The Ohio rapper’s new EP makes a compelling case for his brand of self-aware cynicism.

Faygo Baby EP

There’s a canon of American novels that are either going out of style or already have: books by Roth, Ford, and Exley about underachieving men watching shadows creep across the living room. These characters like to consider themselves misanthropes, but they’re actually a pretty good time. Wielding disdain like a weapon, they voice the sort of harsh truths that go unsaid in healthy friendships and workplaces, their sensitivity rendering them at once vulnerable and dangerous. They drink, they argue, and they don’t abide bullshit because they don’t have the incentive.
Strip away the ambient misogyny and mediocre-white-guy entitlement, and you’d be left with a narrator like Kipp Stone. A quixotic, long-winded malcontent in the tradition of Devin, Masta Ace, and Chris Orrick, the Ohio rapper favors dour, voice-driven plotlessness, shaking his head to see whatever falls out. “Staying optimistic is exhausting,” he sighs in the opening bar of “Manic,” the first track from his new EP Faygo Baby. Like his fictional counterparts, Stone is a self-aware raconteur, but being in on the joke is a hollow victory. “The feeling of not feeling good enough was slowly killing me/And my dislike for envy turned me ’to my biggest enemy,” he rhymes on “Bravado,” which details insecurity rooted in his appearance and childhood.
Stone’s last outing, 2020’s HOMME, was a rewarding if occasionally labored listen, featuring such cheerful refrains as “People Be Trash,” “Jobs Be Trash,” and “World Be Trash.” While he continues to probe the disappointments of early adulthood on Faygo Baby, the warm arrangements make it a surprisingly amiable affair. With its languid tempo, wah-wah guitar, and digitized percussion, “Thoughts to Expand On” evokes Mike Dean and N.O. Joe’s layered production from Rap-A-Lot Records’ golden age. A blunted, off-kilter ambiance almost masks the intricacy of Stone’s compositions, yet his devotion to craft is evident at virtually every turn: subtle beat switches, nested choruses, double-tracked harmonies, and double-entendre punchlines.
Three of Faygo Baby’s seven tracks are self-produced, but it’s primarily a vocal showcase, Stone volleying between chatty monologues and an array of sing-song deliveries. When the subject matter turns grim, these theatrics maintain a lively, unpredictable atmosphere. On “Get Myself Together,” Stone races through knotty rhyme patterns for four or eight bars at a time, casting them aside in favor of increasingly complex schemes; when he finally pauses for the hook, it’s like a well-deserved water break. “Stay Down” is the project’s technical coup de grace, pivoting between breakneck raps and soulful crooning with each beat drop. The format would resemble a talent show medley in less tactful hands, but Stone’s easy transitions evince Z-Ro and Trae’s bluesman instincts.
For all the time Stone spends in his head, Faygo Baby makes a compelling case for his brand of cynicism: he’s able to poke fun at himself, and sometimes the world really is trash. What’s enticing about the record—particularly coming from a 30-year-old artist with a few albums under his belt—is that his years of rap-as-therapy finally seem to have placed him on the verge of a personal breakthrough. A mid-track ad-lib on “Manic” could double as a mission statement: “Be content, think abundantly, you can never be lonely/Never be hungry, be worthless, or not deserving of some kind of peace/I’m protecting mine by any means.” At its best, Faygo Baby plays like more of a motivational guide than a moody diary, with a narrator eager to make peace with his shortcomings. The loudest critics are usually the ones who care the most.

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Devised by Optimo’s JD Twitch and NTS Radio’s Fergus Clark, this new compilation surveys the previously untenable “Fourth World” sound, from post-punk goofs to classical composers.

Various Artists: Miracle Steps (Music From the Fourth World 1983-2017)

In 1980, Brian Eno and trumpeter/downtown composer Jon Hassell released a collaborative album bearing the slightly cumbersome title of Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics. It bore a trace of Eno’s ambient music explorations from the past few years, but it most closely echoed the work of Hassell. A collaborator with minimalists like La Monte Young and Terry Riley, Hassell also loved the needling timbre of Electric Miles Davis and ran his own horn through a harmonizer to delectably destabilizing effect. His music hovered just outside classification: ambient yes, but those thundering Burundi drums weren’t quite relaxing. There were glints of jazz and minimalism, but Indian classical and electronic washes also wormed through. It suggested ethnographs from an imaginary terrain, exotica from another green world, hence the term “fourth world” to try and put a border around it all.
Eno’s subsequent work has all but eclipsed Hassell, but in the past few years, Hassell’s influence on generations of producers has come to the surface. It’s a sound that arises amid the glistening ambience of Visible Cloaks, the contorted computer tones of Oneohtrix Point Never, and the techno productions of Call Super. Further underground you can hear it in the music that Andrew Pekler, Don’t DJ, and the Wah Wah Wino camp puts out. Well-regarded reissue imprints like Rvng Intl., Emotional Rescue, and Music From Memory seek out hybrids from that bygone era that also wed sleek western electronics with weirder folk forms. And now comes Miracle Steps (Music From the Fourth World 1983-2017), a thoughtful overview compiled by Optimo’s JD Twitch in conjunction with fellow Glaswegian and NTS Radio contributor Fergus Clark. Miracle Steps offers up a 14-track exploration of a previously untenable sound, spanning from post-punk goofs to library music loners, bedroom producers to classical composers wholly unaware that blending African instrumentation with western composition had a name.
The set opens with a radiant contribution from Mexico’s Jorge Reyes. Known primarily for abetting new age composer Steve Roach and ethno-chillout act Deep Forest, Reyes’ own ritualistic percussion charges the ether here. “Plight,” a mid-’90s piece, features a wordless chant, rainstick rattles that suggest the Amazon and a drum patter that mimics Indian tabla. It alludes to many sources that it soon sounds like it could only originate from no terrestrial plot. Newcomers like X.Y.R. and Iona Fortune seamlessly slot in alongside early ’80s industrial-ambient collective O Yuki Conjugate, who make a slow loop of flute hover over the track like a dark cloud, foreboding but never filling the sky.
The middle section of the comp offers up the most curious amalgam of sources. It features a Muzak-like take on Hassell’s sound thanks to the processed reeds bobbing around marimba lines. David Cunningham’s name might be familiar for the bristly and frisky punk deconstructions of “Summertime Blues” and “Money” that he rendered as the Flying Lizards. But “Blue River” showcases a more contemplative side of his from the early ’90s, with swells of pedal steel, electric keyboard, and metallophone. Soon each element becomes as slippery as river rocks, everything flowing together like a Javanese gamelan.
On his website, composer Larry Chernicoff boasts that the music he makes is “all organic”; his track “Woodstock, New York” provides the liveliest moment of the comp. It features dueling West African bow harps, soon joined by handclaps and a free jazz flare-up of trumpet and saxophone. It brings to mind Cameroonian renaissance man Francis Bebey and free jazz wanderer Don Cherry, but the propulsive piece stakes out its own space.
For music where the rhythms are primarily a texture—toggling between raindrops and a distant drum circle—Clark and Twitch are deft at making the set flow. The comp floats past like a train journey across numerous landscapes. At its end, it quietly builds to a mellow peak. The woefully named group Afro-Disiak has a kalimba slowly meld with a ghost choir and a growl, reaching a crescendo while still at a crawl. Zoviet-France side project Rapoon uses tabla and a wailing sound that might be voice or strings, subtly shifting between the two for 10 minutes of sustained trance.
Whether recent or from 35 years past, the spirit and sensibilities of Jon Hassell reside in the core of almost every track here. The man himself appears on the title track (taken from his 1986 Power Spot album). Against a waterfall pummel of drums, his trumpet electronically morphs from horse whinny to midnight train whistle. But as I attempt to add a more visual regional descriptor (are these sounds from a sand dune in the Sahara? From a desolate American landscape? Atop the Great Wall?), it all beads away like spilled mercury. While “fourth world” remains a slippery genre tag to affix, Miracle Steps’ curatorial and cartographical attempts to map out such a sound remains notable.


Their first LP since the 1997 departure of Bill Berry that sounds unmistakably like themselves, this is also R.E.M.'s best record in that time.

Collapse Into Now

Though they've been playing stadiums for decades, R.E.M. have never really traded in stadium-sized rock. From the release of the "Radio Free Europe" single in 1981 through 1996's New Adventures in Hi-Fi, the band's most anthemic songs were always tempered by space, restraint, and nuance; even 1994's so-called "big dumb rock album" Monster was an exercise in skeletal glam and sly, swaggering pastiche. When drummer Bill Berry departed the band in 1997, he took with him the one facet of R.E.M.'s sound that no other band has really sought to emulate: a nervous, lockstep grid that lacked the momentum to power a grandiose rock band, but gave Berry's bandmates ample room to weave together the distinctive tones and melodies that have always been the heart of R.E.M.
Since Berry's departure, R.E.M. has struggled to retain both the consistency and the daringness of their first 10 records. After releasing the plodding Around the Sun, the band attempted a "return to rock" with 2008's Accelerate, barreling through a forceful but generic set and grasping at a raw, aggressive sound that was never really R.E.M.'s to begin with. So, it comes as something of a relief that Collapse Into Now sounds unmistakably like an R.E.M. album. At its best, the album evokes R.E.M.'s best work while capitalizing on the energy conjured during Accelerate. At its worst, it sounds like a career-spanning collection of B-sides.
The most immediately striking moments on Collapse Into Now are those that sound like explicit retreads of previous R.E.M. songs. The minor key acoustic guitar and slapback delay-treated opening "hey" of "Uberlin" is a jarring callback to Automatic for the People opener "Drive", distracting from one of Collapse Into Now's best choruses. "Oh My Heart" has all the trappings of one of R.E.M.'s haunting mid-period acoustic ballads, but repeats itself into drudgery. Album closer "Blue", with its abstract sing-spoken lyrics and Patti Smith-sung backing vocals, plays out like an awkward and lifeless re-imagining of New Adventures in Hi-Fi single "E-Bow the Letter", throwing into stark relief just how unlikely and remarkable some of the band's earlier successes were.
Collapse Into Now also hosts some unlikely successes of its own; in spite of its discouraging title, "Mine Smell Like Honey" overcomes a water-treading verse and ascends to a truly a majestic classic R.E.M. chorus, complete with soaring Mike Mills backing vocals and jangling Peter Buck guitars. "Walk It Back" alone is worth the price of admission here, a gorgeous and enveloping song that takes a step back from the album's dense arrangements and gives Michael Stipe's vocals room to resonate. It's wise, mature and relaxed in a way that's subtly different from anything R.E.M. have done before, and it is quite possibly the best song that the band has recorded in nearly 15 years.
Bits and pieces from every great R.E.M. record are present on Collapse Into Now, but the ease with which the band once combined these elements is now tenuous and hard-fought. Some of Buck and Mills's best melodic ideas simply get drowned out or rushed through, and Stipe often trips over the idiosyncratic vocal phrasings he once commanded so well. A deadpanned "20th Century collapse into now" towards the album's end echoes the line "20th Century, go to sleep" from "Electrolite", the last song on the last truly great R.E.M. album. Fifteen years ago, however, Stipe followed that line with a self-effacing "... really deep." This generous and deeply human complexity was often R.E.M.'s saving grace, even as they pursued counterintuitive and seemingly pretentious directions. This album is host to more such complexity than anything since 1998's Up-- but Collapse Into Now still sounds like the work of a band caught between old habits and new adventures.


The two rappers show great chemistry on their collaborative mixtape, even if Future sounds like he’s dragging slightly.

Future / Lil Uzi Vert: Pluto x Baby Pluto

Pluto x Baby Pluto

Future and Lil Uzi Vert might as well be on two different planets right now. Uzi’s still hot off Eternal Atake, one of the year’s best rap albums, and its star-studded B-side, LUV vs. The World 2. On the other hand, Future’s most recent release was High Off Life, a record in which he sounded nearly asleep, as if operating on autopilot. One of the only highlights from High Off Life was the bubbly, Uzi-featuring “All Bad,” a strange yet welcome breath of fresh air that felt like an Eternal Atake cast-off. A collab album from Uzi and the man who inspired his Baby Pluto persona felt inevitable after they appeared on each other’s albums, but the disappointing two-pack of “Patek” and “Over Your Head” from this summer left much to be desired. However, Pluto x Baby Pluto is more than a slight improvement from their earlier missteps—it’s like watching two friends trade lives for a day.
They warmly embrace each other’s production choices on here. Future sounds just as comfortable over the cartoony, electronic Working on Dying production as he does on DJ Esco’s racing melodies. The cheery horns and rattling drums of “Bankroll” sound like they were ripped straight from a Stunt Taylor mixtape. The chaotic tracklist puts producers like WOD’s Brandon Finessin and NeilaWorld’s Lukrative, who first rose to prominence on SoundCloud, on the same album as Atlanta veterans like Zaytoven.
What Uzi brings to Pluto x Baby Pluto is a revitalizing energy that makes Future wake up for the first time since The WIZRD. On “Marni on Me,” they trade bars over ominous whistles, trying to one-up the other with uncounterable flexes. “I push a button my car need no keys,” Uzi says with a carefree shrug. “I push a button, the car drive by itself,” Future immediately fires back. As the album goes on, their designer lifestyle gets even more animated and expensive. They talk about owing money to Elliot Eliantte and buying out stores in Paris as if these were regular occurrences. But even with all this super-charged energy, it’s hard to ignore the moments where Future lags behind, like his unimaginative hook from “Sleeping on the Floor.”
If a project from Future and Lil Uzi didn’t spend some time trying to get their exes to fall back in love with them, it wouldn’t be a project from them at all. On “I Don’t Wanna Break Up,” it’s bizarre hearing someone as self-serious as Future right after Uzi goes full pop-punk on the chorus. “Tryna make better decisions, tryna be more consistent, yeah,” Future dreamily sings. “I’m going through hell just to get to you again.”
Despite their newfound chemistry on Pluto x Baby Pluto, Future and Uzi’s best rapping comes when they’re left alone to get lost in their own thoughts on their solo songs. Future raps vividly about betrayal over the prickled keys and piercing strings of “Rockstar Chainz.” Uzi sounds like he’s rapping every bar as soon as he thinks of it on “Lullaby,” not giving himself a chance to forget a clever thought. “I try my best just to hug her with my fingers crossed, cause I know deep down inside, I am really doing wrong,” Uzi painfully exhales.
Throughout Pluto x Baby Pluto, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Future is playing catch-up with Uzi. It wouldn’t be the first time Uzi’s out-rapped an Atlanta legend on a collab tape. Regardless, it’s exciting seeing how they’ve learned to play off of each other’s energy. It’d be easy for Uzi to coast and phone in verses after the year he’s had so far, but he’s shown no signs of slowing down.

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The godfathers of no wave use bits of punk, post-punk, and disco, connecting them all through attitude. In their first two albums, you can even hear the roots of new wave, industrial, and techno.

Suicide / Alan Vega Martin Rev

Amid the ongoing musical revolution of 1970s New York, Suicide were the ultimate “you had to be there” band. Live, the duo’s music was a cacophonous wall of pulsing noise that could feel physically intimidating. As Martin Rev spewed distorted melodies and hammering beats from a keyboard/drum-machine hybrid he called “The Instrument,” Alan Vega rapped, gasped, and howled like Elvis reborn as a hit man. Vega even ventured into the crowd, crashing through tables to threaten inattentive onlookers. Suicide’s rep was built on the unique danger of this stage act, seemingly impossible to reproduce on something as two-dimensional as a slab of vinyl.
It was possible. But you couldn't have predicted their method. Suicide’s first two studio albums, Suicide(1977) and Alan Vega Martin Rev (1980), don’t try to capture the sonic chaos of their concerts. As Thurston Moore puts it in his notes to Superior Viaduct’s reissue of the former, “the record sounded contained, not blasting and melting your skin off, but it was still amazing because the songs were amazing.” In other words, even when turned down, Suicide’s music shakes with tension. Maybe it doesn’t shove you or knock over your beer, but the animalistic repetition and sinister attitude is still brashly in your face.
In fact, as the primal throbs of these albums infect your nervous system, their minimalism seems less a compromise to studio constraints than a feat of strength. Suicide’s attempt to bottle their energy without sacrificing potency is a daring gambit, but it pays off—so much so that the duo’s most stripped-down track, “Frankie Teardrop” (from Suicide), is its most devastating. Over Rev’s unwavering, tell-tale-heart beat, Vega exhales the tale of a murderer venturing into hell. His harrowing screams at the end are certainly not minimal, but it’s all the chilling restraint that precedes them that makes “Frankie Teardrop” ripple your skin.
That restraint lets Suicide inject danger into some surprisingly sweet, even cheesy melodies. On Suicide, the noir-movie vibes of engine-revving tunes “Ghost Rider” (named after Vega’s favorite comic book) and “Rocket U.S.A.” feel scary. But they’re no more menacing than swaying ballads “Cheree” and “Girl,” which sound like ’50s love songs darkened by disturbing undercurrents. Though Vega was trained as an artist and Rev studied piano with jazz greats, the two initially bonded over childhood love of doo-wop. That influence bubbles inside Rev’s three-chord riffs and Vega’s chanted rock-myth narratives.
Traces of classic pop become more prominent on Alan Vega Martin Rev, due in part to the involvement of the Cars’ Ric Ocasek, who was already a devoted Suicide fan before producing the album. The duo makes their intentions clear in the title of the first song, “Diamonds, Fur Coat, Champagne”: this is a shinier, more glamorous version of Suicide. Just listen to “Sweetheart,” whose lilting tropical-lounge swing is so glittery it makes “Cheree” sound like industrial noise.
But Alan Vega Martin Rev still boasts tons of gut-level grit, and the way the duo apply that to catchier tunes is fascinating. On heavier tracks “Fast Money Music” and “Harlem,” Rev’s knack for rhythmic loops that build without changing is stunning, as is Vega’s ability to shift cadences through those cycles. But even more thrilling are openly melodic pieces “Shadazz” and “Be Bop Kid.” The latter in particular sounds like doo-wop boiled down to its ideal, much the way the Ramones divined diamonds from the coal of classic rock.
There’s also something thrilling about how Suicide found their own space between scenes and styles. They overlapped with punk, post-punk, and disco, and are often cited as the godfathers of no wave. Yet no other band in any of those genres sounded like them. Their connection to their peers was about attitude, which often seems to be the only thing their songs are made of. You can hear roots of new wave, industrial, and techno in Rev’s keyboard lines, even embryonic hip-hop in Vega’s rhythmic delivery. But if these albums initially sound familiar, give them time. Eventually, what sound like simple loops become fishhooks that puncture your skin, leaving marks as indelible as this band’s singular five-decade career.


Five months after her stunning debut album, the Brooklyn composer offers up a modest yet revealing set of sketch-like guitar pieces, drawing unexpected connections between Pat Metheny and Midwestern emo.

fragments

It’s not immediately obvious from much of Our Hands Against the Dusk, Rachika Nayar’s stunning first album, that the electric guitar is the Brooklyn-based composer’s primary instrument. Nayar uses her own melodic lines as source material for electronic manipulation, twisting and stretching them until they ripple and shimmer like reflections on unquiet water. The mirage dissipates only rarely, as in the final section of “The Trembling of Glass.” The uncanny swirls of the piece’s first half recede, and we’re left with a lonesome arpeggiated figure, one of few easily recognizable guitar sounds on the album. Nayar gradually adds more layers but soon halts on a choked staccato note that suggests the abrupt end of an impromptu solitary jam session, one last stab at the strings before putting the instrument away. Within the context of Our Hands Against the Dusk, whose production and arrangement remain poised and deliberate even as the music traverses huge emotional peaks, the unplanned air of this moment offers a look behind the curtain: a brief reminder that, no matter how vast and strange the landscape becomes, it usually starts with Nayar alone at the guitar.
The compact fragments arrives five months after Our Hands Against the Dusk, and it functions as a sort of companion piece. It extends that earlier look at the inner workings of Nayar’s music, revealing the sorts of raw recordings that often serve as starting points for her larger compositions, according to promotional materials. The EP’s 11 tracks range in length from 54 seconds to two and a half minutes, and they generally contain several guitar parts weaved in an intricate latticework, looping with occasional electronic accompaniment. They are often lovely, and almost always end before you’d like. The magic of Our Hands Against the Dusk lies not only in its crystalline textures but also in the way Nayar develops them across the sophisticated compositional arc of a given piece. Each track on fragments is akin to a single stop on one of those journeys. Nayar presents an idea, lets it run for a while, then pulls the plug and moves on to the next one. Listening feels a bit like perusing the auxiliary materials of a museum exhibition, looking at early charcoal drafts on paper while spectacular canvases hang behind you.
Nayar cites Midwest emo as an influence, which in the past was most audible in her work as an undercurrent of sensibility rather than an explicit reference point, an unabashed directness of feeling—and an instinct for chord changes that raise a lump in your throat—that persisted even through the music’s most abstract passages. On fragments, the connection is much closer to the surface. Nayar also mentions the work of minimalist composer Steve Reich, as interpreted by virtuoso jazz fusion guitarist Pat Metheny, as a source of inspiration, and fragments sometimes resembles a literal collision of these influences. The jangly guitar interplay of tracks like “allegheny” and “softness” is plainly reminiscent of the canonical Midwest emo sound, but the way Nayar uses these riffs as vessels for trancelike repetition is pure Reich. (As for Metheny, a Missourian with a nerdy streak whose early albums are filled with twinkling clean-toned paeans to the beauty and desolation of his native landscape—well, maybe the distance between him and American Football isn’t as big as you’d think.)
The EP’s most affecting moments come when Nayar begins filling in the outlines of her sketches with motifs like the heroic synth bassline that arrives halfway through “memory as miniatures,” the harmonized ascending figures of “august 31st,” the circuitous melody winding among the loops of “parking lots”—tracks that begin to feel like compositions unto themselves, not outposts along the way to some weightier end. But it would be a mistake to demand more of fragments, a release that makes no bones about its own ephemerality, from its title to its low-key cassette release to its 15-minute runtime. Our Hands Against the Dusk announced Nayar as a formidable talent among guitarists and electronic musicians. While fragments doesn’t aspire to the same heights, it does provide several compelling new angles from which to view her more substantial work.

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*How did we get here?*

Ours is a generation overwhelmed by frustration, unrest, dread, and tragedy. Fear is wholly pervasive in American society, but we manage nonetheless to build our defenses in subtle ways-- we scoff at arbitrary, color-coded "threat" levels; we receive our information from comedians and laugh at politicians. Upon the turn of the 21st century, we have come to know our isolation well. Our self-imposed solitude renders us politically and spiritually inert, but rather than take steps to heal our emotional and existential wounds, we have chosen to revel in them. We consume the affected martyrdom of our

Funeral

How did we get here?
Ours is a generation overwhelmed by frustration, unrest, dread, and tragedy. Fear is wholly pervasive in American society, but we manage nonetheless to build our defenses in subtle ways-- we scoff at arbitrary, color-coded "threat" levels; we receive our information from comedians and laugh at politicians. Upon the turn of the 21st century, we have come to know our isolation well. Our self-imposed solitude renders us politically and spiritually inert, but rather than take steps to heal our emotional and existential wounds, we have chosen to revel in them. We consume the affected martyrdom of our purported idols and spit it back in mocking defiance. We forget that "emo" was once derived from emotion, and that in our buying and selling of personal pain, or the cynical approximation of it, we feel nothing.
We are not the first, or the last, to be confronted with this dilemma. David Byrne famously asked a variation on the question that opens this review, and in doing so suggested a type of universal disaffection synonymous with drowning. And so The Arcade Fire asks the question again, but with a crucial distinction: The pain of Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, the enigmatic husband-and-wife songwriting force behind the band, is not merely metaphorical, nor is it defeatist. They tread water in Byrne's ambivalence because they have known real, blinding pain, and they have overcome it in a way that is both tangible and accessible. Their search for salvation in the midst of real chaos is ours; their eventual catharsis is part of our continual enlightenment.
The years leading up to the recording of Funeral were marked with death. Chassagne's grandmother passed away in June of 2003, Butler's grandfather in March of 2004, and bandmate Richard Parry's aunt the following month. These songs demonstrate a collective subliminal recognition of the powerful but oddly distanced pain that follows the death of an aging loved one. Funeral evokes sickness and death, but also understanding and renewal; childlike mystification, but also the impending coldness of maturity. The recurring motif of a non-specific "neighborhood" suggests the supportive bonds of family and community, but most of its lyrical imagery is overpoweringly desolate.
"Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" is a sumptuously theatrical opener-- the gentle hum of an organ, undulating strings, and repetition of a simple piano figure suggest the discreet unveiling of an epic. Butler, in a bold voice that wavers with the force of raw, unspoken emotion, introduces his neighborhood. The scene is tragic: As a young man's parents weep in the next room, he secretly escapes to meet his girlfriend in the town square, where they naively plan an "adult" future that, in the haze of adolescence, is barely comprehensible to them. Their only respite from their shared uncertainty and remoteness exists in the memories of friends and parents.
The following songs draw upon the tone and sentiment of "Tunnels" as an abstract mission statement. The conventionally rock-oriented "Neighborhood #2 (Laika)" is a second-hand account of one individual's struggle to overcome an introverted sense of suicidal desperation. The lyrics superficially suggest a theme of middle-class alienation, but avoid literal allusion to a suburban wasteland-- one defining characteristic of the album, in fact, is the all-encompassing scope of its conceptual neighborhoods. The urban clatter of Butler's adopted hometown of Montreal can be felt in the foreboding streetlights and shadows of "Une Annee Sans Lumiere", while Chassagne's evocative illustration of her homeland (on "Haiti", the country her parents fled in the 1960s) is both distantly exotic and starkly violent, perfectly evoking a nation in turmoil.
"Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)" is a shimmering, audacious anthem that combines a driving pop beat, ominous guitar assault, and sprightly glockenspiel decoration into a passionate, fist-pumping album manifesto. The fluidity of the song's construction is mesmerizing, and the cohesion of Butler's poignant assertion of exasperation ("I went out into the night/ I went out to pick a fight with anyone") and his emotional call to arms ("The power's out in the heart of man/ Take it from your heart/ Put it in your hand"), distinguishes the song as the album's towering centerpiece.
Even in its darkest moments, Funeral exudes an empowering positivity. Slow-burning ballad "Crown of Love" is an expression of lovesick guilt that perpetually crescendos until the track unexpectedly explodes into a dance section, still soaked in the melodrama of weeping strings; the song's psychological despair gives way to a purely physical catharsis. The anthemic momentum of "Rebellion (Lies)" counterbalances Butler's plaintive appeal for survival at death's door, and there is liberation in his admittance of life's inevitable transience. "In the Backseat" explores a common phenomenon-- a love of backseat window-gazing, inextricably linked to an intense fear of driving-- that ultimately suggests a conclusive optimism through ongoing self-examination. "I've been learning to drive my whole life," Chassagne sings, as the album's acoustic majesty finally recedes and relinquishes.
So long as we're unable or unwilling to fully recognize the healing aspect of embracing honest emotion in popular music, we will always approach the sincerity of an album like Funeral from a clinical distance. Still, that it's so easy to embrace this album's operatic proclamation of love and redemption speaks to the scope of The Arcade Fire's vision. It's taken perhaps too long for us to reach this point where an album is at last capable of completely and successfully restoring the tainted phrase "emotional" to its true origin. Dissecting how we got here now seems unimportant. It's simply comforting to know that we finally have arrived.


Loosely related to Broken Social Scene, this Montreal band traffics in the same brand of anthemic, proficient indie rock. Arcade Fire's Jeremy Gara guests.

Cloak and Cipher

After spending an entire North American tour supporting Broken Social Scene after the release of debut Some Are Lakes, you'd think that Land of Talk would be be eager to dial back the Canadian Indie Power Pop Bombast a little. Indeed, after the group translated some of the raw energy of its breakout EP Applause Cheer Boo Hiss into the more graceful, delicately arranged pieces found on Lakes, it seemed as if Land of Talk were destined to slip into the recesses of comfortable, regal indie rock. But with their follow-up Cloak and Cipher-- a fevered, grandiose record that's both denser and more technically proficient than its predecessor-- the Montreal trio take every opportunity to make their former tourmates proud with this batch of swoon-worthy, anthemic songs.
If there's one thing the band does right on Cloak and Cipher, it's nail these big, star-bursted choruses. Powell, who acts as both the voice and chief songwriter of Land of Talk, has clearly allowed some of her time working with BSS to rub off on the material found here. While it might be a little dangerous to nick ideas from your new employer, the songs on Cloak and Cipher that sound the most like BSS tunes are the best ones here. Riff-slathered single "Swift Coin" sounds a lot like "7/4 (Shoreline)", while standout "Quarry Hymns" marries some familiar balladry with salted air and sunset-warmed guitars lifted from some late-70s FM station. It's a high-water mark, and one that best captures the band's intent to never allow the emotive moments to get the best of the blustery ones, and vice versa.
Throughout, Powell remains a transfixing voice, and Land of Talk gives her the space she needs to try a variety of approaches. On an otherwise sad but endearing sounding little ballad, "Color Me Badd" (yep, like the "I Wanna Sex You Up" guys) finds Powell's softly spun vocal boiling-over with a controlled kind of lovesick frustration that locates a complex hurt. But most of the time, she doesn't need to rely on anything as dramatic, channelling a humbler, late-era Stevie Nicks on "Playita" or doing a less-precious Feist on "Hamburg, Noon".
Cloak and Cipher wisely enlists and array of heavy-hitters, with guests from Arcade Fire and Stars pitching in where needed. While these helping hands provide added oomph, their reputations for drawn-out tracks and LPs has also seemingly rubbed off on Land of Talk. Those great choruses? Still great, but not when songs are dragged out this long and the payoff arrives right on schedule, about four times a song. It's indulgent, but it's hard to make songs sound this big. Fortunately, it won't be enough to wring-out the magic found in a great many of these songs, and surely won't be able to stall Land of Talk who, with Cloak and Cipher, are progressing quite nicely.


The 20th anniversary reissue of Nirvana’s third LP includes a remastered version of the original mix, B-sides, outtakes, and a slew of embryonic demos, along with a new mix overseen by Steve Albini. Taken together, the set’s vitality puts lie to the notion that In Utero was the soundtrack to a suicide, commercial or otherwise.

Nirvana: In Utero (20th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition)

For the past two decades, we’ve essentially been living with two versions of In Utero. The first was officially released September 21, 1993, though its legend was established several months prior. As the intensely anticipated follow-up to the most transformative rock album of the 1990s, Nirvana’s third record was pre-destined to become a battlefield in the heightening clash between indie and corporate culture, as mediated by a band that was philosophically faithful to the former but contractually beholden to the latter.
While Kurt Cobain famously used the liner notes for 1992 rarities compilation Incesticide to call out the jocks, racists, and homophobes in Nirvana’s ever-expanding audience, In Utero promised a more aggressively hands-on process of weeding out the mooks, a concerted effort to realign Nirvana with the artists they actually listened to and away from those they were credited with spawning. And where the album’s title would reflect Cobain’s lyrical yearning for a back-to-the-womb retreat from celebrity scrutiny, it also proved emblematic of the record's messy birth: A by-all-reports harmonious two-week quickie session with recording engineer Steve Albini in a rural Minnesota studio would lead to months of acrimonious exchanges in the press among the band, DGC, and Albini over the purportedly unlistenable nature of the results, requests for cleaner mixes, and cruddy cassette copies leaked to radio that falsely reinforced the label’s misgivings. (The second-guessing circumstances were not that dissimilar to those of the preceding Nevermind—wherein Butch Vig’s original recordings were eventually handed over to Andy Wallace for a platinum-plated finish—only this time, the outcome had the potential to affect Geffen’s share price.)
Upon release, In Utero may have debuted at number one, but initially it was something of a pyrrhic victory: Rather than lead a wave of Jesus Lizard–inspired noise bands to the top of the Billboard charts, In Utero would send millions of Nirvana’s more casual crossover fans scurrying into the warm embrace of Pearl Jam’s record-setting October ’93 release, Vs., an album that, from a music-biz perspective, was the true blockbuster sequel to Nevermind. In that sense, this first version of In Utero resonates as much today as a symbolic gesture as a collection of 12 unrelentingly visceral rock songs, a how-to manual for any artist at the top of their game—from Kid A–era Radiohead to Kanye West circa Yeezus—that would rather use their elevated position to provoke their audience than pander to it.
The second version of In Utero came to be on April 8, 1994, from which point the album would be forever known as the rough draft for rock’n’roll’s most famous suicide note. In the wake of Cobain’s shotgunned sign-off, it became nigh impossible to hear In Utero in any other context. The infamous album-opening lyric that once dripped with sarcasm—“Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I’m bored and old”—now sounded coldly nihilistic. Where the seismic stomper “Scentless Apprentice” invoked Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume as metaphor for Cobain’s festering disgust with the music press and industry, the song’s grueling shriek of “get awwwwwaaaayyyy” suddenly seemed to be directed at humanity itself. The “Leonard Cohen after-world” fantasy of “Pennyroyal Tea” turned into wish fulfillment; “All Apologies” ceased to be an innocently plaintive pop song and was instead permanently etched into its writer's epitaph.
But with this two-disc 20th-anniversary reissue, we now have a third version of In Utero, and I’m not just referring to the newly remixed iteration of the album. Taken as a whole, the package—which also includes a remastered version of the original mix, B-sides, outtakes, a slew of embryonic demos, and a cheeky but affecting liner-note essay by comedian/tourmate Bobcat Goldthwait—puts lie to the notion that In Utero is the soundtrack to a suicide, commercial or otherwise. In charting the songs’ evolution from rough instrumentals to the militaristic blasts of fury heard on the album proper, and through the outré experiments scrapped along the way, we hear a band that was on the cusp of an intriguing new phase.
In a surprisingly conciliatory Musique Plus interview conducted just prior to the album’s release, Cobain stated that In Utero would mark the end of Nirvana as grunge torchbearers and, throughout the record, the band screech and howl like they're skinning themselves alive to expedite their reinvention. But not a lyric goes by on the album where Cobain doesn’t sound conflicted between what he wants to do and what he feels he has to do. The scowling verses of “Serve the Servants” are countered by the chorus’ soothing incantation of the song’s title, as if Cobain had to anesthetize himself in order to answer his audience’s populist demands. You didn’t need to hear the feedback assault of “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” to sense the irony reeking from its title, while the sludgy savagery of “Milk It” deploys Cobain’s fascinations with bodily fluids and birthing to depict a soul being run through the music-industry wringer. Though Cobain claimed in the aforementioned interview that the deliberately bald language of “Rape Me” was his response to misinterpretations of Nirvana’s more ambiguous portraits of sexual/power dynamics (“Polly,” “About a Girl”), the fact that it cops the riff to his most famous song unsubtly directs the titular demand to his hit-seeking minders; when he answers his request by repeating “I’m not the only one,” he seems to be placating himself with the knowledge that he’s not the first punk-rocker caught in a boardroom power play. (And, in light of Cobain’s mounting disdain for the media, I can’t be the only person who’s always heard that line in “All Apologies” as “choking on the ashes of her NME.”)
But this set supports the theory that Cobain didn’t necessarily fear or hate success; his real struggle was achieving it on his own terms. If he really wanted to clear the room, he could’ve made In Utero a lot weirder than it actually turned out to be: Among the outtakes here is “Gallons of Rubbing Alcohol Flowing Through the Strip” (which previously surfaced stateside on the barrel-scraping 2004 box set With the Lights Out), an exceedingly odd, stream-of-consciousness ramble that sees Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl adopting the art-damaged inscrutability of then-underground darlings Pavement. Also included are Albini’s supposedly contentious original mixes for In Utero’s two singles, “Heart-Shaped Box” and “All Apologies”, which the band eventually handed over to R.E.M. associate Scott Litt to create the spit-shined radio-friendly versions that wound up on the final record. Furthermore, Litt’s crisper alternate take of “Penny Royal Tea” (which scrubs off a layer of its Sebadohian scuzz) is featured here as a reinforcement of Nirvana’s acquiescent impulses—it first appeared on a special edition of In Utero created specifically for Wal-Mart that swapped out the title of “Rape Me” for the more big-box-shopper-friendly “Waif Me.” (That the differences between the Albini and Litt’s mixes are slight speaks to the sort of nitpicking the band were being subjected from without and within.) And in hearing the unvarnished demos of “Scentless Apprentice” and “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter,” you get a clearer sense of just how much refinement and fierce discipline they were subjected to before being presented to the public. (In particular, the versions featured in the band’s MTV Live and Loud concert from December 1993—included in a deluxe four-disc version of this set—perfectly encapsulate the In Utero ideal of arena-rock at its most anarchic.)
There’s also evidence here to suggest that, in spite of In Utero’s caustic reputation, Nirvana were also keen to explore more sophisticated songcraft. “Sappy” was presumably kept off the In Utero tracklist (and punted over to the No Alternative charity compilation) due to its strong resemblance to Nevermind corkers like “Drain You,” but it still stands as one of Cobain’s purest, most effortless power-pop gestures, while the hushed B-side ballad “Marigold” serves as a test flight for Grohl’s Foo Fighters. Most surprising of all is an early demo of “All Apologies” with an acoustic, countrified shimmer that could practically pass for a CCR golden oldie, transmuting the song’s overarching sense of resignation into bright-eyed, fresh-start optimism. Though Nirvana obviously had second thoughts about assuming such a radically chipper guise, that sort of willingness to mess with their essence would carry over to the band’s subsequent touring formation, on which ex-Germs guitarist Pat Smear was added to fill out the sound and the sight of guest cellists was not uncommon.
This exploratory ethos also informs In Utero’s new 2013 mix, overseen by Albini with input from Novoselic, Grohl, and Smear. Strangely enough, the revamp was inspired by another rock icon who died at 27: Novoselic recently revealed the idea came to him after hearing a gussied-up Doors compilation that emphasized certain, previously unnoticed sonic details. Albini, however, has offered a more pragmatic rationale: In Utero’s quick gestation period meant some mixing decisions were made off-the-cuff, resulting in various instrumental parts, alternate guitar solos, and harmony lines being left out. As he told podcaster Vish Khanna, his intention was not to replace the 1993 mix, but to simply take a snapshot of the same songs “from a different angle.” The new version is in fact more textured and nuanced, but not at the expense of the album's bone-dry, brutalizing crunch. Most of its touch-ups are tastefully unobtrusive and illuminating, like the unearthed cello lines creeping behind the chorus of “Serve the Servants” that bring a greater sense of melancholy to the fore, or the screeching strings and slowly decaying fadeout of “All Apologies” that lend a more palpable degree of finality to the proceedings. But there are times where the listening experience is reduced to a parlor game of spotting what’s been added and what’s been omitted: On the upside, “Scentless Apprentice” now sounds like it’s being screamed into a toilet, pushing the song to exciting new levels of gnarliness, but excising the cello parts that are so integral to “Dumb” is, well, kinda dumb.
Fittingly, for an album that starkly contrasts Nirvana’s melodic and maniacal extremes, In Utero (20th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition) highlights another inherent contradiction: much like the Beatles’ Let It Be, what was originally intended to be a raw, back-to-basics reaction to past excesses has, ironically, been subjected to so much over-thinking and console-board tinkering (this latest mix constituting its Let It Be… Naked moment of revisionism). But all these mutations reflect the restless, irrepressible nature of these songs, which—whether in the form of crude demos or modern-day remasters—still sting and ooze like a flesh wound that refuses to heal. And yet In Utero is the sort of painful shock that, paradoxically, reinstills the empowering sensation of feeling alive. Cobain may have been bored, but he checked out before he grew old; when listening to his final collection of songs, you forget, for a little while, the possibility of either.


The Toronto singer and rapper’s second album seeks immortality, but it's just a record full of crude imitations of every remotely bankable contemporary R&B or rap song.

Memories Don’t Die

Memories Don’t Die is Tory Lanez’s attempt to leave an indelible mark, to foster a legacy that will outlive him. “People die every day but the memories don’t,” he intones gravely on the intro. “This my motherfuckin’ album.” It’s too bad, then, that Lanez’s quest for immortality hinges entirely on a record full of crude imitations of every remotely bankable contemporary R&B or rap song. He scans production and songwriting templates through his photocopier and then presents them as originals, all the while taunting those who have criticized him for doing just that. Lanez is obsessed with showing up anyone who doubts him, but if Memories is supposed to offer evidence proving them wrong, it is a miserable failure.
Much was made of his “beef” with Drake, which was rather unceremoniously quashed last May, and, like his more famous rival, Lanez goes out of his way to work all the drama into his narrative on “Hate to Say”: “If … me and Drake mendin’ bridges it’d probably equal to winnin’.” What he doesn’t realize is that he will always be measured by the shadow of the man he impersonates most. The timing of his debut album, 2016’s I Told You, was favorable for the upstart, as it was released shortly after VIEWS, when Drake’s defenses seemed most vulnerable. But this settles it: The chasm between the two has never been wider.
There are still plenty of Drake flows and melodies and impressions on Memories Don’t Die, but a lot of the problems are entirely Lanez’s own. The album is still way too long (18 tracks, an hour and 10 minutes) and his singing can be lifeless and devoid of personality, soaking up the flavor of the month like tofu. His creative impulse is to smash two perfectly fine songs into one annoyingly jumbled one, like on the eight-minute “Happiness x Tell Me.” “Tell me how you feel about a nigga, knowing everything is real about me,” he says flatly on the song. But he doesn’t really want to know. That would require him to do some actual soul-searching.
Until now, Lanez was a functional rapper, fine for an R&B sadboy. He used his bars like a party trick, pulling them out sparingly to show casual onlookers he was a bit more interesting. But he’s leaning more heavily on his raps now, to his detriment. Nearly everything he raps on Memories Don’t Die is something you’ve heard before, performed more ably elsewhere, and the few lines that aren’t are unbelievably simple-minded or straight-up witless. Behold: “My dick giant like Fifo, if you need know/Money singin’ in a C-Note like Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do.” Earlier he rips off this brutal trio of facepalm-worthy stinkers: “I’m cruisin’ through New York in a 911/Used to fuck Julie ’round 9:11/Fly nigga in the buildin’ like 9/11.”
The songs that do work are largely indebted to their guest stars or influences. “48 Floors” is smooth and understated thanks to a shimmering coda from the Oakland singer Mansa. The Fabolous-led “Connection” is the album’s most satisfying listen, a mélange of hollow sounds and wispy melodies; Lanez doesn’t have a verse. The weird and sudden vocal turns on “4 Me,” Lanez’s most daring effort to date, are slippery and elastic; his aerodynamic performance is reminiscent of recent exhibitions from Swae Lee and Young Thug. With every release, it becomes clearer that the singer-rapper’s only true skill is interpretation.
Then there’s “Pieces,” Lanez’s big turn toward evocative drama. The song samples Sting’s “Shape of My Heart”—previously used prominently on Nas’ “The Message”—and tells a convoluted tale of a rape victim who kills the uncle that molested her. The song has a “twist” ending, and Lanez has compared it to Immortal Technique’s cult classic “Dance With the Devil.” But that song had power and purpose, and it wasn’t tragedy for tragedy’s sake. Plus, Lanez’s writing doesn’t have the nuance required to unpack such a complicated situation, and many of the plot points are entirely self-serving. Tory Lanez wants badly to be felt, to be remembered by history. But Memories Don’t Die reflects an inability to achieve anything beyond being featured on RapCaviar.


The debut album from Atlanta-via-Tupelo brother act Rae Sremmurd floats with a singular and sinister energy. Featuring guests like Big Sean, Young Thug, and Nicki Minaj and exceptional production from Mike WiLL, Sonny Digital, and others, SremmLife never sags, packing hooks into every pocket and half-beat.

SremmLife

Last year, buoyed by effervescent hits like the anti-stunt anthem "No Flex Zone" and the jarring synth pound "No Type"—a song revered by composers and bloggers alike—Rae Sremmurd became a household name despite the fact that people have had a hard time figuring out how to say "Rae Sremmurd". SremmLife, their debut LP, floats with a singular energy, a culmination of the group’s 2014 coming-of-age.
While trying to build an album of stuff that’s approximately as good as "No Flex Zone" or "No Type" is a tall task, SremmLife hurdles the hype machine with infectious rap music. It never sags, packing hooks into every pocket and half-beat. Swae Lee giddily slides over syllables ("trill-ass ind-div-vid-du-al" on "No Flex Zone") while Slim Jimmy’s gruffer delivery sets up an interesting vocal dynamic where sometimes it’s difficult to discern who’s rapping, but at other times it’s clear as day. A six-second snippet of each song would be enough for its own free-standing Vine, but often the full product—energetic pounds like "Up Like Trump" and "YNO"—earns its longer form.
Though a few songs stretch out an interesting idea too far—for instance, the post-Nae-Nae scrum "My X"—SremmLife is a showcase of an electric new talent paired with all the trappings of a bigtime major label debut. Guests like Big Sean, Young Thug, and Nicki Minaj (who sings the earworm hook on strip-club anthem "Throw Sum Mo") meet the energy of the Brown brothers, who are paired with exceptional production from Mike WiLL, Sonny Digital, and others. The music here is at once huge but also inward looking—burly soundscapes like "No Type" and the closer "Safe Sex Pay Checks" create an atmosphere that suggest something shadowy lurking outside the frame. Given that SremmLife is a flagship of Mike WiLL’s new Ear Drummer  imprint, it may not be surprising that SremmLife is a logical companion to his other recent pop-minded success—Miley Cyrus’ Bangerz, the album equivalent of being caught up in the thrill of an epic party but knowing that it’ll soon come crashing down. It’s life-affirming music in ways that make you feel both better and worse.
SremmLife fulfills the promise of "No Flex Zone" and "No Type", though a prominent piece of the record hints at something more. "This Could Be Us", SremmLife’s fifth song, stands apart from the whole. A lovely track about a failed relationship, the brothers Brown—Jimmy rapping, Swae singing—deliver a promise that’s easy to project a successful career upon. Above all else Rae Sremmurd pull you in with their synergy and symmetry: SremmLife is a less of an album and more of a way of life.


The first three albums by the Norwegian black metal band Ulver presaged the disintegration of heavy music's stylistic boundaries, laying the groundwork for everyone from Windhand to Deafheaven.

Bergtatt/Kveldssanger/Nattens Madrigal

The Norwegians use the word "trolsk" to describe the dark magic that sets in when you're wandering in the forest after sundown and find yourself seized by a desire to surrender to the id, slinking off like a wolf into the forest. In the early '90s, this untranslatable fury fueled the country's burgeoning black metal scene: a radical, violent offshoot of the misanthropic havoc wreaked abroad by Bathory and Venom. Trolsk imbued Per Yngve Ohlin, Euronymous and Varg Vikernes with the fierce energy they needed to achieve worldwide acclaim—and notoriety—with their respective bands, Mayhem and Burzum. In time, the same forces would lead to their downfall—and inspire musicians and fans to stab men and set churches ablaze.
In Oslo 1993, away from the spotlight, 17-year-old Kristoffer Rygg (known to most by his nickname, Garm) quietly formed Ulver with his friends: Sigmund Andreas "Grellmund" Løkken (who died the same year), Robin Malmberg, Hävard Jørgensen, Carl-Michael Eide, and Ali Reza. A lifelong disciple of black metal, Garm was as enamored with the necrocosms as anyone else, with some exceptions: while his peers were indulging LaVeyan power-trips, the teenager espoused rebellious romanticism, recasting black metal as a dissonant, gloomy cousin of Norwegian folk music, rather than a form love-letter to Baphomet. They crystallized this vision on their first three albums, which are also their loudest:'*95'*s Bergtatt – Et Eeventyr I 5 Capitier, '96's Kveldssanger, and '97's Nattens Madrigal-Aatte Hymne Til Ulven I Manden. A trifold rebuttal to black metal formalism, the records presaged the disintegration of heavy music's stylistic boundaries, laying the groundwork for everyone from Windhand and Horseback to Drudkh and Deafheaven.
Ulver's debut album Bergtatt – Et Eeventyr I 5 Capitier (typically shortened to Bargtatt) derives both its title and inspiration from a Norwegian folk tale centered around the aforementioned trolsk. Lost in the wilderness and enticed by the mythical creatures lurking in the twilight, the album's female protagonist clambers into the mountains, never to return. Accordingly, Bergtatt's five chapters see Ulver dragging Norwegian folk into the black-metal void. The nearly seven-minute “Capitel II: Soelen gaaer bag Aase need” opens with a graceful flute solo that flits about, only to get snapped up by the blast-beats after the first minute. Garm’s phantom croon drifts in to fill the vacant space, guiding the melody through the web of misery. Just when it seems like a truce has been reached and all's at ease, the frontman flips back to black-metal mode, unleashing more punishing death growls. Ulver are a crafty bunch, but they’re not afraid to flex their muscles once in a while.
Bergtatt's massive arrangements are majestic on their own, but the album's esteemed reputation is owed to stylistic diversity, rather than pure aggression. Ulver were among the first to integrate folk into the genre's thorny framework, illuminating the pitch-black racket with haunting, clean melodies and acoustic arpeggios. The razed thicket gave outside listeners an access point into a sound that had catered to diehards, breaking open black metal's hostile niche. Simultaneously, the stylistic juggling paved the way for future crossovers by proving that metal bands could expand their stylistic palette without compromising on their abrasive integrity.
A little over a year after Bergtatt made Ulver heroes in their scene, the band torched their laurels on the follow-up Kveldssanger ("Twilight Songs.") The 14-track album does away with the debut's black metal trappings entirely. In other words, it's an entire album of "Capitel IV"s. Garm's icy tenor has been largely replaced by somber, choral vocals, frequently presented a cappella as if they're sourced from some sacrilegious church service. Unless you're a sucker for medieval chants or Norwegian folkways, you'd be wise to skip over tracks like "Ord," "A Capella (Sielens Sang)," and "Kledt I Nattens Farger" and stick to the instrumental requiems, which reprise Ulver's mournful, multi-faceted approach to melody. Flutes feature prominently on the hypnotic "Naturmystikk," twirling atop the spindly chords like landing snowflakes; they deepen this wintry mood on "Hiertets Vee," situating the woodwinds within a howling blizzard. Devoid of the guitars' molten heft and the drums' thunderous pulse, Kveldssanger can't capture the heft of the previous album; It's an enjoyable folk record, but ultimately underwhelming.
The band completed their Trilogie in 1997 with Nattens Madrigal-Aate Hymne Tip Ulven I Manden ("Madrigal of the Night – Eight Hymns to the Wolf in Man.") The eight-part record reprises the same hyper-focused approach as its predecessor, but its palette's the polar opposite: a riotous return to black metal, stripped clean of all traces of Ulver's folk favoritism. Once again, the group found their muse in the trolsk: more specifically, its animal emissary, the wolf. "It [the wolf] indisputably holds a strong position as the Devil's herald in Norwegian myths and conceptions," the band revealed in an interview with Slayer. "[Nattens Madrigal]  glorifies this fiery crossroads and describes both the pain and pleasure by giving in to and recognizing the beast within."
True to their muse, Ulver frame Nattens Madrigal as a show of musical lycanthropy: not just with regards to its animalistic themes and fanged arrangements, but also its ramshackled, lo-fi production. Fans have come up with some crazy origin stories to explain the record's divergence the from the first two albums' sterling presentation. According to one popular (and sadly, debunked) legend, Ulver recorded the epic in a Norwegian forest on an 8-track recorder after blowing their entire recording budget on drugs, cars and Armani suits. In actuality, the cramped sonics have nothing to due with logistics; rather, the album's compressed presentation is an extension of its return to nature, far from the comforts of a cushy studio.
Inhospitable as their presentation may be, Nattens Madrigal's eight hymns unfold with the same grace as the first two records, provided that you're willing to dig through the din to uncover that wild beauty. Within the monstrous core of "Hymne V," for example, Jørgensen and Pedersen's guitars weave together subtle harmonies that lend the song's mammoth arrangement some much-needed breathing room. "Hymne I" and "Hymne VII" are unexpectedly nuanced as well. Even as Garm growls his throat to shreds, barreling down his devolutionary path in time with the blast beats, his bandmates resist the temptation to transgress. Instead, the guitarists' pointed, victorious solos muzzle the feral roar, ensuring that the tug-of-war between man and beast never gets too one-sided.
Ulver left the woods for good following Nattens Madrigal, but their fascination with the arcane has yet to fade in the 19 years since the Trilogie. From industrial reinterpretations of William Blake to sludgy takes on Greek mythology, they've peered into the darkness through every imaginable prism. Listening to January's sophisticated kraut-rock offensive ATGCLVLSSCAP, it's hard to believe that these three albums came from the same band. Certainly Ulver will go down in history for crafting two of black metal's greatest achievements—but it's that unparalleled polymorphism that marvels so many years later.


Henry Steinway’s second full-length largely abandons the cool-kid stylistic tics of his debut for something bigger, brighter, and wholly anonymous.

Nova

Even considering the trend-hopping world of dance music, Henry Steinway’s career so far has been hard to parse. The 27-year-old producer cut his teeth earlier in the decade with big-room bangers under the Clockwork alias before switching to his current RL Grime moniker; after shaking off his bass-face past with the High Beams EP for Fools Gold in 2013, he released his debut LP Void under the umbrella of California’s woozy, slightly off-kilter WeDidIt collective. Spanning jungle-inspired breakbeats and brittle, cavernous techno, the album contained few true revelations when it came to the type of sounds Steinway was exploring—but there was a level of competence on display that suggested, with a little ingenuity and maturation of style, he could bring a darker and more complex sound to the festival-tent audience he’s since courted.
If Steinway still possesses promise as a producer, it seems we’re going to wait a little longer to see him deliver on it: his second full-length, Nova, largely abandons the cool-kid stylistic tics of Void for something bigger, brighter, and wholly anonymous. It’s loaded with guests, from the increasingly ubiquitous Ty Dolla Sign and Miguel to Chief Keef and songwriter-of-the-moment Julia Michaels; the music backing said guests is appropriately glossy and bombastic, possessing all the subtlety of a thousand confetti cannons. If Void was reaching for stylistic smarts, Nova sets its sights for the highest rafters in the biggest arenas possible. It’s big music, with gaping synth storms and mountain-flattening beats sprawled across its 15 tracks.
The sonic makeup of Nova is split between nasty bass workouts and straightforward pop, but Steinway seems incapable of distinguishing himself as a producer in either mode. The skyscraping throb of “Light Me Up” could’ve come from any EDM mega-producer over the last decade, and it technically did; the song was repurposed from an unused demo from Diplo and Skrillex’s Jack Ü project passed along to Steinway for a spit-shined finish. Play the bleeping, bruising electro of “Pressure” for any Electric Daisy enthusiast Folgers Challenge-style, and they’re likely to mistake it for, say, the searing tang of Alexander Ridha’s Boys Noize project—who, coincidentally, assisted with some analog-synth sounds for the track.
Collaboration is nothing new in dance culture, and even when taking into account the shadowy-but-common practice of ghostwriting in the genre’s upper echelons, it’s far from a scandalized convention—but these by-committee moments on Nova only further the theory that Steinway’s still in search of his sound. He tries his hand at the booming, mainstream-made 2-step sound Skrillex’s recently dabbled in on “Shoulda,” and crashes through the industrial grind of “Era” with a hair-whipping drop that feels as migraine-inducing as it does dated; “UCLA” transitions from a palm-muted guitar bridge to a stomping chorus with a charisma-free anti-hook from rapper 24hrs. As the credits roll on the celestial, M83-aping theatrics of closing track “Atoms,” you might find yourself catching your breath after trying to chase down whatever overarching mood Nova is trying to cast.
Perhaps it makes sense, then, that Nova’s brightest moment is also its most straightforward: the anthemic “I Wanna Know,” assisted by a potent vocal turn from Daya. You might recognize her from the Chainsmokers’ perfectly fine “Don’t Let Me Down,” and, for better and worse, “I Wanna Know” sounds like it could’ve easily come from the pop pariahs’ songbook, with jackpot synths yo-yoing on the chorus and effervescent drums splashing against its backdrop. Like so much satisfying, EDM-influenced pop music from the last several years, it sounds tailor-made for hearing in an open field, swaying to it in a sea of bodies before turning to your friend and asking, “Who made that song?” They probably won’t know, and until Steinway finds his sound and sticks to it, that question will likely remain unanswered.


Cursive frontman Tim Kasher's third album with The Good Life ditches the Cure-informed bent of their past two LPs for its own vision.

Album of the Year

"I was reading Fante at the time/ I had Bukowski on the mind." In the midst of the opener on The Good Life's latest album, the cheekily titled Album of the Year, lead singer Tim Kasher is name-dropping his taste for curb-front cult faves. Now, I hate to be a quibbler, but perhaps Bukowski's more applicable to the emotional thrashing in Kasher's other group, Cursive. The more appropriate literary one-off for this record might be Nelson Algren, whose resurgent castaways could settle quite comfortably into the spoon-fed healing and isopropyl fumes of Kasher's newest songs.
Whereas Cursive has made a career of pleading for catharsis through bruised, over-the-top emoting, The Good Life has always detailed Kasher's lonely nights; he formed the group for the material that would have sounded too sleepy alongside most of Cursive's ranting and raving. Adopting soft, shadowed hues and more rounded arrangements for his confessional tales, Kasher's The Good Life project has made steady progress from its Cure-esque first two albums to more crisp, autumnal sounds.
Album of the Year's premise is somewhat ungainly: to document the passage of a year in 12 songs, one for each month. But, to appreciate its stark, lovelorn poetics, you need know none of this. The songs are instantly welcoming, flickering with enough hope and tenacity to outlast Kasher's heartbreak. It's not enough to revel in your own melancholy without understanding what's being gained through its endurance. Augmented by Mike Mogis' best production of the year (and manning the boards for a label like Saddle Creek, it's been a busy one), each song seems to hover in fathomless space, but interacts with an effortless synthesis that belies such separation.
"Night and Day" is a trapeze-wired waltz that shuffles along on a broken accordion and Mogis' starlit Wurlitzer. In three dizzy minutes, it makes you uncomfortably familiar with the forlorn vagrants that populate Kasher's world. "You're No Fool" adds to this circus-tent feel by combining a lonely saxophone line with a bar-soaked piano, painting a dark tale of exes incapable of losing former lovers. The strong, almost insolent saxophone returns you to Kasher's ability to wallow in sorrow without sinking under its weight, the redemption of the past through its seemingly insufferable passage. Here, Kasher again reminds one of his kinship with Algren, as the track would have fit perfectly alongside Elmer Bernstein's jazz score for the film adaptation of The Man with the Golden Arm.
On "Inmates"-- the one track where Kasher allows someone else to voice his heartache-- Jiha Lee steps in without missing a beat to add a seductive, mesmerizing shyness. Atop a soft acoustic guitar, distant bongos and tingling electronics, both Lee's voice and the epic track build before Kasher turns the song into a duet and electric guitars grind out the transcendent ease. By the time "Inmates" ends with Lee's pronouncement that "she can"t be your prisoner," the song seems to have packed an entire relationship's worth of tempo shifts and transgressions into its 9-plus minutes without ever sounding bloated.
The complaints with the album are worn-in with old caveats, namely the "emo" tag. Those unfamiliar with Kasher's songwriting could mouth that forbidden word after the album's initial sad-eyed glance. One might hear the hysterical strains of Ben Gibbard or Chris Carraba in Kasher's reckless emoting. But remain calm and it will pass: The vibrant productions and transient lyricism will pull you through that knee-jerk response. Kasher has turned his pissings and moanings into grand, translucent tales that typically avoid the isolation of self-indulgence (occasional slip-ups like the sugary bleating of the title track to this year's Lovers Need Lawyers EP only prove how adeptly most of the album is handled). He might tell you otherwise, but like Isaac Brock, he knows that it's tough to live like Bukowski. Instead of seeking spirituality in pocket-change or San Franciscan street-grime, he's after the sudden comprehension gained from nights spent alone and stories that translate the open pitfalls of the heart.


Heralded by Miles Davis, sampled by both Nas and Gang Starr, the great pianist’s 1970 album is alive with a buoyancy and jubilance that went overlooked in its day.

The Awakening

Miles Davis was a great admirer and defender of the pianist Ahmad Jamal, who in the 1950s was not taken seriously by some jazz critics. But the sublime ear of Miles instead recognized a light, exquisite touch, one of varied complexity despite Jamal’s commercial success.
“I loved his lyricism on piano, the way he played, and the spacing he used in the ensemble voicings of his groups,” Miles wrote in 1989. “ I have always thought Ahmad Jamal was a great piano player who never got the recognition he deserved.”
That recognition would eventually come, and Jamal’s stature has only grown over the decades. The Awakening, recently reissued on vinyl by Be With Records, is a fine example of Jamal’s stately—and understated—elegance punctuated with doodles of whimsy. The album, recorded in early February 1970, is made up of two Jamal originals, a standard, and pieces by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Oliver Nelson, and Herbie Hancock, a pianist of similar disposition who Miles famously hired in his “Second Great Quintet.”
In Michael Jarrett’s new book, Pressed For All Time, Ed Michel, who produced the original album for Impulse!, remembers that “Jamal absolutely knew what he wanted to record….We were recording during Ramadan. He was fasting during the day, until sunset. The only real condition was, he said, ‘At six fifteen, we’ve got to take a break. You’ve got to tell us precisely. We’re all hungry.’”
The “we” Jamal is likely referring to is his working trio at the time, the drummer Frank Gant and bassist Jamil Nasser, who sounds especially inspired on this outing. Hip-hop was still years away, but by the 1980s, MCs would begin sampling Jamal extensively—The Awakening in particular. The compelling Jamal-penned title track, for instance, turned up in Gang Starr’s 1989 “DJ Premier In Deep Concentration” and in Shadez Of Brooklyn’s “Change.” The following track, “I Love Music” (written by Hale Smith and Emil Boyd), is almost a total solo performance for Jamal. It ended up on a classic recording of a different kind, nearly a quarter-century later, Illmatic, where Nas, intimately connected with the jazz idiom, and producer Pete Rock used Jamal’s lush interpretation on “The World Is Yours.” When the esteemed jazz critic Leonard Feather—of whom Miles also approved—wrote in The Awakening’s original liner notes that “Ahmad Jamal is one of the most pianistic of pianists,” it’s especially resonant here.
Taking on pieces like Hancock’s “Dolphin Dance” and Nelson’s “Stolen Moments,” as memorable a composition as anything from the 1960s, is trickier considering the drama that the horns—and what horns!—provided in the originals: George Coleman on the former; Nelson on the latter, with Eric Dolphy on flute; and Freddie Hubbard on both. Jamal’s versions are truncated and stripped down—his “Dolphin Dance” is quickened, too—but they still manage to stir. “You’re My Everything,” the only standard on the set, popularized by Billy Eckstine, Nat Cole, and Sarah Vaughan, is almost unrecognizable in Jamal’s hands, but has, like much on this album, a wonderful playfulness, especially at either end of the keyboard, with deep, perfectly-placed thumps with his left hand answered by fanciful phrases in the highest register.
Feather’s last line in the notes, written forty-seven years ago, still may say it best: “…for youngsters and newcomers, let this album serve as a delightful if belated awakening.”


The 16-year-old Harlem drill rapper attained viral fame after the tragic killing of little brother Notti Osama. His debut mixtape is an excruciating contrast of teen celebrity and raw grief.

Here 2 Stay

Last summer, before DD Osama was being played out of every pre-teen’s Bluetooth speaker in the five boroughs, he was a relatively small-time drill rapper from the Sugar Hill area of Harlem. Along with his friend Sugarhill Ddot and little brother Notti Osama, they were a trio of baby-faced 14 and 15 year olds with a couple of no-holds-barred diss tracks to their names. Then tragedy struck. In early July 2022, 14-year-old Notti Osama was stabbed to death in the 137th Street-City College subway station. The incident rippled through New York’s drill scene, bringing a ton of attention to the trio and its music. Seemingly overnight they were sensations. Voyeuristic beef pages and online platforms, including but not limited to No Jumper, ran wild. Drake hit them up to model his newest clothing line. Labels swooped in with heavy briefcases in hand.
In the meantime, Notti’s death was callously turned into a punchline, most infamously by the attention-hungry viral hit “Notti Bop,” a song and dance mocking the way he died. Dark turns are inevitable in a subgenre that’s become the go-to outlet for the youngest residents of the most depleted and underserved corners of New York, but this was a new low. Now 16, DD Osama is the current most popular New York drill rapper not named Ice Spice. He commands a different type of fandom than previous title holders like Pop Smoke and Sheff G; those artists were older by a few years, which is a lot at that age. DD is beloved by kids who are still years away from getting into R-rated movies. Recently I spent a day at a middle school in Harlem and just about the only artist they wanted to talk about was DD Osama. At his live shows, young girls scream like he’s on the cover of Tiger Beat and adult chaperones mill around in the background. The dissonance couldn’t be louder on DD’s eerie new mixtape Here 2 Stay, a debut that’s trying to be drill’s version of My World 2.0 and process grief at the same time.
Understandably, DD is not entirely sure how to handle all of this. Songs that are supposed to be loved-up teenage pop-rap actually sound melancholy and fatalistic, even when they’re trying not to. On “Who I Am,” he flatly sing-raps about a girl that he’s fallen for. The song clearly wants to have the slick tone of “Yo (Excuse Me Miss)” but is unintentionally more like “Heart on Ice” as he lilts, “Been through a lot and I ain’t tryna’ lose you/Lost my brother this shit feels unusual.” Likewise “Be Alright” is a romance where everything is going pretty much fine in the lyrics yet the miserable-sounding ATL Jacob beat and DD’s quiet, cracking voice makes the depression feel inextricable.
Truthfully he doesn’t seem ready to be putting music out there. But the numbers are climbing fast, shows are selling out, and TikToks are being made, so the hype must be capitalized on. You won’t find many songs on Here 2 Stay that are inspired or at least therapeutic; DD’s candor comes out of obligation. He tries to make it work by adopting Lil Durk’s method of fluctuating between typical drill trash talk and traumatic personal reflections. But that style took Durk years to refine, and DD is being thrown into the fire. On “Leave Me,” when he lifelessly sings, “I just want my little brother, I don’t want fame no more,” it’s raw to the point of being unlistenable. His relative inexperience is clear on “Letter 2 Notti,” where his fast-rapping gets awkwardly jumbled as he tries to articulate a tribute to his brother without really having the words. I like it when he gets to have a little bit of fun: The club-drill record “Money Calls,” with Philly’s 2Rare, is a momentary break from having to confront fresh wounds. But that doesn’t last long.
Where else but rap are artists tasked with powering through life-altering events instantly? It’s cruel, isn’t it? The fear of transient fame is hung over their heads by bigwigs anxious to generate enough revenue before the next hot drill rapper comes along. As the money floods in, genuine stars who started attracting too much heat are getting hit with indictments and an opportunist like Lil Mabu is poking fun at the desperation and exploitation while raking in the views from his Upper East Side mansion. Is everyone thriving but the artists themselves? DD Osama’s rise isn’t a success story, it’s a dehumanizing one. At this point, that’s the usual in New York drill.


Aaron Funk's latest album was created and performed live on a modular synth with no overdubbing and editing; it's one of the more beautiful records from the project in recent memory.

Venetian Snares: Traditional Synthesizer Music

Traditional Synthesizer Music

The idea that Venetian Snares might release anything you could describe as "traditional" boggles the mind a bit, but like much in the Snares catalogue, the title of his new record gleams like a trap for the unwary. Since he introduced himself in the early '00s with a brace of rapid-fire records on Planet Mu, Aaron Funk has carved a singular path. He once claimed to have recorded his early works while coming down from crack cocaine; he has sampled Bartók, Billie Holiday, and Elgar (all on his outstanding 2005 LP Rossz Csillag Alatt Született), and once made an entire record about his cats titled, in a rare straightforward gesture, Songs About My Cats. Visually, Funk in no way fits the mold of your everyday IDM egghead. A man mountain with lank hair and unkempt beard, he more resembles a burly woodcutter, or a mad monk: the Winnipeg Rasputin.
Still, in this case there is no suggestion we should take Venetian Snares at anything other than his word. Traditional Synthesizer Music, explains Funk, was created and performed live on a modular synth "with no overdubbing and no editing." If the result still sounds like a logical continuation of his previous work, that's probably because this sort of hardware has long been a part of his playbook. Certainly, this isn't the record where Snares starts making dreamy hippy kosmische. The abrupt opener "Dreamt Person v3" takes us into broadly familiar Snares territory: an unceasing torrent of squiggly, scattershot breaks pinging across the frame, pursued by slow, gloaming synths that float about like jellyfish.
Funk's music often sounds so meticulous and precise that it can be surprising to learn it has improvisational or random elements. But like, say, Autechre—well-known for their algorithmic tinkering—or another modular synth enthusiast, Aphex Twin, Funk embraces chaos as a compositional method. A complex process of patch-building has introduced a random factor into these structures, allowing for surprises or "unforeseen progressions." The titles—things like "Goose and Gary v2" and "Anxattack Boss Level 19 v3"—indicate that these tracks are not fixed in stone but malleable, each track charting one particular path through a chain of possibilities.
Incidentally, this is one of the more beautiful Snares records in recent memory, relaxing some of the more tiring qualities of his music—the unrelenting abrasiveness, the taste for a certain gynecological grotesquery—in favor of moments of relatively straight prettiness. He will never qualify as "easy" listening, of course: "Slightly Bent Fork Tong v2" laces its globular synth-funk with warped chimes and ringing bell tones, while electronics groan and harrumph deep in the bowels of an inscrutable jitter titled "She Married a Chess Computer in the End." But even while it's being difficult, Traditional Synthesizer Music feels relatively palatable by Snares standards. The album's analog genesis lends it a cushioned wooziness, making the manic energy more palatable in the long haul.
Last year, Funk tweeted that he was in "very serious financial trouble," directing his followers toward his Bandcamp (they followed his cue, filling the Bandcamp chart with Venetian Snares albums, and shortly afterwards Funk repaid their loyalty with a pay-what-you-want album titled Thank You for Your Consideration). Looking at the gigantic rig he's assembled on the video to "Magnificent Stumble v2," you can sort of see where all those IDM dollars might have gone. But where some musicians get lost inside the labyrinth of modular synth building, Snares seems adept in harnessing these elemental energies and bending them to his will. Traditional Synthesizer Music feels not so much traditional as a refresh: a suite of music that is crafted and ferociously complex, but at its root a pure and primal thing, high on its own chaos.


The Puerto Rican hitmaker attempts to replicate the magic of his celestial 2022 album in this summery spinoff but winds up lost in space.

PLAYA SATURNO

With Saturn transiting the water sign of Pisces for the next few years, it’s fitting that Rauw Alejandro’s 2022 album SATURNO found its way to the beach. The blue-haired bad boy from the Puerto Rican city of Carolina, who has a penchant for panty-dropping falsettos and ’90s-style flows, built his name making clubby reggaeton just different enough to be interesting. The music is about ass-shaking, yes, but it’s always accompanied by compelling details: a leftfield synth loop, an electric guitar riff worthy of a rock en español track, a Baby Rasta and Gringo interpolation that shows Alejandro’s ear is finely tuned to the old school.
SATURNO was a playful maelstrom of these influences, a concept album that positioned the Puerto Rican star, who donned a chic cyberpunk aesthetic for the release, as an experimental and meticulous presence. He set the bar as an unconventional mainstream reggaetonero, both in his own work and in collaborations (take Tainy’s recent producer project DATA, where Alejandro goes back and forth effortlessly with Skrillex and Four Tet). His crooning tenor is one of the prettier voices among the Olympus of pop reggaeton titans, and his moves are unmatched; just ask the Jabbawockeez, the iconic masked hip-hop crew who spent the last few months breakdancing alongside Alejandro on tour. On PLAYA SATURNO, envisioned as a “spinoff” of its celestially minded predecessor, Alejandro attempts to stretch the stardust to the tune of 14 new songs. Unfortunately dampened by filler tracks, the album winds up lost in space.
For starters, many of the collaborations struggle to live up to their promise. Alejandro’s reliably excellent vocal performances, full of careening vocoder belting and enviably erotic delivery, are still not enough to bring everything together. On lead single “Si te pegas,” Spanish pop icon Miguel Bosé makes a treasured appearance after eight years of vocal difficulties. But rather than a legendary comeback, Bosé’s feature feels tacked-on; his famously velveteen voice shines briefly before he drowns in an ocean of tepid keys and snare rolls. Guanajuato’s golden boy Junior H makes an appearance on “Picardía,” but doesn’t indulge in the relaxed drawl that makes corrido tumbado so powerful. Instead of a potentially exciting cross-genre moment, the rising Mexican star is squashed into a copy-paste feature that could have been spit by anyone.
This is not to say there aren’t showstoppers. The Ivy Queen feature “Celebrando,” a deliciously disjointed electro-perreo that spotlights her distinctive snarl and interpolates the iconic harpsichord of her signature song “Quiero bailar,” feels like an intentional co-sign of El Zorro by La Caballota. Jowell & Randy’s appearance on the appropriately named “Ponte nasty,” a horny anthem with a dembow beat straight out of a sweaty marquesina, adds a touch of grime to one of the hardest tracks at this cosmic beach bash. “I want to fuck her/She wants to fuck me,” Alejandro breathily rasps in English, tapping into the cheeky confidence that makes him so irresistible.
Alejandro’s Bizarrap session, released last month, closes the album on a high note. After a slog of generic beats built for the background music of the afters, long after anyone has stopped listening, it feels unearned. Not even Kenobi Sensei’s ever-shiny production, which has bolstered Alejandro from the start, can make PLAYA SATURNO stand on its own; nor can experiments like the downtempo reggae track “No me sorprende.” Without a framework that allows the real gems to shine, PLAYA SATURNO is just another party album, a chart-chasing reggaeton offering that could move bodies on the dancefloor, but won’t move the needle. It feels imprecise to think of this album as a true sequel to SATURNO, even though it was crafted as a continuation. If the initial record harnessed the energy of the planet, this collection more closely resembles Saturn’s rings: a shiny decoration of ice and dust held in place by the gravity of a more substantial body.


On his most personal project to date, the Buffalo rapper laces intimate narratives with battle-ready barbs over an ornate collage of haunting boom-bap.

Conway the Machine: God Don’t Make Mistakes

God Don’t Make Mistakes

When Conway the Machine opens a verse with his signature “look,” the Buffalo rapper known for his tough talk and impactful rhymes already has your attention. Blessed by his gruff, grim-reaper resonance, each line makes your fingers moonwalk across the progress bar to take in his lucid, precise imagery. But even after several collaborative releases and solo projects, we still don’t know his full story. Thankfully, the Buffalo rapper’s long-awaited Shady Records debut, God Don’t Make Mistakes, gives us an inner-glimpse at his inspiring come-up, plagued with twists and pitfalls.
This introspective mood is complemented by aggressive bars, a balance that makes this his most impressive project to date. Conway’s hard-hitting delivery is a throwback to the era of “106 & Park”’s Freestyle Fridays, when contestants would dazzle the audience for consecutive weeks, score big-budget record deals, then vanish into obscurity. “Piano Love,” with its wintry Alchemist beat, boasts breathtaking couplets: “We don’t play fair, drive-bys right in front of the daycare/We spray hairpin triggers, that FN on the waist here.” It would be satisfying to simply hear him spit hard-body lines like these (as he does on his mixtapes and countless freestyle videos), yet Conway goes even deeper here, providing an intimate look at his personal struggles.
These tales are backed up by a collage of boom-bap that is as haunting as it is ornate. Most of the beats on God Don’t Make Mistakes are provided by Daringer and Beat Butcha, with solid contributions from Bink!, J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League, and, of course, Alchemist. The broken piano of “Drumwork” sounds like it was played by some hardcore composer who sat down to tinker on it after it got hurled from a fire escape; Conway raps like he’s the one who did the hurling. His nimble bars give you goosebumps, and his heartfelt reflections make you feel like a fellow traveller on his journey.
There have been flashes of Conway’s meditative side on previous projects. “Front Lines,” from 2020’s From a King to a GOD, gave a personal account of how the corrupt system that forced him into dope-dealing is predicated on the murder of unarmed Blacks by the police. But God Don’t Make Mistakes marks the first time the forty-year-old rapper has been candid about how he dealt with the trauma resulting from his close call with death. He lays it all on the line on “Guilty,” speaking at length about being shot in 2012 (“No feeling in my legs, I took a bullet in the head, nigga”). You can hear a vulnerability in Conway’s voice when he describes how Bell’s Palsy crippled the right side of his face–his delivery is concrete, evoking a pain he lives with to this day.
In the autobiographical “Stressed,” Conway delves into the nature of addiction and abuse, digging through a lifetime of trauma hoping to find “a lesson in it all.” Conway can craft a gripping autobiographical account as deftly as he can a battle-ready barb; his depth brings to mind similarly skilled veterans like Beanie Sigel, who makes an appearance on opener “Lock Load,” a booth-annihilating screed. Yet Conway holds his own with the Philly vet, spitting, “I get to trippin’, get the blick and this AR in my hands/Every bullet in the cartridges land/The stick look like a guitar in my hands, drummin’ like I’m part of a band.” Lines like these are why Conway is known as an adroit lyricist, and what makes this album so compelling is that it allows us to have a look at the man behind the virtuosic wordplay. He won’t let anything stop him from what he does best.


The debut Hyperdub LP from the duo once known as Hype Williams feels like a trip through the fragments of their collective psyches.

Dean Blunt / Inga Copeland: Black Is Beautiful

Black Is Beautiful

Pitchfork's Paul Thompson began his review of Hype Williams' 2011 album One Nation by struggling to discover exactly who was behind the music. Were they called Inga Copeland and Roy Blunt? Or perhaps Karen Glass and Roy Nnawuchi? For their debut full-length on Hyperdub, the duo present themselves as Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland. Just don't bank on those being their real names, or any kind of indication of a settled moniker for future releases. Notions of a fluctuating self are a crucial part of the world in which Blunt/Copeland choose to operate, although Black Is Beautiful throws up greater thematic ties than their previous work, with the pair gently reeling in its tendency to shape shift its sound into oblivion. There's still a crude, sun-warped skew to their vision. But releasing this album as Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland makes it feel like a layer of mystery has been removed, and that's mirrored in the subtle erosion of their musical identity crisis.
Despite the lurch toward refinement, there are still acres of ambiguity to get lost in here. Blunt/Copeland don't even pose questions without answers. It's more like getting asked a question that trails off halfway through the conversation, never to return to its original intent. The lack of traditional track titles, aside from the opening "(Venice Dreamway)", positions this as a singular work that doesn't lend itself well to being broken down into its various parts. Outside of that opening cut, which begins by slowing down the coughing intro of Black Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf" to an asthmatic wheeze, each track is numbered from 2-15. It's often reminiscent of the dream-pop stencils A.R. Kane sketched out in the late 1980s, especially when they let dub templates delicately seesaw between the dreamy and the discordant. Black Is Beautiful shares the same kind of chimerical idealization of pop as A.R. Kane’s 69, where everything is set up to shoot into the heavens.
Only three tracks of the 15 make it over the three-minute mark, causing the record to feel like a wander through the fragments of Blunt and Copeland's collective psyches. At times it can be frustrating-- their reimagining of Donnie & Joe Emerson's "Baby" is such a gracefully poised sci-fi torch song that it would surely benefit from being stretched out over a greater expanse of time. "11" sparks a similar feeling. Elsewhere, they have a keen sense of how to turn lo-fi tools to their advantage, with the in-the-red vocal cooing on "5" matched by the same kind of boxed-in musical ambition Ariel Pink displayed on Worn Copy. There's a playfulness at work here too, with atom-sized chunks of sound deployed in the shorter tracks, shards of dialogue from sources unknown left to loop into infinity, and plenty of heavily treated audio ephemera cut and pasted into the mix.
But there's a natural path forged between all the shifts, a sense that the abstraction feeds off the structure and vice versa. As such, Black Is Beautiful nears something that could readily be branded as Blunt and Copeland's aesthetic, which is likely to cause them as much consternation as it might pleasure. The key difference is the transformation from throwing a spanner in the works out of a gleeful kind of perversion to that spanner being an integral part of the overall picture. It's there when "9" is cut dead in its tracks to bring in a sample of a newsreader, only to quickly resume where it left off. And it's there in the outstanding centerpiece "10", which causes Copeland's vocal to disappear in the rearview mirror, getting obliterated entirely when the track is stonewalled by spacious stabs of noise. Occasionally the world needs to be blocked out to make sense of it. Black Is Beautiful undergoes that blocking-out process and finds no kind of sense anywhere, instead focusing on the gloriously messy sift through the clutter we go through just to approach a tiny semblance of meaning.