The second album from the promising emo-rap project of Joe Mulherin is sometimes potent, but it buckles from a lack of conviction.

ruiner

Reaper, the 2017 debut from nothing,nowhere., was a sterling emo-rap hybrid in a year when the term became a cultural flashpoint. Vermont native Joe Mulherin’s project stood apart from the crowd through its relative understatement and sense of craft. Unlike the litany of provocateurs applying slapdash Warped Tour aesthetics to Chief Keef flows, the 25-year-old caught the attention of both Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba and The New York Times off of a fluid blend of arpeggiated guitar curlicues ripped from emo forebears like Mineral and American Football, cloud rap production in the vein of Yung Lean, and a vocal style that flitted between the two with grace and dexterity.
On, ruiner, Mulherin adds a potentially welcoming bit of self-awareness but is hamstrung throughout by its depressive cousin, self-consciousness. Much of the lyrical content feels similar to that of Reaper on its face: heartbreak, depression, isolation, the emo works. But where that album often wallowed in those topics, ruiner finds Mulherin genuinely reflecting on them. “I’m fucking sick of writing all these sad songs,” he spits on the jaunty, autumnal title track, before crooning a chorus that reads like a dirtbag version of “Ms. Jackson”: “Oh no/What’s your momma gonna say when I tell her that I broke your heart.” It’s a far cry from “Clarity in Kerosene”’s visceral “I hope you choke in your sleep,” but it’s no less effective, and much less troubling. However, for too much of the album, ruiner falls short of the conceptual task set out by that title track. Only six months after Reaper, Mulherin is losing his confidence.
It’s most noticeable in the production. Unlike Reaper’s gothic spaciousness, the beat-making on ruiner—handled again by Mulherin and Soundcloud mainstay Jay Vee—foregrounds rhythm over melody, submerging Mulherin’s nimble guitar work under Three 6 Mafia for Dummies drum loops. When the guitar is central, such as on the loping, nostalgic “better,” it feels confined to this muted tone that dampens its emotional effect. The most frustrating result is “rejecter,” in which Mulherin’s self-lacerating emoting is sabotaged by amateurish sub-bass production that makes it sound like Drake’s “Doing It Wrong” as performed by the noir-pop of the Neighbourhood.
To go along with the production switch-up, Mulherin also gets in his own way vocally. He’s a far more expressive singer than rapper, but he nevertheless favors the latter on ruiner, and his proficient but impersonal flow never quite makes up for the lack of melodic oomph. “hammer,” in particular, suffers from making the mistake of trying for braggadocio: “Play the guitar like a young Santana/Reppin’ VT like my name Bernie Sanders” wants to be a winking joke but scans as awkwardly self-conscious. Of course, at least he’s noticeable there; more often, like on the droning, boilerplate verses to “vacanter,” Mulherin sounds embarrassingly anonymous, lending unfortunate new meaning to the moniker “nothing,nowhere.”
The sudden lack of conviction is all a little confusing, especially if you came to nothing,nowhere. from Reaper. Considering his recent upgrade from Pete Wentz’s vanity label DCD2 to the emo big time of Fueled by Ramen, it’s tempting to chalk the muddling of Mulherin’s ambition up to A&R overwork, or a misguided attempt at crossover into the more glamorous, Xan cake-adorned corners of the Soundcloud rap universe. He does have a track coming out with dubstep producer Getter, known in sadboi circles through his Terror Reid alter ego and as a prominent collaborator with the more-horrorcore-than-emo $uicideBoy$. But it’s more likely that Mulherin is brushing against the essential contradiction of emo, and even rap: a radical genre too often held back by the limitations of regressive emotional content.
It’s an aggravating album for how close it comes to pushing past its forefathers. On the record’s best track, “sayer,” petulant reflections on a relationship collapse into a shredded “there’s nothing to say now,” followed by what might be the project’s mission statement—“I never meant for this to happen/I turned regret into a habit.” Like its title track, it’s telling and rewarding in its reflexivity and yearning for atonement. Sadly, it never lasts. And through its lack of charisma, ruiner unintentionally communicates that working through a depression offers far less inspiration to Mulherin than indulging it.


Somewhere between a demo collection, a live album with no audience, and a lo-fi left turn, the ad-hoc country trio’s desert recording session focuses on the simple joys of songwriting.

Jack Ingram / Miranda Lambert / Jon Randall: The Marfa Tapes

The Marfa Tapes

No genre romanticizes the art of songwriting like country music, and The Marfa Tapes is a late-night love letter to its myth. Miranda Lambert, along with collaborators Jack Ingram and Jon Randall, headed to West Texas with just an acoustic guitar and some ideas in a notebook. They recorded these 15 songs by a ranch in the desert, documenting first takes, trading lead vocals, and figuring out harmonies. Between songs, they cracked jokes and reassured each other, poured shots and marvelled at their surroundings. In an accompanying documentary, they’re laid-back and amiable, even giddy, as they get to work. “Not everything has to be a business decision,” Lambert says of their process. “I miss music.”
Somewhere between a demo collection, a live album with no audience, and a lo-fi left turn, this music is a joy to hear, like a vacation on record. Lambert has always crafted her studio albums in the spirit of sprawling travelogues, dynamic enough to house radio singles, earnest tributes, and winking in-jokes. Like 2016’s double album The Weight of These Wings, which featured the trio’s first collaborations, The Marfa Tapes excels in this spacious terrain just beyond the mainstream. While it lacks the gravitas of her more polished releases, it is bound by a cozy sense of quiet that spans tracks that sound like hits (“Anchor,” a ballad sung by Ingram) along with the actual hits (a solo rendition of Lambert’s 2016 song “Tin Man”).
Each of these performances are co-writes, and none aspire to be the definitive take. A turn away from the high-stakes world of country radio, The Marfa Tapes puts the focus on the simple joys of songwriting and delivery, offering the group’s music as something wide open and alive, with room to shift and suit their moods. Somewhere along the way in the chugging, old-school “Geraldene,” Lambert tries a stuttering read of the title, lighting a spark in her collaborators and ramping the energy into something closer to Southern rock. Even the rhyme scheme of “Homegrown Tomatoes” (“See ya later alligator/We’re U.S. prime/Weed and wine/Homegrown tomaterrs”) makes it impossible for the trio not to laugh. If you are in the right mood, these recordings can transport you beside them.
In the same way that Pistol Annies, Lambert’s supergroup with Angeleena Presley and Ashley Monroe, formed a righteous utopia after her mainstream success, The Marfa Tapes is a useful pivot following 2019’s Grammy-winning Wildcard: a campfire summit for country lifers who share a belief that the most exciting part of songwriting is when it’s all still up in the air. The music fares best at its most lighthearted, although one of the ballads ranks among the trio’s finest material together. The opening “In His Arms” is a stunner: a standard in the making, where the simplicity of the presentation amplifies the timeless appeal. The lyrics are a basic rundown of the imagery that informs a release like this: rolling stones and tumbleweed, cowboys and tequila. Lambert sings about the one who got away, dreaming of a day when they will be reunited. Randall strums his guitar and joins for harmonies with Ingram every time the chorus rolls around. They are singing about better days ahead but they’re making the present moment sound pretty good, too.

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Underneath it all, the posthumous album from the Florida rapper is woefully aimless and structurally unsound.

Skins

At the center of the Jahseh Onfroy story is his domestic violence case, which was never tried but, after his death, is now closed. Before he was shot and killed in an attempted robbery earlier this year, the 20-year-old rapper known as XXXTentacion was accused of physically and mentally abusing his then-girlfriend, terrorizing her, and holding her against her will. He faced charges that included aggravated battery of a pregnant woman, domestic battery by strangulation, false imprisonment, and witness-tampering. According to arrest reports, the victim was punched to the point where her eyes were forced shut.
The charges raised against X didn’t prevent him from becoming one of rap’s most popular new stars, and his death only complicates the conversations surrounding the music of an incredibly polarizing figure. In the aftermath, questions are raised about its lasting impact and how his murder at the age of 20 might change the way he is remembered. Will his art be treated as sacrosanct? In an attempt to rehabilitate his image, Onfroy’s mother started a nonprofit called the XXXTentacion Foundation to provide “relief [for] the poor, distressed and of the underprivileged.” It’s difficult to square this sensationalized, supposedly kind-hearted version of Onfroy with the one recorded admitting to stabbing eight people, the one who allegedly had a woman “scared for her life,” the one who noted, “I will kill that bitch if she play with me.”
If the X estate plans to highlight the rapper’s own characterization as a “problematic genius,” then their first step towards that makeover is to try and push his art to the fore with the release of the posthumous album Skins. Ultimately, it’s a record stripped so bare there’s hardly more in these songs than his uncoordinated instincts. Skins is the worst-case scenario for a posthumous release, not only devoid of meaningful ideas and moving music but making little to no case for its existence in the process.
Musically, there’s nothing complex about what’s happening in X’s songs. His previous lo-fi bedroom recordings, made on what former collaborator Ski Mask the Slump God once called the “worst recording set up,” touted their terrible sound quality and repetitiveness as pillars of naturalism. They are stark in service of power and intimacy. In fact, many of his most popular tracks are decidedly crude, meant to be read as genuine in their incompleteness.
Sometimes it can be hard to tell if these cuts are finished since so many of X’s songs intentionally sounded unfinished. Some of his old songs were apparently first drafts made in only a few minutes, and while Skins was “very close to being done” when X died, you wouldn’t know it by listening. This 10-song, 19-minute run is woefully aimless and structurally unsound. Half the songs don’t have actual verses. At one point, he just screams, “fake eyes, black man,” repeatedly, which wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t feel entirely witless and underdeveloped. There are a lot of whoas and ohs as dummy text when all else fails.
It’s like a collection of amassed loose-leaf pages with unresolved thoughts and doodles on them. Tracks are more like freeform inner monologues muttered into voice memos and sent as a mass text. Where older XXXTentacion songs, like “Jocelyn Flores”—a half-rapped, half-sung meditation on a fan’s suicide—had dimensionality and were rendered fully, these tracks have no such depth.
At his most captivating, X made music like he was doing an “MTV Unplugged” special for no one but himself. Skins mostly defers to that penchant for tenderness, though there are instances where it channels the fury of hardcore punk, a core tenet of the SoundCloud rap he helped popularize. There’s little to be gained in squaring the vulnerable, would-be soother and sage in some of these songs with the real, savage young man who once claimed he bashed open a gay man’s head in juvie and smeared the man’s blood on his face, just because the man looked at him. But it’s hard to hear X seethe through the rap-rock frenzy of “One Minute” and not consider the implications.
When Kanye, a vocal X fan and supporter, offers his blame-shifting lyrics about how X was wrongfully accused during a guest spot on “One Minute” while X spits and screams the hook, his history wells right back up to the surface. Kanye’s verse seems to continue a two-pronged defense of XXXTentacion’s music: first, suggest that X was a casualty of a call-out culture unwilling to allow for his presumption of innocence, and second, posit that death absolves him of his sins and thus should wipe clean the slate so that his legacy can be written.
All this overlooks X’s own admissions to committing acts of violence, the incalculable role violence played in his rise, and the ways violence seemed to inform the music he was making. Those who would invoke “the aesthetic alibi” on X’s behalf are refusing to acknowledge that the morbid ethos in X’s songs is inextricable from his story. If the very power of his music, in the eyes of his cult-like following, lies in its “realness” then it’s impossible to separate that same music from the real suffering inflicted in its name.
“Emo rap” was the genre that made the biggest gains on Spotify in 2018, and XXXTentacion, as its standard bearer, didn’t live to see its lasting effect. He was synthesizing rap and rock through a process that felt integrative and immersive, a depressive mixing the bluster of hip-hop with the toxicity of third-wave emo. But Skins doesn’t even preserve any of what was affecting about that listening experience. It lacks the same force and is unexceptional in every way. The album never makes a case for X as anything other than a thinly subversive figure and never even rationalizes the baggage that comes saddled with it. X’s musical legacy will forever be interlinked to violence. Skins is merely a shallow attempt to overwrite that legacy gone awry.


After a series of EPs and seven-inches, this post-hardcore, Jade Tree-signed punk band unleashes its excellent debut. Final Fantasy provides the string arrangements.

Hidden World

It's amazing that some original punkers either stray miles away from the sound and intent that gained them notoriety or simply put out the same records they always have decades after the fact, while Fucked Up (FU from here on out, pardon my decorum) show us how to grow up gracefully within the constraints of punk-- and this is only their first full album. While they've been more known for EPs and seven-inches until now, Hidden World is the work of a band that sounds much older and more assured than it should.
But even as I type out punk, it doesn't quite fit: You could call it hardcore, as singer Pink Eyes chokes out every syllable like Negative Approach's John Brannon. You could call it experimental because the songs are longer and they have violins; you could still call it punk, as even with all of that, it doesn't stray too far from home base, from four or five blissfully overdriven guitar chords. It steps outside just enough to show you how daring it can be, before reminding you one more time how its gonna fuck you up. Hidden World finds a sort of perfect balance between musical ambition and staying true to the formula, dishing out scads of overdriven three-chord punk pleasers while adding the barest traces of a band with more omniverous ears: Some violins close out "Carried Out to the Sea", a little spoken word adds some healthy pretension to opener "Crusades", and a fantastical element elsewhere to "David Comes to Live". These might sound like shoehorning or attention-grabbing on paper-- truth be told, they're bookends to these songs at best-- but these small touches only serve to make these ambitious songs sound even more enormous.
In "Crusades", a single guitar chord sustains for eons over a twinkling new-age chorus, before their two-note bludgeoning and rabid-dog vocals begin and they maul the familiar formula, leaving those clichés beaten within an inch of their lives. They then run off to dig on some fantastic and impenetrable story about an impatient young boy named David who's "gonna get to heaven tonight," but with an altogether different plan than your Meatloaf-inspired, dashboard-light-style pursuit. All that somehow clocks in at under three minutes; even at their most concise, FU songs like "David" and "Carried Out to the Sea" feel epic because of their extra flourishes.
Yet even at its most straightforward, the record still thrills, nowhere better evidenced than the gloriously confrontational "Baiting the Public", one of FU's best singles: Six minutes of an indomitable guitar and double-bass-drum attack where Pink Eyes berates anyone within earshot, punching in his vocal from either speaker like a Devil on one shoulder and an undead fire-swallower who makes Satan look like a pussy on the other. Calmer and almost classical details follow, however, with a dollop of creepy whispering that introduces the bouncing guitar line of "Blaze of Glory", featuring the album's catchiest hook that praises "small town hucksters, and big city freaks" with maximum fist-pump praise, as well one of the many appearances of Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy, Arcade Fire), handling all the album's violin parts.
All this would fall flat on its face if FU didn't do the traditional punk thing so perfectly; as is, their aspirations are just the icing on the cake-- a cake with a file in it, with a grenade on the end of the file. The final chords of "Fate of Fates" grind off each other, echoing back and forth through their own purgatory, only to serve as a dramatic introduction to the spitting venom of "Two Snakes", a groove that never tires over its many permutations, including a muted violin-string pluck and Reich-like build-up in its last few seconds. Pink Eyes, meanwhile, never relents from his foaming, strangulated delivery throughout Hidden World, but not so hoarsely that you can't make out his lyrical concerns, ranging from the Book of Enoch and saving our eternal souls to fucking your wife. No concept or approach is too lofty or too stupid; in fact, Hidden World is an incredible testament to the great art then happens when the two meet. Middlebrow hardcore rules OK?


The Thailand-born and Sweden-raised rapper offers a dreamy, melancholic, and abstracted take on mumble rap.

Legendary Member

Born in Thailand, raised in Sweden, and influenced by American rappers like Soulja Boy and 50 Cent, Thaiboy Digital (real name Thanapat Thaothawong) testifies to rap’s status as a global commodity. He also illustrates the gap separating the life of the music from its makers; Hip-hop might go where it wants, but human beings often have more trouble, and Thaiboy’s had a number of scuffles with Swedish immigration authorities over the years (he was deported back to Thailand for a spell in 2015).
Those troubles don’t necessarily manifest in the lyrics of Legendary Member, Thaiboy’s debut album, but they have impacted how the album was made. His deportation to Thailand turned his creative collaboration with Drain Gang, a Swedish collective that includes producers Yung Sherman and Whitearmor and rappers Bladee and Ecco2K, into an entirely digital relationship, a wireless transmission pinging back and forth between different countries and disparate styles.
A restless spirit, Thaiboy drifts between relentless and repetitive flows and Auto-Tuned falsetto crooning. There’s a sense of jubilant menace to straight-up rap cuts like “Drainstar Rock” and “Nervous,” which recount the expected tales of Bentley trucks and double cups. The simplicity of Thaiboy’s hooks — Volvo-sized couplets like “Break it in half/Kit Kat” and “Nowhere else to go/Kiss me through the scope” — betrays the complexity of his vocal delivery and the intricate production that buoys it. Thaiboy’s voice drones like a Gregorian men’s chorus when he’s rapping, but his most confident register is the melodic flow he flexes on glossy love songs like “Kiss Me Through the Scope” and “Lip Service.” The latter track, a duet with Drain Gang associate Ecco2K, is Thaiboy at his dreamiest, a lovestruck ode to an angelic raver girl. The production, handled exclusively by producers Gud, Whitearmor, Woesum, and Ripsquad, is equally dreamy: cascades of vocal samples on “Baby,” wind chimes on “Can’t Tell,” the glittering synth line that lends a melancholic chill to “Legendary Member.”
It’s striking to consider how much-maligned American “mumble rap” has opened up space for rappers like Thaiboy and his seasonally affected compatriots in Stockholm, who come to English as a second, third, or fourth language. In an interview with The Fader, Thaiboy Digital describes his thought patterns as a trilingual speaker: “If I get surprised, I think in English. I like to curse in Swedish. And when it’s some real shit, I think in Thai.” Though his lyrics are almost exclusively in English, there are times where it sounds like Thaiboy is rapping in different languages in his mind. His vocal delivery overrides the specific meaning of individual words, making melodies from the sound of language itself.
Mumble rap transforms what would have been considered mistakes or imperfections in another era of hip-hop into stylistic attributes; there’s meaning in how a voice sounds, not just in what it says. Precision and enunciation, the privileges of native speakers, aren’t priorities in hip-hop like they used to be, and it’s reshaped the linguistics of rap worldwide. The words that come out of Thaiboy Digital’s mouth are often slurred and unclear, their exact meaning obscured until you look up the lyrics, but the intended emotional effect is impossible to miss.


Jade Tree's press release hypes Control as a concept album about the dissolution of a "hyper-modern marriage," but Pedro ...

Control

Jade Tree's press release hypes Control as a concept album about the dissolution of a "hyper-modern marriage," but Pedro the Lion's David Bazan has a difficult time sticking to the subject on this, his third full-length. Aside from a few cynical words for pre-nups in opener "Options" and not one, but three meditations on extramarital sex (thanks for sharing, Dave), the album is padded with typical Pedro ruminations on the pitfalls of vanity and technology.
Unlike our esteemed colleague DiCrescenzo, I enjoyed Winners Never Quit, with its thoughtful and highly personal themes of loss, regret, and competition. But where that album moved with confidence and conviction of purpose, Control wallows in an amoral netherworld of overamped midtempo ballads and incomplete thoughts.
Control's lack of focus is best exemplified by "Indian Summer," a synthy rocker peppered with rhyming non-sequiturs such as, "The experts say you ought to start them young/ That way they'll naturally love the taste of corporate cum." A sluggish, vocoder-treated new recording of "April 6, 2039" (now titled "Progress") does little but detract from the spacey, drum-machine propelled futurism of the original. With its refrain of "your father drank a little, you're on liver number two," Bazan's cautionary words of children spoiled by technology and their parents' emotional detachment should be Control's moral centerpiece, yet the lackluster reading here barely registers.
Instead, Bazan obsesses on the seedy details of his protagonists' motel-room infidelities. "The mattress creaks beneath the symphony of misery and cum," Bazan sings on the aggressive, voyeuristic "Second Best." "Still we lie jerking back and forth, and blurring into one." But Control is never more misguided than on the silly, Metaphor 101 observations of "Rapture," which cheaply likens the moment of orgasm to divine revelation and even slows the pace of the song down, post-coitally, before pepping back up again.
Musically, Control breaks little new ground for Pedro the Lion, though Bazan's drumming has improved greatly since Winners Never Quit, best showcased in the loping rhythms and artfully executed fills of "Magazine." Unfortunately, Bazan goes on to illustrate why you should never let a drummer mix his own record on the next cut, "Rehearsal," with some of the hammiest fills since Wayne's World's Garth drummed for U2 and a headache-inducing barrage of overdriven cymbals. Somebody send Bazan a copy of The Soft Bulletin, pronto!
Not that Control doesn't have its moments: "Penetration," co-written with Seldom's Casey Foubert, is a reasonably cathartic requiem for a dotcom layoff, with chiming, Edge-like guitars and a brash, anthemic chorus. Lines like, "We're so sorry, sir, but you did not quite make the cut this time," will ring sympathetically with anyone who's ever been passed over as casually as a grade-school snot picking teams for dodgeball. "Priests and Paramedics," rising majestically from the overkill of "Second Best," is elevated by a lovely, Thom Yorke-ish melody custom made for Bazan's stoned tenor. It's not hard to imagine its tired protagonist stepping out of Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead and onto the murder scene of Winners's "Never Leave a Job Half Done." The song's evocative imagery and fetching arrangement deserve a better concept album than the jumbled pastiche of Control.
Even Bazan's occasionally astute observations are offset by such poetry-contest entries as, "It will never rain again/ It should do wonders for the GNP," and, "How does that work for you in your quest to be above reproach?" Or the half-baked philosophy of the dead-on-arrival album closer, "Rejoice": "Wouldn't it be so wonderful if everything were meaningless?" Oh, honestly, Dave.
It would be easy to dismiss Control as a pompous, self-important failure were Bazan a vain and sanctimonious artist. But he's not-- he seems like a soft-spoken, thoughtful, nice-enough guy just like you and me. And while he may never make his own OK Computer or Soft Bulletin or whatever he set out to make with Control, I won't dock him points for trying.


With a tone palette as rich as anyone working in chillwave, this bedroom producer crafts a promising debut.

Four More Years EP

A year on from the summer of chillwave, and we've nailed down what makes this stripe of music "beachy": smeary synths, a danceable pace, hints of memory-dulled nostalgia, invitingly vague lyrics about vaguer feelings, stuff about being a young, stuff about weed. It's not a formula, per se, but in some hands it occasionally feels like one. Bedroom producer Teen Daze has been floating tracks onto the Internet for the last year, matching up squiggly keyboard lines to mild thumps and all the requisite haze. He's got a track called "Shine on You Crazy White Cap" and another called "Gone for the Summer". There's a band Tumblr with a picture of a lake as its background. They are called Teen Daze. But unlike a lot of these bedroom blurmongers, Teen Daze seems in total control; his synths bleed into more brilliant colors, his languid pace more purposeful, his memory bank FDIC-insured, his vagueness earned by the quality of his output.
Daze's debut EP, Four More Years, whirls right into its title track, its big spluttery drums and many moving parts not far from Ernest Greene's work as Washed Out-- until a giant synth, part ELP, part Black Moth Super Rainbow, splits the song open down the middle. It feels brash, towering over the relatively lax backing track, but with so much so-called chillwave finds a gentle groove and sticks with it, but throughout Four More Years, Teen Daze find ways to slip these daringly germane little asides into the tunes, rescuing them from complacency. In the twinkly "Gone For the Summer", it's an electric piano line underpinning the tracks' inherent wooziness; in "Around", it's an unusually kinetic bit of synth programming that Delorean oughta consider stealing; in "Saviour", it's a somewhat ill-fitting vocal sample that repeats throughout the track, creating its own odd logic. Four More Years gleans its color from these bold choices, and Daze's tone palette appears about as rich as anybody's working in the genre.
For as much slack memoryfuzz as he conjures, Teen Daze has an eye on the dancefloor, and quite a few of these tracks sound a bit like Erasure numbers left to melt in the sun. Teen Daze 's dance tracks are solid enough, if a bit interchangeable on their own; his tempos tend to knock similarly, with only the terse "Around" approaching something a sober person might move to. Still, this kinetic backbone proves a fine backdrop for Teen Daze 's immersive sonic explorations, and his dance tracks are every bit as intricately layered and inventively odd as the stuff at more patient tempos. Vocally, there's not a ton to grab hold of-- Teen Daze sings like the Tough Alliance guys but tends to bury his voice under a pile of synths. His hooks tend to be instrumental, not vocal. And there's a certain sameyness to the tempos here that wears a bit even in the record's half-hour runtime. But this is chillwave, and Teen Daze's version of same holds up to more scrutiny than most. In piling on the layers, sidestepping the narcotic lethargy that  and making sure to keep things in motion, Teen Daze is making last summer seem like more than just a memory.


The Chicago trumpeter with hip-hop and indie-rock bona fides steps out as a bandleader, shepherding 18 musicians across a complex, soulful album that celebrates interconnectedness.

Resavoir

When Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper tapped into their cities’ homegrown jazz scenes, it proved mutually beneficial for the rappers and their collaborators alike. Their breakout works were strengthened by a century-old musical heritage, and newer jazz artists like Kamasi Washington and Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment got the chance to shine on their own. Over the past few years, Chicago trumpeter Will Miller has shared the stage with everyone from Whitney to Lil Wayne, A$AP Rocky to the late Mac Miller. Taking lessons from indie rock and hip-hop and infusing the resulting hybrids with his own sensibilities, Miller now steps out as a bandleader with Resavoir. His group draws on the tradition established by other fine Chicago jazz-inflected exports over the years (Rotary Connection, Tortoise, Earth, Wind & Fire) while also pushing beyond categorical boundaries to create a debut that is soulful and ear-catching.
Like his fellow International Anthem labelmate Makaya McCraven, Miller deftly draws upon spontaneous improvisation and methodical studio wizardry alike, melding the two practices together (as well as 18 different players) to create an amalgam stronger and sweeter than the sum of its parts. On “Resavoir,” he toggles between crisp beats and sunny 1960s pop, expertly arranged jazz-funk and experimental electronic textures, but its five minutes feel breezy and conversational rather than overstuffed with details. Subtle but deft jump cuts detour from soaring to meditative and back, with plenty of room for instantly hummable horn charts as well as field recordings of gulls and airy vocal harmonies that drift like afternoon clouds. It’s a complex piece of songcraft that also feels dreamy and sunlit.
On standout “Taking Flight,” harpist Brandee Younger evokes both the ethereal glissandos of Alice Coltrane and the head-nodding soul-jazz of Dorothy Ashby. In surrounding Younger with expertly arranged horns and a crackling backbeat, Miller pays tribute to predecessors like Charles Stepney and Richard Evans, the Chicago producer/arrangers who thrillingly blurred the lines between pop, soul, R&B, and jazz in their heyday.
As effectively as Miller keeps to the background, his electronically treated horn moves to the fore on “Plantasy,” featuring smeared-yet-sharp tones that bring to mind Jon Hassell. Miller doesn’t revel in texture for its own sake; the many layers and whinnying high register move in conjunction with piano and the gentle patter of electronic drums to create something dramatic and poignant. He switches between clean lead lines and small squelches on “Woah,” processing handclaps and percussion in a way that brings to mind TNT-era Tortoise, fusing electronics and instrumentation together in organic fashion.
Most of Resavoir is instrumental, but the tracks run at a concise pop length and the melodies are so catchy that when vocalists enter on the album’s last two tracks, it feels as if they’ve been there all along. Both songs neatly encapsulate the album’s dualities. On “Escalator,” a song about the perils of touring life, saxophonist/rapper Sen Morimoto swings between the quotidian (there are “no fucking cashews” at the gas station) to the cosmic (waking “on another planet with a different language”). And on “LML,” murmured affirmations from Mavis Staples and Noname collaborator Akenya Seymour suggest optimism, but the song’s backstory is darker: It was written in the wake of the Parkland shooting. Like the album itself, the song celebrates interconnectedness, embracing both hard life on the ground and the easy revery of the clouds above.


Originally known as Girlfriends, Boston garage pop trio Bent Shapes draw on proto- and post-punk influences like the Feelies and Jonathan Richman. Their proper debut gathers the frenetic declarations, judgments, and uncertainties that have become part of the band's character.

Feels Weird

For fans of Boston's relatively cloistered DIY punk scene, Bent Shapes' debut LP Feels Weird is a long time coming. Originally known as Girlfriends, the trio-- bassist Supriya Gunda, drummer Andy Sadoway, and guitarist Ben Potrykus-- has been a hometown hero of small venues and house shows since they formed in 2009, racking up nominations and wins for their high-strung, merciless garage-pop at the Boston Phoenix's annual Boston Music Poll. Aside from a handful of short, micro-distribution releases, however, they were almost exclusively a live act, one that required fans to seek them out in person to get a proper fix. Then in May of last year, blaming a need for change and the addition of a new guitarist (who vanished almost as soon as she appeared), Girlfriends became Bent Shapes. They collected the bitingly catchy punk songs they'd released over their three years as a band and released a compilation called Cull Shorts, a sort of scrapbook retrospective on the Band That Was Girlfriends.
Though Cull Shorts marked the end of an era, its patchwork structure lingers on Feels Weird. Despite the new collection's intention as a formal album, it contains disordered messes of frenetic declarations, judgments, and uncertainties that have become part of the band's character. While incongruous, seemingly unplanned mishmash on a debut would sink a less experienced band, Bent Shapes' honed songcraft is such that missing the forest for the trees is actually a great idea. As a debutante collection-- celebrating the band's introduction to the world beyond New England at long last, something their contemporaries, and they too, until now, have eschewed-- Feels Weird serves as an eclectic, vivid primer on its creators' sprightly misanthropy.
From the outset, "Behead Yrself Pt. 2" establishes the band's innate grasp on the alluring grievance: bullshit abounds, especially in their uniquely overeducated, often self-important city. Drawing on proto- and post-punk influences like the Feelies and Jonathan Richman, each track exposes a different blistering sore; Sadoway's mellow vocals and Gunda's bouncing, all-business ones knock Potrykus off his earnestly charming soapbox in healthy doses. "Brat Poison", the most explicit, electrifying, and outright funny cut on the record by a wide margin, drips with sarcastic contempt as it eviscerates the hypocritical arrogance of loudmouthed local-scene personalities. (With lines like "drum circle jerks" and "Go put yourself into orbit/ where verbose is verboten/ ferocious, forgotten," it's also a quintessential example of Bent Shapes' immaculate attention to wordplay.) You don't have to have spent time in Boston to appreciate its diss-track qualities, but those fans probably get an amplified experience.
At times, their disgust waxes preachy; at others, like on the garrulous "Boys to Men", their need to say something the right way tangles a song in its own feet, like the words of someone who's been holed up alone in his apartment for too many days in a row, and the band stumbles. But for every overstep, there's a song like "Bites and Scratches", a personal and heartbreakingly sweet cut about love amidst baggage, that serves as a reminder that they're also dissatisfied with their own complicity and intimate failings. And even as it bubbles over into excess, it's hard to bemoan Bent Shapes' knack for marrying lyricism and melody. Every song-- save "Hex Maneuvers", a dreamy experiment that evokes Real Estate's aqueous twang with moderate success-- is irresistibly upbeat in its complaint. Their criticisms, on paper, can seem distant, but somehow-- whether it's vulnerable moments like "I'm not saying you need some deep-seated hatred of self/ But it helps" and "I met a girl, to my surprise/ Said 'I'm damaged goods', she said, 'So am I,' / so I held her hand," or the blithe delivery of even the most biting invectives, or merely a trick of the pop-guitar lick-- there's something genuinely warm about them. Ultimately, theirs are statements that both ask for and infinitely reward a second spin.


The British band’s first new album in 29 years is a rare commodity: a comeback record that’s refreshingly free of nostalgic gestures.

Made of Rain

No performer in rock made bad faith as romantic as Richard Butler did. In the first incarnation of the Psychedelic Furs, the British singer issued pronouncements and put-downs with laryngeal splendor; the band matched him with a mighty saxophone-and-guitar racket like a foghorn raising clouds of toxic fumes from dirty carpets. Serious about being a dickhead, Butler constructed scenarios in which he maneuvers himself into the position of being rejected so he can claim the poor girl was wrong to have given him a chance anyway—that’s sort of the point to “Pretty in Pink,” an unflattering character sketch, ostensibly about a girl named Caroline, that’s really about Richard, “the last to remember her name.”
In the most delightful of surprises, Made of Rain, the Psychedelic Furs’ first new album in 29 years, ranks just a notch or two below post-punk classics like 1981’s Talk Talk Talk and 1982’s Forever Now. Expect no mummified mirror moves, though. Coming to terms with legacy acts often means pining for sequels. But in response to the question “What do the Psychedelic Furs mean in 2020?” the answer is simply, “Loud band with sardonic front man,” neither of which is in abundance in contemporary rock. Paul Garisto’s assured drumming and Mars Williams’ astutely deployed sax bleats are pleasures in themselves; thanks to former Love Spit Love colleague Richard Fortus’ robust mix, each instrument occupies a distinct space while still meshing into that familiar wall of sound. There’s some goop that wouldn’t have embarrassed the sodden Furs of 1986’s Midnight to Midnight (“Stars,” ick), but the goop sticks. Butler and bassist brother Tim can still write hooks, and Richard can still clear a room with rancid quips: “When I said I loved you and I lied/I never really loved you, I was laughing all the time,” he sneers in “Come All Ye Faithful.”
Exploiting Gen X memories and good will in the service of a futurist aesthetic that once hoped to “let it stay forever now,” the Psychedelic Furs have pulled off a neat dialectical trick. They included no “Pretty in Pink”s or “She Is Mine”s, and the album’s better for it. The thunderous Made of Rain opener “The Boy Who Invented Rock & Roll” features Williams’ sax imitating the cawing of crows and Rich Good panning his guitar speaker to speaker while Butler self-mythologizes like Bette Davis as Margo Channing in All About Eve. The Furs excel at rummaging through trunkfuls of abandoned poses: Amanda Kramer’s keyboards channel “Venus in Furs” on “You’ll Be Mine,” and the full band produces a convincing imitation of Wish-era Cure in “No-One,” an observation that would surely pain Butler. The slippage into a narrative confessional mode is an uneasy fit on “Wrong Train,” but it’s worth sticking around for the sad-sack manner in which he notes he’s got a wife who hates him—and so does her boyfriend.
But here’s the thing: Cynics are sentimentalists, embittered because the world doesn’t follow the schemas in their heads. In the Furs’ warmest songs, Butler acknowledged how “knee-jerk negativity/Just never got me through.” Angling for an American breakthrough encouraged the Furs into glossier expressions of romantic interest, but the tension between the pristine synth patches and the hairballs Butler insisted on singing through kept audiences unsettled—and limited the Furs’ crossover chances to the top 30 placing of “Heartbreak Beat” a little over two years before the Cure and Depeche Mode went platinum. Free of such considerations, Made of Rain includes some of their most insistent love songs. On “Don’t Believe,” Butler gets entangled in a thicket of paradoxes and double negatives, determined not to look a fool when pledging his troth: “Everything I never said/Comes crashing on my tiny head.” Unburdened by nostalgia, accepting the world as is while avoiding complacency, Made of Rain isn’t a comeback—it’s a new road.

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The lead singer and songwriter for Blonde Redhead enlists Ryuichi Sakamoto, Greg Saunier, and others for a cottony swirl of an album where everything is quieter than everything else.

Adult Baby

Kazu Makino’s voice always served as ethereal counterpoint to Blonde Redhead’s music—if they were a gut punch, she was a gust of wind. Gradually, over the years, the group followed her lead, shedding the thick, serrated dissonance of its early records as though molting a buzzsaw cocoon. Five years since Barragan, the band’s last and presumably final album, Adult Baby marks Makino’s solo debut, and on it she sounds practically disembodied.
It’s an intriguing new direction for both her voice and her songwriting. The viscous drip of the guitars, the electronic exoskeleton of Blonde Redhead’s last few albums—all of it is gone, replaced by layers of Makino’s breathy head voice. She dissolves together gasps, wordless cries, and half-intelligible sung phrases in a cottony swirl of synthesizers, gongs, flute, strings, and other diaphanous textures.
She has assembled a formidable ensemble: Ryuichi Sakamoto appears on five songs, credited with piano, field recordings, and “organic instruments,” though you’d never necessarily know he was there; by design, his contributions are inextricable from the whole. Her drummers play more forceful roles: Ian Chang (Body Language, Son Lux) is an anchoring presence on several songs, his pointed attack a muscular counterpoint to the music’s flyaway textures. The Brazilian percussionist Mauro Refocso (Atoms for Peace, Forró in the Dark) lays down flickering figures on “Salty” and “Coyote,” his touch featherweight and diamond-tipped. And on “Undo,” Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier’s spacious, exacting drumbeats punctuate cloudy keys and a distant, almost inaudible shriek that brings to mind Portishead.
At its best, Adult Baby is a drowsy delight, swaying lazily in waltz tempo. The foggy sonics are suffused in Lynchian mystery, while Ian Mclellan Davis’ lush string arrangements lend a sense of Old Hollywood grandeur. But the album can also be frustratingly opaque. Makino’s lyrics, when they can be made out at all, don’t hold up under scrutiny. Stream-of-conscious and relatively prosaic, they read like diary entries, serving mainly as springboards for her to explore the outer reaches of her range. And it can be difficult to tell the album’s nine tracks apart from one another, or even tease apart the elements of a given song. The mix is hazy and abstracted, everything quieter than everything else.
But that seems like precisely what Makino and her collaborators intend. Adult Baby works best with the volume turned up, a soft mattress beneath you, all distractions on hold. And even though the music often resists forming into anything as solid as a hook, Makino’s vaporous melodies have a way of creeping up on you long after the record has stopped spinning; they have a sneaky tenacity, like a dream you can’t shake, even if you can’t quite remember its particulars.

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On their second LP, Tennis take the Brill Building tunefulness and classic indie-pop production values of their debut and add a bit of rock'n'roll muscle. Patrick Carney of Black Keys produces.

Young and Old

The title of Tennis' second album could almost as easily describe the first. The music on last year's Cape Dory bobbed sweetly between Brill Building tunefulness and classic indie pop production values, and the basic lyrical themes were at least as old as jazz standard "A Sailboat in the Moonlight", hold the moonlight. But the sailing trip that inspired the Colorado-based band's debut also fulfilled something newer: the internet's need for easily digestible narrative. Luckily, core married couple Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley had a real knack for breezy, deceptively simple beach-pop that could get lodged in your head and inspire your own seafaring daydreams. Or at least make you jealous.
Another story would seem to apply to Young and Old, and it's the one about the "difficult" sophomore record. Musically, Tennis have broadened their horizons just the right amount, adding rock'n'roll muscle and a more purely pop clarity under the oversight of the Black Keys' drummer Patrick Carney, who produced. A few songs still hit at the sense of love-drunk reverie that turned older tracks like "Marathon" and "South Carolina" into blog and college-radio hits. But Tennis couldn't keep writing sailing songs forever, and the new batch doesn't pull us into their world quite as easily-- and it's not only for lack of convenient biographical shorthand. They've gone from under the boardwalk to stuck in the middle.
For all that, a whole lot of what's new here improves on the debut. Under Carney's direction, Tennis upgrade their sonics without losing the fuzz. In fact, sometimes there's even more fuzz, such as in the nicely clanging lead riff on the album's first advance mp3, sprightly piano-popper "Origins". Moore's full-throated lilt and multi-hued keyboard, along with Riley's lissome guitar lines, still aren't that far down the innocent coast from Beach House's supine dream-pop, and now there are extra layers of vocal harmonies, such as the appealingly Free Design-jazzy sha-la-las on "Petition". But Carney especially brings life to the percussion, whether it's the huge handclaps on "My Better Self", a swooning standout reminiscent of the Owls' underrated mid-2000s indie-pop gem "Air", or the snapping snares on "High Road".
"Paradise is all around, but happiness is never found," Moore sings on that last song, which might've been a strong unifying theme for the sophomore album-- a melancholy flipside to the debut's paradise-is-paradise uplift. Sure, the songs on Young and Old occasionally bring back the romance of movement (optimistic "Traveling"), and they're often introspective, but instead the effect tends to be too confused, stilted, or generic to really pack the same wallop. The album's first words, on mellow strummer "It All Feels the Same", are "took a train," a potentially intriguing counterpart to sailing that isn't properly explored elsewhere on the record. Rather than at sea or on the railroad, the lyrics lean toward awkward abstraction: "Will you make my children bear the consequences everywhere?" asks "Origins". Even on "My Better Self", Moore philosophizes clumsily, "What is innate, I do not know/ But meaning comes and it goes."
She sort of has a point, though. As easy as it is to criticize acts that come to us with a ready-built narrative alongside their music, storytelling and image-making have always been crucial elements of pop. What matters isn't whether a record comes with extra-musical buzz attached, but whether the music is good enough to capitalize on that buzz. Cape Dory, to my ears, was; Young and Old is another example of a promising young act that found an audience quickly on the internet before fully coming into its own powers. In other words, it's pretty good, but also a bit disappointing. There's still plenty of time, though, and by album three, the duo that never originally set out to make music will have something else that can be invaluable for a working band: a little more experience in the trenches.


††† has been framed as “Chino Moreno’s witch house” project, but what you'll find on the trio's self-titled LP is stadium-status electro-rock akin to Depeche Mode's Songs of Faith and Devotion and Nine Inch Nails. In fact, ††† are supposed to be taken on the same scale as Moreno's other band, the Deftones.

Do you have a meaningful relationship with the music of Deftones? Are you in a meaningful relationship with someone who does? If that’s the case, I don’t think I need to tell you the code we follow: Chino Moreno is off. fucking. limits. I suspect he’s become one of the most likable rock stars at his level because when he embarrasses himself—and he definitely has over the years—it happens in a way to which most people can relate. Which is to say, you get overly influenced by your friends, let your enthusiasm get the better of you, and try just a little too hard to look cool or to fit in. And that’s why he’s been forgiven time and time again, even after covering Ice Cube’s “Wicked” on a Korn album, tacking on the since-censored monologue at the end of “Pink Cellphone” and remixing “Dragula” in 2012. My love for White Pony runs too deep to link to the “Pink Maggit (Back to School)” video in good conscience.
And so when word got out about †††, it was framed as “Chino Moreno’s witch house project” and subsequently mocked as if witch house ever was responsible for a song as good as “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)”. Or that Moreno could make a bigger ass out of himself in this style than Salem did. As it turns out, “witch house” only applied to their instantly dated font stylization and artwork, as soon we all found out that ††† was on some stadium-status electro-rock shit, think Depeche Mode circa Songs of Faith and Devotion, Nine Inch Nails. Or more, accurately, that song the Cure did for the Judge Dredd soundtrack. Or Filter.
Which is to say that Moreno does embarrass himself here. Quite often. But you can’t blame it on witch house. There are a number of reasons why ††† faceplants in a way that previous Moreno side projects Palms and Team Sleep didn’t—while the latter two were also searching collaborations with trusted friends (here it’s Shaun Lopez of fellow Sactowners Far), they catered to Moreno’s more esoteric tastes and were meant for niche audiences. Meanwhile, ††† played Lollapalooza Chile with only two EPs to their name (both included in full here), so this is meant to be on the same scale as Deftones. And for the most part, you get potential Deftones songs that ensure you never again fail to appreciate the pummeling, inventive musicianship of Stephen Carpenter or Abe Cunningham or Sergio Vega.
You can’t doubt the enthusiasm or commitment, but there isn’t much in the way of craft—despite a professed love of the Tri Angle and Software labels, Lopez, Moreno, and the excellently named Chuck Doom crank the synths and sequencers like they were guitars and ††† retains the same brickwalled, blinding sheen of Far’s proto-emo alt-metal. In fact, most of these plodding, perfunctory beats would’ve sounded dated around the time Water & Solutions dropped. The sickly riffs of “†hholyghs†” bear a heavy influence of Portishead’s “Over”, a few more lope to the same uh-1,2-step as Sneaker Pimps’ “6 Underground”, and many more recall the remix of “Hey Man, Nice Shot” if we’re being real.
But if we’re really being real, Moreno’s the reason we’re here in the first place and a more accurate diagnosis of †††’s failings put the blame squarely on him. Maybe he’s trying to play to arena-goth type, as his concerns on ††† are a confluence of religion, sex, and non-specific menace that can be neatly summed up as—“you’re kinda freaky. That turns me on. Let’s party.” Which is totally not a problem, seeing as how about 75% of White Pony was about the same exact shit. And let’s not forget this a genre where Dave Gahan and Trent Reznor are setting the lyrical gold standard.
And yet, I’ve watched Moreno change...into kind of a creep, and considering the wincing awkwardness of it all, I had to check the credits to make sure Lopez wasn’t still working with Jonah Matranga. The first line on “†his is a †rick” is “something’s changed in your face I notice/ a different sparkle in those crazy eyes,” and from that moment going forward, Moreno’s guyliner’d leering just puts you on the defensive. And it’s hard to enjoy even the good parts of †††, knowing it’s probably a matter of seconds before Moreno spits game like “I gotta tell you something/ I wanna view your dreams/ I wanna pull out your crazy/ pour it over me” or “you make a godly servant/ protect your Bible between your knees.” There’s a 65% chance that “fron†iers” is a love song about strippers, and no one should have to guess about that sort of thing. This is not the same guy who responsible for a track that somehow allowed Maynard James Keenan to sound kinda seductive.
That said, there are good moments here—“†elepa†hy” is something genuinely new, scratching a disco itch and a good deal of ††† isn’t so far off from the booming R&B-metal of the Weeknd’s Kiss Land, albeit with slightly less laughable lyrics. New single “†he epilogue” manages a slinky, KROQ-ready chorus, “blk s†allion” earns its name as an electro inversion of White Pony, while the screaming fits in “bi†ches brew” and “†his is a †rick” prove that ††† would’ve been better off had Moreno just bore his fangs the whole way through. That’s about enough for an EP, but at 15 tracks, ††† fails to establish much flow or continuity or variety, or...oh, fuck it—it’s just too damn long, the longest record Moreno’s ever made unless you think all 32 minutes of silence and hidden tracks at the end of Around the Fur “count.”
Is this is a bad time to mention that Moreno announced Deftones will be taking the rest of 2014 off while he focuses on †††? Hardly. If anything, it shows another reason why it’s so easy to stick with the guy, he keeps this stuff away from his main gig. And really, they’re in a good state*—Diamond Eyes* and Koi No Yokan found Deftones as vital and influential as ever, having recovered from their murky, muddled post-White Pony albums and the tragic, eventually fatal car accident suffered by bassist Chi Cheng in 2008. While ††† may be on the same scale as Deftones, they’re not a replacement, and it stands to reason that Moreno can ascend to the heights of their previous work. But on †††, it’s like he never had wings.


Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin John Power shows his teeth on his new LP as Blanck Mass. *World Eater *is suitable for casual noise fans who have some curiosity for extreme music and a decent threshold for pain.

World Eater

Benjamin John Power has always been typecast as one of the nice guys of noise. With Fuck Buttons, he’s played sun-worshipping primitivist, screamadelic raver, and something close to arena rocker on 2013’s Slow Focus. His solo project Blanck Mass maintains similar posi-vibes while working within mesmeric repetition and industrial dance. At the current moment, however, it may be hard to find much truth in “Okay, Let’s Talk About Magic” and “Sweet Love for Planet Earth” (both 2008 Fuck Buttons titles). The cover of Power’s latest Blanck Mass album seems to nod in agreement. At a time when global politics is just one man after another showing his ass, the only sensible reaction is to show your teeth.
World Eater finds one of electronic noise’s most popular and populist artists making his heel turn. Specifically, it happens after the oblong music box melody of opener “John Doe’s Carnival of Error” goes into double time, generating the promise of euphoric lift-off that typified Fuck Buttons’ 2009 Andy Weatherall-abetted album Tarot Sport. But it’s a classic supervillain trick of lulling its victims with a disturbing, playful calm before unleashing indiscriminate destruction. A nine-minute blitzkrieg like “Rhesus Negative” needs no nuance; the only operative principle here is loud. Brutal kick drums compete with twin-turret guitars for dominance in the mix before a return to the black metal shrieking last heard on 2008’s Street Horrrsing. While Power’s prior work offered the possibility of meditative headphone listening or even dancefloors, “Rhesus Negative” is awesome in the most literal sense, meant to paralyze with both admiration and fear.
But it doesn’t feel like an endurance test—instead, the brickwalled production of “Rhesus Negative” recalls industrial-arena monoliths like Nine Inch Nails’ “Wish” or Cold Cave’s “The Great Pan Is Dead.” Like anything under the Fuck Buttons or Blanck Mass names, World Eater is suitable for casual listeners who have some curiosity for extreme music and a decent pain threshold. The difference here is that Power looks back on the past decade of electronic music and finds how all of it is capable of showing the kind of domineering aggression that people might only otherwise get from Fuck Buttons, heavy metal, or Tunnel bangers.
World Eater evokes everything from his own up-with-people breakout single “Bright Tomorrow” to Purity Ring’s EDM-indie, from witch house to the trap music populating millions of SoundClouds and Vegas nightclubs. The undulating, pitched-down vocals and skittering drum patterns of “Please” bear the echo of Holy Other and any number of Tri Angle acts, though it sounds murderous rather than haunted. It’s a rare instance of World Eater showing menace and finesse rather than brute strength. Similarly, “The Rat” runs “Rock n’ Roll Pt. 2” through TNGHT’s blown subwoofers. “Silent Treatment” is Power going “POWER,” chopping a choir into a war cry and weaving it through a labyrinthian grid of footwork-inspired percussion.
Just about anything is going to be interpreted as an act of protest in 2017. On World Eater, the coexistence of melody and belligerence, of fragility under an invincible veneer, speak to the constructive and destructive capabilities of man. Power is completely honest about which instinct is winning right now. Nearly every reference on World Eater sounded utopian at one point, and had the album been released during a less turbulent time, “The Rat” could have feasibly been used for the London Summer Games alongside Fuck Buttons’ own “Olympians.” World Eater does not seem like a doomsday device by design, though. It might sound like one now, but Power leaves open the possibility of it being his darkest transmission before the dawn of a new bright tomorrow.


The glitch pioneer returns with his most accessible album to date: a surprisingly colorful set that sounds like he’s DJing a retrospective of his own career.

Ultratronics

To step into Ryoji Ikeda’s world is to be immersed in numbers. Audiovisual installations generated through massive datasets from CERN, NASA, and the Human Genome Project bathe audiences in streams of digits, barcodes of light, and ever-shifting astronomical coordinates. Mathematical abstractions are transformed into overwhelming digital chatter as if in imitation of a computer language that we can hear but not understand. As a composer, Ikeda pioneered glitch music in the 1990s by sonifying data overload, but his technological critique belies his instinct for a good tune. Individual components of his sound, from pure sine waves to unadorned white noise, combine for surprisingly danceable moments. “I learned everything in the clubs,” he said. “Nothing intellectual, just, ‘boom boom boom.’” Ultratronics, a new set of compositions based on material recorded in the ’90s, foregrounds his songcraft over his trademark minimalism for the most accessible album of his career.
Whereas fellow glitch originators Yasunao Tone and Oval use damaged CDs to create waves of stuttering skips, Ikeda begins with the barest fundamentals of sound. Landmark albums like 2000’s Matrix, 2005’s Dataplex, and 2008’s Test Pattern feature little more than sine waves hovering at the edge of perception, filtered 32nd-note clicks panning left and right, and blasts of white noise interrupting. Only at the end of his records would these sparse sounds gradually coalesce into proper songs. Ultratronics does away with this barrier to entry, beginning with fully realized and immediately compelling tracks. Instead of slowly building his tonal palette across the album, Ikeda gathers the main threads and loose ends of his oeuvre into a surprisingly colorful tapestry.
Ultratronics goes in directions that Ikeda has left unexplored for decades. After abandoning the use of samples on recent releases, he prominently incorporates recordings of a robotic narrator named “ULT 708X,” who “can teach you counting, reading, functions, and math problems.” In the playful highlight “Ultratronics 04,” ULT 708X tries (and fails) to count to 30, reminiscent of Kraftwerk’s “Pocket Calculator,” while “Ultratronics 01” garbles its voice completely as in Autechre’s “Ccec.” A young Ikeda might have generated these sounds in imitation of his heroes in the ’90s, but now he incorporates them into his own sonic signature of crystal-clear sine tones, double-speed clicks and cuts, and bursts of dial-up noise. He sounds refreshingly loose, guiding us through his evolution as an artist with gracious humor.
Much of Ultratronics is a patchwork of genres, as if Ikeda is DJing a retrospective of his own career. The breakneck shifts may threaten the coherence of the album, but Ikeda weaves a thrilling panorama out of these various strands: a pummeling industrial beat more appropriate for Throbbing Gristle or Esplendor Geométrico on “Ultratronics 09,” his most compelling IDM since Dataplex’s “Data.Matrix” on “Ultratronics 11,” and beautiful ambience on “Ultratronics 14.” Ikeda has carved an unmistakable niche with his relentlessly minimalist, self-consciously academic meditations on data, but he also risks repetitiveness with uninterrupted years of honing his sound. With Ultratronics, he maintains his precise aesthetic but adds a much-needed sense of levity and fun. If you look closely, you might even see him crack a smile.


The Australian punk trio, birthed out of Melbourne’s feminist punk scene, are at their best channeling their political rage into small moments

Far Enough

Jenny McKechnie doesn’t mince words. After her Melbourne punk trio Wet Lips found themselves billed on a gig as the token “girl act,” the band unleashed her frustration on the fiery “Can’t Take It Anymore”: “Do you think you’re an individual? You're just another guy in a Bad Seeds t-shirt...You’re so rock and roll,” Wet Lips singer Grace Kindellan sneered, pointed disses splattering like drops of lye. But after their shudderingly short and loud self-titled LP and a few 7"s, Wet Lips declared an indefinite hiatus. Cable Ties—their tacit successor formed by McKechnie, along with bassist Nick Brown and drummer Shauna Boyle—turns the same acerbic fury outward, transforming hyper-specific callouts of a toxic, male-dominated scene into broader, more explicit calls to action on their second full-length Far Enough.
Melbourne has become known for a thriving female-oriented rock community, with bands like Camp Cope, Chelsea Bleach, and Amyl and the Sniffers showcasing the city’s rowdy pub scene abroad. But by many accounts, this was a hard-won and recent development, one paved largely by McKechnie herself. With Wet Lips, she started WetFest, a festival that ran until 2018 showcasing female and gender non-conforming-led punk groups. That DIY ethos, one that promotes channeling rage into creativity, defines the spirit of Far Enough.
That’s not to suggest there’s a lack of fury. It’s endemic in their sound—the rumbling bass that cuts through Boyle’s crackling drums; the guitars blown up with reverb. Though invigorating, the instrumentation is hardly novel; the record often leans on familiar garage-rock tropes, so much so that it often dips into homogeneity and predictability. But the band also leaves plenty of room for McKechnie’s booming vocals, by far the band’s most impactful instrument. At once pliable and willful, her voice might morph from a biting howl to a striking vibrato in the span of a verse. Like X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene, she occasionally wields it like a weapon, barking about “blood and theft and war” on “Anger’s Not Enough.” That palpable intensity makes the moments where she does regain control of pitch and melody, as on the surprisingly sweet “Lani,” all the more striking, a delicate counterbalance to the band’s grittiness.
But where the vocals lend a sense of ingenuity and innovation, Cable Ties’ lyrics too often fall flat. For a group so ingrained in Melbourne’s feminist punk scene, it is disappointing and even a bit confusing to see the group grasp at dated tropes when trying to stir underrepresented groups to action. “Self-Made Man,” the band’s attempt at an anti-capitalist anthem, is juvenile in its hackneyed critiques, with statements like “He don’t make when he creates/When he takes, he takes away” so broad that they are rendered ineffectual. At times, the band’s attempt at fomenting revolution is so anachronistic that it runs the risk of being regressive. On “Tell Them Where to Go,” what is ostensibly meant to be a searing battle cry for non-male musicians, McKechnie tries to trace an origin story of feminist punk but again settles for obvious platitudes. “Why don’t you walk out your bedroom and steal your brother’s guitar?” she screams, seemingly unaware of the binaries this reinforces. It comes off as tone-deaf, a facile and unsubtle gesture at third-wave feminism that feels immediately outmoded.
The record’s strongest moments instead track more personal politics, the unavoidable contradictions and anxieties that build up simply from participating in a capitalist, patriarchal system. “Hope,” which begins with just a guitar and McKechnie’s voice, takes a more stream-of-consciousness approach: “I’m getting asthma as I run for the train/Is it genetic from my family or is it just harder to breathe these days?” These quiet musings, which connect literal family history to broader political sentiments, paint a more nuanced picture of leftism: fighting with family members over political parties, grappling with feelings of guilt for not fighting hard enough.
It also leaves room for more positive emotions, as tentative as they might be. “It might be hopeless but if I lose hope I bring on that ending,” she sings, wearily but determined. The surprisingly jaunty closer “Pillow” is similarly autobiographical, a sort of “Cat’s Cradle” or “100 Years” for the Doomer generation, tracking her 25th and 26th birthdays through rising sea levels and rising conservatism. The addition of a pounding piano progression and layered vocal accompaniment on the last verse lends weight to her frustrations. There’s a novel terror in admitting that individual radicalism cannot change the world. But Cable Ties succeed when they build collective strength out of that fear.
Correction: An earlier version of this article contained inaccurate information about the band’s origins and songwriting credits. It has since been updated.


Channeling Sade, covering James Blake, and indulging in some silk-sheets saxophone, the Danish pop producer William Asingh makes a plush, playful, and quietly audacious debut.

Good Job No Conversation

It’s likely that no one has ever said to themselves, “Gee, I wish Sade would cover James Blake on a coffeeshop soul record slathered in sexy sex and Spanish guitar.” But sometimes you don’t know what you want until it’s right in front of you. Good Job No Conversation, the debut EP from Copenhagen producer William Asingh, aka Vera, which he posted on SoundCloud in late 2017, is like that. If you’re a credits-digger, maybe you know him from his work behind the boards with Danish acts such as MØ, who was featured on Major Lazer and DJ Snake’s international hit “Lean On.” Now, trying his own hand at pop, Asingh is as much curator as musician, weaving vivid cultural references, tony vibes, and uncredited collaborations—a beat from a friend here, a lyric from his girlfriend there—into an instantly captivating, deceptively single-origin artifact.
Rhye fans impatiently counting the days until the duo’s new album drops next month will find plenty to tide them over here. Though Vera’s sultry timbres are as dry as Rhye’s are dewy, Asingh’s miniature orchestrations have the same kind of aromatic bounce, and the vocals, by a singer whose identity Asingh is keeping secret for now, have the same androgynous quality. They’re pitch-shifted for maximum winsomeness and inscribed on the music with mechanical precision, sounding less sung than played on a sequencer’s ribbon slider. But for all its artifice and polished smoothness, the record and its fetching patina feel fresh and personalized. It’s both a great vitamin in the lean early winter and a compelling announcement of a song-shaper to watch.
Let’s not bury the lede: We should talk about “Life Round Here.” It’s bold for a new act to cover James Blake, which could easily come off as a grandiose promotional gimmick. It’s even bolder for him to take such liberties with the melody and lyrics, and boldest of all to make it work like a snake charm. The bass arpeggio of the original is immediately discernible in the piano, and the percussion—those clockwork snake rattles—fits perfectly with Vera’s penchant for coiling Latin rhythms. (He told Consequence of Sound that the cover of the song, an “all-time favorite,” was inspired by the kind of salsafied pop classics he imagined hearing at a bar on vacation.) But, almost shockingly, Asingh replaces Blake’s verses with new lyrics and braids them seamlessly into a spot-on rendition of the original chorus. Craftily mixing fancy and faithfulness, it’s more alchemical tribute than cover, and it’s kind of outrageous that it doesn’t fall flat.
The same could be said of all the smoldering saxchief that presides over Asingh’s plush bossa nova grooves, fluttering percussion, low-slung bass, and breathy electronics. When the mellow horn comes wailing through the cracks in the icy synth pulses of “In and Out of Love”—one of several highlights in the consistently strong material—you might look up to see if Jon Hamm is breaking through the wall. Yet the edge-of-cheesy idiom is held in check by crisp production, sharply etched melodic writing (especially on the contemporary R&B-flavored “Nobody Else,” which begins with a sly guitar quotation of Gerry Rafferty’s prototypical smooth-sax jam, “Baker Street”), and lyrics of striking clarity and depth. The bewitching opening track, “Mystery,” a perceptive study in the betrayed lover’s canny hindsight, taps into some parallel universe where Blonde Redhead and Carlos Santana collaborated on a late-night snuggle anthem garnished with Balearic breezes and nonsense French, and I kind of want to go live there. The music has such immediacy and personality that it will take but a single click to see if you do, too.


After infamously bailing out right before Oasis’s 1996 MTV Unplugged performance, the irascible, charismatic Britpop anti-hero gets a second chance.

MTV Unplugged

From the beginning, Oasis’ foundation showed visible cracks. Beyond the excesses of drugs and drinking, there was the Gallagher brothers’ fundamentally unstable relationship. But their most seismic fracture came in 1996, when the band was tapped to record an MTV Unplugged session. At the time, earning a place on the show signified real cultural cachet, following a string of multi-platinum Unplugged albums by Eric Clapton, Mariah Carey, and Nirvana. Yet lead singer Liam Gallagher infamously abandoned the group right before they took the stage to begin taping, leaving his older brother, guitarist Noel, to handle vocals. Liam hung in the balcony, swilling beer and heckling his brother. It proved to the world (and perhaps to Noel himself) that Oasis’ primary songwriter—and the technically superior singer, though lacking Liam’s self-destructive panache—was perfectly capable of handling double duty.
Nearly 25 years later, Liam Gallagher gets his second chance, which begs the question, why is the semi-mothballed MTV Unplugged trotting out the Gallagher who spurned them instead of the one who used the gig to prove his own worthiness as a frontman in his own right?
Liam knows that he can never correct for going AWOL in 1996. He even alludes to his walk-off while introducing “Once,” which he dedicates to former Oasis guitarist Bonehead—who joins Gallagher for the performance—for being the only member of the band to play a second Unplugged session. But MTV Unplugged is, at the very least, an indication that the irascible, charismatic frontman can still hold a crowd in the palm of his hand for long stretches. One of those is a remarkable three-song run of Oasis tunes, beginning with Be Here Now’s “Stand by Me” and ending with (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’s “Cast No Shadow.” Sandwiched in the middle is an ultra-rare performance of Definitely Maybe non-album track “Sad Song” that is alone worth the price of admission.
Of course, that stretch, like the entire tracklist, is the result of a bit of sequencing trickery. As televised, the MTV Unplugged concert, recorded in August 2019 and aired the following month, was much more heavily tilted toward Liam’s own songs, including a chunk of five solo cuts that opened the concert. The album, though, is whittled down to just 10 tracks—five by Oasis and five by Liam—and cagily scatters the Oasis songs throughout, the better to stoke the listener’s nostalgia (and ensuring that Oasis fans who aren’t Liam lifers never have to hear more than two unfamiliar songs in a row).
The Liam-written songs are largely a drag, just as they are on his studio albums, save for “Now That I’ve Found You,” a tiny post-Oasis diamond hiding among the weeds, presented in an even better version here as a melancholic acoustic guitar and piano ballad. After a pint or two of Guinness, you might even be able to convince yourself that his brother composed it. But a few of Liam’s clunkers are elevated in the live format, helped greatly by the Hull crowd, recorded high in the mix (and rapturously chanting, “Liam! Liam! Liam!” between songs like it’s 1996 again). Gallagher, who notably struggled to find his place in the music world after Oasis cratered and his ensuing band, Beady Eye, petered out, may have found the recipe for his ongoing success outside the studio.
Take the opener, “Wall of Glass,” which appears on his 2017 solo debut, As You Were. There, it’s a simulacrum of the Screamadelica wall of sound: blaring harmonica, crunchy guitars, heavy handclaps, and thudding bass. Live, though, the harmonica is swapped out for a tasteful organ, the trio of female backing vocalists shines, and Gallagher’s damaged but affecting voice, now cracked and weathered after decades of cigarettes and alcohol, can’t hide.
Stripped of artifice, Gallagher’s words—dripping in cliche, to be sure—ring truer here. The Brothers Gallagher have long been known to speak cryptically to each other through song. (According to 2019’s largely hagiographical Liam Gallagher documentary, As It Was, they don’t speak in real life at all, but a report from February hints at a reconciliation). So while “Wall of Glass,” with its talk of throwing stones, is often read as an attack on Noel, Liam’s recent steps toward self-reflection give the song new meaning: The wall might just be a mirror.  In the years since he first recorded the single, Liam has, in his own way, sanded down his rougher edges, appearing almost remorseful about his estranged relationship with his brother in As It Was and apologizing to his family a few months before the taping.
As charming as Gallagher’s nasally Mancunian snarl can be on MTV Unplugged, it’s borderline cartoonish on “Once”—he rhymes “pyuwel” (“pool”) with “skyuwel” (“school”)—though perhaps for Liam diehards this is a feature and not a bug. But the Hull crowd lifts him up again (he later called them “biblical”) and before long, “Champagne Supernova” is on the horizon.
Here’s where Noel’s absence is felt for the first time, like a phantom limb. On (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? the mega-hit clocks in at seven and a half minutes, and it  would occasionally stretch considerably beyond that in concert, thanks to the psychedelic shredding of its songwriter, Noel. It’s not quite clear how that kind of grandeur is supposed to translate to an unplugged set, with or without Noel, which is why its inclusion is strange to begin with; even more so its abrupt ending at less than three and a half minutes in. Around the two-minute mark, as Liam reaches the cathartic “Why? Why? Why? Why?” bridge, the strings swell and the crowd is on the edge of ecstasy—but without the sublime noise to shape the song’s dramatic arc, it turns out to be a bridge to nowhere. “Champagne Supernova,” the stunted closer of MTV Unplugged, is a metaphor for Liam Gallagher’s output in a post-Oasis world. It’s an amuse-bouche in lieu of an entrée.

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Death Grips are angry. It's unclear why. But on their major label debut, the Sacramento noise group's monomaniacal desire to rain down fiery destruction on the powers-that-be is crystal-clear, even if nothing else is.

The Money Store

Death Grips are angry. It's unclear why. But their thirst for vengeance, their monomaniacal desire to visit fiery destruction on the powers-that-be, is crystal-clear on The Money Store, even if nothing else-- where the hell this album came from; who plays which instrument; what the lead singer is yelling about; and what on earth this band of insurgents is doing signing an Epic Records contract with L.A. Reid-- makes much sense at all. When playing this album, the only thing I'm sure of is my overwhelming desire to split my forehead open on a cinder block.
The Sacramento group seems to have landed from an alternate planet, or at least an alternate decade when defiantly mutant outfits like this were occasionally given major-label backing. They've been persistently tagged as "rap rock" for context, but it's not a very useful description of their music. For starters, not much of The Money Store scans as rock: It's confrontational, abrasive, and chaotic, but only one of its 13 tracks includes a remotely guitar-like noise ("I've Seen Footage") and even that turns out to be a bent, sickly synthesizer. Most of the album is an alien swarm of buzzing and sputtering noises. Death Grips' Zach Hill, a drummer for the fiendishly technical noise-rock band Hella, has also chewed his way through numerous projects, including work with Marnie Stern and Boredoms, and bits of all this float through The Money Store's wildly unpredictable 41 minutes.
Whatever L.A. Reid was thinking when he signed these guys, he surely didn't meddle in their creative process. Sometimes this hands-off approach backfires, but Death Grips have actual designs to be left to, and The Money Store is a million-mph blur of ideas. One can only imagine how many hours it took to make Hill's drums sound like they're traveling inward from every corner of the mix toward its center, but the music seems to be constantly lunging out at you from all sides. A Bollywood vocal sample on "Punk Weight" is obliterated by a mortar-round hailstorm of viciously treated percussion. On "Hustle Bones", a tar-thick drone of indeterminate origin (guitar? computer?) pops into a glitter of synthesized voices. And "Hacker", the final track, hits a peak that the entire album seems to gather towards: With its simple chorus chant ("I'M IN YOUR AREA") and uncharacteristic amount of empty space, it's the only song Death Grips have recorded so far that tugs at your hips as much as it bludgeons your skull.
As for "rap": To call what lead vocalist Stefan Burnett (aka MC Ride) does "rapping" stretches the definition of the word beyond what even an avowed Lil B and Waka Flocka Flame fan like me can endorse. Burnett's deranged shouting brings a lot of things to mind-- Mark E. Smith with his mouth full, Jim Jones during an air raid, Sloth from The Goonies-- but rapping isn't one of them. Follow his lines closely and you'll slam up against the realization that you're largely transcribing word salad: "The fuck you staring at/ You know I'd be so quick to flash/ Terrified of the way a basilisk come out and skin so fast," Burnett barks on "The Cage". But his hoarse, panicked voice functions as primal fight-or-fight communication: Things Are Not All Right.
The clearest link through all the pop-culture static to the music Death Grips make is back to the ultra-aggressive, defiantly ignorant, and proudly dumb American hardcore punk-metal moment of the 1980s-- right along the Suicidal Tendencies/Fear/Cro-Mags axis. I don't watch a lot of skate videos these days, but I know a great highlight-reel song when I hear it, and every moment of The Money Store qualifies. Like those bands, Death Grips appeals to the knuckle-dragging troglodyte and the smirking smart kid in us: thick-headed goonery and bookish, viscera-free nerdiness, making beautifully misanthropic music together. Granted, The Money Store is about as intellectual an experience as a scraped knee. But it's just as good at reminding you that you're alive.


On its debut album, the country-influenced Austin quartet raises open-ended questions about worry, doubt, and making a living in the gig economy.

Bummer Year

“Bummer Year,” the title track to the debut album by Good Looks, is a mess—but that’s the whole point. The lyrics deal with the familiar process of reconciling memories of old friends from small towns with the politically toxic people they’ve since become. “All my friends from high school, they all bought motorcycles,” Tyler Jordan sings like he’s delivering a eulogy. “Joined up with a bike gang, supported Donald Trump.” Working hard not to dehumanize these characters the way they might dehumanize others, he follows a shaky progression from a drunken brawl—“They’re the kind of people you’d want with you in a bar fight”—to a grassroots demonstration. It’s a stretch, but Good Looks play “Bummer Year” like they’re working through those unresolved feelings in real time. The sense of struggling through confusion gives the song its unexpected power.
Good Looks hail from Austin by way of assorted small towns, and they sound like they’re barely suppressing their accents. Bummer Year is grounded in the indie rock from up in Denton, the outlaw country over at Armadillo World Headquarters, and the dramatically chiming guitars of Austin’s post-rock scene. With a subtle twang in his voice, Jordan has obviously listened to a lot of Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. He’s got a long way to go before he joins their ranks (who’s even close?), but he already has a knack for making the poetic sound plainspoken and the plainspoken poetic. He evokes the flat Texas desert as well as its hidden oases on “Balmorhea” and “First Crossing”: “I know a secret spot, clear water that can be got/Trespass half a mile, cross the road and go on awhile.” He sometimes lapses into sentimentality, but there’s usually a good riff or an unexpected hook to offset lines like “It’s hard to tell where your heart stops and my heart begins.”
In other words, he found just the right people to back him in a bar fight. The guitars, courtesy of Jordan and Jake Ames, chime and console on opener “Almost Automatic,” churning up some drama for a tale of unrequited love, but they do poignant just as well as they do punchy, which adds a bit of humanity to the title track. While never showy, the rhythm section of bassist Anastasia Wright and drummer Phillip Dunne allows them to extend several songs into high-strung jams that probably sound even testier and more reckless in a cramped club. They lend “Vision Boards” a prickliness that suits Jordan’s worries about his future and the path they’ve all chosen as musicians. Songs about creative and commercial woes can feel self-indulgent, especially on a debut, but the chugging pace of the song makes his concerns sound relatable, even urgent: “I get ten percent of sales, but it’s just not working out/Making money from my art, man, just not working out.” It’s the gig economy in a nutshell.
Is it worth all the trouble? Is a life devoted to making music sustainable? That’s the question on most of these songs, and it’s one that becomes more pressing in light of recent tragedy. On the day after the album’s release, following a hometown show, Ames was struck by a car, which left him hospitalized with severe injuries. American health care being what it is, the band started a GoFundMe page to cover his medical expenses. In their music, Good Looks don’t settle on a decisive answer; as with the title track, they leave their questions purposefully open-ended. Bummer Year becomes an album about trying to quell your doubts, push aside your worries, and get by in a world that breeds doubts and worries. “To the voices in my head,” Jordan yells on “Vision Boards,” “fuck off!” The fight is worthwhile.


As a member of other people's bands, Robert Beatty specializes in aggressive, speaker-splitting noise-- which also stretched to his work as an artist of album sleeves. But his debut release as Three Legged Race, a chilly electronic project, is all about restraint, echo, distance, and nuance.

Persuasive Barrier

As the founding member of Kentucky noise psych freaks Hair Police and frequent participant in C. Spencer Yeh's Burning Star Core, Robert Beatty is partial to aggressive, speaker-splitting noise. His work as in-demand album-cover artist can be loud too-- it usually features big, bold images with every element clearly in view. There's subtlety in all of his art, for sure, but his starting point tends to be maximum volume.
That tendency is what makes Beatty's solo project, Three Legged Race, so fascinating. The electronic-based music on his debut full-length, Persuasive Barrier, is all about restraint. There's little that could be called noisy or confrontational in its 37 minutes. Instead, Beatty uses echo, distance, and nuance to create a chilly, desolate aura. After years of skilled noise-wrangling, he turns out to also be a master of deep-space vibe. His small blips, short squiggles, and muted beats play like transmissions from a far-off planet.
Exactly what those transmissions mean is unclear, because Three Legged Race is less about concrete ideas than atmospheres. And those atmospheres are wide and evocative enough to sound different to each listener. For me, Persuasive Barrier instills the same eerie feeling I get from the scene in 2001 in which astronauts first encounter the monolith. But for Beatty there's no need for ear-shattering dissonance at the end, just more thick, magnetic sound.
The trippy futurism of 60s-era artifacts like 2001 courses through much of Persuasive Barrier. A few moments-- such as the whirring pulse of the title track, or the rippling lines of "Locked Eyes"-- recall space age bachelor pad music, and others could soundtrack The Andromeda Strain. In weaker hands, these leanings might feel generic. It's a risk shared by many noise types who moved toward electronics in the past few years, approaching new age, industrial, and EDM. And some have in fact been too beholden to the past. But Beatty subverts stylistic constraints, making music that feels less like an exercise than something lived-in and thought-through. As a result, you don't have to be interested in his influences or his past to find something to hook onto.
At his best, Beatty mixes synth-music tropes with less predictable moves, in the process marrying structure to abstraction. In "Magnetic Bride", he combines spacey pulses with what sounds like a robot humming through a vocoder. During "Budgeting Air", Fennesz-like waves of glitch generate trails of phasey tone. Although these and other tracks are wordless, narrative shapes do emerge, with sonic signposts that feel like beginnings, middles, and ends. The shapeliest is closer "Permethrin II". It plays like the entire album in miniature, as Beatty weaves a synth tale not unlike those on Ricardo Donoso's similarly-stellar Assimilating the Shadow. This time, he does end with a 2001 monolith-style din. But it won't make you hold your ears-- more likely, Persuasive Barrier will leave them a little more open than before*.*


Toronto's Fake Palms are, fundamentally, a dream-pop band that plays with garage-punk aggression. Here, Fake Palms has evolved from Michael le Riche’s bedroom recording project to a veritable Toronto underground supergroup, with contributions from members of Hooded Fang, Burning Love, and Slim Twig.

Fake Palms

There are no real palm trees in Toronto, but the city is seeing an uptick in tiki bars—the sort of bamboo-lined spaces with enough beach-scene murals and evergreen faux-fronds to make you think you’ve stepped into a Tahitian resort (at least after you’ve downed four flaming mai tais). But while scuzz-covered Toronto rockers Fake Palms hardly seem like the types to be strategically capitalizing on boutique cocktail trends, band founder Michael le Riche seems well familiar with the sensation of being caught between the world in which he exists and the one he wishes to inhabit.
Le Riche represents a bridge between divergent Toronto indie rock narratives. His former band, the Darcys, were signed to Broken Social Scene’s Arts & Crafts imprint, and, prior to a lineup shake-up last year that’s cast the group’s future in doubt, were being groomed as the label’s next-gen art-rock lynchpins. But with his new full-time concern, le Riche takes a detour down the burning-embered trail blazed by local art-punk heroes Metz to join the freak scene at Buzz Records, whose name is as reflective of the label’s rising profile as its raucous roster’s overheated amplifiers. And yet, even as Fake Palms has evolved from le Riche’s bedroom recording project to a veritable Toronto underground supergroup (with Lane Halley of Hooded Fang on second guitar, Burning Love’s Patrick Marshall on bass, and long-time Slim Twig associate Simone TB on drums), the band’s self-titled debut still bears an intensely claustrophobic quality. Le Riche isn’t so much stepping out into the spotlight as fortifying the walls around him, finding sanctuary in noise.
Fake Palms are, fundamentally, a dream-pop band that plays with garage-punk aggression, subjecting pristine pop songs to bruising beatings. For them, distortion isn’t a weapon, but the inevitable consequence of a stringent, Dogme 95-worthy approach to recording that emphasizes live-off-the-floor authenticity and forbids overdubs. The in-the-red interaction of le Riche and Halley’s gleaming guitar lines, Marshall’s rhythmic rumble, and Simone’s thwack attack has produced a naturally corroding effect, as if all the sound bouncing off the studio walls formed a storm system that soaked the recordings in static.
That shrouding effect can make it hard to grasp exactly what le Riche is trying to express, though the underpinning ennui is easy enough to parse. On the hard-charging opener "Fever Dream", the only easily decipherable words are "my friends"—repeated at the top of each increasingly inscrutable verse line—but they’re delivered with enough audible distress to suggest le Riche is ready to ditch them. The few other soundbites on the album that emerge from le Riche’s foggy cloud of a voice—"I’m not here/ I never was," "Where did my life go/ It’s on the ground," "I need a change"—suggest the singer is trying to retreat from the world even as his band is trying to thrust him to the frontlines.
This tug-of-war tension permeates the songs’ very structural DNA, constantly yielding surprising shifts: the deceptively upbeat twinkle of "Sun Drips" dissolves into a stalking, slow-motion krautrock strut; the wistful, melancholic verses of "Melatonin" are upended by a stomping, storming midsection powered by a twinned guitar line that sounds like broken glass—sparkling yet dangerously jagged. But if Fake Palms’ obfuscating approach threatens to pummel more outwardly melodic, mid-tempo turns like "Estate" into sluggish sludge, the pin-pricked riffs of disco-not-disco thumper "Sparkles" and "YTMATLDPH" poke holes for their fetching "ooh wee ooh" falsetto hooks to waft through, like steam rising out of the punctured cellophane film on a microwave TV dinner.
Though these songs date back to 2011, Fake Palms has the slight misfortune of emerging mere months after Viet Cong showed us how you can translate similar inputs—goth-schooled brooding, shoegaze haze, needling post-hardcore guitars—into something more expansive and emotionally direct. The structural intricacies and melodic integrity of this otherwise raw recording suggest le Riche is capable of pulling off something similarly bold. But for now, Fake Palms’ ocean-sized ambitions are confined to a grimy fish tank.


Isoviha continues in the harsh, blistering vein of the Finnish producer’s 2020 album Rakka and its sequel. But while the sensory onslaught once felt purifying, the new LP is deliberately disruptive.

Isoviha

Vladislav Delay’s 2020 album Rakka and its sequel from last year were inspired by his trips into the Arctic wilderness north of Hailuoto, the Finnish island where he lives. Isoviha is inspired by the anxiety he feels when he returns, and curiously, they sound like two sides of the same coin. Though Sasu Ripatti has usually reserved the Delay moniker for spacious ambient dub, the music on the Rakka albums was harsh and blistering, burying his characteristic deep pads beneath stinging bursts of noise and percussion. This more or less describes Isoviha, but while the sensory onslaught previously seemed like it was meant to be purifying, like a strenuous walk or a cold shower, Isoviha is deliberately disruptive.
“Isovitutus” opens with a gorgeous chord that’d be at home on one of Ripatti’s sumptuous house-music albums as Luomo, but it’s continually interrupted by rhythmically irregular, violently distorted loops that see-saw back and forth like a severely overloaded printer. The track peters out after two minutes, but just when you think it’s over, the printer from hell comes back for a few seconds to remind us not to get too comfortable. This happens all the time on Isoviha. These tracks never build. We hear a blast of noise; it disappears and exposes the music’s ambient guts; the noise comes back. The irregularity of the rhythmic grid contributes to the sense of disorientation, as does Ripatti’s choice to keep the tracks to two or three minutes each.
Isoviha is Ripatti’s most abrasive album, but it’s also one of his most playful. The artist claims he was inspired by the “dangerous overwhelming potential of ordinary objects and events,” and he has as much fun creating ridiculous exaggerations of our overreliance on machines as Terry Gilliam in Brazil or Jacques Tati in Mon Oncle. “Isotv” keeps being interrupted by car horns. The voice on “Isomulkku” sounds like it’s being pulled apart through the telephone. “Isoteko” is a small masterpiece of sonic comedy, with a video-game synth buzzing maniacally as it’s overwhelmed by wet squiggles, pitch-shifted harmonica squawks, and something that sounds like a cuckoo clock––perhaps the most reliable symbol of mechanized madness in pop culture.
Finns will recognize many of the track titles as colorful vulgarities. They’ll also recognize the title of the album as a reference to the “Great Wrath,” when Russia invaded Finland during the Great Northern War of the 18th century and massacred 800 people in Ripatti's home of Hailuoto. It’s easy enough to connect Isoviha to Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine and its potentially nefarious plans for Finland, but those are big ideas for a small album—Delay’s shortest, in fact, shorter than some of his EPs. It feels personal rather than global, and as gnarly as it is, it’s not quite extreme enough to work as a visualization of the horrors of war. It works much better as a record of a man of the wild wandering through the modern world, anxious and a little amused.