The Turkish singer Gaye Su Akyol has emerged at the fore of her country’s revitalized music scene in recent years. Her new album mixes Turkish modes and scales with grunge, surf rock, and psychedelia.

Hologram İmparatorluğu

While Turkey boasted its own heady rock scene during the late 1960s, the Anatolian Invasion didn’t make much of a dent in the West. Were it not for the tireless digging and reissues from imprints like Andy Votel’s Finders Keepers, Pharaway Sounds, and Sublime Frequencies, we still might know little about Turkish rock. Sure, the searing strings of Erkin Koray, Muhlis Akarsu, and the like may have appealed to Woodstock-era rock fans, but the thundering drums underpinning them led to a Turkish revival of sorts decades later, with everyone from the Gaslamp Killer and the Weeknd to Timbaland sampling Turkish music.
But back home, a military coup in 1980 led to Turkey’s rock scene being repressed to the point of near-extinction. It’s only recently that it’s begun emanating beyond the borders, though with President Erdoğan’s new crackdowns on dissent, one fears it might be a short-lived renaissance. Ever since her 2014 debut, vocalist Gaye Su Akyol has emerged at the fore this revitalized music scene, alongside acts like Ayyuka and Büyük Ev Ablukada. The music is unmistakably Turkish in its heritage—the modes and scales to the guitars mimic the baglama and ud—but there are rock influences as well, from Nevermind and Nick Cave to “White Rabbit.” This confluence of East and West makes Hologram Ĭmparatorluğu an intriguing listen even to those who don’t speak Turkish.
A dizzying updraft of buzzing strings immediately makes “Hologram” soar. But while the music alludes to transcendence and the song, on the surface, is about love, it’s also about seeing through such an illusion (fitting for a group whose live shows often feature Akyol and band in masks and an album title that translates as “Hologram Empire”). “Thought I had a new world found/I was fooled,” Akyol sings, but listen closer and Akyol’s august voice also hints at capture and escape, which feels both surreal and real at once: “I am being seized/Two baby finches, let’s escape there/To Pluto.”
Akyol’s father is famous Turkish painter Muzaffer Akyol, and in his vivid, dreamlike canvases, there’s an antecedent for his daughter’s language. On the simmering, bandoneon-laced “Anlasana Sana Aşiğim,” Akyol’s lyrics on love are by-turns strange and tactile: “I’ve become a butterfly/Come and find me/Black holes are everywhere/Confessions all clandestine.” The Bad Seeds influence comes through on the noir-ish throb and reverb guitar riffs of “Dünya kaleska,” and Akyol’s lyrics convey bleakness worthy of Cave.
Snaking hand percussion and rattles gives “Eski tüfek” a driving pulse, matched by the surf guitars of her backing band, Bubituzak. Their guitars are as comfortable evoking the likes of Erkin Koray as they are Dick Dale and Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western themes, heightening the drama of Akyol’s songs. Closer “Berdus” rides a lashing guitar riff and percolating bassline that gives the song a steady building rhythm, as Akyol imagines herself lost in the woods like Little Red Riding Hood and conjures wolves and bears alike. Just don’t mistake it for a fairytale ending. For as the music fades away, Akyol’s last line leaves a pejorative image for her fellow countrymen, and, well, everyone: “Yesterday’s piece of shit has become king over our head.”


Falling somewhere between Bill Frisell’s basement and the Mediterranean Sea, the debut from this instrumental Brooklyn trio marks a promising arrival.

Jasmine on a Night in July

On a first spin, Brooklyn trio Scree’s debut, Jasmine on a Night in July, scans as a promising little electric guitar record. Ryan El-Solh’s subtle, trebly strings touch almost every corner, whether opening the fractured waltz “Beautiful Days” with stunted chords that curl like question marks or stepping out for a solo that, on the title track, suggests late jazz great Jim Hall winking back through the cosmos. At its best, El-Solh’s tone suggests the distorted gleam of an unpolished pearl; it also evokes that sense of distant longing the Germans call Weltschmerz, sweetness twinkling ever so slightly through the dusk. Chet Atkins and Omar Khorshid, Bill Frisell and Mary Halvorson: These players—each with individual, distinct senses of sound and timing—seem essential to El-Solh’s personal pantheon. He’s not there yet, but his playing on Jasmine makes you remember the name, search for the quizzical solo album, maybe bookmark the Bandcamp.
Listen again and again, and something deeper soon emerges through these nine tracks: Scree are a spellbinding and selfless new trio, with a chemistry that belies debut status. Double bassist Carmen Rothwell and drummer Jason Burger—ringers with their own songs and extensive folk-rock credits, respectively—work in conversation with El-Solh, whose instrument is simply the most vocal and pronounced here. It is telling that the 20-second collage that serves as the album’s invocation, assembled by producer Ari Chersky from Scree’s improvisational scree, is all long swirling tones and pointillist percussion, no guitar. When El-Solh’s arid Morricone melody spills suddenly through that din, the creation myth is clear: This wouldn’t exist without all of them, which is exactly what makes Jasmine on a Night in July much more than a promising little electric guitar record.
The key to this instrumental integration is Scree’s insistence in always slipping off the beat, as though every meter has a steep and slightly curving face, as hard to mount as El Cap. Rothwell, Burger, and El-Solh are collectively the rhythm section and a rhythm-less section, the haze emanating from the implied beat. “Fatigue” is the feat here. Lap-steel sighs, bittersweet piano plinks, and bowed bass that feels like both a shrug and a hug unspool beneath El-Solh’s rambling lead. Soon, Burger’s drums give momentary structure to these overlapping moans, the melody tightening around his rumble like a slowly contracting muscle. Just as quickly, it all relaxes, oozing back over the drums like a group sigh. Somewhere between ECM’s famous austerity and Windham Hill’s endless vibes, “Fatigue” packs a life of possibility and doubt into 145 seconds. What is the difference between sitting still or being pushed along, between absolute torpor and ceaseless anxiety? “Fatigue” never finds the answer.
As El-Solh penned the pieces that shape Jasmine on a Night in July, he was reading the work of Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian poet whose childhood home in Galilee was upended by Israeli forces. Though Darwish was an eventual political prisoner and enduring “resistance poet,” his work often mined a sentimental ambiguity, longing for a better past as it squinted at the wobbly future. “I am only my steps, and you are both my compass and my chasm,” he once wrote, loading a universe of equivocation into a single sentence. Scree thrive in those emotional interstices. The brief piano-and-percussion beauty “Wind and Sand” feels like an agitated daydream, the distant organ suggesting background unease you cannot escape. The organ is as playful as a carnival song during “Fresh Bread,” Burger’s drums almost peppy. But there is a lingering sadness, too, especially in El-Solh’s pinched electric notes and the way Burger drifts out of and races back into the meter. This is the memory of sustenance, of sated happiness, not the thing itself.
Almost four years ago, Scree debuted with Live at the Owl, a short set capturing a 2018 night in a small Brooklyn room. Listening back, the parts sound mostly the same—El-Solh’s guitar, suspended somewhere between the Mediterranean Sea and Frisell’s basement; Rothwell’s upright, lumbering and inquisitive like a grazing Quarter Horse; Burger’s drums, slowing and speeding the beat like he’s navigating hairpin turns. What’s not there, though, is the sense of synchronous feeling that makes their debut so enchanting, as if all three are singing the same wordless story in uncanny harmony. Not unlike Tortoise and Labradford in the mid ’90s, Jasmine on a Night in July feels like the proper introduction to a significant new piece of the American instrumental rock landscape, familiar threads woven into fabric that feels novel.


The Odd Future project's 2010 album has been re-shuffled and remastered with two additional tracks for release on Fat Possum.

BlackenedWhite [Reissue]

When MellowHype first released BlackenedWhite on Halloween of last year, the world was a very different place for Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. Events that would eventually cement the collective's budding stardom-- Tyler, the Creator's "Yonkers" becoming a viral sensation, their seminal performance on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon", Tyler inking a deal with XL-- were either weeks or months away. The group at large was still strictly a sensation in a small pocket of the Internet, somewhat mysterious, amorphous, confusing and-- as anyone who tried to grab an album from Odd Future's official blog only to be met with a broken download link could attest-- amateur.
Released after that initial rush of online hype, BlackenedWhite (along with Domo Genesis' Rolling Papers) was, if not an introduction point, at least the first new music released since many had initially heard of Odd Future. Described on the crew's Tumblr as "The Perfect Soundtrack For Mobbing On A Dark Halloween Night," and littered with references to dead cops, the album easily fit into the general perception of what Odd Future's music was about.
So here we are, some eight-and-a-half months later, and BlackenedWhite has now been remastered, rearranged, and re-released by Fat Possum into a market where Tyler easily coexists next to pop stars. And yet, oddly enough, MellowHype's role is almost precisely the same, again representing the first new release by Odd Future since being embraced again by a wider audience. But where in October 2010 it might've been hard to pinpoint exactly where MellowHype stood in relation to guys like Tyler or Domo or Earl Sweatshirt, time has allowed the different personas within Odd Future to distinguish themselves.
Hodgy Beats' wild-eyed glare can be seen next to Tyler on stage during Odd Future's shows, and it's easy to see how he could be thought of as Tyler's sidekick. And in fact, when people talk about Odd Future on a macro level, especially when that discussion is boiled down to the more controversial elements of the music, who they're really talking about is Tyler (and, to a lesser extent, Earl), oftentimes glossing over the individual members of the group. Part of that is by design, of course: Tyler has always been front and center, and not only is his star power blatantly obvious, but he feeds on being on a lightning rod. But lost in the shuffle is that the other arms of Odd Future are putting out music that is far from Tyler's trolling self-autopsies, which is both a good and bad thing.
As a rapper, Hodgy seems mostly concerned with stringing together words on the basis of their sound in rapid-fire fashion. This is seen most obviously in "Igotagun" and "64", the two new tracks added to Blackenedwhite for the reissue. He doesn't have Tyler's focus or imagination, but his garden-variety shit talking, combined with gleefully inhabited fables of drug pushing and cop killing, bring the sort of levity that you would expect from a group of skate-punk "Jackass" descendents, and in a way that's much less obnoxious than, say, Tyler's "Bitch Suck Dick". What can't be found here are all the things that upset people about Odd Future, namely Tyler's reliance on slurs and his elaborate rape fantasies. And though Hodgy doesn't possess Earl's effortless rapping skill (who does?), his penchant for tongue-twisting alliteration further separates him from the stoned flows of fellow Odd Future stoners Domo and Mike G.
The flipside of that is when Tyler storms through on "Fuck the Police" (now rebranded for Best Buys as "F666 the Police"), the effect is slightly jarring. While Hodgy's Flocka homage and producer Left Brain's turn as Timbaland circa "We Need a Resolution" work just fine, Tyler tells a strikingly vivid story of getting pulled over and murdering a cop in what is easily the most accomplished verse on the album. BlackenedWhite is the most fun Odd Future release (excepting, arguably, the collaborative mixtapes) and it's one of the easier to digest, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny in the way that Tyler's or Earl's work does.
This cleaned up version of the album also puts a stronger concentration on the Left Brain productions that lean heavy on Southern rap. Replacing the distinctly Tyler-esque "Chordaroy" and "Loco", as well as the trifles "Stripclub" and "Gram", are the aforementioned new tracks, both of which call back to the beats that the Neptunes used to give to Clipse. The result is both a more succinct and cohesive full-length. The catch-22 for MellowHype is that while their centrism certainly has its merits, their music is unlikely to convert anyone that has, at this point, already written off Odd Future. Which leaves them with a solid, fun rap album to satiate a feverish cult and a growing number of casual fans. Things, all told, could be worse.


The British experimental rock group Adult Jazz tackle themes of gender and the body's changing place in society on their sophomore outing.

Earrings Off!

The British experimental rock group Adult Jazz has no problem cramming their music with ideas and lofty goals. In interviews describing their 2014 debut Gist Is, they name dropped Hermann Hesse, criticized religious institutions, and said that the album tackled everything from morality to empathy and the efficacy of communication itself. NPR even followed suit when reviewing the record, saying it was concerned with “the search for meaning in life.” Two years later they’ve released their sophomore follow-up, *Earrings Off! *a record that equally embraces the same theory-laden attitude. *Earrings Off! *is meant to analyze the complexities of gender and the body’s changing place in society. In descriptions of the album, the band has stressed the record’s interest in “the possibility of authenticity” in a society that rewards normative behavior.
It’s all very interesting to read about what an album is supposed to do, and there is precedent for the political thrust of a piece of music to affect the conversation it’s entering, but these intentions can so often backfire. (PJ Harvey’s *The Hope Six Demolition Project *being a case study for this fine line). The cleverness and unique playfulness of Adult Jazz's debut Gist Is helped steer it away from the cliff of self-indulgence and pretension. *Earrings Off! *edges much closer to that drop-off than its predecessor, burdened by often-silly lyrics and a sound that is a bit more derivative than their last record would suggest.
What still remains uniquely rewarding about Adult Jazz’s music is the construction of their sound. They use a trombone, cello, processed vocals, and a menagerie of sample to tread the line between acidic minimalism and bubbly exuberance in confoundingly expert ways. Of this album’s seven songs, three of them (“(Cry for Time Off,)” “(Cry for Coherence),” and “(Cry for Home)”) are short sonic sketches, serving as the most interesting moments in the otherwise slow pace of *Earrings Off!’s *24 minutes. These three songs mostly focus on single sounds—a helium-cracked vocal cry, dissonant string loops, and the bated breath of a brass instrument. These pared-down constructions generate more and more detail on repeated listens. The album’s four other songs attempt to mimic this but come off as overwrought and heavy handed at best.
The difficult six minutes of “Pumped From Above” exploits corrosive horn sounds and maddeningly uneven drumming for all their worth. It could almost sound like a facsimile of a Peter Brötzman composition, but the arrangement of the chaotic noises can be curiously predictable. The singing is usually so swaddled by the noises that Harry Burgess’ words are obscured, but when you look at what he’s saying on paper it can make the experience even more cringe-inducing. Take this passage: “God cannot be softening/He beats strong with iron wings/Kneeling sporty chest pumping/Before the Alpha-lord.” You can open up any book of poems by Hart Crane or Dylan Thomas and find a similar impenetrability. But these words and images have the feeling of being selected at random; their difficulty doesn't have a sense of clarity or deeper meaning and incomprehensibility isn't the same as seriousness.
This is a running thread through the album that detracts from where Earrings Off! improves upon their debut. They’ve learned how to create hooks without sacrificing from their outre sounds. This is best accomplished in the title track (which pleasantly confirms any of the Dirty Projectors comparisons) and “Eggshell.” But even the pleasure of craft can melt away when you figure out amidst the textures these words are ringing out: “And if he's 1940's/He whistles through a meadow.” It makes it impossible for the album to actually engage with the conversation it proposes, and often made me wish I could ignore the words and allow the singing to be another instrument. *Earrings Off! *is filled with these sorts of growing pains, ones that hopefully point to brighter pastures sometime soon for this promising band.


Smashing Pumpkins soundalikes from L.A. spin spiderweb-rock and scream a lot.

Carnavas

Given Silver Lake's fashion-forwardness (also absurdity), it makes sense that recent grunge-on-the-runway anticipates a 1990s throwback band straight out of aforementioned L.A. hipster pocket. Silversun Pickups, named in homage to a Sunset/Silver Lake liquor store, spurn the Beach Boys and Thrills approach to California, channeling, instead, the weirder darkness of acts like Autolux. Carnavas, the band's first full-length, comes off as something of an aural spiderweb: glinty, silvery, and vaguely treacherous. Their spidery technique for entrapping listeners is this: wrap them up in familiar noises toward which they feel more-or-less favorably and count on imminent stupo
Carnavas scores points for constructing dreamlike aural shrouds. Those nostalgic for Smashing Pumpkins tunes of yesteryear will find them nestled inside the minutes (and there are so many minutes) of "Lazy Eye". Those desirous of music to play while gazing at Magic Eye pics will appreciate the record for its fuzzy blur; it's possible that they'll even find this album extremely rewarding, and find hidden, wonderful things in it, like crosses or hearts, or whatever it is Magic Eye creators are putting in their images these days.
Maybe it's a prereq for making this sort of racket, but Silversun Pickups too often teeter into melodrama. Consider "Future Foe Scenarios", which seems like it could be about a village raising fists to heaven after plagues of something (Locusts? Boils?), dissolving into screams of "I must stop drinking". And "Common Reactor", which also winds up a screaming, terrifying display of pathos.
Unfortunately, the music fails to justify the histrionics. Songs start out exciting, drag on for too long, and/or become screaming. Lyrics seem like they're poking fun at Corgan, or impersonating a high school version of him: compare "Rhinoceros" ("Open your eyes-- to these I must lie?") and "Tempo" ("She said don't open your eyes/ Don't open your eyes/ And said goodnight"). Words elsewhere are wholly incomprehensible ("What was that scar situated from afar/ What was that light integrated in your mind" on "Well Thought Out Twinkles"). Other times-- OK a lot of times-- Brian Aubert's emo-boy voice gets to be too much, worse than even Corgan's barely-tolerable nasal delivery. Girl parts, offered by bassist Nikki Monninger, are welcome respite; also, she's way cute. In the end, despite the band's valiant and respectable effort, Carnavas ends up too unfocused, too rambly, too boring to make any lasting impressions.


Since 2003's Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, M83 mastermind Anthony Gonzalez has created increasingly colossal records. His latest, a double album that serves as a framework to realize the marvelous capability of our dreams and daily lives, could be his best record yet.

Hurry Up, We're Dreaming

Late last year, Anthony Gonzalez announced his next album was almost complete and would be "very, very, very epic." With all due respect, consider the redundancy of that statement: Since 2003 breakthrough Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, every new and increasingly colossal M83 studio record has led to widespread crowdsourcing of synonyms for "epic." What exactly was he promising other than simply another album?
Well, throughout the past decade, the 30-year old Gonzalez has honored the tremendous impact of growing up during the golden age of CD buying by implicitly serving as a patron saint for those who treat the weekly trip to the record store as a pilgrimage and still covet the album as a physical proposition: His output always comes stylishly packaged, with cover art worth obsessing over and credits that need to be scoured in order to spot the guest appearances. Unsurprisingly, he ups the ante here by aspiring to what is still the paradigm of artistic permanence, both in terms of legacy and tactility: the double album, that occasionally ambitious, usually decadent, and almost always fascinatingly flawed endeavor of musicians convinced (rightfully or otherwise) that they're at the peak of their own powers. Hurry Up, We're Dreaming might be all of those things, but above all else, it's the best M83 record yet.
But let's talk about restraint for a moment: While each side of Hurry Up would be oddly slight for an M83 album, the demands of its 74-minute runtime are hardly daunting. It's actually the easiest M83 album to consume in one sitting, a reverse accumulation of past strengths that makes for Gonzalez's most compact and combustive music yet. He continues the path set by Saturdays=Youth by easing out of the mini-movie business in exchange for pop songcraft, while trading that LP's pretty-in-pink pastels for the urban neons and fluorescents of Before the Dawn Heals Us and embodying Dead Cities' mile-wide expansiveness.
But the most crucial change is how touring with the likes of Depeche Mode has inspired a newfound showmanship in his vocals: Previously, Gonzalez enlisted outside help, piped in plot-advancing narratives, or sang in a low, tentative murmur that submitted to its massive surroundings. But here, within the first minutes of "Intro", he's matching blows with the juggernaut bellow of Zola Jesus' Nika Danilova to the point where it's much tougher than you'd think to tell them apart. It's really not too different from the first chords of "Planet Telex" or Lil Wayne's "Tha Mobb" in terms of being an unmistakable sign that you're going to be listening to this familiar act differently.
M83 have never stood for half measures in any aspect, but Gonzalez is absolutely going for it here in a way that sheds new light on known tricks: The hair-triggered drum rolls of "New Map" recall Before the Dawn's searing car-crash fantasy "Don't Save Us From the Flames", but Gonzalez's nervy punctuation at the end of each line sells the idea that he's along for the ride this time rather than being a passive observer. Dead Cities' "In Church" was the sound of blissful acquiescence, but amidst the swaggering synth-metal of "Midnight City", Gonzalez hollers, "The city is my church!" empowered and present, finding a voice for the evangelical zeal always implicit in his work.
Gonzalez has stressed Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness as a major inspiration (and by extension, its forefather, The Wall), and its influence can be spotted in Hurry Up's power ballads "Wait" and "My Tears Are Becoming a Sea", sumptuously arranged tracks that could still be played solo on an acoustic guitar. Thankfully, he didn't retain much from "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" or "The Trial", and rather than one man lashing out at the world from the safety of his own thematic construct, you feel that Gonzalez is trying to connect with it.
As such, the moments of indulgence are in service of the album's most endearing and silly emotions: Some might consider "Raconte-Moi Une Histoire" a throwaway because it's "the one about a magic frog," but besides embodying the whiplash emotions of youth by following the magnificent melancholy of "Wait", its almost eerie brightness and Windows 95-era sound effects capture a technological optimism better than a lot of artists who are trying only to do that. Meanwhile, "Year One, One UFO" attempts to distill the percussion-mad, organic ecstasy of Vision Creation Newsun into three minutes, while on the opposite side, "Claudia Lewis" and "OK Pal" show a mastery of slapbass-poppin', corporate funk-rock comparable to Ford & Lopatin or Cut Copy without the twinge of pastiche.
As with any double album, there's a temptation to strip away the instrumental tracks or simply pick the best 50 minutes for your daily commute. But the interludes here are intended to be every bit as purposeful as the singles: The shorter the track, the more evocative its title ("Where the Boats Go", "Train to Pluton", "Another Wave From You"). While many of them stand as intriguing meditations on their own merits, they reinforce Hurry Up's intentions to be an immersive universe-- check in whenever you want, but the magic's in the exploratory phases. And why leave out what falls in between, like the thermite burst of the two-minute "This Bright Flash" or the stately "When Will You Come Home?"-to-"My Tears Are Becoming a Sea" triptych that serves as the connective transit between Side 1 and Side 2.
Then again, I can't blame anyone who takes shortcuts, since the traditionally structured songs here are some of the most thrilling pop music released this year. The heavily saturated synths Gonzalez favored early in his career invited plenty of My Bloody Valentine comparisons, but whereas pure shoegaze of that nature attempts to overwhelm and obliterate, Hurry Up is like a sonic planetarium, penetrable and totally geared toward enhancing the user experience. Few artists make more ingenious use of the sheer physics of rock to this extent-- defining which synth pads strike which emotional pressure points, using percussion as explosives rather than mere elements of timekeeping, coiling the tension of a verse to make every chorus feel phenomenally cathartic even without any words.
At this point in the year, you'd think a saxophone solo would have lost all the novelty it had accumulated over decades of disuse, yet when one pops up at the end of "Midnight City", it triumphantly squires the track out at the highest point possible. After a streak of staccato guitar chords and splashy cymbal hits rev up "Reunion", the shouts from its chorus could come from a soccer stadium or a speedboat chase. "Intro" is typical of Gonzalez's love for zero-gravity arrangements of massed choirs and cathedral reverb, but there's nothing buzzy or clouded about it-- as high as he takes things, you can still see everything underneath in crisp, butterflies-inducing depth and detail.
And then there's "Steve McQueen", which somehow makes the preceding hour of music feel like its prelude. Point blank, it's as close as most of us will get to being strapped inside a space shuttle, as midway through an almost unbearably tensile verse, you don't hear drums so much as afterburners kicking in. By the chorus, it simply cannot go further up, and it explodes at the perfect moment into hair-metal guitar chords and synth-led skywriting. And yet, because it's almost impossible to say what "Steve McQueen" is about (certainly not the actor), it's capable of glorifying anything you choose-- a slow motion shot of Kirk Gibson rounding the bases in the 1988 World Series, a holiday fireworks display, or getting into your car and simply celebrating the end of an exhausting day.
Is it a lot to handle? Of course, and those who have yet to connect with M83 may wonder if the sort of incapacitating longing expressed by "Wait" can possibly be experienced by anyone over the age of 16 or whether they'll ever be able to afford the stereo equipment seemingly required for its intended effect. But remember, it's called Hurry Up, We're Dreaming: It doesn't attempt to be a comprehensive or even realistic purview of the human experience, and lord knows there's plenty out there that's meant to capture small moments.
It's easy to mistrust something so irrepressibly optimistic about the affective possibilities of music and to attribute these feelings to the domain of some "other," whether it's the 1980s, teenhood, or a pop product. Does it share some sort of commonality with "Born This Way" or "Firework", or any other entry from 2011's chart music that attempts to convince you of your own superstardom? Surely, but Gonzalez never comes off like he's selling a brand, a lifestyle, or even himself-- his lyrics remain as opaque as ever. Hurry Up instead serves as a framework to realize the marvelous capability of our dreams and daily lives, should we be open to experiencing it.


Now two decades into his career, the Huddersfield native balances the brashness of bassline house with the swing of 2-step, demonstrating his own quiet mastery of UK garage’s many strands.

Est. 2003

It doesn’t take much more than the slimmest crack of sunlight to breach England’s clouds each spring for the perennial revival of the sound of the summer to be pronounced. It's not the hum of lawnmowers, or the smatter of birdsong in the air. It's not even Drake. It is, of course, UK garage music. Without waver, it endures; and in its wake come the same debates. For every grizzled old raver pointing out (rightly enough) that garage actually never really went away, there’ll be a fresh upstart digging deep into Discogs lists and pulling out fistfuls of sweet, skippy, sticky (and Sticky) beats. DJ Q sits squarely, and humbly, between these extremes—plugging away.
Growing up in Huddersfield, a market town plonked roughly midway between Manchester, Leeds, and the bassline-house mecca of Sheffield, Q made his first production forays in the heady realms of speed garage and its rowdier, wompier cousin, bassline. A few years in, he switched tack and took on a slinky 2-step swing. He’s made tracks that have entered both canons. In one, there’s bassline chant-starter “You Wot!,” which sounds exactly as you might imagine from the title; in the other, the silky rumble and marimbas of “Brandy & Coke.” With TQD (a supergroup of sorts, alongside Flava D and Royal-T), he’s also helped catalyze a surging, self-sufficient jump-up bassline scene that leaves a trail of sweat and sore jaws across satellite towns and European festival tents alike. Now two decades into his career, on Est. 2003 DJ Q presents a survey not so much of his output to date—this is no retrospective—but of his own quiet mastery of UK garage’s many nebulous strands.
Most of the album—11 tight, spring-loaded cuts, three minutes and change apiece—was written during the months of COVID-19 lockdowns, when clubs were shut and DJs were left asking “Now what?” And while the resulting tracks aren’t defined by that lingering tension, it certainly seeps through on occasion: in the restrained 4x4 bounce of “It’s You” (which could barely be further from its rowdy mid-noughties bassline namesake), or in the distant, clanking keys and stretched, near-lethargic vocals of the Todd Edwards collab “Sweet Day.” Mostly, though, there’s little doubt about the staying power of the dancefloor. Tracks like “Speedy Gs” (with Finn) or the Shola Ama-assisted “I Can’t Stay” conjure memories of the club with exacting precision. The former is giddy with organ stabs and a rushing undertow of sub-bass and sirens, while the latter’s soulful curls cry out for a chorus of clubbers to belt them full-throated into the rafters.
The best moments come when Q offers a sideways glance; as in the final minute of opener “Pipe Dreams,” when the formerly warbling bassline ducks out and returns with a grating, gritty thump, or on the vocal gymnastics and doubled-up kicks of “All That I Could.” His ability to cross-pollinate styles—a dash of bassline squeal here, some hardcore wails there—with relatively little fanfare, and without ever sounding contrived, gives the whole thing a timeless quality. It sounds fun without sounding tired. It’s the same quality that, come next spring, will start the whole cycle off again. This time, with a few more DJ Q tunes in the canon to pick from.


Comprising members of Liturgy, Two Prong, and Eartheater, Guardian Alien's new LP builds one titanic, steady wall of sound over 37 minutes that never shifts dramatically. Instead, it thickens, lightens, surges, subsides; it's mantra music that commands the senses.

Guardian Alien: See the World Given to a One Love Entity

The murky, primordial drone rock that Guardian Alien make is difficult to talk about directly, mostly because it wants to transport you somewhere ecstatically preverbal. At its best, it renders you glassy-eyed, interacting with its texture the way you would a particularly plush rug after multiple bong rips: pure, mindless feel. The band builds one titanic, steady wall of sound over 37 minutes that never shifts dramatically: It thickens, lightens, surges, subsides. It's mantra music, and if it succeeds, it commands your senses on a level that surpasses faculties of articulation entirely.
The band, which formed in 2010, has roots in several other heady, transcendence-focused efforts. Its main member is Greg Fox, the calmly superhuman drummer who departed from art-metal outfit Liturgy last year, dealing such a crippling blow to that band's DNA that they still appear to be sorting out how to continue existing. (They have currently opted for a brutal drum machine that almost works as a bleak meta-joke about his irreplaceability.) Lead singer and guitarist Alex Drewchin of the psych-pop band Eartheater claims heavy influence from Sufi mysticism. Turner Williams, Jr., performs on a woody, note-bending zither instrument called a shaahi baja. Other sometime members include guitarist Bernard Gann, still of Liturgy, and bassist Eli Winograd, who plays in a noise-folk band called Two Prong. Together, they produce a sweat-slicked, heavily perfumed chemistry, an opium den with ventilation problems.
The single composition that is See the World Given to a One Love Entity looks as aimless as a screensaver on the surface, but the outfit maintains a light-fingered grip on the music's pulse, steering it through extended soloing passages without slackening the album's basic through-line. The record glows with the intensity of their shared concentration. It is an experience to be taken whole or not at all: There is about as much use in noting the music's developments as there is in narrating the details of an acid trip. An upsetting asphyxiated baby-goat-like noise at about the 21:20 mark surfaces from the bottom of the music's texture, floats to the top, and sends a shiver up your spine. Then, it stops, the drone closes back in, and the music's serene bubble reforms.
If there is a single thing to take away from the totality of See the World, it is the sheer joy of hearing Greg Fox drumming again. If you think of drumming, somehow, as mechanically rhythmic, or purely muscular, or a bedrock function upon which more melodic and/or dynamic things are laid-- if you don't listen to a lot of other music outside rock, in other words-- Fox might be a good gateway drug out of this line of thinking. His drumming has a harp player's nuance and inner voicings. The album's pulse never overly complicates itself, but Fox's playing is its own lesson on how to keep time while dancing atop it. He is on a short list of drummers whose extended solos you could easily imagine listening to.
See the World belongs in a lineage of tribal guitar rock bands meant to shake loose titanic emotions: Oneida, Boredoms, Grails, Swans, Om. Of all of these groups, they have the least amount of dread and darkness: The music is heavy, and very impressive, but slightly monochromatic. There is none of the clammy, wide-eyed approaching-Gorgon horror of Swans, the quasi-religious release of Oneida or Om, the dark mystery of Grails. If they fall short in any way, it's in the somewhat limited range of third-eye-opening options they provide: Maybe over time, they can take on more colors.


Pianist Vijay Iyer returns to the trio format for a collaboration with Stephan Crump and Marcus Gilmore that includes jazz interpretations of Michael Jackson, Duke Ellington, and Flying Lotus.

Accelerando

It's been three years since Stephan Crump, Marcus Gilmore, and Vijay Iyer made a record together, and in that time, the trio's headliner, Iyer, has clawed his way across the keyboard to a pretty exalted place within the jazz world. He's still working hard, but he's about done paying dues, and he makes magazine covers and the top of year-end lists routinely. The man is one of the best in the world at what he does, and he has one of the finest piano sounds, too, mixing big sheets of sound with blood-rush passages of intricate staccato patterns; he also frequently puts the real action in the left hand while the right holds down the harmonic fort, giving him a thundering, heavy sound when he wants it.
Iyer seems to like the trio format-- he cut a great trio record called Tirtha last year with two musicians originally from India, guitarist Prasanna and tablaist Nitin Mitta-- and he sounds very good in a small combo setting, where he gets to ride or at least hit back at a rhythm section, but also gets to handle the melody. Accelerando is his hardest-hitting trio album yet, loaded as it is with compact, forceful pieces of music. Iyer's own production gives a lot of stereo real estate to Gilmore's kick drum and Crump's bass, meaning that every fast, hard passage hits with a bang, and the quieter, sparser sections, such as the tumbling melodic hook of their version of Michael Jackson's "Human Nature" (which Iyer tackled on his own two years ago on Solo), feel lighter than air by comparison.
The closing interpretation of Duke Ellington's "The Village of the Virgins", which the group infuses with a sort of gospel energy, is one of those lighter moments, and when it arrives, it feels as though the band is dusting all those aggressive block chords and tone clouds off of itself and readying for the next challenge. That aggressive stuff is fantastic, though. "MmmHmm" (a Flying Lotus cover) hangs together loosely as it flies along, and it doesn't even bother with a bassline-- Crump instead plays arco, bowing patterns and melodic answering statements on his bass. The song features an accelerando in the true meaning of the musical term, beginning slow and moody and gradually speeding up until it sounds like even the piano is out of breath.
The word that keeps coming to mind as I listen to this album over and over again (and then again) is power. Everything about it projects power-- emotional power, the power of brute physical force, musical power. It runs on every available cylinder, and if you're out there looking for a path into modern jazz from the world of rock or hip-hop, this record speaks with a directness and verve that may make it an ideal introduction. From the first shudder of the keyboard and crack of drums to that last, celebratory walk through the village of the virgins, Iyer, Crump and Gilmore keep things spellbinding.


Fusing ’80s-inspired hardcore with playful electronics, the Shears brothers’ bass-and-drums duo enlists a handful of high-profile collaborators in their mission for “total freedom of expression.”

Kiss My Super Bowl Ring

The Garden like to make a spectacle of themselves. At a release party celebrating their 2018 album Mirror Might Steal Your Charm, the striking rock duo made a French circus tent their stage; the band’s members, identical twins Wyatt and Fletcher Shears, performed the show’s first half in face paint and medieval jester garb, an image that’s replicated in many of their music videos. They’re not just a band, this campy aesthetic seems to claim—they’re entertainers. And whether it’s in their off-the-wall live performances, their side gigs modeling for designers like Saint Laurent, or their irreverent brand of experimental punk, the Garden want your attention. Convention has never been their intent, and their new album Kiss My Super Bowl Ring is their most unorthodox release to date.
The Shears brothers formed the Garden as teenagers in 2011, taking early inspiration from eclectic ’80s punk group the Minutemen. They’ve since operated by a method they call “vada vada”: “total freedom of expression without boundaries or guidelines of any sort.” Kiss My Super Bowl Ring abides by that process, implementing unexpected electronic influences and enlisting left-field producers Dylan Brady of 100 gecs and WHARFWHIT of Kero Kero Bonito. Blown-out bass and jungle breakbeats give the album’s more computerized moments a clubbier feel, while the occasional thrashing drums and searing shrieks recall the band’s hardcore roots. Sprinkle in features from Ariel Pink and flashy New York rapper Le1f, and Super Bowl Ring attempts to wear many hats at once, a frenetic collection of songs that grapple with existential woes and cathartic rage.
The Garden sound best at their most upbeat, on songs like the rip-roaring “AMPM Truck,” where Wyatt’s melodic basslines and Fletcher’s snappy drumming take the forefront. At the opposite end of the spectrum, “Sneaky Devil” is loaded with anxiety-ridden industrial elements to inspire freaky dancing and open mosh pits. Songs like these embody the restless anxiety the twins divulge in their lyrics: “A struggle, if you wanna call it that/Hate to burst your bubble, but it is that,” Wyatt sings in the bouncy chorus of “A Struggle,” as if to apologize for disconcerting themes to come. “Sneaky Devil” is just one name-drop away from a diss track: “Fuck you, kid, now I have your address/And in a second I could put your racist ass to bed,” he taunts, after unintelligibly listing things he’s “sick of”—politicians, carbon footprints—with a fury that makes you wonder how long he’s been keeping his anger concealed. “AMPM Truck” reckons with life’s futility after a near-fatal instance of nodding off behind the steering wheel. For a band whose earlier work has bordered on sheer absurdity, the distress and malevolence of Super Bowl Ring feels particularly unnerving.
At times, the album can feel erratic. Its first tracks, “Clench to Stay Awake” and “A Struggle,” vacillate between multiple opposing themes with whiplash-inducing suddenness that ultimately sounds haphazard. Slower tracks like “A Fool’s Expedition” and “Lurkin’” plod along in comparison, lacking the frenzy of the album’s brighter moments. However uneven, Kiss My Super Bowl Ring is proudly defiant; the title, Wyatt has clarified, essentially means “kiss my ass.” But where deviation from the norm has spawned countless artistic geniuses, Super Bowl Ring too often comes off as just a hodgepodge of ideas. “Vada vada,” it seems, has hurt the Garden as much as it’s helped them.

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Former Drive-By Truckers member releases another spotty set of songs aiming to capture the spirit and pace of life in the New New South.

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: Here We Rest

Here We Rest

It's a hard truth, but so far Jason Isbell's solo career hasn't lived up to the promise he showed during his short tenure with Drive-By Truckers. When he left the group in 2007, he had held his own in a group full of top-shelf rock songwriters, displaying a flair for quiet drama and telling details. Out of the gate he started strong on Decoration Day in 2003 and owned The Dirty South the next year; "Outfit" may be his most quoted song, but "Danko/Manuel", ostensibly about the tragic Band members, was a better mission statement about saving a bit of yourself away from the gigs. A Blessing and a Curse sounded like rut in 2006, not just for Isbell but for the Truckers as a unit. The band immediately rebounded with one of the best albums of their formidable catalog, while Isbell, going solo, apparently took Blessing as a template, releasing solo albums with only a handful of memorable songs mixed in among rote southern rock.
Granted, that's pretty much what he was doing in the Truckers, but without company from Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, Isbell must now carry an entire album by himself. Three albums in, it might seem unfair to still compare his solo output to his Truckers material, but Isbell simply hasn't yet given us a reason to forget those years or to rethink that particular context. Here We Rest doesn't change that midline trajectory; as with Sirens of the Ditch in 2007 and the self-titled follow-up in 2009, his third album has some great songs that capture the spirit and pace of life in the New New South, that evoke real characters in real predicaments, that lodge into your brain alongside his best material. Unfortunately, it has many other songs that don't.
First, the good: Opener "Alabama Pines" is a soft-spoken lament about a man so lonely he says he doesn't even need a name, and Isbell makes the chorus-- which ushers the character back home through the Yellowhammer State wilderness-- sound quietly moving, as if such memories are all the man has anymore. Similarly, "Codeine" puts us immediately in a character's point of view, one so well drawn he feels comfortable, if not familiar. The song's a stand-out not just for the humor and peculiarity of the details, but for the way Isbell puts listeners right in the moment. Opening with a complaint about a bad cover band bumbling through "Castles Made of Sand", Isbell evokes an entire world through one sad man's eyes, with a sing-song chorus whose catchiness only underscores its tragedy.
The 400 Unit prove to be an agile backing band, able to move resourcefully from the loping melody of "Codeine" to the upbeat throwback country of "Never Could Believe" and the gentle reminiscence of "We've Met". Trying out various styles but never fully embracing them, they sound more slick than soulful, although that may be the fault of their too-crisp production, which rarely sounds live. At times, however, Isbell struggles to keep up. His voice possesses a distinctive rasp that easily evokes his character's dead-end struggles, whether it's their devotion to a drug-addicted woman or their allegiance to a disappearing way of life. The downside is that his vocal range is limited. He can't pull off the sentimental "Daisy Mae" at all, and struggles with tricky rhythms of "Never Could Believe" and the generic country-soul of "Heart on a String". Although he's now logged as much time as a solo artist as he did with his former band, Isbell sounds he's still finding his voice.


Sharing equal billing for the first time, longtime collaborators Noah Lennox and Peter Kember achieve an intoxicating mind meld over a sample-heavy tribute to 1960s pop.

Reset

We tend to think of creative influence as a one-way exchange from an older generation to a younger one. But that formulation is not only simplistic; it’s often flat-out wrong. Occasionally, a veteran musician vibes so hard with a younger peer that they seem to merge aesthetically, philosophically, even molecularly, sharing an artistic evolution over many years. In the remarkable case of Noah Lennox, aka Panda Bear, and Peter Kember, aka Sonic Boom, the two have melded so completely that they sometimes seem like a single musical mind.
At first, Panda Bear was Sonic Boom’s acolyte. Kember’s sludgy, druggy band Spacemen 3, pioneers of late-’80s space rock, were a beacon when Lennox’s Animal Collective helped steer psychedelia into the 21st century. Panda Bear namechecked Spacemen 3 in the liner notes of his 2007 solo breakout, Person Pitch, which deftly employed electronic techniques to make earthy, acoustic-aping sounds. When the two artists met for the first time, it was because Kember—who has a similar knack for coaxing warmth from chilly waveforms—sent Lennox a fan note on MySpace.
Sitting in the producer’s chair, Kember introduced gurgling drones to Panda Bear’s next two records, 2011’s Tomboy and 2015’s Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, and Lennox lent his high tenor to 2020’s All Things Being Equal, Sonic Boom’s first solo LP in 30 years. A denizen of Lisbon since 2004, Lennox was among the reasons Kember moved to Portugal in 2016. In interviews, they speak about each other frequently and fondly, as amped about their friendship as their work together. The duo’s gradual stylistic convergence highlights an unusual collaborative mode: Dissolving hierarchy, they cohabitate common ground as artistic siblings.
Thanks to the sample-based compositions that they have mutually matured into making, this breakdown of influencer and influenced, master and admirer, seems particularly apt. On Reset, the first album to give both men equal billing, Panda Bear and Sonic Boom are students of the 1960s, spinning samples from Kennedy-era acts like Randy & the Rainbows and Eddie Cochran into layered, harmony-heavy arrangements that evoke the decade’s later years. The concept may feel familiar, particularly for Lennox. It might also seem heady and academic, a map of musical strains throughout history. But like the house mixes that both musicians love (which neither have ever, exactly, produced), Reset is simple, ecstatic, as elegant as a math formula. The most pleasurable release of either of their careers, the record aims consistently for gossamer melodies and propulsive rhythms and hits its targets again and again.
Essential to their take on the ’60s are subsequent decades’ interpretations and revivals of that pivotal era. Reset’s generous spirit encompasses the Elephant 6 collective and Cornershop’s gleeful ripostes to the skeptical ’90s; the radical inclusivity of the Avalanches and Daft Punk; and of course some of the echoey sweetness that both Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear found in the Beach Boys in the late ’00s. The record is a paean to the many eras of music lovers who have sifted through their stacks of vinyl and heard something surprising in sounds that have reverberated so long in the culture they threatened to turn trite. Kember and Lennox’s gear reflects this pan-generational perspective—a vintage harmonizer introduced in the mid ’70s, a lo-fi synth designed in the ’80s, the portable OP-1 that has become ubiquitous in the last decade. They incorporate analog filters, bass, güiro, sleigh bells, a dialed phone, and abundantly sampled acoustic guitar, which harkens back to the sunniness of Person Pitch highlight “Bros.” Reset is easily the most natural and intuitive Lennox has sounded since then.
However symbiotic he and Kember have become, the record’s surface is pure Panda Bear. He repeats “drown” on the terrific “Whirlpool” like some teen idol of the doo-wop era. The harmonically delectable “In My Body” builds to a descending refrain that numbers among the most gorgeous vocal hooks in a career brimming with them: “Stuck up on a branch,” Lennox sighs, “And I can’t get down.” This song initiates the album’s unexpectedly chilled-out core, a suite of tracks—“In My Body,” “Whirlpool,” and “Danger”—that will remind many of the slower, more relaxed songs on the back half of the epochal Merriweather Post Pavilion. Reset invites these lofty comparisons, and pulses with life both because and in spite of them.
The lyrics are opaque, impressionistic, and hallucinogenic. More than the content of his words, we notice the way Lennox wraps his mouth around them—“You take a swig and then you take a crack,” he chatters on the chipper, even humorous “Edge of the Edge,” emphasizing crack to coax out its tactile vowel—as well as the repetitive mantras that evoke Sonic Boom’s recent solo albums. “Give it to me,” chants Kember on “Go On” with the incidental charm of a kid messing around with a tape recorder for the first time. The irony is that the lyric is the title of a Troggs single he sampled for the song’s backbone: The demanding boy is just psyched about his record collection.
Reset slips from back-to-basics, handclap-laden pop to new peaks in the familiar range of Lennox’s music. It makes us wonder: Should we be bothered that the record’s best moments can feel cherry-picked from Person Pitch and Merriweather Post Pavilion? Those albums were both sprawling and deceptively formless, oozing out of their constraints like different varieties of colored foam. Reset is refined, concentrated, a focused burst of reggae-esque exultation. If it seems to lack ambition, Kember and Lennox compensate by carving away ideas in order to arrive at a sharp point. This tactic recalls a surprising touchstone: Is This It. But while the Strokes winnowed the rock and post-punk of their forebears, Panda Bear and Sonic Boom chisel at a vernacular shaped by their own prior work.
Their resilient positivity summons mid-’60s Jamaican ska and rocksteady, a connection the artists have made in interviews, although sonically, Reset locates us firmly in the post-Brian Wilson terrain that Animal Collective, Panda Bear, and Sonic Boom have tilled and cultivated. At points, such as the closer “Everything’s Been Leading to This,” we’re mesmerized into a techno-like trance, yet rather than harnessing the genre’s sound, Reset taps into dance music’s spirit, its sanguinity in spite of an unsympathetic society: “Well times are tough/And the draw is raw,” we hear on the final track, one of the few instances when an embedded sense of politics steps to the fore. “We’re skiddin’ through/A closin’ door.”
Reset addresses our own troubled zeitgeist by avoiding the ambient dread, blithe critique, and seething anger that often characterize records we consider to be topical today. “One dude’s sweat/Is another’s balm,” Panda Bear sings on “Go On.” He may be condemning an exploitative capitalist system, but Lennox is also describing his music’s uplift and the hard labor required to make such a salve. Less palliative than corrective, Reset is a dose of human lightness in the drudgery of the now. Conventional wisdom says that only younger performers have the unspoiled optimism and energy necessary to make such enthusiasm believable—the ardent songs Reset samples, after all, were sung by teens or twenty-somethings. But Panda Bear and Sonic Boom counter with the longevity of artists who have never compromised, and they give us the defiant Reset knowing that despair is a weapon in the hands of a present hell-bent on stamping out our souls.


As the New Orleans sludge-metal icons clean up their act, Mike IX Williams’ once-indecipherable howls and Jimmy Bower’s detuned blues riffs come to the surface.

Eyehategod: A History of Nomadic Behavior

A History of Nomadic Behavior

Take a moment to appreciate a few small miracles—Mike IX Williams is alive, he’s sober, and he’s singing on a new Eyehategod album. Five or six years ago, none of those outcomes would have seemed likely. “My whole agenda was getting wasted until the day I die,” Williams told Decibel’s Greg Pratt in 2017, shortly after receiving the liver transplant that saved his life. Post-transplant, Williams had to figure out a new way to live, and just as importantly, a new way to front one of the world’s most famously self-destructive metal bands. On A History of Nomadic Behavior, the first document of that effort, the New Orleans masters shift into a new, more sustainable mode.
Even when Eyehategod was essentially inventing sludge metal on feedback-drenched early albums like 1990’s In the Name of Suffering and 1993’s Take as Needed for Pain, they were fundamentally a blues band. A History of Nomadic Behavior emphasizes that fact more directly than any Eyehategod record to date. Though they’ve historically buried their songs in enough filth to leave you nauseous, the production on History is crisp and clear. Williams has honed his formerly indecipherable howl into a pointed weapon; he wants you to hear every word he’s singing. Jimmy Bower’s detuned blues riffs stand front and center alongside Williams, still full of his trademark bends and vibrato but now with far fewer deliberate feedback squalls to drown out the notes. If 1996’s Dopesick sounded like overhearing an entire band going through heroin withdrawals together, History sounds like those same dudes reuniting years later to jam at the local VFW hall on a Wednesday night.
Sadly, not everyone made it to the jam session. Drummer and founding member Joey LaCaze passed away shortly before the release of 2014’s Eyehategod, and longtime guitarist Brian Patton left the fold in 2018. History is the first Eyehategod full-length to feature Aaron Hill on drums; Patton wasn’t replaced, making the band a four-piece for the first time. That puts the spotlight even more squarely on Williams and Bower, now the only two original members remaining.
Williams’s newfound sobriety is an undercurrent that runs through the album. On “High Risk Trigger,” he shrieks about being “deaf, jagged, and prowling,” like a man who is just barely outrunning his demons. “Anytime I’ve been to rehab or AA or NA, any of that stuff, they always talk about triggers, which can be anything that makes you want to use again,” he writes in the liner notes. “In that way it’s almost the same as a trigger on a gun, because it’s just as dangerous.” Sobriety aside, Williams hasn’t lost the piss-and-vinegar nihilism that made him a hero to dropouts and deadbeats in the early ’90s. On closing track and album highlight “Every Thing, Every Day,” he repurposes the titular refrain of the Take as Needed for Pain classic “Kill Your Boss” as a fuck-everything climax. Just because he got a new liver doesn’t mean he’s punching his ticket for square society.
On early Eyehategod records, the songs, production style, and real-life depravity within the band were intertwined to the point of being indistinguishable. Likewise, it’s impossible to listen to A History of Nomadic Behavior without noting that Williams’ cleaned-up life has coincided with his band’s cleaned-up sound. For those who were drawn primarily to Eyehategod’s apocalyptic self-annihilation, History’s unadorned blues riffs and fully legible lyrics might be a bridge too far. For those of us who want Eyehategod to keep doing this for a long time to come, it’s a welcome evolution.

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The rapper continues to explore identity and belonging on her second album. Recorded in her native Zambia, it folds together zamrock, polyrhythmic percussion, and choral harmonies.

As Above, So Below

When Sampa the Great became one of Australia’s most celebrated rap acts, the Zambia-born, Botswana-raised artist was determined to remind listeners of her African origins. Her response was The Return, a sprawling mix of jazz rap, earth-toned R&B, and self-affirming spoken word that used the displacement of diaspora to explore the meaning of home. Across the 77-minute album, Sampa took solace and found family in the collaborators that sustained her an ocean away from her homeland. That journey of self-acceptance continues on As Above, So Below, where Sampa folds zamrock, polyrhythmic percussion, and choral harmonies into her roving music. Though her rapping remains impersonal, she sounds renewed on these homegrown songs, the anxiety of her past music replaced with relief.
Sampa recorded the album in Zambia over a two-week period, working with local musicians and producers who understood and expanded her cultural reference points. In Australia, she often had to play translator when she wanted producers to incorporate Southern African elements into her music, a process that underscored the very remoteness from home she was trying to lessen. Her collaborators on As Above, So Below let her be a denizen rather than a liaison, allowing her to truly showcase the place and culture she loves, not just evoke it. She never unlocks the full potential of the change in setting, but the arrangements are inspired.
The album is leaner and punchier than its restless predecessor, trading winding verses and interludes for streamlined songs of celebration. Produced by gospel artist Mag44, along with Powers Pleasant and Solomon Moyo, the songs prioritize rhythm and groove with a mix of live instrumentation and buoyant drum programming. As Above, So Below isn’t a wall-to-wall transcontinental party like GoldLink’s Diaspora, WurlD’s My WorlD With U, or Amaarae’s The Angel You Don’t Know, but the mood is festive. “MaskOn” begins with a rhythmic Zambian nursery rhyme padded with bass kicks and shouts, then slinks into a swaying blend of hi-hats and blues guitar reminiscent of UGK’s country rap. “Can I Live,” a collaboration with one of the surviving members of pioneering zamrock band W.I.T.C.H., opens with gospel keys and percussion and builds to a psychedelic electric-guitar freakout. Sampa and crew seem hell-bent on packing the album with details and nods to Zambian music, every track a byway to some bustling hub.
Sampa’s limber singing and rapping fit snugly into all this motion. She performs in both English and the Zambian language Bemba over a pittering marimba arrangement on “Tilibobo.” The growled verses of “Can I Live” lean into the grit of her throaty voice, the strain conveying her irritation. On “Lo Rain,” which channels the lullaby rap of Noname, her double-time flows swing with the drums and keyboard melodies.
On a technical level, these songs offer the best performances of Sampa’s career, but in terms of style and emotion, they fall short. Despite the homecoming mood, Sampa often sounds distant, her rhymes functional and indistinct. The odes to African achievements on “Never Forget” are self-affirming but grayscale. “Who took fabric, made that shit classic/That shit aint average/We did,” Sampa boasts flatly. “Let Me Be Great,” in which Sampa declares herself a lion and a king while demanding respect, is just as generic. There’s no hunger to her delivery, no slap to her chest-thumping. Though heartfelt, her embrace of Zambian music fails to unlock new dimensions to her writing or sharpen her perspectives on home and herself. Sampa flies her flag, but never flaunts it. That anonymity doesn’t sink As Above, So Below, but it dampens the thrill of Sampa tapping into her roots, and underscores her shaky fundamentals as a rapper. Despite her dexterous flows, she lacks presence; her songs signify the many places she’s been and people she’s met, but rarely bring those connections to life.


On this debut EP with new music group La Bagatelle Magique, formed with her keyboardist Markus Jägerstedt and the late producer and Swedish club music veteran Christian Falk, Robyn cuts to the chase with what she wants from you (and herself). What Love Is Free does so well, and so simply, is hone in on just the beauty of finally letting go, physically and mentally.

Robyn / La Bagatelle Magique: Love Is Free

Love Is Free

On last year's collaboration with Röyksopp, Do It Again, and 2010's Body Talk, Robyn made the dance floor her therapy couch, singing of breakups, feeling like a broken cyborg, and all the shit that was killing her over addictive electro-pop. It's exactly this bruised-but-headstrong expertise, built up over two decades as a writer and performer, that imbues Robyn's music with a sort of welcoming trust. So, when she takes a step back in the thumping opening track of Love Is Free, "Lose Control", to say, "Hey, tell me all about your mistakes/ Tell me 'bout the love and the pain/ I know somebody hurt you some way," you might believe her and give it all up.
On this debut EP with new music group La Bagatelle Magique, formed with her keyboardist Markus Jägerstedt and the late producer and Swedish club music veteran Christian Falk, Robyn cuts to the chase with what she wants from you (and herself). La Bagatelle Magique aren't trying to reinvent the wheel here. The group is meddling in music history, cranking out five familiar tracks that are too hard not to dance to.
"Got to Work It Out" plays like an amped up, big beat version of Debbie Deb's 1983 single "When I Hear Music", with a twinkling, childlike xylophone melody buried under the track's trance-y basslines and Vocodered, aggressive vocals. And the standout single featuring rising singer Maluca, "Love Is Free", is ballroom-ready, steeped in a yippy, acid house groove that finds Robyn asserting physical boundaries while preaching free love. "Imma give it to you baby/ Imma give it when I'm ready," she raps over the beat.
A charming, un-slick outlier here is "Tell You (Today)", an eccentric, sample-heavy Loose Joints cover that mashes together instrumentals of the genre (horns, Heatwave-approved harp, disco lasers, etc.) to dizzying effect. The song sounds like someone was smashing their hands against a well-stocked sampler, even when it comes to Robyn's vocals. They're a little stilted in their delivery, as if every word was programmed on its own and played back to form sentences, but the lyrics still reel with the excitement of finally telling someone how much you love them.
What Love Is Free does so well, and so simply, is hone in on just the beauty of finally letting go, physically and mentally. On "Set Me Free", there's a moment when the lyric "Free your body" repeats, getting clearer and clearer until it just hangs there in the middle of the track while the kick-drum pounds after it, punctuating it like a stream of trailing periods. For Robyn and La Bagatelle Magique*,* the simple request might not be the answer to all your problems, but it's sure as hell the start.


Florence Welch’s pandemic album turns her intensity inward, interrogating her relationship to performance and public image. These are her most personal lyrics, and among her most poignant.

Dance Fever

Just before the pandemic, Florence Welch read about choreomania, the medieval European “dancing plague,” wherein hordes of people would flail and twitch until they reached exhaustion, injury, or death. Welch became obsessed with the concept. Entering her mid-30s, nearly 15 years into a career that began when she drunkenly sang to her future manager in a club bathroom, she wanted to prod at her relationship to performance. When she started releasing records, her stadium-shaking voice and songs that crescendoed to catharsis lifted her into the pop charts alongside Adele and Bruno Mars. Four albums in, though, Florence and the Machine is an institution, and Florence Welch, the person, seemed rattled by how much she relied on it. She conceived her fifth album, Dance Fever, as a “‘be careful for what you wish for’ fable,” she told the New York Times; as she read more about the dancing that spread like sickness, she thought about what it would be like to give up performing altogether. And then, a week after she started making the songs that would become Dance Fever alongside Jack Antonoff, lockdown hit.
From those uncanny origins, the new album arrives as a sweeping, grandiose statement, no less outsized than Welch’s past releases but more internal and lyrically cohesive. The songs concern devils and angels and life and death, but Dance Fever is more fascinating as a self-interrogation—these are Welch’s most personal lyrics, and among her most poignant. “Every song I wrote became an escape rope tied around my neck to pull me up to heaven,” she rasps at the end of “Heaven Is Here,” and that horror at her own compulsions reverberates throughout the album. On Dance Fever, Welch stays trapped indoors, sobbing into bowls of cereal at midnight, trying to comfort herself with the crumbs of her own image. She built her public persona by beaming the grandest, fiercest emotions out to a crowd; left alone, she turns that intensity inward.
Unlike another Antonoff-produced pandemic reverie, Lorde’s Solar Power, Welch struggles against the wisdom she seeks to impart; we hear her wrestling with the knowledge she’s acquired, not merely delivering it. She sees herself as a projection, not a person, and she’s terrified by her impulse to self-mythologize. In the spoken-word section that opens “Choreomania,” she traces the contours of an anxiety attack: “I am freaking out in the middle of the street with the complete conviction of someone who has never had anything actually really bad happen to them,” she says in a crisp monotone. The pandemic is a constant presence: She sings about her friends getting sick, about the joy and futility of the mundane. The stakes are high, but too often, she tries to convey the album’s scary-movie sensibilities by contorting her voice into a howl or a croak. The theatrics distract from the more satisfying drama, as the image of an auteur who equates work with worth collides with Welch’s attempts at intimacy.
She examines this tension most strikingly on “King,” the album’s opener. The track chugs along over subdued percussion before it swells into classic, titanic Welch, belting over harp. She argues with a lover about the endpoints of her ambition, whether art is useless, if she can build a version of motherhood that would mesh into her own mythology. “I am no mother/I am no bride/I am king,” she howls. Welch’s ambivalence about motherhood is a central theme. “I feel like to have a child and to let that amount of love in.… I’ve spent my life trying to run away from these big feelings,” she told Vogue. “Big feelings” are practically Welch’s brand, but on Dance Fever, she bristles at them. “What a thing to admit,” she starts off the lilting, Maggie Rogers-assisted “Girls Against God,” “but when someone looks at me with real love, I don’t like it very much.” Welch stamps these stark admissions throughout the album, little lacerations tucked into the bass and trumpets. At times, she reaches for profundity and stumbles into hyperbole. “If I was free to love you, you wouldn’t want me, would you,” she laments on “The Bomb,” comparing love to literal destruction: collapsing buildings, burning skin.
The album sags when it attempts its stated purpose: to celebrate dance itself. Partly this is because of just how disparate these tracks feel, likely as a result of their bifurcated production. Antonoff produced most of the first half of the album, and he shares a writing credit on many of those tracks; the latter half is largely produced by Glass Animals frontman Dave Bayley. Dance Fever is as propulsive as any Florence and the Machine album, but its momentum sometimes feels unearned. Bayley twists “My Love” into a schmaltzy club track, kicking off with what seems like a trite Hamilton reference: “I was always able to write my way out,” Welch coos over finger snaps. Her past EDM collaborations sparkled—none more than the Calvin Harris-produced “Sweet Nothing”—but “My Love” is too stilted to open up a dancefloor. Even “Free,” perhaps the most buoyant song on the album, eventually becomes flimsy. It’s an ode to the power of dance, the freedom in movement—well-worn concepts that Welch treats like novel ideas.
But there’s a moment when the cello slows to a sputter and the frenetic drums ease up, and she seems to think out loud. “Is this how it’s always been,” she muses, “to exist in the face of suffering and death, and somehow still keep singing?” On another album, where the stakes were anything less than life and death, this question might be overwrought. But Dance Fever works best when Welch asks questions, when she’s a witness to terror and absurdity, marveling at her own ability to make it through.


Sunn O)))'s latest album may be their best, as dozens of collaborators join on four epic tracks that run from slow metal to shimmering orchestral drone.

Monoliths & Dimensions

If your interest in Sunn O))) stems primarily from the band's patient employment of tone and time as channeled through electric bass, electric guitar, and stacks of amplifiers, you might hate "Alice", the brilliant closing track of its seventh and arguably best album, Monoliths & Dimensions. Sure, these 17 minutes are loud and torpid, easing from one note to another, distortion dripping from each new intonation. But "Alice" finds Sunn O))) exploiting a newfound spaciousness and elegance. As its founders, Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley, crawl across a loose blues progression that mirrors those of slow metal fountainhead Earth, a swell of French and English horns, violin and viola, harp and light percussion rises. Surrounding the guitars, they're like the perfect summer haze, refracting and softening the season's relentless sunlight. "Alice" ends with a fanfare of sorts for this small orchestra. Its long tones are light and lifting, a little like Stars of the Lid commissioning Igor Stravinsky. More Fluorescent One than Black Two, it's completely unexpected, mesmerizing, and beautiful.
Well, not completely unexpected: Like the rest of Monoliths & Dimensions, "Alice" offers a culmination of most everything Sunn O))) have done right during their decade of volume-based plunder. Anderson and O'Malley have long rendered rock riffs with painstaking deliberation, consistently adding the ideas of elite collaborators and occasional no-explanation experiments. The Grimm Robe Demos took to early Earth, while Black One ground an Immortal black metal burst into one 10-minute tectonic motion. Merzbow, Xasthur's Malefic, Thrones' Joe Preston, and Mayhem's Attila Csihar stood among high-ranking contributors. Pieces like "bassALIENS" (23 minutes of electric bass tone exploration) and "My Wall" (25 minutes of Julian Cope verbiage battered by cascades of amplifier hum) ensured that Sunn O))) was doing more than swapping chords for feedback.
Monoliths & Dimensions takes the idea even further, gathering collaborators-- from Csihar and Earth's Dylan Carlson to Australian drone master Oren Ambarchi and vocalist Jessika Kenney, who sang so well on Wolves in the Throne Room's Two Hunters-- for four tracks that push Sunn O))) in directions unforeseen: Riffs come wrapped in strings. Conch shells share space with upright bass fleets. Both an operatic female choir and Portland noise nut Daniel Menche sing opposite the Mayhem frontman. All told, as on 2007's revelatory Black One, Monoliths & Dimensions indicates that Sunn O))) and the possibilities of its slow music stretch beyond what we imagined.
About three-dozen people contribute to Monoliths' four cuts. Two of these tracks exceed 16 minutes, while their counterparts either approach or encroach on the 10-minute mark. It might seem that only size matters for Sunn O))) here, but that's just the surface. None of these pieces are big for bigness' sake. Rather, they all bear intricacies that erode them from within. A given piece's size becomes its fatal flaw. The strings and synthesizers ascend through the gaps in the sluggish riffs of "Alice", for instance, composer Eyvind Kang arranging the parts to crack and cover their host. By track's end, the guitars are gone, ruins eviscerated by a new growth of ivy.
Then there's "Big Church". The female choir led by Kinney, a four-guitar army including Ambarchi and Carlson, and the manipulated Middle Earth incantations of Csihar clash during three three-minute sections. The guitars or the voices invoke each third, and their parts slip by one another like the pieces of an amoeboid jigsaw puzzle. Csihar always overruns them, though, pushing each section into a chaotic climax. On "Hunting and Gathering (Cydonia)", Csihar cloaks some of the album's most literal lyrics-- "They take the world and the earth, breathing fire on the endless oil seas"-- in his native Hungarian, but the music makes the message clear. Each time Csihar finishes a set of imprecations, a triumph of vocals and horns rises and exalts while the electric riff subsides. This is a new battle hymn.
And there's the album's other giant, opener "Aghartha". As close as Monoliths gets to the classic drone of Sunn O)))'s past, O'Malley and Anderson paw at chords on perfectly engineered electric bass and guitar. Again, a de facto chamber ensemble joins, as a droning Tibetan horn (the two-player Dung Chen) displaces the air beneath the guitars and sharp piano chords splinter whatever they encounter. These sounds sublimate into one drone, forcing the guitars out of the frame before fading into silence themselves. Only the sound of rushing water washes beneath Csihar's daunting voice, as he speaks of "a tunnel [that] gouges in the shapes of the stream in the great abyss of the sky" in booming, broken English. He's looking for new sparks to destroy the old order, for fresh energy to upset the established form. And that's exactly what Monoliths & Dimensions does: It takes one of the world's most lauded loud bands and rearranges its game with an inspiring cycle of risk and reward.
Perhaps Black One came with a caveat emptor or two. You'd better like your music dark and relentless, and contextual understandings of Sunn O))) and black metal and drone helped. Lacking those things, perhaps you suspended your disbelief enough to appreciate Malfeic's scorched voice or, unfortunately, dismissed it outright as two self-serious dudes and their fucked-up friends dicking around with darkness. Incorrect, I think, but understandable. Monoliths & Dimensions requires no such warnings. Per Sunn O)))'s long-standing dogma, "Maximum volume [still] yields maximum results." But this time, there's enough musical range and temperance to usher even the most resolute naysayer into this intricate wonderland.


Capitol follows its excavation of Radiohead's 1990s work with new version of the band's first three 2000s LPs, including the landmark Kid A.

Radiohead: Kid A: Special Collectors Edition

Kid A: Special Collectors Edition

We used to listen to music in an entirely different way. There was once a time when music was organized into 45- to 75-minute chunks-- often a few standout tracks padded with a lot of mediocre filler, but occasionally designed so that the parts built up a larger structure. Used to be, people would sit down and listen to that lengthy piece of music from front to back in one sitting, resisting the urge to jump to their favorite parts or skip over the instrumental interlude that served as grout between two fuller compositions. These antiques were called CDs. Here's a story about the last of its kind.
When Kid A came out in October 2000, it sounded like the future. Unless you were a Napster whiz-kid, the record was one of the last to arrive unspoiled and complete, a physical object, the disquieting Stanley Donwood art reinforcing its dark mystery. It's arguably two-and-a-half minutes into "How to Disappear Completely"-- more than a third of the way through the album-- until anything sounds like a "Radiohead Song," even with how far the elastic of that term was stretched on OK Computer. And while Radiohead were far from the first to glitch-up their vocals with a computer or drown their compositions in ambient washes, it was still a thrilling experimental gamble for a band that could've profitably re-made "Karma Police" 100 times over with minimal reputational damage.
But simply flirting with new technology wasn't enough; even in 2000, the idea of a band "going electronic" was a laughable marketing gimmick from an era that spawned the term "electronica." But the samples, loops, and beats of Kid A were more than just the patronizing dalliance of a bored band, they were tools used to service the album's even deeper exploration of OK Computer's thesis on identity loss in computerized society. It was, unashamedly, a complete album, one where everything from production to arrangements to lyrics to album art were carefully crafted towards a unified purpose.
It's also a contoured album without clear highlights, best experienced in one sitting rather than cherrypicking the best parts. (It's telling that the band famously quarreled over the sequencing of tracks.) The biggest stylistic coup was the corruption of Thom Yorke's vocals-- arguably the band's most singular feature up to that point-- and the detuned-radio effects of the album's opening couplet: "Everything in Its Right Place" and "Kid A" threw listeners expecting that signature "Fake Plastic Trees" falsetto immediately into the deep end. On "The National Anthem", Yorke is shouted down by horn section mayhem, and when he finally gets in an unfiltered word in on "How to Disappear Completely", it's the album's most haunted (and revealing) line: "That there, that's not me."
There's no storyline to pick out from Yorke's lyrics, but a unified thread moves through the album nonetheless: Basically, Kid A is scary as hell. It might be the paranoid, nearly subliminal, unbroken undercurrent of haunted drone, courtesy of a Rhodes or a tape loop or Jonny Greenwood's Ondes-Martenot, a instrument for nightmares if there ever was one. Or it might be Yorke's terrifying one-line, Chicken Soup for the Agoraphobic Soul mantras that alternate between honeyed violence ("cut the kids in half") and clichés and hum-drum observations twisted into panic attacks ("where'd you park the car?").
(A brief intermission to talk about the bonus tracks included with this reissue. Capitol's in a tough spot with finding Kid A outtakes, because they already released such a thing-- it's called Amnesiac...rimshot. So instead the bonus-disc padding is all live tracks, culled from British and French radio or TV shows. In keeping with the album's isolation fixation, the empty studio of the four-track BBC session is the most fitting environment for the band's performance, the vocal manipulations of "Everything in Its Right Place" ricocheting off egg-crate walls. Contrast that with the clap-along crowd on an "Idioteque" from France, which neuters the song's sinister undercurrent and turns it into an inappropriate party jam.)
Every great album needs a great resolution, and Kid A has two: the angelic choir and harps of "Motion Picture Soundtrack" which serve as a much-needed (if fragile and a bit suspicious) uplift needed after such unrelenting bleakness, and a brief ambient coda that justifies the hidden-track gimmick. The silence that surrounds that final flash of hazy analog hiss is almost as rich, conferring a eerie feeling of weightlessness upon anyone who's completed the journey with a proper headphones listen.
But that's where the twist ending comes in. Kid A turned out not be the music of the future, but a relic of the past, more in line with dinosaurs like Dark Side of the Moon or Loveless as try-out-your-new-speakers, listen-with-the-lights-off suites. By the time Amnesiac officially arrived, it had been served up piecemeal on the internet, handicapping the final product from reproducing its predecessor's cohesive structure. From then on, albums have persisted, sure, but they're increasingly marginalized or stripped for parts-- release Kid A today, and many might choose to save or stream "Idioteque" and Recycle-Bin the rest, missing the contextual build and release that makes the album's demented-disco centerpiece all the more effective.
That's not a qualitative judgment: The way things are now isn't better or worse, just different. Technology, of course, is a selection pressure, digital music eroding the arbitrary 45ish-minute barrier that once was dictated by vinyl's finite diameter. But while a single song will often do, there's a talent to building and a pleasure in experiencing a dozen songs weaved together into a 40 minutes that's richer than each individual track, a 12-course meal for special occasions between microwave snacks. Like calligraphy, it's a fading art, as even Radiohead themselves seem to be disinterested in the format, perpetually threatening to dribble tracks out in ones or fours when the spirit takes them. In the end, one of the many ghosts that haunt the corridors of Kid A is The Album itself, it's death throes an unsettling funeral for a format that, like so much else, was out of time.


The new LP from revived emo band Rainer Maria presents a slower, heavier, and more methodical version of the group. It’s a reunion album that stacks up well against their most cherished work.

S/T

During its formative years around the turn of the millennium, the Polyvinyl label was filled to capacity with Midwestern, post-rock-tinged emo bands, most of them high on talent but low on star power. That was never a problem for Rainer Maria. In an emo scene that was somehow even more male-dominated than today’s, singer Caithlin De Marrais stood out for both her poetic flair and her fearless range. She could sound at once bashful and vicious, equally convincing as a sensitive soul or an agent of unadulterated rage. There weren’t many truly dynamic presences in Rainer Maria’s niche corner of indie-rock. De Marrais was one of them.
The band’s original run ended if not quite on a bum note, then with a whiff of defeat. Bankrolled by the short-lived startup label Grunion Records, 2006’s Catastrophe Keeps Us Together smoothed the band’s rough edges in hopes of porting their act to alternative radio and capitalizing on the market Death Cab for Cutie created with Plans. The album failed on launch, but it did finally put to rest a question that had circled Rainer Maria for much of their career: With a real push, could this band be big? Apparently not. The trio played their farewell show later that year.
After their breakup, the band scattered. De Marrais went the singer/songwriter route on a couple of soft-hued solo records. Guitarist Kaia Fischer released a 2008 solo album, then devoted herself to Buddhism, while drummer William Kuehn took on gigs all over the world. Those different paths, and the very different lives the trio has led over the last decade, may account for why the band’s nails-tough reunion album S/T (not self-titled, just S/T) sounds as unbridled by the past as it does. Unlike so many reunion records, it makes no pretenses of capturing the band as they used to be. Rainer Maria are in their 40s now, and they aren’t so naïve as to think they could recreate the sprightly innocence of their first records, let alone improve on that youthful version of themselves.
They aren’t interested in picking up where they left off, either. Instead, S/T corrects the great miscalculation of their final albums, which largely recast the band as a showcase for their frontwoman—a shift that paid off for the band’s one-time tourmates Rilo Kiley, but cost Rainer Maria something essential. De Marrais may have been the band’s main draw, but it was their group interplay that gave the trio their edge. They were never able to muster the same intensity once they phased Fischer out of backing vocals on 2003’s Long Knives Drawn. What a thrill it is, then, to hear Fischer back behind the microphone of S/T’s thundering opener “Broke Open Love,” finishing De Marrais’ thoughts again. The dynamic isn’t quite like it was before, but nothing about this version of the band is.
The new Rainer Maria is slower, heavier, and more methodical than the old one. They swing less but land more blows. Early-album highlights “Suicides and Lazy Eyes” and “Lower Worlds” each lock into a beefy riff with an ever-tightening grip. The latter song has the album’s single greatest thrill: Fischer’s drill-sergeant injections (“SLAM SHUT/THE DOORS!”), set against snarling guitars and a nasty rumble. (Kuehn produced the album, and it’s far and away the most bottom-heavy thing they’ve ever recorded.)
Everything about their sound has calcified, including De Marrais’ voice. She still sings of physical intimacy as an ongoing negotiation, but time has worn the sweet veneer off of her titanic howl. “I need you bigger/I need you honest/I need to hear you call for me,” she huffs on “Possession,” laying out her demands with an authoritative bite that lays clear her upper hand. De Marrais must have put in work to sound this fierce.
Rainer Maria will almost certainly be remembered as they were in their earliest incarnation: wide-eyed literary buffs, singing with an air of optimism about achy hearts and making out. That version of Rainer Maria was important for a lot of people. But should they be remembered as the hardened power trio they’ve grown into, Rainer Maria can be proud of that, too. There aren’t many groups that have repackaged themselves so successfully this late in the game, and fewer still with a reunion album that stacks up this well against their most cherished work.


The Sigur Rós singer fights huge with huger on his solo debut, matching the uplift of his full-time band at their most dramatic.

Go

Jónsi Birgisson doesn't do small. As the lead singer of Sigur Rós, he's starred in several of this century's most epic songs; with their penchant for instrumental swells, feedback, and weight-of-humanity wails, the Icelandic band has practically set a new, near unreachable height for melodramatic art rock. But after perfecting this style on 2005's Takk, Jónsi and his mates have had some trouble finding a way out from beneath the burden of big. Their last album, 2008's Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, tried to temper the bombast but occasionally got bogged down in aimless balladry. Jónsi's subsequent Riceboy Sleeps LP with Alex Somers offered largely voiceless ambiance, akin to Quentin Tarantino directing a silent chamber drama. But with his solo debut, Jónsi fights huge with huger.
Helping to realize the mini symphonies in the singer's head are two key collaborators: pianist, composer, and arranger Nico Muhly-- who has become the de facto solution for artists like Grizzly Bear and Antony and the Johnsons when in need of unique, showy flourishes-- and Finnish percussionist Samuli Kosminen, who can be seen literally banging on old suitcases in an in-studio video on Jónsi's website. The conspirators balance well; though Muhly's manicured arrangements could have come off stiff in this context, their combination with Kosminen's unbridled wallops brings the orchestration dizzily whirling forth. But what truly elevates Go is Jónsi's voice, which still has the ability to stun a decade after Agætis Byrjun introduced most listeners to his alien bleats.
Along with Jeff Buckley and Thom Yorke, Jónsi's pipes have set the standard for modern eunuch-like crooning. And on Go, he makes up for the lack of vocals on Riceboy Sleeps by working overtime, backing himself up to create a Jónsi choir, offering skyrocketing counter-melodies, and even making the occasional bird sound. He beams ecstatically on "Go Do", cracks hearts on the string-laden "Sinking Friendships", and comes as close as he probably ever will to rapping on "Animal Arithmetic". He may lack Buckley's soulfulness or Yorke's infinite melancholy, but Jónsi's distinguishing trait is an innocence that helps make emotions sound fresh. This child-like view is more apparent on Go because it finds the singer mostly expressing himself in plain English rather than his usual combination of heavenly vowel sounds and Icelandic.
On the surface, the language breakthrough is irrelevant; whatever you thought he was singing about before is probably close to what he's singing about in English here. For instance, the hook on "Go Do" goes, "We should always know that we can do anything." Of course it's corny, but Jónsi's sincere intent makes the feel-good anthem feel good. Images of nature come up often, which makes sense considering his gale force lungs. Even when he comes close to "Legend of Zelda" territory, like when he sings of "a treasure chest full of labyrinths" on "Around Us", his committment and wide-eyed naivety go a long way. In Jónsi's universe, cynicism has yet to be invented.
Much of Go matches the uplift of Sigur Rós at their most dramatic. There's more sonic density here than ever-- Go's cacophony of flutes, piano, horns, strings, and bird calls beg for a 5.1 mix. At the same time, the songwriting is pruned down. The usual crescendos spring up in condensed bursts, rather than being spread out over seven minutes. And Jónsi seems to be getting less murky and moody as he collects years. Still, Go isn't pure escapist Peter Pan theater. "No one knows you 'til it's over," he yowls on "Sinking Friendships", "you know no one true 'til it's over." For Jónsi, life and death are spoken in mythic, uncompromising terms. There's not much room for the little things, which is partly why he's able to strike hard around the world; whether singing in English or jibberish, the message is clear. Go means go.


Austin musician Chris Ulsh’s longest-running band returns with a revitalized lineup and a new commitment to death metal intensity.

Cosmic Crypt

Best known as the drummer and sometime guitarist in Dallas thrash band Power Trip, Austin’s Chris Ulsh has spent the last decade or so exploring variations on a simple truth: metal and punk are forces that work best in league with each other. He is efficient, deadly, and never starving for riffs, whether working with pit-ready thrash, noisy punk, chugging powerviolence or good ol’ Venom-esque raunch. If it’s fast and loud, he’ll make gold. The longest-running of Ulsh’s many projects, Mammoth Grinder, hits the sweet spot between death metal and hardcore, particularly the tougher American varieties of both. The band was on ice for a while due to Power Trip’s intense touring commitments, but Ulsh has revived it for Cosmic Crypt, their fourth LP and first with two members of Iron Reagan, guitarist Mark Bronzino and drummer Ryan Parrish. Even with two-thirds of the band based in Richmond, the new album is an object lesson in exactly how Ulsh earned his reverence in Texas and beyond.
The biggest change to Mammoth Grinder’s approach this time is that Ulsh has switched to bass, leaving Bronzino to handle guitars. Perhaps as a result, Crypt doesn’t show much of the Swedish influence heard on 2009’s Extinction of Humanity or 2013’s Underworlds; they’ve exchanged buzzsaw guitar tones reminiscent of Entombed and Dismember for a more bass-heavy sound and deeper vocal delivery from Ulsh. That singing style, in turn, tips the LP further toward death metal, compared to past efforts where the group’s hardcore lineage was more noticeable. “Human Is Obsolete” and “Rotting Robes” are Mammoth Grinder at their most death metal yet, hitting with the force of an impenetrable phalanx. Elsewhere, “Molotov” opens with a floor-punching riff that would sound equally fitting coming from a bludgeoning death metal crew like Acephalix as it would a lean New York hardcore crew like Judge, ripping with a immediate cross-genre lizard-brain appeal.
The blown-out crust sound of Discharge’s foundational 1980s work remains another key spiritual influence on Mammoth Grinder. “Blazing Burst” feels as war-torn as that UK group’s nuclear-ravaged worlds; “Superior Firepower” combines crust’s noisier side with a feedback intro that immediately transitions into a relentless stomp. Ulsh’s spacey bass dive in “Blazing Burst” suggests another of his side projects, Impalers—it’s a lush flirtation in the middle of a minefield. Throughout the album, Bronzino prioritizes noise over technique in soloing, and his explosive entrances give Mammoth Grinder an unexpected dramatic flair.
One reason Crypt fits so effortlessly into the Mammoth Grinder canon is that the new lineup isn’t entirely new: Bronzino and Parrish were touring members in 2014, before Ulsh turned his focus to Power Trip. They’re ideal partners for Ulsh, as their background in Iron Reagan, a crossover thrash band, means they also value economy. Like the slew of new American death metal acts that came out starting at the beginning of this decade, this version of Mammoth Grinder takes from death metal’s faster and more brutish end, but it doesn’t fully fit into that or any stylistic niche. The simplicity heard here draws from Master; the ugliness brings to mind Autopsy; and none of the influences feel like they’re being hastily grafted together. Coincidentally, Crypt arrives not long after Slayer announced its “final” tour. Like those thrash greats’ classic Reign in Blood, this album presents a complete vision in a short running time, stirring metal and hardcore together into one giant, boiling cauldron.