Returning to his best-known alias, the veteran hip-hop deconstructionist scales back his approach, but Sacrifices can feel slight, with songs that too often fade into the background.

Sacrifices

Prefuse 73 principal Guillermo Scott Herren never sits still. He first made his name as a trailblazer: Arriving just a few years after DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… popularized the idea of instrumental hip-hop, Herren helped push the budding subgenre into the laptop age. For a moment, he stood at the nexus of crate-diggers and knob-twisters, crafting music that was glitchy enough for the Warp roster yet rooted in the melodies of long-forgotten records. But, like Shadow, Herren frustrated fans by abandoning his signature sound at its peak, instead following his muse wherever it led: big-name collaborations, baroque electro-psych, goofy hip-hop, an album's worth of minute-long snippets. After years of waning interest from fans and even the artist (who has been almost equally prolific under aliases like Savath y Savalas, Ahmad Szabo, and Piano Overlord), Herren recently found his way back to Prefuse 73’s core sound. One gets the sense that he’s making up for lost time: In 2015, he released an album and three EPs under the Prefuse name, and he now returns with the full-length Sacrifices.
Continuing in the back-to-basics vein of recent Prefuse 73 releases, Sacrifices finds Herren peeling back the layers of his sound in an attempt to further isolate its foundation. At its best, Sacrifices reminds us that subtlety and restraint were qualities that once set Herren apart from his peers. “Late to the Party” wobbles and soars, a stuttering theme for a postmodern silent film. A fuzzed-out dancefloor anthem, "Her Desire Is to Be Left Alone” showcases the deft hand with which Herren manipulates vocal samples. “The World Is Bigger” feels like a bubbly curio you might discover after a deep fall down the SoundCloud rabbit hole, while “Dripping With Excuses” takes its title literally, sounding like a field recording of droplets of water falling off stalactites and onto a marimba.
But at nearly an hour in length, Sacrifices struggles to maintain this level of quality. The album’s lone vocal track, “Silver & Gold,” featuring R&B singer James Tillman, lands firmly in the “easy listening” lane, somewhere between Seal and Coldplay at their drowsiest. To be fair, Herren has flirted with this sort of sound before, say, on Rivington Não Rio’s Rob Crow collaboration, “Quiet One,” or even “Last Night,” his original indie-baiting crossover with Sam Prekop. But here, nestled among so many airy, laid-back, vaguely jazzy compositions, it’s hard to say that it feels like an outlier. Leave Sacrifices on for its full runtime and its songs will first bleed together, then recede into the background. This makes for great music to write emails to, but it’s not likely to sustain many listeners’ active interest for very long.
Herren’s willingness to continually rethink his approach is commendable, though it has made for a frustratingly uneven catalog. Where Rivington Não Rio reminded us of the qualities that made Herren one of the beat scene’s first stars, Sacrifices strips away too many of those traits. Its songs often feel slight and lack the tension, dynamics, and emotional heft of his best work. In the years since Herren first emerged, plenty of descendants have stepped in to fill the lane that he ceded, including Flying Lotus, Shlohmo, and Hudson Mohawke. But Sacrifices doesn’t feel like it’s in conversation with any of these artists. Instead, it too often recalls a different contemporary trend: the inoffensive whirr of made-for-playlists “chill.”


The experimental composer’s new album is a shapeshifting stream of crackling electronics, wordless singing, and gasping breaths. It’s a stark, solitary listen that radiates an unsettling beauty.

Ka Baird : Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos

Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos

Ka Baird entered 2022 feeling adrift. The two years of lockdowns and shutdowns had been difficult for the artist, whose practice—an improvisatory fusion of wordless vocalizations, movement, and crackling electronics—is deeply dependent upon the intimacy of live performance. At Chicago’s Lampo foundation, they developed a new solo piece, Bearings, to be performed 10 times over the course of two nights that spring, for an audience of between one and four people. Pacing the stage, deploying disorienting shifts in lighting and sound design, alternating between bursts of flute and ghostly hissing and chattering, Baird hoped to trigger a mixture of confusion and catharsis—the kind of soul-cleansing experience that might mark a new beginning, helping artist and audience alike get their bearings in a world turned strange. Then, just weeks before the show was to launch, Baird’s mother experienced an unexpected decline in health; the diagnosis was terminal.
Baird went ahead with Bearings—the final performance punctuated, serendipitously, by a fireworks display visible through the venue’s windows. After the shows, they decamped to Decatur, Illinois, where, alongside their brother, they spent the next six months caring for their mother. While she slept, Baird worked on music. On September 1, Karen Faye Lepp Baird died at the age of 79 in her children’s arms, taking her last breath as the sun set. The loss inspired Baird to become an end-of-life doula and also gave shape to their new album Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos, helping to channel the purifying intensity of the Lampo performances into an unpredictable, electric form. Baird’s music has often resembled a metaphorical transmission from another realm. With Bearings, they press forward into the rift.
The album’s organizing principle is the bardo, which Tibetan Buddhism conceives as a portal, such as those traversed by the dying on their passage from life to rebirth. “We are always in a bardo,” writes Baird in the album’s liner notes, “because impermanence never takes a break.” The titling of the album’s 11 tracks, from “Gate I” to “Gate XI,” suggests a succession of doorways, yet Bearings feels less like a collection of discrete pieces than a perpetually unfolding chain of events—a single stream of energy, writhing and twisting and forever taking on new shapes.
The album begins with a low, grinding hum haloed by overtones and bristling with fizz, and it ends with a similar drone pitched exactly one interval higher—as though the idea of ascension were coded directly into the music’s frequencies. In between those bookends, Baird utilizes many of the same techniques that distinguished 2019’s Respires. Their voice sounds more animal than human—hissing, groaning, growling, croaking. Electronic signals pulse in waves, like anxious dial tones; atonal blasts of flute buffet long, flat expanses of wordless singing, like gusts of wind smacking against plate glass windows. The occasional peal of trumpet or plucked viola serve as one of a handful of recurring motifs, like signposts along the soul’s journey. The force that holds it all together is the tension between flowing and stopping—an uneasy give-and-take punctuated by percussive flurries and sudden moments of silence. The only lyrics are a repeated refrain of “Here, disappear, poof,” yet even these words are indistinguishable from a magician’s smoke grenade, just bursts of breath dissipating against the buzz.
Bearings features input from a dozen different players, including saxophonist Andrew Bernstein and synthesist Max Eilbacher, both of Horse Lords; drummer Greg Fox; percussionist Jon Mueller, on gongs; a full string quartet, woodwinds, brass, and even unusual instruments like crystal bowls, waterphone, and saw. (Someone named Nisa—presumably a cat—is credited with “purrs.”) Despite the many players involved, this is an overwhelmingly private-sounding record: solitary, focused, severe. It is not an easy listen, though it’s safe to say that it is not supposed to be. Rather than representing the idea of transformation in idyllic, new-age terms, Bearings underscores the work involved—gasping breaths, dizzying effort, textures as dry as a drought-stricken field. As the album trudges toward its finale, I imagine a body bent double into the wind, pushing forward only because there is no other choice. But the starkness of Baird’s album nevertheless radiates its own kind of beauty. Perhaps the title is not only meant to suggest the metaphorical compass points with which we orient ourselves in times of crisis. Grappling with death, Baird seems to suggest, is a burden every one of us must bear—and in bearing it, we are made whole.


Ryan Adams’ new album is being positioned as one of his classic breakup records. In terms of its sound, at least, it's a winner.

Prisoner

Ryan Adams gravely misread the pop culture climate of 2015 and his fan letter to Taylor Swift was incinerated on arrival by the hot takes. But at least 1989 was a reminder of a time when he was generating reactions that ran deeper than a respect for craft. For most of the past decade, Adams has made albums of almost oppressive competence: whether the songs from Ashes & Fire and Ryan Adams took five minutes or five years of soul-searching to create, they all come out sounding equally effortless. Purely in terms of its content, Adams’ new album, Prisoner, is more of the same, and how that sits will depend on whether you’ve heard the singles or read the press clippings. It’s another down-the-middle, crowd-pleasing Ryan Adams record at a time when that crowd was expecting him to bring the heat.
Still, as latter-day Ryan Adams albums go, there’s more buzz than usual around Prisoner, and rightfully so. The neural blasts of guitar misfiring all over “Do You Still Love Me?” and “Doomsday”’s pink-mist shimmer outline a convergence point where the heartland comfort food of Ryan Adams, the puckish punk whims of 1984, and the arena-rock aspirations of 1989 meet. Purely as sound, Prisoner unquestionably succeeds; though Reagan-era AOR is basically a primary color of modern pop at this point, Adams’ vocals and lyrical tics are so well established that any genre bends to his will. If the title track and “Anything I Say to You Now” aren’t career highlights, they’re at least ambitions fully realized—quintessential 2010s Ryan Adams, conveying a mis-remembered ’80s where Tunnel of Love and The Queen Is Dead are close neighbors on record shelves and equally revered documents of idealized longing.
Previews of Prisoner have not been shy about stating the obvious: this is Adams’ first album since separating from actress Mandy Moore, which he described as a “humiliating and just a fucking horrible thing to go through.” The context of the breakup is so central to how the album is being heard, news of the event might as well be slapped on a sticker on the cover. But though it lacks the intoxicating, top-of-the-world cockiness that powered Gold through its street-walkin’ low points, Prisoner is Adams’ most complete work since then—he’s not stuck in a single mode. The Deadheaded “To Be Without You” rambles on like Cold Roses, so that the line “nothing really matters anymore” registers like a cashed-bowl shrug, while, the chipper strum of “Haunted House” shows the dark side of the record’s offhandedness, coming very close to Hootie’s “Only Wanna Be With You.”
Adams is the first to joke about his stock phrases, and his self-awareness renders his most objectively miserable work tolerable—any mention of “rain” or "trains" in one of his songs, for example, has a meta quality, his version of a DJ tag. But hearing “Thorn in my side/Pain I can’t hide,” “Oh, my soul is/Black as coal,” or “Feel like I’m headed for a breakdown/Feel like I’m racing and I can’t come down” tossed around carelessly within the same song is enough to question where Adams’ appreciation of soft-rock schlock ends and appropriation begins. Prisoner is filled with lyrics like these, lines that feel like placeholders for universal truths or even personalized expressions of pain that rarely emerge. While it’s impossible to evaluate the album’s sincerity, inspiration is a more tangible quality, and Adams comes off like an A student uncharacteristically frozen by an essay prompt, filling the margins with the hopes that his reputation can get him out of this jam, this one time.
A generous reading of Prisoner can play it off as a commentary on the futility of “breakup albums” at a certain point in your life—that the hurt can feel as debilitating and devastating as it did in similar situations years ago, but the need to dramatize it just isn’t there anymore. In fact, as tell-alls have become the norm for public breakups between artists in recent years—ranging from Dirty Projectors to Dirty Sprite 2, from Tourist in This Town to, ahem, Taylor Swift—it can be a relief to hear something that doesn’t feel like an invasion of privacy for the party not present. But the emotional equanimity of Prisoner always feels unintentional, or worse, a byproduct of his unerring craft. While Prisoner clearly aspires to join Love Is Hell or 29 or Heartbreaker as another platonic ideal for a “sad Ryan Adams album,” it can't help but be “another Ryan Adams album.”


Revered electronic duo Orbital call it quits with their seventh and final album, a nostalgic throwback that's being touted as a culmination of their 15-year run.

The Blue Album

Orbital's career is ending, fittingly, on the festival circuit. The duo have announced that they'll be taking their final bow at this summer's T in the Park, after headlining the Other Stage at last week's Glastonbury, the site of the stunning 1994 and 1995 performances that secured the band's legend and destroyed the myth that dance acts can't connect with audiences without the home-field advantage of a club. Orbital, of course, were no slouches in the studio either, producing some of the greatest electronic albums of their time and an immaculate string of singles that effortlessly segue from early acid and rave through the headier ambient techno of their mid-90s.
Orbital's swansong, The Blue Album-- their seventh-- is billed, worryingly, as a culmination of their 15-year run-- which, at least conceptually, implies a grab bag of token nods to better-realized ideas, or an unnecessary Cliff's Notes version of their career. Thankfully, it's instead a fitting footnote, one that leaves a much better final taste in our mouths than the mostly disastrous The Altogether-- a record so misguided that it seems to have cloaked its underrated predecessor, Middle of Nowhere, in an ill-deserved shadow of post-In Sides disappointment.
The Blue Album being a stroll through the past, innovation is not something one should expect from the record. In a way, the album simply highlights many of the reasons why Orbital have been so beloved for the past decade-and-a-half. However, one wouldn't come to that conclusion from the album opener, "Transient". Almost beatless, this kaleidoscopic web of harpsichord, strings and bass, unfurls an almost foreboding yet captivating sound, recalling Philip Glass circa Koyaanisqatsi.
From there, Orbital deliver on their promise, taking us on a Russian Ark-like stroll through their career, echoing elements from In Sides (the serene "Pants"), Snivilisation ("Bath Time") and The Middle of Nowhere (the remarkable urban clang of "Tunnel Vision"). Of course, as on The Altogether, Orbital's stabs at humor here produce more cringes than smiles, as neither "Bath Time"'s blend of children's TV theme music and Jean-Jacques Perrey nor "Easy Serv"'s ice cream van xylophone-- add much to the record. Perhaps it would have nice to exorcise the tracks in favor of the sadly discarded "Initiation" and "What Happens Next", but a sense of humor has thankfully always been one element of Orbital's career and, if nothing else, this album is true to their legacy.
More than anything else, however, The Blue Album is reminiscent of Orbital's first two self-titled records, more commonly known as the Green and Brown albums. Sparks collaboration "Acid Pants" is an old-school, almost tribal banger, while the foreboding, abstract "Lost" sounds like an early effort from the Warp camp. Best of all is album centerpiece "You Lot", the one track that could be segued into Orbital's first record without the bat of a single eyelash. More track-y than most of their recent efforts-- but with a soft ambient core, over which is layered a sample of Christopher Ecclestone babbling on about the shrinking distance between the power of man and God-- "You Lot" is the record's best confluence of what made Orbital so special.
The Blue Album closes with "One Perfect Sunrise", the sort of post-rave/pre-dawn euphoria that Orbital perfected on "Halcyon". And although the track borders on the nostalgic with the same potentially pointless intensity as a Jet track and the same emotional manipulation as a trance version of an 80s hit, here context can melt even the most time-hardened heart. As the sunset to Orbital's glorious career, it's fitting that the track encapsulates the dawn, the time of day that has so often ended the most glorious moments of Orbital's career.


As he ascends from grime rapper to generational spokesperson, the charismatic UK star tries to figure out where to go next.

Heavy Is the Head

Stormzy’s second album hit streaming services in the UK just a couple of hours after polls closed in the country’s latest general election. The vote was touted as the most important in recent British history, but, honestly, you’d be forgiven for having lost track by now. Besides, this timing wasn’t planned: The election was called just a matter of weeks ago. Typically this coincidence in timing wouldn’t matter, but in the years since his debut, Gang Signs & Prayer, went to number one, Stormzy has risen to become something of a generational spokesperson. It feels fitting, then, that the album arrived as the country decided on its future.
Since 2017, Stormzy’s music and his activism have been increasingly intertwined. He used a performance at the BRIT Awards to decry then-Prime Minister Theresa May’s response to the Grenfell tragedy. Thousands of people at Glastonbury were broadcast shouting “Fuck the government and fuck Boris [Johnson, UK prime minister]” during his performance of “Vossi Bop” this summer. Elsewhere, he’s established a scholarship fund for black students at Cambridge University, and launched a publishing imprint with Penguin that’s dedicated to showcasing underrepresented voices.
If there’s a unifying theme to this album, it’s the infiltration of black artists—and young black men in particular, who are especially demonised and marginalised in British society—into canonized spaces. It plays out in the Shakespearean reference in the album’s title, and the hanging of its artwork in London’s National Portrait Gallery. “We’re still taking up space,” Stormzy declares on punchy opener “Big Michael,” and with the repetition of “Big Michael’s back, your time’s up” there’s the sense that he’s addressing more than just opponents in petty grime beefs. On “Superheroes” he rewrites the media’s narrative around young black men, calling out the successes of his peers. He underlines the point elsewhere on the album by calling out the endless list of establishment hallmarks and name-checks he’s notched up in the past two years: The Glastonbury headline slot, Elle cover, TIME cover, GQ cover, number one chart spots, BRIT Awards. It all adds up to a powerful picture.
His phenomenal success and influence have compounded the pressure on his still-young shoulders—“How the hell did I buss so fast?” he asks on “Audacity.” For Stormzy, the remaining questions are existential: Is he comfortable with his status as a household name and figurehead? It’s something he pokes at in the opening bars of the album—“Can’t tell where I’m heading,” he brags half-heartedly—but he arguably never finds an answer. Moments of doubt and frustration creep in. “I am not the poster boy for mental health,” he spits on “One Second,” referring to an unsanctioned NME cover from 2017. “Mummy always said if there’s a cause then I should fight for it/So yeah I understand, but I don’t think that I’m all right with it,” he continues. He’s aware of his contradictions—“One week it’s ‘Blinded By Your Grace,’ next week it’s bang you in your face,” as he puts it on the album opener—and they play out in the open here. There’s gravity in these moments of vulnerability, but Stormzy doesn’t always get it right.
“Lessons” is the album’s most tender moment, but arguably its most problematic. The track appears to confirm rumors of the rapper’s infidelity to his radio presenter/model ex-girlfriend Maya Jama, and Stormzy spends the majority of the three minutes asking for forgiveness. However, lines like “Thought I’d say it here than rather fling it in a text” perhaps reveal his misunderstanding of the power dynamics at play. Of course he has every right to address his personal torment in his art, but in this case he appears to ignore the fact that the person who ended the relationship—and did so as privately as possible—might not want the break-up to play out on an album track that’ll be listened to and combed over by potentially millions of people. It also feels slightly disingenuous when followed by a song whose hook is about ejaculating on someone else’s girlfriend’s face.
The heavy politicizing of his work doesn’t mean he’s not having fun, though. At the root of Stormzy’s appeal, as well as his authenticity, is a charismatic swagger. He skips over the beat on “Pop Boy” with such ease that there’s little to do but sit back and revel in it. The Burna Boy- and Sheeran-backed “Own It” follows: A silky pop anthem for a generation reared on dembows. The album is built around one-two punch combinations like this pairing. Adjacent songs are linked with one another sonically and lyrically: “Wiley Flow” and “Bronze” trade grimey taunts over record sales and certifications; “Crown” and “Rainfall” meld praise and introspection in an extension of GSAP’s “gospel grime” tracks; “Handsome” matches the marching tempo of “Rachael’s Little Brother” and links to the song with its “bun down the rave like Rachael Anson” refrain.
These threads between tracks are a cute touch, but feel slightly overwrought as the record slides between pared-back grime, luxurious R&B, introspective trap, gospel confessional, and puff-chested rap. The versatility on show gives a sheen of adventurousness that isn’t quite backed up by the beat selections—the majority of which feel like safe choices for an artist otherwise known for his accelerated ambitions. And while HITH sees Stormzy navigate second album syndrome with apparent ease, it also leaves open the question of where he goes from here.


The Toronto singer croons his way into a sapiosexual world of love and philosophy, though not without controversy.

CASE STUDY 01

There are few R&B singers who would sample J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist who helmed the design and research of the world’s first atomic bomb. But Toronto singer Daniel Caesar spotlights a quote from the scientist describing the Hindu deity Vishnu as the “destroyer of worlds” at the start of “Entropy,” setting the mood for his new album, Case Study 01. Coming from a love ballad crooner that previously held a reputation for having an insane amount of people proposing at his live shows, this might seem a little morbid and heady. But considering that 2017’s Freudian, was, well, named after Sigmund Freud as a tie-in to his grappling of ego and id within his romantic serenades, the 24-year-old artist now delves further into his philosophical explorations.
On Case Study 01, Caesar employs science metaphors to work through ideas of death, spirituality, and absolution. He does this best on the aforementioned “Entropy,” where he uses the thermodynamic chemical reaction to represent the chaos in his life and also to suggest we, as humans, have little control over the potentially catastrophic rules of nature. But his resolve is impressive as he quells his concerns and turns to his belief and trust in God. And when he sings about welcoming the end of life (“Raise my jersey to the rafters/Let moths consume me in the light”), his lithe voice trembles. It’s a beautiful, vulnerable display of a young man’s faith, despite his uncertainty of the future. He shows more of this serenity on the standout “Superposition,” as he sings about the natural balance of life through a Buddhist lens, referencing “yin and yang” and the principle of superposition. “I’m me/I’m God/I’m everything,” he sings in his airy falsetto over John Mayer’s hypnotic guitar licks and ghostly background vocals, sounding full of grace.
These transcendent moments are accentuated by subtle production that shifts outward from the more straightforward gospel-R&B of Freudian. The Frank Ocean-inspired closing track “Are You OK?” pans out into a psychedelic dreamscape that opens with the introduction of each instrument: glittering chimes, a touch of slide guitar, a skittering synth, and later, the howling sound of distorted voices. While “Frontal Lobe Muzik,” featuring production and vocals from Pharrell, reveals a scattering of new age-y synth bleeps. They sound like they’re ready to drift into space, mirroring Caesar’s sentiments when he says: “I wanna venture into the unknown.”
Caesar doesn’t completely ditch the love songs on Case Study 01. “Love Again,” a glowing funk ballad features Caesar and Brandy sharing their respective breakup stories and reassuring each other through the heartsickness. This is the mode that he thrives in, as shown in his many collaborations on Freudian with H.E.R., Kali Uchis, Charlotte Day Wilson, and Syd, respectively—their voices providing an extra texture and point of view that complements his so well. But this is Brandy we’re talking about, and she unsurprisingly shows up Caesar on his own song, as her powerful, multi-dimensional voice glides between the sultry and dark, and airy and light.
However, her appearance sits in the shadow of Caesar’s recent controversial comments about race. “Why are we being so mean to white people right now?” Caesar asked his black followers on Instagram live as he defended Yes Julz, the embattled internet personality and “culture vulture,” after she ranted about black women criticizing her. Later he added, “You can’t win the game by choosing to not accept the winning team’s strategy” and urged his fans to “make [him] suffer for his opinion” by boycotting his music. So a cognitive dissonance arises when Caesar admires his lover’s skin, comparing it to “Rich dark chocolate, sweet melanin,” on the Kardinal Offishall-featuring, reggae-tinged bop “Cyanide.” Or when he positions himself as a beacon of enlightenment when he sings, “Follow me to salvation/Your mind still ’pon plantations,” on “Too Deep to Turn Back.” Contrary to false reports that his album flopped due to the controversy, it didn’t result in any major consequences. Case Study 01 debuted higher than Freudian on both the U.S. and Canadian charts.
And while there are flashes of wisdom on Case Study 01, there are also a handful of clunky moments when Caesar’s out of his depth. On “Open Up,” he puts on his best D’Angelo impression by deepening his voice, but fails to provide any of the soul legend’s smoothness, as he sings, “I don’t feel like talking unless it’s ’bout me or philosophy.” And it gets even more unsettling horny when he sings in the chorus: “Then you can open up to me, girl/Let me plant my seed, girl.” Or when he brags about his glow up on “Frontal Lobe Muzik” by saying, “Used to be ugly, but now I hit from the back,” demonstrating the antithesis of his earlier humility and tenderness. Like his contemporaries 6LACK and Brent Faiyaz, Caesar is clearly talented, but he’s got a lot of learning to do.


Ivy Tripp, Waxahatchee's first album for Merge, shares an unhurried and natural mood with the best '90s indie rock. Though 2012's breakthrough Cerulean Salt had more people playing on it, Ivy Tripp feels bigger, in part because Katie Crutchfield is growing increasingly confident.

Ivy Tripp

Katie Crutchfield is important to a lot of people. She's just 26, but with more than a dozen releases to her name courtesy of projects like P.S. Eliot, collaborations like Great Thunder, and assorted guest spots here and there, she comes off like the leader of a DIY folk-inflected indie rock/punk scene, a spokesperson for a realm usually against spokespeople.
Crutchfield grew up in Alabama, naming her project after Waxahatchee Creek, where her parents have a house on a lake and where she's made a lot of her music. She's in Philadelphia now, an East Coast city that's cheaper than New York and that allows for more time to make music and just live. It follows, then, that there's a thriving scene there, too, with groups like Radiator Hospital (featuring one-time Waxahatchee member Sam Cook-Parrott) and members of her twin sister (and ex-P.S. Eliot bandmate) Allison's band Swearin', among others.
Ivy Tripp, her third album as Waxahatchee, finds her fronting a band featuring multi-instrumentalists Kyle Gilbride and Keith Spencer (both from Swearin') and still coming off very much like she did on 2012's lo-fi solo effort, American Weekend. She's managed to bring in contributors and a greater range of instrumentation without losing that approachable intimacy. 2013's Cerulean Salt technically had more people playing on it, but Ivy Tripp just feels bigger, in part because Crutchfield is growing steadily more confident. The songs are more cohesive and accomplished—polished isn't the right word, but now and then, there is a kind of shine. Cerulean came off like an extension of American Weekend: it surfaced just as many people were discovering the earlier record, and some listeners were confused by the timeline and which came first. Ivy Tripp, her first album for Merge, feels more like a next step, something that exists on its own, and a move toward something else entirely.
In a statement about the album, Crutchfield said the title of the record is "just a term I made up for directionless-ness, specifically of the 20-something, 30-something, 40-something of today, lacking regard for the complacent life path of our parents and grandparents." She added: "I have thought of it like this: Cerulean Salt is a solid and Ivy Tripp is a gas." This make sense. Cerulean was an album about growing up and losing your innocence and Ivy seems to be about knowing yourself as a grown up, being in the middle of that, and figuring out what comes next. The past is definable and relatively solid; the future is more amorphous and trickier to capture or pin down. You get that sense, of searching, of grasping at something you don't entirely understand, in the album's lyrics and overall narrative.
The exact "Ivy Tripp" line on the record is "Travel the world ivy tripping/ With no spotlight," and it's interesting to see where she's at now, as the spotlight finds its focus. On "Grey Hair" she sings: "You might, wait and see me become/ A candle, precarious psychically among/ The ill at ease, the summer breeze/ But sugar soda pop songs play on the radio." And, as she noted about the record, "I think a running theme [of Ivy Tripp] is steadying yourself on shaky ground and reminding yourself that you have control in situations that seem overwhelming." She doesn't deny the ambition either: "I get short of breath because I can’t slow down," she sings ("Grey Hair").
Many of Ivy Tripp's song titles—"The Dirt", "Half Moon", "Bonfire"—are dusky and colored like earth tones, and that's the setting of the songs as well: moments in transition, the realm between night and day and relationships that have that same kind of momentary feeling. The lyrics feature many maybes and more than a few temporary situations ("You can lean on me for now" in "La Loose"), unread books, and things that may or may not have already ended. "I’ll try to preserve the routine/ And I don’t want to discuss what it means," Crutchfield sings on "La Loose". People "pretend to be strangers/ Lamenting a means to an end" ("Air") and "imitate some kind of love" ("Stale By Noon") instead of just being in love. Music's an "imperfect escape" ("Half Moon").
A low-level anxiety pervades, and on a song simply titled "<" she offers an update on the Blank Generation: "You’re less than me and I am nothing," goes the chorus. Earlier, in "The Dirt", she sings "I’m a basement brimming with nothing great." In "Summer of Love", a photo of people, and not the actual people, are the subject: "The colors allure me but I can’t make out/ A face in the picture of palm trees/ The summer of love is a photo of us." "Sugar" comes up a lot—a sweet thing without a lot of substance, but that tastes good. There's a penchant for finding beauty in small gestures and situations like sleeping or refusing to leave the beach. As well as bigger ones: "You’ll deliver a fable I could live/ And I’ll throw it off the nearest cliff," she sings in "The Dirt".
The one thing that can drag Ivy Tripp down a little is that the lyrics are at times a bit vague or interchangeable. It turns out discussing emptiness can maybe feel a bit empty, and the words here don't always hit as hard as some of her prior work. That said, the way the words are delivered is essential, and with a voice like Crutchfield's—both rough and clear with a slight Southern twang—a lot gets said simply in how these things are enunciated.
That, and the album features a few of Crutchfield's best and catchiest songs. She's mentioned an interest in the New Zealand lo-fi pop band Tall Dwarfs; Ivy Tripp has the feel of classic indie rock. You'll be reminded of other groups here and there: "The Dirt" sounds a lot like the Vaselines, at least compositionally, and much of it would fit in very well at the original International Pop Underground Convention, on Simple Machines, or with '90s Merge acts like Butterglory or Bricks (the fact that she did sign to Merge makes perfect sense—Crutchfield and her cohorts carry the same torch as  Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance). She's mentioned Joni Mitchell time again, as well as Cat Stevens, though on Ivy, you may think more about Cat Power's What Would the Community Think.
Maybe as a result of the cross-pollination and familiarity, there's a casual feel to Ivy Tripp, something about it that's unhurried and relaxed. Which doesn't mean it isn't ambitious or accomplished. This is one way it's most reminiscent of the best '90s indie rock: it never feels forced or like she's making some kind of push. It's unhurried and natural and real. You also get a feeling listening to these songs that Crutchfield is just getting started, and it's exciting to hear a young voice rising so assuredly above the fray, one you can imagine inspiring kids years from now, and inspiring them to pick up guitars and sing and take control of their direction, too.


Testarossa, the second-full length collaboration between Serengeti and WHY?’s Yoni Wolf, shows the rapper born David Cohn finding beauty and life in life's smallest details, as usual.

Testarossa

In the middle of the last decade, Serengeti starting carving out a niche as one of the weirdest and most confounding voices in underground rap, grappling with the tension between art and commerce and the tension between the industrial painter and his smocks. But the Windy City rapper born David Cohn is best known as someone else entirely—Kenny Dennis, the aging rapper he dreamed up, the one who hates Shaq but loves the '85 Chicago Bears, his wife Jueles, O’Douls, brats, beers, and the actor Brian Dennehy.
Kenny isn’t a joke, and he isn’t a one-off; he’s been animated on a handful of full-length records and a masterful EP, and even the fictitious rap group Kenny was supposed to be a member of  during the early '90s got its own, very real album. Kenny has hopes, fears, insecurities, blind spots. In short, Cohn knows how to build worlds.
Testarossa, the second-full length collaboration between Cohn and WHY?’s Yoni Wolf, credits the rapper as Serengeti. While swapping one stage name for another is not necessarily truth-telling, it’s implied that when compared to Kenny Dennis, Serengeti more closely approximates the feelings and experiences of David Cohn. But when Geti lets you into his own psyche, it’s through fractured narratives and half-truths, ill-advised blogging ventures and apocryphal trips to the hardware store. The last Geti/Yoni LP, 2011’s Family & Friends, was intermittently brilliant, but also unremittingly dark. (The standout song from that record, "The Whip," is a portrait of a retired UFC fighter trying desperately to get back in the octagon.) The sequel has fewer songs that are obvious conceptual departures, but finds Geti just as slippery, just as evasive.
The album follows a narrative of sorts, purportedly based on a script that Geti and Yoni co-wrote about a fledgling musician who leaves his wife and young children at home to head out on tour, only to watch his family dissolve from afar. As always, Cohn finds the emotional weight of the story in the crevices: in the weight he gained one winter with his wife, in the rental cars he uses to assume new identities in new towns. On "I, Testarossa," his character wrings his hands over the length of his daughter’s bangs and shoves bills into a jukebox to make strangers dance.
The production and Wolf’s vocals are lush and subdued to where the story feels like one long dream sequence. Its best moments come when Geti yanks you violently into a scene, like he does during a conversation with a girl outside a venue on "Down": "I’m waiting for Yoni outside in a coat/ Smelling like coke, sipping on a smoke/ Talking to a young girl, trying to steal hope/ Leaning in like the pope/ ‘Yo, let’s get down.’" There’s that economy of language, that willingness to sneak vials into the Vatican that make him one of rap’s sharpest writers. Unfortunately, moments like that are too infrequent on the album’s spare front half. But in the suite that ends Testarossa, Geti waxes romantic about homework folders and Google Plus in a way that feels more intimate than any revelations about his childhood could hope to be.


For close to two decades, the constantly morphing Michigan trio Wolf Eyes have churned out releases, inspired other low-budget noise-auteurs, and galvanized scenes both locally and globally. I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces, their first record for Jack White's Third Man imprint, oozes with eerie tones and seat-edge momentum.

Wolf Eyes: I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces

I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces

Wolf Eyes have always had a B-movie aura. They’re like the Roger Corman of underground music, churning out releases, inspiring other low-budget noise-auteurs, galvanizing scenes both locally in Michigan and globally in festivals and collaborations. Many of their blunt album titles have a schlock-horror feel: Slicer, Dread, Burned Mind, Human Animal. That feel is in the music too. At turns scary, funny, dramatic, and transfixing, Wolf Eyes’ morphing sound has one constant: creepy, thick tension.
The trio’s B-movie game is in full effect on I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces, whose title sounds like either a pulpy confessional or a campy drug-education filmstrip. Song names feel like lost movies too: "T.O.D.D." as killer-robot sci-fi, "Asbestos Youth" as mean-streets teen flick, "Cynthia Vortex AKA Trip Memory Illness" as LSD-soaked journey into madness. Lyrics reference drowning heads, toxic thoughts, burning hairs, suffocation cages. If this album getting released the day before Halloween is a coincidence, it sure is a lucky one.
Most importantly, the music on I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces contains all the ominous suspense of a classic horror movie. Each track oozes with eerie tones and seat-edge momentum, such that something terrifying seems to always lurk around the corner. The album even mimics the narrative arc of a thriller: the first few tracks gradually heighten the plot, until action explodes in the damaged-punk climax of "Enemy Ladder" and its tale of "twisted lands of severed hands." The denouement of "Cynthia Vortex" follows, ending with singer Nate Young’s chopped-up groans that evoke a victim’s final gasps of air.
Though he’s an equal partner in sound-crime with bandmates John Olson and James Baljo, Young is the star of I Am a Problem’s cinematic tremors. His jaw-clenched snarls and subliminal seething get under your skin. Razor-like moans in "Twister Nightfall" curl sharply around a monster-march beat and Baljo’s guitar grind, while Olson’s creaky noises on "T.O.D.D." rhyme with Young’s yelps. Even on "Enemy Ladder", where frantic rhythms swirl into a cloud, Young's bark center things like the piercing eye of a pulsing storm.
Beyond his own vocal dexterity, Young’s recent move toward more subdued music in his solo work (often under the name Regression) has steered Wolf Eyes to a place where small shifts can make huge ripples, and hypnosis is as powerful as confrontation. One of the best Regression albums is aptly titled Stay Asleep, and Young has developed a keen knack for sonically replicating nightmares—"I burn my dreams just to stay warm," he sings in "T.O.D.D."—and making gripping music from dark shadows and subtle motion.
In fact, I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces may be too somnambulant for noise-hounding Wolf Eyes heads, or newcomers impatient for quicker cuts to the chase. You have to sit still a while and let the trio’s sonic images wash over you before their musical zombies rise from the dead to terrorize the stereo space. But give this album a fraction of the patience and attention that Wolf Eyes have put into it—effort on a par with their excellent previous effort, No Answer: Lower Floors—and you’ll be glad you stayed up late enough to see how it ends.


On an unexpected collaborative mixtape, the two previously unconnected rappers hone their complementary styles in gloomy songs shot through with paranoia.

OMB Peezy  / Sherwood Marty: Young & Reckless

Young & Reckless

Except for being signed to the same label, the rappers OMB Peezy and Sherwood Marty seemed entirely unconnected until a few weeks ago, when they released their first collaborative single and announced a mixtape called Young & Reckless—a sudden, random move that smacks of industry matchmaking. Peezy is a prodigious and pyrotechnic young rapper from Alabama who moved to Sacramento as a child, but well after a heavy Southern drawl had taken hold of his nasally voice. He’s spent the last couple years molding his singular twang into both of his hometown contexts: Bay Area funk and Cash Money nostalgia. Marty, on the other hand, is from Baton Rouge and channels something more broadly regional in the form of fluid trap. Here, they’re both steeped in the same slurry Auto-Tune, and they play off each other’s strengths, even if a full tracklist sometimes reads less like a gelling duo than a ping-pong game of track features.
Young & Reckless feels like a come-up vehicle for Marty and a catalog build-out for Peezy, who burst onto the scene already in stride in 2016, but, besides a string of stunning loose songs, only has a short EP to his name. He raps about a life of street violence with a yappy drawl and a thousand-yard stare, by turns snarling and somber in a despondent fog of the after-effects. On the lead single, “Crash Out,” Peezy tumbles into the first verse in an immediate rage, prowling for vengeance but never numb to the PTSD (“My first mission won’t leave my mind”) or dread (“Mama pray for me, prison ain’t the place for me”) that accompanies. His voice is metallic and icy, and there’s a slithering elegance to the way his lyrics bundle into conversational knots. But because of the bouncy pacing of his register, Peezy’s flow can sound erratic, and that he’s so often leveraging a threat reinforces the pummeling effect of his delivery. It’s no surprise that he’s the main draw throughout, or that “Crash Out,” the same type of woozy Southern funk-trap he built his breakout on, seems to belong entirely to him.
Next to Peezy, Marty sounds like a slack crooner, flatter and less piercing by comparison. But because of his sing-songy baritone he’s got a grounding presence on Young & Reckless that paints his counterpart as the exclamation point. Still, Marty is more than capable of carrying a song himself, and many of these tracks sound like they belonged to him first, sometimes to the point of casting the other as a phone-in. (That goes both ways.) On the generically flaunting “I’m the Shit,” Marty’s the one that fills up the cavernous shell of a beat, not just with predictable brags but also with his own scurrying melody that bleeds from verse to hook. Peezy is there to punch a quick appearance near the end. The opposite is true on the organ-laced “Lights Out,” where Peezy takes the lead on a cathartically told-you-so chorus and sinister main verse that renders Marty an afterthought before the track closes. Sometimes they’re more in lockstep, like when Peezy’s nasally vocals echo Marty’s barking chorus with matching ad-libs on the menacing “Ready.” On the final two tracks, “Better Dayz” and “Ride Wit It,” they trade songs about gloom and paranoia, slinking into each other’s shared street nightmares and grief.
More than anything, Young & Reckless sounds like a pair of disparate rappers honing their voices, acting as one another’s pacesetters even if they’re running different races. Either of them could command this amount of space on his own, but there’s an obvious relief in sharing the spotlight; lowering the stakes of songwriting gives each the freedom to say less.


The Miami producer’s debut morphs between ambient, downtempo, and dub techno. It’s as tranquil as an afternoon spent watching the clouds drift through the sky.

Jonny From Space: back then I didn’t but now I do

back then I didn’t but now I do

When you’re a resident DJ at a powerhouse nightclub like Miami’s Club Space, versatility is key. Jonathan Trujillo—better known as simply Jonny From Space—has learned that from experience. His own music is rooted in the leftfield legacy of hometown acts like Phoenecia and their Schematic label; most of his bookings, in the more intimate Floyd (a club within the superclub) tend to be alongside like-minded souls like Ben UFO and fellow Florida DJ Danny Daze. But sometimes, the night’s billing dictates the vibe: Trujillo was once tasked with opening for an extended back-to-back set from EDM chameleons Diplo and Carnage—during Super Bowl weekend, at that. That very same week, he revealed a considerably different side of himself on his debut EP. A six-track compendium of ambient bubblers “made in altered states and meditative spaces,” the record suggested that the “Space” in his alias probably has less to do with his employer than it does his fascination with the outer limits.
Over the past couple of years, Jonny From Space has built up a tidy discography of cosmically inclined material, some of it club-focused, and some not at all. On his debut album, back then I didn’t but now I do, he leans into his more introspective instincts, favoring measured tempos and feathery textures. The choice suits the label putting out the record: Jenny Slattery and Anthony Naples’ Incienso imprint, where Naples—originally known for his club productions—has increasingly turned his focus to cloud-watching vibes. But even at his most chill, Trujillo strikes an unusual balance here: His atmospheres may be wispy, but his drums are tough and resilient, sharp as a sudden jab to the sternum.
The album opens on a resolutely downtempo note with “Crystal Eyes,” whose dubbed-out boom-bap and dreamy pads pay homage to smoker’s delights like Mo Wax’s classic Headz 2 compilation series, a cornerstone of mid-’90s trip-hop. Trujillo has a keen ear for contrast: The drum machine is crisp and declarative, yet the track’s tonal elements are unstable and amorphous, hard to get a bead on. The steady groove and flickering accents give the impression of a small town glimpsed from an airplane at night, lights twinkling in the darkness.
A similarly heady vibe plays out across the record, as he wreathes knotty machine beats in gauzy synths and glowing haloes. When asked about his production methods, Trujillo once said, “I space out and start working on the drums until I have a locked groove. From there everything else just flows like water.” That approach shines through in tracks like “Live,” a sidewinding sketch made out of off-kilter clicks and cartoonish voices, as well as “Slip,” a moody, toe-scuffing hip-hop instrumental. For all the simplicity of his arrangements, they’re sneakily crafted: The beats twist up in ways you don’t expect, giving even his most relaxed cuts an unsettling air, as though everything could fall apart without warning.
In a few places, Trujillo indulges his love of the dancefloor. On “Dream Reality,” brittle jungle breaks plunge through a chorus of bleeps and chirps, like space debris hurtling through a satellite array; “Luna Dance” beefs up foggy pads and brushed snares with insistent, bulletproof bass pulses—it’s dub techno encased in a protective exoskeleton. But “Float,” one of the album’s highlights, more closely aligns with his paradoxical MO: The twitchy rhythm, propelled by tight metallic coils, descends directly from Miami’s history with earth-shaking electro, yet everything else is as nebulous and pastel as cotton candy. Like the best of Jonny From Space’s work, it treats electronic music as a lenticular image. Seen from one angle, it’s a potent club track; from another, a taste of ambient at its most ethereal.


The Queens rapper-singer continues to refine her joyfully lascivious, sex-positive sound, but her best moments are the quiet ones.

Bite the Burger

Queens rapper Dai Burger got her start as a background dancer for rappers like Lil Mama, but since then she’s become a fixture at queer parties around Brooklyn. Her new album, Bite the Burger, continues the evolution of her lascivious sound—foul-mouthed, sex-positive lyrics over thrumming production that pulls from Baltimore club and trap. It’s raucous and it’s fun, but some of the most promising moments are the quieter ones, when Dai’s songwriting chops are given space to blossom.
The biggest example here is “Miss Me,” a slow-burning ballad built around a hissing AutoTuned chant. Dai bounces between singing and rapping, delivering reassurances like “The bullshit made me who I am today” before complicating that pride with petty jabs at exes: “You should miss me, wanna kiss me.” Later on “Pics (Interlude),” a wispy and playful jam about the regret that comes with sending nudes, she issues a blithe, baby-voiced warning: “Don’t leak my shits/Cause if you do, I promise you, I’m going to leak your shits.”
Her ability to both sing and rap, along with her Queens accent and the fact that women MCs are hardly ever allowed to stand on their own, is bound to bring up Nicki Minaj comparisons. But where Nicki’s lyrics are often devoted to her singular place in the spotlight, Dai’s are more illustrative of the people around her, whether it’s friends on the dancefloor or lovers in bed. “The Function,” for example, is a ’90s-style house anthem for the club’s most bold and beautiful, complete with cheesy trance synths. On “Urz,” she giddily dives into the benefits of having a down-low lover, confessing, “We be on that sneaky shit, but it’s better off that way/I just keep you on a shelf, call you down when I wanna play.” The track also stands as a showcase of Dai’s knack for describing sexual encounters in hilariously creative ways, none better than the line, “Playing with this pussy like it’s Ableton.”
Dai’s sexuality has always been at the center of her work, unapologetically divulging the juicy details of past relationships and flings. She wields it like a weapon on the album single “Vitamin P,” using the chorus to clearly outline what the “P” in the title stands for: “P for pussy, P for power, P for pride and prestige,” she growls. The line could serve as a thesis statement for all of her music.
But while much of Bite the Burger sizzles, there are moments that fall short, lyrics that don’t work hard enough. On the aforementioned “Miss Me,” an otherwise-stellar track kicks off with a dud when she hollowly boasts, “Couldn’t even walk a mile in my shoes, cause this shit so high you’re guaranteed to lose.” The verses on “5 Dubbz,” meanwhile, are almost endearing in their one-take quality, but start to stumble as Dai repeats herself: “You wouldn’t know love if it slapped you right in the face... You wouldn’t know love if it walked up and slapped you in your motherfucking face.”
And then there are the trap-leaning songs, like “I Be Knowin” and the title track, which rely on shaky keyboard melodies and plastic drums that sound like they were ripped from a YouTube tutorial. Placed aside the high-energy club-oriented tracks, which are thrilling in their influences from a wide range of dance music, they seem small and mundane. An artist as bold and honest as Dai should never sound so boring.


Laurel Halo’s most ambient—and most linear—record to date swims in mysterious electro-acoustic textures; it marks a departure from her usual mode of thorny, cerebral electronic composition.

Raw Silk Uncut Wood

Voices abounded on Laurel Halo’s 2017 album Dust. Voices sung and simpered, voices repeating isolated Japanese words, voices intoning consonant-rich, ASMR-inducing phrases. The album probed at what exactly the voice could do if split apart and rearranged like any other piece of machinery; it destabilized the voice’s traditional role as pop music’s emotional core. Because the Michigan-born, Berlin-based artist tends to ricochet so rapidly between styles from album to album—avant-pop on her 2012 debut LP, minimal techno on the next—it should come as little surprise that her latest, Raw Silk Uncut Wood, omits the voice entirely. If Dust was a series of cubist portraits, fragmenting the human into new and startling shapes, then Raw Silk is a collection of unpopulated landscapes, pristine and placid in their emptiness.
The sense of restlessness that has characterized Halo’s work to date subsides on Raw Silk. She is no longer so invested in parrying attention from one moment to the next; she’d rather linger on one set of chords, one simple melody, or an unusual percussive pattern. The record begins meditatively on the title track, whose name derives from Ursula Le Guin’s translation of an ancient Taoist text: “What works reliably is to know the raw silk, hold the uncut wood. Need little. Want less.” An organ tone maps a soothing chord progression frosted with synthesizer pads and streaked by low notes from guest cellist Oliver Coates. It is the first of the two 10-minute tracks that open and close the record, and it preempts Raw Silk’s more jittery middle section by inducing a state of stillness. There’s no percussion, no sense of divided time beyond slow variations on a theme.
The title track’s glacial unspooling gives way to four short-form songs that find ample common ground between avant-garde jazz and ambient experimentalism. “Quietude” and “The Sick Mind” both clack away at a rapid, glitching pace, not so much following melodies as exploring the tonal qualities of a single instrument or synthesizer patch (it’s not always clear where exactly these sounds originate physically). “Mercury” matches them in speed with scattershot percussion from Halo’s Dust collaborator Eli Keszler. “The Sick Mind,” in particular, plays out like an anxious brain being observed from a mindful distance, racing but not all-consuming, free to worry itself to exhaustion. Because the tone of these songs is so sparse and so muted, even the most urgent tempos shiver inside an overarching sense of calm. The dancing keystrokes don’t break the spell cast by the album’s opening track. They just roil the hypnotic mood.
Whatever tension arises from Raw Silk’s center comes to a head on its final track, “Nahbarkeit.” Here, the unresolved experiments find closure as Keszler’s percussion stutters beneath a wash of celestial synth chords. The oceanic tone of the record’s first track washes over the agitated beats of its middle, and together, the two techniques elevate one another. The drums spur on the chords, and the chords take the nervous edge off the drums.
Halo’s music often rewards listeners who sit with it long enough to untangle all its knots. Raw Silk Uncut Wood marks a departure from her usual mode of thorny, cerebral electronic compositions, but as her most ambient record to date, it also boasts some of her most unabashedly beautiful music. The closing measures of “Nahbarkeit” feel like a revelation of sorts, a moment of surrender after so much searching. More than her previous albums, Raw Silk pursues a cohesive, linear narrative structure. It doesn’t aim to unseat the listener’s frame of reference, only to follow its own threads to the end. Rather than probe or distort the base structure of the music she’s making, Halo lets it glow for the sake of glowing.


Thomas Fec (aka Tobacco) has trafficked over the years in the weird, the uncanny, the not-quite-right. His new album tries for a slightly less confrontational, still-unconventional take on synthpop.

Sweatbox Dynasty

In both his solo work as Tobacco and as the frontman of Pittsburgh-based synth-psych outfit Black Moth Super Rainbow, Thomas Fec has trafficked over the years in the weird, the uncanny, the not-quite-right. He’s done so by taking human elements—often his own voice—and corroding them using filters like vocoder, talk box, and compressed synths that shudder like an atelectatic lung. Like filmmaker David Cronenberg, Fec sees, contained in technology, the most grotesque parts of ourselves.
On Tobacco’s 2010 album Maniac Meat, Fec was able to change guest-star Beck’s speak-sing baritone into something strange and mildly sinister. With 2014’s Ultima II Massage, Fec created muscular pop that was as fetid as it was approachable. But after three albums of increasingly warped solo experiments, Fec’s new album *Sweatbox Dynasty *tries for a slightly less confrontational, still-unconventional take on synthpop.
From the first track, “Human Om,” the keyboards alone make it clear that *Sweatbox Dynasty *is a Tobacco product. Like much of the album, the track takes a deconstructed drum break and overlays compressed synths and Fec’s voice, with processing that alternates between robo-bizarro and playground sweet: “You can be my light come up in the morning/And I can be your spiral spinnin’ down,” he sings. “Gods in Heat” comes the closest to approaching the gonzo pop of *Ultima II Massage’*s best tracks. Though the lyrics are almost impossibly obscured, Fec’s voice anchors the track with a huge chorus—as bubblegum as it is bleak.
When Tobacco’s first solo album, Fucked Up Friends, came out in 2008, Fec’s degraded, deranged approach felt legitimately dangerous. By peeling the skin off of hip-hop, synthpop, and psychedelia, Fec exposed something diseased behind pop’s waxy veneer. But the world has changed, and now Fec’s warped view is mainstream, from “Tim and Eric”’s absurdist horror-comedy to Death Grips digi-fucked rap. So, yes, part of the reason Sweatbox Dynasty doesn’t hit as hard as past efforts has to do with how accustomed we've become to Tobacco’s worldview. But the reality is that these tracks are often just weaker versions of his past work. Whereas Fec previously balanced atmospheric cuts with outright freakouts, Sweatbox Dynasty leans much more heavily on the former, and the resulting tracks, like “Warlock Mary” and “Home Invisionaries,” bubble along but never seem to coalesce. And album closer “Let’s Get Worn Away”—though occasionally quite pretty, in its own Fecified way—can’t justify its six minutes-plus runtime.
Also missing is much of the dark comedy that defines Tobacco’s best work: Fec’s most disturbing songs were often his funniest, but *Sweatbox Dynasty *rarely allows Fec’s puckish side to rise from the muck. Another horror film director, the Italian Giallo master Dario Argento, said “You must push everything to the absolute limit or else life will be boring.” It’s a maxim that Tobacco has embraced in the past, but one that he shies away from here. Still, if you want revulsion and titillation in equal measure, few producers achieve the balance—even on their off days—like Tobacco.


Ricky Reed, the producer behind Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts” as well as hits by Jason Derulo and Fifth Harmony, steps out with a solo debut defined by a hazy, late-night melancholy.

The Room

Ricky Reed, the producer behind Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts,” describes the song’s ascent as the biggest thing that’s ever happened to him. Lizzo brings a singular charisma to the song, an ability to make you feel like the main character when you listen to it. There’s a reason it’s been plastered on countless post-breakup Instagram posts and drunkenly belted at every karaoke night. When discussing the process behind creating the song, his response was more visceral than technical: “My natural inclination on this song, or any song, is gonna be to have the bass knock.” That unbridled exuberance is what makes so many of the other songs he’s produced, from Jason Derulo’s “Dirty Talk” to Fifth Harmony’s “Bo$$,” so undeniably fun.
But despite the success of the countless pop hits he produced or co-written, he hadn’t released much of his own music, except for a few singles, until The Room. His debut album features an array of rising artists like duendita and Lido Pimienta, as well as pop-soul acts like Leon Bridges and A-list indie bands like Dirty Projectors. It sets an entirely different pace and tone from his earlier work, one that is much more exploratory and subdued. These are songs for soundtracking solitary, balmy night drives, not for kitchen dance parties with your friends.
The album promotion leans heavily on the narrative surrounding its creation. Most of these songs were written live during his NICE LIVE! YouTube sessions, which Reed saw as a way of staying connected with friends and collaborators during the pandemic. When “Real Magic,” the album’s first single, brought Reed to tears in the middle of the livestream, he felt he had to turn these ephemeral moments into a more permanent project. Certainly, there’s an improvisational looseness to this album compared to the pristine sheen of the pop music he has worked on. But beyond that, none of the backstory that Reed relays is evident in the music.
Generally, there’s a vagueness to The Room, a hazy melancholy that ties the project together without much lyrical cohesion. It’s hard to parse what this album is about beyond the narrative surrounding its creation. Ultimately, most of the songs on The Room just aren’t that affecting, which is disappointing given the star power here. “Real Magic” might have brought Reed to tears, but the rest of us remain unmoved. The lyrics are unobjectionable, if a little saccharine. But as a whole, it doesn’t showcase St. Panther’s frenetic flow as a rapper or her skill as a vocalist the way her own tracks like “Infrastructure” or “Playa” do. The hi-hats are distracting, and the vocal distortion and watery synth subdue her usual vibrancy. And it’s a disappointment to hear duendita’s tremendous voice largely buried in the mix on “Us (How Sweet It Was).”
Elsewhere, the lyrics can be painfully corny. “Fav Boy”’s refrain of “I want to be your favorite boy/I want to be your favorite toy” has the all-too-familiar syntax of Tinder messages from men who are “just looking for someone to go on adventures with.” Especially following a heavy verse about feeling apathy at a relative’s funeral, the line feels like a bizarre non-sequitur. Godfather666’s laments on “No Future,” which address loneliness in the most direct terms, are similarly unrelatable. It’s hard to feel too much sympathy for someone singing, “Who could ever love me?/I’m only nice when I want something.”
There are a few shining moments here, though. “Catch You” lacks the complex instrumentation—brass and electronic flourishes, rich orchestration—that brought Lido Pimienta’s latest album, Miss Colombia, to life. Still, the flute winds beautifully around her gossamer falsetto. The elusive lyricism—“Wait for me/I’ll be with you though/Trust/And the leaves will fall”—is some of the most evocative on the album. “We’ll Be Home Soon,” which quivers like a serpentwithfeet track, is beguiling too. You’re left wondering what the song could have evolved into if it lasted longer than 40 seconds.
As a means of community building, and as a document of Ricky Reed exploring a new sound, The Room is impressive. It’s nice to see him slow down and reach out. But as a project that stands on its own, there’s not much to keep you coming back. In the dreary, hot days of a lonely COVID summer, these watery songs seem to dissipate into the air. It’s hard not to miss the heartbeat of a knocking bass line.

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The Most Lamentable Tragedy is a 29-track, 93-minute rock opera that grapples with Titus leader Patrick Stickles' manic depression. It is their least specific album but their most universal: The music encompasses everything they’ve ever sounded like and restores their claims to outsized ambition after the somewhat dour Local Business.

Titus Andronicus: The Most Lamentable Tragedy

The Most Lamentable Tragedy

If you've been to Brooklyn venue Shea Stadium in the last few years, you might have encountered Patrick Stickles sitting at the door, selling tickets to shows with crowds far more diminished than those drawn by his band, Titus Andronicus. Such remember-your-roots DIY ethos has always been central to the band’s existence, because at a time when bands are more flexible than ever about taking money to survive, Titus Andronicus are specifically beloved for their refusal to compromise. They start charity funds so their music can be kept out of advertisements; they snidely refer to Kendrick Lamar as a shoe spokesperson, an attitude both rigidly simplistic and technically true.
The Clash were hyped as the "only band that matters," a dubious claim because it was invented by their record label. But for their fans, Titus Andronicus is this type of group. They turn a great, burning eye upon the world and spare no one from their observations, not even themselves. For listeners attracted to rock'n'roll as both flagellating whip and eternal flame, this is powerfully enticing—especially if you also believe the world is on the perennial edge of collapse. (Ironically, they take a similarly analytical approach to the ugliness in themselves and in the world as Kendrick Lamar—only, of course, they'd never sell any shoes.)
Their status was cemented by 2010 breakthrough The Monitor, a wildly ambitious album that used the Civil War as a metaphor for Stickles' life. It was desperate music made for desperate people, filled with howled lamentations about the sorry state of society wrapped around riffs that forced your shoulders out of their sockets. But the follow-up, 2012's Local Business, was unexpectedly dour. Hesitant to accept his band's new position in the music industry, Stickles pulled back. The first line asserted that everything in the world was "inherently worthless," and only grew more precisely negative as it went onward, critiquing the middle-class bubble that allowed a band like them to exist. Music fans will accept a certain amount of doom-and-gloom—many times they actively court it—but there are limits. Few people want to listen to a rock song about why listening to a rock song is bad. That Stickles spent the next few years telling his Twitter followers that Local Business was better than The Monitor (in a run of tweets now gone after he deleted his timeline earlier this year) seemed to cement its status as metaphorical garlic, meant to ward off the punks-in-name-only who today might discover the band through listening to Beats 1.
So when reports first emerged that the band was writing a 30-track rock opera, it sounded outrageous—a pointed gag from Stickles that would probably culminate in, like, an album full of Crass covers. How do you go bigger than an album that uses the Civil War as a metaphor for one's life? But it wasn't a joke: Almost two years later, they announced The Most Lamentable Tragedy, a 29-track, 93-minute rock opera that immediately restored their claims to outsized ambition, as only a 29-track, 93-minute rock opera might.
The Most Lamentable Tragedy is a story told in five acts that follows the Hero, an unnamed man (who's someone like Stickles) in an unnamed city (which is somewhere like New York) grappling with his neuroses. He's confronted by his doppelgänger—an alternate self that seems to have everything figured out, and pushes him to find solace outside of sin. It’s a protracted allegory for manic depression, which Stickles has publicly struggled with since the band first came to attention. Here, he’s reversed course from the literal transcription of his life’s struggles on Local Business (no "My Eating Disorder"), instead interpreting them to fit his larger vision. The Most Lamentable Tragedy is their least specific album—no granular references to obscure Jersey baseball teams—but their most universal, less dependent on empathizing with the suburban sad sack.
The music encompasses everything they’ve ever sounded like: There are knotty guitar anthems filled with chords like power lines thrumming with electricity ("No Future Part IV", "Stranded"), hot-breathed hardcore exhortations ("Look Alive", "Lookalike"), vamps on musical theater where Stickles sounds somewhere between Billy Joel and Meat Loaf ("I Lost My Mind", "No Future Part V"). They filter the visceral riffage of Thin Lizzy ("Lonely Boy"), the all-hands-on revelry of the E. Street Band ("Fatal Flaw"), and the whiskey-soaked romanticism of the Pogues ("Come On, Siobhán") through a fiery, punk-indebted perspective. True, those are reference points on previous albums, but here the elements blend together like a hearty soup. Fifteen musicians are credited on the record (such as Owen Pallett, who handled the strings) and there's a feeling of camaraderie in the production; at times, it feels like the album was recorded in one, rambling live take over a long night.
The album’s ambitions aren’t only limited to the story, which Stickles has eagerly detailed at the former Rap Genius. Instead, it considers their discography as one giant super-structure. It's packed with callbacks to previous work, which any modest Titus head should be able to pick out. The references range from obvious ("More Perfect Union" follows The Monitor's "A More Perfect Union"; "I'm Going Insane" is a reprise of Local Business' "Titus Andronicus vs. the Absurd Universe (3rd Round KO)") to esoteric (lyrical homages to "No Future" and "A More Perfect Union", amongst others) to potentially meaningful: The titular character in "Mr. E. Mann" is the "Electric Man" from Local Business, which was written about a real-life incident in which Stickles was hospitalized after gripping a live microphone during rehearsal for a show.
The idea that electricity and electroshock therapy can cure depression is an old one, hence the smudging of fiction and reality to suggest that the shocks Stickles inadvertently received may have created this fictive doppelganger, who appears to the hero ("I met a mystery man/ On a magic morning") and offers a hopeful path toward clean living. Of course, these layers of potential interpretation are secondary to the fact that "Mr. E. Mann" is simply an enjoyable song, guided by Stickles' sensitive vocal performance and the convergence of harmonica, piano, and strings into what sounds like glistening dew on that magic morning. You don’t need to know that Stickles was shocked by a microphone to enjoy "Mr. E Mann", just as you don’t need to know that he’s from New Jersey to understand the hero's sense of psychic isolation. But like the Hold Steady, the mythology offers deeper enjoyment for anyone willing to burrow into it.
On their earlier albums, Titus Andronicus perfected the art of writing confrontationally self-effacing anthems. Their most potent and most recognized refrains—"You will always be a loser" and "Your life is over"—took on a therapeutic nature when being screamed by crowds of young men and women in the throes of rock-show-as-catharsis. By contrast, the mantras on The Most Lamentable Tragedy look inward. "I hate to be awake"; "I can control something inside of me"; "It's alright"; "I only like it when it's dimed out"; these are confessional observations that sound scribbled in the margins of some diary. Stickles has sounded more personal than this, but never less acidic. This is angst that’s approachable, rather than the starved nihilism that colored their previous records.
With that in mind, the one-two punch of "Come On, Siobhán" and "A Pair of Brown Eyes" is where the record unlocks. In their cover of the Pogues classic, they tweak a few lyrics to change the mood: "One winter's evening/ Stoned as hell." It's marijuana that the hero consumes in this version, not alcohol, because while booze dulls the senses, a real marijuana high makes one ultra-perceptive of all the conditions in one's life. Sifting those thoughts to find some clarity is like navigating a minefield... but here, the hero has a revelation that despite his baleful world view, despite the push and pull between his inner selves, despite the tide of disgust felt toward his surroundings, salvation is possible through someone else. The feeling might be as ephemeral as the high, but for a moment, life looks wide open. It's the first time the band has explicitly sung about love, the transmutation of brutal pessimism into beatific optimism.
This is not maudlin sentiment printed off a Hallmark card, but a hard-fought conclusion following a lifetime of despair. The feeling isn't eternal; a few songs later, the relationship has ended and the hero is plunged back into his depression. But the mood has shifted by "Stable Boy", the last proper song on the album. Over a weeping chord organ, Stickles gazes at the yawning void of "forever" and decides that for all life's dissatisfaction, 'tis better to have lived than not at all.
"Stable Boy" was recorded with the same cassette recorder used for "Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ", the first song off their first record, which captured Stickles' need to do wrong to everyone who'd done wrong by him. The two tracks sound like bookends to the Titus Andronicus project, introducing and resolving Stickles' profound anxieties about life—the running theme through all of their four albums. It's not necessarily a happy ending, but it's one they fought for. And so: It's taken five years, but they've finally answered the grand expectations created by The Monitor. They could go anywhere from here—record that album of Crass covers, become a full-time bar cover band, or even happily break up. At the very least, they can stop writing songs titled "No Future".


As another moniker for Danish musician Loke Rhabek, Croatian Amor finds him at his most ambient, exploring the ugly beauty of love and human connection.

Love Means Taking Action

Croatian Amor’s newest album Love Means Taking Action is the latest entry to the ever-expanding canon of albums that wrestle with the infinite nuances of love. As one of many monikers of Loke Rahbek—a key figure in the Copenhagen punk scene and co-founder of the Posh Isolation label—he explores the idea abstractly, in a fluctuating volley of electronics that communicate everything from ecstasy to despair. Under Croatian Amor, it is the closest he comes to making ambient music, removed from the retro synthpop he plays with Lust for Youth, the power electronics he creates under the LR moniker, or the various explorations of noise he makes in collaboration with Olymphia, Damien Dubrovnik, or Puce Mary. It’s a project that has always been able to balance beauty’s relationship with the ugly.
Never has this dichotomy been more present than on Love Means Taking Action, where both of these elements are amplified more than ever before. It’s perfectly displayed in the opening song “An Angel Gets His Wings Clipped” where a solitary, echoing voice sings a stark melody for a solid minute before all the electronics start swelling around it like steam cutting through earth. The give-and-take emerges, and tension begins to consume everything, setting the tone for what’s to come.
Love Means Taking Action separates itself from Croatian Amor’s previous work because of its ability to maintain an overall mood among its many smaller shifts. Older works like Genitalia Garden would constantly reset tone between tracks, choosing between a darker or lighter sound. Whereas here a song like “No Sex Club” starts so claustrophobically with single-tone electronics and cut up samples of someone panting, only to give way to bright, piano-like chords that shift the whole tenor of the song, while still keeping the original creeping sensation present in the background. These production changes point toward the greater risks Rahbek is taking here. The vocal slicing and splicing on “Like Angel” are reminiscent of Holly Herndon, and the short piano piece “Nadim Call Emergence II” would never exist on previous releases. Here they not only make sense, but give the more traditional Croatian Amor compositions (“Octopus Web,” “Any Life You Want”) more gravity.
These violent contrasts should lead to a complete lack of cohesion. And while the album creates a kind of confusion initially, if this is Rahbek’s attempt to define love, or at least to understand the interaction between other people, then of course there will be odd juxtapositions and gorgeous conflict. But Rahbek ends the album with the title track, one of his prettiest compositions to date, a cheese-filled blossom of skeletal ’80s synths that remains the album’s brightest most cohesive moment as something gorgeous takes hold of everything. It’s as though all the previous chaotic dissonance is a means to arrive, finally, at harmony.


Traversing classic UK genres like 2-step and jungle, the duo’s first commercial mix doubles as a celebration of multiculturalism in modern Britain.

fabric presents Overmono

As modern Britain lurches from crisis to crisis, deeply divided and seemingly at war with its own interests, it may seem futile to look to a mix CD in search of the positives of UK life. Yet fabric presents Overmono, the first commercial mix from the Overmono brothers, takes a pretty good stab at reminding the listener of the deeply ingrained strain of multiculturalism that has made British music—and British life, in general—so rewarding for those who have embraced it.
Overmono, a fraternal duo known for their rugged techno and rave revivalism, wanted their Fabric mix to be “a nod to music scenes past and present” that would capture the feeling of South East London on a cold winter night: “Night buses with steamed up windows. Sirens in the distance.” But the album’s centrepiece, L.B. Dub Corp’s “I Have a Dream,” featuring British dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah, suggests that their intentions go beyond music. “I Have a Dream” is gloriously, necessarily unsubtle in its message of power through multiculturalism, providing the mix with a rapturous and timely focal point. While the song’s lines may be delivered with a wink (“It is written in the great book of multiculturalism that the curry will blend with the shepherd’s pie and the Afro hairstyle will return”), they feel considerably less frivolous in a country where Prime Minister Boris Johnson has compared Muslim women in burkas to “letter boxes” and members of England’s soccer team are routinely racially abused on their home turf.
Elsewhere, Overmono make their point through an incisive musical selection that plucks liberally from the last four decades of electronic music. The set’s 29 tracks run a glorious steeplechase through British musical genres, from 2-step classics (Antonio’s evergreen “Hyperfunk”) through ambient jungle rollers (Orca’s “Intellect”), techstep tear-ups (the hell’s growl of Ed Rush and Optical’s “Bacteria”), warped rave revivalism (Anz’s rainbow-colored “Morphing Into Brighter”) and other weird tendrils of the UK bass continuum (Vex’d’s snarling “Pop Pop,” a track that marks the moment where grime and dubstep collided). fabric presents Overmono also devotes space to the throbbing, thrillingly dark take on tops-off techno that has long sent British crowds into rapture, from DJ Misjah’s trance-y banger “Victim” to the grinding psychedelic loops of Surgeon and James Ruskin’s “Sound Pressure Part 3.”
Holding this all together seems a fanciful task, but Overmono manage it with aplomb, favoring the kind of swift transitions between genres that only make sense while listening; 29 tracks speed by in 65 thrilling minutes. Antonio’s “Hyperfunk” positively slinks out from under the industrial rumbling of Milanese’s “Billy Hologram”; the aquatic stomp of Plastikman’s “Fuk” tears at the belly of L.B. Dub Corp’s euphoric “I Have a Dream”; and the unsettling dancehall lurch of Equiknoxx’s “A Rabbit Spoke to Me When I Woke Up” is an inspired partner to Ed Rush and Optical’s “Bacteria,” dusting the duo’s metallic drum’n’bass with trace elements of dancehall. The mix is well sequenced, too: In the wrong hands, “I Have a Dream” could have felt a little strained in its jovial messaging; employed here after a buildup of tough, industrial funk, its heavenly melodic sweeps and chants of “multiculture” carpet-bomb the hairs on the back of your neck. Later on, Actress’ “Caves of Paradise” provides a welcome pause for breath before the coming jungle onslaught.
Overmono’s four productions on this album—three original tracks and a remix of For Those I Love’s stirring electronic eulogy “I Have a Love”—help greatly in these transitions, positioning them somewhere between UK garage, R&B, and techno, distilling the spirit of the mix into vivid three-minute flashes. “So U Kno,” the Overmono track that opens the mix, is particularly excellent: an iron-clad 2-step battleship with an irresistible hook, the steel of techno colliding against the rubbery skitter of UKG.
For all its Britishness, fabric presents Overmono is anything but parochial: There are tracks here from all over the world, while the UK productions remind us that Black music, from reggae to techno, is integral to British culture. As an insight into British music in times of crisis—and a dynamic contrast to the guitar-led wave of post-Brexit post-punk—fabric presents Overmono is Overmono’s defining statement to date.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Dynamic rock'n'roll lifer and all-around live force Wanda Jackson follows Loretta Lynn's path and has a comeback LP produced by Jack White.

The Party Ain't Over

It's easy to see why Jack White wanted to produce rock'n'roll lifer Wanda Jackson after watching just one two-and-a-half minute YouTube video. The performance clip was taped in 1958 for L.A. TV show "Town Hall Party" and finds Jackson roaring through an Elvis Presley hit single called "Hard Headed Woman". As written, the song doesn't portray women in the strongest light-- "a hard-headed woman is the thorn in the side of a man," goes the 50s-macho hook. But Jackson flips it-- and gives the thing a good hard jolt, too. When she sings the chorus, she adds a blustery "you betcha, yeah!" While many young women of her time were content to pine after Elvis, she dated him while in her teens and symbolically kicked his ass with his own song. But the most startling and awesome thing about the "Hard Headed Woman" clip may be Jackson's badass introduction: "We think this is one of the most beautiful love songs that's ever been written." Kathleen Hanna would most certainly approve.
Jackson's 50s sides would justly earn her the title of "Queen of Rockabilly," and The Party Ain't Over is a reference to her 1958 hit "Let's Have a Party". But, since that early success, the singer recorded many albums of more traditional country, blues, and gospel over the last 50 years. And while her voice was so galvanizing on those early singles-- her signature growl could match any man's-- it would later prove to be tender, lonesome, and gorgeous without a hint of the toughness that originally made her famous. Delving into her catalog now, some of her most lasting music may not be as revolutionary as her gender-busting rockabilly, but it's also less novel; her classy 1964 LP Blues in My Heart in particular is a timeless work, both loose and graceful. But, with The Party Ain't Over, Jack White aims to reconnect the 73-year-old Jackson with her teenage style by any means necessary. So we get truckloads of overzealous horns that sound ripped off from his buddy Conan's late-night band, White's own fuzzed-out guitar, bustling drums, and cartoon-y slide work. The wild excess often ends up shoving Jackson to the sidelines on her own album.
The last time White worked with one of his grandmotherly female idols was on Loretta Lynn's devastatingly personal and loving Van Lear Rose. But there are differences between that project and this one. Van Lear Rose had Lynn writing most of the songs, and White treated them with reverence while maintaining an airy live feel. Jackson didn't write any songs on The Party Ain't Over, which isn't terribly notable in itself considering she hailed from a pre-singer-songwriter era and wrote few of her own tunes. But the songs on the record-- mostly picked by White-- often come off as forced, unfairly anachronistic or both. When the too-loud trumpets and juke-joint piano push Jackson on opener "Rip It Up", it feels a little uncomfortable. It's almost the same uneasy vibe you get when watching that fake old guy dancing up a storm in those Six Flags commercials-- something just ain't right there.
Of course, White's intentions are good here, and chances are many people (including myself) wouldn't even be paying attention if he weren't involved. And if the point was to get folks to revisit this legendary singer's legacy and grant her much-overdue appreciation, mission accomplished. But White doesn't help Jackson make any new classics on The Party Ain't Over. Annoyingly, the last track suggests it didn't have to be that way. "Blue Yodel #6" ditches all the instrumental flotsam as it finds Jackson singing against only White's twanging acoustic guitar. The singer's weathered-yet-vibrant voice and personality finally don't have to battle for the spotlight. It's quite easily the best thing here, as it hearkens back to her post-rockabilly 60s records and shows this undervalued pioneer doesn't need to party to have a good time.


The UK techno titan’s debut album is a display of his sound-design prowess—as well as a reminder that even the heaviest techno needn’t shy from the pleasures of weirdo pop.

Wet Will Always Dry

Two minutes into “Careless,” the second song on Blawan’s debut album, Wet Will Always Dry, something unexpected happens: The UK techno don’s voice wafts into the mix, his airy tone suggesting a Belle and Sebastian B-side blown across the festival field. For a producer whose best-known song—2012’s monstrous “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?”—hangs off a distorted vocal hook that hints at murder, the contrast is eye-opening. It introduces a rejuvenating tinge of vulnerability into Blawan’s sometimes stony techno.
The move is not entirely without precedent. Since launching his Ternesc label in 2015, Blawan (aka Jamie Roberts) has eased off the terrible intensity of “Bodies” and his thunderous work with Pariah as Karenn; that softening has coincided with him turning to modular synthesis to produce his music. Roberts’ twin 2016 EPs as Bored Young Adults and Kilner showcased a more introverted take on electronics, while 2017’s Nutrition EP hinted at tenderness within the thunder.
Even so, that cobweb-light voice on “Careless” is an unexpected highlight on an album that subtly turns up the color on Blawan’s hard-nosed production sound. It’s not just that the vocal is fragile; it also has a hook that you could find yourself muttering in the shower several days later. This is the closest Blawan has come to weirdo pop music since “Bodies” or 2011’s bumping “Getting Me Down.” His knack for an understated vocal hook shows up again on “Stell,” where his wistful voice anchors insolently squelching synths in a piece of electronic music that feels designed for staring out the window on an overcast day.
Musical color is also evident in the fantastically visceral sounds that elevate Wet Will Always Dry above the techno horde. Album opener “Klade” is built around a droning noise that evokes the feeling of lying in the long grass watching planes pass overhead, while “North” layers a springy, insistent synth line over what sounds like a bag of potato chips being thrown on the fire. It helps that the album’s mix is bathed in a satisfying sonic warmth whose rich timbre does for the ears what the smell of polished wood does for the nose.
Odd hooks and noises might not sound like enough to sustain an eight-track album. But Blawan has a way of drawing out the subtle drama in his sounds, playing on the tension between the elasticity of the instrumental lines and the tightly wound percussive structure. The rubbery harp-pluck effect on “Nims,” for example, is forever threatening to veer out of control, only to be brought back in line by the click and thud of the regimented drum line. The album only falters when these touches aren’t enough to sustain interest. “Tasser” and “Vented” both feature hugely satisfying noises—the former resembling the ominous, metallic buildup of a sea storm, the latter a ruler being twanged in the bowels of hell—but neither is developed sufficiently to raise their respective tracks above post-Jeff Mills loopery.
Wet Will Always Dry isn’t an album that will rewire dance music or revolutionize modern electronics, but at its best it succeeds in pushing against the expectations of modern techno, bringing vulnerability, warmth, and oodles of enchanting noises to a musical genre whose pursuit of the future sometimes seems to have gotten lost in po-faced respect for the past. Wet Will Always Dry is tender, intense, and dramatic. But most of all it is fun, in a way that only the pursuit of the most ludicrous aural stimulation can be.


I have issues with women in rock. Not so much the actual act of female human beings playing that rock ...

One Beat

I have issues with women in rock. Not so much the actual act of female human beings playing that rock n' roll music, but the entire media concept of in-quotes "women in rock." I'm tired of Rolling Stone double issues, the VH1 theme weeks, the Tower Records special displays. Condescending, patronizing bullshit, all of it. Now, I won't get into the issue of the built-in misogyny in the rock criticism phrasebook; partially because I wouldn't want to endorse a paranoid shift towards excessively vigilant political correctness, and partially because I myself am guilty of occasionally over-using the adjective 'sultry.'
No, at hand is a bigger fish-- namely, that far too much writing about female musicians gets caught up with the idea that the artist must be saying something about the 'female experience.' Rather than accept these acts as just plain musicians, being a woman playing rock music is automatically assumed to be a declaration of activist intentions. Other than the obvious double-standard (when was the last time you read a review about an all-guy band's songs reflecting the male experience?), this allows the Y chromosome-dominated rock press to focus on gender while still coming off as enlightened. But what of those girl bands that just want to rock, without all that role model jazz?
Consider, for example, indie-rock darlings Sleater-Kinney, just coincidentally the subject of this review! To date, Sleater-Kinney has, in my professional opinion, been a good but not great band with a solid back catalog of energetic but slightly homogenous releases. To the majority of my esteemed colleagues, however, S-K is the three-headed coming of the woman Christ, The Great Female Hope, the band that proves at long last that, hey, girls can rawk too! Never mind the fact that girls are, after all, evolutionarily engineered to have fingers for making chord shapes and strumming, just like boys.
Saddled with such a heavy label, and with unrealistic and undeserved expectations, the three women of Sleater-Kinney could just keep on making the same album over and over again, pleasing their tiny, rabid loyalists and the leather-patched elbow crowd in the press box. Hey, the life ain't too bad for a cult band these days. But, thank god, the Kill Rock Stars trio isn't content to forever meander in that habitat. With One Beat, Sleater-Kinney have turned in an album that absolutely, positively OBLITERATES the gender card, an album so colossal that all prefixes to the label 'rock band' must be immediately discarded.
From the opening, off-kilter drum pattern of the title track, One Beat takes you on a log flume ride through a forest of monumental riffs-- a log flume ride, people! Witness the fretboard slides of "Hollywood Ending", the cocky strut of "Step Aside", the mighty, fist-pumping second half of "Combat Rock" (to which I'd like to just give a premature Forkie for Best Riff of the Year right now). Also, be forewarned that the drumstick-twirling coda of "Far Away" has been shown to provoke sudden miming of snare hits and windmill strums in laboratory animals.
Now, you might be hearing a lot of crazytalk from longtime S-K supporters that the new album is their most disappointing to date. Ignore it; fanbase discomfort is a common symptom of the breakthrough album, proving that the act has tweaked their formula far enough to piss off the vets who want their pet band to stay predictable. Kinney's definitely changed up the recipe (as they had already begun to do with All Hands on the Bad One), but all changes are positive, foremost being a new understanding of how restraint and scaling back can allow for exponentially increased rockage. "Combat Rock" and "The Remainder" stutter along a single riff, teasingly refusing to explode before building to a tantric peak. "Light Rail Coyote" and "O2" both come out with all engines blazing, but retreat to valleys of uncharacteristically subdued hush.
Also helping the cause is an increased singing role for Carrie Brownstein, who sounds more confident than ever sporting a fully developed hiccupy vocal character that plays off Tucker's wail like lime flavoring on Tostitos. For anyone of the opinion that Tucker's banshee act occasionally got out of hand on older S-K material, Brownstein's participation is welcome news for your fragile eardrums. The latest model of the Janet Weiss percussion-cyborg sings a bit, too, but her main contribution is her incredibly melodic drums, strident and full-bodied as ever.
Meanwhile, the band breaks out the required fifth-album accoutrements: horn section, strings, occasional keyboards. It might be predictable timing for the band to expand their sound, but it's handled delicately by producer John Goodmanson, who never allows the spice to overwhelm the dish (er, sonically speaking, of course). The slip-and-slide Moog on "Oh!" drives home the song's oh-woah-woah playfulness, "Step Aside"'s marching band brass lends its revolution beckoning an epic quality, and Sam Coomes' theremin on "Funeral Song" fulfills the FDA requirements for any tune that mentions haunted houses, demons, and Halloween.
So except for a closing track ("Sympathy") where the bluesy over-emoting reminds me of everything I used to dislike about the Sleater, One Beat is an uncompromising, energetic monster of a record. Most of all, it's just accessible (pardon my French) enough to be exactly what the rock world needs these days: the Trail of Dead for those put off by the Danzig-esque lyrics and relentless drum-rolling. It's a dive-headfirst-into-an-empty-pool, take-the-subway-to-Queens, snap-into-a-Slim-Jim, forget-to-bring-back the-library-books, tire-pressure-dangerously-low, sneaking-fireworks-across-the-Illinois-Indiana-border kind of album. That it's performed by three persons of the female gender is entirely beside the point, to anyone who's really listening.