Without flashy bars or marquee features, Jack Harlow’s third album aims for clarity with soft, expensive beats and cloyingly intimate storytelling.

Jackman.

When the cover art for Jackman. dropped, people did not know what to make of Jack Harlow standing there, arms crossed and chest bare. I certainly didn’t. Maybe it’s that Jackman. is as stripped down as the artist: Devoid of features and sparsely populated by hooks. He’s rapping over samples that he definitely could not afford in 2018. Instead of telling us how rich he is now, he lets the luxurious production speak for itself. The confrontational opener “Common Ground” was admittedly predictable: Harlow takes aim at out-of-touch music critics and culturally appropriating white kids. Divine hymnal harmonies from ’90s R&B girl group Jade’s “When Will I See You Again (Intro)” set the contemplative tone. A music video would probably have him rapping from a pulpit.
For three more tracks, Harlow chronicles his come-up and whines a bit more over soul samples. Trends and other people’s opinions mold his records. The internet said he was too cornily commercial, so for the duration of this album, he positions himself as a very serious rapper. Flexing his skills pays off in lines like, “No security, my brothers gon’ step, Will Ferrell” but also flounders: “My homeboy just beat cancer/I call my ex, no answer.” You win some, you lose some! It’s non-threatening in an “Ivy League frat boy bumping Nas to prep for his econ final” kind of way.
Halfway through Jackman., Jackman gets gritty. His candor on “Gang Gang Gang” is gripping. “My friend pulled me to the side like, ‘Did you hear about Marcus?’” Harlow narrates a reunion among childhood friends. “‘A bunch of girls say he raped them in the back of some Target.’” You can hear his boyish naivité rupture as he processes this shocking information. He questions blind loyalty and his role in abuse apologia. It’s raw. It’s self-interrogative. Perhaps he’s pandering to shut down accusations of his vacuousness. Maybe he has grown as a person.
It certainly is a level up from his Shemar Moore impersonation on Come Home the Kids Miss You. Jackman. takes creative risks in social commentary that often pay off. “Blame on Me” showcases Harlow’s narrative flexibility, rapping touchingly about the effects of toxic masculinity on the psyches of men and boys through multigenerational perspectives. It redeems the previous track “It Can’t Be,” where Harlow attempts to shut down the white-privilege allegations by listing evidence of what he thinks are his admirable morality and unparalleled drive. Imagine an 8 Mile battle rap scene if it were directed by Scooter Braun. Like most songs, its sanctimonious rambling is alleviated by a groovy sample.
Harlow claims that he’s not really into personas. That’s not entirely true. “No Enhancers” and “They Don’t Love It” scream Thank Me Later-era Drake. Over pop-rap beats, he’s in the club brooding over how he probably won’t find his wife there. In recent years, when rappers adopted what has become known as “therapy rap” to discuss sociopolitical topics, it served as a marker for personal and artistic maturity. The chameleon that he is, Harlow hops on this wave to manufacture some depth in his discography.
Like his upcoming role in White Men Can’t Jump, his flows and sonic choices are remakes—his greatest tracks come straight from Drake and Kendrick’s playbooks. Yet the 25-year-old proclaims himself “the hardest white boy since the one who rapped about vomit and sweaters.” Harlow’s white male angst isn’t violent or self-flagellating. Those lanes are occupied by Eminem and Macklemore. For a while, he was content being a charismatic goober trying to top the charts. The one thing of value he contributes is his truth. It might make him unlikeable but it adds dimension to a former cardboard cut-out.


On this tightly curated EP, the insightful R&B singer revises the elements intrinsic to her work, providing new meditations on Blackness, womanhood, and love.

AZEB EP

Last year’s grief compounded by the ever present horrors of systemic racial violence seemingly turned everyone into a sage of their own experience. And so what of artists who were preternaturally revealing and insightful, before the world split wide open? Artists like Mereba, whose previous work has intentionally leaned towards transformation and vulnerability: Her sleeper hit “Black Truck” could have been a foreshadowing of all the havoc and the personal and communal revelations that people shared and prayed over in 2020. On AZEB, her latest EP, she’s back with soulful, well-paced verses that soften the existential and painfully direct inquiries she makes of her listeners.
“World feels like a war/Tell me what living’s for/Baby it’s gotta be love,” are the first lines off the EP’s quiet but persistent single, “Rider.” With a video starring Black lovers and friends traveling across arid plains, windswept and reckless, the song lunges for the healing power of intimacy. Even when a community is faced with violence, love for ourselves and our own has kept us, if not alive, then tender and open to the possibilities of rebirth. On “Rider,” Mereba delivers a striking rendition of the fine balance that Black people daily juggle; as we fight to assert and remember that we matter, we are also falling in love and lust, dealing with the dramas of fickle hearts and losing ourselves in the sensuality of those who make us feel safe and cared for. If anything, AZEB’s overarching theme is that with the world at war, love will have to matter so much more for most of us to come out alive.
On “Beretta,” over strumming guitar and lightly layered vocal riffs, the Alabama-born singer, who was raised across the U.S. and in Ethiopia, sings of a love that moves mountains solely in its reciprocity. “Baby boy let’s stick up the world for this cheddar/I’m the getaway and you’re the Beretta/We are renegades/The blood of the brave in our DNA,” with a well-timed emphasis punctuating the last word with ellipsis, and then an exclamation point—continuous and absolute. Like Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA,” Mereba posits that courage and survival are part of the Black lineage, while simultaneously beckoning to the ride-or-die bond of Jazmine Sullivan’s “#HoodLove”; she’s loyal to her person as they move through the world, carrying just the necessities they need to live and be loved. On “Beretta,” Mereba also returns to the jagged pain of “Rider,” but this time with a promise, singing, “I would win a war for this one/’Cause it’s love.” In the subtle ways she ties her songs to each other, Mereba shows herself to be a storyteller, approaching her work as a singular, but expanding range of thoughts, voices and movements.
The standout track has to be “Aye,” a finger-snapping, slightly bouncing side to side, face curled up in satisfaction type of groove. If you know, you know—there’s nothing more exhilarating and gratifying than having your people lift you up with a rousing round of ayeees while you win at whatever it is you’ve set your mind to achieve. Whether yelled or even whispered, the word transmits acknowledgement and echoes with pride and support. “Aye” starts off like an anthem for the mildly buzzed and perpetually chill before breaking off into reminders that speak of peace, but warn of retaliation if that peace is disturbed. “Aye, aye, it’s a war like every day/Keep my gold up in my safe/They won’t bring me to my knees/Got me fucked up/Got my bucks up/With my Chucks on/And my blunt tucked.” It’s a melodic distillation of soul pioneer Erykah Badu’s salient tweet from years past. Mereba will always choose peace, but will take notice if you step to her sideways and without respect: “I’m nonviolent, it’s a crime if you get close to my safe though/Slow ya pace.” OK?
In a year when everyone became a sage, Mereba learned to holster her defenses alongside her incense. Her brooding rhythms are now paired with caustic, pointed wit and an even more open heart, carving space for serenity, release, and warmth. “Gold” and “My Moon” are Mereba as longtime fans have known her; she’s a romantic, looking to the stars for answers and honeyed enough to ease the fury that surfaces on tracks like “Another Kin” and “News Comes.” The former is a haunting elegy where Mereba turns notes into wails that tear through the suffocation of despair. The latter is an anthem for the forward-looking liberation work done far from voyeuristic eyes, which is constant, yet often thankless: “Still, we fight when the screen’s closed,” she sings. “Still, we fight ’til the light’s on.”
As a tightly curated body of work, AZEB is a masterful lesson in editing. It’s never about the number of tracks, but the foundation anchoring the stories, experiences, and characters woven together to form a cohesive and clear outlook on the state of the world. It reveals her growth as an artist, while illuminating an artistic practice rooted in a sparse evocative lyricism. To listen to her work is to look forward to the creations that will come as she continues to reform, rewrite, and revise her art. As articulated by writer Kiese Laymon, revision is “a dynamic practice of revisitation, premised on ethically reimagining the ingredients, scope, and primary audience of one’s initial vision.” On AZEB, Mereba has taken the same ingredients that are intrinsic to her work—Blackness, womanhood, the diaspora, love—and rendered a new offering. Lucky for us, she graciously allowed listeners to be privy to the labor it takes to begin again.
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The Books' fourth album and first full-length in five years finds their knack for finding strange and wondrous samples intact.

The Way Out

The Books have a terrific sense of humor-- and it makes The Way Out, an album built on eccentric vocal samples, a good-natured discovery instead of a cheap piece of mockery. Imagine if a blog had posted these clips of goofball hypnotherapist and meditation consultants, or found a tape of a boy and a girl swapping violent threats with each other: You'd chuckle and move on. But when the Books use these samples, they give them integrity. You find yourself engrossed with people who are alien but also familiar. The flotsam and jetsam of American culture aren't a cheap joke to the Books, but a source of endless discovery and joy.
The Way Out is the fourth LP-- and the first in half a decade-- by the collage art/folktronica/post-New Age/indescribable duo of guitarist/singer Nick Zammuto and cellist Paul de Jong. Their new album is experimental for sure, but just like their early works, it wasn't designed for slow chin-scratching. It works best when it works like a joke: A strange sound or sample clicks in your ears, and then you're on to the next one.
Is "A Cold Freezin' Night", a track featuring a recording of one kid threatening to torture another to death, a commentary on how early and how easily little kids assimilate violent fantasies and gender roles? You could read it that way, but mostly I just enjoyed the jolt of recognition: It's a striking example of the way kids talk to each other when nobody else is listening. Likewise, "Beautiful People" is pretty straightforward: It's a tribute to Zammuto's favorite irrational number, which is a pretty geeky thing to do, but Zammuto connects that number to God, and so he makes it a hymn. Back it with a disco beat and tack on a meticulously constructed brass fanfare at the end, and you have a Books pop song-- one of the only ones they've written.
The band's good humor stops us from mocking "I Didn't Know That", where kids and adults shout, "I didn't know that!" with unironic gusto. My guess is that the samples come from a kid's television show, but the source doesn't really matter. The Books take the speakers and high-five them again and again, with a boisterous melody and a verse that features distorted, hiccupping vocal snippets arranged into musical phrases and emerging as a kind of scat singing. Which, you know, is something you would normally just get up and perform, but instead they do it this way, and it must have taken them a long time to put it together.
When the Books actually get up and make jokes, they tend to shoot themselves in the foot. And maybe that's the point: they want to say they're not trying to sound prophetic. Don't take this so seriously. But they score a misfire at the end of "Chain of Missing Links", which features a self-help guru who's trying to lead us to a higher consciousness. He soothes us and seeks out our pain-- "You're old and used up at the atomic level"-- and while he sounds silly, the music plays along with him. It complements his message, matching the tension and the transcendence in his words. You almost start to wonder if he's onto something. But the track ends on an easy joke, editing the speaker to make a crack about eating brains, and the music leaves him looking foolish. It seems kinda cruel.
The album is book-ended with excerpts of these self-help records, and the funniest thing about that is that the Books really are a boffo meditation band. As smart and complex as they are, their albums are also super-serene, and they could function as New Age music for people who are too skeptical for the real thing. After all, it's soothing to hear two guys digest and synthesize a mountain of information and pass back an orderly whole-- something that most of us information worker-types try and fail on a daily basis.
The Way Out is a step forward for the band, as producers and in Zammuto's case, as a singer: dig his glowing lead vocal on "All You Need Is A Wall". But it's not their best record. Even "Beautiful People" can't match the subtler beauty of The Lemon of Pink's interplay between analog and digital sources, where a glitch and a handclap can form a percussion part, and a vocal line can blend seamlessly with bowed cello. The second half of the album flags, and while it has some eerie moments, "The Story of Hip Hop" is a one-joke song. (They start with a children's story about a rabbit, and guess what kind of a beat they add?) That stuff was fun on their debut, 2002's Thought for Food, but today those easy jokes seem like a waste of their skills. Better to seek out the greater mystery of those weird and splendiferous sounds, and those voices that seem so close and so unknowable in the same breath.


If you were in your late teens and lived near Chicago between 1996 and 1999, chances are, you were a ...

Everynight Fire Works

If you were in your late teens and lived near Chicago between 1996 and 1999, chances are, you were a Braid fan. Too young to have caught Smashing Pumpkins before they mutated into arena-rock dinosaurs, and too rambunctious to chin-stroke along with McEntire and O'Rourke, the angst-filled masses turned to Braid. You could count on the Champaign foursome to play through the area once every month or two, filling up the Metro or the Fireside Bowl with bobbing heads and squinty rock-out faces. Melodramatic lyrics, Fugazi-esque start/stops, time signature chaos, and an excellent balance of hardcore mentality and catchy melodicism-- what more could a Midwestern eighteen year-old ask for?
I know because I was there, pumping my fist to "First Day Back" with the rest of you. And that's why I can't decide whether I'm disappointed or just plain angry about the vanilla ice-cream blandness of Everynight Fire Works. See, Hey Mercedes is 75% of what once was Braid-- their answer to "Saved by the Bell: The College Years," if you will. When Braid broke up in early 2000, I took comfort in the fact that three-quarters of the band would continue on under a new moniker, without the services of guitarist/screamy-guy Chris Broach. Their first, self-titled EP was an unimpressive effort, but live shows featured a number of unrecorded songs with potential.
Then Hey Mercedes broke from Polyvinyl Records, the home of such respectable Midwesterners as AM/FM and Aloha, for Vagrant Records, the home of critically acclaimed artists like... hmmm... help me out here... Snapcase? Well, anyway, given Vagrant's habit of churning out slick pop-punk product for chain-wallet accessorisors that just came down off a bad Blink-182 bender, the warning flags were raised.
And indeed, these warning flags proved accurate upon the release of Everynight Fire Works. Under the increasingly commercial-minded guidance of J. Robbins, every rough edge is polished up to a shimmering, radio-friendly gleam. Close your eyes, and you can imagine most of these songs on MTV, maybe with the band in funny wigs and playing to a house full of underwear-clad teenagers.
Still, Robbins helmed the boards on Braid's final and finest full-length, Frame and Canvas, so the blame cannot rest solely with him. Frontman Bob Nanna seems determined to dumb down his songs to reach a wider audience, trading in the polyrhythms and unusual dynamics of old for power chords, power chords, power chords. Sure, there's a few stutter-steps in tracks like "A-List Actress" and "The Frowning of a Lifetime," but more common are songs like "Our Weekend Starts on Wednesday" and "What You're Up Against," which roll along with little variation in tempo or volume.
The one-dimensional nature of the album leads me to say words I never thought I'd utter: I miss Chris Broach. While his contributions to Braid albums often seemed limited to emphatically yelling "yeah!" every once in a while, Hey Mercedes is sorely lacking the hard vocal counterpoint Broach would play to Nanna's sensitive guy act. Also absent is the intricate instrumental interplay between Broach and Nanna, as guitarist Mark Dawursk adds little to indicate that Hey Mercedes even needs two six-strings.
Frustratingly, a couple songs still manage to strike direct hits on my old Braid-lovin' soul. "Every Turn" features the kind of acrobatically catchy vocal Nanna used to specialize in writing, with a great, crunchy chorus tailor-made for the at-home rockout. Album closer "Let's Go Blue" layers a tiny little riff over a chugging chord progression, and works well until resorting to that most tired of devices, the bass and drums breakdown.
81.8% of Everynight Fire Works, however, inspires nothing more than a yawn and bittersweet nostalgia. The mediocrity reaches its apex with "Quit," five minutes so lacking in hooks and creativity that it feels ten times as long, even before the textbook false-ending and buildup coda.
Of course, it's completely possible that I've just outgrown the target audience for Nanna & Co. Somewhere in Suburbia, I'm guessing there's a fifteen year-old kid just now discovering Hey Mercedes and thinking they're the greatest thing ever. More power to little Ricky-- he could be listening to a lot worse. And maybe my dissatisfaction means I'm actually disappointed and angry with myself, for outgrowing that rockin' inner teenager and becoming a crotchety old foge.
No, wait, that's not right. I'm disappointed and angry about Hey Mercedes' impossibly middling debut album. Sorry, don't know what got into me there.


The Baltimore band’s full-length debut uses slowcore not just as a variant of indie rock, but also a framework to make real-deal pop songs that make boredom sound utterly desirable.

Full Flower

One of the more recent, unexpected, and ironically exciting trends in indie rock has been the embrace of music that, objectively speaking, is intentionally predictable. There are remnants in the recent work of (Sandy) Alex G and Girlpool, and it’s the foundation of up-and-comers like Wild Pink, Hovvdy, Clique and Peaer—that of slowcore and its descriptively-named patron saints Duster and Low, with its rubbery tempos, small note clusters, and drowsy vocals. For some, it’s a daring aesthetic choice, testing and rewarding patience, going against assumptions of modern listening habits. For others, it’s an excuse to avoid hooks and clarity. The latter is certainly not the case with Us and Us Only on their Topshelf debut Full Flower. For the Baltimore band, slowcore not just a variant of indie rock, but also a framework for real-deal pop songs.
They also have a rare sense of humor about themselves in this realm, or at least a self-awareness. Their most recent EP was named Bored Crusader and if you zoom out far enough, Full Flower could be heard as his continuing adventures, a concept record about sleepwalking or even a commissioned soundtrack for an imaginary 44-minute film of someone under the covers, deciding whether or not to stop hitting the snooze button. “I wanna go back to bed,” Kinsey Matthews sings rather convincingly, three times within the two minutes of opener “sun4u” and the next two tracks offer advice of how to handle boredom—and these are the catchiest here.
“Kno” shows how insistent this style of music can be in spite of its soft touch, its repetitive twinkles as enveloping as shoegaze, but crisp and refreshing as a cold drink of water. It’s all in Matthews’ voice, an unusually piquant, lemony tone that cuts through its surroundings even when it doesn’t grip a melody all that tight. Though he barely reaches above a whisper—save for a startling scream at the end of “Lawn”—Us and Us Only are a band of five people playing in neatly manicured spaces, which makes unexpected production choices or stylistic shifts feel more profound.
For a few minutes in the middle of Full Flower, Us and Us Only reveal an unexpected freak-folk tenderness, as the string-swathed piano and acoustic guitar interludes "Veiled/Forming" and “way2loud” could pass for Devendra Banhart sketches. Meanwhile, “My Mouth” emerges from its murk with a slow-burning sensuality and limber groove more reminiscent of Wild Beasts than any of their DIY peers.
Though their work ethic and principles put them within that DIY realm, Us and Us Only’s sonic operating principles are slippery. Full Flower is technically their first album, but they’ve been knocking around since 2009, releasing four EPs that veered from sample-based experimentation to the doomier variation of slowcore that marks the album’s more conservative second half. After the lulling balladry of “way2loud,” the title track and “Lawn” move towards emo tempo shifts, soaring guitar leads, and distorted aggression. They are perfectly fine indie rock songs, yet a curious regression when Full Flower is more compelling and successful trying to be a “sleeper hit” in as accurate of terms as possible.


Reissued for its 50th anniversary, American Beauty is undoubtedly the Dead’s most beloved studio album, a pure and potent representation of their style and philosophical outlook.

Grateful Dead: American Beauty / The Angel’s Share

American Beauty / The Angel’s Share

To an outsider, Grateful Dead fandom can look like a religious calling. Consider the hours spent in contemplation of their famously lengthy jams, the lexicon of shibboleths and symbols that are inscrutable to the uninitiated, the seemingly prescribed style of dress, the reluctant messiah figure in Jerry Garcia. Actual religious groups even attached themselves to the endless tours that provided this community with its gathering places. If you attended one of the Dead’s carnivalesque stadium shows in the late 1980s—when hippie nostalgia, spectacle-driven TV news coverage, and a bona fide MTV hit converged to make their crowds much larger than they’d ever been in the hippie era—you might have encountered the Peacemaker bus. Filled with longhaired evangelicals who followed the band in hopes of drawing its listeners into a cultish Christian sect known as the 12 Tribes, the Peacemaker had two floors, a groovy paint job, and a faintly eerie slogan emblazoned on the back: “We know the way, we’ll bring you home.”
That line comes from “Ripple,” the sixth song on American Beauty, Grateful Dead’s fifth and greatest studio album. But as Pitchfork contributor Jesse Jarnow notes in Heads, his wonderful history of American psychedelia, the Peacemaker’s motto was a perversion of the original. The musicians of the Dead, as well as Robert Hunter, the eremitic poet who wrote many of their lyrics, were temperamentally averse to dogma of any kind. On “Ripple,” a crystalline acoustic ballad with a hymnlike melody, they don’t profess to have the answers. “You who choose to lead must follow,” Garcia sings in his plainspoken tenor atop a cascading mandolin, then finishes with the line the 12 Tribes appropriated: “If I knew the way, I would take you home.” Were the Dead a religion, this would be one of its core tenets. Devotion and uncertainty are inseparable; no one knows the way, but we can try to get there together.
Released in November 1970 and reissued for its 50th anniversary this month, American Beauty is a pure and potent representation of Dead-ness as a philosophical outlook. Earlier in the year, with Workingman’s Dead, the band made an abrupt about-face from the murk and discord of previous albums toward the bluegrass and folk that had captivated Garcia in his early days as a musician, with some Buck Owens and Merle Haggard thrown in for good measure. American Beauty, which came just five months later, uses a similarly earthy palette, but its concerns are quite different. The songs of Workingman’s Dead, filled with archetypal characters of the American West, involve a fair amount of rambling and gambling. American Beauty is more like a guided meditation, or a solitary swim in a cool, clear lake.
Bassist Phil Lesh earned a rare songwriting credit for “Box of Rain,” the heartbreaking opener, whose melodies he wrote to sing to his father as he died of prostate cancer. Hunter’s dreamlike titular image might stand for the ephemerality of the present moment, or of life itself. Again, the band goes out of its way to avoid presenting its wisdom as something certain or compulsory: “Just a box of rain/Wind and water/Believe it if you need it/If you don’t, just pass it on.” Hunter conjures similar impossibilities across the album: lights that no eyes can see, tunes that play on harps unstrung, ripples emerging in water without pebbles to cause them.
Decades before mindfulness became a corporate buzzword, the Dead were devoted to being here now. According to Garcia, an acid-fried visit to the Watts Towers a few years before the American Beauty sessions informed this approach, albeit in an inverted way. The guitarist was inspired not to toil in solitude for his legacy, like Simon Rodia building his folk-art monuments in southern Los Angeles, but to live in the world as it unfolded. “If you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can’t tear down, you know, after you’re gone,” he said later. “But hey, what the fuck? I want it here. I want it now, in this lifetime...I also don’t want to be isolated. I don’t want to be an artist suffering in a garrett somewhere, you know what I mean? I want to work with other people.”
This commitment to coming together and being present manifested most clearly in the Dead’s live performances, communal explorations of the moment that only survived for posterity because of bootleg tapers, the sect of Deadheads who documented the band’s fleeting magic, like catching rain in a box. But they also show up on American Beauty, in subtler ways. “Friend of the Devil,” a narrative told from the perspective of an outlaw on the run, might have been a straightforward piece of Americana if not for the way the band played it. Joined by bluegrass-jazz mandolin virtuoso David Grisman, they refuse to sit still and simply strum the chords. Instead, each player pursues his own melodic path through the changes, which emerge in crystalline polyphony. Each line wanders freely, but complements the others; none could support Garcia’s lead vocal alone, but their latticework holds him high.
Across American Beauty, the band accomplishes such feats without straying from the bounds of country-folk songcraft, encoding their collective interplay within verses and choruses rather than jamming, per se. The album’s simplicity and campfire warmth make it approachable to newcomers even as it embodies the spiritual yearning that turns people into lifelong followers. It is an ideal gateway drug.
The reissue comes packaged with a 1971 concert recording, and arrives in tandem with American Beauty: The Angel’s Share, a collection of demos and outtakes that will hardcore fans will lap up, but newcomers to the album should probably ignore. For anyone in between, The Angel’s Share is a useful reminder of the work that goes into sounding so free. Garcia, Lesh, and rhythm guitarist Bob Weir struggle hard with their vocal harmonies in the “Brokedown Palace” demo, an uncomfortably intimate window on their process, which hardly anyone needs to hear more than once. Drummer Bill Kreutzman stumbles over a flashy drum fill to start “‘Til the Morning Comes,” an intro the band abandoned at some point between the demo and the final version. The Angel’s Share comes in an album-length edition with one demo for every song, as well as a 56-track version containing 20 different takes on “Friend of the Devil” alone. For all their emphasis on spontaneity, these songs didn’t actually emerge from thin air.
American Beauty contains the final studio performances of keyboardist and singer Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. His bluesy shout and rough-hewn charisma made him the Dead’s de facto frontman in their earliest years, but his role in the band receded in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, as he grew dissatisfied with their drift toward experimentation and away from the driving rock’n’roll that was his forte. In 1973, months before the Dead started work on American Beauty’s studio followup Wake of the Flood, he died at 27 from complications related to his heavy drinking, leaving his bandmates devastated. The twangy and good-natured “Operator,” his lone lead vocal and songwriting credit on American Beauty, is the album’s outlier, content on Earth without reaching for anything resembling the divine.
Though American Beauty is undoubtedly the Dead’s most beloved studio album, by fans and skeptics alike, most of its songs were never major staples of their live sets, making it something like an island in the stream of their larger canon. One exception is “Truckin’,” the album closer, an easygoing ode to the open highway that became an anthem for Deadheads and for freaks and hippies more generally. It can be difficult to apprehend how the Chuck Berry pastiche of “Truckin’”’s verses relates to American Beauty’s zen worldview, until you get to the song’s spacious bridge, which spawned one of those catchphrases so ubiquitous as to seem without origin:

Sometimes, the light’s all shining on me
Other times, I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long, strange trip it’s been

In the scheme of things, Grateful Dead were only just getting started in 1970; the trip would get much longer and stranger still, and Pigpen was not the last member they’d lose along the way. The “Truckin’” bridge offers a brief pit stop for reflection on the past, but the point is to keep going, city to city, moment to moment. In concert, “Truckin’” regularly stretched past 10 minutes; on record, it is a modest 5:07. It ends with a fade, a tantalizing glimpse at a jam that might go on forever—six brothers truckin’ down the road together toward home, whichever way that is.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Tia Cabral’s second album retains the great mysticism of her songwriting. The unsettling synth textures and soundscapes fly around her soulful voice, making something beautiful out of sheer terror.

Mazy Fly

There’s a song on SPELLLING’s debut, 2017’s Pantheon of Me, where the vocalist and musician Tia Cabral moans over a high-pitched, murderous guitar refrain, one that sounds like tiny gremlins fiending for blood: “I’m not going back to him.” She repeats herself, slightly changing the plea, as layers of ghostly vocals spill over each other. “I’m not going back to the grave.” Again, more desperate than before, she wails, “I’m not going back to the grave.”
This kind of moment—where intimate songwriting on delicate subjects intersects with bone-chilling horror—is the hallmark of SPELLLING’s short music career so far, one that began in earnest in 2015 after a close friend died and Cabral received a strong vibration that she should pick up music again, a practice she’d neglected at an early age in favor of visual art. With a mystic’s talent for conjuring images of wicked deeds, torturous love, and supernatural powers, SPELLLING released her debut, a paean to the terrifying landscape between dreams and waking life.
Her second record, Mazy Fly, is borne of this same legacy. In 2017, Cabral told KQED, “Nothing I make is ever going to be perfect. And I relate to that as it not being the goal. The goal is just to let it out, the process.” Luckily, Cabral trusted that creative instinct, allowing the album—her first full-length release for Sacred Bones—to pulse with moments as haunting and witchy as on her debut. On Mazy Fly, imperfection is less obvious, but in its place, Cabral has unlocked confidence, clarity, and texture. If Pantheon of Me was more of a horror B-movie, Mazy Fly is set to be her critically acclaimed arthouse film.
A list of Cabral’s influences might read like a free association performed while on LSD: goth rodeos, carousels, clown makeup, witching spells, the Knife, Massive Attack, Solange, Whitney Houston, Mars Attacks!, TRON, Roald Dahl’s The Witches. “Under the Sun” features a high-pitched synth line that sounds child-like—a nightmare carnival—alongside an expansive and surprisingly romantic addition of violin. “Real Fun” tells the story of aliens coming to earth to dance to Billie Holiday and “Billie Jean,” which actually does sound like real fun until the song devolves into a black-metal inspired decrescendo. “Haunted Water” gives voice to the ghosts of slaves who were forcibly brought across the Middle Passage during the Atlantic slave trade. There is even saxophone on Mazy Fly, which might seem like an ill-advised decision until you hear the instrument tiptoe in and out of experimental jazz lines on “Afterlife,” just another spectacularly strange detail to throw Cabral’s songs a few steps off kilter. These songs reveal Cabral’s ability to let herself breathe, even if that means experimenting with—or dancing around the fire with—new and unfamiliar textures.
There are moments where Cabral’s follow-up feels intentionally more structured, like on “Dirty Desert Dreams,” which highlights drums by Janak Preston in a song that could fit neatly on any slasher-flick soundtrack. “Hard to Please (Reprise)” sounds like a Solange B-side (“I try too hard to please” could easily be a Solange pronouncement), and it’s a chance for Cabral to really showcase her vocal capabilities. It’s the kind of track that will convert more pop-minded listeners. Even the heady “Golden Numbers,” a dreamy love song—written in a mostly major key on warbling guitar and with feathery harmonies—is more like a siren song than a straightforward admission to openness. Wooing us to shore, Cabral sings, “I’m ready to love/Count on my golden numbers.” The warble in her voice hints at more sinister intentions.
“Secret Thread” is one of the only songs that might put off listeners who came to SPELLLING early on, if only because it feels like predictable, fairytale-like storytelling at first. But on this record, nothing is exactly what it seems, and happy thoughts can easily turn sour. “Secret Thread” devolves at its finale into a church organ-led, mosh-worthy waltz, like Alice in Wonderland meets Suspiria. (Add those to SPELLLING’s list of influences.) Mazy Fly sees Cabral committing to creating even wider landscapes and fields of vision, which could feel scary for fans who followed her from her debut. But Cabral explodes our ideas about texture and terror on Mazy Fly as she snuggles into a deeper connection to her own songwriting, making an album that connects on a more concrete wavelength. Whatever rabbit hole (or bonfire or wormhole or spaceship or grave) Cabral wants to lead us down this time, we can trust we won’t disappear forever.


Exploring the concept of “queer time,” classically trained musician Isabelle Thorn crafts a prodigiously ambitious, suite-like album that never quite rests.

Pluperfect Mind

When undergoing gender transition, one may develop an alternative relationship to time. With long waiting lists and a multitude of setbacks, the patient can feel they’re dangling between an imagined, increasingly abstract future and a past that no longer belongs to them. Waiting to inhabit a body that finally feels like one’s own—and being made to keep waiting, and waiting, and waiting—can change one’s disposition towards the past, present, and future. It is a kind of “queer time,” a temporal reality that Dear Laika explores on Pluperfect Mind, an album she wrote at the beginning of her transition, while isolated in England’s North Wessex Downs.
Dear Laika is the moniker of the classically trained musician Isabelle Thorn. As a child in the South of England, Thorn sang in church choirs and listened to classical music, two influences that have followed her to adulthood. Today, the 23 year old sounds equally inspired by the austere romanticism of post-minimalist composers like John Adams and Max Richter as she does modern glitch artists like Vladislav Delay and Markus Popp of Oval. There’s a touch of avant-pop in her music too, like if the Guggenheim commissioned late-career Kate Bush to write an experimental opera.
Following a batch of one-off songs and self-released albums, Pluperfect Mind is Dear Laika’s debut for the experimental label NNA Tapes. It is a prodigiously ambitious, suite-like album that collages into a canvas of unusual breadth: a polytonal patchwork comprising field recordings, thunderous chorales, darkwave vocals, and abrupt cuts. Its disorientating compositions burn, unfurl, explode, distort, clarify, slow down, and accelerate—often within the same song—mirroring the wavy contours of queer time. Her lyrics, while often poetic and archaic, also address this liminal state head-on: “Where are my memories? Where is my childhood? Where is my tomorrow?”
Pluperfect Mind begins violently, grabbing you by the throat with what sounds like string instruments inside an industrial shredder. The enormous sound recedes, and Thorn’s piano begins to tinkle lightly, like wood chips made of violin. The sound of nature—birdsong, barking dogs, rumbling thunder—is a leitmotif throughout the record, filling its delicate atmosphere. This vacillation between machinic violence and naturalism is a recurring dynamic, one that echoes the feeling of Thorn’s queer time. “I count the months for flesh to rectify/By time-lapsed clouds against a frozen sky,” she sings over a digitally synthesized new age choir on “Phlebotomy,” marking the discordance between her inner rhythm and that of the natural world.
Thorn’s voice is pure and choirgirl-like, a more holy and less sultry companion to FKA twigs’ expressive, crystalline vocals. Whether she’s layering her parts as intricately as a choirmaster, or letting them breathe during a solo, Thorn emits a precise emotional force. On “Guinefort’s Grave,” the rhythm of her breath and the subtle panic in her voice make it sound as though she is paddling a small boat against a tsunami.
Thorn’s music works in fits and starts, obscuring time’s arrow with glitches and distortion. But on “Asleep in Wildland Fire,” her prepared piano—a technique that involves placing screws between the instrument’s strings to temporarily alter its sound, popularized by John Cage and more recently used by Kelly Moran—plonks ahead in perpetual motion. “I am ready, I am ready, I am ready,” Thorn screams, signalling both her actualization and the restoration of linear time. Rather than letting her narrative resolve neatly, the album’s final two songs explode with chaotic beauty, like a spinning weathervane. A chapter has closed, but Pluperfect Mind never quite rests.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Lissie's debut boasted some venerable personnel—collaborators of Tom Waits and Modest Mouse, among others—and her impressively yarling voice, which got her discovered. My Wild West, her first album on her own label, is full of sturdily crafted but MOR songs.

My Wild West

Lissie Maurus’ debut Catching a Tiger boasted venerable personnel—collaborators of Tom Waits and Modest Mouse, among others—some very pretty production flourishes that rewarded close listens, and the impressively yarling voice that got Lissie discovered, but in retrospect it’s easy to see how it got overlooked. Lissie, despite beginning her career working with the likes of DJ Morgan Page, sits squarely in the Hotel Café roster that’s nurtured the careers of the likes of Sara Bareilles, Ingrid Michaelson, and a pre-sales-singularity Adele—a substantial yet critically shrugged-at genre better known these days as "songs you probably heard on 'Grey’s Anatomy' or something once." This isn’t a criticism so much as fact: Had Catching a Tiger or follow-up Back to Forever been released in the '90s, when this sort of thing was as mainstream as pop got, Lissie might have been a star and would have deserved it. These days, unless you overload your pop with sugar like Rachel Platten or Sia, score a self-consciously "authentic" (and possibly uncredited) topline on, say, an Avicii song, or happen to be a man like Ed Sheeran or James Bay, pop-folk is a genre with a limited future.
Such are the concerns of "Hollywood," the first track proper on My Wild West, a theatrical piece of goodbye-to-all-that with the sort of "Lean on Me" piano riff and carefully studied lyric that could only be dreamed up by someone who’s spent too long in audition rooms. Its main flaw is familiarity. Each city generates its own artform templates for people leaving it, and just as New York’s is thinkpieces, Los Angeles’ is songs. You still can stand out from the California-sized morass of these songs; it just takes exuberant panache, a couple killer lines (the current champion: "fuck California, you made me boring"), or even just a career-long dedication to writing Hollywood songs until you win over the cliché by pure attrition. Lissie’s song is thoroughly competent, yet says nothing beyond L.A. being a place where dreams happen or don’t, and where "running wild" means maybe not telling your mother you’ve gone clubbing a few times.
My Wild West, Lissie’s first album on her own label, is full of these sturdily crafted but MOR songs. The titular conceit—complete with "overture"—threatens an album of self-conscious cowpunk à la Miss Derringer, or perhaps the Americana equivalent of Eat, Pray, Love. Fortunately, the album’s neither of those but comfort-food acoustic pop; unfortunately, this makes it significantly less interesting. Lissie’s voice has settled into a sedate, plainspoken croon, somewhere between Sheryl Crow and Ashley Monroe, or at times like Sia when she sounds like she’s gulping down a faceful of air with every syllable.
And while Lissie remains a fine songwriter—the overture in particular is actually pretty compelling in a spaghetti-western way—she takes few risks here. "Wild West" is, on the one hand, an eminently competent single, one that builds from quiet, prayer-like verse to a full-throated folk-rocker where the kick drums stomp and the guitars practically yodel. But it’s also a worn formula, up to and including that wearisome "hey!" the Lumineers injected into seemingly every folk or pop song of this decade. Similarly, the brass-and-acoustic "Hero" conjures up a nice dustscape that, when it leads only to "I could've been a hero, I could've been a zero," comes off as a mere set piece, with tumbleweeds blown by wind machines. (Also: "I want my 40 acres in the sun" is maybe not the most appropriate metaphor.) "Sun Keeps Risin’" even drops in a couple dozen instances of a stock coyote sample to belabor the metaphor, which is cool unless you’ve heard that exact sample somewhere else. (And if you have, you’ll spend the entire song trying to think of where, as the music slips too easily into the background.)
Like most of Lissie’s albums, My Wild West is most compelling at its most messy and raucous. "Daughters" has one of Lissie’s most passionate vocals and a wonderfully crunchy bridge; it’s one of two tracks on the album that feel exciting. The other is "Go for a Walk," a weird, meandering little track, mostly solo acoustic save for a few playful electric guitar skips. It’s reminiscent of Fiona Apple’s "Waltz (Better Than Fine)"—another track toward the end of its album that feels unplanned and refreshing, like a slice of life that just happened to get set to music. It’s the closest thing on My Wild West that sounds like "going rogue in the wild, wild West," anyway; leaving Hollywood behind is one thing, but better yet is leaving behind the old familiar sets.


Occasionally corny and self-serious, Cordae's redemption tale shows a promising voice bursting into the mainstream.

The Lost Boy

The YBN Crew’s origin story is already the stuff of internet legend, even though the group formed just five years ago. Nick Simmons was born in Birmingham and met Jay Bradley, of Galveston, while playing Grand Theft Auto V. They bonded out of a shared love of rap music and live-streaming video games, eventually recording  their first freestyles in XBOX Live group chats as YBN Nahmir and YBN Almighty Jay, respectively.
In 2017, Nahmir and YBN Glizzy met Cordae Amari Dunston online, and Dunston immediately became the elder statesman of the crew. While the group found viral success with Nahmir’s “Rubbin Off the Paint,” the vision they presented on last year’s YBN: the Mixtape was that of a three-headed monster led by Cordae.
With The Lost Boy, Cordae makes good on the promise hinted at on YBN: The Mixtape, turning in a front-to-back redemption tale. It is Cordae at his most humble. It’s occasionally corny and self-serious. But its 15 tracks show a star slowly finding his voice and bursting into the mainstream.
Through this lens, the Chance the Rapper-assisted “Bad Idea” makes sense on multiple levels. Over an interpolation of Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway’s “Be Real Black For Me,” Cordae takes cues from Chance on the chorus, cooing “Don’t you cry/It’ll be alright.” It’s a ghost-of-Christmas-past tale: Cordae imagines what it would be like to never come home again, the adoring family members he would never see. There’s strength in community, he seems to be saying, and it’s a message that permeates the record.
On first single “Have Mercy,” Cordae turns his gaze outward. Over a “Mask Off”-inspired flute sample and 808, Cordae begins, “Sweet lord please have mercy/Baby Jesus please save us.” It’s a call to join, and in the hands of a less-deft rapper, this sort of proselytizing would come off as saccharine at best, invasive at worst. But Cordae seems to come only from a place of appreciation, bursting with joy at a newfound life that formerly looked bleak.
The Lost Boy splits its time between thankfulness and victory laps. On “RNP,” Cordae basks in the glow of success over a sermonizing Anderson .Paak chorus and bouncy J. Cole production: “Smiling ‘cause I’m young, rich, black, and I’m handsome/Not to mention wealthy/Ass on the healthy.” It is, undoubtedly, a dumb line, and the track is one of the record’s clear misses, mistaking puns for cleverness and energy for quality.
On the flip side, he sounds surprisingly assured next to Pusha-T on “Nightmares Are Real.” He goes toe-to-toe with the veteran, even encouraging Push to find grace in the building blocks of his career: “I can tell you how I started in this rap shit/Eighth grade backflipping on a mattress.”
Despite the glossy guestlist, The Lost Boy remains Cordae’s show. At 15 songs, it could have used an edit, another voice in the room telling him to tone it down. But still, it’s an assured debut. Cordae raps about life with the patience of a pro but the wide-eyed wonder of a newborn. It’s a delicate balance, and he occasionally stumbles, but it’s promising to even watch him try.


For the first installment of its proposed seven-album anthology of the late composer’s work, the California collective breathes new life into his ecstatic minimalist masterpiece.

Wild Up / Christopher Rountree: Julius Eastman, Vol. 1: Femenine

Julius Eastman, Vol. 1: Femenine

Has there been a more compelling story of musical redemption in the last decade than that of Julius Eastman? Born in New York in 1940, Eastman was a precocious teenage pianist and commanding vocalist who emerged as an ambitious young composer. He resided at the borders of minimalism and jazz, the academy’s confines and the city’s downtown crucible. Eastman was also a Black gay man living by the credo “be what I am to the fullest” in a scene that neither looked nor acted like him. After stints working at Tower Records and living in Tompkins Square Park, he died alone in 1990 following reported struggles with addiction, mental illness, and eviction.
But especially since Frozen Reeds’ indispensable 2016 excavation of his early-’70s masterwork, Femenine, Eastman has seemed newly omnipresent, vaunted not only for his ecstatic minimalism but also for his prescient rejection of genre and high/low divides. Over the past decade-plus, there have been a book, a trio of box sets, a DJ/rupture tribute, major newspaper profiles, and multiple versions of Femenine by chic new music ensembles. The Los Angeles Philharmonic paired Eastman’s music with that of Arvo Pärt in August, while the New York Philharmonic will present his work in January, a reappraisal that might have astonished the hometown provocateur. The New York Times even gave this groundswell a name: Eastmania.
No organization has committed more fully to this public reintroduction than Wild Up, a radical California chamber collective of composers, performers, and improvisers whose imagination and ambition seem boundless. They intend to spend the next six years arranging, recording, and releasing an exhaustive seven-volume anthology of the Eastman pieces that survived his piteous end.
They begin with Femenine, the work that has not only been the most publicized for years now but is also something like Eastman’s thesis, the piece where so many of his interests and loves collide in a transcendent hour of nonstop sound. Eastman premiered Femenine in 1974, the same year Steve Reich began writing Music for 18 Musicians and Philip Glass unveiled Music in 12 Parts, three years before Rhys Chatham conceived Guitar Trio. Femenine stands among these pulsating minimalist landmarks but also apart from them. Eastman’s loose score works more as a suggestive framework, allowing whatever musicians are playing Femenine to take liberties with everything besides its rhythms. With a cast of 20, Wild Up run with this mere suggestion of direction: On record, Femenine has never sounded more vital, immersive, or necessary.
A play-by-play accounting of this or any version of Femenine can go one of two ways: Very little happens or changes for the entirety of these 70 minutes, or so much happens in the course of just 30 seconds that trying to chronicle it all would be tantamount to documenting your body’s every skeletomuscular twitch. A choir of sleigh bells rings when Femenine begins, amassing like cicadas at the start of a summer night. A vibraphone soon joins, its enchanting melody instantly indelible. Both persist for the entire piece, gradually fading out toward the end. These double ellipses suggest we’ve heard but a sample of a saga with no beginning or end, glimpsing a cycle that will soon resume.
The rest of Femenine is a dizzying dance of flutes and whistles, violins and synthesizers, piano and voices, which all take the form of perpetual motion machines. Tune out for a second, and a hundred notes seem to whiz past. Femenine works a little like GAS, gamelan, or any other iterative music: The details wedged into the recesses of these repetitive rhythms are what give it power. The music’s emotional dynamism has a pull like that of a particularly absorbing film.
Wild Up push the flexibility Eastman wrote into Femenine to its extreme. Nine soloists improvise against the basic structure. Near the top, pianist Richard Valitutto drifts through autumnal variations so bittersweet they suggest a Bruce Hornsby hymn; warm and sad, his notes offer an apology to Eastman, a tender promise that his short life will relish a long tail. Marta Tiesenga’s baritone saxophone later writhes like a wounded animal, grasping for any shred of comfort but finding none. Singer Odeya Nini grunts and wails, redlining her crystalline soprano until it could crack glass; she inhales pain to exhale it with fury.
Set against rhythms that are as regular as a heartbeat yet flit like an anxious mind, these improvisations collectively suggest a life’s complicated emotional range. The way the weeping flugelhorn and enraged vocals intertwine with one another, and with the effervescent little orchestra around them, mimics the way that at any given moment, whatever feeling is most pronounced is always pitted against whatever else might be bounding through your brain. In Femenine as in life, one mood seldom lasts.
“Pianist will interupt. Must return,” Eastman scrawled in blocky capital letters at the end of Femenine’s score, a command Wild Up borrow for the 10th movement’s title. Throughout their recording, in fact, the instrument plays a crucial role: After a horn launches into a paroxysm during the seventh movement, for instance, the piano cuts in with a clang, commanding its charge to fall in line. It’s as if the instrument is a reminder that this too shall pass, no matter what this happens to be. Femenine backs the joy of existing with the variegated torments of surviving. It feels in keeping with Eastman’s biography that the piece most responsible for his public resurrection is a sweeping survey of chaotic feelings—and an epic testament to perseverance.
We live in a moment that craves newness, that loves the idea of what’s next so much that much of Big Tech’s attention seems focused on content designed to vanish soon after it appears, like a restaurant that sells only smoke. But the same technology that has enabled our quick-hit culture has also fostered a golden era of archival excavation, where gems neglected due to systemic bigotry or mere circumstance are getting their overdue moments of light. Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Laurie Spiegel, Bill Fay: Their returns have thankfully complicated our reductive narratives of history, just as Eastman has done for minimalism.
Eastman’s moment arrived tragically late, of course, a quarter-century after his death went unnoticed by newspapers for eight months. But it’s hard to imagine a better corrective than Wild Up’s rendition of Femenine, which crackles with the absolute urgency of life but moves with the wisdom that it won’t go on forever.

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Nicolás Jaar and Dave Harrington return with a meticulous work of unexpected and even unprecedented familiarity—less a portal than a kiosk existing entirely within the boundaries set by their 2013 debut.

Spiral

For listeners drawn to Nicolás Jaar and Dave Harrington’s intimidating CVs, Darkside seemed like a normie pursuit: a visionary electronic producer and restless guitarist making a psych-rock album that sounds really good if you’re high. While the duo seemed like the types who’d never even need, let alone make, a dorm-room staple like their 2013 debut Psychic, Darkside proved their egghead credentials were compatible with the elevated populism of the Gateway Album. Even in the streaming era, budding tastemakers still might need Kid A or Nevermind as an entry point to IDM or classic indie rock and Psychic served as a grand terminal connecting dozens of far-off, cosmic vistas—whether it was Meddle, Future Days, or even Space Is Only Noise. Jaar and Harrington’s individual visions only grew more vast in the eight years leading up to Darkside’s return with Spiral, a work of unexpected and even unprecedented familiarity—less a portal than a kiosk existing entirely within the boundaries set by Psychic.
Lead singles “Liberty Bell” and “The Limit” cash in on Darkside’s ample goodwill, a sonic brand strong enough to be wholly their own even after only one album. Both tracks align with the feel and extravagant production values of disco and prog-rock, all set to a seductive, zombie groove. And though Jaar’s hollowed-out moan isn’t their strongest instrument, it provides a menacing air that would elude a straight reading of their lyrics (“The me in the sin awoke/You want sin in a rose,” “Submit to the grace/The waters erase”). Even if Darkside no longer sound as effortlessly innovative, there’s always a sinister, muck-turning churn like “I’m the Echo” to ensure they’ll never pass for pop or even chill.
Darkside are less decisive on whether Spiral should be fun or at least retain the impish humor that Jaar brought to Psychic’s “Paper Trails.” “Lawmaker” takes a straightforward narrative on a power-mad, doctor-turned-demagogue and I’m fairly certain (but not entirely positive) it’s not about Dr. Anthony Fauci; more troublesome is the song’s surprisingly unimaginative take on a mode of brooding goth-rock that could serve as bumper music for its prestige TV adaptation. Likewise, “Only Young” hints at Darkside fully embracing dry ice and fog machines, but it’s only a hint. Without fully committing to camp or at least an aspiration for showmanship, its reverb-soaked piano chords and blues scale soloing could pass for a nicely toasted JD & the Straight Shot.
It’s a cruel irony that Spiral’s timidity becomes its distinguishing characteristic. Throughout, Jaar and Harrington, so accustomed to pushing boundaries, are transfixed by minor shifts in the interior decor. “Narrow Road” points toward a more treacherous, unsteady path than Psychic opener “Golden Arrow”: Jaar’s vocals had always been utilized primarily as texture and here, they’re filtered until porous. Darskide forgo their typical 4/4 thump for a rhythm that judders and clanks like a lopsided washing machine. All of these production tweaks can be deemed “interesting” from a purely objective standpoint without serving the song in the slightest. Spiral is rife with truly dazzling sounds—“The Question Is to See It All” makes the most intriguing use of cutlery as percussion since “Spoonman,” “I’m the Echo” imagines a slap-bass made of industrial cable—the kind that silently shame anyone listening through laptop speakers instead of a proper stereo system. Or, it might just feel more like leafing through high-end fabric swatches or going to a cake tasting: samples of luxury operating in isolation, without context that could give it meaning. Most of the time, a beat separates Spiral from being a journey and simply trippy: when “The Question Is to See It All” and the title track ditch the drums, they seem to forget they’re even playing.
The strengths and weaknesses of Spiral are almost exactly the same as those of Psychic, begging an interrogation of that secret sauce that separates their relative quality. The momentum generated by their Daftside one-off, Psychic’s place in a 2013 zeitgeist defined by many other modern classics of nocturnal, extravagant synth-pop. Similar to the luminescent bubble on its cover, Darkside appeared as a whole on Psychic, an endlessly malleable entity with the kind of mystique that only gets enhanced by disappearing for nearly eight years.
Novelty also certainly played a role in Psychic’s success, not in its innovations but in the contagious thrill of discovery that often escapes artists after their debut. “It’s very, very pleasurable to make music with Dave because I feel like we get to play to our teenage selves together,” Jaar said in a recent interview, and for the five minutes of Spiral’s “Inside Is Out There,” Darkside’s dazzling layers of tactile percussion retrains the focus on the communal glee between two production scholars, beaming over a shared computer screen as they surprise even themselves. It’s convincing enough that the who behind their music matters less than the why. And then Jaar’s vocals come in, an interruption or an afterthought at best. It’s both a highlight and a microcosm of the way Spiral forecloses on the endless possibilities stirred by its predecessor for the safest one possible: Another Darkside Album.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Though a couple of safe songs threaten to slow the momentum, the Chicago artist sounds more defiant and grounded than ever on her fourth album.

Thanks 4 Nothing

This past Valentine’s Day, Tink hosted what was essentially a master class on overcoming heartache. At a Morehouse College event in Atlanta, fans lined up with blue baseball bats branded with the Chicago artist’s name and blissfully smashed them against the windshield of a car—just like you might do to a bogus ex’s ride. The whole affair was extremely in character for the 27-year-old rapper and R&B singer, who’s best known for her diaristic, bleeding-heart ballads. And even though she hails from a southern suburb, she’s the quintessential Chicago woman: direct, composed, bossed-up, glamorous but guarded. Her 2022 album, Pillow Talk, was her second full-length collaboration with Empire labelmate and beatmaker Hitmaka. On that record, he phased out the stagnant Timbaland instrumentals that once held her back, bringing a new level of sophistication to the singer’s music. Her latest album, Thanks 4 Nothing, contains Instagram caption-worthy bars, diamond-studded melodies, and smoldering duets, all delivered with poised swagger. Tink’s voice is more potent than ever, her power tucked behind her tongue like razor blades against the tableau vivant of Hitmaka’s lavish, thundering universe.
Over 14 tracks, the singer flows through heartbreak, eventually remembering her worth and finding a graceful sense of self-awareness. A narrative told from the perspective of her shadow side, she excavates the depths of her desires, and refreshingly, never feigns a linear healing arc. Her version of R&B goes beyond confessional and carnal needs—beyond reaching for perfection. On “Toxic,” she admits she’s fallen for someone waving enough red flags to get Chicago’s famed Bud Biliken parade started. An opulent, orchestral string arrangement lays the foundation for Tink to puff her chest as a “real bitch, not industry.” She gains vitality the more she unravels, her raps scorching the earth and clearing ground for healthy life to grow. “Fake Love” demonstrates this superpower to the third degree: “Dipped on me, contradicted everything you claimed to be/Heavy on the mood swings/Speak on how you cuff me to use me.” Here, she’s a sensitive desperado setting her aim on all who attempt to control her. It’s Tink at her bravest, unafraid to demand emotional safety.
But it’s the Chicagoan spirit she shares with her producer that leads to a crucial, heartstopping duet with Ty Dolla $ign called “Let Down My Guard.” Hitmaka assumes the role of a chemist, mixing soft trap percussion into blaring red-light special sirens. Glowing, sliding electric guitar lines accentuate a shared request between lovers: “If I let down my guard, would you give a thug your heart?” The structure evokes the ’00’s and ’90s R&B style of true collaboration, with Ty and Tink singing bar for bar. When Ty cries out, “Girl hold me down, on everything it’s overdue,” the line soothes, if not melts, the scars that come from running cold streets.
Later, Tink’s storytelling shines in her solo track “Gangsta’s Paradise,” in which she crushes on a hustler from the West Side of the city, petitioning to be his fantasy. It’s a side we don’t see much from Tink: She actually believes that the all-in bet she’s placing on her heart will hit. Underneath a spotlight, she reveals her hand, longing for a hectic, intoxicating romance that buds from getting the bag together. Could it get any more P-Valley than that?
Still, there are moments when Tink’s lyrics feel like conceptual misfires. “I’m the Catch” fundamentally works as another flex-on-my-ex coping mechanism, but when she raps about the “dirty-ass women” that her partner “entertains,” it’s hard to empathize. Integrity is supposed to be Tink’s forte; she often cites women’s empowerment as the primary purpose of her music in interviews, so the slippery slope of misogyny that infidelity brings out on this track is challenging to overlook.
It’s clear that the “proudly imperfect” spitfire is no stranger to standing up for herself. Following a three-year stream of acclaimed mixtape and track releases, Tink signed to Timbaland’s Mosley Music Group, an Epic imprint, in 2014. Creative disputes, which included the producer relentlessly projecting Aaliyah’s legacy onto her, would push back the 2015 drop of her debut album, Think Tink. Sadly, the completed album was never released, and the singer eventually parted ways with MMG and Timbaland.
These days, Tink’s autonomy is non-negotiable. While songs like “Someone on You” and “Ain’t Gotta Leave” slow down the record’s momentum with repetitive, safe song structures, they also feel like part of the trademark sound Tink has built for herself (even the first track’s spoken interlude, which echoes her past use of voicemails, feels true to form). She’s proving a point and building her career her way—label heads best move back. Tink is at her most dynamic when she’s having fun being defiant and rejoicing in her unwavering truth. Thanks 4 Nothing is not just Tink’s exhale, it’s her ecstasy, and her vengeance.


Working with the Yamaha Disklavier—a digital descendant of the player piano—the New York musician explores the tension between technical precision and emotional reverie.

Moves in the Field

Kelly Moran treats the piano as an object to be transformed. The New York musician wrings metallic clangs from its strings and slathers each note in sustain, until the instrument loses its telltale form and morphs into something psychedelic and dreamlike. She established her reverie-like style with 2017’s Bloodroot and further expanded it on 2018’s excellent Ultraviolet, in which fuzz-coated melodies magnified and shrank like the patterns of a kaleidoscope. With Moves in the Field, she strips her music down. Where she used to work with prepared piano, she recorded the new album on the Yamaha Disklavier, a digital descendant of the player piano. While continuing to explore the furthest reaches of her instrument, this time she turns inward, writing intricate melodies that evoke a sense of interiority.
Moran began working with the Disklavier in early 2020, when Yamaha loaned her one to try out while she was working on a piece with fellow composer Missy Mazzoli. The machine, renowned for its technical precision, taught her something unexpected: how to find emotional intensity in softness. She began her compositions by playing looping melodies on the instrument, then stepped away and played them back, listening to find space for gentleness. Finally, she played in real time along with those recordings, layering her fluid performance above the precise playback of the Disklavier. The results are more complex than she could have played on her own. The Disklavier allowed her to create layers and patterns that exceed the physical limitations of the most talented human pianist. But despite these complex techniques, Moran’s music feels anything but demanding. Instead, she lets warmth ring out, finding sweetness within the rapid-fire arpeggios facilitated by the instrument.
Moran’s music gradually unfolds over the course of looped melodies that feel both unhurried and like running up a hill, evoking the fast-paced twirls and grace of the ice skaters that inspire her. Much of Moran’s music is driven by technical prowess, but she still finds room for lightness. Opener “Butterfly Phase” foregrounds rippling, fast-paced phrases that interweave like the strands of a spiderweb; on “Superhuman,” she pairs sparkling melodies that flutter up and down the scales while a meditative melody stews underneath.
Though repetition and precision are at the core of her music, Moran focuses less on interlocking rhythmic patterns and more on forming sweeping melodies out of short phrases that evolve over time. “Dancer Polynomials,” one of the album’s most detailed tracks, pairs a brisk, soft melody that churns above a bed of pensive low tones. These two lines feel like they’re in opposition—one airy, one weighty—but they grow together, and by the end, they swirl into a heady union. Album highlight “Sodalis II” balances the emotion and technique that drive Moran’s music. The piece grows from a measured phrase and unfolds into a deep, resonant meditation, informed by Moran’s increasing emphasis on each downbeat and the slight pauses she takes before rolling a chord. As the music crescendos, she encircles its core with speedy riffs, until all the melodies crumble away, leaving a palpable feeling of catharsis.
While there’s messiness and depth in the emotions she explores, Moran writes wholly consonant music. There are few moments of dissonance or discord. Instead, she finds release in the delicate ways she strokes her piano’s keys and elongates tones and pauses between legato phrases. Tension lies in the way she breathlessly rushes through an arpeggio or holds onto a phrase for just a little bit too long, carrying it over into the next. Where experimental music often favors gnarly harmonies and knotty melodies, Moran’s approach is more subtle. Moves in the Field shows us that technique doesn’t need to be showy or daring—without sacrificing rigor or heft, it can also be tender.


Back in the mid-to-late 80s, I was a fan of the Boston Celtics. Actually, not so much the Celtics as ...

Amalgamated Sons of Rest: Amalgamated Sons of Rest EP

Amalgamated Sons of Rest EP

Back in the mid-to-late 80s, I was a fan of the Boston Celtics. Actually, not so much the Celtics as Larry Bird, the "Hick from French Lick". Bird was my favorite player and when he retired from basketball, I lost interest in the game. But one reason I liked him so much (besides the fact that he was one of the best players ever, and a fellow Hoosier) was that he brought out the best in others. And not just his teammates, but his opponents, too: fellow Celtics Kevin McHale and Robert Parish would have been good, but not great, without Bird, and Magic Johnson and the Lakers were undoubtedly at their best when facing the Celtics and Bird.
Maybe it was because I was thirteen or so at the time, but I was honestly excited when it was announced that professional players were eligible for the Olympic Team. "The Dream Team", it was called, with Bird and Johnson and all the other greats on the same team. No one else stood a chance, and the thought of Bird dishing it off to Isaiah Thomas or Magic... well, to my young mind it was like Neil Peart jamming with Joe Satriani. Of course, as good as this sounded at the time, I hadn't quite anticipated just how incredibly boring this would quickly become. I don't remember who they played in that first round of the Olympics or what the final score was (something like 278-29), but I do remember flipping to summertime re-runs of "227" after about two dozen fast breaks in a row.
You probably see where I'm going with this. Amalgamated Sons of Rest is a Dream Team of sorts, if your dreams include birds of prey, whoring, and/or traveling in gypsy caravans. Comprised of Will Oldham, Jason Molina from Songs: Ohia, and Alasdair Roberts from Appendix Out, the Sons o' Rest sound like a great idea on paper. Unfortunately, it also sounds exactly as you'd expect it to sound, and therein lies the problem.
Everything about this disc is a foregone conclusion, excepting who's going to sing bass on the three-part harmonies (usually Will). From the mix of traditional and original material, to the subject matter (death, longing, whaling), the mood (dejected, yet philosophical), and the instrumentation (acoustic guitar, some piano), the record reeks of coasting. Even the song titles ("Maa Bonny Lad", "The Gypsy He-Witch") could be approximated beforehand. Granted, no one was expecting anything revolutionary from this trio beyond what they've already accomplished with their own solo projects and full-time bands, but a little effort certainly couldn't have hurt.
Still, there are small pleasures, if only for completists. All three of these croaky crooners take two turns in the lead vocalist's rocking chair. On the remaining, uncredited song (the hidden track on the CD and the lone song on the etched side of the vinyl version) each members takes turns singing what could nearly pass for a children's song, with the chorus, "I will be good," repeated with increasing adamancy. It's by far the best offering here, not quite so serious as the other songs.
Oldham's single songwriting contribution, "Major March", is also notable, but for a different reason: it's one of the few songs here in which the members sound genuinely passionate about the project, which obviously makes for a solid track, but also serves to highlight the limitations of the rest of the disc. The execution is forceful and determined, with Roberts and Molina echoing Oldham's stark phrasing: "I have grown my hair out longer/ I have grown my beard out, too/ My skin is failing, my arms are frailing/ But you'd still know me, wouldn't you?" During this chorus, in particular, the firm course of direction and the impassioned delivery on the part of each member makes sparklingly clear what this record is lacking elsewhere: leadership.


This collection of early recordings from the Texas thrash powerhouse makes it clear that their influences and focus set them apart from the thrash revival they followed.

Opening Fire: 2008-2014

If you’re not from Texas, your first exposure to Dallas thrash resuscitators Power Trip possibly came through one of their two excellent studio albums, like 2017’s Nightmare Logic, a rare crossover moment for the metal underground. No shame: Their fury is unmatched in modern thrash. But if you were a hardcore fan or even a hardcore-curious metal kid in Texas, you’ve known what Power Trip can bring maybe for a decade now. Released digitally in April and now out physically, Opening Fire collects Power Trip’s earlier EPs and compilation appearances, made mostly before their 2013 breakthrough debut, Manifest Decimation. Their debt to New York hardcore is more apparent in these formative tracks, which offer an elemental look at how they came to define thrash this decade.
Power Trip bested a thrash comeback they never really joined. Crossover was a big part of the mid-2000s thrash revival, epitomized by Municipal Waste and Warbringer. But those bands lifted from the West Coast tradition of Suicidal Tendencies, Cryptic Slaughter, and D.R.I. Power Trip instead tapped NYHC—specifically, Cro-Mags’ metal-leaning Best Wishes. What’s more, lead guitarist Blake Ibanez and rhythm guitarist Nick Stewart borrowed from the tight playing of Canada’s Razor, evident in songs like “This World” and “Divine Apprehension.” Razor eschewed Slayer’s looseness and the prog overtures of Megadeth in the name of pure velocity. When Power Trip sped up, they became a visceral storm. This different batch of thrash influences set them apart, allowing Power Trip to become their own band.
Instead of moving chronologically, Opening Fire begins with Power Trip’s self-titled 2011 EP. On “Divine Apprehension,” sprightly, major-key thrash tics ride above the maelstrom. “Suffer No Fool” captures the essence of Power Trip—thrash with unspeakable fury, combined with slower breakdown sections so the kids can let loose in the pit, all in less than three minutes. “Apprehension” and “Fool” set the tone for Decimation’s breakdown-filled “Crossbreaker,” whose larger-than-life gang vocals have made the song a live staple. With these songs, Chris Ulsh, a formidable figure in Texas hardcore with Mammoth Grinder and Hatred Surge, joined Power Trip, then a few years old. He brings more fury and discipline to a band already brimming with both.
“This World,” from a 2014 compilation, sounds most like today’s Power Trip, with reverb crowning Riley Gale’s vocals and a beefy guitar tone riding alongside it. Meanwhile, an earlier version of “Hammer of Doubt,” a track that eventually made it to Decimation, signals the more relentless turn Power Trip would take, with Ibanez abusing his whammy bar as the band plows through fast verses. Though “World” and “Doubt” may be more familiar from Power Trip’s studio records, it’s telling to hear them in their infancy, stripped of some manipulated vocals, cavernous drums, and noise segues. What remains is an incredibly tight and energetic thrash band.
Fire’s second half revisits 2013’s The Armageddon Blues Sessions, a re-release of 2009’s Armageddon Blues, Power Trip’s first official release. They’re more blatant about their influences here, and these tracks thrive on the youthful charm of aping what you love. “Vultures” is their first experiment with Razor’s formula, and they almost nail it. “Armageddon Blues” and “Questions” brim with NYHC riffing and offer homages to Iron Age, the Austin group who served as spiritual mentors to Power Trip. Still, even here, Power Trip were wildly different and more serious than the Ed Repka-core that seemed to have arrived in droves. Opening Fire doesn’t just collect Power Trip’s roots, then; it demonstrates how they’ve used them to flourish more than their contemporaries, despite their delayed arrival.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 1994 debut by Bark Psychosis, a pioneering work of post-rock that fused guitars and electronics into soundscapes both meditative and menacing.

Hex

For Bark Psychosis, making their debut album was an act of obliteration. Over the course of a few singles and EPs in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the quartet—composed of vocalist and guitarist Graham Sutton, bassist John Ling, drummer Mark Simnett, and eventually multi-instrumentalist Daniel Gish—matured from teenagers obsessed with Napalm Death and noise rock to composers of patient and oft-improvisational pop music. But as they set out to work on Hex, they began to think about the whole enterprise differently. They were ready for the band to die.
“We’ve never been interested in rock,” Sutton told Melody Maker soon after the album’s release. “I’m even uncomfortable with the idea of being in a band. It seems such a juvenile thing. I’m trying to break it all up at the moment.”
Traces of this philosophy were evident in the music they’d made leading up to Hex. “Scum,” a 21-minute song recorded amid the pews and moldy carpets of the London church where Simnett worked and then released as a standalone single, sounds as if their early dreamy pop music had been reduced to misty echoes. Distant vocal sections are clouded out by celestial drones and noises that flutter and flip like heart palpitations. The band moves discursively between loosely defined sections, governed seemingly by the logic of daydreams.
It’s an approach that eventually led Simon Reynolds to call Bark Psychosis “post-rock.” Though the band has little in common, aesthetically or philosophically, with gooey sentimentalists like Explosions in the Sky and Sigur Rós who became popular under that umbrella, in a literal sense, the term fits. “Scum,” and, later, Hex, represented a full-on rupture with the structure and sound of rock. In place of yowling emotionality, Sutton offered sedate murmurs. For preening riffs, they substituted brittle, crystalline guitar figures. Instead of thunderous percussion, Simnett played economically and compactly, recalling the mechanical precision of the Can records and techno they were listening to at the time. Bark Psychosis learned to be meditative, mysterious, and elliptical in a way that felt almost confrontational. Each release became a provocation to meet the band on its own terms, to find whatever peace you could in its strange rhythms.
With Hex, Sutton—the band’s self-described “taskmaster”—sought to push these ideas even further. The group had long nurtured an obsession with the rigid strictures of techno, and the sequencer-based process that generated such ecstatic repetition, an approach they aimed to replicate on Hex. Jettisoning the four-guys-in-a-room-jamming process that birthed “Scum,” the band worked heavily with sampling, editing, and dubbing takes. The effect is subtle, but the resulting songs do share at least a philosophical link to the electronic music that inspired them. Hex’s compositions are hallucinatory and strange; they unfurl slowly, shifting gradually over the course of a track’s delicate sprawl until the opening moments are a distant memory.
Change is a major motivator in Sutton’s work, and Hex captures Bark Psychosis at a moment of intense upheaval, both in sound and in process. While making the record, they carted around a multitrack tape recorder to friends’ homes, various studios across the UK, and the church that had served as their rehearsal space for years. Sutton would later describe the process as “convoluted,” but it no doubt contributed to the hypnotic and disorienting effect of Hex, which unspools the textures and timbres of guitar pop into a singularly dissociative masterpiece.
Sutton and Ling met in 1983 at a private school in London, where they bonded over their love for bristling heavy music—Swans, Big Black, Public Enemy, Psychic TV—and a general disaffection with the environment. The name Bark Psychosis came to Sutton in a dream, he says: a fitting title for a band of teens playing Napalm Death covers, though less so for the drifting sounds they’d soon come to embrace. Sutton was kicked out of school in his final year and Ling dropped out soon after, leaving them with a lot of free time. Simnett joined the duo on drums as they began to pursue their experiments more deeply. Together, in a tiny room at the church, they started channeling all their discontent into noise.
Working on a track that would eventually become “The Loom,” Hex’s loping opener, Simnett has said, they found a common ground between Sutton and Ling’s love for heavy music and his own affection for prog rock. Early singles like “Nothing Feels” and “All Different Things” reflect the alchemy of this period. They’re placid on their face, with gentle guitar lines like reflecting pools for Sutton’s muttered, minimal lyrics. But they also demonstrate a dynamic intensity acquired from the heavier music their creators loved, their mannered arrangements coalescing and swirling until the surface tension breaks, spilling over in chaotic ripples. When Sutton first played “All Different Things” for Cheree Records, he blew out co-owner Vinita Joshi’s speaker setup.
At once severe and serene, these singles reflect an ethos that Bark Psychosis would carry with them throughout their catalog. They gasped out their songs as if an immense weight rested squarely on their chests, and surveyed the busyness of modern life with the melancholic eyes of two kids who’d spent years scratching out a living in a claustrophobic city. Sutton’s voice rarely rises above a labored whisper or tremulous mumble. Even at the record’s most spirited moments, there’s little sense of urgency or drive, just anhedonia and malaise. Few records capture so evocatively the dejection of realizing that the world isn’t everything you’d imagined it might be.
These generally antisocial feelings, along with the lingering resentments from a complicated legal situation following the band’s departure from Cheree (a label that had per Sutton’s estimation eventually involved the financial backing of “a couple of cons”), no doubt played a part in the shroud of disaffection that hangs over Hex’s trudging tempos and murky sonics. Sutton has gestured over the years to the difficulties he faced in the period of his life: He’d been squatting, resorting to stealing wood from the floorboards of derelict buildings nearby to keep the fire in his own home burning in winter. During the making of the record, he was dealing with the emotional fallout of a life-altering breakup which he says made him “maniacally focused” on Hex. “At the time, it was just so fucking bleak,” he told The Quietus.
Hex finally arrived on Valentine’s Day in 1994, an ironic release date for a record that so fully captures the desolate reality that inspired it. On each of its seven tracks, Bark Psychosis trudge through muddled headspaces and foggy instrumentals, only occasionally finding structures that resemble verses or choruses. Instead, there’s the anxious “Fingerspit,” eight minutes of interlocking guitar and piano melodies that shatter and spiral like cracks spreading across a windshield. “Big Shot” oozes and shudders around a bassline that brings to mind the meditative yet menacing grayscale of dub techno, then evaporates into frigid ambience recalling Harold Budd’s collaborations with Brian Eno.
Hex’s greatest pleasures are unstable and fleeting: notes that ring out just a beat too long, passages of eerie silence, stuttering half-melodies. Just when you think you’ve settled in and understand what’s going on, the tempo slows to a crawl or an echo overtakes the mix, upending all that came before it. A trumpet rings out in the distance, then disappears forever. Sutton offers an image on “Big Shot” that succinctly captures the album’s sense of agitation without a particular direction: “It’s 3 a.m., don’t know where we’re going/Just drive somewhere fast.”
Sutton’s writing on Hex was deliberately minimal, the result of paring down “pages and pages” of lyrics into enigmatic koans and heavy-lidded observations. His use of shadowy suggestion over specific detail only heightens the music’s unease. Sutton has made clear that his lyrics were never meant to signify anything specific, and on Hex, he took joy in a process that he described as “writing something, then cutting it up and throwing it up into the air and reassembling it and seeing what happens.” But there’s still a current of pain and disillusionment winding through his supposed formal experiments. “I can’t tell you anything at all,” he sings on the tense, wounded “Absent Friend.” “And that’s the biggest joke of all.”
Part of what lends Hex its otherworldly energy is Bark Psychosis’ increased reliance on samplers and editing. Though Hex sounds like something that could plausibly be played by a band in a room, Sutton estimated in an interview with the zine Audrie’s Diary that half of the record was “running from computer,” an early flirtation with a process that, nearly three decades later, has become de rigueur for rock bands. But rather than using digital techniques to create a more perfect version of their music, these experiments introduced uncanny jagged edges, like the static and feedback that intermittently scours “A Street Scene” or the unearthly ambience that illuminates the closer “Pendulum Man.”
This urge to reinscribe the limits of what a band could be through experimental new processes, however affecting in the context of Hex, ultimately led to the demise of Bark Psychosis. In an interview with The Wire the year after the album’s release, Sutton claims bluntly that “the band disintegrated because I was getting into using samplers.” For a while he dispensed with rock music entirely and made drum’n’bass as Boymerang. In 2004, a decade after Hex, he revived the Bark Psychosis name without his old bandmates and released ///CODENAME: dustsucker, which married Bark Psychosis’ sleepwalking pop with the scruffier sounds of shoegaze, acid house, and jazz. “I’m not interested in ‘expressing myself,’” he told Stylus about that record. “I’m trying to build something that…changes my mood and draws me through things, radically or violently or imperceptibly. I want to end up at a completely different point than you were at a few minutes ago, but not quite sure how you got there, or even noticed the change happening.”
Though he wasn’t addressing Hex directly, the quote could also describe his band’s debut, a collection of long, slow-moving, and unsettling pieces that capture Bark Psychosis in a period of flux. The music, with its wayward trajectories and myriad detours, expresses the same profound truth that this band on the verge of collapse was grappling with while making it: Change—imperceptible, radical, or otherwise—can’t be stopped.


As Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney breezily enter their third decade together, they pay tribute to and put their own spin on the Mississippi blues, turning it into something that sounds supple and comforting.

Delta Kream

At first glance, Delta Kream—the 10th studio album from the blues-rock duo the Black Keys—appears to embody a hoary rock’n’roll cliché. It’s a collection of covers Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney learned to play when they were younger, an attempt to get back where they once belonged.
In the case of the Black Keys, that spiritual home lies in the Mississippi Delta, the swamp that gave birth to American blues. Plenty of legendary musicians played Delta blues in the early 20th century, but  Auerbach and  Carney were drawn chiefly to Junior Kimbrough, a Mississippi bluesman whose career didn’t take off until the 1990s, when the future Black Keys members were teenagers.
Delta Kream isn’t the first time the Black Keys have paid explicit tribute to Junior Kimbrough. He’s been a constant presence in their work, a songwriter they’ve frequently covered, as they did at length on the 2006 EP Chulahoma. Kimbrough originally recorded about half of the songs the Black Keys cut for Delta Kream; his Delta colleague R.L. Burnside—another Mississippi bluesman who experienced a late-life renaissance in the 1990s—is responsible for two other songs on the record. The Black Keys didn’t limit their Kimbrough connection to the repertoire. His former bassist Eric Deaton rounds out the rhythm section, while Burnside’s guitarist Kenny Brown sat in on the two-day, 10-hour session that happened at the conclusion of the Black Keys supporting tour for 2019’s “Let’s Rock”.
“Let’s Rock,” the Black Keys once again started playing arenas, a long way from the grimy Midwestern dives they gigged at two decades earlier. It’s possible to chart that evolution through one song—Junior Kimbrough’s “Do the Rump,” a song the duo cut on their 2002 debut The Big Come Up and recorded again on Delta Kream as “Do the Romp.” The change in vowel isn’t the only difference between the two recordings. In the beginning, the Black Keys played hard: Carney pummeled the backbeat and Auerbach affected a growl to compete with his overdriven amps. Here, the duo not only sounds relaxed, they play with finesse. Some of that aplomb could be chalked up to the confidence derived from their enduring stardom, while the fullness of Delta Kream could be attributed to how it captures an expanded quartet unwinding on their home turf of Auerbach’s Easy Eye studio in Nashville.
Delta Kream sounds spacious but never trippy. The Black Keys explore textures and luxuriate within grooves, an aesthetic choice that pulls the album much closer to such kaleidoscopic latter-day albums as 2014’s Turn Blue than the raucous 2004 breakout hit Rubber Factory. Their version of John Lee Hooker’s “Crawling Kingsnake” puts the emphasis on the crawl, not the snake, a move that robs the band of some bite. Perhaps Delta Kream doesn’t deliver the visceral thrill of juke-joint blues, but its expansive jams do touch upon the modal drone Kimbrough could achieve when he locked into a vamp. The Black Keys put their own spin on this Mississippi blues, turning it into something that sounds supple and comforting even when the tempo ratchets up to a boogie, which it doesn’t often do on Delta Kream.
Coming on the heels of the aggressively cheerful “Let’s Rock”, Delta Kream feels subdued. That’s part of its appeal. It’s a record knocked out in two days by a band who are well on their way to be the grizzled veterans they’ve long admired. Delta Kream is best seen not as a retreat to the Black Keys’ beginnings but rather a signpost on their journey. By spending the time playing the blues that’s buried deep in their soul, the Black Keys reveal how far they’ve gone in a space of 20 years.

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Popcaan’s second album is full of faith, joy, and the wealth of his international pop celebrity, but falters when it comes to his idea of romance.

Forever

Dancehall veteran Beenie Man took shots at Popcaan twice this year. Man’s first video accused the 29-year-old Jamaican deejay of putting on false airs about his humble roots, and the follow-up diss track warned him against surpassing his place. In the past, Popcaan might have entertained a response, like the “Stray Dog” clapback when Alkaline took jabs at his masculinity. Now, though, he prefers leaving those badmind rivals on read. For Popcaan (born Andrae Jay Sutherland), asserting dominance over the Kingston microcosm is an unspoken flex: He lets the private jet, the gold chains around his neck, and a Midas-touch cosign from Drake do the talking. Landing a full four years after his summer 2014 debut Where We Come From, Popcaan’s second album peacocks the wealth of his international pop celebrity. Forever is an overflowing chalice, and he’s is overly eager to offer us a sip.
In late June, the head of Unruly records described manifesting his destiny (in the form of high-profile collaborations with Jamie xx, Pusha-T, Gorillaz, among others) to radio host Zane Lowe, saying: “I keep my thoughts clean and positive.” Fittingly, Popcaan continues to boast his untouchable purity on Forever. The first song “Silence” contemplates the paranoia of fame, but gives reassurance: “And my heart clean, filled with love/And mi meditation sharp like studs.” His chief conspirator and Mixpak Records’ Brooklyn beatmaker Dre Skull makes an equally dignified return, imbuing the song with sonic gravitas through quickening thrums of bass and misty atmospherics. Spirituality is the current that electrifies Forever. On “Firm & Strong,” the glory of a 20-person choir shake stained glass windows with Popcaan’s soulful affirmations. The bookend “A Wha Suh” is a sincere pep-talk from a psalm-slinging confidant—only to be rendered banal by mid-range piano chords from step-in producer Not Nice.
Each blessing Popcaan counts strengthens his carefree swagger. Rather than the accidental intersection of pop and dancehall that sprung from Where We Come From, his sinewy melodies and Dre Skull’s grooves here are more deliberate angles towards mainstream audiences. He claims this bid for the spotlight with the same rigor his soaring croons hurtle over the sparkly synth lines on “Superstar.” Framed within a rags-to-riches context, the singalong chorus, “Man a star, man a star/Man a super,” knows everyone cheers when the underdog punches the air amidst a thrilling recovery. Equally infectious is “Happy Now,” where Popcaan’s wavering ad libs undergo a slight AutoTune treatment, a correction very evocative of pop tradition.
Forever falters when Popcaan confronts romantic limitations. At least the lusty rhapsodies on “Naked” and the cries of “Wine fi the money now” on “Dun Rich” own their irreverence. He barely musters a convincing lilt to carry the words “Girl you love me for free, yeah/This must be love” on the vapid “Through the Storm.” What’s worse is the cloying guitars in the background with a twang borrowed from sine feeble boy band 10 years his junior. Wrestling ballads away from weak sentimentalism requires a higher degree of finesse than assembling hip-swaying hits.
Entering the big pop arena often comes with the question of superficiality, of watering down truth, or tuning up reality for the onlooker. The charisma underneath Popcaan’s veneer of wealth saves his work from feeling entirely contrived. However, like panning for precious metals, Forever requires sieving through plates of glinting sediment before discovering treasure. The album is best when luxuriating in its own divine intensity, when an earnest Popcaan reconciles the hunger of his past with the feasting of his present, hands clasped in grace.