Toronto indie-pop quintet Alvvays’ Chad VanGaalen–produced debut is the sound of pristine pop music blasted through cheap, blown-out headphones. Every time it seems like a song is about to decay before your ears, you sense both the sadness and the liberation of knowing that nothing lasts forever.

Alvvays

Yes, it’s “Alvvays” as in “always,” not “All-vays”—but that typographic quirk is more than just an opportunistic ploy for this Toronto quintet to enhance its search engine optimization. (If anything, Alvvays’ dual affinities for post-C86 girl-group revisionism and dusty-grooved distortion strongly suggest they’re yearning for a time when seeking out bands involved trans-Atlantic fanzine correspondence and mail-order forms.) Apparently, the curious spelling was implemented to avoid confusion with the bygone, like-minded British indie-pop outfit with the same name. However, Alvvays actually proves to be a perfect visual manifestation of this band’s thematic framework: with nearly every crestfallen song on their debut pitched at the crossroads of commitment and abandonment, nostalgia and uncertainty, the band’s name effectively becomes the textual representation of the broken promises catalogued within.
Such quarterlife-crisis concerns—the bane a generation that, as one song puts it, feels like it’s “too late to go out, too young to stay in”—are natural preoccupations for a band of twentysomethings that is the very product of upheaval and a clean-slate reset. As recently as two years ago, Nova Scotia native Molly Rankin was still trying to establish her identity as a solo artist on the maritime club circuit—a task made all the more formidable by the fact she’s a descendent of Canadian roots-music dynasty the Rankin Family. An EP released under her own name in 2010 suggested she was destined to travel down a similarly bucolic path, casting her cheekily self-deprecating lyrics and siren of a voice in familiarly folksy surroundings. However, her partnership with that record’s guitarist Alec O’Hanley (formerly of Prince Edward Island power-popsters Two Hours Traffic) would eventually turn more ambitious. With Rankin enlisting childhood friend Kerri MacLellan on keyboards and O’Hanley recruiting PEI pals Brian Murphy and Phil MacIssac on bass and drums, the quintet relocated to Toronto last year with their new name, new aesthetic, and, in former brunette Rankin’s case, new hair.
But it’s not just the singer’s striking, peroxide-blonde locks that make Alvvays stick out from the infinite number of contemporary indie acts forging a similar union between early-’60s AM-radio pop and late-’80s freak-scene discord. On the band’s winsome Chad VanGaalen–produced debut, it’s the disarmingly frank, aching lyricism that ultimately raises them above the cardiganed fray, capturing both the humor and heartache of seeking intimacy in the big city. Amid the buoyant surf-tingled jangle of the opening “Adult Diversion,” Rankin isn’t just discreetly ogling a fellow commuter from afar; she’s already plotting out their future domestic bliss, asking her oblivious object of desire, “How do I grow old with you even if you don’t notice as I pass by you on the subway?” The rousing, pints-aloft follow-up, “Archie, Marry Me,” serves as a sequel of sorts where Rankin has got the guy, but not the ring—and yet she already sounds less like she’s fighting for the love of her life than checking items off a list (“Honey, take me by the hand, and we can sign some papers/Forget the invitations, floral arrangements, and breadmakers”), thereby proving that the only thing more tragic than a break-up song is one about a person desperate to break in.
Rankin possesses the sort of radiant but deceptively deadpan voice that lets her to infuse these lovelorn laments with sly, sometimes sinister wit: When she sings, “I left my love in the river” on the drowned-boyfriend requiem “Next of Kin,” there’s the simmering implication that she could’ve done a little more to save him. (The chorus to the dreamy slow-motorik ballad “Ones Who Love You,” meanwhile, is home to the most beautifully nonchalant F-bomb.) This sense of irreverence bleeds into the album’s production, whose scabrous guitar lines, synth-blurred vistas, and drum-machine experiments reveal the band are hardly the purists their pedigree might indicate. Presenting a brighter contrast to the claustrophobic insularity heard on VanGaalen’s own recordings and in his work with the much-missed Women, Alvvays eagerly scuffs up the band’s gold sounds with dissonant edges—not to deliberately obscure the gleaming melodies or make the band seem tougher than they are, but to enhance the very feeling of raw-nerved unrest seeping through Rankin’s lyric sheet. This is the sound of pristine pop music blasted through cheap, blown-out headphones—and every time it seems like a song is about to decay before your ears, you sense both the sadness and liberation of knowing that nothing lasts forever.


The Los Angeles quartet reinvents its sound on its sixth album, building on the cosmic post-rock improvisations first teased on 2022’s live Spiders in the Rain.

Vertigo

The West, to quote the Lizard King, is the best. In the years since Jim Morrison committed that bit of boosterism to wax, the synecdoche between a few hundred miles of California coast and our whole hegemonic civilization has only become more darkly involved. Thankfully, this same ballyhooed complex of energy, spectacle, and violence offers a handy template for processing ongoing developments on its political, aesthetic, and psychic frontiers: aptly, the Western.
Vertigo, Wand’s sixth studio album, is undoubtedly a Western—albeit in the contemporary style. Like the cinematic interpretations by Monte Hellman and Jim Jarmusch, it’s a meditation on inner frontiers, where borders constrict, identities shift, and maps go blank. Once upon a time, the Los Angeles quartet excelled at music fit for touring Mulholland Drive on research chemicals. Vertigo, by contrast, beats its vagabond retreat to the desert—to a Llano del Rio or Spahn Ranch of the mind. Its pleasures, consequently, are furtive and indirect, scattering like reptiles from an overturned stone.
At the heart of Vertigo is not a narrative so much as fugitive guideposts through life’s fractured final cycle. From out of a haze of electric guitar texture, opener “Hangman” shuffles the mandala mid-tempo that will sustain much of the album. Frontman Cory Hanson’s voice is somber, shell-shocked; the tale a sketch without fixed subject or object. “Somebody’s trying to disappear/I guess I will find out/I’m gonna see you here tomorrow/I’m gonna be left out…” A dream before dying or the memory of a blackboard guessing game? The hangman carries out his sentence, but he also eases us on our way. In this sludgy fever’s subsidence, extended coda “Curtain Call” suggests a soul’s ascent, its destination still uncertain.
Vertigo, too, emerges from a moment of uncertainty for the band. A four-year recording hiatus saw the departures of keyboardist Sofia Arreguin and founding bassist Lee Landey. Hanson, in the meantime, notched two formidable solo albums (recorded with help from Wand guitarist Robbie Cody and new bassist Evan Backer) whose energetic blend of folk, power pop, and progressive rock threatened intermittently to eclipse the main event. Ever resilient, Wand have conscientiously retooled their sound, crafting songs that seem excavated instead from the kind of cosmic post-rock improvisations first teased on 2022’s live album Spiders in the Rain. The result is a second debut of sorts, an act of self-definition in negative, at once a settling in and a shearing away.
Gone is their past material’s giddy, lysergic bounce; instead, drummer Evan Burrows pours a spacious, continual foundation where melodies rise through repetition, and rich details (with string and wind arrangements courtesy of Backer) slither and swim. The members of Wand would probably be first to acknowledge that this is ambitious stuff—something akin to the tabula rasa of Pygmalion or Spirit of Eden, a whole of metamorphic parts—and thus not without pitfalls. The glistening, incantatory back half of “JJ” must still overcome a somewhat muddled takeoff. Elsewhere, atmospheres can linger indistinctly; at length, you come to miss Hanson’s mischievous persona and the old band’s monster-movie licks.
Vertigo is not all evasion, however. Clouds part around lead single “Smile,” which revels in the band’s easy-riding FM radio influences, scanning for a frequency of longing to cut through our sketch-like desperado’s fatigue. And “High Time,” built from a percussive feedback pulse, seemingly from the top floor down, cascades into a deliriously layered sturm und drang, receding again in a vapor trail of strings and static, headed for the sunset.
But the essence of Vertigo remains defiantly (even frustratingly) in the eerie, interlinked soundworld designed around its peaks. Closer “Seaweed Head” stamps a mystic image on a twilit anti-climax, its flickerings the closest approximation of vertigo itself—the false perception of movement in stillness. “Find it really hard to see the ray/Got you green upside down in the month of May/Someone’s gonna tell you there’s nothing left to hide/Someone’s gonna bring you back through the other side…” Of course, the pervasiveness of motion is a scientific truth, and a spiritual one as well. Whether what awaits our hanged man is revelation, or some return to the primordial source, no one is saying. Vertigo is a welcome return for one of our most fascinating bands, in L.A. or anywhere else. That they’ve arrived with seemingly nothing to lose only heightens anticipation for what’s still to come.


The third album from the New Zealand quartet blends openhearted lyrics about post-breakup regret with a sugar-rush immediacy and a craftsman-like attention to detail.

Expert in a Dying Field

Only beautiful dreamers prize the amicable breakup. With fuck-yous in short supply, severance goes from a clean break to a wrench complicated by second-guessing and enduring fondness—not to mention the painful awareness that fondness either wasn’t enough, or wasn’t given freely enough when it mattered. The Beths’ third album swims in this swirl of hope and anguish—an emotional postmortem that can be hard enough for the regretful to interest their weary friends in, let alone power the kind of snappy songwriting this band made its name on. But the New Zealanders are in their element at turning these murky ruminations into sterling indie rock, its catchiness inextricable from songwriter Elizabeth Stokes’ almost painfully bright and openhearted lyricism.
On Expert in a Dying Field, the Auckland four-piece are back to full power after 2020’s understated Jump Rope Gazers, though they’ve recalibrated, too. Their 2018 debut Future Me Hates Me was giddy and bristling, of a piece with punk-spirited peers such as Hop Along; Expert is richer and less hurried, brimming with smart power-pop that brings to mind the casual virtuosity of ’90s Aimee Mann and the bonhomie and euphoria of Superchunk and Fountains of Wayne. Like the very best of their kind, Stokes, guitarist Jonathan Pearce, bassist Benjamin Sinclair, and drummer Tristan Deck make music that has a sugar-rush immediacy and a craftsman-like attention to detail that invites close listening.
In “Best Left,” Stokes regrets picking at her wounds “well past productivity,” and her bandmates’ pristine harmonies buoy her reminder, yelled at the heavens, that “some things are best left to rot”; the furrowed soloing, meanwhile, makes an intrepid lunge for the freedom of leaving it all behind. Their choruses have an anthemic ease: “Don’t cry/I’m on the next flight,” Stokes imagines her ex saying on “Your Side,” elongating the rhymes to bask in the fantasy, and you’re there dreaming right along with her. But at the same time, their arrangements are visceral and complex, as if they had scored the surges of an adrenaline rush. Stokes often forgoes straightforward melodic toplines to scale and dance around the impetuous playing, moving almost as deftly as Life Without Buildings’ Sue Tompkins amid the chaotic noise of “Silence Is Golden.” Although a couple of songs get samey, Expert is relentlessly invigorating and grounded by the clarity of Stokes’ writing.
On the title track, Stokes wrestles with what to do with the once-shared intimacy of a defunct relationship, her now-obscure specialist subject. What to do with the memory of your former partner’s footsteps on the stairs, your nonsensical shared language, your loving months or years-long research project into how to make them laugh so hard they gag? Stokes’s delivery goes from fluttery to frustrated as she realizes she can’t do anything but live with it. “How does it feel to be an expert in a dying field?” she asks bittersweetly one final time as the song thrashes to a close, as if she’s handing out trophies for her graduating class of pyrrhic winners.
Expert finds its stakes in Stokes’ careful considerations of whether the relationship might yet be salvageable, delivered in a direct address to whoever it is she most wants to hear it. She examines her own fearfulness and and anxieties, admitting to her shame on “Knees Deep” that she only wades up to her ankles in life, and her envy and admiration of someone who slices “like a knife through the surface”—although the full-bodied elation of her performance suggests a different kind of introvert’s boldness. And her attempts at persuasion are even more crushing for their pop perfection. “When You Know You Know” has the loose edge of Sheryl Crow paired with the sort of heart-in-throat bridge writing Taylor Swift does so well. As Stokes sings in a nervous, anticipatory run-on:

Never seen a heart in a worse condition
Pinning all my hopes to the wrong pin cushion
But if you wanna try we could leave it all tonight
We could be aglow in the streetlight

Next the tension breaks to embody her hopes, and they’re “running down the road to jog the memory/Like tit for tat, that is you for me”—just one example of Stokes’ consistently charming and original way with an aphorism. It’s a memory she returns to on closer “2am,” the album’s lone slow song, a lull of rolling guitar and vocal harmonies that steadily build to an iridescent crescendo. “Do you feel it?” Stokes asks. “Feel it like you did back then?/2am/We were pounding the pavement/And I wonder/Could we be that way again?” She sings with an incantatory rhythm, as if teasing their union into existence, and a slight sense of hesitation, all the while painfully aware of the weight of the question. That’s the thing Stokes knows about being an expert in a dying field: It’s the hope that kills you.


The onetime 30 Rock writer and Community star Donald Glover’s newest Childish Gambino album is a multi-platform project that includes guest spots from Chance the Rapper, Azealia Banks, Problem, Mystikal, Miguel, and Jhené Aiko, among others.

Because the Internet

Donald Glover is a restless polyglot, and you can watch him tire of a medium just as he appears to get good at it. He caught the small screen bug after a stint as a writer for 30 Rock and skated off to join the ensemble cast of NBC’s Community in 2009. With Community approaching what might be its twilight, Glover jumped ship this year to become the star and showrunner of his own loosely autobiographical FX sitcom Atlanta. He hasn’t had much time for stand-up since 2011’s hour-long special Weirdo. In a sense, his rap career, hatched in 2008 after plugging his name into an online Wu-Tang rap name generator and receiving “Childish Gambino” as a result, has been his most enduring project. It has also been his most troubled.
Early Childish Gambino releases like 2008’s Sick Boi carried the playful “Just fucking around, sorry!” vibe of a rap career started on a lark but buckled under too much squeaky voiced Lil Wayne worship. Gambino later linked up with Community composer Ludwig Göransson for Culdesac and EP, proudly twee-as-fuck offerings that pondered Glover’s outsider upbringing over increasingly plush instrumental settings. But as the beloved Community awarded Glover’s musical exploits a higher profile, the pridefully uncool sloganeering of songs like Culdesac’s “Different” crystallized into spite. Gambino seemed to draft Camp, his nerd rage nadir of a debut studio album, as a piss and vinegar shower for his doubters. It spent more time thumbing its nose at the backpackers, racists, and dismissive women that gouged out the massive chip on Glover’s shoulder than it did, you know, trying to be a good rap album. The 2012 follow-up mixtape Royalty tried to recover by calling in buddies from Black Hippy, Wu-Tang Clan, and more to boost Gambino’s hip-hop cred, but he ended up getting creamed every step of the way by his more talented friends.
This year Donald Glover got weird. He announced a new album, the clunkily titled Because the Internet, and launched into a promotional campaign that included a confessional series of Instagram posts about depression and fear, frank talk about mortality in interviews, an introductory prelude-cum-making-of-featurette titled Clapping for the Wrong Reasons, an installation at the new Rough Trade NYC store, and, finally, a 76-page, four-act screenplay that shares a title with the album. The star of Because the Internet is “the Boy,” the future estranged son of Rick Ross who gets his kicks trolling celebrities online and hosting mansion parties that only serve to amplify a nagging loneliness. The story tracks the Boy’s helpless, irrational descent to his own undoing. Viewed through the lens of the album and screenplay, Gambino’s pre-release antics may have even been part of a long con to tease the themes of the project out into the real world.
If you’re fleet enough of a reader, the sequential song prompts in the screenplay reveal the album to be less of a stand-alone release than the full-fledged audio component to a daring multi-platform media project whose audio and literary wings collude to complement and even explain each other. “II. Worldstar” begins as a blippy trap number and takes a hard left on a found-sound fight sequence before landing on a psychedelic chamber jazz coda all because of a club night gone wrong in the play’s first act. Unfortunately, as the play begins to lurch with purpose the album resolves to allow the screenplay to do the heavy lifting. The third and final acts of the album are ill-served by the hairpin shifts in action they’re meant to soundtrack, and in the process, we get a series of jerky, very literal advance-the-plot numbers like “The Party” and “No Exit” followed by over-long, mournful fare like “I. Flight of the Navigator” and “II. Zealots of Stockholm (Free Information)”, songs that are well-timed and appropriate in the context of the multi-platform project but don’t make much sense without the screenplay. It’s all very ambitious, but experiencing Because the Internet as the artist intended requires an hour of fully plugged in attentive reading, embedded Youtube clip viewing, and listening.
On its own, Because the Internet’s album component breaks a number of Childish Gambino’s poor rap habits. Glover’s mic skills have radically improved since the last few outings, and his delivery is quite often formidable. The bouts of Kanye, Drake, and Lil Wayne tribute that assailed earlier efforts are mercifully absent. He seems to have found his own voice. Royalty’s injurious guest overload is scaled back in service to showcasing Gambino’s newfound mic control, so that all of the guests here are assigned hook detail. Chance the Rapper, Azealia Banks, Problem, and Mystikal all creep into the picture alongside Lloyd, Miguel and Jhené Aiko, but barring the Aiko spot on “Pink Toes”, Gambino takes all the verses. It’s a blessing and a curse; Gambino’s gotten rather good at the physical act of rapping, but he can still be a Christmas ham with the wordplay. The album is a minefield of wacka-wacka punchlines, facepalm-inducing hashtag raps and clever-until-you-really-think-about-it puns in spots, hampered periodically by gunk like, “In the garage/I had a menage/I murdered the vag,” “I got no patience, ’cause I’m not a doctor/Girl, why are you lyin’? Girl, why you Mufasa?,” “Yeah, you got some silverware, but really, are you eating, though?” and, my favorite, “Tia and Tamera in my bed, I’m a Smart Guy.” (If you’re Smart Guy Taj Mowry, and Tia and Tamera are in your bed, you’re not getting any action. They’re your sisters.)
With Gambino’s wordplay ping-ponging from caustic wit to message board snark, the enduring strength of the album is its production. Gambino and Göransson handle the bulk of it here alongside usual suspect Stefan Ponce and alley oops from twin act Christian Rich and Flying Lotus associate Thundercat. Because the Internet’s production team not only ensures the sounds are pretty, spacey, and jarring in all the right places, but they also effortlessly nail the album’s Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz synchronicity gambit. “III. Telegraph Ave. (‘Oakland’ by Lloyd)” kicks off with a tinny fragment of a Lloyd song bellowing out of a radio station and opens up into a full blown Gambino R&B showcase. (Glover might be a better singer than a rapper now, as tracks like “Telegraph Ave.” and the curt, exquisite “III. Urn” regularly bear out.) Following in lock step with the screenplay, you learn that it’s a Secret Life of Walter Mitty–style bout of impassioned karaoke to a song that nails the protagonist’s station in life a touch too closely. It’s not only the album’s best song; Gambino’s hook writing nearly bests guys we’d previously thought him to mimic, and he slides masterfully into and out of a cogent sixteen on the back end. It’s also a fulfilling payoff for bothering with the totality of Gambino’s project in the first place, a gobstopping execution of a lofty idea.
When the parts here come together you can catch a glimpse of Glover’s ambitious plan fully realized, but these moments run scarce the further into the project you trudge. This is saying nothing of the risky outlying assumption that everyone interested in the new Childish Gambino album is also interested in (or aware of) the new Childish Gambino screenplay you’re meant read online alongside it. Because the Internet is a nobly expansive attempt at plumbing the catacombs of social media for meaning and exploring the gap between the performative avatars we present as our online selves and the offline realities of our lives, but like the Twitter hounds and comment section warriors it speaks to and about, it could ultimately do well with a little less multitasking.


After two game-changing LPs and the surprise 2008 success of "Paper Planes", M.I.A. returns with an album heavy on noise and light on memorable songs.

/ \ / \ / \ Y / \

Pop music has a way of forgiving artists on a hot streak. You can say, do, or get accused of horrible things, but most of time, if you're delivering the goods, the public will remain on your side. This is why R. Kelly is like Teflon, and why outrage regarding Michael Jackson's scandals and peculiarities only truly hobbled him when the quality of his music began to slide in the early 1990s. Madonna, too, has proven herself capable of multiple comebacks following creative missteps and P.R. disasters. Right or wrong, the social contract is simple: If you bring the hits, we'll put up with your shit.
With *///\Y/*, M.I.A. has broken that contract. And she could not have chosen a worse time to do it. The album comes not long after a New York Times Magazine cover story that portrayed her as a pretentious, truffle fries-eating phony spouting radical politics at odds with her extremely comfortable lifestyle. The piece was devastating to her credibility, and her childish response-- putting the author's cell number on Twitter-- only made matters worse. It seems likely that *///\Y/* will only accelerate this M.I.A. backlash. The record is a shambling mess, devoid of the bangers that characterized Arular and Kala, two of the stronger pop albums of the past decade. It aims to capture a technological and cultural zeitgeist in its over-stimulated, digitally degraded sound, but the songs are too flimsy to carry her bold conceit. Without compelling tunes, the obnoxious public antics, dubious political messages, and thin voice that had grated on her naysayers have become impossible for even dedicated fans to ignore. It's as if everything that was great about M.I.A. has been stripped from this music, leaving behind only the most alienating aspects of her art and public persona.
It's hard to tell whether *///\Y/* is half-assed or half-baked. There are certainly a number of good ideas in the mix here, but the execution is lacking. Tracks like "Story to Be Told", "Lovealot", and "Teqkilla" come across like mildly promising demos ready to be edited into sleeker, stronger compositions. Lead single "XXXO" sounds unfinished, as if everyone involved figured they may as well wait around for someone else to make a better remix. Most of the songs are built out of digital clangs and electronic noise, but unlike Kala's "Bird Flu", in which chaotic clatter was the basis for a brilliant track evoking panic and confusion, this cacophony doesn't signify much of anything, aside from perhaps a desire to seem confrontational and daring. There are moments of interesting noise, but in the absence of appealing grooves or memorable hooks, it barely matters.
The production credits on *///\Y/* aren't too different from Kala or Arular. Regular collaborators Switch and Diplo are back, but their contributions are disappointing despite their previous chemistry with M.I.A. "Tell Me Why", one of two songs with Diplo, aims in the general direction of the pop crossover success of "Paper Planes", but the beat is limp, and the song is marred by a poor, heavily Auto-Tuned vocal performance. "Born Free", produced by M.I.A. with Switch, is appealingly aggressive and punky, but the intentionally amateurish sound diminishes rather than accentuates its visceral impact. "Steppin' Up", a Switch collaboration with Rusko, is the album's most successful attempt at grafting her jarring new aesthetic to a traditional M.I.A. rhyme, but it's still a far cry from, say, "Bamboo Banga" or "Pull Up the People". Both producers get lost in this deliberate clutter.
M.I.A.'s new collaborators don't fare any better. Dubstep producer Rusko seems to be the most dialed-in to her current muse, but his tracks are better at evoking vague menace than provoking physical movement. Sleigh Bells' Derek E. Miller, author of some of 2010's most inspired and aggressive bangers, is wasted here. Rather than providing a track as enormous as "Kids" or "Crown on the Ground", his riff from the Sleigh Bells tune "Treats" is mutated into the haphazard "Meds and Feds". That song is not a total disaster, but it's certainly a missed opportunity and a poor application of a strong guitar riff. Sugu's intro track "The Message" is the worst thing on an album of failed experiments-- a bad demo with a simplistic, paranoid rap that's as rhetorically effective as someone in a dorm room ranting about the C.I.A. inventing A.I.D.S. It's not the best idea to kick off your politically charged album with a song that demolishes the possibility of addressing a serious issue about privacy with any degree of depth or nuance.
It's not exactly a surprise that M.I.A. would opt to create such an off-putting and anti-pop album at this point in her career. She may be reaching for an interesting and provocative style, but her motives seem defensive in nature-- reasserting her artsy, agit-prop cred not long after breaking through to the mainstream and becoming engaged to the heir of the Bronfman liquor fortune. On a superficial level, *///\Y/* is a challenge, but it's really more of a retreat. She's shrinking from her chance to engage with a mainstream audience, and refusing to live up to her potential as a pop artist. One hopes that *///\Y/* is just a detour, a misstep, something she had to get out of her system before getting back on track.


The South Sudanese star reflects and celebrates the liminal life of a refugee on his first album recorded in Australia, where he's lived in asylum from his home country's civil war since 2014.

Unity

The king of South Sudanese music has been living in a suburb of Melbourne since 2014, a refugee of his home country’s civil war. Blind since birth, Gordon Koang was a prolific writer and star in South Sudan, with ten LPs to his name. He was in the middle of an international tour when he decided not to return to home, fearing for his safety as members of his ethnic group, the Nuer tribe, were being killed in pogroms. Koang did not release music for a half-decade in Australia, until connecting with Music in Exile, a nonprofit that links refugee musicians with the country’s network of indie venues and infrastructure.
Unity is his first new album since leaving South Sudan, and his first attempt to articulate what it means to be an artist who exists between states. For Koang, this isn’t just a geographical issue. Across Unity’s eight songs, he calls on his home country’s many ethnic groups to find common ground, celebrates the bond between audience and musician, and longs for an eventual reunion with his wife and children, who he hasn’t seen since arriving in Australia. The combination of Koang’s South Sudanese thom and the group of local indie rockers who make up his band produces an energy to match the music he made back home—a pleasant surprise, even if they sometimes struggle to figure out how to use it. (South Sudanese percussionist Paul Biel, Koang's cousin and fellow refugee, also contributes.)
The thom is a harp-like instrument similar in sound and appearance to the East African krar. Koang plays it as both a rhythmic and melodic instrument, making it sound something like a Delta blues guitar or a detuned kora. His melodies unfurl in long, legible lines that he doubles with his vocals. Though his earlier music was largely backed by drum machines and synthesizers, he knows how to command a live ensemble, egging them along with his instrument and daring them to keep up. His bandmates step cleanly into the tight pockets he creates, and they move along at a parade-march pace.
While Koang is capable of leading the band wherever he wants to go, at times it’s not clear where they’re headed. With the thom setting the pace, the songs skip and skitter with frantic, locomotive energy. When properly harnessed, as in the pulsing “Stand Up (Clap Your Hands),” that energy nearly matches the incredible highs of his concerts. But the longer cuts here don’t progress so much as they dilate, stretching beyond what feels like their natural run times without pursuing any kind of melodic or rhythmic development. “Mal Mi Goa” opens with a synth that shimmers like a gold curtain, but the instrument dutifully settles into a simple rhythm pattern for the rest of the song’s eight minutes. Absent any real soloing or groove-digging, the lack of movement can be stultifying.
But Koang’s charisma is strong enough to pull the listener through when the album starts to stall. Whether he’s singing in English, Arabic, or Nuer, he emotes like someone who’s used to making himself heard over raucous crowds, and he knows precisely where to push into a higher register. On the intricately melodic “Stand Up,” Koang prods his listeners to join him and the band on stage, rounding out the chorus by declaring “we love you, audience.” He reels notes out of his thom, nearly cackling with delight as he sings along. His palpable sense of purpose keeps the mood bright, even when the subject matter turns dark. He counsels his fellow exiles in “Asylum Seeker,” advising patience and good cheer as they wait for new visas. On closer “Te Ke Mi Thile Ji Kuoth Nhial,” he sings across the ocean, sending comfort to his family as the band splashes blue chords behind him.
Shortly after Koang finished work on the album, the government granted him his permanent protection visa, making it possible for his family to finally join him in Australia. “There’s a lot of change here” Koang told The Guardian of his new country, “[but] now it’s home.” Unity is a reflection of his in-between existence. It’s indelibly shaped by his Australian bandmates, and it’s of a piece with his South Sudanese roots; happiness and grief wind their way through nearly all of these songs side by side. There’s joy in these liminal spaces, Koang makes clear, setting up shop inside and inviting the audience to join him for a dance.

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For the most rewarding installment in RVNG's FRKWYS series, Sun Araw and M. Geddes Gengras traveled to Jamaica to collaborate with legendary reggae vocal group the Congos on this psychedelic gospel album.

The Congos / Sun Araw / M. Geddes Gengras: Icon Give Thank

Icon Give Thank

By the mid 1970s, Lee "Scratch" Perry's Black Ark Studios in Jamaica was conjuring unequivocal reggae albums (not to mention singles and special dub plates for soundsystem battles) at a possessed rate. There was the soulful work on Junior Byles' Beat Down Babylon and George Faith's To Be a Lover, Doctor Alimantado's raucous Best Dressed Chicken in Town, the drum-drug of Ras Michael & the Sons of Nagus' Love Thy Neighbour, Junior Murvin's trenchant and keen Police and Thieves, Max Romeo's loverman-cum-revolutionary on Revelation Time and War Ina Babylon. And then there was the epochal Heart of the Congos, the 1977 album cut by the Rastarian duo of the same name.
"Ashanti" Roy Johnson and Cedric Myton formed as a vocal duo, but to their already celestial vocal harmonies (perhaps if Curtis Mayfield and Barry Gibb had intermingled their throats), Scratch added the thunderous baritone of Watty Burnett to the Heart mix, which at times also included the harmonized mewl of a zombie cow. Now is not the place to unpack the majesty that is Heart of the Congos (where a song like "Ark of the Covenant" sounds exactly like that). Suffice to say it placed higher than any other reggae album in Pitchfork's survey of the 1970s, and former editor Scott Plagehoef waxed rhapsodic on those angelic voices that "contemplate spiritual awakening, cultural pride and human weakness (while) Perry practices a sort of addition by subtraction."
Even if he does put incants to Stevie Wonder, Bo Diddley, and Don Cherry on his most dubbed-out albums (see my personal highlight, Heavy Deeds, where the flange droops like Dr. Alimantado's zipper), Sun Araw's Cameron Stallones hews closest to Perry's cosmic swamp noise. Having Stallones-- with fellow West Coast noisenik M. Geddes Gengras-- venture to the wilds of Jamaica to record with the Congos (a four-piece now with the addition of touring member Kenroy Fyffe) makes a strange sort of sense. As long as you don't think too hard about stoned white guys tripping down to a third-world country seeking spiritual communion.
"With the Congos, if we had gone there and tried to be 'Hey, we're coming to you as white musicians from America... and we're going to do it in this way...' [we'd have been] setting up a hierarchy," Stallones told the Wire in a recent cover story. "As if [we're] understanding the situation more clearly than they do. And that's incredibly condescending. And incredibly false." There are moments of each party feeling the other out, resulting in an album that grows more assured only as it goes deeper. And for this collaboration, it sounds like Sun Araw are practicing sonic subtraction rather than addition.
"Happy Song" squiggles around Johnson's unwonted high register, guitars snake like something out of Black Dice's Creature Comforts, all of it underpinned by massive hand-drum bass drops. Between those canyonesque drops and the Nyabinghi drums that open "Invocation", this might spur UK dubstep producers like Shackleton and T++ to book the next flight to Kingston. A paean to "Sunshine" slinks at a crawl, the Congos incanting that it's "time to make a move, time to get you in the groove" while Gengras and Sun Araw instead proceed like a Pocahaunted acid folk processional.
In that same article, Stallones hints that even he was uncertain of how the Congos might react to the alien, non-roots music presented before them. And at the fore of the album, there are instances where the Congos sound hesitant on such terrain. Peak-wise, there are more transcendent vocal harmonies to be heard on Heart's bountiful "Fisherman" than on the entire first side here. But then a shift occurs: "At some point a little bit further into the recording though, [Ashanti Roy] turned to me and said, 'Oh, they're like chants.' And from that point it made so much sense to everyone." So as the album closes on "Invocation" and the ethereal lagoon drift of "Thanks and Praise", the symbiosis between both parties levitates to another plane, beyond dub, dancehall, roots, Ancient Romans, never really sounding like anything of the aforementioned genres. It's not the best reggae album of 2012, nor the best noise album, but it's undoubtedly the best psychedelic gospel album you'll hear all year.
What makes this, if not the most fully realized, then the most rewarding entry in RVNG's already ambitious FRKWYS series (see here and here) is that it doesn't sound like noise dudes just trying to make the simulacra of a dub reggae album. Nor is it a recording-artists-of-a-bygone-era-aligning-themselves-with-youth project. While Heart of the Congos' most repeated refrain remains "we've got to reach a higher ground," when Icon Give Thank succeeds, it's when the six men instead find common ground.


Let me get this off my chest right away: Your Blues, the latest album from Vancouver-based singer/songwriter and New ...

Your Blues

Let me get this off my chest right away: Your Blues, the latest album from Vancouver-based singer/songwriter and New Pornographers contributor Daniel Bejar, could be the soundtrack for a Sega Genesis game about kittens studying post-structuralism. It is host to unapologetic MIDI instrumentation, glaringly theatrical vocals, and that ubiquitous but rarely implemented synth preset called "aah voice." Much more so than with any other Destroyer album, the aesthetic of Your Blues can be intensely jarring, and will likely annoy the fuck out of many, many people.
Ultimately, though, it's the most initially vexing aspects of Your Blues that prove the most endearing, memorable, and surprisingly touching. Like Bejar's 2002 release This Night, Your Blues constitutes a fundamental challenge to deeply ingrained conventions of sincerity and emotional honesty. The record's conceptual brilliance lies largely in Bejar's ability to craft deeply moving passages out of ostensibly artificial and contrived elements, subtly suggesting that all music, if not all human expression, is in effect some sort of artifice. Bejar's critical engagement with codified aesthetic techniques certainly renders Your Blues a less immediately "accessible" record, and can at first come off as kitschy or detached. But the album's unique and defiant expression makes this the most holistically accomplished album Bejar has released to date.
Though it's a conceptually fascinating record, it would be unfair to write off Your Blues as a "concept album," or to suggest that its atypical aesthetic renders it unlistenable. Without a doubt, it's the songs here, not the conceptual meaning that could be read into them, that constitutes the core of the album's appeal. In fact, Bejar's newfound ability to conjure a plastic orchestra allows many of these songs to achieve a textural and structural richness only hinted at on previous albums. "The Music Lovers", previously released as a Sub Pop Singles Club seven-inch, benefits greatly from this treatment, as rising lines of synthesized strings grant the song a terse harmonic complexity absent from its more previous incarnation. "It's Gonna Take an Airplane" is an exercise in pure melodic elegance, a sing-songy, cleverly composed construction of bright acoustic guitars, multitracked vocals, and warm, evocative synthesizers.
Elsewhere, Bejar's songwriting takes on a more grandiose bent. The album's opening track, "Notorious Lightning", finds Bejar sing-speaking his way through a string of vague-yet-striking images, slowly building to a rousing, anthemic finale. Framed by fake tympani, strings, and snare drums, Bejar sings, "And someone's got to fall before someone goes free," his voice carrying an unrestrained, fist-clenched passion never before present in a Destroyer song. "Notorious Lightning", like many songs on Your Blues, has a markedly theatrical quality to it, its breathy vocal delivery and artificial orchestral arrangements landing somewhere between Stephin Merritt and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Like Merritt, Bejar explores the emotional momentum that these theatrical forms can evoke, reinforcing this connection with a computerized simulacrum of bombastic arrangements.
Lyrically, Bejar is at the top of his game, his words reinforcing his musical play on artifice in lines like, "Warm yourself by the fiery stage/ Fiery 'cause I lit it," and most notably, "Always the play, never the thing." The song "An Actor's Revenge" borrows its title from a Japanese movie, but replaces the film's visceral and dramatic plot with a more general and pointed discussion of impersonation, sincerity, and frivolity. On "What Road", Bejar hijacks a Smiths lyric, whispering, "There is a light and it goes... out," before an ascending swell of synth-strings ushers in a forceful coda, with Bejar hissing, "Your backlash is right where I wanted you," a clever (whether or not intentional) address to his potentially befuddled audience. Oftentimes, Bejar's delivery evokes Thunder Perfect Mind-era Current 93, only more fangy and melodic, and with substantially fewer lyrics about dragons.
Certainly, those hoping for a return to the more straightforward Destroyer of yore will initially be put off by Your Blues. But it's hard to see Bejar's refusal to backtrack as a creative hindrance. A full six albums into his career, Daniel Bejar is making a compelling case for self-doubt as a fine art-- not content to rest on the fractured charm of City of Daughters, the formal, classicist brilliance of Streethawk: A Seduction, or the epic, perverted rock-isms of This Night, Bejar has made his bravest and most iconoclastic album to date. Now, finally, the bandname begins to make sense.


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 Pink Floyd’s conflicted and brilliant album from 1971.

Meddle

It was a single note, flickering out like a beacon to lead a wayward ship through the night. Pink Floyd had no new songs prepared when they started recording in early 1971, but they did have access to the legendary Abbey Road Studios, and free rein from their label to mess around until they found their way. They spent weeks improvising with each member isolated from what the others were playing—a harebrained search for the sort of strange and spontaneous inspiration that their old leader, guitarist and songwriter Syd Barrett, conjured freely.
They called the results “Nothings 1-24”: Predictably, they were almost entirely unusable—except for this one note: a high B, played on a piano near the top of its range, warped by the undulations of a rotating Leslie speaker. It was piercing, but slightly obscured, as if it had traveled a great distance to reach your awareness. “We could never recreate the feeling of this note in the studio, especially the particular resonance between the piano and the Leslie,” drummer Nick Mason wrote later. So they used the demo tape, and began composing around it. “Echoes” grew from that note into something awesome: a 23-minute psych-prog voyage from tranquility to triumph to desolation and back, with a riff like a lightning bolt striking open sea, and a pillowy lead vocal keeping you cozy and safe below deck. It was the first song Pink Floyd completed for Meddle, their conflicted and brilliant sixth album.
After a period of flailing for direction, “Echoes” offered a path toward the populist art-rock epics that would make Pink Floyd one of the most successful bands in history. But it was also a kind of ending. During the late ’60s, under Barrett’s mad reign, Pink Floyd was turbulent and intuitive, balancing his fairytale songs with the sort of chaotic and noisy improvisations that presumably inspired Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon to name her dog after him. As their fame rose and bassist Roger Waters seized ever-tighter creative control across the ‘70s, the music increasingly favored solemnity over whimsy, formalism over exploration. “Echoes”—and Meddle as a whole—sit at the intersection of these two approaches, offering a hazy preview of Pink Floyd’s future as international stars without yet abandoning their past as visionary young ruffians.
From Pink Floyd’s founding in 1965 to Barrett’s ouster in 1968, they were the de facto house band of London’s nascent psychedelic scene. The members, a group of brainy misfits who’d assembled while attending university for art and architecture, mostly kept a professional distance from actual psychedelics—with the exception of Barrett, who indulged heartily. Soon after the release of Pink Floyd’s debut album, 1967’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, he became withdrawn and erratic: He refused to participate in performances, sat unresponsive as people tried to talk to him, sabotaged a TV appearance by standing still when he was supposed to mime along to a backing track. His bandmates grew frustrated by these impediments to their success. One day in February 1968, they decided they simply wouldn’t pick him up on the way to their show that night. That was the end of his time in Pink Floyd. Barrett recorded two solo albums, then withdrew from public life until his death in 2006. “I’m disappearing, avoiding most things” he told a Rolling Stone interviewer in 1971, the year Pink Floyd released Meddle without him. Two of the last songs he recorded with them were deemed too dark and unsettling for release until several decades later. “I’ve been looking all over the place for a place for me,” he speak-sings in one of them, his voice taking on a theatrical Mad Hatter edge. “But it ain’t anywhere.”
Syd Barrett’s story fits neatly within two late-’60s archetypes: the acid casualty and the doomed rock star. The reality is probably sadder, and more ordinary. With the rock star myth no longer as culturally potent as it once was, and more nuanced contemporary understanding of LSD’s relationship to disorders like schizophrenia—it can precipitate psychotic breaks in people who are already disposed toward them, but it doesn’t cause them by itself—he looks simply like a man with a serious mental illness, no desire for fame, and no one around who understood how to help him.
Nick Mason, in his memoir Inside Out, returns multiple times to the callousness with which he and his bandmates treated their frontman while he was unraveling, presenting their disregard for Barrett as a consequence of their fixation on making it as musicians. Beginning with 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon, their post-Barrett superstar years can be seen as a series of attempts to reckon with his absence and their guilt, even as they moved away from his vision of the band: Dark Side, a suite about how the pressures of modern life can drive a person to insanity, exploring mental anguish by the light of a lava lamp; Wish You Were Here, an elegiac and sometimes cynical album presented more or less explicitly as a tribute to Barrett; The Wall, a rock opera about a singer’s increasing alienation from society and his loved ones. These albums’ status as dorm-room classics can make their preoccupation with psychological instability seem like a bit of trippy kitsch, but it seems unlikely their creators see it that way.
There were six years and six albums between The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and The Dark Side of the Moon. During this limbo period, Pink Floyd seemed to be avoiding a confrontation about their identity, who they really were without their leader. 1968’s A Saucerful of Secrets mostly follows in the style of Piper; it came as Barrett was on his way out of the band, and is the only Pink Floyd album where he and Gilmour, his friend since secondary school, both appear. After that, there was a film soundtrack, a double LP with a live recording and a series of pieces the members recorded individually, and a ponderous quasi-symphonic work assembled in large part by a guest arranger. “Meddle was the first album we had worked on together as a band in the studio since A Saucerful of Secrets,” Mason writes, positioning Pink Floyd’s sixth album as the true follow-up to their second, and their first proper collaborative statement without any involvement from Barrett.
Making Meddle took the better part of a year, thanks to the band’s touring schedule and their insistence on doing things in “the most complicated way possible,” as Mason puts it. The every-man-for-himself jams that produced the “Echoes” piano sound were only the beginning: There were fruitless attempts at recording vocals backwards, pedals wired up the wrong way, a dog trained to howl along to music brought in as a collaborator. At some point, they convinced EMI, their label, that Abbey Road lacked the technical sophistication for the music they were trying to make, and moved the operation to George Martin’s recently opened AIR Studio, which had the state-of-the-art 16-track tape machines Abbey Road lacked.
Soon, Pink Floyd would marshal the precision of new recording technologies toward albums that were carefully planned from the top down, with every moment derived from an overarching theme and tuned for maximum impact. On Meddle, they’d arrived nearly at the rich and enveloping sonics of Dark Side, but not yet at its elaborate compositional holism. No other Pink Floyd album sits in quite the same sweet spot: huge and ambitious but beholden to no extramusical narrative, pushing at rock’s limits without reaching beyond them for the virtues of cinema and theater. It needs no three-act storyline or operatic themes and reprisals to flatten you to your couch and scorch a hole in your brain; the thunder of the band is enough to do that on its own.
Progressive rock was on the rise in early-’70s UK, and punk wasn’t far behind it. Pink Floyd would eventually come to be associated with the indulgences of the former, but they were always an imperfect fit for prog—they were certainly indulgent, but they simply lacked the instrumental virtuosity of bands like Yes and King Crimson. Early on, they had as much to do with noise rock, though the term was still decades from being invented. Johnny Rotten famously wore an “I Hate Pink Floyd” t-shirt onstage with the Sex Pistols; not long after, his deconstructed jams with Public Image Ltd. weren’t so different from the freakouts of “Careful With That Axe, Eugene,” or “Interstellar Overdrive.” Meddle has both: the sweep of Floyd’s proggy later days and the scrappiness of their origins.
The mostly instrumental opener “One of These Days” sounds like a Camaro rocketing through the cosmos. It is a visceral thrill that exists only for its own sake, introducing Meddle with a bit of hard rock sci-fi that does nothing to prepare you for the narcotized drift of the rest of the first side. The album’s first lyrics (aside from a brief spoken interjection in “One of These Days”) do a better job of setting the languid prevailing tone: “A cloud of eiderdown draws around me, softening the sound/Sleepytime, and I lie with my love by my side, and she’s breathing low,” Gilmour sings to open “A Pillow of Winds.” Whether consciously or not, these lines contain strong echoes of Barrett, who sang of being “Alone in the clouds all blue/Lying on an eiderdown” on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
If the Pink Floyd of Dark Side and onward grappled with Barrett’s legacy in their subject matter while shaking off his direct musical influence, Meddle is indebted to him as a musician without yet directly acknowledging him as a man. Its only inessential song is “Seamus,” featuring the aforementioned canine, whose blend of blues pastiche and playful sound collage is the clearest attempt to replicate the madcap character of Floyd’s earlier era. But where Barrett might have located some essential strangeness at the meeting of slide guitar and singing dog, the rest of Pink Floyd seem to believe the juxtaposition itself is enough. The lyrics—“I was in the kitchen/Seamus, that’s the dog, was outside”—are almost perverse in their refusal to engage with anything substantial.
“Fearless” is another matter. It focuses on the quiet dignity of an “idiot” following his own path up a hill while a crowd jeers from below that he’ll never make the top. As with much of Meddle, the guitar seems to proceed in slow motion, matching his humble climb, a stately ascending riff with ringing open strings that Waters played using an alternate tuning Barrett taught him years earlier. Gilmour takes the lead vocal, and his sleepy delivery—which usually implies a state of stoned beatitude—instead conveys sadness and futility beneath the determination. “Fearless” is among Pink Floyd’s greatest and most moving songs, heartbreaking even as the idiot seems to prevail over the voices that tell him he won’t.
If the band felt the story held any resonance with their own personal trials, they didn’t show it overtly. “Fearless” ends with a recording of a football crowd bellowing out the anthem of Liverpool F.C., framing its tale of perseverance with the simple good feeling of an underdog defeating a rival. Mason could never understand Waters’ insistence on this strange coda, especially given that the bassist was a devoted Arsenal supporter. Maybe his affinity was for the familial sentiment of the song itself, a Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune adopted by Liverpool fans after a local group turned it into a pop hit, rather than its sporting context. “Walk on with hope in your heart,” fans can be heard singing as “Fearless” fades out, “and you’ll never walk alone.”
But Meddle’s real reason for being is “Echoes,” which takes up the entirety of the album’s second side. Ambitious beyond anything Pink Floyd had attempted before, wild beyond anything they’d attempt after, it takes the origin of life itself as its subject, another humble ascent. In lilting harmony, Gilmour and Wright describe a scene deep below the sea: “No one knows the wheres or whys/But something stirs and something tries/And starts to climb towards the light.” As the song’s storm gathers force, its focus shifts to an ambiguous chance encounter between two people, descendents of those stirring amoebae. The drums grow more forceful; the guitars turn from vapor to liquid to solid to flame. In place of a climax, there is disintegration. The rhythm halts, the bottom drops out, and for one last time, Pink Floyd sound more like avant-garde improvisers than stadium rock musicians: groaning, twisting, screeching, expressing the complicated freedom of coming untethered from any plan.
Eventually, the beacon of that high B on the piano returns. The band reassembles and finishes the song. Later, they release one of rock’s greatest albums with Dark Side of the Moon, and solidify their status as icons forever. As if in a dream, Barrett makes a final visit to the studio as they record Wish You Were Here, its followup. He wanders into Abbey Road as an uninvited guest, bald and barely recognizable, seeming confused and disengaged when they play him samples of an album they wrote partly about him. Pink Floyd find their way through the storm of his absence, and eventually steer into another one: ego, money, fame, their corrosive effects on brotherhood. But for now, they are at the center of the turbulence, making noise, lingering in darkness and uncertainty until it’s time to climb out.

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On their third album, the Mexican dream-pop duo leans further into their soothing and immersive sound, taking a soft dive into the comfort of solitude.

Aprender a Ser

During the height of the pandemic, Mint Field returned home to Mexico City to record Aprender a Ser in isolation, then spent the last three years refining its sound. The mood is wistful, but never dreary. They sketch out hazy scenes, like clouds settling over a vast landscape without a stormy ending or a slinky noir film. While their previous work relied more on contrasting airy vocals with gritty guitar outbursts, Aprender a Ser leans into sleek trip-hop, with vaporous synths and Sebastian Neyra’s heavy basslines. It’s dream pop without a script.
Mint Field build a collection of shadowy tracks that blend seamlessly into each other. On “El Suspiro Cambia Todo,” radiating synths and licking reverb set a consistent atmospheric tone for the rest of the album. The group excels at fostering a specific airy reverie, and they don’t verge often from this chilled-out stupor. But on standout “Moronas,” a drum machine punches up the pace and locks in a track perfect for a vintage intergalactic video game. Mint Field pull from a popular set of ’90s influences—Portishead, Low, Mazzy Star—but they never feel too referential. The group weaves strands of its inspirations together to create their own avant-pop sound.
Frontwoman Estrella del Sol Sánchez’s hypnotic voice is at the core of the group. There’s a numbness in her drawn-out breaths. She never fully gives into her deepest emotions, so we’re left with our ear against the door, making sense of the muffled voices behind it. She was inspired by the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser, whose vocals served more as a layer inside a song’s arrangement. And like Fraser, Sánchez is always on the verge of floating away. On “Sueño Despierto,” Sánchez’s delicate falsetto melds with a swirl of fluttering saxophones, pulling us further into her impending dream state. It’s a harmonious example of how her voice fuses with lush instrumentals–the aural equivalent of watching dollops of paint mix on a canvas.
Sánchez is a spare songwriter, relying more on the timbre of her voice to convey the songs’ emotions than lyrical complexity. Her words often repeat, soft and yearning, evoking natural ephemeral images—the leaves of an orchid wilting or a butterfly’s brief lifespan. For Sánchez, nature is a reminder of her impermanence. There aren’t huge revelations to take away from these tracks. Sánchez only grazes the surface of her inner world without much personal specificity. And the album can dwindle as its weightless charm wears off. But Mint Field are more about conjuring a feeling than spelling out a narrative. Aprender a Ser is a dream world without much explanation, but like the body settling into a chilled pool, the acclimation is worth it.


Love Is Overtaking Me, a compilation of more as-yet-unavailable Arthur Russell material-- most of which was born from a more traditional singer/songwriter structure than the avant-garde cello compositions and kinetic, jazz-influenced disco for which he has also come to be known-- continues the late composer and producer's winning streak.

Love Is Overtaking Me

In the four years since Audika began releasing the much-loved but less easy to find music of composer and producer Arthur Russell, his popularity has soared. Particularly striking a chord with a younger generation of musicians, many have enthusiastically championed his progressive and influential sound. In 2007, Jens Lekman arranged the brief but tenderly constructed EP, Four Songs By Arthur Russell, which featured imaginative covers by Joel Gibb, Vera November, and Taken By Trees. Meanwhile, artists including Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear (who digitally restored and edited Love Is Overtaking Me), St. Vincent, and DFA's James Murphy have effused about their admiration for his distinctively free-flowing, compelling arrangements.
As Matt Wolf's perceptive, beautifully shot film, Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, reveals, Arthur Russell quite literally had hundreds of tape reels documenting the material he recorded, from his first compositions in the early 1970s to the very last made in 1991, a year before he died of AIDS in New York City. Love Is Overtaking Me, a compilation of more as-yet-unavailable material created during those two decades, proves to be a valuable insight into Russell's extensive body of work. Most of the 21 tracks on this album have a more traditional singer/songwriter structure than the avant-garde cello compositions and kinetic, jazz-influenced disco for which he has also come to be known. Tracks such as "Close My Eyes", "Oh Fernanda Why", and the traditional cowboy song "Goodbye Old Paint", are strong examples of his connection to folk music and are largely developed on acoustic guitar. A common thread always runs throughout Russell's work and is well represented here: his moving, gentle voice-- and a knack for storytelling that could rival Bob Dylan. On this album, these lovely lyrical details are especially prevalent on songs like "Habit of You" and "Big Moon", where Russell's sensitivity and sense of humor gracefully anchor the music.
Many other great artists at a similar level of Russell's prolificacy have more than enough skeletons in their musical closet, plenty of which would only appeal to the most die-hard of fans. The tracks currently being dusted off in his archive, however, have so far been dependably strong, despite being mostly unfinished tracks of incredible musical variety. Russell himself was rarely satisfied with his results, preferring to move on to the next song rather than dotting the i's and crossing the t's. His creativity, it seems, was pretty much constant. He would work every day without fail, and the songs on Love Is Overtaking Me are a deftly selected microcosm of this brilliant musical world. The compilation features all elements of Russell's margin blurring, from the warm pop of "Planted a Thought" and the Modern Lovers-influenced delivery of "Time Away" to the stark, cello driven song, "Eli", where the vocals and strings seemed to be in a tonal battle, although this brings an urgency to the lyrics (about a lonesome, mistreated dog) and allows them to resonate in the best possible way.
At the time of his death, Russell's music had reached only a limited audience outside of his devoted, often high profile connections (he collaborated with Philip Glass, David Byrne, and Allen Ginsberg, among others). Yet his distinctive music has the rare resilience to keep growing, connecting to more and more people because of its extraordinarily contemporary, even timeless, quality. While he was alive, Russell and his relatively small group of listeners were convinced that his music should reach more ears; that it should be able to stretch across the same boundaries that his compositions navigated so elegantly. Now, through the care of Audika and the genuine love of fellow musicians and fans that have recognized his prodigious talent, Russell is finally getting the acknowledgment his honest, powerful, and most remarkable music deserves.


After a protracted streak of hijacking Top 40 smashes like “U.O.E.N.O.” and “Bugatti”, spitballing weirdness out on mixtapes, and farming his more saccharine ideas out to huge pop stars, Atlanta's Future returns with Honest.

Honest

Much of the intrigue surrounding Future’s debut album Pluto fixated on the voice: raw and emotive, possessed of both a forlorn R&B Lothario’s despondency and the gruff yawp of a drug-runner celebrating a sold out batch, and shellacked in a thick, forbidding coat of Auto-Tune and reverb. Coupled with a penchant for interstellar iconography, the vocal modification frequently attracted science fiction descriptors, portraits of the artist as a moody machine. But Pluto’s most gripping cuts (“Turn on the Lights”, “You Deserve It”) took flight by scaling back the mods to focus on the unnerving frailty of a singer unafraid to skim around and across the break in his voice. Even in moments where Pluto’s vocals were heavily processed, the most captivating quality was the humanity poking through. So let’s set aside this robot business.
Pluto’s greatest success was opening new avenues in Future’s songwriting. At the time, his calling card was the trap house shouter: 2011–12 mixtape highlights “Tony Montana”, “Magic”, and “Same Damn Time” delivered dopeboy truisms via battering ram. Pluto collected those cuts for good measure, but otherwise it dispensed with the tough guy shit, reintroducing Future as a lovelorn hook man. As with Kanye’s 808s & Heartbreak, the transition from rapping to singing was smoothed out by a T-painian dollop of purposefully overdriven pitch correcting tech and confessional emotionalism. The gambit worked, but the album was a touch too reliant on its crutches in retrospect. After a protracted streak of hijacking Top 40 smashes like “U.O.E.N.O.” and “Bugatti”, spitballing weirdness out on mixtapes, and farming his more saccharine ideas out to pure singers from Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus to Rihanna and his fiance Ciara, Future finally returns with his second proper full-length, Honest.
Future’s got a notably greater command of his instrument two years on from Pluto, and to that end, much of the Auto-Tune and reverb that occasionally gave the first album’s vocals the distance of a radio transmission have been scrubbed. The training wheels are off. Fight songs like “My Momma” and “Covered N Money” draw their intensity from the quirky sound of a voice giving out screaming the titular choruses, a trick perfected on the searing pre-album street single “SH!T”. Flubbed notes are left in for character rather than squeegeed out by computers, but there’s less of those than ever because writing for and performing alongside other singers has worked wonders for Future’s range. The rousing upper register chorus for “Blood, Sweat, Tears” and the slick falsetto hook on “Honest” wouldn’t have worked with his voice before. “Never Satisfied” refuses to let Drake do the heavy lifting as Future confidently soars past the Toronto MC’s introspective vocalizing in between choruses. And where guests were once employed to secure a measure of credibility, now they hover in Future’s orbit: Drake gets faded out mid-chorus on the two-minute “Never Satisfied”, and even when Kanye parks the Kardashian roadshow in back of “I Won”, he sticks to the script.
Honest relinquishes Pluto’s romantic tendencies as well, retaining a personal bent without resorting to pining for affection to achieve it. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, Future said flatly, “There are no love songs on this album,” although mid-album stunners “I Won” and “I Be U” teem with pride and excitement about meeting the mate he yearned for on “Turn Out the Lights”. Otherwise, Honest prefers to buck expectations by sneering through the slow jams. Deep cut “Special” is all somber strummed guitars and taunts for an ex who couldn’t handle the fame. (“You ain’t even tryin’ to be special.”) The title track uses a sedate piano-filled production from DJ Spinz and Metro Boomin to coolly revel in newfound wealth and status in a wan, sad deadpan. (“I’m a rock star for life, I’m just being honest.”) Honest is consistently moneyed and aspirational in all the places you might’ve previously expected sap.
Future’s eagerness to escape his old tics and methods also means moving away from trap. There’s still room for grisly, gothic stompers from a murderer’s row of 808 architects from Nard & B to Sonny Digital and 808 Mafia, but Honest’s production is expansive. “Look Ahead” outfits a sample of Amadou and Mariam’s Santigold-assisted “Dougou Badia” with kicks, claps, and guitars for a powerhouse opening argument for Future’s growth. Fresh off a year of platinum hits, frequent collaborator Mike WiLL Made It has gotten weird: he approximates Noah “40” Shebib’s pulsating bass and muted drums on “Never Satisfied” and affixes rattling low end to the gritty, almost atonal synths of “Move That Dope” like a Southern rap Trent Reznor. The album closes with “Blood, Sweat, Tears”, a sermon about the fruits of perseverance delivered over martial drums and wrenching strings specifically designed, it would seem, to blow the lid off arenas.
The searching stream of mixtapes and loosies that followed Pluto appeared to many to signify a struggle to maintain footing in an industry notorious for feeding on Atlanta rap sensations and casting them aside once the hits dry up. But Honest surges with the self-assurance of an artist finally coming into his own. The bruisers are icepick sharp, the ballads restlessly toy with convention, and Future’s heightened ease with both makes Pluto look like a transitional album in retrospect, the dress rehearsal for this, the actual takeover.


Mount Eerie / Julie Doiron / Fred Squire: Lost Wisdom

Lost Wisdom

At a glance, a Phil Elverum/Julie Doiron meet-up seems entirely apt, perhaps even inevitable. The two share collaborators, hail from sleepy corners of their respective countries, and make music a Last.fm or Pandora bot would more than likely peg as "similar." Viewed a certain way, however, the two couldn't be more far afield. Elverum, as a songwriter, has long occupied himself with The Big Questions, his catalog full of probing meditations on birth and death, the elements, and the unknown. Doiron, conversely, has consistently stuck to the simple and domestic, quietly reveling in the tangible and everyday. Songs such as "Snowfalls in November" are patiently observed odes to satisfaction and serenity in the absolute. In short, Doiron is the contented period to Elverum's searching question mark.
The mini-album Lost Wisdom represents an intersection of those two distinct sensibilities and their resulting voices: Elverum, his tone often hesitant and sorrowful; Doiron, her singing reassuringly direct and familiar. For Doiron, this is a chance to wrap her warm, homespun vocals around Elverum's words of uncertainty, bringing earthly color to songs which, under the Mount Eerie banner alone, might emerge cold and gray. From her entrance on opening track "Lost Wisdom", a stately rumination rife with natural imagery which sets the tone for the album, through her solitary vocal on the Songs-era Leonard Cohen-evoking "If We Knew...", and on to the closing duet "Grave Robbers", Doiron is a reassuring presence in song-world often threatening to capitulate to doubt.
Indeed, it's this presence of a second voice that distinguishes Lost Wisdom amid the abundance of post-Microphones Phil Elverum material. To hear Elverum sing of his existential quandaries in isolation is frequently compelling, but with these songs often cast as duets, we're presented with the notion that Phil's struggles are universal. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than on "Voice in Headphones", the closest thing to a standout track on Lost Wisdom, with its harmonized refrain-- borrowed from Björk's "Undo"-- of "It's not meant to be a strife/ It's not meant to be a struggle uphill." It's the sort of lyric Elverum would have the whole crowd singing along to at a show, and here-- surrounded as it is by plenty of brooding restraint-- it sounds resoundingly triumphant, a more terrestrial counterpart to the otherworldly song it quotes and a kind of modern day spiritual for those oppressed within.
Elverum, too, benefits from the de facto constraints of this collaboration. The album was recorded during a brief touring respite, forcing him to forgo the intricate (if still lo-fi) ornamentation that typically adorns his output. It is instead, as he told Pitchfork, a "documentary of a session." Even Fred Squire's electric guitar is notably unobtrusive as it complements the two voices and the steady rumble of Phil's acoustic. The result is a collection of songs so taut and concisely resonant as to be psalms. But psalms to be sung, perhaps, in secret: "Grave Robbers", the closing track, ends with someone abruptly shutting off the tape. In a way we're made to feel as though we've been eavesdropping all the while, but even so, seldom has an act of auditory voyeurism been so rewarding.


A deluxe, remastered version of the indie rock classic, this original 1988 album was the first full articulation that the underground music of the Reagan era-- hardcore punk, high-art avant garde, quirky college rock, DIY, weirdo regional scenes-- was converging into a new, exciting Alternative Nation.

Sonic Youth: Daydream Nation: Deluxe Edition

Daydream Nation: Deluxe Edition

I don’t expect to hear too many complaints about the rating above. Daydream Nation is a great uniter: You’d be hard pressed to find many fans of indie rock who don’t have some love for this record. That’s partly because this record is great, sure—that’s one boring reason—but it’s also because this record is one of a handful that helped shape the notion of what American indie rock can potentially mean. It’s almost a tautology: Indie fans love Daydream Nation because loving stuff like Daydream Nation is part of how we define what indie fans are.
Not that there wasn’t plenty of underground music in the U.S. before this album’s 1988 release—hardcore punk, high-art avant garde, quirky college rock, DIY, weirdo regional scenes. But the notion that all those Reagan-era discontents might be in the same boat—a new Alternative Nation just beginning to converge—hadn’t yet been fully articulated. Sonic Youth sensed that convergence in the making, and they were pretty sure it had something to do with Dinosaur Jr.: “A new aesthetic of youth culture,” Thurston Moore called it in Matthew Stearns’ 33 1/3 book about the album, “wherein anger and distaste, attributes associated with punk energy, were coolly replaced by head-in-the-clouds outer limits brilliance.” Right. So the band writes the most glorious, accessible pop song of its career, calling it “J Mascis for President”—i.e., an underground-rock campaign song—and it kicks off this record under the title “Teen Age Riot.” What does that sound like if not the grand calling-together of a nascent underground audience?
Sonic Youth don’t set the song up as a call to arms. Instead, Thurston, singing, is in bed, just like you might be while listening to it—or to Bug, or Surfer Rosa, or Isn’t Anything, all of which came within the same year. Just two motes of potential energy, both waiting for Mascis to “Come running in on platform shoes/With [his] Marshall stack/To at least just give us a clue.” The video for this song contains more images of musicians who aren’t in Sonic Youth than musicians who are: Ian MacKaye, Patti Smith, Mark E. Smith, Iggy Pop, Black Flag, Sun Ra, Daniel Johnston, Neil Young, the Beach Boys—a crash course in what still, almost 20 years later, looks like an indie canon.
Following that, the band spends this double album managing to inhabit just about every major strain of the underground, collecting and referencing each facet of what this “new youth culture” might look like:

avant-garde Downtown NYC new music, complete with odd harmonic collisions and screwdrivers wedged in guitars
hardcore punk sneering and double-time drumbeats
good old off-kilter, accessible collegiate pop music
gorgeous, oceanic “head-in-the-clouds outer limits” guitar stuff, which-- along with the previous year’s releases from My Bloody Valentine, Dinosaur Jr., and the Pixies—would define indie rock’s guitar vocabulary as much as anything this side of Joy Division/New Order
high-art, film, and literary references, ranging from the album cover (a Gerhard Richter painting) to the lyrics (which borrow from an Andy Warhol film and books by Harry Crews and Denis Johnson—and this is before Denis Johnson published Jesus’ Son)
giant tongue-near-cheek rock gestures, like including a three-part “trilogy” and four Led Zeppelin-style icons representing the band members
slacker poses and goofy skater-kid trash culture
ambitious art-world braininess
this
that
the other

All melted down into one lump: “Seamless” isn’t even the word.
Of course, now that a whole genre's grown out from Daydream Nation’s roots, all its “difficult” sounds, modified guitars, and strange collisions have become de riguer, invisible, and normalized, more clearly revealing the shimmering pop epics that always lay beneath. What’s really shocking is the energy of it. This record’s default setting is the place most rock bands try to work up to around the third chorus—guitar players veering off into neck-strangling improvisations, singers dropping off the melody and into impassioned shouts. These songs start there and just stay. Usually the guitars spend a few bars wandering off and into sideways tangles, choking out their harmonies, and then come back together and spend a few bars pinning down the riff: On “’Cross the Breeze,” that means Kim Gordon keeps returning to the same refrain, each time grunting it more insistently than the last. Sometimes they don’t even stay there: Lee Ranaldo’s “Hey Joni” starts off already on some next level of energy, and then Lee shouts “kick it!” and the band ratchets up to some next next level, and then he coasts up to one exhilarating shouted “HEY!” and the band bursts through a ceiling higher than you could have imagined at the start of the track. It’s the kind of transcendent glory that crosses genres and even arts: that same in-the-zone feeling you get from a be-bop combo in top gear, a rapper at the absolute clear-eyed peak of his game—hell, even an athlete in perfect function.
Lyrically, it’s Thurston who turns in the rock slacker trash: When he’s not just lying in bed, heÆs wandering around downtown Manhattan, getting mugged, blowing up amplifiers, and talking in a stoned skater-kid argot (“you got to fake out the robot!”). Lee, being Lee, exists on some more mystical future/past plane, located in dreams and open fields instead of on the Bowery. Kim’s lyrics are the brutal, terrifying ones, each song outlining a flirtation with some demonic jerk. In “Kissability,” it’s a rotten entertainment mogul, pledging “you could be a star” and probably playing with himself under his desk. In “Eliminator Jr,” it’s Robert Chambers, the teenage rich-kid “Preppy Murderer,” and a horrible little shit even before he raped and strangled Jennifer Levin behind the Met in Central Park. In “’Cross the Breeze,” it may be the devil himself.
This reissue does what reissues have to do these days, raising the volume to compete with all the over-compressed new stuff on your mp3 player. Someone’s clearly taken care with the process, making sure not to spoil the wide dynamics of this music, but this kind of re-master isn’t the best fit for the open-room feel of the original: I’d be lying if I said the crystalline brambles of guitar in these songs didn’t suffer a little from being flattened out like this. (Steve Shelley’s busy, subtle drumming gets a particularly raw deal.) Mild audiophiles—or anyone attached to the feel of the original CD and LP issues-—might want to spring for the vinyl re-release.
On the plus side, this package is well aware that Daydream Nation is for celebrating Daydream Nation, and that there are already record stores where you can spend a year’s salary on Sonic Youth rarities. Never mind the four covers included, or the home demo of “Eric’s Trip” that quietly fades out the album disc: The treat, for this album’s devotees, is a terrific, seamless collection of album-contemporary live performances, touching on every song on the album. (Yes, even “Providence.”) It’s a thrill, and not just for those who've heard this record enough times to need a fresh perspective. Daydream Nation was one great, liberated scribble on the mostly blank slate of what underground rock was starting to become, and through these tracks you get to hear the band take it out on the road and show it to everyone—playing loose, sliding energetically through things they made precise on record. And, 12 tracks in, taking their J Mascis campaign song on a Straight Talk Expressway to Yr Skull.


The Los Angeles ambient musician continues to explore the interdependence of plants and humans, but they add new wrinkles to their placid style, shifting from easy listening to dynamic soundscaping.

Green-House: A Host for All Kinds of Life

A Host for All Kinds of Life

For proof that we all must ultimately coexist on this planet, look no further than coquina. The porous sedimentary stone forms almost entirely out of fragments of shellfish, trilobites, and other invertebrates; over millions of years, snails, urchins, and other creatures make the rock home alongside algae blooms, forming communities inside each rainwater-carved divot. Coquina lends both an opening track title and general ethos to Los Angeles musician Olive Ardizoni’s new album as Green-House, A Host for All Kinds of Life. Within Ardizoni’s ambient collage of field recordings, synth, and piano flourish idiosyncratic melodies crafted with the patient and methodical hand of a gardener.
A Host for All Kinds of Life is the first Green-House album Ardizoni has made with longtime collaborator Michael Flanagan as an official partner, and it represents a maturation of the ideas introduced on Green-House’s 2020 debut, Six Songs for Invisible Gardens. The music, deconstructed new age designed as a communication between plants and those who care for them, has evolved from soundtracking individual organisms to the mutually beneficial ecosystems they create. But Green-House’s work has always been invested in biotic beings big and small, following in the footsteps of artists like Mort Garson and musicians associated with kankyō ongaku, a Japanese style of ambient sometimes translated to “environmental music.”
Like kankyō ongaku, which sprang up in the 1980s in conversation with architecture and contemporary art, Green-House’s own branch of environmental music homes in on what flora and fauna might sound like behind the din of modern metropolis, almost as if a biodome started up a chamber band. Throughout A Host for All Kinds of Life, electronic elements—clean tones from Casio synths or mellotrons that form hypnotic refrains—are woven with field recordings that evoke intimate moments with the natural world, moments Green-House insists are still an intrinsic part of urban living. Even in a concrete jungle, signs of life as minuscule as the chirping of birds lift a veil of false separation between a city and its roots.
Where 2021’s Music for Living Spaces played like incantations for a struggling bird of paradise, A Host for All Kinds of Life takes more interest in pauses and negative space. Moments of stillness in “Lichen Maps” are brought to life by distinctive noises like the rustling of a dried rattlesnake tail, fed through a granulator plug-in, or a deep human breath. Sitar- or theremin-like synths on “Coquina” and “Luna Clipper” ring out tentatively before growing into more complex compositions. Green-House’s measured approach means that even on songs that intertwine three or four melodies, discrete textures from foley recordings or keyboards still ring out in the background like muted bells. The details in cuts like “Coquina” or “Castle Song” build so intuitively that it’s almost as if they’re happening in secret, a thicket blossoming away from prying eyes.
The gentle singing that graced Music for Living Spaces standout “Find Home” is absent from A Host for All Kinds of Life. The timbre is missed, but the choice may be deliberate: The only voice heard on the album arrives at the end of the winkingly titled penultimate track, “Everything Is Okay,” in the form of a voicemail from Ardizoni’s mother following up on a missed connection. “I didn’t want you to think that our conversation you wanted to talk about wasn’t important,” she assures Ardizoni, “because you are the most important.” Coming right after the title track collapses in a frenzy of agitated, pitch-shifted saxophone, “Everything Is Okay” feels like a steadying hand on the shoulder, unexpected but familiar.
Green-House bridges similar dichotomies often and skillfully on A Host for All Kinds of Life, engendering an atmosphere that's comforting but not exactly comfortable. In structuring the album around pregnant pauses and hushed single-instrument lines, Green-House realigns their sound away from easy listening and back toward a vision of active communion in shared space. Like any plant, A Host for All Kinds of Life requires careful attention without demanding it. But spend time with these songs, and small wonders—a chime, a beep, a grainy but unmistakably maternal “you”—continue to surface like new blooms on a lovingly tended vine.


Trumpeter Amir ElSaffar is after a trance-like state of ecstasy on the new release from his chamber orchestra group Rivers of Sound, which boasts some of contemporary jazz’s most powerful soloists.

Amir ElSaffar / Rivers of Sound: Not Two

Not Two

Trumpeter Amir ElSaffar’s father immigrated to the United States from Iraq. His mother was American. Because of that biography—and because ElSaffar grew up to be an expert in Middle Eastern modes as well as jazz improvisation—he has been the subject of a lot of talk about cross-cultural practices. In the liner notes for his ambitious new double album, he seems over it. Of his new orchestra group, he writes: “Rivers of Sound is not concerned with ‘bridging’ divergent cultures. In each composition, one can hear elements of maqam, polyphony, polyrhythmic structures, melisma, and groove. But these do not exist as separate entities ‘belonging’ to any people or place.”
In other words: sure, there’s a lot of material that goes into music like this. You’re not likely to have heard a jazz keyboardist playing a microtonally-tuned piano while riffing alongside a powerful rhythm section, a cellist, a vibraphonist, and musicians specializing in instruments like the buzuq (a lute-like instrument) or the santur (a hammered dulcimer instrument that ElSaffar sometimes plays). But focusing too much on individual ingredients isn’t the right approach.
ElSaffar is after balance, wholeness, a trance-like state of ecstasy. Throughout Not Two, the careful, even self-effacing manner in which ElSaffar guides his large ensemble manages to underline the benefits of this philosophical approach. The Rivers of Sound orchestra that plays ElSaffar’s compositions boasts some of contemporary jazz’s most prominent and powerful soloists: players like pianist Craig Taborn and guitarist Miles Okazaki. While there are select moments when individuals command center stage, the music never seems overly taken with a hero-soloist format.
Some of the best parts are dialogues, as at the tail end of the 12-minute composition “Ya Ibni, Ya Ibni (My son, my son).” After Taborn has contributed a short solo on an altered piano—required by this particular maqam’s scale—the sound of Jason Adasiewicz’s vibraphone joins the space. The latter’s resonant instrument creates strange but compelling harmonies alongside the microtonally-tuned piano. Next, percussion and guitar join, establishing a final groove. It’s a unique sound, and easy to dream along with.
The album is full of dramatic changes that sneak up in unassuming ways. Opener “Iftitah” begins with string instrument lines that create an ambient spell. The introduction of brass and reed instruments in the third minute could easily break the mood—but the ensemble’s control of dynamic levels makes the progression sound appropriately grand, all without seeming aggressive in nature.
There’s a stirring lute-instrument solo during “Jourjina Over Three,” but the group sounds most energized during a sprinting finish that manages to incorporate some free-improv style playing. The second disc’s opening tune, “Layl (Night),” introduces ElSaffar’s own vocals. The singer’s entrance comes after a long-lined theme that has been slowly, steadily building in intensity. The arrival of the vocal melody is the climax of the same community vibe that the other members of ElSaffar’s orchestra have been working to establish.
The smoothness of all those transitions means that one of the most complex pieces on the album—the 16-minute, suite-like composition “Shards of Memory/B Half Flat Fantasy”—moves through its changes in a comparatively harried manner. Every twist in the music is exciting, and the performances sound great. But it’s possible to imagine ElSaffar stretching the same melodic material out to symphonic length, and getting that much more out of all his ingenious sonic effects. For now, Not Two works as a towering statement of purpose—wise to many traditions, even while it remains accessible to anyone.


The long-awaited debut from the Jersey singer is a opulent, raw R&B album that constantly tests the borders of the genre. SZA’s deeply personal lens on modern romance gives these songs endless life.

CTRL

Originally titled A, the debut album from SZA was meant to conclude a trilogy of self-titled releases following 2013’s S and 2014 ’s Z—her official entré into the music world. The release date was originally projected for summer 2016 and, as she revealed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly at the time, it was going to be a frank recounting of her romantic life, warts and all. “I’m talking a lot of grimy shit, but it’s truth,” she said. In the year the album sat in the wings with her label TDE, the fearless style of her grimy shit fermented into a powerful R&B set piece that is unlike any released in recent memory.
Over a lonely electric guitar riff on CTRL’s opening track ”Supermodel,” she sets the tone: “Let me tell you a secret/I been secretly banging your homeboy/Why you in Vegas all up on Valentine's Day?” This sorry setup isn’t fiction, either. In the same EW interview, she said that one of the songs on her album would be about her ex-boyfriend leaving her on Valentine’s Day while she slept with his friend as revenge. “[It] will be the first time he hears about it,” she said.
Boyfriends and more, ahem, casual acquaintances are taken to task across the album, but this isn’t a pity party. CTRL is about sexual freedom while still having your hunger for intimacy be taken seriously. On the woozy “Doves in the Wind,” SZA sings about Forrest Gump—not a figure running through her mind like Frank Ocean—but the kind of guy who sees women as more than just their bodies and who “deserve the whole box of chocolates.” Born Solána Rowe, the Jersey singer seems to take comfort in the freewheelin’ Forrest Gump character Jenny Curran (on Z track “Warm Winds,” SZA quotes young Jenny’s “Dear God, make me a bird so I can fly far, far away” prayer). But SZA finds solace in the sweetness offered to the adult Jenny by Forrest. That sentiment (without literal Gump references) bleeds through on tracks like the heartbreaking “Normal Girl,” about being unable to find a paramour who wants to take her home to meet his family, not just home to his bedroom. But when she sings, “I really wish I was a normal girl?” it’s a stinging reminder that with so many platforms to meet people, there are just that many more people to be hurt by. What if not finding an emotional connection means there’s something fundamentally wrong with you?
SZA’s scrutiny of modern dating is not always self-effacing. “Love Galore,” featuring an able Travis Scott, is the perfect anthem for the not-looking-for-a-pen-pal set. SZA and Scott coo, “Why you bother me when you know that you don’t want me?” It’s a sentiment that feels especially potent in 2017 when loneliness is so much easier to combat fingers-to-screen instead of face-to-face. Ask a friend and she’ll tell you she quit Tinder because she was tired of having ten text-boyfriends but not one who’s ever asked her out on an actual date. Its foil comes in “The Weekend,” a song about sharing a boyfriend with other women. The hook rings, “My man is my man is your man, heard it’s her man, too,” with a tone of both freedom and a muted sadness over settling. She knows there are concessions one makes to boost their sense of self-worth and little fibs we tell ourselves to turn a bad situation into something we think we want.
It's ironic that the album’s little misfires do not really come from SZA herself. “Doves in the Wind” features a verse from Kendrick Lamar who employs the song’s all about vaginas theme to produce some inscrutable lines like, “Pussy can be so facetious,” and, “How many niggas get mistaken for clitoris in a day?” No matter. SZA shines so bright, her honeyed voice making lines like, “I'm really tryna crack off that headboard/And bust it wide open for the right one” sound sweet instead of like bawdy pillow talk.
The album’s finest moment arrives with “Prom,” a meditation on the existential worry of youthful aging—“Fearin' not growin' up/Keepin' me up at night/Am I doin' enough?/Feel like I'm wastin' time”—that sounds like it was pilfered from The Forbidden Love EP-era. But SZA has never been one to glom onto trends. Other areas on the album have more of an indie influence, as well, like “Supermodel” which blooms from its spartan guitar intro into something more in line with old Jimmy Eat World than the undefinable “alt-R&B” tag. Even when there is trap percussion, like on “Garden (Say it Like Dat),” it’s still clear why SZA cites artists like Jamiroquai and Björk as influences. CTRL’s adds indie rock and neo-soul flourishes on its radio-friendly fare, while its cottony production centers the album and pushes against the borders of R&B. She’s not looking to fill the SoundCloud status quo.
SZA deals outside of the confines of her genres, a distinction that is all but meaningless in the polygluttonous context of 2017. Her forebears are more Keyshia Cole and Mary J. Blige, who have hurt and have been fearless enough to sing about that hurt, from Blige’s heart-crushing second album My Life to Keyshia’s chart-topper “Let It Go,” around and around again. People will go to extremes to absolve themselves of judgment, whether it’s for liking something as benign as “The Bachelor” or by mining the depths of psychology to determine that breaking someone’s heart was somehow just an act of radical self-care. SZA has the grit to say that it doesn’t just feel shitty, it is shitty. She is in touch with love’s fragilities and understands that it is worth protecting, there is just a lot of tireless work to get it. The record is all the more beautiful for it.


The music on this compilation documents the bursting scene in Guinea from the late '70s, when state-sponsored record label Editions Syliphone Conakry urged the residents of the newly independent African country to forge the voice of a new Africa through music. The sound that Syliphone promoted was an astonishing, elegant blend, embracing old Guinean folk music as well as newly heard Cuban music and American jazz bands.

Musique Sans Paroles

Guinea’s state-sponsored record label Editions Syliphone Conakry closed permanently in 1984, with the death of President Ahmed Sékou Touré. The economic, cultural, and political situation in the newly independent African country had been sliding downward since the mid-'70s, but at one point the label had been a beacon for the country. Sékou Touré, perceiving that creating a strong national identity for the one-time French colony hinged on developing its culture, established a record label and a national radio station, distributing instruments to citizens and funding bands. The imperative was for the young nation of Guineans to create the voice of a new Africa.
The sound that Syliphone promoted was an astonishing, elegant blend, embracing old Guinean folk music as well as newly heard Cuban music (by way of the Congo) and American jazz bands, all under the banner of "authenticité". In an ideal world, proponents of small government and shuttered arts programs might hear the twinkling, beguiling music rendered by Guinea bands like Bembeya Jazz National, Jardin De Guinée, Balla et Ses Balladins and be charmed into state sponsorship of the arts so as to "Make (insert country) Great Again." By 1976, Guinea was in turmoil, with a failed assassination plot on Sékou Touré, and detention of political dissenters. Some of the strongest music from Syliphone predates this struggle, but that's part of what makes Musique Sans Paroles (translation: Music Without Words), released that same year, such a jewel: Amid increasing unrest, Sans Paroles serves as an oasis.
This compilation documents some of the label’s lesser known acts: Only one of them, alto saxophonist Momo Wandel, has more than one release to his name. Given the turmoil of Guinea, it’s likely that many of these groups never got the chance to record again. Opening band Sombory Jazz most closely resembles the flagship acts of the imprint, the rhythm shuffling between African polyrhythms and Cuban rhumba without quite settling. The horn work evokes comparison to Bembeya Jazz National, the guitar solo imbued with that rippling, eddying guitar tone so prevalent in the era, liquid and psychedelic at once. But from there, Sans Paroles explores little-heard wrinkles. Wandel’s "Tam-Tam Sax" emulates Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango but with squawks that bring to mind spiritual jazz players like Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp.
Each song shows a stylistic shift. The seldom-recorded Quintette Guinéenne does a rhythm & blues number on "Douga", while "Flute Parlante" is as close as the album gets to words. Highlighting solo flute, it brings to mind the recordings that the old Folkways Records used to document. The highlight is Quintette Guinéenne’s second contribution, "Massane Cissé". A Griot thought to date back to the 12th-13th century, it exemplifies Sékou Touré’s mission to update his country’s traditions in the new century. Between the extended guitar solo and battery of percussion, it brings to mind the exploratory psychedelic rock happening across the Atlantic Ocean. Trio Papa Kouyaté, named and propelled by Miriam Makeeba’s longtime conga player, offers up two nimble acoustic numbers with Kouyaté shadowed by stand-up bass and acoustic guitar. Kouyaté’s conga playing hints at Arsenio Rodriguez’s groups of the 1950s. Close your eyes and the capital of Conakry starts to turn into downtown Havana. Or, in the case of "Massane Cissé", the epicenter of San Francisco a decade prior.