The Irish-Catalan singer-songwriter’s latest release is playful and elliptical, as reverent of folk-pop as it is invested in experimenting with it.

Cyclamen

Núria Graham’s homespun folk-pop carries a playful sensibility. A sense of wonder pervades the Irish-Catalan singer-songwriter’s breezy music: When Graham relays a laconic story or asks a lilting question in her velvety, laid-back voice, you lean in closer. On 2020’s Marjorie, Graham explored abstruse reflections about death, heritage, and memory, couched in pleasant, surfy guitar tones and keys that occasionally flattened out her personality. With her fourth album Cyclamen, Graham course-corrects toward a more intentional point of view, lighting up her delicate music with winding, jazzy vocal melodies and a sly sense of humor that brings her elliptical lyrics to life.
Named after a Mediterranean flower whose blooms resemble butterflies suspended in flight, Cyclamen draws on that naturalistic conceit through gossamer strings and horns, lending Graham’s sound a newly cinematic burnish. The album slips between surrealistic stories set on Italian isles populated by flora and fountains, but she keeps things grounded with a bedrock of closely mic’d piano and double bass. Graham always sounds in repose; her voice flits over twinkling chord progressions on “Yes It’s Me, the Goldfish!” as she compares the enclosure of a fishbowl to the mundanity of life. She experiences both comfort and distress as she peers out at the world, a perspective that endures across Cyclamen’s ruminations on home and memory. The music is vibrantly off-kilter, locking into different airy grooves to draw out her poetic tales, even in its more traditional moments. The delicate “Fire Mountain Oh Sacred Ancient Fountain” is pared down to basic elements—plucked strings, a striding guitar line—that briskly glide around each other, highlighting Graham’s skill with folk simplicity.
Cyclamen showcases Graham’s talent for hushed, reverent folk-pop while making room for experimentation. Two iterations of the dreamy interlude “Procida” bracket the album, both stripped-down tracks that layer Graham’s backing vocals into resounding instruments of their own. On the memorable outlier “Disaster in Napoli,” she adds further dimension: A grungy, feedback-loaded guitar, à la Sonic Youth, describes an unnamed catastrophe tearing apart the titular city. Smoky and agitated, the song is a tense detour that displays Graham’s far-reaching impulses.
Graham’s rambling vocal delivery lends itself well to the album’s occasionally dark stories, recalling Aldous Harding’s sardonic folk-pop or Destroyer’s fragmented philosophizing. Graham’s humor appears in surprising left turns, as on “Yes It’s Me, the Goldfish!” (After recalling a particularly disturbing incident about a woman who suffered burns in an accident, she simply murmurs, “How fucked up is that?”) The more offbeat lines don’t feel tossed off, instead giving her ornate music another dash of charisma. Over roving piano and double bass on the highlight “The Catalyst,” she sing-speaks a stream-of-consciousness rant that grows increasingly wistful, ranging from wanting a “party and a kiss” to seeing the devil in her room. “But I don’t really mind,” she says, at peace with death at her door. “As long as he’s just sitting here.” It’s a strange, fantastical moment that joins Graham’s whimsical lyrics with a crushing sense of reality.
Cyclamen’s ruminative moments work in tandem with its daydreamy instrumentation, a balancing act Graham extends to the album’s most transcendent songs. On “The Beginnings of Things,” the refrain of the song title becomes a pensive mantra aimed at her younger self. It culminates with fingerpicked guitar and grandiose strings: “It’s no secret that I like the beginnings of things,” she sings, slightly modulating the melody each time, leaving space for ambiguity around her feelings on starting anew. Like Graham’s best songs, it prods you to adopt the same kind of cockeyed curiosity about the world and its everyday uncertainties.


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 Peter Gabriel’s 1986 art-pop masterpiece, a turning point in the commercial globalization of pop music.

So

On January 1, 1984, television stations around the world aired a program produced by video artist Nam June Paik titled “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell.” Described by host George Plimpton as “a rather unusual event in live television” and “a global disco,” Paik’s special aimed to counter George Orwell’s dystopian vision of the dawning year, where mass media and fascism were to become inextricable. Instead, Plimpton announced, the program would feature “positive and interactive uses of electronic media, which Mr. Orwell, the fierce media prophet, never predicted.”
As the broadcast wound on, however, it was clear that Paik created it with tongue firmly in cheek: It was plagued with technical difficulties in satellite link-ups, multiple performances airing at the same time, and wildly overdone graphics manipulation. Befitting the year that would inaugurate the music video revolution, “Good Morning” was an irreverent, avant-garde MTV in miniature, with performances by Merce Cunningham, Oingo Boingo, Allen Ginsberg, Simply Red, and to open the program, a duet between Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson.
The two art-pop icons lip-synced “Excellent Birds,” which they’d co-written a week or so earlier at Paik’s request. The song’s aphoristic lyrics were aligned with Anderson’s 1982 debut Big Science, while the song’s funk-derived bassline and synthesized flute sample hewed much closer to Gabriel’s 1982 self-titled fourth solo album, dubbed Security by his American label Geffen. The green-screened visuals—cutting-edge for the time—staged the pair pensively gazing and spasmodically dancing over a series of dazzling and futuristic backdrops.
The “Birds” performance signified an important sonic and technological pivot point in Gabriel’s career. He split from UK art-rock titans Genesis nearly a decade earlier because he wanted fewer dissenting voices pushing back against his grand plans to more fully merge sound with visual images, and explore forms of music that didn’t emerge from the European canon. Like his avant-garde pop contemporaries Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, Gabriel moved out of a theatrical British art-rock group and into the ’80s with an eye towards non-Western composition and cutting-edge studio experimentation. Gabriel was an eager dilettante of Africa’s varied musical forms, soaking up South African film scores, Ethiopian folk music, and Senegalese drumming, often from dubbed cassettes. And like Eno and Fripp, Gabriel was not as interested in customs, habits, and beliefs, as much as he was dazzled by tones and rhythms and subject matter that, to him, expressed different emotions and alternate states of mind than European-rooted composition.
Gabriel’s obsession with the bleeding edge of digital studio technologies came from the same curiosity: How can I make noises and rhythms of my own that sound completely different than anything else? He was the first UK artist to purchase a programmable CMI Fairlight synthesizer—an early sampler—which he used on Security and its in 1980 predecessor (also self-titled, and popularly called Melt after its photo-manipulated cover image) to mutate his bizarre field recordings and smear the results through his music.
Security opener “The Rhythm of the Heat” is an early example of Gabriel’s studio-bound ethnographic pop experimentation. The song was inspired by psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s 1920s trip to Africa, to shed his modern European trappings and absorb the continent’s mystical power (the song’s working title was “Jung in Africa”). With similar colonialist naïvete, Gabriel wails that “the rhythm is inside me” and “the rhythm has my soul.” Unlike “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell,” there was no arch wink at the audience here—Gabriel was entirely sincere in his belief that he could technologically engineer a psychological transformation. In 1982, “Rhythm” sounded amazing, but even then, its cultural politics—Africa is where white Europeans go to find their “true” rhythmic soul—was laden with unexamined appropriation.
Two years earlier, Melt’s final track evinced a different side of Gabriel’s perspective on an artist’s role in African music and politics. Though he had proven his ability to sing as an earnest rock frontman on his 1977 hit “Solsbury Hill,” there was no real rock precedent for “Biko,” the epic seven-and-a-half minute power ballad about Steven Biko, an anti-apartheid activist who died in South African police custody in 1977. Gabriel set the song to a dirge tempo rooted in South African funeral music, slipped in and out of Xhosa in the lyrics, and added a synthesized bagpipe and Fripp’s distorted guitar for good measure. Others had experimented with African rhythms and guitar textures, but Gabriel had crafted a global anthem for a fallen African freedom fighter.
By 1984, Gabriel had been out of the industry’s spotlight for a couple of years, doing soundtrack work and getting his WOMAD festival—a combination of UK new wave acts and artists from around the world—off the ground. In his absence, the record business caught up to “Biko.” From late 1984 through 1985, the massive charity spectacles Band Aid, Live Aid, and “We Are the World” raised tens of millions for Ethiopian famine relief, while E Street guitarist Steven Van Zandt organized the “Sun City” project to draw attention to the horrors of South African apartheid. In the liner notes for the album—to which Gabriel contributed a song—Van Zandt summed up the well-intentioned naïvete of rock’s white elite, thanking Gabriel for the “profound inspiration of his song ‘Biko,’ which is where my journey to Africa began.”
In 1986, Gabriel was invited to participate in Amnesty International’s “Conspiracy of Hope” stadium tour by Bono, who had used Live Aid’s global audience to cast himself as rock’s new messiah. For the June 1986 tour finale, Gabriel performed “Biko” to a stadium audience of 55,000 and an MTV television audience of millions more. His long-awaited fifth album, simply titled So, had been released a month earlier.
So was not an explicitly political album, but Gabriel’s outsized presence in 1986 and 1987 was synonymous with what might be called rock’s NGO phase: the moment when the world’s biggest superstars convinced themselves that doing their job bigger and more seriously could actually make the world a better place. So was released in the middle of pop’s most nakedly consumerist era, when the biggest artists were as unapologetic about their ambitions for global stardom as they were devoted to speaking out on global crises. The gap between superstar and everyone else was expanding exponentially. Advances in digital recording and mastering had clarified the sound of rock records, and the 74-minute capacity of the newly released compact disc encouraged sonic sprawl. Gabriel worked on So with one of the masters of rock’s new sonic frontier, Daniel Lanois, an Eno disciple who had just produced U2’s 1984 album The Unforgettable Fire.
In Gabriel’s choice of collaborators, So was a signpost for the future of the global record business. The disputed corporate genre “world music” doesn’t have a single origin point, of course, but it’s possible to hear in So’s musicians—French/Ivorian drummer Manu Katché, Senegalese vocalist Youssou N’Dour, Indian violinist L. Shankar, Brazilian percussionist Djalma Correa—a key moment when rock pivoted in its approach to the so-called “Third World,” from charity spectacle to studio collaboration.
The first 20 seconds of So’s first single “Sledgehammer”—a trilling, echo-laden bamboo flute created by an E-mu Emulator II synthesizer—is just a feint before the song explodes into a sharp left turn: a ’60s soul rave-up. Gabriel’s latest revelation wasn’t rooted in geopolitics, but his own libido (“I wanna be your sledgehammer” is a classic R&B double-entendre). And though he could have easily programmed the song’s brassy trumpet hook into his synthesizer, Gabriel was an R&B aficionado who valued cultural authenticity, so he flew in Otis Redding’s 1960s sideman Wayne Jackson to play the chart. In Gabriel’s global mindset, Jackson was every bit the bearer of a distinct musical tradition as Katché. He called the duo’s participation “a commanding blend of parallel heritages.”
Like art-punk turned R&B shouter David Byrne on 1978’s “Take Me to the River,” it was bracing to hear Gabriel, one of the most self-serious artists of his era, so at ease in a new idiom. For the first time in his recorded life, he actually seems to be having fun. Though it was a clear break with his earlier work, Gabriel knew exactly what he was doing. He crafted his first single in four years to fit perfectly into the era’s boomer-fueled R&B revival, a time when the radio and MTV were dominated by rejuvenated ’60s and ’70s icons Tina Turner, Kool and the Gang, the Pointer Sisters, and Lionel Richie, all of whom reinvigorated their careers with digitally gleaming updates on black pop’s golden age.
In late July, “Sledgehammer” hit No.1, coronating Gabriel as a bona fide pop star. While the song stood on its own, its music video took him to a world no artist had ever entered. Over a strenuous 100-hour week in April 1986, Gabriel and a team of animators—including Stephen Johnson, who produced the Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” and Aardman Animation, who would later create the claymation franchise “Wallace and Gromit”—produced the most innovative music video in the short history of the form. Eschewing cheesy digital visual effects for ostentatious stop-motion animation, claymation, and time-lapse videography, Gabriel was inserted into a series of dreamlike scenarios that occasionally mirrored the lyrics (a steam train, bumper cars, fruit), and were otherwise silly and bizarre (dancing raw chickens). “Sledgehammer” was an absolute sensation on MTV, winning 10 Video Music Awards and competing with “Thriller” in the network’s “best video of all time” countdowns. Not only was Gabriel a card-carrying member of rock’s diplomatic elite, but he was also now at the very forefront of its visual revolution.
“Big Time” borrows even more directly from Byrne, powered by Tony Levin’s fretless bassline and visualized by an animated video that opens with a tuxedo-clad Gabriel awkwardly dancing in front of video static. But while Byrne’s dialogue with modern life was one of quasi-religious self-realization, “Big Time” is a cheeky, self-referential bildungsroman, connecting Reagan-era bootstrapped corporate aspirationalism to Gabriel’s own desire for musical fame. Where the rest of So reaches solemnly outward to the non-Western world, “Sledgehammer” and “Big Time” insert Gabriel into a vivid, self-contained fantasy world; a sibling to the ’50s exotica-inspired wacky utopia of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, which also debuted in 1986.
Gabriel tackled the opposite side of ballooning Western capitalism on “Don’t Give Up,” an emotional response to the growing sense of working-class British despair under the stifling austerity of the Margaret Thatcher era. Like Reagan in the U.S., Thatcher preached the gospel of free-market individual resilience in the face of the skyrocketing unemployment. While Gabriel sketches a despondent scenario about a man on the verge of losing everything, Kate Bush alights on the chorus, her empyrean voice offering sincere comfort: “Don’t give up/’Cause you have friends/Don’t give up/You’re not beaten yet.” Bush and Gabriel had collaborated before (she provided the eerie vocal counterpoint on “Games Without Frontiers”), and she had zoomed past him in his absence to the vanguard of experimental UK art-pop. Now, they held one another in a deep embrace for the length of the “Don’t Give Up” video, the perfect visualization of such a simple, compassionate sentiment, cradled by the gossamer chords of the CS-80 synthesizer. Though rooted in a very 1980s political reality, three-and-a-half decades later it is perhaps Gabriel’s most affecting song.
A simple dialogue of worry countered by encouragement, delivered while spinning in full embrace: “Don’t Give Up” seems drawn from Gabriel’s established interest in fringe science approaches to performative displays of extreme emotion. He had become close with the counterculture’s favorite psychotherapist R.D. Laing and had participated in Erhard Seminars Training (EST), the cultish late-’70s self-discovery fad started by a former car salesman. In his abiding belief that music should express a profound sense of emotional compassion and catharsis, his closest peers were Tears for Fears, whose titanic 1985 LP Songs from the Big Chair was inspired by the “primal scream” work of psychologist Arthur Janov.
Thanks to his deep engagement with Jung, Gabriel believed that dream interpretation was the most important key to personal emotional transformation. “I take dreams very seriously,” he told Spin in 1986. “I think everyone should.” Imagery drawn from the unconscious suffuses So from the first verse of the first song, the U2-sized “Red Rain”: “I am standing up at the water's edge in my dream/I cannot make a single sound as you scream.” Dreams are the subject of “Mercy Street,” as well, inspired by a posthumously published work by Pulitzer-winning poet Anne Sexton. Sexton started writing poetry while recovering from a breakdown, and her therapist encouraged her to pull subject matter from her dreams. Gabriel was drawn to her poem “45 Mercy Street,” where Sexton recounts wandering through a dreamscape, looking for the imaginary address through which she could access a fictional idyllic past. With misty synths muting Djalma Correa’s ululating percussion, Gabriel offers an exegesis of Sexton’s work and then expands her narrative universe, ending with the poet peacefully sailing on the ocean with her father.
The heady emotional state of So was further complicated by the fact that Gabriel’s 15-year marriage was on the verge of collapse. His side-relationship with Rosanna Arquette was an open secret, and the album’s lyric sheet is rife with references to fledgling attempts at personal communication. Though “That Voice Again” has the album’s most appealing non-“Sledgehammer” chorus, it also contains the album’s most biting lyric, which could have been drawn straight from a counseling session: “I want you close I want you near/I can’t help but listen/But I don't want to hear/Hear that voice again.” In this context, the album’s inclusion of longtime concert staple “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)”—named for the notorious psychological experiment that claimed to prove humans were innately predisposed to harm others—gains an added layer of resonance.
In the years after So’s release, it was revealed that Gabriel conceived its best and most enduring song while fully enamored of Arquette. Originally titled “Sagrada Familia” in tribute to Antonio Gaudi’s Barcelona basilica and reportedly inspired by the myth of rifle heiress Sarah Winchester’s delusional construction of a maze-like mansion, Gabriel’s lyrics for “In Your Eyes” equate romantic infatuation to getting lost in a beautiful, mysteriously constructed edifice. Though now beloved as much for its climactic use in 1989’s Say Anything..., wedding dances, and senior proms, in 1986 the song signaled a new turn in rock’s engagement with African music. The track’s production is its own marvel of sonic construction, Katché’s quietly complex rhythmic syncopations meshing with Jerry Marotta’s rock-derived drumming, leading to a transfixing coda belted out by N’Dour, who translated the refrain into his native Wolof.
“In Your Eyes” is the moment where Gabriel fully fuses the personal, spiritual, and global impulses in his music. “On two recent trips to Senegal,” he told Spin, “it was explained to me that many of their love songs are left ambiguous so that they could refer to the love between man and woman or the love between man and God.” But on a platinum-selling album circulating through a global, billion-dollar pop industry, the primary reference of any song is always the star, and “In Your Eyes” is, at root, about Gabriel’s global voyage of self-discovery.
In 1986, N’Dour was already a living legend in his own country. A decade earlier, he was a primary force driving the creation of Mbalax, of the first truly Senegalese pop music. More recently, he’d shown his own willingness to engage in a trans-Atlantic dialogue, adapting the Spinners’ “Rubberband Man” into his own voice. But outside of West African music aficionados, N’Dour was still unknown. After So, that changed: Gabriel saw himself as not just N’Dour’s musical collaborator, but his promoter. He took N’Dour on tour with him and they collaborated several more times. There is no question that Gabriel made N’Dour a bigger star. The thornier question is what did N’Dour do for Gabriel? Was their relationship another example of pop and rock’s long legacy of colonialist absorption? An instance of music business market expansion exemplified by Gabriel starting his Virgin-distributed Real World label/studio in 1989? A simple act of earnest musical dialogue between kindred spirits? Yes. “I’m pleased to see that in most record stores…you see an African section now,” Gabriel said in 1986. “Maybe in another decade there’ll be a world-music section.”
In the mid-1980s, the intertwined forces of rapidly advancing communication technologies and the ever-expanding interests of capital had ushered in the era of “globalization.” To optimists like Gabriel and his pop peers Byrne, Sting, and Paul Simon, it was the dawn of a borderless, utopian era of cultural creativity and fluid identity. To critics, world music forwarded a notion of increased cultural diversity as a garish cover for the increasing centralization of Western economic power and expansion of global economic inequality. Like any popular music form that seeks to make a political statement, world music was founded on a contradiction. It was at once a marketing category designed to sell non-Western music to Western audiences, that also, at its best, could function as a form of cross-cultural diplomacy.
Gabriel fully understood his limits he was working within. “I don’t think we can change the world as directly as many people thought was once possible,” he told Spin. “What we can do is provide information and then let people make up their minds.” Gabriel’s focus on the individual’s role in global change reflected So’s twin fixations: psychological transformation and global communication. So became a blueprint for pop music do-goodery, a political statement executed through self-reflection, collaboration, and the best audio-visual experience money can buy.


The oddball Phoenix rap trio traffic in wild, boundary-pushing production and playfully anarchic bars.

Injury Reserve

The oddball Phoenix trio Injury Reserve seem more like a random selection of three customers at a Zumiez store than a rap group.  Their true origin story isn’t that far off: rapper Ritchie With a T moved to the city with his mom so she could launch a Vans store there, and that’s where he met Stepa J. Groggs, who was an employee.  Their imaginative 23-year-old producer Parker Corey, a swim-team captain who only got into beat-making when an injury kept him from competing, is so green that Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is the first rap album he ever listened to in full. A tinkerer without limits, he’s sampled everything from K-pop idol group f(x) to bebop trailblazer Donald Byrd. Without a rap scene in Phoenix, they played house parties with punk bands, and their debut album is an attempt to make something uniquely modern of all this incongruity.
Their breakthrough mixtape, 2015’s Live From the Dentist Office, which was literally recorded in the office of Corey’s DDS grandfather, was a foray into jazzy alt-rap that threatened to define them, and they’ve subsequently pushed back hard against it. “I say this ain’t jazz-rap; this that spazz-rap/This that raised-by-the-internet, ain’t-had-no-dad rap,” Ritchie explains on “Oh Shit!!!” from the 2016 follow-up tape Floss. Since then, they’ve continued to move outward into weirder sounds without sacrificing their inherent smoothness. “There’s people that can make really accessible music, and there’s people who can make experimental music, but there’s only a handful of people who can do both,” Ritchie told Billboard. They aim to join this handful, making noise music that still scans as pop.
Despite their pursuit of the avant garde, neither Ritchie nor Stepa are particularly groundbreaking MCs. Both are straight-talk rappers that rap a lot about rapping. And yet they’re regularly shown up by their own guests, whether it’s Rico Nasty annihilating them on “Jawbreaker” or Freddie Gibbs slashing through “Wax On” with surgical precision. Neither rap anything as memorable across the entire album as Aminé’s bars on “Jailbreak the Tesla”: “Your engine go ‘Vroom’ and my engine go—/Elon on them shrooms/And Grimes voice gon’ be the GPS.”  Ritchie and Stepa are best when playing off each other, and they both have a genuine feel for making the most out of Corey’s productions.
Much of their boundary pushing is reliant on Corey. He doesn’t know enough about hip-hop to be following any traditional producer blueprints; a child of white suburbia, his rap plug was YouTube. The beats he makes are the endgame of an alternate rap universe where MBDTF is the Big Bang. His productions put premiums on maximalism and feats of curation; he draws inspiration from Arca and follows bread crumb trails to bizarre landing places. This is the cornerstone of the Injury Reserve brand: rap music that isn’t beholden to rap conceits, or, put frankly, rap for people who don’t listen to much other rap. The group is signed to Loma Vista, a primarily indie rock-focused label, and Corey made a beat enthusiastically sampling Dory Previn’s Mythical Kings and Iguanas for Mass Appeal’s “Rhythm Roulette” series wearing Mitski merch from Bury Me at Makeout Creek.
When Corey is at his most inventive, Injury Reserve feels remarkably fresh and singular. On “Jailbreak the Tesla,” he scraps “Tokyo Drift (Fast & Furious)” by the Teriyaki Boyz for parts and turns a supercar garage into a strobing nightclub. “Rap Song Tutorial” deconstructs one of their own songs only to reconstruct it as a primer for other would-be rappers. The guitar tune-up that opens “Best Spot in the House” becomes the crunch for a glitchy, wailing synth trance. His talent and vision can make Ritchie and Stepa seem like true originals. Too often, though, Injury Reserve gets stuck between its experimental urges and its pop ambitions.  In searching for a happy medium, it’s never quite noisy enough or quite catchy enough.


A collection of stripped-down and unreleased tracks from the infamous folk singer's early days offers little clarity to his mercurial career, but these demos remain striking and emotional.

Tim Buckley: Lady, Give Me Your Key: The Unissued 1967 Solo Acoustic Sessions

While their recorded output was inversely proportional, the earthly fates for father and son Tim and Jeff Buckley were eerily similar. Whereas Tim released nine studio albums in his lifetime before a heroin overdose at the age of 28, his son Jeff released but one studio LP before drowning in the Mississippi River at the age of 30. And after their too young deaths, their posthumous fates have also been parallel, with a plethora of live recordings and outtakes swelling both Buckleys’ legacies. Since he had less material to draw upon, Jeff's discography and cult have sadly become the definition of barrel-scraping: a 2CD set of demos, a deluxe edition of Grace, three live albums, a live DVD, another album of soundboard tapes and demos, not to mention this year’s cash-in of covers. Jeff’s aura is lit by his unfulfilled potential, while Tim’s is shaped by the cautionary arc of an artist: from young fledgling to fully-realized artist to a man broken by the end of his life.
Father Tim’s legacy continues to fly under-the-radar, in part because he recorded and released records at a clip, toured constantly, and never amassed a big fanbase. From his baroque-pop self-titled debut in 1966 through his astonishing avant-garde primal scream Starsailor in 1970 to the B&D r&b of Greetings From L.A., Buckley evolved and molted so quickly that even the most dedicated fan wouldn’t have been able to keep up. Even though a release like Lady, Give Me Your Key unearths never-before-heard material, it still doesn’t reveal anything new about the mercurial man.
Part of what makes Key a lukewarm listen is its relation to one of Buckley’s heavy-handed early albums, 1967’s Goodbye and Hello, right before he matured with his expert fusion of folk and improvised jazz on 1969’s spellbinding Happy Sad. While the excellent 1999 set Works in Progress found him making leaps and bounds towards his breakthrough with every take, Key finds him still on the other side of that discovery, near the cul-de-sac of an exclusively “folk” artist. Bob Dylan was pushing at every boundary of the genre with each new album, but Buckley’s own breakthrough was still a year off.
The unreleased title track is a sly play on the dual meanings of “key,” though it might be a red flag to begin a romantic relationship with anyone stashing a kilo of a controlled substance in their home. The demos of “Knight-Errant” and “Carnival Song” will land on modern ears like Ren Faire throwbacks, the heavy crackle of the acetate making them more of historical interest than listening pleasure. “Sixface,” another one of five unreleased songs included here, features the kind of lyrics that drastically age this particular era of Buckley’s songs with gobbledygook lines like, “Your seven seas and contraband on bluebird sun.” That said, you can hear how he trashed the rest of that quickly-strummed song, kept the opening plea of “Come here woman,” and later recast it as the central howl on Starsailor’s kinked and manic opening assault just a few years on.
Some of Goodbye and Hello’s better moments are presented here in stripped-down acoustic versions, peeling away some of their studio trappings. “Once I Was” gets pared back and slowed to a crawl, the lonesome prairie harmonica line that hounded the released version nowhere to be found. The powerful “Pleasant Street” retains its power even in this crackly version, before Buckley decided to soar into a higher key at the chorus. The driving congas are missing on “I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain,” leaving just Buckley’s furious 12-string guitar and voice. It’s a striking early song, even if it reads now as a haphazard defense of being a deadbeat dad to his son: “The Flying Pisces sails for time/And tells me of my child/Wrapped in bitter tales and heartache/He begs for just a smile/O he never asked to be her mountain.”
When there was a concert paying tribute to his father in 1991, “Mountain” was the song that Jeff Buckley decided to tackle and make his own. For a man who was all but abandoned by his father during his lifetime, there’s a latent rage and rightful sense of indignation when Jeff recasts his father’s voice as his own. It’s a bittersweet irony that in taking on his father’s song, it became his own coming out party, establishing Jeff as an iconic new voice and setting him on a path that would tragically echo that of his father. But while Jeff didn’t live long enough to scale those same heights, just beyond the scope of Key, we can hear just how high Tim climbed.


Drawing on both his West Coast influences and Detroit hometown, the rapper’s third mixtape of the year ranges from hard-hitting and aggressive to chill and reflective.

Game Time

Shaudy Kash is a byproduct of a kinship between Detroit and the Bay Area that dates back to the Great Migration and lives on through their respective rap scenes. With shared foundations in funk and soul, rappers in both regions have long spoken of a bond that extends beyond words. “Through spirit and through blood there is a connection through Oakland and Detroit,” Oakland legend Too $hort has said. Detroit’s FMB DZ agrees: “It’s like we cousins man.”
The 23-year-old Shaudy was raised around Detroit’s 6 Mile Road, but grew up on the music of Bay Area natives E-40, Spice 1, and Mac Mall. (One of his biggest songs to date is a 2021 remix of E-40’s 1995 classic “Dusted ’n’ Disgusted.”) Shaudy’s own casual and conversational rap flow is not unheard of out West, but it’s most directly influenced by hometown hero Babyface Ray. Similar to Ray, Shaudy is usually laid back, though he can up the energy when he needs to. What separates him from his Detroit inspirations is a lyrical perspective that wouldn’t be out of place on a mid-’90s West Coast posse cut: Darkness is in the air but the focus is on slice-of-life stories about fly women, fast money, and hanging out. His best moments recall the feeling of watching more lighthearted John Singleton fare, like the road trip scenes in 1993’s Poetic Justice.
Game Time is Shaudy Kash’s third mixtape of the year, and unlike the other two, its songs aren’t connected by theme or sound: February’s Ghetto Heartthrob featured eight songs about being such a ladies’ man that it’s a hassle and May’s On the Yeah Side was all calmly delivered rhymes over producer Topside’s smokiest grooves. The 12 tracks on this latest tape range from hard-hitting and aggressive to chill and reflective. Shaudy sounds most comfortable when he’s both engaged and distracted, as if you’re on a midday cruise with an old friend who is filling you in on what they’ve been up to.
His chronicles are small in scale and rarely sound exaggerated, which makes them feel genuine. “She like how I talk, how I speak/I’m a dog, she a freak/Give her a call, no two thoughts involved, she come to me,” he raps breezily about a sweet friends-with-benefits situation on mixtape highlight “You See Me.” Then, over the woozy melody and ticking hi-hats, he recounts how it went wrong. He kept sleeping around but she wanted more; he shrugs off the split with slightly performative indifference. It’s not quite emotionless, but the burnt-out monotone vocals add a wrinkle to his storytelling. On “No Stretch,” he plays it cool with a new fling, but every now and then a strain in his voice signals agitation or boredom. His ramblings about trust issues on “Real vs. Fake” would be basic out of context, but he delivers them so naturally that they sound thoughtful.
When the beats take on a darker edge, as on Game Time’s first half, they cloud Shaudy’s conversational style (except for “Matt Hardy,” where the flow is so sharp and easygoing that it works anyway). Still, the songs are short and the duds drift by innocuously, which isn’t always a good thing, because a lot of the better tracks don’t last long enough. They’re missing second verses, or at the very least extensions of existing ones, giving them the incomplete feel of snippets. On “The World Is Mines,” Shaudy smoothly rides a Nas sample, then throws in the towel not long after the one-minute mark. “Yes Yes Yall” combines signature Detroit shit talk with silky Bay Area wordplay, but if you wait for the intensity to ramp up, you’ll be waiting the whole minute and a half. A fleshed-out version of Game Time could have elevated the mixtape from a standout in the Shaudy Kash catalog to a potential spot on Detroit rap’s annual shortlist.


Matador's deluxe Pavement reissue campaign continues with Brighten the Corners, the underrated record that signaled the group's turn toward the serious and mature. Also included are 32 outtakes and radio-session cuts that more accurately reflect the loose, ramshackle feel of the group's early-to-mid 1990s work.

Pavement: Brighten the Corners: Nicene Creedence Ed.

For a band that often seemed be on the verge of a commercial breakthrough, Pavement made all the right moves-- they just did them in the wrong order. With its crystalline production (courtesy of R.E.M. architect Mitch Easter and Bryce Goggin) and more refined songcraft, Pavement's 1997 release Brighten the Corners was the logical follow-up to 1994's indie hit Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. But of course, that move from A to B took a tangential turn back to Z with 1995's notoriously slapdash Wowee Zowee, an album beloved by the band's diehard fans, but one that effectively squandered any crossover potential Crooked Rain might have built up (and which would've made a lot more sense as Crooked Rain's predecessor than successor).
Brighten the Corners' more focused, melodic approach could thus be heard as the sound of Pavement making amends, but it arguably came too late-- by 1997, modern-rock radio was already tuning out brainy indie-rock in favour of pre-fab pop-punk and numbskull nu-metal. Pavement understood this shift all to well, which could be why Brighten the Corners sounds like their most self-aware and, by extension, honest album-- when Stephen Malkmus yells, "listen to me, I'm on the stereo!" on the album's excitable opening track, it's with the implicit knowledge that he'd have to settle for hearing himself on his home hi-fi rather than on KROQ.
Perhaps as an attempt to reconnect with their pre-Wowee Zowee catalogue, Brighten the Corners takes various structural cues from previous Pavement albums: as on 1992's Slanted and Enchanted, the second song fades into a brief instrumental; the slowly intensifying mid-song jam on third track "Transport Is Arranged" sounds like it was grafted from Crooked Rain's own third track "Stop Breathin"; and Malkmus still couldn't resist the glaring name-drop (though Crooked Rain's now-dated Stone Temple Pilots/Smashing Pumpkins swipes were replaced by more eternal ruminations about the peculiar oration of Geddy Lee). Consistent with this self-reflexivity, Malkmus cheekily addresses his own status as the most overanalyzed lyricist in 90s indie-rock, describing himself as "an island of such great complexity," declaring that "if my soul has a shape, well, then it is an ellipse," and even raging that he's "sick of being misread by men in dashikis and their leftist weeklies." (That said, it would take 11 years and one ridiculous Republican campaign to lend any significance to the line "there's no women in Alaska.")
The May 1997 Alex Ross New Yorker essay that accompanies this reissue-- the fourth in Matador's superlative series of Pavement packages-- focuses on Malkmus' lyrical gift for extracting substance out of nonsense, and the folly of trying to saddle it with literal interpretations. But on no other Pavement album do all those bon mots and non sequitirs form such a coherent picture of the band's emotional state. Even the album title-- the only one that doesn't rely on rhymes and/or alliteration-- is telling: Rather than re-ignite the band's commercial prospects, Brighten the Corners marked the beginning of Pavement's slow fade into the sunset, while shedding light on its principal songwriter's future course.
Not coincidentally, both Malkmus and co-founder Scott "Spiral Stairs" Kannberg turned 30 during the album's recording, and both sound consumed by all the melancholy, anxiety, loaded significance, and renewed perspective that life-change carries. Malkmus' charming, chiming "Shady Lane" reasserts the "settle down" sentiment of Crooked Rain's "Range Life", and "Transport Is Arranged" seems to address the historically conflicted dynamic between relationships and life on the road ("a voice coach taught me to sing, he couldn't teach me to love"); Kannberg's two exemplary contributions-- the Big Starry-eyed power-pop rush "Date w/ Ikea" and the smooth Stonesy funk of "Passat Dream"-- equate responsibility and commitment with consumerism.
Easter and Goggin's luminous production casts this wistfulness in an appropriately soft-focus lens; in return, the band, so scatterbrained on Wowee Zowee, turn in their most pleasingly patient performances of their career, establishing a deeper sense of space through the use of mellotrons, drum-machine breaks and synths set on "swoosh." The dreamily drifty centerpiece track "Type Slowly" now sounds like a dry run for the sort of exploratory jams Malkmus would fashion in his post-Pavement band the Jicks (a point driven home by the extended, more volcanic live version included here), while the closing two jangle ballads, "Starlings of the Slipstream" and "Fin" are two of the most affecting songs in the Pavement canon, each appended with guitar solos that compensate for Malkmus' still-developing chops with genuinely pained expression. If "Fin" didn't prove to be the band's actual swan song, the track does sound like a farewell to Pavement's wiseacre persona.
But if Brighten the Corners signaled a turn to the serious, the 32 outtakes and radio-session cuts compiled here give Pavement plenty of room to, as one B-side aptly puts it, "fuck around." Which means indie-rock in-jokes (the Pussy Galore pastiche of "Neil Hagerty Meets Jon Spencer in a Non-Alcoholic Bar"), 1960s pop goofs ("Nigel"), cartoon themes (two stabs at "Space Ghost"), and kill-yr-idols covers of the Clean (Kannberg's electro-fried take on "Oddity"), Echo and the Bunnymen (a Crazy Horsed interpretation of "The Killing Moon"), and heroes-turned-nemeses the Fall (a gleeful desecration of the already blasphemous "The Classical"). And in the seven-minute rough cut of stoner-rock dirge "(And Then) The Hexx" and the freewheeling biker-bar boogie of "Roll With the Wind", you can hear Malkmus moving ever closer to adopting his future role as beardless-hippie guitar hero.
According to the liner notes, "(And Then) The Hexx" was originally intended to be Brighten the Corners' opener, but its sinister creep would've made an awkward introduction to the album's more winsome, mellowed-out material. (The song eventually surfaced on 1999's Terror Twilight.) However, that same rationale might also explain why the terrific "Harness Your Hopes" was demoted to B-side status, it being perhaps the most typically Pavementy Pavement song ever: the reductive, repetitive Velvet Underground riff; the rhyme-a-second wordplay ("nun is to church as the parrot is to perch"); and a line that seemingly sums up the band's conflicted, outsider relationship with the pop world-- "Show me/ A word that rhymes with Pavement." Given that Brighten the Corners captured Malkmus trying to break free from Pavement's established aesthetic-- and given that, two years later at London's Brixton Acadmey, he would famously sum up his feelings about the band by waving a pair of handcuffs-- the word he was looking for was under his nose along: enslavement.


Built around wistful piano pieces that follow unexpected paths, the Chicago composer’s third album has far more personality and strangeness than its almost aggressively generic title suggests.

Romantic Piano

It’s an audacious move to put a single song with vocals and lyrics in the middle of an otherwise instrumental album. There’s no avoiding the significance the words will take on, standing like a lone billboard in an otherwise empty landscape, inflecting and commenting upon their surroundings; whether intentionally or not, suggesting to the audience how they might interpret material that might be better off remaining abstract. You’d better have something good to say, and Gia Margaret does.
“I can’t really say where the memories fade/But some are burnt into my brain,” the Chicago composer nearly whispers in “City Song.” “I can’t really say what they meant to me/But now I’ll never be the same.” The lines come across like a mission statement for Romantic Piano, an album that often has the quality of wistful recollection: hazy outlines of melodies once heard, ideas left hanging unresolved, compositions that wind down just as they seem to be getting going. Sometimes, it sounds as though Margaret started with a full-fledged song, added ornamentation on piano and electronics, then stripped the song itself away, so that what’s left is like a frame without a picture. Or a lingering memory of a scene whose significance has since faded.
Romantic Piano has far more personality and strangeness than its almost aggressively generic title suggests. Margaret, who called her previous album Mia Gargaret, clearly has an appetite for impish absurdity. This album opens with “Hinoki Wood,” which practically dares you to slot it in with the sort of faceless playlist fodder that the album title suggests. The chords are simple; the recording is exquisitely close, with the softly tactile sound of felt hammers on piano strings nearly as present as the notes themselves. But the melody’s curlicues are too sprightly, too mischievous, to settle in the background for tuned-out, vibes-only listening.
Just when you think you’ve got the album’s sensibility figured out from the title and the opener—a charming piano miniature with more wit and vivacity than mood music requires—the second track pulls that assumption out from under you. Built around a flickering drone, with a field recording of soggy footfalls for percussion and no central tune to speak of, “Ways of Seeing” resembles a piano-centric version of Christian Fennesz’s gorgeous guitar-and-laptop abstractions. We’ve already gotten far afield from the surface sensibility of “Hinoki Wood,” though the placidly inquisitive mood hasn’t changed much.
These subtle reversals of expectation recur throughout Romantic Piano. The album’s instrumental and harmonic palettes are deliberately limited, and its emotional tenor is steady, but within these apparently tight quarters Margaret finds space for reinvention with every track. It’s a solo piano showcase—no, it’s electronic ambient music—no, it’s a singer songwriter album that happens to feature very little singing—no, it’s soaring post-rock, presented in miniature. At one point, it’s a guitar record, bringing to mind the meditative understatement of Windham Hill founder William Ackerman. (That track, which reveals Margaret’s remarkable sensitivity and rich tone on an entirely different instrument than the one she’s ostensibly here to play, is titled in typically deadpan style: “Guitar Piece.”) Small changes over the course of a single composition register as quietly monumental: a single chord from just outside the key in the otherwise purely diatonic “A Stretch”; a tweak to the EQ that edges the drums slightly closer to foreground partway through “La langue de l'amitié.” Each of these moments carries an emotional charge, though the particular emotion can be difficult to articulate.
Romantic Piano feels self-consciously minor despite its surplus of ideas: over in 30 minutes, with many of its tracks getting in and out in under two. One of them, “Sitting at the Piano,” sounds like just that: approaching the instrument, spinning out 30 seconds of delicate, possibly improvisatory figuration, and then moving on. The most ambitious track by far is “City Song,” which remains in keeping with the album’s overarching wispy atmosphere despite its more conventional song form and prominent vocals. Margaret’s first album, There’s Always Glimmer, was a straightforward singer-songwriter effort, and on “City Song,” she demonstrates how she might find new resonances within that mode, bringing it closer to the impressionistic ambiguity of Romantic Piano’s instrumentals—namely, by treating her voice with the same attention to timbre, arrangement, and silence that she treats every other sound; layering it, gently processing it, making it as malleable and expressive as she makes her primary instrument.
Besides the singing on “City Song,” there are a few other legible words on the album. At the end of “La langue de l'amitié,” a sampled speaker philosophizes: “While no one has ever successfully defined music, we can at least permit ourselves to say that it is a language of feeling.” At its best, the music of Romantic Piano approaches the promise of that sentiment, speaking the feelings that words cannot.


The Malaysian-born, L.A.-based musician moves away from folk-pop into simmering R&B, with features from Tyler, the Creator, Little Simz, and others.

Rouge

Yuna has always made dreamer’s music: ethereal and achy, often centered on the gap between desire and reality. But on Rouge, the 32-year-old sounds clear-eyed, grounded, and sure of herself. Rouge is Yunalis Zara’ai’s fourth internationally released studio album since moving from her home country of Malaysia to L.A. eight years ago and, not inconsequentially, her first as a married person. On lead single “Forevermore,” she croons, “I’ve been dreaming of this light/ Piercing through the darkest night,” and one gets the sense she’s been waiting for this self-trust and certainty a long while. Her 2012 self-titled debut placed her within the world of Ingrid Michaelson-esque folk-pop, but on Rouge she’s making simmering R&B bops, pulling from disco and hip-hop along the way.
“Amy” drifts like incense, flush with the trappings of Sade-inspired smooth jazz and Masego’s shadowy backing vocals. “Pink Youth,” featuring Little Simz, is a girl-empowerment track that rides a hazy disco beat reminiscent of Beyoncé’s “Blow,” while “Castaway,” featuring Tyler, The Creator, is a soft-spoken yet indisputable middle finger to a former lover. Neither song contains their guest artists’ typically sharp bars (Tyler did not need to rhyme “Beer belly is on horizon” with “You really don’t have Verizon”), but texturally, they work. By contrast, on album highlight “Does She,” Yuna’s duet with Jay Park unfolds like actual dialogue, rather than just a requisite 16-bar insertion.
Not every track is so seamless. Album single “Blank Marquee” bumps along to a roller-rink-ready beat that recalls the break in Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” which then dovetails into a woozy Tame Impala synth groove, only to be interrupted by a grubby and unpleasant G-Eazy. On “Likes,” Yuna’s plum-sweet voice rides atop an aquatic wash of Rhodes piano chords with trumpet lines recalling Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment’s Surf. She sings of the double standards she faces as a Muslim woman in the American music industry; if people aren’t knocking her for dressing modestly or not drinking, they’re complaining that it isn’t a Muslim woman’s place to be singing on stage in public. It’s one of the more personal moments on the album—until KYLE enters, and his verse zaps the mood almost as effectively as J. Cole on Jeremih’s “Planez.”
These bumps in the road only underscore Yuna’s evolution: She’s broadened her palette, but she is still figuring out how to make these sounds feel like her own. There are some singular moments: her lilting, off-beat synths; the gentle instrumental stretches that feel more experimental than anything she’s done; a recurring motif—alternately framed by traditional Malay gendang-like percussion, meditative vocals, and raindrops—that haunts the corners of the album.
It is in the final track that we see Yuna most clearly. Inspired by syair, a form of Malay narrative poetry-singing, album closer “Tiada Akhir” lingers like a faded memory. Against a rainy, silver-gray backdrop, Yuna intones in Malay, “You were born, like a bright light [...] I thought you would save me/But you were the poison that stopped my heart.” It is a poem about loss—and yet, in its ashes, we come to witness the truth: that from its depths, Yunalis Zara’ai is rising.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Further narrowing his focus from the meticulously reductionist values of his One trilogy, Matthew Herbert zeroes in on a recording of a pro-Gaddafi plane flying over Libya and dropping a bomb, contorting and manipulating the sample to explore his feelings about a single act of terror.

The End of Silence

Matthew Herbert just took the meticulously reductionist values of his One trilogy and further narrowed his focus. This time around, he zeroes in on a brief moment in time in order to explore his feelings about a single act of terror. The End of Silence uses one 5-second sample as its sole building block, which is contorted and manipulated by Herbert and a three-piece band he put together for this recording. That sample is a recording of a pro-Gaddafi plane flying over Libya and dropping its deadly payload, prefigured by a whistle and a cry that hastily warn of the event. In a 2011 interview Herbert talked of how we now have "the capacity to listen to the world in a different way." This is his way of slowing the world down to make sense of it, in the process creating something that shares the weight of a blood-spattered historical snapshot that provokes an uncomfortably lingering gaze.
There are just three tracks here, the first of which is almost 25-minutes long, while the shortest is just over 10 minutes. Herbert's stated intent is to "freeze history, press pause, wander around inside the sound." The music works in direct inverse to the event itself, providing acres of time to stop and think and ponder the consequences. Herbert exploits the silence as much as the act itself, stretching out the sense of anxiety that leads up to the terrifying point of impact. The first part is often mixed so sounds are barely perceptible, forcing you to crank the volume. It's a trick that serves to emphasize the bomb drop when it comes, ripping and tearing through the sound, sometimes bolstered by a thick layer of distortion. The use of silence is transportative, triggering an evaluation of the actions of the people on the ground, posing impossible questions about the thoughts rushing through their heads.
What's striking about this work is how it's set up as the antithesis of 24-hour rolling news culture, where bombs sailing out of the sky are presented with a rote facade, then passed over for the next space-filler on the agenda. It's almost old-fashioned in a way, bringing a layer of meaning back to a singular event, pointing out how we're glazing over atrocities that may have caught the world's attention had they taken place in less media-saturated times. The processing through which Herbert and his band force the sample often make it unrecognizable, but they're careful to imbue their tinkering with feelings of fear, dread, and suffering. It's not exactly music as reportage, but when the pace picks up in the second part it often has the same sense of urgency as someone frantically typing up a report, sending an important dispatch outlining how a small part of the world just changed forever.
Distance plays an important part here, too, with Herbert working in sounds of the natural world, all captured on mics set up outside the barn in Wales where these tracks were recorded. It's a valuable reminder of how far outside the original sound he is, of how alien the whole process of exploring a bomb drop is to the average person. This is an approximation of terror, an artificial rendering of distress constructed in a relatively safe space, where shrapnel becomes a percussion instrument and human cries become neatly layered loops. It adds an air of surreality to the album, at times drawing on that sense of being anesthetized to events like this, where you feel so far removed that it's tough to find meaning amid the blizzard of information. The End of Silence is Herbert effectively tussling with what "significance" means at this particular moment in time, in a record that's as much a part of the gathering noise of the 21st century as it is a comment on the constant numbing we've wreaked upon ourselves.


Charity album collects the Jersey band's spontaneous, by-request WFMU benefit covers performances, including takes on tracks from the Beach Boys, Sonic Youth, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

Yo La Tengo: Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics

Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics

From the right angle, Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics is the funniest record in the world. At first the title only seems sarcastic-- when you listen to the album, it turns out it's just honest, if humorously so. The disc features Yo La Tengo and a few friends flat-out slaughtering other people's songs in on-air performances during WFMU fundraisers. It makes sense that this collection of bootleg-quality recordings of unrehearsed covers would be associated with WFMU, given the freeform radio station's legendary penchant for incorrect and outsider music, and the saving grace of the whole thing is that no one involved is taking it remotely seriously.
The deal is this: The members of Yo La Tengo were trying to think of a way they could help their favorite radio station (it, like the band, is located in Northeast New Jersey, although you can tune in from anywhere in the world via their website). Then it struck them that they could perform requests live on the air in exchange for pledges of support. The trick was that they had to play each request on the spot, with no rehearsal or time to remember little things like, say, lyrics. They did it first in 1996, and it's since become a hugely entertaining annual tradition. Gathering requested covers from 1996-2003, Murdering is temporarily charming and fun, but inevitably, its 30 tracks (over 76 minutes!) are a gruelling slog.
To be fair, the band members know music inside and out, as the well-rehearsed covers that populate their records (covers album Fakebook, in particular) and concerts demonstrate. Additionally, they have a jazzier sensibility than most rock bands, so interpretation isn't beyond them. But those hoping for anything even close to the ballpark of their studio albums clearly haven't read the warnings all over the band's own website, which kindly inform prospective listeners not to expect much. Besides, they do have a proper album planned for later this year.
What I'm getting at is, should you order the disc, you're not really buying a Yo La Tengo album. You're not even buying a live album. You're buying a comedy record, for all intents. The bit where Ira Kaplan forgets the second verse of Three Dog Night's "Mama Told Me (Not to Come)", and wisecracks about the band's singer, is great-- though not nearly as funny as the version of Archie Bell & the Drells' "Tighten Up" that opens the album. Kaplan's exhortations to "tighten up on the drums now, Georgia" are so hilariously geeky they actually sort of work, and both he and fellow guitarist Bruce Bennett (who joined the band for these fundraisers) accidentally come in when Kaplan calls for the bass. James McNew doesn't exactly know the bassline anyway, but he gives it his best shot.
There are a few songs Yo La Tengo really nail, like the Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner", which Ira spikes with a blistering guitar solo. It's also fitting that they'd turn in a competent rendition of NRBQ's "Captain Lou", given that the cult band's cover-request shows were the inspiration for Yo La Tengo's own fundraising appearances. And I honestly cannot believe how well Kaplan remembers the verse lyrics to Huey "Piano" Smith's "Sea Cruise"-- never mind Doug Sahm's "Mendocino". On the opposite end of the spectrum, the band's take on Yes' "Roundabout" is side-splittingly inept, with someone basically leaning on an organ to approximate Rick Wakeman, while the version of Bachman-Turner Overdrive's "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" is just plain ghastly (and yet considerably less annoying than the original).
Unsurprisingly, the album's best moments are attributable to inspired listener requests. By far the most imaginative of these is the old promotional song "Meet the Mets", a jingle advertising New York's less appreciated baseball franchise. What's more impressive is that the band actually knows all the words to it. Later, recalling their Genius + Love collaboration with Daniel Johnston on his "Speeding Motorcycle", a young caller named Lela sings "Route 66" over the phone while the band plays softly in the background. It's so genuinely sweet that the band's uncertaintly over the chord sequence doesn't much matter. But again, while these are great moments on the air, they don't exactly translate to replay value, so the disc, packaged inside Adrian Tomine's fantastic artwork, becomes just a keepsake for fans of the band and WFMU (or anyone who ever wanted to hear the Knack, the Beach Boys, Sonic Youth, and Bonzo Dog Band in the same ramshackle medley).
In short, this is the kind of thing that would have been a fan-club disc back in the 90s. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but much as I love Yo La Tengo, WFMU (possibly the greatest radio station in existence, by the way), and the general idea, it's difficult to give this a genuine recommendation. Instead, save your money for next year's WFMU fundraiser: Tune in, make a pledge, request a song, and brace yourself. It's for a good cause.


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 Ja Rule’s fleeting moment in the sun, a chart-topping 2001 album whose magnetic pop crossovers foreshadowed the future of melodic rap.

Pain Is Love

It was 2002 and Ja Rule was irate. DMX had recently appeared on DJ Kay Slay’s show to accuse Ja of biting his style; 50 Cent was taking to diss tracks and interviews to castigate Ja for imitating 2Pac. He’d had as much as he could take. He called into Hot 97. “Everybody wants to make comparisons to Pac and X and me,” Ja shouted through the receiver and across the airwaves. “Y’all niggas wanna see Pac come back? … It’s here, nigga. It’s here.”
It wasn’t. Because Ja Rule might seem like a relic of 2000s hip-hop whose career-ending beef with 50 Cent should probably be above the fold on his Wikipedia page, it’s easy to dismiss this bravado as posturing, a snarling burst of delusion from the co-founder of Fyre Festival. But in 2002, Ja tried with all his might to fashion himself as Pac’s rightful heir. Now the comparison is ridiculous, an example of Ja’s boundless self-regard, but back then it didn’t seem completely implausible that Ja could one day have an impact akin to Pac. It wasn’t just the bandana looped around his head, the manicured mustache, or the way he stretched his vowels and spit from the pit of his stomach. It was how his bluster contorted into anguish, how his arm-wheeling freneticism made him seem 10 feet tall, how he packaged brazen attitude into radio-ready rap hits. Emboldened by a string of chart-topping singles and a pair of No. 1 albums, Ja was on the Hot 97 airwaves that day battling for position as the biggest rapper on the planet, trying to bring down anyone who stood in his way. The Greek tragedy of Ja was already in motion.
A year earlier, from the height of his cultural ubiquity, Ja released his third studio album, Pain Is Love. His beefs were still inconsequential; his label, Murder Inc., was still a reputable force in mainstream music. Like his hero Pac, he leveraged his success to start acting, landing a supporting role in the first installment of the soon-to-be commercial behemoth Fast and the Furious franchise. His culture-dominating duet with Jennifer Lopez, “I’m Real,” made him such a household name that MTV, after 9/11, asked him to share his thoughts on the tragic events—a moment that Dave Chappelle memorialized for its absurdity.
Ja achieved massive popularity in part because his music appealed to female audiences, a demographic often ignored in ’90s and early ’00s hip-hop. His R&B-styled crossovers influenced his identity as a “sensitive thug,” someone whose loverman persona counteracted his hard-edged street side. Ja was one of the rare A-list rappers whose songs could pop off at a bar mitzvah or a block party, whose work elided clear distinctions between hip-hop, R&B, and pop. And considering the imminent Auto-Tune era and melodic rap boom, Ja’s stylistic choices now feel prescient, a forward-thinking maneuver that soon became standard across mainstream hip-hop. But back then 50 Cent and hip-hop writ large taunted Ja for his doe-eyed love songs, and he chafed against this archetype, not knowing it would help define rap for the next 20 years.
Ja, born Jeffrey Atkins, knew how to scrap for success. An up-and-coming rapper from Hollis, Queens, he got his first big break when, in 1994, he formed a trio named Cash Money Click with local rappers Chris Black and 0-1. Their first single, “Get Tha Fortune,” was produced by fellow Hollis native Irv Gotti, a DJ turned industry everyman with close connections to Jay-Z and DMX. Gotti helped Cash Money Click secure a one-album deal with TVT Records, and they made waves when their video “4 My Click” appeared on Yo! MTV Raps, catching the attention of Def Jam executive Lyor Cohen, who was reportedly struck by Ja’s tenacity. Rocking a thick down coat and a backward flat-brim, Ja hurtles himself across the frame, his boisterous, wide-eyed bars jolting the ambling song to life. It’s no wonder Cohen saw a star; Ja, the smallest guy in the video, carried himself like he already was one.
After Cash Money Click collapsed, Gotti brought Ja Rule to Mulford Gardens to meet DMX. The two freestyled for each other, Ja with his melodic barks and DMX with his mouth wired shut from a broken jaw. Gotti watched a mutual respect bloom between them and was eager to link them with an up-and-coming rapper named Jay-Z. The trio began working together soon after meeting, and their competitive spirit made for undeniable chemistry: Take 1998’s “Murdergram,” where Jay-Z’s slick, conversational flow sharpens into a growl, matching DMX’s literal growling and Ja’s gravelly timbre. Even though he’d guided Ja, Jay, and X to solo deals with Def Jam, Gotti sought to formally solidify the trio as a supergroup: Murder Inc., the same name as his new Def Jam imprint. Here were three of the most promising young MCs in the game, each seeking to fill the vacuum Pac and Biggie’s deaths had left in hip-hop. Gotti understood the magnitude of their collaboration: “[They] gonna go in the studio and compete—they all super competitive, which is gonna make the illest records…it would’ve been an immortal album.”
One problem: Jay-Z and DMX didn’t share Gotti’s vision. By 1999, Jay had three successful solo records under his belt, and X was fresh off two No. 1 albums. They didn’t need Murder Inc. like Gotti and Ja did; they were already the two hottest rappers out. “I was the low man on that totem pole,” Ja recalled in a 2020 interview with HipHopDX. “If I would’ve [recorded an album with Jay and X]...everybody would’ve always talked about how I came in on that and every hit record I would’ve made after that would’ve been, ‘Well, it’s because…he’s part of Murder Inc.’” Though his solo career was building momentum—he’d scored guest verses on songs with Nas, Method Man, and LL Cool J—Ja was desperate to prove he was more than a sidekick. In his eyes, as well as Gotti’s, he was a superstar: the East Coast reincarnation of Pac, the prodigal son the world didn’t know was coming.
His debut single, 1999’s “Holla Holla,” didn’t just announce Ja as a star—it shifted the direction of his music. When he turned in his first album, Venni Vetti Vecci, to Def Jam, they gave it back to him with a clear directive: Make a hit. “At the time, I’m just like, ‘What the fuck you talking about? They’re all hits!” Ja told Complex in 2013. “I didn’t [yet] grasp the idea of making a radio record.” Unlike the sinister beats and gritty verses that made up much of Venni Vetti Vecci, “Holla Holla” leaned into Ja’s scratchy singing and knack for crafting raunchy, rugged hooks. In the Hype Williams-directed video, he scours a beach shirtless, surrounded by a swarm of bikini-clad women, sneering into the camera and goofily dancing along a Brazilian boardwalk. The song peaked at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 and guided Venni Vetti Vecci to strong first week sales and, eventually, a platinum plaque.
Though he’d tasted success, Ja remained near the bottom of rap’s star hierarchy, a reality he began to resent. His debut wasn’t critically lauded like Reasonable Doubt, nor did it top the charts like It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot. Instead, as Kris Ex wrote for Rolling Stone at the time, Venni Vetti Vecci—and namely “Holla Holla”—“seemed more like a novelty tune from one of DMX’s buddies than a career-building smash.” Sensing this stigma, Ja knew he had to make music that set him apart. “Holla Holla” provided a template: big hooks, sex appeal, and a little bit of singing. While Jay and X made music for the streets, Ja found ways to integrate his tough-guy persona into pop crossovers. His next two singles, “Between Me & You” and “Put It on Me,” were, as Gotti said, “female friendly-driven…[all] while Ja is still spitting and being that raw nigga.” Both became massive hits, catapulting Ja into a new stratosphere of celebrity.
By 2001, Ja was an inescapable voice in pop music, a frog-throated firecracker who penned indelible hooks and rapped with an almost deranged ferocity. Pain Is Love basks in the spotlight, sprawling with glitzy, gimmicky production and horny punchlines. In a departure from his once menacing street raps, Ja sings or, more accurately, guffaws about thongs, ecstasy, and lavish trips abroad. The album’s lead single, “Livin’ It Up,” captures this spirit, interpolating Stevie Wonder’s “Do I Do” in an ode to excess and luxury. Throughout the song, Ja seems overwhelmed with good fortune, asking, “You think I got time to blow all this dough and do all these shows?” The answer then was a resounding of course not; he was pop’s most in-demand rapper and a budding actor just hitting the peak of his career. And, fittingly, the album’s best as a joyride, like on “Down Ass Bitch,” where Ja groans a string of mimicable lines (“Every thug needs a lady!”) over a glistening guitar lick.
But no song better captures the magic of Ja Rule than the Ashanti-featuring “Always on Time,” Ja’s only No. 1 song as a lead artist. Newly signed to Murder Inc., Ashanti was eager to catch a break; she’d been replaced by Jennifer Lopez as the lead vocalist on “Ain’t It Funny,” which she co-wrote with Ja, and had yet to release an official single of her own. She struck gold with successive features on “Always on Time” and Fat Joe’s “What’s Luv?” (which also features Ja), anointing her as a star who could elevate Ja’s excursions into pop. On “Always on Time,” her airy soprano perfectly compliments his gruff baritone, a back-and-forth formula the pair would fall back on again and again. While still spitting with intensity and fervor, Ja mostly waxes romantic, striking a healthy balance between belligerence and sensitivity. “Always on Time” remains his legacy-defining smash, a song so addictively catchy it’s hard not to wish he’d leaned further into his R&B instincts and away from his 2Pac impersonation.
About that 2Pac impersonation: He samples a Pac song and verse on “So Much Pain” (one of Ja’s best songs, with some of the strongest bars of his career: “I spits razors/Never been a stranger to homicide/My city’s full of tote-slangers and chalk lines”), but his Pac-inspired songs tend to be his weakest. On two Murder Inc. posse cuts, “The Inc.” and “Worldwide Gangsta,” Ja’s writing lacks the imagery and specificity needed to nurture a mafioso identity. When he raps, “Family orientated through guns, drugs, and good relations/Real conversations, we call it real talk/And that shit spreads all the way from L.A. to New York,” the character he’s portraying doesn’t align with the one he inhabits on his more sentimental songs. Pain Is Love fails to find balance between Ja’s conflicting identities, hedging his forays into R&B with constant reminders that he’s still not someone to mess with.
Still, Pain Is Love is Ja’s most pop-oriented album. This is largely due to Marcus Vest, who earns a production credit on nearly every song. His instrumentation is all stock sounds standing in the foreground, a bubble-rimmed artificiality heard often in early 2000s R&B: sweeps, fat synth plucks, the odd finger-picked bass, a melody so obvious no vocalist could veer away. When it doesn’t work, it really doesn’t work, like on “Lost Little Girl,” where a whiny reversed synth clanks against beeps and overzealous drum programming. Sometimes, though, Vest’s production and Ja’s approximated singing synergizes into something meaningful, like on “Never Again,” where Ja offers harrowing insights into his past life: “Never again would I run down a road so dark/Hoped to die, cross my heart/But the streets keep calling.” He’s not shouting or shoehorning melody where it doesn’t belong; he’s tapping into a bluesy reflection suited well to his abrasive singing, and he’s never sounded more vulnerable or honest.
Pain Is Love was Ja’s second and final No. 1 album, and perhaps the last time you could mention his name without also mentioning 50 Cent’s. It’s unclear how the beef between the two Queens natives began. Ja claims it started when he didn’t greet 50 at the “Murda 4 Life” video shoot; 50 alleges it began when one of his friends robbed Ja at gunpoint and stole his chain. Regardless of its origins, the rivalry quickly escalated. After a physical altercation at a club in Atlanta, Ja’s Murder Inc. affiliates allegedly stabbed 50 at the Hit Factory, a recording studio in New York. 50 dropped a slew of diss tracks taking aim at Ja’s street cred, labeling him as “soft” for singing and lambasting him for imitating 2Pac. With some of hip-hop’s most dominant forces—Dr. Dre, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes—backing up 50, Ja could hardly hope to compete. He trotted out Black Child and Caddillac Tah, undeveloped Murder Inc. artists without solo careers; Hussein Fatal, a former member of Pac’s Outlawz crew; and, for a brief time, Jadakiss and Fat Joe, whose paper-thin alliance with Ja couldn’t stack up against the Shady/Aftermath industrial complex. Meanwhile, Ja’s disses flailed with nonspecific insults and hollow threats. The narrative cemented itself across hip-hop: Ja was an overly emotional, Pac-derivative fraud.
It’s hard to pinpoint an exact song or situation that crowned 50 Cent and G-Unit winners of the beef. But by 2003, 50 Cent was the most popular rapper alive—his debut album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, sold close to a million copies in its first week and pushed hip-hop’s mainstream further from crossover collaborations toward unrelenting gangsta rap. Ja’s credibility was so diminished that when Lyor Cohen tried to solicit Suge Knight and his rebranded Death Row Records to release Ja’s fifth album, Blood in My Eye, Knight declined. Upon its eventual release the album was a commercial and critical failure, and by its 2004 follow-up, R.U.L.E., Ja was barely hanging on to a career. He was up for more acting roles in Training Day and 2 Fast 2 Furious but lost them because, according to 2 Fast director John Singleton, “He was acting like he was too big to be in [it].” When federal agents raided the Murder Inc. offices and opened an investigation into the label’s involvement in drug trafficking, fraud, and money laundering, Def Jam opted not to renew Murder Inc.’s contract. Embroiled in drama and stained with shame, Ja took a hiatus from music, one from which he’d never fully return.
Ever since 50 superseded Ja in the hip-hop hierarchy and on the charts (“In Da Club” was exponentially more popular than any Ja Rule song ever was), Ja’s public reputation has continued to suffer. He served a two-year prison sentence for gun possession and tax evasion, co-founded the disastrous Fyre Fest, and went viral for an awkward halftime set at a Milwaukee Bucks game. While 50 has faded more profitably into post-rap entrepreneurship and celebrity, Ja’s remembered as if frozen in time—as a try-hard, a fake thug, a wannabe singer with little actual skill. 50 fueled and added to these narratives, but Ja’s hubris did him no favors. His dreams of being the next 2Pac thwarted his burgeoning legacy as a melodic rap icon, the natural precursor to genre-melders like Kanye West and Drake. But unlike Drake, Ja didn’t unabashedly commit to the bit, instead trying to compete with 50 in the gangsta rap arena, the chip on his shoulder ballooning with each failed diss. And, with time, his R&B-based songs began sounding cheeky rather than radical, like failed experiments from an artist still determining the scope of hip-hop’s sonic and emotional range.
In the 20 years since Pain Is Love dropped, hip-hop’s ethos has shifted. Street authenticity still matters, but it’s no longer an essential quality for a rapper to become commercially viable. The stigma that explicit emotionality and a dedicated female fanbase signaled weakness rather than savviness, or that singing and rapping broke some sacred social code, has waned. The modern male rap star can be multidimensional, his masculinity intact even when the music isn’t macho. You can see it in an artist like Lil Nas X, whose pop-rap fusion feels partially indebted to Ja. But Nas gleefully weaponizes controversy and subverts expectations of Black rap-adjacent performers; for Ja, during his prime, rejecting social attitudes about Black masculinity would have meant sacrificing everything: his pride, his past, his art, his career. As a result, Pain Is Love is an album trapped between sounds, genres, eras, and identities, a playful album that desperately wants to be taken seriously. It’s a shame: Playfulness flattered Ja far more than being a gangsta did, something none of us would realize until it was too late.


With Youth Lagoon in the rear-view, Trevor Powers remains a sure-handed sculptor of sound. His voice here surges to the fore, newly exposed and digitally treated.

Mulberry Violence

Trevor Powers used to be the smallest thing in his music. As Youth Lagoon, he whispered his doubts miles beneath massive, billowing guitars. He sounded both dwarfed and enveloped by the sounds he made, and you could pull his records around you like a blanket and huddle inside it with him.
Mulberry Violence, his first record under his own name, takes a rusty trowel to this sound and disembowels it. Indie rock, with its rounded edges and primary colors, is gone. The drums are broken, loud, and looped, and they splatter when they hit. The silences are thicker, they yawn wider, and the sounds they separate tend to clip out like shorting wires. The stylistic touchpoints seem to be the creeping dread of Portishead, the ragged voice manipulations of Bon Iver’s 22, A Million, the weedy urban-ruin expanses of King Krule. Powers leaned this direction on 2015’s Savage Hills Ballroom and shortly afterward, he declared that Youth Lagoon was over. Mulberry Violence leaps with both feet: You get the sense that Powers wouldn’t rest until he looked over his shoulder and Youth Lagoon was nowhere to be seen.
In this new environment, Powers’ voice surges to the fore, like maybe we’ve never actually heard this guy at all. He still sounds small, maybe a little frightened, but he is exposed here, and what you hear has a menacing edge. On “Squelch,” he distorts and treats his voice until it bubbles from the bottom of the mix like a ghoul. On “Film It All,” he nearly melds with the screaming digital static bursting around him. The violence he does to his own singing feels personal, even vengeful, like watching someone scribble out a picture of their own face until the paper rips.
His lyrics, accordingly, only leak through in fragments. They hint at death, the mortification of the spirit, the fragility of the body: “Safety isn’t real anymore/It’s just a thing we say,” he sings on “Film It All,” with his voice needling in the red. On “Ache,” he shares a harrowing scene of helplessness and abuse. “Nobody watched you as you grabbed the serrated kitchen knife and threatened to take my life/Nobody watched you as you dragged me to the middle of the bed, to perform the acts you said.” It hurts to hear it, and the music he builds around it only deepens the mark: The song feels furtive and private, a series of scurrying plinks and far-off drum hits that puts the moment in unsparing relief. When it erupts, midway through, into a tempest of string pads, like Nine Inch Nails remixing Shostakovich, the catharsis is almost a relief.
Powers has always been sure-handed with sculpting sound like this—even before he worked with Ben Allen on Youth Lagoon’s Wondrous Bughouse, his music sprawled commandingly across your headphone space. This skill serves him nicely now that everything around him is digital. There are still guitars, or at least hulking guitar-like Things, prowling through his arrangements, but nothing reaches your ears without submitting to some kind of manipulation or defacement. The pianos feel denatured, surreal, someone’s childhood memory of piano. The drums on “Plaster Saint” hit so hard against them that you wince, a handy microcosm for the record itself: brutality and tenderness locked in uneasy coexistence.
Mulberry Violence isn’t ugly music by any stretch—all of the bleeding, shrieking noises are undergirded by rich chords, and Powers drops little moments of untouched beauty for us to get our breath: “Playwright” gives us what sounds like a zither, a few notes of it, skipping across an echoing expanse. “Plaster Saint” and “Common Hoax” end the album on an eerily placid note. He sounds like someone who has withstood dehumanizing trauma and survived, if not intact, then at least upright; determined to persist, if thriving is no longer an option.


Full of plinking synths, blown-out bass, and skittering beats, the Atlanta producer’s latest compilation sounds like the flyest rap video game never made.

University!

Popstar Benny once said his music is “the soundtrack to a video game that doesn’t exist.” On the surface, that description only applies to the chirpy plugg beats and sound effects the Atlanta-based producer is most known for. But he’s remixed this deep-fried sensibility with several other subgenres: R&B, rage, drum’n’bass, underground boom-bap. His songs can be as saccharine as a wet wad of cotton candy, but sometimes, they can feel as prickly as a Brillo pad—a fitting spectrum for the collages of plinks, samples, and blown-out 808s coming from Benny’s mind. It’s easy to imagine every song as its own level in a game, digital worlds tethered together like a cable connecting a Game Boy Advance to a GameCube. University!, Benny’s latest album, isn’t his first time making a producer project, but by his cacophonous standards, it ranks among his darkest and most adventurous. These are beats for a mini-boss to thrash to.
From the project’s opening moments, it’s clear that Benny’s operating with a murkier, more spacious palette than before. His instrumentals are still jumpy, but there’s less going on all at once, with plenty of room for his rhythms and array of producer tags to stretch out. The melodies on “Snow Boots On” and “Kno Where 2 Start” are muted, like they’re being played in distant rooms. Synths and chimes on “Wildboy” and “Call Me!” flex the crisp atmospheric zen of Clams Casino-era cloud rap as much as they do MexikoDro-indebted plugg. His half-dozen producer tags still crowd the margins like a Trapaholics bootleg download from LimeWire, but overall, he inverts his process by scaling his walls of sound back slightly. The pieces he does focus on put a minimal spin on his maximalist style.
Just because University! is more stripped-back doesn’t mean it’s lacking for ideas. If anything, this newfound space has Benny feeling more experimental than usual. He has cited Pharrell Williams as an influence, and he shares the Virginia legend’s affinity for effortlessly recontextualizing every sound and style in his image. Peep the way he stitches the smooth guitars and melodies of two Gorillaz samples between warbling drums and verses from New York and Atlanta rappers Moh Baretta and Tony Shhnow on “feelbadcorps” and “Pack After Pack,” respectively. Or consider how his musical wanderlust pushes him to explore more sounds on the edges of rap. The most radical is “All the Girls <3,” a peppy, plugg-ified take on Jersey club fitting for a round of Dance Dance Revolution. Other tracks tinker with convention. “Glick” turns the bass on its drums down so Memphis rapper GUN40’s blaring verse floats above everything, while the keyboards and kick drum on “King of the Hill” are soothing and relaxed—two words rarely used to describe Benny’s music.
Half the fun of a producer compilation is seeing if the rappers and singers slot themselves into the beats well, and University! mostly delivers. The majority of its vocal cast is already a part of Benny’s world, and they’re eager to cut their way through his creations: 3AG Pilot’s mid-range voice fits seamlessly over the chipmunked choir in the background of “Sore Loser;” elsewhere, 4pooch’s flow matches the skittering crawl of “Wildboy.” The only two artists to show up multiple times are longtime collaborators Shhnow and Bear1Boss, and they consistently prove why Benny keeps them close. But he also gets mileage out of newer talent, like $pook on the astral “Club Spook” and Los Angeles’ Loso Hendrixx on the chiptune-adjacent “Cold Blood.” All of these vocalists have different ranges, flows, and perspectives, and outside of the bland “Duck Unlimited,” Benny corrals them into a diverse roster worthy of a well-balanced fighting game.
Coaxing rappers and singers onto beats as spacey and animated as these requires mutual trust. The MCs have to confide in the producers to come with music that’s interesting and open enough for them to do their thing, and the producers have to count on the rappers to handle whatever they can throw at them. This is a balance that Benny has maintained across a plethora of one-off collaborative tapes and beat placements for some years now, all stemming from a unique understanding of how every form of rap music ultimately feeds back into the whole. More than any of his other projects, University! feels like a home base in an adventure game—a welcoming hub that also prepares you to jet off into the unknown.


Separated by a decade, the first two post-Beatles albums credited solely to Paul McCartney are a strange pair, but they shouldn't be overlooked.

Paul McCartney: McCartney / McCartney II

McCartney / McCartney II

Released 10 years apart, McCartney and McCartney II are the first two post-Beatles albums to be credited solely to Paul McCartney, without Wings or Linda McCartney. In that respect, it makes some sense to reissue the two simultaneously, but their original contexts could hardly be more different. In 1970, when advance copies of McCartney were sent to journalists, they included a press sheet announcing Paul's departure from the Beatles, which had the further effect of breaking up the band. McCartney was released a month before Let It Be, and it contained a fair amount of music that had been kicking around for some time. McCartney II, on the other hand, was released in 1980, about a year before the breakup of Wings, a band that was never much more than a vehicle for McCartney's solo songwriting efforts.
Wings had no John Lennon to play foil to McCartney. Lennon and McCartney, as everyone knows, were the songwriting partners who made the Beatles such a titanic force in the 1960s. By the time the band broke up, however, the partnership had been mostly dissolved for years. The two were almost always writing separately, and on those late Beatles albums, you can hear their personalities pulling apart. The separation is complete on the solo albums the two former Beatles released in 1970. Lennon's Plastic Ono Band is rough, nasty, self-absorbed, not a little narcissistic, and devoted to laying bare the rawest of emotions and memories. It has overshadowed McCartney since its release.
McCartney is a different type of album. First, let's talk about that title. This is a name that had been paired with Lennon, separated by a slash, for years-- we weren't used to seeing it all by itself. When the media ran stories on McCartney, he was often just "Paul." He could have called his album Paul McCartney, but he pointedly did not. I think he wanted people to see his name out there as a songwriting credit, without the old prefix. And the album he made has some parallels to Lennon's, too. They share a rawness, a seeming desire to move away from the opulence of 1969's Abbey Road, the last album the Beatles recorded together. But where the rawness of Plastic Ono Band plays into anger, aggression, and disillusionment, the rawness of McCartney is only in the sound. The record has a homespun charm, and a feel that suggests McCartney wasn't putting too much pressure on himself to carry on the Beatles flame or make a statement.
Paul played everything on the record himself, apart from some backing vocals by Linda, recording much of it at home on a four-track. No singles were released, there are several instrumentals, and it's all a bit ramshackle, the type of album that in the hands of most musicians would lend itself to introspection. And yet McCartney doesn't really tell us much about McCartney. As a songwriter, he wasn't (and still isn't, really) the confessional type. To a degree, McCartney is an actor whose medium is his songs. His love for Linda, expressed so ebulliently on "Maybe I'm Amazed", was certainly genuine, but he wrote this eventual FM-radio staple as a classic, universal love song. When presented with the opportunity to let his guard down and show us his unvarnished self, Paul McCartney never did-- even in this intimate setting, his songs remain extroverted and devoted to achieving some measure of pop accessibility.
The highlights of McCartney's later solo albums were often uptempo rock songs, or big, show-stopping tunes, but here, apart from "Maybe I'm Amazed", the peaks include two versions of the same quiet song, "Junk". The sparse vocal version features McCartney accompanying himself with acoustic guitar and a bit of bass and percussion, ticking through a nostalgic inventory of disused objects. McCartney later reprises "Junk" in a "singalong" instrumental version, with mellotron and piano joining in for a pretty waltz. I'd be surprised if Elliott Smith didn't learn something from it. Much of the rest of the album was written and recorded off the cuff, and it shows-- McCartney plays with Latin rhythms ("The Lovely Linda"), a bit of blues ("That Would Be Something"), and some bounding, half-time country pop ("Man We Was Lonely"). "Teddy Boy" is sentimental storytelling, and closer "Kreen-Akrore" is McCartney experimenting in his weird, humorous way with oddball drum patterns and sound effects.
That sort of experimentation and lack of polish was something McCartney didn't often allow himself on later solo efforts. As the 70s moved on, he got back to consciously crafting big hits, and he scored quite a few. Ram, Venus and Mars, and Band on the Run rank among the best Beatles solo albums, and all exhibit the kind of studio perfectionism that was absent on McCartney. On McCartney II, the polish is there, but that's partly down to improvements in home recording technology-- McCartney did much of the recording on his own at his farm in Scotland, and there's a similar low-pressure, anything-goes vibe to the final product. That said, this album is likely to be jarring for an unsuspecting McCartney or Beatles fan. It's largely experimental, devoting most of its songs to eccentric synth-pop that's just as weird as anything from the early days of new wave, and not all of it is compelling.
McCartney II's opener and first single, "Coming Up", wastes no time getting right into this startling territory, with a guitar part that could have been lifted from a Talking Heads song, buzzy keyboard hooks, and vocals that find McCartney singing through a filter and backing himself up with quirky falsetto. McCartney's discography is actually filled with strange little one-offs and experiments, including late-period work with Super Furry Animals and Fireman, but this one is unusual for the way he presented it as a central part of his output rather than a side project.
Elsewhere on the album, McCartney remains similarly difficult to pigeonhole. If I told you the instrumental "Front Parlour", with its tinny drum machine and sunny keyboard melody, was a 2009 blog hit by a lo-fi synth act, you'd likely believe me. And then there's "Temporary Secretary", a frankly irritating but still interesting song that combines frenzied synth programming with a self-consciously bizarre vocal-- McCartney sings as nasally as possible on the refrain, and tweaks it to sound robotic. Other songs turn away from this type of maximalist approach. "Summer's Day Song" is pretty and sparse, featuring just McCartney and a few keyboards. TLC-presaging single "Waterfalls" is even more bare, only McCartney and an electric piano, with a tiny dollop of synth and acoustic guitar.
Two other songs stand out on McCartney II, and they're as distinct from each other as this record is from McCartney. Album closer "One of These Days" is simply great, benefiting from a rudimentary approach that strips away the synths and drum machines that dominate McCartney II. Bonus track "Secret Friend", included on the second disc of this reissue, is also pretty jaw-dropping-- a 10-minute, beat-driven synth opus that shares plenty in common aesthetically with dance music a decade its junior. Though relegated to the B-side of the "Temporary Secretary" single, "Secret Friend" is among the most forward-looking things McCartney has recorded in his post-Beatles career.
Those McCartney II extras stand in sharp contrast with the bonus material for McCartney, which is largely inconsequential-- the live tracks are 1979 performances with Wings, hardly illuminating where McCartney was as an artist at the time he made the album. Still, McCartney is a very good record and deserves another look. And this is just about the perfect time to take another look at McCartney II, despite its flaws. Parts of the album sound oddly current; it's difficult to gauge whether McCartney II had any real influence on the synth-pop of the 80s, but its diffuse and slightly wobbly atmosphere certainly aligns with a great deal of recent music made on synths and drum machines. Though an odd couple in many ways, these two albums represent often-overlooked corners of McCartney's music, and they're worth rediscovering.