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 No Doubt’s 1995 record, an icon of the ska revival and the auspicious beginning of Gwen Stefani’s pop stardom.

Tragic Kingdom

In the mid-1990s, when alternative was the new pop, there were all sorts of subgenres duking it out for dominance. The success of grunge put everything from Bush to Blind Melon on the radio, but perhaps the most curious alt offshoot to emerge in one corner of the mainstream was the ska revival. The third-wave ska scene ran the gamut from Reel Big Fish’s cornball, horn-driven antics to Less Than Jake’s emo-tinged losercore to Rancid’s gritty take on the Specials to Sublime’s frat-boy-and-420-friendly strain, not to mention the peppy breakthrough of longtime stalwarts the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. But there was no ’90s ska figure quite like Gwen Stefani, the movement’s Dickies-clad poster-girl turned culturally roving ’00s hitmaker turned People Magazine staple. There is also no pop star origin story quite like hers.
At the urging of Gwen’s keyboardist brother Eric, the Stefanis performed at a school talent show in their native Anaheim, California in the mid-’80s. Their song of choice was “On My Radio,” the 1979 hit by the two-tone ska band the Selecter. Gwen wore a homemade dress that resembled one worn by Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, her favorite musical. Showtune theatrics and Selecter singer Pauline Black (who mixes a hyper-feminine chirp with an operatic warble) would go on to influence Gwen’s early vocal style, and set her on the path of pursuing hybrid sounds and aesthetics.
In 1986, Gwen and Eric formed a band alongside John Spence, their classmate and co-worker at the local Dairy Queen. Spence, whose go-to response—“No doubt!”—gave the group its name, shared vocal duties with Gwen and served as her gruff-voiced foil. They were just kids in love with the way British bands like the Selecter, Madness, and the Specials made everyday frustrations feel lively, and they were trapped in sunny Orange County, the home of Disneyland and suburban punk ennui. No Doubt played the house-party circuit, quickly found a local following, and picked up members, including bassist Tony Kanal, who would soon start dating Gwen in secret. But tragedy struck when, in 1987, Spence took his own life. It was the first of three destabilizing events that would change the course of No Doubt, a band forever defined by its interpersonal drama.
After trumpet-player-turned-co-vocalist Alan Meade exited No Doubt, Gwen was ready to front the band on her own. By 1990, the lineup was solidified with fan-turned-drummer Adrian Young, local metal guitarist Tom Dumont, and a robust horn section. Their popularity around Southern California clubs and colleges grew until finally, they caught the eye of Interscope A&R Tony Ferguson. In 1991, he brought famed record executive Jimmy Iovine to one of No Doubt’s shows, where “Jimmy told someone, ‘That girl will be a star in five years,’” recalled Gwen (and corroborated by Iovine) in a 1996 SPIN cover story. Over the next five years, Gwen would go from singing two-tone covers and her brother’s originals for devoted local crowds, to zig-zagging the globe with her own tales of heartache and rage. She would have to lose the two men closest to her first.
No Doubt’s debut for Interscope, a 1992 self-titled LP, was mostly (but not entirely) devoid of hooks, and partially informed by Eric’s cabaret flair and goofy sense of humor (they gave away kazoos at the album release party, if that explains anything). Poor sales made Interscope hesitant to dive right into a follow-up, and the label took a stronger hand in guiding the group’s sound, namely with producer Matthew Wilder. Eric didn’t like that, and over time he isolated himself from the band, despite practice being held at his house. After he quit in 1994 to work as an animator on The Simpsons, the other members took over songwriting duties on the album that would become Tragic Kingdom. Right around the same time, Kanal called it off with Gwen, after seven years together.
Gwen had never really written her own lyrics, but it helped that she was suddenly filled with pain and confusion. She was, in many ways, a girl with traditional values: In interviews from this era, she marveled at the fact that she got famous instead of starting a family, and her songs sometimes yearn for a “simple kind of life.” But this is perhaps not the impression you’d get from the initial wallop of Tragic Kingdom, featuring one of the decade’s fieriest opening four-song runs, all of which were singles: “Spiderwebs,” a new-wave rafter-shaker about a girl screening her calls; “Excuse Me Mr.”, a dramatic ska-punk number about a girl confronting a dude who’s avoiding her; “Just a Girl,” a fun-but-menacing-sounding hit about a girl just trying to live; and “Happy Now?”, an ever-shifting rock song about a girl chiding her ex. The point was made: girl mad.
Following the surge of third-wave feminism in the early ’90s, the mid-’90s became the peak of the “angry white female” era in rock and pop. It was a time when feminized aggression—from Hole and riot grrrl to Liz Phair and Alanis Morissette—was suddenly perceived as being on-trend, as if women haven’t been furious forever. Stefani, girly tomboy ultra, arguably benefited from this kind of branding, even while she maintained the fun, energetic personality that led Courtney Love to dub her a “cheerleader” and others to call her the “anti-Courtney Love.”
Lead single “Just a Girl” was Gwen’s bridge to planet angry. Upon its release in September 1995, it became a theme song for any girl fed up with living in a boy’s world—with the emphasis once again being on girl. Spice Girls would soon turn “girl power” into a full-on marketing technique, but “Just a Girl” was some kind of magic middle-ground in the context of ’90s pop-feminism: sassy, addictively sweet and sour, yet still accessible. Dumont’s indelible looping riff adds a taunting feeling, while the lyrics leave interpretation conveniently ajar with lines like “I’m just a girl/So don’t let me have any rights.” Never has Stefani’s vocal style—with its forays into babydoll voice and its breathless, swooping belts—felt more intentional as a performance technique meant to amplify her message. “Just a Girl” is not a subtle song, but what it’s doing is quietly masterful: The sarcasm subverts the underlying victimhood in a sneering way, but victimhood is also something girls (particularly white or privileged girls) quickly understand as a tool for getting what they want.
Gwen’s Tragic Kingdom-era pain was incandescent because it felt off the cuff, uninhibited, and barely removed from its cause. You saw that up close in “Don’t Speak,” the breakup ballad that pushed No Doubt’s success over the edge, topping the Billboard airplay chart for 16 weeks. Starting in late 1996 and continuing for much of 1997, flutters of Spanish guitar and angelic whispers of “hush hush, darling” were inescapable; for those listening across radio formats or watching MTV at the time, the song’s ubiquity reached “if I hear this one more time…” levels. But people also could not look away from the saga of Gwen and Tony, SoCal ska’s Stevie and Lindsey. Every night they’d hit the stage and seemingly be forced to relive their split through “Don’t Speak,” a song musically at odds with nearly everything in their upbeat catalog.
Not every song on Tragic Kingdom is overtly about the breakup or the frustrations of girlhood—this is ’90s California ska, after all, a few mostly positive chillers are required. But the album tracks skew cheesy, especially now. Ska bands of the era would sometimes show off their funk chops with a disco cut on their LPs, but No Doubt’s take, “You Can Do It,” is plagued by fake disco strings and a guitar jangle that borders on musical clip art. “Different People,” a brass-and-keyboard-led ska track about how the world is big and diverse, has the tension of a child’s picture book, and the depth of one too. Eric’s musical-theater-strikes-back closer “Tragic Kingdom” is cringeworthy in highly specific ways: the sampling of theme-park announcements, the egregiously drawn-out tempo changes, the fact that it seems to be about how evil Walt Disney is. (Besides, on an album like this, the most tragic of kingdoms is actually Gwen and Tony’s love story, not the suburbia surrounding Mickey’s castle.)
The rush of energy you get from Tragic Kingdom’s opening run is enough to keep the album within spitting distance of the ’90s canon, emblematic of a specific time and place. Other highs include sixth single “Sunday Morning,” where the seasoned band easily finds the pocket with nimble, driving percussion, reggae rhythms, and overdubbed harmonies. “End It On This,” one of the only songs credited to Dumont, Kanal, and both Stefanis, is low-key pummeling: Gwen, in all her high-low vocal glory, recalls the last kiss with Tony while the band fires on all cylinders. Every player gets to show off a little with their “thing,” but Dumont is the secret all-star: His tough opening riff sets the song into intricate lockstep. Dumont, much like fellow unlikely-’90s-rock-star Rivers Cuomo, was a Kiss fan and longtime metalhead; you can hear that in his guitar hooks, which lent Tragic Kingdom a fizzy edge.
If Weezer were politely challenging the post-grunge alternative landscape with moves copped from the Cars, No Doubt were more like Blondie: a band that came out of a distinct regional punk scene, hit it big with a hybrid new-wave sound, and faced both adoration and criticism largely centered around its platinum-blonde singer. This last factor became a central tension in the narrative of No Doubt once Tragic Kingdom began its long ascent up the charts (it was a diamond-seller by the decade’s end). There was this recursive interview cycle where the band would discuss how Stefani was always the solo cover star, which said magazine would also do; then the band would complain about that in their next interview. They portrayed the meta “photographer singles out Gwen” plotline in the “Don’t Speak” video, and to an extent did it themselves on the album cover, where Gwen poses in front offering up an orange while the guys scatter in the desolate grove behind her.
But Gwen’s solo career was always more a question of when. After Tragic Kingdom’s follow-up, 2000’s new-wave coming-of-age Return of Saturn, Stefani struck out on her own with duets alongside techno star Moby and rapper Eve, which suggested she was defined less by a specific sound than a particular attitude. It would take years, well after she appropriated Japanese Harajuku street style and scored more hip-hop hits, for people to recognize the pattern: the Orange County girl with a bindi between her Chola eyebrows had always been borrowing from other cultures and using it to form her identity in messy ways. Taking its cues from two-tone, where Jamaican rhythms met a punk point of view, Tragic Kingdom was only the beginning for Gwen. Back then, she was just an It Grrrl full of contradictions, pulling a little from everywhere and figuring out where to land.


The Hartford, Connecticut five-piece repurpose what many consider the worst parts of 2000s scene culture and rap-rock into a 22-minute ode to unpretentiousness.

Guilty Pleasure

Over the past few years, ’00s Hot Topic bands defined by earnest melodrama have caught a second wind and influenced a new crop of stars. For every reappraisal, though, there’s a dozen acts from that era whose musical maximalism and kitschy aesthetics still feel cold to the touch—at least, to most everyone but Cheem. On their new album Guilty Pleasure, the pop-rock five-piece couldn’t be more proud to reclaim their aughts touchstones. The album is an indulgent sundae of sugary harmonies, mall-punk choruses, turntable scratches, and electro-pop beats—like A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out if Hellogoodbye and 311 were featured artists. When you lean on subgenres and stylistic choices widely regarded as cheesy, the project you started for fun quickly becomes the hand that puts the “Kick me” sign on your back. “Critics slam your favorites/Change your mind ’cause you feel like you have to,” Sam Nazaretian complains on “Cheem Szn,” taking comfort in making an argument for unpretentious self-expression in itself.
Formed in 2013 in the backyards of Hartford, Connecticut, Cheem got their start churning out glittery, polished math rock. But where albums like 2017’s Downhill flirted with emo, Guilty Pleasure has a bone to pick with the state of rock music at large. “We tried to make a tape to end it all/But everywhere they still compare us to American Football,” Nazaretian sings on “Mango.” Hence Guilty Pleasure’s chaotic onslaught of genres, few of which have ever scanned as cool—neither during their heyday nor in the present. Cheem aim to get louder and weirder, boosting your mood with the music that defined their childhoods. They’re not trolling, and there’s none of the irony of fellow sensory-overload acts like 100 gecs or Death Grips. Cheem want to detonate the concept of “guilty pleasures” by fully embracing “pleasure.”
Since their inception, Cheem have split vocal duties between two primary singers—a decision modeled after the catchy harmonies of Blink-182 and Barenaked Ladies. With Nazaretian and guitarist Skye Holden holding down vocal melodies, the rest of the band has space to peel off in any direction they choose. “Virtual Boy” brings in glitchy synths, crunchy guitar riffs, and double bass drum kicks while vocoder solos warble in the distance. On “Mango,” a dub rhythm section grounds ska upstrokes, a rap verse, and dueling shouts lifted from hardcore punk. They don’t stick the landing on every style. Even the most nostalgic listener may grimace at the rap-rock verses shouting out Kenny G and Kero Kero Bonito or the dated squeaks of turntable scratches. Experiments aside, the songs on Guilty Pleasure always boast an undeniable hook, aided by hyper-clean production from the band’s own guitarist Gabe Weitzman and mastering by longtime scene veteran Kris Crummett. “Clueless” best illustrates this balance: It sounds like Limp Bizkit, if they decided to lighten their angst with some minor-key falsettos and a few twinkly math-rock runs.
And yet, the most obvious reference points are often the most accurate. Cheem channel early Panic! At the Disco in scope and ambition, and Nazaretian’s vocals are a cross of Brendon Urie and Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump, singers whose precise pitch and smooth delivery lent a reputable technique to their bands. Listen to the first 15 seconds of “Snag” and it’s impossible to miss. Contrary to the knee-jerk reaction those names might prompt, Cheem make the comparison seem like high praise—a reminder that Urie’s classical training eventually landed him on Broadway. The voices of these singers—particularly their falsetto range and theatrical showmanship—helped their punk bands ascend to the level of pop stars. Nearly two decades later, Cheem return to that same blend of styles with no hope for commercial success or mainstream fame. Instead, Guilty Pleasure is the sound of taking risks in the name of good fun.


Linnea Siggelkow downsized her city of choice, a move that inspired her to confront confusion and ambivalence in six dream-pop gems that carve out a welcome space of security.

The Fuzz EP

Unable to keep pace with the rising rents of her home base in Toronto, Ontario, songwriter Linnea Siggelkow decamped last year an hour west to Hamilton, a smaller, less-hectic place with a working-class soul and fertile DIY scene. Liberated from the bustle and hustle of big-city living, she began exploring pensive songs that unfurl at a deliberately languid pace, like someone dipping their toes into a cold swimming pool. The six dream-pop reveries of the resulting debut EP as Ellis crackle with just enough distortion to earn their name, The Fuzz. And that feeling is as mental as it is musical, as she works through a mix of confusion, sadness, anxiety, and ambivalence. But these songs are neither about wallowing in that void nor necessarily rising out of it. They’re about learning to acclimate and carve out a space of security in a world that offers only perpetual instability.
Siggelkow established this template as early as July 2018 with the release of her divine first single, “The Drain,” The Fuzz’s grand opener. A meditation on the disorienting qualities of desire, “The Drain” crystallizes all of Ellis’ defining qualities—rainy-day guitar ripples, slow-motion momentum, luminous synth smears as vivid and static as a nighttime skyline. But Siggelkow’s distant-yet-direct voice projects confidence and fortitude in its naked vulnerability despite barely being pitched above a whisper.
The rest of The Fuzz presents variations on that theme, but each track inhabits its own distinct phase of loneliness. “Frostbite” is about excommunicating a selfish, toxic influence (“I wish that I never knew you,” Siggelkow sings on the chorus) from one’s life; its gradual journey from a Velvets-like torpor to a cathartic crescendo reflects the emotionally fraught process of working up the nerve to tell that person to fuck off. The gorgeous melancholy of “What a Mess!” maps the flipside of achieving independence, as a forlorn Siggelkow ponders sinister amusements: “Took the scissors to my hair again/Another form of self-destruction.” But the way she repeats the chorus—“What a mess I’ve made of this”—feels less like a pity party than an act of accepting responsibility.
As The Fuzz plays out, you sense Siggelkow becoming more resolute. Like a doom-metal Mazzy Star, she leans into the distortion pedal as she lays into an ex on “All This Time.” And her paralyzing ennui finally boils into something resembling rage during the title track; for its stormy finale, she cries out the chorus as if self-administering an emergency adrenaline shot. Still, even if you shake yourself out of the fuzz, the symptoms can creep back. On the EP’s stark closer, “N Y E,” Siggelkow finds herself spending the rowdiest night of the year at a party of one, her ghostly voice enveloped by a guitar whose distortion seems to pick at the scabs. She signs off with a missive heavier than the Times Square apple: “After midnight/In the windowless dark/I was falling asleep/You were breaking my heart.” She drifts off, safe in the knowledge that she’s survived another shitty year just to start the next one.


The 24-year-old South Londoner Sampha Sisay lent either his voice to nearly every track on SBTRKT's 2011 self-titled debut. After spending time as an integral part of the UK producer's live show, and collaborating with the likes of Jessie Ware and Drake, he's stepping out on his own with this deeply personal EP.

Dual EP

Part of the charm of SBTRKT's 2011 self-titled debut was the presence of Sampha Sisay, a now 24-year-old South Londoner who lent his voice to nearly every track on the album. There was never a doubt that, based on raw talent alone, Sampha was not only an artist to keep a close eye on (the same year found him collaborating with then-upstarts Jessie Ware and Lil Silva), but one with star potential. On the bracing "Hold On", his vocals-- warm but damaged, understated yet dynamic-- ache with loneliness, whereas on more movement-minded concoctions like "Sanctuary", it's transformed into a conduit for light-speed, future-minded R&B. In other words, Sampha's instrument is a dexterous one, effortlessly commanding attention in whatever context it's placed. Now after spending the past few years as an integral part of SBTRKT's live show, he's finally stepping out on his own with the deeply personal Dual EP.
Last month, Drake debuted his new single "The Motion" in anticipation of his forthcoming third record Nothing Was the Same, with Sampha in tow on both vocal and production duties. Though Sampha's singing isn't featured prominently, the melancholic tug of his presence is felt in nearly every corner of the track, from the lighter-than-air atmospherics to his downcast, honeyed croon. It signified what could be a more noticeable arrival for Sampha, especially when coupled with the the release of Dual. But somewhat surprisingly, it feels as if he's pushing against the idea of an elevated profile with the 17 minutes of music that make up his first solo venture. Instead of acting as a grand coronation, Dual is a patient piece of work that finds Sampha in no rush to capitalize on a moment, instead opting to showcase simple, relatable musings on loss, uncertainty, and moving forward. At the same time, Dual carries a strange urgency with it, as if these songs had to come out of him now (despite their genesis going back years, in certain cases). The result is unexpected, but refreshing, with Sampha comfortably inhabiting the role of an artist interested in staying true to himself.
So it goes without saying that Dual isn't something you'll find yourself dancing much to (save maybe for the sultry "Without", complete with plastic bucket street drumming and bleary synths). Instead, these ruminative, revealing songs paint a more intimate portrait of Sampha. There are ghosts hiding around almost every corner, like on the lost lullaby "Beneath the Tree", which finds him wishing a monster would "take all its things and go." Anchored by his delicate piano, it's the first thing that truly springs to life on the EP (it follows opener "Demons", one of two very short, homemade sounding one-offs). Sampha's relationship with keys are important to Dual; almost everything here seems to orbit around his voice and piano. The radiant "Indecision", with its gospel-like quality, feels as if it would be just as effective unplugged. But to do away with all the wonderful details, like those strange, mechanized backing vocal snippets, would be to ignore Sampha's deft ear for detail and his restrained but vibrant approach to mixing. These songs are nuanced and uncluttered. At the same time, the humanizing imperfections are never lost. (It's no wonder Drakes has revered him as a producer as much as a singer.)
Unfortunately, this probably means that many won't pay as much attention to Sampha as a bonafide songwriter. And it's a shame, because while a passing glance at these songs may not reveal many layers, his use of repetition and unfussy language afford Dual some startling emotional relevance. Closer "Can't Get Close" is sung for his late father, who Sampha lost at the age of nine and still regards as one of his most important musical influences. Tapping into something haunting and pure, he sings over a mournful weave of pitched vocals, lamenting, "I can't get close to you." The desperation is something that will resonate with anyone familiar with the helplessness of loss. For someone so willing to lay himself this bare as a first impression is rare, but in terms of the music found on Dual, nothing could be more natural. It's further proof that following the sound of your own voice is often more fruitful and rewarding than doing what everyone else expects of you.


Musician/producer Jay Arner excels at sneaking despondence and alienation into airtight, earwormy pop gems. On Jay II he explores his love of New Wave and other '80s pop.

Jay II

Musician/producer Jay Arner is a sharp, efficient, exacting songwriter in the mold of fellow Vancouverites the New Pornographers. At his best, he smuggles expressions of despondence or alienation into airtight, earwormy gems with enviable ease. While 2014’s New Dimensional, the lone release from his Energy Slime duo with Jessica Delisle, traded in truncated bursts of psychedelic garage rock, that’s hardly Arner’s default. He’s predisposed to plunder and pastiche 1980s FM oldies: 2013 solo debut Jay Arner bore Smiths, A-Ha, and New Order echoes, while “Broken Glass (In the Hall of Shattered Mirrors)” half-cannibalized Cyndi Lauper single “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”
More taut, concise, and sweeter than its predecessor, Jay II finds its namesake lovingly and enthusiastically exploring new influences and reference points. The nagging “Personal Line” triples an irrepressible core melody with starchy guitar, phased synthesizer, and ramshackle piano: it’s a doting period homage, with lyrical nods to Billy Ocean’s “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car” and Tommy Tutone’s “867-5309.” Slick with faux, angelic falsetto, “Crystal Ball” makes for a nervy New Wave comet; “What’s Reality?” suggests the Phil Spector-era Ramones rocking a sock hop.
Jay II is strongest when Arner turns more introspective. On “Back to School” and “Earth to Jay,” he casts himself as a weary stranger to the music scene that nurtured and continues to support him. That’s a sensation familiar to all aging musos hanging in beyond a certain age range; suddenly, everything seems like a blur. Elsewhere, his woes are uncategorized but no less pressing. “I’ve got the perfect life blues again,” he admits in angelic triplicate on the flanged, syrupy “World of Suffering.” There’s no laundry list of injustices or outrages to be found here: just an uber-compressed pop rune that muses on the sheer, disorienting helplessness that results from realizing that we’ll never be able to help everyone. Maybe, just maybe, stolid songcraft can be rescue enough.


The new collaborative project from New York Native Tongue veterans Q-Tip and Busta Rhymes, The Abstract and the Dragon, features a handful of interesting exclusives but mostly revised older work. The new cuts, in particular, showcase a madcap chemistry unblemished by the passage of time.

Busta Rhymes / Q-Tip: The Abstract And The Dragon

The Abstract And The Dragon

The form and function of the hip-hop mixtape have shifted remarkably over the last decade, so that a medium that used to showcase DJs’ cutting and blending abilities in the genre’s early days is now a umbrella format describing the constant flood of releases meted out in the absence of record company tinkering. You never know what you’re getting until you see a tracklist. When New York Native Tongue veterans Q-Tip and Busta Rhymes dropped the loping disco romp “Thank You” late last year and announced the impending release of the collaborative mixtape The Abstract and the Dragon, the impression among breathless fans was that the pair were finally teaming up for a full project. When the mixtape arrived, of course, that rumor was promptly put to rest. The Abstract and the Dragon isn’t the surprise collection of new material we’d hoped for; it’s more a travelogue of a friendship well into its third decade, a Busta and Q-Tip greatest hits collection compiled by hip-hop journalist Shaheem Reid.
Most of the duo’s legendary pow-wows are present, from the inaugural Leaders of the New School & Tribe Called Quest posse cut “Scenario” to select tracks from their solo careers (“Ill Vibe” from Busta’s debut solo album The Coming, The Big Bang’s new jack rebuke “You Can’t Hold the Torch”, the remix to Q-Tip’s breakout solo single “Viv’rant Thing”). Tying it all together is a series of affable skits featuring Busta, Q-Tip and friends shooting the shit and telling stories behind the songs, like when Busta recounts his reluctance to repeat “Scenario”’s “Rawr rawr like a dungeon dragon” shpiel on Big Daddy Kane’s 1991 “Come On Down”, a big get for him and Q-Tip at the time, only to tack it on after Kane hears his verse and asks “Where the ‘rawr rawr’ at?” The song selection hews a little obscure; lesser known fare like Tribe’s Rhyme & Reason soundtrack spot “Wild Hot”, and “For the Nasty”, a Neptunes collaboration from the NBA Live ‘06 soundtrack, appear, but beloved singles Tribe’s “Oh My God” (which samples Busta’s “Scenario” verse) and the Fugees, Tribe & Busta posse cut “Rumble in the Jungle” do not. But the real draw here is The Abstract and the Dragon’s smattering of exclusives.
Scattered throughout the playlist here are a handful of brand new Busta and Q-Tip recordings and revised takes on classics. Alongside “Thank You”, here remixed by Kid Capri, there’s the follow-up tandem cut “Butch & Sundance”. We also get the mixtape’s title track, a snippet of a new song from Busta’s upcoming E.L.E. 2 album, and “We Taking Off”, all Busta spotlights with Q-Tip handling production. Elsewhere E.L.E. DJ Scratch remixes “Gettin’ Up” from Q-Tip’s The Renaissance, and Busta appends a verse to Tribe’s Midnight Marauders closer “God Lives Through”. The new cuts showcase a madcap chemistry unblemished by the passage of time, Tip’s ineffably slippery flow and beat construction anchoring Busta’s verbal gymnastics as heartily now as they did when they were teenagers.
The exclusives are a welcome addition to a mix largely built out of previously released material, but they also point to the more intriguing forms The Abstract and the Dragon could’ve taken with a little more care. “God Lives Through”’s freestyling-over-each-other’s-deep-cuts ethos is a stroke of genius. “Gettin' Up”’s friends-remixing-our-deep-cuts tack is too. Hell, this thing could’ve just been an EP of the new songs. But The Abstract and the Dragon gestures to all these forms but never settles on one. It’s a good mix, but fans of either artist could probably construct the vast majority of it out of their own iTunes and will probably end up stripping the 28-song project for the six they haven’t had kicking around their record collection all these years and decades.


The legendary British DJ has been around the block. He returns with his Crooked Man project with pedigree, craftsmanship, and, delightfully, zero aspiration to the “new.”

Crooked Man

Richard Barratt was there. He was there when the Sheffield youth first started mixing drum machines and soul, when Cabaret Voltaire begat Human League, before Heaven 17 and ABC went global. He was there when pub DJs started giving themselves ridiculous names, like his own pseudonym DJ Parrott, and tried their hand at building a Paradise Garage on every corner. He was there when the soil-your-pants excitement at this thing called house music created the great sampladelic explosion of late-’80s UK pop. He was there, at the Hacienda (which he once gloriously described as “a vision of hell”), and at the birth of Sheffield’s own massively influential “bleep” label. He was also there when it all went to hell in the early ’90s with the anti-rave laws and the drugs, with the cult of the DJ and the lack of musical and human diversity; which is when he stopped being there.
This is all unsubtly true. But as that point about Barratt’s disengagement hopefully makes clear, the facts of history can only account for so much. And while Parrott really did give up DJing (completely) and producing (mostly, kinda), there is a big difference between facts, and the emotional resonance of lives that create them. If there’s one thing that Barratt’s return as Crooked Man makes clear, it's the nature of the resonance which makes the story. Barratt’s stockpile of grumpy tales with hopeful edges is an opportunity to gather round a bassbin and bask.
The basic premise of Crooked Man is house music as a classic songwriting form. The album collects nine vocal tracks, many of which Barratt has self-released in microscopic vinyl quantities since 2012, resulting in a pop-dance album that lives comfortably alongside Caribou and Disclosure, but with pedigree and craftsmanship, and zero aspiration to the “new.” In this, Crooked Man fits the moment: EDM songsmiths’ conservative structures top the charts, popular disco and house remixes gloriously restage contemporary material rather than deconstructing it, while much of the club underground rebels against these dated designs. Yet even though Barratt and writing partner—another Sheffield music lifer, Michael Somerset Ward—come up with results that are undoubtedly old-fashioned, they’re not the slightest bit nostalgic. The pair hook earworms with the pride of professional writers, methodically and gleefully revisit British dance music’s cornerstone structures (electronic soul, dub, acid-house), and reinforce the dancefloor’s inclusive, anti-commercialist ideologies from a position of long-held beliefs. That’s how Crooked Man ends up feeling like the unlikely product of the Brill Building, Wigan Casino, and, say, the Music Box—classy, classic, and defiant.
It helps that the album is also deftly programmed and controlled. There’s a clear narrative arc to the sonic range—ambient-house chill-out to open (“Coming Up for Air”), a deep dub version of a Northern Soul classic (Soul Brothers Six’s “I’ll Be Loving You”), radio-friendly electro-pop (“Girl With Better Clothes”), and a gospel-house anthem that serves as an emotional exclamation point (“Happiness”). The vocalists too, an assortment of 20 Feet From DJ-style locals and lesser knowns, expertly play their roles. The angelic falsetto of Sunburst Band’s Pete Simpson appears in exultation and testifies against soul-destroying machines. Bostonian diva-in-the-making, Amy Douglas, brings the biblical boom. And young, boisterous Sheffielders Rachel E and Danae Wellington get involved in excellent kiss-off moments—not of lovers, but of modern scourges such as fashionistas, bankers, and purveyors of boring-ass beats. When a chorus calls for strength in numbers, they become a gang.
Hence, Crooked Man’s overall vibe is the timeless aspiration of people who share great parts of their lives on dark dance-floors. All these songs boil down to the idea of community and its desires and rules, a set of signposts to keep the party going in the right direction. In many cases, these may be generic—Simpson’s cooing prayer to “love your friends” (“Try Me”), or Douglas’ motivational declaration that “we’ll get on the right track” (“Happiness”)—yet with a great big dollop of soul (and the right piano chords), they blossom exponentially. In at least one case though, it’s specific as all get out: “Tell all the witch doctors/There ain’t no presets,” rings the hands-in-the-air vocal hook of “Preset,” Crooked Man’s most fully-formed address on the beat-wise freedoms. Amid an insistent thumb-piano loop, the track expands, opens up and goes deep, with smiles and tears mixing forever-ever.
This is the natural oblivion of people who live long enough to end up justified and ancient. It’s a curse, but it’s also a source of the joy. Because being there isn’t all it’s cracked up to be if you’re not also willing to be here now; which, whether Barratt will ever admit through all his cynicism, is never a question in his music.


Big Star's never-completed third album is enshrined in a triple-disc box that contains all known recordings from the 1974 sessions and finally makes sense of all the chaos.

Complete Third

Big Star never completed their third album. In fact, it’s likely that the music collected on Omnivore’s triple-disc box set Complete Third was never intended to be a Big Star album. Alex Chilton maintained as late as 2007 that he and drummer Jody Stephens never considered these 1974 sessions a Big Star project, a testament supported by the fact that none of the tapes in Ardent Studios were labeled with name “Big Star.” Instead, they were credited to Alex Chilton alone, Alex & Jody, and Sister Lovers, a punning reference to the fact the pair were dating sisters at the time.
Sister Lovers also provided Rykodisc with a subtitle for these recordings when they issued Third/Sister Lovers on CD in 1992, marking the first time a label attempted to seriously piece the puzzle of Big Star Third together. Prior to that, the album came out under a variety of titles—3rd, The Third Album, Big Star’s 3rd: Sister Lovers, Sister Lovers (The Third Album), with the alleged provisional title Beale Street Green remaining the province of bootlegs—all bearing a different track listing, none of which mirrored the test pressing that was unsuccessfully shopped around to labels in 1975.
Reissue producer Cheryl Pawelski uses that test pressing as her lodestar on Complete Third, letting it form the foundation of the third disc of final mixes, serving as a culmination to the discs of demos and rough mixes that precede it. A good chunk of these tracks previously appeared on archival releases from Rhino, Big Beat/Ace and Omnivore, but 28 debut here. None of these unheard cuts would make much sense on their own release, but they provide crucial pieces of the narrative on a box set that attempts to make sense of sessions that the creators themselves don't quite understand.
One thing all participants—Chilton and Stephens, producer Jim Dickinson, Ardent owner/producer/engineer John Fry—can agree upon is that no official version of Third exists. Dickinson attempted to piece it together for Rykodisc in 1992 but he freely admits that his vision differed from Chilton’s and once this period passed into history Chilton showed no interest in revisiting it. In the liner notes to Complete Third, Ken Stringfellow—the Posies guitarist who was instrumental in ushering the reunited Big Star into the ’90s and 2000s—recalls a time when he and his partner Jon Auer cajoled Chilton to attempt “Kizza Me” at a latter-day reunion show. Once the band kicked off the song at sound check, Alex stood still as a statue, refusing to lay hands on his guitar or sing. By that point Chilton was finished with Third. But as Chris Stamey— a co-leader of the dB’s who helped maintained the Big Star legend in the ’70s as Stringfellow did in the ’90s—notes elsewhere in the liners, there was a time when these were among his “newest and dearest” tunes.
Those early demos on the first disc do indeed carry traces of sweetness, particularly in the delicate readings of “Lovely Day,” “Thank You Friends,” “Take Care,” “Jesus Christ,” and “Blue Moon,” all sounding like natural extensions of the folk tunes scattered through the first two Big Star albums, not to mention some of the material Chilton attempted just after leaving the Box Tops. Even the album’s towering triptych of gloom—“Holocaust,” “Nightime,” and “Kanga Roo” (entitled “Like St. Joan” in its first incarnation)—feel brokenhearted rather than desolate. So what happened between these initial readings and the final mixes, which often feel like a fever dream from a man embracing madness?
Again, nobody knows for sure, but everybody orbiting Ardent in the mid-’70s agree Chilton was hell bent on self-immolation, bitter at the industry, angry at himself, and involved in a destructive relationship with Lesa Aldridge, his girlfriend and muse who co-wrote “Downs,” an improbably chipper valentine to quaaludes. Jim Dickinson could always spin a yarn, and he invented a tale for Third, determining that the album was all about decomposition—a decay that began with the unraveling of Big Star, spread through the dissolution of the golden age of Memphis music, then taking root at the breakdown of Chilton himself. It’s a good story, one that’s likely true on some level, but it’s also a bit pat, the kind of thing that a producer invents: he’s cobbling together a narrative out of what seems to be a mess.
Complete Third presents that purported mess as a whole, offering every known existing recording from the sessions, and, in doing so, it suggests the sessions weren’t quite as chaotic as lore suggests. Certainly, the demos show that Chilton’s songs were fully formed at the start, so it was a deliberate decision on his part to record the songs just as Jody Stephens was learning them. Ardent producer/engineer Adam Hill supports this theory: “While the lack of pre-production contributed to the loose feel of the songs, there’s no doubt that Alex was chasing sounds he heard in his head, and he knew when had captured them on tape.” If Chilton was deadset in chasing chaos, Dickinson was his ideal partner. Where John Fry favored precision—fitting for an engineer who ran a studio—Dickinson preferred to let things careen out of control, either because he knew magic came with mistakes or because he couldn't resist mischief.
Once Dickinson enters the picture, somewhere around the tail end of the first disc after the initial demos were completed, things start to get weird and heavy. The pivot is a pair of duets between Alex Chilton and Lesa Aldridge, where the pair turn the Beatles’ “I’m So Tired” into a narcotic crawl and pretend to be Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris on “That’s All It Took.” From there, the madness has settled in, so it's no surprise that they stumble through T. Rex’s “Baby Strange” or spend five minutes dicking around on guitar and steel drums dubbed “Pre-Downs”—an indication that the innocence of the initial demos had now curdled.
The second disc documents how the sessions started to congeal, the beauty and the bleakness sometimes existing on the same plane, sometimes separating into their own spheres. If there are no great revelations here—the closest is a version of the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours” sung by Lesa, one of many Lou Reed allusions here (another is Alex quoting “Perfect Day” at the start of “I’m So Tired”)—it nevertheless gives an idea of the vibe of the recordings, how it was pitched halfway between madness and intention. Comparing the first disc of Complete Third to the second, and it’s clear that Chilton wanted to create the illusion that everything was spinning out of control.
Perhaps Chilton succeeded too well, muddying the barrier between the act and the art. After a while, John Fry pulled the plug. He reached his breaking point when Alex pulled in a drunk off the street to sing on a soused version of Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Fry claimed later that the sessions turned “perverted,” which might be a reference to run-of-the-mill late-night seediness but might have a deeper meaning: Third perverted the ideals Fry held for Ardent. When he opened the studio, he allowed the British Invasion mavens of Memphis to hone their craft after hours at a cut rate. It’s how Chilton and collaborator Chris Bell developed the crystalline power pop of #1 Record and Radio City—these largely were songs invented in the studio and executed by Fry—and such late night sessions are also how Third came to be, except they came out curdled instead of clear.
Fry shopped the album to labels in 1975 in the hopes of recouping some of the money poured into the project. Nobody bit. Lenny Waronker at Warner asked, “I don’t have to listen to that again, do I?” Over at Atlantic, Jerry Wexler claimed “This record makes me feel very uncomfortable.”
Wexler was onto something. The bleakest moments of Third remain unsettling, capable of causing existential shivers on a bright, sunny day. Creeping along with no seeming sense of momentum, “Holocaust” and “Kanga Roo” have an inexorable pull—listening to them is like being pulled out to sea on an inescapable undercurrent, utterly impossible to navigate your way back to shore. When paired with the carnivalesque flourish of “Jesus Christ,” the homespun baroque pop of “Stroke It Noel,” the explosive carnality of “Kizza Me” and the woozy sway of “O, Dana,” Third can’t help but suggest that Alex Chilton was losing his grip. The primary gift of Complete Third is to reveal that this was a deliberate performance, not audio verite. Perhaps Third was, as Jim Dickinson claimed, the sound of decomposition. But by presenting the demos, working sessions and final mixes in order, Complete Third makes plain that far from being an unwieldy jumble, Alex Chilton meant to have Third sound as tortured, haunting and beautiful as the darkest moments of the soul.


Akio Suzuki has been making earthy yet ethereal sounds for over four decades now, all quietly\n\ emanating from the ...

Odds and Ends

Akio Suzuki has been making earthy yet ethereal sounds for over four decades now, all quietly emanating from the Japanese countryside. Born in 1941, he's made outdoor sound the focus of his career, constructing installations that transcend space and time, turning the outside world into a lucid daydream. In 1997, Suzuki analyzed the French town Enghien-Les-Bains, precisely mapping out (with footsteps) areas where echoes were most resonant. He built a simple concrete enclosure on the banks of their lake, designed to eliminate vision but maximize sound, a natural sensory amplifier with disorienting, very Zen implications. Barely available on record, some of Suzuki's experiments are finally captured on this two-disc compendium available from Hören (most readily available in the US from Forced Exposure).
Most pieces grow out of wind-swept silence, sometimes gathering the force to transform into typhoons of feedback (see "Howling Objects"), but most of this sound barely brushes across the leaves, turning all into Aeolian harps. "Analapos '70", named after an instrument Suzuki built himself, echoes like Watazumido Shuso's bamboo flute drawing its breath through Aphex Twin's ambient hull, an aural free fall that lets the body blow about, weightless. As Jim O'Rourke nicely put it, Suzuki's music "reminds us that we don't need to rush to feel alive, don't need to 'be somewhere' in the next 15 minutes, because we're already 'there', all you have to do is listen."
"Drumming" builds to incomprehension, as incessant waterfalls on a hand drum cascade beyond any rhythmic pattern. The birds and glass tubes of "Ha Go Ro Mo" float between a Pygmy lukembi, Tibetan prayer bowl, and Javanese gamelan, vibrations somehow disembodied from any obvious geography. Most peculiar on the double-disc set is "Plate Juggling", an archived performance from 1984. Set up for lock grooves on three record players, Suzuki's sounds at times approximate ducks on a pond, kazoos, and Tuvan throat singers. As these odd bursts of quacks and skronks build, the audience's unmitigated laughter becomes yet another source, finding its place among the inimitable noises. At turns minimal and maddening, this piece makes for a most singular listening experience, drastically altering concepts of what can be made from such grating sounds.
Suzuki's unadorned sense of play has been cause for admiration: O'Rourke, David Toop, and Eye from Boredoms all sound off in wonderment of what he's capable of creating from such nondescript items. To simply suggest that Suzuki makes incredible soundscapes out of sun-baked brick echo chambers, elongated springs, looping records, rocks, or empty beer bottles is to falsely convey that he's somehow distinct from these objects. As ancient scribe Tzu-ch'I put it: "Blowing on the ten thousand things in a different way, so that each can be itself-- all take what they want for themselves, but who does the sounding?"


On a lively new album, the electronic producer is a master of atmosphere, creating a mood of childlike whimsy while teasing a future in dream-pop songwriting.

Release Spirit

Dylan Khotin-Foote has been bobbing between lo-fi house and moth-eaten ambient music for nearly a decade now. On four albums released between 2014 and 2020, the Canadian electronic musician known simply as Khotin established a remarkably consistent palette, not so much developing his style as sinking further into it, as one might into a well-worn yet exceptionally cozy sofa. He is fond of muffled drum hits, plush sub-bass, and washed-out pads from the Casio SK-1, a legendarily basic sampling keyboard from the 1980s. On his debut LP, Hello World, Khotin leaned heavily on vintage Roland drum machines and classic house grooves, but in the years since, he has slowed the tempo and thrown a thick blanket over the percussion without tinkering too much with the essence of his sound. His moods are as unvarying as his toolkit: dreamy, faintly distracted, and unmistakably bittersweet, yet filigreed with something resembling optimism.
Release Spirit, Khotin’s first album since 2020’s Finds You Well, follows a move from Vancouver back to his hometown of Edmonton, Alberta, but it’s difficult to discern what impact, if any, those 700 miles may have had on his music. A suggestion of childlike whimsy pervades the music; flutelike leads trace lazy circles in the air, and the squishy contours of his synths occasionally recall Play-Doh, or Silly Putty. Like Boards of Canada, he uses nearly subliminal tape-warping effects to vividly nostalgic ends, and autobiographical tidbits litter the album like yellowing snapshots you might peel from the pages of a spiral-bound photo album. In the opening “HV Road,” he digs out a recording from a family vacation at British Columbia’s Okanagan Lake, his younger siblings’ voices bleeding across the singing of crickets. (“Why are you recording again?” one of them asks with barely veiled disdain.) And “3 pz” borrows its oddly discombobulated, strongly accented spoken-language vocals (“You stained your suit… Oh my god, you stained your dress… This guy is so annoying—you annoy me, do you understand?”) from an English-language learners’ tape he found at the home of his grandparents, who immigrated from Russia in the 1980s.
The album’s pulses are practically cryonic, yet the music is surprisingly lively. Sluggish drum machines and languorous breakbeats are frequently threaded with silvery detailing and cascading metallic accents. In “Lovely,” a trim, bleepy arpeggio embroiders curlicues around a beat that trudges like boots in slush; in “Life Mask,” a calm landscape of Harold Budd-like piano and ambient birdsong is interrupted by rapidly spinning twisters of dub delay. Everywhere you listen, overlapping rhythms—unsteady tremolo effects, pitter-pat hi-hats, stuttering vocal samples—are spreading out and colliding, like ripples on the surface of a lake.
Some of the best tracks use the mercurial sound of the TB-303 as an organizing principle. “Home World 303” unrolls contrapuntal acid lines, one squelchy and one pinging; “Computer Break” tips a portamento lead into seesawing motion. It’s a smart addition to the playbook—music as hazy as Khotin’s benefits from a point of focus. Like his previous records, the wispy Release Spirit is so uniformly pretty that it doesn’t always leave a strong impression. But two tracks point to potential new directions for Khotin’s sound. “Techno Creep” starts out on Andy Stott’s chilly, torpid turf, but—warmed by Balearic guitar and new-age synths—it thaws and blooms as it goes, like a patch of Arctic tundra turning tropical. “Fountain, Growth” begins with a slow-motion acid-trance chug before the voice of Montreal’s Tess Roby comes fading into earshot, her reverberant sighs as blissfully enigmatic as the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser. It’s a dream-pop distillation of the classic Khotin sound—and a suggestion that this master of atmosphere might have a future in actual songs.


The Australian band sets tales of the dystopian future to punk rock that’s nasty, cartoonish, and short.

3D & the Holograms

Listening to Australian punk band 3D & the Holograms is like thumbing through a comic book killing spree. The carnage is splashy and colorful, an addictive thrill that keeps you turning the page. The Sydney miscreants are fronted by the scuzz-voiced Billy Reilly of Research Reactor Corporation. Ishka Teevee, who records as Tee Vee Repairman and Satanic Togas, handles bass, lead guitar, and synths. JJ Gobington, from Olympia, Washington’s the Gobs, fills in on drums and rhythm guitar. On their self-titled debut, 3D & the Holograms thrash through 12 fast and nasty songs in under 15 minutes, leaving a trail of busted drumsticks and frayed power cables in their wake.
3D & the Holograms formed as a way to combat the idle months of the 2020 lockdown. Reilly was creatively restless and unable to play live with his other bands—Studs, Mainframe, and the Motorheads. So he tapped Gobington to email him guitar and drum tracks that he later fleshed out with Teevee in Sydney. The resulting debut is scrawled with distortion and laser beam guitar, and it’s driven by Reilly’s gristly howl. Each clipped track—none of which reaches the two-minute mark—dispatches grim reports from a dystopian future.
Mostly, Reilly is shouting about technology turning on its master, whether it’s a 3D printer that spits out humanoids (“Machine”) or a murderous AI entity (“Projection”). On “VR Execution,” he imagines a simulation that lets you witness your own death. “Strap you in the chair/Administer the shot,” he croaks. “Screening your own death/Into your frontal lobe.” The band makes these rants about the distant future sound ripped from vintage 7"s: Teevee treats his synthesizer like an electric organ, emitting a shredding hook that glows like plutonium. It recalls the mad-scientist energy of ’70s electro-punks the Screamers or a rabid, street urchin strain of early Devo.
Despite his phlegmy sneer, Reilly is  more of an apocalyptic prankster than a politico crust punk, and he prioritizes a sense of humor across his many bands. “It’s like we’re a cartoon or like Toxic Avenger,” he told an interviewer around the time 3D & the Holograms were forming. “We’re like a goofy the-world-is-ending-but-who-cares thing.” He was talking specifically about Research Reactor Corp., but the same themes apply for 3D: wasteoid punks stomping around in combat boots, dodging killer cyborgs Terminator-style. But thanks to his unintelligible delivery—unless you can scrounge up a lyric sheet—you’ll have to enjoy Reilly’s jokes from a glance at the tracklist (see: “Sack of Meat” and “Buried in Leather”).
You might not know exactly what you’re saying, but Reilly’s lyrics are still built to bark along to. On “Asshole Hotline,” he plays an irate phone operator, listing off numbers like “1-800 fuck off” and “1-55 eat my shit” as Teevee whips up a synth line fit to guide a soccer stadium chant. On “C4,” the singer devises his own dramatic end, snarling over trash-can-lid snares. “Dynamite squeezed in my ass/I’m going out with a blast,” he foretells. A sample of glass smashing in the background only underlines the band’s cartoonish shtick—like a “POW” or “KABOOM” scribbled in red block letters. 3D & the Holograms might be mapping out their very own techno dystopia, but it’s inked in Day-Glo and dotted with only the most essential information—like where to get pissed and pogo as as the world crumbles around you.


The electronic duo Odesza are at the center of the current movement in stadium-filling ”chill” music. Their latest is full of billowing vocal harmonies, seismic rumble, and turbo-charged trap beats.

A Moment Apart

In the past couple of years, chill has become ubiquitous, not just as a verb (“Netflix and chill”) but as adjective (the “chill bro”), prefix (chillstep, chilltrap), and even noun: Per SoundCloud hashtags, at least, “chill” has become a genre unto itself. Contra Moore’s Law and all the breakneck terrors of an accelerated age, chill has been elevated to something like a state of being: a lifestyle, a philosophy, a categorical imperative.
A whole musical scene has evolved to satisfy the urge to decelerate. But as the aforementioned chillstep and chilltrap (faded variants of dubstep and trap, if you hadn’t guessed) suggest, ironically enough, the chill scene, at least in electronic music, is inextricable from its main-stage, peak-hour EDM counterparts. It derives its power from super-sized subtlety, exaggerated gestures, a kind of weaponized softness; in its side-chained whoosh and billion-watt sparkle, it practically screams: YOU ARE VERY RELAXED NOW! (It seems not coincidental that the rise of chill has appeared alongside not just marijuana’s widespread legalization but also its lab-grown, gene-spliced, THC-boosted explosion in potency.)
Odesza may not be the biggest stars of this movement (that distinction probably falls to Australia’s Flume), but they’re close. If their YouTube stats are impressive—23 million views for 2014’s “Say My Name,” 14 million for “Sun Models”—their numbers on Spotify are just mind-boggling: More than 82 million plays for “Sun Models,” nearly as much for “Say My Name,” close to a third of a billion cumulative plays across their top 10 songs on the platform. Not bad for a couple of guys who started making music together just five years ago, shortly before graduating from Western Washington University.
The first Odesza album, 2012’s Summer’s Gone, offered a fairly innocuous contribution to the emerging chill canon, taking cues from Bonobo, Tycho, and Four Tet and smoothing them into a tantalizing array of chimes, feathery textures, and powdery drum hits. Two years later, In Return bathed in an even more opulent abalone glow; it also honed their pop instincts, fleshing out their usual ribbon-like strips of sampled vocals with chirpy guest turns that channeled the decade’s default pop-EDM vocal style into whimsical, helium-fueled shapes. It was original and meticulously produced, but it got cloying real fast, like chugging from an oversized hummingbird feeder.
Today, Odesza are a proper stadium act. In May, they did two sold-out nights at Colorado’s Red Rocks, complete with electric guitar, eight-person choreographed drum line, and visuals by in-house live creative director Luke Tanaka. The new album is accordingly ambitious; it wants to be a lot of things, trigger a lot of feelings. It’s full of billowing vocal harmonies and seismic rumble and turbo-charged trap beats; its default mode is a kind of eyes-closed beatitude, and every climax is but a stepping stone to a bigger climax. That it’s an album about desire is obvious; you can sense their anticipation at feeling that brass ring brushing beneath their fingertips.
After a ruminative introduction, the title track explodes with so much light and color that you half expect Animal Collective’s voices to come soaring through the flames. From there, A Moment Apart just keeps chasing bigger thrills, deeper colors, and more heartstring-tugging emotions across an hour-long set of bright-eyed electronic pop, pan-pipe trap, breakbeat soul, and slow-motion house. “Boy” is a gleaming trap/dubstep amalgam fitted out with a yearning vocal hook; “Meridian” flips cascading, exotic-sounding choral harmonies into a soundscape evocative of a CGI-enhanced rainforest flyover in IMAX. As they’ve beefed up their sound, though, Odesza have lost some of their uniqueness. “Higher Ground,” featuring Naomi Wild, borrows from Purity Ring’s Kevlar-coated twee; “Line of Sight,” featuring the singers WYNNE and Mansionair, is a moody, mid-tempo ballad reminiscent of the Chainsmokers’ “Closer,” right down to the wheezy, staccato keys.
It doesn’t help that their guest singers’ lyrics rarely scale heights comparable to the duo’s vertiginous waveforms. “I need you now/Gravity can’t hold us down/So just take me there/To higher ground,” sings Naomi Wild, hemmed in by the confines of her rhyming couplet; two songs later, WYNNE falls into the same moon-June-spoon-shaped rut: “I’m feeling in and out/I turn full circle round and round/So will you help me down/Come grab my hand for solid ground.” But those vague platitudes may be preferable to Leon Bridges’ verses on “Across the Room,” a cloying slow jam whose sappy, sexed-up gravitas brings to mind Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me.” The breakup song “Just a Memory” is less icky; Regina Spektor is a more convincing storyteller, but her soaring soprano coo feels better suited to a Disney theme song. Squeezing genuine emotion out of this music is about as likely as finding comfort snuggling with one of Jeff Koons’ balloon-dog sculptures.
It all comes to a head with the closing “Corners of the Earth”: Over diffuse choral harmonies, RY X does his best Justin Vernon impression, while swelling synths and pounding drums conjure M83 and Sigur Rós. As the song builds, you can practically see the fighter jets crisscrossing overhead, their fuselages kissed with the colors of the fireworks exploding around them. “Tonight we run/Through love we never knew/Our love to everyone/We love tonight for love,” he sings, tautologically; “We’re golden/We’re golden/We’re golden/We’re golden.” But the harder the band strive to reach sublimity, the more earthbound their music feels. It’s fitting that he should begin with “Tonight we run/We run into the sun”; the song, like the album, has Icarus’ charred fingerprints all over it.


Hamilton Leithauser and co. faithfully cover the 1974 Harry Nilsson album recorded by his friend and drinking buddy John Lennon.

Pussy Cats

It's not hate, it's practicality: The Walkmen's note-for-note reproduction of Harry Nilsson's Pussy Cats (and its accompanying DVD) is not being given away as a free download, nor as a CD-R at shows, a fan club release, or even a limited run-- they're just plain asking for your money on this. It'd be more forgivable if this record were bringing Nilsson's material to a new or wider audience, but despite the Walkmen playing illustrious venues like the Bait Shop, I'd guess the opposite is happening. The Walkmen's Pussy Cats is for the tiny sliver of the Venn diagram where fans of the original LP and long-established Walkmen fans intersect (and where this writer admittedly rests). The band's faithful recasting is a curio to Nilsson followers, and while it'll stir many fans to sing along, it's in all the same places they've been doing for years.
The story behind Nilsson's original is almost as good as the record: Nilsson was friendly with all the Beatles, but was far closer to (and owed more to) John Lennon than the rest. Nilsson was Lennon's main drinking buddy throughout the ex-Beatle's "Lost Weekend" period in L.A., a time when Lennon was separated from Yoko Ono and Pussy Cats came to fruition. When the two finally went into the studio with Lennon as producer, Nilsson's vocal cords ruptured, ruining his impressive higher register for the entirety of the session-- yet he never told Lennon, for fear the project would be halted. It goes to show how Nilsson valued and looked up to his friend, but also why he remained a cult figure despite writing huge hits, being loved by esteemed fellow artists like the Beatles, and remaining incredibly consistent as a songwriter (though the fact this album was originally to be called Strange Pussies is but one example of how Nilsson flouted record company wishes and public regard).
So there's a big reason why the Walkmen are a perfect fit for not just Nilsson, but for this album in particular, and it's not just that Hamilton Leithauser has a talent for sounding like his throat is scorched. The Walkmen cultivate the stubborn, lovable loser segment of Nilsson's persona on a microscale, eschewing structure and expectation from song to song where Nilsson did it album to album-- and we know that the Walkmen are just as capable of writing hits (see "The Rat") if they weren't following their own muse wherever it led and just being so goddamned stubborn. I'm a fan of every incidental noise on Bows and Arrows, but the band's (numerous) slow jams always have that last-call weave just as this particular record does, and anyone who's seen the Walkmen live know they're not afraid to put in a frazzled performance for the sake of spirit , even if they don't quite have the same command of their craft.
Or do they? It's funny how they can reproduce the sounds on the original Pussy Cats so accurately, from the strings on "Many Rivers to Cross" to the guitar tone in "Subterranean Homesick Blues", casting their other records as carefully arranged where they might have sounded vague and unfinished to casual listeners. Funnier that the only track here that sounds like the band themselves ("Black Sails") isn't even sung by Leithauser, but by Mazarin frontman Quentin Stoltzfus (the writer of "Another One Goes By", which the Walkmen cribbed to close A Hundred Miles Off). If I were the type to make assumptions, I'd be tempted to say the boys are having something of an identity crisis this year.
But I hated "Many Rivers to Cross" on first listen and I still do, just as I'm disappointed by "Subterranean Homesick Blues". Whether it was personality or just necessity under the circumstances, Nilsson's covers on this record were distinctive; the Walkmen just paint by numbers, despite that the canvas is unlimited. They were within their bounds to record these songs however they wanted, not just how Nilsson did. Ian Svenonius (of Nation of Ulysses, the Make-Up, etc.) shows up to add barely-noticeable backup to "Subterranean", though he's more audible on a duet of "Save the Last Dance" that sounds like it's being sung through a home karaoke shelf system while he and Leithauser sound appropriately inebriated.
Still, better they piss all over the source material than the stiff reverence of barroom ballads like "Don't Forget Me", "Old Forgotten Soldier", or even the sprightly teetotaler anthem "All My Life"-- even if the band nails them and Leithauser sounds more comfortable here than on much of his band's last record. Do they embarrass themselves? Not in the least. But they do raise the question of why this album even needs to be heard outside the band themselves, and why it should be in stores. The accompanying press will encourage letting them off easy by emphasizing that it's all in fun, and I'm not saying that's wrong-- I mean, one of them is dressed as a piece of fruit on the cover. It's supposed to be a lark, but rarely does the gaiety or spontaneity so evident on the original Pussy Cats shine through.
One exception: The album was recorded in the last days of the band's self-owned Marcata Studios before being torn down, and the drill sounds that open the final cut "Rock Around the Clock" could be the walls coming down as the band races through their last track, tripping over their feet in their final minutes of fun. Then, and pretty much only then, does something more than admiration materialize, and the band catches some of the intangible legend floating around Nilsson's output of the Pussy Cats era. Every booze-soaked bad idea is remembered the next day with half-grimace, half-impish grin-- there's always a thrill to know what you got away with that you may not have otherwise. This was all over Nilsson's album, and the Walkmen catch at least a glint of it here.


A dystopian band for dystopian times, Ladytron return with an angry, pitiless, evil-sounding record whose nihilism presents them as sirens of the apocalypse.

Ladytron

Two Decembers ago, news viewers were gripped by videos of flames engulfing the California mountains, cars on the 405 shuttling imperturbably toward the blaze. For the past couple years the world has produced apocalyptic scenarios like people exhale breath, but seldom have they looked so much like an apocalypse, like literally driving into hell—or running into it, as the cover of Ladytron’s first album in nearly eight years seems to depict.
Basically, there’s something going on, and it’s bad, and Ladytron are aware: Since 2011’s Gravity the Seducer, the band members have scattered to Brazil, the U.S., England, and Scotland, a cross-section of recent disaster sites. And much like the world, they have spent the last few years steadily draining their music of any levity, any fun, of anything like Light and Magic’s “cocaine decisions.” (It is mind-boggling to remember this band once did a jokey garage-rock cover of Tweet’s masturbation tease “Oops (Oh My).”) There was always a bitterness to their lyrics, as on the evergreen-like-poison-ivy “Seventeen” (as in, “They only want you when you’re...”), and a striking prescience: the dead-eyed Fiverr-ad gig-economy hellscape of “Weekend” to the ragged, running heroines of Velocifero to the self-explanatory “Fighting in Built-Up Areas.” Their best-known video was already set in an austere ice hell. They are the dystopian band for these dystopian times.
Ladytron is to Gravity the Seducer what Velocifero was to The Witching Hour: the same idea, sharpened into a knife. It is an angry, pitiless, at times evil-sounding record. Opener “Until the Fire” returns to the melting glacier of “Ace of Hz” or “White Elephant” and hitches it to frantic percussion, like staging “Rebel Girl” in a decaying cathedral. The martial drums of Igor Cavalera, of Sepultura, tear through “Horrorscope” like a haunted-carnival Tilt-A-Whirl. “Figurine” pairs the coldest of sawtooth synths with the most windswept of string whooshes: a lonely, gorgeous juxtaposition. Helen Marnie’s swirl of backing vocals on “The Mountain” makes it resemble “The Sound of Silence” shrouded in gas. “Deadzone” rests atop a synth throb not unlike the one in “Dancing on My Own,” but it’s dipped in about three poisons. Early single “The Animals,” with a riff like a war cry, is the closest Ladytron have ever come to making another “Destroy Everything You Touch"; somehow, it may be even bigger.
Despite the cover, Ladytron is not a political record so much as a nihilistic one that just happens to fit the moment. Their records tend to soak up the spirit of the times—Daniel Hunt credits Velocifero’s punishing drive to the recession happening the year before—and so does this. “[The record comments] on all the social things that are going on right now, but I wanted to create a sense of disorientation and maybe claustrophobia, which I think a lot of people are feeling,” Marnie told Paper. With the need to comment comes a streamlining of the lyrics; Ladytron tend to be oblique in their songwriting, but here they are less so. The change isn’t always for the better—the album’s very first couplet lands on a “fire”/”desire” rhyme. But mostly, they get straight to the nihilistic point.
“The Islands” presents the Martin Gore-like slogan, “Faith, lust, desire,” and the Ladytron thesis: “We are sirens of the apocalypse.” “There’s no law, there’s no God,” they warn on “The Animals": “There’s no heart, there’s no love,” and no mood has been bigger. Images recur: bad futures, horror films, shattered glass, animals hunting and hunted; deaths and rebirths, plural, as if Ladytron were providing one of the moody synth pieces from the soundtrack to “Russian Doll.” The occult abounds: “Ballerina palm reader” is the nightmare emcee of the Mira Aroyo-led “Horrorscope"; Aroyo’s other track, “Paper Highways,” mentions turning to tarot cards. “Deadzone” and “You’ve Changed” seethe with anger and unresolved trauma, Helen Marnie less singing than sputtering out words in a panic, tense to the bones.
Every Ladytron album has a few extremely low points, and on Ladytron those are “Run” (a part two to “The Animals,” not a particularly necessary one) and “Paper Highways” (the first part is great, as if wrought from iron wreckage, but it veers into a saccharine, completely misplaced chorus, like they handed it to Disney for a second). Much better as a ray of solace is the quietly experimental “Tomorrow Is Another Day,” getting through a Peter Gabriel-ish beat, a sandblaster of a synth, Jam & Lewis cowbells, and shading chords like disappearing and re-emerging hope. It’s the kind of packed track you can imagine a whole album springing out of, much like Ladytron could have sprung out of “The Lovers.”


On their first album in 17 years, the post-hardcore band comes exploding back with dutiful performances and familiarly obtuse lyrics, but the overall impact of their style has waned.

in•ter a•li•a

Take a few minutes to reacquaint yourself with the “One Armed Scissor” video. The one shown on MTV, the late night performances, any will do. This was how most of the world was introduced to At the Drive In, and every time, the El Paso band was presented as the most exciting shit imaginable in 2000: the explosive intraband dynamic, their acrobatic musicality, the barely controlled violence of their live performances, the afros. Meanwhile, their first piece of new music since Relationship of Command was premiered with a video that focuses solely on the two things that make At the Drive In seem kinda ridiculous in 2017: the lyrics and their artwork. “Governed by Contagions” maintains a kind of vestigial potency on account of sounding instantly recognizable as At the Drive In, which is true of in•ter a•li•a as well. But just as often, there’s the sense that time has diminished that power, and much like the vanished hyphen in their name and the replacement of Jim Ward with another member of Sparta, the subtractions are as subtle as they are undeniable.
in•ter a•li•a doesn’t exactly pick up where Relationship of Command left off; it just imagines if ATDI continued to coexist alongside the side projects it spawned, like a carton of milk absorbing the odors around it. “Call Broken Arrow” and “Torrentially Cutshaw” are *Relationship of Command *deep cuts refracted through the groove-oriented Antemasque and the stylized psychedelia of Bosnian Rainbows, while “Incurably Innocent” has a third-gen emo edge that could be sourced from guitarist Keeley Davis’ former band Engine Down. Meanwhile, “Governed by Contagions” imagines an inverted trajectory of ATDI, as if they were actually a fusion of the Mars Volta’s hammiest operatics and Sparta’s rigid alt-rock. “Thaaaat’s the way the guillotine claps,” Cedric Bixler-Zavala sings, punctuated by a gimmicky handclap and the swift liquidation of any goodwill generated by their 2016 return.
Hearing it as the fourth track on in•ter a•li•a doesn’t make a good song, but while almost four minutes of slightly off-brand At the Drive In is a massive disappointment in the context of 2017 and Relationship of Command, after 41 minutes, it’s easier to accept what in•ter a•li•a brings to the present day when no one else sounds anything like them. And when Bixler-Zavala’s language is the only one being spoken, it’s easier to meet him on his own incomprehensible terms. At the Drive In’s dispatches on shadow governments, mind-crime operations, and cloak-and-dagger espionage remains resonant like most prog of its kind, even when littered with obvious buzzwords like “bourgeoisie” and “chemtrails.”
In a rare instance of verbal candor, Bixler-Zavala has explained his intent to place in•ter a•li•a firmly within 2017: the writing process drew on the instability of the Korean peninsula, parenthood, his wife’s trauma from sexual assault, and possibly Daniel Holtzclaw, an Oklahoma police officer serving life in prison for multiple counts of rape. These are sensitive topics and so Bixler-Zavala’s puzzle-master approach to writing is reasonable. But what exactly are lines like “Smuggled in their faith like an orbit in decay/drools the cloying adulation of the pissants,” or, “Caving the symptom of confessional/Into the licorice forgery/And she dogged the seduction subdued by The Handmaid's Tale” trying to get across? Though it’ll be given a more serious reading than anything on a Mars Volta album, Bixler-Zavala’s verbal indulgences express little more than its own prolificacy, adding distance and distraction rather than depth.
Once again, this isn’t a terribly different approach than what came before; in fact, the band went to great lengths to take the same approach, revisiting old books, movies and even mixtapes to enter the mindset they had while creating Relationship of Command. But when ATDI careened with the same scatterbrained urgency as Bixler-Zavala’s lyrics, their mania cohered into a worldview that could be understood on a gut level.  No revelation came immediately: What would “Arcarsenal” be if it didn’t have its 50-second intro or the piano on the bridge? What if “Pattern Against User” lost its tropical punk asides? What about the bridge on “One Armed Scissor” or the a cappella whispering in “Invalid Litter Dept.”? They would probably fit right in on in•ter a•li•a, which only rocks as if bound by duty: the guitars are loud, the tempos are up, and most songs can be momentarily confused for, say, “Cosmonaut.” But even though they’ve spent almost two decades maligning the Andy Wallace and Ross Robinson mix that allowed Relationship of Command to compete with nu-metal on alt-rock playlists, the stiff and textureless sound of Rich Costey's Muse-honed production aesthetic will only help ATDI sound like a fit with the metalcore titans Of Mice & Men and Memphis May Fire that they can now call their labelmates.
It’s tempting to play armchair psychologist and say the lack of stakes or risk inherent in in•ter a•li•a is just the inevitable result of this being an ATDI album where everyone seems to enjoy each other’s company; or, the natural outgrowth of a well-received reunion tour that wasn’t tainted by the band’s own claims of it being a nostalgic cash grab. At the Drive In engaging in fan service is understandable, but they arrived at this point by always having something to push against. Earlier in their career, it was the struggle to be noticed in a notoriously blighted city, and later it would be the limitations of their sound or the stagnancy of rock radio, and certainly against each other. While in•ter a•li•a has plenty of motion and heat, it needs friction and resistance to light a spark.


The singer-songwriter’s vibrant, self-titled seventh album bridges the gap between his lo-fi impulses and the more conventional pop sound of his debut, without compromising his artistry.

Shamir

Shamir’s music has undergone a few striking overhauls in the past five years. The Las Vegas native abandoned the glossy dance-pop of his debut, Ratchet, after creative differences prompted a split with indie label XL, and spent six follow-up albums as an “anti-career artist.” That meant forgoing the pop-star trajectory and returning to the lo-fi, bare-bones folk and country music he first loved as a youth, taking detours through grunge and indie rock along the way. His uniquely self-reliant catalog represented an effort to divorce the industry and recontextualize himself and his music, mapping out a DIY route to his self-titled seventh album. Here, Shamir’s esoteric musical impulses meet Ratchet’s more conventional songwriting style without forsaking his carefully built artistry. An upbeat and vibrant album, Shamir spans alt-rock, folk, synthpop, and country, heightening the drama of each unpredictable genre shift with agile songwriting and steely confidence.
Often Shamir feels like a pep talk to himself, with lyrics that offer self-assured counters to anxiety, intrusive thoughts, and difficult relationships. “I refuse to fucking suffer/Just to feel whole now,” he trills over jagged guitar riffs and blown-out drums on the standout breakup anthem “On My Own.” The song recalls the guitar pop highlights on 2017’s Revelations and this year’s intimate, fuzzed-out Cataclysm, reveling in a sugar-rush chorus that sounds beamed in from ’90s MTV. Shamir’s dexterous, featherlight voice remains his most powerful tool, able to bend from an offhand whisper to a high-pitched singsong and back down to a growl. “Paranoia seems to be my very best friend,” he quivers softly against a tense, feedback-loaded guitar on “Paranoia”; the clashing elements sound like we’re experiencing a sleepless night in his overactive mind right along with him.
Shamir’s flexible voice imparts joy, yearning, or loss depending on what the moment requires, but the songwriting on Shamir feels newly deft and expressive as well. He worked with several collaborators to help bear out his vision, including indie rock producer Kyle Pulley, who appears on nearly half of the album’s songs. The teamup works especially well on “Running,” where a breezy echo of shoegaze guitar backs up lyrics that wrestle with the conundrum of wanting to be by yourself and in a relationship, too: “I prefer to be alone, but you can join if you like/I’ll stay strong for you ’cause I don’t want to be seen when I cry.” The sticky hooks frame a writerly self-reckoning, turning introversion into armor in a prescient, urgent thematic throughline.
Shamir delights in pivoting from one mood to another, never getting too comfortable with one style for long. On “Pretty When I’m Sad,” a quick drum beat and multi-tracked backing vocals add a delicacy that belies the song’s depiction of a mutually destructive relationship: “Mess with me and face impending doom,” he sings sweetly over a jangling guitar. “Other Side” carries on the album’s contradictory nature, building a country-fried lament that scans as an outlier until its moody lap steel gives way to a sturdy pop chorus about reuniting with a loved one in the afterlife. The genre exercises only falter on the stark closing ballad, “In This Hole,” where a crackling vocal is set against heavy, plaintive strings. The mournful tone is sparse and effective, but the heaviness feels at odds with the rest of the album.
Over a lone, echoing guitar on “I Wonder,” Shamir’s sense of grandeur comes into focus. “I wonder if you’ll be the death of me,” he ponders, stretching out the final three words in anguish. The song builds over a minute and a half until it crests in a blur of synths and drums, scraping up against the piercing emotion of his voice. It’s a raw performance and a gleaming example of the album’s ethos: There’s no element Shamir isn’t willing to try on. By collapsing genre boundaries and molding them into his own homespun image, he’s made an unconventional pop album entirely on his own terms.

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The Russian techno DJ Nina Kraviz enlists Jlin, Buttechno, Midland, and others in remixing all 13 songs from Annie Clark’s 2017 album, to sometimes scattershot effect.

St. Vincent / Nina Kraviz: Nina Kraviz Presents Masseduction Rewired

If Masseduction Rewired didn’t exist there would be no great clamor to invent it. St. Vincent’s Masseduction, on which this remix album is based, has already been remade once in acoustic form, and there is no obvious crossover between St. Vincent’s warmly inventive indie pop and the arctic techno freeze of Rewired curator Nina Kraviz. More worryingly, remix albums generally run the gamut from damp squib to outright embarrassment.
Against the odds, though, Masseduction Rewired is actually rather intriguing. No one—bar a rabid and possibly theoretical St. Vincent/Kraviz crossover fan—will enjoy everything here; the 22 tracks frequently stretch the patience, but most people will find something to love. Rewired also provides food for thought: Its catholic approach to remix styles encourages the listener to consider the tangled art of the remake and the question of authorial identity.
Broadly speaking, the remixers on Masseduction Rewired fall somewhere between two poles: those who see the commission as a chance to tweak the original song and those who follow the Aphex Twin school of throwing the master tapes against the wall and seeing what sticks. Steffi’s gilded remix of “Slow Disco” does little more than nudge the original song into deeper disco territory, while EOD’s scuffed up and eerie take on "Los Ageless” makes full use of the original song structure. In both cases, St. Vincent’s songwriting dominates.
At the other end of the scale, Buttechno jettisons all but a few syllables of St. Vincent’s vocal for his remix of “Savior,” which he squanders over a weakling acid-house number that does neither party any lasting good. There’s something rather cheap about this approach, as if the talented Russian producer couldn’t raise himself to properly engage with the material. Icelandic artist Bjarki is also guilty of this; his version of “Pills” reduces the original’s sardonic take on pharmaceutical culture to precisely the two lines —“Pills to fuck” and “Pills, pills, pills”—that you might expect a techno producer with a looming deadline to employ. It’s not a bad song, exactly, just rather uninspired.
Against this are a number of takes where the remixer manages to reinvent or even subvert the original song without destroying it. A remix of “Masseduction” by Midland, the UK producer of “Final Credits” fame, foregrounds the gorgeous string rush in the original’s middle eight to stirring effect; Emika’s take on “Sugarboy” chills St. Vincent’s electro pulse into a glacial, neo-classical synth sweep; and Jlin’s version of “Smoking Section” bustles the original’s languorous waltz into a frisky, devious skip, the authorial spoils shared equally between remixer and remixee.
These individual songs represent the album at its best. But as an overall listening experience, Masseduction Rewired is a slog. It’s not just the album’s fanatical length; the decision (on the digital release) to shadow Masseduction’s original tracklisting means songs get bundled together that are either too similar to their neighbors—Nina Kraviz’ three individually excellent takes on “New York” come in a rather testing row—or too mismatched, with EOD’s mournful remix of “Slow Disco” being rudely interrupted by Kraviz’ more gabber, less gentle “Gabber Me Gently” overhaul of the same song.
Inconsistency and overindulgence mean Masseduction Rewired won’t join Massive Attack’s No Protection in the elite group of truly essential remix albums. But a handful of transformative moments rescue it from the tire fire where Daft Punk’s TRON: Legacy Reconfigured pleads guiltily for our pity. Masseduction Rewired is by no means indispensable, but as a distraction it has the frustrating charm of a good crossword puzzle.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Released on Berghain’s house label, Dominick Fernow’s latest is built around clubbier techno atmospheres, but its transitional nature recalls the spirit of his earlier cassette releases.

Vatican Shadow: Rubbish of the Floodwaters EP

Rubbish of the Floodwaters EP

Stateside, Vatican Shadow is considered the industrial techno side project of Dominick Fernow’s main concern, Prurient. That’s not how it is in Europe, where Vatican Shadow is far more popular than Prurient. It was one of the reasons Fernow relocated to Berlin and made Rubbish of the Floodwaters, his first for noted Berlin club Berghain’s house label Ostgut Ton, and one of his few Vatican Shadow releases not on his own Hospital Productions. It’s built around a club atmosphere, although it’s not as huge of a shift as that might suggest.
Two significant Prurient records were influenced by transition—Bermuda Drain’s abrasive synthpop was shaped by traveling through Europe and moving to Los Angeles as part of his tenure with Cold Cave, and returning to a changed New York City made Frozen Niagara Falls more like his older noise works, but wasn’t a “return to form.” That is somewhat true of Floodwaters, his most polished work yet, even more so than last year's Arthur Rizk-produced Media in the Service of Terror. Two of its three tracks are built around longer grooving, molding the Vatican sound from a post-war wasteland soundtrack into a post-fallout seance. Tape hiss is a thing of the past, as is any semblance of rough edges. The actual songs themselves are more subdued, never approaching the bombast of “Enter Paradise” or “Peace Rage.”
Disembodied, stretched out voices that barely resemble voices permeate the title track. “Floodwaters” is like a more streamlined, murkier version of “Not the Son of Desert Storm, but the Child of Chechnya,” which also built around similar vocal effects. For Vatican Shadow, Fernow’s always used vocals as haunting textures and never as hooks, and that subversion of club convention is still true even as Floodwaters aims for more consistency. “Weapons Inspection” is the most active of the set, with shifting beats, ambient underlays, and bursts of sputtering rumbles. Opener “They Deserve Death” plods along a snowy terrain, a smoother version of a keyboard-driven black metal intro. Honestly, it wouldn’t sound out of place on an early Blut Aus Nord record or a remastered Paysage d’Hiver tape, and it’s so nocturnal Striborg could make some use of it. The icy electronics of “Death” are a staple of Fernow, who wrings the most out of brittle melodies, making it the most ominous song here despite its brevity and beatless nature.
Floodwaters’ transitional nature recalls the spirit of his earlier cassette releases, which were similar in visual aesthetic if not always sound. While they were mostly more industrial and more beat-driven than any of his numerous projects, they ran the gamut from barebones bass rattles to jittery chaos to lo-fi ambient. Here, Fernow is figuring out how to mold Vatican Shadow to his newfound success, while maintaining a mysterious air. It heightens the contradiction that has always driven Vatican Shadow: while it’s Fernow’s most accessible project, it’s shrouded by an oblique presentation. Before, it was vague references to terrorism abroad and the shadowy nature of modern politics; now, it’s a darker overall sound that’s more within reach, but also more impenetrable. Floodwaters looks like the start of a new era, and it’s not as though Vatican Shadow wasn’t danceable. After all, if a minimalist jam like “A.T.F. Sinful Messiah” didn’t translate live in the first place, he wouldn’t have bothered to move to Berlin at all. Fernow’s shown he can adapt Vatican Shadow to more spacious settings, but there’s definitely more he can do to solidify that move, one that might need a full-length to really prove.


Through muscular, chugging guitars and plodding percussion, Nashville's Adia Victoria explores ugly emotional realities with "take it or leave it" boldness.

Beyond the Bloodhounds

As any woman will readily tell you, our emotions are constantly subjected to public scrutiny. We’re told to “Smile, baby!” We’re reprimanded for being crazy if we seem too angry or too excited. We talk about “ugly crying,” as if we must apologize for our grief not being romantic or beautiful enough. If we talk about our frustrations or feelings too much, we’re dismissed as fretful, overemotional, or just plain bitchy. But on her debut LP Beyond the Bloodhounds, Nashville’s Adia Victoria (full name Adia Victoria Paul) makes it pretty immediately clear she doesn't give much of a shit about any of this.
Paul’s music has been described as "creepy," a notion that barely scratches the surface of what she accomplishes. The album is often unsettling, yes, but that feeling is more a byproduct of the feelings Paul explores on her gnarled songs than an end in itself. Even the record’s “prettiest” song, the wavy and fuzzy “Mortimer’s Blues,” revolves around Paul’s inescapable loneliness. She approaches love-song territory with “Horrible Weather,” but there, she sings about finding that person whose dark clouds and troubles match yours. Paul powers her songs with muscular, chugging guitars and plodding percussion. Her riffs crackle, snarl, and sneer with subtle country and blues signifiers, and keys alternately thrum and prick on “Dead Eyes” and “Howlin’ Shame.”
Paul has a knack for crafting drifting lyrical lines that inch under your skin and stay there. Sometimes, they sneak up on you, as in the spoken section that concludes “Invisible Hands.” The track begins with Paul speculating what her fears look like, but when she arrives at “The choir sings Hallelujah from the ovens,” the song becomes outright chilling. Beyond the Bloodhounds isn’t a blues record per se, but in the grand tradition of the blues, it creates space to look your demons in the eye and acknowledge their foul existence without necessarily doing much about them.
On “Stuck in the South,” Paul reckons with feeling trapped on her home turf. She sings that she’s “dreamin’ of swingin’ from that old palmetto tree,” and notes that her skin color “give ‘em cause to take and take.” She promises to leave, but can’t—she’s stuck. Paul’s ache is familiar for many native Southerners: The political and social dynamics of the South are complex and often ugly, as it’s been forever, but for some reason, you stay. Paul’s recognition of her Southern identity goes beyond cloying “hey y’all” affectations. Instead, she weaves together her disgust, frustration, and uncertainty, building a frank look at how she feels about home. From there, Paul closes the record with “Mexico Blues,” lilting as she sings, “You go your way, and I’ll go mine.” It sounds as though she’s still making up her mind about what her own way is, exactly. But with Beyond the Bloodhounds, she’s made a satisfying plunge into decadent darkness.


Melding disco extravagance with Old Hollywood glamour, the Los Angeles duo’s lush, shape-shifting glam rock transcends pastiche with theatrical flair.

Painting the Roses

Inside the velvet-lined world of Midnight Sister, Juliana Giraffe and Ari Balouzian party like it’s 1972. The Los Angeles nu-disco duo make lush, seductive glam rock informed by their respective fields: Lead vocalist Giraffe is a filmmaker and visual artist, and composer Balouzian writes movie scores. Their visually rich approach draws on a pile of colorful references, among them vaudeville, glitter rock, and Lynchian melodrama. In 2017, they introduced their moody, cabaret-influenced style with Saturn Over Sunset, pairing the record with dramatic self-made music videos. A new album, Painting the Roses, ups the theatrical flair, showcasing their love of layered orchestral pop, ornate disco, and breezy psychedelia. Their muses may be familiar, but Midnight Sister approach them with a fascination that transcends mere imitation.
Midnight Sister are not shy about acknowledging their forebears—Saturn Over Sunset’s “Blue Cigar” namechecked one of their more obvious influences, T. Rex. But their total commitment to disco glitz offers the kind of escape we could all use, and their attention to detail is striking. Over the rose-tinted dancefloor groove of “Sirens,” Giraffe sings about a “midnight disco,” her voice enveloped by the genre’s go-to motifs: hot horns, Chic’s chucking guitar, and a breath-heavy bridge à la Donna Summer. Giraffe and Balouzian toy with pastiche throughout Painting the Roses, but it’s done with swagger and musical devotion. Their enthusiasm redeems even the cheesiest moments on the record—it’s hard to deny their infatuation with a bygone era of carefree, extravagant nightlife.
Giraffe, the face and conceptual mastermind of the group, often directs and photographs Midnight Sister’s surrealist music videos. A trained cinematographer and graduate of mime school, she brings an off-kilter flamboyance that shapes the duo’s highly referential sound into something more unique. In the visual for “Foxes”—a glitter-rock ballad heavily indebted to Marc Bolan—Giraffe emerges from a dingy blue curtain wearing a pearl-encrusted catsuit. Instead of stepping onto a stage, she stalks a drab backlot, perching on dumpsters and posing in front of razor wire, her makeup and hair askew. Part diva, part doomed court jester, Giraffe’s performance is a playful subversion of tacky circus revivalism tropes. Fortunately, Midnight Sister’s music is good enough to justify the pageantry.
Recording an album is a far cheaper way to build a world than making a movie, as Giraffe has noted, and Midnight Sister are certainly proficient in world-building. Their snapshots of Los Angeles’ neon-lit motels, desert drives, and doughnut shops could make even a staunch New Yorker (briefly) acknowledge the city’s appeal. Though L.A. is a character in Midnight Sister’s script, it’s a romanticized, filmic L.A.—filled with vibrant characters and vintage buildings, not strip malls or traffic. Balouzian’s arrangements inspire an even more remote vision of the city; his cinematic strings on “Escalators” and the title track conjure the drama of Old Hollywood film scores, the kind performed in theaters by live orchestras.
Giraffe’s choral arrangements are equally well suited to the silver screen, particularly on “Song for the Trees,” where an operatic chorus arrives as a welcome contrast to the sleepy, LSD-era Beatles sound. Here, as on “Wednesday Baby,” Giraffe dips into a low, wispy Nico register, one of her many vocal guises. Unlike the classically trained Balouzian, Giraffe is a self-taught singer. Her range is playful and wide, and she swaps out voices like shades of lipstick. A screech, a dreamy falsetto, and a macho drawl could all exist within the same song—a satisfying manifestation of Midnight Sister’s shape-shifting, character-driven music.
Painting the Roses, as a phrase, echoes another: “gilding the lily,” the unnecessary adornment of an already beautiful thing. Allegedly, it’s something to be avoided. Midnight Sister, whose music is decked out in brass, Mellotron, Wurlitzer, accordion, and all sorts of other bells and whistles, beg to differ. Their album is a celebration of harmless indulgences: dressing up, going out, getting swept into the drama of a song. In Painting the Roses’ one-stop discotheque of the mind, more will always be more.

Buy: Rough Trade
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