The wounded love songs on the Mexican singer-songwriter Carla Morrison’s new album, Amor Supremo, evoke great wellings of despair and desire. Featuring a grand sound that includes disembodied drums, shimmery synths, cathedral organs, Middle Eastern strings, Lynchian guitar, and her distinctive vocals, it's one of the most genuinely moving pop records of 2015.

Amor Supremo

A towering standout on Carla Morrison’s new album, *Amor Supremo, "*No Vuelvo Jamás" is a pining anthem that opens with the Mexican singer-songwriter delivering a cascade of wordless syllables that sound less like a human voice than a wind instrument. Her overture is punctuated by an emphatic drumbeat and ominous piano chords, then an electric guitar crashes down around her. Yet, she remains unfazed by the commotion, as she half-whispers lyrics about losing herself in lovelorn madness ("locura desmedida") and succumbing to a yearning that hurt worse ("más dolor") than physical wounds. Morrison’s voice wavers and twirls, suggesting a less forceful Florence Welch or a more grounded Jeff Buckley. This is pop music with a healthy sense of grandeur.
The song itself is one long, careful, patient crescendo, and by the halfway point, it seems to have reached its climax. But then something unexpected happens: Rather than let the momentum subside, Morrison and her band coast on that cresting wave for several more minutes, maintaining that tension without sacrificing any nuance in her vocals or resorting to ostentatious melodrama. It’s a big moment on an album full of big moments—on an album that is, in fact, all about big moments. These wounded love songs evoke great wellings of despair and desire, amplifying and ennobling those emotions in a way that ought to be comprehensible and relatable even to those listeners who don’t speak Spanish.
A native of the Baja California region of Mexico, Morrison has been a central figure in the extremely tight-knit and defiantly independent Mexican pop community for just six years, releasing a steady stream of EPs and LPs and winning two Latin Grammys for her 2012 album Déjenme Llorar. Although she has recorded with a range of Mexican artists—including the singer-songwriter Natalia LaFourcade, the Monterrey band Kinky, and Tijuana producer Alejandro Jiménez, better known as Jandro—Morrison may be best known to American listeners from her cameo on Calexico’s Edge of the Sun earlier this year or from the 2012 documentary Hecho en México, about the Mexican indie scene. Both showcased her distinctive vocals, but neither suggested Morrison was capable of something as impressive as Amor Supremo.
In fact, nothing in her catalog sounds anything like this album. Her previous work has generally adhered to acoustic instruments and mixed new rock and pop sounds with older Mexican bolero and ballad traditions. With each subsequent release, however, Morrison has grown bolder and more adventurous, and the title of her 2013 EP—Jugando en Serio—sums up her approach perfectly. That sense of playing seriously culminates on Amor Supremo. As she explained to Billboard in September, she recorded the album over eight months in a house near the beach in Playas de Tijuana, "where we could hear the ocean all day." There she worked with producers Jandro and Demian Jiménez as well as a rotating group of musicians to find a new sound—one rooted in Mexico but embracing international trends and ideas.
First single "Un Beso", released in September, heralded a dramatic change and introduced the elements that color Amor Supremo: the disembodied drums, the shimmery synths, the cathedral organ, and the stabs of Lynchian guitar. What’s remarkable is how much mileage she gets from these few instruments. They provide the foundation for every song, but there’s always a twist, always some new combination that prevents the music from becoming repetitive or tired: the Middle Eastern strings on "Cercanía", the prismatic synth theme on "Mi Secreto", the weightless rhythms of "Tú Atacas", even the crackle of guitar on "Azúcar Morena", which sounds like a fuse being lit. Even when the production becomes gauzy and blurred around the edges, it’s usually to emphasize the emotional specificity of her vocals, which are forceful but not overpowering, wounded yet strong, pleading but never whiny. Even the way she sings a simple word like "tí" can stop you short.
Morrison commands these songs, cuts across the language barrier, makes you understand something beyond the words. And the words are important here. In shedding her old musical palette, she embraces trends and traditions that sound more international in scope, and these songs draw from a range of influences, including American soul and European pop. And yet, she continues to sing exclusively in Spanish, even when an English-language album might have more commercial potential. It’s a crucial decision, one that implies there are certain emotions and ideas—certain big moments—that are specific to Mexico and expressible only in her native language, whether it’s the particular sugar she tastes on her lover’s skin ("Azúcar Morena es tu piel") or a personal struggle she knows she must overcome ("Esta lucha es solo contra mi"). All moments are big moments, and that epiphany makes Amor Supremo one of the most rewarding and genuinely moving pop albums of 2015.


The L.A. psych-soul artist’s first album in more than 40 years is a plodding, overdriven blues-jazz odyssey that feels like a chore.

Inter-Fusion

Cut Shuggie Otis some slack. After decades in the wilderness, the L.A. native is finally enjoying the acclaim and attention that eluded him the first time around. His second act started in 2001 with an acclaimed Luaka Bop reissue of his haunted ’70s psych-soul classic Inspiration Information, and kept going with re-releases of his other studio albums from that era. The man who was once a small mystery, known only to hip-hop producers and anyone who looked up the writing credits for the Brothers Johnson’s hit cover of his “Strawberry Letter 23,” is now able to play stages around the world. It’s an appealing story of redemption—which in some ways makes it even more disappointing that Otis’ first collection of new music in over 40 years is such a chore to listen to.
Inter-Fusion is the kind of plodding, overdriven blues-jazz odyssey that Otis has occasionally hinted at during his recent run of live performances. He shows no interest here in touching on the zonked-out brilliance of Inspiration Information highlight “Happy House” or the deep funk of his 1970 debut, Here Comes Shuggie Otis. Instead, he calls back to his early days backing up his father, ’50s R&B pioneer Johnny Otis, and perhaps previews a future showing off his instrumental virtuosity in bars.
That facility with a guitar is the one element that Otis really has going for him on Inter-Fusion. He attacks each song ferociously, peeling off solos that are just showy enough to prove why he was qualified to jump in the fire as Frank Zappa’s bassist on “Peaches En Regalia” at age 16. His fuzzed-out breakdowns on a meaty re-recording of “Ice Cold Daydream” (originally found on his 1971 album Freedom Flight) crack through the light funk groove nicely, kicking out a subtle nod to Jimi Hendrix’s “Third Stone From the Sun” for good measure. And each song is anchored by his sturdy yet flexible rhythm work.
What Otis needed was a creative partner who could help him plot a course between the extremes of his past achievements and whatever he’s attempting here. Instead, he hitches his star to Kyle Hamood, a member of L.A. rock nobodies Them Guns, who buffs and polishes every last inch of Inter-Fusion until you can practically see your reflection. Otis cedes almost all control to the producer and the rhythm section—drummer Carmine Appice and bassist Tony Franklin, both studio lifers—letting them write all the songs and clutter them up with showy fills and sickly synth tones. It’s enough to make you wish someone had given him Dan Auerbach’s number instead, or Daptone Records leader Bosco Mann’s.
There’s no getting around the fact that Inter-Fusion is a missed opportunity. For all its failings, though, at least Otis sounds engaged with the material—he’s having fun, even if no one else is. This isn’t the leap forward fans might have hoped for, but if it gives him the momentum to keep writing and recording, that’s better than nothing.


Julia Brown is the lo-fi indie pop project of Maryland-based musician Sam Ray, and An Abundance of Strawberries is their first and possibly final full album. It is a dense and varied collection of homemade pop that pushes against lo-fi limitations at every turn, and it feels like being surrounded by a group of your most creative friends.

Julia Brown: An Abundance of Strawberries

An Abundance of Strawberries

An Abundance of Strawberries both is and isn’t a Julia Brown album. While the Maryland-based indie pop outfit intended to record an album in 2014, the band stalled and effectively dissolved, leading frontman Sam Ray to take the reins, recording an album by himself and bringing in past members and anyone who was willing to help finish the job.
Ironically, for an album that was shaped largely by one person, An Abundance of Strawberries exceends the band’s sole demo and single in ambition. Ray pushes past the conventional limitations of "lo-fi indie pop" at every turn: The opening title track begins with Ray's soft singing and a strummed acoustic guitar, before giving way to cymbal crashes and a cavalcade of voices as the song expands and blossoms. Likewise, "The Body Descends" is a near-epic at five minutes, growing from quiet piano chords to Infinity Crush's Caroline White singing along with Ray, her voice melding with his as as viola swells with the drums to create a pristine piece of ballroom pop.
On the surface, An Abundance of Strawberries feels like a continuation of Julia Brown’s old, home-taped sound. "Procession (full)" is full of choppy guitar strums and has a ramshackle quality meant to hide how well put together it is. "All Alone in Bed," with lines like "Does your mother know/ That you’re skin and bones/ Does your mother know/ Those things you do when you’re all alone in bed" over plinked xylophone captures the intimacy, playfulness, and quiet melancholy of To Be Close to You.
But then something like "Snow Day," which is built around an off-kilter drum machine and near-random keyboard notes, draws just as much from the production work Ray does under his Ricky Eat Acid moniker. This quiet experimental runs throughout the album and binds everything together, even at its extremes. "You Can Always Hear the Birds" opens with an out-of-nowhere jungle freak-out before giving way to looping drum crashes and Ray’s Vocoder-masked vocals, yet the album ends on "Bloom," the album’s simplest track: Just Ray and his guitar, reminding everyone the true essence of his work.
An Abundance of Strawberries is a dense collection, but it coheres thanks to Ray's ability to twist a connective melody out of the most unlikely of places. It feels indebted to the Elephant 6 creative model, where albums express the vision of one artist through a whole host of close collaborators. It has a similar communal feel, like being surrounded by a group of creative friends. If this is indeed the last work of Julia Brown, it’s heartening to know that the band was able to end on such a grand statement.


The Bronx rapper’s second solo album grapples with questions of faith over jazz and gospel production.

There Will Be Rain

On “The Flood,” the opening track from 20-year-old Bronx musician Caleb Giles’ second solo album, There Will Be Rain, a voice sings about the weather through heavy digital distortion: “It’s gonna rain/You better get ready and bear this in mind.” Delivered as a statement of fact, the line is less a visionary prophecy than a child’s repetition of a familiar story handed down by an elder. In fact, “The Flood” is a cover of “It’s Gonna Rain Again,” an early-1970s song from the traditional gospel quartet the Sensational Nightingales. Giles, like the Nightingales before him, is seeking truth in the Book of Genesis. But there’s an implicit admission in this cover—sung by his Standing on the Corner bandmate Gio Escobar—that he may never find the meaning of the rain. The story of the flood raises impossible questions about humanity’s relationship with God that date back to Biblical times, and Giles revives that conversation without offering an answer.
Giles, who plays saxophone in Standing on the Corner, made his solo debut last year with Tower, an album that aimed to showcase his lyrical ability as a rapper. On this eight-track follow-up, he’s still working toward a distinct identity. A line like “We write style, all with the stroke of a pen” could be delivered by nearly any young MC, but it suggests an awareness on Giles’ part that he is still developing as an artist. And while Rain is only obliquely autobiographical, setting tones more than scenes, when Giles does get specific (“Had me a block swallow up niggas mad fast/Tags and them black masks, I seen it all”), he suggests a well of untold stories waiting for their time.
That undefined quality can enhance the power of Giles’ frequent Biblical allusions. On the plaintive highlight “Wondering,” he raps, “Feel fire approaching/For the things that I’ve done/For the things that I’m holding.” The image of retributive fire calls back to the opening track, but once again, he leaves the details unmentioned. Later on the same song, Escobar sings, “Looked into my father’s eyes/And I realize, I realize/Why I was wondering.” There’s a lot of wondering on this album, and little moral certainty, which feels right for a work of art about faith.
In under 20 minutes, There Will Be Rain offers a lovely melange of jazz, hip-hop, gospel, and soul. There are no grand experiments, but just enough variance within that spectrum. Giles’ rapping, likewise, is perfectly competent, a steady vessel. On “Impatient,” the album’s best song, his flow is metronomic as he connects his own experiences of moving around as a kid to a larger antsiness. “Feel sick of waiting and missing payments,” he raps, “And missing love/Why niggas hating?” The music pulls back with violin stammers and pushes forward with a piano melody. There’s a deep longing to know in the song—to know what he’s growing toward, or to know what he wants at all.


The latest entry in Bob Dylan’s frequently brilliant Bootleg Series focuses on previously unreleased music recorded around the time of the savagely reviewed 1970 double album Self Portrait. Included among the alternate takes, demos, stripped-down mixes, and live cuts are songs that wound up on New Morning and Nashville Skyline.

Bob Dylan: Bootleg Series, Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969-1971)

It’s a little hard for those of us who weren’t there to understand the critical reaction to Bob Dylan’s 10th album, 1970‘s Self Portrait. First, let’s pause a moment to reflect on the fact that there was a 10th album already at that point, only eight years and a few months after Dylan released his self-titled debut. It was a busy time: he wrote and performed, culture was churning ahead and changing at what was then an unprecedented pace, and some people in the music world thought of him as a sort of leader of a new consciousness. Into this world he released an album called Self Portrait. One imagines seeing that title and expecting something deeper, heavier, some kind of reckoning with what has gone before. But what the listening public got instead was a mish-mash-- a few original songs, a few live cuts, lots of covers, and a generally disjointed sound. It seemed slapdash. And it caused Greil Marcus, Dylan’s best critic, to begin his review of the double album in Rolling Stone with the words “What is this shit?”
The latest entry in Dylan’s Bootleg Series provides a new opportunity to evaluate the music of this period. Calling this volume Another Self Portrait, including liner notes by Marcus, and offering up a new painting by Bob Dylan as a cover image, is a sly and gutsy move. By most accounts, Dylan was hurt by the initial savaging of Self Portrait, and rushed out its 1970 follow-up, New Morning, to put the album in the rearview as quickly as possible. Later, there was a sense that he wanted to scrub it from his own history. In interviews, Dylan sometimes suggested that Self Portrait was deliberately bad, thrown together as a way to confuse his audience or provoke the media into moving on to someone else so that he could have more privacy in raising his family.
Though we’ll never know exactly what he was thinking, the idea of Dylan making a poor album on purpose never made sense. He worked with too many top-shelf musicians that he cared about, and had friends and colleagues investing too much time, to make something that would embarrass them. It seems more likely that the “intentionally bad” storyline was a defense mechanism for a mysterious artist who did, after all, have a pretty hefty ego and was deeply aware of his own talent. So it’s reasonable to conclude that Self Portrait was a strange and all-over-the-place album because, for one reason or another, that’s the kind of album Dylan wanted to make at that time.
Another Self Portrait complicates the narrative. Considering the strength of these alternate takes, demos, stripped-down mixes, and live cuts, it's a little hard to believe that these were the cast-offs from what was perceived to be an artist’s worst album. Many of the songs come from the sessions for New Morning, but there were no clear lines between Self Portrait and New Morning sessions in 1969 and 1970. Akin to Neil Young’s later method, Dylan at the end of the 60s seems to have been about recording songs first, lots of them, and figuring out how they fit into an album later.
There was a marked shift in Dylan's music at the end of the 60s. “For sure my lyrics had struck nerves that had never been struck before,” he wrote of this time in Chronicles Volume One, “but if my songs were just about the words, then what was Duane Eddy, the great rock'n'roll guitarist, doing recording an album full of instrumental melodies of my songs? Musicians have always known that my songs were more than just words, but most people are not musicians.” This passage provides a good framework for understanding the music here. After the word-drunk work he’d created in the mid-60s, and following the mysterious motorcycle accident that laid him up in 1966, his music became simpler and more tuneful. Drawing on his longstanding interest in country music, standards, and any well-constructed song, he began to write and perform songs that felt universal.
That is where the deep and immense pleasure of this set resides: hearing melodies-- some new, some old, some borrowed-- performed by a distinctive singer at the height of his powers. The two discs are arranged for flow, with songs roughly split along two lines. Disc one is mostly songs recorded prior to Self Portrait, and is heavy on alternate versions of Dylan tunes and renditions of traditional songs. This “Time Passes Slowly” and the demo of “Went to See the Gypsy” don’t supplant better-known takes, but they’re different enough in feel and arrangement to make the songs sound new. Other differences, like the alternate version of Nashville Skyline’s “I Threw It All Away”, are more subtle, and the appeal is in hearing the song tinted by a new setting.
But the real revelations on the first disc are the unreleased versions of songs from the public domain. It’s now accepted that Dylan returned to relevance late in his career when he released two albums of traditional songs, 1992‘s Good as I Been to You and 1993‘s World Gone Wrong. The idea being that, in times of trouble, when he’s not sure where else to go, the songs Dylan grew up with and studied were there for him. The versions here of “Railroad Bill”, “Little Sadie”, “Pretty Saro”, and the especially powerful “This Evening So Soon” are brilliant showcases of his ability to inhabit old material and make it his own. And they benefit from the generally spare and acoustic sound. Dylan started his career singing traditional folk songs, but his understanding of them eight years later was far richer.
The second disc is heavier on versions of Dylan originals, with roughly equal smatterings of alternate takes from Self Portrait, New Morning, and Nashville Skyline and live cuts from Dylan and the Band’s 1969 Isle of Wight Festival performance. Some of the differences in these versions are striking. The radically altered take of “If Not For You” is performed by Dylan with piano and violin, making the song sound even more tender and vulnerable. There’s an alternate version of the funky Nashville Skyline trifle “Country Pie” that, when it breaks down, shows just how in-the-pocket his session pros were when playing live in the studio. There’s a version of “New Morning” with a shimmering horn section, giving it an even more buoyant and joyous cast. “Wigwam”, the instrumental that was given a bombastic treatment on the Self Portrait album, is heard without orchestration, revealing it as an effortlessly tuneful cowboy tune (the countrypolitan near-instrumental “All the Tired Horses” is heard in a similarly lean version).
Most of the music is heard in versions with minimal instrumentation: Dylan’s guitar, a second guitar adding fills, sometimes piano. Which makes the set oddly cohesive and album-like, ironically more so than the Self Portrait album itself. The outliers in this regard were also some of the stranger inclusions on the original album-- the in-concert tracks with the Band. Given that neither Dylan nor the Band played live during this period, the fact that they came together for a massive festival was surely big news, so the set is obviously of historical importance. That is doubly true since by this time the recordings they made together in Woodstock were leaking out on bootlegs like The Great White Wonder, so the desire for Dylan/Band collaborations was high. But plucking random numbers from that Isle of Wight set didn’t make much sense on the original album, and it doesn’t make much sense on Another Self Portrait either. The deluxe version of this set includes a disc with the full set, which is welcome-- it has a ragtag charm, Dylan mostly sings in his Nashville Skyline voice, and the song selection is ace. But there’s still a weird distance to it all, a lack of intensity that is hard to put a finger on, with laid back versions of familiar tunes that don’t really probe for any new meanings.
The deluxe version also includes a remastered version of the Self Portrait album proper. Returning to it, it’s hard for those of us a generation or two younger to understand the reaction to it not because it paled in comparison to the greatness that came before, because it obviously did. If you’ve spent any time listening to Bob Dylan’s 1960s catalog, you are still trying to wrap your head around the thought that one person wrote the 56 songs on Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, and Nashville Skyline between 1965 and 1969. Self Portrait, next to these records, in that moment, must have seemed like a joke. But later generations hear it differently. We’ve discovered Self Portrait in the used bins, torrent downloads, and streaming services alongside records like Street Legal, Saved, Empire Burlesque, Down in the Groove, and Under the Red Sky. And in this broader context, it sounds quite good, another weird and sloppy record from a guy who released a lot of them. And hearing it again with all the fantastic music that surrounded it, music that further cements Dylan’s Bootleg Series as one of the most important archival projects in modern pop history, it remains a beguiling artifact.


The young Jamaican singer shows off her versatility on her debut EP, slipping between rapid-fire ragga grit and conscious reggae styles, and maintaining an unwavering focus on memorable melodic hooks.

Rapture EP

The opening strains of the ultra-infectious “Toast,” the first single from Jamaican teenage upstart Mikayla “Koffee” Simpson, demand a repeat. It’s the perfect tune to “lick back”—to pull back and rewind to the start—as is the practice of the mobile discotheque soundsystems on the island, building the anticipation for the beat to drop.
Koffee, who initially drew attention with an acoustic tribute to Usain Bolt, has a crisp delivery that moves back and forth between rapid-fire ragga grit and one drop conscious reggae, a style referred to as the portmanteau “singjay” (combining “singer” and “deejay,” the Jamaican term for MC). There’s been a great deal of talk about up-and-coming women in Jamaican music—Shenseea and HoodCelebrityy, to name only a couple—but this five-song EP indicates that Koffee can, like many of the singjays who made their mark in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Sizzla, Capleton, Buju Banton), navigate between dancehall and reggae with ease.
Production on the EP reflects multiple genres and seems to travel in and out of Jamaica as well. “Toast” might be called near-Naija in its styling—and no surprise, given that Walshy Fire was involved. As a member of Major Lazer, the outfit known for its constant (and sometimes controversial) international search for rhythms, Walshy is no stranger to Afrobeats, that genre with a woefully vague name. And then there’s the much more reggaefied “Throne”: It oscillates between plaintive chorus and sharp verse, showing off Koffee’s ability to shift from “alto to baritone,” as she sings. The thump of “Blazin” provides adequate backing for Koffee’s rapid-fire delivery; fellow newcomer Jane McGizmo’s soprano chorus floats and echoes above.
Given that this is a woman whose initial career goal was to be a pharmacist, it’s hard not to think about her as mixing up some seriously original medicine, because some of these tunes just tower over a whole lot of what’s being released these days. A one-minute performance of “Rapture” on a bespoke riddim by the UK’s Toddla T led to a breathless Twitter reaction. The longer version here is a touch moodier, but the boastful chorus, “Koffee come in like a rapture, and everybody get capture,” is sticky, sticky, sticky. What is clearly constant throughout each of the strong five songs here is a focus on hooks—it’s another thing that sets her apart.
Maybe she gets it from Chronixx. The breakout reggae-revival superstar has a penchant for perfect hooks that has rubbed off on this young woman; she’s obviously been paying attention to how important memorability is where melodies are concerned. It’s hard to come away from listening to a song like “Raggamuffin” and not be humming the chorus. When she performed it live at the legendary Tuff Gong studios as part of BBC Radio 1xtra’s 2018 visit to the island, Chronixx added bits and pieces to the chorus. Watching the video, there are a couple moments where the Grammy nominee breaks out in a huge smile as Koffee casually spits lyrics over the classic real rock riddim. He knows that he’s hearing something special. The Rapture EP is further proof of her talents, and its mix of rhythms and reggae seem likely to be but the first taste of what’s yet to come.


The peripatetic electronic artist takes inspiration from her Tunisian Berber heritage with her new alias. Full of yawning spaces and dembow-like rhythms, the music explores a space where body music and head music become one.

Draw Me a Silence

Azu Tiwaline has spent a lifetime wandering. She grew up in the West African nation of Côte d'Ivoire, the child of a Tunisian Berber mother and Cambodian father, but moved to France as a teenager. As an adult, she began spending extended stretches on the road, touching down in India, Senegal, Mongolia, and Réunion, seeking out “places in the world where I felt the same energy, the same gentleness as in Côte d'Ivoire.” She has been equally peripatetic in her music. In France in the mid-1990s, she discovered the rave scene—and along with it, the mind-bending techno of artists like Cristian Vogel, sending her down the path she would pursue for the next two decades as Loan. (Her first name is Donia, though she chooses not to share her surname.) Since the late ’90s, her own productions and live sets have wound through hard techno, dubstep, UK garage, hip-hop, IDM, and, frequently, fusions of several of those styles.
In 2017, Donia moved to the el-Djerid region in southwestern Tunisia to tend to a small plot of land left to her by her late mother, and the landscape seems to have done something to her music. A menacing palette of jagged synths and concussive drums had connected her previous stylistic shifts, but as Azu Tiwaline—Berber for “Eyes of the Wind”—those hard edges have melted away. Her debut album under the alias takes inspiration from her Berber heritage and the expanse of the desert, where date palms outnumber people 15 to one.
As with Loan, a unique palette holds together Draw Me a Silence, rather than any single musical style. The record is practically all percussion; almost everything Donia plays is evocative of objects being struck or shaken. She draws from a deep well of stock samples, homemade recordings, and synthesized drums: leathery thwacks and timpani-grade booms, tinkling bells and rustling brushes, thunderclaps and bullroarers. Crickets and village noise offer a vivid sense of place, and melodies are scarce. Instead, she uses dub delay to fill the yawning spaces between all these elements: Lines of resonant feedback stretch out, glistening, like furrows irrigating the arid surroundings.
A few songs incorporate traditional North African rhythms, scales, and instruments. The metallic splashing of iron qraqeb (also known in Tunisia as wonderfully onomatopoeic chkachek or shqashiq) drives “Berbeka,” and a mournful reed-like melody infuses “Izen Zaren” with a predawn chill. But Draw Me a Silence is just as deeply rooted in contemporary UK bass music. “Until the End” opens the album with a 4/4 kick reminiscent of Andy Stott; the influence of Shackleton echoes throughout the album; and the resonant textures and syncopated beats of “Luz Azul” recall artists like Parris and Batu. (Fittingly, Azu Tiwaline’s Magnetic Service EP appeared last year on Livity Sound, a Bristol label whose shadowy kinetics helped shape the development of both those musicians.) Like them, Donia is motivated by the meditative aspects of bass weight, and she uses slowed-down tempos and dembow-like rhythms to emphasize her drums’ depth. The Berber signifiers make her music unique; what makes it compelling is her exploration of a space where body music and head music become one.
Draw Me a Silence originally appeared last year as a pair of successive EPs, but a new, extended version of the album adds a new closing track, “Eyes of the Wind,” that offers a fresh perspective. Where the other 11 songs foreground percussion, “Eyes of the Wind” is mostly ambient, cradling a brief passage of languid hand drumming inside a shimmering expanse of drone and bleep. If the downbeat “Izen Zaren,” the album’s previous closing track, served as a denouement, the spacious “Eyes of the Wind” provides passage to another world. Perhaps it took a move to the desert for Donia to absorb the Slits’ maxim, “Silence is a rhythm too.” For all the album’s earthy textures, it is ultimately guided by the movements of the desert air and the sprawl of the heavens above.

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On his new new seven-song EP, dropped on short notice, YG is back on full throttle, racing ahead and sounding more nimble than ever.

Red Friday

If you’ve gone outside in Los Angeles County since November 8, you’ve heard “FDT.” YG and Nipsey Hussle’s skeletal protest song—the one that made the Secret Service come knocking all the way back in April—had a brief run during the primaries, but became an anthem shortly after the election was called for The Donald. “I like white folks, but I don’t like you”: Within 24 hours of the election results, there were effigies burning at City Hall and protesters choking off the 110. “I’m ‘bout to turn Black Panther”; across Temple and down Figueroa, through South Central and over to the Beaches, the song rattled from Priuses and pickup trucks and seventh-story windows. “And if your ass do win, you gon’ probably get smoked.”
The overtly political is nothing new for YG. He’s been handing out groceries and school supplies with Compton mayor Aja Brown; he ended his sophomore album, Still Brazy with a three-song suite that tackled gross, race-based injustice. The first was “FDT,” but the next two (“Blacks and Brown” and “Police Get Away Wit Murder”) take aim at a state that can be murderous no matter who’s at the helm. And so with Red Friday, the new seven-song EP dropped on short notice, YG is back on the throttle, rushing ahead, nearly unbothered.
Red Friday finds him darting across the Pro Tools sessions, more nimble than he’s ever been before. Sonic landmarks of L.A. rap come and go over the course of the record, but the tempo is constantly being pushed. Some of that comes courtesy of DJ Mustard, YG’s longtime creative partner who was completely absent from Still Brazy after the two had a personal falling out. “Get Out Yo Feelin’s” in particular is a testament to their rediscovered chemistry: Mustard’s eerie undertones and breathless drums make YG and RJ’s wisecracks from the club sounds sinister, even unhinged. And “Down Bitch,” which should be a pretty rote song about loyal girlfriends, comes out sounding like a Christmas carol that took too much ketamine.
There’s no songwriting on Red Friday as instantly quotable as “Twist My Fingaz” or as sneakily brilliant as “Bool, Balm, & Bollective,” but what YG ends up rapping is tight and economical—and occasionally vivid. “I Be On,” an unfeeling rebuff to main girls and side girls alike is delivered gleefully, then qualified by acknowledging the drink in his hand. On “I Know,” he opens his verse with a three-bar riff on Houston one-hit wonder Mike Jones’ existence, then doubles down on his taunts to those rappers who need handholding to make the transition from grassroots fame to national stardom.
But without question, the crown jewel of Red Friday is “One Time Comin’,” a frenzied blur of guns and paranoia. YG gets pulled over by a police officer, presumably because someone with his complexion shouldn’t be driving a Maybach; his mind darts to the last moments he was able to spend with his baby daughter. It ends with a bridge that couldn’t be more unambiguous, a complete rebuke of the Los Angeles Police Department and those who support it. That YG decided to deliver it over such an urgent beat—and on such short notice that his label might have fumbled the release—is simply a nod to the days we live in. There’s not much time to waste.


The Bay Area quintet's first record for Matador feels a long way from its powerviolence beginnings, with a cleaned-up sound and a focus on garage-rock hooks.

Zoo

The first 7" I bought, when I was 13 or 14, was Minor Threat's "Salad Days". This was in 8th grade, or my first year in high school, so we're talking the late 1980s/early 1990s, though the record came out earlier, in 1985. The three-song EP was Minor Threat's last 7", the one that featured slower songs, an acoustic guitar, church chimes (or, at least that's what I thought of them as), and a cover of the Standells' "Sometimes Good Guys (Don't Wear White)". I was too young to realize Ian MacKaye and company were fucking with the hardcore template and looking beyond the genre's horizon, but they were: Those songs worked as a bridge to "Waiting Room" and the rest of Fugazi's self-titled 1988 EP and onward. All to say: Hardcore bands deciding to stop doing hardcore is not a new thing.
The Bay Area quintet Ceremony formed in 2004, playing especially raw, noisy, super-fast hardcore, something people tag "powerviolence." It's worth knowing that Violence Violence, their 13-song debut LP (right, right), lasted just over 13 minutes. (The CD version appended a re-tooled take on the 2005, 7-song Ruined EP.) Early on, though, they'd mentioned Joy Division, Suicidal Tendencies, Pink Floyd, Negative Approach, and Tom Waits as influences, and by the time they released their third album, Rohnert Park, in 2010, they were doing something very different, essentially making good on the promise of their eclectic record collections. Ceremony slowed things down, got sludgier and noisier in a Siltbreeze sense, discovered some British post-punk roots, and reminded me at times of the Shadow Ring covering the Fall.
On Rohnert Park's opening track, "Into the Wayside Part I / Sick", vocalist Ross Farrar lists a bunch of things he's sick of, including Black Flag and the Cro-Mags. Fair enough. For a band who named itself after a Joy Division song, that's not necessarily surprising. It's especially unsurprising in 2010-- like saying you're sick of the records your father grew up listening to. If that wasn't enough, they finished out their time on the hardcore/punk label Bridge 9 with Ceremony 6 Cover Songs, an EP that found them tackling Pixies, Wire, and L7's version of "American Society".
Given their history, the stylistic shifts on Zoo, their fourth album (and first album for Matador), shouldn't be all that surprising. At least not for the reasons you might think. Yes, they've changed things up again and they've cleaned and clarified their sound, but we already knew they had a Wire homage in them. Plenty of bands have shed genre constraints to arrive at a successful second act, though even more have fallen flat on their faces. Those disasters can be interesting, at least. In Ceremony's case, they don't wipe out; worse than a colossal flop, they sound exceedingly mediocre, and this is their least compelling album by far.
Zoo features a couple of good songs, including opener "Hysteria", a true group punk sing-a-long. But too much of it drifts into generic 1960s-nodding garage-rock territory. It's their best sounding record: the dense atmosphere is charged and fuzzed-out in the right ways, creating an ambiance I can get sucked into even when the songwriting falters. Kudos to producer John Goodmanson here, though people focusing on the indie rock portions of his resume should remember he has plenty of  experience with punk via those old Team Dresch albums, Bikini Kill's Reject All American, a couple of Unwound classics, and Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out and All Hands on the Bad One, among others. Here, he makes the band sound sturdier and more colorful than they've ever sounded. But it doesn't matter when the songwriting itself is monochromatic, mid-tempo Troggs rock.
All said, Zoo makes for a very long 36 minutes. By the time you get to the drifting feedback that ends the third track, "Repeating the Circle", they already sound bored. "Quarantine" would be a late-period Social Distortion song that didn't make it onto a late-period Social Distortion album. They nod to the Cramps on "Hotel" but by the end, you'll be nodding off. The more punked-up raver "Ordinary People"? Very ordinary. They do offer an interesting look, and taste, on downcast closer "Video", the longest song on the collection: Here we see them stretching things out like they did on the more experimental Rohnert Park, controlling a pent-up intensity-- and pleasingly bleak atmosphere-- that they're able to maintain for the low-key, slow-burn track's four minutes and change. It's a great finale.
Ceremony will be inevitably be compared to Fucked Up because they, too, are playing more ambitiously pop music than when they started, and for the same label. But Fucked Up pushed themselves in ways that paid big dividends: The multi-tracked operatics were as exciting for the listener as they were for the out-of-breath band. Here, it feels like a downgrade to go from the early frenetic madness or the rickety, exhilarating post-punk of Rohnert Park to these decent, very safe punk nods. There's not much on Zoo that you won't find on dozens of garage-rock albums released by smaller labels this year. It's hard to say why things went wrong, but on another of the better tracks, "Adult", Farrar sings that, as we get older, "we have to give up the things we love sometimes," a line that doesn't ring true. Even with a family and a new set of responsibilities, you can easily hold onto what got you into punk in the first place, and growing old shouldn't mean growing boring.


Los Campesinos! haven't changed much on their fourth album, their darkest yet. The band's serrated twee is not exactly in fashion, though, and if LC! are the last men and women left holding the flag for an antiquated era of indie rock, it has only intensified their vitality.

Hello Sadness

The music of Los Campesinos! has always been about straddling the line between sincerity and irony. It's a tough game to play, but thanks to songwriter Gareth Campesinos' wry humor and self-deprecation, the band has been able to make a career out of writing songs where breakups literally equal death. The music is intensely personal, but it's equally as inclusive-- Gareth paints himself as having it worse than anyone, but the unspoken acknowledgment that makes the band churn is that he really just has it as bad as everyone else.
Hello Sadness is the band's fourth album, and though not much has changed with the band itself, the ground underneath which LC! stand has shifted. Gareth's style of writing-- naked oversharing that goes far past the margins of his pad-- used to feel like a natural outgrowth of the type of discourse found at places like LiveJournal and Blogger, but those mediums are dinosaurs now, replaced by the opacity of Tumblr and the short, controlled blasts of Twitter. Likewise, the band's serrated twee is not exactly in fashion in the world of indie rock right now, a truth that's an undercurrent of their announcement late last year that they would be distributing a quarterly fanzine. But, if LC! are the last men and women left holding the flag for an antiquated era of indie rock, it has only intensified their vitality to those looking for more than chillwave's call to tune in, turn on, and drop out.
Though the album is arguably the band's darkest yet, it starts off with both the album's peppiest song and one of LC!'s best singles to date. "By Your Hand" finds Gareth at the very infancy of a budding romance, and it casts him as a sort of lovable hero, a role that he inhabits when he's not, say, fantasizing about burning the skin off his hands before going to a palmist. Gareth narrates himself initiating another round of dirty texting before breaking into one of the more memorable passages he's penned: his fooling around with "fate"-- "a cruel mistress, girl"-- who suggests that the two go back to her place, where "fate" then, naturally, vomits on him. He does this with gusto, which is accentuated by the chorus, wherein the entire band shouts, "By your hand is the only end that I foresee." The exuberance, not just for the romance itself but for his eventual end at the hand of his lover, is crucial to Gareth's ability to write songs about what happens when the relationship is at the other end of the spectrum. We know that he's always coming back for more, even when the rest of us can't stomach it.
Otherwise Hello Sadness is an album largely obsessed with themes of despair and images of death, but Gareth is an able gallows humorist. On the album's final track he enters a slaughterhouse where he sees his guts strung up, only for him to be turned away because "his sad eyes are too much to bear." On "Baby, I Got the Death Rattle" he gets frostbite from scribbling dicks in the snow for every girl that wouldn't sleep with him before watching a halo slip from the top of his lover's head and, presumably, decapitate her. And then there is "Every Defeat a Divorce (Three Lions)", Gareth's long-coming ode to the English soccer team, wherein crosses on the pitch become crucifixes and the team's crest nearly claws him to death. It is the album's centerpiece, if only because for Gareth, and for a lot of us, the one thing more wrenching than romance is sports.
These songs are genuinely affecting, though, both because they explore the darkest depths of a romantic's psyche and because LC! have transitioned rather seamlessly into maturity. The fizzy, excitable songwriting of their early output is far in the past, and they've learned to write songs that build and swell to moments that can knock you off your feet ("To Tundra" is the killer here). Gareth also explores his range as a vocalist to great success, stretching himself to sing melodically and in a strikingly deeper voice. His vocals have long been a breaking point for many non-converts, and while Gareth hasn't morphed into King Krule, his impressive singing here bodes well for the future of a band whose music largely revolves around him.
The buzz has long worn off of Los Campesinos!, but Hello Sadness is their fourth straight great album, and each of them is close enough in quality that you'd likely get split numbers if you conducted a straw poll at one of the band's shows. Even if there is no breakthrough moment for them, there is something to be said for a band that is this young, this consistent, and this committed to both carrying the torch for and freshening up a style of indie rock that has, for the moment at least, been left behind.


On her debut, this Japanese 20-year-old takes inspiration from indie rock to craft lonely, glowing bedroom pop that relishes in the ecstatic possibilities of sound.

Before Sunrise

At 16, Nana Yamato fell in love with her first indie record. Among the bins of central Tokyo’s Big Love, a record store specializing in independent music from the U.S., UK, and EU—where J-Pop and Japanese artists run scarce—she discovered a Danish punk rock band named Iceage. For years after, she spent after-school evenings flicking through the shelves, doodling and doing homework alongside the new sounds before retreating back home to make her own music in her bedroom, where she began experimenting with guitar, layered vocals, and MIDI beats. Yamato’s story came full circle a few years later, when she was discovered by Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts.
Now, with the release of Yamato’s debut LP Before Sunrise via Savage’s label Dull Tools, the record store she still frequents looks out toward the Japan National Stadium which looms, unoccupied. Originally built for the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games, the 68,000-capacity stadium spent years in renovation for the 2020 Summer Games, only to go wasted and unused. Where the construction site once held a great, globalized fantasy—“a piece of time” where “the rope of the blue crane” reached out for “the hope of the balling crane,” as Nana sings in Japanese on album highlight “Gaito”—it now functions as little more than a dead monument in a city largely devoid of statues and visual history. Twice ravaged by war, Tokyo has a record for rebuilding itself with remarkable speed, leaving behind scant reminders of destruction and lost futures. Nana’s music is a whimsical expression of the city’s peculiar urban psycho-geography; a metropolis in which collective memories have been made to replace concrete monuments.
Written during lockdown in Tokyo, Before Sunrise considers the entangled relationship between the self and the city. The lyrics emulate an act of disappearing into the streets. “I don’t want to see,” she sings on “If”; “I kill my voice” on “Gaito”; “The only thing left, my desires” on “Under the Cherry Moon,” before segueing into a field recording of rushing and chatter on a busy Shibuyan street. Closer “The Day Song” is overwhelmed by a haze of synths and nostalgia, as adult Yamato imagines herself walking down the streets where she played as a child, knowing that time and age only serve to estrange her from these memories.
While Beyond Sunrise is somewhat indebted to the Western indie rock Yamato forged her musical identity on—the exuberant horns recall some of Iceage’s grander moments; the zigzagged synths occasionally sound Johnny Jewel-adjacent —her sharp ear for melody and dynamic transitions transcend her cumulative influences. On “Burning Desire,” she subjects her layers of grooves to a pendulum ride between ebullience and urgency. One moment, it feels fanciful; the next it sounds as though the world’s going down on a sinking ship. There’s a sheer joy to it, though. Yamato almost makes music the way kids play with toys, relishing in the ecstatic possibilities of sound.

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Sufjan’s masterful new album recalls his intimate singer-songwriter days. But it also draws on his entire catalog, his dazzling musicality, and his lifelong inquiries about love and devotion.

Javelin

Once when Sufjan Stevens was in college, he brought an injured crow to the biology lab to help save its life. “You are doing the universe a great favor,” a woman who ran an animal sanctuary told him once he called her to the scene. This is one of several stories Stevens tells in his 10-part essay included in the elaborate physical edition of his latest album, Javelin, all in service of exploring his ever-expanding definition of “love.” He writes in an inquisitive and self-aware tone, joking about how that experience with the crow provided “endless fodder” for his collegiate creative writing: “So much meaning, so little time,” he reflects. But if a young Sufjan once sought these encounters for their symbolic potential, the present-day writer of this essay, and of these songs, tells a more pressing story: even more meaning, even less time.
Over and over again on Javelin, Stevens contemplates the end. Sometimes his language, along with the hushed longing of his voice and the romantic sweep of his largely acoustic instrumentation, points toward the demise of a very long relationship. “I will always love you/But I cannot look at you,” he explains, tracing the broken logic governing the loss. “It’s a terrible thought to have and hold,” he admits after wishing ill to someone he once held dear. “Will anybody ever love me?” he asks in the aftermath.
Instantly, the songwriting feels as raw and direct as ever. And indeed, Javelin is Stevens’ first proper album in a long time that seems designed with no grand concept to unify the material or inspire theatrical adaptations; no autobiographical insight to make you reconsider everything you thought you knew about him; no jarring musical change-ups to remind you he is a proud member of the Beyhive. Running under 45 minutes, Javelin begins with a deliberate inhale and ends with a cover of a deep cut from Neil Young’s best-selling album—a track that Stevens manages to make sound even sweeter and more hopeful than the 1972 original.
Like much of his defining work, Stevens wrote, recorded, and produced Javelin almost entirely alone, minus a few key appearances: some guitar from the National’s Bryce Dessner in the dazzling eight-minute “Shit Talk,” and frequent vocal accompaniment from a small choir that includes Megan Lui, Hannah Cohen, Pauline Delassus, Nedelle Torrisi, and the activist and writer adrienne maree brown. It’s got at least one song that instantly joins the ranks of his very best (“Will Anybody Ever Love Me?”) and plenty that draw direct lines to previous high-water marks, both thematically and musically. Centering the devotional melodies and heart-tugging intimacy that characterized his early masterpieces, it’s the type of record, two decades into an artist’s career, that tends to be called a “return-to-form,” suggesting an embrace of his strengths and a diminished instinct to surprise or provoke.
But is anything ever so easy? The intricacy of Javelin is central to the essays and art accompanying the album: collages that overflow with faces of friends and family and heroes, paintings whose colors seem intended to combat Seasonal Affective Disorder. Many songs follow the path of these maximalist projects, beginning with gentle fingerpicking or piano before fireworking into electronic symphonies, orchestral crescendos, and choral rounds. The cumulative effect suggests that, while each story might begin as a stark, personal inquiry, Stevens strives to lead us somewhere divine, an altitude where our lives might appear more beautiful and still.
It is through these trajectories that Javelin, despite its tone of endless searching, becomes one of Stevens’ most uplifting records. In “Should Have Known Better,” a sudden burst of Casio keyboards accompanied an optimistic glance to the next generation—a rare bright spot on 2015’s grief-stricken Carrie & Lowell; Javelin is filled with these kinds of turns. With the notable exception of “Shit Talk,” which dissolves into a long ambient coda that lingers like fog after heavy rain, each song ends somewhere brighter, fuller, and lusher than it began. “So You Are Tired,” which includes Stevens’ most heartbreaking set of lyrics since Carrie & Lowell, climaxes with a lapping wordless refrain from the choir. As his words zoom in closer to a separation (“So you are tired… of even my kiss”), the soothing, major-key resolution suggests an elemental sense of peace, leading to a blend of emotions that feels entirely new within his songbook.
If there is anything Stevens learned from his last proper solo album, 2020’s pared-down synth-opus The Ascension, it is to tell these complex stories in simple ways. Take, for example, “My Red Little Fox,” a love song cast in waltz time, where Stevens uses one of his most classically beautiful melodies to express a series of escalating refrains: “Kiss me with the fire of gods,” he sings, then, “Kiss me like the wind,” and eventually, “Kiss me from within.” Here is the story of Javelin in miniature: The first two are seductions, spoken from person to person; the last is more like a prayer. If the lyrics on Javelin lack the proper-noun touchstones of Stevens’ story-songs, these ones gain authority from an intrinsic sense of self and place. They are approachable like pop songs, but delivered with the same precision as his folk confessionals. They break our hearts from within.
“I know I’ve often been the poster child of pain, loss, and loneliness,” Stevens recently wrote to his fans. “But the past month has renewed my hope in humanity.” He was referring to his ongoing treatment for Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare auto-immune disorder that left him learning to walk again after losing feeling and mobility in his hands, arms, and legs. In the lead-up to Javelin, he has taken to Tumblr—long his preferred method of communication—to give frequent updates on his recovery. Sometimes he finds humor in the situation—a post about his dream wheels, the “Porsche 911 of wheelchairs”—and sometimes his words are more troubling (“Woke up feeling trapped”). But nearly every post ends with a positive affirmation, or at least a sign-off with a series of X’s and O’s.
This is the tone that Stevens now favors, something familiar and close, where the stakes are high and his sense of empathy is pervasive. This tenderness is partially how “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?,” with its Morrissey-level self-deprecation and whispered instructions to “pledge allegiance to my burning heart,” manages to feel less like a breakdown and more like time-lapse footage of a flower turning toward the sun. Throughout his career, Stevens has used the language of love songs to express religious devotion, and vice versa. Across Javelin, he seems intent on understanding and being understood, with the purpose of exposing the common thread between his pet subjects: raising the endless questions that lead us to seek meaning in one another, and rejoicing in the euphoria of sometimes finding it. And if it sounds like he is occasionally singing to us from rock bottom, it’s only so we can witness the steady ascent onward.


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 Nick Cave’s early punk band and their pulpy, lurid, and legendary 1982 album.

Junkyard

To be a Birthday Party fan was and is to understand in one’s bones how much damage and electricity can be conducted through a truly spectacular new wave hairdo. “Thank you,” Nick Cave says at the end of the live version of Junkyard’s “The Dim Locator,” found on the raucous and essential Live 1981-82 compilation, “I love your haircut as well.” And hairdos, even metaphorically, the Birthday Party had in spades. The image of bassist Tracy Pew, practically shirtless and throbbing beneath an oversized cowboy hat, is as iconic a part of the Birthday Party’s mythos as the subway grate is to Marilyn Monroe’s. Whether it was Cave or guitarist Rowland S. Howard who popularized the long-sleeved shirt unbuttoned to the belly, that every frontman of every noise gothic cow-punk outfit has adopted since the early ’80s, the lineage of scrawny come-hither-ness that began in the Birthday Party’s camp is undeniable. They were the exemplar of having great hair as both aesthetic and ethos. There’s a reason that the Great Plains’ song “Letter to a Fanzine,” a 1987 nerd-punk anthem of scene-hierarchy jealousy, begins with the lines, “Isn’t my haircut really intense/Isn’t Nick Cave a genius in a sense?” In a sense, they all were.
By the time of Junkyard’s release in 1982, the Birthday Party (along with co-songwriter Anita Lane) had been in England for two years. Left behind in Australia was the band’s old name—the ironic and aptly teen-dreamy the Boys Next Door—and that old version of the band’s core influences: Roxy Music, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, and more Roxy Music. “We became a bunch of sniveling little poofs,” bassist Tracy Pew said in a 1981 NME interview. Cave added, only slightly less problematically, “I used to wear frilly shirts and pigtails before any of this English shit. We committed the unpardonable error of playing to the thinkers rather than the drinkers.”
Complicating the shift is the fact that the Boys Next Door’s second album—1980’s The Birthday Party—was also the Birthday Party’s first album. While released under the original name, that album was written and recorded after the band heard the first convention-warping records made by the Pop Group and Pere Ubu, and were transformed. Though newly inspired, the Boys Next Door/Birthday Party album sounded like a near-complete transition into what Nick Cave, Tracy Pew, Rowland S. Howard, Mick Harvey, and Phill Calvert would become. With Howard’s mutant mosquito guitar and Cave’s yowl still changing from plaintively put-upon to predatory put-upon-er, the record utilizes the same jerking rhythms of the Fall, another band that inspired the decampment from Melbourne, but the Birthday Party’s sound is swampier, more soulful even, with horns and high-guitar squall giving a threatening silliness to the proceedings. It’s like the band was already driving the Ed Roth hot rod depicted on Junkyard’s cover, but drunkenly and underneath a circus tent.
Initially, the UK press embraced the Birthday Party with open arms. While plenty of post-punk bands like PIL and the Pop Group sounded like the ghosts of the free market, and there was already a few vampiric seducers like Bauhaus on the baritone scene, only the Australian transplants sounded like the wolfman, Frankenstein monster, and all the other underrepresented creatures of the collective unconscious. The mythmaking started early: That same 1981 profile in NME made an unintentional case for poptimism by using the avant-garde French dramatist Antonin Artaud as a point of reference and contrasting the Birthday Party’s violent realness against the “fools and phonies” music of Fleetwood Mac.
This high, dumb praise came just a few months after the release of the Birthday Party’s second long player, 1981’s Prayers on Fire, a near-perfect representation of the band’s delirious rhythm’n’skronk. Howard’s scabrous guitars slashed over Pew’s lurching yet lithe basslines. Both served as vehicles for Cave’s hiccups of desire and disdain. Whether the band’s bottom-fed frenzy was a more affecting ode to self-abnegation than the only slightly more subtle Fleetwood Mac is a judgment best left to the individual listener.
Less than a year later, another equally effusive NME review hinted at the English press’ shifting opinion of the band, saying, “the Birthday Party are awful. Subversively awful. Awesomely great. Awesomely brilliant.” Like many bands of the time, the young men played their own part in their complicated relationship with the press. They performed annoyed disinterest in interviews, bad-mouthed their peers, and seemed distinctly ambivalent about anyone liking them at all. “When we went back to Australia last year we were greeted with such acclaim and adulation it made what we were doing pointless,” Howard complained not long before the band’s breakup in 1983. “The whole life of the group had been based on reacting against what was around us and turning it into some kind of positive force. So once everything was positive towards us it defeated the purpose. We loathed it for the main part.” When the band was breaking up, Cave dismissed the Birthday Party as “trash” and “utter rubbish.”
The initial adulation is understandable. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to misremember the early ’80s as a sparkling parade of post-punk innovation and joy. But for every Joy Division or Slits, there were a hundred tuneless strivers who had the new boots and signed contracts but not much else. What the Birthday Party brought to the table was absent even among the actually good post-punk bands. If Echo and the Bunnymen and Teardrop Explodes (Cave hated these bands: “They were horrible,” he told NME in 1981) were digging through the ’60s for a psychedelic profundity and the whole of punk looked to the ’50s for rock’n’roll “realness,” Nick Cave and co. looked at the same decades only for backwoods pulp and Hollywood detritus. They found Peggy Lee, Robert Mitchum chewing up the scenery, mafia-era Sinatra and his Rat Pack’s overblown love/hate relationship with the opposite sex, the Addams Family, and even the oeuvre of Mr. Sinatra’s daughter (the Boys Next Door covered “These Boots” and Rowland S. Howard and Lydia Lunch would, concurrent the release of Junkyard, do a version of “Some Velvet Morning”). Punk had perhaps correctly loathed the plasticine nature of showbiz, but the Birthday Party took the spectacle and blew it up, exposing and embracing the violence underneath. With, really, only the equally knowing Cramps and the utterly po-faced Misfits as peers, they approached pop culture like a comic strip sharing column space with the obits.
It didn’t hurt that the band managed to make a cohesively outré inversion of blues-rock that, while indebted to Captain Beefheart and the Stooges as everyone said, was equally within the traditions of absurdist, sophisticatedly wacky mid-century composers such as Carl Stalling, Raymond Scott, and Spike Jones. Sex and death abounded, but they were combined with lounge-funk vamps, eye-bulging awooga horns (and guitars played like horns), and a singer taking Mark E. Smith’s promise of a truly “hip priest” to its illogical conclusion. Cartoonish, yes, but a cartoon world where the holes Wile E. Coyote draws on the sides of mountains were both overtly Freudian and actual working tunnels that lead somewhere very dark and very hot.
Junkyard—its title, surprise surprise, a reference to heroin—was produced in part by Tony Cohen, who had produced the last Boys Next Door/first Birthday Party album, and Richard Mazda, who had worked on some early Fall tracks. On the surface, most of the songs on Junkyard are about killing girls, killing boys, killing someone of indeterminate gender, and getting into something disreputable while either driving or living in a trashcan in Texas. And doing a lot of heroin.
I won’t argue that the songs on Junkyard are not about the above topics. Without taking away from the smarts of its 5/4 time signature, the lyrics of “6" Gold Blade” (“I stuck a six-inch gold blade in the head of a girl”) don’t exactly lend themselves to a variety of interpretations. Nor am I insisting that the songs on Junkyard are necessarily about any specific thing. Howard’s “Dim Locator” (“Intriquintomitry treads on my trail/Entriggering traps for a gross gang of ghost types/Who later are packed in a cast iron trunk/These things have been known, to get out of their wraps”) is so enjoyably ludicrous that it’d be a shame to pester its mystery with presumptions of specific meaning.
But fun as it is to ponder how delightfully hairbrained gothic cowboy culture was before goth’s aesthetic shifted from “rhinestone cowboy junkie” to “steampunk Lestat in pleather,” the Birthday Party’s commitment to a theatrical bump’n’grind was not merely some internal fixation on homicide and hogwash. In the rich tradition of razzle-dazzle—whether freak show, creature feature, or Lennie killing all those lil’ mice and nice ladies—how the Birthday Party sang their song was arguably more important than the text of the song itself. They were, at the end of the day, putting on a show.
Throughout Nick Cave’s career, the most often referenced tentpole of his lyrics is his love of Southern gothic literature. He’s never been shy about drawing from the doom-pervert protagonist of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, or the polyamorous revelators of countless blues songs. Seeing The Johnny Cash Show on TV as a child, he’s said, gave young Cave his first indication that “rock’n’roll could be evil.” And certainly some of Cave’s ’80s and ’90s blues workouts (particularly with the Bad Seeds on Kicking Against the Pricks and The Firstborn Is Dead) are smothered and covered with enough Southern gothic signifiers to make Jonah Hex blush. But, somewhere along the way, the application of “Southern gothic” to Cave’s concerns has become a trope unto itself. It discounts the gonzo noir of a song like Junkyard’s “Hamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow),” the Iggy-in-reverse come-on of “She’s Hit,” and even the influence of the cold, weirdo existentialism of another Cave favorite, Philip Larkin, in favor of reading all Cave’s lyrics as an ode to a murderous, hayseed-savant’s hand-scrawled bible.
The death drive of the Birthday Party has been well covered. Reasonably so, as that drive is apparent from the most casual perusal of the song titles, album art, or publicity photos. The band’s version of “kick out the jams, motherfucker” was, after all, Cave howling, at the start of their 1983 EP, The Bad Seed, “Hands up! Who wants to die!” But if the band was solely an exercise in violence and transgression, their appeal would mostly be contained to anhedonic edgelords, crime scene fetishists, men who dress like warlocks and bring their pet snakes to the bar, and other assorted transgression hobbyists. No, the Birthday Party’s flagrant sensuality must not be ignored.
Of all the bands that fit loosely under the umbrella of early-’80s “post-punk” bands, the Birthday Party was easily the sexiest. This is both obvious and the faintest of praise. As far as primal concerns went, being sexy wasn’t a big one for, say, Gang of Four. Only Bauhaus, fellow princelings in the “Don’t call us goth!” boyband olympics, came close. But Peter Murphy’s glam quartet was practically obsessed with being sexy, and even the most performatively minded sex-haver will tell you that too much effort can be a real turn-off. Couple Bauhaus’ preening with Peter Murphy’s somewhat ooky lifelong oedipal relationship with David Bowie, and the field for sallow-cheeked hip thrusters really opens up. Without discounting the Birthday Party’s reputation for being scary, their (anti-)religiosity, or the body count that came with all that intravenous drug use, what shines brightly about the music, in conjunction with its loony tunosity, is its sheer, feral horniness.
Junkyard, for its part, is a profoundly sexy record. It is sexy in Tracy Pew’s lumbering bass. It’s sexy in Phill Calvert’s stuttering snare. It’s sexy in Howard and Harvey’s transmogrification of Voivod-esque guitar stab back into the serpentine funk that birthed the sound. And, of course, Junkyard is sexy in Cave’s utilization of every trick in the James Brown/Don Van Vliet playbook to fully inhabit a drooling, yowling Elvis Presley-infected beast. Good sex can be a transcendent communion between two loving souls. Good sex can also be an unholy mess, a phantasmagoria of bodies and dark, ravenous need, akin to a sexy soccer team crashing into a sexy mountain range.
The Birthday Party, disaster reenactors onstage and off, performed the latter. Both Cave and Howard were in the throes of a substance dependency that would thread in and out of their lives for at least the next decade (Cave would eventually get straight after the sixth try at rehab; Howard would die at age 50). Harvey was generally dissatisfied with the band’s direction, or lack thereof. In ’82, Pew was arrested for drunk driving for the third time and served two and half months in a Victoria prison, necessitating Harvey and future Bad Seed Barry Adamson to play bass on “Kewpie Doll” and “Kiss Me Black,” respectively. And Calvert, while still drumming on the majority of Junkyard, was on the way out, soon to be slandered in interviews by his former friends as an all-around unimaginative musician. The men and women who made up the Birthday Party’s social milieu (the sick boys themselves, Anita Lane, Jim Thirlwell, Blixa, Lydia Lunch, Genevieve McGuckin) were of the age and disposition that mental health issues were both taken for granted and actively disregarded. Asked if Cave was depressed during this time, Lydia Lunch has said, “He was a heroin addict—of course he was fucking depressive.”
For Harvey’s part, in a 2012 Quietus interview, the multi-instrumentalist was agnostic on the topic of how much any internal or external hardships came into play, saying, “It’s impossible to appraise how much of the music was down to living in harsh circumstances and reaction to them.” That said, the overarching psychodrama of Birthday Party was probably part of what pushed the band’s previous tropes of rockabilly maximalism and Night of the Hunter rural noir even further on Junkyard. The producer Nick Launay, who recorded “Blast Off” and “Release the Bats”—two songs that were not on the initial album but were included on a reissued CD version—described to the Quietus how Harvey and Rowland tormented their singer by making him redo a particularly arduous verse over and over, less to get it right than to get off on his distress. On Junkyard’s sole moment of quietude, “Several Sins,” a pensive, boom-swagger-boom blues walk penned by Howard and his brother, the band gives Cave a breather. Though Cave would later express discomfort at singing any lyrics not his own, he doesn’t sound detached from the abstractly murderous apologia of “Several Sins.” He sounds like he’s sad, and exhausted by everything.
Or maybe not. The Birthday Party were of the post-punk school that eschewed straight confessionalism in their lyrics. Cave’s strength has always been the ability to convey lyrics as abstract as “Dim Locator,” as elliptical as “She’s Hit,” and as straight-ahead murder fantastical as “6" Gold Blade” as though he were telling the truest stories ever told from the pulpit, a Broadway stage, or the gallows. The stories may be too grotesque to take at face value. Threaded as they are to the rest of the band’s dramatic instincts, the stories also can’t be reduced to just abstract, elliptical, murder-fantastical ways of saying, “heroin, amirite?”
Even if punk made a big to-do about no gods, no masters, no heroes; even if the UK press briefly turned on the Birthday Party for not being as tasteful as the Jam’s Paul Weller; even if, after two decades, the American press wouldn’t truly embrace Nick Cave till enough terrible things happened to him that he dropped the hoodoo jive of “archetypes” and “metaphors” and gave critics the transcriptions of trauma which is the only art that many American critics understand; even with all that, the Birthday Party have become a myth. Not hugely, mind you, like Jesus or the Velvet Underground. But big enough that it’s hard to think of them without a pack of vampires showing up at one’s mental doorstep, clutching a hypodermic needle in one hand and the Collected Stories of William Faulkner in the other, scratching at the screen, begging for an invitation to enter.
This mythology was achieved partially because of goth-rock loving its own past as much as any subculture. It was achieved partially from the gravitational pull of Cave’s career. And it was achieved partially from the band’s own vision; the dragging of white blues into different territories of urban muck, the violent spectacle of their live shows, the music’s sheer insistence that it’s within the traditions of murder balladry, post-Stooges glam, and neo-deconstructed rockabilly. In a 1982 NME interview, Andrew Eldritch, the singer of Sisters of Mercy, said, “There was one great heavy metal group and that was the Stooges, and there’s only two bands around that can touch them and they’re Motörhead and the Birthday Party.”
The Birthday Party would, having kicked out Calvert, put out two more EPs as a four-piece. Both would be works of astounding beauty and both would be torn apart by the British press. By 1984, Cave would be, in a cosmic nod to early hyperbole, well on his way to becoming his own naughty version of Stevie Nicks, then Leonard Cohen, then Nick Cave again, and eventually he would take on his current role as Man with Some Important Things to Say. Mick Harvey would co-form the Bad Seeds and make a bunch of frankly delicious Serge Gainsbourg tribute records. Anita Lane would make a couple lovely solo albums but be misogynistically discounted as a muse. Pew would die of an epileptic seizure in 1986, Calvert would play the blues, and Rowland S. Howard would make a rich and devastating body of work with Lydia Lunch, These Immortal Souls, and finally solo, that few would pay attention to until after his death.
As of this writing, everyone involved’s hair is, in either this world or the next, still terrific.


A double LP and CD box set collect the irascible English rockers’ studio recordings, B-sides, and live cuts. Though new material is limited, the band’s commitment to legacy is perfectly in character.

Art Brut: A Record Collection, Reduced to a Mixtape / And Yes, This Is My Singing Voice!

In the Rebel Alliance to resurrect Real Rock’n’Roll, Art Brut frontman Eddie Argos viewed himself as Luke Skywalker. How else are we meant to interpret one particular live version of the band’s 2007 single “Pump Up the Volume,” which opens with John Williams’ Star Wars title theme before the horns crash into the song’s swaggering first notes?
When Art Brut first met in 2002, at a party hosted by short-lived London indie darlings Ciccone, NME’s number-one ranked album was Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head. The early aughts post-punk revival was bursting at the seams (Interpol’s Turn on the Bright Lights came out the same year), but the pop charts could barely manage a distortion pedal. British music media was similarly fractured—BBC’s Top of the Pops was sprinting towards its swan song, while NME and Kerrang! struggled to adapt to the velocity of new online-only publications. Armed with Argos’, well, brute sprechgesang and wielding their guitars like battle axes, Art Brut painted themselves as the saviors of a dying scene. On two new compilations titled after lyrics, the 2xLP A Record Collection, Reduced to a Mixtape and the 5xCD box set And Yes, This Is My Singing Voice!, Art Brut assemble their studio recordings, B-sides, and a handful of electrifying live cuts that argue that the scene, in turn, saved them.
In the nearly 20 years since the band’s debut, 2005’s Bang Bang Rock & Roll, it seems painfully clear that Argos has failed to write “the song that makes Israel and Palestine get along,” or to pen the next “Happy Birthday,” as he declared on “Formed a Band.” But Art Brut’s influence on contemporary indie rock has only grown since their last album, 2018’s Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out!. The echo of Argos’ cocksure yet self-aware monotone can be heard in Joe Casey’s tortured soliloquies for Protomartyr, the deadpan nonsequiturs of Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw, or the fever-pitch rants of Idles’ Joe Talbot. And while the band’s lyrical themes—falling in love with girls, starting a band to make out with girls, loving music more than making out—appear provincial compared to their politically minded disciples, Argos’ contemptuous streak has resurfaced in a recent crop of British bands like Yard Act and Squid. These newer groups might couch their music in the alienation of late capitalism, but fundamentally, they’re asking the same question that Argos barked back in 2005: “Why don’t our parents worry about us?”
This isn’t the first time Art Brut have revisited their past. In 2013, they released a “best of” collection, Top of the Pops, named after both the band’s 2004 song and the show on which they’d never have the chance to perform. For the casual Art Brut fan, there isn’t much added value on these new releases. The first few songs on both the LP and CD sets mirror the Top of the Pops tracklist almost exactly, opening with “Formed a Band,” “My Little Brother,” and “Emily Kane.” Instead, this collection is both an introduction for potential new fans who were still in primary school during the band’s peak, and on the other end, an overdue celebration for Art Brut obsessives, who will doubtlessly appreciate the frenetic live recordings included here. At the time of its release, Argos used Top of the Pops to prematurely anoint Art Brut a “CLASSIC ROCK BAND” (they had been on the front cover of German Rolling Stone, after all), and projected that their “Next phase is HERITAGE ROCK BAND. See you in 10 years for a Second Volume.” It took a little longer, but Art Brut have returned to cement their status: being a Heritage Rock Band usually requires leaving some sort of lasting physical legacy.
For Argos’ teeth-gnashing musical protagonist, discovering rock’n’roll was the first step in a futile quest—electric guitars evoked a world of declining relevance and unfulfilled potential. But it was hard to tell how much of the band was an act. Was their bassist’s name really Freddy Feedback? What about first guitarist Chris Chinchilla? How serious was Argos when he sang “popular culture no longer applies to me,” and how much was a deflection from his own insecurities as a songwriter? These box sets suggest that both can be true: Art Brut sound at the peak of their powers performing live, darting frantically across the fretboard and drumkit at the French festival Eurockéennes in 2006. At that show’s rendition of “Bad Weekend,” Argos justified his anger as he begged his audience to write books and make films: “You can’t complain about it unless you’re doing something about it!” Without the band behind him, he seemed to say, he’d be just another guy whining about art after one too many lagers.
The outlandish confidence of Art Brut’s debut, which seemed to demand critical success by sheer force of will, wasn’t born in a vacuum. On these box sets, we hear Argos’ journey to overcompensatory arrogance: On an early version of “Formed a Band,” one of several “Brutleg” demo tapes, he sounds almost bashful as he dryly explains, “And yes, this is my singing voice—it’s not irony, it’s not rock and roll.” All the pieces are there on the first take of “Modern Art”—guitars that build like a structure fire, wild screams that echo behind Argos as he screams, “Modern art makes me want to rock OUT!”—but he hadn’t quite mastered the authoritarian sneer he wields on the final version. The demos, though skippable for the average post-punk fan, are both humbling and humanizing, a crack in the assertive facade the band projected onto its albums and live shows.
When Argos sang “We make pop music,” on a song by the same name, he wasn’t describing the sound of the mainstream charts. He meant pop as in “popular,” and he wanted Art Brut to be the biggest band on Earth. These proclamations feel misaligned to the current pop landscape, where cult-like fanbases persist in the absence of actual hits (and even a smash doesn’t guarantee loyal customers). Art Brut came to life in an ecosystem that felt, comparatively, diverse: more blogs, more labels, more DIY venues—more access to music than ever before. It only makes Art Brut’s trajectory feel more tragic, their later albums supplanting delusions of grandeur with petty scene squabbles (“He dresses like he came free with the NME,” he sneered on 2011’s “Bad Comedian”) hidden behind a veil of sarcasm. These reissues recall a recent past that felt more meritocratic, where one glowing blog post or energetic late-night TV performance could break a band. In our tangled post-streaming landscape, Art Brut’s dogged belief in their own greatness seems like a balm against entrenched pop hierarchies. “No more songs about sex and drugs and rock and roll, it’s boring,” Argos sang on the debut album’s title track. If only he’d known how much worse it could get.


The LA quartet’s second album is more musically focused and emotionally unsettled, its once shaggy sound sculpted into post-punk precision.

Post Earth

Judging by the response on Twitter, the New England Patriots–L.A. Rams game earlier this month deserves to go down as the Worst Super Bowl Ever. But in between all the shit-posting about Tom Brady and Adam Levine’s tattoos, we were treated to perhaps the greatest post-game soundbite in NFL history. When asked about his team’s 13–3 loss to the Patriots, Rams offensive tackle Andrew Whitworth indulged in some unexpected locker-room existentialism: “I don’t give a crap if you have a Hall of Fame bust, if you’ve been a Pro Bowler, or win 20 Super Bowls. At the end of the day, you’re all gonna die.”
There’s something heartening in knowing that the despair we’re all feeling has trickled up to even handsomely paid athletes playing in the most popular sporting event in America. And while FEELS are the product of a very different LA, located far beyond the glare of stadium lights and militaristic spectacle of the NFL, they share a certain fatalist worldview with their hometown’s resident gridiron philosopher. On their second album, Post Earth, the band is consumed by the idea that our days here are numbered, and that the same assholes doing the lion’s share of destroying the planet are the only ones who’ll be able to afford to a rocket-ship escape from it. To FEELS, expressing deep concern for the state of the world means not giving a fuck about decorum and civility.
On their 2016 self-titled debut, FEELS didn’t sound like a band overly fixated with the fate of civilization, with producer Ty Segall wrapping their tunefully tattered garage-psych in cotton-candy fuzz and wiggy reverb. But over the past three years, it sometimes seems as if we’ve all aged about three decades, and the FEELS we hear on Post Earth sound more musically focused and emotionally unsettled, with producer Tim Green (ex-Nation of Ulysses) helping sculpt the playfully shaggy sound of their debut into taut post-punk precision. Segall’s mischievous spirit lingers in the opening dirty boogie of “Car” (right down to Laena Geronimo’s leering, Emotional Mugger-esque invitations to “come with me to candyland”), but it kicks open the garage doors to eulogize “the land of the free/One nation under fraud.”
The record is occasionally haunted by the specter of another of Green’s past production clients, Sleater-Kinney, whose prickly propulsion, do-or-die intensity, and chant-and-response interplay course through the album’s rabble-rousing mission statement “Find a Way.” But the most important lesson FEELS have heeded from their Olympia forbears is that polemical discourse and rock’n’roll fun are not mutually exclusive—and, if anything, they should encourage one another. “Sour” unleashes an acidic attack on VIP rooms and the self-absorbed posers who inhabit them, but it invites you to shimmy to an extended B-52’s-style rave-up before crashing the party. The title track eats the rich with even more animalistic bloodlust, its fusion of grunge sludge and beaming harmonies harking back to that brief moment when Veruca Salt teamed up with Steve Albini. And while “Awful Need” and “W.F.L.” (not a Happy Mondays cover) examine our omnipresent insecurities, Geronimo and fellow singer/guitarist Shannon Lay deliver their diagnoses with sun-smeared psychedelic melodies that suggest Magical Mystery Tour by way of Kill Rock Stars.
But if Post Earth is built from familiar reference points, it reassembles them in novel ways. The album’s brisk, 35-minute momentum is further accelerated by shapeshifting songs rigged with trap doors that lead to unlikely destinations, like the hardcore blitzkrieg that upends the slowcore lurch of “Tollbooth,” or the ominous, Sonic Youth-like breakdown that brings the simmering tension of “Find a Way” to a boil. Even an 82-second circle-pit stomper like “Deconstructed” is emblematic of Post Earth’s more considered approach: Lay and Geronimo’s overlapping rapid-fire rants twist like the strands of a double helix before their voices come together to announce their temporary cure for unrelenting frustration and anxiety: “Just give me a cigarette/Just give me a fucking cigarette!” Post Earth may not allay your fears of our impending apocalypse, but at least the advice is sound: Smoke ’em if you got ’em.


Parquet Courts' third album is a bracing snapshot of a band on a roll. Their music is not explicitly political, but Parquet Courts are definitely a thinking band, and a critical one.

Human Performance

When Parquet Courts debuted in 2011 with the supremely bratty American Specialties cassette—its Dada-esque cover art a repurposed Chinese takeout menu—Andrew Savage, who is also a visual artist, presented the facts unsentimentally. "Facebook pages/ Boring boring!/ Rock'n'roll has got me snoring," he gasped over a skeleton of atonal guitar-noise, ultimately landing upon the most sacred of conclusions: "Music! Matters! More than ever! Free your brain and conform never!" Lucky for us, Parquet Courts have spent the past five years heeding their own call.
With Human Performance, their third proper album and first for London's legendary Rough Trade Records, Parquet Courts offer a fine testament to rock's continued power and relevance. They might mine the past for feedback and eccentricities, but their astute lyrics tackle the present head-on—co-songwriters Savage and Austin Brown write as if their songs might have real-world consequences. Parquet Courts emerged at a good time, when we yearn for something slightly more intellectual and aware and less about vibe—a longing that has spread into all areas of music culture. While not explicitly political, Parquet Courts are definitely a thinking band, and a critical one, which is equally important when the world is falling apart. Perhaps some of this sharpness comes from their roots in the DIY punk and hardcore underground with their previous bands, including Wiccans and the criminally overlooked Teenage Cool Kids.
At its best, Human Performance is Parquet Courts in a mellower, heart-stopping Velvet Underground mode, but it is also at turns upbeat and funny, sensitive and odd. Compositionally, these are the most dynamic Parquet Courts songs yet. You could no longer brush these guys off as mere Modern Lovers rip-offs, as you might have around 2012's clangoring, whip-smart Light Up Gold. Human Performance presents a more earnest, emotional side of the band. The record's bare, stunning closer "It's Gonna Happen," penned by bassist Sean Yeaton and sung by Savage, recalls the heart-wrenching minimalism of Lou Reed's starry 2000 ballad "Turning Time Around." And it's kind of touching to hear Brown—author of such genius dispatches as "Socrates died in the fucking gutter!"—sing a simple, open love song like the wistful road ballad "Steady On My Mind."
As ever, the fever-pitch of New York life is alive and fast-walking within these songs—zig-zagging the concrete to blaze past all the downward-gazing multitaskers too busy texting to get on where they're going. Human Performance captures the humor and horror of New York in 2016, alive with post-Cagean street noise, with a faster-louder Ramonic ideal, with the erratic rhythm of train delays, a bus that never shows up, or the "skull-shaking cadence of the J train rolls." Something about Parquet Courts' intense-yet-witty existential energy reminds me of the legendary NYC tour-guide-cum-philosopher Speed Levitch (immortalized in '90s doc The Cruise), who has long approached New York as if the city itself were an epic poem.
The sour rattle of Human Performance's absurd and charmingly cartoonish opener "Dust" juxtaposes so many elements—jaunty piano riffs, discordant car honks, sweet organs—that you could imagine it soundtracking the opening sequence to a demented musical. "Dust is everywhere/ Sweep," Brown taunts on loop, and it is not a stretch to hear the decrepitude as a metaphor for the finely-ground wreckage of Western civilization that we have all inherited. There is dread implied, but "Dust" mostly makes you laugh. Parquet Courts' take on New York life grows legitimately and rightfully severe on "Two Dead Cops," a sobering and compact punk song that is literally about two cops who were murdered in Savage's Bed-Stuy neighborhood.
There are songs on Human Performance that defy logic; they should not work and yet somehow, they do. On the trudging, visceral centerpiece "Captive of the Sun," the Beaumont, Tx.-bred Brown's rhythmic delivery is basically rapping. (He has written at length about his intense personal connection to the "outsider art" that is Houston rap.) Earlier, Sean Yeaton voices some city-fueled discontent with the stream-of-conscious curiosity "I Was Just Here." It takes on a classic New York dilemma—a jarring elegy for a Chinese restaurant that has recently closed much to his surprise and chagrin. "You look so nice/ Chinese fried rice/ Wouldn't you know/ That place just closed," the band laments with an alien Devo affect, in turn evoking the beloved underground punk-band-of-the-moment, Indiana's Coneheads.
The latent weirdness of "I Was Just Here" reminds me of the time Savage wearily shouted-out the true freaks of Zappa's backing band, the Mothers of Invention, in a cheeky Teenage Cool Kids song called "Beg to Differ." In fact, there are several moments on Human Performance that recall Teenage Cool Kids' 2011 cult hit Denton After Sunset (in which Savage romanticized Texas in a way to rival John Darnielle). In some of Human Performance's best songs—like "Berlin Got Blurry," with its winding Spaghetti Western riff and wandering spirit—there's a bright directness he hasn't shown since back then. Denton After Sunset was a love letter of sorts to the place Savage came from; it showed his adept understanding of the evocative power of geography, something he's carried into his New York songbook.
Alongside the likes of Courtney Barnett and Sadie Dupuis, Savage remains one of the best rock lyricists of his generation. In the past, he has written philosophical punk songs about cats, candy, and existence; about Stalinist art and opera. Here, he cuts inward, clawing further into his own soul. It's in the arresting one-two punch of "Human Performance" and "Outside" that Savage's writing shines most elegantly. These are break-up songs, for sure, but sometimes it's hard to tell if Savage is breaking up with a lover or with himself. At the core of the soulful "Human Performance" is a difficult, messy question: Am I good person, or am I fooling everyone, including myself? Savage's tender ruminations on love and loneliness are deeply self-critical: "I told you I loved you/ Did I even deserve it? When you returned it," he croons, sounding like Dylan circa Nashville Skyline. The layered feel of the track's chorus reminds me of the "multi-latch gating" technique that Tony Visconti used to produce "Heroes"—each time Savage screams, the echoes sound further away, more unhinged and desperate, tempered by lovely organ lines and jazzy drum patterns.
The sub-two-minute "Outside" follows, and it is the sunniest, snappiest Parquet Courts tune ever—a song about admission, about accepting your flaws and finding peace. For such a short song it is impossibly beautiful. "Dear everything I've harmed/ My fault lies on my tongue/ And I take it holy as a last rite," Savage sings, his voice shining with palpable abandon and relief, a kind you only get from telling the truth. "Outside" is ultimately about turning honesty and imperfection into virtues, and that purity is doubled by its indelible melody. Little details, like a lopsided beat and an endearing note sung flat, only serve to deepen it.
Human Performance is a bracing snapshot of a band on a roll. As punk turns 40 on both sides of the Atlantic this year, it's fitting that this record is out on Rough Trade—that era's arty, leftist wing of outsiders-among-outsiders. You'd be hard pressed to find a contemporary rock band honoring the classic Rough Trade legacy as well as Parquet Courts, in both sound and spirit, while doing something audacious and new. In a sense, they even revive Rough Trade's O.G. connection to eccentric Texas psych-rock, from back when conceptual artist Mayo Thompson of the Red Krayola was the label's heady spokesperson, producing crucial records by the Raincoats and the Fall, and collaborating with members of Pere Ubu and Swell Maps. Parquet Courts deserve to be discussed within this lineage. Intelligence is addictive, and there is accordingly a quiet mania to Parquet Courts fandom that matches that of their forebears. On Human Performance, Parquet Courts send a generation-skewing message that avails not, time nor place: it is cool to really think.


The Broken Social Scene frontman confronts loss, survival, and addiction on a set of brooding dispatches from middle age.

Aging

Every album anniversary tour is also about the march towards death. Ben Gibbard is no longer the baby-faced up-and-comer who made Transatlanticism and Liz Phair is no longer the romantically frustrated 25-year-old who made Exile in Guyville, but they’re still bringing these milestone albums on tour, inviting us to reflect on how they’ve changed and we’ve changed and everything’s decayed in the years since we first heard them. We’re all getting closer to the grave, but at least “Fuck and Run” still bangs.
Kevin Drew, of Broken Social Scene fame, has spent the past year negotiating the same nostalgic mindfuck, performing 2002’s You Forgot It in People in full to audiences for whom “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” and “Lover’s Spit” were as formative as Sgt. Pepper’s. If that record’s 20th trip around the sun made you feel old, how do you think Drew feels? Now, after revisiting the creative output of his twenties, he returns to the unsettled present on a short, grayscale solo record that’s literally titled Aging.
If Drew’s 2007 debut, Spirit If…, was a solo album in name only—billed as “Broken Social Scene Presents,” with swelling arrangements featuring many of Drew’s bandmates—Aging is the real thing. Shorn of the communal spirit that courses through BSS’s records, these are brooding, synth-heavy dispatches from middle age. “My skin is cold/I’m not aging right,” the 47-year-old croons on “Awful Lightning,” a six-minute centerpiece that wrings slow-burning drama from Hauschka-like piano arpeggios.
Drew has long excelled at writing emotionally resonant songs even when you don’t have a clue what he’s singing about. (SongMeanings.com commenters will crack “Shampoo Suicide” as soon as the cops find Jimmy Hoffa’s body.) But Aging was written as Drew grappled with the loss of friends and mentors, and death has a way of nudging songwriters towards the blunt and direct. At times, it’s disarming to hear him singing to us so plainly about his troubles.
On the burbling, melancholy “Elevators,” his deepening baritone sounds uncannily like Matt Berninger as he puts a cosmic spin on grief: “Elevator please change your name/Because they’re coming for me tonight/And my friend died.” “Party Oven” summons the nocturnal musings of a guy wondering if a lifetime of debauchery was all worth it. The stirring song captures a lot of feeling in few words; when Drew sings, “We partied into your grave/Was that okay?” you can detect grief and guilt mingling together.
These are evocative late-night brooders, but the record’s sense of loss and vulnerability is too often neutralized by its bland MIDI-piano sheen. Drew flirts with synth pop on “All Your Fails” and “Fixing the Again,” but the arrangements are simultaneously too plain and too fussy: groaning synth pads and film-score piano that mush together without any real tension or drama. If those tracks are nondescript, “Don't Be Afraid of the Dark” is dismaying, a cloying attempt at Auto-Tune balladry that functions as the album’s nadir. The dour production forms an unflattering contrast with the eccentric instrumentation and dynamic bursts of those early BSS classics Drew has been revisiting on tour.
For an album as self-consciously downbeat and reflective as this one, Aging ends on an optimistic note. On “You’re Gonna Get Better,” Drew emerges from the storm and seems to be offering counsel to a friend mired in addiction or depression: “No matter how hard you fell there/I know you can get back soon,” he sings over downcast synths. It’s a song that makes explicit the purpose people find in getting older and living through rough times. You can look someone in the eye and say: I survived, and you can too.