Though containing music that goes back to 1985, Music For Installations is hardly a retrospective in any traditional sense. It’s more a whimsical line connecting ideas in Eno's own personal Long Now.

Music for Installations

Not long after Brian Eno coined the term “ambient music” in the late 1970s, he generated another Eno-ism with an extended lifespan, one with an appropriately slower dissemination.”I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now,” the producer wrote in a notebook. He thought of his then-recent recordings as sound “suspended in an eternal present tense.” Perhaps unconsciously channeling Baba Ram Dass's brand/mantra, Be Here Now, the always-conceptual Eno began to expand his sense of scale. Two decades ago, Eno helped start the Long Now Foundation, working to connect the present moment to the far-extended arc of human history. One project was the 10,000 Year Clock, for which he created patterns for the clock's chimes, each to be rung once and never repeated.
By the mid-’90s, the period representing the general starting point of the six-disc Music for Installations, Eno's “ambient” work had largely fallen under the subtly different rubric “generative” (that is, music that is created according to a system of algorithms, only partly under its maker’s control). Each piece here represents its own individual slice of one possible Long Now, with Eno providing the finely considered coordinates so that the music itself can run infinitely, changing into new patterns like a river or an ocean. Grown from mid-’80s experiments with four tape recorders looping cassettes of differing lengths, Music for Installations contains what are essentially field recordings from a series of different environments, each its own universe. Filled with gorgeous washes of bells and drones and unidentifiable luminous shimmers, deep vibrations moving across widescreen stereo fields, one might imagine them all as separate galleries and vestibules in a vast museum, each filled with light and sound, running constantly as night and day change outside and the seasons pass. Though Music for Installations contains sound created for specific situations and places, as a box set, it might be used to step outside of time.
Of course, a streaming service might still label all of the above as “ambient,” part of the new chill-out economy seemingly driving Spotify to its own kind of generative musak. But what Music for Installations proves beyond a doubt is that, to paraphrase Chevy Chase, he's Brian Eno and they're not. Though containing music that goes back as far as 1985 (”Five Light Paintings”), Music For Installations is hardly a retrospective in any traditional sense. It’s more a whimsical line connecting ideas in Eno's own personal Long Now.
Eno is everywhere and nowhere in this music, much of it not so much performed by him as willed into existence, like a character from a science fiction novel who dreams in sound. On several of the longest pieces, such as the 44-minute 77 Million Paintings, low rolling notes played sparsely at long intervals seem to indicate melodies unfolding too slowly for immediate comprehension, perhaps even direct continuations of the similar motifs from 1978's Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Released in DVD editions in 2006 and 2007, 77 Million Paintings constitutes the audio accompaniment of a generative video program Eno created. As he recounts in the liner notes, when he first set it up, he began to document individual frames of it with a still camera, shooting off some 800 pictures before surrendering to the ephemerality. The feeling of listening to Music for Installations is often similar. Its pieces are beautiful and always different, and yet always the same, generic without losing character.
Much of it is resolutely not chill-out music. The nearly 40-minute piece “I Dormienti” is filled with a ceaseless moving richness that's hard to reconcile with the idea of machine creation. High-frequency electronic tones and clusters of upper register piano notes flutter between percussive samples of vocalist Kyoko Inatome, amid other layers. Composed for a joint installation with the sculptor Mimmo Paladino in the subterranean space beneath London's Roundhouse, the music is perhaps more suited for the kind of contemplation that goes along with quietly freaking the fuck out, an accompaniment to Paladino's haunted work as it was seen in the darkroom, pieces displayed on the floor like strange creatures preserved after a Pompeii-like disaster.
The set's final two discs don't actually contain music for installations, except in ever more conceptual ways. Making Spaces was a CD sold at installations, and little of it feels generative in composition or structure, though the liner notes don't clarify. In the context of the box set, it feels not only like a separate, hidden Eno album of its own, but a brilliant one, demonstrating that Eno is still perfectly capable of seizing the means of production. The nine pieces feel less like spaces and more like the objects inside, sculptures with distinct shapes and boundaries and artistic intentions. The unearthly “New Moons” features a sparsely strummed guitar part with defined chords (and even a bridge), aglow from start to finish, perhaps one haunted vocal away from fitting perfectly onto the song-based album some strata of Eno fans always want dearly. “All the Stars Were Out” contains a background flutter that could equally be the sound of crickets or the flicker of a film projector, but is just one more expressive tone carved out by Brian Eno. Each of the tracks contains its own inventions and deployment of color-forms or unexpected tonal voices or structural turns.
The set-concluding Music for Future Installations, meanwhile, is perhaps the box's cheekiest conceit, music for new places, new situations that haven't yet happened.”I often find it helpful to have an alibi for making a piece of music,” he observes, and the seven discs of Music for Installations might serve many contexts. Music For Airports was never for airports (though it certainly is capable of providing calm inside one), and the function of Music for Installations is wherever the listener might like to install it, less about the purpose of the music and more about the listener's desired level of engagement. But no matter what level of engagement one chooses, Eno will be there, too.
The set's 60-page liner notes are filled with documentation, though it's sometimes unclear which recordings correspond to which installations, if any. More, though, it acts as a Little Red Book of Eno-isms, where he lays out one deeply awesome hot take after another.”I thought of television as a light source rather than a narrative source,” he writes about his video installations, “at that time the most controllable light source that had ever been invented.” (I… had never thought of it like that.) No matter how vibed-out the music may get, there is always the sense of a voice and mind behind it. Even when trying to abdicate the order and arrangement of the notes being played, Eno's control over sound remains at a practically spiritual level. “Eno is God,” ran the early ’80s graffiti, and depending on how you define his domain it might still be true, manifesting in the smallest of breezes and the tiniest of bleeps.


On his debut album, the UK producer attempts to shake the shackles of “lo-fi house” in search of a more nuanced understanding of dance-music nostalgia, but he can’t quite escape the shadow of his influences.

Family Portrait

Early in Chris Marker’s freewheeling 1983 film Sans Soleil, an unseen narrator muses: “I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.” In that light, lo-fi house’s curious way rewriting memories of dance music makes more sense. As nostalgia for electro, breakbeat, and 1990s house continues to infiltrate modern dance music, there’s something quaint about the hazy productions of artists like DJ Seinfeld, DJ Boring, and Ross From Friends. Just as their wince-worthy handles and titles evoke ’90s pop culture, their fuzzy, fussy sound laments the loss of VHS tapes and cassettes. As Ross From Friends (aka Felix Clary Weatherall) put it in one interview: “I do it because I’ve gained a real love for the old-school sound, where it really just sounds worn-out and knackered, and it’s got a lot of character. Everything’s very crushed and compressed.”
Yearning for eras beyond their reach is the bane of most dance fans’ existence, whether they missed out on the Paradise Garage, the Second Summer of Love, or a warehouse show last weekend. But with Family Portrait, Weatherall’s Brainfeeder full-length debut, he also pines for something else from the past: his own parents’ courtship and relationship to dance music. His father built his own soundsystem in the late 1980s, staging hi-NRG dance parties at various squats around London before embarking on a European trip with a friend of a friend who would one day become Weatherall’s mother. For Weatherall, then, mining rave history isn’t academic, it’s personal. Still, as he has matured in his productions, Weatherall has created ever more highly textured tracks, moving beyond that “old-school sound” for something denser and more contemporary. But with all of Ross’ attention to detail on Family Portrait, sometimes the tracks don’t fully cohere or else their sentiment feels half-baked.
Playing contrasting textures off each other makes for some strong highlights. “Project Cybersyn” twines digital chirrups and underwater gurgles; the drums sound like  thumping on wet cardboard, and the track feels both sleek and soggy all at once. And that’s before Weatherall deftly slots some ’80s saxophone into the mix. At a time when woeful thinkpieces posit the saxophone as a corny novelty, Weatherall thankfully doesn’t deploy it with a wink; instead, he makes the most of its piercing timbre. “Parallel Sequence” also pulls from curiously textured sounds—a dinky distorted melody, a beat that sounds like it’s sculpted out of ice crystals—to create a poppy confection as the end result.
Too often, though, Weatherall’s intricately layered details just don’t add up, leaving elements stacked up for the sake of it. There are high-pitched squeals, quadruple-time toms, and misty synth washes all in play on “Pale Blue Dot,” but rather than blending, they ultimately cancel one another out. The tropical lilt of “The Knife” shows off Weatherall’s knack for crafting catchy earworms, but his heavy-handed way with the filter scatters the drama rather than heightening it.
In looking back on electronic music’s history, Ross From Friends emulates some of its finest practitioners, albeit imperfectly. The slow, shaken bells on the title track bring to mind Four Tet’s Rounds, but without the same sort of wistfulness. And while Weatherall conjures the eerie, childlike chimes and subliminal whispers of Boards of Canada on “R.A.T.S.,” he can’t quite pull off their sense of the uncanny. Worse still, “Wear Me Down” attempts to do Burial as a paint-by-numbers exercise: There’s a spectral vocal sample ribboning through the track, muffled and distorted programming, beats that accelerate and then dissipate, heaps of negative space haunting it all. But despite such surface qualities, Weatherall doesn’t come close to his inspiration’s heart-quickening depths. It’s moments like these that lead you to wonder just what Ross From Friends’ core sound actually is. Family Portrait dreams big, yet doesn’t dig beneath the surface of these memories. Too often, we’re left with the lining.


Like a distant Canadian cousin of Blitzen Trapper, this Montreal three-piece spins shaggy songs into expansive, genre-bending symphonies.

Parc Avenue

Montreal's music scene is like a clown car: just when you think it couldn't possibly have room to contain any more talent, some more emerge. The City of Saints can already lay claim to Billboard chart-toppers (Arcade Fire), Polaris Prize winners (Patrick Watson), punky Francophone ambassadors (We Are Wolves), no-wave revivalists (Les George Leningrad), noise rockers (AIDS Wolf), rappers (Gage), electro-funk party-starters (Chromeo) worldly indie pranksters (Islands), plus all the members of Wolf Parade and their many side projects. And now it can add ambitious, sun-baked trio Plants And Animals to the ranks of its growing community of celebrated musicians.
Like a distant Canadian cousin of Blitzen Trapper, this three-piece spins shaggy songs into expansive, genre-bending symphonies. And though last year's too-brief * With/Avec* EP hinted at Plants and Animals' expansiveness, it didn't fully prepare listeners for Parc Avenue, a sprawling collection of rootsy melodies, majestic arrangements, and classic rock riffs that owes as much to jam-band psychedelia and it does to delicately orchestrated chamber-folk.
The album kicks off with "Bye Bye Bye", which sounds, initially, like a Coldplay ballad led by Neil Young. But, mere seconds into the song, it explodes into a choral epic built on a foundation of jaunty pianos and embellished with plangent autoharp runs and bursts of stately brass. Tellingly, the track's infectious climax is more satisfying because it comes in fits and starts, its anthemic build interrupted several times by quiet interludes of noodley folk.
That, in short, is Plants And Animals. They offer up explosive, Polyphonic Spree-sized choir choruses, 1970s AM radio guitars, cozy folk balladry, and rambling stoner boogie-often in the course of one song-- and switch between them with little warning. Many of their songs clock in at over five minutes long, but that's all the better for them to pick up steam, stylistically mutate, or expand. "Faerie Dance", which also appeared on the EP, explores multiple genres and tempos within its seven-minute run. Its dreamy opening is marked by ethereal backing vocals, but then gives way to a wiry, disorienting guitar melody that churns in opposition to melodramatic strings. Just when you've given in to its post-rock vertigo, a lackadaisically strummed guitar pushes the tune into slacker-blues territory à la * Mellow Gold*. Likewise, the album's centerpiece, "Mercy", marries a Phish-like guitar vamp and jazzy, cymbal-heavy drumming to Go-Team!-ish cheerleader chants and handclaps. Saxophone belches add some welcome hard-edges to the loosey-goosey jam, and singer Warren Spicer offers, as counterpoint to the chipper cheering, a growling Sean Connery impression.
Spicer's lithe tenor, in fact, proves malleable over the course of the album, adapting to dispassionate talk-singing, raggedy country warbling, and arty, dramatic vibrato. His Beck impersonation on "Faerie Dance" is followed by "Feedback in the Field", on which he cops a convincing Tom Petty accent ("Somethin' in the air to-nye-ite"). "New Kind of Love" begins like a spare Iron & Wine ballad, but builds to theatrical, Arcade Fire levels of orchestral splendor. And on "Sea Shanty"-- which starts out like Ryan Adams' "Amy", minus the confessional self-pity, and evolves into meandering Lynyrd Skynyrd-style Southern rock-- Spicer is able to affect a honeyed croon.
From its scrawled, lower-case liner notes (complete with mistakes and cross-outs) to its sound, everything about Parc Avenue feels homemade. Its analog recording, which took place, in part, in Spicer's apartment, crackles with warmth and intimacy, and because the guest artists who fill out these orchestrations (including Arcade Fire/Bell Orchestre's Sarah Neufeld) are friends of the band, a sense of camaraderie prevails. Plants and Animals may not be the first band to put Montreal on the musical map, but, with this album's there's-no-place-like-home vibe, they are certainly the first to celebrate it so warmly.


One of the leading drone artists of recent years offers this massive, two-hour, 12-song cycle of drones and textures.

Kyle Bobby Dunn: A Young Person's Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn

To picture the effect of the music on A Young Person's Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn, close your eyes and imagine that you're driving across Antarctica. You begin on a flat, white plain, and you watch the landscape go by. It's so unchanging, it's hypnotizing, and you notice changes only when you look away for a second and then refocus. The ground gets rougher, maybe slopes. Something appears on the horizon, mountains in the distance. The angle of the sun changes, and with it the quality of the light. It's actually that last bit that is closest to the experience Dunn provides on his best extended works. If you were to watch the same spot on the ground all day, its appearance would vary greatly over time, but not in such a way that you'd register the changes as distinct moments when something was suddenly different.
It may seem as though I'm comparing listening to his music to watching paint dry (and to some people, that's probably what the glacially shifting 17-minute drone "Butel" will seem like), but it really is interesting, involving music for fans of ambient drone. The sound sources for this music are brass, strings, and guitar, plus piano on a couple of short tracks, but it's hard to distinguish which source you're hearing at any given time because Dunn uses a computer to thoroughly distend, reshape, and smear these sounds until they result in new timbres of his own creation.
Four of the 12 pieces on Young Person's Guide originally appeared on the download-only album Fervency (the "young person's guide" title of this release seems like a self-conscious joke about our instant-archive culture, and may also be a King Crimson reference), and they're here inserted into a massive, two-hour, 12-song cycle of drones and textures. The eight extra tracks are from the same sessions that produced Fervency, and they are far from padding. I think this actually works better than that album precisely because of its much longer running time, and the shorter, more active pieces on the entirely new second disc help balance the longest, stillest tracks. There is a certain element to this supremely patient music that requires immersion for the listener to really draw maximum satisfaction from it, and positioning these four familiar tracks as a much more expansive work accomplishes that. Think Stars of the Lid's sprawling double-disc albums for a point of comparison.
I don't think Dunn's work here will do much to pull in listeners who haven't enjoyed drone music in the past-- it's too committed to the form and takes stasis too seriously for that-- but for drone fans this stuff is catnip. On the second disc especially, the injection of muted broadcast samples and rougher textures offers a welcome evolution of Dunn's style, one that he's also tentatively explored on the Rural Route No. 2 EP. As an expansion of Fervency, Young Person's Guide fills in what in hindsight was a very incomplete picture of where Dunn was as an artist during the recording, and in the process becomes his definitive statement so far.


The Brooklyn rapper’s official debut is focused on creating the type of inoffensive watered-down drill that would make a certain mayor happy.

B.I.B.L.E.

If a politician in Chicago, the UK, or New York is craving attention, an easy way to get it is to declare war on drill. Enter Eric Adams, New York’s new photo-op thirsty mayor, who earlier this year, claimed his son, who works at Roc Nation, showed him drill videos, and the “displaying of guns, violence” left him disturbed. In response, Mayor Adams said his new goal was to get the subgenre banned from social media platforms, blaming the style for deeply rooted issues he’d rather ignore and using recent deaths of drill rappers like Chii Wvttz and TDott Woo as mere props. Of course, after erasing all nuance, Adams moved on once he got the attention he really wanted when a picture of himself alongside New York rap staples and popular drill stars went viral.
In the photo, seated to the right of Adams is Fivio Foreign, the popular East Flatbush, Brooklyn rapper who’s become the unofficial spokesperson for New York’s take on the Chicago-born style. It’s not because his music is particularly that great, though he’s had some incredibly memorable moments: the 2019 ad-lib barrage “Big Drip” is one of the most fun hits of Brooklyn drill’s creative apex, and his Funk Flex freestyle and guest verse on Kanye West’s Donda showed off some lyrical chops. But mostly, he’s built himself up by smoothing out the rougher edges of drill and becoming the rapper who artists outside of the subgenre hit up to sprinkle their record with the distinct flavor. Drake did it. Mary J. Blige did it. Nas did it. Kanye did it a couple of times.
Similar to Pop Smoke’s overly polished posthumous albums, Fivio Foreign’s official debut B.I.B.L.E. is completely focused on creating drill with crossover appeal. The idea sounds fine, but too bad the execution is full of boring radio-friendly R&B hooks, samples coasting on nostalgia, and records that sound like drill on the surface but soften the subgenre’s personality. The Destiny’s Child-flipping “What’s My Name” is the most glaring example, clearly influenced by the Bronx’s wave of viral sample-driven drill singles like B Lovee’s “My Everything” and “IYKYK,” but unlike those tracks, Fivio and Queen Naija lean so heavily on the original that they’re damn-near doing karaoke. (Apparently, to clear the sample, Beyoncé left a note to make it less vulgar.) Also added to the list of things nobody ever asked for is Fivio’s romantic side. Pop Smoke pulled it off because he had this slightly melodic delivery that made everything he said sound smooth. I can’t say the same for Fivio. On “Love Songs,” he recruits Ne-Yo for a jarring revamped version of the singer’s 2005 hit “So Sick,” and on the Chlöe-assisted “Hello,” he has the charm of a catcaller as he flirts with a girlfriend by using his catchphrase (“Baby, you viral”).
When he wants to, Fivio can rap pretty well. “On God” may sound like Donda scraps, down to the gospel choir outro and the quiet, moody production, but the way Fivio’s flow tumbles as if he’s kicking a freestyle and can’t stop is hard. “Feel My Struggle” is the best pure drill cut on the album; he gets fairly introspective over AXL’s jumpy bassline. The generic Vory chorus on “Change On Me” could go, but the dramatic hi-hat-fueled buildup sets the stage for Fivio’s breathy delivery.
Besides a handful of catchy verses, though, there aren’t enough standout moments on B.I.B.L.E. The song I can’t get off my mind is the New York homage “City of Gods,” a more annoying variant of “Empire State of Mind,” which was already annoying in its own right. Just downgrade Jay-Z to Fivio; replace a tolerable Alicia Keys hook with a grating one; touch it up with drill’s signature elements like the sputtering drums and gliding 808s; cap it off with Kanye’s weirdly out of place headline-addressing verse. And you have the type of inoffensive watered-down drill that would make Eric Adams happy.


Girlpool's sound gets bigger on their sophomore LP, but Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad’s voices still sit center stage in all their vulnerable glory.

Powerplant

Outside of their native Los Angeles DIY scene, Girlpool first became known for eerie nursery rhymes about standing up to slutshaming and getting eaten out to American Beauty. Still teenagers, the best friend duo of Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad spoke bluntly in dull-knife harmonies and punk primitivism. It was the power of small sounds taking hold. By the arrival of their debut 2015 full-length, Before the World Was Big, their songwriting had turned towards introspection—being young but feeling old, brimming over with equal parts hope and fear, and simply marveling at (to borrow a phrase) how strange it is to be anything at all. With just a guitar, a bass, and two voices, there wasn’t a single place to hide in their music.
Though the intensity of Tucker and Tividad’s bond has always seemed bigger than some percussion and feedback, Girlpool have properly beefed up their sound, recently adding drummer Miles Wintner. In turn, their sophomore LP Powerplant sounds a little more like everyone else, echoing second-wave emo sourness (“Your Heart”), Britpop jangle (“She Goes By”), and classic alt-rock loud-quiet-loudness throughout. But Tucker and Tividad are wise enough not to abandon what makes them distinct—that unsettling magic that exists between them when they sing, the harmonic equivalent of The Shining’s Grady twins. Breeders songs would highlight Kim and Kelley Deal’s telepathic harmonies but were rarely mixed to sound as though the compositions revolved around the voices. Girlpool have fleshed out the music but thankfully, the voice in all its vulnerable forms still sits center stage.
Under the cover of noise, Tucker and Tividad are more comfortable indulging their poetic inclinations. On Before the World Was Big, they would often pair an abstract scene or turn of phrase with tiny mantras (“Do you feel restless when you realize you're alive?” goes their best), before peppering the whole thing with their friends’ names or other lyrical tchotchkes. The proper names and loose imagery remain, but now Girlpool’s lyrics feel less tangible out the gate. The text feels more open to interpretation like, “I know I’m the weekend selling Sunday morning” (from “Kiss and Burn”). Clever one-liners still pop—from, “I’ve had crumbs in a bag in my pocket all week,” on “Corner Store” to, “I faked global warming just to get close to you,” on “It Gets More Blue”—but there’s fewer of them, devoid of Girlpool’s more dogmatic or revealing sensibilities early on.
Certainly there’s less pressure now to hang a song on their lyrics alone. Yet the emotion evoked by their spare words is like crystal behind the fingerpicking that shifts to sludgy feedback, piano lines that add cheery bursts, and drums that fill in around a feast of vocal dissonance. Lead single “123” takes hold about a minute in when Tucker and Tividad start shouting their lines, but it’s a slight drum roll that builds up the stunning, swirling tension just beforehand. “Soup” is the album’s best example of a song that wouldn’t have worked nearly as well on Before the World Was Big; it likely would have been little more than deadpan vocals rising slightly over the course of two minutes, before retreating back to a hopeless whisper about how it turns out life can be a lot. But here when they hit the climax, the guitar lines drop out as they shout, “Can you feel it?” Immediately afterward, a surge of distortion basically answers the question.
In obvious ways, Girlpool’s world has gotten bigger with Powerplant. But the thing about growing up is that the overflowing possibility of it all can make you burrow deeper into personal crevasses, forcing you to consider what you really care about. No longer teenagers, Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad seem no less overwhelmed by the world, but their methods for coping have changed. Noise can help. So can a little opacity. What Girlpool seem to crave is a moment just to be, together. “Tell me you are here/I hope I’ll find you/Static somewhere,” Cleo and Harmony sing as the album closes, their voices finally in clear harmony.


The Norwegian avant-gardist’s most atmospheric and filmic album draws on several traditions: vampire movies, the cross-hairs of art and pop, and the lineage of artwork made of menstrual blood.

Blood Bitch

When the feminist artist Judy Chicago showed her painting Red Flag in 1971, she set the precedent for a subject of art that now has a rich lineage: menstrual blood. Red Flag was a photolithograph that closely depicted a woman removing a used tampon from her vagina. At the time, moon-cycles were so hushed and taboo that Chicago said many people had no idea what they were seeing. Period art has since taken many forms. The disarray of Tracey Emin’s 1998 “My Bed” installation included stained underwear. The 13 abstract canvases of Lani Beloso’s 2010 “Period Piece” were thickly painted with her own blood. And let us not forget, more recently, the punk singer Meredith Graves mixing her blood into the vinyl of Perfect Pussy’s debut record. In 2000, the artist Vanessa Tiegs coined a term for this field: menstrala.
There is a long history of abject art that makes use of corporeal waste. Julia Kristeva articulated this in her book Powers of Horror: “These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands... on the part of death,” Kristeva wrote. “There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.” But period blood is different. According to Kristeva, it “threatens the relationship between the sexes” because it “signifies sexual difference.” And so, in threatening men, the stigmas surrounding menstrala have not waned. This year, the artist Rupi Kaur posted on Instagram a poised self-portrait with a central red stain—and it was twice removed, “accidentally.”
The Norwegian avant-gardist Jenny Hval takes on the possibilities of musical menstrala with Blood Bitch. In an artist’s statement, she called Blood Bitch “an investigation of... blood that is shed naturally... the purest and most powerful, yet most trivial, and most terrifying blood.” With that, Blood Bitch, her sixth album, deliberately enters two other great traditions: vampire movies and—as with all of Hval’s work—the timeless cross-hairs of art and pop.
No contemporary artist sings words like “sublimation,” “clitoris,” or “soft dick rock” with such enveloping elegance or unfettered ease. On Blood Bitch, Hval continues with her subtle deliveries of “abstract romanticism,” “subjectivity,” and “speculum.” Her voice is at once extremely musical and coolly flat; occasionally, she whispers. On “The Great Undressing,” even as Hval makes a cogent metaphor between capitalism and unrequited love (“it never rests”), the yearning in her voice recalls Lana Del Rey. (In 2015, at least once, Hval’s touring troupe of singers, dancers, and performance artists did an unusual cover of “Summertime Sadness” that I will not forget.) Hval’s “Period Piece” weaves melodies like gorgeous latticework as she describes a sterile scene in a gynecologist’s office but turns it into her own personally transcendent experience. “Don’t be afraid,” she beckons, “it’s only blood.”
Collaborating again with noise producer Lasse Marhaug, as on 2015’s Apocalypse, girl, Hval was drawn to reflect on her roots in Norwegian metal (in interviews, the duo have even noted ties between Darkthrone’s black metal classic “Transilvanian Hunger” and Blood Bitch’s lush, rolling penultimate track, “Secret Touch”). Though there are patches of harsh noise to be found, Blood Bitch parallels black metal more by its atmospheric nature, how it feels as though the record is thematically all-gravity and yet physically floating. The arrangements employ repetition, with recurring motifs and menacing synths that move in concentric circles. A subtle siren blare anchors “Female Vampire” and carries over “In the Red,” replete with the sound of incessant panting, as if someone is running in fear. On the former, Hval sings directly of “a strange slow rhythm, not exactly creating a rhythm, in and out of focus, vulnerable,” underscoring the nonlinear textures of Blood Bitch’s sound. At its most featherlight, Hval’s music is still positively saturated with ideas, all pulp, marrow, and (indeed) blood.
Combined with copious interstitials and its horror premise, Blood Bitch is Hval’s most filmic album (which is saying something considering Apocalypse, girl listed characters from Bergman’s Persona in the credits) as well as her most conceptual and surreal work. It’s also slyly hilarious, adding levity to her repertoire. “The Great Undressing” starts with a meta piece in which Hval’s bandmates discuss the record itself—a classic expository scene. (Zia Anger: “What’s this album about, Jenny?” Annie Bielski: “It’s about vampires.” Anger: “No!” Bielski: “Yeah... Well, it’s about more things than that...”) Hval evokes true modern horrors, not just fantastical ones. On “Ritual Awakening,” she sings, “I clutch my phone with my sweaty palm,” soon flipping the object as “the coffin for my heart... It’s so loud/And I get so afraid.” Machines lock us. Whether it’s Anger deeming vampires “so basic!” or Hval singing of “useless algorithms,” Blood Bitch sounds fiercely present.
Blood Bitch is also more a montage than any of Hval’s records. “Untamed Region” includes a sample of the British filmmaker Adam Curtis describing the disorienting power-trip of Russian politics: “It sums up the strange mood of our time,” Curtis says alongside choral sighs, “where nothing makes any coherent sense.” “Untamed Region” moves into a stately passage in which Hval vulnerably and assuredly dissects her own period, touching the blood. More extreme is “The Plague,” which goes from tabla taps to a distressed, vampiric Hval summoning skyward, “I don't know who I am!” It’s all cut with horror organs and absurdist dialogue (“Last night I took my birth control with rosé!”) before ghastly noise bleeds into a faint dancefloor banger. “The Plague” is like a repository of ideas, as if precisely documenting an active mind.
“Conceptual Romance” is Hval’s best and loveliest song, and its genesis point is clear. Hval has often cited Chris Kraus’ 1997 theoretical novel I Love Dick as her favorite book. The text celebrates the interior intellectual life of its narrator, a failed experimental filmmaker, in the context of a peculiar love story—she’s become obsessed with a man named Dick and she writes letters to him. It began one night, when she believed she had “conceptually fucked” him (through conversation). She turns her fixed “infatuation” into an art project. When Hval sings of her “combined failures,” when she sings “I understand infatuation/Rejection/They can connect and become everything/Everything that’s torn up in your life,” it’s like she is writing her own love letter right back to Kraus (which Hval herself affirmed in a recent Wire feature). Hval said she was inspired by karaoke on Apocalypse, girl, and “Conceptual Romance” could be a result. Her most lucid writing casts the spell of dream logic. “Conceptual Romance” is Blood Bitch’s lightening bolt moment, but it throbs with grace, like a procession of clouds.
“Why do people still not get it when we [women] handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?” Kraus writes in I Love Dick. It’s a fine summation of Hval’s music. More than any of the musicians to whom she is often compared (Laurie Anderson, Björk), Hval is a clear disciple of Kraus. On paper, Kraus moves fluidly from reference to reference, dense with ideas; Hval’s music is like this, too, and never more than on Blood Bitch. Like *I Love Dick—*which tends to draw lines, life before reading, life after—it is primarily about female genius and voice. “I need to keep writing because everything else is death,” Hval sings on “The Great Undressing,” “I’m self-sufficient, mad, endlessly producing.” Blood Bitch conveys the visceral euphoria of creation. Blood, it reminds us, is not only a life force—it’s where we begin.


Avant-garde pianist Vicky Chow releases an album full of roving, tense compositions from modern-day composers, blending her traditional piano with blurs of digital effects and percussion.

A O R T A

Pianist Vicky Chow has been building a discography focused on modern classical sounds ever since completing her studies at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music. She appeared on a release from John Zorn’s Tzadik imprint, and interpreted the music of John Cage. More recently, she made a star turn on a Steve Reich album. Though Chow is obviously a virtuoso when it comes to acoustic work, she has also shown an interest in pieces that employ electronics. Her premiere of Reich’s “Piano Counterpoint” required her to play against pre-recorded parts; Chow’s recording of composer Tristan Perich’s Surface Image found the pianist threading notes in between 40 channels of chirping, 1-bit sound.
Due to that resume, it’s hardly a shock to discover that Chow’s sophomore album for the New Amsterdam label involves electro-acoustic setups. A O R T A features pieces from six up-and-coming composers, each of whom pushes the limits of the instrument in some way. Christopher Cerrone’s “Hoyt-Schermerhorn” has an icy profile, at first, as softly played progressions creep slowly into the piano’s highest reaches. But when a rising figure in a low octave is introduced, Chow’s playing communicates the effusive release embedded in those notes (even as the overall harmony remains melancholic). Unusually dense layers of sustain are the product of an electronic patch created by the composer. But even when Cerrone’s digital design asserts itself more clearly—via glitchy, refracted notes—the center of the piece holds.
Another winner is Molly Joyce’s “Rave.” The work starts out sounding anything but exultant, sporting motifs that seem emotionally mismatched. (In the score, Joyce’s description of a tempo as “controlled but on the edge” seems appropriate.) As the composition develops, Joyce’s lines achieve an odd syncopation, and ultimately a sense of balance strong enough to suggest a club-influenced feel.
There is a potent sense of physicality in Chow’s performance of that piece—one which also carries over to Andy Akiho’s “Vick(i/y).” Written for Chow and fellow pianist Vicki Ray, Akiho’s prepared-piano opus stretches the range of the instrument by calling for the direct strumming of strings inside the piano’s body. That technique isn’t a new one. But Akiho’s use of it here serves percussive and melodic ends that prove structurally satisfying, when traditional-sounding lines sprout and shoot away from the modernist opening material.
The rest of the hour-long program isn’t quite on the same level as those compositions, though the pieces are all worth hearing. Jacob Cooper’s “Clifton Gates” is a clever homage to John Adams’s famous minimalist composition “Phrygian Gates.” Jakub Ciupinksi’s four-movement “Morning Tale” has moments of dramatic propulsion. Two movements from Daniel Wohl’s “Aorta” contain the composer’s typical blend of jabbing aggression and dreamy fluidity. Though without a full performance of the work, its impression is necessarily muted. Chow handles these composers’ various electronic setups with grace, never letting the tech overwhelm the particular aesthetic. Arrangement eccentricities aside, the most notable quality of A O R T A is the pianist’s deep, evident investment in these consistently rewarding pieces.


The former Pearl Harbor issues their first LP as Puro Instinct; it needs more headbanging and/or ecstasy.

Headbangers in Ecstasy

If they haven't been already, Puro Instinct, formerly Pearl Harbor, are a profile in your local alt-weekly waiting to happen; a pair of very young sisters (Skylar Kaplan is 16, Piper 23) who dropped high school for independent study and rep second-tier shoegaze influences make for pretty easy copy. But who are they exactly? It's a question that largely goes unanswered on their debut LP, Headbangers in Ecstasy, a record whose most distinguishing quality is the fact that it really doesn't have one: Whether you wish to parlay Puro Instinct into a discussion of precocity or whether they're truly about their Russian cultural references ("Stilyagi" loosely translates to "style hunter," or, if you prefer, "hipster"), Headbangers in Ecstasy won't do anything to get in your way.
Despite the chorused guitars and laggard dream-pop tempos, the facile comparison to fellow L.A. labelmates Best Coast are warranted. Like Crazy for You, there's a hovering sense of simplicity and nostalgia that isn't based in a certain era so much as Southern California, an area that produced Ariel Pink and then unsurprisingly had no involvement whatsoever in chillwave. But the contrast is also pointed, since whereas Best Coast indulged in classic formulae aiming for the radio of beachgoers, Headbangers in Ecstasy is made for poolside lounging-- and as attractive as that sounds, its actually the LP's biggest weakness.
This is the sort of music that is best served by immersion, and the songs are stretched too wide and shallow for you to dive in headfirst. It's pointless to argue whether or not the wafer-thin sound was the best production Puro Instinct could afford at the time considering similarly minded documents like Real Estate or even Beach House cunningly flipped their shoestring budgets, turning stray amp buzz, flubbed takes, and shabby mic settings into positive atmospheric contributors. Meanwhile, Headbangers is distractingly fragile: Skylar's arpeggios and soloing have the pinched treble of early Cure but none of its bite; Piper's unhurried deadpan muddles melodies, begging for more harmonies or reverb for support; and you can hear a bass at points, though its presence is all but theoretical. The "KDOD" radio interludes that pop up sporadically throughout Headbangers in Ecstasy attempt to present the record as a wholly conceived musical experience, but they're every bit as good at jolting you out of the torpor caused by dream-pop nodding off.
And that's a shame considering the occasional strength of the Kaplans' songwriting. The choral harmonies of "Lost at Sea" have a squinting beauty to them. Then there's the curiously hyped "Stilyagi", whose swooning chorus lines are proper Stevie Nicks but fittingly the impact of its major talking points are nearly imperceptible-- Ariel Pink's production is detectable only by the credits, and trying to parse the lyrics will most likely confirm that the title was chosen for its implicit coolness rather than its actual meaning.
But the bigger problem is that the second half of Headbangers takes its structural cues from "Stilyagi", nearly every song sleepwalking through non-committal melodies without either much headbanging or ecstasy. Titles like "California Shakedown" and "Luv Goon" exert an aggressiveness that's aspirational at best considering their owners. You can tell by the intentional garishness of that airbrushed cover that Puro Instinct have both the youth and self-awareness for more promising things, but right now Headbangers in Ecstasy is the image's sonic embodiment: pretty, vacant.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Shakira’s big crossover record that revealed her fascinating, idiosyncratic songwriting and created a rift among her fans.

Laundry Service

In early 2001, Shakira was holed up on a farm in Uruguay, surrounded by her close family and a herd of cows. She’d just spent the last three years touring and performing across Latin America, establishing herself as a pop goddess with a rockera edge. Now she was convalescing in a quieter place, trying to write an album for an English-speaking audience that would somehow preserve the spirit of her trenchant pop-rock—all without forsaking the legion of Latin American fans that made her a pop luminary. It seemed to be an impossible task.
Over the next year, Shakira would confront this challenge head-on, embracing the totality of transition. The video for “Underneath Your Clothes” was the Colombian singer’s self-aware introduction to Anglo audiences. In the opening scene, a thirsty journalist chases after her through the Palace Theater in Los Angeles, her newly blonde—but still tousled—braids silhouetted under an oversized Brixton cap. He asks, “Shakira, Shakira: What’s it like to crossover and sing in English?” The rockera launches into a breathless monologue in Spanish about music’s ability to create a spiritual connection between spectators and performers, about the poetry of music beyond the artificial borders of language. As she walks away, the reporter begs, “Oh, but in English!”
It’s unlikely that such a calculated, performative exchange would appear in a Latinx artist’s English-language debut today. But back then, industry conventions dictated that Shakira be explicit in her approach. As she told MTV’s Making the Video, “I wanted that scene so badly in the video, because it’s something that is daily bread in my life lately.” Today, listeners around the globe are a bit smarter, less receptive to such overt maneuvers when artists are navigating new audiences. But we have only begun to challenge these stale tropes—and question the fantasy of “boom” narratives, where Latinx artists appear and disappear every few years based on their legibility to Anglo audiences.
That clear-eyed intentionality at the beginning of “Underneath Your Clothes” was the crux for her metamorphosis into an international supernova. Long before the Beyoncé collaboration, the World Cup anthem, and the forays into watered-down reggaetón, Shakira Mebarak Ripoll proudly used her versatility in her favor. As she told Colombian daily El Tiempo in 2001, “Fusion offers me the opportunity to remove any type of label people want to place on me. It gives me freedom...I don’t want to be tied to a specific style and become the architect of my own prison.”
She’d learned those lessons the hard way. Her first two albums, recorded as a young teenager and released only in Colombia, were comprised of lackluster, forgettable pop ballads. The records flopped, the former selling less than a thousand copies. At 15, Shaki moved from her hometown of Barranquilla to the capital of Bogotá, enduring an ill-fated stint on a telenovela. While her acting career didn’t pan out, she immersed herself in a wide range of U.S. and British rock styles, like the Cure, Led Zeppelin, and Aerosmith, all while maintaining her childhood love for belly dancing, a product of her Lebanese roots. In 1994, it seemed she’d finally found her calling. She recorded the original song “¿Dónde Estás Corazón??” for the Colombian rock compilation Nuestro Rock; the track’s success led her original record label Sony to allow her to write an entire rock album, which would become Pies Descalzos, released in 1995, followed by ¿Dónde Están Los Ladrones? in 1998. Pies Descalzos sold nearly 4 million copies worldwide, while ¿Dónde Están Los Ladrones? went multi-platinum. Both records spawned international tours and hit singles, securing Shakira’s future as a Latin American pop diva.
The albums also served as harbingers of the mutability of Shakira’s pop identity. On ¿Dónde Están Los Ladrones? executive-produced by her then-manager Emilio Estefan, Shakira smashed up mariachi horns and traditional doumbek drums, developing a reputation as the irreverent leader of Latin American rockeras, one who paraded her trumpeting yodel over songs about heartbreak and allusions to government corruption. Through intimate, rhapsodic lyrics, Shakira captured the attention of clever sadgirls across Latin America and its diaspora. But it was only a matter of time until she’d have to accommodate two legions of fans—one that worshipped her for her candid, political introspection, and another that demanded she conform.
After the release of a Grammy-winning MTV Unplugged album in 2000, Shakira was ready for something new. In early 2000, Freddy DeMann, the force behind Madonna and Michael Jackson’s careers, took over her management. Sony suggested she recruit Gloria Estefan—the pop powerhouse and wife of her ex-manager—to translate the lyrics of ¿Dónde Están Los Ladrones? into an English album for her U.S. debut. All of these maneuvers fell squarely into the pop crossover formula of the early 2000s: appoint a well-known manager in the Anglo world, hire the Estefans to be involved somehow, and record English versions of already wildly popular songs.
But after some tutoring, Shaki grew more comfortable with English, and she called off the translated version of ¿Dónde Están Los Ladrones? to write a brand new collection of songs instead. Though she knew how to speak conversational English, Shakira wanted to cultivate a more literary approach to composition, so she studied the work of Walt Whitman and Leonard Cohen. She spent a year writing at the farm in Uruguay, as well as a rented house in the Bahamas, creating new material that would eventually make its way to Laundry Service.
In the fall of 2001, the album finally saw the light of day. Opener “Objection” is a plea for the collapse of a love triangle, blending B-52’s guitar licks with Argentine tango’s bandoneón. The anti-drug hymn “Poem to a Horse” weaves a fervid horn section with riffs seemingly lifted from a Nirvana B-side. “Te Dejo Madrid” features a gnarly harmonica solo alongside Shakira’s trembling vibrato, which was once described as the “bleating of a goat” by her second-grade classmates. This brand of musical pastiche has garnered Shaki acclaim, but it’s also made her the target of satire. Tracks like “Ready for the Good Times” demonstrate the pitfalls of such collage—a feel-good hook like “I’m ready for the good times/Now that I’m not alone” isn’t enough to redeem the uninspired, disco-laced beat or the sticky chorus.
It is in her meditations on erotic power that Shakira excels. “The One,” “Fool,” and “Underneath Your Clothes” put her diaristic sensibilities on full display. She draws on her own romantic torment, crafting raw paeans to her lover, or heartfelt reflections on surrendering herself to intimacy. Through power ballads and post-grunge vengeance, Shakira empties her body, harnessing anguish and devotion and tracing a blueprint for so many young people’s journeys of femme self-discovery. And while many of these songs iterated on similar ideas, her inimitable warble threaded all of these musical endeavors together, often leaving an even greater imprint in English. Between these album cuts and her hits, Laundry Service is a formidable compendium of Shakira’s sonic and corporeal world.
But it was “Whenever, Wherever” that transformed Shaki. An ode to her then-partner Antonio de la Rúa, the son of the deposed Argentine president, “Whenever, Whenever” immortalized her capacity to appeal to pop and rock audiences alike. The song incorporated Andean instruments like the quena pan flute and charango strings into the pop world, foreshadowing her career as a perennial shapeshifter. The video seemed to air on a loop on MTV; in it, Shakira belly-danced in an earthy halter top, sporting blonde tresses and writhing in the mud—prompting all of us to replicate her moves in our own bedroom mirrors.
The Anglo press had no idea how to parse an artist like Shakira. They drew endless, flimsy comparisons to both Britney Spears and Alanis Morrissette, which confused even Shakira at the time. Her name—Arabic for “full of grace” or “full of gratitude”—produced tongue-in-cheek but abhorrent one-liners. “Shakira, not to be confused with Shaquille O’Neal, ‘Shock the Monkey’ or anything involving your moneymaker or the shaking thereof...” went one Rolling Stone piece; Entertainment Weekly claimed the album was “enough to incite another anti-WTO rally.”
Many publications were preoccupied with Shaki’s lyrical idiosyncrasies. Reviewers described her English-language lyrics as “imponderable,” “odd,” and “curious,” and were disapproving of her eccentric “non sequiturs” and “lyrical clunkers.” Of particular frustration among critics was the couplet, “Lucky that my breasts are small and humble/So you don’t confuse them with mountains” from “Whenever, Wherever.” A 2001 Rolling Stone review stated she sounded “downright silly” in English, claiming that her magic was “lost in translation.”
In the late ’90s and early ’00s, when the careers of artists like Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez, and Marc Anthony were in full bloom, it was difficult for Anglo critics to decipher the differences between Latin Americans and U.S.-born Latinos, who grew up speaking and writing in English. Today, this obsessive focus on language feels archaic and embarrassing; the internet has since expanded the boundaries of musical consumption and helped to erode long-held myths around language barriers. But the album’s mixed reception is evocative of the pressures Latinx artists faced 20 years ago. As one reviewer from The Guardian observed, it falls on critics to open themselves up to the lyrical sensibilities of Spanish: “Ripoll is not struggling with the intricacies of English, just expressing herself in a singular and puzzling way. Good for her.” Shaki seemed in on the joke, too; in 2001, she told El Tiempo, “Sometimes I say typical phrases in Spanish in English-language songs, and for Americans, that proves novel and interesting. That makes the process entertaining.”
Despite some lukewarm critical reception, the album fared well commercially, debuting at No. 3 on the Billboard 200. But it also introduced a deeply racialized debate around Shakira’s malleability and authenticity in the pop industry, one that captured tensions and conflicting desires between Latinx, Latin American, and Anglo audiences.
Among her diehard Latin American fans, Laundry Service had its share of detractors. Many labeled her a sellout, claiming her newly blonde hair, transition to English, and new look meant she was abandoning her essence as an incisive rockera and transforming into a whiter, sexier version of herself, one palatable for Anglo audiences. A 2001 story on Shakira for the Los Angeles Times cited a message board in which a fan wrote, “She’s got to dye her hair blond and bare her body—which she said a decent woman would never do—just to succeed in the United States. She doesn’t care about what we’re going through. She just cares about conquering the Anglo market.”
At the time, Shakira dismissed the criticism, telling the Post, “Maybe people think I dyed my hair blond to meet a certain requirement of the Anglo market, but I didn’t. The first time I dyed it, I dyed it red. I just like to go to extremes.” But for the Shaki devotees, Latin America’s pop queen was no longer for the people—she was transforming into somebody else, for somebody else. Like many young women in the music industry before her, Shakira faced constant sexualization and exotification. Anglo audiences no doubt drooled at the sight of a writhing woman with an accent in the “Wherever, Whenever” video. But, as cultural critic Pier Dominguez notes, some have argued Shakira exploited these tropicalizing tropes of Latinas, buying into collective fantasies for greater visibility, even as she put her musical eclecticism on display.
These kinds of authenticity debates are inscribed in the very fabric of pop music (think Madonna and voguing, or Miley Cyrus and twerking, or countless other stars). For decades, white U.S. artists have mined black aesthetics for “creative inspiration,” obstructing their originators from the credit and visibility they deserve. Shakira may have been using the structures of white U.S. pop against itself, but that is hardly subversive—her identity as a white, blonde Latina facilitated her explosive entry into the English-language market. Her whiteness allowed her to play off and against these tropes, particularly through the mediums of movement and dance, furthering her ascent to the upper echelons of pop, where black and brown Latinas were denied access.
Still, Laundry Service helped forge a path for other Latina stars to follow—releasing a mainstream pop album with both Spanish and English-language tracks no longer seemed unthinkable. It also laid the groundwork for Shakira’s legacy as a pop chameleon; every new reinvention, whether it was the electro-pop ditties of She Wolf, the merengue-rock thumpers of Sale El Sol, or the soca-tinged “Waka Waka,” can be traced back to the hybrid vision initiated on Laundry Service.
In 2020, as conversations about equity and representation seep into new pop cultural spheres, listeners might interpret this kind of musical tourism as appropriation. Crossover stories like Shakira’s seem like a relic of the past, a transparent marketing tactic laid bare by the music industry’s ceaseless grind. Even though we exist in an increasingly globalized landscape, we’re still consumed by the same feel-good narratives of cross-cultural exchange, where the mainstream success of a Latinx artist is lauded as an antidote to political and social oppression. Look no further than the collective reception of “Despacito,” which many celebrated as a salve for Latinx communities (excuse me while my eyes roll into the back of my head) in our endlessly xenophobic political climate. Laundry Service exhorts us to rethink the utility of the crossover narrative—who it is designed for and who it liberates, if anyone.


The 80-year-old folk artist returns with an album that is as sparse as prairie grass, even as it teems with a rich, Appalachian greenness. M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger produces and contributes, along with Brad and Phil Cook of Megafaun.

Follow the Music

Alice Gerrard turned 80 this July, and while that shouldn’t necessarily matter when it comes to assessing the singer/banjoist’s new album, Follow the Music, it's worth taking into consideration. Ageism is a real thing in the music world, and that reality is made all the more tragic by the fact that so many of our best artists get better with time. Sadly, ageism is still the safest of all bigotries to harbor; the quest for the new and novel never relents, especially in music. It's ironic, then, that Gerrard is new and novel to most contemporary listeners; despite the fact that she’s been recording for half a century—a discography that includes historic records with Hazel Dickens, such as the duo’s Smithsonian Folkways’ anthology Pioneering Women of Bluegrass—she’s known primarily in folk and bluegrass circles.
Follow the Music might change that, if ever so slightly. The album was produced by M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger, who also plays on the record, and Brad and Phil Cook of Megafaun contribute, as well. These are artists whose own work, while never strictly traditional, understands and engages with the folk idiom; that engagement becomes intimate on Follow the Music, but it never creeps into overfamiliar territory. Taylor and the Brothers Cook mostly fade to the background, leaving Gerrard plenty of clear air and open space in which to thrive. Taylor in particular is used to working with legends: As a member of country-rock revivalists the Court & Spark, he enlisted the help of the Byrds’ Gene Parsons (on 2001’s Bless You) and folk-rock icon Linda Thompson (on 2004’s Dead Diamond River).
To Taylor’s credit, you barely know he’s there: Follow the Music is as sparse as prairie grass, even as it teems with a rich, Appalachian greenness. “Bear Me Away” glides on a twangy drone, as much of a plea for release as a surrender to eternity. The metaphysical underpinnings of the album can’t be ignored, nor should they be: this is spiritually harrowing stuff, from the eight-minute, a cappella paean to predatory lonesomeness “The Vulture” to the almost cosmic resignation of “Goodbyes”. Gerrard’s songs cast long shadows; “Wedding Dress” quivers with violin and Gerrard’s spry yet stately banjo, while her similarly arranged reworking of the standard “Boll Weevil” takes on a sinister, at times lascivious symbolism. “I seen a spider runnin' up and down the wall/ He must be going to get his ashes hauled,” she sings, and the potency of those delivered lines is enough to the ruffle the spine.
As strong as Gerrard’s gifts as an instrumentalist remain, it’s her voice that consumes Follow the Music. On the honky-tonk romp “Teardrops Falling in the Snow”, she weaves her narrative through the loping rhythm with an easy yet aching cadence, holding notes until they strain from the weightlessness. That masterful, effortless tension—not to mention her ability to veer from breezy to steely at the drop of a chord—makes the album’s title track as much of a ghostly confession as an abridged autobiography. But it’s “Foolish Lovers Waltz” that draws the ear the closest, a feather-soft shuffle in which Gerrard exhales, “Whirl, twirl, spin faster now/ They know they’ll never fall/ But the piper always plays his tune/ In the foolish lovers waltz”. The arc of youth to adulthood to middle age and beyond is bound up in that whirl, and it’s as close as Gerrard comes to meditating on her own longevity. But it’s enough to make Follow the Music a strong case as to why audiences and artists alike would do well to follow her.


The French label Antinote has spent five years carving a niche in the electronic music landscape with a sonically and geographically diverse roster, which this compilation neatly surveys.

Various Artists: Five Years of Loving Notes

Five Years of Loving Notes

In five years, the Parisian label Antinote has quickly carved out a quirky niche for itself in the electronic music landscape—one that is not beholden to the popular French filter house sound that many still identify with the country. The Antinote catalog might not even scan as dance music, depending on what title you pull from it. The label has included the turbid techno of IUEKE’s Tapes (its first release), the winsome analog twinkle of Syracuse, and the fuzzy boogie of D.K. At times, its sound hearkens back to the Balearic 1980s or else Stereolab during their experimental Duophonic prime and Momus during his Le Grand Magistery years in the 1990s. Antinote’s insouciance with regards to genre applies to borders as well, in that most of its roster hails from outside of France, making for an international cast of eclectic producers.
A wide emotional and genre range from around the world can be most readily grasped on Five Years of Loving Notes, the label’s five-candle cupcake to its fans. The neatly-arranged, 14-track compilation kicks off with the delectable minimal bleep-pop of “+371” from mysterious group Domenique Dumont, who delivers vocals en francais even though the country calling code referenced in the title is for dialing Latvia. Slap bass wobbles around a soft purr, bits of static, and blips from an old dial-up—putting it in company with the likes of Jlin’s “1%” and Laurel Halo’s “Moontalk” for best use of bygone 20th-century telephone noises in 2017.
While Thai-born, Paris-based producer Dang-Khoa Chau has a few releases on the noisy L.I.E.S. imprint, with his D.K. moniker he delivers “Market Session” here, a marimba-laced track that evokes the same smoggy dub as Peaking Lights. Meanwhile Antoine Kogut & Nico Motte’s “Jungle Dweller” is a warped take on 21st-century exotica, right down to canned lion roars and macaw cries. Even stranger is Motte’s own solo track, “Cap De Creus,” which moves at a snail’s pace. Using only finger snaps for a beat and a keyboard set to “door chime,” at first it feels like a West Side Story number set in white sands. But as a synth swells like a sunrise near track’s end, it suddenly turns luminous.
Across a handful of tracks on the back half of the comp, the beats build up some momentum. Leonardo Martelli’s “03 23 (Notte)” brings to mind early Autechre, though the ad nauseam vocal snippet about “25 joints” soon makes it redundant, one of the comp’s few tracks that fails to engage. IUKE’s “Giza” brings to mind his first release for Antinote, which featured tracks rescued from some cassette tapes that the artist (born Gwen Jamois) had stashed in his flat from back in the early ’90s. And while “Giza” is a new production, it still retains that distorted tape feel, a hypnotic throb of drums and claps that sound as if the machine is about to chew up the tape, approaching a breakbeat but never quite getting there.
Düsseldorf artist Tolouse Low Trax—aka Detlef Weinrich, also drummer for long-running band Kreidler—delivers the comp’s most enchanting and irreducible track. A longtime DJ at Dusseldorf’s revered Salon des Amateurs—which Resident Advisor once opined was “where strange music thrives”—Low Trax embodies such strangeness on “Raut.” It’s a low-slung, throbbing, and squelching track that seems to be filled with little metal BBs rattling around at the fringes. “Raut” snakes through dark wave, primitive synth electro, and many other possibilities, never quite beholden to any one sound. Fittingly, the German’s contribution best encapsulates this French label’s unslottable aesthetic.


Last year, the seminal American composer and arranger put out Arrangements, Vol. 1 on his Bananastan label. He has now reissued 1968's towering Song Cycle, 1972's calypso-themed Discover America, and the 1975 songbook record Clang of the Yankee Reaper.

Van Dyke Parks: Song Cycle / Discover America / Clang of the Yankee Reaper

If you've heard any of Van Dyke Parks' solo records in your life, your first reaction was likely some variant on "I don't get it." That's okay, you weren't supposed to. At the time of their release (the late 1960s and early 1970s), Parks was part of a crowd of mercurial genius weirdos wandering record-label halls; of this group, Parks could easily have been voted Least Likely to Succeed. (He probably would have volunteered himself for the honor.) The records he issued under his own name had a cheerful Mt. Olympus aura about them: They sat contentedly in rarefied air, budging for no one but graciously welcoming any travelers who hazarded the journey.
Over the ensuing decades, this is where they've remained: known vaguely by reputation, name-checked for erudition, never playing at parties. Every five years or so, some devotee does some of Parks's publicity work for him; Joanna Newsom hired him to orchestrate Ys and spoke with awe of listening repeatedly to Parks' Song Cycle while Ys fermented in her mind. But otherwise, Parks' solo records have always seemed destined to be known more for their influence, celebrated more for the big ideas they dislodged in the minds of others rather than for themselves.
Recently, however, Parks has begun attending to his own solo legacy. Last year, he put out the compilation Arrangements, Vol. 1 on his own Bananastan label; it was a reintroduction of sorts, and a prudent place to begin. Immediately ingratiating and full of pop songs, Arrangements hinted at the knottiness of Parks' vision. Still, as a primer for Song Cycle, Discover America, and Clang of the Yankee Reaper, which Parks has now reissued, Arrangements is adequate only insofar as dipping your toes in a wading pool is preparation for leaping from a cliff into a raging sea.
1968's Song Cycle is the big one, the one with the capital-R Reputation. Perfumed, florid, over-crowded, the album is Parks' attempt to synthesize 100 years' worth of American music on borrowed studio time. The album cost a staggering amount and sold next to nothing; with this gesture, he cemented his artistic reputation and sank his career like a stone. Warner Bros. heralded Song Cycle with a panicky flop-sweat flourish disguised as a marketing campaign.
The standard line on Song Cycle is that it's impenetrable, and it can be. But it depends what you're listening for. If you approach it expecting a tuneful singer-songwriter album, then you're going to be continually deposited on the top of your own head. If, however, you're looking to take a midnight stroll through a Civil War memorabilia museum, where every figurine and placard suddenly springs to life and begins singing, then you'll feel right at home.
Part of Song Cycle's bum rap for seriousness is earned-- the name itself suggests something too weighty to consider itself a mere "album." But once you adjust to its mannerisms, Song Cycle is a freewheeling, often goofy listen, a down-the-rabbit-hole take on American music that reimagines bluegrass on a symphony-hall stage, showtunes up in Appalachia, and the sturm-und-drang rumblings of Romantic-era classical orchestras facing off against a squeezebox. Richard Henderson, in his 33 1/3 book on Song Cycle, called the album "Charles Ives in Groucho Marx's pajamas," and it captures the antic spirit of an album whose working title, before Song Cycle, was "Looney Tunes".
Parks doesn't corral all of this mess so much as rattle around cheerfully inside it. You might get lost in a thicket at some point-- maybe when the orchestra dissolves into pedal-steel guitar, which dissolves into chirping birds on "Palm Desert". Or when "Public Domain" fades out for the fourth or fifth time, or when a wobbly 78 starts playing in the middle of "By the People". But no matter where you are, Parks is ambling just around the corner, like the Cheshire Cat, offering clues. The sixth song on the album is called "Van Dyke Parks": It is a recording of the gospel hymnal "Nearer My God to Thee", accompanied by the sound of rushing water. What could this possibly mean? Would it help to know that "Nearer My God to Thee" is traditionally assumed to be the last song played by the band on the deck of the Titanic? No?
This inscrutable bone-dry wit is as encoded into Parks' music as his evident love of beauty. His singing voice has a peculiar quality; high and sweet and chipper and fey and dripping with ill will, he plays the part of the wiseguy pipsqueak wandering around a grand manor, surveying the grand artifacts with skepticism. He built the place, but to hear him, you would think he not only had nothing to do with the construction but finds the whole display mildly distasteful. The lyrics of Song Cycle are full of starving artists and privation: "Widows face the future/ Factories face the poor," he remarks jauntily on "Widow's Walk". Parks is merely a bohemian with an empty refrigerator; these songs are too nice for him. This tension-- a distrust of finer things, a respect of their power; an appreciation of their beauty, an understanding that the finer things are inherently ridiculous-- gives Song Cycle its melancholy depth, corroding its sheen like acid rain on a sculpture.
After Song Cycle, Parks disappeared back into his arranging work for four years. It wasn't until 1972 that he dared put out another record with his name on the sleeve. Discover America begins, as Song Cycle did, with a brief clip of someone else's music. On Song Cycle, it was Steve Young hollering the bluegrass staple "Black Jack Davy". On Discover America, it is the Trinidadian calypso artist Mighty Sparrow complaining merrily about the perseverance of aging prostitutes in a song called "Jack Palance". (As in "she got a face like.") The song fades out, and a recorded voice blurts in, dryly, "here are all of the natives of Parnassus, Pennsylvania." Whatever Parks learned from the commercial fiasco that was Song Cycle, it wasn't to tone the weirdness down.
The presence of Mighty Sparrow isn't a red herring; Discover America is a Van Dyke Parks calypso record, suffused with wooden marimbas and the cheery ping of steel drums, and overlaid with at least two or three layers of distanced weirdness. Parks treats calypso with the same forensic fascination and trickster spirit he applied to Song Cycle; track four is called "Steelband Music", and Parks uses it as a "Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" opportunity, asking us eagerly to pay attention to "the prominent notes on the tenor pan." "The Four Mills Brothers", a cover of a Depression-era standard, has more helpful, record-collector advice for us: "The best crooner is Rudi Valli/ But for voice control visit Bing Crosby."
For Parks, discovering America is inseparable from discovering its music. Even more than Song Cycle, Discover America is a vaudevillian stage, across which Parks parades a series of acts. "Occapella" and "Riverboat" are rumpled, mellow Allen Toussaint covers. "Sailin' Shoes", a song written by Little Feat's Lowell George, adopts a ripe, heavy-lidded sway to describe a woman doing a dance "so rhythmically" underneath "a cocaine tree." Parks seems about as unconcerned with the sordid leer of the lyrics here as he does the genteel misogyny of the father-son advice song "Be Careful"; they are all just songs to him, and songs are blameless.
On his following record, 1975's Clang of the Yankee Reaper, the bit players and special guests claim the stage. The album contains only one original Van Dyke Parks composition-- the title track. The rest is a lovely and generously selected songbook record, ranging from the calypso of Mighty Sparrow's "Pass That Stage" and Sandpebbles' "Another Dream" to Irving Caesar's Tin Pan Alley tune "You're a Real Sweetheart". All lovely songs, with lovely performances, but otherwise, it is the least-essential of Parks' first three records. It emerged from his brain, which means it is warped, both structurally and psychologically, but on a scale of more Van Dyke Parks to less, in which Song Cycle is a steep 10 and Discover a more manageable seven, Clang is a mild six. The thrill is in the disorientation, in the genial free fall; Clang offers hardcore seekers of this particular thrill only a gentle breeze in the face.
To accompany these reissues, Van Dyke Parks recently performed a show at London's Barbican Theatre. He opened it with a wisecrack about his career, as if to squirt bug spray at anyone with the nerve to canonize him: "We're here to celebrate anonymity-- what Faulkner called 'the authority of failure,'" he cracked. He said something similar to me, in passing, when I spoke to him briefly a few years ago. The repetition leads me to believe it's something of a cocktail-napkin line for him, a droll quip he's cultivated for dinner parties that suggests a deeper worldview. It may be a defense mechanism, a way of handling an illustrious career overshadowed by rock stars. It may also be a curious kind of armor: Van Dyke Parks, the wag who spoke in tongues. I hope that with the reissuing of these seminal records, that Parks won't have reason to pretend to be anonymous and misunderstood for much longer.


Arca’s ambitious musical cycle concludes with four albums spanning reggaeton, club experiments, and tender synth lullabies. It’s a slippery, unwieldy, mind-bending collection of sound design that drives home the ur-theme of all her music: transformation.

Arca: KICK ii / KicK iii / kick iiii / kiCK iiiii

Arca’s music refuses to be contained. From the very beginning, it has thrived on its intractability. Her first two EPs, 2012’s Stretch 1 and Stretch 2, oozed beyond category, harbingers of an elasticity then creeping into the fringes of electronic music. The Venezuelan-born electronic musician was equally cavalier about format: On the 2013 mixtape &&&&& and 2016’s Entrañas, she strung together bewildering assemblages of rhythms and textures into maze-like 25-minute suites; on 2020’s @@@@@, she mapped an even more labyrinthine path through a single-track collage more than an hour long. Later that year, she used an AI to generate 100 versions of her song “Riquiquí.”
She has swung from amoebic abstractions to spleen-crushing club experiments and from tender arias to Kevlar-coated reggaeton, sometimes in the course of a single album. She speaks of her work in terms of quantum states; a proudly nonbinary trans woman, she celebrates her own multiplicity, and as an artist, she revels in the right not to have to choose. It’s right there in the title of &&&&&: andandandandand—not this or that but everything all at once. Four new albums, released across four consecutive days in late November and early December—KICK ii, KicK iii, kick iiii, revealed in a staggered series of announcements over the past couple of months, followed by the surprise kiCK iiiii—offer a sprawling, multidimensional picture of that everythingness.
Last year’s KiCk i heralded a new phase in the Barcelona-based musician’s career. Arca was no stranger to pop music’s periphery, having collaborated early on with Kanye, FKA twigs, and Björk, but KiCk i felt like the first major step toward reinvention as a pop star in her own right. The sound design was cleaner and more pristine; in place of the airy falsetto of 2017’s Arca, her vocals shouldered to the front of the mix, particularly on club-centric songs like “Nonbinary,” “Mequetrefe,” and the Rosalía collaboration “KLK.” Though her rhythms shuddered as violently as ever, they focused more narrowly on reggaeton and trap-influenced grooves. There was no shortage of variety, but it felt as if she had tamed some of the chaos, gotten used to saying “or” instead of “and.” Volumes two through five complicate the picture once again. Their 47 songs testify to Arca’s giddy penchant for excess, and the way the four volumes tangle together reinforce the idea that she is uninterested in following any path for long—even one of her own design.
Outwardly, each volume has its own character, and although those distinctions tend to blur as you go deeper into each disc, KICK ii is generally identifiable as the reggaeton album. Following an eerie, abstract intro in the form of “Doña,” a witchy invocation set to skittering FX, the first three proper songs delve into crisp, clipped percussion arrayed into loping dembow rhythms. All three feel like clear extensions of KiCK i’s “Mequetrefe” and “KLK,” but they also stand on their own: Swimming with plangent synth melodies that recall ’90s trance, they move with an aquaticism that contrasts with Arca’s fiery vocal takes. Variously shouting out Prada heels, her beloved “transformistas,” and the “gringos” and “güeros” throwing bills in the air, Arca cuts a larger-than-life figure bestowed with a voracious desire. (Fellow Barcelona-based Venezuelan expat Cardopusher co-produced all three; Boys Noize also contributed to “Tiro.”) In “Rakata,” she comes off as a metaphysical poet of horny-on-main: “Que me como al mundo ya/Con estas ganas de follar ya” (“I could devour the world now/With this urge to fuck”). It’s worth noting just how funny she can be; repeating the syllable “ya,” she adopts a sing-song tone that bounces like a slow-motion yo-yo. In “Tiro,” she commands listeners’ attention in clipped, staccato tones—“Tacones negros, falda beige/Labios rojos, mira, mírame” (“Black heels, beige dress/Red lips, look, look at me”)—in between reeling off Venezuelan place names, as though she could upend North/South geopolitics by the sheer force of her sexual magnetism.
They’re among the fiercest songs in Arca’s catalog to date. “Luna Llena” and “Lethargy” are slower and sultrier, suffused in Harold Budd-esque piano and processed vocals; the beat of the latter consists of little more than plunging bass and samples of hissing breath. From there, KICK ii fragments into sketch-like mutations; after that initial trio of bangers, the abstract “Araña,” “Femme,” and “Muñecas” feel like three interstitials in a row. Still, the dizzying swirls of piano and voice on “Confianza,” another Cardopusher co-production, show that Arca doesn’t need more than a minute or two to make her mark; the song’s ambient finale might be the most satisfying 30 seconds of music in the whole set, and would have made a fantastic finale to KICK ii. Instead, she follows with “Born Yesterday,” a Sia collab whose belted vocal feels better suited to an EDM topline circa 2011. The shift midway through from glitch beats to turbocharged four-on-the-floor is the rare case where Arca’s maximalist instincts miss the mark.
Where KiCK ii is the (mostly) reggaeton disc, KicK iii is dedicated to experimental club beats influenced by the IDM of Arca’s youth. Pairing the risk-taking instinct of her best music with the swaggering confidence she projects as a kind of cyborg diva, it is the best of all five albums in the set, and one of her strongest full-lengths to date. She comes charging out of the gate on “Bruja,” a bluntly percussive ballroom anthem featuring some of her most audacious lyrics (“Hissy fit throw it up bitch bounce back/Get it wet, pull it, rip it, stroke, tranny cumming hard, till my chochi pulses raw”). As on KICK ii’s most dramatic tracks, her flow—octaves cracking, Rs rolling—overflows with sass. But after the helium-voiced trap/breakbeat hybrid “Incendio,” things quickly turn thrillingly strange once again. “Morbo” rumbles like a bulldozer in a pachinko parlor; “Fiera,” strafed with erratic drum patterns, just barely avoids ripping itself apart, less a song than an avalanche. The chiming “Skullqueen” pays homage to drill’n’bass-era Aphex Twin; a few tracks later, the Max Tundra collaboration “Rubberneck” returns to the waterlogged piano that comprises one of the set’s throughlines, but the springy beat is pure UK bass.
The mind-bending sound design drives home the ur-theme of all Arca’s music: transformation. Synthesized sounds take on the dimensions of real-world objects; acoustic signals like piano or voice transmogrify into iridescent, wormlike shapes. “My 2,” KicK iii’s antepenultimate song, consists mostly of processed vocals that whiz like loosed balloons and bleat like melting kazoos. It’s a swarming, sludgy sound, like a beehive in a tarpit. But the collection’s sheer surfeit of ideas also makes it harder for standout moments like this to rise to the surface. The lurching “Intimate Flesh,” which follows, sounds like something we’ve heard from Arca many times before; its familiarity dulls the senses, which is a shame, because “Joya,” which closes out the set, is one of the best songs of the entire five-volume series. “Te quiero decir/Eres una joya entre los hombres/Siento tanto amor,” she sings in her most clarion falsetto. (“I want to tell you/You are a jewel among men/I feel so much love.”) A spiritual kin to Björk’s “Hyperballad,” it’s one of the most dulcet, heartfelt songs Arca has made, and it deserves more breathing room.
If confidence is the unifying thread of the swaggering KICK ii and KicK iii, tenderness comes to the fore on kick iiii, as Arca takes stock of the changes she has undergone and celebrates the self she has birthed. “Now there was no need to look back/Everything she had was right there inside of her/Beckoning to see,” she announces on kick iiii’s opener, “Whoresong,” her voice a Windex smear over rain-spattered piano. On “Witch,” No Bra’s Susanne Oberbeck croons through Auto-Tune about “merging multiple monsters” over glistening pools of piano. And on “Alien Inside,” Garbage’s Shirley Manson gives a dramatic spoken-word performance over a shoegaze rumble that sounds like Tim Hecker taking a sandblaster to M83. Citing “the first death” and “the last birth”—themes that recur across the album—Manson intones, “The first time you recognize the alien inside/In the face of abject misery/Remember posthuman celestial sparkle/A mutant faith.” “Mutant faith” is not a new concept in Arca’s work; she used the phrase as the title of an improvisational performance piece at New York’s The Shed in 2019. But here, it sounds less like an abstract concept than a supernatural force distilled into sound.
kick iiii contains some of the most contemplative songs in the series—like the Oliver Coates collaboration “Esuna,” a mournful swirl of strings and plaintive vocal harmonies—but the widescreen intensity of “Alien Inside” fuels two more of the set’s boldest songs. “Queer” is a regal, fist-in-the-air anthem set to a gargantuan gothic trap beat. “I got tears, but tears of fire,” Planningtorock sings over titanium synths and bear-trap drums: “Tears of power, tears of power/I got tears like a queer/Queer power.” A protest song in the plainest of terms, it’s one of a few tracks here that feel likely to become fan favorites, even rallying cries. The unequivocal nature of the song’s message combined with its innocent imagery and Yeezus-grade beat are refreshingly original. And on “Lost Woman Found,” Arca leans into her quantum states to sing a song of herself. The melody is soaring, almost melodramatic; the swirls of synth and white noise are forbiddingly dense. Yet her lyrics are as intimate and direct as she’s ever been. After years spent “walking towards the light,” she declares, “I finally have something to say:/You can find out on your own/What it means to be mutant/What it means to recognize the alien inside the abject.”
kiCK iiiii, released without advance notice the day after iiii, is the most understated of the five volumes. “Pu” is a lovely little synthesizer lullaby, like a music box from the future. “Estrogen” is a lyrical piece for harpsichord and reverb, “Ether” a pensive piano etude. The beatless ambient techno of “Amrep” wouldn’t sound out of place alongside early Oneohtrix Point Never. These songs don’t grab you by the lapels; they’re soft and sweet, expressions of intimacy and vulnerability that feel diametrically opposed to the over-the-top visual universe that Arca and Frederik Heyman have devised for the project, with its phantasmagorical dioramas full of two-headed skeletons and sphinx-like sculptures towering over the naked bodies of fallen men. Against the preceding volumes’ most attention-grabbing moments, they may risk getting lost in the shuffle, but perhaps that is part of their charm, too: The whole fifth volume feels like an Easter egg in a video game—a sparkly basket of jewels collected from the crevices of Arca’s more imposingly monumental works.
As Arca’s stature as a cult icon has grown—as her project has become simultaneously more personal and larger-than-life, towering on forbidding prosthetic stilts or colossal plinths—her music has become more idiosyncratic. Her pop collaborations, like the one with Sia, feel less distinctive than most of her work; the bulk of the new albums reflects a protective, hermetic energy, as though she were refocusing her efforts on her own evolution. She speaks of the Arca project in terms of world-building; on the new albums, it’s a world that grows inward, not outward. That can make approaching these four volumes, taken together, a daunting prospect: For all the songs’ evident variety, their repetition of familiar moods and core techniques causes much of the material to blur together.
But the excess is the point. For Arca, part of recognizing “the alien inside” is embracing all parts of herself—“merging multiple monsters” into an unsteady union. Just as KiCk i coincided with her public coming-out as transgender, these albums flesh out the continuing story of her becoming, in all its complexity. Perhaps the best way of approaching the five-volume series is as a single playlist with all 59 tracks on shuffle: a maze-like course obeying no logic but its own, a perpetual process of discovery. As she sings on “Whoresong,” realizing that “everything she had was right there inside of her” all along crystallized a new ability: “To encounter the unknown time and time again/A bloodlust for beauty.” Slippery and unwieldy and all the more fascinating because of it, this collection drips with that messy, scarlet-streaked desire.

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The Verve’s blockbuster third album—newly reissued in a five-disc expanded edition—has come to be seen as the swan song for Britpop’s cultural hegemony. But in 1997, it felt like a step forward.

Urban Hymns

By 1997, Britpop’s clashing titans were diverging in sharply different directions—Blur with the discordant experimentalism of their self-titled album, Oasis with the overblown and obvious Be Here Now. That opened up a big lane for Wigan, UK misfits the Verve to swoop in and conquer the nation with their blockbuster third album, Urban Hymns—a record that has come to be seen as the swan song for Britpop’s cultural hegemony, but at the time suggested an intriguing next stage in its evolution. It boasted all the anthemic grandeur of Oasis at their Wembley-baiting best while spinning away from Britpop’s traditional 1960s rock/1970s punk axis for a greater emphasis on lush atmosphere and deep groove. As such, it was the rare Britpop album that could be embraced by those who were turned off by—or had outgrown—the genre’s unabashedly retro indulgences and two-fingers-aloft, cigarettes ‘n’ alcohol hooliganism.
But even when they were on top of the world, the Verve were always on shaky ground. Urban Hymns was the surprise third act for a band that seemed doomed after its second. Their most successful single up to that point—1995’s string-swept ballad “History”—doubled as an epitaph, with the notoriously embattled relationship between frontman Richard Ashcroft and guitarist Nick McCabe triggering the band’s demise just before it snuck into the UK Top 30. Ashcroft, bassist Simon Jones, and drummer Pete Salisbury would swiftly reconvene with a new guitarist (their old school chum Simon Tong) to begin work on a record that, for a time, seemed destined to become an Ashcroft solo release. But the singer quickly realized his vision would be incomplete without McCabe’s six-string sorcery, and after inviting his old foil back into the fold and reformulating the group as a five-piece, the Verve’s comeback narrative was in motion.
However, even with McCabe back at Ashcroft’s side, his hallucinatory guitar squall would prove less of a defining feature. On the Verve’s first two records, McCabe was the engine that rocketed the band to the stratosphere—but on Urban Hymns, the Verve achieve their heady cruising altitude on a cloud-bed of cosmic funk grooves, hip-hop-schooled beat science, and elegant orchestration. Where, in their early days, an ominous ambient piece like “Neon Wilderness” might get stretched out to a 10-minute excursion, on Urban Hymns it functions as a brief, sides-bridging interlude, a foggy flashback to the band they once were. Strobe-lit, wah-wah-splattered jams like “The Rolling People” were now the exceptions rather than the rule.
McCabe’s presence is barely perceptible on the album’s crowning achievement, “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” a glistening, swan-ice-sculpture of a song that injected Britpop with a healthy dose of boom-bap. (Alas, this monster hit wholly lived up to its name when the band was forced to fork over the royalties from their biggest hit to the Rolling Stones and their iron-fisted rights-holder Allen Klein for sampling an orchestral version of “The Last Time” without the proper clearance.) Urban Hymns’ other towering peaks—celestial, lighter-waving sing-alongs like “The Drugs Don’t Work,” “Sonnet,” and “Lucky Man”—likewise use windswept strings and tasteful ambient shading to fill in the space where McCabe’s heavenly storms used to rage.
At the time, Ashcroft was still fueled by enough underdog insolence and the maniacal self-belief that he could make even those soft-rock songs hit hard. Equal parts boho Bono and Jagger swagger, he wasn’t merely content to earn song dedications from Noel Gallagher, he wanted to overtake him at the top of the charts. At the same time, as “The Drugs Don’t Work” unsubtly suggested, he was eager to put his Mad Richard reputation to bed—and for much of Urban Hymns, he sounds less like the barefoot shaman of old and more like someone easing into a pair of slippers.
In the wake of possibly the only British space-rock soap opera in history, Ashcroft had married Spiritualized keyboardist Kate Radley in 1995, and in stark contrast to the psych-jazz meltdowns her ex-boyfriend/bandmate Jason Pierce unleashed on his own 1997 opus, Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating in Space, the prevailing mood on Urban Hymns is one of sunrise-summoning renewal. The album’s second half is mostly given over to clear-eyed statements of devotion like “Space and Time,” “One Day,” and “Velvet Morning”—the relaxed, contented sound of Britpop entering middle age (the net result of which was a slew of younger bands—Coldplay, Starsailor, et al—who would emerge already sounding like genteel old men). Even when the Verve momentarily revisit their primordial roar on the closing “Come On,” with Ashcroft screaming “fuck you” to no one and everyone, it’s ultimately an expression of joy rather than psychosis.
As this five-disc expanded edition reveals, Urban Hymns could’ve easily wound up an even mellower record. The sessions yielded enough material to fill another album, and for the most part, the Verve made the right calls to hold it back. Many of the Urban Hymns holdovers are less compelling versions of the songs that made the final tracklist: acoustic ballad “So Sister” is “The Drugs Don’t Work” without the dark-night-of-the-soul reckoning; “Echo Bass” and “Three Steps” are medium-heat psych-funk workouts that never reach the roiling boil of “The Rolling People.” (Notable exceptions include “Never Wanna See You Cry,” which makes for a fine “Sonnet II,” and the nocturnal voodoo soul of “Monte Carlo.”) And then there’s the slick, celebratory folk-rock of “This Could Be My Moment,” which even in light of Urban Hymns’ sunnier disposition, represents a swerve into MOR too far.
But if those outtakes present the Verve at their most pedestrian, the wealth of bonus live material here serves to restore some of their formative mysticism. Urban Hymns represented millions of people’s first contact with the Verve, and the band used live appearances to bring the newbies up to speed on their previous travels—like on a 1997 BBC Evening Session where they dip into moody, mercurial versions of A Northern Soul’s “Life’s an Ocean” and ’92 debut-EP cut “A Man Called Sun.” And while including the band’s entire May 1998 set at Wigan’s Haigh Hall (i.e., The Verve’s own Oasis-at-Knebworth moment) plus a whole ’nother disc worth of random live tracks from the era may seem like overkill, the recordings capture a band committed to elevating concerts to holy communions, no matter the venue. Even when the Verve were playing to a thousand or so people at Washington D.C.’s 9:30 Club shortly after Hymns’ release, they were already envisioning the 30,000-plus that would greet them a half-year later in their hometown.
For all the inter- and intra-band drama that fueled its creation, Urban Hymns ultimately centered around a very basic, universal theme: live for the moment and give it all you got, because we’ve only got one shot at this thing called life. It’s a sentiment that would seem terribly cornball and clichéd—if the Verve’s subsequent history didn’t so thoroughly reinforce its veracity. Less than a month after their Haigh Hall coronation, a disgruntled McCabe left the band once again, prior to a North American summer arena tour. What should’ve been a victory lap instead became a funeral procession, with Ashcroft and co. dutifully going through the motions alongside a session-player replacement before calling it a day once again. Of course, as the lyrics to “Bitter Sweet Symphony” attested, the Verve had at that point become well accustomed to life’s cruel twists and unforgiving ironies. Like the resuscitated heart-attack victim who had cheated death once, this was a band that knew it was living on borrowed time. But this collection is a testament to what can happen when you make the most of it.