Keep It Hid

Relative to the garage-rock outfits with whom they were compared to in the first part of this decade, the Black Keys have more or less stuck with their thing: austerely nostalgic, drums-and-guitar-in-a-dying-industrial-city blues-rock. Singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney have managed to forge a career and five albums out of variations-on-a-theme riffs and stripped-for-parts grooves, outliving almost all of those peers. They lack the audacity of Jack White (in fact, their blues-rock extends more from Midwestern modesty than from self-aware showboating), and the Reigning Sound's Greg Cartwright has a stronger melodic sensibility and more potent lyrical venom. Their limited range, however, stands in inverse proportion to their sturdy longevity, which always seemed built into their conceptual underpinning, as if the sheer quantity of songs legitimizes their Spartan approach.
But last year's Attack & Release saw the Black Keys' resolve weakening: Auerbach and Carney collaborated with Danger Mouse and wrangled additional players-- including Jessica Lea Mayfield and Carney's uncle Ralph. That the additions of a high-profile producer and programmed beats only augmented rather than expanded their sound was both a bit comical and strangely commendable. You take the Keys out of their basement studio, but you can't take the basement studio out of the Keys. Now Auerbach has made a solo album, and in retrospect, this turn of events seems inevitable: Ostensibly he wanted to escape even momentarily his band's self-imposed restrictions and give vent to his wildest ideas, like having a bass player.
Like Attack & Release, Keep It Hid takes only a few baby steps up the basement stairs. There are plenty of new song shapes and sound textures here, from the softly strummed opener "Trouble Weighs a Ton" to the brief din of "Because I Should" to the Smithsy guitar on "Heartbroken, in Disrepair". A sacred organ drenches "Real Desire" like profane sweat, and "Whispered Words (Pretty Lies)" struts on a Stax rhythm section and a nifty descending melody. "When the Night Comes" ends Side 1 on a quiet note, with soft keyboards and piano decorating some of Auerbach's most tender lyrics to date. Side 2 loses some of Side 1's urgency, as "Mean Monsoon" and especially "When I Left the Room" sound uncharacteristically unfocused.
Nothing here, however, would sound at all out of place if "Black Keys" were written on the jewel case spine. Whether Auerbach should be criticized or credited for his consistency could be debated, but the approach, the mission, and the music here all sound pretty close to what we've heard before from his day-job band. As a Black Keys album, Keep It Hid sounds less detached and distracted than the Danger Mouse collaboration, but lacks the thickfreak sound of their earliest releases and the sharp songwriting of Rubber Factory. Auerbach has written horndog riffs like "I Want Some More" and "Street Walkin'" many times before, and neither is the best of his lot. And no offense to the dependable drumming of Bob Cesare, but these songs lack Carney's crafty, unhinged beats, which work overtime to fill in Keys' songs as much as possible.
The biggest change here might be Auerbach himself, whose vocals have loosened up somewhat since The Big Come Up in 2002. On "Whispered Words (Pretty Lies)" and "My Last Mistake" he actually sounds indistinguishable from John Fogerty-- and the swampy drumbeat on the latter suggests he's aware of it. Rather than put him at the head of a small studio band like this, one wonders how he would sound either as a player in a more democratic unit (much like White in the Raconteurs) or backed by a pre-existing group like Drive-By Truckers, where he might have to work outside of himself to adapt to a communal sound. As it is, the more Auerbach changes things, the more they stay the same.


Two versatile hip-hop vets-- each in a nice patch in their tumultuous careers-- combine for a tape of dense lyrics and evocative tracks. Freddie Gibbs guests.

Covert Coup

One thing about the New Orleans rapper Curren$y: He's adaptable. In a decade-long career, he's played a staggering number of roles: Serving as foot soldier in Master P's fading No Limit empire, standing in Lil Wayne's shadow during that man's historic mid-00s run, striking out on his own and building himself to cult-favorite status on a series of weed-and-sneaker-addled solo mixtapes, inhabiting Ski Beatz' sumptuous psychedelic-soul production on last year's two great Pilot Talk albums. And now that he's established himself as one of the stars of an ascendant Internet-friendly stoner-rap scene, he's giving himself a new challenge, pairing up with the producer Alchemist for the online giveaway Covert Coup.
Alchemist has had a tumultuous career of his own. He's a Beverly Hills native who came to prominence crafting Tunnel anthems for New York roughnecks like Mobb Deep and Jadakiss. These days, he specializes in a broken, warped form of rap production-- classic New York boom-bap refracted through prisms, the loose-and-shaggy Stones Throw cratedigger style turned ominous and bloodthirsty. His tracks for Covert Coup aren't far removed from the stuff he did on Gutter Water, an overlooked 2010 album that found him teaming with the West Coast underground stalwart Oh No, the two of them bouncing their queasiest, most unsettled head-nodders off of each other. On Covert Coup, his decayed guitar loops and creeping drum breaks remind me of the shattered post-apocalyptic New York that Snake Plissken had to escape. It's a different kind of weed-rap, one Curren$y hasn't really tried to do. And yet he slip-slides through it with the charming, effortless ease that's become his trademark. Nothing fazes this guy.
Curren$y's been calling Covert Coup an EP, but it's 10 tracks in 28 minutes, longer than plenty of punk and indie full-lengths I own. The mixtape follows what I guess you'd call the Madvillainy model-- 90-second stretches of dense lyricism, [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| usually without a chorus-- before the rapper fades out and the woozy, evocative track takes over. Curren$y's verses aren't punchline marathons; they're stoned reveries, and it can be riveting to hear him depict certain situations with loose, unhurried narrative precision: "Let the little homey kick it in the auto shop with us/ Long as he can make store runs and keep his mouth shut/ Same way I came up."
As a rapper, Curren$y's greatest asset is his delivery, the way his pinched, nasal Louisiana drawl slithers its way through the track. But he's also great at coming up with sharp, unexpected ways to address standard rap topics. On his weed-smoking capacity: "The toxic air that I'm breathing would leave a average man weakened." On his own charisma: "If you looking for that nigga, I is him/ All eyes in this direction/ A burden and a blessing." On his home life: "White carpets in my Scarface house/ No undergarments on my Scarface spouse." On how high he is right this second: "Playa all Himalaya-ish." His lyrics are full of slick little tricks like these, tiny turns of phrase that sneak up on you after multiple listens but which dazzle in their economy when you parse them out.
A few well-selected guests turn up on Covert Coup, and all of them make strong foils for Curren$y's conversational calm. Freddie Gibbs' focused on-fire double-time on "Scottie Pippen" stands in stark contrast to Curren$y's style, and the two extremes work well together. Alc's just-out-of-prison blood brother Prodigy plays a tough, raspy uncle figure, showing a sense of hardhead style that emerges too rarely on P's own recent online offering, The Ellsworth Bumpy Johnson EP. Curren$y's puff-buddy Smoke DZA breezes right through "Life Instructions". And fellow New Orleans vet Fiend has a great moment on "Blood Sweat and Gears", letting off a couple of lines in a bluesy moan-sing before snapping into an excellent grown-man verse. These guest spots do what they're supposed to do. They don't overwhelm Curren$y or clash with his style; they just bring some new dimensions out of his songs. They're there for chemistry reasons, not name value, and they work great.
Curren$y let Covert Coup out into the world on 4/20, a fun but unnecessary attention-grabbing stunt. There's plenty of zoned-out atmosphere on the tape, but it's a strong, focused, unified piece of work, not just a lava-lamp soundtrack. It stands on its own.


With daring lyricism and technical ingenuity, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Brittney Parks’ second album conjures a frenzied energy as emotionally soothing as it is physically crushing.

Sudan Archives: Natural Brown Prom Queen

Natural Brown Prom Queen

Black women artists so rarely receive credit deserved for technical innovation in music-making, outside of vocal talent. Aretha Franklin’s discerning ear for melodies made her a fierce arranger who knew just where to place the instruments that formed the scaffolding of her hits. Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s guitar melded the sonic waves of Delta blues with the amorphous dissonance of a nascent rock sound. Patrice Rushen is a skillful piano player who can add classical notes to an explosive pop moment. Too often, their capacity as instrumentalists, mixers, and curators of sound at a diasporic and deeply intimate level is nudged to the side, the breadth of their accomplishments equated to the range of their voices. Sudan Archives’ work resists this flattening at every turn. Brittney Parks, the Ohio native whose 2019 debut Athena was a vivid introduction to her avant-garde pop, hip-hop, and electronic whimsy, is a self-taught multi-instrumentalist with an inescapable audio imprint. On her second album, Natural Brown Prom Queen, the singer and songwriter dances with herself at her own party, where she also happens to be guest of honor and headlining act. She’s a one-woman band who, across 18 sprawling tracks, transmits a frenzied energy that is as emotionally soothing as it is physically crushing.
“Only bad bitches in my trellis” is the siren call off “Home Maker,” the album’s first track, which turns the communal act of building a homestead into a flirty reminder that those we keep close speak volumes about how we wish ourselves to be perceived. Sudan only hangs with the very best, which makes her equally as striking as the baddest person in her corner. She’s optimistic and still observant, hyper-aware of the doubts and horrors beyond her doorstep. On “NBPQ (Topless),” her lyrics approach self-fragmentation at disorienting speed. Sudan is cynical and forlorn as the song opens, leaning into Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye narrative and longing for her body to resemble those that are most celebrated: “Sometimes I think that if I was light-skinned/Then I would get into all the parties/Win all the Grammys, make the boys happy.” Hitching her vocals on electronic beats held together by sparse violin notes carrying rhythms reminiscent of the Sahel in summer, “NBPQ” plays like a moodboard, the unsettled feel of its instrumentation illustrative of an evolution in process. When her tone shifts on the chorus from despondency to indomitable confidence, so too does the beat, from strained reverie to thumping syncopation, interspersed with insistent claps. When she chants, “I’m not average, I’m not average, I’m not average,” there’s no choice but to believe her.
Midway through the album, the psychedelic road trip anthem “ChevyS10” arrives like a SZA confessional with the gilded heft of a stellar Kanye West presentation. Delivered as a rap that morphs into spoken word, Sudan’s verses pirouette across elongated beats that manipulate her voice so it lands like a robotic interjection from outer space. She reminds you of FKA twigs as she reaches for higher octaves, achieving a sound that is simultaneously ugly and captivating. Her cries to “leave tonight or live and die this way” harken to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” another plea for a love powerful enough to become an escape. Where they differ is in Sudan’s acknowledgement that, alone or not, she’ll still catch the town in her rearview mirror. Self-preservation, mental and physical, is of paramount concern, and she’s seeking pleasure at her own pace and in the keys of her choosing. “Ciara,” “OMG Britt,” and “Freakalizer” are the vocal equivalent of your most reliable vibrator—they sound good, sweaty, damn near turned on by the sensuality of a private rendezvous. As a trinity preaching a lavish type of self-centered prosperity gospel, this is dance music that invokes the eroticism exuded by a lineage of artists from Donna Summer, Cheryl Lynn, Betty Davis, through Janet Jackson.
Building in the steps of Black women and their sonic architecture, Natural Brown Prom Queen thrives on improvisation, daring lyricism, and technical ingenuity. Sudan’s DIY expertise means she’s attuned to the most minute shifts in her compositions as she records; her trusty Boss RC-20 loop pedal, alongside her ever-present violin, gives her room to indulge and savor. Hearing how the final beats of each song transition into the genesis of another—how the glitching static from “Copycat (Broken Notions)” sets the foundation for the rapturous sermon that kicks off “It’s Already Done,” and how the vibrating strings on “Milk Me” trampoline gracefully into “Yellow Brick Road”—lend each track a heady cinematic drama. Threaded throughout are Sudan’s universal themes: the social currency of beauty, the supreme boredom of the status quo, and the euphoria that accompanies new love. She’s moved by them but she is not beholden to them; on Natural Brown Prom Queen, she rejects all expectations and demands better from herself and everyone listening.


On his new mixtape, the Flint rapper continues his run as a solid flagbearer for his city’s rap scene. It’s a tight and punchline-driven offering, marred by occasionally stiff delivery.

The X Tape

In the summer of 2020, the freak show that is Flint’s street rap scene blossomed. Three of the city’s landmark rap songs dropped within the span of a few months, all featuring the scene’s signature blend of depraved, punchline-driven comedy and unorthodox delivery. The tracks in question were YN Jay and Louie Ray’s “Coochie,” Rio Da Yung OG and Louie Ray’s “Movie,” and BFB Da Packman’s team-up with out-of-towner Sada Baby on “Free Joe Exotic.” Just a year later, things started to slow down, as Rio, the nucleus of the movement, began a five-year prison sentence. In the years since, there have been noteworthy tracks and mixtapes here and there, but without its defining star, the scene started to splinter, and its energy floundered.
Enter Babyfxce E. During Flint’s big summer of 2020, he was a freshly minted high school grad who hadn’t yet stepped into a recording booth. Last year, seemingly overnight, he became his hometown’s newest ambassador with a run of singles backed by sharp wisecracks and wordplay. While the bars are colorful, Babyfxce lacks an identifiable vocal presence. The competition is tough: He has to contend with local staples like RMC Mike, who sounds like he gargles whiskey instead of mouthwash, and KrispyLife Kidd, who can always make jaws drop. In a city full of borderline cartoon characters, Babyfxce is a smooth talker. That quality has turned him into a solid flagbearer for the Flint rap sound, as his less abrasive—and by extension less exciting—take on the style is easier for the uptight music world to digest.
On Babyfxce E’s newest project, The X Tape, he leans into that role. It’s tight and barely over 30 minutes, heavy on what made this era of Flint pop: the shit talk. E’s got that down, with an active imagination that produces some twistedly funny one-liners. He cracks jokes at your debt (“I did made more money in this rap shit than your student loans” on “Rich Talking”), and dreams up absurd scenarios where he gets freaky with a pregnant woman and wonders if he just went too deep. (We need to enroll him in a sex ed course, pronto.) He’s at his best when he doesn’t waste too much time on the hook, and locks into a zone where each subsequent punchline amplifies the intensity. The pummeling “Chicken Little” is a good example: As the crackling beat escalates, the bars start flying faster. Or take the 40-yard dash “Hot Outside”; in a thrilling three-second rush toward the end of the song, it feels like his verse is about to end. Instead, he catches his breath and finds a second gear.
The X Tape is missing more moments like that. Too often, punchlines get buried because Babyfxce delivers them as if he’s reading from a teleprompter. It makes you appreciate the power of all of the vocal tics that more established Flint rappers have: their dramatic pauses for emphasis, their way of slipping in and out of tangents, and their ability to turn three or four bars into short, wildly humorous vignettes. In contrast, Babyfxce doesn’t have enough tricks to make bars consistently stand out. On lowlights like “Charge It to the Game” and “Watch Me,” his words fade into the background. There are scenes that could be vivid, as in “Today,” when he shows up to the doctor with a fake cough trying to score drugs. But they don’t end up being very compelling, mostly because he only spends one line on the image. He can be a stiff rapper on occasion, which is the polar opposite of what has made Flint so distinct.
“Flint Flow,” a posse cut which features some of the city’s recent stars, is the loosest Babyfxce E sounds on the entire mixtape. They’re all having fun here: Mike talks out of pocket and Packman makes coke-sniffing sound effects while clowning some girl’s boyfriend. Meanwhile, in his anchor verse, E jokes about how hard Packman sounds, improvising his way through a slip-up by powering through the mistake instead of doing another take. It’s such free spitting that it feels like they’re all in the studio cracking each other up. That no-fucks-given attitude is what Flint rap is all about.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 2004 debut from John Legend, one of hip-hop and R&B’s most soulful synergies.

Get Lifted

Back when Kanye West was clamoring for respect as a rapper, he was also looking to prove himself as a mogul. In 2003, the first artist he signed to his fledgling imprint, Getting Out Our Dreams (aka G.O.O.D Music), was a 25-year-old ex-choirboy named John Stephens, whose demo tape of spare, piano-backed R&B had been getting rejected by multiple labels. Not your typical executive, Kanye was a hitmaker with an ear for narrative tension, naturally drawn to the sinner-saint dichotomy in Stephens’ songwriting. Kanye urged the singer to adopt a nickname friends had been calling him, John Legend, and when introducing his flagship artist at showcases, he would describe Legend’s sound as “spirit music,” contrary to the commercial R&B that West had deemed “popcorn shit.”
Under Kanye’s creative direction, Legend reworked his demo for his debut album Get Lifted, which dropped in December 2004 amid the whirlwind of Usher’s Confessions and with neo-soul on its mainstream decline. The pop world was, at the same time, still pining for throwback singers, and Legend fit the bill: a trained pianist with a new-school edge and a raspy morning voice whose closest peer was Alicia Keys. His music crossed generations while heralding a new era of millennial entanglements. While Legend was making smoldering hymns steeped in love and deception, Kanye was a newly in-demand producer known for mining sped-up samples into classic gems. With Get Lifted, they created one of hip-hop and R&B’s most soulful synergies, split evenly between jubilant Kanye-produced records about infidelity and earnest commitment ballads that telegraphed Legend’s forthcoming evolution from player to family man. The album blazed a trail for its sacrilegious spin on gospel and R&B—you can practically hear the ghost of old Kanye cackling in the background as Legend embraces his most toxic impulses, singing heartily, “You can’t say, I don’t love you/Just because I cheat on you.”
This is John Legend 1.0, with the voice of an angel and a Kanye-sanctioned ego. Get Lifted thrives on the eternal conflict between gospel and secular, perfected by his predecessors like Marvin Gaye, Ray Charles, and James Brown who could all, as singer-songwriter Ed Townsend said of Gaye, “sing the Lord’s Prayer, and it would have sexual overtones.” Legend’s debut achieves that unholy matrimony in stretches but prioritizes mischief over emotional complexity, with hints of the latent heartache often buried under male pride. The album’s cockiness is a necessary evil. Like many of his forebears, Legend had the power to make cheating sound too sexy to resist, and where else do you learn the art of sinning than in church?
John Stephens grew up in a musical, churchgoing household in Springfield, Ohio, and started taking piano lessons around age 4. At least twice a week, the family attended El Bethel Temple, where his mother was a Sunday School teacher, and his father sang and played drums in the choir. His grandfather was a minister, and his grandmother an organist. By age 10, John had a regular role as a church pianist. In a 2007 interview, he described the church as an ideal training ground for vocalists, a space where young people could sing on a platform akin to a pop star. “You really get used to performing and working the crowd when you grow up in that setting,” he told Charlie Rose. R&B fans love grieving that today’s singers are so religiously detached that they miss out on the schooling that made voices like Marvin, Aretha, and Whitney seem anointed from the pew. As one blog wrote in 2021, “Jesus had the girls hitting every note, but now they just hit some of them and pray to AutoTune instead.” Legend’s roots gave him the range to be able to testify on a track or luxuriate next to Rick Ross’ affluence raps as effortlessly as he could sing a praise song or float over a soul sample. He has a preacher’s cadence and a handsome grain on his voice that can easily slip into smarm if uncontained.
As a skilled pianist, Legend had the makings of both a star and dream collaborator. He graduated high school early and entered the University of Pennsylvania at 16 as an English major, juggling two jobs: director of his school’s a cappella group, the Counterparts, and of an Afro-Methodist church choir in Scranton, Pennsylvania every Sunday. In his junior year, he landed his first major placement after a friend who’d been singing backup for Lauryn Hill hooked him up with a studio session for Hill’s 1998 solo debut, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Then just 19, Legend wound up playing piano on “Everything Is Everything,” earning a $500 session fee. Four years later, he quit his job as a management consultant to pursue music full-time in New York, where he worked with producer Dave Tozer on recordings like 2001’s Live at Jimmy’s Uptown and 2003’s Solo Sessions Vol. 1: Live at the Knitting Factory and sold the CDs at his shows. That’s when a college roommate, Devon Harris, introduced him to Kanye West, who Legend pinned back then as “just some cousin that made beats as far as I knew.”
Kanye was intent on being much more than that. He felt he was filling a lane in mainstream hip-hop with equally flossy and uplifting rhymes, and he saw Legend as a spiritual counterpart. After Legend signed to G.O.O.D Music in 2003, he earned a cushy slot as a background pianist and vocalist on some of Kanye’s most buttery early productions: JAY-Z’s “Encore,” Alicia Keys’ “You Don’t Know My Name,” Slum Village’s “Selfish.” By then, Legend had already completed most of the songs that would land on Get Lifted, but he needed Kanye’s cosign to get noticed. The College Dropout’s runaway success in 2004 helped Legend land a deal with one of the labels that had previously dismissed him, Columbia. The duo re-recorded his demo tracks and led with the Kanye-produced single “Used to Love U,” a jaunty breakup anthem where Legend sarcastically relents: “Maybe it’s me, maybe I bore you/Maybe Puffy, Jay-Z would all be better for you,” which is something of a complement to Kanye’s subsequent anthem about ambitious women, “Gold Digger.”
On Get Lifted’s first half, Legend embarks on a doomed journey toward fidelity with an impressive four-track run where he moves from deception to remorse in the most chaotically slick fashion. “She Don’t Have to Know” is a tale of two indiscreet cheaters reveling in the threat of being caught: “Damn, it’s so stressful doing the dirt we do/So sad but true,” he sighs over breezy chapel organs. The gleefully catchy “Number One,” which samples the funky 1975 Staple Singers single “Let’s Do It Again,” builds Legend’s jovially-sung lies into a Jenga tower of excuses. “You can’t see all I do to keep you from knowing the things I do,” he sings, before assuring a partner that he wears protection while sleeping around and then swearing to be faithful, accompanied by a festive background choir: “I said it the last time… But this is the last time.” Kanye swoops in with a verse about his own wayward penis: “I tried to jag off/He said, ‘Who is you playing with?’” If the 2004 version of Legend were on a dating show like Too Hot to Handle, he’d be cast as the playboy, pretending to reform while smirking during a confessional. The album’s tone can be so cheeky as to seem affected sometimes, but there’s an overall soothing levity to the project. It helped that Legend’s shallow indiscretions came in witty couplets that painted him as a forgivable anti-hero.
Get Lifted’s latter half transitions from sinner to penitent, with “Ordinary People” as a clear divider. The redemptive, gospel-tinged “I Can Change” opens with a testimonial moan, then the keys and horns drop, and Legend pledges to do evidently challenging things like listening when his partner talks and staying home at night. Snoop Dogg’s recommitment meanwhile requires a river baptism: “Man, it’s cold, I ain’t been clubbing, dranking, or smoking—I’m focused,” Snoop professes. Legend turns the act of being faithful into a cliff-hanger at the end, repeating cynically, “This time I mean it…,” with implied ellipses that suggest otherwise.
The rest of the album pulls back on the guilty pleasures, easing into restraint with stripped-down ballads like “Stay With You,” a sincere slow jam about choosing devotion, produced by Legend’s frequent collaborator, Tozer. But it’s “Ordinary People” that remains Legend’s most immortal tune, a beautiful homage to the reality and suspense of long-term love, set on a misty arrangement of keys. The lyrics are timeless, inspired by Legend’s parents, who remarried 12 years after they divorced. And though the song sounds pre-programmed for Grammy praise (it won in 2005 for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance), Legend sells the conflict with genuine clarity, making it believable that his character could effortlessly evolve over the course of 15 tracks.
It took until his fourth studio album, 2013’s Love in the Future, for Legend to complete his transformation from philandering frog to Prince Charming. He wrote his wedding classic, “All of Me,” as an ode to his then-fiancée new muse Chrissy Teigen, netting him his first No. 1 single. In his 2020 Verzuz battle with Alicia Keys, the two sat back to back behind their respective pianos, and Legend stated the obvious: “A lot of people get married to both of our songs.” Like other prestigious R&B acts, they’ve evolved into artists whose records now soundtrack Oscar films and pander to spouses and former presidents. As Legend moved toward making music for lovers and lounges, mainstream R&B has incidentally shifted away from conventional romance and into the arms of situationships, with women like Jazmine Sullivan, SZA, and Summer Walker leading the way, carrying the spirit of imperfection that fuels Get Lifted.
The John Legend of today is too wholesome an artist to bend the rules of monogamy. He’s a political family man who regularly posts about his two children on Instagram and defends his wife’s social media faux pas. Adult contemporary R&B dooms musicians to the fate of virtuousness that way. A faded portrait now, Get Lifted is Legend is at his most intriguing, singing about being unable to evolve as a man. But so it goes. It’s fun to be reckless until you discover the only thing more enticing than making the same mistake twice is stability.


After making an album under the name Happy Birthday, Kyle Thomas returns with a new moniker and sharper songwriting chops, resulting an album that is long on distortion and short on subtlety, but still manages to transcend lo-fi.

King Tuff

Even if you don't recognize the name Kyle Thomas, you may know some of his associations. Seth Bogart, better known as Hunx, cites him as his best friend. He was the frontman of stoner-metal outfit Witch, but wasn't the band's best-known member. (That honor goes to the band's drummer and all-around indie-rock hero J Mascis.) He was a part of sprawling Vermont hippie collective Feathers back when you could use the term "freak-folk" without feeling embarrassed for yourself. But to a specific portion of the rock-nerd underworld, Thomas is foremost known as King Tuff, Playground Legend (at least among those who proudly flaunt 3" Burger Records badges on their jean jackets). If that name doesn't ring a bell, here's a quick briefing: His charisma is magnetic, his shows are akin to cheap-beer-soaked tent revivals, he combines the stadium-sized guitar licks of Erik Cartwright with the bratty whine of Eric Cartman, and his solo debut, 2008's Was Dead, was the sort of album most scuzz-loving musicians would incinerate their garages to make.
Though long on distortion and short on subtlety, it would be a stretch to dump Was Dead in the "lo-fi" category. Though Thomas worked on the album completely by himself, it was better-produced (or, if you prefer, recorded less crappily) than modern dirtbag-punk classics like Jay Reatard's Blood Visions and Ty Segall's Melted. It was a record packed to the brim with energy and irresistible hooks, with its best moments ("A Pretty Dress", "Just Strut", "Animal") going a long way to prove why the enthusiasm toward Thomas' solo project is well justified. If you were expecting King Tuff's self-titled sophomore album to be Was Dead 2: The Resurrection, don't hold your breath. This is both a good and bad thing.
Irreverence is paramount to being in a garage-rock band (unless you're, say, Women, there are few things more boring than a garage band that takes themselves too seriously), and Thomas has this in spades. In "Keep on Movin'", he shouts out arcane dance moves and, in his own words, lets his guitar (whose name is Jazijoo) drool. He lets out a comically puny bark in "Stranger". He gives his songs titles like "Loser's Wall" and "Swamp of Love", which sound like landmarks where misfits in the Deep South meet to make out. The album art bears the image of a cartoon bat holding a Gibson guitar and a magic wand. Clichés frowning upon judging a book by its cover need not apply here.
King Tuff's aforementioned cover looks exactly like the kind of decal someone would slap on the bumper of their beaten-to-shit 1976 Camaro, and for the most part, the music sounds perfect for playing inside such a vehicle while attempting to see if it can still hit 80mph. There's the too-appropriately-titled opener "Anthem", carried by a double-neck lead begging to be greeted with devil horn gestures. There's the Lynyrd Skynyrd-esque boogie of "Stranger", the freewheeling and fun "Baby Just Break", and climactic closer "Hit & Run". Album highlight "Bad Thing" is Hunx's Hairdresser Blues spiked with brown liquor, equipped with a supercharged chorus. Completely free of arty abstraction, the good parts of King Tuff were designed with maximum impact in mind.
Unlike most of his contemporaries, Thomas' chief value as a songwriter is his accessibility. While most of his top-shelf contemporaries have wandered out of dive-bar stardom and into the world of indie rock-at-large, they have also drawn a clear line in the sand between themselves and fans who may not be receptive to their sound. Thomas, on the other hand, has no problem meeting those fans in the middle.
At times, this creates problems for the album. Tunes like "Unusual World" and "Evergreen" sound like quieter holdovers from Thomas' 2010 album under the name Happy Birthday, and sound out of place here. Both songs provide breathing room between the album's stompers, but perhaps a bit too much breathing room, to the point where they feel like filler. "Loser's Wall" and "Keep on Movin'" drift at midtempo, leaving you with the feeling that Thomas has written these songs before, only faster and better. One of the many great things about Was Dead was its near-relentless pacing, making it a breeze to listen to over and over again. King Tuff feels like the couch surfer friend you invite to your house party, the one who's often charming and fun but will not leave until every last drop of beer is gone.
For all his mishaps in attempting to broaden his style, the gambit Thomas takes on "Swamp of Love" is the one that pays off. A wistful piano ballad at its core, the song wildly benefits from Thomas' romantic croon and the climax that bookends it. It's actually kind of difficult to imagine this as the kind of song King Tuff had in him. Through all the hits and misses artists go through while expanding their songwriting breadth, surprises this satisfying are why artists step out of their comfort zone in the first place. Even though it's nowhere near as consistently great as Was Dead, it's nice to witness a songwriter like Kyle Thomas treading unfamiliar territory instead of delivering more of the same. It gives hope that his next great album won't sound like his last great album.


Mexico City collaborators Mabe Fratti, Camille Mandoki, Gibrana Cervantes, and Concepción Huerta conjure up fluid, freeform chamber improv that feels like the product of a collective mind.

Amor Muere: a time to love, a time to die

a time to love, a time to die

The music of Mexico City-based collective Amor Muere stretches between dream states and the waking world. The group—comprising cellist and songwriter Mabe Fratti, singer and sound artist Camille Mandoki, violinist Gibrana Cervantes, and electronic musician and tape manipulator Concepción Huerta—built their project on a foundation of friendship and creative collaboration. The four women have been performing live within the local scene for years, sitting in on each other’s sets and participating in a larger-scale multidisciplinary piece written and directed by Mandoki. As Amor Muere (translation: “Love Dies”), they seek free expression within a democratic setting. On their debut album, a time to love, a time to die, they tap into the reaches of their conjoined minds and extract avant-garde compositions grafted from gritty electronic textures, discordant strings, and soaring vocal melodies. Even in their most abstract sketches, each musician retains a distinct fingerprint. But their work also seems hewn by a single set of hands.
To create their debut, Amor Muere expanded and refined material developed over multiple jam sessions in recent years. Some songs highlight the dynamics of texture and silence: The wordless “Shhhhh” captures a frantic, creaking conversation between Fratti’s cello and Cervantes’ violin. The dialogue is sparse at first, but whips into a tangled frenzy as Huerta and Mandoki goad the string players with digital blasts and distorted washes of synthesizer. Fratti sings the lead vocal on “LA,” a sun-dappled counterpart to the moody “Shhhhh” that tracks the interplay between bowed strings and electronic atmospheres. Her tone is mottled but reflective, like slightly smudged glass. “Suave aire sobre la cabeza/Sabe a dónde llegar” (“Soft air over our heads/Knows where to arrive”), she sings. Measuring the impulse of a breeze that drifts naturally yet with seeming purpose, Fratti’s lyrics—steeped in dream logic—might be an ode to improvisation itself.
“LA” shares DNA with Vidrio, a new album Fratti made with Héctor Tosta under the name Titanic. That record is lighter, more traditionally melodic, and relies on Fratti’s delicate, watercolor voice to illuminate the duo’s vibrant, roving jazz compositions. But with Amor Muere, Fratti is free to wander across craggier terrain, and her voice offers a dulcet reprieve from the strange noises she and her bandmates conjure. On “Can We Provoke Reciprocal Reaction,” Fratti’s vocalizations intertwine with Mandoki’s smoky timbre, repeating, “Oh, this life/I want it all again/I faded out,” atop plucked strings and wailing synthesizer. The ambling, circular rhythm mimics the song’s inspiration: a daily walk. Amor Muere treat the quotidian activity with a sense of wonder, peppering the song with springy, metallic, jaw-harp-like noises, injecting a sense of playfulness into the sense of repetitive motion.
Mandoki sings lead on “Love Dies,” the first piece Amor Muere wrote as a group. Her dry, gauzy vocal sounds like it’s creeping up from the earth, coated in a thin veil of soil. Cervantes and Fratti’s keening strings lure Mandoki’s voice upward, into the golden air. The collaborative nature of the music is so instinctual, it often seems like the band is fluidly exchanging complex ideas using only their instruments —as on the 19-minute ambient closer “Violetas y Malvas,” which is among the group’s most freeform compositions. It is so free, in fact, that Fratti and Mandoki unspool nonverbal passages rather than sing intelligible lyrics. But there is no shortage of communication. Whether responding to Huerta’s warped ribbons of tape, or Mandoki’s crackling synth phrases, the members of Amor Muere have crafted a nuanced and seemingly telepathic dialect of their own.


With renewed confidence, focus, and contentment, Alec Ounsworth delivers a consistently satisfying Clap Your Hands album, the best since their debut.

The Tourist

Since their 2005 debut, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah have evolved from being an actual band into being just an idea of one. Once a proper quintet, they’ve gradually shed members over the past decade, and after drummer Sean Greenhalgh bailed following 2014’s Only Run, the group was down to one man clapping—lead singer/songwriter Alec Ounsworth. Of course, Ounsworth has been the band’s creative center since the very beginning, and even though he’s released music under his own name, he’s held onto the Clap Your Hands brand—as much for its obfuscating qualities as recognition value. Always too cryptic and theatrical a raconteur to fit the traditional singer-songwriter mold, Clap Your Hands is Ounsworth’s means of holding up a funhouse mirror to it, through restless, combustible songs as elastic and exaggerated as his voice.
But even though his original band has effectively fallen apart, Ounsworth has some quality Krazy Glue in the form of Dave Fridmann. The producer has a history of stabilizing bands in a state of flux, whether charting the Flaming Lips’ course out of “Jelly”-ville, or promoting himself from Mercury Rev’s bassist to their studio-bound sonic architect in the mid-’90s. Fridmann has worked on two very different Clap Your Hands records, both of which bore the pressure of the band’s circumstances at the time: 2007’s infamously cluttered and blown-out Some Loud Thunder was an unsubtle pin-prick to the inflated anticipation that followed their debut; the deconstructed, discombobulated Only Run captured the sound of a shrinking band trying to figure out where to go next. Like the latter record, The Tourist was self-produced by Ounsworth and mixed by Fridmann, but Only Run’s sense of blank-canvas uncertainty has been replaced with renewed confidence, focus, and contentment.
The result is the most consistently satisfying Clap Your Hands album since their debut. Ounsworth’s once-adversarial songwriting smarts and sonic ambitions are more in sync than ever before, and Fridmann’s lustrous mix ranges between the intimate and the epic. The Tourist furthers Only Run’s predilection for synth-smeared textures, but the songs here feel less like randomized experiments and more purposefully constructed for dramatic effect: “A Chance to Cure” begins in an ambient, after-hours R&B haze but erupts into a blast of psychedelic funk, powered by a hiccupping drumbeat that locks in with Ounsworth’s rap-like repartee; “Down (is where I want to be)” is a delirious disco in the spirit of “Satan Said Dance,” spiked with Eno-esque harmonies and a surprising rock-out climax that transforms it into the first Clap Your Hands song to make you pump your fist.
Ounsworth has said The Tourist was written during a period of personal tumult, and his lyric sheet here is riddled with references to ambulances, drugs, “visiting hours,” and “dark flowers.” But he works through his woes with sly humor. The charming, organ-poked waltz “Unfolding Above Celibate Moon (Lost Angeles Nursery Rhyme)” sees Ounsworth declare, “it’s no good trying to be someone you’re not,” before building a couplet from quotes of the Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and Broken Social Scene’s “I’m Still Your Fag.” And atop the glistening glide of “Better Off,” he confronts an existential crisis (“It’s better to keep moving/Better just to hold still”) with zen-like bliss, rendering a scene of interpersonal turmoil by cribbing the “hit me with a flower” quip from Lou Reed’s “Vicious.”
In spite of The Tourist’s surface shimmer, Ounsworth still wields his frail voice like a weapon, dramatically punctuating his lines with hysterical tics like someone feigning a fainting episode to get out of an uncomfortable situation. But they’re also natural responses to moments when he’s just too overcome with emotion. The heart-rending “Ambulance Chaser” surges forth like an acoustic complement to “In This Home On Ice,” its fidgety rhythm emblematic of the unsettling medical drama unfolding in Ounsworth’s motor-mouthed lyrics (“There’s a limit to how much I can endure/I’ll take my medicine and you’ll just hope for the worst”).
The revitalizing vigor of The Tourist suggests that whatever troubles were plaguing Ounsworth are now behind him, with the post-punk thrust of “The Vanity of Trying” putting the exclamation point on the album’s liberation philosophy when he exclaims, “We can be whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever we want!” A decade ago, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were a modest, rickety band bearing the albatross of hype; today, they’re an amorphous, musically adventurous entity basking in the freedom of no expectations.


Marissa Nadler's elegant new album is also her most expansive, with production that sharpens old strengths while exposing new ones.

Little Hells

The core of Little Hells-- Marissa Nadler's elegiac and elegant fourth album-- is appropriately wedged in the middle: After moving alongside dual Wurlitzers and a theremin throughout opener "Heart Paper Lover", slowly waltzing above a country quartet on "Rosary", and augmenting a dark conversation between a man and his tired wife with industrial-iike programming and synths for "Mary Come Alive", Nadler settles back into her minimal roots for the next four tunes. During those 14 perfect minutes, it's just her voice and finger-picked acoustic guitar, augmented cautiously by piano, organ, and ripples of electronics. Surrounded by little else but her own melancholy, Nadler sums up her career's existential despair: "Ghosts and lovers/ They will haunt you for a while," she sings. And while they do, Little Hells suggests through 10 of Nadler's best songs yet, the sadness will either kill you or keep you going.
Nadler's earlier albums delivered this somberness almost exclusively through songs for acoustic guitar. On those records, her backing musicians seemed intent upon emphasizing the spectral, lost-love tendencies of her words, adding ominous cello shrieks, sinister electric leads, or raggedy lo-fi touches, which found her tagged from the start as a freak-folk artist. As late as her most recent album-- the exquisite breakthrough Songs III: Bird on the Water-- she did little to dispel that categorization, filling the record with archaic language and outsider accompaniment by New England experimentalists like multi-instrumentalist Greg Weeks and cellist Helena Espvall.
At last, Little Hells moves Nadler well beyond easy categories, thanks to a newfound clarity in her words, a compelling link between her songs, and production that sharpens her old strengths wheile brightly exposing new ones. Sonically, her reach is wider and more assured. On "Mary Come Alive", circular drumming, gauzed vocals, and synthetic harmonium suggest the unlikely union of Cocteau Twins and Swans. Meanwhile, "Loner" stacks organ sustains and submerges them beneath Nadler's strum and half-hummed coo. It's like Grouper coming back down the Hill or Valet emerging from the Acid, but more memorable and accessible than both.
But the LP's highlight is still the four-song core that recalls vintage Nadler-- now played, captured, edited, and arranged better than in the past. Her only solo turn here, "Brittle, Crushed & Torn", is crisp and concise, the presentation revealing the strength of the melodies in her bass-heavy picking and the wispy vocals above. "The Whole Is Wide" uses only that voice and Dave Scher's staccato piano march; the simplicity helps the album's most lyrically complex song translate off the page as Nadler intertwines the stories of two women, Sylvia and Laila, who waste their life away in the absence of a man. Nadler swaps first- and third-person pronouns and twists verb tenses, building tension by suggesting that they're both dead or at least headed that way. That time-and-person slipstream is what binds the 10 tracks of Little Hells so well. Nadler mixes images of individuals in various stages of love and loss, often pairing them with imagery of death, decay, and rebirth.
What Nadler's done on Little Hells suggests Antony and the Johnson's work on one of the year's other accomplishments, The Crying Light. Hegarty too alternated between thoughts of giving up, getting out, or fighting back. To do that, he eschewed the guests of I Am a Bird Now, choosing to sing with himself through fascinating harmonies, vocal lines intersecting with one another in unexpected patterns. He also expanded his sound in unexpected directions while refining what he'd always done well-- luxuriously layered arrangements-- through subtlety and tension. Nadler does all of that on Little Hells, and-- like Antony-- she's transcended freak folk as a result.


The Chicago quartet’s debut is well-oiled and worn-in indie rock, played with the precision and confidence typically expected from a band much further along in its career.

Deeper

When Deerhunter released their seventh album, Fading Frontier, back in 2015, they capped a decade of genre shape-shifting with a record that sounded resolutely like themselves—a reminder that very few bands had even attempted replicating the band’s post-punk/dream-pop alchemy in the interim. Calgary outfit Women briefly garnered comparisons to Bradford Cox’s band, but following a hiatus and the death of guitarist Christopher Reimer, their regrouping as Preoccupations (fka Viet Cong) swapped hazy guitar tones and tape-hiss atmospherics for noisier, more brittle soundscapes; now, there’s Chicago quartet Deeper, whose short and sweet self-titled debut LP comes closer to evoking Deerhunter’s past-plundering sound than any other band in recent memory.
Despite the chiming guitar interplay splayed across the record, Deeper is not so much the result of a band trying to sound like other people as it is four musicians trying to find a sound that works for them. Deeper’s origins date back to 2014, when the dissolution of a previous iteration of the band resulted in the current members—singer/guitarist Nic Gohl, guitarist Mike Clawson, drummer Shiraz Bhatti, and bassist Drew McBride—holing up in search of a new identity. Clawson recently described the resulting album as “us frantically throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks,” but perhaps that description does Deeper a disservice. This is well-oiled and worn-in indie rock, played with the precision and confidence typically expected from a band much further along in its career.
Not counting the dreamlike centerpiece “Pavement,” most of Deeper moves at a steady speed, Bhatti’s timekeeping and Gohl and Clawson’s six-stringed assault contributing to the record’s just-right 26-minute runtime. Tracked in the band’s recording space and given a slight touch-up by Chicago mastering engineer and scene magnate Dave Vettraino, the record boasts an overall fidelity hovering somewhere between hissy claustrophobia and bracing clarity.
That sonic stasis suits Deeper’s nervy music quite well, especially when they slip into a brief squall of noise on the second half of “Should Be” and flip the chugging build of “Feels” several times over, increasing the intensity with every shift. Gohl’s vocals nicely round out Deeper’s web of sound, acting as a functional instrument and at times lending a distinctly punky attitude; his lyrics lean heavily on snapshot-sized imagery and the occasional evocation of paranoiac doubt, but you don’t have to focus too much on his words to grasp the mood—urgent, yet distinctly overcast—that Deeper conveys.
Overall, the record proves that Deeper have a solid grasp on one specific sound: guitar-centric indie rock with few frills or extroverted gestures to be found. As far as debuts go, its singularity of vision is commendable, but there are moments in which Deeper risks sounding a little samey. Opener “Pink Showers” and penultimate track “Taxi” hew closely to each other in terms of riffage and structure, but the album’s brevity moots most charges of homogeneousness. It’ll be interesting to see whether Deeper are able to establish a stronger sense of personality in their music going forward. Doing so will be necessary; the kind of music they make doesn’t always stand out to less discerning ears, a challenge many indie-rock bands past and present have faced while developing their own sound. For now, though, Deeper stands as a promising rock record possessing the kind of heat-drunk gloom that’s easy to blare on repeat after your air conditioner breaks down.


The most exciting strain of dance music the past 18 months, UK funky-- an offshoot of UK garage and grime-- finally gets a sprawling, solid introduction.

Ministry of Sound: The Sound of UK Funky

The Sound of UK Funky

UK funky has been the most exciting thing in dance music the past 18 months or so, but it nonetheless remains a tricky thing to pin down. After all, what is UK funky other than house music produced by Londoners? Sure, it's house produced by refugees from UK garage and grime looking to have a good time while bringing their sonic and stylistic baggage with them: But, well, so what? It's still just house, isn't it? But UK funky is both "just house" in its most conventional sense and also "other than house" in pretty much every manner that is worth pursuing. It's house at the point where house becomes rave, R&B, rap, dancehall, soca, and, a lot of the time, just manic percussion. But also, a lot of the time, just house.
All of which makes packaging this emerging genre a difficult proposition: UK Funky is like a magic eye picture, its startling multi-genre topography invisible to the naked eye until you discover, perhaps by accident, the right perspective from which to observe it. For many listeners, myself included, the right perspective was provided by the imposition of the MC. On a good radio set-- mixing fast and loose from one track to next, treating full-blown songs like they're functionalist riddims-- the MC confirms that the closest fit for funky's sensibility is dancehall: hence the obsessive focus on dance crazes, the trash'n'treasure opportunism of its sonic eclecticism, and, most importantly, the unlikely balancing act of its covalent relationship between vocal and groove, mouth and body.
In its overdue attempt to come to grips with UK funky, the Ministry of Sound stable was never going to allow an MC to spoil proceedings, if only because this might alienate listeners expecting a more conventional take on "funky house." Partly as a result, this slick 3xCD collection cannot capture the ravey excitement of a the best funky radio shows (so search, if you can, Mak 10 and MC Shantie's set for Deja Vu FM). But these reservations aside, Ministry of Sound Presents the Sound of UK Funky is about as good as anyone reasonably could have hoped.
Well, nearly: the mostly great first disc courtesy of Pioneer can drift into tepid territory at times, keen to remind you [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| of the music's roots in the more polite end of U.S. house. But the second and third discs, mixed by Footloose and Supa D respectively, are mostly spectacular. Of the two, Supa D gets the lion's share of current scene anthems, from Crazy Cousinz's peerless xylophone workout "Inflation" to the hyperactive electro-dancehall of Perempay & Dee's "Buss It" to the rippling but rough bongo fetishism of Fr3e's "Tribal Skank" (spoilt somewhat by the addition of a perfunctory and uninspired vocal). But if Supa D's set is strongest track-for-track, Footloose's set is the more enjoyable by a small margin, perhaps because it edges closer to portraying UK funky in its absolute best light.
Put this down to the irrepressible energy of Footloose's mixing, the way he impatiently jumps from one track to the next, or teases out transitions to create hybrid tracks where competing rhythms jut into one another like rotor blades. It also seems to be mixed slightly faster, giving snare-heavy tunes like Crazy Cousinz's remix of Kid Cudi vs Crookers' "Day 'N' Nite" or Tru's remix of Karizma's "Darqness" a steroidal muscularity they might lack at a more stately tempo. Funky's stumbling but cheerful rhythms seem primed to soundtrack alcohol consumption rather than drug use, but at their manic best these selections latch onto that fleeting moment at the very beginning of drunkenness, when enthusiasm and adrenalin bring on a rush of energy that's as dangerous as it is enjoyable.
What Footloose and Supa D's sets share is an almost perverse attraction to the genre's extremities: both take a childish delight in jumping from sweet vocal tunes to menacing percussive numbers and back again. So Footloose switches from the hyper-intense rave-soca of his remix of Brasstooth's "Celebrate Life" into the slinky Latin swish of Delio D'Cruz vs KCAT's "Get Off The Wall", all high-pitched vocals and shiveringly delicate beats, while Supa D overlays the sly R&B of L.A. Cartier's "Call Me" with a full minute of overbearing, clanking tribal drums from Bakongo's "Bambara".
But UK funky isn't solely about this kind of outer-edge gymnastics. Rounding out Supa D's disc, the driving piano stomp and yearning, ghostly male vocals of Fuzzy Logik's "The Way You Move" offer a simple, moving love letter to classicist early house, while closer "I Feel" by Nat-Mor is simply timeless, delectable vocal garage, its lush groove and stirring diva chorus temporarily making "other than house" seem like a pointless destination. It's not, but UK funky's fetish for transformation isn't pursued at the expense of remembering its origins, and the resulting conflation of past, present, and future offers the best of all possible worlds.


They share a label and lo-fi bent with groups like Vivian Girls, but Woods focus on a more pastoral and rustic vein of songcraft to beautiful effect.

Songs of Shame

Like many Woodsist Records alums-- the NYC-based label has also recently issued records by Vivian Girls, Wavves, Crystal Stilts, and Sic Alps-- Woods have spent much of their time together quickly earning respect and fans in underground rock circles. Unlike those previously mentioned groups, however, they've done it by exploring a more pastoral and rustic vein of songcraft rather than loft-ready noise. On their three previous albums-- released in limited editions on a variety of formats across a choice selection of micro-labels-- Woods created a distinctive blend of spooky campfire folk, lo-fi rock, homemade tape collages, and other noisy interludes, all anchored by deceptively sturdy melodies.
Woods' latest album, Songs of Shame, is their most cohesive collection, and it's not only quickly lifted them to front of the Woodsist crew but positioned them to be the group that appeals to those who've previously been uninterested in the 2008-09 crop of lo-fi. As with the best lo-fi albums, Songs of Shame performs some sleight-of-hand by sounding private and homespun yet also not just accessible but immediately lovable. Along the way, Woods can evoke any number of their lo-fi ancestors, from early Guided by Voices to the murkier depths of the Siltbreeze or Flying Nun back catalogs, but they're still able to retain their own immediately recognizable off-kilter character.
The group is centered primarily on the duo of Jeremy Earl (proprietor of Fuck It Tapes) and Jarvis Taveniere (Meneguar, Wooden Wand) and they've designed this record through an affinity for home recording and its attendant cassette culture. As befits an act with a somewhat befuddling discography, many of the recordings on Songs of Shame first appeared last fall on the tour cassette Some Shame. But even for the select few who've heard that release, these tracks have lost none of their charm. On the melodic "Down This Road" or "Born to Lose", Earl's vocals have a strange, slightly unhinged pitch, sounding something like a muffled Neil Young. Drums clatter in the distance as though buried behind drywall, and G. Lucas Crane occasionally adds discreet tape effects to the din. Meanwhile, forceful guitar solos zoom unpredictably in and out of the frame, hazily recalling a time when it seemed every band boasted at least one avid J Mascis aficionado.
Of course, it wouldn't be a Woods album without a few surprises. The most glaring example is the nine-minute guitar jam "September With Pete", which features a cameo from Magik Markers' Pete Nolan. Although the piece is solid and less jarring than some of Woods' past noise experiments, its position early on the LP somewhat dulls the album's momentum. Equally unexpected is another Some Shame holdover, a faithful cover of Graham Nash's "Military Madness", an earnest anti-war ditty that in Woods' hands sounds like Nash and Young strumming away in the treehouse while Crosby and Stills are forced to wait out in the car.
Mirroring the wistful tone of "Military Madness", the album closes with an especially potent trio of songs: "Rain On", "Gypsy Hand", and "Where and What Are You?". The melancholic "Rain On" in particular is a near-perfect dusky gem, underlining the album's subtle themes of loss and disaffection. Despite Woods' humble production values and their fondness for living room ambiance, Songs of Shame has that almost subliminal ability to make one want to move in to listen more closely. And once you've been drawn in for a good listen, it becomes difficult not to want to come back for many more.


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 Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno’s glam-rock, art-school masterpiece.

For Your Pleasure

Roxy Music singer and mastermind Bryan Ferry grew up in the sooty industrial North. His father tended to pit horses in the local mine in Washington, where the glum employment options for men were the mine or the steel factory. Roxy Music keyboardist and troublemaker Brian Eno grew up in rural eastern England, where his dad worked as a postman and augmented his meager salary by repairing clocks on the side. Both Ferry and Eno felt rat-trapped by an impermeable class system, perpetuating privilege for the wealthy legacy students at Eton and Harrow. Neither could have afforded college if not for England’s post-war education reforms.
Yes, the great flowering of British rock in the 1960s began, obscurely, with the 1944 Education Act. England’s schools had withered, due to years of German bombs in World War II, evacuations of children, and general neglect; a study found Dickensian conditions in village schools, more than half of which still used buckets as lavatories. Among the Education Act’s extensive reforms, two had impacts for the working class no one could have anticipated: Students were required to stay in school until they were 15 and school fees were eliminated, making British education free to all.
As part of this scheme, the Ministry of Education accredited more regional art schools and greatly loosened entry requirements. By the late 1950s, those schools had become havens for misfits, truants, and strays, financed by local and government grants available to anyone who could hold a paintbrush. Art school was “somewhere they put you if they can’t put you anywhere else,” Keith Richards (who studied graphic design at Sidcup Art College after being expelled from his secondary school) told Rolling Stone in 1971. Chris Dreja of the Yardbirds later classified his fellow art students as “buffoons and social drop-outs.”
Art schools were unruly outposts of free thinking, free drinking, and liberation. A few years ago, the artist Roy Ascott, whose students included Brian Eno and Pete Townshend, told me, “It was very releasing for students to come out of their horrific bourgeois backgrounds into an art school where they could fuck and drink and smoke.” And also learn to play guitar, all under a government subsidy.
Collectively, these schools had a transformative effect on England’s rock music. From the time the Beatles released their first UK single, “Love Me Do,” in October 1962 to the summer of 1973 when Queen and 10cc released their debut albums, nearly every significant English band had at least one member who’d gone to art school: the Beatles, the Who, the Kinks, the Yardbirds, the Animals, the Jeff Beck Group, Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Deep Purple, and Roxy Music, plus David Bowie and Eric Clapton. Of these artists, Roxy Music is the one that most directly translated the radical, emancipating ideas of art-school into pop music. And For Your Pleasure, released in 1973, is their most art-school album, as well as their greatest.
During an unsuccessful, dispiriting U.S. tour for Roxy’s debut album the previous year, they shared a few bills with Humble Pie, whose up-tempo boogie incited Ferry to write For Your Pleasure’s most raucous songs, “Do the Strand” (the album’s lone single) and “Editions of You,” models for the ferocity of punk rock. Both songs pledge themselves to the moment: “In modern times, the modern way,” Ferry trills in the latter, and in the former, which opens the album, he begins, “There’s a new sensation.” In “Editions of You,” a song about the beauty of pining for someone long gone, Ferry builds a chilly metaphor for love out of mechanical reproduction and Andy Warhol’s silkscreened paintings.
Ferry had studied at Newcastle University under England’s preeminent Pop Art painter and theorist, Richard Hamilton, who compelled his students to consider fashion, pop music, industrial design, TV, comic books, and other dismissed aspects of lowbrow culture. Hamilton was working largely in collages, most famously in his 1956 work, “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?” where he uses images of American consumerism, clipped from magazines. Hamilton regarded a painting, not as a canvas, but a mood board, an array of inspirations and goals that could as easily clash as blend together. Ferry applied this idea to Roxy’s music, which careened across the past and into what still feels like the future. “Editions of You” jump-cuts from Andy Mackay’s 1950s R&B sax invocations to a madcap, pitch-bending synthesizer solo by Eno, who torques the synth’s frequency control to create what he later approvingly termed “quite unpalatable noises.”
Hamilton’s influence was so significant that he later, a bit grandly, called Ferry “my greatest creation.” The most tangible residue of his influence is “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” Ferry’s macabre, hilarious love song to a blowup sex doll, referring back to Hamilton’s “Just what is it...?” collage. The song is a two-part essay about interiors and illusions—there are glimpses of modern sophistication, but behind it, only horror. “But what goes on?/What to do there?/Better pray there,” Ferry sings, gazing in awe at a mansion. Then the façade cracks. After three minutes of transfixing melodrama and funereal organ, the music stops asymmetrically on the one, and Phil Manzanera takes a staggered guitar solo, chalked with distortion, shaking with vibrato, and phase-shifted through Eno’s signature electronic treatments. Perhaps, the song implies, the modern way is not the best way.
In a 1960 lecture, Hamilton said, “In its efforts to gain and hold the affections of the mass audience, a product must aim to project an image of desirability as strong as any Hollywood star. It must have gloss and glamor...” Everything is a product, he believed, including fine art. So Roxy Music was one of the first groups who understood that music is a product in need of a package, a mission that began with their carefully constructed album covers, which are like advertisements for the male gaze. For Your Pleasure was released as a gleaming gatefold, in a blue-black hue, showing a statuesque model (Amanda Lear) in tight black leather, walking a panther, silhouetted by a gleaming urban skyline, while a smiling Ferry, dressed like a chauffeur, waits next to a limo. It was an enthralling, modern image of desirability, danger, sexual satisfaction, and luxe living, a tableau as posed and planned as a fashion magazine spread of Helmut Newton photos. Like a lot of rock, the cover offers adolescents a misleading fantasy of what adult life is like.
Throughout the album, the band is puffed up with ideas, and desperate to make an impression. Ferry summarizes his passions for artifice and postmodern thought in manifestos: “Part false, part true, like anything/We present ourselves,” he sings in a theatrical baritone that recalls, at various times, Noël Coward and Dracula. For Your Pleasure is happily pretentious and self-involved, the juncture where glam and prog meet with the greatest degree of success. Glam steals from prog’s song lengths and love of soloing, and prog swipes glam’s exclamation marks and sex appeal.
Ferry was drawn to the anxious, feminine side of R&B, evident on the album’s most retro moment, “Beauty Queen,” which the band bookends into a salmagundi of a song, complete with tempo changes navigated by stalwart drummer Paul Thompson. Ferry is dumping a woman who has “swimming pool eyes,” but it sounds more like he’s pitching woo. He lavishes her with purple praise, promises she’ll be fine without him, and carefully lathers his words with his heaviest Scott Walker vibrato. Ferry, with his fondness for dualities, uses theatricality and even camp to prove his sincerity, implying that everything make-believe is also real, and vice versa.
For Your Pleasure’s two longest songs, “The Bogus Man” and the album-closing title track, leave plenty of time for Eno’s deviations. This first sketches out a musical design for trance, years ahead of it, with a long, minimalist break that confirms Eno’s mantra, “Repetition is a form of change.” Each instrument mutates, minutely transmogrified, on some mysterious cycle. On “For Your Pleasure,” Ferry makes only a brief vocal appearance. Over the last four and a half minutes, producer Chris Thomas and Eno are playing the recording studio as though it’s an instrument, conducting the song at a mixing board, and building a panoramic disorientation. They add more echo on the electric piano, more reverb on the guitar, phasing, tremolo, the drums slip away, and it gently becomes hazy and puzzling: Chopped-up bits of “Chance Meeting” from Roxy’s first album come in—Roxy are sampling themselves—then Judi Dench murmurs, “You don’t ask why,” and almost randomly, la fin. An album that began with Ferry’s request for your attention ends with Eno placing you in the strange new world you were promised. A new sensation has delivered new sensations of arousal and uncertainty.
Roxy aimed for a melding of American R&B and avant-garde European traditions (Mackay’s oboe on “For Your Pleasure” sounds like the last thing you’d hear before bees stung you to death). You don’t hear a struggle between Ferry and Eno, just two guys with similar ideas and a band juiced on its early success and acclaim, trying to get farther from earth while still holding on to the Marvelettes and the Shirelles. The playing is so adept and surprising, and Thompson and Manzanera do such strong jobs of grounding the music’s outlandish shifts, that you only slowly realize none of the album’s eight songs has a chorus.
A few months after For Your Pleasure was released, Eno left the band, quitting before he could be fired, and starting an unparalleled career as a solo artist and producer. Bryan and Brian were incompatible. Ferry was a neurotic—Woody Allen trapped in the body of Cary Grant—while Eno was a disruptor. In interviews, Ferry withdrew like a turtle; Eno excelled at them, and talked fluidly about Marshall McLuhan, Steve Reich, or his ample pornography collection. Eno most avidly pursued the band’s androgynous style, and dressed like he was Quentin Crisp’s glam nephew (leopard print top, ostrich feather jacket, bondage choker, turquoise eye shadow). Out of the chute, he was a cult hero, and Ferry grew tired of hearing punters yell “EEEEEE-NO!” in the middle of ballads, or seeing Eno credited as his co-equal.
The music had no immediate impact in the U.S., where it grazed the album chart at number 193. The band’s two-album deal with Warner Bros. had expired and the label happily left them go. American audiences, Ferry told a British interviewer, “are literally the dumbest in the world, bar none.”
But in England, it was the album of the moment, and Roxy returned to TV’s Old Grey Whistle Test, where Whispering Bob Harris, a stodgy presenter who was still stuck in the ’60s, sneered at them, as he had the previous year as well, dismissing them as great packaging with no substance.
The notion that style and substance were contradictory was a holdover from the ’60s, and it’s one that has never gone away, revived periodically by fans and critics who long for seeming authenticity. Years later, those Roxy TV appearances would start to feel almost as significant as the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Harris’ contempt was recommendation enough for lots of kids, of myriad genders and sexualities, who would soon come to Roxy shows dressed in sparkling tunics, glowing frocks, and immaculate dinner jackets, boys and girls both in drag. But glamor and self-invention were only part of the aftereffect: Within the next few years, plenty of future punks and new wavers went on to art school, where they immediately started acting, dressing, and playing like Roxy Music.

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For almost two decades, Dawn Richard has been increasingly beholden to nothing but her own satisfaction as an independent artist. Her sixth album is a decadent testament to her maturation.

Dawn Richard: Second Line: An Electro Revival

Second Line: An Electro Revival

From her 2005 debut Been a While to her singing competition days on Making the Band 3, Dawn Richard has been making music for almost 20 years. After her pop group Danity Kane’s dissolution in 2009, she was the only member not let go from her contract with Bad Boy, where all five members had been originally signed. That same year, she joined Diddy-Dirty Money alongside the group’s namesake and singer/songwriter Kalenna Harper. In less than two years, they recorded an album, Last Train to Paris, plus two mixtapes before going the route of DK and disbanding in 2012. Since then, Richard’s trajectory as an independent artist has involved balancing artistic freedom alongside financial restraints. Her sixth album Second Line is a testament to her musical maturation.
With its 16 tracks that blur the lines between song, spoken word, and short stories, Second Line is a continuation of an avant-garde musicality born from the place Richard calls home and where she returned after her pop career stalled. Conceptually, the album takes from the New Orleans tradition of parade revelers gathering to dance, mourn, or celebrate. Whatever the occasion, music is constant, and so is the idea of being an individual within the crowd—you move as a unit while keeping your own pace. Jazz is the most known accompaniment; and yet in a Second Line, you’ll also hear an eclectic fusion of funk, hip-hop, soul, and blues.
Second Line is a synth-heavy record that makes liberal use of frequency and vocal modulations, evoking very human insecurities with the steady manipulations of modern tech. The album is couched in house beats, a geographically malleable force that can transport you to a club in New Orleans, a party in Johannesburg, or a beach in Salvador. It could work as a companion piece to Solange’s 2019 album When I Get Home, in the way it connects threads of Black migration that first brought travelers to New Orleans. Aside from their meditations on belonging, both artists’ solo careers expanded the limits of what it means to be a Black woman bending multiple genres. “Nostalgia” is light on lyrics yet brimming with cleverly arranged melodies and Richard’s voice freely bouncing over the beats. “Bussifame” goes from grime to R&B to the unmistakable sounds of percussion rooted in the familiar rhythms of the Black diaspora, all in less than five minutes. On “Pressure,” her voice hangs over a heavy bass intro that builds into a danceable midpoint. “Oh, I really think it’s time/For us to bump and grind/Ride the pony Ginuwine,” she croons.
A little-known fact about Richard is that she has a deep passion for anime (the name Danity Kane came from an anime character she drew), with its empowered female characters who are as lethal as they are tender-hearted. But rarely are they Black, as her album cover depicts, yet that has not deterred Richard’s love for the art form; it’s instead compelled her to lend her efforts to animation via her work with Adult Swim. All this to say that the absence of Black faces and Black women in spaces that interest her has not stopped Richard from going in headfirst. Like other Black women who didn’t plan on being pioneers, she’s become part of the genesis out of a sheer need to not be boxed in.
Throughout Second Line, a female narrator pops in to converse with Richard. It’s only on “Mornin | Streetlights” that we realize the woman is her mother. When asked how many times she’s been in love, her mother responds, “One time. Your father.” Richard’s tone is languorous on this two-sided track—on the first half, “Mornin,” her mood is sensual, Urban Hang Suite-reminiscent; on “Streetlights,” it’s moody, dark, and pounding. Her choice to transition from the early sunny outlook of “Mornin” to the overcast end of “Streetlights” is, like the rest of the album, a gesture towards the range of human emotions.
Love stories are often sentimental, but they’re also turbulent—sometimes all at once, with the same person. “Le Petit Morte” takes Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” and turns the already mournful composition into a ballad for the brokenhearted. “I’ve been battered and bruised/I’m too good to be this used,” Richard offers as a lamentation. It’s not just about asking to be treated nicely; it costs infinitely less to be nice than it does to be good. Niceness is transactional, where goodness is labor. It’s that under-appreciated emotional exertion that Richard harnesses on the song to express love and survival after pain.
Scattered through the album, these intermissions are as vocally revelatory as her longer singles. “Voodoo” and “Pilot” are held together by the agility in her tone that goes from low, steady rhymes to soaring pop intros. Their presence highlights that Richard was luxurious with her time when making the record. She would not be rushed, she’d slow down if the mood called for it, and she’d muse for 58 seconds if the moment was ripe for reflection. The beats are decadent, but so too are the liberties she takes as an independent artist beholden to nothing but her own satisfaction.
Richard continues to make music that bears a resemblance to multi-faceted artists like Justine Skye and Teyana Taylor. All three have been signed to record labels run by men who’ve not quite figured out how to best support some of the most talented artists on their rosters. Whenever Skye drops new music, fans decry the lack of promotion, and Taylor has walked away from the industry after vocalizing frustration over the label’s treatment of her and getting “little to no real push from the ‘machine.’” That “machine” is the music industry and all its flexible conventions in many ways but archaic in others. When it comes to the latter, it’s artists like Richard, whose music cannot be easily packaged or defined, that fall victim to the stagnant framework. But on Second Line, she’s choosing to do it the NOLA way, making her own rhythms and moving at her own pace.

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Stevie Knipe’s third LP builds layered arrangements and a renewed sense of confidence without sacrificing the earnest, confessional vulnerability of their songwriting.

Driver

To drive is to be in control while accepting there is nothing you can control. On Adult Mom’s Driver, self-doubt almost sends Stevie Knipe spinning out in the aftermath of a breakup. But with wry, intimate lyrics and jangly electric guitar, they wrest back control to celebrate small, precious triumphs amid the trauma of everyday life. The effect is both cathartic and dazzling, like the high you feel on your way out of a really good therapy session.
Knipe writes lyrics so honest they border on awkward, capturing the often embarrassing everyday minutiae of depression and soul-crushing capitalism. “I am isolating, I get my communication/From an overdue hospital bill,” they sing softly on “Breathing,” over phased synthesizer and Olivia Battell’s staccato drum beat, before Allegra Eidinger’s guitar interrupts and Knipe calls up a wistful soprano that brings to mind Imogen Heap’s “Goodnight and Go.” Their revealing lyrics establish trust: They’re not trying to come off as anything but totally honest.
A knack for storytelling that feels real, even when it’s unflattering, is the cornerstone of Adult Mom’s music. If their first album, 2015’s Momentary Lapse of Happily, was intimate as a dorm-room performance, Driver feels bigger, like it’s performed from a stage. Knipes uses the emotional force of their suffering to propel expansive, layered arrangements that make room for head-bobbing melodies, chilly synths, and guitar solos. Even “Passenger,” a cozy, melancholy ballad whose guitar strums and close harmonies recall First Aid Kit, has a sense of urgency.
Regaining control is rarely a linear path; it comes with ugly setbacks, which Knipe articulates with the cathartic levity of the dog who says “this is fine.” That levity is perhaps best exemplified in the surfy daze of “Dancing”: “I’m dancing to/The song I crashed my car to,” they sing, a Russian doll of a lyric that opens to reveal trauma within triumph, joy within tragedy. “Sober” addresses an ex-lover with trademark candor: “The only thing that I’ve done/This month is drink beer and masturbate, and ignore phone calls from you/What else am I supposed to do.” A jaunty drum-machine beat and minimal keys provide a canvas for Knipe’s clear vocals, which glide easily from speaking to singing, giving the song a confessional quality. It ends with a victory that hits like a punchline: “Now I don’t even think of you when I am sober.”
“Adam” notches another victory: making it to the other side of anxieties around queerness. On “Told Ya So,” from Momentary Lapse of Happily, Knipe sounded more tentative, setting lyrics about shame and self-acceptance to understated rhythm guitar. On “Adam,” they turn the dial up, punctuating the song with juicy, Guitar Hero-worthy riffs. “I see the girl I want to kiss/But I’m not sure if she wants to kiss/But at least I can ask without feeling like shit,” they sing, with a nervousness and excitement that seemingly allows them to fit 30 syllables into one breath.
Regaining agency amid heartbreak, depression, and loneliness is often messy, and just when it feels like you’re finally on your way, you trip and fall. But coming back to yourself doesn’t have to mean remaking your whole life; healing happens both in celebrating the triumphs—like asking the girl if she wants to kiss, or not drinking the beer—and in cataloguing the messiness. Driver succeeds because Knipe is able to do both.

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The R&B star has described the Rated R sessions as "theraputic," and the vitriolic, rough, raw end product is about as brutal as you'd expect.

Rated R

There was an exact moment when Rihanna stopped being a milquetoast pop automaton and started to establish a persona unto herself. It wasn't "Umbrella"; however ubiquitous, that megasmash's most meaningful and believable utterances-- "ella, ella, eh, eh, eh"-- meant nothing. It wasn't February 8, 2009, when Chris Brown beat her with enough force to warrant a 50-yard, three-year restraining order; though that incident and its aftermath informs most of Rated R. And it wasn't her piercing, uncomfortable, and ultimately valiant interview with Diane Sawyer, where she embraced her role as de facto domestic violence spokesperson with a level-headed understanding far beyond her 21 years.
On 2008's no. 1 single "Take a Bow", Rihanna blew off a philandering numbskull and delivered her most realistic performance to date. When she scoffed "please" at the whimpering chump 43 seconds into the track, she officially put the ice queen routine behind her and entered the realm of full-blooded pop stars. (Her newly severe, emo-boy-esque haircut seen in the song's video did not hurt, either.) "Take a Bow" was witty, funny, and as full of attitude as kiss offs come, and Rihanna definitely sounded like she was having fun with the imagined breakup. Fallouts mark Rated R as well, though they are decidedly heavier. Over the course of the album, Rihanna puts a revolver to her temple on "Russian Roulette", recalls "white outlines" on "Cold Case Love", and even threatens to crash head-on into a boyfriend on "Fire Bomb"-- not exactly the most politically correct metaphor in the age of IEDs, but it does get her point across. In a recent interview, Rihanna described the Rated R recording sessions as "theraputic," and the vitriolic, rough, raw end product is about as brutal as you'd expect.
The brutality comes in two modes: sentimentally self-lacerating and superhero defiance. The bulletproof guise is good for the record's high point on "Hard", a strutting statement of power bolstered by a roiling undertow of a beat from "Umbrella" producer Tricky Stewart. "Brilliant/ Resilient/ Fan mail from 27 million," huffs Rihanna, slyly acknowledging the need for such an anthem while justifying its existence. The similarly chest-thumping "Rockstar 101" and "G4L" are harder to justify considering their mindless boasts and torpid production. The more melodramatic fare is also mixed. For every "Fire Bomb"-- a stunningly overzealous power ballad Pink would blow shit up for-- there's something like the actually-quite-dim "Stupid in Love" or the lost-in-translation lesbian farce "Te Amo", both of which aim for Almodóvar but end up closer to Telemundo.
The ballads also suffer due to the fact that they require singing-- which still isn't Rihanna's forte (tellingly, aforementioned highlight "Hard" is a near-rap with single-syllable "yeahs" for a hook). The strumming "Photographs" comes replete with teary-eyed remembrances ("all I've got are these photographs") and a hint of poignant anachronism-- after all, most photos are a "delete" button away from nothingness nowadays. On the track, Rihanna is more wounded than ever, her voice offering as-yet-unheard levels of tenderness. Then, just as her sorrow peaks, the track is sunk by an infuriatingly tone-deaf and goofy verse from producer will.i.am, who can be a real asshole. It's a frustrating moment from an album pockmarked with them.
Like its lyrical themes, Rated R's tones are decidedly darker than anything Rihanna's done; notably, UK dubstep producers Chase & Status provide production on a few tracks, marking a U.S. pop breakthrough for the bass-riddled genre. Specifically, the undercooked-yet-alluring "Wait Your Turn" shows promise for future dubstep crossovers, and the loping style matches Rihanna's dourness for better and worse (see: the cartoonish tough-chick clunker "G4L"). Canned rock flourishes turn "Rockstar 101" [ft. Slash], "Russian Roulette", and "The Last Song" into instantly-dated missteps from a bygone era when a Slash feature was cool. The Stargate-produced "Rude Boy" is the flightiest thing here, a club trifle that would fit snugly on 2007's Good Girl Gone Bad. It also trumps much of the album's "riskier" material.
Talking about Rated R in a promo interview, Rihanna said, "Anybody can make a hit, but I wanted a real album." Such is the flawed logic of a newly legal drinker who has known only skyrocketing commercial success. While the singer is trying to accentuate her individuality and independence with this album, the "dark" and/or "mature" LP is nothing new-- from Janet Jackson's The Velvet Rope to Christina Aguilera's Stripped to Kelly Clarkson's My December, the rebel record is now a de rigeur coming-of-age maneuver. Based on Rated R, Rihanna's artistic aspirations are currently loftier than her abilities. Then again, her tenacity in the face of the unimaginable public humiliation this year is beyond brave. For a while, Rihanna lacked a compelling narrative but couldn't yawn without hitting the Top 10. Now her story is overflowing, but her songs aren't sticking as they once did. Not just anybody can make a hit, and no one can make hits all the time.


The New Mexico musician’s second album has no shouts, no sudden guitar outbursts, no startling tom thwacks. Instead, she layers arrangements so thick it feels like you could lie down in them.

Petrichor

The second solo album by the New Mexico musician Heather Trost is composed largely of overlapping synthesizers, sumptuous bands of them that glow like Rothko paintings. Out of this undulating field of sound, her cool voice emerges, often near-swallowed by the arrangements so that you don’t hear as much as overhear her. Trost has played violin in Beirut, and she’s one-half of the trad-folk duo A Hawk and a Hacksaw with her husband (and Neutral Milk Hotel drummer) Jeremy Barnes, but her solo work seems to arrive from someplace entirely separate—late-’90s Chicago, maybe, around the post-rock boom, circa Stereolab’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup.
There are no surface-piercing noises on Petrichor—no shouts, no sudden guitar outbursts, no startling tom thwacks. All of the edges are rounded, smooth, all the colors bright, evoking in their curves the kind modernist structures designed to lull rather than stimulate your senses—picture a long, empty airport terminal. The priority is the glossy, lulling surface, and listening to it occasionally replicates the pleasant dissociative tingle of transatlantic travel.
Trost sings evenly and with an appealing clarity but little emotion, letting her voice tangle with the various layers of sound until it’s just another signal on the switchboard. Over the two-note chime of opening track “Let It In,” she chants the title quietly in singsong thirds, sounding more like someone singing under their breath to themselves than someone trying to communicate with the outside world. The melody wanders in intriguingly wayward paths, but the song never reaches out its hand, despite the title. Like Kevin Parker, Trost seems to wander around inside the cavernous confines of her own music like its sole inhabitant, a pair of fat headphones insulating her from the clamor of the outside world.
Also like Parker, she has a stunning ear for arrangements, and on Petrichor she specializes in the kind that are so many layers deep it feels like you could lie down in them. With its buzzing psychedelic guitar tones and rolling drums, “Love It Grows” initially sounds like a pretty straightforward Jefferson Airplane homage. But Trost thickens the arrangement with so many moving parts that by the end it’s less song than labyrinth, containing three or four possible versions of itself. You could follow a different melody line each time through.
As she did on her first album, she offers a Harry Nilsson cover. On 2017’s Agistri, it was “Me and My Arrow,” from 1970’s The Point! Here, it is a rendition of “Jump Into the Fire,” from 1971’s Nilsson Schmilsson. “Jump Into the Fire” has been covered many times, and is a naturally boisterous song—the original is nearly overwhelmed by a solo from two drum kits that sounds like the sky has opened up and started raining shoes. Trost turns its wild-eyed attack into a sleepy pulse, Nilsson’s frantic vocal take into a jump-rope melody. In her version, the words “you’ll never be free” sound almost comforting, a reminder that there are truths more eternal than our own desires. Trost’s music radiates this sort of impersonal benevolence, and the further she retreats into her lush, impenetrable arrangements, the more you want to follow her.

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Steve Gunn and John Truscinski's first album as a duo touches on folk, psych, raga, and rock, turning each into hypnotic guitar pieces.

Sand City

Sand City is Steve Gunn and John Truscinski's first album as a duo, but it sounds like they've been playing together for a while. Technically, they have-- both are members of the New York outfit GHQ, alongside Pete Nolan of Magik Markers and Marcia Bassett of Double Leopards. But their two-man guitar-drums project has been going only for about a year. In that short time, they've honed a remarkably confident, open sound. They mix touches of folk, psych, raga, and rock into hypnotic pieces that straddle the line between improvisation and songcraft.
None of that should be a surprise to anyone familiar with Gunn, whose 2009 solo album, Boerum Palace, was a masterwork of guitar exploration. Flying through finger-picked blues, country twang, and wiry electric essays, Gunn mined many traditions while adding a new touch to each. It would be tempting to guess that record's diversity was a product of doing it himself, but Sand City shows his wide-ranging style can also mesh tightly with a collaborator. On all four tracks, his string wizardy snakes through and wraps around Truscinski's drumming, as if the two had discovered a secret ability to silently trade thoughts and rhyme ideas.
Calling their conversations telepathic might be overdoing it, but there is a magic, almost psychic quality to these songs. Maybe it's just the way the duo approaches raga, with a loose, intuitive sense that's somewhere between Jack Rose's solo mediations (themselves inspired by John Fahey) and the Sun City Girls' reverent adoptions of Eastern melodies. The best example is the album's longest track, the 13-minute "Wythe Raag", which starts like a sunrise over a temple, gradually building to a sonic epiphany. As Gunn's electric guitar climbs up Truscinski's mallet-heavy steps, I'm reminded of John Coltrane and Rashied Ali's intertwining prayers on their 1967 LP, Interstellar Space. It's obviously way too early to put this pair in that class, but the fact that they even bring such reference points to mind is impressive.
Either way, reducing Sand City to comparisons or influences is unfair. Gunn and Truscinki's conversations, like any good musical dialogue, are marked primarily by the unique idiosyncrasies of their particular speech. It will be interesting to see where they take their discussion next-- Sand City is only 31 minutes long, and you get the sense that the pair could make reams more music like this without repeating themselves much, if at all.