-thinking and often quite singular, Opeth's still very much within the tradition. That Åkerfeldt thinks otherwise casts an interesting pattern on the past. It also makes me curious about his recently announced (unnamed) side project and Opeth's ninth studio album (reportedly due before the end of the year).


Courtney Barnett’s second album is smaller, more introverted than her debut. It’s tentative but with a purpose, songs about what it means to not have—or need—the right words for everything.

Courtney Barnett: Tell Me How You Really Feel

Tell Me How You Really Feel

The most Courtney Barnett line on Courtney Barnett’s second album is a quote from an online troll. “He said, ‘I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and spit out better words than you,’” she recalls, on “Nameless Faceless,” and then offers an uncharacteristically cocksure response in a shruggy sing-song: “But you didn’t.” The anonymous critic’s putdown assumes that Barnett’s witty early EPs and debut album cemented her style, making it ripe for parody. Abandoning social realism and polysyllabic razzle-dazzle, Tell Me How You Really Feel in fact overhauls almost everything we’ve come to expect from Barnett as a writer while vindicating everything she promised of herself on her 2015 debut LP: “Put me on a pedestal and I’ll only disappoint you.”
On Tell Me, Barnett repeatedly flails at the question of what a Courtney Barnett line would be anyway: What kind of bargain does a songwriter strike with her audience? “I don’t know a lot about you but/You seem to know a lot about me,” she sings, perturbed, on “Need a Little Time.” What does she have to say and should she even say it? “Indecision rots like a bag of last week’s meat” on a song called “Crippling Self-Doubt and a General Lack of Confidence.” She vacillates between despair and self-loathing, living on nerves and feelings. Introspection becomes claustrophobia, the kind where you want to unzip your skin, clamber out, and shake your self off like a wet dog. The palpable discomfort could come off as Barnett complaining about her modest fame if her low-key personality didn’t make evident precisely how much she’d abhor that idea. It’s more essential than that: Courtney Barnett is tentative about how to be in the world, full stop.
Fortunately, her crisis of confidence isn’t reflected in the music: Tell Me is adventurous and nuanced; shapelier than its rabid greyhound predecessor, making Barnett’s game, punky guitar a key part of the storytelling rather than kindling for the engine. She can still go neck-and-neck with Stephen Malkmus when it comes to hangdog indie-rock triumphalism, but her playing now tells stories of tenderness and frustration, too.
The country lockstep of guitar and rickety piano at the end of “Walkin’ on Eggshells” feels like being carried along by a creature much bigger than you, and then placed, safely, at your destination. “Help Your Self,” in which Barnett seems to admire a customer much cooler than her, starts in a meditative fashion, her long, sinewy guitar purrs evoking breathing exercises as she tries to channel this person’s chill. It doesn’t work, and she lets her frustration erupt into extremely satisfying absurdity: “You got a lot on your mind/ You know that half the time/It’s only half as true/Don’t let it swallow you,” she sings. But as she repeats the refrain, it sounds as if she’s saying, “It’s only half a strudel/Don’t let it swallow you!” just as the guitar goes knees-first-through-the-mud bananas. It’s sweet, silly relief: Who’d be consumed by half a pastry?
Considering that Barnett squeezed the word “pseudoephedrine” into her debut single, the linguistic treats on Tell Me come in smaller, subtler nuggets. There’s confidence and elegance to the paring down (and maybe a smart long view, too, unburdening herself of her reputation as rock’s quirkiest chronicler). She conjures in an image what previously took a small parable. Compare the debut’s “Elevator Operator”—a picaresque story about a kid called Oliver who sacks off work to admire the view from a skyscraper rooftop—with this line from “Need a Little Time,” a terse study in caution and release: “Shave your head to see how it feels/Emotionally it’s not that different/But to the hand it’s beautiful.” In that vein, she preserves moments of secret meaning: What exactly is your “innermost lecherous,” a phrase she coins for the grist listeners demand from songwriters? And what’s an “absolute anosmic”? These seeds of cryptic potency develop her own private language.
But for now, Barnett’s inability to express herself is the album’s main theme, and it’s a strange, almost meta proposition: a 30-year-old artist lauded as one of the most gifted songwriters of her generation who’s convinced, on just her second album, that she’s a false prophet. If her debut’s “Pedestrian at Best” sounded like the fierce thrash of In Utero, Tell Me shudders with its malign spirit. Barnett’s introspective outlook also allows her to test the limits of songwriting, from the cliché to the confessional. “City Looks Pretty” contains one of the record’s blandest choruses—“Sometimes I get sad/It’s not all that bad”—but it’s chased by a line that makes that drab couplet seem knowing rather than feeble: “The city takes pity on your injured soul/And heavenly prose ain’t enough good to fill that hole.” What use is a well-turned phrase in the pit of despair?
Tell Me opens on “Hopefulessness,” one of a few songs that invokes a rhetorical cliché in disbelief. “You know what they say…” Barnett drawls in a faded croak, a tone she maintains throughout the song as it builds to a catastrophic sludgy squall, a clever reflection of numbness. Imagine having the blithe confidence to lean on cliché, she seems to imply, when you mistrust everything that comes out of your mouth. Barnett has a go at coining her own turn of phrase on “Walkin’ on Eggshells,” and it’s a beautiful one: “Before we get started I’ll clean this up/No use drinkin’ from a leakin’ cup,” she sings, trying to hit reset on a destitute argument. But it misfires: “Y’know what I mean? Not really, it seems…” A few lines later, she subverts well-worn terms commonly used to describe pain and swashbuckling adventure to distill her frustration at not being able to get the words out: “Pullin’ teeth, white knucklin’.” These opaque emotions are harder to parse and less immediately easy to love than the anecdotal action of her debut, but they make for a rich album all the same, one that pushes the listener to meet Barnett on her terms. “Don’t stop listening,” she sang on her debut; “Are you listening?” she yowls here.
At the center of Tell Me, Barnett gives the listener no choice but to listen when she adopts an unusually ferocious tone across two consecutive songs. “Nameless, Faceless” paraphrases a Margaret Atwood quote for its grungy chorus: “Men are scared that women will laugh at them/Women are scared that men will kill them.” And “I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch” is a roiling tirade that needs little more explanation beyond its title. They’re both visceral, lunging songs, but neither really works—they’re too broad for an artist who excels at minutiae. Both have been described as Barnett addressing the era’s misogyny, and there is something a bit box-ticky about them.
But one of the more refreshing things about Tell Me at large is how uninterested Barnett is in providing any kind of “necessary” commentary at a time when many artists feel duty-bound to address politics in their work: The chorus on the next song, “Cripping Self-Doubt and a General Lack of Confidence,” finds her singing, “I don’t know, I don’t know anything” with breezy relief. There’s courage in admitting her inability to know what to say, though it’s a privileged position—something she alludes to. “Sorta self-righteous, my heart of gold,” she concedes on “Walkin’ on Eggshells,” highlighting the dual bind of being a nervous introvert: the anguish over self-expression coupled with the suspicion that not using your voice is neglectful.
Barnett has often sung about that gap, the one between who she is and who she wants to be. On Tell Me, the gap widens, and those dueling identities become even less clear. It’s complicated. There are no punchlines. In these songs of existential despair, a change in perspective is its own kind of revelation, as is Barnett finding the few good words to describe it.


This surprise-released collaboration sees the Atlanta rappers finally finding common ground, though neither is in peak form. Super Slimey forgoes explosiveness and poignancy for streamlined action.

Super Slimey

Young Thug and Future are often mentioned in the same breath. It’s not just because they’re both Atlanta rappers, or that their creative arcs began cresting at the same time, but because it’s hard not to spot some obvious stylistic parallels, the most glaring being Auto-Tune. It’s hard to believe that the two ridiculously prolific MCs—who grew up 20 minutes from each other, run in the same circles, and dip their pens in the same lean-laced ink—so rarely cross paths. Both rappers are longtime running mates of producer Metro Boomin. They frequent the same track lists: Travis Scott’s Rodeo, Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book, Lil Durk’s LilDurk2X, Mike WiLL’s Ransom 2, to name just a handful of the albums they’ve featured on. Thug once claimed Future was planning to sign him to the Freebandz imprint for $1.5 million, but the deal never came to fruition. For a while, everyone seemed to be putting the two together—except the artists themselves.
Their weird dance quickly shifted from “constant coexistence” to “outright avoidance” in 2015 when Metro publicly questioned the productivity of other rappers and warned that they shouldn’t try to replicate his and Future’s tireless work rate. Thug took offense, and called Future the Tito to his Michael Jackson. Months later, as both artists were preparing to drop new projects, Future and Thug traded insults about output (“I hope Apple save you lil niggas… Or church!!!!”). It seemed these two pillars of the rap zeitgeist would never connect as fans hoped. Things turned around when Thug apologized for the “internet arguments,” making amends on stage during Drake’s Summer Sixteen tour and finally hitting the studio. Thug named a song on JEFFERY “Future Swag,” and more recently featured Future on the BTG number “Relationship.”
Capping their tumultuous dynamic, Future and Young Thug join forces for a new mixtape called Super Slimey and finally find common ground—in syrupy Auto-Tune, colorful diamonds, Patek Philippe timepieces, double cups, cruise ships, and personal torment. But maybe it’s because they’ve squabbled so much about efficiency, and quality over quantity, that Super Slimey is somewhat anticlimactic. It is, in part, a release memorializing audio engineer Seth Firkins, who died in his sleep last month. Firkins was Future’s primary vocal producer and mixer, a man behind the scenes on several popular mixtapes, Future's reissued debut Pluto 3D, and 2015’s Dirty Sprite 2. (The engineer also worked on records for Jay-Z, Rihanna, and Young Thug.) Firkins worked closely with Future for more than six years, and so Super Slimey is offered as an homage. “Super Slime in Peace Seth Firkins,” Future tweeted after the project dropped. On “4 da Gang,” he raps, “Go check my profile, I beat the verdict/I was kicking it in overdrive, for Seth Firkins.” These guys value the studio grind most, and so the highest compliment they can pay him is to keep working.
Future often finds strength in tribute and on Super Slimey, he pushes through the pain just like on 56 Nights, when he toasted his newly-freed, wrongfully-detained DJ Esco. Few go bigger than Future in mourning, and Thug also adds his share of colorful one-liners and wowing stunts (“Different color diamonds, I’m a peacock,” “I’ve been blown a mil’ on jewelry, but it’s past tense”). There are flashes of their more private sides, too, like Thug rapping, “It’s true I said I love you but I didn’t promise” on “Real Love,” or Future opening up about depression on “4 da Gang”: “I look my demon in the face, I’m booted up the worst way… I can’t grieve, ‘cause ain’t none of my grandma bills late.”
Neither Future nor Thug is at the peak of his powers on Super Slimey, which forgoes explosiveness and poignancy for streamlined action, and many of the solo cuts shine brighter than the team-ups. The same problem plagued Future’s collaboration with Drake, What a Time to Be Alive. The assumption here was always that this would be different because Future and Thug supposedly occupy the same territory—they’re both croon-first, spontaneous emoters whose viscous squawks rely heavily on pitch-shifting technology to add dimension—but there have always been subtle variations in the ways they like to move in open space, and their short track record shows they have trouble maximizing their talents in tandem. Most of the songs are never greater than the sum of their parts. Even when the verses and hooks aren’t pedestrian (by their standards), the segments seem cut together. A song like “All da Smoke” is really just a FUTURE cut with a pasted-in Thug verse. But there are moments like the Offset-assisted “Patek Water” or “200” where the stars align and they seem like perfect companions, or at least sparring partners. Even when they don’t click, you sometimes end up with two dynamic MCs trying to dunk on each other.
The Super Slimey production crew spotlights standout beatmakers from across the Future and Young Thug discographies: Mike WiLL Made-It, Southside, TM88, Wheezy, and London on Da Track. But Metro Boomin, who has unquestionably had a hand in both artists’ success and produced their best ever tag-team cut “Chanel Vintage,” is noticeably absent from the project. That void is never quite filled, despite the constant slaps, delivered especially on the glimmering Thug solo song “Cruise Ship” and the spectral “Drip On Me.” There’s something unfulfilling about Metro unwittingly driving a wedge between them and not being around for their reunion, as his comments seem to reverberate throughout it. If anything, Super Slimey is a reminder that compromise isn’t always productive.


With her sixth album, Charli XCX transcends all narratives and delivers a hit. Brat is imperious and cool, nuanced and vulnerable, and one of the best pop albums of the year.

BRAT

It’s the era of the relatable pop star, where the Machiavellian hustlers of the music industry A-list write songs about being as unlucky and confused as you and I. These days, the world’s biggest musicians are apparently also the salt of the earth, perpetually downtrodden by their relationships or jobs. They’re down bad but they’re doing the work, jamming the radio with songs about setting boundaries or learning their moon sign. And have you heard? Their latest album is their most vulnerable to date, despite the public’s seeming allergy to moral ambiguity and the sense that it’s been years since anyone was remotely honest about their motivations. Are you having fun yet?
Meanwhile, Charli XCX has been dreaming of a time when the It Girls were hot messes, flashing the paparazzi as they tumbled from the Chateau or looking feral outside Les Deux at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday. The Bimbo Summit’s on her mood board, as are the neon-splattered club nights of the mid- to late-2000s, back when dance music was in its bedroom-producer phase and pop singers were still divas who’d never condescend that they were anything like you. It’s a vibe that’s rather popular as of late. (Oh, to be a creative director tasked with explaining “indie sleaze” to Camila Cabello.) But Charli lived it, albeit as an English teenager whose MySpace demos had titles like “Art Bitch,” raging vicariously through the blogosphere.
BRAT, the sixth album from the 31-year-old songwriter, has roots in this stretch of the aughts, which holds a tenuous claim to the last IRL gasp of “alternative culture” before it moved into our phones. It’s also a reaction, as Charli’s records tend to be: to the focus-grouped monotony of playlist-fodder pop, the tedium of our current “authenticity” obsession, and to her previous album, 2022’s Crash, which posed the question: “What might it sound like if I did sell out?” If you read trendy literature or spend much time on “X,” you might recognize the mode of defensive self-awareness, pre-empting the possibility of sounding like an idiot or looking like a flop. That album—on which she utilized for the first time in a decade the A&R services of her label, Atlantic Records—was her first to top the UK Albums Chart. But it lacked the culture-shifting oomph of a Vroom Vroom or Pop 2, records that felt like risks that no one else would take. Joining their category and transcending it, BRAT arrives as the best-sounding version of the Charli XCX promise to make the Apollonian pop landscape Dionysian again.
The moment bent to Charli as the winter turned to spring, beginning with the February Boiler Room set that broke the company’s RSVP record within a matter of hours. In a sweaty Bushwick warehouse, alongside BRAT producers A. G. Cook and EasyFun, she debuted the album’s first single, “Von dutch,” whose revving synths trigger flashbacks to the mid-’00s electro of Boys Noize and the Bloody Beetroots, with a hitch before the drop you can feel inside your gut. “It’s okay to just admit that you’re jealous of me,” she yelps, winking but meaning it. The imperial streak continues on its follow-up, “Club classics,” over whose stripped-down bounce she declares her intentions to dance to her own tracks all night. Is it just me or is “360” her best pure pop tune in ages? (The video, teeming with It Girls, feels heavy-handed but not unearned.) For years, both Charli and her critics seemed distractingly obsessed with her position—the darling of the underground who either would or could not graduate to Main Pop Girl. Then something shifted, and it hardly seemed to matter. She had something they didn’t. She was cool.
With the charts full of warmed-over disco and weepy Reddit-detective pop, I’d have happily accepted 15 high-end throwback bangers about being iconic and dressing like you’re on The Simple Life, as Charli seemed to tease. And as an homage to French dance music of the late ’90s and 2000s, from the euphoric filter house of Crydamoure and Roulé to Ed Banger’s heavy metal disco, BRAT delivers. I hear Bangalter and Braxe in the compressed ecstasy of “Talk talk,” the sweetness of Breakbot on “Apple,” shades of DJ Mehdi’s piano drama on “Mean girls.” “Rewind,” a love letter to MySpace-era naivety, is served up in ditzy spoken word somewhere between Uffie’s “Pop the Glock” and The Teaches of Peaches. Charli reprises the affect on “Girl, so confusing,” a song that busts the floodgates of a dozen “indie dance” memories I was certain I’d repressed. Not once in 42 minutes does the momentum fade.
But past the singles, Charli complicates the idea she’s introduced of the imperious bad bitch whose ideas the world loves to jack, beginning to explore much more fascinating themes: jealousy, narcissism, “girl power.” On “I might say something stupid,” whose Gesaffelstein piano chords distill the essence of early Justice, she returns to her liminal position in the industry, describing with writerly precision the feeling of being the least famous person at the party: “Snag my tights out on the lawn chair/Guess I’m a mess and play the role.” I’ve never had a Charli lyric bounce around my head the way that lines from “Apple” have, with its curious fruit allegory and wonderfully vague remarks about driving to the airport. On “Sympathy is a knife,” whose buzzsaw synths and modulated banshee howls sound most like the Charli we’ve known, she spirals over an acquaintance who taps her insecurities: “I couldn’t even be her if I tried.” (“Don’t want to see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show,” she goes on. “Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick.” Wait…)
There are a handful of cute songs clearly directed to said boyfriend, the 1975’s George Daniel, now her fiancé. But BRAT’s most intriguing moments regard her relationships with women, which she unpacks with striking candor. The pop feminist discourse of the past decade never seemed to make it to the topic of competition, but on the sparkly/scuzzy “Girl, so confusing,” Charli goes there, painting a picture of a peer to whom she’s frequently compared, who’s either her long-lost BFF or perhaps wants to see her eat shit—it’s hard to say. (Surely Deuxmoi will have a field day with lines like “You’re all about writing poems, but I’m about throwing parties,” but for now let’s enjoy the mystery.) If you’re a certain kind of online, you’ll pretty quickly recognize the motifs of “Mean girls”: cigarettes, vocal fry, daddy issues, Catholicism. Yes, it’s the first major label pop song inspired by the Red Scare podcast. It’s also a counter—a catchy one, at that—to what the “Relatable Era” demands of artists. Is there a way to be a pop star without being a role model? Can a woman feel empowered without being a girlboss? Can she reject the pose of perma-victim and still make resonant art?
These ideas feel substantial in new ways for Charli. Writing BRAT, she quieted her inner industry pro who strung together vowel sounds and buzzwords that rhymed, approaching her lyrics as if she were typing a gossipy text to a friend. The method worked, nudging songs about subjects like grief and motherhood past the usual clichés of “confessional writing” and into reality. The somber “So I” is about missing SOPHIE, Charli’s late mentor; it’s also about how terrifying it can be to be friends with a genius. Much ink will be spilled about “I think about it all the time,” where a visit to a friend who recently became a mother inspires life-altering questions about what her freedom’s worth. But what gives the story life is the striking admission that, alongside tenderness and joy, she feels a sting of jealous FOMO: “She’s a radiant mother and he’s a beautiful father, and now they both know these things that I don’t.” You might call it her most vulnerable record to date, if you’re into that sort of thing.


A raw, high-energy run-through of their early live set, the Beatles' debut is also the sound of rock'n'roll finding a suddenly large, new audience.

Please Please Me

Whether or not you think the Beatles are the best rock band of all time, it's hard to deny they're the best rock story*.* Their narrative arc-- of graft, tragedy, and stardom; of genius emerging and fragmenting-- is irresistible. More so when you factor in the sense that they drove their fascinating times as much as mirrored them.
But the satisfying sweep of the Beatles' epic risks doing them a disservice. It makes their achievements and development feel somehow predestined, an inevitable consequence of their astonishing talent. Of course, this isn't the case: Every record they made was born out of a new set of challenges and built around tough decisions. The marketing of the band over the past few decades by their record label, Apple, has been aimed at creating a sense of apart-ness: Let lesser talents digitize their songs, feature on compilations, sell their music to samplers. The Beatles are different. This flatters listeners who were there, but setting the band apart from the rest of the pop world risks sterilizing their music and making newcomers as resentful as curious.
Besides, at the start they weren't so different at all. Britain in the early 1960s swarmed with rock'n'roll bands, creating local scenes like the Mersey Sound the Beatles dominated. Rock'n'roll hadn't died out, but it had become unfashionable in showbiz eyes-- a small-club dance music that thrived on local passion. It was raucous, even charming in a quaint way, but there was no money in it for the big-timers of the London music biz.
At the same time the record market was booming. The Conservative UK government of the late 1950s had deliberately stoked a consumer boom: Aping the post-war consumption of the U.S., more British households than ever owned TVs, washing machines, and record players. The number of singles sold in Britain increased eightfold between the emergence of Elvis in 1956 and the Beatles in '63. Combine this massively increased potential audience with the local popularity of rock'n'roll and some kind of crossover success seems inevitable-- the idiocy of the Decca label in turning down the Beatles isn't so much a businessman's failure to recognize genius as a businessman's failure to recognize good business.
The Beatles' life as a rock'n'roll band-- their fabled first acts in Hamburg clubs and Liverpool's Cavern-- is mostly lost to us. The party line on Please Please Me is that it's a raw, high-energy run-through of their live set, but to me this seems just a little disingenuous. It's not even that the album, by necessity, can't reflect the group's two-hour shows and the frenzy-baiting lengths they'd push setpiece songs to. It's that the disc was recorded on the back of a #1 single, and there was a big new audience to consider when selecting material. There's rawness here-- rawness they never quite captured again-- but a lot of sweetness too, particularly in Lennon-McCartney originals "P.S. I Love You" and "Do You Want to Know a Secret".
Rather than an accurate document of an evening with the pre-fame Beatles, Please Please Me works more like a DJ mix album-- a truncated, idealized teaser for their early live shows. More than any other of their records, Please Please Me is a dance music album. Almost everything on the record, even ballads like "Anna", has a swing and a kick born from the hard experience of making a small club move. And it starts and ends with "I Saw Her Standing There" and "Twist and Shout", the most kinetic, danceable tracks they ever made.
The "evening with the band" feel makes Please Please Me a more coherent experience than other cover-heavy Beatles albums: Here other peoples' songs work not just as filler, but as markers for styles and effects the band admired and might return to as songwriters. McCartney, for instance, would go on to write songs whose drama and emotional nuance would embarrass "A Taste of Honey", but for now he puts his all into its cornball melodrama, and the song fits.
Please Please Me also works as a unit because the group's vocals are so great. At least some of this is due to the remastering, which makes the Beatles' singing thrillingly up-close and immediate. I'd never really paid much attention to "Chains" and the Ringo-led "Boys", but the clearer vocals on each-- "Chains"' sarcastic snarls and the harmonies helping Ringo out-- make them far more compelling.
And as you'd imagine, making the voices more vivid means Lennon's kamikaze take on "Twist and Shout" sounds even more ferocious. Done in one cut at the session's end, it could have been an unusable wreck. Instead, it's one of the group's most famous triumphs. This sums up the Beatles for me. Rather than a band whose path to the top was ordained by their genius, they were a group with the luck to meet opportunities, the wit to recognize them, the drive to seize them, and the talent to fulfil them. Please Please Me is the sound of them doing all four.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]


The innovative Toronto kulintang ensemble’s debut album is a hybrid of traditional Philippine gongs, electronic production, and Western pop influences.

Pantayo

In the southern Philippines, kulintang music is played by multiple Indigenous groups, including the Maguindanoan and T’boli peoples, during ceremonial and everyday events like weddings and village homecomings. Named after its main instrument, a set of eight knobbed gongs laid on a wooden rack similar to a xylophone, it’s often accompanied by other gongs (gandingan, sarunay, agung) and a drum called a dabakan. Traditionally considered a women’s instrument, kulintang ensembles in the country today include both men and women. When the music was introduced to North American audiences in the 1970s and ’80s, though, it was played primarily by male artists like Danongan “Danny” Kalanduyan and Usopay Cadar.
For the Toronto-based all-women collective Pantayo, who describe themselves as “lo-fi R&B gong punk,” kulintang is a vehicle for exploring their identities and experiences as queer diasporic Filipinas. The group’s five members—Eirene Cloma, Michelle Cruz, Joanna Delos Reyes, and sisters Kat and Katrina Estacio—switch between instruments and share vocal duties, delivering lyrics in English and Tagalog. Produced by alaska B of Canadian operatic rockers Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, with whom Pantayo previously collaborated on the soundtrack to the 2016 indie game Severed, the quintet’s self-titled debut is the result of several years spent honing their sound in Toronto’s arts centers and music venues. Blending atonal traditional percussion, electronic production, and Western influences including synth-pop, R&B, and punk, these eight tracks are joyful, resilient, and wholly contemporary.
In the hands of lesser musicians, the hybrid of styles might come across as gimmicky, but over an economical 28 minutes, Pantayo prove adept at deconstructing genres and building something new with seemingly disparate parts. These songs never rest in one place for long, frequently shifting tempos midway to encourage spontaneous movement. Pantayo’s gongs often feel like additional vocalists, thrumming and conversing with one another as they oscillate between meditative and frenetic rhythms. Opener “Eclipse” begins with a simple kick drum, bass, and gently chiming gongs, before introducing cooing R&B harmonies. Instrumental centerpiece “Bronsé” creeps and reverberates, and the first half of “Bahala Na” floats like an Angelo Badalamenti dream and then descends into a cacophonous psychedelic freakout.
Unlike their previous recordings, Pantayo incorporates vocals, and serves as a love letter to the pop and hip-hop acts that the group grew up with. “Sometimes when I play kulintang ‘riffs’ I am reminded of some pop song I’ve heard and then this idea drives me to hum along with the melody of that song,” band member Katrina Estacio said. During a recent DJ set for Zoom-based queer dance party Club Quarantine, Pantayo paired their own tracks with selections by Missy Elliott and Canadian neo-soul singer Remy Shand. It’s not hard to draw a line between Shand’s 2001 hit “Take a Message” and Pantayo’s self-love ballad “Divine,” which pushes gongs to the background in favor of soulful vocals. Warped four-on-the-floor highlight “Heto Na,” inspired by OPM (Original Pilipino Music) disco songs from the ’70s, celebrates the dancefloor as a safe space for community to gather and be themselves, instructing listeners, “Pakapalan no mukha” (“Own up to that funky shit”).
As their platform grows, Pantayo continue to amplify other queer and diasporic voices, while challenging themselves and their audiences to consider their participation in colonial, patriarchal, and heteronormative systems. On Pantayo, they engage serious topics with the guidance of producer alaska B, who suggested they keep the “vibe a little light.” The record’s most exhilarating moment comes on the electro-pop anthem “V V V (They Lie).” Though the band likens the song’s varied textures to a glass of bubble tea, there’s nothing sweet about the implied story of street harassment at its center. The narrator hears a passerby say, “Fuck you/Really, really fuck you,” but they choose to roll their eyes and walk on, knowing the culprit is unlikely to fess up. And with “Taranta,” Pantayo sound ready to call bullshit and rally together in sisterhood. It’s only fitting that their name means “for us” in Tagalog—they know they’re stronger together than apart.
Update: After publication, some language in this review has been adjusted.


De La Soul’s knotty and brilliant third album is a fever dream of shared memories, historical touchstones, geographical landmarks, first-person pronouns and six feet-deep self-actualizations.

Buhloone Mindstate

In 1972, Nikki Giovanni wrote a lovely poem by the name of “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason).” Inspired by a trip to Africa, it was an anthropological toast to black feminine pride and drew strength from history, geography and, ultimately, impenetrability: “I am so perfect, so divine, so ethereal, so surreal/I cannot be comprehended except by my permission.”
It’s not entirely clear that the Long Island trio De La Soul had this poem on their mind specifically when, in 1993, they recorded their knotty and brilliant third album, Buhloone Mindstate. “Ego Trippin’ (Part Two)” was the album’s second single, but that title was by all accounts a hand-me-down from rap’s earliest eccentrics the Ultramagnetic MC’s, who recorded their own “Ego Tripping” in 1986. It’s possible that the De La MCs Posdnuos and Trugoy the Dove and DJ Maseo recorded their “Ego” without ever knowing of Ms. Giovanni’s existence—hip hop memory has always been shallower than its actual roots often demand. In any case, it’s hard not to read Buhloone as a direct successor to the OG “Trippin’”—a fever dream of shared memories, historical touchstones, geographical landmarks, first person pronouns, and six feet deep self-actualizations. It's also a notoriously and proudly inaccessible project. “Fuck being hard, Posdnuos is complicated” has become its unofficial tagline in part because it was one of but a few direct statements made in an otherwise indecipherable web of interlocking wordplay.
The De La catalog had always been littered with linguistic in-jokes and secret passwords, but the broad stroke mythology was fairly straightforward prior to Buhloone. Check any number of the nth-anniversary reviews that practically write themselves today: Their 1989 debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, was an exercise in fluorescent sampledelic hippie rap, conceived or at least marketed as an antidote to all the tough guy posturing that had previously come to define hip-hop. The follow up, De La Soul Is Dead, was the reaction to that reaction. The group recanted their flower child ways and knuckled the fuck up. They were weirdoes to be certain, but these lunchroom identity narratives—the Peace Loving Hippies Have Arrived; the Peace Loving Hippies Strike Back at the Folks Calling Them Peace Loving Hippies—provided an anchor for that weirdness. Buhloone was just weird, lost in the woods. There is no decoding this album; you can only hope to inflate its context.
So here it goes: Buhloone Mindstate came at a time when De La’s career was hanging in the balance. …Is Dead was a success by both critical and commercial standards but less so than the dominant 3 Feet. Their Native Tongues collective—an amorphous, ever-growing posse comprised of A Tribe Called Quest, the Jungle Brothers, and basically every other rapper to ever rock a leather medallion at the dawn of the ’90s—was falling apart in the way adolescent social circles typically dissolve with time. Dr. Dre’s genre realigning gangsta opus The Chronic had just dropped. Enter the Wu-Tang was on its way. But rather than chasing trends or (worse still) pushing back against them with a grown-up scowl, they embraced their fate as outsiders. It was a case of personal liberation via free fall. They buried themselves in themselves.
“This time out, the peace of mind was cool,” Pos told Vibe in 1993. “We dealt with the stuff we had to deal with on the second record... we didn’t care; we said, ‘Let’s go back to ‘Buggin’ Out.’” “Buggin’ Out” meant bouncing off the walls in a narrow space. Songs might stop mid-verse; verses felt like they might never end at all. The production was deceptively accessible, less chaotic and warmer than their earlier stuff and drawing a bit from the jazz-rap pool that Tribe and Gang Starr had been dabbling but without any of the explicit nostalgia. It’s a much shorter album than its overstuffed skit-heavy predecessors too, clocking in at under 50 minutes with just ten full rap songs and yet is crammed with more information than ever before. It’s never light but always loose. “We had so much fun in the studio creating it,” Pos continues in the same interview. “The mistakes we made on this album? We left them in, ’cause they sounded cool.” Cue Nikki: “I am so hip even my errors are correct.”
It didn’t have to be quite so bugged, though. The first movement of Buhloone hints at a more coherent concept album. The intro incantation of “It might blow up but it won’t go pop.” is clever but to the point, on some “No Sell Out” shit. And while the three songs that follow were definitely written from the advanced De La code book—“I hit the shines but I’m shoeing it now/’Member when the floor model had a spine? Well it’s all bent over/A dayglo nigga gets the red doormat/It’s a roller coaster when your shit’s burnt toast” laments Dove—they also occupy a clear thematic territory, navigating industry racism and the pitfalls of fame.
But then just as those ideas start to coagulate the group’s focus turns outward. They turn their mics off and make room for a somber five minute solo track from long time James Brown saxophonist Maceo Parker. Then comes a short freestyle from the Japanese rap trio Scha Dara Parr, who don’t utter a word of English until they chant “Yes, yes, y’all, we don't stop” right before being tagged out by a lo-fi live dub of Bronx old schooler Tricky Tee shouting about Long Island.
And just like that the whole album cracks open, giving way to a full-on psychedelic-egotistical history lesson. While Ms. Giovanni traced the full African American diaspora, De La narrows in on its one corner that has, for better or worse, come to most visibly represent it over the past four decades of hip hop music. Their Sahara was the South Bronx, their Noah was Kool Herc, their precious jewels were the hand me down tape recordings of late ’70s and early ’80s rap concerts funneled eastbound to the Long Island suburb of Amityville that they called home. (Pos’ personal background is even more tangled than than just the reels on his cassettes here—when he was still in elementary school his family was forced out to L.I. after their South Bronx apartment was burnt down by one of the many crooked landlords who would leave the borough in ruin while inadvertently setting the stage for the most important American cultural movement of the 20th century. You can hear Pos’ own take on these events in the opening verse of the gorgeous Michael Jackson-–flipping “Breakadawn.” His telling also involves catscans and stew.)
Though hip hop’s absolute commercial peak wouldn’t come for a few more years, it was already a global, multimillion dollar industry by 1993. And as is frequently the case with global, multimillion dollar industries it had already begun to lose sight of its cultural origins. Rappers who were once household names to the small cadre of first-wave, five borough hip hop heads had become ancient history in the wake of the Def Jam explosion. To many of the kids buying De La Soul tapes, particularly those outside of the culture for whom 3 Feet’s hippiedom provided an easy point of entry, Grandmaster Caz or Melle Mel might as well have been Fats Waller. It would’ve meant something had De La just said their names. And they did do that. But they also showed a deeper spiritual connection to the old school, foregrounding the language and stylistic tics of their predecessors. If you spend enough time listening to rap music, your brain will break, and all of your thoughts will be colored within the lines of the many raps you’ve memorized.
I think a little bit of that was happening on Buhloone. Nearly every bar on the record is a triple folded origami reference to a rap verse from a bygone era. Disembodied Busy Bee routines dialogue with repurposed Joeski Love adlibs. On the 12"-only “Ego Trippin’ (Part 3),” Pos explains: “My style was created from the tapes of boys and girls/Who had the second generation dubs of crews at Harlem World.” (For further B-side breadcrumbs check the rare, supplemental promo EP Clear Lake Audiotorium where they actually rocked alongside Caz, Prince Whipper Whip of the Fantastic Five, and LA Sunshine of the Treacherous Three on the posse cut “Stix & Stonz.”)
And however tethered they were to those old-school routines this was no revival act. There was a perpetual newness bursting out of their cadences. Pos in particular was peaking here, rocking a sharp-elbowed, crisply enunciated and instinctively avant-garde flow that had few stylistic precedents. Sometimes he’d stilt his bars, leaving half measures hollow or letting sparred ad-libs from guests like Biz Markie and Shorty No Mas fill in the blanks. Elsewhere he would ramble on for bars and bars without even hitting a single identifiable rhyme. I’ve long believed that the greatest rappers—from T La Rock to 2Pac to Gucci Mane—were the ones who rapped and wrote like they needed to get every last thought they’ve ever had committed to tape. Pos’ style here gives shape to that sense of urgency.
At times that stream-of-consciousness gives way to straight-up consciousness. Check the album’s emotional centerpiece “I Am I Be,” a pageant of self-definition that draws Pos back down to earth for a minute to paint the record industry as a modern-day slave system and to shout out his daughter and late mother by name. Dove, on the other hand, stays in the abstract, letting trees fall for ink playgrounds and spilling H2O drops, but does so with such sentimentality that you would swear he was speaking simply. “This record flowed on feeling, on emotions.” Pos told Vibe. “I listen to it now and think ‘Wow we weren’t even thinking of saying this or that.’ It’s like a jigsaw puzzle.” This is perhaps the best way to approach Buhloone as a listener, too. If you roll with the stikabushes and absorb all the zoas, and dodge every punk squid, the album’s depths reveal themselves with time. Let it all go over your head and it will come back around and hit you in the heart.
Unsurprisingly mainstream audiences did not show Buhloone the patience it demands upon its release. It did not go pop; it did not blow up. It fared well critically—four-and-a-half mics in the Source, No. 8 on the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop critics poll —and was embraced by diehards but was basically dead-on-arrival commercially. It remains a bit of a favorite amongst critics to this day, but isn’t nearly as adored as the more accessible De La albums. When it does get a mention, its inherent and remarkable weirdness is usually brushed over in favor of parroting the basic Won’t Go Pop thesis.
Even the group themselves has seemed baffled by the project in retrospect and reluctant to stand behind the strength of their own gibberish. On the follow up, Stakes Is High, they would take a sharp turn towards conservatism in both form and content, fleshing out many of the concerns about the state of hip hop that had only obliquely addressed on Buhloone and in the most literal terms possible. “We being real blatant now,” Mase told Rap Pages at the time of its 1996 release. “No more symbolism, no more beating around the bush, no more talking over people’s heads in a language we only understand.” In a 2005 interview with AllHipHop.com, Dove—having long since formally rechristened himself as just “Dave”—dismissed the bug outs of Buhloone even more directly: “Personally, I hated Buhloone Mindstate.… I think we were just a little too creative.”
But appropriately enough, Buhloone lives on in the subconscious of modern day hip-hop. You can hear specks of its style in Kendrick’s anxiety of representation, in Chance’s responsible whimsy, in Earl Sweatshirt’s ADD introspection, in Young Thug’s cascading chatter, and in Big Sean’s run-on sentences. It’s unlikely that all or even many of these artists have even heard the record—in part because it, like every ’90s De La album, remains woefully unavailable for streaming or legal download—but again, sometimes influence is ephemeral. And hip hop’s memory is still out of focus. It cannot be comprehended.


The late sculptor Harry Bertoia became a drone musician almost by chance, making tactile sound-art out of metal rods before his death in 1978. These previously unreleased recordings befit his legacy.

Clear Sounds/Perfetta

Lots of drone musicians have been called sound sculptors, but Harry Bertoia literally was one. The Italian-born American artist, who passed away in 1978 at age 63, remains well-known today as a sculptor and designer. In the last decade of his life, though, he also became a musician, pretty much by chance. While building large metal sculptures—mostly collections of tall rods standing upright on square bases—he discovered that they generated long, rich tones when struck. Enthralled by these sounds, he remodeled a barn in rural Pennsylvania to house over 90 of the pieces and began obsessively playing and recording them. A series of 11 privately-pressed LPs—released on Bertoia’s own Sonambient label—became highly sought-after among experimental music aficionados.
Last year, John Brien of Massachusetts label Important Records collected all of Bertoia’s albums in a CD box set, and began combing through the unreleased recordings that Bertoia left behind. In keeping with the format of the original LPs, Brien’s first release on the relaunched Sonambient label, Clear Sounds/Perfetta, is titled after single, uninterrupted tracks that appear on each side. And just like the very first Bertoia LP—1970’s Bellissima Bellissima Bellissima / Nova—this new record features a performance by Harry Bertoia on Side A and one by his brother Oreste (who assisted Harry in much of his playing and recording) on Side B.
The legend of the original Sonambient albums looms so large in sound-art circles that choosing their successor comes with some pressure. But Brien was up to the task, as Clear Sounds/Perfetta holds up well next to Bertoia’s previous releases, sharing their unique combination of tactile realism and otherworldly abstraction. Often the clanging and crashing of the metal is so tangible you can practically see Bertoia’s sculptures swaying and vibrating. But just as frequently, his massive sounds feel utterly removed from time and space—alien tones that have no real parallel in any music generated by conventional instruments.
Bertoia’s work reaches a frightening pitch in “Clear Sounds,” a recording he made in June of 1973. Amid a wealth of high-end ringing, sounds emerge that could be repurposed for a horror film, including buzzsaw-like noise mirrored by cavernous echoes and distant gong-like rumbles. There is a terrifying moment at the 12-minute mark that must be the disembodied cries of tortured ghosts. Yet “Clear Sounds” is also imbued with a calm, meditative tone, which persists even through the piece’s loudest, most skin-raising stretches.
Recorded in June of 1971, Oreste Bertoia’s contribution, “Perfetta,” is not as immediately striking or oddly intriguing as “Clear Sounds.” But Oreste’s style is busier and more tonally varied, and there’s much to be hypnotized by in his rippling static and quiet-to-loud drones. Whether you actually are hypnotized by this music or simply find it a neat sonic curiosity seems on the surface like an either/or question. But one of the attractions in Harry Bertoia’s work—and perhaps what makes it still sound so alive 40 years later—is that it's simultaneously a creative marvel and a captivating experience. Clear Sounds/Perfetta continues and extends that multi-layered effect, while stoking the fires of anticipation for what’s still to come from Bertoia’s archives.


Earl's latest release feels like the realization of a voice he's been working towards: one that is both fluid and all angles, vacillating between naked introspection and pushing us as far away as possible. He is whittling away carefully at the tendencies he's always had, remaining confident that he’ll light upon something that feels fresh and honest. So far, he's right.

Earl Sweatshirt: I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside

I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside

In an interview with Clash Magazine following the release of Doris, Earl Sweatshirt said: "I’m starting to sound like myself again*. Doris* is cool, but you can hear the doubt in my voice." The remark played into the narrative surrounding the album: that it was a document of re-acclimating to the world after a year lost to boarding school, of trying to figure out (amongst a sudden rush of newfound attention and worldly temptations) what kind of music the still-teenage rapper was really interested in making. Nonetheless, "doubt" seemed a curious way of describing the actual music on Doris. Earl exhibits a stunning level of technical and tonal control on that album; if Doris, in all its brazenness and complexity, was Earl feeling timid, what would the opposite sound like?
His latest album, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, suggests an answer. From the first bars of the swaggering organ-driven opener "Huey", it feels like the realization of a voice that, in some sense, he's had an APB out on since his first record: one that is both fluid and all angles, vacillating between naked introspection and pushing us as far away as possible. He sounds deadly serious and self-effacing at the same time, and his rocky, withdrawn psychology is more visible, and easier to trace, than ever.
Increasingly Earl is doing more with less, to an extent that might surprise many fans. He streamlines his verses radically, sometimes rapping at half his average speed on Doris. I Don’t Like Shit will come as a letdown to those who valued his DOOM-esque free association or Eminem-esque title-fight motor-mouthing, but he's lethally effective, absorbing whole styles for a verse's time as they seem to fit him. He strikes cocky, familiar poses in inventive ways ("Niggas want to fade me, bitches feel some type of way for me/ 50s in my pocket falling out like fucking baby teeth," "Niggas, my team is magicians/ We think of the shit that we want then we get it"). "DNA" finds him insult-rapping in stop-and-start and triplet flows straight from Kevin Gates and Lil Herb. He never sounds like he's experimenting or even switching hats—just finding the mode of communication that best fits his thought or mood.
The album’s aesthetic is still based in the ambling beats, messy synth counterpoint and off-jazz chording to which Odd Future releases usually defer. But Earl, who produces every track except Left Brain's "Off Top", dims the light to near-darkness. Melodies are oblique or hardly there, with keyboard leads diced up and strewn across tracks in fragments; drumbeats are tuned down and fuzzed out halfway into oblivion. The lead single "Grief" is perhaps the most interesting piece of production on the record—set back in a haze of post-industrial smog, it wheezes along like a broken piece of rusty machinery. The sound resembles the murky and glitch-ridden "alternative trap" of Chicago rapper Lucki Eck$, a recent collaborator of (stylistically like-minded) R&B artist FKA twigs.
While other OF artists struggle to avoid self-parody or anonymity, Earl is carefully whittling away at the proclivities he's always had, remaining confident that he’ll light upon something that feels fresh and honest. So far, he's right. He’s making music that never gets ahead of itself, or what he needs to communicate: the way he processes the outside world (on an example-by-example basis) and why and how he runs away from the things he runs away from. EARL’s precocious kid who said things you couldn’t believe he was saying, or Doris’ prodigal teen who had insights beyond his years, both feel distant. With nothing to prove and no longer an upstart, Earl sounds, more than ever, simply like himself.


The Wand frontman’s second solo record blows open the chamber pop of his first for a lysergic and unsettling take on cosmic Americana.

Pale Horse Rider

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that many musicians are just frustrated TV-show hosts. Not content to stage a mere livestream concert, a number of artists used their forced break from touring to launch their own DIY telecasts, from Miley Cyrus’ Instagram gabfest Bright Minded to IDLES mouthpiece Joe Talbot’s Balley TV to Yungblud’s transformation into the pop-punk James Corden. Cory Hanson—best known as the frontman for L.A. acid-rockers Wand—is the latest to cross the line, with the recent debut of his new web series, Limited Hangout. But where those aforementioned acts have used their online shows to reinforce their connection with fans in a time of isolation, Hanson is using his to scramble the signal.
For one, Hanson doesn’t so much host Limited Hangout as haunt it, appearing in red face paint and a yellow suit, and only opening his mouth to sing songs from his new solo album, Pale Horse Rider. But in between those psychedelic performance segments, Limited Hangout presents an absurdist, Tim and Eric-esque procession of puppets, dancing Uncle Sam mimes, and fishermen decked out head-to-toe in Spotify swag, all hosted by a creepy talking pink blob hovering over an ersatz Tonight Show set. In other words, the show is the complete aesthetic opposite of the serene country-rock serenades of its companion record. And yet, the two share a codependent relationship: Limited Hangout is a funhouse reflection of the manic media saturation and junky pop culture from which Pale Horse Rider provides a welcome wagon-wheeled escape.
Pale Horse Rider is Hanson’s second solo release following 2016’s The Unborn Capitalist From Limbo, an album of lushly orchestrated psych-folk lullabies that—like much of Wand’s output up to that point—still betrayed Hanson’s pedigree as a Ty Segall acolyte. But just as Wand eventually found their own voice, Pale Horse Rider finds Hanson evolving into a different kind of singer-songwriter. He’s expunged the last vestiges of arch, Brit-tinged glamminess in his voice for a honeyed cosmic-Americana croon and blown open the claustrophobic chamber-pop of Unborn Capitalist to bask in vast desert skies.
Pale Horse Rider was recorded out in the Mojave, and sounds like it—this is patient, languidly paced music, full of casual saloon-piano rolls and shooting-star pedal-steel sweeps (courtesy of Tyler Nuffer). But it’s a desert record where the glow of big-city lights can still be felt in the distance at night and the ominous hum of power lines infuses the air, suggesting the album’s peaceful mood can be disrupted at any moment. Standing at the crossroads of Music From Big Pink and All Things Must Pass, “Paper Fog” begins as pure cowboy fantasy camp—“The wind is at my back, horses running in my head,” Hanson sings—until the song’s ticking drum-machine beat explodes into a gush of psychedelic guitar. His TV show’s namesake track, “Limited Hangout,” begins in Neil Young Harvest mode before its jittery background noises become all-consuming. You start to feel like you’re laying in a hammock whose sway is making you nauseous.
Pale Horse Rider’s uncanny vibe is heightened by Hanson’s lyrics, which blur the line between fact and fable: “Angeles” shares a title and a certain bedsit intimacy with an Either/Or-era Elliott Smith track, though it’s hard to imagine Smith ever delivering a confabulated line like, “Your mama, she was a psychoanalyst, until she egged my car, and then she was my nemesis.” But when he’s not rendering everyday L.A. street scenes as mini-soap operas, Hanson strives to make the mythical feel real. Inspired by a tarot-card image of a bone-collecting skeleton on a horse, he turns the soaring title track into a redemption song that’s both triumphant and tragic, a celebration of a savior who may not be as virtuous as they appear.
After spending the record carefully tiptoeing the line between idyll and unease, Hanson finally loses his cool on “Another Story From the Center of the Earth.” Over the course of this eight-minute epic, Hanson drifts out from placid “Fade Into You” territory before arriving at his very own “Cortez the Killer.” It’s the moment where the silent flashes of lightning that were always flickering over Pale Horse Rider’s horizons become a full-on monsoon, with squealing solos that buzz and spark like a downed transformer. But even in this moment of chaos, Pale Horse Rider remains a source of great comfort. As the guitars fizzle out, the track continues on its steady path, reassuring us that every storm shall pass.

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Still balancing earnestness and technique, Marnie Stern's songs here are darker, the lyrics lingering on loss, regret, doubt, and failed love.

Marnie Stern

Marnie Stern's hyperactive finger-tapping guitar technique is flashy and impressive when taken at face value, but her records are memorable because they're more about earnest expression than technical demonstration. Her complex arrangements evoke emotional turmoil as the songs ping-pong between excitement and panic, ecstasy and despair, extraordinary confidence and harrowing self-doubt. It's intense stuff, and given its jittery rhythms and extreme treble, it's not always easy on the ears. Still, Stern's songs invite a strong bond with the listener-- for all its charged-up rock power, this is intimate music. It's like jumping headfirst into someone's psyche.
Stern's last two albums were long on self-directed pep talks, and channeled the nervous energy of her guitar playing into optimistic anthems like "Ruler" and "Transformer". Her latest isn't quite so positive. Though her words still show some faith in her ability to overcome adversity and change bad habits, the tone is far from triumphant-- in fact, some of these songs are outright defeatist. Stern's approach to songwriting and performing hasn't changed much, but the mood is darker, and the lyrics linger on loss, regret, doubt, and failed love. It's an album full of heavy, noisy catharsis, and the lines that stand out amidst the clatter are the ones most at odds with the can-do spirit of her last record. The fact that she spent so much time in self-help mode last time around makes the moments of crippling self-doubt all the more gutting-- it's hard to hear the woman who once declared, "nothing can hold me down!" and sold "WIN 'MARNIE' WIN" t-shirts at her merch table insist that she is "not enough" on two consecutive tracks. You just want her to believe in herself all the time.
The bad vibes on Marnie Stern have a way of highlighting an expressive, emotionally resonant quality that's been in her work all along. "For Ash", a song written in memory of a deceased ex-boyfriend, opens the album by cycling through stages of grief in waves of speedy riffs and harsh percussion before ending on a lovely, brittle melody-- "I want to be in your imminent, elegant light." "Transparency Is the New Mystery" is the closest Stern has come to a power ballad, and its equal measure of longing and hopelessness is totally heartbreaking. "Her Confidence" gains its power from an atypically blunt riff that blurs the line between terror and empowerment. Many of these songs would be little more than pyrotechnics and flamboyant gestures in lesser hands, but Stern infuses every moment of her songs with odd humor and wounded, fragile humanity. It's impossible to miss the distinct person at the center of this noise.
Given that Stern is a genre of one-- art-metal math-rock bubblegum pop, basically-- there's always going to be some novelty factor to her music for certain listeners. But with this set of songs, she's proving that the bells and whistles of her style are less important than what she's trying to express. This isn't to say that her technical prowess isn't still dazzling, or that her chemistry with drummer Zach Hill has become anything less than a thrill. As usual, Hill is her secret weapon. His percussion consistently enhances and complements her parts, and rarely in obvious ways. In some songs, such as "Gimme" and "Female Guitar Players Are the New Black", his fills seem to fight it out with Stern's notes, while in others, his accents fall on surprising beats. There's plenty here for musicians to analyze and dissect with envy, but first and foremost, this is an album for the body and the soul.


The rhyme skills and lurid way with imagery that first brought the Atlanta rap trio Migos to national attention remain on display throughout Yung Rich Nation, their major-label debut. It hints at weirder records it could've been, but ultimately comes across as safe.

Yung Rich Nation

As a young rapper with a fresh record deal, there are a few ways to navigate your first formal release. You can sidestep hype and release a juiced-up approximation of your pre-album mixtapes, as Young Thug did this year on Barter 6, a stunning but low-stakes offer that didn't seek new listeners so much as drag them in with sheer oddball magnetism. You can play ball with terrestrial radio, genuflecting to popular regional sounds and shopping for chart-topping guests with label money but also running the risk of losing sight of what made you intriguing in the first place. This is a well-trodden path littered with experiments too awkward to fly but too funded to fail, ill-remembered debut albums by Wale, Meek Mill, B.o.B, and the like that it would take dedicated stylistic retrenchments to undo. Another strategy is to forsake fan and label expectations to charge full bore into something scary and new. Vince Staples and No I.D.'s anemic, apocalyptic dance party Summertime '06 was a challenging, unexpected gear shift, jarring and immediate as shin splints.
Yung Rich Nation, the debut album from Atlanta's Migos, toys with a few of these methodologies. Throughout, the group leverages a further push toward pop sounds initiated on last fall's Rich Nigga Timeline with the harder edged meat-and-potatoes street rap of last spring's No Label 2. But what's missing is a lot of the goofy spirit and momentum of 2013's Young Rich Niggas, which drilled the group into the national consciousness with the madcap "Hannah Montana" and "Versace". The first five songs on the new album establish a plodding brutality, thanks in large part to darkly cinematic production from the Honorable C.N.O.T.E.; the lyricism is sharp and the cadences more varied than usual, but grim early album autobiographical cuts like "Migos Origin" and "Street Nigga Sacrifice" will likely scare off a casual listener drawn to the group by a "Fight Night" or "Handsome and Wealthy". These are all solid album cuts, but laid out in a row at the top of the tracklist, they're uninviting.
The album opens up around "Highway 85", a white-knuckle cop chase sequence on the interstate highway that runs from Virginia through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama aided by a C.N.O.T.E. production mining the sparse, Moogy funk Dr. Dre hasn't made much since the second N.W.A. album. Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff's tales of cruising out of run-ins with the law are gripping exercises in verse-length storytelling from a group whose lyrics tend to get absorbed line by outrageous line as humor. This classic gangsta rap sound is Yung Rich Nation's most intriguing fit; "85", along with "Gangsta Rap" and "Street Nigga Sacrifice", serves up a poignant reminder that Southern rap and West Coast rap have commonalities that stretch back decades before Jeezy and 2 Chainz hopped on DJ Mustard beats. They also prove that the Migos don't need a big ugly trap beat to get busy. (See also: Social Experiment's "Familiar".)
Lead single "One Time" pops up in the middle of the album suggesting that Yung Rich Nation could've been sleek and mercenarily hooky if the group wanted, but then the Chris-Brown-by-numbers rap&B collaboration "Just for Tonight" follows, illuminating what happens when an impressionable act courts spotlight too openly. The one is effortless and fun-loving; the other, labored and unnatural, like Migos guesting on someone else's album instead of the other way around. Neither one carries that feeling, which was so palpable on their early mixtape hits, that the Migos had arrived at radio thanks to a magical collusion of undeniable skill and personality. They feel like concessions.
Yung Rich Nation avoids many pitfalls that render major label rap debuts forgettable or else regrettable but sacrifices a world of possible intrigue in sticking to its guns. It hints at weirder records it could've been but, in choosing the sampler platter over a more brash dish, ultimately comes across as safe. Peppering what seems to want to be a street album with quirky little singles that jut out perpendicularly from the rest of it makes for a record unsure of whether it should shirk commercialism or embrace it. In a time where we're keen on young Atlanta talent but casually disinterested at the first indication the hit parade's about to subside, there's not much room left for the Migos to keep figuring out how to present themselves in a mainstream field of play. The rhyme skills and lurid way with imagery that first brought the group to national attention remain on display throughout the album, but YRN's warring agendas suggest a few more tries are in order for the Migos to get their formula sorted.

Atlantic / Quality Control / 300 Entertainment


The experimental polymath looks back on key musical influences in a 34-minute piece that seamlessly melds noise and melody into one of his most personal recordings yet.

Shutting Down Here

In 1990, Jim O’Rourke visited the studio of the Groupe de recherches musicales (INA GRM) in Paris. The experience was monumental for the guitarist, budding composer, and 21-year-old college student. Back at DePaul University in Chicago, O’Rourke’s teachers, he once told an interviewer, “were just trying to mold you into becoming professors.” In Paris, he was meeting his heroes, radical luminaries of the mid-century avant-garde, particularly the concentric genres of musique concrète and acousmatic music.
O’Rourke’s latest, Shutting Down Here, is billed as his return to INA GRM 30 years after he made his first pilgrimage. This narrative might seem like a bit of sentimental marketing boilerplate, but his 34-minute piece slots brilliantly into the history of the French studio, which pioneered the musical uses of field recordings and noise, along with the notion that compositions could exist only as recordings, as opposed to pieces meant to be performed in concert on traditional instruments. For O’Rourke, who rarely plays live, and whose pedigree as a composer is rivaled by his crackerjack sound design and engineering—he mixed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Ys, to name a couple of touchstones—the GRM philosophy fits well. Importantly, though, he pushes back against the studio’s orthodoxy by employing instrumental collaborators and ensuring the sources of his found sounds are recognizable. Shutting Down Here melds noise and melodic ideas so seamlessly that the piece works as both tape music and as contemporary orchestration, reminiscent of John Adams’ similarly audiophiliac The Dharma at Big Sur.
This isn’t O’Rourke’s first venture into the symphonic—or acousmatic—sphere. A spiritual sister to Shutting Down Here, his 1995 album Terminal Pharmacy balanced bracing car sounds with delicate instances of cello and woodwind. Shutting Down Here has a similarly mammoth dynamic range: It tempts you to crank up the volume to hear the swelling harmonics that begin the record, then turn it down again when a door slams. There are spectral piano chords, courtesy of Eiko Ishibashi, and a bit of trumpet in the last 10 minutes, played by Elvind Lonning. Yet in consummate musique concrète fashion, O’Rourke treats these orchestral elements like a computer musician layering blocks of sound, not a composer writing for the various pieces of an ensemble.
During the decades since his first visit to INA GRM, O’Rourke has worked on hundreds of albums that span rock, folk, classical, and, most thrillingly, the gaping maws between these varied styles. He’s turned ambient music into a journal-like daily practice with his prolific Steamroom series. He played rock star in the early ’00s, helping Sonic Youth scale peaks of both accessibility and audacity during his five years as a member of the band. Shutting Down Here, with its moments of moving consonance, gives the impression of a polymath coming full circle, approaching a very early passion with honed skill. The result feels personal and even direct, both strange words to hang on O’Rourke. Whenever we’ve expected the musician to embody these qualities—for example, on his excellent Drag City-released songwriter albums—he subverted our expectations with his famously evasive sense of humor and bleak worldview. His detractors have sometimes taken umbrage with O’Rourke’s slipperiness, as though the trait were invariably a pose, rather than a reflection of the musician’s character.
Shutting Down Here is further proof that wordless abstraction is O’Rourke’s way of being candid. His album is almost memoiristic, even though it eschews the literal for the heady crafts of recording and arrangement. Revisiting a studio that captured his imagination as a very young man, he chips away at his wit and irony to reveal a feelingful core. Yet Shutting Down Here never sacrifices the knotty complications that make his work far weightier than a mere genre study. This is a personal record, after all, and knotty might just be a big, welcome part of who Jim O’Rourke is.

Buy: Rough Trade
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