The proper, widescreen debut from Quavo is filled with passable, professional songs that pale when compared to nearly any full-length Migos record.

QUAVO HUNCHO

This was always inevitable. The laws of physics and commerce and Spotify guaranteed, from the moment they vaulted into stardom, that the Migos would try to conquer the world as solo artists. From the jump, Quavo was thumbed as the breakout star. His voice was (and is) lighter and more slippery than Offset’s or Takeoff’s, and he seemed better-suited for the rap/R&B hybrid songs that have dominated the charts for much of this decade.
The truth is that Quavo’s early lurches into solo work were uneven at best. He laced 2 Chainz and Gucci Mane’s excellent 2017 track “Good Drank” with a very good hook and turned in a superb verse for Travis Scott and Young Thug’s “Pick Up the Phone,” and has also been grafted onto sure bets by Post Malone, Lil Yachty, and DJ Khaled. But his collaborative album with Scott last year was a quickly-forgotten dud, and his true solo efforts have so far have been merely fine, tepid, there.
QUAVO HUNCHO, the proper, widescreen debut, sees Quavo trying to shoulder long stretches of a 66-minute record by himself. What the experiment yields are passable, professional songs that are barely moving and pale when compared to nearly any full-length Migos record, including this year’s Culture II—which, flab aside, was a showcase for the trio’s interplay and 2+2=5 alchemy. By contrast, QUAVO HUNCHO is flat and nearly anonymous.
There are a couple of deeply bizarre successes, though. “FUCK 12” calls on Offset (and Malcolm X, and a disembodied voice shouting lyrics from Boosie’s “Set It Off”) for a woozy, hallucinatory anti-police anthem. The following song, “LOSE IT,” features yet another star turn from Lil Baby, and “CHAMPAGNE ROS´´É makes excellent use of Cardi B and, quizzically, Madonna. But the collaborations on QUAVO HUNCHO are, almost uniformly, stronger than the tracks without guests. Quavo’s voice works best as a foil for others, and the competition seems to bring out the best in his writing: On the Drake duet “FLIP THE SWITCH,” Quavo gives his take on the Juvenile “Ha” flow, making for one of the album’s more interesting passages.
The production comes from a smattering of stars and near-stars in the Migos extended universe: Dun Deal, Murda Beatz, Buddah Bless, Wheezy, Tay Keith, WondaGurl, etc. It’s darker and muddier, with less snap or playfulness than can be found on either Culture installment. In a way, this is good: The grim feel is a welcome counterpoint to Quavo’s voice, which tends to waffle and warble rather than force the listener to lock in and engage with it. Unfortunately, amid the competent-if-indistinct beats are a few inexplicable clunkers. The worst offense is the Pharrell production “GO ALL THE WAY,” which is so digitally glitzy that it sounds like a video game where the final boss is a teenager who buys and resells Supreme to pay for more Supreme.
At least QUAVO HUNCHO is not a complete trainwreck—it works fine as a stopgap or as background music. It sounds like license-free 2010s trap, for which there always seems to be a market. But it is so ordinary, so uniquely uninspiring that it makes it difficult to imagine a solo work from Quavo that would truly grip our attention (or our club nights or car stereos). The gap in quality between the collaborations included here and the solo songs is a gulf. The interplay of voices is sorely missed, as are the more consistently engaging pens that Takeoff and Offset provide. At least the cover art is great.


Confessional singer-songwriter abandons the personal tragedies that inspired his debut in favor of an astoundingly original twist on the loner-folk template.

Pope Killdragon

Timothy Showalter has a beard, an acoustic guitar, and a heartbreaking backstory-- on the surface, the confessional singer-songwriter start-up kit. But he'd prefer not to talk about his heavy history even if it would make you root for him. For one thing, he'd rather not relive some of the personal tragedy (a bad breakup, a house fire) that inspired his debut, Leave Ruin. But it also would obscure the otherworldly mythology he creates on Pope Killdragon, an astoundingly original twist on the loner-folk template.
He begins the mesmerizing "Sterling" like he's keeping an especially heavy secret, but Showalter is merely an observer and a confused one at that. If his lyrics are occasionally too loopy to pin down what it's "about," they're perfectly suited for an unreliable narrator trying to piece together lost time. In the darkly comic "Daniel's Blues", he inhabits Dan Aykroyd, racked with depression after the death of John Belushi. I won't spoil the ending, but it's by far the most pathos-laden song ever to recall the decision to take a role in Ghostbusters. Meanwhile, the spare "Alex Kona" is the stuff of Mastodon epics-- 12-foot monsters, sermons from the mount, mothers wailing in the streets-- and to drive that point home, it's immediately followed by "Giant's Despair", an honest-to-god doom-metal instrumental.
Those are the attention-grabbing tactics, but Pope Killdragon maintains these strange juxtapositions throughout: historical fact with whimsical fiction, a mournful delivery of absurd lyrics, an odd allure to the bifurcated sonics where synths sidle up with acoustic guitars. It's easy to envision the "next Bon Iver!" plaudits-- Showalter looks and sounds the part, but that would miss the deeper commonality. Auto-Tune, Gayngs, rolling spliffs with Rick Ross-- Justin Vernon has made the most of the spotlight by cutting against an image that requires him to continually hurt harder than others. Similarly, Pope Killdragon's playfulness and sense of humor allow it a broader range of emotion than the typical sadsack folkie. Showalter did a good deal of bloodletting on Leave Ruin, and now Strand of Oaks' horizons are limited only by his fantastical imagination.


The no-holds-bar rapper and producer weave a tight tapestry of musical references that only hundreds of hours spent sweating to music by queer elders could produce.

Muvaland Vol. 2 EP

Muvaland Vol. 2, the second collaborative EP from Brooklyn rapper Cakes da Killa and house producer Proper Villains, starts with a bang: “This is for f**gots,” Cakes drawls before nary a rhyme has been spit. He repeats the statement again and again, in case you misheard it the first time. Then, about 30 seconds in, a pulsating beat drops, and Cakes unleashes his signature military-grade precision flow, which resides comfortably between Lil’ Kim’s confident snarl and Busta Rhymes’ full-chested bravado. The track in question, “Stoggaf,” sets the tone for what Vol. 2 is all about—unabashed club music, unrelenting lyricism, and attitude.
By his own admission, Cakes da Killa came up in the so-called queer hip-hop boom of the early 2010s, counting the likes of Zebra Katz, Mykki Blanco, and Le1f among his peers. In retrospect, the fervor around this purported scene seems misplaced—they were all very different artists with different destinies. At the same time, queer culture has shifted dramatically from a decade ago: Pose and RuPaul’s Drag Race wouldn’t be snatching Emmys for years to come, giant corporations never mentioned Pride, and Gen-Z superstar Lil Nas X was still in grade school. While the recent mainstreaming has its pros and cons, Cakes now has the space to create something with his community in mind, decidedly shunning the hetero gaze.
Muvaland Vol. 2 isn’t just a house record with entertaining verses thrown on top—Cakes and Proper Villains deftly weave a tight tapestry of musical references that only hundreds of hours spent sweating to music by queer elders could produce. The intro to “What’s the Word” is reminiscent of a bitch track (a kind of shady diss record made popular in the ’90s ballroom scene), with Cakes exasperatedly coaxing a nameless friend into a night out (“Yeah, girl, what? Yo! Yeah, girl, just yeah. Girl? Girl!”). In Proper Villains, Cakes has found the type of collaborative partner who comes around once in a career. Villains’ nuanced dance production is the perfect romper room for Cakes to go crazy in, his incessant wordplay bouncing off the structure of booming bass and diamond-sharp hi-hats. “Lite Werk” is where their partnership shines the brightest. The beat is almost unsettling, shifting from muffled pounding to rimshots until the last minute when the music shifts tempo and drops into a clattering polyrhythm. It’s these moments that turn Vol. 2 into a statement and not merely a handful of fun club tracks. It’s about who’s at the club, why, where they’re from, and what they have to say.
The closing track, “Spinning,” changes the mood completely. A love song, it features vocals from Australian pop singer Sam Sparro, and for the first time in the EP’s 15 minutes, Cakes lets his guard down. Singing softly, “I’m sinking in sand, and I can’t feel my feet/I’m lost in your dance,” he sounds like he’s about to slo-mo death-drop into a lover’s arms. The song unlocks yet another facet of Muvaland Vol. 2: that when it’s all said and done, the comedown can be just as sweet as the build-up. These pair of Muvaland EPs started as quarantine projects, but within the canon of rap music, queer or otherwise, they will be remembered as the shift in Cakes da Killa’s career when it all came together—when both his persona and his talent went supernova.

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The debut solo album from the 45-year-old, would-be rock’n’roll savior fails to match the charm of his cantankerous public persona.

As You Were

Liam Gallagher was made for viral stardom. His flawless insults anticipated an era where celebrity reactions became shorthand for shade, and they’ve mostly been his internet currency until recently. Gallagher started promoting his debut solo album, As You Were, in a very early interview with Britain’s Q magazine last August. It wasn’t his jabs at older brother Noel (“that cunt”) that orbited Twitter, but signs of a more meditative outlook. “I was running on [Hampstead] Heath and I thought, ‘That looks like a nice tree, I’m going to climb that fucking tree,’” he said. “Climbed it and sat there with my hood up for about 10 minutes.” He reached peak dad malapropism back in August, referring to A$AP Rocky as “that bloke, WhatsApp Ricky.” More recently, his theory that real rock stars don’t make tea did big numbers, along with his approach to flying. “I just sit there and stare out the window,” he said. “Pure mind control, mate. I’m a Zen cunt, me.”
The promotional campaign for Gallagher’s solo debut has been going on for 14 months. When critiquing bands’ unwieldy album cycles has become a genre unto itself, it is borderline remarkable that nobody in their right mind would complain if the Liam Gallagher press tour went on forever, lighting up our timelines with a never-ending stream of the 45-year-old bon vivant’s observations on the beautifully mundane. We cannot all spend the afternoon getting drunk in the back of the butcher’s, as he does in that fairytale Q feature, but we can all climb a tree and mellow with age without forsaking our idiosyncrasies. Who really needs a Liam Gallagher solo album? How can you improve on perfection?
But given that rock’n’roll transformed Liam’s life, it’s not surprising that he takes his self-appointed role as its last protector very seriously, though his staunch commitment to Real Rock Music over the last 25 years makes As You Were an interesting contradiction. He’s always accepted his limitations as a songwriter, mostly singing Noel’s songs in Oasis or writing with former Oasis bandmates Gem Archer and Andy Bell in Beady Eye. But those are plausible Proper Band formations. About a third of As You Were was co-written with pop songwriter Miike Snow’s Andrew Wyatt and produced by Greg Kurstin. There are two songs with no Gallagher writing credit at all. The prospect of a strong Gallagher album—him at the peak of his powers, backed by songwriters who understand how to pair the best of him with punchy production—is tantalizing. But the diluted authorship leaves him floundering amid songs that manage to be overly complex and fiercely indistinct at the same time.
As You Were starts promisingly enough. Lead single “Wall of Glass” is easily the record’s best song, cresting on a big, hairy harmonica blast that leers with intent. It’s as much of a hodgepodge as anything on 1997’s abrasively multi-tracked Be Here Now—a wall of guitar, gospel choirs, brass—but it leaves space for Gallagher’s voice to catalyze a snarl of disapproval into the belief that there’s something better just out of reach, that unique quality that’s let him outlast two decades of terrible albums after just two years of great ones. He briefly regains his vocal power here after several years of sounding utterly shagged. But it doesn’t last throughout the record: He sounds uncomfortable at higher tempos (“Greedy Soul,” “You Better Run”) and mawkish on syrupy numbers like “Bold,” a semi-acoustic apology for bad behavior that is neither contrite nor cocky. John Lennon died at 40; at 45, Gallagher has no vocal compass.
His lifelong musical preoccupations are laced through the record: Beatles grandeur (“Paper Crown”), T. Rex (“You Better Run”), self-referential Oasis nods (“For What It’s Worth” sounds like “Stand by Me”). But As You Were lacks direction and plays out as a series of inoffensive dirges. The rocking motion of the raucous “I Get By” makes it feel seasick, and “When I’m in Need” lumbers from stodgy prog madrigal to endless attempts at an ornate pay-off, none of which land. “Paper Crown” sounds like Cast, “Come Back to Me” like Radiohead, “Universal Gleam” uncannily like nemeses Blur’s “Tender”—an identity crisis if ever there was one. Aside from “Wall of Glass,” As You Were never convinces you of its reason to exist, and there’s little more purpose to be found in the lyrics.
Searching for clarity in a Liam Gallagher lyric is like looking for artistic depth in a coloring book, but a brief summary anyway: Everyone who’s ever let him down had better watch it, because they’re gonna get their just desserts, but when he apologizes, you best believe God is on his side. “In my defense all my intentions were good/And heaven holds a place somewhere for the misunderstood,” he shrugs on “For What It’s Worth.” Fine—imagine how pointless a humble Gallagher album would be. If he’s writing in his typical classic rock madlibs (“Angels, gimme shelter/‘Cause I’m about to fall/It’s all gone helter-skelter,” he swaggers on “You Better Run”), then his co-writers are having fun reassembling his greatest tropes as Gallagher fridge poetry.
It’s probably no coincidence that As You Were’s silliest song is also an unmitigated highlight. “Chinatown” was written entirely by Andrew Wyatt and Michael Tighe, who have an uncanny ear for Gallagher’s surrealist worldview. “Well the cops are taking over/While everyone’s in yoga/‘Cause happiness is still a warm gun,” rock’s best anorak-wearer drawls over a steady beat and soft finger-picked guitar. “What’s it to be free, man? What’s a European? Me, I just believe in the sun.” Fortunately, there’s little time to contemplate Gallagher’s searching inquiry into Britain’s post-Brexit identity as a huge, beautiful, meaningless chorus comes to blow it all away, just as it should.
After some impressively boilerplate material, the last few songs offer a tiny bit of insight into Gallagher’s sense of purpose on an unmemorable album. On “Come Back to Me,” he could be pulling himself back from the brink. The laconic “Universal Gleam” feels like his promise to keep on playing this role for fans, a middle-aged “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” about his ability to galvanize and reflect unheard lives (“I’ll help you fix your broken dreams/I’ll give you something you can shout about/I won’t ever let you down”). And although the gooey “I’ve All I Need” apparently takes its lyrics from inspirational quote montages (“Tomorrow never knows/The winds of change must blow”), as a tribute to his girlfriend’s unwavering support, it’s unusually vulnerable. As You Were isn’t, as Gallagher billed it last year, “chin-out” music. It’s more chin-up, a faltering effort from an artist whose voice continues to drown out his music.


Despite its jacked-up end-times framing, the former Majical Cloudz singer’s third solo album mostly hews to the melancholy synth pop and emotional interrogations of his previous solo work.

Devon Welsh: Come With Me If You Want to Live

Come With Me If You Want to Live

There’s no better time than the apocalypse to get jacked. That’s the none-too-subtle takeaway from the presentation of Devon Welsh’s third solo album, the threateningly titled Come With Me If You Want to Live. Welsh is lifting weights in every press photo; the garish album art exaggerates his muscles even further; the only thing in the way of a bio is a short story written by Welsh from the perspective of a journalist being shepherded around a hellscape called America 2 by a writer using the alias Max Paragon that looks like “Rambo meets Arnold, with a dash of Houdini.” Pre-release singles “You Can Do Anything” and “That’s What We Needed” mirror this burly chaos; their thunderous breakbeats are easily the loudest drums Welsh has ever sung over. But beyond the imagery, the imagined backstory, and those two singles, Come With Me If You Want to Live is a far less aggressive listen than it might seem, one that remains squarely within Welsh’s wheelhouse.
As the vocalist of the now-defunct project Majical Cloudz, Welsh radiated a deadly seriousness amid the duo’s lush, ambient-inspired soundscapes. “I’ve always dealt with revealing myself, and intimacy, and trusting people,” he said in a 2015 Pitchfork cover story. “It’s scary shedding those layers and saying, ‘This is who I am, this is how I feel.’” On the surface, Come With Me If You Want to Live’s thematic underpinnings suggest a departure from the brutally honest, autobiographical mode that persisted on Welsh’s previous solo outings, but his depictions of the end times—set to plaintive synth pop and dramatic, reverb-soaked vocals—still favor the hyper-personal, even the mundane.
The album’s lyrics are predominantly directed at friends and family, treating the wreckage outside less as an excuse to make sweeping declarations about the state of the world than a final chance to say what needs to be said to the people that matter most. There are songs titled “Brother” and “Sister.” “Before the Moon Was Full” is a misty-eyed, fatalistic look back at a romance that bloomed before the shit hit the fan. “Best Laid Plans” addresses Welsh’s late father: “Hey man I’d really love to see you/I feel so far away from you/I really miss you.” Even the angrier-sounding singles revolve around calls to action to those close to Welsh: “You Can Do Anything” argues for shrugging off the shackles of societal pressures, and “That’s What We Needed” advocates for stewing in your feelings.
Welsh kicked off his solo career with 2018’s Dream Songs, an album built around string-heavy live instrumentation provided by multiple collaborators, which starkly contrasted with Majical Cloudz’s spartan, synth-heavy palette. The following year’s True Love reverted back to the mean, and despite the aforementioned breakbeats, the bulk of Come With Me If You Want to Live could also be easily mistaken for Majical Cloudz material. As on True Love, Welsh is largely left to his own devices, with his plaintive baritone and penchant for moody atmospheres suggesting John Cale recording an album inspired by the Blue Nile’s late-night masterpiece Hats. The meditative second half of the album treats percussion as a form of sketchwork rather than a propulsive backbone, and wispy, reverb-laden synths serve as the sole melodic accompaniment to Welsh’s straight-faced vocals.
There are moments when this vibe serves the theme. The gothy “Fooled Again” reeks of appropriate desperation. “Twenty Seven” is an intriguing story about an aspiring musician that strikes an uncanny-valley connection between Welsh’s own trajectory and the dismal, not-so-fictional music-industry landscape that he lays out in the album bio. The scorched-earth intensity of the two lead singles was enough to prop up Come With Me If You Want to Live’s powerful, if slightly preposterous, fanciful backstory. If Welsh had continued to pursue that slight stylistic shift, the album might have pulled off an improbable balance between a pulpy sci-fi vibe and its creator’s gift for stoic realism. Instead, it’s a strangely somber Rambo reboot in which our muscular hero spends most of his time staring pensively out of rain-soaked windows.
Correction: An earlier version of this review erroneously stated that “Best Laid Plans” is about a friend; it is about Welsh’s late father. Also, it erroneously stated that the bio was written by Welsh; in fact, Max Paragon is a pen name for a different (unidentified) writer.


Once a model who appeared on the covers of Vogue and Marie Claire, the singer's debut is the first music she's ever shared with the world, having written in private for years. Sleeper evokes the seedy prowl of Royal Trux and early Sonic Youth, and has a disaffected air.

Sleeper

Carmen Villain's first single, "Lifeissin", was a placid ballad with something dark and evasive at its core: Over a faint glimmer of guitar, Villain murmured sour nothings about closing the blinds, going to hell, living in fear. Even the song's run-together spelling suggested something slurred from the corner of the mouth. Like R.E.M.'s "Perfect Circle", the song danced in the middle distance, defying you to twist the lens and sharpen its edges.
Carmen Villain, aka Carmen Hillestad, is a similarly blurry prospect: The fact that she was once a model, appearing on the cover of magazines like Vogue and Marie Claire, seemed to be the only available scrap of biographical information. One of few exceptions, an interview she posted to her own Facebook page, was conducted entirely in Swedish. Google Translate helped to extract a few intriguing morsels: She chose the stage name Villain to help distance herself from her modeling career. Her debut album Sleeper is the first music she's ever shared with the world, after writing in private for years. And much of the album, she said, "is about indifference, being in a kind of emptiness."
This foggy unease and blankness communicates itself everywhere on Sleeper, a frustratingly imperfect record that nonetheless holds onto the essential mystery that sparked my curiosity. It is gloomier than "Lifeissin", which surfaces through the murk here as a lone moment of clarity. Hillestad surrounds her bored, flat-as-earth vocals with a smeared wall of half-tuned guitars, evoking the seedy prowl of Royal Trux and early Sonic Youth. There are strong hints of bad drugs, and the unpleasant sensations that accompany them.
The songs with strong, legible vocal melodies carry themselves the best, transforming all of this disaffection and spiritual emptiness into something worth making your own. Hillestad has a knack for curdled, nursery-rhyme melodies, like the late-album highlight "Dreamo", which walks up and down the same four half-steps like someone humming to themselves. "They caught me staring out the window," she sings, a lifelong dysphoric on guard against another well-meaning intervention from the outside world. She hits this note repeatedly in her lyrics, which seem to regard regard human interactions through a thick pane of bulletproof glass. "People keep telling me, real life can be real nice," she sings on "Two Towns".
This noncommittal shrug occasionally prevents Sleeper from hitting harder. Without pushing further into her exploration of despair or sharpening her songwriting, Hillestad sometimes lets her music just sit there. Stretches of the album simply drift past, like the cut-and-paste interlude "Slowaway" or the six-minute drone piece "Obedience", during which there isn't much left to focus on save for the album's rich, reverb-heavy production. "What is love, but a second hand emotion?" Hillestad sings on the haunting "Dreamo", quoting a beloved Tina Turner line. In my attempts to gather some surrounding context, I ended up corresponding briefly with Hillestad, who told me the quote was a tribute to the lifting power of a memorable song. "That Turner lyric is a sort of reference to the type of cultural noise, for example heard through the radio, that could momentarily drag me out of the detachment I could quite often find myself in," she wrote. It's a neat object lesson in where she should go next: Music expressing detachment is easy, but music that addresses it requires some heavier lifting.


The least visible member of the Black Hippy collective, who Schoolboy Q has called a "human dictionary" and Kendrick Lamar "a wizardish genius," releases his exhilarating debut.

Control System

Here's what Schoolboy Q said about Ab-Soul, the least visible member of the Black Hippy collective, when I interviewed him for Self-Titled magazine last winter: "I write a line, and I bring it by him. He's like my actual human dictionary when I'm in the studio rapping." Black Hippy alpha Kendrick Lamar told Andrew Noz something similar in last February's issue of The Fader: "When I first met [him] I thought he was a nerd. A nerdy, wizardish genius." These two aren't slouches in the eloquence or intellect departments: To hear them speaking with hushed reverence about Ab-Soul was interesting, to say the least.
Now here's Ab-Soul, speaking for himself, on the opening track to his resounding new full-length Control System: "Said I was the underdog/ Turned out I was the secret weapon." The album opens with a quote from Janet Jackson ("This is a story about control/ My control"), and Control System similarly feels like a young artist discovering his voice. Ab-Soul is the only member of Black Hippy from the suburbs (Carson, Calif.); he throws around terminology like "paradigm shift" in his lyrics. He is probably the member of Black Hippy who has spent the most time in a headlock. But Control System booms with self-possession and confidence. "I used to wanna rap like Jay-Z, now I feel I can run laps around Jay-Z," he tells us matter-of-factly on "ILLuminate", and I think of Lil Wayne explaining why he called himself "Best Rapper Alive" on Dedication 2: When you are busy mastering your craft, you should absolutely feel like you are the best at it in the universe. Ab's record is an exhilarating real-time document of that process.
All of the Black Hippy full-lengths are powerfully internal experiences: To spend time with Kendrick's Section.80 or Schoolboy's Habits & Contradictions is to walk around wearing that rapper's head on top of yours for a while. Wearing Ab's head proves to be a particularly intense experience: "You should see the shit in my cerebrum," he tells us on "Showin' Love", comparing his synapses to "lightning" at another point. Being an "actual human dictionary," Ab hasn't chosen these words lightly: His lyrics reel from wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing (at one point, Hitler's face appears in the burning Twin Towers) to egg-headed abstractions (Sumerians, Saturn, third eyes, Andromeda) to powerful, lucid observations. Ab sums it up neatly for us on "Track Two": "Just imagine if Einstein got high and sipped juice/ Broke rules, got pussy, beat up rookies on Pro Tools," he offers. Oh, sure, one of those.
This cerebral/visceral friction is one of the most satisfying elements of Black Hippy, and Ab-Soul arguably carries it the furthest of the group. There is a song called "SOPA" on Control System, named for the Stop Online Piracy Act; Ab-Soul includes a pointed lyric about Trayvon Martin in his verse. But the beat, which shudders and lurches like a dying car, will make you scrunch your face and jerk your limbs like you are suffering neurological crisis. Schoolboy Q is on the song, too, and he would like you to know that he fucked your girl.
The song "Terrorist Threats", meanwhile, is prefaced by an incendiary quote from the documentary Slavery By Consent about imprisonment through debt. The beat sounds like the world’s loneliest single-person ping-pong game, being played in an abandoned car garage. "If we could link up every gang/ And niggas is willin' to bear the pain/ We could put the White House lights out today," Ab-Soul barks, an echo of Dead Prez's "run up on them crackers on the White House lawn" call to arms. But what is that Jhene Aiko is coolly chanting in the background? A paraphrase on the "spit yo flow" hook from Jay-Z's "Nigga What".
Ab sees politics everywhere, even in the drink being mixed up in front of him ("Hennessy and coke, 1800/ We mixin' dark and light like the 1800s," he quips on "Bohemian Grove".) But politics are never all he sees. "Genius idiot, best description of myself," he raps on "Showin' Love", and over the hour-plus course of Control System, he touches, lightly, on almost everything: heartbreak, cockiness, righteous anger. On "The Book of Soul," he tells of being diagnosed with Stevens-Johnson syndrome, the origin of his unlikely nickname "Black Lip Bastard." On "Beautiful Death," he assures us that while we die as individuals, we will rise as a nation. On the song here actually called "Black Lip Bastard", he accuses other rappers of "eating yogurt in bed." By the time it's over, he still sounds like he's only getting warmed up.


Chrystia Cabral gives her old highlights new studio arrangements, lending them the immediacy and clarity of live versions.

SPELLLING: SPELLLING & the Mystery School

SPELLLING & the Mystery School

As SPELLLING, Chrystia Cabral dances the line between straightforward dream pop and aquatic, experimental electronic folk, creating music that both roils the soul and inspires whimsical daydreams. She expanded upon her tactile sound on 2021’s audacious The Turning Wheel, using rich instrumentation to animate her folkloric stories. Working with her touring band on new album SPELLLING & the Mystery School, Cabral reshapes previous album cuts with fresh arrangements, giving them the rhythmic, freeform feel of live versions. Her voice has never sounded better, even as some of the album makes you want to turn back to the delights of her charmingly shambling earlier work.
Most of the reworks clear away the originals’ hazy production and make drastic vocal changes. Whereas before Cabral could sound like she was singing from another room, here her voice is clear and concise, with vocals mic’d up close. Her more expressive, colorful tone on the new “Walk Up to Your House” adds a heightened sense of drama to the song’s hallucinatory lyrics. She also trades the song’s lurching synths for a trembling string section from the Del Sol Quartet, a San Francisco-based chamber group that embellishes Mystery School’s songs with subdued flourishes. They’re especially resonant on the update of Turning Wheel’s “Boys at School,” which opens with a theatrical prologue that gives one of SPELLLING’s most memorable songs new, rousing intention.
Throughout Mystery School, the murky synth chords and drum machines that define Cabral’s catalog are replaced with streaks of piano and violin and audacious guitar solos that complement her playful vocal delivery. While previously Cabral’s roaming melodies were occasionally lost beneath low-lit production, they are front and center throughout Mystery School, whether on the slow-burning, psych-rock deluge of “They Start the Dance,” the spartan, chilling “Cherry,” or the closing “Sweet Talk,” which starts at a barroom croon and escalates into a swinging, sweetened falsetto. These slight but meaningful makeovers make Mystery School a worthwhile endeavor, like listening in to Cabral rethinking her craft in real time.
Nonetheless, some songs on the album don’t quite have the same ghostly, evocative glow as the originals. The shuddering “Phantom Farewell” moves at the same crawling pace, only straying during a frantic, searing guitar solo that’s less climactic than its predecessor’s psychotropic, clattering synth stomps. The revised Mazy Fly highlight “Under the Sun” strips the song of its watery, implacable groove, leaving behind an overly histrionic recreation. Despite the occasional misstep, Mystery School overall succeeds in enhancing the most spellbinding aspects of Cabral’s music: her winding, changeable voice and unpredictable melodic left turns.


Chicago singer-songwriter Jessica Viscius moves through grief in a profoundly moving and generous way on her spare debut as Bnny.

Everything

The debut LP from the Chicago indie-rock band Bnny has the sound of an empty bedroom. Everything features a solitary lead electric guitar that gasps, reverberates thickly, and then deadens, as if resonating between walls recently stripped of room-softening decor. Jessica Viscius, the songwriter behind the project (and former Pitchfork graphic designer), barely allows her voice to vibrate above a whisper, like she’s committing song ideas to a recorder alone at night in a window-side chair. In the moments when her full band does show up to keep time or add some texture, they seem to materialize like a figment of her imagination that she can summon when she shuts her eyes. Multiple songs sound a lot like the Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes.”
On those minimal characteristics alone, Everything is a beautiful record from wall to wall, comfort food for heartbroken insomniacs. But it also arrives with a tragic background that casts an entirely different kind of shadow over the evocation of an empty bedroom. In September of 2017, Viscius’ former partner, Trey Gruber, died of an accidental overdose of heroin that was laced with fentanyl. Gruber was also a gifted musician who had formally released just one song and played only a few shows under the name Parent, but they were enough to ignite a rolling word-of-mouth buzz through the city about the soulful, wounded-sounding singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist. After his passing, Viscius spent the next couple of years preserving Gruber’s recorded output alongside his mother, compiling and releasing the 25-song double LP Herculean House of Cards for Numero Group. With that chapter now closed, Viscius finally takes her turn to sing. Everything is a long-awaited debut that resembles a journal spanning five years, its first half consisting of songs written during her relationship with Gruber and its second half of ones after it. It is worth every year that went into it.
When Viscius first began writing songs, a waterlogged sound was emerging from Chicago indie-rock. A proudly lo-fi recording quality gave a satisfying wobble to both the wilting grace of Angel Olsen’s Half Way Home and the tinnitus-inducing crash of NE-HI’s self-titled debut. Some songs here bear the distinct markings of that mid-decade time and place: “Sure” takes notes from Olsen’s “Lights Out” but flips the idea from an encouraging nudge forward to resigned acceptance of a slow freefall. “Time Walk” is a masterclass in economy, barely running over 90 seconds but somehow rocking extremely hard through muted breath, nicely punctuated by a jagged, seven-second solo from Tim Makowski, who plays some fantastically cracked and frail lead guitar lines throughout the album. Seconds later, on “So Wrong,” his solo falls somewhere between Yo La Tengo’s “Today Is the Day” and a slowed-down sample of a cat groaning to its sleeping owner for breakfast. In sequence, they make for a binge-worthy three-song run.
But it’s the back half of Everything that reroutes its course from a restless exhibition of stripped-down songs to an affirmation of the will to press on. For all the album’s stillness, there’s not much tranquil about the place where Viscius was writing these final songs from, and collectively, they serve as a twofold love letter: they’re about Gruber, but also about the complicated love for his memory. She calls out to him by his name on “Dreaming” and finds peace in planting a flower and replacing a young life on “Little Flower.” Then, in a gutting final step, she ends the album with a voice recording of the two, slowly singing a song fragment together over three acoustic chords. It’s a vivid representation of the fleeting memories that she learns to live alongside on Everything, and a final moment for the two songwriters to sing together.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Autechre have surprise-released nearly four hours of music, spanning five volumes. It is the IDM equivalent of a Netflix series binge, and it posits the duo as a sort of post-human jam band.

elseq 1-5

Arriving in a month thick with surprise album releases from A-listers like Beyonce, Drake, James Blake, and Radiohead, Autechre’s Elseq might not surpass its peers in terms of buzz or anticipation. But it has definitely got them beat in sheer volume. The five-part series—which was posted to the UK-based electronic duo’s webstore last week—adds up to more than four hours of music, out-clocking its peers by a significant margin. Taken at once, Elseq 1-5 is a mammoth hunk of listening, the IDM equivalent of a Netflix series binge. It is twice the length of Autechre’s last—and previously, lengthiest—album, 2013’s Exai.
Musically, the collection seems to advance the argument for Autechre as a sort of post-human jam band, with members Rob Brown and Sean Booth improvising at length within an opaque world of custom-designed music software. Free from the limitations of a physical format (there is currently no CD or vinyl release planned for Elseq), Autechre are free to sprawl and wander. And wander they do. Elseq 1-5 are as heady and frustrating as anything the duo have ever released. In some stretches, the music is glacial and serene (“eastre”). In others, the Brown and Booth’s violent squelches suggest machine-on-machine violence in the spirit of Survival Research Laboratories (“c7b2”). Absorbing the whole thing requires a bit of commitment. Or maybe it just takes a giant bag of weed and a lot of free time. Thankfully, Elseq is also available to purchase in installments.
Active since the late ’80s, Autechre’s early full-lengths—Amber, *Tri Repetae—*could be more clearly understood in the context of dance music, as the duo relied on similar hardware, like drum machines and analog synthesizers. Even still, their output has always embraced and amplified electronic music’s eerie otherness. “We had heard these Latin Rascals edits with these fast bits with drums that sounded weirdly robotic, taking electro into this other zone,” Booth told Thump last fall. “Half of the tracks that we do as Autechre are about recreating the actual sensations I used to get from those things—just getting post-human and next level.” As the years have passed, the duo’s music has become ever more idiosyncratic and abstract. The DNA of techno and electro are in there somewhere, but Booth and Brown have largely abandoned traditional melody and harmony in favor of raw sound design.
Elseq 1-5 is not Autechre’s first foray into download-only releases. 2008’s Quarstice was followed by a series of digital EPs that offered expanded and alternate mixes, which were often superior to that album’s edited material. Last year, the duo posted a series of nine recent live recordings of new material for sale online. An important part of Autechre’s identity has been the duo’s willingness to mess with its audience’s perceptions. A track might register as repetitive, yet never actually repeat itself. Another might repeat the same phrase for 20 minutes at a stretch. Other works have been so chaotic that it is nearly impossible to retain them in your memory.
The set’s second installment is the most extreme, with Booth and Brown delving into crunchy, headache-generating digressions in 10-minute chunks that will feel either exhausting or exhilarating. “eastre” kicks off the third grouping with nearly a quarter-hour of droning, unearthly string tones. Not all of it is engaging, but if you ever wondered what it would really mean for Autechre to take an uninhibited plunge into the weirdo void, now you have your answer.
Elseq feels like an advancement of the duo’s recent live sets, offering a similar ratio of rhythm to noise and order to chaos, but a richer palette of sounds. There aren’t a lot of melodies to be heard, but there are a number of distinctive tones and tricks—percussive thumps that sound like collapsing cardboard boxes, gritty woofer-busting bass tones. At the start of “pendulu hv moda” a reverb effect seems to move rapidly between wet and dry, spacious and tight, creating the dizzying sensation that space is expanding and contracting in time with the music. The best tracks land perfectly in the DMZ between the mechanical and musical. On “foldfree casual,” shimmering chords at first register as sentimental, but become more repetitive and emotionally vacant as they are pushed into the wings by jittery and alien rhythms.
As a live act, Autechre is pretty much without parallel. In concert, the duo’s music feels un-gridded and spontaneous in a way that few computer or drum machine-backed performers can manage. In its best stretches, Elseq seems like a document of this aspect of Booth and Brown’s process – the part that’s just two dudes taking pleasure in real-time collaborative music making. Which, in a way, might serve to deflate the futuristic vibe a little. All talk of robots and post-humanity aside, it’s hard to think of anything quite as earthly as a jam session.


Newly reissued as a boxed set, the Smiths’ 1986 masterpiece still stands as an enduring testament to England in the ’80s, the complex relationship between performer and fan, and the ecstasy of emptiness.

The Queen Is Dead

The “imperial phase” is a nifty concept coined by Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys that describes the point in a pop performer’s career arc when they can do no wrong—that Midas-touch stretch when creative risks and commercial heights keep peaking. Signaled by its aptly regal name, The Queen Is Dead is when the Smiths crest into their own imperial moment. Morrissey’s words and delivery were never more deftly idiosyncratic or grandly moving; Johnny Marr’s guitar overflows with sparkling melody while his arrangements sustain a balance between spareness and intricacy. Rhythm section Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce supply foundation and frolic, proving once again how indispensable they were to the group’s magic. For believers, the release of The Queen Is Dead in June 1986 proved that the Smiths were the greatest group in the world.
Trouble was, there weren’t that many believers in those days. Imperial in their own minds, the Smiths could never convince enough of the pop public to agree with them that they were the crucial group of their era. It’s now so commonplace to bracket the Smiths and the Beatles together that you forget just how marginal Morrissey and his minions were in their time.
Because they believed in the Top 40 as pop culture’s central arena, the Smiths reactivated the ’60s practice of releasing lots of non-album singles. But they never came close to dominating the chart like the Beatles or the Stones. After a flurry of good-sized hits at the start of their pop career, by 1985 their singles had fallen into a disappointing pattern. Fan sales would propel “How Soon Is Now,” say, or “Shakespeare’s Sister” into the lower middle of the chart—but then the single would quickly plummet, its rapid exit seemingly hastened by the group’s appearances on “Top of the Pops,” where Morrissey’s ungainly dancing felt mesmerizingly subversive to fans but grotesque to regular eyes.
Increasingly grandiose and paranoid, the singer alleged there was a conspiracy of radio silence to suppress his profoundly serious lyrical content in favor of the trite and trivial. “In essence, this music doesn’t say anything whatsoever,” he declared of the competition. “It’s an absolute political slice of fascism to gag the Smiths.” A month after the release of The Queen Is Dead, the quartet threw down the gauntlet with non-album single “Panic,” whose war-cry chorus proposed to “hang the blessed DJ” for constantly playing music that “says nothing to me about my life.” Along with the broadcast media, the band blamed its record company, Rough Trade, for a perceived weakness on the promotional front. Geoff Travis, sorely tried boss of the illustrious independent label, remarked waspishly that Morrissey seemed to believe “he had a divine right to a higher chart position.” His wording is revealing: Divine right is something possessed by kings and queens.
The conception of Morrissey as the unacknowledged ruler of pop—as a spurned savior who could restore to British music the urgency and relevance it had during punk—is one of the shadow implications of the title The Queen Is Dead, lurking behind its overt anti-royalism. On one level, the exhilarating blast of the title track is meant to be taken as the long-awaited sequel to “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols.
But if this is punk reborn, it’s a radically camp version of it, starting with the song’s name, which is borrowed from a section about a drag queen in Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1964 novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. Rather than Johnny Rotten’s full-frontal assault on the “fascist regime,” Morrissey is impertinent, declaring himself a distant relation to the royal family and breaking into the palace only to engage in arch banter with Her Majesty. (The inspiration here came from a 1982 incident in which a mentally unbalanced man snuck into the Queen’s bedroom and chatted with her.) Morrissey further suggests to Prince Charles that it would be a lark if he cross-dressed in his mother’s wedding clothes and posed on the front page of the right-wing, royals-obsessed newspaper The Daily Mail. The absurdist fantasia of Morrissey’s lyric recalls the black comedies of ’60s gay playwright Joe Orton, in which every kind of conventional propriety is riotously inverted. But under the frivolity, there’s a plaintive seriousness to the lines about castration and being tied to your mother’s apron strings: Morrissey seems to identify with Charles, who’ll never become the man he’s meant to be until his mother finally kicks the bucket.
A complex allegory about arrested development on the individual and national level, “The Queen Is Dead” starts with a sample from The L-Shaped Room, one of those British black-and-white social realist films of the early ’60s that Morrissey adores. A middle-aged woman sings “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty,” a First World War ditty of patriotic homesickness. Nostalgia folded within nostalgia, the sample—even if intended as bitterly ironic—shows Morrissey’s fatal attachment to the past. Like Rotten in “God Save the Queen,” Morrissey knows there’s no future in England’s dreaming; the country will never move forward until it abandons its imperial legacy of deluded exceptionalism. But the outlines of a future Brexit supporter are already becoming clear.
From Prince’s “Controversy” to Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do,” it’s always perilous when pop stars start to address their own position as public figures. Where “The Queen Is Dead” is the sort of Big Statement a band makes when it acquires a sense of its own importance, “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side” is one of a group of full-blown meta-songs on the album. Morrissey appeals to the sympathy of his disciples by lamenting the far larger number of indifferent doubters out there: “How can they hear me say those words still they don’t believe me?” There is a hint of reveling in the martyr posture in “Bigmouth Strikes Again” too, what with its references to Joan of Arc going up in flames. It doubles as both a relationship song and a commentary on Morrissey as the controversialist forever getting in trouble for his caustic quips and sweeping statements.
“Frankly, Mr. Shankly” is petty as meta goes: At the time, nobody but a handful of music industry insiders could have known that it’s a mean-spirited swipe at Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis. What’s more interesting now is Morrissey’s admission of his insatiable lust for attention—“Fame fame fatal fame/It can play hideous tricks on the brain”—but nonetheless he’d “rather be famous than righteous or holy.” Couched in a jaunty music-hall bounce, the song also serves as a preemptive justification of the Smiths’ decision to break with Rough Trade for the biggest major label around, EMI.
The cleverest of the meta-pop Smiths songs of this period, though, can be found on this reissue’s second disc of B-sides and demos. Originally the flipside to “Boy With the Thorn,” “Rubber Ring” gets its name from the life-preservers you find on ships. Although his songs once saved their lives, Morrissey anticipates his fans abandoning him as they grow out of the maladjustment and amorous ineptitude in which he will remain perpetually trapped. The empty young lives will fill up with all the normal sorts of happiness, he predicts, and the Smiths records will be filed away and forgotten. “Do you love me like you used to?” Morrissey beseeches, as if he’s actually in a real romance with each and every one of his fans, acutely aware of the perversity and impossibility at work in pop’s psycho-dynamics of identification and projection.
Two other loose categories could be formed out of the songs on The Queen Is Dead: Beside the meta, there’s the merry and the melancholy. Despite the morbid (and misspelled) title, “Cemetry Gates” is sprightly and carefree. Even though they’re strolling among the gravestones quoting poetry at each other to show how intensely they feel the sorrow of mortality, the life-force is strong in these precocious youngsters. As so often with Morrissey, the frissons come with the tiny quirks of unusual word-choice or phrasing—the little jolt of the way he pronounces “plagiarize” with an incorrect hard “g,” for instance. Featuring the album’s second instance of cross-dressing, “Vicar in a Tutu” is a slight delight with just a casual twist of subversiveness in a passing reference to the priest’s kinky antics being “as natural as rain”: This freak is just as God made him. Almost cosmic in its insubstantiality, “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” seemed at the time an anticlimactic ending to such an Important Album. Now I think the understatement is just right, rather than the obvious curtain-closer, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”—the glide and glisten of Marr’s playing on “Some Girls” is that never-fading light.
And then there’s the life-and-death serious stuff. Both songs of unrequited love, “I Know It’s Over” and “There Is a Light” make a pair: The first spins majesty out of misery, the second transcends it with a sublime and nakedly religious vision of hope-in-vain as an end in itself.  The writing in “I Know It’s Over” is a tour de force, from the opening image of the empty—sexless, loveless—bed as a grave, through the suicidal inversions of “The sea wants to take me/The knife wants to slit me,” onto the self-lacerations of “If you’re so funny, then why are you on your own tonight?” and finally the unexpected and amazing grace of “It’s so easy to hate/It takes strength to be gentle and kind.” Not a strong or sure singer by conventional standards, Morrissey gives his all-time greatest vocal performance, something ear-witness Johnny Marr described as “one of the highlights of my life.”
As for “There Is a Light”—if you don’t tear up at the chorus, you belong to a different species. The scenario involves another doomed affair, a love (and a life—Morrissey’s) that never really started. But here Morrissey hovers in an ecstatic suspension of yearning that becomes its own satisfaction, an emptiness that becomes a plenitude. The greatest of his many songs about not belonging anywhere or to anyone, it so very nearly tumbles into comedy (and there are those who’ve laughed) with the melodramatic excess of its image of the double-decker bus and the romantic entwining-in-death of the not-quite-lovers. But the trembling sincerity of “the pleasure, the privilege is mine” keeps it on the right side of the gravity/levity divide in the Smiths songbook.
Marginally more robust and shiny than the last time it was remastered, this new Queen comes with a couple of extra discs and a DVD that contains a promo directed by British filmmaker Derek Jarman. The demos contain differences that will interest the diehards. “Never Had No One Ever,” the album’s one real dud, is enhanced by an unlikely trumpet solo and some strange moaning from Moz. Elsewhere, you hear the singer trying out different word-choices and phrasings: The demo of “I Know It’s Over” lacks the “oh, mother” address and its bed is “icy” not “empty.” For those who like that sort of thing, there’s a live album, recorded in Boston in August 1986. Having seen them twice in their quasi-imperial prime, I never thought the Smiths were that potent as a live band: The delicate flower of Marr’s playing fared better in the studio, Morrissey’s voice strained to compete with amplified music, and the electricity came mostly from the audience’s ardour.
Being a Smiths fan during the band’s actual lifetime felt like an aesthetic protest vote signaling your alienation from both the ’80s pop mainstream and the political culture it reflected. As that context drops away with the passage of the decades, what endures is the peal of exile in Morrissey’s voice, a timeless plaint of longing and not-belonging. Without Morrissey’s tart wit and strange mind, Marr can be merely pretty, as shown by the instrumental B-sides of this era. Equally, without Marr’s beauty, Morrissey can be unbearable (as much of his post-Smiths career bears out). But when Morrissey’s sighs are caressed by Marr’s serene, synthesized strings on “There Is a Light,” or when the singer’s wordless falsetto flutters amid the guitarist’s golden cascades in “Boy with the Thorn,” there’s something miraculous about the way their textures mesh. It’s a great musical tragedy that barely a year after releasing The Queen Is Dead, this odd couple went their separate ways, for reasons that still feel not fully explained. These boys were made for each other—and surely deep down they still know it.


Drawing on the sounds of ’90s Eurodance and classic rock’n’roll, these six songs are light, lush, and streaked with melancholy.

Postcards From Italia EP

It took Mykki Blanco years to bloom into their current arc. After almost a decade of putting out raucous, multi-modal hip-hop collections, the artist’s sound softened and brightened for 2021’s Broken Hearts and Beauty Sleep. The LP that followed, 2022’s gorgeous, guest-spangled Stay Close to Music, deepened Blanco’s range even further. Joined by the likes of Saul Williams, Ah-Mer-Ah-Su, and Anohni, Blanco luxuriated in introspection, juxtaposing playful club romps like “Ketamine” with clear-eyed musings on queerness, Blackness, and femininity, like “Carry On” and “Your Feminism Is Not My Feminism.” Their latest release, Postcards From Italia, features six songs recorded in the same rush as their past two albums, continuing their prismatic collaboration with producer FaltyDL. Clocking in at just 16 minutes, Postcards is light, lush, and streaked with intermittent melancholy. It hits like a breeze on a top-down drive along the Mediterranean coast.
With bright, crisp guitars and shuffling beats, Postcards edges closer to classic rock’n’roll than Blanco’s ever taken us before, replete with the genre’s originating burst of sexual delight. Opener “Magic on My Back” layers multiple eras of rock’s historical resonance. A Bo Diddley guitar strum flowers over a wobbling bass line that immediately summons up Lou Reed’s tribute to the trans girls of 1970s New York, “Walk on the Wild Side,” itself a warm but muted rehash of 1950s rock’n’roll ingredients. And then, at the fore of the mix, a punchy kick-snare drum pattern calls in “Wild Side”’s 1990 reinvigoration as a sample in the hands of A Tribe Called Quest, “Can I Kick It?” All those decades coalesce to set the stage for one of Blanco’s most joyful, exuberant tracks to date, a song about sex so good the whole world floods with pleasure. “You do it slow/Can’t help but smile,” they sing on two simultaneous vocal tracks, playing both the smooth, sultry backup singer and the charismatic, off-the-cuff bandleader.
Darker, more ambivalent notes waft through the middle of the EP, though the production’s sheen never dulls. Across a handful of mostly bite-sized tracks, Blanco considers all the ways people can fall out of synch with each other, even while standing in the glow of real love. The twinkling R&B ballad “Love Fell Down Around Me” renders a breakup through precise, tactile details: “Your tears on blue jeans/My coffee on the living room floor.” On the hazy, psychedelic “Just a Fable,” Blanco sings about kissing a tearful white lover in the midst of the 2020 uprisings after the killing of George Floyd. "It was a fable of the city/It was a fable of the U.S.A.," they sing over a bounding bass line. The vignette collapses and expands its scale from thousands of people in the streets to two people in a room and back again—intimacy huddled inside a world-historical movement, ballooning to the size of myth.
The EP’s closing bookend “Holidays in the Sun” spikes the BPM to a club pulse. William Eaves’ production calls back to the blunt abandon of flash-in-the-pan Eurodance acts like Haddaway and La Bouche, whose maximal sound ricocheted back to the United States with comic frisson during the mid-’90s. Blanco’s pitch-shifted voice swings across the song’s title in a repeatedly triggered sample; on the verses, they curl their consonants to affect a country drawl. Blanco has always approached their vocals with a generous sense of play, quick to don and shed exaggerated characters on a dime, and their Eurodance persona is no different. “I believe in love and I believe in going hard,” they proclaim over the dance floor in a hypnotic Sprechstimme. The beat throbs, incessant, leading all the loose threads and fractured hearts throughout the EP to sweet release.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the 1969 album that provided a pioneering experimental composer with his own scales and instruments to make music that elevated stories from the fringes of American life to mythological status.

The World of Harry Partch

The world of Harry Partch was a difficult one. Over the first three-quarters of the 20th century, he moved through it mostly sick and broke, with little sustained attention and even less money paid to his extraordinary world-building. Out of step with the various artistic movements his work would prefigure or refuse, the pioneering experimental composer was mostly viewed as too arcane, too complicated…too much. In truth, he was one of American music’s great inventors: of entirely new scales; of massive, sculptural instruments whose material and form looked back to antiquity and toward nuclear war; of a way of singing he felt more accurately replicated the rise and fall of everyday American speech.
And of ways to thwart himself: He drank excessively, and frustrated friends and patrons alike with his combination of ambition and self-defeat. He died in 1974, in unrequited love with a young man who was working on a documentary about him that was supposed to change it all. (That shuddering sound you just heard was a thousand gay men in ecstatic melancholy at the prospect of such a fate.) Partch left a body of work that is extremely difficult to perform or otherwise reproduce, because it requires the use of his custom-made instruments and the highly specialized knowledge of how to play them. For a long time, the world barely seemed to notice.
Five years before Partch’s death, in the July 12, 1969, issue of Rolling Stone, Columbia Records ran an ad for a compilation called The World of Harry Partch. The album’s cover showed him silver-haired and tucked into a dapper plaid shirt, surrounded by his instruments and staring down the viewer. “That’s why this album will shock you,” the ad copy proclaimed in bold letters. It seemed as much a dare as a promise, a bet that the same rock-oriented audiences getting their minds blown that year by the bohemian Moondog’s self-titled album and Terry Riley’s synth-bliss A Rainbow in Curved Air just might dig this avant-garde composer as well. The World was a strange choice for appealing to Rolling Stone’s rock-oriented audience, no matter how thoroughly the exploding psychedelic movement had primed them for musical exploration.
There is a shivery, side-long interpretation of the myth of Daphne and Apollo, set to marimba arpeggios in an ever-changing rhythmic meter. On the flip, “Barstow - Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions From A Highway Railing At Barstow, California” roams for 10 minutes, its instruments sounding like massive motorized Slinkys gunning their engines and looking for adventure, while men sort of yodel and scat and intone personals messages that Partch found scrawled on a roadside in his years of transient life.
The final track is perhaps the album’s most challenging: The 16-minute “Castor & Pollux - A Dance for the Twin Rhythms of Gemini from Plectra & Percussion Dances” incorporates what might strike American ears as kind of sonic Chinoiserie, with drums and bells and strung instruments doing little duets with each other, one playing rhythm and the other playing melody—now, switch. The music might be exotic but it is decidedly not exotica. Every now and then, it might make one think of a Looney Tunes character tiptoeing or scrambling their legs, but Partch was very serious, if not without a wit. The songs didn’t seem to care if you listened to them or not, but if you did, they’d reveal what can be found when you follow your muse past all rhyme and reason: a world of glittering echoes, both decadent and punk in its own way, born of intellectual sweat and flamboyant rigor.
Partch was born in 1901 to a pair of Christian missionaries who had just returned to the United States from China and soon settled in the remote Arizona desert, driven there by the father’s new job in the federal immigration department and the mother’s tuberculosis, which the dry climate helped to mitigate. In his 1949 book explaining his musical theories and instruments called Genesis of a Music, he recalled that “my first and most poignant aural memories are the whistles of the trains which ran across that valley, from one mountain range to the opposite range.” From the start, his world was an instrument.
The family moved to Phoenix, then Albuquerque. The young Partch gave himself an informal education in global music via Edison cylinder recordings: “Hebrew chants, Chinese theater, and Congo ritual,” he later recalled. As a teenager, he found work playing mechanical organs during silent movies, and another job delivering prescriptions on his bicycle, with many orders going to the sex workers in Albuquerque’s red light district, who became his friends. He soon began composing for the piano. He also realized he was homosexual. After his father died three months before he graduated from high school, Partch moved to Los Angeles and began studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Music, its fealty to European classical music bored him. A year after he arrived, his mother came to see him and was killed by a trolly.
As detailed in musicologist Bob Gilmore’s empathetic, authoritative Harry Partch: A Biography, Partch quickly left the academy, and Los Angeles, heading north to San Francisco to teach himself music theory at the city’s libraries. One book, a foundational text on human perception of sound called Sensations of Tone by Hermann von Helmholtz, enthralled him. So did a young actor named Ramon Novarro, with whom Partch took up until Novarro’s career pushed him back into the closet. Partch may not have had another love affair in his life, though he was certainly not celibate.
Mostly, though, his energy seemed to have gone into rejection. He rebuffed the classical music world as stuffy and pretentious. He renounced the traditional European system of dividing the octave into twelve equally spaced pitches as an arbitrary constraint—“twelve black and white bars in front of musical freedom,” he later called it—and researched an older tuning system known as just intonation, which could more purely replicate the simple ratios between frequencies that occur naturally in pitched sounds, and had been used by ancient Greek and Chinese composers. Eventually, he rigged up a viola to compose similarly, the first of many one-of-a-kind instruments. Finally, just before turning thirty, he burned everything he’d ever written on a stove in New Orleans. It was time to build something new.
In May of 1944, the New Yorker published an account of a recent performance at Carnegie Hall by a “pale bachelor who in June will be, as he puts it, the same age as the tones in his scale.” Now forty-three, Partch and his musicians had performed a quartet of compositions on a series of contraptions he’d developed over the years: that “adapted viola”; a “chromelodeon,” or adapted harmonium; and, most distinctively, Partch's take on a Greek instrument called a kithara, with 72 strings and a set of sliding glass rods used for tuning. All of them were tuned according to a complex system Partch developed which allowed for 43 distinct pitches, as opposed to the standard 12. Partch would become America’s foremost proponent in the esoteric field of just intonation and alternate tuning systems more generally. The rising stateside popularity of Indian music in the late ’60s, thanks to crossover artists like Ravi Shankar, might have helped adventurous American ears adjust to the sound of just intonation by the time of The World of Harry Partch’s release. But in 1944, per the New Yorker, the audience was bemused at best.
They were also put off by his singing voice, and perhaps what he was singing about. Despite some funding from the Guggenheim and the Federal Writers’ Project, Partch had spent the 1930s mostly homeless, riding trains around the Western U.S. in search of work. Instead, he found a community of men in similar straits, who looked to each other for friendship and sex as they tried to make their mark on the world. At Carnegie Hall, Partch performed “Barstow,” which would later appear on The World, and used graffiti he’d seen on California highway railings during those hobo days as its lyrics. Some of the messages are heartbreaking in their specificity: “It’s January 26. I’m freezing. Ed Fitzgerald. Age nineteen, five feet ten inches, black hair, brown eyes. Going home to Boston, Massachusetts. It’s 4 p.m., and I’m hungry and broke. I wish I was dead. But today I am a man.” Others are ribald: “Looking for a millionaire wife. Good looking, very handsome, intelligent, good bull thrower, etc. All you have to do is find me, you lucky woman. Name’s George.”
Partch sang, and spoke, in tune with his instruments, with a vocal presence somewhere between musical theater exposition, rap, and the deceptive plain talk of later performance artists like Laurie Anderson. “He believes that with his forty-three-tone scale, he can duplicate the tones of human conversation,” the New Yorker said, then added with a touch of dry condescension: “He made a pretty good stab at this.”
“Barstow” eventually grew into an epic, multi-part work Partch called The Wayward. In a better world, it would have been heralded as a sort of Americana amalgamation of The Rite of Spring and Grapes of Wrath, with a bit of Our Town mixed in. But because it could only be performed on his cumbersome instruments like the Boo (bamboo marimba), which were expensive to ship, it was hard to stage and impossible to tour. Few ever heard it. Typically, Partch reacted to these difficulties by going even bigger. By 1952, he’d made a great leap forward with “Castor & Pollux,” one of three pieces comprising a work called Plectra and Percussion Dances written for even larger iterations of the kithara; various custom marimbas; and the terrifically-named Harmonic Canon II, which looks to be something between a pedal steel guitar and a dulcimer, and produces a metallic uproar when played.
One day, Partch visited the radiation labs at the University of California, Berkeley, which were investigating cosmic rays by cutting discs out of large Pyrex jugs and running particles around them. Partch took the discarded tops and bottoms of the jugs, resized them so they produced his desired tones when struck by soft mallets, and then suspended them via ropes across a seven-foot wood frame. He called these instruments Cloud-Chamber Bowls, and they produced bell tones both hellish and heavenly. In “Castor & Pollux,” their ringing announces the arrival of Zeus in the form of a swan, and also soundtracks a swarming of sperm around an egg. Even in its abbreviated form on The World, “Castor & Pollux” shudders with immense, erotic violence.
If listening to Partch’s music could be difficult, realizing it as a performer could be brutal. He had lately hit upon a notion he called corporeality, a unifying idea that intertwined the practices of playing instruments, dancing, and acting. The musicians who first had to learn how to play his wild musical inventions also had to be dancers and actors. For live performances of “Castor,” they were tasked with conveying, with movement and spoken word, his take on the Greek and Roman myth of a pair of twins conceived by different fathers who eventually became the constellation Gemini, while also playing the demanding music. Partch asked much of himself, too. For decades, he’d been scrambling to record these herculean efforts on vinyl, even starting his own labels to sell them directly to those listeners who were able to find him. In Partch’s world, everyone had to do everything.
Partch seemed destined for cult status. Sure enough, the underground came calling, though not always with fruitful results. Kenneth Anger asked Partch to soundtrack his 1954 queer occult fantasia Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, but Partch, who trusted almost no one and wasn’t about to start with the likes of Anger, never sealed the deal. A proposed collaboration with modern-dance titan Martha Graham kept falling apart due to their inability to communicate. More fortunately, he composed a major work about witches, The Bewitched, and in trying to get it produced met Danlee Mitchell at the University of Illinois, who went on to be his longtime conductor, confidant, and heir. By 1966, he’d produced six more major works, each bigger in staging and instrumentation than the last. But he was drinking more, and the university residencies he began earning often went unrenewed when his uncompromising attitude didn’t produce the easy results the institutions were after. He needed a break, and The World of Harry Partch should have been his big one.
One day in 1969, the curious and the cognoscenti alike lined up down the block outside the Whitney Museum of American Art, which had invited Partch for a pair of performances and an exhibition of his instruments—though, Gilmore notes, the museum didn’t pay enough to cover shipping them or travel for their thirteen expert players. The assembled watched him and his troupe play his Gourd Tree, his radiating Cloud-Chamber Bowls, and the Spoils of War, which he’d made in 1950 of Pernambuco wood, steel springs, and brass shell casings, and required the players to keep different kinds of mallets in each hand and use them simultaneously. This is the genesis of The World of Harry Partch: with instruments and players at the ready, Partch booked a studio with Mitchell as conductor and recorded three compositions. The back cover of the album shows handsome men at work, striking and stroking objects of uncommon beauty to produce unsettling sounds that fill the empty space with temporal signals, like a train whistle between the mountains.
Shockingly, the world didn’t come around to Harry Partch upon the album’s release. He made one last work, 1972’s horny, crepuscular The Dreamer that Remains–A Study in Loving, to soundtrack a documentary about him made by Stephen Pouliot, the young filmmaker with whom he had fallen into unrequited love. With its cruising men and corpse choirs, it’s one hell of a swan song. Two years later, Partch would die of a heart attack in San Diego, unmoored and impoverished. He left his vast archive of manifestos, musical instruments, and mementos to Mitchell, who has found various homes for them at institutions across the country and kept the Harry Partch Ensemble playing them. In 2015, the German group Ensemble Musikfabrik performed his work at Lincoln Center on their extensive recreation of Partch’s instruments, with the blessing of Dr. Charles Corey, the director of the Harry Partch Music Institute at the University of Washington, which holds many of the originals. They and others are managing the tricky business of keeping Partch in our ears.
Back in his 1949 book Genesis of a Music, Partch wrote: “And every lonely child builds worlds of his own, both with objects and in fantasy, a dozen a year, or even a dozen a day.” The World of Harry Partch remains an incomplete but inspiring portal to the world of a prodigious talent, a man who grew up on the outskirts of America and stayed there. No single recording could sum him up. But these moments sound furiously, fearlessly of themselves. They’re proof, maybe more welcome now than when Partch was alive, that even a man not at home in this world can nonetheless build new ones of his own.


The teenage newcomer’s latest EP is a maximalist maelstrom of frothy hi-hats and hazy synths. It contains flashes of brilliance, but sometimes falls back on cheap imitation.

Crueger EP

In a studio vlog from 2022, rapper-producer SEBii is gobsmacked as he talks to the comparatively reserved 16-year-old che. He reflects giddily on the “new genre” they’ve created with “euphoria,” one of che’s first songs to break through the SoundCloud rap underground. (Spongebob narrator voice: It wasn’t a new genre.) The track is still incredible: tactile and minimal, built on shards of digital glass. It offered a respite from the blaring rage beats that everybody was hopping on after Playboi Carti dropped Whole Lotta Red and LA-via-Portland rapper Yeat forged a real path to stardom in this lane.
A year later, che has all but abandoned that stripped-back brand of hyper-rap, exploring a  maximalist and orchestral sound with producer Natecxo. The songs on his Halloween EP Crueger continue the creative partnership established on last summer’s dizzying album closed captions. These are frothy geysers of hi-hats and synth work, and che’s voice is the glowing orb that guides you through the haze. You’ll catch a decent line here and there, but his approach is less about bars, more about texture—hitting a turn of phrase like that. When he weaves his vocals through the laser beams of “Badu,” he sometimes disappears in the storm, but his punched-in melodies are so fluid and hypnotic that it doesn’t really matter. In the studio, che will hunch over a laptop with the mic next to him and engineer himself meticulously to achieve this level of detail, one hand on the mouse as he raps, a smattering of presets smeared on his vocals.
Peep the original artwork for Crueger, a clear homage to Chief Keef’s Dedication, and it might start to make sense: che is just another teenage Sosa disciple, pushing the Chicago rapper’s  atmospheric and electronic hits into wall-of-sound territory. Unlike the glut of producers emailing Keef-type “glo” beats to Summrs and Sexyy Red, Natecxo and che go for something riskier behind the boards, often just by cranking everything up. See the bombastic “Sayso,” which throws a marching band stomp into a maelstrom of melodies; the blooming organ and bass is turned up to speaker-detonating levels, like one of those DMV rap beats from hell. On the following track, “Busan,” che’s vocals—submerged under big, blocky bass—struggle to come up for water, but the payoff is the swathe of chaotic, button-mashed filters at the end. It’s head-spinning music, for better or worse.
che has a shrill, lean voice that helps him land his more ambitious melodic moments (the soaring “Right Now”). He’s got the formal technique down to a science, but you only wish that some of Keef’s raw charisma rubbed off on him, too. At his most creatively deficient, he tends to lapse into straight Sosa karaoke with none of the swag. See, for example, “Gah Damn,” which is powered by a dazzling hi-hat barrage reminiscent of the 4NEM cut “See Through.” That song was great because Keef was funny and menacing; the chaos of “Gah Damn” doesn’t feel earned, just like cheap imitation. “Call Me” is a Thot Breaker-type dancehall song, but that only worked for Keef because he did an unhinged “No Scrubs” interpolation. che’s song, by comparison, is stiff and aimless, crunching up any of its island breeziness like dead leaves.
Even when the biting is blatant, there’s something beautiful about Keef being a bottomless well of inspiration for so many rappers of this generation, with still more flows and concepts to discover. When che and Natecxo successfully experiment with those ideas, they arrive at a cavernous, claustrophobic sound that, like the young artist’s breakout hits, feels a few degrees weirder and more adventurous than the new vanguard of online rap.


The Tucson duo traveled to New Orleans to record its latest album, named for a neighborhood on the southwest banks of the Mississippi River, home to krewe dens, Catholic churches, jazz clubs, and Katrina-flooded homes.

Algiers

Geography has always played a big role in Calexico's music, even back when they were apprenticing with Howe Gelb in Giant Sand. Since going duo in the 1990s, Joey Burns and John Convertino have evoked the Southwest United States in heady, careful detail-- not only in sad stories about border crossers, doomed drivers, and restless wanderers, but in slyly adventurous music that combines Latin American traditions with North American rock'n'roll sounds. Impossibly, they showed such a keen facility with those styles and such a commitment to that sound-- and, by virtue, to that place-- that these two gringos never came off as exploiters or tourists. So it makes sense that Calexico would be involved in immigration reform efforts: For one thing, how could you live with yourself in Arizona and not be involved? For another, their music has proved that the borders between styles can be as blurrable, as mutable, as porous as those separating countries and cultures.
Burns and Convertino have recorded nearly every Calexico release at their WaveLab Studio in Tucson, which has proved popular with acts like Amos Lee and Neko Case as well. They've been so associated with those concentric locales-- the studio within the city within the state within the region within the country-- that it seems especially significant that they chose to record their latest album, Algiers, elsewhere. The duo, along with producer Craig Schumacher, trekked east across New Mexico and Texas and set up shop in perhaps the most storied and tragic city in the United States: New Orleans. The album is named for a neighborhood on the southwest banks of the Mississippi River, home to krewe dens, Catholic churches, jazz clubs, and more than a few Katrina-flooded homes.
It doesn't sound like they left Tucson at all, which is slightly disappointing but which might actually be their deftest trick: Algiers carries very little of the city's baggage. No one is going to argue for this as a post-Katrina album (or even a post-Isaac album). There are watery allusions peppering these songs, as when Burns exhorts, "Take it all the way down/ below the water line," on first single "Para", but that has more to do with burying the past than reviving it. There's something refreshing about this approach, as it opens up the city to new ideas and new moods and new meanings, placing that horror into a larger historical continuum.
On the other hand, if place defines Algiers as much as that album title signals, it must have done so in the creative process, as these songs never sound too far removed from Tucson or from the raft of Calexico's catalog. On one hand, there are no Mardi Gras trinkets on this album, no street bands or zydeco flourishes, no Quintron or Trombone Shorty or Dr. John, no hoodoo charms or Saints gear. Burns and Convertino went east to make another western record, one that even indulges Spanish-language lyrics and songs about sacrifices to Quetzalcoatl ("Puerto" may be the most overcooked thing Burns and Convertino have set to tape). Algiers sounds great, with a noticeable sensitivity to instrumental interplay and an emphasis on Burns' conspiratorial vocals, but the album is haunted by the missed opportunities to absorb the particulars of this neighborhood and reflect that in the music.
What we're left with, after a few spins have dispersed expectations, is another solid Calexico record, impeccably conceived and imaginatively crafted. Such consistency may gnaw at any excitement over a new installment from the band, which means Algiers never sounds quite as momentous or as immediate as 2003's Feast of Wire or even 2008's Carried to Dust. But that may only be a way of saying that the record demands more time and more spins before it burrows into your head. There are certainly enough moments to hook your interest: the dissonant cascade of strings that ends "Para" and hints so vividly at something horrible; those lovely ghost vocals on "Fortune Teller"; the sparkling tango theme on "Sinner in the Sea" that rises into a tense and fractious crescendo.
Opener "Epic" even manages to live up to its title, beginning with a single, steady, insistent acoustic strum that just hangs in the middle air, suggesting a kind of weightless motion-- as though Burns and Convertino were positioning the listener just out of the way of song's action. It's a sound and technique they've used on nearly every Calexico album, and as such it's become instantly recognizable as Calexico. While it may sound familiar, it's nevertheless effective, ushering you you into the world of this album. And ultimately, it is a different world from those evoked on previous albums, one thoroughly shaken by the tectonic cello rumble that undercuts the violent squalls of electric guitar. Perhaps this is the power of New Orleans working on a musically subatomic level, determining decisions made just out of earshot. The result is an album that never sounds settled or still, defined not by one or another place but by the tumultuous spaces in between.


The German producer tests the balance of bleak ambience and diamond-tipped breakbeats on an introspective EP that remains true to his own idiosyncratic style.

Hectic Shakes EP

A faraway foghorn calls out a warning in the first minute of Christoph De Babalon’s new EP, Hectic Shakes. The air is thick with echoes of “Opium,” the veteran German producer’s 15-minute opener to his 1997 opus If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It, which got a fitting reissue last year. Two decades on, he restages its theatrics for a more distracted generation: the dense atmospherics of the five-and-a-half-minute “Harakiri” are intermittently sliced open, spilling jungle’s glistening entrails into the gloom. (The track’s title is another word for seppuku, the Japanese form of ritual suicide by disembowelment.) Back in the late 1990s, when a dozen imported and home-grown permutations of house, trance, and techno ruled the main rooms of many European clubs, jungle and drum ’n’ bass were often viewed as the murkier alternative. In the context of De Babalon’s heavy ambient sound, however, it’s the breaks that let in the light.
Now into his 25th year of releasing records, De Babalon has never made music with the rave in mind. As he explained to his one-time label boss Alec Empire in a 2008 interview, he was influenced by jungle and techno rhythms, “but the atmospheres I wanted to work with come from deep within me. Some sort of melancholical [sic] longing. A sea of tears, a universe of sadness, a romantic apocalypse.” Outside of a long hiatus in the 2000s, De Babalon has released pretty consistently over the years, but as critics have long noted, he has never strayed far from his sonic palette of chaotic breaks and horizonless ambience. That’s not a slight: Some artists paint the same scenic view their whole life, finding deep satisfaction in the shifting of time.
Hectic Shakes might suggest a departure but its arc is familiar. From the perforated despair of “Harakiri,” the four-track EP moves through themes of introversion, thaw, and solace. “Endless Inside” sends synth flares into a sky of white noise before erupting into anxious drum breaks and towering bass. The hi-hats cut through, the crispest feature in a dubbed-out world. Things get even livelier on “Shivers and Shakes,” which has both feet in the ambient drum ’n’ bass world, but it’s the EP’s closer that’s the real scene-stealer. “Raw Mind” sits somewhere between the original Solaris soundtrack and a worn-out copy of Orbital’s “Belfast” in spirit, almost wholly ambient with just two short runs of breaks. The forward motion is palpable and poignant.
“Musically, I am mostly exploring the past,” De Babalon said in 2015. “Generally, I have been trying to make as much music as possible while staying as far away from the music scene as I possibly can.” The producer’s relative self-isolation from the revolving door of the music industry has no doubt contributed to the stalagmite-like growth of his sound. As he quietly created his doom-laced discography, around him others have stepped into the foreground. Fellow German producer DJ Healer, for example, has enjoyed underground success in the last year or two with his own ambient recontextualization of the hardcore continuum, albeit occasionally straying into Enigma territory (incidentally, another German act with a history of cheesy appropriation). What makes Hectic Shakes feel fresh in comparison is its dedication to introspection. In a landscape saturated with well-worn tropes, it’s an artist’s willingness to embrace their own idiosyncrasies—no matter whether the sounds they work with are trending or not—that makes for truly satisfying work. The devil, as they say, is in the details.


Popcaan is the current leader in the neverending battle for supremacy among Jamaican deejays, but unlike previous kings of the hill, he’s not overly concerned with projecting the image of a badman. With his latest LP, he's made the best dancehall album of the year so far, as well as one of the best pop albums of the year.

Where We Come From

The best dancehall album of the year so far is also, interestingly, one of the best pop albums of the year. Popcaan, aka Andre Jay Sutherland, is the current leader in the neverending battle for supremacy among Jamaican deejays, but unlike previous kings of the hill (most recently, Mavado and Vybz Kartel, the latter who also has functioned as Sutherland’s mentor) he’s not overly concerned with projecting the image of a badman. He’s a lover, not a gangster, and it’s an impressively broad kind of love that he’s putting out. Where We Come From is a party, and everyone’s invited.
The album was executive produced by Brooklyn beatmaker and Mixpak label owner Dre Skull, aka Andrew Hershey, who’s become an unlikely heavyweight in the Jamaican music scene thanks to jubilant compositions like the Kling Klang and Loudspeaker riddims. He also worked on Snoop Dogg’s reggae rebrand as Snoop Lion alongside Diplo and Ariel Rechtshaid, and Where We Come From feels like another attempt at doing what last year's Reincarnated failed to do: connect dancehall with an American pop audience that hasn’t seen an actual dancehall artist on the pop charts in years.
Sutherland and Hershey make a great team. Sutherland has a super-melodic flow (he’s what is sometimes referred to as a “singjay”) and nimble sense of melody, so Hershey's beats offer a lot of opportunities to exploit both talents, even as they stick to chord progressions that don't stray from dancehall's conventions. Hershey's production skills also make a good platform for Sutherland's expressive delivery, converting the plaintive strings and funereal tolling bells of “Hold On” into triumphant uplift and the stroboscopic rave synths of “Ghetto (Tired of Crying)” into a meditation on violence tinged with hint of hopefulness.
Overall, Where We Come From isn’t animated by solemnity, or even the salaciousness that infuses “Number One Freak” and “Love Yuh Bad”, but an ecstatic joy that transcends genre. Sutherland is a massively charismatic character, and it’s hard not to get caught up in the elation that he so obviously feels when he gets from finding the perfect groove. That feeling permeates every corner of the album, but it comes through strongest on two particular tracks. The thematic concerns of “Everything Nice” are right there in the title, and it’s easy to feel the same way while the song is playing, thanks to a buoyant, bliss-inducing beat by Mixpak-affiliated producer Dubbel Dutch (who’s responsible for five of the 13 tracks).
“Waiting So Long,” on the other hand, bursts with kinetic energy. The beat, by Swedish producer Adde Instrumentals (who also produced Sutherland’s 2011 Jamaican hit “Ravin”), is a techno-bubblegummy pileup of whining synths, string stabs, and handclaps that, boosted by Sutherland’s recursively loopy vocal melody, constantly reaches higher and higher towards giddy new levels of euphoria, exploding kaleidoscopically like the all-out finale of a fireworks explosion that lasts three straight minutes. It’s the type of song that can push everything else completely out of your field of attention for its entire duration, one of those pop moments that fully deserves to be called “transcendental.” In a perfect world, it would be a smash; as far as the one we live in now, it’s noticeably better for having this song  and Where We Come From in it.


Featuring nothing but piano and his voice, Julia With Blue Jeans On is Spencer Krug's starkest, most gripping Moonface record to date. It's also one of the finest LPs of his prolific, unpredictable career.

Julia with Blue Jeans On

As 2010 crept into 2011, Spencer Krug's life changed. In that two year span, Wolf Parade—one of the most celebrated indie rock bands of the 2000s—announced their indefinite hiatus. Around that same time, Krug dissolved his much-loved Sunset Rubdown, forged a new solo project called Moonface, saw the end of a particularly intense romance, and left Canada for Finland. There, Krug linked up to Finnish rockers Siinai for the seething breakup record Heartbreaking Bravery. Krug's pre-Bravery Moonface efforts—2010's Dreamland EP: Marimba and Shit-Drums and 2011's Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped—found him training his focus on a particular instrument, a fascinating process that nevertheless yielded mixed results. Krug's maintained a commitment to making every Moonface record very different than the last, and with Siinai's help, Bravery was the closest thing to a full-on rock record he'd been part of since Wolf Parade's 2010 swan song, Expo 86. Julia With Blue Jeans On, his latest, is another sharp left turn: with nothing but piano and Krug's voice, it's the starkest, most gripping Moonface record to date, and one of the finest LPs of Krug's prolific, unpredictable career.
In his work with Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown, Krug, a classically trained pianist from a young age, shied away from the acoustic piano used throughout Julia. In interviews, he's claimed the choice to return to the piano was an attempt to refold some simplicity into his oft-knotty work and to bring more clarity and optimism in the wake of the ruminative Bravery. The stripped-back sound of Julia is never less than striking; Krug, whose agitated compositions and operatically addled vocals have often been marked by wild leaps and jittery flourishes, has never made a record this well-shorn. True, Julia's got its share of dramatically cascading melodies and plenty of big chest-bursting flare ups; although Krug's claimed Julia's inspiration came from sources as disparate as modernist icon Erik Satie and Rachel Grimes' solo effort Book of Leaves, even the most serene songs here couldn't have come from anyone else. Still, it's not just Julia's denuded piano-and-voice constructions that keep it feeling considerably less frantic than much of Krug's work; both lyrically and compositionally, he's not jamming as much information into every stanza, which makes every note—and every word—count.
"I am a barbarian sometimes," Krug sings a minute or so into the album's opening track, and time and again throughout Julia, Krug returns to this kind of brutal self-examination. Although the bile that underlined much of Bravery is gone, there's plenty of regret and self-loathing to go around. It's as though Krug, looking back on the relationship he spent Bravery deconstructing, has newfound perspective on just what went wrong, and rather than casting aspersions elsewhere, he's looked inward and found himself every bit as at fault for its downfall. "I have a way of bleeding dry anything you'd call a rose," he sings on the album's title track; on "Love the House You're In", he likens himself to a "well-intentioned demon" and "a ghost lighting up in the courtyard." Julia's lyrics find Krug—long fond of vaguely fanciful, sometimes impenetrable imagery—retreating from metaphor, retelling the story of love's end with often shocking clarity. A thread of Biblical imagery runs throughout Julia, but by Krug's standards, these allegories aren't difficult to parse. "Everyone has to gather souls around them to feel useful, and loving, and loved," he sings on "Everyone is Noah, Everyone is the Ark", still trying to navigate the storm without a partner at his side.
Most of Julia is at least semi-autobiographical, albeit somewhat out of order; "November 2011" comes fairly close to a blow-by-blow recount, but spend enough time with the disc, and the narrative starts to fully unfold. Centerpiece "Dreamy Summer", the out-and-out loveliest of Julia's 10 tracks, seems to describe a time before the troubles. On "Barbarian", Krug confesses "darling, it's finally the fall, and finally, I've not destroyed anything at all." But by the time closer "Your Chariot Awaits" rolls around, Krug admits "we got way too close way too quickly." Where Heartbreaking Bravery's Siinai-assisted bloodletting pushed Krug's feelings outward, Julia's quieter, more reflective sonics illustrate the time he's spent looking inward. "Set fire to my music, it wasn't much good anyway," he sings on "November." That's far from true, but Julia is clearly Krug's attempt at burning it all down and starting anew.
Compositionally, Julia's marked by a marvelously uncharacteristic simplicity. For every intricate right-hand construction, there's a series of blunt, forceful chords, better suited to enhancing emotion than inspiring awe. Krug's music has, in the past, sometimes felt overly showy, often using three notes when two would do fine, shifting rhythms and enjambing lyrics to onerous effect. On the whole, Krug's Moonface records—like the early Sunset Rubdown EPs, which also centered around a single instrument—are less dizzying than some of Sunset Rubdown's more circuitous work, but they've occasionally seemed more conceptually clever than genuinely captivating. There's an urgency at work throughout Julia that keeps convolution at bay, a sense that these songs had to come out this way, commanding and unadorned. On paper, the piano-centric Julia may appear to be another of Krug's experiments, stripping back as a means to stave off boredom. But Krug, in foregrounding his voice and minimizing the instrumentation, is clearly trying to limit the distance between himself and these songs, resulting in his most immediately gripping work in ages.
Chances are, you won't put on Julia very often; it's emotionally exhausting, 48 minutes of soul laid bare. Between the spartan presentation and the deep wells of longing, it's not an easy listen, not made for the background, which means you're going to have to find yourself in a mood a lot like Krug's to want to sit there and get swept up in it for the better part of an hour. Though Julia ends with a bit more optimism than it begins with, whatever streaks of hopefulness Krug promised after the frothing Bravery aren't easy to find here. That fairly restricted emotional range proves both Julia's best quality and its only limitation. Even still, Julia's impressive discipline rarely gets in the way of its ability to affect; it's all so deeply felt, it's impossible not to feel it, too.


The Seattle pop-punk band shape-shifts through ‘90s alt-rock but sacrifices its personality in the process.

Falling

At their best, Dude York sound drunk with unbridled joy. With two full-length albums, a Christmas record, and a handful of EPs, the Seattle pop-punk band has carved out a spot beside Charly Bliss and Diet Cig, indie rock bands suited for sleepover dance parties. On their third proper album, Falling, the trio loses its individuality in a wash of generic hooks and half-hearted lyrics that only recall contemporaries who did it better.
Guitarist Peter Richards and bassist Claire England split songwriting and vocal duties for the first time, sequencing the album so they take turns.  On “Longest Time,” England turns in an alt-rock anthem, and Richards answers with the psychedelic power pop of “Doesn’t Matter.” Drummer Andrew Hall pulls it all together with streamlined, uptempo rhythms and quicksilver drum fills.
Over the course of 13 songs, though, Dude York wind up mimicking their idols as opposed to referencing them. “How It Goes” is decent by-the-numbers Weezer, while “Should’ve” huddles in the shadows of Dinosaur Jr.’s towering amp rig. And it’s almost surprising to learn “DGAFAF (I know what’s real)” isn’t a Bright Eyes cover. Falling shape-shifts through ’90s alt-rock, but the band sacrifices its personality in the process.
No track captures this problem like “Box.” The glossiest song on the album, it leans into the synth-pop melodrama of the Cure while Richards elongates his vowels, doing his best Robert Smith. The rhythm section is sprightly and the chorus is catchy, perhaps because it is uncannily similar to Janelle Monáe’s “Cold War.” It’s a decent dance song, and the protagonist in the song’s music video does exactly that, jumping and spinning feverishly by herself as band members occasionally join in. Eventually, it’s revealed that the woman is dancing on a stage for approval—a single person sits in the empty crowd, bored and gazing at his phone screen, while she breaks a sweat. It’s an unfortunate metaphor for a band that has lost its voice. “I wish I was someone who could stick up for themselves,” Richards sings on “:15.” It’s hard to disagree with him.

Buy: Rough Trade
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