If you haven't had the chance to see the German legends on their recent tours, this 2xCD live album hints at what you missed.

Minimum-Maximum

When Lester Bangs interviewed Kraftwerk for Creem in 1975, Ralf Hütter explained how the band's Menschmaschine concept influenced its concert approach: "We use tapes, pre-recorded, and we play tapes also in our performance. When we recorded on TV we were not allowed to play a tape as part of the performance because the musicians' union felt that they would be put out of work. But I think just the opposite: With better machines, you'll be able to do better work, and you will be able to spend your time and energies on a higher level."
Thirty years later Kraftwerk certainly have better machines, and judging from the fantastic show they put in last week in Washington D.C., they've been spending their time and energy on everything but playing their instruments. The latter-day Kraftwerk live experience is total theater, an intense multimedia spectacle in which the nuts and bolts of who is doing exactly what is not only impossible to determine but completely irrelevant. So it is in a sense odd that Kraftwerk has chosen this time to release their first officially sanctioned live album. Minimum-Maximum is a collection of performances recorded in the last couple years, sequenced to closely reflect the set Kraftwerk are currently touring. Even if Minimum-Maximum is essentially a mixed-down document of whatever pre-recorded sounds the band loaded into the production's computers, it's still an excellent record for three reasons:
1. The Sound
I have Kraftwerk live bootlegs from 1971, 1975, 1981, and 1998, and the sound varies from horrid to passable. Minimum-Maximum, however, is rich, balanced, and full, reflecting the careful pre-show assembly while allowing enough room reverb and crowd noise to let you know it's a live recording. Far be it for Kraftwerk to let substandard sonics soil anything born in the Kling-Klang studio.
2. The Arrangements
While Kraftwerk do less physically live than they once did, their arrangements are constantly being tweaked, so Minimum-Maximum never feels like a playback of familiar records. One need only follow the evolution of "Autobahn" from a trance-inducing jam in the mid-70s that could last up to 40 minutes to the lean, effective version here that seems pop song-length at just under nine minutes. The vocal breakdown in "Autobahn" featuring layers of robots harmonizing on the song's theme (first introduced on The Mix) finds its way into this version, cementing the song's connection with the Beach Boys.
Other shifts in focus are more subtle but still significant. The vocodered vocals on the opening "The Man Machine" are much more prominent, bursting forth from the speakers in a way that seems to command a fully robotic future, even as the songs backing music seems warmer and less harsh than the album version. The beats for "Trans-Europe Express" and the accompanying "Metal on Metal" are thicker and more syncopated, putting the focus of Kraftwerk's railroad homage squarely on the rhythm. The technofied songs from Tour de France Soundtracks have not surprisingly changed the least and, truthfully, "Vitamin" and "Elektro Kardiogramm" can't quite match the classics that surround them. Which leads us to the final reason Minimum-Maximum is worth your time:
3. The Songs
More than anything, Minimum-Maximum gets over because a well-chosen selection from the Kraftwerk catalog is basically unstoppable. The four-song Computer World run on the second disc is particularly powerful, arguing for a steady upward trajectory in Kraftwerk's output through 1981 and also showcasing their deadpan humor. "It's more fun to compute" is the ultimate Kraftwerk line, a t-shirt slogan that pokes fun at the 70s while articulating a pop-culture prescience. Indeed, the mood throughout the live show is upbeat and celebratory-- "Having a Party With Ralf and Florian," if you will. The opening of "Radioactivity" is the only truly heavy moment, with a robotic voice intoning disturbing statistics about plutonium, but even here dance beats kick in roughly halfway through.
Since Autobahn, Kraftwerk have created music in which melody and rhythm become one, and roughly two-thirds of the tracks here are perfect examples of this precise, economical aesthetic. As a career overview Minimum-Maximum far surpasses The Mix. This record's importance in the Kraftwerk story is up for debate, but there's no question it's a hell of a lot of fun.


With country as her foundation, the versatile singer and songwriter pivots toward classic rock. She sounds less like the honky-tonk rebel and more like the Nashville professional.

Margo Price: That’s How Rumors Get Started

That’s How Rumors Get Started

Margo Price wasn’t always a country singer. Long before she nodded to Loretta Lynn with the title of her 2016 solo debut, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, she gigged around Nashville in a variety of bands, playing British Invasion rock with Secret Handshake and soul and classic rock with Buffalo Clover. She proved as adaptable as she was ambitious, fitting her voice to multiple genres and developing an impressive stylistic range that was bound to be underappreciated in Nashville. After a series of tragedies and misfortunes—the loss of a child, jail time for drunk driving, professional inertia—she finally leaned into country music, assembling a barnstorming backing band called the Price Tags to set her woes to a honky-tonk soundtrack.
That’s How Rumors Get Started represents a pivot away from twang toward a more classic rock sound—something closer to Buffalo Clover than her previous two albums. She named Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac as touchstones, perhaps even hat-tipping the latter with that album title, and recorded in Los Angeles, at the storied EastWest Studios, with a group of session players including Benmont Tench from the Heartbreakers and Matt Sweeney from Chavez and Zwan. Co-producing is her old friend Sturgill Simpson, who sat in with the Price Tags many years ago and has his own strained relationship with country music. What ought to be a remarkable lineup, however, sounds overly constrained on Rumors, which lacks the heroic self-determinism of Daughter and the eccentricity of All American Made.
This isn’t a case of “anything but country,” though. It’s more like “anything and country.” That remains the foundation of her songwriting, but she’s reaching out in new directions, tinkering with different sounds and settings with hit-or-miss results. The flatulent guitars on “Twinkle Twinkle” so strongly recall the bouncy blues-rock of the Black Keys that it just might constitute a casual dig at her old label Third Man and its co-founder Jack White. Much more compelling is “Heartless Mind,” which uses country as a springboard into New Wave. Price’s voice sounds surprisingly comfortable, invigorated even, alongside the drum machine, the bobbing organ, and the processed guitars, at times channeling Marilyn Martin without sounding especially retro. It’s the most animated track on the album, the riskiest but also among the most rewarding.
Primarily, though, Price is interested in gospel music and the drama it injects into her songs. The churchly melodies and jubilant harmonies of the Nashville Friends Gospel Choir lend momentum and road-dog romance to “Prisoner of the Highway,” about the sacrifices you make as a touring musician, but those same elements are a distraction on “What Happened to Our Love?” which erupts into melodrama about halfway through, like a jump scare in a bad horror flick. When Buffalo Clover recorded the slow-burning “Hey Child” for their 2013 album Test Your Love, Price sang it like she was stuck in Memphis rather than L.A., her voice bouncing off the mournful Stax horns. Since then, she has become a more nuanced singer, which is apparent in the quieter moments on this new version, but the slick sound of Rumors sacrifices spontaneity for a scripted climax.
In this West Coast setting, Price sounds less like the honky-tonk rebel and more like the Nashville professional. That can sharpen the ironies as well as the hooks of a song like “Letting Me Down,” with its prickly guitars and concrete details, but on the title track she sounds oddly resigned, even a little melancholy as she confronts someone spreading lies about her. “And here you are, still doin’ you,” she sings. “It never worked out, but it never stopped you.” Those are great lines, rich in their accusations, but there’s no sting in her voice, just a weary resignation. No artist has to bristle constantly, but Price’s outrage at industry double standards made her previous solo albums sound righteous, and her pain at life’s tragedies resonated even if you didn’t know her backstory. Rumors buffs away some of the rougher edges that made her so much more compelling than so many of Nashville’s aspiring singer-songwriters. Those albums made the fight sound worthwhile, but there’s too little fight in these songs.

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Buy: Rough Trade
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Drexciya / Transllusion: Neptune's Lair/The Opening of the Cerebral Gate

In a curious case of happenstance, right as Aphex Twin resurfaces for the first time in a decade with Syro, two of the most crucial pieces of the Drexciya puzzle also reappear on shop shelves. Out of print for some 15 and 13 years respectively, Drexciya’s first full-length album statement Neptune’s Lair and Transllusion’s debut The Opening of the Cerebral Gate have finally been re-pressed, the latter with bonus tracks never before available on vinyl. On the surface, there seems little to connect these early '90s contemporaries—that is, the British cult-of-personality producer and two of the most obscure electronic music makers to ever call Detroit home. But the two acts shared labels, and it’s almost impossible to imagine the idiosyncratic music of Richard D. James without the insular yet profound example of Drexciya.
Masked and anonymous up until the death of James Stinson in September of 2002 from heart complications that signaled the end of the group, the duo of Stinson and Gerald Donald left behind a staggering yet fragmented body of work. The group only released three full-lengths (with both Harnessed the Storm and Grava 4 being released in the months before Stinson’s death), Drexciya’s decade-long run of singles and EPs were singular in electronic music, connecting the likes of Detroit’s Underground Resistance to European imprints like Clone and Tresor.
They also presented a unified vision spanning across those singles and albums, a world of sound that soundtracked a dystopian future while paying tribute to forefathers like George Clinton, the Jonzun Crew, Cybotron, and of course Kraftwerk (see “Aquabahn”). While the excellent Clone series Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller painstakingly compiled and presented four volumes of Drexciyan music, they never quite put together the backstory of the group. Nevermind that they grew up landlocked in Detroit—Donald and Stinson created a warped water world peopled with Darthouven fish men, Stingray battalions, and Lardossan cruisers shaped like giant squids.
And how did such fish men wind up 20,000 leagues under the sea? Why, via pregnant African women thrown overboard during the Middle Passage of course, as brutal a creation story as any in modern music. Couched in such real-world horror is a layer of science fiction queasiness, like touching fish flesh. As an early comp's liner notes described: “Are Drexciyans water-breathing aquatically mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed? Recent experiments have shown a premature human infant saved from certain death by breathing liquid oxygen through its underdeveloped lungs.”
Drexciya’s bleak outlook was matched by a brutal strain of electro, acid, and techno across those initial 12”s. But what makes Neptune’s Lair and Stinson’s own The Opening of the Cerebral Gate great portals into that waterworld is that Neptune's 21 tracks temper those bludgeoning machinistic beats with other sounds: evocative acid tracks that take you deep inside your own mind, spasmodic electro sprints, strange interludes, and the sort of off-kilter melodic bits that Aphex Twin would soon make his own.
Monk chants and weird voices uttering “Drexciya” give way to the bubbly “Species of the Pod” that leads into the exquisite waterlogged funk of “Habitat 'O' Negative”, “Bottom Feeders”, and “Surface Terrestrial Colonization”. In contrast to the harder tracks that defined their '90s output, the keys and 303s are nudged down from “incapacitate” to “intoxicate.” Even beatless sketches like “Draining of the Tanks”, “Quantum Hydrodynamics”, and closer “C to the Power of X + C to the Power of X = MM = Unknown” offer kaleidoscopic synth washes, nuanced and textured like fragments of shells and sea glass made smooth in the tide.
Even Stinson’s The Opening of the Cerebral Gate offers up a slightly more moderate variation on the Drexciyan template. “Transmission of Life” is built on a furious throb and submarine alarms and the unreal squalls of “Cerebral Cortex Malfunction” sound exactly like its title suggests, but elsewhere Stinson tempers such overdriven tendencies. There’s the flickering keyboards that glide across the electro pulse of “Walking With Clouds”, being at once heavyweight and effervescent. Other standouts like “Do You Want to Get Down?” and “Unordinary Realities” hint at the more downtempo direction he would explore as the Other People Place on the long out-of-print 2001 classic Lifestyles of the Laptop Cafe.
What strikes me about revisiting Stinson’s music a decade-plus after his passing—despite clear antecedents in electro and acid—is how singular his vision was. Struggling with health issues as he finalized Drexciya and other solo projects, the anger and bleak outlook of their earliest output gives way to acceptance and a sense of the sublime. What better way to convey the sense that life is but a dream than to coin an artist name like Transllusion, a play on both "translucent" and "illusion"? That such a sense of humanity can be conveyed via the programming of machines until they begin to sing speaks to Stinson’s genius. In much the same way that—after a decade of near silence—Syro reminds me that rather than the innovative aspect of Aphex Twin’s music, what makes it stand the test of time is its irreducible sense of individuality, it remains the same for Stinson and Donald, and the music they made as Drexciya will endure, even if everything else gets submerged in the rising oceans.


The Belgian electro-rock outfit Soulwax have aged gracefully. Over two decades on, they’ve finally found a coherent sound, layering robust synths, dusty live drums, and simple vocal melodies.

FROM DEEWEE

If every ’90s alternative act updated their sound as gracefully as the Belgian electro-rock outfit Soulwax, the alternative era might never have ended. Hold the band’s latest full-length up to, say, God Lives Underwater’s likeminded 1998 sophomore effort Life in the So-Called Space Age, and you might think the two titles came out no more than a couple of years apart. On closer inspection, though, FROM DEEWEE gives us a glimpse of what those ’90s acts would sound like today had they managed to loosen up just enough to absorb modern sensibilities.
When Soulwax debuted with Leave the Story Untold back in 1996, their music had some pluck but did little to distinguish itself from the guitar bands flooding the market at the time. Soulwax would go on to reinvent themselves as a Britpop, synthpop, techno, and dance-remix act. They declared their omnivorous tastes on 2005 reworking of Daft Punk’s “Teachers,” which name-dropped a litany of influences from the Cramps to Kyuss to Urban Dance Squad to ELO. By their 2016 soundtrack to the film Belgica, core members Stephen and David Dewaele were basically play-acting from a grab bag of styles. But even when their genre exercises were spot-on, Belgica prodded the question: who is this band?
This time, the Dewaele brothers and their cast of supporting musicians finally have a coherent sound. And while it isn’t exactly revolutionary, FROM DEEWEE reconciles the polarity between Soulwax’s rock and electronic sides. Drawing from a battery of three drummers (including none other than former Sepultura ballast Igor Cavalera), the Dewaele’s marry synths to dusty, boxed-in live drums. That contrast prevents the album from tipping too far into the artificial and also works as a counterweight to how the band self-consciously references the past.
From Deewee hearkens back to those halcyon days where funk, disco, krautrock, new wave, rap, and punk all flowed forth into the same pool. The main melody and wheezing steam-engine groove of “My Tired Eyes” both recall classic Depeche Mode, while “Conditions of a Shared Belief” wears the influence of Eddy Grant’s 1982 smash hit “Electric Avenue” on its sleeve. But even at their most electronically inclined, Soulwax remain a ’90s rock act at heart. Mining the disco era, the Dewaele brothers scuff things up, stopping just short of lo-fi. (The album was in fact recorded live with the band capturing songs all together in one take.)
That’s not to say the Dewaeles give production short shrift here. On the contrary: The production is skilled and meticulous. The synths are rich and robust, and the brothers layer multiple drumsets with a sense of finesse that evokes John McEntire’s classic work at the boards for Stereolab. But compared to the haphazard variety of Belgica, FROM DEEWEE comes across with a uniformity and stylishness that grounds its playful moments, such as the punk drumming that introduces and closes the otherwise gleaming synth number “Missing Wires.” As far-reaching as Belgica got, it lacked the simple majesty of the vocal melodies the Dewaele’s have a field day with this time around.
Soulwax betray their ’90s roots the most with their singing. On “Masterplanned,” the main vocal walks the line between dour monotone and sublime earworm. On the other hand, towards the end of “Missing Wires,” a strobing organ figure touches on the upbeat dance style that countless modern indie bands have built careers on. More nimble than they’ve ever been, the Dewaele brothers manage to stack three different eras of music on top of one another without anchoring their songs to any of them. Soulwax have always been a band in transit from one style to the next. On FROM DEEWEE, they arrive at the settled creative space they’ve hinted at but never quite reached in the past. As “Masterplanned” goes, “Thought the journey was the point of the race/But it seems the destination has taken its place.”


After flirting with indie dance, then Calvin Harris and Starsmith-produced EDM, singer Ellie Goulding takes a strong turn toward club-ready synth-pop.

Delirium

Making a full-blown pop record like Delirium isn't a stretch for Ellie Goulding—she's seen booming, bright-eyed singles like "Lights" and "Anything Could Happen" become Top 20 hits, after all. Even when she was making low-key electro-pop, Goulding’s music has always played heavily with a high drama beyond reality. She’s good at selling stories, constructing big "us against the world" tracks for fans who want songs that play like fairy tales and battle cries like some dancefloor-ready Natasha Khan.
But after flirting with indie dance, then Calvin Harris and Starsmith-produced EDM, Goulding is adding some Swedes to her arsenal for Delirium: Max Martin, Carl Falk, and Peter Svensson, to be specific. And Goulding, who went from being famous only in the UK to performing at the White House, very much deserves at this point in her career to have a third record fit with all the big pop trimmings.
While Halcyon was a dark collection that flitted between club-ready synth-pop and soulful, orchestral ballads, Delirium dives head first into the former with confidence. At times, the record exists in the same '80s-pop wannabe universe as Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION or Taylor Swift’s 1989, with gushing vocals and Moroder-kissed synths on tracks like "Codes" and her Fifty Shades of Grey song "Love Me Like You Do". Elsewhere, she inches back to her dance music roots on the sultry house-leaning "Don’t Need Nobody" and the marriage of a scratchy acoustic loop with techno on "Devotion".
But while the best tracks here are the ones that transcend and build on pop trends, a few others merely copy them. "Keep on Dancin’" is a more minimalist sibling to Adam Lambert’s Martin-produced hit "Ghost Town" and while "Something in the Way You Move" might be a mighty fine song in a vacuum, Selena Gomez has already done it with "Me & the Rhythm". The bubbly, "I’m sticking to you like glue" doo-wop of "Around U" feels particularly out of place among Delirium’s darker, deeper tones, playing like a better fit for Meghan Trainor than Goulding. Still, even when the songs here evoke other hits, they’re still bangers in their own right.
And Goulding’s signature vibrato and energy make even the more trend-chasing songs on the album fully hers. Her voice is fullest in the jangly ballad "Lost and Found", where she keeps her straightforward vocals at the forefront. "We got other things we can do with our," she sings flirtatiously in the verses of "Codes", stopping for a beat, before drawing out "tiiime" into a high-pitched lilt, but she moves into a punchy, shouting sing-song for the chorus.
Aside from a little well-done sass ("You were talking deep, like it was mad love to you/ You wanted my heart but I just liked your tattoos") on the album’s single "On My Mind", there’s an adult sophistication to Delirium. Nobody’s shaking off haters, bemoaning that same old love, or asking that you don’t tell your mother that you, uh, made out with someone? Granted, Delirium is fun, but the mood is upfront, Goulding’s romantic propositions more realistic demands than adolescent, yearning questions. A track like "Codes" might be dressed up in sexy language but the sentiment is clear: can we please put a label on this? "When love’s not playing out like the movies/ It doesn’t mean it’s falling apart/ Don’t panic," she assures on the stand-out "Don’t Panic", whose musical-box quality makes it sound like a polished Lights-era throwback. Delirium manages to be a cool, dramatic pop album that rarely hyperbolizes what love is all about. And might I remind you that this is the person who wrote "Burn".
Delirium grounds Ellie Goulding’s penchant for spectacle in tightly-written pop songs. Her evocative storytelling and ability to craft great dance music is all here, but repackaged as something more emotionally tangible, ditching feel-good EDM lyrical logic for realness. And while these songs can sometimes evoke other major players in her genre, she makes Max Martin’s signatures feel personal, making a mature pop record that feels like a natural progression.


On his first album since joining Real Estate, the hesitant singer and lavish sound artist at last puts those elements on equal footing with his songwriting.

Rat’s Spit

At least historically, it wasn’t surprising when Julian Lynch became Real Estate’s new guitarist in 2016: He and the band’s founders were childhood pals from New Jersey. Though Lynch had relocated to Wisconsin to study ethnomusicology, they’d remained close, releasing records on the label Underwater Peoples and sharing a loose scene. But after firing guitarist Matt Mondanile due to allegations of sexual assault, Real Estate needed a replacement, and Lynch was not only free but also familiar as both friend and guitarist. Musically, however, it made for a strange fit. On his own records, Lynch always seemed amorphous and slippery. His debut, Orange You Glad, turned something like chillwave into a collage, while Mare mixed warped soundscapes with brief bursts of lush instrumentation. It was a mesmerizing experiment at the intersection of acoustics and electronics, but country miles from Real Estate’s backlit guitar reveries.
Lynch has returned at last to records of his own with his first album in six years, Rat’s Spit. Much like the pop of Brian Eno, Lynch delicately blends buzzing electric guitar with a newfound lucidity, his looped acoustics and muffled drums underscoring his soft voice. “Catapulting,” for instance, is a warm and measured start, with Lynch mirroring the melody with careening guitar solos flown in by Here Come the Warm Jets. “Hexagonal Field” has the pulsing percussive undercurrent of Eno’s “St. Elmo’s Fire.” The songs are wound tightly but never suffocating, the compositions busy but never finicky. They’re more adherent to familiar song structures than his previous records, too, as Lynch uses melody to map the movement of these pieces.
In the past, Lynch would go to great lengths to shroud himself in effects or bury himself beneath instruments. On 2013’s “Yawning,” he was almost indistinguishable from the accordion-driven pulse, betraying a startlingly self-conscious approach. Lynch’s music has always been foregrounded in a love of sound, sometimes at the expense of the songs they tried to shape; he would float through tunes rather than push them forward. At times on Rat’s Spit, Lynch is still reticent, but his voice—and his understanding of how to use it as an accent and tool—has evolved. During the muddled noise-pop jam “Peanut Butter,” his singing matches the instrumental timbre and buzzes with the same electricity as the pounding pace.
Many of these songs begin or end in media res, but Lynch fills in the missing pieces with colorful flourishes, like the hummed melody of “Peanut Butter” or the way it occasionally slows, as if a metronome has faltered. On “Strawberry Cookies,” the isolated drops of a rainstick make for a quixotic rhythmic trick, highlighting Lynch’s contemplative tune. He drenches his voice in effects until he becomes an unironic counterpart to Enya. The best and boldest track on the album, it is spiritual in its exploration of the unknown but never mawkish.
For Lynch, Rat’s Spit is an updated statement of intent and confidence, a declaration from an artist who often opted for a whisper. Lynch can be heard loud and (sometimes) clear here, floating among ideas that he finally allows to breathe. Despite the traces of anxiety written into the lines he sings, it’s a welcome respite when so much else has turned to smog.


With the help of collaborators, the 76-year-old songwriter takes what would be another great, narrative album set to the familiar rhythms of a country waltz and brings it to new places.

Terry Allen & the Panhandle Mystery Band: Just Like Moby Dick

Just Like Moby Dick

Over 50 years, the multidisciplinary artist and songwriter Terry Allen has received prominent fellowships, had work featured in biennales, and released 12 albums. Two of these, Juarez and Lubbock (on everything), are venerated touchstones of outlaw country, recently reissued by North Carolina-based label Paradise of Bachelors. At this point in his career, nobody would fault him for coasting. But on Just Like Moby Dick, his first collection of original songs since 2013, Allen evolves, bringing new musicians and singers into the fold to create an album whose strongest moments result from its collaborations.
Together, they take what would be just another great, narrative album set to the familiar rhythms of a country waltz and bring it to new places. Folk stalwart Shannon McNally’s warm, worn-in vocals amplify the sadness at the center of “All These Blues Go Walkin’ By” and “All That’s Left Is Fare-Thee-Well.” On the latter, the brittler tones of album co-producer Charlie Sexton tell a story about a relationship—a life, really—that can’t be mended, a wrinkle that refuses to be ironed. Though it’s a tale of futility, it ends with some of Allen’s signature sour optimism: “But somewhere in this old dirt/There’s bound be some gold/Something real that you can feel/Something you can hold.”
Each song on Just Like Moby Dick, even the one about a traveling circus descending on a city of bloodthirsty vampires, casts a tender glow. That’s in large part due to the sensitive and lyrical performances by the members of the Panhandle Mystery Band. Throughout, Lloyd Maines’ slinky slide guitar sets a slow pace from which the other players gracefully follow or depart. On album opener “Houdini Didn’t Like the Spiritualists,” the band dexterously stretches the notes out of their instruments, creating a supportive palette of sounds to surround Allen’s soft and briny singing. We may have heard these string-derived textures from Allen before—“Death of the Last Stripper” is not dissimilar to Lubbock (on everything)’s “The Beautiful Waitress”—but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth hearing again, especially with a little more rhythm.
Davis McLarty has served as the Mystery Band drummer since 1996’s Human Remains, but his presence is pronounced here. He comes most alive halfway through the album on the militant “American Childhood I: Civil Defense,” one of two tracks where the bass and cello cede control of the rhythm section to the drums. The other is “Abandonitis,” which features Allen’s son Bale on the djembe as a curmudgeonly Allen reminds the younger generation how universal life’s cruelties can be: “Maybe your sister’s in jail/Your brother’s a punk/Your folks are both dead/Or maybe just drunk/Feel all alone/So sorry for yourself/But just stand in line/Like everybody else.”
Abandonment and sorrow are two of the record’s dozen or so related themes; there’s also endless war and the fallibility of memory, topics the satirical “American Childhood” triptych captures with simple, heartbreaking truths. “It’s just the war/Same fucking war/It’s always been/It never ends,” Allen laments bluntly, drawing connections between Vietnam and Iraq. Thankfully, for every devastating literalism, there’s an equal burst of menacingly surreal imagery: a burning mobile home, a gang of murderous pirates, a child riding a squeaky bike through an abandoned town. The tendency for contradictions is evident on “Harmony Two”—a song seemingly about a high-speed chase, set to the sleepy pace of a drifting houseboat. Written by Allen’s wife and collaborator Jo Harvey Allen, it’s characteristic of an outlook on life that falls somewhere between “everything’s on fire” and “it’s 5 o’clock somewhere.”
It’s for this very reason that, at a time when crisis mode feels like the new normal, Just Like Moby Dick is worthy of an earnest listen. Perhaps the serene perspective Allen embodies is only available to those—like fellow songwriters Randy Newman and John Prine—who have lived long enough to witness tragedy become comedy. He doesn’t dismiss the calamities we face; life’s not a complete joke. But when it strikes you with a thousand harpoons, what choice do any of us have but to carry on as best we can?

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Irish folk singer’s third album fills out her sound to incorporate elements of jazz, country rock, slowcore, and psychedelia.

Head Above the Water

Brigid Mae Power’s music never quite settles on solid ground. The Irish singer-songwriter flits between past and present; between traditional and modern forms; between the heaven in her voice and the earthbound epiphanies of her words. Her last album was called The Two Worlds. I’d say she inhabits a few more than that.
Power emerged from Galway’s bohemian scene, experimenting with the parameters of traditional music in unlit car parks and remote churches. Until now, the echo of open spaces has been a defining feature of her music, her intimate songs bolstered by cavernous reverb and drone. Those textures are less prominent on her third album. Recorded in Glasgow in three days with a band assembled by Scottish contemporary folkie Alasdair Roberts, who co-produced alongside Power and her husband Peter Broderick, Head Above the Water fills out her sound with a broader sweep of instrumentation. There is room for the bodhran, fiddle, and bouzouki, but also the synthesizer, Shruti box, drums, and electric guitar. Roberts encourages a more adventurous spirit to enter the proceedings. Though still rooted in folk—there’s a stunning cover of the traditional ballad “The Blacksmith”—the 10 songs blend elements of jazz, country rock, slowcore, and psychedelia.
Occasionally, the music has real bite, as on the snaking, sinister “I Was Named After You.” More typically, the songs amble dreamily toward their destination, as though following an ancient map on which the coordinates have begun to fade. On “Wedding of a Friend” and “You Have a Quiet Power,” buffeted by cross breezes of pedal steel and Mellotron, Power sounds like she’s fronting a slightly woollier Mazzy Star. “On a City Night” recalls the giddy joie de vivre of some of the lighter moments on Bob Dylan and The Band’s Basement Tapes.
What remains from past albums is the plain beauty of Power’s voice, part of a lineage that includes Anne Briggs, Linda Perhacs, and Beth Orton. It seems otherworldly until you listen to the words. Head Above the Water is, she says, “a continuing tale of everyday survival.” The lyrics merge the poetic and prosaic, recounting past conversations, recalling locations, journeys, small moments, until the whole assumes a cumulative weight.
In “Wedding of a Friend,” a baby’s head lies on her chest, “stuck with sweat.” In “On a City Night,” a quotidian conversation regarding the merits of city vs. country begets a sly love song about giving up things you cherish for the person you want to be with. In “Wearing Red That Eve,” the color of a dress denotes an elemental strength. As the song unfolds lazily over a soulful three-chord pattern, Power rises above the yelled profanities of a group of men on a New York street and ascends to the mountains, where she professes love “for everything and everyone.”
On many of these songs, she tells her story and then breaks into a series of wordless cries which carry their own meaning. Mostly, it sounds like joy. While previously Power seemed to be swimming against a tide of bad luck—she has spoken about her struggles as a single mother and past abusive relationships—there’s an air of breakthrough here, articulated most clearly on “I Was Named After You”: “I was in a battle I could neither win or lose, but time has passed and I can freely move.”
There are some obvious flaws. The uniformity of mood, melody, and texture means the album can drag, and while the spontaneity of the recordings is largely vindicated by the results, it also leaves some loose threads dangling. “Not Yours to Own” isn’t alone in meandering prettily without seeming to care too much about where it’s headed; a more attentive working process might have developed things further. At her best, however, Power lives up to her name. The closing title track, with its glassy beauty, twinkling piano, and soft strings, speaks to her continued progress. An artist at swim, head above the water, “looking across to the shore.”

Buy: Rough Trade
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The coarse Cobain head-scream of Bully singer, songwriter, and guitarist Alicia Bognanno is its own resuscitating jolt of protest. In a startling shift from the band's easygoing 2014 debut EP, she spends much of Feels Like tearing down the house with her howl.

Feels Like

Alicia Bognanno's coarse Cobain head-scream is its own resuscitating jolt of protest. It liberates Bully's songwriter, singer, and guitarist from the oppressive weight she carries on the Nashville band’s debut album, Feels Like: Worn down by lying jackasses, locked in the "invisible handcuffs" of patriarchal expectation, eroded by the male gaze, her feelings discarded like garbage. Compounding all the external fuckery is a black hole of self-doubt and self-deceit that she’s trying to break through. "My lies settle thicker than my milkshake/ But they both make my stomach ache/ And they’re both slowly weighing me down," she sings on "Brainfreeze", one of her few moments of pristine indie pop sweetness across these 11 songs.
In a startling shift from Bully’s easygoing 2014 debut EP, Bognanno spends much of Feels Like tearing down the house with her howl. She and the band—Clayton Parker on guitar, Reece Lazarus on bass, and Stewart Copeland (no relation) on drums—leave behind that EP’s warm and shaggy take on '90s guitar pop for a tougher, more pointed assault that initially sounds austere. Not that anything has been lost in translation between Bognanno’s mind and her microphone. With assistance from staff engineer Jon San Paolo, she recorded the whole thing herself at Chicago’s Electrical Audio, where she interned a few years ago; in the house style, she refers to herself as the engineer of these songs rather than the producer.
But over time Feels Like’s essential power becomes evident. "I’m just looking for clarity to help me through," Bognanno sings on "Trying", and the relatively spare production allows the emotion of every guitar part to smack harder: On that song, it’s a yearning whine as she sings about her recurring worry that she’s "growing so far from myself." The chorus of "Trash" sounds as if she’s leaping up and down on a broken mattress, pretending it’s the head of the liar who treats her worried-over feelings as something disposable, while the killer "I Remember" races as fast as her memories of a complex, enduring love. Bognanno is fond of making her choruses into stumbling blocks that stall the pace for a moment, but the joyous "Milkman" has a loopy waterslide rush that disguises the deceptively sour lyrics: Already trying to outrun her speeding mind, she also realizes that the more she loves a boy, the more he’ll lie to her.
The '90s nostalgia of Feels Like is undeniable, but the hooks are catchy and Bully are most reminiscent of an under-appreciated band—the Blake Babies circa 1989’s Earwig and 1990 follow-up Sunburn. Melodically, Bully are operating on the same level as Juliana Hatfield and co. after they had taken a massive step up from their shambling 1987 debut, Nicely Nicely, and both bands makeover their beleaguered cries as exhilarating, fun pop-punk. Hatfield could be incredibly self-flagellating; Bognanno is never quite so brutal, but in spite of the shit she shoulders throughout Feels Like, she’s much harder on herself than any of the perpetrators. She’s an anxious introvert with a knack for slipping in sad details as mysterious asides. "I’m not that social anyway," she sings on homebody anthem "Reason", where she admits that one of her favorite hobbies is watching her dog stare at the shed—though she’s happiest hiding out "by the lake, at my dad’s house/ I can take that old bike that my mom left behind a very long, long time ago."
Once she’s shut out the whole world, however, the noise in her head starts to take over. Nineteen years on, she can’t forgive herself for breaking her sister’s arm, she sings on "Six", even though as a kid she slept on her own broken arm for a night to try and make up for it. Time disappears on the moody "Picture", where she balks at having her photo taken—at being fixed in time at the point in her 25-year-old life where she’s trying to figure out how far she is from who she used to be, and which parts of herself she wants to make permanent. Within this explosive, rollicking music, Bognanno is as intimate a songwriter as Courtney Barnett or Waxahatchee's Katie Crutchfield, her attempts at being honest with herself contrasted by the liars who want to sink her with them as they renege responsibility for their own lives.
Feels Like doesn’t reference any specific dates or weather, but it feels like a summer coming-of-age album. Sure, there are the mentions of milkshakes and scabbed knees, along with the way Bully’s untamed punk should soundtrack windows-down freedom in rattling first cars. But there’s also that sense of lonely intimacy with oneself within what can feel like a vast void of time; six weeks where you tempt yourself with the promise of reinvention that you’ll probably never commit to, lay uncomfortably with your regrets, and fret that the future isn’t making itself clear. These are anthems for "all of us and our unpaid dues," as Bognanno sings on "Brainfreeze"; people who, per the album title, are slowly learning to trust their intuition and the weight of an emotion. On "Picture", one finally weighs too heavy on her, but in a good way: "Break before I start to bend," she sings, finding herself in the act of resistance.


Wale is buoyant on his latest LP, but remains fixated on the subjects that have long obsessed him: success, wealth, and the haters who are blocking his path to success and wealth.

Shine

It’s been almost a decade since Wale released The Mixtape About Nothing, an earnest collection of well-rapped thinkpieces couched in a savvy, “Seinfeld”-referencing framework. The sitcom was a tempting lure to attract the internet tastemakers, and they helped introduce the D.C.-area rapper to the mainstream. But early acclaim came with high expectations, from both Wale’s audience and from Wale himself. Ever since, he’s been striving to reclaim the near-universal praise earned by that mixtape.
Five studio albums, and one mid-career reinvention later, we arrive at Shine, the rapper’s fourth full-length with MMG. Wale has promoted the new project as a record overflowing with contentment, thanks in part to a newborn daughter, Zyla. (The album’s title is an acronym: “Still here ignoring negative energy.”)  In an interview with Complex, he said he wanted to put less pressure on himself. “I put myself through a lot of doom and gloom,” he said. “And I’m just like, ‘Wale, man, just be happier.’”
Accordingly, Shine is a more buoyant album than his back-to-basics 2015 offering, The Album About Nothing. There’s not a song here that feels grounded in much more than the desire to enjoy the moment or at least feign doing so well enough to make radio playlists. The album hopscotches its way through a varied set of production styles, with Wale performing his usual acrobatic routine through hoops positioned by marketers and focus groups. The Don Cannon-produced “Colombia Heights (Te Llamo)” refers to the largely-Hispanic D.C. neighborhood and features the reggaeton superstar J Balvin, whose presence livens up a meandering track.
“My Love” and “Fine Girl” chase the Caribbean muse that Drake has exploited so successfully. The former, which features Major Lazer, Dua Lipa and Wizkid and on which Wale doesn’t rap until nearly two minutes in, is pleasant enough to wiggle into a spot on a backyard party playlist. But “Fine Girl” stumbles around blindly, wasting features from the Nigerian artists Olamide and Davido. On these songs, and many others, Wale is there but not there, his lyrics contractually obligated, though every so often he finds time to drop a regrettable line, like “she penetrating my mind, I penetrate that physique,” on the single “PYT.”
Occasionally, on tracks where he’s more present, the mood lures the listener in, as on “Thank God,” an opener meant to sell the idea that Wale is through with pettiness; he uses the orchestral Cool & Dre beat to coo at his daughter, announcing “that feminist side come out when Zyla there” and turning the hook over to the R&B singer Rotimi. “Scarface, Rozay Gotti,” a surprisingly tender tribute to some of Wale’s rap heroes, induces a smile as the rapper sings drunkenly, then launches into deft, empty raps about courtside seats at a Wizards game.
Still, there are hints—beyond that “doth protest too much” acronym—that Wale can’t help but relive the past. His flow remains flexible but he’s fixated on the subjects that have long obsessed him: success, wealth, and the haters who are blocking his path to success and wealth. A strange hook on “Thank God” is preoccupied with his enemies, despite the fact that he’s never had a longstanding public beef with any relevant rapper.
Shine isn’t dark. But it feels like an exercise in avoidance as if Wale took the advice to ease up too far. Even “Smile,” the type of conscious song that animated Mixtape About Nothing, feels dispassionate and obligatory. And for those who were listening to his mixtapes a decade ago, “Running Back” a Lil Wayne feature and one of the best songs on Shine, doubles as a yardstick for what’s happened since. On Wale’s first Wayne feature, you could hear him striving to compete. A decade later, both rappers sound like they’re working solely for the paycheck, their pro forma raps clanging out emptily as a fantastic little sing-song DJ Spinz beat does the heavy lifting. Listening to Shine, you can’t help but think that Wale has finally dropped his rigorous standards for himself. He hadn’t met them in several years, but before this, he was still trying.


ELO has been dormant since 2001. But Alone in the Universe, Jeff Lynne's new record under the name,  doesn’t simply unearth that classic ELO sound like some ancient artifact. Instead, it gently updates those elements to 2015, and works best when contrasting downcast lyrics with the effervescence of the music.

Alone In The Universe

ELO has been largely dormant since they released their thirteenth album in 2001. And yet, their music continues to find new listeners, whether through compilations, car commercials, soundtrack placements, or G+ copies of Eldorado in used record bins. On one hand, the band ought to have aged about as well as Emerson Lake & Palmer or Styx, which is to say, not very well. ELO’s best albums— A New World Record and Discovery in particular—are prime examples of the excesses of the '70s, with all the pomp and studio wankery of the most ambitious prog rock imaginable. And yet, Lynne deployed those techniques in service of songs that had all the exuberance and abandon of early rock 'n' roll. If he was making big statements, then they typically amounted to "I really want tonight to last forever / I really wanna be with you."
Given their propensity for cosmic imagery (have you seen their web site?), the title of their latest album sounds all the more wistful, as though the absence of alien life is the saddest thing Lynne could ever imagine. That particular melancholy informs first single and album opener "When I Was a Boy", which may sound slight but is animated by the kind of nostalgia often found in country songs. "Radio waves kept me company in those beautiful days when there was no money," Lynne sings, as though flipping through old photo albums. "When I was a boy, I had a dream." He’s still no wordsmith, but there’s something bracing about his directness; any lyrical pretensions would ruin the reverie.
On the other hand, you have something like "Dirty to the Bone". With its florid harps and thrumming drums, it’s an upbeat pop song in tone and tempo. But the lyrics are mean-spirited to a near-comical degree, as Lynne describes one of those she-devils who seem to exist only in old rock songs: "She’ll mess you up, she’ll move around… she’ll deceive you till the cows come home." That kind of cartoony straw-woman writing abounded in the '70s, but the casual misogyny, not to mention such threadbare cliché, feels profoundly out of place now.
Alone in the Universe fares best when Lynne is more generous, when he can contrast the downcast sentiments of the lyrics with the effervescence of the music. After a rocky side 1, side 2 picks up considerably, thanks to light-speed "Ain’t It a Drag" and the zero-gravity "I’m Leaving You." Lynne may be a maximalist, but he makes every element count. He still has a good ear for simple but driving rhythm sections, and most of these songs use an acoustic strum to augment the beat and warm the track—a familiar, but still effective, technique. Likewise, the sympathetic backing vocals on "All My Life" underscore the yearning in the songs, making the simplicity of the lyrics ("I’m so glad I found you, just want to be around you") sound all the sweeter.
Alone in the Universe doesn’t simply unearth that classic ELO sound like some ancient artifact. Instead, it gently updates those elements to 2015, the year Lynne celebrates his 68th birthday and his 52nd year in the music business. These songs sound precarious, both musically and emotionally. Partly that is due to age and the slight quaver in Lynne’s vocals, which aren’t quite as robust as they used to be. Partly it is due to technology. Lynne has always used to the studio to define his band’s entire identity, and the difference between then and now is the difference between the air-brushed UFO on A New World Record and the CGI saucer on Alone in the Universe. There’s a gauzy thinness to the sound, an inescapable two-dimensionality that occasionally hinders Lynne’s mission. Still, this is a fine addition to their catalog, perhaps not as consistent as 2001’s Zoom but much better than these late-career revival albums tend to sound.


The Boston indie rock band craft a winning, cathartic record about grief, capitalism, and all the stuff we leave behind.

Smell Smoke

From their frivolously chosen band name to a comparison of songwriting and “healthy bowel movements,” Boston’s Vundabar is a ceaselessly jovial band. Even when their latest album deals with the morbid, they insist that “it’s supposed to be fun,” further adding, “please have fun.” By doing so, the restless indie rock band illustrate that, for better or worse, there is no singular way to deal with illness and death. Its inevitability and lingering irrationality feel at odds with capitalism and its American dream. Over labyrinthine melodies and punching distortion, Vundabar thread existential thoughts, fears, and anxieties into their latest album Smell Smoke.
Their third album grew from frontman Brandon Hagen’s intimate, four-year experience of taking care of a loved one in declining health. His songwriting explores the limiting corporeality of being human, the materialism that ostensibly adds value to life, and the abjection that’s a consequence of both. Oftentimes, we are only contemplating the cost of living, but on Smell Smoke, Vundabar reconcile the ironies and pain when dealing with the cost of death. Recently, Hagen dubbed it an “American album,” that emphasizes “a defunct language of morals and ideals.” Although death is a universal reality, profitable exploitation and materialist validation are inherently American.
Albeit dark and strange coming from a place of grief, Vundabar maintain their witty humor when making fun of capitalistic greed. “Big Funny” takes jabs at the cost of healthcare, particularly in a country where there seems to be complete lack of respect for the idea of health itself. “$$$” is a sassy, hard rock reaction to monetary leverage. Hagen’s tone is jaded, complimenting the unrelinquishable power of the man fronting the hundred dollar bill. “God bless the frankness of Franklin the thief,” he sighs before concluding that at least American corruption is transparent. That counts for something, right? The initial dredging whine of guitars transforms from a finger plucking tiptoe into a distorted sprint during the final three minutes. It’s a cataclysmic and therapeutic acknowledgment that everything is fucked.
Smell Smoke is dynamic and riveting, a guitar-forward mosaic that pieces jagged edges of art rock, math rock, punk rock, and pop together. Its instrumentation carried out by Hagen, assisted by drummer Drew McDonald and bassist Grayson Kirtland, emphasizes lyrical complexity and vocal bungee jumping. Lead single “Acetone” reckons with repressed emotions that fractures the self and come back with legs of their own. “There’s nothing that’s poetic about a bedsore,” Hagen asserts on the opening of “Harvest,” before descending into a scene about flies feasting on aged fruits’ rotting flesh. A phantom sigh from background organs creates a vulnerable atmosphere for Hagen’s storytelling.
Hagen acknowledges that the real American dream can be governed by money and emotions. Smell Smoke’s cover alone hints at the paralysis of grief, a forced feeling to smack a smile and pretend everything is peachy. Free-floating grief can conjure shame, projecting societal norms instead of revealing an emotional truth. Death, which is already literally an untouchable subject for us living, feels even more alienating in a society that values valuing things. Numbers, prices, estimates, averages, among other condensable evaluations feel like common-day language until paired with mortality. Hagen’s clever songwriting harnesses the weird, merciless irony of humans not being able to understand or articulate loss when structural institutions assign a cost to it.
The album concludes with a thunderous anecdote about a man who loses his life’s purpose when he loses his hat. Before reaching an existential epiphany, he finds the same hat on sale and returns to his limiting philosophies. You can’t take it with you, but Vundabar have brilliantly crafted an album that feels like it resonates with joy and sorrow both here and in the hereafter.


In their duo debut, these guitarists step outside of free jazz and indie rock to offer a dozen surprisingly accessible and warm instrumentals.

Mary Halvorson / John Dieterich: a tangle of stars

a tangle of stars

The guitarists Mary Halvorson and John Dieterich appear to inhabit disconnected worlds. During the last decade, Halvorson has reimagined the rules and roles of jazz guitar by pairing a graceful approach to melody with an iron will to warp, corrupt, and subvert it. In September, her work as a composer, bandleader, and improviser earned her a MacArthur “genius” fellowship. Dieterich, though, comes from what remains of the indie-rock underground. For two decades, he has been one of two guitarists in Deerhoof, a band whose only allegiance is to its absolute irreverence for genre. They make jock jams for nerds, pop songs for noise lovers—a scrappy, self-styled realm where philanthropic foundations rarely tread.
But Dieterich’s Deerhoof are one of the most enthusiastically exploratory bands of their generation, as emphatic and magnetic covering the songs of The Shining as they are splitting the difference between Stereolab and Don Caballero. And Halvorson is the kind of musician who is perpetually down for whatever, whether supplying her singular approach to Anthony Braxton and Bill Frisell collaborations or writing intricate songs for others to sing. On their debut as a guitars-plus duo, a tangle of stars, this sense of wonder that Halvorson and Dieterich share takes center stage for a dozen disarming instrumentals. They score a frantic fight scene for “short knives” and summon the shapes of acid tracers on “continuous whatever.” They flirt with budget psychedelic rock with “my mother’s lover” and float through a haunted house on “ghost poem,” shaping a record that’s surprisingly accessible and emotional for this idiom.
Guitar duos often suffer from too much or too little bravura: They can feel like masturbatory Guitar Center technical workouts, or limp handshakes upon a cold introduction. But Halvorson and Dieterich bring an easy aplomb to this session, captured at his New Mexico home when the two met to improvise to one another’s loose compositions. Early stunner “drum the rubber hate” is a feat of athleticism fit for metal shredders on a tropical holiday.  Their interwoven guitar lines move in and out of phase, each player taking a solo over the other’s rhythmic picking. But it’s a supremely good song, too, full of narrative tension and resolution and built with a hook that sinks deeply. Dietrich and Halvorson are self-assured enough as instrumentalists to realize their rendezvous is about something more than instrumental prowess.
Indeed, the most complicated and compelling aspect of a tangle of stars is the rich and varied emotional landscape it surveys. None of these pieces trace easy moods in obvious ways; conflicted feelings are bound to each other like the rose and its thorn. “lace caps,” for instance, feels at first like an early fall day, the sun sparkling at the onset of the golden hour. It is as gentle and warm as the recent Windham Hill reappraisals of fellow traveler William Tyler. But notes start to wobble from their axes, Halvorson pushing them quickly to one side like a cat batting a ball of string, until the whole thing collapses. You listen again, searching for early trouble. “the handsome” is both ecstatic and panicked, “balloon chord” at once a daydream of drone and a nightmare of echo.
Halvorson and Dieterich remain identifiable as composers and players throughout these pieces—you could spot her hard-edged picking inside a hurricane, after all, and his leads often glow like the neon sign of an all-night pizza parlor. But you can sense both players moving toward a shared space—or, at the very least, making room within their own systems for someone else. During “vega’s array,” Halvorson morphs notes in her trademark way, while Dieterich turns a mesmerizing melody into a never-ending spider web. Toward the middle, their styles begin to blur, one’s tricks dissolving inside the other’s. The song starts to shimmer like a mirage—inviting but illusory, thrilling but dangerous, two worlds collapsing into one unstable beauty.


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 Stephin Merrit’s 1994 meta-country album, an idiosyncratic, lo-fi travelogue bursting with gothic wit and pathos.

The Magnetic Fields: The Charm of the Highway Strip

The Charm of the Highway Strip

Stephin Merritt’s early life makes for a great country song that no one would ever think to write. Born in 1965, he has claimed that he was “conceived by barefoot hippies on a houseboat in St. Thomas.” He likes to say that he and his single mother lived in 33 homes during his first 23 years, mainly in the northeastern United States. She was an English teacher and Buddhist seeker, drawn toward communes and homeopathic remedies. They were “sometimes very poor.” He grew up not knowing his father, an obscure folk-rock singer from the Virgin Islands. Even Merritt’s first name was in flux: He changed the spelling as a teenager, inspired by something he saw on television about junk mail and indulged by the progressive prep school he wound up attending in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Merritt’s musical interests were similarly wayward. He formed the Magnetic Fields with his longtime friend and collaborator Claudia Gonson in the late 1980s, when the Pixies’ dynamic Dadaism was about to burst out of the Boston club scene and help galvanize an alternative-rock revolution. But he was fixated instead on the stylish sophistication of ABBA or the teenage symphonies churned out by the Brill Building’s songwriting assembly line: clever, catchy, and unrepentantly beautiful. In 1991, as Nirvana were overhauling the music industry’s landscape with the sludgy stadium-rock verité of Nevermind, the Magnetic Fields’ debut single, “100,000 Fireflies,” on Cambridge indie label Harriett Records, was wry and wonderful bedroom synth-pop. Every witty lyric, sung at a teasing deadpan remove by guest vocalist Susan Anway, bears meticulous unpacking, but the conclusion could hardly have been more resolutely out of step with the era’s pedal-stomping MTV trends: “Why do we keep shrieking/When we mean soft things?/We should be whispering all the time.”
For all of Merritt’s grand ambitions, his fledgling band could barely draw a crowd, and the Magnetic Fields would soon bounce between labels the way a younger Merritt had once moved homes. “100,000 Fireflies” originally appeared on the Magnetic Fields’ first proper album, 1989’s Distant Plastic Trees, a set of eccentric synth-pop that was available only in Japan, via RCA Victor, and the UK, via indie label Red Flame (Merritt has claimed that Red Flame’s owner vanished with all the overseas proceeds). In 1992, they self-released The Wayward Bus, a homespun electronic update of swooning 1960s girl-group production; the same year, the House of Tomorrow EP followed on the Chicago indie Feel Good All Over. In the meantime, Mac McCaughan of North Carolina indie-rock pioneers Superchunk got hold of the “100,000 Fireflies” single and his band started raucously covering it at shows. Gonson met McCaughan after a Superchunk gig at Brandeis University, and a fateful decision rushed into view: The Magnetic Fields’ next album would be released on Merge, the label McCaughan co-founded with Superchunk bandmate Laura Ballance.
The Charm of the Highway Strip encapsulates the urbane, humane, and above all stubbornly idiosyncratic sensibility that has turned Merritt into one of the more fascinating songwriters of the last few decades. It wasn’t the first Magnetic Fields album, but because it was put out on Merge, it was the first to be widely available in the United States; it was also the first to have Merritt’s lead vocals, a unique morose rumbling not unlike that of Calvin Johnson’s creaky baritone. Like all of Merritt’s best work, it’s centered around a whimsically specific concept that ends up feeling marvelously universal, invoking tropes that could be considered hackneyed or artificial to achieve a genuine emotional connection. “You couldn’t believe it hadn’t been done before,” Merritt has said of hearing songs by his heroes ABBA, Ella Fitzgerald, and Doris Day. “That’s what I want to do.”
For starters, The Charm of the Highway Strip was sort of a country album, or the Magnetic Fields’ version of one. “When we signed the Magnetic Fields, I thought they were going to be an electro-pop band, because the records they’d made up to that point reminded me of Yaz, which I loved,” McCaughan has said. “And then the first record they delivered to us was The Charm of the Highway Strip. So, even that was a left turn compared to what we expected from them.” In 1988, an A&R rep for Capitol paid the Magnetic Fields $2,000 to record the songs that would become The Charm of the Highway Strip but opted to pass on the demo, reputedly objecting, “I hate Johnny Cash.” They were talking about Merritt’s low voice, but the lyrics also center around country staples like the open road, trains, and—naturally—country songs. “I’m never going back to Jackson,” Merritt begins on “Lonely Highway,” the ghostly opening track. “I couldn't bear to show my face/I nearly killed you with my drinking/Wouldn’t be caught dead in that place.”
More specifically, then, this was a road-trip album, as gaudy and gothic as the neon-signed motels strewn alongside the American autobahn. Merritt designed the cover art—dashed yellow lines against a night-black backdrop—himself. On the lonesome, harpsichord-accented “Long Vermont Roads,” he reaches for geographical comparisons that any self-respecting Nashville songsmith might dismiss as a little strained: “Your eyes are the Mesa Verde/Big and brown and far away/And your eyes are Kansas City/In Kansas and in Missouri,” Merritt croons, pronouncing Missouri as “misery.” It’s so audaciously hokey that it somehow circles back again until the narrator’s meta sadness (“And country songs never help you sleep,” Merritt observes) becomes achingly real.
Merritt often protested that his songs weren’t based on his life. Maybe he protested too much: At its best moments, The Charm of the Highway Strip has a gloomy fatalism you might expect of someone who grew up leaving town almost twice a year. The stately electro-rock of “Born on a Train,” for instance, begins with Merritt invoking “ghost roads” and the “walking dead.” But what makes this song one of the finest in the Magnetic Fields’ vast catalog is the heartbreaking contradiction at its core, as Merritt ruefully sings, “And I’ve been makin’ promises I know I’ll never keep/One of these days I’m gonna leave you in your sleep.” Tramps like him weren’t born to run; they were destined to be pulled along by some powerful engine beyond their control.
None of this actually sounds like the alt-country of contemporaries such as Jeff Tweedy’s pre-Wilco band Uncle Tupelo, let alone the mainstream country stars of the era. Thrift-store keyboards, off-kilter percussion, and Magnetic Fields secret weapon Sam Davol’s swooping cello lope along over distant echoes of basslines from the Crystals or the Ronettes, all filtered through a lo-fi murk. But in the Magnetic Fields’ hands, these homespun tools convey vast expanses. “Fear of Trains,” which juxtaposes synth wobbles with jaunty Dukes of Hazzard plucks, is an empathetic sketch of a young woman encircled by the forces of race, religion, and class, all pithily transferred to a railroad phobia. Gay and Loud was the name of Merritt’s publishing company, but tender ballad “I Have the Moon” hints only quietly at a possible romance with a closeted lover: “You have become like other men/But let me kiss you once again,” Merritt dryly intones. The dream-like “When the Open Road Is Closing In,” with a lullaby pace and drowsy vocal delivery that belie its calliope-like keyboards, suggests that the highway isn’t just a part of life. Rather, life—as another poet once put it—is a highway: “The world is a motor inn in the Iowa highway slum,” Merritt sings, then warns, “You won’t be coming home again.”
The Charm of the Highway Strip arrived with all of the impact of a beat-up car stalled on the side of the road. Merritt refused to tour in support of it, and what little coverage the album got tended to pair it with its near-simultaneous follow-up, Holiday. But accolades slowly gathered. In a brief piece in September 1994, several months after the album’s release, SPIN’s Charles Aaron aptly highlighted Merritt’s “mordant lyrics that Morrissey might mope for.” Come December the magazine ranked the record as one of the year’s best, deeming it “metapop of an austere lushness.” (In the 1990s, Merritt worked as a copy editor for SPIN and Time Out New York.)
Of course, before long the Magnetic Fields would upend expectations again with 1999’s 69 Love Songs. An enormous gamble for Merge and also the band’s swan song on the label, the triple-CD set sold out immediately, with Robert Christgau awarding it an A+, The New York Times lauding Merritt as a “contrarian pop genius,” and assorted music publications eventually ranking it in their lists for the greatest albums of all time. Faced with dozens of fresh tracks to sort through, newcomers really would have their work cut out for them going back to find the charms of The Charm of the Highway Strip. But the album’s crafty country-western transience was evident in 69 Love Songs’ “Papa Was a Rodeo,” its slyly bleak determinism in the instant earworm “I’ll never say ‘happy anniversary’” from “I Think I Need a New Heart.” The projects are more alike than they seem. Holiday, too, with its vacationing abandon, now seems like another form of escape, of constant motion. Merritt, like any of us, has been endlessly adrift, perpetually in a state of subtle reinvention.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan


The UK singer-producer teams up with Rostam for a collection of chilled-out electro-pop that plays it a little too safe.

Euphoric

On Georgia Barnes’ self-produced breakthrough, 2020’s Seeking Thrills, the UK singer and producer embraced a ramshackle approach to synthpop and house music. The album washed her voice in effects and scaffolded hooks in clattering, unpredictable production, netting her a Mercury Prize nomination and establishing her as an up-and-comer in a crowded pop field. On her follow-up, Euphoric, Georgia chose to expand her circle, working with former Vampire Weekend member and indie pop producer Rostam to try on a new sound. Introducing acoustic instrumentation and unvarnished vocals, Euphoric takes an overly safe approach to themes of growth and companionship, largely sanding down Georgia’s steelier, more idiosyncratic production.
Georgia and Rostam first linked up in 2019 by way of Mura Masa, who tapped the singer for his winding club track “Live Like We’re Dancing”; after hearing the song, Rostam quickly reached out via DM to work with her. It’s a combination that works well on paper: Rostam’s effervescent, ’80s-influenced production style has brought about wonders for established pop stars and indie wunderkinds alike. But on Euphoric, the team-up brings forth hit-or-miss arrangements that lose Georgia in the mix. For each tuneful dance workout like standout “Some Things You’ll Never Know,” which ramps up to an prismatic, corkscrewing drop halfway through, there’s an overdressed song like “All Night,” whose garish chorus of widescreen synths induces an instant headache. Some songs just never seem to reach a clear destination: The nervy, muscular electric guitar melody that winds throughout “The Dream” treads water until the song fizzles out.
The expanded instrumentation occasionally works in Georgia’s favor, typically when she branches her percussion out beyond the usual kit and programmed drums. On the late highlight “Keep On,” gentle congas and mellotron open up a peaceful, laidback sound that shapeshifts into a sitar solo and speaker-shaking climax. During “Give It Up for Love,” Georgia dials into a similarly easygoing groove inspired by William Orbit’s spacey, acoustic-driven electronica on Madonna’s Ray of Light. It’s a touchstone you wish Georgia would reach to more often on Euphoric, providing a shimmery, expressive backdrop for her soaring voice.
Georgia’s willingness to experiment is promising, but it’s unfortunate that Euphoric takes such a predominantly safe journey. As on Seeking Thrills, some songs also succumb to vague lyrics that resemble placeholders. “Why do I feel my face /Crumbling all over the place?” she asks on “Friends Will Never Let You Go,” an ode to complicated friendships that quickly gets tied up in a self-conscious jumble. She finds more success on the title track, balancing a simple sentiment of adoration (“It’s euphoric when you’re next to me”) with more specific, grounded relationship details, like meeting up in Regent’s Park and feeling too shy to speak her true feelings. Set to a loping guitar melody and a pulsing blend of congas and 808s, the song promises an album of chilled-out, deeply felt bangers that Georgia doesn’t quite deliver.


George Lewis Jr.’s self-titled fifth album is an island of good feelings and vacuous summertime indie-pop jams.

Twin Shadow

For a moment in 2015, it seemed like George Lewis Jr., who performs as Twin Shadow, was about to break out of indie rock and into actual pop-star fame. Around the time of his major label debut, Eclipse, Lewis wrote a song for Billy Idol and submitted material for Chris Brown and Eminem. He dated Zoë Kravitz, posing on red carpets in a Calvin Klein suit. He donned a pair of white skinny jeans and talked about his artistic process for Levi’s. He became fodder for Page Six. But Eclipse, the album that was supposed to usher Lewis across the velvety threshold into the kind of mainstream success enjoyed by, say, Grimes or the Weeknd, was bizarre and confused. It peaked at No. 91 on the Billboard charts, stranded between indie rock and mainstream pop. His 2018 follow-up, Caer, flew under the radar. Now, Lewis returns with his self-titled, self-released fifth record, blending elements of reggae, funk, and classic rock into a collection of vacuous summertime indie-pop jams.
Twin Shadow is all soft corners. It’s plush, a place to sink in and zone out. It exudes the energy of a vintage conversation pit, upholstered in an unimposing shade of tan, with a little table in the center for your ashtray. Recorded partly in Lewis’ native Dominican Republic, the album is an island of good feelings set apart from the madness of the outside world. Its cozy, prefab sensibility is full of fat bass and anachronistic synths. On opener “Alemania,” Lewis’ rich tenor goes down easy, and when it meets Kadhja Bonet’s opalescent harmonies, you’re likely to fall into a pleasant trance. Perhaps you will be transported to a beachside bar, swaying gently as you ward off brain freeze from a $15 frozen drink. Most of the record is like this: easy to listen to and easy to forget. When the song changes, you’ll barely recall what it was you just heard.
It shouldn’t be alarming that Twin Shadow plays like a mix of the greatest soft-rock hits of the 1970s and ’80s—Lewis has written music that feels plucked from a crate of old 45s for his entire career. Pastiche is his calling card. The guitar on a song like “Sugarcane” would not be out of place on an Eagles B-side. “Is There Any Love” compresses Lewis’ vocals and lays on the funk, building up the kind of bottom-heavy disco track you might hear as a movie protagonist dusts off their leather jacket and slams on the gas pedal. Nacreous synthesizers and four-on-the-floor percussion push to achieve a euphoric liftoff that never arrives.
Twin Shadow is not meant to be deep; Lewis isn’t one to write with thematic complexity. Instead, he’s focused on conveying a mood, making sure you have a good time. He wants you to dance. He wants you to spark up a joint and vibe. The lyrics are clunky and silly in a way that feels lacking in inspiration. On the listless “Modern Man,” Lewis reflects on his love life over languorous keys and stripped-down guitars. “I’m not some stupid Romeo,” he sings with a sense of unearned dolefulness. “I pride myself that I’m a hoe.” On the ridiculous reggae Western “Lonestar,” he dramatically cries, “Don’t kick me off of my wave, boy,” over a looped “Hey, hey,” shotgun blasts, and what sounds like a horse’s neigh.
On a recent episode of How Long Gone, the podcast helmed by men’s fashion and lifestyle gurus Chris Black and Jason Stewart, Lewis revealed he recently recovered from Covid-19, despite getting vaccinated. To this, Black said, “You should not have gone to Tulum with Diplo, I told you not to do that!” It’s a friendly joke that somehow also captures the hollow tone of Lewis’ most recent work: Twin Shadow feels like an overpriced vacation with a bunch of DJs. It’s an aesthetic comprised of scare quotes, where aspirationally vibrant feelings become performative and dull: “trippy,” “vibey,” “psychedelic,” “sun-kissed.” It’s not real fun if you have to try.

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Seven years after his debut, the Top Dawg fixture returns to his habitual stylistic fusions but too often, his muddy, psychedelic haze fails to summon the dreamlike quality it’s aiming for.

Audiodidactic

Since his career began, Lance Skiiiwalker has been painted as one of a kind. The Chicago-born vocalist and producer, aka Lance Howard, first popped during a weekend trip to Los Angeles, when a friend who managed a clothing store on Fairfax put on one of his beat tapes. Two customers who patronized the store that day happened to be former Top Dawg Entertainment president Dave Free and Kendrick Lamar, who were so impressed with his music that they had the manager call Skiiiwalker back to the store to meet him. He quickly fell in with TDE’s inner circle, becoming a fixture at the Carson house that served as their de facto headquarters, and bringing woozy touches of R&B, funk, jazz, and hip-hop to songs from Jay Rock’s “Money Trees Deuce” to Kendrick’s “untitled 04 08.14.2014.” He was called a “mad scientist,” a “glitch in the system” capable of unlocking a song’s potential.
After becoming something of a secret weapon for the label, Skiiiwalker signed to TDE in 2016 and dropped his solo debut, the warped and hazy Introverted Intuition. It was certainly unprecedented by Top Dawg standards, an album that dabbled in several genres without committing to any. Songs meander from crunchy beat music and wafting R&B to new-age funk; they feel like attempts to buck convention by throwing everything at the wall. But aside from establishing what separated him from his labelmates, Introverted Intuition offered little insight into Skiiiwalker himself. Being freewheeling is one thing; get too untethered, though, and the ideas simply float away, as sweetly ephemeral as vape smoke. Audiodidactic, his first proper album in seven years, following a handful of EPs, trudges even further into Skiiiwalker’s imagination. Every song is awash in a psychedelic haze that misses the very dreamlike quality it aims for; Skiiiwalker sounds lost in a musical echo chamber of his own creation.
He deserves credit for having honed his craft. His production work on albums like SiR’s 2019 album Chasing Summer and Isaiah Rashad’s 2021 comeback record The House Is Burning pushed Skiiiwalker to develop his piano, vocal, and plugin skills. That dedication informs the album, right down to its title. Through self-teaching and instinctive wanderlust, Skiiiwalker pulls from multiple stylistic corners: neo-soul, prog rock, the 2010s California beat scene. Unfortunately, he’s so determined to throw the listener off his trail that Audiodidactic often feels adrift, the vibes left frustratingly indistinct.
It’s a shame, because in the few places that things come together, Skiiiwalker plays with interesting textures. Audiodidactic’s best moments, self-produced cuts like the shoegaze-esque single “Beantown” or the crisp, futuristic groove of “It Was All,” achieve a soothing mesh of bass, synths, and vocals swirling like quasars. “IG,” another highlight, captures the beauty of smashing punk rhythms and chirpy, muted keys together. The rest of the album tries to stretch across styles but comes out amorphous and bland. Muddy vocals on the Groove-produced opener “Friends” and the title track melt into fields of saxophone and plugin-soaked synths, attempts at collaging that register only as background noise. Many of these songs have pretty melodies (like the Matt Miller-produced “Everybody Hurts Somebody”) but can’t corral them into concrete ideas; instead, they just dissolve into a mush of colors and influences.
Skiiiwalker is a talented musician with good connections who has yet to figure out how to translate his faculties into solo work that amounts to more than a bunch of genres rubbing shoulders for the sake of it. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that: Lil Yachty’s recent excursion into psychedelic synth rock and funk, Let’s Start Here, is also a mess of a record, but Yachty’s passion and presence keep things more focused. Texas singer-producer Liv.e’s recent Girl in the Half Pearl is more successful, weaving gauzy R&B, drum’n’bass, and synth funk into a rich tapestry of love in all its forms. Much of Audiodidactic, on the other hand, feels anonymous, like an amalgamation of Robert Glasper, Mndsgn, and Shabazz Palaces songs searching for a binding agent. Until Skiiiwalker can add some more interesting ideas of his own to the mix, it will be difficult to tell where his influences end and he begins.


John Cudlip’s shoegaze band evokes the eyes-closed, blown-out atmospheric rock of the 1990s with studied precision and genuine passion.

Happening

Happening is John Cudlip’s first album as Launder, but it’s no stroke of beginner’s luck. Since starting the project in 2018, the Los Angeles songwriter has released a bevy of lo-fi alt-rock singles and an EP, Pink Cloud, before signing with Ghostly in 2019. In those next three pandemic-tainted years, he got sober and tucked 60 demos under his belt, diligently writing while live shows screeched to a halt. Then he and his band—guitarist Nathan Hawelu, bassist Chase Meier, and drummer Bryan De Leon—recorded take after take, commemorating each slight variation with a joke: “It’s happening.” A rapturous love letter to the scuzzy alt-rock of the early ’90s, Happening pays homage to Cudlip’s dream-pop and shoegaze influences. Marrying the angelic, throbbing melt of Slowdive or Beach House with the punchy clarity of the Drop Nineteens, it’s a precise, evocative expansion on the eyes-closed, blown-out atmospheric rock that destroyed countless Gen X eardrums.
Happening is refreshingly unabashed in its reverence. Cudlip recorded at Los Angeles’ New Monkey Studio, formerly owned by Elliott Smith; he used Smith’s microphone and compressor to record his own plaintive vocals. Sonny Diperri (My Bloody Valentine, Nine Inch Nails) mixed the album, which is streaked with Loveless and Souvlaki influences, even veering toward Goo-town on mid-album standout “Beggar.” But amid a multiplying flock of genre revivalists who imitate or recycle sounds from previous eras, Cudlip builds on his influences with such studied precision and genuine passion that it all ends up sounding natural.
Though most tracks on Happening chart a similar path—gradual buildup to explosive texture—they feel newly cathartic every time. Collaborating with French singer Soko on “Become,” Cudlip morphs spacey guitars into a heavily layered crunch that nearly drowns out her vocals by the end. Distorted, menacing chords seep and shudder through the latter half of the grunge-influenced “Withdraw” like blood through a bandage. Even the most pedestrian track, “On a Wire,” suddenly blossoms into a lush, guitar-driven blur that surpasses the previous four minutes’ relatively uninspired Souvlaki LARP. Cudlip’s mastery of the slow burn shines on closer “Lantern”; over its eight and a half-minute sprawl, the song evolves with impressive subtlety from a gentle guitar and vocal melody into a full-blown shoegaze arrangement, kicking off a nearly four-minute instrumental section with a Loveless-worthy screech.
In spite of its transcendent, emotive capabilities, Happening can feel a bit too clean at times, a little too influenced. The more ’00s alt-leaning tracks like “Harbour Mouth” and “Chipper” would stand out on a lesser album, but Cudlip’s oblique songwriting feels so perfectly matched to his moodier arrangements that the poppier songs threaten to power-wash the complexity out of the music. Lines like “Chipper”’s “I’m in love with the money, but we can share” feel out of place when delivered so smoothly, particularly in comparison to a sad headbanger like “Beggar,” where gnawing bass and Cudlip’s caustic groaning locate the song perfectly at the intersection of craven horniness and biblical rage.
In spite of its precision, the messiness is what makes Happening a compelling listen. Smashing the distortion pedal into oblivion, Cudlip is a genuine alchemical force, and as each song swells toward fury, euphoria, or something ineffably in between, it becomes clear that he wants us to feel everything that arises simply as it comes. Naturally that includes anxiety about what’s to come at all: “Couldn’t foresee all the misleading,” he croons on “Unwound.” The best shoegaze is all about atmosphere, and Cudlip pays the ultimate tribute to his influences not through imitative flattery but by following their lead and building his own world of towering sound and emotion.


On the second album under her solo alias, the Speedy Ortiz frontwoman uses maximalist electronic pop to explore youth, self-perception, and a reckoning with her past.

Haunted Painting

A few years ago at Seattle’s Frye Museum, Sadie Dupuis locked eyes with Saharet, painted by Franz von Stuck in a 1902 portrait. The famous vaudeville dancer is pictured in a green gown, a red rose in her hair, her lips slightly parted in a smile; upon first glance, she appears content. But dark shadows encircle Saharet’s eyes and her cheeks are ghostly white, a stark contrast. Drawn to Saharet’s enigmatic face, the Speedy Ortiz leader began thinking about haunted paintings, and then writing new music. In works like The Picture of Dorian Gray and Ghostbusters II, possessed artworks are often avatars for age-old themes like the mutability of the self and the thirst for eternal youth. Dupuis explores these sweeping ideas about art and existence throughout Haunted Painting, the fantastic, frenetic second solo album from her solo project Sad13.
Whereas Sad13 was previously Dupuis’ bucket for poppier Speedy Ortiz songs, Haunted Painting marks a clean break, a bifurcation of her musical personality. It’s Sad13 reckoning with her past, one she doesn’t quite recognize anymore. Recording at five different studios with five female engineers, Dupuis plays 18 instruments, including guitar, theremin, lap steel, glockenspiel, electric sitar, and “toys, trash, ephemera.” If that sounds exhausting, it sometimes is. Most songs are stuffed with diverging melodies and dense instrumentation. But Dupuis is such an adept songwriter and accomplished singer that the excesses are part of the appeal.
Take “Ghost (of a Good Time),” an anthem to aging out of the afterhours. Reaching the other side of 30, Dupuis looks back on nightlife as a “heavy fog, mistook for aura.” But sonically the song evokes exactly what Dupuis claims to abhor: Synthesizers soar, buzz, and twinkle over a jittery, syncopated drumbeat from Zöe Brecher, melding dance music and math rock. A good time in its own right, it’s a party song about being fed up with partying, in which the keyboards throb like an ice-cream headache—the consequence, perhaps, of too much of a good thing.
That incongruity is a neat trick, a bit of sleight of hand that Dupuis pulls across much of the album. As she lyrically paints vivid pictures of mental-health diagnoses, indie-rock misogyny, and disappearing from existence, she fills each canvas with endless layers of glossy, bouncy pop music, juxtaposing weary eyes with a smile.
Dupuis also knows exactly when to pull her foot off the gas. On “Market Hotel,” a comparatively straightforward rock song about confronting both the patriarchy and her self-perception as an adult, Dupuis sings, “I’m working three fucking jobs, I’m too embarrassed to die.” At that moment, most of the noise fades to make way for a heartbreaking moment of honesty, one of many on Haunted Painting. “What a dream when you float out of sight/Dragging the haze that cloaks the morning to decimate my life,” she sings in the final chorus of “Oops...!” as the herky-jerky drums, fuzz guitars, and plonking organ melt away. For a few seconds, it’s just Dupuis, her multi-tracked background vocals, and a sparse acoustic guitar. The New York City native even twangs the word “morning,” stretching into a third syllable and opening the door for a country-pop album when synthesizers go out of vogue.
The opener, “Into the Catacombs,” and the penultimate song, “Take Care,” are windows into an alternate universe in which Haunted Painting is a chamber-pop album, mostly unencumbered by her neon universe of electric instruments. Backed by a classical octet and joined by pair of male vocalists—Helado Negro’s Roberto Carlos Lange on the former, Pile frontman Rick Maguire on the latter—Dupuis’s voice is the centerpiece. It’s just two words floating with a pair of flutes, but Dupuis stretching “I care,” across the chorus is affecting enough to make you wish for more songs like this. These moments offer brief, beautiful peeks at one version of Sad13—a hidden world within Haunted Painting. They’re alluring in their own right, but in the end they’re merely parts of the larger self-portrait: the sad eyes to her sly smile, rounding out the complexity that makes her music so appealing in the first place.

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With subtle tweaks to her sound, Frankie Rose shows that her glossy, new wave style can be a way of cutting through the murk to find clarity.

Cage Tropical

A style can be a mold—something that gives form to shapeless ideas. It can also be a jumping-off point for points unknown. And sometimes a style can be a straitjacket. Frankie Rose has experienced all of these things. Over the past near-decade of her career, the New York musician has given herself the toughest kind of challenge: How to keep her music fresh without losing its essential Frankie Rose-ness—without giving the impression, in other words, that it has changed at all.
The roots of her style lie in her work with groups like Vivian Girls and Dum Dum Girls in the late 2000s, hammering out jangly garage-pop anthems that wrapped themselves in Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” as though it were an old fur coat, a moth-eaten vestige of a more glamorous yesteryear. Rose’s solo debut, a self-titled album credited to Frankie Rose and the Outs, followed the same blueprint: fuzzy guitars, ginormous backbeat snares, and girl-group harmonies spun as airy as cotton candy. If those records were the mold, then 2012’s Interstellar was the cosmic launch pad: a sleek, retro-futuristic take on indie pop bathed in wordless coos, layers of luminous synths, and endless reverb—not so much a wall of sound as a doorway to a higher dimension. The difference between the two albums was stark, but that’s when the diminishing returns set in. The lovely Herein Wild, just a year later, was virtually identical to its predecessor; after the surprise of Interstellar’s stylistic quantum leap, it felt like a cosmic cul-de-sac. Fortunately, on Rose’s new album, Cage Tropical, she shows that style can also be a lens, a way of cutting through the murk to find clarity.
Cage Tropical does not break with the form established by its predecessors. Her sound remains vast and yearning, with gut-punch drums pushing through explosions of colored powder; her voice is a chrome-plated sigh, and her agile melodies soar effortlessly. But the best songs manage to take the Frankie Rose formula and subtly tweak it. She’s always had a hybrid sound, as indebted to ’80s new wave (particularly Cocteau Twins and the Cure) as it is ’60s pop, but her alloys have never been as complex as they are here. “Art Bell” begins with Stereolab-like organs and dips into sultry, snake-like goth before diving into one of her characteristically gleaming, ’60s-inspired choruses. “Trouble” rides a motorik rhythm reminiscent of Neu!, marking her most extensive foray into krautrock yet, and it sounds fantastic, particularly when paired with her long, linear melodies and counterpoints. There’s an unmistakable hint of funk in “Cage Tropical,” one of the album’s standouts, which lives up to its title in the lilting, syncopated keys, and on the moody “Dancing Down the Hall,” she lets slip a pitch-bending blue note. Even though it’s over in a fleeting moment, the effect stays with you; it’s a small but significant shift from her usual habit of creating tension by contrasting minor and major-key passages.
Though it was recorded in her longtime home of New York, much of the album was written during an ill-fated stint in Los Angeles, and you can detect traces of the Southern California atmosphere in the record’s grooves—the dry desert heat tamping down her customary reverb, the hours on the freeway yielding a boomy mixdown that feels optimized for car stereos. (The bass on this album marks a major leap forward from the last two records.) The Los Angeles connection might also make you think, however incongruously, of Haim. Rose shares their fondness for the faintly uncool side of ’80s pop, acts that availed themselves of new wave’s sheen without possessing much in the way of underground cred—bands like Tears for Fears, Simple Minds, A Flock of Seagulls. Time and again, she returns to those groups’ glassy digital synthesizers and crystalline guitar tones—the chords at the beginning of “Game to Play” are dead ringers for the ones that open the Fixx’s “Stand or Fall”—and her use of the studio is deeply indebted to a moment in the early ’80s when gloss burned exceptionally bright.
Which shouldn’t be surprising; these were bands that understood how much mileage you could get out of style. Many new wave acts advanced their careers by taking vintage hits and putting a modern polish on them: Soft Cell with “Tainted Love,” Naked Eyes with “Always Something There to Remind Me,” Love and Rockets (whom she references obliquely in the opening “Love in Rockets”) with “Ball of Confusion.” In the best cases, the shift from R&B quartets or easy-listening pop to synthesizers and sequencers made for a spine-tingling sense of defamiliarization. And while one occasionally wishes that Frankie Rose could get a few paces further out from under her own shadow, the best of Cage Tropical does something similar, taking her own retro influences and using them to leapfrog her way out of a creative rut. “Red Museum” is one of the best songs she’s ever written; it’s the rare Frankie Rose song you can imagine being given an acoustic reading. Combined with the four-dimensional production sheen—the gossamer backing vocals, upfront electric bass, an ice storm’s worth of digital keys and electric guitars—it offers a thrilling glimpse of what Rose is capable of.


A comedian known for his absurdity and irony, Tim Heidecker returns with an album of protest art as musical comedy. Its shining moments come when he is honest about his fear and anger over Trump’s regime.

Tim Heidecker: Too Dumb for Suicide: Tim Heidecker’s Trump Songs

In the dizzying, ludicrous, sociopolitical climate America has reduced itself to, what used to feel relevant now seems impotent. Take the overlapping forms of political comedy and protest art. Humor remains useful as a way to avoid insanity, but mocking someone as self-evidently farcical as Donald Trump is sadly futile. At worst, comedy right now can come off as clueless about how bad things really are, like laughter at a funeral. Protest art faces an even bigger quandary: how can artists hope to sway the consciousness of a public paralyzed by endless distractions, algorithmic bubbles, and weaponized lies?
It’s fitting, then, that one of the few explicitly anti-Trump albums released since the November election comes not from a truth-telling comic or a hard-hitting musician. Instead, it’s by an anti-comedian known not for satire or commentary but absurdity and layers of irony. As you might expect, some of Tim Heidecker’s bluntly titled Too Dumb for Suicide: Tim Heidecker’s Trump Songs has the what-the-fuck quality of his surreal TV programs “Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job!” and “On Cinema at the Cinema.” When he’s in this mode, the ambiguity of his sincerity—how funny is this really supposed to be?—becomes the point, rather than just making you laugh or giving you clear messages to think about.
But even though there’s a fair share of goofy meta-comedy on Too Dumb For Suicide—an alt-rock anthem about Trump’s bowel movements and a parody of Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” called “Mar-A-Lago” being the most obvious examples—the best parts of the album can actually be taken at face value. Heidecker wrote these songs quickly, “with the blood still boiling from whatever indignity or absurdity had popped up on my newsfeed that day,” as he put it. That expediency apparently pushed him to be more direct in places, helping him capture some of the fear and anger in our current miasma.
Too Dumb For Suicide opens quite directly, with a statement of intent called “Trump Tower.” Heidecker insists he’ll keep mocking the president no matter the consequences, even ending by openly thanking the First Amendment. Such a forthright approach produces the album’s best moments. On the Randy Newman homage “Cooked Chinese Chicken,” he makes a compelling case for burning the White House down to eradicate Trump’s stain. A fantasy ballad about Trump’s future legal reckoning, “Sentencing Day,” plays like both a celebration and an elegy. Heidecker’s words—“He’ll be gone/And we’ll all get to move on”—sound hopeful, but his mournful piano echoes the dread that justice might never be delivered. Even better is the buoyant “Trump Talkin’ Nukes,” a meditation on how one crazy person can blow up the world that’s also a surprisingly poignant history of generations dealing with nuclear doom, from hiding under school desks to play-acting Red Dawn.
In between these thoughtful tunes, Heidecker clowns things up to varying degrees of success. In the bluesy “Richard Spencer,” he relays a decree from God that it’s OK to punch Nazis, while the countryfied “For Chan” is a caricature of internet trolls narrated by a greasy-faced alt-righter who “can’t get away with murder/But I can ruin somebody’s weekend.” (Heidecker writes from experience here, having been targeted himself). Less convincing are tracks that indulge in easy cliches, such as “MAGA,” a heavy-handed satire of the stereotypical Trump voter that sounds like a bad Twitter thread.
The weaker spots on Too Dumb for Suicide don’t diminish its high points. It’s perhaps inevitable that a project aimed at a broad yet impenetrable target would be hit or miss. But the hits work in part because they’re coming from someone who is rarely this earnest in his passion. Here and there, Heidecker manages to articulate some of our prevailing confusion and terror in a way that resonates. With the days getting increasingly darker, even a few such moments can feel like the light at the end of a tunnel.