In a departure from the spatial concerns of his site-specific pieces, the composer’s new album explores the physicality of sound itself.

Body Consonance

Byron Westbrook’s music has always been physical. But over a  near-decade of his work as a sound artist and composer, “physical” has mostly meant “spatial.” He’s devoted much of his time to installations and site-specific pieces, exploring the way sound can fill and interact with three-dimensional spaces. On previous releases (under his own name and as Corridors), he has tried to replicate the experience of those projects, perfecting that goal on 2015’s Precipice. Its extended tracks are so rich and textured, they seem to carve out their own virtual environments.
To make his new record, Body Consonance, Westbrook turned his focus to the physicality of the listener. His goal was, he says, “to explore working with sounds that project into the listener’s space as opposed to acting as a window to another place.” He makes this intention clear in the album’s titles, which are filled with references to bodies, movement, and dance. Westbrook’s music matches this corporeal theme, taking on shapes that stretch like muscles and bend like joints. The result is a kind of “body music” that is as much about making sound incarnate as it is about moving and affecting the listener.
Westbrook achieves his body-centric mode through a diverse tool kit. Repetitive sounds and persistent rhythms are a major part of his arsenal, but he also uses drone, texture, stasis, and volume to help forge music that can ring through your bones as if they were tuning forks. At times it feels like he’s actually translating physical substances into sound—or turning aural vibrations into tangible objects. The viscerality of his rhythms and tones adds extra layers of meaning to a track title like, “What We Mean When We Say Body Language.”
The wordless language Westbrook speaks on Body Consonance uses a pretty simple vocabulary. With electronics, guitar, tape, and some computer-based manipulation, he sets up basic parameters for each track, usually a few sounds repeated in loops, and then patiently massages the space between those parameters until it begins to feel infinite. His song structures can seem mathematical; one track title, “Ritual Geometry/Sympathetic Bodies,” could also describe the album’s obsession with patterns. But Westbrook’s melding of sounds—the way he injects thick layers and subtle pulses into every track—puts flesh and blood on his compositional skeletons.
The most exciting demonstrations of Westbrook’s physical alchemy come when he mixes clearly-defined rhythms with enveloping ambience. The best example is “What We Mean When We Say Body Language,” which starts with an insistent, bassy rumble that quickly merges with soaring tones and gliding atmosphere, landing somewhere between dissonant techno (echoing the bristly beats of Fuck Buttons) and post-rock drama. Everything on Body Consonance is a thoughtful mixture of rhythm and abstraction. The rhythms may be more subtle in the rising drone of “Fireworks Choreography” or the Terry Riley-like electronic blips of “Levitation Game.” But ultimately Westbrook is always playing with time and texture, probing the ways that reality’s ticking clock can intersect with illusions of permanence. It’s a heady tack for such physical music to take. Westbrook understands that there’s more to bodies than just skin and bone, and with Body Consonance his sounds cut to the marrow.


Squarepusher's Tom Jenkinson received an invite to develop music for a group of music-playing robots collectively named Z-Machines. The resulting EP sounds like he schooled a group of robots in his familiar musical motifs, dragging them down with him into the mix of jazz fusion and electronics he’s been peddling for the past 20 years.

Squarepusher / Z-Machines: Music For Robots

Music For Robots

Tom Jenkinson’s work as Squarepusher lacks any real center, instead firing off in multiple directions to dizzying effect. His best tracks are vibrant in their nutty, wild-eyed ways, such as Go Plastic's ultra-precise “My Red Hot Car”, or when they sound like a refined version of his rubbery, bass-driven puzzles (Just a Souvenir's “The Coathanger”). Sometimes, his work seems designed to provoke fatigue, with the sheer density of sound violently throwing up multiple barriers to entry, to the point where his listeners are left skirting on an infinite loop somewhere outside the process. Pitchfork’s Jess Harvell described Squarepusher’s last full-length album, Ufabulum, as having an “angry-jazz-droids-run-amok” feel—a useful summation of his sound that now reads as oddly prescient: on Music for Robots, Jenkinson hands the keys to the car to some actual droids.
This five-track EP was conceived after Jenkinson and a number of Japanese composers received an invite to develop music for a group of music-playing robots collectively named Z-Machines. The robots are programmed to play somewhere beyond the human realm—there's a guitarist with 78 fingers, and a drummer with 22 arms. Naturally, the corporate world quickly zoomed in on this phenomenon, as Coors’ alcopop offshoot Zima sponsored a rather dispiriting-looking debut show by Z-Robots in 2013. “When [the robots] see the audience raise up their bottles of Zima, they jam harder,” reads a caption in this YouTube clip.
Watching a dreadlocked robot shredding in proportion to how enthusiastic an audience is about promoting a drinks company—with its eyes lit up in a message from its sponsor, no less—may put a damper on any “New robot overlords” thoughts. But enlisting Jenkinson to see just how far out they can push the concept means that at least someone in the Z-Robots team has been dreaming creatively. Regardless, for anyone with a cursory knowledge of the Squarepusher back catalog, the results on Music for Robots are unsurprising. This is no brave new world Jenkinson is entering; instead, it sounds like he schooled a group of robots in his familiar musical motifs, dragging them down with him into the mix of jazz fusion and electronics he’s been peddling for the past 20 years.
Although Jenkinson seems like an adventurous choice to test out this type of composition, in a sense he’s not the right guy for the job. His bass playing—so fluid, so knotty, but so often a triumph of technique over feeling—already has an un-human remove to it. So when EP highlight “Sad Robot Goes Funny” enters into the realm of blur-of-fingers playing, it doesn’t feel like there’s much going on that we haven’t heard in prior Squarepusher records, especially as it’s tied to berserk drum patterns that carry a whiff of jazz. Anyone wondering whether genuine machine music can provoke an emotional response won’t find any answers here because it’s all wrapped up in the work of someone who has spent much of his career retreating from feeling. There’s no combat to this music—as strange as it sounds, this feels like a collaboration between like-minded peers.
That Jenkinson's involved in work of this type shouldn’t be a surprise, and to criticize it for being something it was never trying to be is an easy stumbling block to encounter when discussing Squarepusher. But there's still questions about the validity of Music for Robots beyond its status as a musical exercise. Most of it dips into detached terrain; the manic piano runs of “World Three” are rendered without drums, and the layered buildup on “Dissolver” is executed in such a precise manner that it’s positively suffocating in its rigidity. It leaves Z-Robots feeling somewhat pointless beyond the novelty status afforded to a group of machines performing on stage. But this is an album released on Warp with a notable contributor on board, which triggers wider questions about what it brings to the conversation—that is, a daring vision of the future that turns into a humdrum training session at the office.


Balancing contemporary house and techno with detours into footwork, gqom, and more, the Canadian musician’s mix reveals the range of influences behind her own singular brand of synth pop.

DJ-Kicks

In Jessy Lanza’s world, every dancefloor is a dancefloor for one, Janet Jackson’s “Empty” is the highest-selling pop song of all time, and the clock always reads 2 a.m.—the time of night that the quiet, heady dance music Lanza makes is best consumed. With each successive solo album, the contours of the Lanzaverse become more refined and the topography becomes a little more precise. After three albums—including, most recently, last year’s All the Time—Lanza’s sound feels unique and immediately identifiable. Lanza is so consistent, in fact, that it can be hard to identify her contemporaries. Her work is comparatively featherweight alongside the austere, forceful techno of her longtime collaborator Jeremy Greenspan, and although a song like “Begins,” from 2016’s Oh No, might nod to the dark, vocal-led electronic pop of FKA twigs, it’s far from her main mode. The closest fit might be someone like Doss, who, like Lanza, often seems to be making dance tracks that are just as good for daydreaming as dancing to.
Lanza’s installment in !K7’s long-running DJ-Kicks series acts like a decoder ring for the rest of her catalog. Composed largely of contemporary house and techno with occasional detours into footwork, gqom, and funk carioca, her selection offers welcome insight into the varied influences threaded through her work. Although it’s a decidedly more straight-shooting mix than recent standouts in the series—including memoir-ish sets by Jayda G and DJ Koze, and a rangy leftfield entry from Avalon Emerson—it’s a surprisingly vital complement to the rest of Lanza’s output, a clubby addendum for fans wanting to venture to the far reaches of her world.
A handful of inspired choices lend the mix the thrilling weightlessness of Lanza’s best solo music. As a selector, Lanza plays it admirably fast and loose, rarely letting something run for longer than two minutes. When she does grant a song extra space—as with the gorgeously chintzy house throwback “Freak Like U,” by Italian production duo Masarima—it feels euphoric, a natural release after a more fleet-footed patch. Built around undulating synth organs, an earworm bassline, and a sweet, breathy vocal sample—“Baby, you make me move/Like a freak like me needs a freak like you”—“Freak Like U” feels like something Lanza might have written, an anthemic heater whose key melodic components are nevertheless tinny and strung out, as if heard from the bathroom or balcony.
As “Freak Like U” begins to transition into Portland-based producer Golden Donna’s spectral tech-house cut “Foaming,” Lanza ad-libs the title of “Freak Like U,” further blurring the lines between her own music and the mix. The effect occurs again later, when Buckinghamshire grime producer G3’s “Drum 2 (Peanut)” gives way to “A Path of Weeds and Flowers,” from Inga Copeland’s 2018 album as Lolina, The Smoke. The latter song’s creeping, alienated synth work feels like a funhouse-mirror version of one of Lanza’s songs, and Lolina’s rhythmic meditations (“Your eyes are on me/Your voice around me/I want nothing to do with/Deceptive emotions”) recall Lanza’s own lyrics about communication and romantic conflict.
Lanza’s DJ-Kicks is filled with these kinds of callbacks to her own oeuvre; although three of her four original contributions, including collaborations with Hyperdub labelmate Loraine James and fellow Bay Area producer Taraval, are placed right at the start of the mix, it’s hard to forget whose house you’re in. The only lull is around halfway through, when a stretch of minimal house and techno tracks threatens to pull the set’s pleasantly eccentric mood down to stone-faced seriousness. Still, it’s a slight moment among an otherwise vibrant mix that offers an enlightening peek into Lanza’s singular world.

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Roy Montgomery made some of the most innovative music to come out of New Zealand in the 1980s and 90s, exploring post-punk, drone, and solo guitar, but practically vanished at the turn of the century. He returns with a trebling, chiming score to an imaginary movie about 60s Britrockers, Badfinger.

Roy Montgomery: Music from the Film Hey Badfinger

Music from the Film Hey Badfinger

In the avant rock underground of the 1980s and 90s, New Zealander Roy Montgomery was as significant an artist as you could find. His work with vital post-punk outfit the Pin Group through his dronier trio Dadamah into his diverse solo guitar work overflowed with innovative sounds. But around the turn of the century, he practically disappeared. After 2001's Silver Wheel of Prayer, signs of musical life-- a few new tracks on a retrospective, a split with Grouper, an EP by his duo, Torlesse Super Group-- became small and rare.
So for Montgomery followers, Music from the Film Hey Badfinger, his first truly new solo album in over 10 years, is a big event. But it's also a mixed blessing. Its 23 short tunes, conceived as the score to an imaginary movie about 60s Britrockers Badfinger, are energetic and thoughtful. But he chose to play every one with the same chiming, trebly tone, presumably using a chorus effect pedal. The results can be evocative, but the narrow, low end-avoiding sound is also tiring.
It's an odd choice considering the sonic variety of Montgomery's previous work. Whether or not you find this new sound grating, it takes at least some suspension of disbelief to think it's the best mode for every one of his ideas. Montgomery's decision reminds me of a similar one made by John Fahey on his 1998 live album, Georgia Stomps, Atlanta Struts, and Other Contemporary Dance Favorites. That record also offered interesting ideas wrapped in tinny, ear-testing treble. But at that point, Fahey was pretty prolific, so the album could at least be seen as a tangent in the midst of a diverse oeuvre. Montgomery's decision after a decade-plus of relative silence is harder to figure.
Paradoxically, Montgomery's self-imposed sonic straitjacket makes Hey Badfinger impressive as an exercise. He manages to coax a good bit of creative variety from this deliberate monotony. In that sense, the album recalls another late 90s record by a guitar legend, Loren Connors' Airs. That record also focused on short pieces and simple, recurring ideas, producing a suite of motifs that felt less like repetitions than variations on a theme.
Montgomery catches a similar vibe on Hey Badfinger. Some of the songs rhyme with each other, sharing chords or structures that get subtly altered between tracks. And there are times when the album does feel like a soundtrack, albeit less to a band bio-pic than some kind of robotic Western. But where Connors' Airs was sonically rich and not beholden to a single mode, Montgomery's relentless tone flattens some of his ideas until they sound dull and identical.
Still, there are a lot of those ideas here, and Montgomery clearly has more to say. Hopefully he thinks of this album as a first step back (most of it was recorded several years ago), and plans to employ the rest of his sonic arsenal soon. That would make his approach this time around easier to accept, because taken solely on its own, Music From the Film Hey Badfinger can be tough to swallow.


Neil Young’s decision to prioritize immediacy over craft in his later years means these tunes arrive lovingly weathered, but rarely go anywhere in particular.

Barn

Neil Young is standing on the porch, smoking weed, waiting for somebody else to show up. That’s the basic premise of “They Might Be Lost,” the strangest, loosest—and thus, the quintessential—song from Barn, his latest album. (Young’s discography itself is strange and loose enough that contextualizing Barn in the usual ways seems futile, but if you must know, it’s his 41st studio effort, and the 14th to feature Crazy Horse, his trustiest backing band.) Young wrote “They Might Be Lost” quickly and intuitively and didn’t give the band much time to rehearse it, a first-thought-best-thought approach that pervades Barn.
You can hear it in the three-chord progression that repeats through the song’s entirety, a rickety scaffold even by the standards of 21st-Century Neil, and in his initial contentment to let whatever’s close at hand guide his subject matter: the headlights through the trees, the call announcing that the latecomers have only just now gotten off the highway. This all may be fascinating to those of us who have spent years of our lives invested in Young’s skewed and shaggy psyche, but I wouldn’t necessarily encourage an outsider to check it out. Still, there’s a minor epiphany here, if you’re willing to follow the trail that emerges from the end of his joint: “The smoke that I burn keeps taking me to the old days/The jury’s out on the old days, you know/The judgement is soon coming down.”
“The jury’s out on the old days” is the closest thing Young offers to a thesis statement for Barn, an album that, like much of his later work, has a complicated relationship with nostalgia. “Heading West,” the warmly rousing second song, invokes “the good old days” explicitly and liberally in its remembrances of a first guitar and afternoons spent pulling a wagon through the neighborhood. “Change Ain’t Never Gonna,” addresses people who cling to an idealized history despite the desperate need for progress, imagining a “great conspiracy” to take away their freedom and “stop them from living as they’ve always been living.” Young is critical of these people, but as a guy who’s often wrapped up in his own journey through the past, he’s not entirely unsympathetic. The tonal balance reminds me of Greendale, his 2003 concept album about a young environmental activist whose radical visions drive her out of the idyllic but parochial small town where she grew up. Now, instead of assigning his conflicted views out to a cast of opinionated townspeople, he’s just saying how he feels, allowing the contradictions to speak for themselves.
Despite its elaborate narrative, or perhaps because of it, Greendale also marked a turn toward blunt simplicity over supple tunefulness in Young’s compositional approach, a sense that the urgency of the message meant more to him than the music that carried it. Over the two decades since, that turn has come to look more and more definitive. Young’s stylistic restlessness and commitment to in-the-moment rawness can sometimes overshadow the fact that at his best, he is a melodist in the realm of Carole King or Paul McCartney. But on Barn, as on many recent predecessors, the tunes meander along the most obvious routes of the chords that underpin them, rarely going anywhere in particular, and almost never taking the sorts of audacious twists that might lodge them in your heart and mind.
This doesn’t appear to be a case of Young losing his touch, but the result of a deliberate decision to prioritize immediacy over craft. “I don’t sit and play the guitar and sing the song. I might sing one verse, or think it while I’m playing, maybe humming or something. Then I write all the words out and I try to never do it again until it’s being recorded with the band,” he told Rolling Stone about “They Might Be Lost.” According to a Washington Post interview, he wrote “Human Race,” a wild-eyed rocker about climate change, while walking to the converted barn that served as Crazy Horse’s recording studio, and recorded the version that ended up on the album when he got there. Both songs gain something from the roughness of their presentation. “They Might Be Lost” has a dreamlike half-improvised quality akin to Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, the sense of a band reaching for something without quite knowing yet what it is. The frenzy of “Human Race” suits its dire lyrics, and could have been dulled with too much time spent working out kinks. But neither seems built to last. It would be pointless to ask Young of all artists to repeat himself—just ask David Geffen about that. Still, I will humbly suggest that great songs don’t come from scrawled diatribes and afternoon daydreams alone. You have to work at them.
Great songs are not exactly what Young is after on Barn. Roughness and sprawl have been as important to his music as beauty and concision, especially when he’s working with Crazy Horse, since at least as far back as 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, his first album with the band. (Nevermind that “Cinnamon Girl” had a sugary melody to go along with its famous one-note guitar solo.) And if you have any fondness for the particular racket that these four men make when they get together—Barn is the second Crazy Horse album with on-again-off-again Neil collaborator Nils Lofgren on second guitar, after the departure of longtime member Frank Sampedro—you’ll still find plenty to like about Barn. These sound like first or second takes, with few if any overdubs, a recording style well tailored to the band’s proudly unrefined groove. It’s still a thrill when Young’s fuzz-tone guitar scorches the surfaces of drummer Ralph Molina and bassist Billy Talbot’s pounding rhythms, even if you’ve heard them do it a million times before. And the casual setting brings some welcome humor out of Young, like when busts out a half-yodel on the chorus of “Shape of You,” or refers to a flock of geese as “honkers flying low above the waves” on “Song of the Seasons.” Though the songs occasionally grapple with heavy subjects, the whole thing has the tenor of a backyard reunion between beloved old friends.
Young’s new songs may be blunter instruments than his older ones, but he’s lost none of his grace or delicacy as a lead guitar player. If there’s one track from Barn that deserves canonization, it’s “Welcome Back,” whose eight-minute simmer gives him plenty of space to stretch out. Between verses delivered with the hushed intensity of a beat poet, he reaches a level of expressiveness on his instrument that’s far beyond what he mustered as a songwriter for Barn, rendering thunderous drama with small handfuls of notes, using subtleties of dynamics and articulation to tell stories where words fail. “Welcome Back” is also where the album’s deliberately half-formed aesthetic comes to its greatest fruition. We can hear Neil’s bandmates attuned to his musical direction, communicating without speaking about when to step forward and when to hunker back, dreaming up the shape of the performance together in real time. There’s not much of a chorus to speak of, but the sing-spoken refrain encapsulates Barn’s complicated relationship with the past, and its use of familiar sounds in dogged pursuit of something present and new: “Welcome back, welcome back/It’s not the same.”

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Matthew Cooper crafts another record of ambient music that's music first and ambient second, with a good sense of pacing and structure.

Copia

As an ambient artist, Eluvium's Matthew Cooper is working in a pretty crowded field, but with a gradually evolving sound and distinctive approach to his genre, his profile continues to rise. Though his 2003 all-piano record An Accidental Memory in Case of Death might have seemed like a left turn in light of the guitar-based drone tracks that came before and after, his records all share an aesthetic: Eluvium's ambient music is music first and ambient second; it leans forward, asks for consideration, and has no desire to slip into the background. That thread continues on his newest full-length, even as his palette broadens considerably.
Incorporating strings, horns, woodwinds, and more piano, Copia is the grandest, most sweeping Eluvium record to date. The word that keeps coming to mind is "regal," perhaps because the lush opening fanfare "Amreik" sets the tone for the album so perfectly. Just over three minutes long, the rich blend of French horns, trumpets and trombones comes together to form a soundtrack for convocation. From there, the record dives headlong into the 10-minute "Indoor Swimming at the Space Station", which layers piano and strings (never quite clear throughout what is sampled, what is live, and what is synthetic) on his most filmic piece to date.
As "cinematic" music goes-- and the adjective is appropriate throughout Copia-- these pieces tend toward widescreen pictures with big budgets. It's grand movie music in the "Adagio With Strings" sense; we're not talking about exercises in subtle shading. With that in mind, Cooper has developed a good sense of pacing and structure, and some of these pieces are terrifically affecting. "Seeing You Off the Edges" is mostly a cluster of held cello notes, but those moments when the melody jumps an octave trigger an immediate pang of longing. "After Nature", a chamber piece that layers violins with heavy reverb, sounds like something that would waft out of the ballroom in The Shining during one of Jack Nicholson's breaks away from the typewriter. "Ostinato" is a gradually unwinding piece for pipe organ with a simple melody, but during the pattern's lowest ebb, when the bass pedal comes in and vibrates the room, it echoes a towering cathedral.
My issue with Copia-- the thing that keeps this record from greatness-- is Cooper's approach to piano. I know people who love Accidental Memory and the dabbling of acoustic keys on last year's When I Live By the Garden and the Sea EP, but this is where I always find myself tuning out. Copia is the first record where piano is fully integrated into other aspects of Cooper's sound; for my money, these tracks are the record's weakest, coming across as unpleasantly leading, sometimes bordering on manipulative. Any sense of mystery-- a quality essential to Eluvium's best music-- evaporates completely during "Prelude for Time Feelers" and "Radio Ballet", where piano dominates. The word "Satie" sometimes comes up when he goes in this direction, which is way off; "Winston" is more accurate. Coming from a guy who owned a few Windham Hill albums back in the day, I don't mean this as a dig; the piano-led tracks are enjoyable and pretty but almost defiantly surface-level.
The nine-minute finale "Repose in Blue", on the other hand, shows Cooper at his large-canvas best, where the on-the-nose emotional pointers work to his advantage. He discards the line between drama and melodrama as he bursts in halfway though a piece of brooding cello drone laced with horns and throws a recording of fireworks against the black sky. The explosions sound like bass and kettledrums as they burst at random without a discernible pattern, and it nicely completes the John Phillip Sousa Americana hinted at on the record's opener. If "Amreik" was a formal procession in June, this is Independence Day a month later, with bombs bursting in air as the orchestra beneath weaves a lament for the radio simulcast. It is, of course, over the top, but to a degree that strikes me as courageous. Eluvium's music isn't a web of possibilities to be explored, but a very specific path to be followed. When it works as well as it does on "Repose in Blue", it takes you to an exalted place.


R.E.M.'s overlooked and transitional third album from 1985, produced by Joe Boyd, receives the deluxe reissue treatment.

R.E.M.: Fables of the Reconstruction [Deluxe Edition]

These days we tend to think of music culture as being almost unreasonably fast-moving. Musicians, however, are generally not as productive as they once were. When R.E.M. were burning through a non-stop cycle of writing, recording, and touring in the 1980s, it was the industry norm. By 1985, the group was midway through the most productive period of its career, and had already released two instant classic albums within the span of 24 months for IRS Records. R.E.M. thrived on this pressure, and critical success seemed only to embolden them, resulting in a series of distinct, increasingly ambitious records that nudged them ever closer to the mainstream without sacrificing their character.
Fables of the Reconstruction, the third release in this astonishing reissue blitz, is the first to show any sign of strain from the band's relentless schedule. It's a great and inspired album, but not quite as consistent as Murmur or Reckoning, or other R.E.M. works to come down the line. Aside from the oddball lead single "Can't Get There From Here", which approximated southern funk via Peter Buck's chiming Rickenbacker chords, Fables is a dark and murky set with a textural palette close to the muted earth tones of its packaging. As the title suggests, it is their most "Southern" album, with a sound that evokes images of railroads, small towns, eccentric locals, oppressive humidity, and a vague sense of time slowing to a crawl. For a bunch of guys who were still new to life on the road, the specificity of setting makes a lot of sense-- it's the homesick pride of people suddenly removed from their usual context.
Michael Stipe's lyrics, at this point just beginning to gel into deliberate themes after a few years of intuitive mumbling, are mainly concerned with imagining the inner lives of outsiders and recluses; men who have traded companionship for a life on their own terms. This fascination can tip into sentimentality-- "Wendell Gee" may be the most syrupy R.E.M. tune-- but the best of these songs bypass mawkishness and stress Stipe's identification with his subjects. "Life and How to Live It", an ecstatic rave-up based upon the life of a schizophrenic man who alternated his time between two sides of his house, showcases Stipe at his most spirited and unhinged.
Musically, Fables is a transitional work. Buck was still working within his jangle-pop style-- "Driver 8" is basically the ultimate archetype of this aesthetic-- but they'd begun to toy around with grander ambitions. "Feeling Gravity's Pull", the album's ominous opener, contrasts a grim, trebly lead guitar part reminiscent of Tom Verlaine with stately, cinematic strings and vivid lyrics detailing Stipe's dreamscape. "Can't Get There From Here" successfully integrates horns and funk grooves, and along with "Maps and Legends" further develops Mike Mills as a foil to Stipe on harmony vocals. Less ambitious cuts like "Green Grow the Rushes" and "Good Advices" are charming in their own right, straightforward in their simple, unfussy beauty. Fables is the end of the line for that particular strain of R.E.M. song-- within a year, these guys would move on to making their own brand of arena rock on Lifes Rich Pageant, never to return to more intimate affairs.
This reissue includes a bonus disc of demos recorded in Athens before heading to London to track the songs with producer Joe Boyd. At this stage in the process, the songs were written but not entirely fleshed out. Though it is nice to hear songs such as "Driver 8" and "Auctioneer (Another Engine)" in a raw state, these demos are mainly a curiosity for hardcore fans. That said, comparing and contrasting the demos with the finished recordings makes an excellent case for Boyd as a producer. Since the band has mentioned in past interviews that the Fables sessions were stressful and difficult, Boyd has received a fair amount of negative criticism for his work on the album. This is unwarranted. The band have worked with better and more simpatico producers in their time, but Boyd did a fine job of finessing and polishing these tunes without getting in the way of the album's peculiar earthy vibe. "Can't Get There From Here" is the most dramatic example of Boyd's positive influence. The demo sounds awkward and confused as Stipe and Mills stumble over one another in the chorus, whereas the finished version runs smoothly, carried along by Buck's exceptionally crisp chords.
In the context of R.E.M.'s career, it's hard not to damn Fables of the Reconstruction with faint praise. It's not an obvious classic, but it certainly doesn't fall into the category of "lesser works." Fables is a fine album that has aged very well, and the simple fact that it is not on par with its two predecessors or further landmark records like Document and Automatic for the People is not a comment on its quality on its own. Ultimately, Fables is best enjoyed as something slightly off the beaten path, with a proudly eccentric style befitting its offbeat subjects.


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 a fascinating outlier in Frank Sinatra’s catalog, an unsparing and bleak concept album from 1970.

Watertown

Frank Sinatra always recorded his vocals the same way. He would stand at the mic in the center of the room, surrounded by a large ensemble, conducted by an arranger who’d written the score to suit Sinatra’s own voice and mood. In the 1940s and ’50s, his baritone emerged in slow, steady sweeps, reaching out and reeling you in. He sang about universal topics with such ease and charisma, attracting such a large audience and developing such a recognizable persona, that his role in the greater cultural consciousness now lands somewhere between myth and a cliché. But back then, it was based on these particular choices, tailored to the voice, the sound in his head and the story in the words.
If those predilections seemed out of fashion in the ’60s—when artists were moving away from singing the standards toward writing their own compositions, backed by music that jittered and quaked as opposed to swooning and swinging—Sinatra found a way to reposition himself. It was during this decade he began operating his own record label Reprise—where he assumed the enduring nickname “Chairman of the Board”— and bolstering his acting bona fides in films like The Manchurian Candidate and The Detective. This was also around the time he took up residency at the Sands Casino in Las Vegas, where he gathered with crowds of like-minded performers and celebrities and refitted his music for an older audience, solidifying the image he would maintain in pop culture for the rest of time. “How did all these people get in my room?” he would ask the crowd at the start of his casino sets. More than half a century later, it can feel like we never left.
During the ’60s, Sinatra’s voice also began showing some wear—a little gravel at the end of a line, longer pauses between the words. This raggedness allowed his best performances to tell a different kind of story. “Now I think of my life as vintage wine from fine old kegs/From the brim to the dregs,” he sings as strings swell in his 1965 rendition of “It Was a Very Good Year,” a song whose lyrical conceit (“When I was 35…”) demands a performer at least capable of portraying a man with as much life behind as ahead. The wear and tear of Jack Daniels and unfiltered Camels and years of public agonies and stress all build toward a slightly wearied, self-preserving effect, pulling him back like concerned friends in the places he might have once caused a scene. But the drama is still there. Listen with your eyes closed, whether you know anything about Sinatra or not, and you can see him—the slender guy in a suit, cigarette in hand, shoulders swinging. Listen closer and the room fills up—the elbows of the orchestra swaying like waves, stage lights dimming as the audience applauds.
But who is the man on Watertown? By Sinatra’s standards—and by most standards—this was a strange project. It was the first of his records to feature all new compositions, written specifically for him. Moreover, it was a concept album. It was also the first time he overdubbed vocals separate from the music, tracked in isolation in a Los Angeles studio, in part because he was unhappy with his initial performances, in part to avoid being on the East Coast during an investigation into certain organized crime operations, and in part to meet the current standard of studio recordings as the ’60s drew to a close.
Sinatra’s career was, if not failing, then at least growing stagnant as the times changed. He was not a fan of rock music, and he even had taken to referring to the new generation of artists as “pukes.” To his credit, he still experimented. There was a brief, beautiful record with bossa nova guitarist Antônio Carlos Jobim. There was also a collection of poetry by trendy writer Rod McKuen set to music. He was trying new things, pushing himself out of the box.
This perhaps led him to the set of a dreadful Western called Dirty Dingus Magee, a box office flop that would prove to be his last film role for many years. By all accounts, it should have at least been an interesting failure. Sinatra—whose best performances were not far from his dignified public persona—playing a guy named Dirty Dingus Magee, a goofball outlaw, the butt of everyone’s jokes, scruffy and desperate and quick to make a self-deprecating joke. Novelist Joseph Heller contributed to the screenplay, and an organization called the IFTP (Indians for Truthful Portrayal) somehow offered their first endorsement for a Hollywood movie’s representation of Native American characters. (Roger Ebert, in a one-star review, notes that the IFTP’s president “talks amazingly like an MGM press agent.”)
The filming of Dingus took place just after Sinatra’s father, Antonino Martino “Marty” Sinatra, died of a heart attack. By this point, Sinatra had been divorced three times; he had killed and kickstarted his career enough times to feel like a ghost of himself; he had lost friends and collaborators, seen trends come and go. Due to an injury incurred on the set of 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate, the hand he used to hold a microphone was often in immense pain. But his father’s death, according to those who knew him, was what broke him. “He became a little more quiet, a little less ebullient,” his daughter Tina reflects in My Father’s Daughter: A Memoir. “He needed this silliness after Grandpa died,” Nancy Sinatra Jr. explained. After Watertown arrived to the worst sales of his career in March 1971, and after Dingus hit theaters to critical disdain that fall, he announced his retirement, and, for a short while, disappeared.
II
The story of Watertown goes like this: A man is left alone with his two sons after his wife, Elizabeth, leaves for the big city. He feels lonely, hopeless, lovesick, and bored. On a sunny day, he goes to the train station, hoping she will return. She does not. Then it rains. The End.
The songwriters, Bob Gaudio and Jake Holmes, wrote all 10 songs with the ambition of stripping Sinatra of everything that had come to define his music, as if dictated by a series of prompts.
Where do Frank Sinatra songs usually take place? Somewhere luxurious and exciting, or if the mood strikes, a smoky bar, filled with familiar faces and commiserating drinkers. Watertown is set in a small town that may or may not be the one in upstate New York, some 30 miles from the Canadian border. “Nothing much happening down on Main,” Sinatra sings in the opening title track. “’Cept a little rain.”
Who is the usual narrator of Sinatra songs? It is a man in touch with his feelings, able to express himself with great passion and conviction, communicating even his lowest thoughts with the composure to suggest he’s on his way to better things—or at least a nicer bar. On Watertown, our narrator is nameless and listless, dwelling neither in pain nor in anger, circling the same subject over and over as the days blur together. “As far as anyone can tell,” he sings in what may be the album’s most hopeful line, “The sun will rise tomorrow.”
What do breakups usually sound like in Sinatra songs? They are elaborate, catastrophic events, narratives that demand to be orchestrated with the grand opulence of Christmas songs and film scores. On Watertown, the central breakup is a cold, empty thing that onlookers might ignore entirely if we didn’t have access to the protagonist’s internal monologue. “There is no string ensemble,” he tells us, “And she doesn’t even cry.”
These are, on the whole, the sparsest and saddest songs that Sinatra ever sang. The big swing for a single was “I Would Be in Love (Anyway),” which arrives early in the album to declare that this marriage was the peak of the narrator’s life, no matter how poorly it turned out. The second-to-last track, “She Said,” goes down in less than two minutes, consisting almost entirely of brief messages from Elizabeth, sung slowly and sternly over strange, clattering percussion and brief flourishes of strings. “She says she’s coming home,” it concludes. By the next song, you realize this was either a hallucination, a lie, or a cruel joke.
When Sinatra and his team enlisted Bob Gaudio for the project, it’s likely they were thinking about the hits that he wrote for the Four Seasons—pop morsels like “Sherry” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” songs that share Sinatra’s penchant for romance and humor and swingin’ melodies. Or maybe he was thinking about the hits he co-wrote for other artists, like the Walker Brothers’ “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” a mini-opera that captured heartbreak at its eternal, elemental peak.
Instead, they got the Gaudio who had just come off The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette, the Four Seasons’ bizarre and fascinating 1969 concept album, inspired by recent innovations like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The album, which blended political satire with long-form symphonic song structures, was a failure, and it seems that Gaudio and his writing partner, Jake Holmes, learned a lesson to rein in their ambition this time around. The Watertown tracklist is brief; the mood is focused; the color palette is muted and sepia-toned. The songs don’t necessarily follow a linear narrative, but if you were to cut any of them, or listen in a slightly different order, it would ruin the effect.
Maybe it could have been a success. There’s a “Mrs. Robinson” jaunt to “The Train,” and a lonesome Glen Campbell twang to “What’s Now Is Now.” The magnificent, waltz-time chorus of “For a While”—“I forget that I’m not over you… for a while”—has a baroque charm, accompanied by French horns, muted piano, and gentle strums of acoustic guitar. “What a Funny Girl (You Used to Be),” with its memories of messy kitchens and tableaus of teddy bears, cuts through with much-needed lightness at just the right time. “Elizabeth” kicks off with an actual electric guitar solo. It’s all pretty hip, in an AM-radio-soft-rock-circa-1970 kind of way.
But then there’s Sinatra. With the disembodied effect that comes from a guy singing alone who’s used to singing with bands, his vocals elevate Watertown from merely a well-crafted left-turn into a downer classic. He’d sounded more polished before, and he would sound more confident later, but he never reached quite the same emotional tenor for the span of an entire record. No singer ever has sung the word “goodbye” quite like Sinatra, and here, he gets another song devoted entirely to it: “Goodbye (She Quietly Says)” is the only track on the record that involves both characters in a room together and it’s narrated in the past-tense, a descending chord putting its vision further in the rearview with each repetition of the chorus; the effect is so haunting and dejected that, placed so early in the record, it feels like an attempt to clear any casual listeners out of the room.
For those who stick around, you could lose yourself in the delivery of any individual line. For me it’s in “Michael & Peter,” a song written in the form of an unsent letter to Elizabeth, detailing how their kids have grown, always stopping short just before begging her to come back (“Maybe soon the words will come my way…”). The key moment arrives as Sinatra starts describing the guy who cuts their lawn, who continually asks where she is. “Can’t tell you all the times he’s been told,” he sings. “But he’s… so… old.”
It’s the kind of casual inside joke shared among people who’ve cohabitated for a long time, and in this telling, Sinatra exudes equal resentment and sympathy for the guy. You get the sense that what might have once been an annoying routine between the two has now become a kind of comfort: At least he has some company, and at least he gets to talk about her again. You see him hunched over the letter, underlining each word, laughing to himself a little, writing more quickly as he loses himself to the memory. It is maybe at this precise moment, delivered at the end of the final verse, that the narrator decides not to send the letter.
None of this, for what it’s worth, is in the lyrics. It’s all how Sinatra sings it, stringing the words together, taking a deep breath and lowering his voice, maybe even doubting himself a little as he summons the bravado to sing what might be the most banal observation ever to find itself at the climax of a Frank Sinatra song. And if he used to give these types of performances in banquet halls filled with musicians and friends, electric and buzzing with live music, in this telling, he takes off his headphones, exits the recording booth, and stands in a soundproof room somewhere in Los Angeles, at the precipice of even more quiet to come.
III
Frank Sinatra announced his retirement in March 1971, and he was back on stage and making records again by January 1974. But even before his self-induced exile from the industry, it never seemed like Watertown would play much of a role in his narrative. Just a few months after its release, during a radio interview, he seemed to have forgotten the names of the songwriters he worked with (“I think the two kids did a great job”), and rumors quickly died about a TV special where he’d play the lead. It’s hard to imagine what this would have even looked like: a guy sitting alone in his house, singing to himself while gazing wistfully out the window? A scene-stealing appearance from the old man cutting the lawn? In the context of the career-spanning 2015 documentary, Sinatra: All or Nothing At All, Watertown accounts for roughly 20 seconds of its four-hour runtime, all in the service of explaining how dire his commercial prospects were before retiring.
The only song from the sessions that ever made it into Sinatra’s concert setlists was “Lady Day,” a gentle, non-album single that seemed to have nothing to do with the larger concept. Sinatra would introduce the song as a tribute to Billie Holiday, who had died from liver damage about 10 years earlier. Even with its elegiac tone, the words are sweeter and softer than anything on the record. “Her morning came too fast, too soon,” Sinatra sings, “and died before the afternoon.” It’s sad, but, in his telling, it also sounds a little like relief.
A common line on Sinatra is that he could not sing what he did not feel, which, like a lot of inherited wisdom about Sinatra, seems to be about half-true. After all, he’s on record as having never enjoyed performing chestnuts like “Strangers in the Night” or “My Way,” and throughout the ’70s and ’80s, he recorded plenty of ill-fitting material that might have seemed like a stretch, even then—say, “Sweet Caroline” or “Just the Way You Are.”
When Gaudio and Holmes sent Sinatra their homemade demos of the material (“Who has the nerve, at 28 years old, to sing a demo for Frank Sinatra when you’re not a singer?” Gaudio reflected earlier this year), they were under the impression he would pick just a song or two. Instead, he was taken by the whole project. Maybe it was the recent death of his father and the songs’ sympathetic portrayal of parenthood from a man’s perspective. Maybe it was its depiction of a woman leaving her marriage to pursue life in the big city, as he had recently served Mia Farrow divorce papers while she was in Los Angeles on the set for Rosemary’s Baby. (Sinatra had demanded Farrow—his wife of two years, almost 30 years his junior—abandon the project and meet him in New York, where she would co-star in his own film, The Detective. “While she’s working for us, she’s Mia Farrow, not Mrs. Sinatra,” he was reportedly told by a producer. This was the last straw.)
In the decades to come, Sinatra had more hits ahead of him. His rendition of “New York, New York,” released in 1980, would finally replace “My Way” as the crowd-pleasing closer of his live sets. He’d also return to his saloon ballad comfort zone on 1981’s She Shot Me Down, reuniting for the last time with arranger Gordon Jenkins to follow the thread of his more characteristic breakup songs from the ’50s and ’60s. He even returned to film work, some seven years after Dirty Dingus. Which all leaves Watertown in a vulnerable position, documenting an artist at a personal low, released to widespread indifference, clearing the path for the first moment in a long career where he felt that nothing of any consequence lay ahead of him.
There is some irony in this set of songs—written specifically to avoid the common tropes of Sinatra’s image, already set in stone by 1970—aligning so closely with his personal life at the time. But any autobiographical symmetry dissolves when the music plays. Unlike “Lady Day,” which Sinatra could perform as his own remembrance of a lost colleague, there was no way to fold these songs into his greater body of work. A charming gentleman in an expensive tuxedo does not sing “Goodbye (She Quietly Says).” “Michael & Peter” would not make sense for the audience at a casino. Try telling the narrator of “For a While” that the best is yet to come. These songs stand apart, and so Sinatra kept them apart. In their words—full of anticlimaxes and dead-ends, solitude and longing, small towns and gray skies, empty trains and unsent letters—there was a story close to his heart, one as serious as life and death. It wasn’t the story he’d set out to tell, or the one the world wanted to hear from him. But it was the story, nonetheless.


On The Incredible True Story, the Gaithersburg, Md. rapper Logic assumes the role of screenwriter and director, claiming to have written a script for the album. It’s set 100 years in the future, as two narrators search for a planet named Paradise following Earth’s destruction.

The Incredible True Story

New artists face intimidating challenges after signing to major labels. For starters, creating a debut that not only sees the light of day, but is successful enough to warrant a follow-up. In certain cases, that first album is everything they’ve been waiting to say for years, but the second album is the bigger test, as it proves that the artist has something to say beyond the cathartic release of emotions heard on their debut effort. For instance, Logic’s 2014 debut, Under Pressure, was a detailed account of his chaotic Gaithersburg, Md. origin layered with his method of coping with stress while trying to escape the situation before it consumed him. It was honest and, on occasion, impressive. The announcement of his second collection, The Incredible True Story, generated questions about how Logic could follow something as intricate and personal as Under Pressure. Where could he go? The answer: outer space.
Under Pressure was evidence of Logic’s attention to specifics, which he remains committed to on The Incredible True Story. You may have noticed him often wearing a NASA flight jacket leading up the album’s release, similar to a movie director wearing a t-shirt or hat emblazoned with the name of his latest film. On The Incredible True Story, he assumes the role of screenwriter and director, claiming to have written a script for the album. It’s set 100 years in the future, as the two narrators, Thomas and Kai, search for a planet named Paradise following Earth’s destruction. (Thalia, who served as the Midnight Marauders-inspired virtual guide on Under Pressure, returns as the computer for the ship driven by the narrators. Thankfully, she’s still more Siri than HAL 9000.) During their journey, the duo revisit the past through Logic’s music.
Because Logic’s catalog serves as an artifact in the album’s narrative, the early placement of "Fade Away" is calculated. Over a dreamy sample reminiscent of a doo-wop song, Logic reflects on death’s inevitability: everyone dies eventually, so strive to create something that lives on after you. "Upgrade" maintains the futuristic theme (The Fifth Element allusions and all) as Logic explains how success has altered both his day-to-day existence and his perspective.
Despite being set in the future, the album takes time to dip into the past. On "Young Jesus", Logic and guest Big Lenbo trade verses over producer 6ix’s recreation of '90s hip-hop ambiance. Its highest points come on the second and third verses, where Logic hands the song off to Big Lenbo like they’re performing live and sharing a mic. Logic’s introspective thoughts match the mellow calm of "Innermission", as he longs for the ability to revisit certain moments just to dwell in them again. It’s a moment of clarity most folks arrive at as they get older: you’ll never be present in your memories again.
This is another constant theme on The Incredible True Story—Logic’s evolution under the spotlight. "City of Stars" finds him at his most sincere. Once Logic’s harmonizing breaks, his and 6ix's production becomes more aggressive as Logic unloads his frustrations with hip-hop, including the fixation on the biracial MC’s appearance. "I didn’t talk about my race on the whole first album/ But black versus white bullshit was still the outcome," he rhymes, clearly exasperated. He then takes aim at critics, amateur and professional, who chide Drake for harping on "money and bitches" yet praise 2Pac for doing the same. Logic is at his best when getting shit off his chest, but even in the midst of these brazen admissions, there are still missteps.
From its off-kilter drag to his deployment of boast-riddled yells in the place of bars, "I Am the Greatest" reeks of Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. Recycled flows and rhyme schemes are common in this era of hip-hop, but there’s a fine line between homage and imitation. Furthermore, while Logic has proven himself to be a talented MC who respects hip-hop culture and puts obvious effort into his work, there’s very little on The Incredible True Story that's worth constant replays. The music is enjoyable and Logic’s ambition is evident, but the final product just doesn’t attach itself to the memory.
The Incredible True Story is a pleasant voyage to Paradise orchestrated by an artist who’s earned the approval of legends from Rick Rubin to Big Daddy Kane. Logic has the tools to create music that has longevity, but has yet to unlock the characteristics that truly set him apart. If he’s able to tap into that, his subsequent releases will have the impact he aspires for.


For the past few weeks, I\x92ve had a crash course in No Wave: from CDR mixes to press packets ...

Theoretical Girls

For the past few weeks, I've had a crash course in No Wave: from CDR mixes to press packets, to an interview with the big daddy of it all, James Chance, I've been absolutely deluged in a movement all but kept secret on my own New York streets for over twenty years. The cherry on top is finally being able to hear this archival release of the Theoretical Girls, a band whose moniker treaded close to becoming an apt description of their turbid presence in the history books of the late 70s downtown scene. Hypothetically, what would a band featuring hundred guitar orchestrator Glenn Branca, visual artist Margaret De Wys, Sonic Youth producer/engineer Wharton Tiers, and theatre/dance composer Jeffrey Lohn sound like were they still in their mid-twenties, when the city was still up for grabs and there were many aspects of rock that had yet to be turned by their forefathers the Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, and the others?
Surprisingly, they sound a lot more rock'n roll than their contemporary art credentials would lead you to surmise. And while the Glenn Branca reissue on Atavistic focused only on his singing contributions and the more avant leanings of the Girls, this set of songs descries the styling of Jeffrey Lohn, the more straightforward side of the group. Their theme song starts the disc off at full gallop, taking the thundering count-off numbers of the Ramones and stretching them to the limit, concentrating less on ideas and more on the mad tempo blast, straining to stay within the chords even as Tiers' drums thump relentlessly. "Computer Dating" foresees the advent of Nerve.com, and the faceless frenzy of the New York City hook-up infects every note of the song like a chancrous outbreak.
Perhaps their closest contemporary at the time would be the Step Forward-era Fall, matching their raw rock non-production with the profuse, sneering verbiage of "Europe Max," as well as embodying the lean, gleeful bounce from a few choice rhythmic elements, becoming the latter act's modus all the way through its Brix-era pop sensibilities. The unrefined keyboards of De Wys serve as link not only to the similarly primitive bleeps of pre-Eno Devo, but all the way through the spasmings of another Ohio group, Brainiac, nearly twenty years later. On "Lovin in the Red," her organ's throbs act as contrary motion to the rest of the band, speeding and slowing defiant to the rhythms of the spiky guitar riffs of Branca and Lohn.
The only track ever to see Carter-era light-- as the A-side of their lone single-- "U.S. Millie" runs together inane pop culture references to Howard Johnson hotel chains, Jews for Jesus pamphlets, yogurt health, and Scientology at a Taxi Driver pace, contorting the marquee barrage of Times Square through Lohn's catchy derisions and setting up the 3-card monte stand for Thurston Moore's street hustles circa Sister-era Sonic Youth. Equally powerful is the frustrated garage rage of "No More Sex," grunting and steaming like the nastiest of '77 punk. "Electronic Angie" howls secret constellations of blackened bubblegum on subway platforms, illuminating the preordained patterns of sidewalk cracks and black tar asphalt. Real street gospel.
Some of Lohn's experiments, like "Keyboard Etude" and "Polytonal," are too short and unformed to be effective, especially in light of Branca's buzzing behemoths. "Parlez-vous Francais" works despite their tendencies to shout lyrics in French, but even as redundant tracks appear on the second half of the disc, songs like "Theoretical Girls," "Electronic Angie," and "Chicita Bonita" are high voltage and variegated enough to warrant revising those old No Wave maps, which right now only include DNA, Mars, Teenage Jesus, and the Contortions.


During his brief lifetime, James "J Dilla" Yancey produced thousands of tracks. The dozens of untitled beats on Dillatronic are like sketchbooks from a widely recognized master of the art form. Yet in total, they bear traces of his superior instincts.

Dillatronic

During his brief lifetime, James "J Dilla" Yancey produced thousands of tracks. As Erykah Badu, who worked with him on her Mama's Gun album, once said during a RBMA lecture, Dilla made "beats all day long." He collected many of them onto CDs, and handed them out to friends and colleagues. These "beat tapes" had begun circulating across the Internet by the time he passed in 2006 at the age of 32.
Dilla's work has since become fodder for dozens of compilations, posthumous "collaborations" like the 2013 album Sunset Blvd. with Frank Nitt and his brother Illa J, and unnecessary reissues like a "badge-shaped" Record Store Day 2015 version of his 2001 12-inch "Fuck the Police". The Yancey estate has also begun issuing his beats in raw form, without vocals. (Before, they were available as "instrumental" accompaniments to projects like Rebirth of Detroit, which paired Dilla's beats with newly recorded vocals by various rappers.) Last year's The King of Beats: Ma Dukes Collector's Box Set boasted some memorable packaging—it included four 10-inch records, a cassette, and a floppy disk formatted for an E-mu SP-1200 sampler keyboard—as well as an imposing $207.74 price tag.
The King of Beats, as well as 2013's Lost Tapes Reels + More, and now Dillatronic are like sketchbooks from a widely recognized master of the art form. On the latter, each track bears the spartan title "Dillatronic 01", et cetera. According to its promotional materials, Dillatronic represents his "electronic-influenced" material, but that's a loose theme at best. There is nothing here as gloriously techno as "Nothing Like This" from the 2003 EP Ruff Draft, or the Kraftwerk homage "B.B.E. (Big Booty Express)" from his 2001 album as Jay Dee, Welcome 2 Detroit. If anything, many of these virtually unnamed and undated "beats batches" float along like the rudimentary, keyboards-and-bass-drums beats of late-'90s indie rap producers like Shawn J. Period and 88-Keys. Most have a running time of around two to three minutes, while a few last less than a minute. Yet in total, they bear traces of his superior instincts.
There are echoes of better-known productions here: the penetrating synth keyboard of "Dillatronic 10" is reminiscent of "E=MC2" from The Shining, and track 35 unfolds a neo-soul guitar groove that evokes his work on Phat Kat's "Dedication to the Suckers". With its enchanting yet disembodied chorus of "ooohs," "14" is like a distant cousin of Slum Village's "Get Dis Money". "29" whips a blaxploitation funk lick around a sample of M.O.P.'s "Ante Up", while a sample of Whodini's "Escape (I Need a Break)" girds the hallucinatory track 34. The latter is one of the more fully realized electronic instrumentals included here, but there are others, like the "Tetris"-like effects on "22", and the ghostly electro on "24" that cruelly ends in 45 seconds.
A few of these files suggest paths unexplored. "05", which only lasts a minute and three seconds, weds a bhangra-like melody to a drum kit. It's an avenue Dilla's close friend Madlib explored more fully on his Beat Konducta in India. "31" builds like a '70s horror cut (or perhaps a porno flick?) around an unnamed woman breathing "No" as a solitary keyboard sound throbs creepily. "33" weaves around a sped-up recording of a voices chirping as if out of The Wizard of Oz.
Dilla's familiar techniques are evident, like his frequent use of air sirens and hard, slapping percussion. He speaks only once, near the end of the minute-and-three-second track "39". "Yeah! Bounce with a nigga!" he commands to us over loping bass and spacey keyboard effects. This might be a data dump of studio experiments, not a cohesive Donuts-like experience that casual listeners might crave. But admirers of this brilliantly inventive musician will find much to rhyme over, get inspired by, or simply bounce to on Dillatronic.


Paul McCartney's Ram is a domestic-bliss album, one of the weirdest, earthiest, and most honest ever made. What 2012's ears can find is a rock icon inventing an approach to pop music that would eventually become someone else's indie pop.

Ram

Flipping through the booklet to Paul McCartney's Ram reissue, you'll find no scholarly liner-notes essay. This is odd. Usually the reissue-packaging gods demand the positioning of an eager critic between you and the product, dispensing wisdom on how you might experience the music they're standing in front of. What you find instead is a McCartney family-photo scrapbook: Paul draping himself playfully around monkey bars with his infant Stella. Mary, about three years old, hoisting fat headphones above her tiny head; on the opposite page, Linda nuzzling Paul, those same headphones ringed around his neck. In the photos, Paul looks dazed, as if he were smacked in the face with a pillow seconds before the shutter clicked. It drives the point home: Ram is a domestic-bliss album, one of the weirdest, earthiest, and most honest ever made. No wonder critics loathed it so passionately.
Or at least, some critics did. Sometimes an album gets a review so resoundingly negative that it lurks forever like a mournful spirit in its rear view mirror: Jon Landau, writing for Rolling Stone, claimed to hear in Ram "the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far." Which is intense. But people wanted impossible things from Beatles solo albums-- closure, healing, apologies, explanations for what to do with their dashed expectations. John Lennon tried telling everyone outright "The dream is over" on Plastic Ono Band's "God", but that still wasn't a cold-water jet hard enough to prepare people, apparently, for the whimsical pastoral oddity that was Ram.
Landau was right, however, that it did spell the end of something, which might be a clue to the vitriol: If "60s rock" was defined, in large part, by the existence of the Beatles, then Ram made it clear in a new, and newly painful, way that there would be no Beatles ever again. To use a messy-divorce metaphor: When your parents are still screaming red-faced at each other, it's a nightmare, but you can still be assured they care. When one of them picks up and continues on living, it smarts in an entirely different way.
Ram, simply put, is the first Paul McCartney release completely devoid of John's musical influence. Of course, John wiggled his way into some of the album's lyrics-- in those fresh, post-breakup years, the two couldn't quite keep each other out of their music. But musically, Ram proposes an alternate universe where young Paul skipped church the morning of July 6, 1957, and the two never crossed paths. It's breezy, abstracted, completely hallucinogen-free, and utterly lacking grandiose ambitions. Its an album whistled to itself. It's purely Paul.
Or actually, "Paul and Linda." This was another one of Paul's chief Ram-related offenses: He not only invited his new photographer bride into the recording studio, he included her name on the record's spine. Ram is the only album in recorded history credited to the artist duo "Paul and Linda McCartney," and in the sense that Linda's enthusiastically warbling vocals appear on almost every song, it's entirely accurate. Some read Paul's decision as the ultimate insult to his former partner: I've got a new collaborator now! Her name is Linda, and she never makes me feel stupid. In the album's freewheeling spirit, however, the decision scans more like guilelessness and innocence. The songs don't feel collaborative so much as cooperative: little schoolhouse plays that required every hand on deck to get off the ground. Paul had the most talent, so naturally he was up front, but he wanted everyone behind him, banging pots, hollering, whistling-- whatever it is you did, make sure you're back there doing it with gusto.
It is exactly this homemade charm that has caught on with generations of listeners as the initial furor around the album subsided. What 2012's ears can find on Ram is a rock icon inventing an approach to pop music that would eventually become someone else's indie pop. It had no trendy name here; it was just a disappointing Beatles solo album. But when Ben Stiller's fussy, pedantic "Greenberg" character painstakingly assembles a mix for Greta Gerwig intended to display the breadth and depth of his pop-culture appreciation, he slides Ram's "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" on there. It's the song we see her singing along to enthusiastically in the following montage.
Critics hated "Uncle Albert". "A major annoyance," Christgau opined. Again, from the current moment we can only plead ignorance, assume that some serious shit had to be going down to clog everyone's ears. Because "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" is not only Ram's centerpiece, it is clearly one of McCartney five greatest solo songs. As the slash in the title hints, it's a multi-part song, starring two characters. To put its accomplishments in an egg-headed way: It fuses the conversational joy listeners associated with McCartney's melodic gift to the compositional ambition everyone assumed was Lennon's. To put it a simpler way: Every single second of this song is joyously, deliriously catchy, and no two seconds are the same. Do you think early Of Montreal, the White Stripes at their most vaudevillian, or the Fiery Furnaces took any lessons from this song?
What a lot of people thought they heard on "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey", and everywhere else on the album, is cloying cuteness. But it turns out you can say a lot of things-- things like "go fuck yourself" ("3 Legs"), "everything is fucked" ("Too Many People"), and even "let's go fuck, honey" ("Eat At Home)"-- with a big, dimpled grin on your face. "It's just the critics who say, 'Well, John was the biting tongue; Paul's the sentimental one,'" Linda observed shrewdly in a dual Playboy interview from 1984. "John was biting, but he was also sentimental. Paul was sentimental, but he could be very biting. They were more similar than they were different."
The joy of paying close attention to Ram is gradually discovering that Paul was humming darker things under his breath than it seemed. "Smile Away", for instance, is a messy, romping slab of Buddy Holly rock. Paul makes a joke about his stinky feet. The chorus goes "Smile away, smile away, smile away, smile away, smile away." But it's not just "smile," a brief, cost-free act that can last a second. It's "Smile Away", keeping a fixed grin as conversation grows unpleasant. In interviews of the period, Paul was asked repeatedly if he felt lost without his collaborating partner, if he was motivated solely by commercial success, how he felt about being "the cute Beatle." The backing vocal chant behind "Smile Away" goes, by turns, "Don't know how to do that" and "Learning how to do that." "Smile away horribly, now," Paul slurs over the song's fadeout. Yes, he's fine. No, he and Linda will not become the next "John and Yoko." But thanks so much for asking. If you tell a dog it's a brainless fleabag with the same tone of voice you use to say "Good boy," it will still wag its tail.
The album is riddled with dark grace notes like this: "Monkberry Moon Delight" has an absolutely unhinged vocal take, Paul gulping and sobbing right next to your inner ear. The imagery is surrealist, but anything but whimsical: "When a rattle of rats had awoken/ The sinews, the nerves, and the veins," he bellows. It could be a latter-day Tom Waits performance. "Too Many People" opens with Paul warbling "piece of cake," but the lyrics themselves wag their finger at societal injustices, former bandmates-- basically everybody. The lyrics to "3 Legs" are full of hobbling animals with missing limbs.
The almost-title song "Ram On", could serve as the album's redeeming spirit: A haunting, indelible little tune drifts past on ukulele as Paul croons, "Ram on, give your heart to somebody/ Soon, right away." The title is a play on his old stage name "Paul Ramon," which makes the song a private little prayer; a mirror image, perhaps, to John Lennon's "Hold On". The song is reprised, late in the record, functioning like a calming breeze. "I want a horse, I want a sheep/ Want to get me a good night's sleep," Paul jauntily sings on "Heart of the Country", a city boy's vision of the country if ever there was one, and another clue to the record's mindstate. For Paul, the country isn't just a place where crops grow; it's "a place where holy people grow." Now that American cities everywhere are having their Great Pastoral Moment, full of artisans churning goat's-milk yogurt and canning their own jams, Ram feels like particularly ripe fruit.
This reissue comes with a disc of extras from the period, which hardcore McCartney fans will already know well. They are lovely, an extension of the album's mood and world without interrupting it or diluting it. Songs like "Another Day" and "Hey Diddle" feel like a cracked-open door onto the kind of records Paul could have conceivably gone on making forever. A few years later, he had returned, presumably chastened, to crafting over-arching concept records about fictitious bands, the sort of thing he'd gotten a lot of applause for in the past. But the bracingly pure and simple air of Ram has resonated further.


On her debut album, the London-based cellist and composer explores her experiences as a child of the Chinese diaspora. Musically and conceptually, the record evokes hazy, in-between spaces.

YIAN

The word yian, or yàn (燕), refers to a swallow, the migratory harbinger of spring that in Chinese culture appears often in maobi paintings, children’s songs, girls’ names, and superstitions. In her largely self-produced debut full-length, YIAN, Lucinda Chua is both the swallow—the bird in flight, in search of home—and the swallowed, a body succumbing to something greater than itself.
The London-based cellist and producer has spent years excavating the delicate interiorities of melancholy and longing. Her previous EPs, 2019’s Antidotes 1 and 2021’s Antidotes 2, captured tender vignettes of shifting moods and moments in time. YIAN, by comparison, expands outward, offering not just vignettes but stories, often rooted in the artist’s own experiences as a child of the Chinese diaspora. Born to a Chinese-Malaysian father and white British mother, Chua seeks both a relationship to her roots and release from its inherited traumas. It follows that much of the album is spent navigating—and redefining her relationship to—hazy, in-between spaces.
Haunting these spaces is the classic diasporic question of home. On the elegiac “Autumn Leaves Don’t Come,” glassy strings played sul ponticello criss-cross like flocks of birds. Chua’s voice thickens like rope, and she casts it outward, as if in search of anchorage. Here, as throughout the album, Chua creates landscapes out of the hollow spaces within her. Each track becomes its own kind of home, or at least a safe harbor. The orchestral “Meditations on a Place” evokes both the impressionistic warmth of Ravel and the icy panoramas of Sibelius. A bass drone pulses gently; low strings swell; and the tremolo of violins shimmer like light on water. Meanwhile, “Grief Piece” drifts through the lonely expanses of its namesake. Digital distortion glitches the matrix like sorrow short-circuiting the brain.
Over the course of YIAN, Chua gathers the threads that link home, history, and their relationship to the body. Lead single “Echo” is a quiet declaration of independence from ancestral trauma. In the single’s cover art, she reaches out her hand in the shape of lánhuāzhǐ (兰花指)—a primary hand gesture in traditional Chinese dance, based on the lánhuā (兰花), or orchid. Yet the way she holds it (wrist barely bent, head and neck stock straight) is a departure from tradition. In dressing her wounds, Chua finds a need both to draw such boundaries and to reach across others. On “You,” aquatic backing vocals bloom and give way to a vibrating cello line. Chua’s voice arches like a bridge, seeking connection to a relationship rendered distant by time and past circumstances: “I want you to know/ That all of your kindness/ Is all of my kindness./ I hope that you find this.” The suggestion of a shared psychic space is also echoed on “Do You Know, You Know?” As a train-like whistle blows through a veil of synth reverb, the artist intones, “Help me […] I don’t want to hurt you/ It’s hurting me too.” The dissolving of personal borders hints at the possibility of new growth, even if a clear resolution is out of reach.
In a sense, by sublimating the self—by unlearning and unbecoming—Chua is able to return to herself. On album standout “An Ocean,” she finds freedom not in earthbound love, but in the tides that carry her away from its shores towards a home of her own. The sea between the two, once a source of hurt, churns instead into a site of power. A muted Rhodes figure bobs along an undulating piano line as violin strings like wings scythe through staticky rain; her voice emerges, a lighthouse: “The waves swallow me whole,” she intones. “Tides carry me home.” By allowing herself to experience loss and be lost, she invites the possibility of renewal, of spring. “I Promise” is also born of loss. Chua’s breathy vocals catch like cotton on splintered driftwood: “I, I, I promise under—,” she repeats, as if searching for the vow that will heal her. Over soft dissonance and unresolved chords, she articulates a desire not for an object of love but for love as an object, untethered to any human form. Of course, this produces a tension, as the idea of an objectless love is not unlike that of a placeless home. The creation of both necessitates imagination.
Yet it is precisely ephemeral and imaginary spaces, rather than any physical roost, that best hold the poet. And if imagination is a pathway to embodiment, then surrendering to the skies can also be a way back to one’s body, one’s original home. On album closer “Something Other Than Years,” Chua duets with the ethereal-voiced Yeule—two voices at once uprooted by and rooted in diaspora. Warm harmonies like thermals buoy the sparrow higher and higher, until in a crystalline blaze, she disappears once again into the fog whence she came.


Greg Gonzalez has a lovely voice and a convincingly atmospheric take on dream pop, neither of which is well served by his two-dimensional fantasies.

Cry

It feels almost like a novelty these days for a dude to write an album entirely about being extremely horny. Men don’t make music about sex the way they used to. We are far past the epoch of Serge Gainsbourg writing pop songs that involved Jane Birkin or Brigitte Bardot mimicking the sounds of orgasm. People have more or less collectively agreed that rendering women as pure sex objects in music doesn’t need to happen so much anymore. Greg Gonzalez, the frontman of the noir dream-pop band Cigarettes After Sex, must not have gotten the memo. He operates within a space of midcentury sexual anachronism. His second record, Cry, is a 41-minute dream about Penthouse pets and women in silken underthings, filtered through chiaroscuro and top-shelf whiskey. There is a universe where this raciness could conceivably offer a reprieve from indie rock’s occasional prudishness. Unfortunately, Gonzalez’s candor about his desire comes off as lifeless and borderline asinine.
This is clear from the first play of the record. The bleak textures, like those of the band’s debut, have been airlifted from the darkest corners of dream-pop music. There are notes of Violet Indiana and the Verve circa A Storm in Heaven, as well as more obvious tips of the hat to Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch. “Kiss It Off Me,” the album’s second song, uses subterranean synth parts that are uncannily similar to the ones on the Twin Peaks soundtrack. The intrigue and Lynchian darkness pretty much stop once we meet the apple of Gonzalez’s eye, a protagonist as two-dimensional as a piece of paper peeling off a picnic table in a light breeze. “I could see you were walking slow/Drinking a Slurpee/In a peach baseball cap/Falling in my lap/You were so thirsty,” Gonzalez sings, with unearned wistfulness. He yearns to make her forget about “all of those rich fuckboys” she tends to date, and by the end of the song, she’s biting her lip and begging for it before she heads off to the gym in the morning. If there is anything romantic about this encounter, it is washed away by the song’s utter inability to deviate from overused ’90s pastiche—or, more importantly, to represent the woman in question as anything other than some chick who loves to work out and have sex.
Then there’s “Hentai,” a song that’s literally about anime porn. Specifically, about a hentai video he described to his paramour the first time they “made love,” about “a girl who as soon as she made you come/Could show you the future and tell you your fortune.” The scene setting could almost be funny, but there’s scant irony in Gonzalez’s delivery. The sound of the song is as delicate as an antique plate gathering dust on a shelf: High notes on electric guitars are languidly plucked, and the bassline is a slow IV drip that gives you goosebumps. Then there’s the question of Gonzalez’s voice, a truly lovely and androgynous tenor that’s wasted on lines like these. You could lose yourself in the sound, if losing yourself is akin to collapsing on an overly plush bed. “Pure” is an equally banal and pornographic sketch of a song. Here, Gonzalez’s woman wears a white bodysuit and has wet hair.  Long story short, she goes down on him, and then they go stare out the window but all he can think about is how he got to see her naked. It’s the album’s closer, but it’s likely to leave you feeling nothing, other than perhaps blunted anger.
Cry doesn’t evoke much in the name of passion. Unless, of course, passion is the same thing as wafting through depression, and sex is the means to fill that void. There is nothing wry about the way Gonzalez writes about sex. The album has almost zero sense of humor and is deadly serious in its execution. It’s important to write about sex on one’s own terms, and there are plenty of compelling ways to explore sexuality in song. The problem here is that the narrative of this record is essentially one giant, dull, and gross fantasy plucked from adolescent male puberty. It presents a vision of sex that comes from surfing Pornhub after school before your parents get home from work, and from looking at pictures of minimally clad Instagram influencers while waiting in line to get a flu shot. Gonzalez’s attempt to be honest about his experiences is far removed from the reality of what it is like to be sexually vulnerable in front of another person. Cry is a soulless and Styrofoam record as hollow as a booty-call text at 3 a.m. “Hey sexy, you up?” the record seems to beckon. It’s hardly an inviting proposition.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Crisp and shiny as a compact disc, these 10 songs position the North Carolina upstarts as late-1990s alt-connoisseurs, unashamed of and unapologetic about their enthusiasms.

In the Living Room

The first thing you need to know about North Carolina’s Diva Sweetly is that they are a byproduct of the Fest, the annual weekend in Gainesville, Fla., where the most exuberant, communal, and wildly uncool forms of punk rock congregate. Some bands are looking to smash the patriarchy, others to smash a bunch of PBRs, and some to do both. Diva Sweetly are pretty much the Fest made flesh: Call Diva Sweetly pop-punk, emo, or merely note the dashes of ska or nu metal, and they’d be honored. Daniel Gorham’s snare is one of the tightest you’ll hear this side of a 311 record, and Nick “Scoops” Dardaris’ production is astoundingly hi-fi for a new band on an upstart label, crisp and shiny as a compact disc.
Diva Sweetly draw a thick border around their most formative and least fashionable influences; in doing so, they have managed to emerge as the rare rock act that sounds truly young. Their debut LP, In the Living Room, honors the track-stuffing alt-rock of the late 1990s, with instrumental flourishes that burst out like comic thought bubbles. “Cult” betrays the band’s Southern roots by throwing in a banjo non sequitur; the chorus of “Wax on My Candles” balloons into Broadway spectacle and gets a campfire reprise. Diva Sweetly also rig their lyrics with joy buzzers. “Wax on My Candles” contains what must be the first documented usage of “egg sando” in a song, and a screen door is broke “just like me after I dropped a grand” by going on tour. “We were sniffing glue from ’92,” Gorham howls during “Floor Caved In,” his anachronisms linked by rhyme. Friends dose their drinks to “postpone the millennium,” while they flip the melody of “Auld Lang Syne” to namedrop Third Eye Blind.
Diva Sweetly are late-’90s alt-connoisseurs born a decade too late, on trend for 2019. Their vocal dynamic should be familiar: Karly Hartzman is the one with the actual chops, sifting spun sugar over the loping groove of “Detox Island” and adding crystallized tartness to “Cult.” Gorham supplies the energy; when he steps away from the New Rock Revolution vocal filters, he strains and yelps, keeping In the Living Room close to its DIY roots.
They’re a unified, if not wholly confident, front against the ills that define modern indie punk songwriting: anxiety about dropping out of college, anxiety about cults, anxiety about weed. “You’re calling this your life/But it’s seeming like a slow suicide,” Hartzman sings on “Education,” which would be the most profoundly despairing song heard in an Urban Outfitters if shoppers ignored the lyrics. In the Living Room can breeze by like that. Its sweetness isn’t cloying, even though Diva Sweetly do slather an even glaze over the second half. That prevents it from ever becoming bigger than the sum of its parts—10 songs of ingratiating, hooky, state-of-the-art, communal indie rock.
The other thing you need to know about In the Living Room: It includes a skit—not a spoken-word reading, not a voicemail, not a field recording, or anything else that typically accounts for an interlude in indie rock. This is an actually scripted skit, putting In the Living Room within a small but surprisingly elite class that includes There’s Nothing Wrong With Love and Fevers and Mirrors. Diva Sweetly offer a fake infomercial for the “Tongue Knife,” a concept introduced in “Education,” like a “Bigmouth Strikes Again” for kids who discovered the Smiths and ska in middle school. It’s all done in an intentionally grating tone that no one really uses anymore in a format that went the way of public-access television. I started fast-forwarding after the second listen, but this record wouldn’t really exist without it. No throwaway gag, it is the spiritual core of the rare indie rock album willing to go to any lengths to be the life of the party before everyone’s crying in their beers.


Deeply invested in Americana aesthetics, the fourth solo album from James Jackson Toth-- the three previous ones flew under the Wooden Wand banner-- finds him abandoning his bizarre psych-folk for alt-country. Members of Wilco and Deerhoof make guest appearances.

Waiting in Vain

James Jackson Toth's solo work-- Waiting in Vain is ostensibly his fourth solo record, though the three prior all flew under the Wooden Wand banner-- has traced a linear path from the bizarre psych-folk of Harem of the Sundrum & the Witness Figg to the layabout dust-rock of last year's James and the Quiet. Those albums, increasingly structured and tuneful, felt like a natural reaction to Wooden Wand's unstructured heathenism. Here, however, Toth transforms from hip(pie) priest to forlorn wanderer via a cocktail of Casanova-isms, armchair psychology, and alt-country. That Toth swung fully the other way was no surprise, but it was always a dicey proposition: Toth is neither an excellent vocal stylist nor a particularly clever wordsmith, and his intrigue has always been based on a mixture of homespun oddity and improvisational excess. To think that his world is now vying for a(nother) Bright Eyes opening gig-- see: "Beulah the Good"-- or hacking college radio playlists places that intrigue in the rearview.
Waiting in Vain is deeply invested in Americana aesthetics, positing Toth as the pose-able Kris Kristofferson action figure. Early on, it becomes apparent that given a lilting, slow-beat ballad, Toth will wind himself in knots being poetic: enter the detestable "Doreen", in which all of Toth's worst lyrical tendencies-- arrogance and vagary amid simple rhymes-- pop up. To wit: "I'm dreaming in a room with a complicated clown," "You tell me I ain't your dad/ But I'm better than the one you had," and, most vexing, "You're the water/ I'm the trace of lead inside." "Look in on Me" presents "Cocaine and bourbon, pinball and pool" as personal attributes, as if they represent a sense of despair or emotional investment. "Poison Oak" (NB: not the Oberst song of the same name) drags depressingly ("Your father oughta have his old head busted in/ For raising you up like he did"); "Do What You Can" is soggy and shapeless.
Too bad, because "Look in on Me" represents one of a handful of songs on Waiting in Vain that contain both competent hooks and a careful arrangement. Toth has always had really cool friends, and here Vetiver's Andy Cabic shows up. Nels Cline (Wilco, the Nels Cline Singers) and Deerhoof's John Dieterich take turns on guitar; the brilliant, harmonic squiggles on "The Dome" and "The Banquet Styx" are likely theirs. The beefy, uptempo rush of "Beulah the Good" and "Styx" help overcome Toth's missteps. On "Beulah", he momentarily discovers his inner Blonde on Blonde-- "I was miserable and bitter/ Life was easy," "I used to have seven wives/ I can't even count to six"-- and finally seems at ease in his druggy self-consciousness.
"The Dome" is particularly frustrating: Its seven minutes of doom-folk sound like someone bloodied R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" and as Toth drones ominously about "the telephone zone" it becomes clear that this displaced drudgery is a better fit for Toth's demeanor than jaunty, pretty country-rock. Wooden Wand more than proved Toth an idiosyncratic artist worthy of attention, but Waiting in Vain trades oddity for reasonably executed convention far too often. The result is pale, beefy, and contemptuous.


Best known for recordings for chamber ensemble or prepared piano, Haushcka here embraces house music. Members of múm and Calexico guest.

Salon des Amateurs

Lately, there have been a number of acts making variations on house music, loosely speaking, using acoustic instruments and ensemble techniques. Brandt Brauer Frick is probably the best known in dance circles, performing thumping, techno-inspired grooves with lineup of harp, strings, mallets, and other acoustic instruments (as well as the requisite laptop and 808 handclap). But there are also Nicolas Jaar, Wareika, dOP, and Kadebostan, among others; Elektro Guzzi, signed to Stefan Goldmann's Macro imprint, splits the difference between minimal techno and math rock with just drums, electric guitar, and effects. Hauschka's Salon des Amateurs is the latest addition to the canon. It has been made primarily with prepared piano, with understated contributions from múm drummer Samuli Kosminen and Calexico's John Convertino and Joe Burns.
It might seem like a bold move coming from Hauschka (Volker Bertelmann), a musician who's best known for intimate, classically inspired recordings for chamber ensemble or prepared piano-- hushed, pretty, and sometimes bordering on precious. The point hasn't been lost on Hauschka himself, who spells out his status as an interloper in the self-effacing title. (It also refers to a club in the artist's native Düsseldorf where he presents an annual piano festival.) But he needn't have: Salon des Amateurs is an inspired reverse engineering of house and techno's fundamentals, replacing the music's familiar circuitry with steel wire and felt pads.
By design, it's not really house music: There's no rhythmic quantization or bottom-heavy kick drum to appease club DJs. Compositionally, too, these songs are more ambitious than most club tracks, given to the kinds of harmonic changes that don't lend themselves to DJ tools. But it's not not house music, either. Despite varied rhythms and tempos across the album, steady 4/4 grooves are the norm. All the songs share dance music's fondness for [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| ring pedal tones and a [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| long, arcing shape, even if the mood and the style range from minor-key funk to steppy tango to all-out pastoral bliss. This is the kind of music you could imagine being played by DJs like Dixon, Âme, or Optimo-- DJs who know how to recognize dance music's essential thread, no matter how wooly the garment.
There are two main instruments here, Hauschka's piano and his computer. (Occasional percussion, horns, accordion, and bass synthesizer add color.) The piano he prepares, in the tradition of John Cage, with any number of small objects-- paper clips, clothespins, a packet of Tic-Tacs-- inserted between strings or laid across them in way that provokes strange, tinny timbres and harmonics. (You can watch him prepare his piano in a fascinating series of videos on NPR.org.) Thus the piano, or a few notes of it, anyway, can come to imitate growling synthesizer bass, congas, and spluttering ride cymbals.
The computer is used as a multitrack recorder, allowing him to build each song in a succession of parallel lines. There is very little evidence of digital post-processing; it sounds, for the most part, like he has played each part in full in real time, rather than cutting and pasting phrases and fragments into a post-hoc collage. (For anyone interested in a really close examination of his method, you can download all 20 multi-track parts to "Ping" from Juno.) It sounds, for lack of a better word, organic. I don't mean that in a loaded way; some great electronic dance music is radically inorganic, fit together out of tiny snippets of isolated sound in such a way that emphasizes disjuncture. But this album, in contrast, feels natural, artless. There are no evident seams.
The preparations give Hauschka an enormous range of timbres to work with, lending the music a wonderful sense of depth and texture, and tugging it closer to sounds normally thought possible only from electronic instruments. He also makes a good case for the piano as a percussive instrument, layering parts in short, repetitive bursts, indebted both to electronic music's syncopations and to the "pulse" minimalism of the 1960s and 70s. The influence of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians and Terry Riley's In C is all over Salon des Amateurs, particularly in Hauschka's method of daubing on tone color, even if his sense of structure owes more to popular music.
Ultimately, the album succeeds not in imitation, but interpretation, borrowing house music's rudiments and riffing on them until it takes the music somewhere else. Piano house is in vogue right now, but the vast majority of it sticks to a single sampled chord. This is something else. It isn't so much that it's a facsimile of house, with downbeats here and staggered chords there, but a way of assuming its voice, of learning its vocabulary and grammar, stumblingly, and embellishing along the way with ideas borrowed from jazz and pop and classical music. It's gleefully polyglot, confident even in its own clumsiness-- awed by the scope of its subject and humbled by its own limitations, but still bright-eyed and unstoppable. If you've ever, while learning a language, passed through a phase where every new discovery felt like a giddy eureka moment, you'll know what I'm talking about. Curious, constantly in motion, full of puzzle-like counterpoints and arresting chord changes, it's a joy to listen to, and one of the brightest, most invigorating records I've heard all year.


If 1999's Us and Us Only was the UK vets' "Dylan album" and 2001's Wonderland their "Studio 54-era Stones album," this record could be called the band's "Jamaican album."

Simpatico

At March's SXSW festival, the Charlatans UK (as they've been known in the U.S. for more than a decade) were as ubiquitous as baked beans and tongue-staining energy drinks. While fellow Manchester vet Morrissey zipped in and out of town for a single showcase set, the Charlatans popped up on bill after bill and at party after party, like they had something to prove-- because, even after 16 years and nine albums, they do. The Charlatans survived Madchester, they've survived Britpop, and they've even survived their Madchester/Britpop-survivor phase. Now, with a whole new generation of north-country boys adopting Tim Burgess' streetwise sneer, it would appear to be high time to step up and kick those Monkeys back to the polar ice cap.
But then the Charlatans have always been a touch too well-behaved for such antagonistic displays. As impressive as their SXSW stamina was, on Simpatico, the Charlies just sound like they'd prefer to sit on their asses and listen to dub records all day. Like most Charlatans albums, Simpatico begins big: "Blackened Blue" is an IMAX-sized pomp-rocker that rides the sort of urgent piano riff used to introduce Olympic athletes in opening-ceremony telecasts. Burgess promises "there won't be a dry eye in the house," but the dramatic entrance is quickly undermined by the "Apache"-grooved "NYC (There's No Need to Stop)", which is regrettable for a) Being yet another song by a British band romanticizing Big Apple bustle, and b) Coming off like EMF having their way with the Clash's "Magnificent Seven".
"NYC" at least projects a youthful exuberance that's nowhere to be heard on the rest of the overly measured Simpatico, which could be called the Charlatans' "Jamaican" album, in as much as 1999's Us and Us Only was their "Dylan album" and 2001's Wonderland was their "Studio 54-era Stones album." Like My Morning Jacket on Z, the best moments here-- the dirty grind of "Dead Man's Eye", the late-night romanticism of "When the Lights Go Out in London"-- are more informed by reggae's clipped cadence and suggestion of open space than its regional accent. But far too many tracks here opt for atmosphere over impact: In particular, the interchangeable dubwise ballads-- "City of the Dead", "Road to Paradise", and "The Architect"-- veer perilously into a Club Med cocktail-hour circa 1984, with non-threatening staccato-guitar jabs, piano/synth lines clinking like champagne glasses and Burgess' usually endearing observations obscured by noncommittal attempts at patois and overuse of the word "paradise." It took the Charlies years to shake off the baggy-pants crowd-- do they really want to contend with the hacky-sackers?