On his fourth solo album, Jack Antonoff and his band keep writing their own version of the rock’n’roll myth. It’s clever, empathetic, and still a bit clunky.

Bleachers

Put the new Bleachers record on for a friend and they might be floored: Do the National have another record out? On the opening track “I Am Right on Time,” the similarities are uncanny: the jut-jaw baritone, the cryptic profundities, the modest motorik pulse driving an illusion of endless ascension. In time, though, the millennial touches of Jack Antonoff reveal themselves: a sense of shared disillusion (“Our ballroom bliss/Counterfeit, under-extended”), a stray “whoo!” in the background. Even the downers on a Bleachers record can feel like a party might break out.
Antonoff and his crew are still trying to answer the plea from the last album’s title. There, Bleachers’ best grooves were tied up in stadium-made swirl. It was a world where Talking Heads headlined Live Aid: the quirks vanished at scale. But on Bleachers—especially on the singles-heavy first half—the band is simply playing for each other, much to the songs’ benefit. “Jesus Is Dead” is a dispatch from New York that wistfully namechecks Longwave and the venerated dance-punk label DFA, but the track moves with the economy of prime Strokes; instead of cresting on some post-punk swell, Antonoff dials up a dual-sax solo. They play the rapid-fire list song “Modern Girl”—think “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” crossed with “Dancing in the Dark,” but listenable—with the verve and cross-stage winks of a seasoned bar band.
But most bar bands aren’t fronted by a three-time Grammy-winning Producer of the Year. Jack big-ups a couple of the boys on “Modern Girl,” a nice gesture if a little low-effort; later, when someone yells “fuck off!” after Antonoff puts some “venue herbs” on blast, it lands with the dutifulness of an employee posting a positive Glassdoor review. As with any of Antonoff’s A-list production jobs, the Bleachers project is as much mythological as personal. So when an actual A-lister—Lana Del Rey, who’s mastered both of those dimensions—shows up to duet on “Alma Mater,” he goes for broke. The pair race down the Jersey Turnpike, screaming about Balenciaga, fake-crying to Tom Waits, throwing shirts out the window. The result is surprisingly blissful: cocooned in a puttering sophistipop arrangement that recalls Antonoff’s recent work with the 1975, Jack and Lana luxuriate in the chaos.
Those hijinks aside, the fourth Bleachers record marks a conscious shift in subject matter. Previous albums drew from the unimaginable loss of Antonoff’s younger sister to brain cancer. Even at his most life-affirming, there was a mania familiar to anyone who’s endured something similar. Now he’s trying something different. “I’m not numb to the pain,” says skate legend-turned-motivational speaker Rodney Mullen at the end of the sweetly desperate ballad “Ordinary Heaven,” as Jack mutters along. “I would argue I’m more conscious of it than anyone else. But I’m also more conscious of what that gives me.” “Ordinary Heaven,” like the album’s outlook as a whole, takes inspiration from Antonoff’s wife, the actor Margaret Qualley. She makes a left-channel cameo on “Call Me After Midnight,” an adult-contemporary R&B strutter that exchanges one Bruce for another (Hornsby). Co-produced by Kevin Abstract and Romil Hemnani, the song is Antonoff at his best: chameleonic, tender, and casually grandiose. “They don’t want you, they want your faith,” he howls at the climax. Then he cuts himself off to answer the door.
Antonoff is famous for beginning a co-write by asking, essentially, “What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” His newfound domesticity has disrupted that process: a number of these songs are basically him rubbing his eyes in moony disbelief. The devotional acoustic number “Woke Up Today”—which recalls Joni Mitchell in its dulcimer-like tone and its evocation of the “holy surreal”—bridges grief and joy. “Me Before You” borrows the smolder of mid-’90s Springsteen for a portrait of the producer in drift (“Crossfade in the dark/Have a smoke”); On the compact, lovestruck “Tiny Moves,” Bleachers change into their reception-band duds, yawping as a group until a Disney orchestra pops up in the final minute.
It can feel like a bit much, or perhaps not enough. In a recent viral interview with the L.A. Times, Antonoff teed off on the idea that his good friend and occasional client Taylor Swift doesn’t write her own material, comparing it to “challenging someone’s faith in God.” But even the omnipotent Swift wouldn’t risk referencing “wires” in six different songs. Having shelved their musical fireworks, Bleachers’ lyrical clunkers (“The muddled and the modern/Will pull you down a size”) echo all the louder. The fluttering, deliberate “Self-Respect” is a defense of messiness that, in rhyming “the day that Kendall Pepsi smiled” with “the day that Kobe fell from the sky,” truly walks the talk. (With “Batter after batter/I couldn’t play ball,“ “Jesus saves and Bubba scores,” and “Call it American football chic/Breakin’ your neck for no reason,” Bleachers goes 0-for-4 on sports references.)
Antonoff fares better when he’s talking shop, whether drawing from Swift’s arsenal of counterattacks (“I guess I’m New Jersey’s finest New Yorker/Unreliable reporter/Pop music hoarder”) or undergoing ego death (“A teenage girl just sized me up/It’s something I don’t wanna discuss”). Antonoff has spent years assembling a sort of doomsday empathy machine. Now he’s trying to retool it on the fly. Approaching his 40s at the pinnacle of his profession, the Jersey-boy underdog scrappiness that fueled him may be in shorter supply. But he’s got a deep bench of collaborators, a goldmine of capital, and an emotional breakthrough to explore. All that could make for one hell of a party.


Live at the Music Hall, a three-LP, career-crossing set from Phosphorescent, was recorded during a four-night stand at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn after the release of 2013’s Muchacho. On it, Matthew Houck strives to overcome the official live release format's high potential for emptiness.

Live at the Music Hall

Of all rock 'n' roll’s tropes and traditions, is the official live album the most meaningless? There's a certain we-made-it hubris to it, an assumption that people not only care enough to see you perform but that they wish to relive the experience in the privacy of their own homes, too. It’s not enough to simply press "Record" and play: If you’re going to issue an onstage set, you’d better make sure that the band behind you is rehearsed, that your catalog is fit to be culled, and that every factor in the room, from the amplifiers to the engineer capturing it all, is ready to be immortalized.
What’s more, the band had better be prepared to be more than a mere traveling karaoke machine. If they can’t add some new element or interpretation to the tunes, why bother with a two-dimensional reproduction of something that happened in front of a three-dimensional audience? This troublesome sub-category has produced some incredible and urgent records, but during the past five decades, it has also built a monumental morass of between-album stopgaps, a wasteland of records that mostly remind you a band you like still exists. Live records, then, can be as functionally unnecessary as the carbon filler used to turn virgin vinyl black—there to keep up appearances, if little else.
Live at the Music Hall, an exhaustive hour-and-a-half, three-LP, career-crossing set from Phosphorescent, falls somewhere in between these extremes. Recorded during a four-night stand at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn nine months after the release of 2013’s Muchacho, the album attempts to meet the extra pressures of the official live format. Surrounded by a six-piece that features drums and auxiliary percussion, stopping for an intimate solo acoustic section, and adding a string quartet on "Song for Zula", Matthew Houck works to turn Live at the Music Hall into more than a mere document of another gig. The band recharges "Dead Heart", an old organ-and-acoustic dirge, with the neon-light electricity of Crazy Horse. They turn up the volume for a closing 10-minute version of "Los Angeles", where Houck screams and the drummer rolls and the pianist pounds until the air of desolation becomes an exorcism. And they amplify the space-cowboy glee of "Ride On/Right On", with Houck smiling audibly through the playful wah-wah pedal and calypso organ.
But the six-piece around Houck is more competent than combustible, a quality that’s long made Phosphorescent a good band to see for a 90-minute show but not one that makes you need to take them home. Phosphorescent was, for years, a crew powered by instability, where players would fall into and out of a fold that clearly belonged to the frontman. And no matter how many people ended up playing on them, his records were at their best when they read like personal transmissions, confessions delivered during the dead of night or from the bottom of a bottle. In recent years, though, Phosphorescent has somewhat codified its lineup, with anchors like Ricky Ray Jackson on guitar, Christopher Marine on drums and Scott Stapleton supporting with piano and harmonies. They’re all here. Still, these 19 songs make it clear that Phosphorescent remains Houck’s act. The players are there to support the songs, not to rearrange them. As a result, the musicians sometimes feel hemmed in, leashed. "A New Anhedonia" is heavier and more indulgent than the Muchacho take, but it mostly scans like the studio version sans its subtle flourishes. "Terror in the Canyons (The Wounded Master)", which follows, suffers the same problem. As if aware of the stasis, Houck screams the final chorus, his voice cracking in an uncontrolled eruption. For a singer who can make even the most tortured feelings sound like small talk, it’s a rare error of overexertion.
Indeed, the star here remains the same that it’s been for much if not all of Phosphorescent’s discography—Houck’s voice, a beautifully idiosyncratic instrument full of cracks and bumps and bruises that have always made his words feel lived-in and real. During the set’s three-song solo stretch, he’s in stunning form, whether condensing and distending the syllables in lithe little runs during "A Picture of Our Torn Up Praise" or harmonizing with himself and a loop pedal for the sublime close of "Wolves". During an organ-abetted rendition of "Muchacho’s Tune", he brilliantly renders the helplessness and hope of the song’s protagonist. He murmurs about being fucked up and being a fool, his voice in shambles. But then he strenghtens his tone subtly, and by verse’s end, he sounds the signal of his own redemption: “I’ll fix myself up to come and be with you.” The transition gives the familiar song a fresh layer of vulnerability. He's just as poignant leading the band through a full version of "Wolves", too, adding just enough soul-singer gusto to suggest abandon without losing control.
Phosphorescent has always indulged popular music’s great referential gestures.  In 2009, that meant naming and recording a Willie Nelson tribute album in the same way Nelson had done for his own hero, Lefty Frizzell. In 2013, it meant using introductions and reprises to bookend Muchacho, a quick nod to concept albums. The spirits of Houck’s inspirations have always been a vital part of his music, too, linking his work to a strange but specific arc of predecessors that includes Will Oldham and Willie Nelson, Brian Eno and Sandy Denny, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen. The live album, then, seems inevitable for Phosphorescent, another tradition-steeped move in a career rich with them. It’s obvious that Houck has studied how these things should go, the requisite features that bind the best ones. At points, he even gets there, but most of those successes don’t require a six-piece band, a string quartet or a three-LP set. They just require these songs, that voice and a little air to breathe.


Shelved for decades and now finally released in full, Wings’ 1974 Abbey Road sessions are intimate and exploratory, showcasing a seldom heard, anything-goes side of the former Beatle.

Paul McCartney / Wings: One Hand Clapping

One Hand Clapping

It took 52 years and an eight-hour docuseries to confirm that the recording sessions for the Beatles’ Let It Be weren’t exactly the miserable, band-killing ordeals that the namesake 1970 documentary had made them out to be. But long before Peter Jackson put a feel-good spin on the Beatles’ dying days in Get Back, Paul McCartney had already made it clear he was totally cool with having a documentary crew hovering over his shoulder during his most vulnerable moments of creation—because a mere five years after the Let It Be experience, he eagerly subjected his post-Beatles band Wings to the same cinematic scrutiny.
Riding high on the runaway success of 1973’s Band on the Run, McCartney and Wings set up shop in Abbey Road Studios for four days in August 1974 and let filmmaker David Litchfield document their every move as they whipped through a sprawling setlist of recent hits, upcoming singles, B-sides, neglected album cuts, off-the-cuff medleys, instrumental jams, songs that wouldn’t be officially released until the following decade, ’50s rockabilly covers, and even a few Fab Four favorites. The result was a documentary called One Hand Clapping, whose overriding concept wasn’t so much “get back” as “get born”—an opportunity to show skeptics that Wings weren’t merely McCartney’s appendages, but a blossoming group fueled by the same sort of collaborative camaraderie and derring-do that his previous band possessed a decade prior. Alas, like the 1969 project, things didn’t go exactly as planned, and it’s taken five decades for a definitive document of the moment to see the light.
From day one, Wings were burdened by a seemingly insurmountable contradiction. “For me, I like working with a gang of people, I like a little team,” McCartney told Litchfield. “I’ve never been a solo performer, so it’s natural for me to find myself a group.” Despite his stated desire to be part of a community, the fact is, no one but John Lennon could hope to be on equal creative footing with Paul McCartney in a band. In former Moody Blues member Denny Laine, McCartney found not so much a new partner as a trusted accomplice who could both fill the harmonic holes left by Lennon’s absence and flex the extra guitar muscle required in the hard-rockin’ ’70s. But even with the core of McCartney, keyboardist wife Linda, and Laine in place, Wings were always a band in flux, with different personnel appearing on each record; the triumphs of Band on the Run ultimately owed more to the trio’s crafty approach to their low-tech setup in EMI’s Lagos studio than to a proper band coming into its own.
But the version of Wings that McCartney corralled for the One Hand Clapping sessions exhibited the laser focus and playful spontaneity of a tight-knit rock’n’roll band that seemed to have put in their 10,000 hours in just a few weeks. The preternaturally talented guitarist Jimmy McCulloch would be the closest thing McCartney ever had to a swaggering, Mick Ronson-like guitar phenom at his side, and drummer Geoff Britton consistently hit the sweet spot between Ringo Starr steadiness and Keith Moon power (while effortlessly adjusting his sunglasses without missing a beat). Sadly, this iteration of the band barely outlasted these sessions: Britton left the group six months later, reportedly because the drummer—and judo enthusiast—had the opportunity to work on a karate flick in Japan.
With American session drummer Joe English stepping in, Wings continued their skyward trajectory with two more chart-topping albums—1975’s Venus and Mars and 1976’s Wings at the Speed of Sound—and an epic world tour. In the midst of this hot streak, the One Hand Clapping project shifted to the back burner before being shelved outright. Cherry-picked selections from the ’74 sessions eventually surfaced as bonus tracks on the 2010 Band on the Run box set, which also included an official DVD release of Litchfield’s One Hand Clapping film. This new release compiles Wings’ Abbey Road repertoire into a joyful 2xLP document of Paul in peak mullet ’n’ cigarettes form, as he was transitioning Wings from a low-stakes Beatles antidote into a formidable rock institution in their own right.
Though it was recorded without an audience, One Hand Clapping unfolds like a proper concert, charging out of the gate with the band rocking at full strength, before calling in an orchestra to launch the symphonic fireworks of “Live and Let Die,” detouring into a mini solo piano set, throwing a few old nuggets to the Beatlemaniacs, and ending on a “Hi, Hi, Hi” note. (A bonus six-song 7" of acoustic recordings captured in Abbey Road’s backyard serves as the comedown encore.) McCartney has spent his entire onstage career contending with arenas full of shrieking fans, so it’s a real treat to hear him perform without being drowned out by screams. Compared to the bombastic, cavernous sound of the 1976 live set Wings Over America, the recordings on One Hand Clapping are appealingly raw and in-your-face intimate, making the listener feel like the sole ticket-winner to a private Macca soundstage performance.
In essence, One Hand Clapping is the photo-negative counterpart to Get Back: Instead of capturing the casual genius of pulling future classics out of thin air, it showcases McCartney’s willingness to rough up and rearrange his songbook. With Linda’s fuzzy keyboards jacked up in the mix, this version of “Jet” makes a case for Wings as the first synth-pop band, while Britton’s hard-charging backbeat injects the song with a punky thrust. And while this performance of the rarity “Soily” is more taut and less manic than the runaway-train version that brings Wings Over America to a fiery finale, it retains its status as McCartney’s toughest rocker this side of “Helter Skelter.” Even when he revisits weighty Beatles ballads like “Let It Be,” he approaches them with the carefree confidence of someone who’s discovered a vacant piano stool in a hotel lobby; after singing a verse of his melancholic magnum opus “The Long and Winding Road,” he clears his throat and barrels into a brief run through the jaunty “Lady Madonna.”
Get Back’s greatest virtue was allowing us to see rock’s most omnipotent group as mere mortals, wracked by the same dysfunction and insecurities that afflict any band running low on time and inspiration. But for McCartney, Wings represented its own kind of demystification process: In contrast to the Beatles’ rarefied status and trailblazing track record, Wings responded to the music of their contemporaries. One Hand Clapping serves as a time capsule of a moment when rock was splintering off into infinite subgenres, with McCartney’s effortless melodicism serving as the connective tissue between the glammy strut of “Hi, Hi, Hi,” the country serenade “Sally G,” and a divine reworking of “Bluebird” that transforms the Band on the Run cut from a low-key “Blackbird” sequel into a proto-yacht-rock groover. And while critics weren’t kind to early Wings albums like Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway, representative tracks from that oft-overlooked era—like “C Moon” and “Power Cut”—reflect a longstanding fascination with Jamaican music that abetted reggae’s mainstream entrée.
For all the charming moments contained within, you can understand why McCartney opted to scrap One Hand Clapping back in the day: It showcased an already outdated iteration of the group, and its loose, anything-goes spirit must’ve felt at odds with Wings’ growing reputation as an arena-rock powerhouse in the mid ’70s. But its reappearance in 2024 aligns perfectly with the current Macca moment, when younger generations of fans have reclaimed him as the patron saint of oddball indie auteurism. The McCartney we hear on One Hand Clapping isn’t so much the pop perfectionist of classic-rock legend as the merry prankster less concerned with pleasing the masses than amusing himself.


Pharoah Sanders’ group rolled up all the best qualities from his early-1970s LPs into a newly reissued set that bursts with joy and discovery. It’s a concert that sounds more like a party than a seance.

Live in Paris (1975)

When Pharoah Sanders played tenor saxophone with John Coltrane in the 1960s, his tone was harsh and wild. Soloing alongside Coltrane on records like Ascension, Om, and Live in Japan, Sanders’ horn would shriek and howl and cry, reaching a pitch of earth-shaking intensity on pieces that pushed jazz to the limits of legibility. But after Coltrane’s death in 1967, Sanders began exploring a different path. Playing with Alice Coltrane on Ptah, the El Daoud and Journey in Satchidananda, and on his own albums for the Impulse! label, his sound was still searching, but now it was lyrical, and his musical settings often included trance-inducing grooves. After a half-decade enduring the blast furnace of free jazz, Sanders’ style grew more spiritual and cosmic and started looking to music from around the globe for inspiration.
The records Sanders made for Impulse! in the first half of the 1970s are marked by intensity and emotional focus but also by accessibility. Solos sometimes included intense overblowing, but sunny melodies and rich instrumental textures bent the music toward peace and light. This is where we find Sanders and his band when they played a show in Paris in 1975. His Impulse! period was behind him, and a few years away were the records for Clive Davis’ Arista, where he’d make deeper forays into R&B and even touch on disco. While he was in this in-between space, Sanders’ group rolled up all the best qualities from his early-1970s LPs into a set that bursts with joy and discovery, positive vibrations radiating in every direction. It captured a gig in a studio at the studios of Radio France with a capacity of about 800 people, the site of live albums by Cannonball Adderley, Freddie Hubbard, and Grant Green. The quality of the sound is exceptional. Given the sonics and the wide appeal of the set, this isn’t a bad place to start for someone new to his work.
The essence of Sanders’ music in this period is the two-chord vamp. This wasn’t the only structure he used and he would occasionally take on standards or tunes by John Coltrane, but vamps undergirded a lot of his most memorable music. Most of the tunes on “Live in Paris (1975)” are built from simple basslines by Calvin Hill, and pianist Danny Mixon seesaws back and forth between two chords, with a few variations. Music that goes on for minutes on end with only two repeating chords creates a special mood. It’s not unlike listening to the sound of breathing. Tension builds and releases with each successive bar, but the feeling is open and easeful, bringing to mind dreamy images—trees moving outside a car window, waves crashing into a shore. A two-chord vamp suggests travel, but it never feels like it’s going anywhere in particular. The journey, rather than the destination, is what counts.
Such a harmonic framework is perfect for Sanders, who stretches out on solos that are melodic and lyrical but still relatively simple, a triumph of tone and phrasing possible only when virtuosity is a given. “Love Is Here,” performed in two parts, mostly centers on a vamp, with Hill playing his bass high on the neck to give the groove an elastic propulsion, as if he’s in front pulling the band behind him. At times, Sanders goes into the fiery overblowing that he made his name with, but these eruptions never last long, and they seem celebratory rather than violent. He also sings through his horn, creating a beautiful bird-like yelp that blurs the lines between voice and instrument. Similar techniques are found in “Farrell Tune,” another classic-sound vamp that bears some resemblance to Sanders 1971 tune “Thembi.”
Sanders’ reins in his most far-out musical conceptions here; it’s a set that sounds more like a party than a seance. The original version of “The Creator Has a Masterplan,” which debuted on Sanders’ 1969 album Karma, ran over 32 minutes. But this take is more focused, keeping the original’s searching melody but simplifying the arrangement. Mixon gets harp-like tones out of his piano, with quick trills on the upper keys that sound almost like strums, and he breaks out for a funky solo. “I Want to Talk About You” is a ballad closely associated with John Coltrane—it appears on both Soultrane and Live at Birdland—and it’s the one change-up on a set that is otherwise quite unified. Sanders gives it a yearning, though relatively straight reading, and the standard’s chord changes offer a welcome diversion from the consistent groove.
Three of the six tracks feature the word “love” and another suggests that God knows what he’s doing, so the overriding mood here is one of comfort and bliss. On the closing “Love Is Everywhere” Sanders sings and chants as often as he plays his horn, sounding like a preacher at a revival leading a call-and-response. Hearing his rough vocals over the impossibly peppy and cheerful music compels the untrained singers among us to join in. The song’s false ending, taking a page out of James Brown’s book, is pure communal ecstasy, filled with an organ swell, crashing drums, and chants that seem to bring every Parisian in the room to their feet. It’s so stirring, it makes you want to look around wherever you are when listening to confirm what he’s singing: Love is everywhere. Could it be? Whatever contrary evidence exists elsewhere in the world, now or any other time in history, Sanders makes a convincing case for its omnipresence on this particular day 45 years ago.


The version of the band that toured behind 2017’s American Dream gathers in the legendary New York studio, giving old songs new life and additional oomph.

Electric Lady Sessions

Though they mostly sound the same, there are two LCD Soundsystems. There’s the one James Murphy cooks up in private, the one you hear on albums, studio concoctions where one guy plays the glockenspiel, the bongos, the tambourine, the Casio MT-68 and the Casio CT-410V, and sings, too. Other names pepper the liner notes, but Murphy’s sits beside the most instruments, conjuring the image of a studio nerd laying down track after track until everything’s dense and perfect, which it often is. Over the past 17 years, this LCD Soundsystem has served as a sparkling vessel for one guy’s neuroses, threading lines about aging, ennui, and self-loathing into complex webs of disco beats and new wave basslines.
The second band, the one that takes to the stage, has the same lyrics as the first but isn’t really about individual insecurity. Because LCD Soundsystem play dance music, toying with elements of disco and house and new wave, they are always in dialogue with an impression of the crowd and their own interactions. Live, LCD Soundsystem work as a decentralized commune, Murphy the competent yet reluctant leader. He doesn’t typically play instruments onstage; more often than not, he’s just negotiating with the microphone, serving as interlocutor between the band and the audience, softening the barrier between the two.
Electric Lady Sessions, like 2010’s London Sessions, fits this second band in a room and documents the conversation that unfolds among its members. There’s no crowd here, no mass of people singing along with Murphy as on 2014’s The Long Goodbye. There’s just the band that toured behind American Dream, the 2017 record that ended LCD Soundsystem’s self-imposed hiatus. Recorded in the famed New York studio of the same name, this session captures a moment of arresting chemistry among longtime collaborators who sound excited to be playing together again.
LCD Soundsystem’s position as a mouthpiece for a talented, anxious frontman has always created friction with the genres the band absorbs. Disco, at root, springs from the queer collective, from long nights at gay clubs in the early 1970s, when the DJ kept crowds pulsing until sunrise. There’s no consistent history of bedroom disco, no solid pedigree of dance music as a pressure valve for one guy’s intergenerational insecurity. Disco seeks to break down walls around the individual psyche, while Murphy’s sly witticisms and open complaints have often reinforced them. That tension eases when the band plays live. Murphy’s voice rings out not as a narrator presiding over an environment of his own making, but as another instrument as prone to failure and bouts of joy as any other.
The adrenaline bursts that pop up through American Dream—the moments when Murphy breaks from dazed, dreamy synth jams into post-punk existential terror—take on new life and added volume on Electric Lady Sessions. The end of “Emotional Haircut” here might be the heaviest this band has ever gotten. Propelled by Pat Mahoney’s vicious drums, Murphy sounds like he’s ready to sink his teeth into the nearest jugular. “Listen to it now!” he howls, almost buried beneath bandmates, like he has to fight to be heard since he’s no longer the only star of the show.
This dynamic, where Murphy flows along with his band, does wonders for these songs. Most in this session are taken from American Dream—“Call the Police,” “Tonite,” and “Oh Baby” stand out—although a few pop in from This Is Happening and Sound of Silver. In this arrangement, “You Wanted a Hit” loses some of its defensive barbs, shifting attention from Murphy’s sour monologue to playful exchanges between Nancy Whang and Gavin Rayna Russom on the keys and group vocals that coalesce at the hook. Smartly, nothing from LCD Soundsystem’s self-titled debut makes the cut; that album’s acidic tone would derail the setlist, which finds the band pushing for moments of spontaneous vulnerability.
Covers of Human League’s “Seconds” and Heaven 17’s “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang” serve as bookends, grounding the record as an explicit reprieve from daily horrors that are not music. “Seconds” touches on the specter of gun violence, with a verse that mentions white knuckles and a shot “heard around the world” and a jarring chorus that insists, “It took seconds of your time to take his life.” The commanding baritones of Murphy and guitarist Al Doyle are gripping. The fast-paced group singalong “Fascist Groove Thang” makes a fun epilogue, the title speaking for itself. And a cover of Chic’s “I Want Your Love” late in the set sees Whang take lead vocals, rounding out LCD’s nod to their formative influences. Their version is tighter and crisper than the original, but it retains Chic’s utopian bent.
On Electric Lady Sessions, LCD Soundsystem strip back and then bone up the grooves that have always made their music work, despite its contradictions. The groove takes precedence over the words, and Murphy gives his studio meticulousness over to the energy of the group. The synths run bright and juicy. The bass sounds like it could knock you out if you stood too close. The drums hit fast and sharp. Murphy slips from his throne as record-geek auteur and dissolves into the group—one musician among many, and better for it.


Though it’s full of guests and emotional twists and turns, the late rapper’s posthumous album is largely sloppy and inconsequential, a sour note to bookend a storied legacy.

Exodus

Aging in hip-hop is still a fairly new phenomenon. Death often forces fans and critics to prematurely unpack a rapper’s legacy, whether they were cut down in their prime or before they began to truly blossom. Some don’t live to see 30. Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G., two of the most important rappers of all time, were murdered in their mid-20s, barely six months apart. Over the last three years, the rap community has lost a string of young talent to gun violence (Pop Smoke), drug overdose (Juice WRLD), and other unfortunate circumstances. This makes it all the more special when a rapper does cross over into middle age, a privilege only some of the genre’s legends have been able to enjoy.
DMX had just turned 50 before he passed away on April 9, 2021. Since the early 1990s, X had funneled a life of unspeakable adversity into music as pious as it was grisly, a guttural voice confronting his own personal hell in order to see heaven. His constant struggles with drug addiction and mental health were a frequent topic in his music, coloring a tumultuous 30-year career that included five consecutive No. 1 albums, several hit singles, and film roles. DMX wasn’t the first rapper to turn their demons into jet fuel, but he lived to build an inspiring legacy that persisted even as his personal problems became public fodder for jokes and memes.
Exodus, his posthumous eighth studio album and first proper album since 2012’s Undisputed, was sparked by the overwhelming fan support shown during his Verzuz battle against Snoop Dogg in July 2020. According to longtime collaborator Swizz Beatz—who also executive produced the project—X wrestled with thoughts of retirement during the recording process, so they attempted to make Exodus as emotionally and musically varied as possible. “There are many different sides of X,” Swizz recently told Complex. “We wanted to channel all those sides on this album.” It may have sounded like a fitting tribute on paper, but Exodus is largely sloppy and inconsequential, a sour note to bookend a storied legacy.
In all fairness, Exodus wasn’t initially intended to be the swan song for DMX’s career. On the contrary; it was supposed to be a comeback album of sorts. Swizz insists that the album was finished within X’s lifetime and that the only change made to the record was subbing out a previously used Pop Smoke verse for one by Memphis rapper Moneybagg Yo on the aptly titled “Money Money Money.” If this truly was X’s vision, his attempt to come back with a big bang with his partner-in-crime by his side, it sputters more often than it pops.
At its best, X’s voice is magnetic, dragging everything in its orbit to the center like Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. However, many of his verses across Exodus sound spent, his trademark bark hollowed out and strained. Both “That’s My Dog,” a reunion track with fellow Yonkers rappers The Lox, and “Hood Blues,” the highly anticipated matchup with Buffalo trio Griselda, begin with their respective trio of guests before ending with an X verse as an attempt to build tension before the man of the hour bursts through the door. Both verses are underwhelming and pale in comparison to their guests, but the “Hood Blues” verse is noticeably lackluster. X’s overdubbed vocals and ad-libs sound more incoherent than menacing, stumbling through bars like a boxer on the ropes while Westside Gunn, Conway the Machine, and Benny the Butcher rap circles around him. This verse should’ve never left the studio.
The verse is also a microcosm of Exodus’s most glaring flaw: This is a feature-heavy album—all but two tracks have guests—that put X in various uncomfortable spots. On “Money Money Money,” he and Moneybagg Yo flail over chintzy organ keys and drums, operating on two completely different wavelengths. “Skyscrapers” with U2 frontman Bono and “Hold Me Down” with Alicia Keys are stabs at pop balladry that attempts to marry X’s gruff motivational talk with sappy swelling instrumentals but never truly find a balance. “Bath Salts,” a nearly decade-old track that was initially leaked during a 2017 beat battle, houses X’s best verse on the album but can’t help being outshined by JAY-Z and Nas’ second reunion of the year. Exodus has the most features of any DMX album, and whether they were his idea or not, it’s clear much of the star power overwhelmed his usual gravitational pull.
A handful of inspired moments prevent Exodus from fully succumbing to mistakes and whiffs. Swizz seems to be having fun behind the boards. “Take Control” teases a modern swing out of a well-flipped sample of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” to create a nice slice of rap-funk for X and Snoop Dogg’s horny uncle bars. “Hood Blues” is a decent aping of the grainy Griselda aesthetic that wouldn’t sound out of place on any of their most recent projects. “Hood Blues” also houses one of the album’s handfuls of truly arresting moments: “I ain’t 50 years old for nothing,” X growls on the song’s outro, confronting his mortality in more literal terms than he likely realized.
But the album really takes off on its final two tracks. “Letter to My Son (Call Your Father)” abandons all pretense for a heart-to-heart between X and his son about fading love between parents as he extends an olive branch (“We could've been best friends all along/But it kinda defeats the purpose of the song”). It’s a heartfelt moment quickly followed by “Prayer,” a two-minute prayer session recorded at Kanye West’s Sunday Service at Coachella 2019. These two moments are the closest X gets to the life-or-death anxiety of earlier albums like It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, his love for his family and his God pushing him through the ring of fire.
Posthumous releases are never easy, though DMX’s Exodus stands in a unique position. It wasn’t A&R’d to death like Pop Smoke’s Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon; it wasn’t cobbled together from years-old recordings like any Tupac album released after 1996. For all its shortcomings, it’s a genuine effort propelled by a sense of purpose instilled from artist to producer. DMX lived long enough to know his legacy was secure, but he still deserved a better sendoff than this.

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In a collaboration with the stunning singers Theo Bleckmann and Jodie Landau, the sharp young composer processes poems and strings into surprisingly magnetic meditations on time.

Terrain

No, your stream is not buffering, and your headphones are not broken. But for the first two minutes of Terrain, the captivating second album from the conceptually intrepid and processing-minded composer Jacob Cooper, you will invariably wonder what is wrong with your sound. A fusillade of glitches and silences suggests an interrupted connection or a failing circuit. Soon enough, though, Cooper’s digital cacophony yields to the splendid consonance of Theo Bleckmann, a singer whose dashing fluidity made him a mensch of Meredith Monk’s Vocal Ensemble and shaped his stunning album of Kate Bush interpretations. “Nettles, daisies, and long purples,” he finally manages after the slurred start of “Ripple the Sky,” images of natural wonder barely outracing Cooper’s ruthless electronics.
For the next 15 minutes, Bleckmann serves as a sort of narrative tour guide, singing a poem about the depression and suffering that thread together Ophelia’s woe in Hamlet, the suicide-minded works of Robert Schumann, and our own inescapably anxious times. He rises above a snarling string section only to have his splendid tone chopped, screwed, doubled, and damaged to the edge of oblivion. “Ripple the Sky” is a daring piece about trying to hold onto shreds of beauty in a cold world that rarely cares about what you covet. Those stutters at the start, the ones that will make you check your connection, and the squeal of scraped strings at the end are ellipses, reminders that our worries were no more new to Ophelia than they are to us. Shakespeare, Schumann, and you—that’s the timeline Cooper is condensing.
Cooper has long been a fan of teasing his audience’s perception of time. In an opera, he constructed an alternate universe where Justin Timberlake again wooed Britney Spears. He also stretched the start of a hymn about Mary mourning Jesus’ crucifixion until you could almost visualize her forming tears. (That last work, Stabat Mater Dolorosa, is rapturous and highly recommended, as beautiful a buck as you will ever spend on Bandcamp.)
Terrain features three pieces written between 2016 and this year, each based around new poems commissioned by Cooper and sung by Bleckmann, his younger stylistic descendant Jodie Landau, and, for the finale, the two in tandem. These poems and the pieces at large consider the ways time reinforces or diminishes our individual experiences. Where “Ripple the Sky” is about the immortality of our woes, “Expiation” examines humanity’s customs of killing animals and, broadly, our inability to “escape past pressure.” The most recent work and title track, “Terrain,” tries to hold onto fleeting moments of beauty while the world races ahead.
All of this might sound dry or overly esoteric—and, yes, it’s a lot to ponder. But the wonder of Terrain is how Cooper makes these ideas and his rigorous treatments sound so vital and compulsive, in conversation with a world well beyond the conservatory. Late in “Ripple the Sky,” for instance, the strings become especially grating, and Bleckmann seems ready to succumb. It’s like the dreamworlds of Tim Hecker turned inside out, so that the music is pure hellish attack. For its magnetic middle, “Expiation” sounds like Animal Collective circa Strawberry Jam, when skywriting vocals crisscrossed intricate layers of surrealist sequences. The piece’s climax is a proper dance number, with hypnotic harmonies webbing a throbbing beat to Landau’s half-yelled pleas for empathy. “Each tongue troubles its dark canker,” he repeats, demanding that the past be reconsidered for the continually changing present.
During “Terrain,” a duet Cooper builds by processing both singers against the pensive cello drones of frequent collaborator Ashley Bathgate, Bleckmann is in the foreground, his voice given a kind of magisterial authority. Landau is below, squeezed until he sounds like a robot running out of electricity. The combination feels like hearing someone’s internal dialogue about some deep turmoil, an approach familiar from Moses Sumney’s græ or Bon Iver’s 22, A Million—extravagantly warped vocals and largely unadorned ones vying for limited space, slipping in and around one another in an uneasy exchange.
It’s fitting that Cooper continues to dwell on time and how we handle it, since Terrain feels like his futuristic view of classical music, firmly rooted both in the distant past and music much closer to the present. His audacious interpretation of these librettos stems from tradition. The tools he uses to do so, though, border on production’s bleeding edge, so much so that, now and again, you will wonder if something’s wrong with the sound itself.

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On their second album in as many months, the Los Angeles rap crew stay sleek and cool, but offer more appealing bouts of aggression and swagger.

Saturation II

BROCKHAMPTON’s second album arrives just over two months after their debut. A third album is imminent. So it’s fitting that this trilogy is called Saturation, a flood of material functioning as an extension of the group’s personality. BROCKHAMPTON are a rap collective defined by confidence—the idea that trying is as valuable as doing. They’re like a West Coast Wu-Tang Clan where everybody’s a winner. “It’s musical vomit, you just throw it up, you can’t resist the urge,” Ameer Vann said after the first Saturation came out. “We’re just trying to capitalize on how easily everything is flowing right now, we don’t really want to stop.” The sequel is not vastly different from its predecessor, but it is an improvement. Whereas the first Saturation preached self-assurance, the second actually collects on it.
In a short span, BROCKHAMPTON have ameliorated some of their more glaring flaws that existed on their debut. In place of the preachy motivation and biographical introductions, the Los Angeles group offer more appealing bouts of aggression and swagger. On the sinister “Chick,” Vann raps astutely, “Imma be a star even if I say the same things.” He’s has emerged as the most magnetic member of the nebulous-numbered crew. He’s got a biting sense of humor and weaves political commentary into his lyrics as easily as he does drug talk, but it’s the “Chick” line that gets to the core of his and BROCKHAMPTON’s ethos: They don’t have to say much to succeed, so long as they say it convincingly. On the same track, Matt Champion proves the point: “And I won’t cater to you/Yeah, I am not Carrabba’s/And I ain’t taking orders,” all with a knowing wink that name-dropping an Italian food chain is not exactly fashionable, but he still sounds good doing it.
The catchiest BROCKHAMPTON songs isolate one glossy element—like a keyboard arpeggio on their debut’s “Gold” or string plucks on II’s “Jello”—atop the mix as stand-ins for richer, fuller beats. The production on II continues in the same form as their debut: cool, funky, and polished, with just enough odd ornaments (a swirling G-funk synth on “Gummy,” a snake charmer’s melody on “Sweet”) to stand out from the mainstream. But there’s a grimier mood that adds to the record’s urgency. Kevin Abstract begins “Junky” with a ferocious verse about being queer—“‘Why you always rap about being gay?’” he shouts, “’Cause not enough niggas rap and be gay!”—and even when his bandmates rap with less objective gravity, the coiled beats makes them feel just as important.
It’s not yet clear the through line that makes BROCKHAMPTON a bona fide crew rather than just a bunch of guys who rap together. Across these 16 tracks, their personalities and strengths come into sharper focus: Abstract, the founder and leader, is best when relegated to the hook; Dom McLennon plays the straight man, delivering a steady flow when called upon; Champion is dry and blunt; Merlyn Wood is a vocal wildcard; JOBA is the falsetto changeup who can hold his own as a rapper; bearface is the hidden balladeer; and Ameer Vann is just plain great. But there are precious few moments where they complement each other or build on distinct themes. For the most part, members are just placed together on lengthy tracks like “Sweet,” “Gummy,” and “Swamp,” where serviceable verses become less than the sum of their parts.
BROCKHAMPTON are still awkwardly straddling the hip-hop and pop worlds, a byproduct, perhaps, of their superego-free approach to making music. It feels like the bars and hooks from the young crew are still incubating, so the music on II comes out a little underdone. The album is joyful, but it’s more like joy in a vacuum, with little ebullience to make the music transcend beyond its inherent quality. The beats are smooth, but often lack the requisite bass knock to rattle around in your head for days. Their rhymes are playful (Dom McLennon puts on a show on “Sweet,” opening his verse with, “The original lick-splickety, higher than Yosemite”), but they don’t test vocal or lyrical limits. On Saturation II, there remains a sense that no matter how cool BROCKHAMPTON sound, they prize coolness more than they prize breaking molds and taking risks to become something bigger.


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 album that made the Dave Matthews Band forever famous, in search of its long-overlooked dark heart.

Crash

The Dave Matthews Band seemed lame from the start. The quintet emerged, after all, at the beginning of the 1990s from Charlottesville, Virginia, a quaint college town better known then as a tourist hub for Shenandoah National Park and Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved fiefdom than its music scene. Flanked by fiddle and saxophone, Matthews was a lanky white weirdo who sang about satellites, climate change, and the crucifixion of Christ like Kermit the Frog, raspy from all the weed. The locals lined up in throngs outside of clubs, coffeehouses, and frat parties to hear these anachronistic Grateful Dead acolytes.
But the truly big cities sounded different than the University of Virginia quad around 1992, with music that was unequivocally defiant or unabashedly snotty. Hip-hop poured into the heartland from both coasts, locked in a steadily escalating duel. Seattle’s grunge scene spawned a web of glowering toughies, all pursuing fiscal nirvana. And indie rock drifted toward wider prominence, abetted by a fawning music press and loaded major labels. By 1994, Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus was the cool-kid avatar exported from Charlottesville. Matthews was just the town’s astronomically profitable punchline, a magnet for and magnate of hippies and yuppies. “Matthews jams politely,” Robert Christgau ribbed the band’s 1994 studio debut, Under the Table and Dreaming. “He’s as bland as a tofu sandwich.”
In the spring of 1996, nearly five years to the day after their first performance, the Dave Matthews Band declared that coolness would never be their credo. Crash, their second studio album, burrowed deeper into the idiomatic musical mélange that had made them popular and polarizing. The funk hit harder. The ballads luxuriated in deep moods, sexy or solemn. There were pan-African instrumental duets, velvety saxophone solos, and snarling acoustic rockers. Oh, and of course there was “Crash Into Me,” a once-ubiquitous precoital standard for some that doubled as an onanistic anathema for others. Crash typecast the Dave Matthews Band as the neoliberal darlings of Bill Clinton’s happy, wealthy, largely white United States, a sound perfectly suited for a second term.
A quarter-century later, that assessment feels superficial, overlooking not only the album’s dark heart but the way the band presaged the collapsing borders between genres, between pop and everything else. Crash made the Dave Matthews Band a beloved household name and one of the most reviled acts in the history of contemporary rock’n’roll, fodder for competing visions of how music should function.
The biography of Matthews himself cuts to the roots of his band’s head-scratching lineup and sound and their surprisingly enduring relevance, especially on Crash. It likely doesn’t resemble that of his legion of disciples, either—namely, the youngest Gen Xers or oldest Millennials who learned the horny “Crash” or the philosophizing “Typical Situation” to woo anyone within earshot of their state school’s dormitory.
Born in 1967 in a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa, Matthews followed his family between England and New York for much of his first decade, accompanying a father who worked as “one of the granddaddies of the superconductor,” he once told Rolling Stone. But his father, John, died of cancer when Matthews was 10, prompting the family of five to return to South Africa after three decades of apartheid rule. Back in one of the world’s most destabilized political climates, Matthews learned about pacifism, activism, and resistance from his mother, Valerie, while absorbing the country’s native sounds and imported Western pop. A lackluster student, he indulged instead in listening to music, drawing, and acting. He bucked apartheid strictures, too, like a teenage punk. As he once told Spin, he’d lift his Black friends and physically carry them into segregated businesses. “See, they’re not touching the floor,” he’d say, taunting the staff, “so they’re not really here.”
To avoid South African military service, though, Matthews fled to the United States in the mid-’80s. Around the age of 19, he settled with his family in Charlottesville, where his father had once taught. Matthews soon found a downtown bartending job, a natural fit given his quick wit and knack for impersonations. There, he encountered a fertile community of musicians motivated by improvisation and collaboration.
With his mind set on making a demo, Matthews first approached a regular from the bar—LeRoi Moore, a Southern jazz saxophonist with a languorous sense of melody. Moore had worked for years with the drummer Carter Beauford, an area hotshot and BET session player who seemed as busy as an entire beehive behind his kit. A friend soon recommended the electric bassist Stefan Lessard, a teenage phenom who had been raised by hippies but was now sneaking into bars to jam. Fiddler Boyd Tinsley, the last to join, broke any easy notion of how this racially diverse quintet might sound—jazz? rock? bluegrass? country? Arabic maqam? African highlife? Yes. From the very start, the quintet seemed like an awkward but interesting teenager during puberty, trying to suss out what all these strange parts could do.
The band’s star rose quickly, especially in their native South. They would play most anywhere at any time, from frat houses to warehouses. And thanks to a tape-trading network modeled after ones used by the Grateful Dead, they turned those early shows into a form of proto-viral marketing, so that the kids in Savannah knew the songs before the quintet even arrived from Chattanooga. They signed a major-label deal and sold three million copies of 1994’s Under the Table and Dreaming by the time they finished its follow-up, Crash.
In a way, their mainstream introduction felt hesitant, even unfinished. It seemed as if they understood that being an acoustic rock band with a fiddle and a saxophone (and not singing all-American epics like Bruce Springsteen) made them plenty weird three years after “punk broke.” Recorded to click tracks and polished by veteran producer Steve Lillywhite—the real rock star in the room thanks to his work with U2 and the Rolling Stones—its songs were peppy or sentimental, snappy or pleasant, avoiding any liminal sense of danger. Months before it was released, one of Matthews’ sisters, Anne, was murdered by her husband in South Africa, leaving Matthews and his other sister, Jane, to raise her children. The Dave Matthews Band’s subsequent ascent to fame as the happy-go-lucky band singing about marching ants was chased by the long tail of yet another family tragedy.
The success of Under the Table and Dreaming—and the band’s relentless tour schedule—served as a permission slip to push their panoply of sounds harder the second time. By the time they reconvened with Lillywhite for several months in upstate New York to record Crash, they’d been playing its songs for years, many of them already bootlegged fan-favorites. They burned through untold hours of tape, vamping in the same room while they tried to tease out fresh renditions of tunes their “Daveheads” already knew.
In retrospect, previous live versions of these songs sound like pencil sketches for grand paintings. On Crash, the band ping-pongs between gleeful aggression and droopy melancholy, between feather-light strings and heavyweight horns for a full hour. “Too Much” and “Tripping Billies” are supreme gutbucket funk, Matthews growling his way through the verses as Beauford and Lessard work the meter like it’s a championship racehorse. (James Brown would eventually join the band onstage.) That rhythm section is the secret to “Crash Into Me,” too, with Beauford’s drums pushing the song toward a climax that never comes. It is a maniacal tease, a musical illustration of the song’s unfulfilled desire.
While Moore and Tinsley take a few extended solos, most memorably during “#41,” Lillywhite smartly enlists them as textural experts alongside Tim Reynolds, the band’s longtime part-time guitarist. Moore’s baritone saxophone lines during the first four songs, for instance, add welcome ballast, a counterpoint to Matthews’ reedy tone and Beauford’s prancing rhythms. Tinsley’s violin howls beneath “Drive In Drive Out,” lending the song a sense of true madness, like Matthews’ brain is about to break.
Still, the most daring moment of Crash is “Say Goodbye,” which empties out of “#41” through a clever segue. The song begins with a flute-and-drums duet, Moore and Beauford darting around one another like two hummingbirds eyeing the same colorful blossom. Violin plucks and muted guitar chords bounce through the mix like free electrons. It is a clear callback to the South African Kwela Matthews would have heard in his youth, a prelude that slides into seductive pop. More adventurous than any moment on Under the Table and Dreaming, “Say Goodbye” is a testament to the Dave Matthews Band’s escalating will to incorporate almost anything into its dynamic.
This new fusion gave critics even bigger fits than before. While Christgau had given that “tofu sandwich” a C+, he refused to reward Crash with anything other than a typographical bomb. In Rolling Stone, Jim DeRogatis compared Matthews to Sting and the band to Roxy Music before dissing the album via an extended metaphor for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. And in an issue with a leather-clad Roseanne on the cover, Spin’s blistering review deadpanned, “If the DMB hadn’t existed, Sesame Street would have had to invent them.”
Even the positive notices were littered with backhanded compliments, deploying phrases like “guitar wanking” or “You couldn’t mosh to it if you tried” as caveat emptors. It was as if, as far as the music literati were concerned, continued Dave Matthews Band fandom required a preemptive apology. A high-school nerd, I was an obsessive DMB fan, with binders full of bootleg CDs and a wardrobe consisting mostly of overpriced tour shirts. But as college began, I fell for the false binary these critics framed—you couldn’t simultaneously like the Dave Matthews Band and “serious music.” It took the better part of two decades for me to realize I’d been posing, that the Dave Matthews Band could also count as serious music.
Crash’s popular appeal, on the other hand, was both instant and extended. The record sold a million copies in two months, a pace that flagged only slightly during the next year. The band sold out Madison Square Garden in three hours, added a second show, and sold it out again. They were the unquestioned stars of that summer’s H.O.R.D.E. tour, permanently outstripping festival founders Blues Traveler. In 1997, “So Much to Say” won the band its only Grammy despite 11 career nominations, somehow besting the Smashing Pumpkins, Oasis, Garbage, and the Wallflowers. (“Crash Into Me” would lose to the Wallflowers the next year.)
But the feel-good image that Crash’s sounds and sales created never quite comported with the songs themselves, the messages Matthews nested within the music. Naysayers often cite the Dave Matthews Band in the senescence of grunge, their giddiness supplanting that movement’s raw angst. But on Crash, Matthews mined the same emotional cores as Kurt Cobain—dejection, loneliness, anxiety, sexual and social frustration. Everything about their presentation—the sounds, the mood, the culture—was different, but the sentiments were often the same. This semblance is perhaps clearest on the 1999 album Live at Luther College, the fifth show from Matthews’ 1996 acoustic tour alongside Reynolds just as Crash was being finished. It is their MTV Unplugged, the songs stripped to their essence. Without its horns, “#41” sounds broken and mournful, wallowing in hurt. It is a gorgeous elegy for innocence.
Indeed, Crash’s songs fit neatly into three broad categories, each a bit more serious than the album’s musical buoyance may suggest. There are, most famously, three songs about unrequited love and lust, a nascent rock star pining for sex he will never have. “Crash Into Me” epitomizes the idea, of course, with the true-to-life testimony of any teenager who’s ever fallen asleep in the throes of a fantasy. It is both creepy and quotidian, the testimony of a child confronting changing biochemistry.
Taken together, “Say Goodbye” and “Let You Down” shape a cautionary tale—the former a plea to forgo morals for a night of fireside adultery, the latter his mea culpa for the deed after it is done. Matthews was years into a courtship that led to marriage and children; this trio presents his subliminal timeline for learning to respect love amid the temptations of stardom and the exigencies of adulthood. He begins it as a boy staining the sheets; he ends it as a partner swallowing his pride.
A second triptych, scattered unevenly through these 69 minutes, represents what Matthews has long called his “seize-the-day” songs. These are his odes to living informed by those around him who have died, each anchored to a slogan fit for high-school yearbooks and cursive tattoos. “I can’t believe that we would lie in our graves/Dreaming of things we might have been,” goes the most mirthful one. “Celebrate we will/Because life is short but sweet for certain,” reads the moodiest, laced by pizzicato violin and eerie wafts of noise. And Matthews bastardizes multiple Bible verses at once for “Tripping Billies,” a gleeful Meters approximation that races with delight around a joyous violin line. All three remain live staples, each an enduring memento mori for a band and fans aging at the same pace.
But the most interesting parts of Crash—fully half the album—document Matthews’ interpersonal and sociopolitical woes. These laments are sometimes oblique. Seemingly ebullient opener “So Much to Say” lambastes our tendencies for small talk, for example, and demands we be something more honest and vulnerable, like a “little baby.” “#41” is a punch-drunk epic about the financial conflict that prompted the band to split with their first mentor and manager. It sounds elliptical and guarded, as though purposely written to avoid being entered into evidence during a lawsuit.
Matthews eventually squares up to that greed and concomitant cruelty. “Too Much” feels like one of those carpe diem anthems, with Matthews yowling and growling about eating and drinking over cataracts of bright horns and strata of snarling guitars. But it is a barbed indictment of American wastefulness at home, imperialism abroad, and how they’ve been normalized into a pernicious cycle. We use what we have here, Matthews sings with acrid glee, until we must crush someone else’s culture to get what they have, too. Played on Saturday Night Live and at the disastrous bacchanalia Woodstock ’99, “Too Much” is the Dave Matthews Band’s Trojan Horse, their way to soundtrack and excoriate the party in the same five-minute span.
“Cry Freedom,” on the other hand, is as musically unadorned and politically explicit as the band has ever been. Before and after, Matthews took care not to overstate his life as a young white man in South Africa, around for the beginning of the end of apartheid; he has assiduously avoided inserting himself into abuse that his heritage can never fully allow him to understand. But “Cry Freedom” takes its name from the 1987 film about Steve Biko, the South African revolutionary murdered by Afrikaner police a decade earlier. It is Matthews’ most straightforward lyrical reference to his childhood surroundings.
The band treats the subject with the reverence it deserves. Beauford taps out a simple beat over grayed guitar chords. Tinsley and Moore stretch long, woebegone tones behind it, the drapery blocking the sun from a room full of mourners. “How can I turn away?” Matthews sings softly at the start, framing himself as an ally. He maintains that cautious approach throughout “Cry Freedom,” reiterating that he’s only the anxious observer to this injustice, not the injured party. Though written about apartheid after its end, the song feels prescient for the United States 25 years later, a smoldering lament for a country of Blue Lives Matter banners that flap even as state-sponsored violence rages on. It is a salient reminder to be a witness, even if you’re not a savior.
Matthews’ outlook doesn’t resemble the vision of the United States that the saxophone-playing president broadcast at the time or the version that glassy-eyed suburban kids twirling on amphitheater lawns as the band played “Too Much” had likely experienced. Crash is dark, frustrated, and vulnerable, no matter how many hacky sack circles or light-beer-flavored makeout sessions its songs soundtracked. These messages are the secrets beneath the sounds; hearing them is like noticing the shadows that linger around the neon glow of Dan Flavin’s light sculptures or the turmoil lurking inside one of Meredith Monk’s exercises in vocal ecstasy. Crash is an album that actually longs to lift you up, not break you down.
There are a lot of reasons to deplore the Dave Matthews Band, to have never given Crash a second thought—so many, in fact, that speculating about them has become Matthews’ de facto sport during interviews. Perhaps you think Matthews sounds like he’s squeezing his voice from the warped horn of a tiny Victrola. Perhaps you think Beauford is always too fussy behind his drums (he certainly can be) or that the since-disgraced Tinsley was often out of tune, which isn’t wrong. Perhaps your relationship with “Crash Into Me” lacked the same redemption as that of Lady Bird. Or maybe they’re for you what the Doors are for me—an absolutely smoking band fronted by a self-important windbag. No act was more important to my rural childhood life, exposing me to so many musical ideas in the course of a single album that here I am, still pondering them. But all those complaints check out.
But the Dave Matthews Band fared well in the end. Crash made them superstars, pushing them to such popularity that they’ve been playing the same circuit of massive amphitheaters and arenas since they released it. That status eventually earned Matthews a tender-hearted cameo on Sesame Street and the band its own Ben & Jerry’s flavor, the delicious “One Sweet Whirled,” named for their most blatant example of hippie idealism. Their ultimate rejoinder to critics, however, was that they were right on Crash—right to pursue whatever sounds they loved, right to pile one unlikely element atop another, right to be weird in earnest.
A complete accounting of those that Crash influenced is both impossible and useless, an endless index of guitar strummers and kinetic drummers. Justin Vernon’s high-school band, for instance, thanked them in their adolescent liner notes. John Mayer sat in with them at the Hollywood Bowl in 2007 for a 14-minute rendition of “#41,” prefacing it with, “I’ve been waiting a long time to say this: I am who I am because of Dave Matthews Band.” Even Stevie Nicks has faithfully covered “Crash Into Me.” You could spend the better part of a lifetime watching covers of Crash songs on YouTube. (You probably shouldn’t.) More important than any single musician it helped shape, Crash helped give a generation of upstarts permission to do whatever they wanted with their own music. That sort of broad philosophical inspiration was altogether different than what Nirvana, Pavement, or most every other rock act cooler than the Dave Matthews Band supplied at the same time.
“That is bad as shit,” Beauford screams off-mic at the end of “Drive In Drive Out,” a frantic confessional about emotional torment. He is marveling at the tight-cornered rhythmic maze the band has navigated at top speed. It is, as he insists, bad as shit. I suppose that isn’t a cool thing to say about your own music on tape, especially on an album that will forever make you famous. But it sounds deeply felt and sincere, the core characteristics that always made Crash more compelling than its critics dared to admit.

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True critical consensus is rare, but I've yet to read a bad word about Wolfgang Voigt's Kompakt label ...

In Moll

True critical consensus is rare, but I've yet to read a bad word about Wolfgang Voigt's Kompakt label. If Voigt had to set aside making music as Gas to get Kompakt off the ground, figuratively trading in his mixing console for a shiny Steelcase desk piled with telephones and staplers, at least he's done it right. Kompakt is emerging as a model electronic label, showing the upstarts how it should be done: present a unified visual aesthetic, release an impressive variety of music that manages to retain identifying reference points, and offer a number of excellent compilations that develop and refine the overriding approach.
Last year's Pop Ambient 2001 compilation was the first to showcase the ambient side of the Kompakt coin. The fantastic collection offered two tracks by Germany's Markus Guentner, who has now released his debut album, In Moll, on the label. The initial buzz surrounding the record had Guentner picking up the torch of hyper-textural cloud music where Gas had left it with Pop.
And it's true: Guentner's approach has similarities to Pop, especially on In Moll's first half. Keyboards focus on spiraling patterns of repeating melody, precisely mixed clusters of noise highlight the music's tactile qualities, the 4/4 thump pokes in its well-manicured head on a track or two. Mind you, I'm not complaining about the similarities-- Guentner does Gas-eous ambient extremely well.
But there's much more to Guentner than mimicry. While the timbral quality of the music sure feels familiar, the overall tone of In Moll is unsettling. Rather than conjuring images of vast open space, Guentner seems to bounce around inside a concrete box. There is, for example, a distinct claustrophobic edge to the second track (the pieces are not titled). For all the squishy sonic seasoning it contains, the piece sounds like a recording of the boiler room that powers some bleak animated world. The wheezes and throbs of the machine seem to echo in some tight, dank space: industry triumphs over nature.
The fourth track begins with two spare chords that suggest a peaceful "calm after the storm" kind of atmosphere, then takes a left turn as the pastoral chords are overwhelmed with a swell of prickly static. The fifth track is the glitchiest of the bunch, as several distinct and individually compelling swatches of music are stitched together into complex overlapping patterns. Track six adds a synthetic orchestral grandeur that reminds me a little of... well, Vangelis, really-- there's something epic and dignified about 'strings' that aren't even trying to sound real. Even In Moll's closing piece, a patient exercise in drone and assorted electronic percussion, manages to stay engaging for its sixteen minutes.
Guentner's debut album is an impressive work of atmospheric electronica, and In Moll threads another feather into Kompakt's cap.


Blending elements of J-pop, rap, and hardcore, the experimental Japanese artist’s latest album presents a convincing balance of nihilism and hope.

Shunka Ryougen

Kimishima Haruna’s artistic world revolves around springtime, in both its renewing beauty and its violent contrasts. The title of her 2018 studio debut, Haru To Shura, referenced both spring and a demon of war from Japanese folklore; her newest album, Shunka Ryougen, roughly translates to “spring fire lighting the field ablaze”; her stage name, Haru Nemuri, means “spring slumber.” In parallel, Haru’s bright, euphoric J-pop is shot through with incongruous screams of fury, a vibrant juxtaposition of life and death. Self-described as a poetry rapper, she performs with electrifying abandon, breathlessly illustrating the crush of her helplessness and existential anxiety. Across Shunka Ryougen’s sprawling 21-song tracklist, her voluble poetry investigates destruction—whether to the environment, to authorities, or self-inflicted upon herself.
Haru’s sound is hemmed with an experimental, noise-rock edge, an eccentricity flavored with Aurora’s superlunary alt-pop, the rich detail of Fugazi’s punk, and the proud “RIOT GRRRL” label in her Twitter bio. In 2018, Haru To Shura infused breakneck, upbeat J-pop with the sound of DIY reinvention. Shunka Ryougen sustains the voice and tempo, but takes on a colder, more mechanical cast. Though it cycles a flurry of musical ideas, the record avoids overshadowing Haru’s presence; instead, it works alongside the searing dynamism of her voice. The cybernetic rhythm and Haru’s glacial Auto-Tune electrify tracks like the erhu-tongued “Souzou Suru” and the eerily bare “Sister With Sisters.” The martial march of “Déconstruction,” a single threaded with references to Fight Club, introduces Shunka Ryougen’s obsession with catalysts as Haru instructs: “Let’s start our paradigm shift/Like the project mayhem.”
The recurring motif of déconstruction refers to Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of dismantling form and medium to better understand concepts themselves, an idea Haru vibrantly reappropriates into the tangible context of her music. Frenzied, she fires off a litany of invective—spitting “asshole!” at a “pedigreed politician” on “Old Fashioned,” arguing with herself about the efficacy of her own lyricism and punctuating the quarrel with a self-directed “shut the fuck up!” on “Heart of Gold,” and personifying global warming as a flaming angel as she cries “Who the fuck is burning the forest?” on a track of the same name. There’s an inexpressible depth of conviction in Haru’s delivery; her voice is a finely reactive instrument that can switch from a desperate, out-of-breath invocation to a primal scream at the drop of a pin. When she asks, “Why do you want to die? Why do you want to live?” on the title track, her voice deepens into a growl that knifes into her vocal cords. It’s so vivid you can practically feel her gripping you by the collar and demanding an answer. Destruction is not only external: “Never Let You Go,” Shunka Ryougen’s crown jewel, deconstructs the very idea of Haru Nemuri—the moving, self-destructive cry of its chorus confesses that Haru’s “whole body is hoping to disappear.”
Ultimately, she offers herself a solution steeped in both obliteration and renewal: “Breathe in, breathe out, and become a song.” Despite all of Haru’s frustration and fury, her poetry finally blossoms into joy. Optimistic punk records aren’t anything new, but Shunka Ryougen is convincing in its balance of nihilism and hope. After more than an hour of Haru’s candid self-doubt and self-confessed misery, the logic of her decision to embrace love for its own sake is sincere and unsaccharine. The bouncy melody and glittering poetry of “Ikiru,” which translates to “live,” sounds like a traditional romantic love song. But instead of singing to a lover, she adopts Nietzsche’s concept of “amor fati” and declares her love for the struggle of being alive—both the good and bad. Radiantly, she ends Shunka Ryougen with a full-hearted, hard-won call: “How beautiful life is!”


The Coneheads are nothing if not self-aware. On their first vinyl release—a compilation of two crude 2014 cassettes—the Indiana punk trio are making some of the most extraterrestrial rock music around, fueled by their hatred of big cities, authority, and themselves.

The Coneheads: L.P.1. aka "14 Year Old High School PC-Fascist Hype Lords...

Yeah, that's the full title: 14 Year Old High School PC-Fascist Hype Lords Rip Off Devo for the Sake of Extorting $$$ From Helpless Impressionable Midwestern Internet Peoplepunks L.P. (The alternate title could be When the Pawn Hits the Devo.) The Coneheads are nothing if not self-aware. The Northwest Indiana punk trio actively resist the goofy mechanics of the music industry in 2015, cobbling together bits of late-'70s popular and unpopular culture to create their own hidden galaxy. Their first vinyl release is actually a comp of two 2014 mean, crude, and acutely hilarious tapes: Canadian Cone and Total Conetrol, the latter of which is curiously going for $200 on Discogs now (hopefully just another outsized joke).
If those newfound close-ups of the most-distant Pluto had a cartoonish soundtrack, it could be Coneheads—this is some of the most extraterrestrial rock music around. (Referring to your audience as "peoplepunks" seems like calling fans "earthlings.") Coneheads do steal from the art-rock of their Midwestern forebears—a previous band of theirs did a hardcore cover of "Mongoloid"—but they mutate those robot sounds with a raw, rare grasp of punk history and a breakneck sense of pacing. It sometimes sounds like a four-track has been set up inside of a cardboard box with three people playing three different songs, including unlikely nuggets such as "I Used to Be a Cheesepuff", the tale of a guy who "[goes] to school in studs and leather." Just as you think a minute-long track has run its course, a demented riff will jump back in for the final three seconds. Though skilled players, they use their instruments in a way you might if you'd just landed on Earth and never held one before—so while Coneheads may "rip off Devo," per the title, their weirdness seems more spirtually akin to, say, the Shaggs.
When he sings, vocalist/bassist Mark Winter actually sounds like a Conehead, his voice flat and nasal, with words spit so fast as to make the listening process a delightfully obnoxious blur. But Winter's words are pissed as hell, brimming with disdain for authority, the "chumps" of the outside world, and himself. On the angry 67-second blast "Violence", he smugly references the "pathetic human race" alongside a thick, rubbery, rocketspeed bassline (a mere 10 seconds is reserved at the end for a guitar solo). "Hack Hack Hack", a song literally about taking an axe to your enemy, appears in two versions—one of which is a creeping minimal synth rendition—because why not? The best tune here must be "Big City Baby", clocking in at 41 seconds, a middle-finger to the bourgeois faux-intellects of major cities: "I got a big city baby, she's just like me/ We both listen to the Smiths, ain't that interesting?" But cities are not restricted to geography in 2015; earlier he snarls a warning at his critics, "You don't even know who the fuck I am/ You and your Internet snooping can burn in hell." (True to form, they make fun of Pitchfork on the album sleeve.)
Make no mistake, Coneheads despise big cities. For a band that clearly takes the ethos of "what we do is secret" to heart, the closer "Way Things Am" is an anti-mission statement: "I like the way things am/ I can stay with any luck/ An uninteresting jaded fuck... When it comes to all good things/ I'm the sole authority/ So shove it." The band steam-rolls through a genius, hyper-compressed cover of Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer"; while David Byrne is busy shaking his fist at a cloud because New York has changed, Coneheads are laughing all over his song. If Kurt Cobain could hear Coneheads' recent cover of "In Bloom"—rudimentary and unrecognizable—he might cry tears of joy at their terrible racket.
It behooves us to remember that Coneheads—with its premise of clowny aliens stranded on Earth—started as an "SNL" skit in 1977, just as punk was taking shape, and the reference hangs over this analog outsider music like a gravitational pull towards that era. Coneheads, however, are the center of their own tiny local scene alongside Big Zit, CCTV, and Liquids, as documented on their own compilations: Cool Bands, Cool Bands 2, Cool Bands 3. This crew has ties to Chicago hardcore, but Coneheads' alien approach and bizarro time signatures remind me of late Vermont synth-pop freaks Blanche Blanche Blanche more than anything going on in hardcore. Their cult and deliberate enigma are palpable: they included "I Am a Coneheads Fan" bumper stickers with the album, and they share phone numbers on their releases that you can text to inquire about new material, or whatever. (This spring, to learn more, I tapped out a text message to one of the numbers, found inside a Liquids tape, but it felt more like dropping a letter into a well or unleashing a carrier pigeon.)
Since the release of these two endearingly peculiar cassettes, Coneheads have been subject to the nebulous and perennial cycle that is "punk hype"—an odd elixir of divisive chatter on blogs, message boards, and word of mouth that can go far in 2015—but not without good reason. It's true, for instance, that Coneheads turned down an opportunity to work with Jack White's Third Man Records. And Coneheads' appeal is not dissimilar to the stranger side of a New York band that recently worked with the label: Parquet Courts. This album has been "released" in the most minimal sense imaginable—it first surfaced earlier this year from small German label Erste Theke Tontraeger, also responsible for a collection last year by Coneheads comrades Lumpy and the Dumpers, and is now, apparently, fleetingly available stateside from the band at shows, but who knows. They do not sound like they want to be found.


The Georgia teenager’s oddball digicore tracks reflect the creative freedom of rap on TikTok. His debut EP opts for a more traditionally hard sound to diminishing returns.

3

A legion of hip-hop vloggers, streamers, influencers, and promo accounts—some bankrolled by record labels—wants you to believe in a New Underground of internet rap. Its commander-in-chief, a white, keffiyeh-wearing man from Portland named Yeat, has over seven million monthly listeners on Spotify. In his wake, an army of RapTok-famous teens trot out their attempts at pluggnb, digicore, rage rap, and everything in between. Platform dynamics threaten to erase musical lineages; kids ditch class for studio sessions in L.A. Are we out of touch, or has the future somehow been decided for us? How to separate the signal from the noise?
cheRomani+’s viral single “euphoria,” featuring Specxfic, presents one solution: Cut away all the noise. Drumless loops aren’t just for steely New Yorkers with snow in their beards. When digicore producers SEBii and kimj fit a bouncy bassline (and little else) to cheRomani+ and Specxfic’s breakneck flows, it prompts you to experience the song through their rubbery voices, tuning in to every namedrop and silly threat. Their almost cartoonish velocity atop the sparse instrumental feels like slamming two cans of Monster, or if Do or Die had a hyperpop arc. Fast rap hasn’t sounded so fresh and alive in a while.
Like a lot of newly minted TikTok rappers, the most notable thing about cheRomani+ might be just how little there is to know. Early in the pandemic, the high schooler from Georgia quit basketball and casually started toying around on FL Studio. Last summer, he received attention on TikTok for his remix of Yeat’s song “Off the Lot.” He scored a couple more internet hits with “euphoria” and a feathery tune called “agenda,” and…that’s about it.
Compared to his big singles, cheRomani+’s debut EP 3 opts for a more traditionally hard sound to diminishing returns. A disciple of rapper-producer Lil Tecca, he’ll occasionally land on an idea that marries voice to music in a unique way, like when he sings urgently over the triumphant brass of “Hugo.” On opener “City” and closer “Nine,” che does a serviceable Yeat impression; his latest collaboration with Specxfic, “007,” is fine but doesn’t touch “euphoria” or their ridiculous TisaKorean-meets-Tay-K moment “School k pt 2.” cheRomani+ isn’t a particularly compelling writer (few rappers in this scene really are; this is a producer-driven environment), so when his beat selection is average, too, there isn’t much left to chew on.
What’s interesting about che is that he doesn’t have the baggage of an artist forged in a specific SoundCloud scene. For as much hate as “TikTok rap” gets, it offers a creative freedom that the hyper-specific norms and genre tags of other internet rap communities sometimes suppress. Yvngxchris pivots from sample drill to rage beats, pluggnb artist Weiland draws fresh ears to his weird, kinda bad synth pop, and cheRomani+ can make oddball digicore. 3 presents a small, rather unexciting picture of that freedom; in the grand scheme, it’s probably just noise.


Powered by her commanding voice, the L.A. songwriter’s debut casts questions about family, relationships, aging, death, and the afterlife in buzzing neon hues.

Caroline Kingsbury: Heaven’s Just a Flight

Heaven’s Just a Flight

If the dulcet tones of Norma Jean are to be believed, it takes a lot of faith and a little resilience to make it to the pearly gates. “Heaven,” she sang sweetly on her 1968 country-gospel standard, is “just a prayer away.” For Caroline Kingsbury, an L.A.-based musician raised in a religious family in Florida, the great beyond is more attainable. If Norma Jean was spending her Sunday mornings in church, Kingsbury finds spirituality under cover of night, in drum machines and thrumming basslines. Her debut record, Heaven’s Just a Flight, casts questions about family, relationships, aging, death, and the afterlife in the buzzing neon hues of backroom bars and dimly lit dancefloors.
On past projects, Kingsbury experimented in the hazier (and perhaps more anonymous) textures of dream pop. For her first full-length, she commits both her look and her sound to the sequin-clad, cocaine-dusted ethos of glam rock. That level of drama is a tall order, but it’s a stronger and more defining background for her rich and robust voice, which flits between a growl and a yelp on a moment’s notice.
Her deep, textured croon recalls the power and theatrical range of Heart. “Massive Escape,” a runaway fantasy set to minimal new wave instrumentation, nearly vibrates with the strength of her voice, so commanding that when she sings about causing a plane crash, you’re scared to doubt her. At other times, she recalls the naked vulnerability of Karen O or Kate Bush, conjuring a sense of danger with her vocal slipperiness. When she belts out the final “fall” on the chorus of the booming “Fall in Love,” her voice tics up as if suddenly startled, evoking an actual fear of falling. Heaven’s Just a Flight finds its footing in these winking moments when hair-metal kitsch becomes living, breathing performance.
The album’s instrumentation is a collage of stylistic eras united by their outsized personalities, from disco to post-punk revival. While the distorted guitars and twinkling synths never quite transcend their root influences the same way Kingsbury’s vocals do, they provide such a convincing homage to the source material that it would almost feel perverse to stray further. Variation and experimentation takes the form of imitation across genres: “Breaking Apart” maps Kingsbury’s vocals onto the gothic syncopation of Depeche Mode. “Lose,” a mid-album slow burn, stretches her voice into a withered howl, like an uncanny companion piece to the Killers’ “Glamorous Indie Rock & Roll” (Math Bishop, who’s credited on Wonderful Wonderful, also worked on several songs on Heaven’s Just a Flight).
On an album that runs nearly an hour over 16 tracks, it’s easy to miss these small differentiations. Kingsbury describes the record as the culmination of three years of songwriting, and despite her best efforts to unify disparate periods of creativity, the album’s writing is uneven and drags in the final third. Her best songs grab you by the rhinestone-studded collar; her weaker ones feel like discarded diary entries, unfolding slower than life itself. Kingsbury covers a lot of ground on Heaven’s Just a Flight—the loss of her brother, coming out to her religious family, falling in love with her girlfriend. But in trying to compress these events into a singular vision, their themes blur and her message loses its meaning. From another angle, though, it’s just the right amount of excess for an album that paints every last call as a biblical experience.

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Banks' The Altar has a lot in common with the alt-R&B singer's breakthrough Goddess, including its fatal flaw: its attempts to position her as edgy or dangerous, despite all evidence to the contrary.

The Altar

Alt-R&B artists love to evoke turn-of-the-century R&B, albeit a version of it in which everyone was Aaliyah. While Banks, the alt-R&B project of LA singer-songwriter Jillian Banks, seems conceptualized and curated to within an inch of its life, the reality is a couple years of Banks searching for that fit. The list of collaborators on 2013’s London comes off as an attempt to reverse-engineer getting onto BBC's Sound Of list; Goddess did the same for getting onto playlists with the Weeknd. And after some success—including “Beggin for Thread” becoming a minor alternative hit—Altar attempts to do the same. In fact, The Altar has a lot in common with Goddess, including its fatal flaw: its attempts to position Banks as edgy or dangerous, despite all musical evidence to the contrary.
Single “Fuck With Myself” is indicative. The conceit, your basic tale of fuck-the-haters-I’ve-got-self-love-but-ooh-what-kind? (in an interview with Zane Lowe, Banks boasted that it had “so many meanings,” which is weird because the slang has one or two) is so anodyne in 2016 that True Grit kid Hailee Steinfeld's done it with mild bowdlerization. Producer Al Shux (“Drowning,” “Empire State of Mind,” “Wicked Love”) constructs a skeleton of an R&Bass song, the sort of half-there production that’s minimalist in a way that suggests they avoided fleshing out the details. Where Banks might have brought menace to the void, she substitutes vocal gimmicks: stage whispers, clipped runs or, bizarrely, a gulped cadence that suggests she’s either choking through a straw or greeting an approaching cat.
You don’t pull out this many vocal tricks unless you’re compensating for something, and in this case it’s probably Banks’ voice. At best, it evokes Martina Topley-Bird; more often, it evokes Martina Topley-Bird with a bad cold, or that bit in Chicago where Roxie likens Amos’ voice to fixing a carburetor. This wouldn't happen so often if Banks wrote to her voice, but like too many alt-R&B artists she tries to fit her voice to other artists’ cadences and winds up showcasing every weakness. The heavy Drake-reminiscent drone drags down “Haunt”; the title to would-be slow jam “Lovesick” scans a bit too literal, and the quavers-intact Vocodering of “Poltergeist” turns the track into 808s and Pneumonia. The production, while consistently solid, isn’t noteworthy enough to compensate, and while Banks’ lyrics are noteworthy, it’s not in the good way. “Judas” spends more effort name-dropping Banks’ past singles than it does on the metaphor; the last pop song, and inescapable comparison, on this subject was a brash, theologically junk mess, but at least it sounded like its artist actually fucked with Judas, or at least considered the thought. “Gemini Feed” relies on tabloid astrology and a bloodless couple’s gripe of a pre-chorus: “you’re passive-aggressive.” Perhaps it’s the remarkably coincidental timing, but “I smell a clown looking goofy dressed up like a native” would kill any track’s momentum.
The other thing you'll hear Banks’ music described as is “dark pop.” In 2016 this could also mean just about anything, but mostly marketing; Tove Lo, Dua Lipa, and dozens of aspiring pop stars are launching careers on it. At this point it’s possibly an even more flooded market than R&B, yet it’s where Banks sounds the most natural. “Trainwreck” evokes, to great effect, the particular darkness that was all over pop radio in the early ’10s—blown-out vocals, big menacing synth pads, barely concealed panic. The production goes loud, and so does Banks. (It’s no coincidence that here Banks finally starts to sing.) Hitched to the chorus is a sprinting, stopping verse, Banks racing the beat and pausing to emote. On another album this might evoke rap, but it evokes just as much singer-songwriters like Maria Mena, or unlikely Drake collaborator Chantal Kreviazuk, or, more than anything, “Fast As You Can” by Fiona Apple—one of Banks' stated idols.
The track’s a standout, in that it sounds like it’s off an entirely different record. If this were actually the late ’90s, with the industry trends of the time, The Altar would either be R&B via Hot AC—think Jennifer Paige—or an acoustic singer-songwriter project, and there are hints throughout the album that Banks may have had that in mind. “To the Hilt,” save a few Mýa cadences, is a straightforward piano-and-strings ballad. The title telegraphs this a bit much, but “Mother Earth” gets quite close to folk-Americana, wisps of harmonies and all, and Banks' voice serves this material nicely. One wonders what an entire album of this sort of thing would be like. It might be fusty. It would not be particularly on trend. It would not get one tours with the Weeknd. But it might finally let Banks be herself, more than anybody else.


Eleven albums in, a band that has become an industry unto itself attempts an artistic rejuvenation that still seems out of reach.

Gigaton

Before they had anything—a legion of devoted fans, walls of platinum records, a destination festival—Pearl Jam had a community. In the Seattle grunge scene of the early ’90s, they emerged as part of a larger mosaic, members of a supergroup before their debut even came out. This support from contemporaries is likely what empowered Pearl Jam to find their voice, writing earnest, soaring rock songs inspired by punk but delivered as arena anthems in jam band-style marathon live sets. Now that they are an industry all to themselves, their origin story might seem like a footnote—especially in 2020, when they remain the last band intact from their particular scene. But this sense of uplift still defines their work.
Communal goodwill is the saving grace of Gigaton, their eleventh studio album and first in nearly seven years. At 57 minutes, it’s their longest album, as well as the one that took the longest to complete. You feel the weight of both durations throughout. The ballads stretch out slowly, and the uptempo numbers are derailed by meandering build-ups, like stopping for a chat while running in place mid-jog. From the curveball disco-rock of first single “Dance of the Clairvoyants”—a portal into an alternate universe where David Byrne produced the Who to soundtrack an ’80s action film—the band immediately forecasted an attempt to revitalize its sound. In context, it’s more of an outlier: a reminder of their underdog mentality, that they have some fight left in them.
From the sounds of it, Pearl Jam pieced Gigaton together from various sessions over several years, with Vedder adding vocals to the choice bits after the fact. It’s hard to imagine this process leading toward a unified statement from any band, let alone one that’s already been having trouble finding inspiration. After records like 2009’s Backspacer and 2013’s Lightning Bolt combatted their dearth of ideas with low-stakes thrashiness—a throwback to the rowdy garage band that they never actually were—Gigaton attempts to reinstate their ambition. Co-produced by the band and Josh Evans, it’s filled with all the markers of cerebral, studio-born rock music: drum loops and programmed synths, swirling keys and fretless bass, wide dynamics and spacey textures. For the first time in a while, the winning moments are the slower cuts: songs like “Retrograde” and “Seven O’Clock” that evolve patiently into their atmosphere, as opposed to pro-forma ragers like “Never Destination” that never quite find their groove.
To unify this sprawling material, Vedder offers wordy, zoomed-out lyrics that directly address Trump, the climate crisis, and a growing sense of apocalyptic unease. And if his lyrics occasionally come out jumbled (“They giveth and they taketh/And you fight to keep that what you’ve earned”) or totally miss the mark (a reference to the title character of Sean Penn’s novel), his performance is as keyed-in and comforting as ever. For all the record’s studio experimentation, the moments that cut through are the subtle choices he makes as a vocalist: his anxious speak-sing in “Seven O’Clock,” the way he mimics the wordless refrain of the eerie “Buckle Up,” the seething cry of the chorus in “Quick Escape.” With songs contributed by each band member, Gigaton is an undeniably democratic statement, but Vedder remains their guiding light—the voice that allowed this particular band to outlast an entire generation of imitators.
The artistic rejuvenation that Gigaton aims to provide still seems somewhat out of reach. In that sense, it reminds me of U2’s No Line on the Horizon—another late-career attempt at experimentation after a series of back-to-basic statements. Both records indulge an influential band’s artsier side in mostly superficial ways—longer songs, pasted-in ambience, grand attempts at state-of-the-union philosophizing—while backing away from the actual subversion that made them exciting in the first place. Like U2, Pearl Jam have been able to sustain their legacy even without vital new studio work. But unlike U2, Pearl Jam seem content to deliver their messages to the already converted, with no interest in the mainstream attention that once came naturally. Their self-awareness both grounds this music and confines its ambition.
For a long time, Pearl Jam had an uncommon strength for asserting their individuality while pleasing the masses, looking to the future while staying true to their own history. On Gigaton, they admit they don’t know what happens next. Their message hits hardest in the closing tracks: the singalong strummer “Retrograde” and the fragile pump organ ballad “River Cross.” Both tracks forecast darker skies with calm, reassuring music. In the final moments of the record, Vedder offers a mantra: “Can’t hold me down.” As the music swells and his voice rises to the occasion, he switches from “me” to “us”—a last attempt to gather the community, to band together before the coming storm.