Baltimore band mixes its own spin on new wave with highly charged drama courtesy of bellowing lead singer Samuel T. Herring.

In Evening Air

Future Islands have described their first full-length for Thrill Jockey, recorded after relocating to Baltimore and falling in with Dan Deacon's Wham City collective, as "post-wave." Taking cues from early Devo and New Order and replacing the dance-pop movement with rich characterization and storytelling, they've found themselves at a pleasant distance from most formal genre comparisons. Their music is playful but steeped in subtle detail, with both emotional heft and a pungent sense of theatricality.
Playing together since their college days in North Carolina but not truly finalizing the band until 2006, the trio seems comfortable bouncing ideas off each other while remaining anchored in their individual roles. J. Gerrit Welmers' synth work reinterprets those crystalline new wave textures and enhances them with feedback and buttery depth, sometimes accented with sparse snippets of programmed drums and rusted samples. But Future Islands avoid cluttering their music, allowing bassist William Cashion (a Peter Hook disciple if there ever was one) to direct the ship with his undulating plunks and strums, stringing the rest of these mercurial details along with him.
Any talk of Future Islands is bound to come back to scene-stealing frontman Samuel T. Herring, a dramatic, verbose showman eager to spin each one of these lush but simply-stated orchestrations into something grander. At times wailing like a cross between Tom Waits and the Sea Captain from "The Simpsons" (nicely exemplified at the stirring peak of "An Apology"), occasionally adopting a strange British patois to augment a sort of sing-speak, Herring's presence is over-the-top in just the right way. He often seems overwhelmed by tragedy (usually waxing cryptic about lost love), and brings a great sense of damage and loss-- as well as welcome spots of humor-- to each acrobatic performance. But what he uncovers in the patches of calypso, sci-fi movie noise, and circling synth patterns is often surprisingly heartening. Drawing from a few different traditions while making them their own, Future Islands prove here to be a well-versed group of wild, woolly storytellers.


The Field follows his breakout album with one that splits the difference between more of the same and new ideas.

Yesterday & Today

As with any artist whose singular sound wins an admirable cross-section of hearts-- especially in a time when fewer niche artists are rewarded with attention from outside their scene-- it's hard to envy Axel Willner as he follows his debut, the 2007 breakout From Here We Go Sublime. Offer a complete revamp of his paradoxically mist-light-but-brick-dense mix of ambient and trance? He'd be accused of selling out his smitten fanbase. Pack Yesterday and Today with six slabs of self-parodic more-of-the-same? He could await the entitled mewling about wheel-spinning and diminishing returns.
So it's unsurprising that Willner's taken the easiest route. Yesterday and Today calculatingly comprises three songs that extend the known rush of Sublime-- the barely there hissing drums; the short, soft vocal samples swept into grandly corny pastel clouds; the poignant you-call-those-melodies? abstracted from the emotionally-manipulative fakebook of post-rave cheese-- and three very different potential future directions for the Field discography. It sounds like a hesitant record, made by a man stuck between the rock of new non-DJ expectations and the hard place of an artist's desire to grow without being compromised by an audience whose needs he can only guess at. It's also quite good, despite the possible failure of nerve on its creator's part.
Good or no, though, it's doubtful the new-old stuff will convince those un-seduced by Sublime. Willner's tracks are so formally simple that's it not necessarily wrong to claim that if you've heard one then you better dig a lot of edge-of-perception variations in woosh and chug to get through a whole record. But then the rickety claim that "there may not seem to be much going on but..." has tripped up decades' worth of critics trying to sell verse-and-chorus kids on bleeps and loops. Let's say this to the suspicious: If the sound-qua-sound of a Field track's first minute doesn't trigger near-synaesthetic glee, it's guff to promise any mind-rearranging revelations five minutes later, or even many of traditional minimalism's "holy shit!" moments.
The length of Willner's tracks, their did-he-or-didn't-he? shifts in mood, and their easy to miss addition/subtraction of instrumentation via the volume knob suggest background music, and maybe that's the best "in" to the Field's world. You can certainly let the a trance-ish synth swoosh and near-inaudible plinky piano of opener "I Have the Moon, You Have the Internet" (a subtle advance rebuke to peanut-gallery griping?) wash over you and be satisfied. Of course that might mean you'll miss Willner's genius deployment of a single rising chord in the final minutes. And if you've been gripped by "I Have The Moon" for its duration? Well, there's your nape-tingling bonus.
It's also not clear that the aesthetic curve balls will please Sublime partisans. Korgis cover "Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime" is more or less a snooze, a looped line of (gasp!) full vocal over a dapple of static-ridden soft-pop and swelling strings-and-cymbals, a pleasant diversion as the B-side remix to an indie rock single, but filler here. Better is "Yesterday and Today", truly tweaking Willner's trademark and suggesting the fruits of the Field's cross-genre jaunt across America, rubbing shoulders with four-man bands in our finer rock-centric ratholes. The chunky, lengthy bass-and-drums outro thankfully sounds less like punk-funk and more like a tribal DJ tool from a Masters at Work set, albeit replacing MAW's gussied-to-hell layers of horns and chants with a nostril-dilating blast of pine-scented Kompakt ambiance.
But then there's the appropriately named, implacable, acid-tinged "Sequenced", a nostalgic cruise straight into the murky neighborhood of 1970s/80s Europe's half-remembered pioneers of O.C.D. keyboard-play as an end in itself. Despite the late introduction of a (there's sadly no other adjective) spangly melody, it's by far the darkest thing Willner's ever waxed. And though it features the album's most insistent rhythm, it's too slow for dancing, more like what a post-JDF producer would play during a casting call for his kitsch discosploitation movie. It's also the key to understanding why those who kvetch about the Field failing as "dance music" are missing the point. Like those repetition-happy German/French/Italian pioneers, the Field's making music more suited for passively-received images than actively moving bodies.
It's impossible to tell where Willner will go from Yesterday and Today. One might hope he continues on from the title track, adding weightier rhythms and making a few no-bullshit dancefloor singles. Or you can imagine a double-disc of deep-listening mid-tempo head-nodders taking "Sequenced" to prog/concept extremes. Whatever the evolutionary next-step, the hope is that Wilner can keep the feel of the Sublime-ish half of Yesterday and Today without stooping to third-time's-killed-the-charm recycling or willfully denying the pleasures he can provide so easily. That's the kind of tall order that's felled artists more time-tested than the relatively young Willner, and so for now I'll just wish him luck while very much enjoying the rich mix of retreads and possibilities we've got.


Three decades into her career, one of country music’s most reliable and empathetic songwriters offers a profoundly intimate record, full of hushed revelations.

Mary Chapin Carpenter: The Dirt and the Stars

The Dirt and the Stars

More than three decades into her career as one of country music’s most reliable and empathetic songwriters, Mary Chapin Carpenter can set an identifiable mood with just the sound of her guitar. She favors open tunings on acoustic instruments; chord progressions that never quite resolve but let in enough light to feel at ease. In her lyrics, and even just her song titles, she gestures toward words of comfort and self-affirmation: We’re all right. I have a need for solitude. It’s OK to be sad. The magic of her music is how every texture at her disposal—from her gentle fingerpicking to her smooth and precise singing voice—can communicate these messages just as clearly.
Chapin’s 15th studio album, The Dirt and the Stars, is devoted to this elusive gift, how a quiet sound can summon a world of associations. In fact, there’s an entire song about it. It’s called “Old D-35,” and Chapin dedicates it to John Jennings, the guitarist and producer who worked with Chapin on her 1987 debut Hometown Girl through her commercial breakthroughs in the ’90s. Singing to her old friend, who died from cancer in 2015, Chapin finds a sense of peace in the music he left behind: “As long as there are songs that sound like rain on an old terne roof,” she sings, letting her accompanists finish the thought with a fragile, descending piano line.
With such a careful and attentive sound, it is doubly impressive that Chapin and her band recorded the album entirely live in the studio. It is one of the most intimate records in her catalog, and the entire band seems locked into the introspective intensity that marks her best songwriting. In the opening “Farther Along and Further In,” they join slowly with pedal steel and mandolin and a lapping drumbeat. When they lock into a groove near the end of the song, Chapin lets out a sudden, whispered exclamation. It is less the sound of a bandleader losing herself to the music than the lightbulb flash of a good idea arriving late at night, when no one else is awake.
The lyrics are populated with these kinds of hushed revelations. “There’s no day that’s useless,” Chapin notes in “It’s OK to Be Sad.” As if putting her own advice to use, she spends these songs singing about hard wisdom and dark spirals, looking for patterns in the ways people fall apart: “All broken hearts break differently,” she reminds us. There are two explicitly political songs: “American Stooge,” a tragicomic character study, and “Secret Keepers,” a heartland rocker about women forced to keep their stories of abuse to themselves. Set to one of the album’s most upbeat arrangements, the dissonance is intentional, the sound of private thoughts surfacing among people who understand.
Chapin has a gift for finding universal wisdom in these deeply personal struggles, and these songs strive for clarity in the face of darkness. In the closing “Between the Dirt and the Stars,” one of her most vivid and beautiful songs to date, Chapin allows herself refuge in scenic memories from a teenage road trip. “If we’re lucky, ghosts and prayers are company, not enemies,” she sings. Her band sprawls into a lengthy instrumental coda with a climactic guitar solo by Duke Levine, suggesting a kind of spiritual catharsis. But Chapin’s thoughts keep turning to an old song playing on the car radio, somewhere deep in her psyche. “Everything we’ll ever know,” she sings, “is in the choruses.” And so she keeps listening, learning, driving on.

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Tapping directly into the great lineage of batshit bubblegum pop, Baltimore art kid Dan Deacon's Spiderman of the Rings is one of this year's happiest, catchiest, and weirdest records, repeatedly hitting pleasure centers with track after track of gleeful, electronics-infused hyperpop and candy-coated sound experiments. Plus, you can mosh to it.

Spiderman of the Rings

I first saw Dan Deacon play live in August 2005, just after I moved to Baltimore. The occasion was a "bridging-the-gap" measure at a local loft space to foster unity between the city's art-damaged noise kids and its breakbeat-loving club kids. By the time I arrived, a balding, baby-fattened fellow with a patchy Brillo frizz of beard was unraveling a mess of electronics on a table in the middle of the dancefloor. And once all the plugs were plugged and the jacks were jacked, this man, Dan Deacon, turned himself on.
What came out of the PA was a barrage of cheap-sounding, rainbow-hued, breakcore-tempo electronic noise. It felt like I was hearing my entire childhood record collection of cheerful kiddie 45s sped up on a hotrodded Fisher Price record player. Deacon himself was dancing along with a joyous palsy, singing through a scrim of squeaky effects. In a night where I'd shown up wanting dance music, Deacon had completely upended my expectations. He also made me a fan for life. A small handful of the grouches stood with incredulous arms folded across their chests and everyone else proceeded to freak the fuck out, almost as wildly as Deacon himself. Welcome to Baltimore.
"Wooody Wooodpecker", the opening track from Deacon's Carpark Records debut Spiderman of the Rings, combines everything awesome-- and potentially alienating-- about Deacon's music into 3:50 and sticks it right at the beginning of the record. Here, he loops and distorts the famous cartoon character's convulsive laugh over a sizzling synthesizer crescendo, a needling 12-note keyboard melody, and mechanical percussion that winds to a point where a human drummer's tendons would snap. It's like Deacon's switch got stuck somewhere between "irritate" and "captivate" and he decided to never bother fixing it.
Despite its cacophonous electronic surface, the best of Spiderman of the Rings hits the pleasure centers with a string of great pop singles. "The Crystal Cat" could almost be a straight-up surf-rock tune until the moment when Deacon's leader-of-the-pack goon croon becomes a grotesquely twisted helium shriek and the drums explode like illegal fireworks. "Okie Dokie" is basically "Wooly Bully" rewritten with Deacon's handmade tone generators and ring modulators.
See, Deacon makes "noise rock" that taps directly into the great lineage of batshit bubblegum pop. Spideman connects at various points with Kasenetz and Katz, Sam the Sham, happy hardcore and gabba techno, "Surfin' Bird", the twinkly melodies of an infant's mobile (the unexpectedly gorgeous "Big Milk"), the Ramones, Koji Kondo (composer-in-residence for the Nintendo Entertainment System), Max Martin, and Daft Punk. On an earlier EP, 2006's Acorn Master, Deacon covered Bobby Darin's "Splish Splash". That spastic take on a rock'n'roll classic feels with hindsight like an obvious run up to Spiderman.
But there's at least one song on Spiderman that betrays his deep background in more cerebral electronic and avant-garde music. Deacon is a core member of Baltimore's Wham City crew-- a Baltimore loft/show space and arts collective-- and the 12-minute "Wham City" is this album's centerpiece. In this tribute to his friends and his former home, you can hear hints of all sorts of hypnotic beats, from Neu!'s motorik percussion and Kraftwerk's synthesizers to Steve Reich's mallets and Terry Riley's keyboards. But as a sing-along-- or chant-along in this case, one of the catchiest of the year-- it also hints at a deep love of old "Sesame Street" records and a full collection of "Muppet Show" DVDs. Even when Deacon goes epic-- and pays tribute to the hardcore experimental composers he studied in college-- he can't resist the urge to play up to your inner child.
Like all the kid-friendly stuff that informs his sound-- pop bands, candy ravers, Carl Stalling, noise bands in stupid masks, rap music reduced to a bunch of catchy catch-phrases, and jumping on your bed with friends-- Deacon doesn't care about looking cool. (Rock magazine stylists will never get within 100 feet of the guy.) And if you're down with the cause (Wham City fliers flatly stated "no jerks"), Deacon wants you to join him in adding silly joy to a world that's been feeling pretty drab. This fearlessness in the name of trying to make people happy spills onto Spiderman of the Rings like neon poster paint. The album deserves to make song-and-dance man Deacon a superstar, or at least as much of a superstar as the Dean Martin of self-soldered electronics can be.


After two albums of jazzy, humid club cuts, the British producer moves beyond the dancefloor with a stunning concept record about his grandparents that incorporates ambient and modern classical music.

Nothing Is Still

Every time Leon Vynehall releases new music, you’re guaranteed a fundamental level of coherence. The British producer is a quiet, cerebral guy, and his long-form statements communicate rich themes and a solid sense of structure even though they’re largely wordless. His 2014 breakthrough, Music for the Uninvited, explored house music’s queer history and Vynehall’s own childhood memories, like his mom’s handmade mixtapes and N64 games. Sultry follow-up Rojus, from 2016, used ornithological samples to trace the arc of a single night out dancing.
On Nothing Is Still, his first studio album for venerable UK label Ninja Tune, Vynehall mines a piece of family lore: his grandparents’ emigration from England to New York City more than 50 years ago. But instead of using the story to frame another collection of jazzy, humid club cuts, Vynehall changes course. More deliberate and expansive than any of his other releases, the album moves beyond the dancefloor by incorporating traces of ambient and modern classical music.
Nothing Is Still isn’t a radical reinvention—it relies on the same sumptuous palette Music for the Uninvited and Rojus used—but it does deconstruct Vynehall’s established sound. The parts that make up lengthy bangers from earlier in his career, like “It’s Just (House of Dupree)” and “Blush,” are distributed across multiple songs, forcing you to focus on individual elements: the breathy sax drifting through “Movements (Chapter III),” the lusty grunts peppering the woozy “Drinking It in Again (Chapter IV),” the disorienting throb of “English Oak (Chapter VII).” Although it’s less engaging on a track-to-track basis, this approach yields an album that works through a much wider spectrum of emotions. Rojus was supposed to soundtrack an evening from start to finish, but it ended up hanging in place like a thick fog; Nothing Is Still swells and recedes. At its most intense—like the menacing second half of centerpiece “Trouble - Parts I, II, & III (Chapter V)”—the record can hit you like a punch to the back of the head.
That trade-off between moment-to-moment scintillation and holistic satisfaction is the crux of Nothing Is Still. It’s designed to reward a degree of investment that goes beyond the passive listening experiences that define the streaming era. Vynehall described Rojus as “functional club music,” a phrase that gets at that record’s strengths: Each of its tracks can be isolated and embedded within a marathon DJ set. It’s hard to come up with a similar phrase that cuts to the core of Nothing Is Still—a “multimedia narrative experience,” maybe. (The album is being released alongside a series of short films and a novella co-written by Vynehall.) That’s a much less evocative set of descriptors, and its hollowness reflects this album’s higher degree of conceptual complexity.
The implicit connections between Vynehall’s compositions and his grandparents’ move to America are what make Nothing Is Still sparkle. The graceful, swelling strings of opener “From the Sea/It Looms (Chapters I & II)” suggest the ebb and flow of a transatlantic voyage. Interludes “Birds on the Tarmac (Footnote III)” and “Julia (Footnote IV)” evoke the sonic clutter of a Manhattan morning—doors opening and closing, cash registers ringing, scraps of conversation—with layered, repeating passages reminiscent of Steve Reich. And after subjecting listeners to the anxious, noisy climaxes of “Trouble” and “English Oak,” Vynehall doles out a treat: the stunning “Ice Cream (Chapter VIII),” which starts as a play on the Field’s looping reveries and ends with birdsong layered over crashing waves of sound. The track feels like walking from the park down to the shore with a soft-serve cone, letting yourself be soothed by the rhythm of the tides.
I spent much of my time with Nothing Is Still thinking about a recent sonic statement of purpose by Vynehall’s contemporary, Sam Shepherd, another young British producer who imagined himself moving beyond the club sphere. 2015’s Elaenia, the first full album Shepherd released as Floating Points, found him making a sharp left turn from the house and techno of his early EPs into tranquil ambient jazz and piano impressionism. It felt like a slab of music meant to be digested as a whole; it wielded silence and texture instead of groove and melody.
Shepherd and Vynehall seem too progressive to believe that an association with dance music has somehow limited their prestige, but it’s also easy to imagine either of these bright, ambitious, insatiably curious artists wanting to do more than making people move. Like Elaenia, Nothing Is Still invites the listener recalibrate their expectations of the artist behind it. Vynehall is more than a producer with a great ear for texture and a nostalgic streak—he’s a storyteller, one who demands and merits our full attention.


Musicians' lives don't naturally translate to compelling movies, but in the right hands, they can make for powerful albums. On Okkervil River's autobiographical fourth full-length-- their most emotionally devastating yet-- frontman Will Sheff masters both self-reflexivity and twisted confessionalism while his band ramps up to an unhinged aggressiveness that was only hinted at on previous releases.

The Stage Names

Despite biopics like Walk the Line and Ray, musicians' lives don't naturally translate to compelling movies. The relentless repetition of touring, the fleeting nature of creativity, the mundane conflicts between bandmates and hangers-on-- none of it seems all that visually or narratively interesting.
Fortunately, in the right hands, that life can make for a powerful album-- like The Stage Names, the fourth full-length from Austin group Okkervil River. This sort of self-reflection should come as no surprise from the band responsible for both "There Is No Hidden Track" from 2004's Sleep and Wake-Up Songs EP and especially Black Sheep Boy, an album based loosely on the exploits of doomed folk musician Tim Hardin; what does surprise is how much they can accomplish with this confessionalism, which is at its most potent on opener "Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe".
As frontman Will Sheff howls hysterically about the lack of plot contrivances, epic endings, and dramatic camera angles in daily routine, the band becomes increasingly unhinged and aggressive, careening wildly from pent-up verses to explosive something-like-choruses-- an unexpected turn for an ensemble more associated with brains than brawn. Near the end, it all finally and artfully falls apart, leaving Sheff to close with the clincher about "a calm clicking, like a pro at his editing suite takes two weeks stitching up some bad movie." Life gets two thumbs way, way down.
Interestingly, Okkervil River's career is in the midst of a trajectory that perfectly mirrors a traditional narrative arc. Their first two albums, Stars Too Small to Use and Don't Fall in Love with Everyone You Meet, formed the introduction; Down the River of Golden Dreams was the exposition; and Black Sheep Boy initiated the rising action. The Stage Names, if not the climax itself, at least significantly thickens the plot, seeming just as artistically unsurpassable as Black Sheep Boy did in 2005, and even more emotionally devastating.
With his fondness for dizzying wordplay (who else writes in parenthetical asides?) and lyrical ambiguity, Sheff may seem like the ultimate indie pessimist on the rollicking r&b number "A Hand to Take Hold of the Scene" or the caustic relationship deconstruction "Plus Ones", but actually, he's just a realist who captures scene conventions and rock'n'roll marginalia even as he sees the void beyond them. The mercurial River sound looser and louder than they did on Black Sheep Boy, especially on the dramatic ebb and flow of "Title Track", and the tenderly rootsy "A Girl in Port". In fact, Travis Nelsen's explosive drumwork and Jonathan Meiburg's backing vocals often lend The Stage Names the immediacy and recklessness of a live recording. Their energetic imprecision-- one of their most commanding features-- coils effortlessly into Sheff's self-reflexive lyrics; few groups can so nimbly or inventively use music as an extension of lyrical themes or vice versa.
Fittingly, The Stage Names ends with "John Allyn Smith Sails", a document of failure so complete that the main character can't even succeed in killing himself: "I was breaking in a case of suds at the Brass Rail, a fall-down drunk with his tongue torn out and his balls removed," Sheff sings, embodying doomed poet John Berryman (his birthname gives the song its title). "And I knew that my last lines were gone, while, stupidly, I lingered on." Berryman seems to be indie's new romantic failure-- he also inspired the Hold Steady's "Stuck Between Stations". Craig Finn had the Minneapolis connection; Okkervil River essentially rewrite the Beach Boys' "Sloop John B" as a suicide note, turning the song into a joke so grim it's hard not to laugh.
Ultimately, The Stage Names shows how a vastly talented "mid-level band" (Sheff's words) sees itself, but there's no bitterness here, just overwhelming self-doubt and perseverance. Despite its density (they fit worlds into just nine songs), the album remains exciting and accessible, albeit highly sobering. It's about the folly of popular music and its attendant lifestyles, but these songs are so good and so moving that they only give us stupid, stubborn hope.


The L.A. duo's second album seems to be reporting from three simultaneous decades of rock history. But having a great record collection and having some idea what to do with it are two different things, and on W**e Are The Ambassadors Foxygen have internalized enough of the music they love to start toying with it.

Foxygen: We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic

Before you play a note, your band begins as a series of decisions: Which bands inspire us? Who do we want to sound like? What are we going to call ourselves? These early triangulations often lead to everything else falling into place: bass lines, vocal affectations, guitar tones, production, album-art style. They say a lot about the band you intend to become. Sam France and Jonathan Rado, a duo from L.A., decided at some point that they would be called Foxygen. Yes, they were still in high school at the time. But when you pair that name with the unwieldy title We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic, you get a certain picture: goofily endearing, kid-brother types, the kind of guys who will probably embarrass you in public if you let them. Which makes the assured and witty We Are that much more surprising.
France and Rado have been playing together for years, and they've apparently spent that time working through their relationships to their record collections. Faced with the terrifying bounty of the rock menu on their 2012 EP Take The Kids Off Broadway, they seemingly shut their eyes and ordered everything at once: The songs stumbled through styles like there was a demented drill-sergeant producer in the background yelling, "OK now, Memphis soul! Now, when I say, Merseybeat-era Beatles! GO!"
We Are, by contrast, has more poise, rifling with effortless cool through retro-rock quotes and mannerisms-- France's gulps and sobs draw directly from the Mick Jagger of "Let's Spend the Night Together" at one moment and channel the thousand-ton boredom of Lou Reed the next. Meandering organ pokes through on "No Destruction"; flecks of "Under My Thumb"-style guitars pop up on "On Blue Mountain". In the lovely "San Francisco", France paints the city as a place where "the forest meets the bridge," and the grass scent of the Kinks' We Are the Village Green Preservation Society wafts by (even their album title is an echo of that one). Having a great record collection and having some idea what to do with it are two different things, and on W**e Are The Ambassadors Foxygen have internalized enough of the music they love to start toying with it.
As you spend more time with We Are, you begin to notice some of that playfulness manifesting itself, like the pitched-down vocals counting in the opening of "On Blue Mountain", a song that rattles through multiple tempo and key changes without seeming disjointed. The warbly "Oh Yeah" can't seem to decide what kind of homage it is, veering between a yearning Captain Fantastic falsetto chorus, Blood Sweat & Tears symphonic soul, and an "aww-yeah" breakdown that is a near-direct quote of "Mr. Big Stuff". The echoes are blurred further by producer Richard Swift, a talented singer-songwriter with a meticulous ear for period detail. He follows the band's songwriting cues wherever they lead, and Ambassadors seems to be reporting from  three simultaneous decades of rock history.
France, meanwhile, has become a sharp storyteller and lyricist, reeling off lines that feel like insults even if you can't parse them: "I caught you sipping milkshakes in the parlor of the hotel," he yawns on "No Destruction", before delivering the piercingly direct (and already heavily quoted) stinger "There's no need to be an asshole, you're not in Brooklyn anymore." On "Shuggie", he sighs "I met your daughter the other day, that was weird/ She had rhinoceros-shaped earrings in her ears," an arresting image that in context evokes an odd sense of sadness. The call-and-response chorus of "San Francisco"--  "I left my love in San Francisco/ (That's okay, I was born in L.A.)"-- hits like a joke even if the target isn't clear.
Slipped between the air quotes are proclamations that ring with personal truth: "We can live on blue mountain like livin' in a sunset/ We can live honestly and true," goes the chorus to "On Blue Mountain". On "Shuggie", France sings "If you believe in yourself, you can free your soul." He sings it in a warbly, affected voice, pulling a face at the sentiment slightly, a trick he repeats at the album's coda, where he keens in an off-key choirboy voice: "If you believe in love/ Everything you see is love/ So try to be what God wants you to be/ And say that I love you/ Again." It's one thing to give your band and your album a silly name, and to play dress-up with rock history while tweaking the formula. It's another thing entirely to mean it; the more time you spend with Ambassadors, the more clearly that commitment and joy comes through.


On his ninth studio album, the Man on the Moon has never sounded more checked out.

INSANO

Near the middle of “Often, I Have These Dreamz,” the first track of INSANO, Kid Cudi recalls a dream of falling back to Earth. The song’s thundering drums fade into the background and guest DJ Drama barks an ad lib (“Cudi, talk to ’em!”) before Cudi proceeds to stumble through the most milquetoast fantasy imaginable. “I have these dreams of me falling through the sky, you know what I’m sayin’?/And uh, somehow, before I hit the ground, I start flyin’... I fly back up to the sky, you know, high as fuck/High as fuck, past the planets,” he says, practically mid-bong rip, before diving into a verse of empty product placement and cliché mythmaking.
Cudi has attempted to sell himself as both an underdog and a superstar since the blog era, but the more he parlays his late-aughts musical clout into the worlds of film, television, and fashion, the harder this image has become to take seriously. His failure to meaningfully evolve as a musician isn’t the only reason INSANO is a bad record. The best Cudi songs have at least enough sense of direction and confidence to convince you to buy in. Even his much-maligned psych-rock album Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven had some passion coursing through it. Here, that yen is gone—he’s never sounded more checked out. Even Cudi doesn’t seem to believe his own hype anymore.
To its credit, INSANO is trying to do something different—that different thing, however, is just having DJ Drama provide thin narrative window dressing to a spate of uninspired Kid Cudi songs. Classic Cudi moments where he grapples with his demons, like “Tortured” or the XXXTentacion-featuring “X & Cud,” are retreads of stories he’s told better and with more conviction elsewhere. What’s left are flex and rage raps that are somehow hollow and overwrought at the same time. On “Keep Bouncin’” and “Cud Life,” his staccato flow is undermined by his drawn-out slur, a vocal affect that doesn’t make the bland boasts about white Benzes or faceless groupies any more interesting. “A Tale of a Knight” is part autobiography and part anonymous bacchanalia, hampered by more annoying vocal tics and production I can only describe as Hans Zimmer trying to recreate the beat for Young Thug and Gunna’s four-year-old “Hot” after hearing it from a passing car at rush hour. The more Cudi tries to spin these songs as effortless and fun, the more labored and rote they sound.
The beats and guests don’t offer much respite, either tripping him up or fully outclassing him. DJ Drama’s omnipresence marks INSANO as a Gangsta Grillz project, but Cudi’s raps are too meandering and generic to earn that title the way bolder auteurs like Tyler, the Creator and Westside Gunn have recently. Travis Scott is the next most prominent presence, and not because of his two forgettable features. Beats are handled by old partners (Plain Pat, Dot da Genius, WondaGurl, Clams Casino) and a handful of newer faces (BNYX, Take a Daytrip), but many sound like they were made with Scott’s maximalist slog UTOPIA in mind. The blown-out 808s and general cacophony of the rage aesthetic don’t play to Cudi’s strengths and tend to drown his voice. In the few spots where things level out, he either sounds out of place (the inexplicably hyphy “Electrowavebaby”) or gets lapped by another artist: On “Rager Boyz,” Young Thug lands the album’s most colorful line (“How your hat say White Sox and you from the Bronx?”) with a shrug.
Though he was far from the first rapper to do so, at his peak Kid Cudi provided an outlet for emotional vulnerability and mental health awareness in the genre. For millennial and younger rap fans, his status as an alt-Black kid who enjoyed indie rock as much as he did Bape and GOOD Music represented a fresh vision of mainstream celebrity. But he’s spent the years since 2013’s Indicud rehashing old ideas to the point of self-parody (when his new ideas aren’t fizzling out in their own ways), creating overindulgent and sloppy albums that have soured much of the goodwill he’s coasted on since 2009. He’s hinted that he may be ready to retire from music at 40, and on the unfathomably boring INSANO—which, coincidentally, represents the last album in his contract with Republic—it sounds like he already has one foot out the door.


Massachusetts songwriter Cooper Handy’s naive, bizarro-world pop is a portal to a dimension weirder and more vivid than this one.

The Music Industry Is Poisonous

Cooper Handy, aka Lucy, has been making bizarro pop music since 2010, when he was 16 and living on Cape Cod. He started as a teenager messing around with GarageBand plugins, then cut his chops in the Dark World collective, Western Massachusetts’ answer to GothBoiClique. (He left the group in 2016, not long after the FADER published a photo of the crew drinking Dunkin’ shirtless.) Now based a few hours away from the Cape in the town of Hadley, he’s become inescapable within a certain East Coast DIY set, showing up on bills at every basement venue and semi-legal artists’ loft you can think of. There’s a reason for this: His surreal songs exist on their own planet. The Music Industry Is Poisonous, his ninth record and second release of the past year, is one such offering.
Handy’s music is naive and free-associative, written with the exploratory excitement of a little kid flipping rocks in search of bugs. Over frenetic drum machine and synth on “Turn Page,” he catalogs his elementary school teachers: “My first-grade teacher was Mister O/My second-grade teacher was Miss M/Third-grade teacher was Miss W,” he sings, sounding as if he were perhaps under the influence of a hypnotist. The equally strange “Like a Weakness” laments the “bad boy lifestyle” and waxes poetic about “growing up/been a great kid.” And on “Rock, The,” where one percussive effect sounds suspiciously like the sound of a computer trash can, he’s sad because a friend doesn’t want to “play” with him anymore.
It would be easy for this kind of writing to come off as trite, but The Music Industry Is Poisonous often feels like a trip to a dimension more vivid than the one we currently occupy. It’s a sensation underlined by Handy’s explanation of his band name: “Maybe a loose cigarette maybe psychedelics maybe that hominid from the Australopithecus afarensis species. Love Unity Communication Yes.” But he’s not so much of an alien that there isn’t a blueprint for what he’s doing: Compare, for instance, the Moldy Peaches’ love songs about playing video games, or Alan Vega’s Farfisa Elvis impersonations in Suicide.
Part of the joy of listening to this record is in the fun Handy clearly had making these songs—they sound effortless, one-take, fueled by a first-thought-best-thought ethos that doesn’t bother to check itself. Even so, The Music Industry Is Poisonous is sometimes too goofy for its own good, so wide-eyed and unserious that it verges on twee, or worse, a comedy bit. Album closer “Lucky Stars,” though, feels labored over in a way that the other songs don’t. Drum machines shuffle in the background as detuned pianos recall evenings on the couch, watching old cartoons with friends. It’s a proper ballad; you might even call it romantic. Best of all, Handy’s lyrical hook riffs on “Maps,” the Yeah Yeah Yeahs classic. “They don’t love me like I love me,” he sings. You kind of don’t believe him at all.
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The bass clarinet and synthesizer duo and the Oakland guitarist collaborate on an immersive quartet of tracks that feel like still-life paintings of the same object from slightly different angles.

Golden Retriever / Chuck Johnson: Rain Shadow

Rain Shadow

Jonathan Sielaff, Matt Carlson, and Chuck Johnson share an apparent aversion to sharp edges and hard surfaces. For more than a decade, Sielaff and Carlson’s Portland, Oregon, duo Golden Retriever has used the unusual pairing of bass clarinet and modular synthesizer to make music that flows like liquid. Unbowed by their instruments’ limitations, they create an illusion of fullness, using just-intonation systems to pull ghost tones out of thin air, arpeggios to suggest mirage-like harmonies, and overdubs to weave narrow bands of tone into shimmering expanses. Oakland, California, guitarist Johnson also knows something about making his instrument sound like something it is not. Though he got his start playing fingerpicked acoustic folk in the American primitive tradition, his 2017 album Balsams turned the plaintive sound of the pedal steel to blissfully ethereal ends. And in the duo Saariselka, alongside Marielle V. Jakobsons, he eked even more weightless atmospheres out of his slide and steel strings.
Rain Shadow amounts to a meeting of like minds, with a twist. Though Johnson and Golden Retriever have occasionally appeared on the same bills, they’ve never actually played together, not even for the making of the album. While Golden Retriever habitually mix real-time improvisation and subsequent editing, this time all three musicians hunkered down in their respective studios, composing and then swapping their individual parts in a three-way round robin exchange. Golden Retriever performed the final mix and arrangement on two of the album’s four tracks, while Johnson took on the other two. It’s a testament to the musicians’ collective mind meld that no song bears the obvious signature of any individual; it’s impossible to say who put the finishing touches on any of these uniformly luminous instrumentals.
One of two 13-minute tracks, “Empty Quarter” opens the album with a soft chordal blush of unknown provenance, the pedal steel sailing gently over the top; multi-tracked clarinets rise in the mix, answered eventually by electric current from Carlson’s modular. There is no melody, just strands rippling and swirling like seaweed. But some imperceptible transformation takes place along the way: The sound thickens and congeals, its individual elements blurred like the texture of frosted glass.
These songs differ principally not in method but in tone. In “Lupine,” the album’s most lyrical and sentimental track, twinned clarinets and pedal steel twist in slow-motion counterpoint against a glowing, major-key backdrop; the closing “Creosote Ring” takes similar elements and turns them pewter gray, like rain clouds pierced by harsh sunlight. All four tracks feel like parts of a series; they might be still-life paintings of the same object from slightly different angles, or photographs of a grassy field captured at dusk on four consecutive evenings.
Given this uniformity, it might be hard to say just why the long “Sage Thrasher” is the album’s highlight, but it is; there’s a sense of mystery that the other songs don’t have, elements cruising into earshot like prop planes in the distance. The first five minutes feel like swimming through honey, then the body of sound seems to turn paper-thin before expanding once again in all directions, like a physics model of an alternate universe. From modest beginnings, the piece builds to high drama, with the enveloping buzz of an orchestra tuning up—an orchestra of fluorescent tubes, bowed metal, laser beams, and brain waves. It coasts out on a two-minute denouement, dissolving slowly into white noise.
At times it would be nice to hear more variation, more detail, more friction: There’s a moment in “Lupine” when analog distortion adds a faint dusting of grit, a welcome counterbalance to the song’s overwhelming consonance. But the relatively concise album is a warm and immersive listen, and it feels timely. Created in isolation out of choice, rather than dictate or necessity, it’s an example of music’s refusal to be locked down. On Rain Shadow, notes bleed across the stave, pass through walls, and are transformed by good old musicianly telepathy; all that is solid melts into air.

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On their first full-length collaboration, legendary UK producer Adrian Sherwood and dubstep producer Rob Ellis, aka Pinch, tap into Sherwood's '80s dub-punk productions and Pinch’s 21st century tracks, namely the '90s genre known as downtempo.

Late Night Endless

"There’s more warmth and space in dub, more than in any other music," UK producer Adrian Sherwood told Time Out back in 2013. "It’s uncluttered, yet if it’s a good production, people can hear things that aren’t even there." Sherwood should know. Situated in London in the late '70s when punk, reggae, industrial, Afrobeat, electro, and hip-hop began to entangle and crossbreed, Sherwood was often in the producer’s chair to help dub out the results. His credits range from punks like the Fall and New Age Steppers to Lee "Scratch" Perry and industrial hip-hop band Tackhead. And his remixes—be it for Sinéad O’Connor or Skinny Puppy—accentuated both the sharp and corroded edges of the beats as well as the space in-between. The work he rendered in Brit-Jamaican mash-ups as Creation Rebel, Dub Syndicate, and African Head Charge on his On-U Sound label in the early 1980s remain the headiest amalgams of dub some three decades later.
Collaboration lies at the heart of Sherwood’s work, be it with Pop Group’s Mark Stewart or The Voice of Thunder by Prince Far I, so it makes sense that in the 21st century, he’s gravitated towards a new generation of producers who also favor the concuss of Jamaican bass, primarily dubstep producer Rob Ellis, aka Pinch. Dub oozes from Ellis’ production portfolio and he, too, favors collaboration, be it with old drum and bass producer Photek or the likes of Shackleton. Ellis and Sherwood’s collaboration stems from a 2011 DJ night at London superclub Fabric and singles followed.
On their first full-length collaboration, Late Night Endless, the two draw on their formidable pedigree, yet at times the album feels cluttered with sound. A lumbering drum pattern underpins "Shadowrun", sounding like a jungle 12” pitched down, hinting at Pinch’s dubstep heritage while "Music Killer Dub" draws from Sherwood’s lengthy CV. The voices of Jamaican legends like the Congos and Lee "Scratch" Perry—with a sample of now-deceased reggae-punk icon Mikey Dread—all intermingle on the springy track, squelches and gurgles spurting out every few bars. Daddy Freddy’s well-deep growl rumbles underneath "Bucketman" as the other sounds push into the red and back. "Gimme Some More (Tight Like That)" might have the most telltale dubstep wobble of the set, infused with menacing horror soundtrack synth chords and growling dancehall vocals sped into chipmunk territory.
On the back half of the album, the collaboration settles into a flat middle ground somewhere between Sherwood’s '80s dub-punk productions and Pinch’s 21st century tracks, namely the '90s genre known as downtempo. A female vocal sample talking about birdsong, another sampled voice asks "Did you get lost on the trip?" gets tossed with a little diddle on piano, all of it wedded to a soggy drum track that is uncharacteristically generic for the two. "Precinct of Sound" also sounds staid, a voice croaking "sound" as alarm-like sound effects swirl around, lasting barely two minutes. If the hand drums of "Africa 138" had a bit more space, and didn’t have to tussle with another disembodied vocal and guitar line, the beat might have stuck. The most classic dub-sounding track of the album, closer "Run Them Away" best blends the two producer’s formidable skills. Though coming as it does at album’s end, the otherwise lovely chorus—sung by Sherwood associates Bernard Fowler and Bim Sherman—sounds like an exit strategy.


The Chicago rapper’s first milestone is a careful step in his legacy-building business. It's an obvious turn inward, but Vic also digs his heels into new political ground.

The Autobiography

It only takes a minute into his debut album for Vic Mensa to say “I told you so.” The 24-year old Chicago rapper has been obsessing over this moment for years. He’s actually talking to his parents and friends, which makes the moment all the more endearing in its lack of snark. It’s goodwill he carries through the rest of The Autobiography, an unimaginative and over-promising title for an artist’s first major milestone, but one that’s not overly lofty in describing Mensa’s album-length character building.
With its long windup and veteran industry legend No I.D. helming the ship as executive producer, The Autobiography feels like a purposeful statement of intent, a careful step in the Vic Mensa legacy-building business. Mensa has the industry trappings of a nascent star: JAY-Z’s personal and major label backing, deep roots in the Chicago hip-hop scene that graduated artists like Chance the Rapper and Joey Purp, an opening spot on a Justin Bieber tour. Part of the appeal of Mensa’s debut has been its purposefully and grandly shrouded expectations. Last year, Vic publicly scrapped plans for an album called Traffic, this in the middle of leaning ever more into his punk rock image while espousing a burning activist bent. He was there in 2015 protesting the Chicago Police Department’s killing of Laquan McDonald and then joined in last year at Standing Rock as a conspicuous quasi-celebrity voice against the Dakota Access Pipeline. As his name has grown, Mensa has lent it to progressive issues and made music that reflects that commitment. The Autobiography is an obvious turn inward, but Vic also digs his heels into this political ground.
Perhaps Mensa has been less urgent in developing his artistry, but The Autobiography gathers up all his charms, including his most compelling case as a genre-agnostic vocalist alongside some missed-the-mark rock crossovers. “Rollin’ Like a Stoner” is a big, clunky Kid Cudi homage about addiction, the titular chorus more than a little corny, but the angsty sentiment entirely sincere. The simple pleasure of hearing Vic’s versatile raps makes it easy to forgive him for the type of low-hanging lyricism he dabbles with throughout. “They say, ‘Vic, are you okay?’/Dude, no way,” he sputters here, and at another point he just belts out an unadorned “Rockstar life!” The Weezer feature on the next song, “Homewrecker,” must have been years in the making, but it’s really just Rivers Cuomo wailing out the song’s title on the outro. The follow-up “Gorgeous” is a more petty song about cheating, but it’s also less cumbersome without the burdens of the winding storytelling featured on “Homewrecker.” Even though he’s nurtured his singing voice into a powerful soulful rock tool, the Internet’s Syd helps Vic out on the hook, a surging electronic affair built on plodding piano changes. Even when he swings and misses on the power pop outings, The Autobiography never casts Vic out of pocket despite all the mood switching. Still, it’s his rapping that got him here.
As much as he is a naturally voracious emcee, Mensa is also writerly. His bars can sound productively picked at and pored over, or clunky and pent-up when overly pampered. (The cover of The Autobiography shows Mensa sitting on the ground, pen in hand, surrounded by crumpled up paper, a trite advertisement that he’s been taking this whole thing super-duper seriously.) The Autobiography splits those tendencies down the middle, casting its star as a remarkable, easy-to-digest rapper with an affinity for half-baked wordplay. The sound of Mensa’s rapping never grates the ear, but he also says stuff like “It’s hard to put this shit in words/It’s like Macklemore at the Grammys, man/I just feel like you got some shit you didn’t deserve.” There he’s rapping heartfelt about the death of a close friend, and that awkward, years-old rap industry reference sounds entirely out of place, especially on a song that’s otherwise an accomplished storytelling feat, each verse a chapter written by a mourning Vic, the looking-down-from-heaven victim, and the guilt-ridden murderer himself. The-Dream pops up here and then on a later reprise, his voice sounding hauntingly angelic over the twinkling hook.
Tracks like “The Fire Next Time” and “OMG” cast Vic as the cypher-ready emcee he originally built his name on, just with pricier, star-level production, and in that latter case, an expanding rolodex in the form of a Pusha T feature. Still, there’s nothing here better than that beginning moment of the album. “Say I Didn’t” is triumphant and expensive, a red carpet for the rest of the record. The Darondo sample has been beaten to death but sounds fresh in the hands of a troupe of producers that includes No I.D. and BOOTS. “You used to hate to hear the phone ring/Now you can’t wait to hear the phone ring,” Vic raps at his once dubious father, tacking on an affected, “Ain’t that a beautiful thing.” It’s an unpretentious way of saying he’s come a long way without needing to tell the whole story, just that things are better for him now. He might smack you in the face with it, but Vic’s style leaves nothing to interpretation. As long as he’s clear where he stands, that dramatic lucidity suits him just fine.


On the follow-up to 2020’s WOMB, the duo is torn between looking back and moving forward. Mostly, they add layers of polish to their familiar electro-pop sound.

graves

Eleven years ago, when Purity Ring released their breakout single, “Ungirthed,” the pairing of dirty South-style rap beats and twee synth pop was remarkably novel. Even during the heyday of witch-house artists like SALEM and oOoOO, nothing quite compared to the contrast between producer Corin Roddick’s whimsical grit and Megan James’ macabre yet sweetly sung lyrics. The Edmonton, Alberta, duo had captured lightning in a bottle, and they continued to harness its spark across three albums.
That’s not to say Purity Ring have never tried new things. In 2015, their sophomore album, another eternity, seemed meant to counter any accusation that the 11 songs on 2012’s Shrines were all variations on one great idea. Roddick added fluorescent EDM synths and stately piano to his 808-driven rhythms; James began experimenting with a more explicitly pop-oriented cadence and elocution. WOMB, their moodier third album, was in many ways a beefed-up return to form—girded with rich atmospherics, heavier synths, and processed vocal hooks on par with contemporary chart-toppers.
Two years after WOMB, the graves EP is firmly rooted in the same subtle reconfiguration that comes with each new Purity Ring release. Some songs even sound outright regressive, which isn’t always bad. James has said that the title track “has been haunting us for eight straight years,” and its bouncy trance chords and glowing piano clearly recall the euphoric rushes on another eternity. The touches of 2010s nostalgia are charming, but less so when “nthngsfine” and “unlucky” evoke an overproduced and undercooked Shrines. When James breathily sings, “How lucky you are to be so unlucky, breaking onto the rooftops over Waikiki,” amid clouds of effects and reversed synths, it sounds both convoluted and ill-fitting. Simple compositions and evocative lyrics were integral parts of Purity Ring, and without them, the music feels more like a glittery spectacle than an immersive pop world.
With every layer of polish shellacked onto their core sound, the people behind Purity Ring’s genre tropes and dark poetics grow increasingly obscured. James has always favored evocative abstractions in her lyrics, but there’s less to grasp here than before. Small illustrative moments appear (“You sailed away on a sunken boat,” goes a memorable line in “neverend”), but they’re often undercut by non-sequiturs (“This city’s fucked but how’d you know about the side road”) or throwaway refrains (“Spinning like you never end, just do it again let’s do it again”). “watersong” is a fine little ditty with an interestingly choppy synth line and sticky melody, but it’s riddled with vocal quirks and half-baked lyrics that interrupt the song’s easygoing flow. At best, James’ angelic lilt can elevate her words beyond meaning. At worst, her over-pronunciation, heavy vocal processing, and awkward word choices can kill a track’s momentum and leave it thematically barren.
James and Roddick occasionally find their stride, and even occasionally set foot in new territory. After their familiar pop pastiche takes on a palatial quality in the first half of “neverend,” the song slips into a broken and emotive electronica that brings to mind early-aughts glitch-pop producers like Dntel and Schneider TM, with James’ incomparable voice gliding effortlessly through the noise. “soshy” tries out a 4/4 dance beat with Roddick’s time-stretched synths and pitched samples, and the snappy, sumptuous arrangement pairs impeccably with James’ gentle singsong. It ends up feeling like a “Hold On We’re Going Home” or “Passionfruit” moment on a Drake record, treating us to an unexpected side of an artist that outshines some of their best-known music.
Closing the EP is a short, sparse piano instrumental that sounds unlike anything else here. Played by hand and recorded intimately, “xsalt” feels like a huge breath letting air into Purity Ring’s hermetically sealed electro pop, expanding its frame and shaking out the settling dust. The melody is quaint and tender, with inconsistencies that make it sound improvised. You can hear the wooden creaks in the room and the pillowy impact of each key being pushed down. Simply put, it feels authentic and alive—a revealing piece of music on an EP otherwise awash in effects and affectation.


Balancing the grotesque and the beautiful, the Pittsburgh group's Kickstarter-funded new album may be their most accessible to date. But if this is psychedelia, it's only in the sense that each song replicates the intensity of the trip: the suicidal lows and the love-is-everything highs.

Cobra Juicy

No one believes themselves to be evil. The killer keeps pet pigeons. The thief drops change in a bum's cup as karmic reimbursement. Even Lucille Bluth would occasionally shed a tear if she could spare the moisture. Maybe Baudelaire put it best: the Devil's greatest trick is convincing people he doesn't exist. But Baudelaire never dealt with Ikea parking lots, petroleum executives, or Reddit trolls.
Tobacco's greatest trick is reminding people that not only does the devil exist, he keeps a Pittsburgh address. Since Black Moth Super Rainbow came to attention with 2007's Dandelion Gum, the band's demon-throated frontman has mastered the art of sounding sinister. He's so upfront with his intent that the group's new Kickstarter-funded album Cobra Juicy has a song called "I Think I'm Evil". He also named himself after the most pernicious herb since hemlock.
Of course, you can point to any number of metal bands or horrorcore rap groups who have brandished the triple six as a way to sell records and satisfy their evil urges. What's unique about Black Moth Super Rainbow is the balance achieved between the grotesque and the beautiful. This is not as easy as it sounds. Descend too deeply into darkness, and you run the risk of becoming fright-night schlock. Lean too delicately on seraphic chords and melodies and you lack menace. And should you lack the pop sensibilities, your satanic majesty's request can get exhausting. Examine the more underwhelming moments of the Odd Future catalog to see what happens when N.E.R.D. never quite meet nihilism.
From jump, Black Moth Super Rainbow have been unfairly tarred as gimmickry. This stems from several reasons. First, there are the names sounding straight from an un-purchased Adult Swim pilot. Tobacco, Iffernaut, Ryan Graveface, Bullsmear, and the Seven Fields of Aphelion. Ex-members include Father Hummingbird and Power Pill Fist (who presumably left to join Danny Brown's Bruiser Brigade). Then there's the band's semi-anonymity and penchant for shrouding themselves in darkness, wearing masks, and performing backed by 80s aerobics videos. Yet it's mostly the voice. Tobacco uses a vocoder on every song. This isn't the Teutonic turtle-necked modulation of Kraftwerk, the mad-scientist whimsy of Bruce Haack, or the funky lothario of Roger Troutman. This is when the robot supposed to solve your problems goes awry; it's the musical equivalent of the animated automatons at Itchy & Scratchyland attacking the Simpsons.
Slot Black Moth Super Rainbow as psychedelic at your own peril. There are no yawning guitar solos and the songs rarely slink past the four-minute mark. Black Moth Super Rainbow triangulate early Beck and the Air of the "Kelly Watch the Stars" era. But neither cognate flashes the crooked smile of Cobra Juicy. Even the title itself seeks to pair the contradictory ideas of vitamins and venom.
Opening track "Windshield Smasher" features vocals that sound like gorgons moaning, paired with synthesizers that sound like they got bubble gum got stuck in the gears. The drums snap like the trap floor at a hanging. They are a band explicitly antithetical to the idea of Rap Genius. They've always been purposely obfuscating, but Cobra Juicy's lyrics are even more difficult to decipher than usual. It is pop as Rorschach blot. You hear what you want bubbling out of the murk. Yours ears absorb toxic effluvia about kissing gasoline and shattering glass. Devil's Night finally gets the soundtrack that D-12 could never deliver.
"Hairspray Heart" finds Tobacco wailing about "sucking all the poison from a snakebite" and "a fucking diamond falling from my fucking eyes" over freeway underpass-dirty drums and rainbow sherbet synths. "Psychic Love Damage" is swooning ballad that might be the closest BMSR come to romantic, but even then, the lover's smiles "wreck" him. "We Burn" channels folk singer era Beck, if he was abducted and forced to entertain Xenu and John Travolta.
Other than would-be mission statement, "I Think I'm Evil", "Gangs in the Garden" might be the song that best encapsulates the helter-skelter aesthetic. There is synth bass, a beat that could soundtrack a robbery at a roller rink, distorted guitars, and vocals that channel the voice of the snake in the Garden of Eden. All this would be schtick if not for Tobacco's ever-improving pop gifts. Wait for the bridge at 1:20 of "Blurring My Day" when the chaos relents for a few seconds like a confession metaphysically wiping away weeks of sin. If this is psychedelia, it's only in the sense that each song replicates the intensity of the trip: the suicidal lows and the love-is-everything highs.
This might be BMSR's most accessible effort, but if you couldn't get past the vocoder and voodoo before, it's unlikely that you will now. This is a cult, one large enough to raise over $100K to fund this record-- led by a man advocating cutting Kool-Aid with cyanide and always inviting new members.


The New York producer once known for muscular house and techno continues to drift into the ether, channeling ’90s chillout and dub techno into his singular vision.

Orbs

As he prepared to close his first decade of making music, Anthony Naples reached an impasse. Having established his club bona fides with a growing catalog of tough, distorted house and techno, the New York producer had indulged his appetite for ambient with 2018’s Take Me With You; then, the following year, he answered the atmospheric zig with a floor-friendly zag, Fog FM, that returned him to his body-moving wheelhouse. But the closure of nightclubs in 2020 gave Naples time to think; he suspected Fog FM had been too “obvious.” In retrospect, he said, “I was afraid to make the music I’m making now.” So with 2021’s Chameleon, he took a hard left once again, this time into an unusual fusion of post-punk and downtempo that was some of the most beguiling music of his career.
Where Naples used to be a dance producer who occasionally dipped into home-listening fare, he has increasingly come to look like a downbeat maven with a side hustle in rugged club jams. On Orbs, his first album in nearly two years, he continues to keep dance music at arm’s length. Orbs shares Chameleon’s measured tempos and wistful air. It also shares that album’s hybrid instrumentation, mixing electric guitar, bass, and acoustic drums into a dreamy, ethereal sound that weaves between ambient and post-rock. But the new record is smoother and lusher than its predecessor. And where Chameleon often felt guarded, Orbs glows with newfound confidence.
Naples once wondered if people might think an uncharacteristically colorful set of chord changes was “cheesy,” and on Orbs, he leans into ’90s chillout—a sound also tinged with the faintest hint of uncoolness. The slow-motion dub groove and woozy pads of the opening “Moto Verse” call back to the Mo Wax label’s Headz 2, a pair of 1996 compilations that mapped the era’s downtempo landscape. “Orb Two” goes further, sinking into shimmering pads and a lite-funk bassline that wouldn’t be out of place on Kruder & Dorfmeister’s dorm room make-out staple The K&D Sessions. (Or, more generously, Air’s timeless Moon Safari.) A low-key trip-hop revival has been bubbling away for a while now, but what’s surprising about Orbs is how unabashedly frictionless, even frothy, it can be—particularly coming from a guy who used to pile on the distortion and tape compression. By rescuing outmoded sounds, Naples provides a buoyant counterbalance to underground electronic music’s self-conscious darkness.
He eases into a more customary set of reference points on the album’s back half, where featherweight, slow-motion dub techno comes to the fore. The vibes are wispy, but the emotions cut deep. There’s hardly anything to “Ackee,” at least on paper—just a languid descending bassline answered by twinkling chords, all of it wrapped in a gentle fog. But there are things happening out of earshot: shimmering chimes and scraps of melodica, and imperceptible micro-rhythms that flutter around the stolid, four-on-the-floor kick. “Scars” and “Strobe” offer similarly enigmatic takes on ambient techno, and with the closing “Unknow,” Naples swirls together all the album’s influences—and a few more—into one of the most bewitching songs he’s ever made.
The gloomy electric bass and backmasked pads fall halfway between DJ Shadow and the Cure; soft tendrils of clean-toned guitar have the warm, reassuring feel of the Durutti Column, yet the snare drum echoes like a gunshot across a frozen field. The net effect suggests something like Balearic goth—a weird amalgam that shouldn’t make sense, yet somehow does. As in the best of Naples’ work, it’s impossible to tease out the different strands; the emotional crux of “Unknow” is a subdued melodic riff that might be someone humming, or maybe a muted trumpet, or maybe both things digitally soldered together. Yet it’s not all so sweet: An abraded synth periodically cuts crosswise across the track, an intimation of ominous forces lurking in the wings. You can hear an echo of his corrosive club instincts gnawing away at the margins of this tranquil reverie. Naples once worried that he had let others’ expectations unconsciously guide his music-making into “obvious” places. “Unknow” is the gorgeous capstone on an album that demonstrates the singularity of his vision.


An encouraging, comforting voice permeates O.K., Gabrielle Smith's second album in her solo project Eskimeaux. O.K. invites us to view the world through Smith's eyes, and somehow it feels as if Smith is lending her ear to you rather than the other way around.

O.K.

The most appropriate word to describe Gabrielle Smith's solo project Eskimeaux might be "togetherness." The band founded Brooklyn songwriting and art collective the Epoch in 2011 along with several of their friends, but this sense of mutual support and do-it-together philosophy has long been a part of Smith's M.O. She originally formed Eskimeaux in 2007, all the while happily joining her peers' and fellow collective members' bands—Bellows, Told Slant, and Frankie Cosmos. Smith's songs reflect this type of profound concern for the well-being of those around her, an eagerness to take a backseat when others need her and a longing to still express her own sharp meditations on love and loneliness.
Several of the songs on O.K. are new versions of previous recordings, but this time around Smith has scaled back to outline each melody in clearer brush strokes. Where certain tracks on 2013's Igluenza were monotone or drawn out, they graduate to fully formed pop on this release. Before, "I Admit I'm Scared" felt flat despite its visually compelling lyrics ("Everything I said spewed like sparklers from my mouth/ They looked pretty as they flew but now they're useless and burnt out"), while here it's one of the album's strongest moments. Subtle harmonies slowly coax Smith's gentle alto into a confident soar over Felix Walworth's galloping drum fill. She casually divulges secrets as though her arm is already on your shoulder, her quiet relatability spiking upwards at the climax ("If I had a dime for every time I'm freaking out/ We could fly around the world or just get out of your parents' house").
This encouraging, comforting voice permeates O.K. It may not always come in the form of a soft whisper in the night, but somehow it feels as if Smith is lending her ear to you rather than the other way around. Whether she's letting you know that it's okay to be scared and sad—notably on danceable bedroom pop number "Alone at the Party"—or tenderly confessing how important you are ("The Thunder Answered Back"), the sweetness isn't saccharine, it's sincere and intimate. And when the entire band accompanies Smith on the latter track, she serves gut-wrenching doses of candor: "It must feel like fucking hell/ To be a patchwork of yourself." Smith is a hyper-aware observer, able to pinpoint others' despair just as well as her own.
Sonically, O.K. is the most fitting pallette for Smith's work. In the past she's played around with drum machines and broken synth beats, which weighed her down in gloomy, droning noise. This LP finally matches Eskimeaux's illuminating presence. She slips from sparse indie-folk to ethereal pop throughout the record, each arrangement rich and meticulously composed. The band never overpowers Smith's celestial vocals, and she's able to keep up with the slow-burning tension when it eventually detonates. Walworth's attentive drumming is a welcome addition that swells and retracts to complement Jack Greenleaf's twinkling synth arpeggios.
At face value, it's easy to mistake Smith's nursery rhyme name-dropping and misty-eyed warmth for childlike naiveté. However, she's no Pollyanna—she's simply acknowledging the darkness and aiming to move past it. O.K. invites us to view the world through Smith's eyes. The unassuming strength of her vision is what makes that invitation so worth accepting.


The Chicago duo experiments with how many wayward impulses fit inside conventional pop structures on their expansive and thrilling second album.

Fantasize Your Ghost

“I want to tell you quietly, but I’m afraid you won’t hear it,” sing the members of Chicago duo Ohmme in the first verse of “Spell It Out,” braiding their voices tightly together, as they almost always do. The song’s narrator is trying to get through to a thickheaded partner who won’t shoulder their fair share of domestic labor, and the hints she’s dropping aren’t working. Singer-guitarists Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham make the tension audible in cyclical guitar figures, and a pensive string section hovers over the proceedings like a summer rain cloud that may or may not burst. When it opens up, the downpour is gentle. The strings become sweeping and romantic, and the narrator finally spells it out: “What ever happened to you wanting to be there?” The dishes are only the beginning of the problem, it’s clear. Fantasize Your Ghost, Ohmme’s second album, tells you things quietly. Like the obtuse partner of “Spell It Out,” you’d do well to listen closely.
Cunningham and Stewart formed Ohmme in 2014, emerging from Chicago’s fertile scene for left-field improvised music. (Cunningham works for the company that produces Pitchfork Festival.) Though their roots are in the avant-garde, they have connections in many of Chicago’s less foreboding musical corners: they’ve lent backing vocals to Chance the Rapper and string arrangements to Whitney, played in bands with Jeff Tweedy and Vic Mensa. Their 2017 self-titled EP, and 2018 debut album Parts, established them as a virtuosic and wildly inventive indie rock band, pursuing their experimental inclinations across bright and punchy songs, with noise freakouts and placid vocal harmonies sharing equal space. The two songwriters operated as if one, sharing nearly every lyric and lending steady accompaniment to each other’s improvisatory guitar excursions.
Even at its most exuberant, Parts felt sealed off from the outside world, mirroring the tight quarters of its cover photo. Fantasize Your Ghost is more spacious, and the duo experiments with how many cock-eyed experimental impulses can fit inside a conventional pop song. “The Limit” picks up the thread Dirty Projectors left hanging after Bitte Orca and Swing Lo Magellan, fooling you into believing that melodies of dizzying baroque complexity are actually sugary singalong hooks. The lurching riff and brain-melting feedback of “Selling Candy” come across as celebratory rather than confrontational, thanks to the light touch of drummer Matt Carroll and the sly humor of Cunningham and Stewart’s lyrics, which reminisce on childhoods spent wandering a city filled with hot dog vendors and streets imagined as hot lava.
For all the liberating chaos of their guitar playing, Ohmme have always had an affinity for quiet and an improvisers’ commitment to listening and responding to each other. (Few bands whose genre tags might include the word “noise” could pull off a Tiny Desk Concert; Ohmme’s is a marvel.) The back half of Fantasize Your Ghost gives extended space to the band’s meditative side. “3 2 4 3” is restrained and hypnotic, with Carroll channelling Jaki Liebezeit’s trance-funk groove and Cunningham and Stewart repeating an elliptical mantra: “Different today, but I’m the same.” Ohmme are a powerhouse live band, and it’s easy to imagine “3 2 4 3” evolving into a sprawling Can-style jam with multiple fiery peaks whenever they’re able to take this material on the road. For now, the climax is more subdued: a stab of strings and a wordless vocal harmony, stretching forever as the band glides on.
Fantasize Your Ghost ends with a juxtaposition. First, “Sturgeon Moon,” the group’s most dissonant piece of music by far, a scorched and metallic landscape that sounds like it was improvised from scratch, recalling early Sonic Youth at their most apocalyptic. Then “After All,” a magnificent pop song with the easy melodic elegance of a Brill Building gem, whose lyrics acknowledge the surprising about-face with a wink: “After all the commotion/After all, I need to plant my rose.” Cunningham and Stewart’s vocal blend is at its richest and sweetest, a single glowing sound that never loses their individual variances of inflection and pitch. They are like instruments in a string quartet, an effect heightened by the appearance of an actual string quartet, swooping in to take over for them in the third verse. Stewart and Cunningham seem capable of almost anything, a surplus of ability extending in so many directions that the music might feel scattershot if not for this grounding factor. No matter the surroundings, it always comes back to those two voices, singing together.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Fifty years after the three-day concert made rock’n’roll history, a gargantuan, 38-disc set attempts to tell the full story of the event for the very first time.

Various Artists: Woodstock – Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive

The mythological status of 1969’s Woodstock Music and Arts Festival can sometimes feel overpowering. The festival is the ultimate expression of the 1960s. Moments from the three-day concert have crystallized as symbols of the era, with details like Richie Havens’ acoustic prayer for freedom, Roger Daltrey’s fringed leather vest, or Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” held up as sacred countercultural relics.
Partly to blame are both Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 documentary film and the accompanying triple-LP soundtrack, which multiple generations of fans encountered through older relatives or at midnight showings at revival houses. The truth about what happened on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in upstate New York is vastly more interesting than the myth, but for years, there was no counter-argument available.
With the festival’s 50th anniversary, producers Andy Zax and Brian Kehew made the case that this was the time to set the record straight and get it right. As Zax writes in the liner notes, “If we’re still thinking and arguing and opining about the meaning of Woodstock after half a century, shouldn’t we at least have a set of baseline facts about what happened there?” The result is the limited edition 38-CD set Woodstock - Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive. (Several abridged versions—10xCD, 3xCD and 5xLP sets—were released in June.)
Over the course of the set’s 432 tracks, producers Zax and Kehew unveil an exhaustive, end-to-end reconstruction of the festival in precise chronological order, the result of 10 years of careful research, audio reconstruction, and debunked myths, as Zax relates in the 88-page liner notes. But the true revelation of this release is simply how great the newly restored recordings sound. Zax and Kehew approached the mixing by referring to photographic documentation, which allowed them to situate the performers within the mix based on where they were standing onstage. Comparing the original soundtrack to the 2019 product is like switching from black and white to Technicolor: The compression and flatness that choked the life out of the original release is gone. The result is a sonically welcoming experience that is as immersive as you could want; it is a joy to listen to.
A glance at the complete lineup drives home the fact that there was an abundance of talent onstage at Woodstock. The stretch from late Saturday night into early Sunday morning stands out in particular, beginning with Creedence Clearwater Revival at 12:30 a.m., then Janis Joplin (who took the stage to an enormous roar at 2 a.m.), Sly and the Family Stone, and the Who, finishing as dawn broke purple behind the stage, with Jefferson Airplane (who were on the orange acid, as opposed to the brown acid featured in the now-infamous warning over the PA), providing what lead singer Grace Slick proclaimed “morning maniac music!” at 8 a.m. The experience of hearing these sets back to back is extraordinary. As ’60s rock chronicler Ellen Sander says in the liner notes, “Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more fabulous, it did. It was like being in the heartbeat of a mythic beast.”
Almost all the artists involved allowed their full, actual sets to be included this time around. (The lone exception was Jimi Hendrix: The owners of his catalog held back two songs from his set.) John Fogerty complained for decades about Creedence following the Dead, but their set turns out to have been 50 minutes of high-octane choogle, including three recent Top Ten singles. The Band’s set, originally rejected by the group because “it wasn’t totally up to our standard,” proves to be delicate, gorgeous, and heart-wrenchingly evocative. Crosby Stills & Nash substituted tracks from a later Fillmore East performance on the first Woodstock album, but their set at the festival was better, transmitting an ebullience and energy that feels more like they’re singing together for the first time in Joni Mitchell’s house than onstage in front of half a million people; both “Wooden Ships” and “Long Time Gone” have an electric depth that still resonates 50 years later. And the Dead’s longtime assertion that they were a disaster is greatly exaggerated, even if 40 minutes of “Turn on Your Lovelight” is a little much, even for Deadheads.
Also restored and contextualized in this release are all the legendary stage announcements from production team members John Morris and Chip Monck—each one of which, writes Zax, might serve as “the start of a miniature novel”: Louis Price is summoned with a number to call in Washington, D.C.; Wheat Germ is told that the bag containing his medicine is in the possession of Holly; Edward Shea needs to meet Barbara at the car right away. Special mention goes to the idiots who climbed the lighting scaffolding and spent the festival being admonished twice an hour by an increasingly annoyed-sounding Monck. The mundanity and humanity of these details draw you in, and it’s a much more believable scenario than the Wadleigh documentary with its triple-split-screens and jump cuts. Ultimately, the announcements are the mechanism that places the attendees within the story. As the Who’s Roger Daltrey astutely (and affectionately) notes, “The stars of Woodstock were the audience.”
The one negative of this project is its inaccessibility. Rhino only manufactured 1,969 box sets; each one retails at $799.98, and there are no plans to make the 38-disc version available on streaming services. For those with smaller budgets, the 10xCD version is still worthwhile, as it’s the first Woodstock compilation to feature every artist that appeared at the festival, and was assembled with the same intent of conveying the experience of the three days. What the 38-disc box set succeeds at is not just righting the record, or presenting a mammoth set of live songs, but in creating an environment that effectively transports the listener to that muddy pasture in upstate New York. In the spirit of the original event, that experience should be extended as widely as Woodstock’s influence.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Songs: Ohia fans, consider this a test of faith. The unstable, minor-key discomfort of Ghost Tropic\n\ is long gone ...

Magnolia Electric Co.

Songs: Ohia fans, consider this a test of faith. The unstable, minor-key discomfort of Ghost Tropic is long gone, and for the first time, Will Oldham comparisons will be shelved by critics in favor of, god forbid, Bob Seger. The wailing, desperate spirits that plagued Jason Molina through his earlier albums have been banished, mostly; others have come to help him light candles against the darkness, and now "something's got to change." So he's left the quiet sorrow of Didn't It Rain sucking the diesel fumes of 70s roots-rock by the shoulder of a lonely stretch of highway, consciously emulating his ancestors in a long line of working-class heroes. No matter what you might think of Seger (and pretty much anything would be justified), or the earthy bombast of the time, such simple honesty as Molina's is always in style, and the results are rarely less than excellent.
It may simply be the natural progression from the slightly fuller sound of Didn't It Rain, but the overt desire to move on preoccupies Molina. If the last album was a lamentation on finding home in Chicago and the sheer inertia of blue-collar hand-to-mouth, then Magnolia Electric Co. is about finding the strength to move, to grow, and to leave it all behind. "While you've been busy crying about my past mistakes/ I've been busy tryin' to make a change/ And now I've made a change," is Molina's righteous cry in the early moments of "I've Been Riding with the Ghost"; it's this bittersweet sentiment that forms the lingering heart of this album. But then, with the unearthly call of steel pedal strings and the line, "See, I ain't gettin' better/ I'm only gettin' behind," the motivation for this need to pick up stakes becomes evident. It's beyond just a noble determination not to succumb to the stagnation of poverty or routine, and when the first hints of an underlying fear crack the façade, the effect transcends the allegorical simplicity of gallant idealism to something far more moving, something almost indescribably human.
These themes are echoed even more poignantly on the title-says-it-all opener "Farewell Transmission", perhaps the most powerful Songs: Ohia tune yet: "I will try/ No one ever really tries/ I will be gone/ But not forever." This stirring mix of melancholy and hope which Molina consistently finds in his lyrics is swelled to epic levels by the driving alt-country pride and a painfully plaintive refrain. Molina's fixation on the symbolic romanticism of the moon and the darkness might be predictable, but it continues to impress as he segues from heartaching confessional to oblique metaphor in a single breath.
When Magnolia Electric Co. hits its stride in tracks like these, and others like "Almost Was Good Enough", it soars over Molina's previous work, but it's not an unqualified success. First, although the rotating lineup of Songs: Ohia players recasts familiar faces Jennie Benford as Backing Vocal #1 and the Mi Sei Apparso Come un Fantasma musicians as The Band, Molina's brought along Lawrence Peters and Scout Niblett as Guest Vocalists #1 and #2, respectively, and he turns the reins over to them on "The Old Black Hen" and "Peoria Lunch Box", to decidedly mixed results. Neither singer seems to connect with the written material, leading to slightly flattened deliveries of what might otherwise have been breathtaking in Molina's broken drawl.
Niblett does all right for herself, still managing to infuse "Lunch Box" with a sort of haunting (if off-key) resignation, but Peters is more problematic. His fatherly, Haggard croon is a little more upbeat than the subject matter, and he sounds an awful lot like someone who should be saving his tears in the beer bottles he keeps in the back of his burnt-out pickup (with his dog) while he drives down dusty country roads, and the thunder rolls, and the lightning... whatever. Depending on one's tolerance for that hardcore country-soaked vibe, he's either extremely impressive or just awful. But either way, he's not Molina, whose voice you bought this disc to hear.
Aside from that, the music doesn't always support the strength of Molina's words, especially in the gratuitously stormy "John Henry Split My Heart", but that's less a shot at the compositions than a testament to the wrenching sincerity of the lyrics. It takes a colossal effort to back Molina's candor, and given what a departure this record is for the band, it's not surprising that some of the songs get bogged down here and there. It's also not much of a problem; in the end, the more obviously misguided moments will be long forgotten, left in the roadside dust. Magnolia Electric Co. is the sound of change. It may be uncertain whether this is the journey of a man moving towards what he wants to become, or away from what he has been, but it's a great ride regardless.


On their debut, My Morning Jacket discovered the heavy reverb that would make them legendary.

My Morning Jacket: The Tennessee Fire: 20th Anniversary Edition

My Morning Jacket recorded parts of The Tennessee Fire at Above the Cadillac, a makeshift studio on a Kentucky farm. Located in a tiny town called Shelbyville, the farm was owned by the grandparents of Johnny Quaid, My Morning Jacket’s original guitarist and cousin of singer Jim James. It’s a decent backstory, but then James laid his vocals down in an abandoned grain silo, and now, that’s the only part people remember.
Maybe James could have achieved the same tone in a deserted steel mill a few hours away in Evansville, Indiana, or a meat locker in Frankfort, but that Shelbyville silo helped James—and My Morning Jacket—achieve a sort of supreme rusticity years before Justin Vernon holed up in Wisconsin. For god’s sake, the town of Shelbyville was once the home of the real-life Colonel Sanders.
Its misleading title aside, The Tennessee Fire feels modeled after Kentucky itself—Rust Belt, midwestern, and Appalachian, yes, but always country, and misunderstood by the majority of outsiders. “I was born in East Kentucky/Home of where the grass is dyed/Always down and always out/But my morals always seemed just fine,” James sings on The Tennessee Fire’s solo centerpiece “I Will Be There When You Die”—a sentiment and a song that could’ve comforted a Pineville coal miner a century ago. “Take me out of this hell I'm in/Take me out of this dead-end nightmare/And put me back in a world I can live,”  he wails earlier on a “Nashville to Kentucky,” with enough reverb to float him into the same anti-gravity airspace that Sigur Rós occupied that year.
The earnest austerity of “Nashville to Kentucky” might’ve slotted Jim James next to Will Oldham. But it’s the rebel-yell shitkickers like “Heartbreakin’ Man,” “The Dark,” and “It’s About Twilight Now” that foreshadow where My Morning Jacket would go next on At Dawn. The band hadn’t yet solidified their lineup or toured enough to have the confidence or awareness to recognize their future in extended guitar jams; only one song tops out over five minutes on The Tennessee Fire, and most are under three.
This relative innocence makes The Tennessee Fire the breeziest of My Morning Jacket’s opening trilogy of “harmony and folk shit” records, even if it’s the most uneven. You can hear hints of the restlessness that would eventually lead to 2008’s scatter-brained Evil Urges, which James once compared to a Super Mario Bros. soundtrack. But there’s no overarching theme here, just a band trying on sounds without knowing what they’re doing or expecting anyone to pay attention.
If The Tennessee Fire only hints at the festival juggernaut My Morning Jacket would become, it’s because they rarely sound like an actual band on these songs. James has always been the focal point, and here he plays the high-lonesome crooner that could’ve lived at any point in the past century. This is a drinking-alone album, and the lyrics are startlingly bleak when you tune into them: James mostly anaesthetizes himself amongst the lowdown friends and lovers who leave him for dead, dreaming of “casino bars, tight whores, and Tinseltown.” “I think my mother would kill me/If she knew what I was about,” he moans on “I Will Be There When You Die.” This band never deals in outright anger or aggression, but on The Tennessee Fire, the bitter, aluminum aftertaste of that silo reverb says what James can’t bring himself to.
The Tennessee Fire remains more suited to revisitation than reassessment—its legacy as “the one before At Dawn” feels secure. This reissue comes stocked with the requisite alternate takes and demos, but the most important song from this era isn’t actually included. Technically speaking, the band’s biggest hit is their cover of Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” included on Chapter 1: The Sandworm Cometh, a collection of odds and ends that preceded their breakthrough At Dawn. It’s easy to see how James related to “Rocket Man” in 1999— one guy trapped inside a metal box, burning up his fuse all alone.


With top-shelf beats and assists from A-list contributors, the South London rapper’s new mixtape aims to show American listeners that there’s more to British rap than grime and cameos on Drake singles.

Wamp 2 Dem

Giggs’ new mixtape arrives at a time when his profile has never been so high yet his reputation, at least in the U.S., has never dipped so low. A couple of guest spots on Drake’s 2017 playlist album More Life may have elevated the South London rapper to new levels of global renown, but the reaction of American audiences to his work—and in particular the Batman-referencing verse on Drake’s “KMT”—has proved tepid verging on hostile. “His flow is wack. It doesn’t go with the beats he’s on. His mixing engineer did an awful job with his vocals and he’s got some weak bars,” a 17-year-old rap fan told Noisey UK when the music website set out to investigate the biggest Anglo-American culture shock since U.S. audiences started taking Gavin Rossdale seriously.
American criticism of Giggs tends to focus on two particular aspects of his performance. Many U.S. rap fans scoffed at the idea of a British rapper talking about drugs, guns, and gangs, as Giggs does on “KMT,” responding on Twitter with the timeworn clichés of tea and the Victorian empire. Others dislike Giggs’ brutally spartan rap style, comparing him unfavorably to Skepta, an MC who operates in an entirely different style of music. They may both hang out with Drake in London but Skepta is a grime don, while Giggs is the king of road rap, a name recently coined for the heavier, trap-infused style of modern British hip-hop. Giggs has said that Wamp 2 Dem—pronounced “W’appen to dem?,” a nod to the Jamaican patois that is omnipresent in South London—is meant in part as a rejoinder to the first charge. “What I did care about was people wasn’t really respecting England, like the hoods and shit,” he told Beats 1 host Ebro Darden. “I didn’t really like the disrespect of what man’s been through.”
Wamp 2 Dem displays Giggs’ talent for painting brutally dark London scenes with a sparse lyrical touch peppered with enough British slang to keep Genius in advertising dollars for the foreseeable future. On paper, Giggs’ lyrics often don’t amount to much. But he writes perfectly for his own voice, a pitiless, bassy mutter that oozes like tar slopping out of a barrel, infusing lines like “Man ain’t really too confirming/None of these vermin” (from “Gully Niggaz”) with an ominous force. True, some of the lyrics on Wamp 2 Dem may be decidedly charm-free—“Moist Pussy” is about as artless as the name suggests—but you are left in no doubt that Giggs’ native Peckham is far from the Mary Poppins utopia that some stateside listeners clearly imagine it to be.
The beats, meanwhile, show Giggs’ knack for mining the best in transatlantic rap production, a skill that dates back to his breakthrough track “Talkin’ da Hardest,” where he owned the instrumental of Stat Quo’s “Here We Go.” Production on Wamp 2 Dem comes from Florida duo Cool & Dre, Atlanta’s London On Da Track and Zaytoven, and Londoners Donae’o and Footsie, among others, and the overarching feel is of American trap bluster soaked in icy South London rain. American audiences may not find anything especially new here—particularly compared to the spikier, more frenetic sound of grime—but the beats on Wamp 2 Dem are finely tuned for Giggs’ crawling South London menace.
Opening track “Gully Niggaz” is perhaps the best example of this simpatico voice and production fusion. The beat samples Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” an idea that sounds on paper like the kind of contrasting musical blend we should run to the hills to avoid. (In fact, it’s the second time Giggs has taken on the Tchaikovsky ballet, after the 2015 Dizzee Rascal collaboration “Nutcrackerz.”) But the classical bed sits well with Giggs’ bruising monotone; helped by a fantastically heavy, pitch-shifting drum pattern, it adds just enough musical polarity to really lift the song. “Ultimate Gangsta,” which follows, pulls off a similar feat, marrying an eerie string sample to a nervy beat made out of gunshots and hi-hats, over which Giggs and 2 Chainz exchange tales of gangster life.
This high standard barely dips over Wamp 2 Dem’s 13 tracks, which are helped by sympathetic production and guest turns that do more than just take up space in the credits. “Times Tickin’” joins the dots between Giggs’ London hustle, Jamaican dancehall, and American hip-hop, thanks to a commanding guest turn from Popcaan; “Gangstas & Dancers” sees Giggs join forces with Lil Duke and Young Thug on a chilling, detuned beat; and London MCs Footsie and D Double E lend “Outsiders” a wonderfully paranoid energy. But don’t be misled by the A-list guests: Wamp 2 Dem is very much Giggs’ album, where his voice dominates and his aesthetics rule; it is Giggs in excelsis, whether he is being hard, crude, introspective, or playful. By the time “Ruler” closes the album in an epic, almost operatic fashion, the rapper has already made his point: London life isn’t all bangers and mash, British MCs don’t just make grime, and Drake fans who dismissed his performance on “KMT” have a hell of a lot of catching up to do.