Odd Nosdam recorded the T r i s h EP in memory of the late Trish Keenan of English noise-pop act Broadcast. It finds him at his most abstract and untethered, dispensing with any notion of genre to explore the evocative qualities of sound.

T r i s h EP

What does it mean to remember someone? Beyond the abstract idea of remembrance lie some hard truths about our own limitations: our memories are imperfect and constructed and they degrade over time much as we do ourselves. Odd Nosdam’s T r i s h EP is an act of remembrance that wrestles with these limitations. Its six largely instrumental songs bear the tenor of memories: at once warmly familiar and hazily indistinct.
Nosdam recorded the T r i s h EP in memory of the late Trish Keenan of English noise-pop act Broadcast. Originally released as a limited-run cassette on the Baro label in 2013, the out-of-print EP is now seeing wider release on vinyl. While Nosdam is known best as a producer of cerebral hip-hop beats, the songs on T r i s h are comparatively formless, often eschewing low-end and percussion altogether. This is Nosdam at his most abstract and untethered, dispensing with any notion of genre to explore the evocative qualities of sound. Working with tape loops, samples, and layers of distortion, he constructs churning songs whose melodies lie buried under blankets of static. While Nosdam is certainly no stranger to noise in his work, these tracks often push into Broadcast territory, sounding like transmissions from a radio station that’s just out of range.
Nosdam’s primary focus here is texture; he spends much of T r i s h smearing recognizable shapes into more impressionistic forms. Take the chiming opening melody of "O l y n n," which feels like it was ripped straight out of a Broadcast song. Around the two-minute mark, the track cuts to silence before that same melody returns, pitched up, massively delayed and barely recognizable. Grouper’s Liz Harris contributes a vocal to the song—a haunting, wordless wail—but even that ultimately gets swallowed up by a cloud of echo as well. Nosdam approaches samples with a similarly warped sensibility on T r i s h; "L o n j a e" sounds like a yé-yé 45 left skipping on a turntable until it transforms from a song to a drone.
Broadcast’s greatest trick might have been sculpting pop songs out of noise and Nosdam manages to perform a similar alchemy on the closing track, "T r i s h." Here, the producer gives himself over fully to Broadcast’s school of songcraft, employing the sort of fuzzy organ and heavily distorted bass that became hallmarks of that band’s sound. Even more striking, though, is the vocal that floats through the middle of the track. It's a sample from a late-'60s Norwegian folk record but the singer, Annlaug Lofthus, is a dead ringer for Keenan. For a brief moment, amid swells of noise, we catch a glimpse of Trish Keenan through the haze. And then, just like that, she’s gone.
Correction (1/6, 3:50 p.m. EST): An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified the singer on "T r i s h" as Trish Keenan. It is Annlaug Lofthus, as now stated.


It's a rare occurrence indeed that listening to a record actually causes me physical pain. I'm capable of ...

Separation Anxieties

It's a rare occurrence indeed that listening to a record actually causes me physical pain. I'm capable of putting on a stoic smile when confronted with friends' Dave Matthews records. Korn and Limp Bizkit can induce a twinge, nothing more. But listening to 12 Rods' newest release makes me hurt. Bad. Separation Anxieties is the ear infection that antibiotics can't cure fast enough. It's the headache that half a bottle of aspirin just won't alleviate. It's the splinter you can't pull out of your foot without the assistance of heavy-gauge needles or sufficiently pointy tweezers. This record is acid reflux, gastroenteritis, and dysentery all rolled into one.
But the stomach-turning pain this record causes me doesn't stem from any particularly grating noise or gut-wrenchingly awful sonic mishap to be found on the record. Rather, it comes from the knowledge that a band I once considered to be one of the absolute greatest bands in modern music could produce a record that sounds so bad. What's even more perplexing is that the same band could call such an obviously terrible-sounding record "the record we wanted to make and that sounds like us."
12 Rods' 1998 debut LP, Split Personalities, rocked ass from here to Bangladesh by showcasing a band in peak form. With Ryan Olcott's robotic whine, Christopher McGuire's maniacally inventive drumming, and Olcott brother Ev's keyboard talents and studio noodling, this band had finally figured out how to translate its unique elements into a well-oiled machine. The record sounded nothing short of perfect. Every chord, every melody, every synthetic bleep, every pathetically self-deprecating word Olcott spat out-- it all fit together so perfectly. 12 Rods were a band who not only played great songs, but knew how to listen to their own sound and refine it to the point of absolute perfection. Which is all why this record comes as such a shock.
Separation Anxieties' opening track, "Kaboom", begins with a stupid, but not overly offensive barrage of gratuitously poppy guitars, drums, and synth bursts. But any hopes for a salvageable song are instantly shattered when the sound dies down and Ryan Olcott shouts "Sex!/ It's a regular practice," just in time for a hokey and completely displaced power-chord progression that simply sounds wrong.
This is followed by "What Has Happened", which may very well be the album's worst. Over yet another generic power-chord progression, Olcott whines: "My ex thinks she's so tough/ She flicks her cigarettes before she puffs/ I think she's a man when she wears Adidas/ She lost her libido then dumped me for a punk/ Who's in a band, sounds like Korn/ But pretentiously aggressive/ Not too impressive." Yow. As the song segues into the marginally less offensive chorus of "What has happened?/ What has happened to the one that I love," the listener's sentiment mirrors Olcott's verbatim. After only the second song, almost all hope is lost, replaced only by a sickening sense of disappointment and bewilderment.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Separation Anxieties is the fact that every time it seems like the guys might stumble upon a patch of decency, it all goes awry. "Astrogimp" is musically incredible, but the worst lyrics you may ever be exposed to taint the song's relative virtue (the title is all the proof you need). Two less offensive tracks, "I Think I'm Flying" and "Your Secret's Safe With Me", are followed by the album's single most intolerable moment, the distressingly horrid jack-in-the-box and quivering falsetto introduction to "Marionette", a song with a chorus consisting of yet another overused, run-of-the-mill chord progression-- and what the fuck are these lyrics?! Augh!!!!
Since I bought Separation Anxieties over a week ago, I've been attempting to convince myself that the alarming decline in quality from the last record is not the fault of 12 Rods themselves-- or rather Ev and Ryan, the only two remaining members of the "new" incarnation of 12 Rods. It's easy to blame producer Todd Rundgren, whose production work with Hall & Oates is eclipsed only by his vocal arrangements for Celine Dion. Certainly, the man had his day in 1987 with XTC's Skylarking, but his insipid overproduction on this album is far more typical of his recent efforts.
Another easy way out is to blame the record company. Some of the material on Gay? and Split Personalities had been around for a while-0 maybe V2 forced the band into releasing a record full of material the band wasn't comfortable with. They did title the last song on their own record "Glad That It's Over"...
But no matter whose fault it is, nothing changes that Separation Anxieties is a huge letdown-- especially considering the fact that I've patiently waited for its release for the better part of a year. I marked its release date on my calendar. I bought it the day it came out. I was expecting an album in the spirit of Gay? and Split Personalities-- a record that would instantly cement a place among my favorites. Obviously, it didn't happen like that.
It saddens me that this record barely warrants a 2.0. Nothing would have made me happier than to issue my first rating above a 9.5 to one of my absolute favorite bands. But on the plus side, I can now throw Separation Anxieties on the fire and spend the next couple of months convincing myself that it was all a bad dream, and that 12 Rods are still one of the greatest bands in the world.


On its third album, the Scottish indie pop group parts with band member John Henderson and continues to distinguish itself the old-fashioned way-- with memorable melodies and engaging lyrics.

Camera Obscura: Let's Get Out of This Country

Let's Get Out of This Country

"I feel like getting confessional," Tracyanne Campbell sings on the title track of Camera Obscura's third LP. This comes as no surprise to those of us who got all moony and maudlin over the Glaswegian sextet's first two albums. In 2001, the group issued their debut, Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi, in perfect-storm conditions for comparisons to Belle & Sebastian. They even had formal connections: Stuart Murdoch produced the album's lead single, "Eighties Fan", and Richard Colburn had played drums in an earlier incarnation of the band. The similarities extended to the vocals, as well, with Tracyanne Campbell often sounding like a more charismatic Isobel Campbell (no relation). But while that record echoed so much lace-and-paisley B&S, in Camera Obscura, Tracyanne played the dominant Murdoch role; John Henderson her recessive yet crucial Isobel. That inversion made the two bands seem like mirror-images of each other, and it was easy to pretend that Tracyanne Campbell and Murdoch were each the silent interlocutors in the other's wry dialogues.
Camera Obscura's second album, Underachievers Please Try Harder, expanded the band's sonic palette to encompass the influence of Leonard Cohen ("Your Picture") and the Beach Boys ("A Sister's Social Agony"), but did little to allay the persistent comparisons to their forefathers. By no means does this make Camera Obscura the poor man's Belle & Sebastian-- to the contrary, by emerging at a time when B&S was moving away from intimate chamber pop toward more ambitious, less immediate fare, they fell neatly into the stylistic niche that their fellow Scottish band was gradually vacating. And Murdoch's take on heartbreak-- masculine, but tinged with the classically feminine values of empathy and spirituality-- seemed less emulated than complemented by Tracyanne Campbell's perspective, which was feminine, but tinged with the classically masculine values of coarseness and aggression. "I should be suspended from class/ I don't know my elbow from my ass," she sang to a skittish crush on "Suspended From Class".
One of Camera Obscura's finest attributes is consistency. There's hardly a dud to be found in their catalog, and their similarly styled songs distinguish themselves the old-fashioned way-- with memorable melodies and unique lyrics. Pleasantly, that ethos remains mostly unchanged on Let's Get Out of this Country; there are few subtle changes to the band's sound, and only one of them is more than cosmetic. With John Henderson's departure, lead vocal duties now rest entirely on Campbell, relieving the music of a measure of contrast. Campbell, however, has more than enough charm to fill the role herself, and so while Henderson's departure shifts the nature of the group, it isn't for the worse.
Let's Get Out of this Country also emphasizes a zaniness that was only hinted at on its slightly more reserved precursors. This is due in no small part to the fabulously schmaltzy Vegas-wedding organs that flash all over the record like blindingly white grins. You can find them short-circuiting the indefatigable bounce of lead single "Lloyd, I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken"; trilling through the dreamy melt of "Tears for Affairs"; and dappling "The False Contender"'s melancholy sigh. Too much of it would have wrecked the album's delicate poise, but luckily, the group doesn't lean too heavily on it for melodic counterpoint, balancing it out with elegiac brass and moodier organ tones.
Campbell's lyrical focus here remains squarely on love and its ugly aftermath. But the real struggle in her songs isn't between men and women-- it's between emotional vulnerability and the stubborn will to retain emotional independence. This unresolved point of view conveys a sense that Campbell's specific personality is coming through the words unfiltered, especially on the soaring title track: "I drowned my sorrows and slept around," she sings, adding hastily and chastely, "When not in body at least in mind." "Lloyd" contains a familiar Campbell arc, one that moves from timidity ("You can stay a girl by holding a boy's hand") to hard-nosed pragmatism ("I've got my life of complication here to sort out/ I'll take myself to an east coast city and walk about") in less than four minutes of fancifully brisk pop.
On "Come Back Margaret", Campbell addresses the still-pined-for ex of her own still-pined-for ex with "tears in [her] eyes", but still acknowledges that she "likes the free days with no expectations." And on the weepy, twanging "Dory Previn", Campbell is "sick of the sight of [her] old lover", eventually concluding that it's "time I let my love for him die." No endless yearning for Campbell, but no defiant posturing either-- instead, she explores the vagaries of searching for the circuitous route between the two. Though they haven't changed much in the span of three terrific albums, Camera Obscura no longer recall Belle & Sebastian; they only sound like themselves.


The Oregon-based singer-songwriter's taut fifth album channels the wounded spirit of Elliott Smith.

Chaotic Good

A quiet rage simmers beneath Johanna Warren’s first four albums. You can hear it in the way she fries her voice on “A Bird in the Crocodile's Mouth,” or the distant, uneven percussion of "Here to Tell," which sounds like angry footsteps growing closer. It’s there under the abundant beauty of her mostly acoustic earlier work, which inspires calm and dread in equal measure. On her latest full-length, Chaotic Good, Warren lets that rage erupt to the forefront.
If the Oregon-based singer-songwriter’s music can be slotted neatly beside the lunar environments of Julianna Barwick and Grouper, women who take distance as a primary emotive strategy, she also finds a deep kinship with the work of Elliott Smith, the late folk-rock songwriter who sublimated anger into taut and compelling pop. Smith knew when to subdue his compositions and when to ignite them, when to whisper through gritted teeth and when to open  into a full-hearted yelp. Warren’s study of these gestures shows more clearly than ever on Chaotic Good, which evinces Smith’s influence on the brisk, rolling guitar chords of “Part of It” and on the close-whispered vocals of “Every Death.” Alongside Smith’s echo, bolder, brasher notes of Hole and Liz Phair also peek through—’90s contemporaries of Smith who indulged their anger playfully, in ways that tore up the scripts for women artists at the time.
Warren often multitracks her voice to create a chorus of one, adding depth and dimension to her striking soprano. On Chaotic Good, the first of her albums she’s produced on her own, there’s a moment where she pitches that common technique into overdrive. It comes on a song called "Twisted," a heavy exorcism of a troubled relationship. Against a throbbing guitar progression and a simple rock drum beat, Warren's voice ascends to a breaking point. “I give up/I give up/I gave it my all,” she howls at the song's climax, her voice splitting the last syllable open into a paralyzing shriek.
Chaotic Good is an album about recognizing and deprogramming your codependent tendencies, the habit of needing a partner to feel whole. The ‘90s touchstones Warren calls upon often explored similar themes, excavating the ruins of relationships and trying to reassemble the self in their midst. “I wanted you to stay/And I wanted you to leave/Each day it’s a little harder to believe,” Warren sings on the gorgeous, sloping "Bed of Nails,” a song where her transformation from shadowy folk songwriter to rock bandleader comes into clearest view. The space around her opens up, and more instruments join the fold, bolstering her sound with adrenaline and grit.
The change fits the subject. As much as leaving a soured relationship can feel lonely, like the entire world has been compressed into the space of your own skull, the aftermath is often a communal rite. You call out to others to bear witness to what you’re leaving behind, to reestablish yourself in the social fabric. You quit codependence for interdependence, and then, eventually, independence, having learned to stand on your own two feet in a crowd. It’s a painful process, often an angry one. And then the fire finishes burning, and the nearby ground is clean.

Buy: Rough Trade
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A new compilation digs deep into stacks of jewel cases and explores an inflection point in Japanese pop music where changes in technology brought changes in sound.

Various Artists: Heisei No Oto: Japanese Left-field Pop From the CD Age, 1989-1996

Heisei No Oto: Japanese Left-field Pop From The CD Age, 1989-1996

It’s almost impossible to talk about the renewed interest in Japanese music in the West without invoking the YouTube algorithm. The meteoric rise of city pop, as well as the ambient music that’s come to be known as environmental music, seems propelled by its musical merit and the allure of its imagery in equal parts. The striking photo of Mariya Takeuchi by Alan Levenson adorning the upload of “Plastic Love”—effectively the official anthem of city pop, with 56 million views and counting—has inspired fanart and cosplay. (The song itself has been covered in a number of different languages, and has recently even appeared in a Calvin Klein ad campaign.) The most beloved environmental music, similarly, seems to trade on an image of mindfulness and mystique; check the comments of any popular video and you’ll see tons of messages about singing trees and aligned chakras. But what about the music not so easily filed under an “aesthetic”? An unfathomable amount of Japanese music will fall through the cracks, simply because it lacks the unspoken qualities that make some things go viral.
Norio Sato and Eiji Taniguchi, the owners of Osaka record stores Rare Groove and Revelation Time, respectively, are interested in putting in the legwork to find lost treasure themselves. Though their stores primarily deal in vinyl—and there’s plenty of gems yet to be uncovered on vinyl—the format represents only a portion of what’s left to be discovered. The CD became the primary format for major labels in Japan in 1989, and by the mid-’90s had become the only format for many releases. Sato and Taniguchi, constantly on the lookout for songs that haven’t been heard by many, turned their digging efforts to things that exclusively existed on CD—and Heisei No Oto: Japanese Left-field Pop from the CD Age, 1989-1996 is the result of their archaeology.
Heisei No Oto’s mission statement of “left-field pop” is an intentionally vague descriptor, housing samplings of dance, new age, electronic music, and more under its umbrella. Rather than zero in on a niche sound, such as Light in the Attic’s city pop or environmental music compilations, it casts a wide net that broadly surveys Japan’s pop music landscape of 1989 to 1996. It’s the sort of big picture thinking that makes sense for a couple of record store owners with keen eyes for what moves through the circulatory system of their shops. Songs by artists now known the world over, like Haruomi Hosono and Toshifumi Hinata, sit alongside names you’re less likely to recognize, presented with the same acclaim. Heisei No Oto explores an inflection point in Japanese pop music where changes in technology brought changes in sound. The production of music on CD ramped up around the same time that synthesizers were getting cheaper and easier to experiment with—not only for artists working in the mainstream, but also the ones on the fringes.
The tracks that veer furthest to the left of field feel like the star players; “Yeelen” by Love, Peace & Trance—Haruomi Hosono’s excellent 1995 foray into hippie mysticism—is a cavernously wide-open ode to inner peace with a spoken monologue guiding you through a meditation. “Phlanged Vortex” by Friends of Earth and Interior alum Eiki Nonaka is another blissful highlight, with soft percussion, whistles simulating bird song, and smooth tenor saxophone played by the inimitable Yasuaki Shimizu. Even the less offbeat tracks, like pop star Yosui Inoue’s “Pi Po Pa,” follow the underlying theme—its brisk, funky bassline puts it in the camp of easy listening, but the kalimba melody and misty synth washes throughout make it just a little bit weird.
Fumihiro Murakami’s “Miko”—a deluge of synth twinkles, whooshes, and waves—was hand-selected by Haruomi Hosono for inclusion on 1995’s École, a compilation of amateur artists. The track would appear again on Strange Flowers Vol. 1 for Daisyworld Discs in 2003—a label Hosono created strictly for music that he likes. Kina Tomoko’s “INK,” one of the strongest standouts, puts her distinctive singing against a backdrop of traditional percussion and electronics that evokes the past while facing the future. Her vocal style developed from the folk songs that she heard as a young girl—she performed at some of the most popular minyo clubs in Okinawa at the age of 15, and would eventually join Champloose, one of Okinawa’s most famous bands. Yasuaki Shimizu wrote and produced the track, and ubiquitous songwriter Kenzo Saeki penned the lyrics. Heisei No Oto represents a passing of the guard, featuring several tracks in which established musicians offer their talents to fledgling artists, but leave them plenty of space to flourish.
There’s nothing here as immaculately polished as Hiroshi Sato’s sparkling pop diamond “Say Goodbye” or as transcendentally peaceful as Hiroshi Yoshimura’s “Blink.” The new technology, new ideas, and newfound ambition of the CD age coalesced into an experimental spirit that can be identified, but not so clearly defined. That resistance to being easily sorted into playlist-friendly vibes is probably why these songs aren’t likely to show up in your YouTube recommendations. Rather than a mood, Heisei No Oto builds a narrative—one that tells the story of a rapidly changing Japan, and of acceleration to new frontiers. The rough edges are on full display, but gratifying to look at closely.

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You are slowly being destroyed. It's imperceptible in the scheme of a day or a week or even a ...

William Basinski: The Disintegration Loops I-IV

The Disintegration Loops I-IV

You are slowly being destroyed. It's imperceptible in the scheme of a day or a week or even a year, but you are aging, and your body is degrading. As your cells synthesize the very proteins that allow you to live, they also release free radicals, oxidants that literally perforate your tissue and cause you to grow progressively less able to perform as you did at your peak. By the time you reach 80, you will literally be full of holes, and though you'll never notice a single one of them, you will inevitably feel their collective effect. Aging and degradation are forces of nature, functions of living, and understanding them can be as terrifying as it is gratifying.
It's not the kind of thing you can say often, but I think William Basinski's Disintegration Loops are a step toward that understanding-- the music itself is not so much composed as it is this force of nature, this inevitable decay of all things, from memory to physical matter, made manifest in music. During the summer of 2001, Basinski set about transferring a series of 20-year-old tape loops he'd had in storage to a digital file format, and was startled when this act of preservation began to devour the tapes he was saving. As they played, flakes of magnetic material were scraped away by the reader head, wiping out portions of the music and changing the character and sound of the loops as they progressed, the recording process playing an inadvertent witness to the destruction of Basinski's old music.
The process may be the hook for this sprawling four-disc set, but the loops themselves are stunning, ethereal studies in sound so fluid that the listener scarcely registers the fact that it's nothing but many hundreds of repetitions of a brief, simple loop that they're hearing. I imagine that life within the womb might sound something akin to these slowly swelling, beauteous snatches of orchestral majesty and memory-haze synthesizer. The pieces are uniformly consonant, embellished with distant whalesong arpeggios and echoing percussion.
In essence, Basinski is improvising using nothing so much as the passage of time as his instrument, and the result is the most amazing piece of process music I've ever heard, an encompassing soundworld as lulling as it is apocalyptic. A piece may begin bold, a striking, slow-motion slur of ecstatic drone, and in the first minute, you will notice no change. But as the tape winds on over the capstans, fragments are lost or dulled, and the music becomes a ghost of itself, tiny gasps of full-bodied chords groaning to life amid pits of near-silence. Some decay more quickly and violently than others, surviving barely 15 minutes before being subsumed by silence and warping, while the longest endures for well over an hour, fading into a far-off, barely perceptible glow.
There is another, eerier chapter to the story of the Disintegration Loops-- that Basinski was listening to the playbacks of his transfers as the attacks of September 11th unfolded, and that they became a sort of soundtrack to the horror that he and his friends witnessed from his rooftop in New York that day, a poignant theme for the cataclysmic editing of one of the world's most recognizable skylines. Removed from the context of that disaster and transposed into the mundane world we live in every day, The Disintegration Loops still wield an uncanny, affirming power. It's the kind of music that makes you believe there is a Heaven, and that this is what it must sound like.


The best songs on the singer-songwriter’s excellent fourth album invoke the surreal melodramas of Björk and the wry social commentary of Pulp.

Kitchen Sink

On her fourth album, Nadine Shah unearths hard-luck stories in all sorts of bleak corners, squaring off with sleazy creeps, spiteful deadbeats, and neighborhood racists. But while the songs have the verisimilitude of the grainy British dramas they’re named for, she isn’t interested in the humdrum trappings of reality. Instead, she colors her songs with vibrant shades, drawing out tragicomic absurdities with sly panache. The result is direct but disorienting, like a grim domestic scene painted by Matisse.
For Shah, it’s a concept closer to home than 2017’s fraught, state-of-the-world address Holiday Destination, which took in British bigotry, the Syrian refugee crisis, and the “fascist in the White House.” Yet she shifts focus without losing grip of her unsettling songwriting: these character-driven vignettes are rooted in grim realities, pressures, and prejudices, and although she swaps brooding post-punk for brighter, more lurid sounds, she still builds her songs for discomfort. Often she explores her experiences as a woman in her 30s and the sexist, ageist drek she and have friends have endured: “Running gauntlets/Swerving perverts,” she drones over skittish percussion and swarming-bee synths on “Walk,” transforming a walk down the street into an Escherian obstacle course.
Those disconcerting flourishes allow Shah to tease out the political grit in each personal ordeal, and the best songs land in some odd hinterland between the surreal melodramas of Björk and the wry commentary of Pulp. The title track’s slinky throb finds Shah, a British Muslim of Norwegian-Pakistani heritage, clocking dirty looks from xenophobic neighbors. “Gossiping, boring bunch of bitches,” she fires back, relishing every snarky syllable with her theatrical Geordie drawl. On “Club Cougar,” she’s pestered by a smarmy guy who just knows she’s an older woman on the prowl; in truth, they’re basically the same age and she finds him repulsive. “All dressed up/ Think I did it for ya,” she sneers, refusing to play along with the track’s carnal atmosphere of sultry saxophone and animal howls.
In the wrong hands, that grotty-scenario-meets-lavish-score formula could slip into farce, and Shah isn’t afraid of mining black humor from the incongruities. She brings a sensual purr and lithe guitar to “Ladies for Babies (Goats for Love),” the tale of a neglected trophy wife whose husband treats her like livestock and his farm animals like sweethearts, and calls out a gaslighting drunk on the swampy strut of “Buckfast.” But she never prioritizes cheap laughs over gut punches. Restless, eerie rhythms give “Trad” a dark uneasiness, and synths glower and swoon as Shah panics she’s running out of time to do what society expects—get married, have kids—even though she knows how stifling those expectations are. “Shave my legs/ Freeze my eggs,” she sings, half-mesmerised and half-miserable, in the thrall of a dangerous spell. “Will you want me when I am old?”
Early in her career, Shah was routinely hailed as a mythical lovechild of Nick Cave and PJ Harvey, and she holds onto some some of that gothic grandeur: “Kite,” with its haunted chants, whistles, and twinkles, sounds like one of her old compositions broken down into a ghostly western. Increasingly, though, she sounds less their stylistic disciple than a similarly charismatic, chameleonic storyteller. On the closing “Prayer Mat,” she explores the dwindling days of her relationship with an influential figure—“the pioneer who learned to love abroad”—the two of them blotting everything out with booze and old memories. “We batten down the hatches/ We drink on airport time,” intones Shah over shuddering guitars and electronics. “Together we write our epitaphs/Whilst dizzy from our wine.” Like most of Kitchen Sink, it’s a report from an altered state, a true story in a strange hue; real life, but only as Shah could tell it.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The piercing clarity of Youth Lagoon’s third album, Savage Hills Ballroom, feels like a reaction to the muffled bedroom ambience and warped kaleidoscopism that defined Trevor Powers' earlier collections. He worked on the record with Ali Chant, who co-produced Perfume Genius’ similarly glammed-up and streamlined third album Too Bright.

Savage Hills Ballroom

Youth Lagoon's first two albums felt introspective at the time: Trevor Powers mused about the posters in his childhood bedroom, his first "it's not you, it's me," and driving his parents' car in a meek mewl that come off as conversational rather than performative. He favored post-production tricks that made him either sound trapped in a well or a bouncy castle, but he always sounded alone, and the music bore none of the visceral signifiers of rock. But he'd likely call his previous work "insular" now, created at a point when he was lucky enough to talk about love, death, and the societal contract as abstractions and avoid dealing with the real shit going on inside of him. After the release of Wondrous Bughouse, Powers cancelled a run of tour dates after the drowning of a close friend. Up to this point, Powers already seemed like a guy who'd bruise from a stiff wind; Savage Hills Ballroom has him feeling everything with even greater sensitivity.
This is first time we can hear what Powers actually sounds like—the piercing clarity of Savage Hills Ballroom has to be a reaction to the muffled bedroom ambience and warped kaleidoscopism that respectively defined The Year of Hibernation and Wondrous Bughouse. And the most immediate revelation is just how aggressive his vocals are. When clouded by reverb and dozens of flange effects, Powers resembled bemused warblers like Dean Wareham and Wayne Coyne. "Officer Telephone" and "The Knower" present Youth Lagoon as a freak-folk torchbearer gone digital, Powers adopting the keening, incantatory tones of Joanna Newsom or Devendra Banhart (and even a melodic glimpse of Tori Amos' "Crucify" on "Free Me"), though without the same kind of supernatural presence.
Powers still sounds barely a third of his 26 years ("we're all babies born too soon," he yelps), but it works in the context of his angriest music, since most toddlers don't know much about restraint either when they first discover the world pushing back against them. With the assistance of Ali Chant, who worked on Perfume Genius' similarly glammed-up and streamlined third album Too Bright, Powers equips himself with the instruments of war—Savage Hills Ballroom is full of layered drums, atonal noise, and horn sections used for both melodic counterpoint and blunt force. Even when the loping keyboards of "Highway Patrol Stun Gun" and "Rotten Human" recall Powers' standard operating procedure, the songs are kinetic, obsessed with forward motion and melodic precision—aspects that are completely new to Youth Lagoon.
Savage Hills Ballroom is also the first time we can hear what Powers actually has to say, and that's by far the greatest risk on a record that's already attempting to redefine Youth Lagoon. Powers shows an admirable willingness to engage with broader societal issues, though the accusatory tone of "Rotten Human", "The Knower", and "Again" open him up to scrutiny the often banal commentary can't withstand: "the clones, they've always said to stay in line," "so we take a pill and trust the doctor's lie," "television soundtrack drones," using "computer" as a verb. "Through aisles of cans you walk/ 'Cause you'd rather spend than grow a crop," he spits on "Again"; there's a possibility he's critiquing his own obsessive habits here, but he eventually shifts to the plural first person and becomes the guy on your Facebook feed posting #hottakes about GMOs.
While Savage Hills Ballroom awkwardly stretches to make universal points from Powers' personal distaste, his personal heartache results in the most truly resonant moments. Tucked within the civic-minded back half, the exceptional "Kerry" is a dramatic elegy to Powers' uncle, holed up in Vegas, on the run from the law and addicted to crack cocaine. Meanwhile, "Officer Telephone" finds Powers in a heightened sense of shock while mourning, the "terrible tone" of ambulance sirens reminding him of a time when they were too late to help. Both of these songs match the devastating emotional impact of "July" and "Dropla" while accessing a darkness he couldn't address directly on The Year of Hibernation or Wondrous Bughouse ("I've felt heaviness creep since I turned 8 years old"). Regardless of the subject matter or the production or the arrangements, the most truly self-searching Youth Lagoon album has Powers realizing he perhaps knew his position of strength all along—the inner child set adrift in the adult world, left to figure it out on his own.


The veteran rapper’s 29-track, 112-minute album is a bloated attempt to remind everyone he’s a great MC, flitting between styles without rendering any of them memorable.

Drillmatic Heart vs. Mind

Riffing off another artist’s work to make your own is a tried-and-true cure for writer’s block. But while such exercises often serve as a jumping-off point, on The Game’s new album Drillmatic Heart vs. Mind they’re the endgame—resulting in a nostalgia trip with little substance, the rap version of the Stranger Things aesthetic. Game has long approached his place in hip-hop with a mix of reverence and entitlement; the hook on the title track of his 2005 major label debut The Documentary is literally just his list of the greatest records of all time, his own included. He may truly believe that he’s among hip-hop’s elite MCs, but his career in the two decades since has been defined by his inability to accept the fact that few would agree.
The result is Drillmatic, an exhausting campaign for GOAT status that finds the Compton rapper doing his best to out-rap his guest features while using their own style, à la the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Notorious Thugs.” The problem for Game is that this is extremely difficult to do—Biggie was one of the most talented rappers to ever pick up a mic, and even he tried this only once on Life After Death. The Game is less talented, and his experiments with different styles often prove disastrous. He whiffs on attempts to ape Cam’ron’s forceful enunciation (“K.I.L.L.A.S.”), Pusha T’s restrained Southern mafioso flow (“No Man Falls”), and the rollercoaster rhythm of Fivio Foreign’s Brooklyn drill delivery. It’s a daring move that only the most skilled performers should even attempt; Game takes shot after shot on Drillmatic without ever really coming close to succeeding.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of these “tributes” is that Game has good taste; it’s just that the creative elements and wordplay he contributes are often so corny they scan as parody. “Money Cash Clothes,” his flip of a Jay-Z and DMX ’90s synth-heavy club hit, quickly descends into something spiritually aligned with Jersey Shore. On “Chrome Slugs & Harmony,” his awkward attempts to mimic Bone Thugs-n-Harmony’s Cleveland G-Funk are almost as bad as his play on their name. Even when his choices are aesthetically pleasing—the “Rump Shaker” horns (“La La Land”), the Janet Jackson interpolation (“Universal Love”), a snippet of the late Prodigy’s intro to Mobb Deep’s “Quiet Storm” (“What We Not Gon’ Do”)—they fail to grow into something new, feeling more like Easter eggs than inspiration.
The 10-minute Eminem diss “The Black Slim Shady” takes the mimicry to another level. Game goes beyond merely mocking the white rapper’s voice, delivery, and complexion, writing himself into the Marshall Mathers Cinematic Universe: He kidnaps the brother of Eminem’s infamous “Stan”; murders (and eats) Dr. Dre; and name-drops Em’s childhood bully D’Angelo Bailey, his ex-wife Kim, and that cluttered closet. He makes desperate attempts to sound as deranged as the white Slim Shady, making for some truly smooth-brained one-liners—“I stick my dick in your podcast,” “Wipe down my stripper pole with the hair grease from your bandana.” The Game’s reverence for Eminem is well-documented, so his claim that he’s only ever played one of his records in his car rings hollow. There’s a sad sweetness to his obsession, the kind of admiration that can only be felt by a die-hard fan.
Drillmatic still offers some poignant moments, however brief. On “Voodoo,” his remake of BOA QG and BOA Hunxho’s original, Game paints a scene of a desperate father struggling to care for his newborn as her mother battles breast cancer, imbuing an otherwise standard ode to the trap with pathos. And Kanye’s verse on “Eazy,” in which he laments the behavior of his spoiled children (“When you give them everything, they only want more/Bougie and unruly, y’all need to do some chores”) might even garner some sympathy, despite the latent narcissism and toxicity he directs toward his ex. Yet at nearly two hours of runtime across 29 songs—with almost as many features—Drillmatic is plagued by the tracklist bloat typical of the streaming era. Neither fun nor profound, the album is almost impressive in the sense of collecting so much talent to create something so mediocre.
Even at The Game’s commercial peak, he was often overshadowed by his mentor-turned-rival 50 Cent, and he’s been trying to distinguish himself ever since. It’s a little tragic: From the start of his career, the Game has been desperate to be included in the pantheon of his rap heroes, like the ones who performed at this year’s Super Bowl. Yet almost 20 years later he’s even further from that dream, his rivals having taken his place. It’s a common aspiration, to be acknowledged by those you admire. But Game has spent so much energy wanting to be the GOAT that he forgot to actually be great.


The rapturous debut from the British singer-songwriter takes adventurous pop-rock crucibles to new heights with her illusory songwriting and stunning voice.

Miss Universe

In some ways, Nilüfer Yanya’s career maps onto that of King Krule: Both young Londoners arrived with stark, bruised elegies led by their electric guitar and urchin cries; both quickly eclipsed their early promise. But where Archy Marshall swerved towards solitary murkiness, Yanya, on her debut album, has shocked her desolate confrontations into some of the most adventurous pop-rock crucibles since Mitski’s Puberty 2. They are catalysts for communal outpouring that spark with adrenaline and anxiety, a mixture of the raw and the refined, her guitar fuzz mingling with tinselly synth glitter and the bluesy disaffection of her startling voice.
Between some songs, you hear Yanya playing the part of a telephone operator for a wellness hotline she has called WWAY Health, the concept of which, across five satirical skits, eventually fizzles out. They’re quite funny the first time, but they break up what is otherwise a fantastically sequenced and always essential album. They undersell it a bit, too: Yanya’s lyrics on Miss Universe aren’t so much about looking to external forces for easy affirmation as they are figuring out the kind of intensity and hunger that she can allow herself to feel as a young woman: “Got to learn/Got to realize what this means/Got to earn/Got to decide who to please,” she sings on “Angels,” her waltzing guitar gaining intensity before the pressure gauge blows.
Yanya writes gorgeously about the seduction of sensation, no matter its side effects: “Deep underwater I breathe/Let me soak/Chasing the shades of the love that we made, of the love that we broke,” she sings on “Baby Blu,” a cloudy meditation that builds into subtly euphoric gospel house. On “Tears,” if someone doesn’t hold her back, she’ll be “lying in a pool of someone else’s blood.” She’s “getting high just from the heat” in “Heat Rises,” singing in snatched, gasped phrases over a fizzing drum machine, the effect as decadent yet panic-ridden as an anxiety attack in a sauna. Her songwriting is a textural palace of wonders.
Where Yanya’s lyrics portray her as someone prone to wallowing in forbidden emotions, her arrangements are more circumspect, toying impeccably with resistance and release. “In Your Head” lurches between gimlet-eyed composure and cataclysmic panic. She never uses climaxes as a musical surrogate for emotion. A few tracks towards the end echo the spaciousness of Yanya’s early material and shape the album’s enveloping dynamic as a whole. Others, like “Safety Net,” exude a simmering sadness built from nimble drum machines and seamless pop melody, or, like “Paradise,” buoy Yanya’s worries with easygoing saxophone motifs courtesy of her improbably named sidekick, Jazzi Bobbi.
Nothing controls the mood of Miss Universe like Yanya herself. She is adept with both a wounded lament and a desperate falsetto. Sometimes she whips between the two with exhilarating yelps, as if someone yanked a ripcord inside her lungs. In powerful moments, her voice is full of hunger; in desperate moments, that hunger empties out. “I’m still wired to want these things,” Yanya sings sullenly on the last song, the relatively unadorned “Heavyweight Champion of the Year,” slashing out choppy chords that tease one final cathartic payoff. Yanya’s songs reflect a woman who’s uncertain of how much of herself to reveal to the world. That is both the allure of Miss Universe and what augurs even brighter things to come.


Snail Mail’s striking debut album is emotionally wise, musically clear, and encompasses the once and future sound of indie rock.

Lush

Sincerity is Lindsey Jordan’s superpower. The moody guitar confessionals she creates as Snail Mail contend with suburban teenage ennui—the angst of feeling like you’re the only person who’s truly alive in a dulled world. But unlike so many other disillusioned 18-year-olds with a Fender and a microphone, Jordan does not whine or wallow; she transcends. She articulates the self-conscious shame of youth with a startling clarity, but she also knows that these things too will pass. Her sorrowful pleas—of disappointment, of confusion, of unrequited queer love—often turn into triumphs upon hitting open air. When she claims “I’ll never love anyone else” on her debut album, Lush, she is not moping—she sounds psyched, turning the sad sentiment into a singalong, as a rush of bass, drums, and jangling chords raise her up high.
With Lush, Jordan earns her place as a leader in the next generation of indie rock, the ones who are keeping the genre’s honorable ideals alight while continuing to expand its purview beyond straight white dudes. She was born in June 1999, the same month Napster started, and by the time she was in her early teens, the once-sturdy walls that separated mainstream and underground music were all but rubble. So while Jordan is indebted to the ethos of ’90s indie rock, she bends it to her will and her moment. There are echoes of early Liz Phair in Lush’s stark guitars and its tightrope walk between despair and enlightenment, but there are also flashes of the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg at his most wrung-out, and Paramore’s Hayley Williams crinkled emo soulfulness, and Fiona Apple’s ferocity, and Taylor Swift’s savvy heartache, and the solemn quietude of Frank Ocean’s Blonde. Jordan doesn’t make a big show of her eclecticism on the album—on its face, it is a collection of slow and mid-tempo guitar rock songs—but there are details that separate it from the tried-and-true indie of yesteryear, that make it feel born into her era.
For one, Lush lives up to its name; “I never wanted to make a lo-fi record,” Jordan recently said. All 10 songs go down clean, every note is heard, every part delivered with both verve and poise. As a classically trained guitarist who began playing at age 5, Jordan colors many tracks with layers of pleasingly sour chords kissed by reverb, her clean tone in concert with her emotional transparency. Her guitar work helps Lush achieve a sidewinding spell that invites obsessive listening. It also opens up plenty of space for her bandmates to add unfussy accompaniment and, most importantly, for her voice to ring out unencumbered. Whereas her vocals were buried on 2016’s Habit EP, they are gloriously exposed on Lush, and we really hear Lindsey Jordan for the first time.
As a singer, she embodies the chaotic changes that teenagers quickly cycle through in a given month, day, minute. She is bored. She is defeated. She is bratty. She is jubilant. She is blunt. She is elliptical. These shifts occur from song to song, but also from line to line, or even word to word. On “Pristine,” she reels off lines of devoted romantic poetry before immediately dismissing them with a tossed-off “anyways,” pumping up and deflating her own crush in a single breath. Throughout the record, each line is given its own story. Every vocal feels deeply considered and felt, yet nothing is over-rehearsed. She knows precisely when to dial in and when to dial back, when to fully commit to her longing and when to step back and shake her head at it.
There’s a ragged grit to Jordan’s voice, and she can make it growl or tame it into a rasping lilt in order to make her point. “Heat Wave” begins warily, with Jordan pining in yesterday’s clothes, her voice a groggy croak. As the song picks up pace, it sounds like she’s gaining confidence with each verse as she considers a particular flagging relationship. Finally, after an invigorating guitar spasm, she snaps out of her funk, sets her feet square on the ground, and lets it rip: “I’m not into sometimes,” she decides, her throat full, her delivery resolute. The song is an entire Greta Gerwig coming-of-age film in about five minutes.
Several of the most disarming moments on Lush come in the form of a question: “Do you love me?” “Don’t you like me for me?” “Who’s your type of girl?” “What could ever be enough?” “Did things work out for you?” These are intimate appeals, the kind that often come with watery eyes and trembling chins. But when Jordan sings them, it’s as if she’s staring directly at the person in question, commanding in her vulnerability. This attitude defines Lush, and Jordan turns it into a mantra on “Full Control.” The song finds her moving past the bullshit of another failed romance, done with waiting for someone to love her back. The strident verses coalesce into the album’s most cleansing hook: “I’m in full control/I’m not lost,” she attests, her voice soaring. “Even when it’s love/Even when it’s not.” Lindsey Jordan does not have all the answers. But, in music and life, she knows what she wants, and she’s unafraid to ask for more.


On a new collection of recordings stowed away since the 1980s, the iconic color photographer extends his knack for defamiliarizing the mundane to synthesizers and pop standards.

Musik

There’s a William Eggleston photograph that I think of every time I travel; as memorable and satisfying as the hook of a pop song, it’s been embedded in my subconscious since the moment I first saw it. Eggleston, a Memphis-born photographer known for his color-saturated work, took the photo, called “Untitled (Glass in Airplane),” sometime between 1965 and 1974. It depicts a drink on the tray table of an airplane seat—rum and coke, by the looks of it. What makes the photo spectacular is the play of color and texture: the atmospheric sunshine illuminating the nubby fabric seat back, the ruby liquid in the glass, the graceful hand holding the straw.
In all its gratuitous visual pleasure, “Untitled (Glass in Airplane)” looks almost like an advertisement. But there’s a hint of something not quite right just beneath the glossy surface of the image. Something vulgar, strained—a little louche, or unhinged. The image is too knowing to register entirely as kitsch. It draws you in only to undercut your desire; the glistening colors are like the shine on a poisoned apple. Eggleston suggests that the objects of our desire might not be so desirable after all.
The casually cryptic photograph also came to mind while listening to the 78-year-old artist’s rather difficult first album, Musik, a highly unexpected compilation of instrumental synthesizer compositions. Eggleston recorded it in the 1980s on a Korg OW/1 FD Pro, stored the files on floppy discs, and is only releasing them now, with the label Secretly Canadian. Mostly meandering improvisations, the 13 tracks combine luscious, slippery textures with discordant melodies, moving without going anywhere, fighting easy resolution with every turn. The style makes sense: As the photographer famously said of his visual work, “I am at war with the obvious.”
Eggleston has played the piano since his childhood in Mississippi, and he has said that music is his “first calling,” even before visual art. It’s easy to find videos of him plinking away somewhat ostentatiously on grand pianos at openings for his own museum shows in Sweden and Tokyo. A longtime resident of Tennessee, he also befriended Big Star, providing the cover for their 1974 album Radio City. Still, Eggleston was canonized not for music but his pioneering color photography, which helped legitimize the genre at a time when it was still anathema to the art world.
In the 1970s, the vast majority of photographs printed in color were ads; art photography was always in respectable monochrome. Instead, Eggleston took snapshots that bordered on the mundane (critics called them “perfectly boring”) except for their saturated, almost sickly palettes. His iconic 1969 photo of a tricycle in Memphis settles like a bruise.
Like the ads that his photos resembled, Eggleston’s musical compositions can seem cloying or tasteless. The synths are unabashedly cheesy. “Untitled Improvisation DCC 02.9” (named presumably for the file format, digital compact cassette) is carnivalesque, while “Untitled Improvisation DCC 02.25 3-01” brings to mind the bomp-bomp-bomp theme of underground “Super Mario” levels. The pieces have classical-music pretensions—the Germanic spelling of the title apparently references Bach—but the highbrow was never Eggleston’s strong suit.
Instead, the artist excels at ambiguity. “Untitled Piano Improvisation FD 6.9” is by far the longest track, at 16 minutes of wandering, and its piano sound is the most naturalistic. You wait for the composition to cohere and it doesn’t, repeatedly flouting expectations, dipping into melodies and then dissolving them, evoking nostalgia without embodying it. It induces a Brian Eno-ish ambient stupor, like Music for Airports run through a saloon player piano.
Eggleston includes two standards on the album: Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Tit Willow,” from the orientalist musical “The Mikado,” and “On the Street Where You Live,” by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner. In both, the familiar becomes strange, in part due to the synths but also Eggleston’s ponderous hand. There’s no telling where these well-worn songs will go next. In this sense, the album—as much a kind of private sketchbook as anything—is curiously in keeping with his photographs. Even in music, he rebels against the obvious.


Erin Birgy’s delightfully freaky sixth album is dense but full of whimsy and romance, pulling in strains of folk, jazz, and chamber pop to marvel at all the odd little wonders of the world.

Life, and Another

In Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno, the actress and performance artist used costumes and chintzy set pieces to explain how insects have sex. The series, which debuted in 2008, consists of short videos wherein Rossellini does things like dress up in a praying mantis costume and talk about how, when the male mantis mates with a female, the female mantis will bite its head off. In another clip, titled “Whale,” she explains the difficulties of reproducing when you live mostly underwater and are the world’s largest mammal. Watching Rosselini hop around in little costumes explaining the bird and the bees is endearing and goofy, but it also has more profound effects. It evokes a sense of childlike wonder, reminding us that learning is a lifelong process and can open the world beyond our day-to-day quotidian drudgery. Erin Birgy assumes a similar vantage point on her excellent sixth album as Mega Bog, Life, and Another. It is a record that is whimsical and sensual; weird and romantic.
Over the past decade, Birgy has written from the perspective of aliens, animals, and three-eyed humanoids. The sonic texture of her music behaves like these strange creatures. As a composer and arranger, there’s room for improvisation in her music, but it all feels purposeful and intricate. Her work is loaded with playful juxtapositions. She writes arrangements that are jazz-oriented, but not jazz. She writes pop songs if you consider Stereolab to be a pop group. She makes punk music if you are the kind of person who moshes to the Lounge Lizards. Her work is slinky and decadent, like a vintage mink stole draped over a fainting couch. It’s roughly of the same cerebral terroir as Cate Le Bon or Meg Remy’s project as U.S. Girls. Life, and Another is compositionally dense without feeling overwritten or pretentious. Birgy’s music is joyful. Her delivery is that of some kind of palm reader who has been around the metaphorical block of life a few times.
Life, and Another exists in a terrestrial zone. The record takes place on Earth, if Earth were slightly freaked. These songs are an approximation of reality, imbued with magical elements: purple desert stones, dogs hovering atop glittering nimbus clouds. On the smokey “Butterfly,” blasts of guitar, saxophone, and pristine flickers of keys flutter like wings in the sky at night, turning purple to dark blue. The opening “Flower” sprawls out like a lone sunbather in the middle of the desert. Here, guitars courtesy of band members Will Segerstrom and Meg Duffy are sun-soaked, and the percussion of James Krivchenia and Andrew Dorsett clips away softly and stoically. Birgy’s voice sounds relaxed, and you can tell she is having fun: “You think you’re funny,” she sing-speaks like she has a big grin on her face “I don’t get it!”
As a lyricist, Birgy doesn’t take herself too seriously, but she’s not unserious either. She’s a very evocative and very funny writer, and her songs are marked by poignant, perfect little images. On “Obsidian Lizard,” she muses about a tiny blue lizard, a girl named Mallory, and a mystical entity by the name of Debbie Dubai. Her words come in like snippets of conversations, she favors the dreamy, mercurial, and poetic. “The big cat rips at the meat between the worlds,” she sings as if she were gazing into a crystal ball. The quartz-like “Before a Black Tea,” shares lineage with the kind of jazz-oriented pop of a band like the Rotary Connection or Burt Bacharach. It sounds rooted in the ’60s without feeling overinvested in sounding at all retro or being any kind of pastiche of the past. There are blips of free jazz, and warm-toned percussion. Birgy sings about bumping beetles into jars as a guitar solo brightens the sky; somewhere in the background, someone mimics the meow of a cat and the call of a bird. Listening to her music can feel like a trip to an all-night diner where the cockroach you see on the way to the bathroom would very much like to tell you its life story.
What is really excellent about Birgy’s work is her emotional registry. “Maybe You Died,” is the record’s starkest and most somber moment. On it, visions of Coach leather bags, chewing gum, coffee stains, and bad dreams are enough to conjure the sensation of soured feelings and puffy red eyes. But it’s the end of the song that feels the most painful. When Birgy sings the line “He didn’t die for me/Or anybody,” I thought about the absurdity of what it means to literally be dead. How often is it that you sit down and listen to a weird pop record with saxophones on it, and leave thinking about how bizarre it is to not exist anymore, at least not in the physical form while also being reminded at the same time of how wonderful it can be to be alive? There is tension present in how she communicates the basic functions of living and breathing and moving through the world. She’s funny and messy and writes like the dreamiest kid on the playground and also the wisest old man. It’s kind of like in those Rossellini videos: Birgy makes it seem like even the tiniest protean critter is a marvelous sight to behold.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Captain Beefheart’s 1969 masterpiece set an unmatched standard for avant-rock. This new reissue from Third Man puts it back in print on vinyl.

Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band: Trout Mask Replica

Trout Mask Replica

Though it’s hard to tell by listening, the first two albums by Captain Beefheart (aka Don Van Vliet) found him creatively frustrated. Safe as Milk from 1967 and Strictly Personal from the following year were inventive blues-rock records, but Beefheart had bigger ambitions. At that point, his group the Magic Band were a mostly democratic collective, and since Beefheart had less musical expertise than his colleagues, his odder suggestions were vetoed as too unconventional. “That really pissed him off,” said bassist Gary Marker. “[Because] he had all these ideas in his head and he had no way of getting them across to people.”
To gain the control he needed to express his vision, Beefheart morphed the Magic Band into a kind of musical cult. In mid-1968, he replaced some members of the group with younger, more impressionable players (guitarist Bill Harkleroad and bassist Mark Boston were each just 19), gave everyone a nickname to match his own, and holed up with them in a house on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The sessions in the house have since become a crucial part of rock legend, the subject of contradictory stories and much myth-making. By many accounts, Beefheart imposed weird lifestyle rules and played mind games that bordered on brainwashing. Some claim the musicians couldn’t leave the premises save for a weekly grocery trip, and drummer John “Drumbo” French said he spent one month eating only a cup of soybeans every day.
Beefheart put a piano in the house—despite not knowing how to play it—and banged out ideas, which French transcribed and assembled into tunes. The resulting pieces were more like puzzles than songs, giving different instruments conflicting time signatures and varying part lengths that had to somehow meet at specific points. French compared it to building a solid wall with bricks of unequal size. This unorthodox complexity forced the Magic Band to rehearse 12 hours or more a day, usually without Beefheart. Often they would sleep right where they had just practiced, and immediately continue upon waking.
After six months of this bunkered mania, the Magic Band entered a studio with Beefheart’s friend Frank Zappa, who “produced” them by staying out of the way. Riding the adrenaline of their intense woodshedding, the group recorded 20 songs in less than six hours. Beefheart added vocals separately, syncing uncannily with the music despite rarely having rehearsed with the band and eschewing headphones during takes. In less than a week, after adding two tracks from an earlier session and a few more made at the group’s house, Trout Mask Replica was born. As Third Man’s new reissue makes clear, this 28-song double album might be the strangest record in major-label rock history. Beefheart made more accessible music before and after, but his most difficult work is still his most famous, defining his musical legacy and the sound of the Magic Band for going on five decades.
Its enduring place in the canon is due in part to the allure of Trout Mask Replica’s singular logic. Like life in a cult, the music seems crazy to an outside observer but makes perfect sense once you’re inside. In a 1993 BBC documentary, “The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening said it took him just seven listens to go from hating the album to deciding it was the greatest of all time. Few records lend themselves to such a transformation, where they eventually click into place while still sounding so thrillingly wrong. The rules that Trout Mask Replica shattered haven’t been reassembled in quite this way by anyone since. After all, capturing its sound would mean somehow retracing the steps from Beefheart’s enigmatic brain to French’s devout hands to the Magic Band’s inhuman toil.
The thrill of Trout Mask Replica also lies in the boggling assemblage of stylistic and thematic strands. There are shards of rock and blues in the band’s deconstructed grooves; free jazz in Beefheart’s primitive, Ornette Coleman-inspired saxophone playing; literary surrealism in his obscure yet oddly resonant lyrics; outsider folk in his growled a capella songs; and postmodern collage in the album’s diverse sound sources, which include field recordings, spoken skits, studio banter, and even vocals recorded over the phone. Though the songs seem to reject convention, there are references to musical history scattered throughout Trout Mask Replica, from snippets of melody borrowed from traditional tunes to lyrical quotes like Beefheart’s chant of “Come out to show them” in “Moonlight in Vermont,” taken from Steve Reich’s tape experiment from two years earlier. Though Beefheart’s lyrics were mostly oblique conundrums, he could also be bluntly topical, singing boldly about the Holocaust and the Vietnam War.
And though Beefheart could be pathologically controlling with his bandmates, he was surprisingly open to chance and accident throughout Trout Mask Replica. He left in the sounds of the tape player pausing in his acapella songs, inserted recordings of himself wandering the weeds into others, included mistakes and under-breath commentary in pre-song skits, and created one spontaneous track, “The Blimp,” by having guitarist Jeff “Antennae Jimmy Semens” Cotton call Zappa and read him a poem, which Zappa recorded while his own band, the Mothers of Invention, played in the background.
Perhaps most surprising is how catchy Trout Mask Replica’s jagged songs turn out to be. Some even have verses and choruses, albeit filtered through the band’s sonic contradictions and Beefheart’s skewed timing. The rushing climaxes of “Ella Guru,” the building swing of “Pachuco Cadaver,” and the swaying blues of “She’s Too Much for My Mirror” are all earworm inducers, as their multiple sonic elements coagulate into melody, like filaments spastically aligned by a magnet.
Over five decades, Trout Mask Replica has proven incredibly durable, still sounding as bracing and radical as any rock music since. That’s even clearer in this remaster, sourced not from the decayed original masters but from less-worn backups. But was the music worth what Beefheart put the Magic Band through? French and Harkleroad have both said that though they wouldn’t want to endure it all again, they were thrilled to have created such a landmark. They certainly deserve more credit than they got from Beefheart, who often claimed to be the sole songwriter (he even left French off the original album credits completely, apparently as punishment for leaving the band before it was released). But luckily each member’s vital contribution is loud and clear in every note, beat, and weird and wonderful turn. Captain Beefheart might have led this cult, but Trout Mask Replica is the work of a collective—a serendipitous line of charged neurons that wired together to make something truly magical.


The St. Louis, Mo., experimental composer Joseph Raglani approaches his sound like both a musician and a DJ. His newest offers a hectic mix where synths ripple in overlapping circles, melodies dive into longer tones, beats morph, and static melts.

Raglani: Real Colors of the Physical World

Real Colors of the Physical World

There's so much happening on Real Colors of the Physical World that absorbing it all might be impossible. In Joseph Raglani's hectic mix, synths ripple in overlapping circles, melodies dive into longer tones, beats morph from pin pricks into plunges, and churning static melts into what sounds like a funk band jamming underwater. His hyperactive sound doesn't just encourage repeat listens-- it makes you wonder if you could ever hear it the same way twice.
Making music sound busy isn't unique, especially when it's electronic; nor is it a guarantee of quality. But even though Raglani's approach has precedents, his knack for mixing and matching sounds, through wavy dissolves, liquefied cuts, and coursing turns, is distinct. In a sense, he's equal parts musician and DJ-- attentive enough to sonic detail that he avoids mere pastiche, but restless enough that his insistence on adding new ideas injects everything with constant energy.
Part of why Real Colors feels so busy is that its first two tracks last over 20 minutes each, and they unfurl like eventful journeys. Apparently portions were designed separately, since the track list includes parenthetical subtitles. Maybe if Raglani had added gaps of silence in between, Real Colors would be easier to digest-- but it wouldn't be as interesting, or as enjoyable. Because as fascinating as the individual passages are, the fissions between them are even more striking.
Examples abound. I'm partial to a section early in opener "Fog of Interruption" where a blasting synth crumbles into distant transmissions, then rises from the dead in the form of shiny, laser-like reflections. Even better is a passage in the following track, "Terrain of Antiquity", wherein a chaotic mass of lighting-bolt synths slowly turns into a vocoder-like melody that recalls the Residents at their most beatific.
There are echoes of other antecedents throughout, particularly the strain of German experimentation known as K**osmiche Musik. But where Raglani's last widely-distributed release, 2008's Of Sirens Born, felt like a synthesis of his influences, Real Colors bears his own stamp more clearly. That comes across most in its endless pulse, which eternally bubbles and often threatens to burst. His loops feel solid enough to last forever, but never settled or relaxed. Instead, Raglani is always as interested in what his sounds could do next as what they're currently doing.
The final two tracks on Real Colors are significantly shorter-- each lasts just a bit over five minutes-- and less varied than the first two. Where their predecessors were like aural colleges, these pieces are more conventionally song-like. Each begins with an arpeggiated loop that passes through modifications in scale and volume, creating a kind of verse-chorus pattern. "The Exploded View" in particular is a bona-fide song, with haunting vocals that follow the synths through cycles of tension and release.
Despite the shift toward contained structure, Raglani makes the second half of the album as restless as its first. Perhaps this is a cleverly-designed after-effect-- once you're immersed in his busy environment, even simple synths can sound ripe with potential. Maybe it's the basic urgency he gives his loops, a skill he's recently honed with Mike Pollard in the excellent duo Bryter Layter. Whatever the reason, Real Colors of the Physical World demonstrates the beguiling versatility of Joseph Raglani's sound-crafting skills.


The Texas artist’s second album contains sparks of brilliance, but its overreliance on generic flex raps feels stale and tedious.

Texas Boy

On paper, Texas rapper Mike Dimes has the resume of a rising star your teenage cousin won’t stop raving about. A year ago, the former basketball player was balancing a rap career with college, pursuing a degree in business management. But he also recently landed a TikTok hit and co-signs from JID and Joey Bada$$, a product of his cold delivery, versatile flows, and talent for spitting over sedated boom-bap and subwoofer-shredding beats. Last year’s debut album In Dimes We Trust was high-octane, but occasionally Dimes would slip into generic flexing that caused his words to get drowned out by the beats. That downward trend continues on his sophomore album Texas Boy, which has all the color and personality of a graphic tee that was left in the dryer for too long.
Dimes is still a technically competent rapper. His style blends the groove and bounce of his home state with the laidback confidence of New York, creating pockets for his clear monotone to dip into. Vocally, it’s hard to tell if he’s too cool for this world or just masking a deeper pain. After the hearty track "INTRO," which features Houston legend and Chopstars founder OG Ron C, producers Spliff Sinatra and Ben10k bring deep bass licks and drums to “WHISKEY AND WEED,” making inspired connections between different generations of Texas rap. Dimes skips across the track while reflecting on making his family proud: “They counted me out/Shout out to momma and poppa, I made me a M in the house/I don’t think they can get to me now.”
But this reflective mode only shows up in fits and starts, which would be fine if so much of Texas Boy wasn’t obsessed with bland, empty stunting. Flex rap is entertaining because it’s voyeuristic and specific; take Tyler, the Creator bragging about his kelly green BMW and canary diamonds on “DOGTOOTH,” or Megan Thee Stallion casually name-dropping her Nike deal after talking about running shit on “Megan’s Piano.” Dimes is desperate to flaunt his ends any way he can, but he is missing the flavor and magnetism that makes it compelling. “I just spilt my cup, uh, all on my kicks/Designer on cuffs, that’s all on my bitch,” he says on “ARSENAL,” leaving out the drink and the designer brands in the process. Occasionally, a stray detail will help a line pop, like when he compares himself to swordsman Tomioka from the anime Demon Slayer on “UNDEFEATED,” but for the most part, the particulars play out in the most basic ways imaginable. He hooks up with women in Venice (“GREEN”) and in the backroom of chicken spot Zaxby’s (“FEELIN’ ME”). He runs up bags, counts money, and drops bands on nothing in particular. Both “KARMA” and “KISS N’ TELL” use his boring posturing to floss on faceless women; the songs would be offensive if they weren’t a snooze.
Dimes is capable of good storytelling, which only worsens the frustration. On “HATCHBACK,” he recalls times running drugs with friends “who used to bust a couple scams off of Snapchat,” putting you in the driver’s seat for its first verse. On “ALL 4 YOU,” Dimes pines for an ex who has copies to all his house keys and envelops his thoughts: “I could’ve kept you on my team, but I’m too scared of saying ‘we.’” Rap doesn’t have to be autobiographical, but these bits and pieces are more intriguing than hearing Dimes whip it like Betty Crocker for the millionth time.
The man has potential, but the music never fully connects like it should. He sounds great cutting his way through Ben10k and cdmp3’s violins and throbbing 808s on “ARSENAL” and the screeching sound effects that power “HATCHBACK” and “STRETCH,” but often lacks the perspective or charisma to rise above them. And any time he’s paired with a guest, they consistently prove just how out of his depth he is. Denzel Curry’s memeable three-word intro to his verse on “ARSENAL” (“I smell bitch!”) hits harder than Dimes’ whole 16s. On closer “OFF THE PORCH,” fellow Texans BigXthaPlug and Maxo Kream squeeze more excitement out of clever pronunciation and word games than their host does on the entire album. Dimes is working to assert himself here, but technical skill and nonchalance aren’t everything. Sometimes you need to hit the car with a fresher coat of paint.


The posthumous marketing of Nick Drake's music has been arduous and fitful, a decades-long attempt at setting right what everyone agreed went horribly wrong the first time. His new box set Tuck Box, the latest and possibly final repackaging, includes studio albums Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, and Pink Moon as well as two compilations of rarities.

Tuck Box

Nick Drake did not lead a colorful life.  Shy, abstracted, and bad with eye contact, he shuttled quietly from boarding school to prep school to Cambridge and made few friends along the way. The most rebellious act of his youth was a note politely informing his tutor he was leaving school. His musical career was a disaster, but not a funny or entertaining one—his albums were simply ignored and audiences talked obliviously through his live gigs. He moved back home, fell into a deep depression, and one night, either by accident or on purpose, took too many pills. When he died, there was almost nothing to feel good about.
This has proved a difficult predicament for the record labels charged with profiting off his legacy. The posthumous marketing of Nick Drake's music has been arduous and fitful, a decades-long attempt at setting right what everyone agreed went horribly wrong the first time. First there was 1979's overpriced Fruit Tree box, which bombed. Then came the slightly more successful 1985 best-of Heaven in a Wild Flower and 1986’s Time of No Reply,  a collection of rare and officially unreleased tracks. His cult profile rose modestly through the 90s, but it wasn’t until 2000, when “Pink Moon” famously found its way into a Cabrio commercial, that Nick Drake's fortune as a "penniless genius" finally received its uplifting footnote. Since then, there has been a flurry of release activity, all of it packaging the same tiny body of work spanning six years. Nick Drake is finally famous, but it took the record industry 40 years to figure out how to make it happen.
It's worth revisiting this dubious history while considering Tuck Box, the latest and possibly final repackaging. Alongside his three studio albums—Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, and *Pink Moon—*this boxed set includes the 2004 compilation Made to Love Magic, (itself a barely altered repackaging of Time of No Reply) as well as Family Tree, a 2007 collection of Nick Drake's home recordings with a few short, haunting songs by his mother, the folk singer and poet Molly. There is not a single second of new or unreleased music waiting for you inside this handsomely designed object, in other words; the packaging, which replicates the wooden box that Nick Drake’s mother used to send him cakes in while he was at Marlborough College, is the sole original flourish.
What Tuck Box offers, then, is simply another chance to revisit Nick Drake's short, sad story. Because Drake died in desolation and obscurity, and because his music grows more influential every year, there will never quite be a bad moment to rediscover him. His three studio albums have settled into cultural totems, albums that anyone hoping to know something about rock history buys sooner or later. Even 40-odd years later, their thumbprint remains unique, a strange and compelling mix of timeless poetic melancholy on the one hand, and cloistered, pampered schoolboy modernity on the other. They sit completely to the left of all rock music, which Drake could care less about; his version of a garage band was a group of boys at his boarding school, one of whom was the grand-nephew of John Maynard Keynes. (Their name was the Perfumed Gardeners.)
Drake was influenced instead by British folk royalty like John Martyn and Bert Jansch, or Ashley Hutchings of the Fairport Convention. When he recorded his debut, 1969’s Five Leaves Left, he must have felt, at least momentarily, that he was joining their ranks. It was Hutchings who had enthusiastically approached Drake in local pub The Roundhouse, offering to pass his information along to the legendary manager Joe Boyd. Drake's entrance into the business, at least, was effortless and auspicious, and he was joined in the Sound Techniques recording studio by a few of his personal heroes. The warm, rounded upright bass playing is from Danny Thompson, a founding member of the Pentangle. Richard Thompson plays the pearly guitar leads. Listening to “Time Has Told Me”, the first song on his debut album, is to hear to what might very well be the happiest and most fulfilling moment of Nick Drake’s professional life.
Even as a 20-year-old, Drake's vision for his music was strikingly assured. He was nervous, fumbling, and difficult to engage in conversation in the studio, but he knew what he wanted. He calmly insisted that Boyd and John Wood hire arranger Robert Kirby, a fellow student at Cambridge. Bewildered, they obeyed, and were rewarded with the breathtaking string chart for “Way to Blue”. With its clean lines and grave elegance, "Way to Blue" suggests the philosophy that would distinguish Nick Drake’s music over the years and damn it during his lifetime: in Joe Boyd’s words, it simply  “was not reaching out to you." Drake was painfully English, and showiness wasn’t really in his nature. But profundity glowed from his music.
This approach extends to his guitar playing, which was so obsessively perfect it almost escapes comprehension. You will never hear a single string buzz. It's not the sort of virtuosity that quiets a chattering crowd, but once you've attuned to the absolute silence, it quickly grows otherworldly. Even on densely packed fingerpicking runs like "Day Is Done", each note sits in the mix like a stone at the floor of a clear pond. He was a frighteningly flawless player, in a way that served to magnify his incorporeality: There is no surviving video of Nick Drake playing live or talking. He died in 1974, but his physicality is as remote to our modern imagination as Gustav Mahler's.
His concerns were similarly otherworldly and timeless, informed by a childhood of English Romantic poets. The futility of knowing the mind of another was a persistent theme in his lyrics, which looked right past people to stars, trees, eternity. “Who can know the thoughts of Mary Jane?” Drake muses. “Who can know the reason for her smile?” His music viewed human behavior and its peculiarities with quizzical detachment, even when the case study is Drake himself: “So I'll leave the ways that are making me be/ What I really don't want to be,”, he sings on "Time Has Told Me". Sizing up the enormity of this task, examining how it might be accomplished—these were not really his philosophical concerns. They overwhelmed him or they simply didn’t interest him, but either way, they came to trip him up, as they do us all.
When it was released in the fall of 1969, Five Leaves Left went unnoticed. Island Records had done it no favors. The packaging was insultingly botched; two songs—"Day Is Done” and “Way To Blue”—were switched in the tracklisting and “Three Hours” was mistakenly titled “Sundown”. But Drake was also complicit; he began his first ill-fated tour behind the faltering album, and between songs, he would tune his guitar for minutes on end to stony, uncomfortable silence. He often walked off dejected before finishing his set. He disappeared into dope smoke, a predilection that was slowly hardening into a crutch. He blew off radio sessions and interviews and slowly began retreating into himself. It was under these circumstances that he ventured back into the studio for Bryter Layter, his second full-length.
Ironically, it was initially conceived as his "up" album, a poppy rejoinder to Five Leaves Left. Five Leaves was pastoral, written in the wooded confines of Cambridge. Layter was written in London, and was meant to reflect urbanity. It did, but only from the perspective of Drake's one bloodshot eye, peering out cautiously at the world. Over woolly saxophone on "At the Chime of a City Clock", he confesses "I stay indoors beneath the floors and talk with neighbors only/ The games you play make people say you're either weird or lonely". Over the peppy horn charts of "Hazey Jane II", Drake sings lightly of how it feels "when the world it gets so crowded that you can't look out the window in the morning." The city, on Bryter Layter, is one long harsh unpleasant noise occurring outside. Nothing good or stimulating seems to happen there.
The music, however, is brighter—this is the Nick Drake you can hear reflected in latter-period Belle and Sebastian. He rehearsed with a band for the first time, including other members of Fairport Convention, and the result is the most fulsome studio recording he ever managed. Some of the arrangement decisions remain bewildering—the gospel backup vocals, jazz-comping guitar and noodling piano crowding the space on "Poor Boy" remain as jarring now as they were when the album was released. On "Fly" and "Northern Sky", Drake worked with John Cale, and you can hear a more natural dynamic in their collaboration. It's either a shame or a relief they didn't work together longer: "Fly" and "Northern Sky"are the two most affecting songs on Bryter, but it's also likely Cale introduced Drake to heroin.
On Pink Moon, Nick Drake’s final official album, there is one single overdub: the piano part drifting over the title track. The rest is just Drake, his pristine, eerily perfect playing, his mumbling, and silence. Bryter had also sold poorly and received near-zero notices—the most favorable review compared it to "Classical Gas". By now, he hardly spoke to anyone; in between takes, John Wood remembers, Drake betrayed neither pleasure or displeasure. He simply sat. Keith Morris, the photographer who shot the album's photography, remarked that working with Drake was "like working with still life." The album was recorded in two evenings, by his bewildered crew, who were uncertain of what they were even making. When Drake was finished, he dropped the manila package, almost without a word, at Island Records.
A "pink moon" is a baleful symbol, a sign of impending death or calamity. On "Pink Moon", it's "gonna get ye all." On paper, this sentiment reads like vindictive rage, but on record, it sounds contemplative. Drake's voice never conveyed palpable anger or sadness; he had a slight, gentle voice and upper-class accent, the product of his upbringing, clipped and clean, and his guitar, as always, rang out with a crystalline purity. His music is so consoling that the darkness at its heart is not always accessible. It's almost impossible to hear the emotional abandon in Pink Moon, then, without the taste of his first two albums lingering on your mouth. It's only then that the bone-dry resonance of the guitars registers as slightly alarming, and the backdrop of silence suggests both the purity of Drake's vision and also something darker: like someone who has dropped out of the world, mumbling prophecies.
On "Place to Be", he remembers his youth only as a time he "didn't see the truth hanging from the door"; now, he is "weaker than the palest blue." "Know" consists of just four lines—"You know that I love you/ You know I don't care/ You know that I see you/ You know I'm not there." It sounds like a back-and-forth between Drake and the world at large. There is a stillness to Nick Drake's music that bewitches anyone who gets near enough, and Pink Moon is its purest expression. It remains the Nick Drake record most people begin with, and for good reason.
The eleven songs on Pink Moon were not Nick Drake's final recordings, however. In the last year of his life, he would return to the studio, his fingernails long, his hair dirty, his clothes in shambles, to cut beginning tracks for what would have been his fourth album. They went poorly. Joe Boyd recalls that Drake, the flawless technician, was no longer able to play and sing at the same time, so the sessions limped agonizingly while he fumbled through guitar takes and then returned to sing, shakily. These four songs—"Black Eyed Dog", "Rider on the Wheel", "Tow the Line", and "Hanging on a Star"—are the only truly discomfiting records he ever made. On "Black Eyed Dog", he sang tremulously over some hammered harmonics about growing old and wanting to go home. Within four months, he was dead.
The most consequential material on Made to Love Magic remain these final tracks. The sundry unreleased tracks, such as the hallucinatory “Clothes of Sand” and the odd, jaunty “Mayfair", are interesting but inessential. The rest of the album is the usual posthumous footnotes tumble: A version of "River Man" recorded when Drake was still at college; a scrapped version of "Three Days" from the tentative early sessions of Five Leaves Left; an early alternate take of "Thoughts of Mary Jane", with distracted, noodly lead guitar playing from Richard Thompson. There are a handful of performances from Drake's first-ever public concert, the so-called "work tape" from his college days. They don't do much to enrich the Nick Drake story.
Family Tree, though, is odder and more interesting. The album, which was only released in 2007, compiles all the known existing home recordings of Nick Drake—music he recorded at his parents' house for fun or to kill time; rehearsals of Mozart trios with his aunt and uncle (he played clarinet). The 28 tracks consist largely of covers and traditionals, including a run through "All My Trials", sung with his sister Gabrielle.
Family Tree doesn’t give the world any classic lost Nick Drake music, but it does give the sensation, achieved with a little effort, of what it might have been like to sit in the Drakes' parlor in Far Leys. You can hear the actual clink of actual tea cups in the background of his cover of Bob Dylan's "Tomorrow Is a Long Time". You get to hear Nick Drake messing about on guitar, which sounds better than anyone else's. His version of "Cocaine Blues" is enjoyable  both because it's a looser and bluesier Nick Drake than we're used to, and also because of his pronunciation of "cocaine," which suggests a side of finger sandwiches.
Family Tree also includes two of his mother's haunting, intriguingly wayward songs. "Poor Mum" makes for an odd companion with her son's "Poor Boy"; "Joy as it flies cannot be caught", she sings, searchingly, her voice climbing into a breath-catching question mark. There is an unmistakable hint of the fatalism that trailed her son's music in these recordings, and in "Do You Ever Remember", she sings lines that could lead directly into "Time Has Told Me": "Time was ever a vagabond/ Time was always a thief/ Time can steal away happiness/ But time can take away grief."
This was Nick Drake's existential dilemma: He would rather ponder time than observe the present, would sooner gaze into the sea than engage with the people around him. School friends recall conversations about spirits and "the little people" as the only times they saw him animated. The rage he directed at his producer Joe Boyd for his failed career on "Hanging on a Star" ("Why leave me hanging on a star/ When you deem me so high"?) was in part the sound of someone realizing that their worldly woes have slowly blotted out their view of the stars, perhaps forever. "I could have been a signpost, could've been a clock," he mused on "One of These Things First"; this is the sentiment of someone who barely assented to the burdens of being a person. For such a soul, there can never be such a thing as a career. There can only be a legacy.