In the current issue of Bookforum, Jeff Tweedy, who has been documented referencing a certain darling\n\ quartet by changing ...

Uncle Tupelo: 'No Depression', 'Still Feel Gone' and 'March 16-20, 1992'

In the current issue of Bookforum, Jeff Tweedy, who has been documented referencing a certain darling quartet by changing the refrain of "Heavy Metal Drummer" to "Playing Joy Division covers, beautiful and alone," says: "The circuit between Justin Timberlake and a fourteen year-old girl is what's really important about music, and... that connection is more profound than the one between an Interpol record and a fifty-year-old rock critic." Whuh-oh! Holy Christgau! The Tweedist notes that if a scientist from the future came to visit us (why not a Terminator, Jeff?) that "N*SYNC would tell him more about our culture than any Will Oldham record." (Ahem, females have made remarkable advances in science-careering, there, Cap'n Foxtrot.) Then he half-disses Wilco! Have fourteen years of high-profile music-making got my boy all discombobulated? If he's truly under the spell of über-pop's nauseous gravity, something tells me he'd find the hullabaloo over his remastered, bonus-track-befattened early work with Joltin' Jay Farrar a tad unremarkable. And I'll admit: the worth of these discs to anyone not already a Tupelo tutee will depend on whether your response to monoliths is an infantilizing, golly-bum wonderment, or an urge to pull a Jello Biafra and tinkle on the shriney behemoths.
Let me set the scene for the cultural landscape when Uncle Tupelo busted out: The cassingle shelves were still reeling from the layered grooves of Neneh Cherry's "Buffalo Stance". People were fascinated with the psychological underpinnings of evil-twin absorption due to Stephen King's scouring of the subject in The Dark Half. Filmgoers finally learned what happened after Chris Lloyd's unforgettable Doc flew away in the garbage-fueled hovercar; and to tell the truth, we were underwhelmed by Cyborg Biff, Western Biff, and the absence of Crispin Glover as the fitful McFly patriarch. The scene was clearly set for a pair of Illinois malcontents to usurp and enhance a country sound that had already been fangled by folks from places as far away as California, some quite well (Rank & File, Green on Red, etc).
The "heartland" was suffering as usual from Bookended Syndrome, penned (if one can be penned in vastness) between all manner of paisley undergrounds and post-punk revivals. And even the South had that whole "Southern" brand to promulgate. So these two prophets of the twang-blast complaint-jam, Tweedy and Farrar, successfully tractorjacked a style of delivery, reappropriating it for the midwest, further secularizing its good-versus-evil conceits (which already hinted at man-versus-machine struggles) by installing a new industrial devilry. No Depression is, of course, the album that spawned a webboard, a magazine, and a movement (if "movement" is an accurate word to describe a music largely about sitting around, watching trains go by, inhaling silo rust, drinking, and feeling grandiosely bummed). What's beautiful is that the expression isn't Unkie's but A.P. Carter's, from Toop's cover of his economic theodicy "No Depression in Heaven"-- one of two Carter covers that beg for hill-cred on this hyperactive debut. (While we're being infinitely tangential, consult Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirshberg's excellent page-turner Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone for a history of the spastic and rambling A.P., the father of country who stole as many songs as he wrote.)
Reissues, though, demand to be examined in terms of how they "hold up," and No Depression's reputation seems vestigial, especially next to its follow-up, Still Feel Gone. Sure, "Screen Door" is a damn good skittle of misfitude, but elsewhere the boys sound like they haven't grown into their coveralls, and they were certainly yet to discover subtlety. Tweedy's faked southern accent can induce smirks, and Farrar's spoofable earnestness might have you bellowing about assembly lines into your Body Shop hempbrush. No Depression is innovative for about thirteen minutes, after which it's sorely redundant. The sophomore album is so much stronger-- it sounds like a fourth or fifth album-- that one wonders why the bash-n-crop genre these guys spawned isn't called "feelgone." In addition to how Still Feel Gone's spectacular drums and (cliché alert-- but they earn it) "blistering solos" benefit the most from the digital refurbish, the band had settled into its song structures: the lyrics, though still awful slogany, are less strained (especially the part about "walking cancerous miles"), the banjo backdrops are better timed, and the shifts from harmonica and acousti-pliddle into Hüsker Dü-dom are more organic. This album is a slightly wiser No Depression with plenty of power steering fluid.
Though definitely saddle-punk, Still Feel Gone is interestingly the least country Tupelo record, due to its trad-coverlessness, its Minutemen tribute "D. Boon", its heavy-handed production by the Fort Apache crew (who knobbed everyone into Boston-fodder a la Dino Jr and Buffalo Tom), its genius opener "Gun" (on which Tweedy synthesizes the entirety of The Replacements' Tim), and its genius closer "If That's Alright" (on which Tweedy lays the groundwork for what would become known as the grunge ballad). How did it become conventional wisdom that Farrar was the better songwriter? Much of his stuff is prosaic and melody-less; he may have better pipes than Jethco, but his homemade Stipe-Mellencamp-Linnell-Rollins smoothie can get hoary and grate.
Oh snap: The boys then hooked up with newly mandolin-competent producer Peter Buck, fresh from losing his religion and wearing vests over blouses, to record, in the actual South, their least characteristic but by far best album. (Sorry, Anodyne fans-- call me revisionist, but that out-n-back disc hardly sounds like a unified band. You can practically hear Tweedy sizing up new member Stirratt's mutiny-mettle. Even Still Feel Gone predicts a future schism, as any careful listener can detect seedlings of the irreconcilable differences between Farrar's insistence on gestures of meaningfulness and Tweedy's burgeoning nihilism.) Forty percent rearranged traditionals and covers, March 16-20, 1992 strove for a porchiness that risked hokum, but thankfully, Buck rendered the project pristine; you'd think it were laid down in some soundproof gazebo outside an all-retiree church. The acoustic guitar has rarely sounded better than it does here.
This record's Geffen-be-damned songs against capitalism and Danzig-be-damned songs against Satan helped to make Tupelo the favorite uncle of many a bandwagon purist. The not-quite bluegrass of Tweedy's tearjerker "Wait Up" stands as one of the band's most inventive moments, and slowcore owes a debt to the almost-undrummable version of murderer's lament "Lilli Schull". (This review will now acknowledge the stickwork of Mike Heidorn. The man kept the fuggin beat.) Farrar tormentedly taps into some woodland ghost on his rendition of Dylan's rendition of the anonymous "Moonshiner" (since revisited by Cat Power, who rightfully added a verse about wanting to tour hell). The songs about hard labor and unionbusting on March transcend the almost-quaint pre-NAFTA factory sentiments that underscore the first two albums. Tupelo's decidedly unescapist catalog reaches its apex in these oppression anthems, which, eleven years later, still haunt as mottoes of a perennially defeated army (and Wilco would, of course, go on to double-honor workingman's minstrel Woody Guthrie). Surely gazillionaire Buck was so enraptured by the blacklung alchemy underfoot that he could have never guessed that something called Wilco would tour with R.E.M., or that he'd play with the lauded troupe on a record called Down With them.
I'm the rare bitch who resents bonus tracks. They violate the sequencing of classic albums; imagine how a film's coherence would be disrupted if the "deleted scenes" played right after the denouement (consult the recent ripoff Forever Changes, though I won't complain about the mid-90s Ryko reissues of Bowie and Costello). This triad boasts the usual, serviceable smattering of faster versions, slower versions, live versions, and rare covers. Standouts include the unbelievably naptime-then-thunderous "Sauget Wind", among the band's top five songs, and proof that a fallen tree in the forest makes a bustass sound even if Albini didn't mic it. Two covers that should have been included on albums are "I Wanna Destroy You" (especially now that The Soft Boys are, um, soft) and Iggy's "I Wanna Be Your Dog". These awesome homages would have broken up the austerity of Tupelo's humorless albums; one of my record-store coworkers once tossed March across the sales floor, proclaiming, "I can't take their seriousness anymore, man: I'm trying to digest a hot dog, and I gotta live." An aborted, hidden cover of the theme from The Waltons constitutes the ultimate pop-south surrender, though the show's atheist dad remains an inspiration.
Funny how Tweedy went on to be the John The Baptist of futro folk-rock, while Farrar's last project was a (vocal-less, natch) score for a film about the homoerotic subtext of football. Though this band spent two albums raving about beer and entropy, and could be skimpy on imagery, they rocked at a better ratio than they didn't. But is being the forebearers of a genre whose proponents average two good songs per album really something to be proud of? All we need now is for some statistician to ascertain why No Depression is loved by a disproportionate amount of people with mustaches.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the British singer-songwriter’s 1972 album, an intimate and delicate collection of queer folk-rock from one of the best voices in his generation.

Labi Siffre: Crying Laughing Loving Lying

Crying Laughing Loving Lying

“There are things you can say in a song that you would be too embarrassed to say in conversation,” Labi Siffre told a BBC interviewer in 1972. “In a song you can say it and it sounds correct. It’s a cowardly way of saying things one would never say.” Delightfully unpretentious, Siffre sits in a gray collared shirt against a window overlooking a thicket of trees, still fresh-faced at 27 years old and already sharply perceptive of the vulnerability of his own folk music. He’s being a little playful, quoting a song of his own at the end. His confidence is earned: He had just released his exquisite third album, Crying Laughing Loving Lying, the record which introduced him as a generational talent, one who over the next 50 years would create timeless music that’s become a touchstone for his folk descendants, pop superstars, and rappers alike.
Born in 1945 in Hammersmith, London, to a Nigerian father and multi-racial mother from Leeds, Siffre was the fourth of five brothers. He followed in their footsteps and attended a religious school that proved an ill fit for the artist. “I was brought up to have low self-esteem,” he once said of growing up as a gay kid surrounded by rigid Catholic ideology. “I grew up being told by society that as a homosexual I was a bad, wicked, evil person.” The experience led him to become a lifelong atheist; he recalled being bemused at how people believed in an omnipotent man who “does magic tricks of life or death.” For Siffre, his emotions and beliefs mattered most—mindfulness of those around you, political engagement, love and compassion. He identified as gay as early as 4 years old, a sheer, unalterable fact that inevitably colored his life and music. “The most important thing in your life is what happens at home,” Siffre once said. “It is head and shoulders above everything else.”
To escape Catholicism’s orthodoxy, Siffre found solace in music he discovered in his older brother Kole’s expansive, well-curated vinyl collection: Fats Domino, Charles Mingus, and Little Richard, plus electric bluesman Jimmy Reed, jazz-pop lounge singer Mel Tormé, and the soul-stirring Billie Holiday. Those early influences often bubble up in Siffre’s music, delivered through his complex fretwork, bittersweet lyricism, and a sense of wilted yearning bound in sweet melodies. An obsessive childhood love of Frank Sinatra’s dramatic, heartbroken “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” speaks volumes to the wistfulness that arcs through his discography.
By the mid ’60s, Siffre had his mind fixed on becoming a musician. While slogging through an array of day jobs—driving an unlicensed taxi, working as a filing clerk at Reuters, carrying and stacking boxes at a warehouse—he played guitar by night in a trio at Annie’s Club in the Soho district, run by famed jazz artist Annie Ross. Modeling his bluesy style after legendary guitarist Wes Montgomery, the moonlighting allowed Siffre to hone his skills while encountering a series of stars: Mose Allison, Betty Carter, and Joe Williams all passed through the club, setting Siffre’s mind ablaze as he learned from watching his childhood heroes up close. Eventually, he began performing solo at saxophonist Ronnie Scott’s club, where he switched to singing and ditched the electric guitar, preferring the closeness of sound that an acoustic offered him. “For me it always feels as though the amplifier is between me and the guitar,” he explained. “If it’s all fingers then it’s just you.”
That intimacy, drawn from Siffre’s faithful acoustic guitar and his inimitable, high-pitched voice, imbues his music with a comforting glow, as if bathed in the warmth of a snug fireplace. Following his improvised jazz club education, Siffre briefly attended the Eric Gilder School of Music in his early twenties for lessons in harmony, guitar, and singing, where he discovered he’d “merely been hearing” as opposed to listening. At 24, feeling more confident and strapped with several demos and a backing band of his own, he spent three months performing at clubs in Amsterdam to find his footing onstage. When he returned to London in 1969, the demos had made their way around the industry and he was signed for his first album, spurring a prolific run through the beginning of the 1970s that contains some of the decade’s most beguiling music.
Siffre’s first two albums, 1970’s self-titled debut and its follow-up, The Singer and the Song, are rife with pristine, homespun folk-pop like “Bless the Telephone,” a song about waiting for a lover’s call that remains one of Siffre’s most masterful expressions of everyday romance. The records were modest successes, led by the lilting, strings-laden radio hit “Make My Day.” By the time he recorded his third album, Crying Laughing Loving Lying, he had found a sweet spot, chiseling every element of his craft down to a polished, delicate new form.
Crying Laughing Loving Lying is produced and written in its entirety by Siffre. The music runs counter to the flowery, psychedelic English folk of the era, confronting the listener immediately with the stark a cappella song “Saved.” “I am a free man, and my father he was a slave,” he sings, voice soaring into an echo, “I have been broken but my children will be saved.” The song sets the table for the album’s focus on nurturing and being nurtured above any other higher power. “I don’t need religion to tell me what to do,” he affirms. “I know that I should love you.”
An album full of sumptuous acoustic folk, Crying Laughing Loving Lying remains his best work, a fine-wrought synthesis of his lovestruck sound. The jaunty “It Must Be Love” rides a taut ukulele melody during its verses before blooming into a full-hearted valentine: “I need to be near you every night, every day,” he sings, gentle as a down comforter. It’s no wonder the crowdpleaser became the album’s biggest hit, lending itself well to a swaying Top of the Pops performance and reaching No. 14 on the UK charts. But the best song is the knotty, early highlight “Cannock Chase.” Siffre’s guitar gently canters forward while his voice reaches up into a dreamy falsetto to overcome a wave of self-doubt. “I thought my day would never come,” he sings, “Maybe it won’t/But I’ll have fun and I’ll hold tight/’Cause that way it might.” The hopefulness is spurred on by a flurry of horns and strings, rising around him like birdsong.
Siffre’s openness is his greatest strength as a songwriter. He had come out of the closet by the time Crying was released, and was no longer writing oblique lyrics in his ballads. “It occurred to me that I couldn’t do that any more,” he said, instead determined to speak directly about the men he loved, even if listeners didn’t catch on so easily. “I don’t care if there’s another man/I don’t care if there’s three or four,” he sings with a tremble in his throat on the lullaby “Fool Me a Good Night.” “I don’t care because it’s better than the way I was living before.” His queer love songs were written in plain sight, unavoidable to those who listened close enough. (“Give me the simple signs,” he sings on the same song, “Just the ones I want to see.”) The same is true of the sweet, minute-long “Till Forever,” which opens with the image of Siffre peering up from a book to see his lover asleep and wearing his sweater on the sofa, a scene of lived-in romantic bliss that’s restorative in its sincerity. “Put your arms around me, now, after all this time,” Siffre sings in a rousing example of his eye-widening breath control, allowing the phrase to deepen like an exhale.
Siffre’s steady command extends to his uniquely diaristic songs, adding further heft to the ethereal instrumentation and songwriting. “Hotel Room Song” is one of the few tracks about a specific autobiographical moment, based on a TV interview that put Siffre in a sour mood before a concert. The song catches him mid-thought over career doubts, captured against rippling guitar and celesta: “Last night I thought ‘I’ll never ever write another song,’” he sings ponderously, “Last night I decided that all the songs I write are wrong.” It’s a brief self-portrait of a young artist struggling with the demands of an industry he already found himself in spiritual conflict with.
On the title track, another hit single, he finds astonishing beauty in simplicity. Locking into a mesmerizing roundelay, Siffre circles a tranquil guitar melody with warm, multi-tracked vocals, moving through four similar verses that capture a swirl of contradictions with sly ease. “Loving never did me no good no how,” he sings, “That’s why I can’t love you now.” Then he reveals the undercurrent of irony: “Lying never did nobody no good, no how,” he allows, voice fading into the air, “So why am I lying now?” It’s a distillation of his best songwriting impulses, roaming and tightened at once, with sheer joy holding its center.
Crying Laughing Loving Lying reached No. 11 on the UK charts, making it his most successful album and leading to critical acclaim and a wider fanbase. The music on his three follow-up albums, especially 1973’s social justice-minded For the Children and 1975’s funky Remember My Song, continued his trend of crafting precise, absorbing music, now occasionally informed by more explicit political and sociological ideas. Unsurprisingly, audiences weren’t as receptive.
Following the release of 1975’s Happy, Siffre moved to the English countryside to spend time with his lifelong partner and husband, Peter Lloyd, and focus on different pursuits. He was disillusioned by a fickle music industry and the constant demand to write singles resembling past successes. “I went in believing that the music business would be run by—who else?—musicians,” he conceded. Siffre also faced the claustrophobic labeling of his music by his various identities. “Being Black, you were supposed to be ethnic. Being gay, you were supposed to be camp,” he explained. “Then you could be put in a little box.” His work always resisted such markers and Siffre insisted that his music be respected on its own, never abiding by the cult of celebrity around any artist.
During his absence from the spotlight, however, Siffre never stopped writing. He returned to the charts in 1987 when, horrified by a documentary on apartheid in South Africa, he penned the anthemic “(Something Inside) So Strong” as a direct response. While its lyrics vividly condemn racist discrimination, “So Strong” is multifaceted and speaks just as easily to Siffre’s sexuality. “The higher you build your barriers/The taller I become,” go the opening lines, offering a path of self-expression for those who may not have one readily available. Through his music, Siffre has always subverted the ways institutions exert power over people, threading themes of self-empowerment into his easy-listening production with subtle repose. During Pride month in 2020, he released the ballad “(Love Is Love Is Love) Why Isn’t Love Enough?,” a reworking of an older track that speaks to years of living and loving as a queer person.
Though Siffre never became a household name, his influence is wide-reaching. When the ska-punk band Madness covered “It Must Be Love” in 1981, it peaked at No. 4 in the UK and has since become a wedding staple in the country (Siffre is there at the end of the video, grinning and playing a violin as a surprise member of the band). Olivia Newton-John released a version of “Crying Laughing Loving Lying” in 1975, while Kenny Rogers covered “So Strong” and built an entire album around the song only a year after its release, giving it a healthy second wind. As recently as 2014, Kelis recorded a cover of “Bless the Telephone,” adding to the song’s lovelorn pathos with her own faithful spin.
It’s easy to see why so many artists remain besotted by Siffre’s unassuming complexity. His work most prominently pumps through hip-hop’s DNA; it’s Siffre’s funky guitar, reinterpreted from the delirious 1975 two-hander “I Got the…,” that Jay-Z used for “Streets Is Watching” and which Dr. Dre looped in order to launch Eminem’s career on “My Name Is.” (Siffre, unfamiliar with sampling and bothered by Eminem’s lazily homophobic and misogynist lyrics, only approved a clean version of the track at the time.) On “I Wonder,” a beatific track from Kanye West’s 2007 album Graduation, West lifts a passage from Crying’s “My Song” and leaves it largely intact, fully understanding the power of his voice left unadorned. Siffre’s work is so stitched into the pop cultural fabric that, once you start to look, you find his fingerprints everywhere.
Now in his 70s, Siffre is a prolific author and has begun to open up more in interviews on his undersung career with characteristically British modesty—“I’m getting used to being rediscovered,” he joked with a hearty laugh during a 2020 podcast. His entire catalog is rooted in that unswaying sense of self. “I don’t believe in giving the audience what they want,” he said in that early 1972 BBC interview. “I believe in giving them my best and making them like it. You don’t make hit records that way, but you can sleep at night.” A profound sense of dignity courses through Siffre’s entire career, but it effloresced on Crying Laughing Loving Lying, a statement of compassion that hasn’t lost any of its well-worn charms.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.


Assisted by Brooklyn beatmaker DJ Rude One, the rambunctious rapper makes his most focused, pared-down project yet.

DJ Rude One / RXK Nephew: The Onederful Nephew

The Onederful Nephew

RXK Nephew is a bug-eyed paranoiac with a work ethic like no other. When he’s really in the zone, you’ll blink and discover 10 new songs on his YouTube channel. Included in his immense catalog are insights into all the ways you can block someone online (on Yahoo!, PayPal, the Canadian dating site Plenty of Fish), why certain male artists are problematic (“Lil Yachty never had a yacht before rap”), and why he wants to sue Applebees (“Bitch I’ve been having 2 for $20”). He’ll seemingly riff on anything, over anything—slinking West Coast funk, spacey Atlanta trap—even if he hates the beat.
Earlier this year, Neph declared intentions to be more strategic, slowing down his output ahead of his studio debut, Till I’m Dead, which he recorded sober with only one producer. That more considered pacing didn’t last long—he released five projects in three months, but they all had a sense of polish that his loosies tend to lack. Now, Neph teams up with Brooklyn producer DJ Rude One for The Onederful Nephew, his most focused, pared-down project yet. In lieu of his typically colorful, haphazard palette is tense neo-boom bap; Rude One’s beats are restrained to a white-knuckling degree, pairing barely-there loops with spare percussion.
This restraint rubs off on Neph, who tones down his usual ranting and cultivates a menacing presence. His writing takes on a sickly hue. Over the horror-movie organs of “Murder for Hire,” Neph wrestles with his love for selling dope and the guilt of seeing his auntie nod out and break her teeth. He gives himself a disquieting ultimatum: “If rap don’t work then it’s murder for hire.” On “Raw Dope,” he paints himself as a cold-hearted kingpin over tinny drums and harpsichord. The threat of violence underpins every relationship: When he snarls “beating up that bowl, I got domestic prices,” it’s an unnerving double-entendre.
Neph frequently raps in the second person, lobbing absurd insults at a target just out of view. Here, his disses feel like score-settling. Against different production, a line like “How you 50 with a 12-year-old boy chest?” from the brooding “F**k Yo’ Set” could be funny. But set against Rude One’s chiaroscuro backdrops, Neph is Tommy DeVito pressing, “I amuse you?”
The pair cut the tension with “B.B. Belt,” a hysterical ode to the bedazzled belts designed by B.B. Simon. Over Rude One’s most animated beat, Neph goes into a stream-of-consciousness trance: “I’ll run your ass over in an Audi/ I’ll run your ass over in a Beamer/I’ll run your ass over with some black forces,” he threatens, roasting his faceless, presumably broke haters. It’s a welcome respite from the near-suffocating pressure of the rest of the record, comic relief after a jumpscare, but doesn’t subtract from the rest of The Onederful Nephew’s harrowing vibe. The thrill of The Onederful Nephew comes from watching a loose cannon become more calculated.


On the followup to his explosive major-label debut Edgewood, the Atlanta rapper tries to show us his heart but trips over his own painfully limited writing.

Thug Luv

Tupac Shakur said that even thugs cry, and Atlanta rapper Trouble takes that to heart on Thug Luv. Usually a hardened street presence, on his new album, he wants to display a softer side of himself. In his follow-up to his 2018 major-label debut, Edgewood, he tests his limits—writing more about his search for intimacy, upping his use of Auto-Tune, and switching up his flows. But the album is tonally confusing, aesthetically grating, and lacking the deft touch of Edgewood architect Mike WiLL Made-It.
Unlike his idol, Boosie, Trouble struggles to reveal the layers beneath his hard exterior. On opener “Dreamin Bout My Dawgs,” he reminisces powerfully about friends he lost to long prison bids—“Young, it was just somethin’ ‘bout your spirit/Your smile just gave a nigga extra hope, I need you near me/Be free,” he raps. But that emotional force dissipates as the album goes on. There are songs about self-medicating with drugs and pursuing a soulmate, but he never has anything more to express than the basic idea that thugs are people too. In a mini-doc called “Origins,” he claims that “Special” is about his son, but except for a cursory “Had a son, I had to cut back on the drink” line, Trouble has nothing to say about fatherhood or what makes his son special to him. He does, however, manage to rap about buying a Tesla and offer to “take that big booty to a movie.” Like most of the album, the song simply exposes his limitations as a writer, and it’s hard to see Thug Luv as anything other than a massive stylistic regression.
Edgewood was executive produced by a locked-in Mike WiLL Made-It. Returning to hardcore rap after a few years in pop, Mike offered some of his most inspired beats in years, turning Zone 6 into A Nightmare on Elm Street and the bando into a haunted house. By comparison, Thug Luv isn’t just poorly produced, it sounds cheaper, lighter on resources. The bootleg Timbaland bounce of “Which 1 Of Em” and the lazily recycled “Choppa Style” beat on “She A Winner” are both shoddy. Verses from 2 Chainz and Jeezy are phoned-in, and Trouble can’t even seem to settle on any coherent theory on what thug love means to him. It is impossible to get invested in this rapper as the thug with the heart of gold when he won’t even commit to the bit.
The few occasions where Trouble shines, he’s back to his cutthroat ways. The sinister, Mike WiLL-produced “All My Niggaz” finds him standing his ground: “Fuck all that playin’ and wolfin’ I’m with the shits,” he raps. On “Ain’t My Fault,” he flips Silkk the Shocker’s 1998 hit into an indifferent anthem of his own. “Pride” is the closest he comes to diagramming the ways in which performing emotionlessness gets thugs killed. But in these songs, he’s all but scrapping the album’s theme of showing love and taking care.
One of Edgewood’s final tracks, “Ms. Cathy & Ms. Connie,” laid a clear path for the album that Thug Luv could’ve been. On the song, Trouble remains the same get-it-at-all-costs hustler he’s always been, only the subtext is that everything he does to make a buck—be it thugging or rapping—is for the sake of those around him.  He doesn’t have to spell out his love for these people or slather on Auto-Tune for you to feel the weight of his commitment to them. Trouble has built a reputation as “the rapper who stayed,” the guy for whom making it out didn’t mean leaving those in his community behind. The mini-doc shows him chopping it up at the local barbershop, mingling with the kids at a barbeque, and buying his mom her beautiful new house—more or less being the mayor on his block. He would’ve had far greater success leaning into that characterization on Thug Luv. Love doesn’t always have to be demonstrated so bluntly. Often it speaks for itself.


This new 50-song box set traces parallel paths through the futurist rockers’ rise, fall, and eventual reunion.

Devo: 50 Years of De-Evolution 1973–2023

50 Years of De-Evolution 1973–2023

Devo’s philosophy of de-evolution feels prophetic: Society does seem to be slipping backward. So the time is ripe for 50 Years of De-Evolution 1973-2023, an anthology of the Akron art rockers who made their name pairing wiry proto-punk grooves with sly social critique. Fitting their embrace of irony—they opened 1979’s Duty Now for the Future with a regal instrumental called “Devo Corporate Anthem,” after all—the career-spanning compilation is available in a variety of incarnations, the splashiest of which is a 4xLP box set containing a variety of collectible tchotchkes.
The air fresheners, lithographs, and Brain Dead capsule collections add to the distinctly festive air surrounding 50 Years of De-Evolution. Unlike the previous double-disc set Pioneers Who Got Scalped: The Anthology, this compilation isn’t a chronological document, but a celebration of a complex, sometimes baffling body of work. Too long to count as a greatest-hits compilation, too reliant on the band’s standards to be of considerable interest to hardcore fans—all the rarities have been in circulation for a while—50 Years of De-Evolution nevertheless portrays an act that simultaneously inhabited its times and pointed the way to the future.
Few bands had as electrifying or confounding a first act as Devo. They were art school students who were radicalized by the May 4, 1970 shooting of student protesters at Kent State University, where core members Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh were witnesses to the massacre. Devo used the idea of de-evolution to convey their outrage at the country’s swing to the political right. Casale and Mothersbaugh and their respective brothers, both named Bob, distilled their grimy mix of fantastical futurism and eroding industrial dreams in The Truth About De-Evolution, a 1976 short film where they appeared in a variety of guises. One of the roles they played was a robotic rock band who sang “Jocko Homo”—the source of the group’s famous call-and-response chant, “Are we not men?” “We are Devo!”—and “Secret Agent Man,” a perverted cover of the 1966 hit by Johnny Rivers. They were kinetic transmissions from an alternate universe.
The Truth About De-Evolution won first prize at the 1977 Ann Arbor Film Festival, but the band soon gained enough momentum to eclipse its filmmaking ambitions. Locking in their lineup with drummer Alan Myers, Devo knocked out a handful of terse, nervy singles that refined rock’n’roll to its brutalist essence, which left plenty of space for smart-ass sci-fi musing. Early on, Devo used cover songs to illustrate the distance between themselves and other rock bands: Where their peers reveled in abandon and catharsis, they specialized in rhythms so tightly wound, they seemed mechanical. This difference was especially evident in their version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which stripped the Rolling Stones anthem of Keith Richards’ signature Fuzz-Tone riff and ramped up tension with guitars that scratched to a clockwork beat.
At their best, Devo seemed like aliens translating cultural clichés back to an unexpecting audience. Witnessing Devo on Saturday Night Live in 1978 or happening upon the video for “Whip It” during the early days of MTV only reinforced how unlike the group seemed from everything that surrounded them. Their regimented concerts put the lie to punk’s allegedly anarchic spontaneity; the cookie-cutter conformity of their uniforms—especially after they introduced their matching “energy dome” hats in 1980—seemed unnerving. And the Booji Boy mask could be genuinely unsettling.
Although it’s replete with period photos and memorabilia, 50 Years of De-Evolution doesn’t quite capture the thrilling sense of otherness Devo conveyed at their peak. Heard within the vacuum of their own catalog, Devo seem more eccentric than revolutionary. This is especially true of the increasingly computerized music they made after 1980’s Freedom of Choice, the album Mark Mothersbaugh retrospectively called “the end of Devo.” The band carried on for many years after that, yet their creative processes shifted. Instead of workshopping material in group rehearsals, Mothersbaugh built songs on his synthesizers. The stiff, clipped drum machines and plasticky keyboards—crystallized on the clanging din of “Shout,” the title track to a 1984 album beaten into submission by a Fairlight synthesizer—were in a sense a logical progression from Devo’s mechanical rock’n’roll, yet the airless arrangements made it seem as if the band were succumbing to the very things they once satirized. Devo sounded most alien, ironically, when they were clearly just humans attempting to play like robots.
Yet 50 Years of De-Evolution goes a long way toward disguising Devo’s self-acknowledged drop-off in the mid-1980s by effectively offering two paired compilations that retell the band’s story in quick succession. Each CD (or 2xLP pair) starts at the beginning, then follows the group’s rise and fall. The first disc runs through the big hits, then concludes with their 2010 comeback. The second disc starts over with ostensible rarities from the early years—not exactly hits, but still canon—and then retells the story, ending once again with their 21st-century return. (The gambit can be confusing: The original indie versions of “Mongoloid” and “Jocko Homo” are tucked away on the second disc, while the major-label remakes open the first disc.) It feels like the compilers got halfway through the comp before deciding it needed a dose of the demented energy of “I’m a Potato,” “Be Stiff,” and “Uncontrollable Urge.”
By re-tracing its steps, 50 Years of De-Evolution winds up shifting focus to Devo’s true strength: Underneath the futurism, they were a tough, lean rock’n’roll band. The first three records are underpinned by the heavy backbeat of Alan Myers, a “human metronome,” as Casale called him, who nevertheless retained a sense of funk. Devo didn’t quite disguise this debt to R&B: They hired Robert Margouleff, an engineer and synthesizer pioneer who made his reputation through his 1970s work with Stevie Wonder, to help record Freedom of Choice. R&B’s influence is readily apparent throughout the anthology, in both their early songs and material from the 2010 reunion record Something for Everybody, which featured Josh Freese on drums.
Freese may not possess Myers’ subversive swing, but he gives Devo a necessary pulse that contrasts markedly with the mannered music Devo made in the waning days of the ’80s. That’s the real revelation of 50 Years of De-Evolution: These Midwestern art rockers may have portended the future, but in their hearts, they pledged allegiance to the same working-class rhythms that fueled 20th-century rock’n’roll.


Featuring multiple songs that became staples of the Grateful Dead’s live set, the 1972 solo debut by the guitarist and singer gets a deluxe edition with a new mix and some recent live recordings.

Bob Weir: Ace (50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)

Ace (50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)

In the early 1970s, the Grateful Dead were playing the most exciting music of their long career, writing many of the songs that would sustain them for the next two decades, but they weren’t spending much time in the studio. A newcomer might take a look at their discography between ’70’s American Beauty and ’73’s Wake of the Flood and conclude that the famously stage-centric band had abandoned studio albums entirely: a pair of live records and a solo outing each from singer-guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir. Though Garcia’s solo debut often sounded like the work of the Dead, and contained several songs that the band would make their own in concert, in practice it was a hermetic affair, with Jerry playing nearly all of the instruments himself. Weir’s, on the other hand, features the full lineup, save for keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, still an official member but in ill health at the time.
Just 19 years old at the time of the Dead’s founding in 1965, Weir was the band’s youngest member, and spent its earliest years as a support player, adding shards of harmonic accompaniment to Garcia’s liquid lead guitar lines. Over time, he grew into a sort of second frontman: affable and workmanlike, the guy onto which the audience could project themselves, his easy relatability a natural foil to Garcia’s gnomic mystique. Ace marks Weir’s transition from mere rhythm guitarist to a full-fledged composer and driving force of the band. Despite its origins as a receptacle for surplus Weir material, all of its songs but one became beloved staples of the Dead’s live sets.
Weir was writing songs steadily in the early ’70s: “I got a lot of material, and I just can’t use all of it for the Grateful Dead,” he told a Crawdaddy interviewer months after Ace’s release. But soon after he began working, the other members started showing up, asking if they could contribute: “Everybody gets wind of the fact I got the time booked, and I may be going into the studio. So, one by one, they start coming around, Lesh and Garcia, ‘Hey, man, I hear you got some time booked at Wally Heider’s. Need a bass player? A guitarist?’”
It is a Dead truism that the live tapes are more essential than the albums, an inversion of the hierarchy that governs other bands’ canons. Ace is no different. Surely, most listeners of its 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition will be more familiar with various bootlegged versions of “Playing in the Band” or “Greatest Story Ever Told” than the recordings presented here. From the perspective of deep fandom, it is almost impossible to imagine how the album might come across on its own terms to a listener approaching its songs for the first time. On the surface, it fits in with other West Coast folk- and country-rock of its time. But Weir, the Dead’s jorts-wearing regular joe, is a much stranger composer than he initially seems. Melodic lines, and sometimes entire song sections, jut out crookedly from their surroundings. Complex rhythms disguise themselves as simple, and vice versa. It might take you several listens to discern which part of a given tune is supposed to be the chorus, if it has one at all.
For fans, the Ace reissue is primarily an opportunity to get reacquainted with the studio versions of its songs. The most obvious difference is the horn section—instrumentation that the Dead never took on the road with them, but that Weir has continued to employ in his various projects outside the band over the decades. “Black-Throated Wind,” one of the very best collaborations between Weir and John Perry Barlow, his childhood friend and frequent lyricist, uses the tale of a solitary hitchhiker to reflect on a larger American loneliness. Onstage, it was rawboned, sometimes desolate, anchored by a descending Garcia guitar line. The Ace version is comparatively peppy, with funky punctuation from New Orleans-style brass. Disappointingly, a new mix for the reissue isolates the horns in the left stereo channel and brings them down to the point of being barely audible, perhaps in an effort to bring the accompaniment more in line with the song’s overall emotional tenor. Like many Dead studio efforts, Ace has an occasionally uncanny character, with a gloss that can seem gaudy and unsuited to the material. But why make it sound more like the live versions when there are so many live versions already out there?
The reissue also includes a live recording from last year of Weir and his Wolf Bros band playing through Ace in its entirety, augmented by a horn section and guest vocals from Americana stars Tyler Childers and Brittney Spencer. Fans will get a kick out of hearing Weir and Spencer duet on “Walk in the Sunshine,” the one song from Ace that didn’t make it into the Dead’s repertoire. (They were wise to leave it out: Its sprightly melodies are deflated by a preachy lyric from Barlow, espousing an indulgent and individualistic view of hippieism in keeping with his future career in libertarian politics.) Weir’s voice, an acquired taste even when he was young, has grown gnarled with age, and the decision to pair him with consummately professional singers like Childers and Spencer doesn’t serve either side of the equation: The performance can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be a warts-and-all affair in classic Dead fashion or a slick theatrical revue.
But Ace itself holds up as a rare chance to hear the Dead throwing down in the studio during its most creatively vital era. Sitting between the band’s stripped-down acoustic work of 1970 and the increasingly jazzy and progressive albums of ’73 through ’75, it comes as close to capturing their classic early-’70s sound as any other non-live recording. The arrangements are tightly wound, but no one stays too close to the center for long, finding outside spaces for improvisatory flair—Phil Lesh’s wandering bass melodies on “Looks Like Rain,” Bill Kreutzmann’s cascading tom fills on “Cassidy”—and then weaving back in.
If nothing else, fans and neophytes alike can bask in the studio version of “Playing in the Band,” Ace’s eight-minute centerpiece. That’s nothing compared to live versions, the longest of which clocks in at 46 minutes. But the Ace version contains some of the best jamming they ever did in the studio, at a relatively compact and approachable runtime. Onstage and on record, “Playing in the Band” is a marvel, slipping from liquified jazz fusion to hard-charging rock’n’roll and back, making them sound like two opposing sides of the same essential force. Only the Dead could sound like this, and only with Bob Weir at the wheel.


The Denmark-born, Sweden-based experimentalist works with humble, home-recorded materials, but the richly expressive dimensions of her 4-track creations transcend their threadbare origins.

Skærgårdslyd

The title of a recent compilation neatly sums up the sound brewing in Gothenburg: Contemporary Handmade Music From Sweden. “Handmade” is the crucial term here: Artists gathered around Discreet Music—a record store, label, and distributor in the southwestern coastal city—are cobbling together an experimental style that’s distinctly homespun. DIY to the extreme, this ragtag mix of folk, field recordings, and noise suggests gummed-up tape heads, weatherbeaten guitars, and waterlogged Casio keyboards in basement studios lined with moth-eaten carpets—maybe the occasional pagan bonfire, too, given the music’s often eerie cast.
At once amateurish and avant-garde, much of this stuff could conceivably have been made at any point in the past 50 or 60 years. Blod’s contribution to the compilation, “Tillsammans,” sounds like a pair of overdubbed takes from a grade-school piano recital; Hugo Randulv’s “Cello improvisation 1” channels Arthur Russell, John Cale, and Suicide in dubbed-out buzzsaw drones; Arv & Miljö’s “Dirty deeds done dirt cheap” hums like an outboard motor. A relative newcomer to the scene, Astrid Øster Mortensen works with similarly humble materials, but the richly expressive dimensions of her 4-track creations transcend their threadbare origins. On one of her two contributions to the compilation, tape-warped harp plucks and tentative vocalizations blossom into radiant, sweeping glissandi, as though mapping out the imaginative leap implied in the song’s title: “Har ondt i halsen og går til biblioteket for at låne en bog” (“Have a sore throat and go to the library to borrow a book”). She may be “a shy kind of being,” as her other song on the collection puts it, but beneath the hush, big ideas are at play in her music.
Skærgårdslyd, Mortensen’s second long player, captures a powerful sense of presence. Like her debut, 2021’s Gro Mig En Blomst, she recorded it among the islands of the Gothenburg archipelago (Skærgårdslyd translates as “archipelago sound”). Birdsong and church bells leak through open windows; murmurs in the background, or dishes clattering on a countertop, hint at daily life going about its business. When she plays guitar, her fingers squeak against the strings, drawing your attention to the physicality of flesh and metal; when she sings, her voice distorts slightly, as though her lips were brushing against the wire mesh of the mic head.
On Mortensen’s debut, her music sometimes felt less like songs than blurry snapshots of windswept vistas, and on the new album, her sounds remain raw and rough-hewn. The opening “Igenom Livet Utan Att Såra Någon” (“Through Life Without Hurting Anyone”) begins with footsteps, wind noise, and ghostly whistling; as she stabs sternly at bright, brittle guitar chords, tinny, rapidly bowed violin descends like a fine gray mist. On “Styrsö Kyrkorgel,” a solo organ piece, reminiscent of Kali Malone’s work, that Mortensen recorded in a church on the tiny, car-free island of Styrsö, she patiently builds meditative harmonies as smooth as the floorboards beneath her. In tracks like these, the abiding sense of stasis has more in keeping with minimalism than song form.
In places, Mortensen seems intent upon developing more fully fleshed-out compositions. On the gorgeous “Hvem Er Det Som Stjæler Min Ungdom” (“Who’s Stealing My Youth”), she sings wistfully, her voice high and thin over gently plucked guitar, wrapped in a warm blanket of slap-back delay; not since Grouper’s Ruins has a mood this lonely felt so welcoming. And “Det Endnu Usagte” (“The Still Unspoken”), where she mulls a plaintive monotone melody over slowly rising piano chords, could almost pass for a cover of “Everything in Its Right Place,” as if Radiohead’s song had been fished from a tide pool after years underwater, sun-bleached and worn smooth by the waves.
These songs hint at places Mortensen’s music might go next, but for now, even her most unvarnished soundscapes remain captivating. DIY music has always prized, and sometimes fetishized, spontaneity and error, but on Skærgårdslyd, the lo-fi qualities never feel forced; they are integral to the album’s mode of expression. Often it feels like a documentary of work in progress: Tracks frequently stop mid-song, pause, and then pivot to a new melody or instrument. All these strategies come to a head on the penultimate song, “Du Finns Kvar Någonstans” (“You Are Left Somewhere”). It begins with clanging church bells, passes through a squall of tape distortion, then settles on a dulcet lullaby for piano and voice. Thirty seconds before the end, Mortensen pauses: We hear background voices, footsteps, the clanking of dishes in the sink, the beeping of a microwave. She returns to the piano but the key is different, the melody vague. It sounds as though she’s trying to recall a tune she once knew, and as the volume fades out, she’s still absent-mindedly probing at the keys. Whatever we are hearing, it’s clearly not a rehearsed performance, but something rough and unplanned—a glimpse of musical thought in the wild. It’s a reminder that music is not a polished object but a living practice. Skærgårdslyd derives its power from this unaffected intimacy: a home, a hearth, two hands, and whoever happened to be in earshot. You feel lucky to count yourself among them.


Following Klaxons and Justice, the third of this year's big indie-dance crossovers issues its debut album. SMD's debut maintains an unerring devotion to always-hooky pastiche in the name of a good time and to pop's unbreakable and road-tested formalism when it comes to things like song length and the need for a kick-ass chorus.

Simian Mobile Disco: Attack Decay Sustain Release

Attack Decay Sustain Release

Can we call a moratorium on using the phrase "rock artists getting into electronic music" as a pejorative, unless you're going to chuck out, I dunno, Sweet Exorcist or that guy who used to be in the Housemartins or dozens of other beloved post-rave producers? Simian Mobile Disco were as deep in rock as a pair of quarrymen, even if you'd never know it to listen to this record. James Ford and James Shaw got their start in workman-like indie four-piece Simian, lost to the discount bins had SMD not branched sideways into success in the populist end of dance. That success first came with Justice's remix of Simian's "Never Be Alone" (titled "We Are Your Friends"), released on Ed Banger-- a label which, for many people, might as well be a rock imprint. And as a production team, SMD did the rock remix thing and helmed the debut album from neon enthusiasts and indie rock serial daters the Klaxons.
But Myths of the Near Future was, even accounting for taste, a tinny din. It was the sound of its producers trying to futilely collate the rapid-fire ideas of a young band without the taste or craft to execute them without it sounding like a drunken bar fight. And Justice wields dance music as if fending off zombie attackers at the DJ booth. Meanwhile, SMD's excellent debut album as a stand-alone group, Attack Decay Sustain Release, is for dancing, not moshing-- especially if that's dancing in front of your bedroom mirror to the radio, like Tony Manero, primping before hitting the town.
What makes SMD a better pop band than Justice or the Klaxons is their commitment to clean danceable beats (the electro arpeggios of "Sleep Deprivation" clang as loudly and brightly as a Max Martin production) and lighthearted and immediate hooks ("Hot Dog" turns robotized double-dutch taunts, motor-revving bass, and stampeding drums into the rollerskate chant the last Rapture album couldn't quite reach). But what really sells Attack Decay Sustain Release is Simian Mobile Disco's unerring devotion to always-hooky pastiche in the name of a good time, and to pop's unbreakable formalism when it comes to things like track length and the need for a kick-ass chorus.
Justice and the Klaxons are pastiche artists, too, but SMD's vision is friendlier, scornful of "weren't the '80s wacky" irony, with their ears wide open to such less-than-punk sounds as Bobby O's hi-NRG, Information Society's pure energy, Sweet Sensation's freefalling freestyle, and every lite-brite shade of pop-house and techno in the spectrum. "It's the Beat" falls over itself combining all of the above plus a New Order morse code bleep, a numerical-minded Kraftwerk squelch-melody, a Technotronic fanfare riff, and a rap from a Go! Teamer who wants to be Roxanne Shante. And forget rock, except for maybe the martial tempos, because there's nothing aggressive (read: "overly masculine") about SMD's mix, and nothing purposefully ugly, either. "I Believe" and "Love" both shamelessly borrow the classic big-fey-voice-over-booming-synth dynamics of Depeche Mode at their most pop and Erasure at their most soulful.
For SMD, electronic music begins and ends with the radio, from Soft Cell to Crystal Waters, and so its over-the-top friendliness, immediacy, and excitement has a cramped, amped-up hysteria, like all great bubblegum. (It's also short like a bubblegum album-- 10 tracks in under 40 minutes, most songs being perfect A-side lengths for seven-inch singles.) And even as prototypical indie kid pop-cultural curators-- who else is so into old bubblegum sounds?-- SMD's knock-out craft just might win them a wide American audience. After all, another indie pop duo (who used to record for Stereolab's label!) went on to become one of the top-shelf post-rave pastiche pop acts and to sell out arena crowds. And if SMD aren't quite Daft Punk, Attack Decay Sustain Release is a good sign that their Discovery might be right around the corner.


The English duo's latest studio album backs away from the darkness of 2010's Delicacies and moves toward the pleasure principle once again.

Unpatterns

The middle ground is dangerous territory when it comes to dance music. Simian Mobile Disco have existed there, uneasily, for over five years now. Making things difficult for themselves, SMD try to borrow from both ends of the spectrum without ever fully embracing lowbrow or highbrow, all-grins fun or fearsomely precise grooves. 2007's debut, Attack Decay Sustain Release, is their only album to really tackle the combination head-on, and probably not so coincidentally, it's also still their best. On Attack, SMD brought the underground's attention to detail and bubblegum dance's playfulness to what might have otherwise been churned-out bangers. They remembered the starkest acid tracks and the most cavernous bleep experiments were once played alongside stupid-fresh (or plain dumb-assed) hip-house foolishness.
If you haven't heard a thing SMD's done since Attack, you might think Unpatterns is the work of a completely different act. It's probably the most low-key and dazzle-averse SMD album yet. Gone are the sassy rollerskate-jam vocals and fat-bottomed rhythm tracks, along with any hint of rock-band bombast or hip-hop swagger. If all those sound like things that make life worth living, you may wish to proceed with caution. These 10 tracks build slowly, each crisp element added to the mix with a watchmaker's patience, and at their most energetic they're still pretty laid-back. SMD want part of the pleasure to be hearing that ingenuity in action, how you can build from just a rustle of synthetic snare drum to complex climax, all without going for obvious crowd-pleasing moves. It's not minimalism, at least in sense of your more acetic art-techno types, all scrawny sonics and inhibited groove. It's more like populist forms-- banging jack tracks on "Put Your Hands Together", lush deep house on "Seraphim"-- stripped back to the most essential parts.
When it works, it's thrilling because SMD can provoke an emotional response, make you swoon or tense up or bust in-seat dance moves, with almost nothing, as if trying to one-up all those other producers who need luscious chord changes, rude basslines, over-the-top diva interjections, etc. But while these tracks want your total attention, they're just as often best appreciated as ambient with a lingering taste of club music, something that passes the time pleasantly enough without really sticking. SMD want these subtle shifts in beat and synth to sound momentous, but their desire for nuance sometimes get the better of them, the results crisply rendered but without any visceral hook or ear-engaging compositional oddness, the extras that makes even the most intellectual-minded dance music compulsively replayable. When disconnected bleeps on "Cerulean" finally resolve themselves into an astringent hook, just in time for the gentle beat to drop, it's clearly meant to be a nerve-tingling dancefloor epiphany, even if you're parked on your keester nowhere near a club. But the whole thing's so dainty and fussy that it provokes a shrug rather than a shudder, and it's too beholden to DJ formula to go anywhere surprising, to play with the really out-there kids in art-techno's first-rank.
The lackluster stuff on Unpatterns isn't a chore, the way smarty-pants dance can be when producers mistake restraint or difficult as intrinsically interesting qualities. But it does make you realize that one of SMD's gifts, as a rock band that defected into the dance world, was a fearlessness at incorporating elements (singing, bridges, dynamics) shrugged off by techno aesthetes who too often confuse monotonous with hypnotic. (It's not surprising that your ears will perk up every time a vocal drops in on Unpatterns.) The last few SMD discs have gone either all-pop or all-weird, with wildly different results, quality-wise and otherwise. 2009's Temporary Pleasure erred by making the duo's crass hunger to crossover a little too overt for comfort, stuffing itself with limp performances by ringer guest singers and trying to pass off over-fussed loop music as radio-ready. (You know, just minus the songs.) 2010's Delicacies could almost be heard as a band recoiling from an obvious mistake. The darker, stranger tracks offered few concessions to SMD's original dance-curious rock fanbase, even if the album occasionally tipped into the kind of rote "stripped-down" groove-making that's been everywhere in the last decade.
And that's where they've decided to stay, apparently, even if Unpatterns backs away from the darkness and moves tentatively toward the pleasure principle once again. This album may lack the wonky heights of Delicacies. It also stays far, far away from the cheeseball lows that stunk up Temporary Pleasure, something for which I guess we should be thankful. SMD are still stuck in the middle, and if they've finally happened on a formula that goes down smoothly for the length of a whole album, you may still find yourself missing the slick tricks and rough edges, all that dance-as-rock oomph and crap rapping, that once made them so endearing.


Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart and Shearwater's Jonathan Meiburg come together for a new project.

Blue Water White Death: Blue Water White Death

Blue Water White Death

It's no surprise that Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart and Shearwater's Jonathan Meiburg were drawn to each other. They both like pretty songs with abrasive embellishments, and their voices sound startlingly alike. As a bigger fan of Xiu Xiu than Shearwater, I had to listen to this collaborative album by Stewart and Meiburg several times before realizing that the songs where Stewart sounded more like Carey Mercer than usual were actually sung by Meiburg. I might still be getting them mixed up in some places, and that's fine-- the haziness of identity suits both musicians' personae. Unfortunately, ambiguity also pervades at the musical level to less interesting effect.
Stewart is always best as his most extreme-- not just the violence and volume of "I Luv the Valley OH!", but the restraint and grotesque intimacy of "Fabulous Muscles". When he goes all-out, his music can be riveting even when it's disastrous by conventional standards of taste. Meiburg, too, thrives when simmering or combusting more than anywhere in between. This album downplays both of their strengths. The band name comes from a 1971 documentary about reckless shark hunters, but the air of danger and excitement is thin. Stewart turns in a few inspired passages of ominous lyricism, but the music itself is a rickety stage for them.
The opening track is short and boiling, like a warm-up for a big, scary album to come. But then it just keeps warming up. "Grunt Tube" is good, with Stewart's layered voice hovering over the piano for a big Antony-style climax, but many other songs are forgettable and embryonic. "Song for the Greater Jihad" and "Death for Christmas" are interminable, their meandering acoustic arpeggios and organ blears haphazardly splattered with power-tool sounds and noisy percussion. They tread a safe middle road between traditional beauty and experimental ambition. I'd be all for Stewart trying out an album of traditional songs-- he's got a great voice and an under-appreciated knack for catchy tunes-- but this is too equivocal; its conventional gambits are slackened by peripheral noise and draining repetition.
The record was conceived and recorded in a single week, and it leaves you wondering what would have happened if they had done more sketching beforehand. A couple of the best and most polished tracks are tucked away at the end, creating the impression that Stewart and Meiburg were just starting to seriously gel when they called it a wrap. "Gall" has a deep and dreamy feel, with hints of classic soul, and points toward the mannered singer/songwriter-style work this could have been. "Rendering the Juggalos", a glorious noise-pop topiary, raises another compelling "What if?" It's intriguing enough to warrant hope for a second record, but this complacent first try-- neither too pretty nor too ugly, too conventional nor too experimental-- feels inessential for all but the most sympathetic Xiu Xiu and Shearwater fans.


Cabaret spook, glam-rock stomp, and Germanic electro-house from should-be star Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory.

Supernature

I should probably like this more than I actually do. Who doesn't want to get behind Alison Goldfrapp and company? She's nothing if not on the ball, having transformed herself from elegant mid-90s Orbital cooer to elegant late-90s spook to an equally timely role-- something like a cross between Kylie Minogue and PJ Harvey, between Annie and Siouxsie Sioux, between Rachel Stevens and Beth Gibbons, the evil-twin model of the shimmery dancefloor princess-bot. And Supernature kicks off with that flag flying high, on "Ooh La La": some hard schaffel, some hand-clapping glam-rock stomp, some dangerously icy taunting, and enough Germanic electro-house action to make you want to drop it like it's cold, ruthlessly efficient, and strangely angular. Why do I have a sick suspicion that this is how awesome Peaches thinks she sounds?
So I do half-go for it, from that first rush of ice to the veins to the dots of old-model cabaret spook that crop up later, and from there through the buzz and pulse of the inbetween. Witchy English vibes, analog synth surgery, superhuman icy-vulnerable vocals, and production that sounds alternately like high-polish chrome and a sucking black hole: What more do I usually ask for?
Well, something, obviously, because somewhere along the line I lose it. Maybe it's the part where Alison wants to "ride on a white horse," though I suppose there's both a half-decent hero/heroin joke and a T. Rex reference in there. Maybe it's the part where I remember that I have Gary Numan and Siouxsie albums I still haven't listened to it enough. Or maybe it's just the peculiar plaint of the electro dance-pop full-length: the sound of those mid-tempo album-completing tracks. They're effortlessly organized, full of so much dense trebly shimmer and helium swooning and sighing that you actually zone out and stop hearing them, right up until you realize your ears hurt a little from taking it all in. They're loads of effort poured into a product that winds up sounding like nothing in particular, immaculate synth arrangements not quite making up for the fact that the song will neither bang and swell nor relax into a dreamy lull. If Alison were Kylie, she could at least spice things up by switching modes-- sunny here, earnest here, then back to machine-tooled intimidation. Alison, being Alison, has to stay all witchy all the time.
And there's the non-shocker: This is sure to sound better in the variegated sweep of a good DJ mix-- something that's not, given the present currency of "electro-house," so difficult to come across. The bangers here will sound fab on the pop ends of said mixes, "Ooh La La" owning all. The tracks that lapse back into Goldfrapp's old Felt Mountain electronic-chanteuse mold will sound fine in your apartment. ("U Never Know" and "Let it Take You" make a gorgeous break from the ultra-dense buzz, getting progressively softer, silkier, and more minimal.) But plenty of these tracks keep feeling like exercises: too thick and melodic to work like dance music, but with melodies that refuse to stick as satisfyingly as pop.
Which makes this pretty much what you'd expect: the prime-time flagship of glammy electroid dancefloor pop, curiously expensive-sounding and accessible to all, but strangely stripped of the functionalism of the dance record and the full thrills of pop. Sometimes that lands it in the sweet spot. Just as often, though, it seems to have forgotten what in the world it was meant to offer in the first place.


Two veteran selectors propose an ideal soundtrack for sunsets on Ibiza, drawing from Japanese electro-pop, soundtrack classics, and recent productions with a Balearic mindset.

Various Artists: La Torre Ibiza — Volumen Dos

La Torre Ibiza — Volumen Dos

“Balearic by its very nature is about three things: melody, counterculture, and proper personal freedom and individuality.” So Mark Barrott told me a few summers ago on the island of Ibiza, ground zero for an omnivorous and nebulous dance music style that exists in defiant opposition to the trends that clog the small Spanish island every summer. Though his philosophy may not be shared by many of Ibiza’s visitors, Barrott has nevertheless carved out a little niche for this club counterculture, right down to a residency at Hostal La Torre, an inn nestled on a cliff on the west side of the island where Barrott soundtracks the most mystical time on the island: sunset.
The classic chill-out Ibiza mixes of yore often came from cafés and luxury resorts; La Torre also releases its own compilations, which are helmed by Barrott and La Torre musical director Pete Gooding, a White Island veteran whose name can be found on comps with titles like Viva Ibiza Chill and Café Mambo Ibiza 2005. On the latest installment, across 17 tracks, the two alight on modern dance music, Hawaiian funk, Italian dream house, and classic Hollywood film scores, embracing and making coherent all of Balearic music’s quirks. It’s cosmic and cosmopolitan, dancey and drifty, cheesy and dramatic.
The collection opens with the elegant pop of Japanese act dip in the pool and their 1989 single “On Retinae (East),” a track that’s stuffed with sounds—piano, electric keys, pizzicato strings, chiming guitar, and clarinet—yet graceful on its feet. Balearic music is rooted in the 1980s, but the two selectors are sagacious in their choice of recent material: Following dip in the pool comes Studio Barnhus associate Ishi Vu’s 2015 track “Tema Perr Malva,” striking a balance between effervescent and exotic, and full of ethereal strings, wordless vocals, and giddily bubbling hand drums. There are also sparkling cuts from the UK’s Lord of the Isles and Australia’s Tornado Wallace, both of whom released impressive debut albums in the past two years that somehow went overlooked. Another standout comes from the duo Fuga Ronto’s recent debut EP: Their spry and refreshing “L’Uomo Invisibile” revives the famous Compass Point sound (Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love,” Talking Heads’ “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)”) with spindly guitars, dubbed-out percussion, and sensuous vocal chants—the aural equivalent of a sun-dappled day.
DJing in a Balearic style appears easier than it actually is. It’s one thing to beat-match hours’ worth of contemporary genres like house or trance, another to dart like a bumblebee between different styles, as one might expect to hear at David Mancuso’s Loft, a Moodymann party in Detroit, or at the fabled Ibiza clubs of yore. Though it’s a compilation and not a DJ mix, La Torre Vol. 2 succeeds remarkably well at the Balearic DJ’s sleight-of-hand. It might at first scan as forced eclecticism to move from Malian vocalist Oumou Sangaré’s beguiling “Diya Gneba” to the Durutti Column’s Tracy Chapman and Otis Redding-sampling “Otis,” and then on to a wind-chime-laced song about surfing, but it all hangs together beautifully.
So deft is Barrott and Gooding’s touch that they can take even well-known pieces like Vangelis’ 1981 Oscar-winning score for Chariots of Fire and reimagine them as scores for that serene ocean view. It takes a DJ’s strength of vision to make the well-worn harmonica of John Barry’s Midnight Cowboy theme sound fresh. But here, far from the bitterly cold streets of New York City, it triumphantly wafts out over the Balearic Sea at sunset.


Nelly Furtado’s exuberant energy elevates her new album. Her flexibility is an asset as she attempts many styles—synth-rock, R&B, and piano balladry among them.

The Ride

Nelly Furtado’s past decade splits nicely into two halves: a winsome folk-pop starlet amid a cluster of similar folkies, turned Timbaland collaborator amid a cluster of those. It’s hard to talk about Furtado’s career without mentioning her impressive reinvention. Furtado’s a stylistic chameleon, able to adopt almost any style and do it as well or better. “I’m Like a Bird” and “Turn Off the Light” had an exuberance lacking from the anodyne soft-rock and dreary nu-grunge alongside her on the radio. And 2006’s Loose—foreshadowed by a preternaturally assured verse on a Missy Elliott remix—distinguished itself on nearly every single, even with its clichéd good-girl-gone-bad narrative tread by countless pop stars before and after.
Furtado’s 2010s, however, have so far been one attempt after another to recapture 2012’s The Spirit Indestructible and its standouts, such as the M.I.A.-alike “Parking Lot.” But the overall pop audience hasn’t bitten. Enter plan B: going independent, getting metaphorical with Dev Hynes about the Large Hadron Collider, joining Merrill Garbus for a color-guard show, releasing a series of spacey singles. There’s a certain inevitability to this. As pop radio grows more and more hostile to female singer-songwriters and is as hostile as ever to older artists—and as Timbaland has torpedoed the relevance of his sound via a succession of bad tracks—virtually all of Furtado’s peers are going this route. Vanessa Carlton released an art-pop record with aspirations closer to Regina Spektor than Rachel Platten; Michelle Branch cut an album with Patrick Carney. Furtado’s now working with St. Vincent’s producer John Congleton. As always, this causes a little confusion. The line between mainstream and alternative pop blurs more and more by the month—but this reality tends to let albums slip off both radars.
Thankfully, Furtado’s vibrancy elevates The Ride from the rote affair it could have been. Her flexibility is an asset as she attempts many styles. “Cold Hard Truth” and “Right Road” have the bassy strut swagger of St. Vincent’s “Digital Witness”—the former with call-and-response interludes, the latter with a distorted guitar line. “Sticks and Stones” has M83’s arena synth-rock in its blueprint; “Pipe Dreams” channels Dev Hynes’ gossamer R&B; “Carnival Games” and “Phoenix” are piano ballads. “Paris Sun”—to shockingly good effect—recalls Goldfrapp at their steeliest. (Given that Alison Goldfrapp’s career has followed a near-identical trajectory to Furtado’s, maybe this shouldn’t be surprising.)
The Ride’s primary flaw is apparent in its mere titles. Too much of the record, particularly the ballads, falls into the songwriter’s trap of taking a conceit and writing every last bit of subtext out of it. (Most egregiously, as The Ride is a comeback record of sorts, is the right-on-cue closing ballad about a phoenix, executed with all the quiet assuredness of a track that’s already been done dozens of times.) Sometimes this isn’t entirely Furtado’s fault. “Tap Dancing,” written with Nashville songwriters Natalie Hemby and Liz Rose—best known for working with Miranda Lambert and Taylor Swift, respectively—strives like so many other Nashville portfolio pieces to stretch a figure of speech out to four minutes. And without the twang a country artist would give it, those four minutes are pretty bland.
Even these tracks, though, are redeemed by Furtado’s spirit indestructible. She tears into every song with indomitable energy, and usually has production to match. Though it doesn’t quite mesh with the ballad, the twitchy percussion of “Carnival Games” at least livens things up. Where similar tracks might coast on their heroic synth riff, “Sticks and Stones” pushes the arrangement to a crescendo that sounds actually thrilling. And “Flatline” is a subversion in the Swedish pop style: one loud chorus, complete with snare-drum fireworks and “Two Weeks” piano pep, set to the line “I don’t feel nothing at all”—the song equivalent of a Hyperbole and a Half cartoon. For the album’s graphic emblem, Furtado settled on sunflowers with swords, a symbol of how, she told Billboard, “life when it is at its most beautiful is at its most painful.” Like Furtado’s best work, the peaks of The Ride capture the same.


Super Furry Animals singer teams with a Brazilian VCR repairman/peace activist to craft a record on a homemade synthesizer/drum-machine.

Tony Da Gatorra vs. Gruff Rhys: The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness

The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness

The wonderful thing about the Super Furry Animals is the way they make the most illogical ideas seem perfectly sensible. Experimentation in rock music often implies a certain degree of pretentiousness and studiousness, but since their formation 15 years ago, the Super Furries and their offshoots have embraced the anarchic joy in pushing the structural and conceptual parameters of their psychedelic pop songs. So when band leader Gruff Rhys announced that his next extracurricular release would be an album recorded with Brazilian VCR repairman/peace activist Tony Da Gatorra, using his namesake homemade synthesizer/drum-machine contraption, the immediate response wasn't so much "WTF?" as "but of course."
The byproduct of the South American sojourn captured in Rhys' recent documentary, Separado!-- an exploration of his familial roots in Argentina's small Welsh expat community-- The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness diverges sharply from the winsome folk-rock that's defined Rhys' two solo albums to date and the sleek synth-pop of his John Delorean-inspired Neon Neon project, not to mention the Super Furries' grand, progged-out epics. This is lo-fi electro-punk done favela-style, on the cheap and on the fly. (Recording reportedly took all of five hours.) The operative word here is the "vs." separating the two principals' names on the album cover: The songs on The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness share the same rudiments-- Rhys' nastily distorted guitar riffs and the skeletal click tracks produced by Tony's Gatorra-- but given that the songwriting is split evenly between two guys from very different backgrounds who don't speak the same language, their respective contributions contrast considerably.
Sonically, the album is of a piece with the earliest home-recording excursions of Ween and Royal Trux, wherein the tinny resonance of the synthetic rhythms and the phased-out fuzz of the guitars bleed into the same cacophonous frequency. But even in these harsh environs, Rhys' melodic graces still shine through: It's not hard to imagine the robot rock of "In a House With No Mirrors (You'll Never Get Old)" and the T. Rexy "Oh Warra Hoo!" being used as raw demos for future SFA elaboration. Da Gatorra's Portuguese-sung compositions, however, are far more demanding, and not just on account of the language barrier. According to the accompanying press materials, Da Gatorra's message is one of peaceful protest and the inevitable triumph of good over evil, but his delivery is far more caustic than such hippie-centric platitudes would suggest.
Not being a naturally gifted singer or songwriter, Da Gatorra opts for circular sing-speak rants-- positing him as something of a Brazillian Mark E. Smith-- whose repeated refrains provide some semblance of structure but are prone to rambling on arbitrarily past the five-minute mark. There are certainly moments on "O Que Tu Tem" and "Voz Dos Semterra" where you can hear Rhys' guitar playfully joust with Da Gatorra's stream of verbiage, and you get a genuine sense of two new friends with different tongues devising their own unique mode of communication. But with most of Da Gatorra's tracks locked into minimal, metronomic beats, and precious little in the way of discernible melody or groove to latch onto, there's no compelling reason for non-Portuguese-speaking listeners to revisit them. When Rhys reemerges late in the album for the cool, Suicide-styled Parisian-protest salute "6868", you're not so much appreciative of the change in pace as left wondering how exactly these songs are supposed to relate to one another. The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness may attempt to forge a common ground between two trans-Atlantic artists, but even when working from the same instrumental base, the sensibilities at play here are still oddly segregated.


Every second of Brooklyn-based DJ and producer Brian Friedberg’s debut album is a cacophony, with sounds that range from Bible-verse vocal samples to foghorns to the tinkling of shattered glass.

Adepta

What do you do when your life’s work is putting you in harm’s way? Brian Friedberg, a Brooklyn-based artist who DJs and produces dance music as Rizzla, faced this quandary while working on their first full-length, Adepta. In a recent interview, they recounted how a cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment prevented them from engaging in the club culture that is dance music’s lifeblood, explaining that this sudden disconnect from the social and experiential elements of the art form freed them up to work in the studio. “Reorienting my relationship to the making of music from a direct product of DJ sets in the club to a more speculative experiment in world building has been simultaneously painful and liberating,” Friedberg reflected.
That combination of agony and ecstasy comes through in the sonic chaos of Adepta. Despite Friedberg’s stated intention of taking their sound beyond the confines of the dancefloor, the record’s iridescent intensity bears a closer resemblance to their mixes and DJ sets than to their previous studio works. Their last proper release as Rizzla, 2015’s Iron Cages EP, balanced trippy, relentless beatcraft with pockets of negative space. But there’s little breathing room to be found on Adepta, which comes via producer Kingdom’s Night Slugs-adjacent Fade to Mind and bears the brash, polyphonous touchstones of that label’s brand of dance music. Every second is a cacophony, incorporating sounds that range from Bible-verse vocal samples to foghorns to the tinkling of shattered glass.
It’s not exactly noise music, but Adepta can be a harsh listen. Yet Friedberg’s kitchen-sink approach to assembling these 12 tracks (which are accompanied by two fine vocals-driven remixes) is energizing even as it threatens to exhaust. British bass maven Untold’s Black Light Spiral, from 2014, is a recent analog—but while that record emphasized its endless-tunnel atmosphere above all else, Adepta’s most surprising moments highlight Friedberg’s melodic sensibility. The title track centers around a sling-blade vocal sample that slices through the splashy drums and bed of low-tone bass that surrounds it. “Test Man” fuses a bruising industrial techno motif with tangy trance synths. And the punishing drums of “Dewdrop” fall away to reveal a lovely thumb-piano-sounding melody submerged under layers of processing.
While compositions like these craft an environment that feels separate from the dancefloor functionality of proper club music, Adepta’s two bonus tracks marry that world-building studio nerdery with more crowd-pleasing immediacy. The effervescent “Fall of Cadia” will sound familiar to listeners who’ve followed the Night Slugs or Fade to Mind catalogs over the past decade. “Chainsaw,” meanwhile, is pure maximalism—a pair of intertwined, cascading melodic lines smothered by an alluringly grotesque vocal sample and a gradually intensifying footwork beat. Dizzying, disruptive, and danceable all at once, it’s a concise and spellbinding encapsulation of the frenzied perspective that guides Friedberg’s debut album.


With inventive storytelling and eclectic beats, the Toronto-based rapper constructs a breakup album that sucks everyone into the drama.

Crying Crystals

Even when she’s slipping between vantage points and historical perspectives, Haviah Mighty maintains a strict sense of focus. On “Snowfall,” the opener to her latest album, Crying Crystals, she vaults between first- and second-person narration as she tries to make sense of a failed relationship. The nameless lover she once dreamed of picking out “French oak doors” with is ready to bail at the first sign of choppy waters, and Mighty raps to her with a suppressed croak: “You the type that don’t believe in love deep down/Once the lust died down, I ain’t seen you ever since.”
You can hear the level-headed swag of Young M.A battling it out in her head with Drake at his most treacly, an interplay channeled in her voice: measured yet crushed at the prospect of failure. “Snowfall” doesn’t have the macrohistorical ambition of a song like “Thirteen,” a standout from her Polaris-winning 13th Floor, an album that charted the history of North American slavery through the signing of the 13th Amendment and beyond. But it takes a similar narrative approach. Both songs leap between the perspectives of “I” and “you” in an effort to live within the story. Mighty’s charismatic writing guides us through the switch-ups.
Crying Crystals’ subject matter is less wide-reaching than that of 13th Floor and the 2021 mixtape Stock Exchange. Instead, Mighty brings her fearsome skill as an MC and narrator to an account of personal growth and acceptance through every stage of a deteriorating relationship, finding autofictional spectacle in inner turmoil and outer conflicts. Sometimes, like on the second verse of “Lil Baby,” she’s depressed and, instead of taking the pills her doctor prescribed, she throws herself into fleeting rebounds. She refers to a “betrayal” but also admits she’s plenty toxic herself. On “Boundaries,” the emotional abuse she inflicted on her partner summons feelings of guilt that quickly explode into arguments. The drama is as messy as anything on Love Island, but Mighty gives dimension to petty spats by honing in on the hurt and neglect lingering in the background. On “Main Character,” pleas for affection (“You ain’t a work of art, you the gallery”) give way to molly-fueled ragers when fences can’t be mended. She brings equal confidence to moments when she’s losing herself in new love (“Zoom Zoom”) or tearing down a sneaky link who oversteps: “I ain’t make you bathe in my piss enough,” she growls on “All the Time.”
As a Canadian with Jamaican and Bajan ancestry who grew up enthralled by battle rap, Mighty brings a love for hip-hop and diasporic sounds that shines through Crying Crystals’ eclectic beats. The Jersey club patterns and pastel synths on “All the Time” sit comfortably alongside the new-age riddim Mighty conjures on the self-produced “Zoom Zoom” and the lush amapiano pulses of the sultry “Room Service.” Some of the more traditional rap beats—the moody guitar strums and 808s of the Tony Parker-produced “Manifest It,” the faded violins and thumping drums of the Bizness Boi-produced “Honey Bun”—sound unseasoned compared to the deep grooves that dominate the album’s back half. But in Mighty’s hands, these styles blend like different shades of the same color. She’s no longer seeking to bridge broad political subjects and autobiography: This time, she’s telling a simple story of love, acceptance, and broken hearts in vignettes. She makes it sound as cathartic and natural as deleting photos of your ex.


Like 2012’s Clear Moon and Ocean Roar, Mount Eerie’s new album Sauna is a careful cataloging of a single mind state. In some ways, it is an unacknowledged part three of that series: hushed and patient, a processional of wispy, anxious sounds paired with Phil Elverum’s calm, soothing voice.

Sauna

Here Phil Elverum is again, two and a half years after we left him on Clear Moon and Ocean Roar, and he's still, essentially, in the same spot. As he put it on Clear Moon's "Through the Trees Pt. 2": "I go on describing this place, and the way it feels to live and die." The line was a clear mission statement, and the "go on" in this formulation seems as important as the "describing". On Sauna’s title track, he says he writes "to prove I don't exist/ To show that I am beyond this animal form and this lost mind." Existence, for Elverum, is conditional, not to be trusted, something that might disappear the second you take it for granted. Mount Eerie releases feel like an act of philosophical tax-paying, Elverum’s way of reasserting that he still exists, at least for a moment or two longer.
Like Clear Moon and Ocean Roar, Sauna is a careful cataloging of a single mind state. In some ways, it is an unacknowledged part three of that two-part series: hushed and patient, a processional of wispy, anxious sounds paired with Elverum’s calm, soothing voice. The album opens with a monumental whoosh of an organ, accompanied by crackling fire and the hiss of water hitting hot coals. The setting is pretty obvious, given the record’s title, but Elverum makes it explicit immediately: "I don’t think the world still exists/ Only this room in the snow, and the light from the coals." The song rolls on for 10 minutes, a luxurious stretch of drone rock as thick and murky as the lyrics are clear: "My life is a small fire I carry around," he sings, echoing, maybe, the "carrying the fire" line from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Elverum has never been artful or coy about his music: If you listen to a few minutes of one of his records, he will probably spell out for you exactly what he is exploring on them, and he will probably even tell you how he intends to do it. There is an admirable transparency to him, a sense that he has nothing to hide and would like for you to venture into the mysteriousness of his records armed with exactly as much information as he has. His lyrics are riddled with everyday actions: "I walked to the bookstore in the rain that silently filled the air/ All the lights were off or dim/ And there was nothing to do but walk to town and back," he sings on "Pumpkin".  There is something almost aggressively quotidian about the scenarios he paints, like an indie film that aims to test your patience for how little action constitutes a "motion picture." Coffee is poured, windows are gazed at pensively, tractors idle.
As always, that mystery resides in the sounds he manipulates. No one else sounds like Phil Elverum. The amount of mood, texture, and feeling he can communicate with a single guitar drone is uncanny. His sounds feel soft and pliable, like they've had a portion of their middle frequencies carefully ladled out, yielding only boom at the bottom and wisp at the top. The only frequency in between is Elverum, his conversational voice sailing out of the murk like a paper airplane hitting your bedroom window. The arrangement serves as a neat metaphor for Elverum’s relationship to the world: His voice, small as it may be, is the only thing he can be sure of.
Musically, Sauna represents a thawing, the point when the icy chill of black metal, which has gripped Elverum for years, passes. Instead of snow imagery, we get rivers, and the blotted, heavy guitars and humid organ act out the thaw the lyrics describe. Piano and violins share a plucked major-key figure on "Books", which speckle the surface of the song like little orange and red paint daubs blobbed onto grey. Folky 12-string guitars ring out on "Pumpkin", a song on which Elverum clambers over damp rocks to observe a split-open pumpkin sitting on a river bed. The pumpkin, bright and fat, feels like a fertility symbol, and his fascination with it in the song stands in for the album’s preoccupations. On "Spring", the 13-minute climax of the record, the mood darkens, as the organ blasts out hair-raising dissonances and the thaw turns into a deluge: "Nothing is impermeable/ The basement’s flooded," he intones. Even in a season of rebirth and fertility, Elverum sees the possibility for oblivion.
Weather—specifically, crappy weather—has always been an inspiration for Elverum, something he discussed last July on the podcast Song Exploder. Deconstructing his beloved "I Want Wind to Blow", from the Microphones’ The Glow, Pt. 2, he called the weather "a metaphor for my emotions. That was kind of what all of my songs were about then and, arguably, still are." On Sauna, the weather has shifted, but Elverum’s mind state has not. "As long as I am drawing breath, the world still exists/ But when I die, everything will vanish," he sings on "Planets".


Billing itself as a “guitarless guitar band,” the New Zealand noise-rock trio endeavors to make bass, keyboard, and two-piece drum kit sound as loud as possible.

Wax Chattels

Wax Chattels bill themselves as a “guitarless guitar band,” which is a shorter way of saying that they make loud, taut noise rock without one of its customary ingredients: electric guitar. Instead, the Auckland, New Zealand, trio spends most of its debut album trying to find exactly how many different ways it can make a bass, keyboard, and two-piece drum kit sound as loud as possible. For most bands, that would just mean cranking all their instruments into the red as a way to mask any potential sonic holes. Wax Chattels certainly know how to do this with ease. Album opener “Concrete” is blunt and to the point: Each instrument cuts in and out with increasing frequency, starting and stopping until it all blurs together into a cavalcade of noise. “NRG” could break apart at any moment, the drums nothing but snare rolls and cymbal crashes by the end, paired with raw, organ-like squeals from a keyboard that sounds like it’s on the verge of short-circuiting.
The album’s frantic and frenetic nature may stem from the circumstances of its creation. Wax Chattels recorded their debut album—the first material they ever put to tape—in just two days, with sessions stretching until four in the morning, and nearly all of it was recorded live. Yet there is more at play than just nervousness and sleep deprivation. The musicians, who met while attending jazz school at Auckland University, know not to just repeatedly hit the listener over the head with a barrage of oversaturated distortion. Dips into airy psychedelia on “X-Files” tribute “Gillian” and Damaged Bug-esque pop on “Parallel Lines” help keep the album from becoming one-note.
Even more than loudness, the album’s defining characteristic is its undercurrent of acidity. Lots of bands are loud without letting bleakness or bitterness in, but Wax Chattels fully embrace both. As cheeky as it might be for a band to sing about “shrinkage,” dig deeper and something darker is at play, from the buzz-saw bass lines to the casual way Peter Ruddell manages to infuse a “Seinfeld” catchphrase with such spite. Singing the titular chorus of “Stay Disappointed,” the band’s resignation is palpable in a way only those leaving their twenties could fully understand. It all comes to a head with the closing track, “Facebook,” a lurching, static, borderline sludgy attack on social media and its dehumanizing nature. It’s the album’s weakest moment, feeling a little too much like another snarky op-ed written about those dang millennials. But it does serve to crystalize Wax Chattels’ larger viewpoint: The world is an ugly place, so why not make noise that reflects that?
Noise rock doesn’t always lend itself to variation; that Wax Chattels so gracefully maneuver within the self-imposed limitations of the genre is commendable. Their debut doesn’t dwell in darkness, but it does understand it. They clearly had fun, in the most twisted sense of the word, crafting something harsh and driving. It’s a concentrated sour gumdrop of a record, melting a small hole in your mouth before giving any relief. But that pain is part of the point.


Attempting to cement their title as a legacy rock act, Green Day absorb the kind of lazy regression they once rallied against.

Saviors

Billie Joe Armstrong says that he listens to punk rock every day. He wants you to know that Green Day recorded their 14th album, Saviors, while all three members were physically present in the same room because—and this part is important—that’s what real rock bands do. According to its creators, Saviors is the final installment in a trilogy that began with 1994’s breakout Dookie and 2004’s mainstream-conquering American Idiot. It’s been touted as a revival of the real Green Day: the dyed-in-the-wool East Bay punks who don’t shy away from politics, as they did on 2020’s Father of All Motherfuckers, or lean into bloated theatrics, as on 2009’s 21st Century Breakdown. It’s not the first time the band has trotted out its bona fides: 2016’s Revolution Radio was similarly promoted as a “back to basics” rock record. Saviors isn’t a return to form so much as another overcorrection, professional rebels trying to live up to their status as Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees.
“You wanna make rock’n’roll history again together?” That’s how megaproducer Rob Cavallo, who did some of his most famous studio work with the band on American Idiot, pitched frontman Billie Joe Armstrong on the creation of this album. Here’s what that sounds like: The guitars are overdriven to the point of parody, like a rock preset on GarageBand. There’s the dense opening solo on “One Eyed Bastard” that sounds strikingly similar to P!nk’s “So What,” the palm-muted downstrokes on “Coma City,” and the Blur-indebted riff that opens “Living in the ’20s.” The band is eager to honor its influences—Saviors, recorded in London, has a cover that might recall a famous UK punk group. But it often feels like Green Day are pantomiming some other band rather than embracing the three-piece rapport that made their early records so maddeningly catchy. Bassist Mike Dirnt is barely audible in the mix and Tré Cool’s drumming remains perfectly proficient, keeping time and nothing more.
Green Day used to be kind of transgressive: proud stoners when weed was still anti-establishment, self-aware pranksters in a scene that took itself deadly seriously. On Saviors, their politics are milquetoast at best and dubiously reactionary at worst. Armstrong wrote opener “The American Dream Is Killing Me” around the time the band was recording Father of All Motherfuckers, but thought the song might be too much of a lightning rod in an already polarized country. Who can say if things would have gone differently had the world heard “Don’t want no huddled masses/TikTok and taxes” back in the Trump era? Within the contemporary political moment, his observations are quaint and overly broad: “People on the street/Unemployed and obsolete,” he laments on Saviors’ first song. Elsewhere, it’s hard to tell if he’s for or against enhanced policing (“Coma City”) or anti-racism (“Strange Days Are Here to Stay”). It’s a blessing that in 46 minutes Armstrong never sings the word “woke.”
When they’re not diagnosing America’s ills (something to do with condos?), Green Day are trying to live up to that wildly ambitious album title. Decades removed from the sweaty Gilman walls that birthed them, their lyrics land somewhere between punk Mad Libs—“Slam-danced on my face again… Rude boy going comatose” from “Look Ma, No Brains!”—and profane Simlish: “Fuck it up on my rock’n’roll,” Armstrong sings, more mouth sounds than words, on “Corvette Summer.” He is extremely comfortable cribbing lyrics from the ghosts of pop’s past: “Don’t know much about history” on “Look Ma, No Brains!” and “Get around/I can get around” on “Corvette Summer.” Squint at the title track and its anthemic chorus—“Calling all saviors”—sounds strangely familiar too. Charitably, you could call it paying homage; cynically, you might wonder if this qualifies as copyright infringement. There’s also a love story somewhere in here: “She is a cold war in my head, and I am East Berlin,” he sings on “1981.” I’ve tried my hardest, but the best I can determine is that he means that he is thinking about her all the time, or that she is somehow rationing his food.
These days, Green Day interviews exude a sense of pride and acceptance: No, they’re not going to retread the Imagine Dragons DayGlo synths of Father of All Motherfuckers; they’re here to make rock’n’roll history! But with that comes complacency. Stripped of the urge to reinvent themselves, Green Day hope to ride into the sunset as America’s most affable punks. Even the album’s one sincere stab at acting the band’s age, a reflection on parenthood called “Father to a Son,” seems to give up halfway through, content to repeat its title rather than dig deeper. It’s a shame to see them trade in the legacy of their best work while repeating themselves as farce.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that, prior to Saviors, Rob Cavallo last worked with Green Day on 2004’s American Idiot. The producer worked with the band on a trio of 2012 studio albums.