After the labyrinthine twists and turns of 2018’s Sorpresa Familia, the Catalan quartet tightens up its songwriting and sharpens its pop-punk attack.

Self Worth

Mourn have always had a slightly antagonistic approach to rhyme. The English-language lyrics to the first song on the Catalan indie-rock band’s promising 2015 debut were intriguingly, ever so slightly askew: Singer and guitarist Jazz Rodríguez Bueno rhymed “candy” with “rancid,” drawing out the vowels of both words as if to stress her indifference to the imperfection. The remainder of “Your Brain Is Made of Candy” had a few more similarly tenuous near-rhymes, and they haven’t gotten much nearer since then. Already four albums deep, Rodríguez and her co-frontwoman and co-lyricist Carla Pérez Vaz now seem convinced that any time spent choosing words that don’t immediately communicate their frustration loudly and clearly—and they sound as frustrated as ever on Self Worth—is time wasted.
At its best, Self Worth doesn’t waste a second. Songs are tighter, reversing the contortionism of their labyrinthine 2018 album Sorpresa Familia, whose melodies and structures surprise-shifted like the architectural features of the famously incohesive Barcelona basilica that it referenced by name. Escapist imagery, meanwhile, goes almost entirely out the window here, making room for cogency. Lines like “I don’t wanna be a failure and disappoint my parents” are sung with dead sincerity. If the band’s early work channeled PJ Harvey with a faithfulness made all the more impressive by the fact that they were teenagers, Self Worth skews more pop-punk, airing feelings of self-doubt that tend to be associated with adolescence but linger well beyond it. This also happens to be their most polished recording, which suits its straight-shooting songs well. If you had been waiting for the Mourn studio album that went all in on “studio,” Self Worth delivers.
Mourn are no longer writing about eating brains, but taking care of them. In just a few years, the band has already weathered its fair share of crises. There was the tension with their Spanish label, Sones, which nearly derailed them around the time of their sophomore album, Ha, Ha, He. And now, their first lineup change: Former drummer Antonio Postius Echeverría left the group on some apparently rough terms before writing began on Self Worth, which plays like an exorcism of all the spirits haunting what should be a young band succeeding on its own merits. Their straightforwardness sharpens the songs, and the thrill that they get from it is palpable in highlights like the incandescent second half of “Men,” in which the line “I don’t really trust men” kicks off a dramatic exchange between Pérez and Rodríguez’s long and high shouts over new drummer Victor Álvarez Ridao’s speed-bag drumming.
Mourn’s newfound clarity of voice propels Self Worth, which flies from the get-go, opening on a five-song tear and closing with four straight heavy hitters, hampered only by a middle stretch that wilts a bit in comparison. On the rare occasions when Mourn don’t sound totally sure of what a song should be, they fall back onto breakneck intensity instead of exploring more varied dynamics. Self Worth is a relentless album that never really pulls back, but maybe that’s a function of survival for Mourn, who will probably always write songs with teeth bared. They’ve straightened and polished them on Self Worth, but their bite remains formidable.

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Constructed around archival NASA recordings, the latest from Wilco’s Mikael Jorgensen’s features meticulous, pop-molded instrumentals that feel just a little incomplete without a vocal narrative.

Hip Mobility

As a full-time member of Wilco, Mikael Jorgensen’s ideas are always a part, and never the whole of bandleader Jeff Tweedy’s songs. There’s a case to be made for Jorgensen’s prowess as a singer-songwriter in his own right, but he’s made it difficult in the past. Quindar, his new space-themed project with musician/art historian James Merle Thomas, paints a picture of a songwriter again stopping just short of the sublime, even as he gets within inches.
The one album where Jorgensen showcased his innate touch with a hook—2009’s All Is Golden, released under the name Pronto—flew almost completely under the radar. Pronto isn’t even listed among the numerous projects that get the spotlight on Jorgensen’s website. All Is Golden’s droll AM-inspired indie rock remains lost in the shuffle, along with the compositional acumen that went into its making.
In 2013, Jorgensen and partner Greg O’Keeffe released their self-titled album, on which Jorgensen replaced his original guitar and piano parts with synths. Even that decision didn’t cover up the inherent tunefulness of the tracks, but they sounded incomplete, as if Jorgensen were building them up into songs and simply neglected to sing over them. It’s not that Jorgensen’s music necessarily needs singing—he has a knack for giving his keyboard parts the kind of heartfelt drama that’s typically reserved for lead vocals. But on songs like “Where to Begin” and “Precious Like a Sneer,” Jorgenson’s charmingly off-kilter voice synergizes with the other instruments for the kind of power he should be pursuing more.
No such luck on Quindar’s debut Hip Mobility, which frustrates as much as it entices, even more so than the Mikael Jorgensen & Greg O’Keeffe album, its older spiritual twin. Constructed around archival NASA recordings, Hip Mobility contains no singing at all—which is quite unfortunate because this time Jorgensen outdoes himself, sustaining a level of majesty with his sounds from the very first note. At times, he doesn’t even wait for the middle-end section of a track to deliver the climax, either with a sweeping key change or with layers of sounds that open up onto breathtaking aural vistas. Literally, every single track contains an example of this in some form.
So what’s the problem with an instrumental album that tips its hat, as the liner notes explain, to three visual artists from the ’60s and ’70s who satirized the space program? Well, for one, Jorgensen and Thomas (whose doctoral dissertation “explores abstract art, experimental architecture, and radical design of the 1960s and 1970s avant-garde, as related to NASA”) didn’t actually make an ambient album laced with found sounds. Had they done so, the music would match the conceptual intent laid out thusly in the liners:
Strewn across corporate history offices and government filing cabinets throughout the country, the archival recordings are grounded in the minutiae of a given historical moment, yet tempered by our interest in separating that data point from its context[...] deciding in some cases to go so far as to fully obscure the original piece of archival audio with which we began.
To their credit, Jorgensen and Thomas actually achieved their goal: only the first and final tracks on the album contain obvious space-program samples in the form of spoken radio communication. (The rest of the source sounds consist of the radio signal tones from which the album draws its title.) But as much as their explanation reads like an over-baked artist statement for a college art project, the duo structured the music in a standard pop mold. For the third album in a row, Jorgensen has proven himself to be masterful at carving arrangements so that all the parts work in tandem in a perfect balance between form and function, not a skill to be taken lightly or under-utilized.
Tunes like “Wembley,” “Choco Hilton,” pivot along on a sturdy backbone of electronic beats that recall early-period Amon Tobin, etc, while the acoustic guitar strumming on “Italian Conversation” lands close to pop-leaning electro-organic hybrids like Tycho and the Album Leaf. “Oranganus” even recreates the club-friendly thump of house music. Jorgensen and Thomas have done such a thorough job of carving out a pocket that your ear immediately points to the space where vocals would go. They’ve recently said that the samples are supposed to “take the place” of lyrics, but with the NASA samples mostly obscured from center stage, Hip Mobility plays like the “TV mix” of an album whose vocals have been removed so the songs can appear on TV and in film.
The son of recording engineer Joe Jorgensen and a longtime staffer at John McEntire’s SOMA studio, it seems only natural for Mikael Jorgensen to prioritize sounds over songs. Indeed, he wears the tinkerer-eccentric hat with a great deal of flair. But Hip Mobility barely conceals the inner songwriter that’s been straining to come forward for his entire discography. It’s about time he wore that hat too.


Released in 1979, the R&B group Edge of Daybreak’s Eyes of Love was recorded in one take at the Powhatan Correctional Center in State Farm, Va. The band members were all inmates, incarcerated for armed robbery and assault, with sentences ranging from six to 60 years. Thematically, the collection is about a group of guys making the best of a tough situation.

Eyes of Love

There’s a moment near the end of the Edge of Daybreak’s Eyes of Love where the LP’s structured soul gives way to a brief, fluid jam session. It happens on "Your Destiny", and it’s the freest moment of a recording made in five hours in a Virginia federal prison.
Released in 1979, Eyes of Love was recorded in one take on a $3,000 budget at the Powhatan Correctional Center in State Farm, Va. The band members were all inmates, incarcerated for armed robbery and assault, with sentences ranging from six to 60 years. The musicians, some of whom played in other bands before they were locked up, were allowed to play instruments at the prison complex. They covered songs by the Isley Brothers, Slave, and Earth, Wind & Fire. Jamal Jahal Nubi, the Edge of Daybreak’s lead singer and drummer, entered the Virginia prison in 1976 and established another group called Cosmic Conception with Edward Tucker and William Crawley. He’d later form Edge of Daybreak with fellow prisoners Harry Coleman on additional vocals, James Carrington on keys, Cornelius Cade on guitar, McEvoy Robinson on bass, and Willie Williams on percussion. The band didn't have equipment to overdub, so they brought in backup musicians to play instruments when the regulars had to sing.
A few local media outlets covered Eyes of Love upon its release. Only 1,000 copies were pressed. "PM Magazine", a now-defunct television news show, produced a segment called "Cellblock Rock" that aired footage of Edge of Daybreak’s recording. The album arrived as the outside world was moving away from brassier sounds for the likes of disco and nu-wave. Up the road in Washington, D.C., musicians like Chuck Brown and Trouble Funk were putting their own unique twist on black music. Their blend was called go-go, a percussive strain of funk designed to keep the beat going without breaks.
In a way, the Edge of Daybreak seemed influenced by the homegrown genre, and at certain points on Eyes of Love, you sense the band’s urge to break away from the literal and figurative structures that contained them. Given their circumstances, it would’ve been easy for the group to create something sullen. Yet on Eyes of Love, it’s as if the band wanted to uplift themselves through song, and to forget their living arrangements if only for a few hours. These songs are optimistic, touching on the brilliance of love and glorifying romance in all its sugary splendor. Songs like "Let Us" and "Let’s Be Friends" recall the 1960s doo-wop era, while "Edge of Daybreak" and "I Wanna Dance With You" are extensive dance grooves.
Thematically, Eyes of Love is about a group of guys making the best of a tough situation. That a collection of inmates even recorded an album is a testament, and the fact that it’s so well done is a plus. The inmates couldn’t just go to the studio. Prison personnel required Alpha Audio—in nearby Richmond—to record the band at the Powhatan complex. They had to sing and play their instruments simultaneously, and get everything right the first time. The album’s last song, "Our Love", was recorded as prison guards told the band to wrap up recording. The group members were taken back to their cells as soon as the last song finished. Despite the duress, there aren’t any noticeable hiccups on the LP, making me wonder what could’ve been if the band had more time to perfect it.
By the fall of 1980, keyboardist Carrington was transferred to another prison. Then vocalist Coleman. Then Cade, who was moved to Powhatan’s North Housing Unit, essentially breaking up the Edge of Daybreak. There were talks of a sophomore album, but with the musicians in separate prison facilities, it was impossible to rehearse. In the end, Eyes of Love would be the group’s swan song. Thirty-six years later, it’s still a living testament to what can be done in tumultuous conditions. It’s a push to make a way, and to persevere, even when the light is dim.


A previously unknown recording from a small Seattle club in 1965 documents one of the saxophonist’s signature works—spiritual, searching, unstoppable—as never heard before.

John Coltrane: A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle

A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle

A quote attributed to jazz multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy touches on the ephemeral nature of sound: “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air. You can never capture it again.” He was talking about live music in the moment, and, since Dolphy died in 1964, he was speaking to us from a very different world. In his day, unless a recording of a gig was arranged ahead of time, the music did indeed vanish after the instant in which it was heard. There’s an intrinsic “now-ness” to improvised music in particular—for touring jazz musicians, what’s created every night is distinctive, offering a novel experience available only to those there in the room. John Coltrane, who brought Dolphy into his band during one of his many astonishing bursts of creativity in the early 1960s, was writing and recording an enormous amount of music during that decade, along with his steady live gigs. And while the vast majority of what he produced on the bandstand is gone, it’s remarkable just how much if it survives. More than 50 years after his death, revelatory unheard music from Coltrane is still making its way into the world.
The latest example is a previously unissued version of Coltrane’s signature suite, “A Love Supreme,” recorded in Seattle in October 1965. In the past few years, numerous “lost albums” by Coltrane have come to light; that there are still-unheard sessions out there is not all that surprising, given how often he visited the recording studio during his time on the Impulse! label. But “A Love Supreme” isn’t an ordinary Coltrane composition, and uncovering a new rendition of it is no small thing. He wrote the piece in tribute to God, to thank the creator for Coltrane’s own religious awakening. The suite sits at the center of his recorded work and has become instantly identifiable shorthand for the expression of spirituality in jazz.
Coltrane was moving fast in 1965—A Love Supreme was released in January—and he was always on to the next thing. His own sound on his instruments was constantly changing, and his band was in a state of flux. So while A Love Supreme was an immediate hit and recognized as a jazz landmark, Coltrane was too busy with new music to linger over it for long. For decades, Coltrane’s only known recorded performance of the suite happened in Antibes, France, in July 1965; that set has been issued in various forms over the years, including on the 2013 collection A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters.
The Antibes version is excellent but this set is more compelling, both because of the personnel and how Coltrane extends the composition. On Antibes, the band adheres closely to the piece’s essential form, improvising and embellishing but retaining its shape. Here, the players are free to explore new territory when the spirit moves them. It’s striking just how low-key the whole occasion was. While the July run-through was recorded at the International Jazz Festival and has an announcer setting the scene, this night in Seattle came as just one stop on a long tour, with no advance billing and nothing written about the show after the performance. As famous as Coltrane was by then, on this evening he was playing to a 275-cap room, The Penthouse. Saxophonist and teacher Joe Brazil taped it through the club’s two-channel recording system, and he held on to the reels.
Through most of 1965, Coltrane was working with the “classic quartet” that laid down the album version of “A Love Supreme”—Coltrane on tenor sax, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums—but here the band is augmented with three additional musicians. Pharoah Sanders plays tenor, multi-instrumentalist Donald Garrett plays second bass, and Carlos Ward, a member of Brazil’s band, who played a set earlier the same day this was recorded, sat in on alto sax. Both Sanders and Coltrane are also credited with percussion. The addition of another bass and extra layer of percussion turns the larger band into a roaring polyrhythmic machine.
Compared to the two complete versions of “A Love Supreme” we know, this one is stretched out further and played with more intensity. It lasts for 75 minutes, more than twice the length of the studio recording, though some of that extra runtime is because of lengthy solos noted on the tracklist as “Interludes.” That said, the ensemble pieces are also significantly longer—the opening “Acknowledgement” represents the most drastic expansion, extending to 22 minutes from the studio version’s eight.
“A Love Supreme” is a hypnotic and enveloping piece, and the added length allows the listener to slip deeper into the music. Once you’ve heard the first few notes of Coltrane’s opening fanfare, it’s hard to resist the pull of the rest, no matter how long the record is. Varied in tone, mood, timbre, and tempo, it’s never less than thrilling. The lengthy interludes will be trying for some—there are three bass solos and another extended showcase for Jones—but they’re gripping in the context of the whole, mixing passages of heightened focus with moments of calm.
Despite the fact that it comes from a private recording, the sound quality is very good. The left microphone is quite close to Jones, and the drums are louder than anything else on the record. But if you’re wired to hear the quartet a certain way, that’s not a downside. Jones is playing at an absurdly high level, bringing every technique he’d developed during his years with Coltrane to bear. If you focus on just one part of what Jones is doing, it's hard to connect it to a specific pulse or fixed sense of time. But when his kick drum, hi-hat, snare, toms, ride, and crash are considered together, his grooves reveal themselves to be both deeply complex and also strikingly coherent. And here, his drum kit almost functions as the lead instrument.
Coltrane’s solo on “Acknowledgement” puts the piece in a radically different territory than any we’ve heard before—he’s overblowing with an energy far beyond that of the studio recording, and sometimes it sounds as though his horn might break apart. Coltrane's solos throughout are just as blistering as Sanders’, but he still lands on notes; there’s a clear logic to his choices that stops just short of abandon, while Sanders is always ready to cross that line. The younger player’s most prominent showcase comes on “Pt. II - Resolution,” on which he delivers a flurry of smeared tones and growls—he sounds possessed, tearing his way through the piece with little regard to what had come before. Sanders’ ecstatic sound points firmly to where Coltrane was headed—and, on some nights, where he already was—but it’s fascinating to hear it here, in the context of the refrains and chord progressions we know so well from the original record.
Coltrane’s shrieking on the suite’s third part, “Pursuance,” is bone-chilling, and then a fleet and beautiful solo from Tyner follows, juxtaposing high-speed Bud Powell-like melody lines and hard, percussive chords with his left hand. After an almost 11-minute bass solo in two parts, the set ends with “Pt. IV - Psalm,” a slow and impressionistic lament on which Coltrane conveys through his horn the rhythm and phrasing of a poem he’d written about his religious epiphany. It’s alternately haunting and exhilarating. Jones brings the percussive thunder and Tyner plays harp-like tones on the piano, evoking the heavens. And then it ends. We hear clapping and then quiet. One bassist plucks away and you can hear a few voices chatting in the distance. Soon the musicians will pack up and move to the next town. What a journey this music has had, from almost entirely unknown to forgotten and unheard, and now, here for all of us. The only possible response is gratitude.

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Ryan Hemsworth has been prolific and populist over the course of his brief career, releasing high-profile mixes, finely-tuned pop remixes, and playing genre-mashing, crowd-moving live sets. But the title of this free, more intimate EP says it all, showcasing an omnivorous producer who stays up after everybody else has gone to bed.

Still Awake EP

Halifax producer Ryan Hemsworth, he of the narcotized pop instrumentals and nostalgic radio bootlegs, has been prolific and populist for the entirety of his brief career. His new EP, Still Awake (released out of nowhere for free last week) comes on the heels of three major mixes-- one for Diplo and Friends, one for Fader, and one for Rinse FM-- a host of loose singles, and a couple of the finely-tuned pop remixes which got him noticed in the first place. But Still Awake finds Hemsworth eschewing his usual stew of radio-friendly samples for a sound both more intimate and more insular. There’s no lingering question behind the title of this EP: it’s a showcase for an omnivorous producer who stays up after everybody else has gone to bed, tasked only with entertaining himself.
Gone are the Juicy J and Waka hooks, trap drums and associated tomfoolery. Hemsworth’s hip-hop leanings are still present, but they’re put in the service of making elegant miniatures like “(｡◕‿◕｡) (or, I Want to Stare at Your Face Until I Die)”. Dumb name, but it’s a track on which Hemsworth manages to shrink desire down to pocket-size, yearning and plaintive synths all resounding with the same kind of Gameboy fervor.
Still Awake feels more well-blended than anything Hemsworth has done, as if his rap, pop, and indie influences are now completely internalized. The samples are deftly woven-- it's not immediately obvious that there’s a lonesome dude moaning below the surface in the first minute of “Empty Thoughts Over a Shallow Ocean”. If the biggest problem with last year’s Last Words was a lack of cohesion between one track and the next, then consider Still Awake the solution, one on which all songs present are recognizably part of the same project. Even the remix of “Perfectly” that ends the EP-- repurposed as a dyspeptic party jam by the Japanese producer Taquwami-- sounds like Hemsworth giving one of his own tracks his patented remix treatment.
So Hemsworth has found his voice, more evidence of which can be found here in the inclusion of the video game sonics that he loves so much. Earlier this year he contributed a track to a compilation meant to honor the video game composer Yasunori Mitsuda, and he can often be found on Twitter referencing the sounds of "Pokémon", "Zelda" and "Street Fighter". “Perfectly”, the strongest track on the EP, uses that arcade sound as a foundation-- a loop of merry provincial chimes keep it grounded as samples flutter by. But all of the tracks on Still Awake use that small sense of scale to great effect. This is bite-sized music with serious emotional punch.
Hemsworth is omnipresent: in the music he releases, his constant touring (he’s on the road with Baauer and R.L. Grime this summer), and loudmouth social media presence. But his own tracks are often wedged into the middle of mixes populated with more famous faces, and live, he’s prone to crowd-pleasing drops and well-mixed, next-level mash-ups, only airing out his latest bedroom craftwork for a minute or so before quickly switching gears. Still Awake shows the flip side of that coin, revealing an introversion that powers the sinking dolor of “track 5 (crashed)” and the intimacy of the understated “All Our Thoughts Are Physical”.
That reticence speaks to the kinds of personalities that inhabit this purple beat scene. Producers like Hemsworth and his close contemporary Shlohmo didn’t start making music to be stars, and while both have an affinity for crowd-moving rap and R&B, they shine most when left to their own devices, working with a sensitivity that a fun Backstreet Boys flip only hints at. With his remixes, Hemsworth has shown himself to have a developed understanding of what makes pop music tick. But his database of knowledge and constant musical curiosity is better served when he’s refashioning it into delightful little originals like those found on Still Awake.


The consistent Memphis rapper continues his workmanlike grind to the top.

43VA HEARTLESS

Who listens to Moneybagg Yo? The question is a Beckett play for the streaming era: An extremely solid rapper with no discernible standout qualities regularly racks up charting numbers off of mixtapes, puts out collaborative albums with NBA Youngboy, and has Future roll through to hop on the occasional track. It’s hard to figure out who, exactly listens to Moneybagg, and if there’s such a thing as the diehard Moneybagg Yo fan. But here he is with 43VA HEARTLESS, another very good record that refuses to make a case for or against his role in rap’s hierarchy.
One look at the 43VA HEARTLESS tracklist betrays Moneybagg’s secret-star status. Gunna, Offset, Lil Durk, and Kevin Gates appear, as do upstarts City Girls. 2018’s Reset—his eighth for Yo Gotti’s Interscope subsidiary CMG—features J. Cole, Future (twice), Kodak Black, Kevin Gates (again), Jeremih, and YG. That’s a star-studded cast, showcasing the pull and attraction of rap’s quietest elite member. Despite the support, the emcee born Demario DeWayne White Jr. is at his best when he’s solo and cold-blooded, going after heads of rivals with a nonchalance that borders on sociopathy.
Stylistically, the influence of Gotti and the various stars he entertains on 43VA HEARTLESS is there, but Moneybagg’s flow most resembles that of Gucci Mane. The rhyme patterns, the schemes and style all recall the East Atlanta Santa, and rather than run away from this comparison, Moneybagg tweaks it to great effects. It can be a bit distracting—sometimes he sounds too much like Gucci—but White is able to highlight Gucci’s greatest strengths and make them his own. He has that same casual menace, the laughing delivery that masks something much more sinister. You can almost see the blank stare in Moneybagg’s eyes as he spells out the ruthlessness it took to become a star: “Got no heart/Just a black hole on my soul,” he raps on the Lil Durk-featuring “On My Soul.”
The best songs on HEARTLESS dig deep into a fractured psyche. On the DrumGod produced “Toxic” he’s not necessarily heartbroken—he would never admit to that—but he’s tired and depleted from a ruined romance. He sounds hurt, and it’s the first time on the album that Moneybagg’s vulnerability leads a song instead of his confidence. “Didn't wanna seem like I left you for dead/I knew you would let that shit go to your head/And say that I changed for the bread,” he raps. The little moments—his girl scrolling and posting after he falls asleep—are the ones that elevate 43VA HEARTLESS.
Moneybagg’s strength is in his versatility, with no aspect of his style standing above the rest. The hooks are solid, and his songwriting never falls beneath a certain quality standard. In an era of inconsistency and 15-minute fame, perhaps what makes Demario White stand out is the guaranteed commodity. You know what you’re getting with a Moneybagg Yo record, and it’s always very good. Moneybagg Yo is the reliable drop, and as such, we’re always ready for more.


The debut LP from Odd Future DJ Syd tha Kid and her OFWGKTA cohort Matt Martians mixes neo-soul, experimental jazz, and funk but lacks the collective's usual take-no-prisoners confidence.

Purple Naked Ladies

"When I first started really fucking with Odd Future heavy, my dad was like, 'Really? They talk about some crazy shit and as a female, you're slapping a lot of other females in the face.' I'm like, 'That's what I do. I slap bitches, Dad.'" That's Sydney Bennett talking from the backseat of a van during an MTV interview. Bennett, whose stage name is Syd tha Kyd, comes up often from Odd Future defenders. As the only female member of the otherwise testosterone-fueled OFWGKTA and one of the few openly gay figures in the hip-hop community, she's often cited as proof that the collective can't possibly be as hateful in practice as all that anti-gay, anti-female lyrical violence portends.
Syd maintains a low-profile but powerful role within the collective, producing beats and offering up her parents' home for the boys to record in. Though she stands tranquilly behind the decks during the group's live gigs, her presence is commanding-- try watching her as she menacingly nods along to the beat and slowly raises her middle finger over her head without getting chills. But as a side act dubbed the Internet, alongside Odd Future member Matt Martians, that take-no-prisoners, "I slap bitches, Dad" confidence is absent. On one hand, that's the logical result of a bona fide badass showing her soft side, dipping her toes into sounds gentler than anything else in the Odd Future catalog. But Purple Naked Ladies is frustratingly flat regardless of Syd and her cohort's reputations-- it comes off as a demo reel of an act that's still fiddling with what sounds right and what doesn't.
Think "Odd Future R&B side project" and you're bound to imagine the velvety slink of Frank Ocean's "Novacane". But Purple Naked Ladies leans more heavily toward neo-soul, experimental jazz, and funk than anything else. At its brief best-- during its final three songs-- the album recalls Baduizm-era Erykah, soulful and patient and poetically narrative-driven. "Fastlane", for example, pairs a steady boom-bap backdrop with Syd's featherlight singing voice as she creates a four-minute metaphor out of love and car traffic.
The album's backend is a welcome respite from the awkward instrumental clutter that bogs down too much of the record. Too much here demands fast-forwarding, from the hollow instrumental opener "Violent Nude Women" to "C*nt", which strikes an ear-perkingly rich note for all of a few seconds before dissolving into an overcrowded mess. Lacking in songwriting muscle, many of these songs sound simultaneously thin and cluttered. As debuts go, it's primarily a failure of editing-- an EP of tightened versions of the record's best cuts would have packed a stronger first punch.
Purple Naked Ladies isn't going to do much for you if you closely follow the genres it dabbles in. Like many spinoffs from the Odd Future machine, it's a small piece of a larger puzzle, useful for obsessives concerned with keeping their catalogs up to date. In that sense, it's also a reminder that Odd Future is about strength in numbers, functioning best as a gaggle of goony characters instead of individual breakout stars in the making (excepting Tyler, of course). That's okay for now-- those boys would be hard-pressed to fill Syd's spot if she took off on her own.


With the boiled-down quality of a good short story collection, the debut album from the Texas songwriter is cryptic, bewildering, and daringly simple.

Optimism

Jana Horn recorded a solo debut before Optimism that she scrapped because it sounded too good. “It didn’t reflect me very much,” she told The Guardian. The Texan post-grad fiction writer and teacher recruited some members of the band Knife on the Water and made another album, from scratch, that she liked better. The music was daringly simple this time, and in that space, something sprouted and proliferated: her writer’s mind, which snaked into the cracks left by the arrangements.
That album, now being given proper release by Philadelphia’s No Quarter, reveals its quizzical heart in its opening seconds. Horn plays the beginning of “Friends Again” on two acoustic guitar strings with two fingers. Absent a few chord changes, the song is intriguingly close to something you could write and play with no guitar knowledge whatsoever. A trumpet eventually chimes in with some whole notes, but otherwise, the action is confined to Horn’s words, which trace the circumference of a psychic wound over and over. “You didn’t just push me out, you dug me out, deep,” she sings airily, adding dripping-faucet repetitions of the word “deep,” as if each time might bring her closer to the injury’s root.
From there, the album blossoms into a muted country sway, the turnaround licks and shuffles and cymbal hits all played sotto voce. The dry peculiarity in Horn’s delivery recalls Phil Elverum, just as the chilly serenity of the music sometimes evokes Mount Eerie. Filigree—a soft Hammond organ, like a raised eyebrow, on the title track; an electric guitar glinting in the corners of “Time Machine”—warms the edges. If Elverum’s mood is solitary reverie, Horn’s is more tender and intimate: many lyrics read like eavesdropped conversations between partners.
In her unusually entertaining press bio (“a grad professor once told me that masturbation is writing, as long as you’re looking out a window”), Horn cites Raymond Carver, and her best songs have the bewildering, boiled-down quality of one of Carver’s miniatures. As in Carver’s stories, or Amy Hempel’s, you’re not always sure what the narrator is revealing, or to whom, and the story feels broken off from some larger, ongoing narrative. Take “changing lines,” which opens with one character confessing they woke up “down in my brain” to another. The second character delivers a curious rebuttal: “In certain ways we just won’t relate, and that’s where sympathy can be, and is, enough... down to the molecule, opposites exist, and to exist depend on their opposites (what God is not, he is).” Is that clear? No? The song ends there.
The album feels about five times larger with the inclusion of “Jordan,” its first single. Whereas the rest of the record sounds homey, “Jordan” surveys alien territory. The bass thrums simple eighth notes, accompanied by nothing except atmospheric swirls and Horn’s lyrics, which detail a dreamlike scenario full of the willfully Biblical symbols and cryptic exchanges that characterize Leonard Cohen songs. She sing-speaks calmly in flowing meter, and as the song swirls and darkens, nothing is clear except for its riveting portent. She’s mentioned it was the last song she wrote for the record, and it has the feel of a transmission from some other place—maybe where Jana Horn goes next.

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In the late 70s, Craig Leon produced crucial albums that defined the punk and new wave landscape for future generations. For his own debut Nommos, released in 1981, one can hear how the punks rubbed off on him, imbuing his primitive electronic music with a striking rawness.

Nommos

The name Craig Leon won’t be familiar to most music fans, but take away the albums he recorded and our Top Albums of the 1970s list would look very different indeed. In the late 70s, Leon produced crucial albums that defined the punk and new wave landscape for future generations, ranging from the recorded debuts of Suicide and Blondie to the Ramones’ self-titled and Richard Hell & the Voidoids’ Blank Generation EP (as well as the early singles from DMZ, Weirdoes and Zeros records released on Greg Shaw’s mighty Bomp! imprint). It’s easy to imagine that Leon brought a certain level of professionalism to these earliest punk sessions-- these days, Leon mostly produces classical recordings for the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, the London Symphony Orchestra and Joshua Bell-- but for his own debut album, Nommos, one can hear how the punks rubbed off on him.
Originally released on John Fahey’s Takoma imprint in 1981, Leon’s debut album joined ranks alongside such glorious catalog oddities as The Psychedelic Saxophone of Charlie Nothing, Joesph Byrd’s Yankee Transcendoodle and Basho Sings!, not to mention Fahey himself, prone to play guitar atop audio collages of Tibetan monks and Nazi marches. And since Takoma is also regarded as the birthplace of placid New Age guitar, releasing early albums from George Winston and Will Ackerman, one can only imagine how Nommos made a certain type of music listener’s teeth grind, to where the album stands alone as the most audacious and “punk” effort ever released on that label.
So it makes sense that it's remained out of print for 30 years. Since then, it’s found favor with Fall fans (Leon produced three early 90s Fall albums), fans of industrial and primitive electronic music, techno enthusiasts as well as the recent spate of noise artists like Pete Swanson and Andy Stott who pair bracing noise to 4/4 pummel, to where the album fetches ludicrous sums online. Booted in the past few years, it now sees a more legitimate release. Opener “Ring With Three Concentric Discs” sets the album’s tone in a slightly schizophrenic manner. There’s a nerve-rattling metallic loop not unlike a broken fan belt thwacking aluminum siding but before long, a gorgeous warbling synth melody drifts over the noise, just smoothing down the sharp edges so that it might find good company alongside Cluster & Eno or Harald Grosskopf.
It then leads into the polyrhythmic tock of “Donkeys Bearing Cups",  which sounds like every hi-hat, handclap, snare, rattle and thump was triggered by one of Kraftwerk’s showroom dummies: stiff yet strangely funky. About a minute in, Leon introduces some unidentifiable noise that does its best anticipation of My Bloody Valentine, at once blinding and body-melting. The title track again strikes a balance between skeletal beat and juxtaposed synth line that with its sense of strange negative space seems to be a subconscious template for the sorts of beats the Neptunes would craft two decades later for Hell Hath No Fury.
The eleven-minute “Four Eyes To See The Afterlife” and seven-minute robotic rhumba of closer “She Wears A Hemispherical Skull Cap” comprise Nommos’s second half. And it’s here that the sparseness of Leon’s evocative metallic throbs slowly but surely steer the album away from merely being strange electronic music to drop into an adventurous DJ set into a more rarefied and unsettling space. “Afterlife” slowly develops from a near-empty clang to something approaching hypnosis. And when a female wail arises midway through the piece, it turns into this anxious slice of early 80s electronic minimalism that has few peers. It’s a strain of minimal, nearly New Age music that-- rather than dissolve your anxieties away-- gives you the night creeps.


Sung mostly in French, Gainsbourg’s gripping new album finds her in the tangles of grief. It is at once scorchingly intimate and fantastically oversized.

Rest

In Melancholia, Lars von Trier’s apocalyptic 2011 film, Charlotte Gainsbourg portrays a woman struggling to pull her sister from the throes of mental illness. Her performance is raw, devastating, and revealing of the singer/actress’ artistic fascination with darkness. There’s also a grim sort of prescience to the role—Gainsbourg’s own half-sister, the photographer Kate Barry, died in late 2013, after falling from a window. Her death was presumed to be a suicide.
As it has for so many artists—like Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum on this year’s A Crow Looked At Me, or Sufjan Stevens on 2015’s Carrie & Lowell—Gainsbourg’s grief took up residence in her music. The groundwork for an album, her follow-up to 2009’s IRM, had already been laid when tragedy struck; in its aftermath, the project recentered around reckoning with loss. Gainsbourg decamped to New York to escape the ghosts that trailed her in Paris (where she also lost her father, famed singer Serge Gainsbourg, in 1991). There, producer SebastiAn, known for his work with Frank Ocean, joined her for a year’s worth of writing and recording sessions during which, he reports, she “wanted to make something with all this sadness she had.”
Gainsbourg, though, showed little interest in delivering ecclesiastical murmurs like Stevens’, or a heart-wrenching catalog of detail like Elverum’s. The album that emerged from these sessions, Rest, is at once scorchingly intimate and fantastically oversized. Gainsbourg mourns by leaning into her cinematic sensibilities, cushioning her pain with orchestral swells and dramatic synth. With SebastiAn, she’s dreamt up a sonic palette that wouldn’t feel out of place in a horror film—take, for instance, “I’m a Lie,” which pairs a vaguely Halloween-like synth hook with French lyrics about the distressing physiological effects of desire. On the six-minute epic “Deadly Valentine,” Gainsbourg interpolates wedding vows in an unnerving, half-whispered vocal performance supported by sweeping strings that heighten the drama of the demented nuptials. One poster for Melancholia, that haunting image of Kirsten Dunst floating through murky water in full bridal regalia, seems like a fitting visual aid for the song. Gainsbourg’s grief is vast, and she’s writing accordingly.
For non-Francophones, it might be tempting to brush past the French lyrics that appear on this record, and certainly, there’s a hushed urgency in Gainsbourg’s delivery that maps out her tone. But the songs on Rest are some of the first whose lyrics Gainsbourg has penned on her own, and every word craves attention. She pulls off stunning bilingual wordplay on the album’s title track, co-written and produced by Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo—the English title, “Rest,” evokes eternal rest, while the French variant that Gainsbourg sings, “reste,” means “stay.” Of all the songs on the album, this one was written in closest proximity to Barry’s passing; it sees Gainsbourg simultaneously laying her sister to rest and imploring her to come back (“Reste avec moi s’il te plaît” translates to “Stay with me please”). The all-French elegy “Kate” makes a similar plea: “On d’vait vieillir ensemble,” meaning “We should grow old together.”
Of course, writing through grief doesn’t have to mean writing about grief. Tragedy doesn’t erase human complexity, so even as sadness is central to this album, notes of twisted romance, familial love, and fervent restlessness fill out its songs. “Sylvia Says,” a perplexingly funky but delightful homage to “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” builds a Revolution-worthy bass groove into Sylvia Plath’s lovesick verse from 1953. In the lush, string-fueled “Dans Vos Airs” (“In Your Expressions”), Gainsbourg reflects on motherhood. “Songbird in a Cage,” the only song of the set that she had no hand in writing, was given to her by Paul McCartney (who takes a guest turn on piano, drums, and guitar); it lays listless phrases, alternately spoken with cool detachment and sung in quiet earnestness, over a stuttering beat and guitar hiccups.
Songs like these affirm life, even in the face of death. They transform personal suffering into public spectacle. Few things are more terrifying than exposing our bruises to others, knowing that they could misunderstand, or prey on our vulnerability. On Rest, Gainsbourg doesn’t just reveal her pain, but monumentalizes it, lays out a red carpet, and invites people to watch. Her refusal to be sequestered by grief is, quite literally, a death-defying feat.


Upping the ante from her 2009 debut, Merrill Garbus fuses acoustic folk, R&B, funk, Afro-pop, and rock into a bold, uncompromising hybrid all her own.

w h o k i l l

The stylization of the name tUnE-yArDs in print is a bit off-putting, but it at least gives people fair warning: This is not an act with any interest in politely conforming to expectations. tUnE-yArDs is the music project of Merrill Garbus, a songwriter, vocalist, percussionist, and ukulele player who has fused elements of acoustic folk, R&B, funk, Afro-pop, and rock into a bold, uncompromising hybrid all her own. Garbus is blessed with an extraordinary voice, and she wields it with great confidence, always coming off in total control of her phrasing while seeming totally uninhibited in her expression. There's an authoritative quality to her voice-- she often sings with a commanding, full-bodied boldness, but even at her softest, Garbus sounds assertive and forthright.
w h o k i l l, Garbus' second album as tUnE-yArDs, delivers on the promise of her 2009 debut, BiRd-BrAiNs. Unlike that album, which she recorded almost entirely on her own using a digital voice recorder and the sound editing program Audacity, w h o k i l l was mostly made in traditional studios in collaboration with bassist Nate Brenner, engineer Eli Crews, and a handful of other musicians. The music benefits from the increased professionalism, but Garbus has not abandoned her lo-fi aesthetic. As on BiRd-BrAiNs, Garbus layers sound to create a patchwork of contrasting textures. This time around, the greater clarity allows for more exaggerated dynamics. This is most apparent in "Gangsta", a carefully arranged track that evokes danger and fear with bluntly abbreviated blasts of horn noise and sounds that cut in and out erratically like a set of headphones with a busted wire or a cell phone that can't hold its signal. On the opposite end of the spectrum, she creates an almost unsettling intimacy on "Wooly Wolly Gong" by mixing the ambient hum of room sound with closely mic'd arpeggiated chords and vocals.
Brenner's presence on bass is the biggest difference between w h o k i l l and BiRd-BrAiNs. His style is loose and jazzy, with fluid, melodic lines that add dimension to Garbus' compositions. She sounded so isolated on BiRd-BrAiNs, but suddenly her music is like a conversation, with Brenner's parts bouncing off her voice and rhythms like thoughtful banter. He brings a janky funk to "Es-so", a zippy groove to "Bizness", and a delicate weight to the airy "Doorstep". On "Powa", his lead lines slink around Garbus' slo-mo rock riff as if in a subliminal duet with her expressive vocal performance. That song builds steadily over the course of five minutes until it reaches a stunning climax in which Brenner's bass bounces gently as Garbus hits a glorious high note like a feral Mariah Carey.
Throughout w h o k i l l, Garbus confronts thorny issues of race, gender, body image, and privilege in ways that are pointed but nuanced. She mostly sticks to personal narratives, suggesting big ideas and complex tensions in her subtext while emphasizing the urgency of small moments and concrete details. She's most direct in the opening cut "My Country", in which she wrestles with guilt over her own privilege, but she's more thought-provoking when in murkier, more ambiguous territory, like when she sings about a sexual fantasy involving the brutal cop who arrested her brother in "Riotriot" or when she wonders aloud why she does not have more black male friends at the end of "Killa". Garbus is particularly fascinated by violence; most of the tracks on w h o k i l l deal with power struggles that arise from inequity and lead to further cruelty and injustice. Her lighter moments are still quite complicated-- she playfully wrestles with negative body image in "Es-so", while that same lingering disgust and self-doubt brings a moving subtext to "Powa", an ode to a lover who can get her to momentarily let go of stress and insecurities.
Back in 1983 Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon wrote an essay for Art Forum that suggested that when we go to rock performances, we pay to see other people believe in themselves. A lot of what makes w h o k i l l and tUnE-yArDs' excellent live performances so compelling is the degree to which Garbus commits to her ideas and displays a total conviction in her personal, idiosyncratic, high-stakes music. This, in and of itself, is very inspiring and empowering. This unguarded, individualistic expression encourages strong identification in listeners, so don't be surprised if this record earns Garbus a very earnest and intense cult following.


The metal band’s latest album retains the sludgy ferocity of their best work while opening up to include elements of shoegaze and dream-pop, to mixed success.

Admission

Torche’s business is heaviness. The Miami metal band specializes in the kind of formidable, down-tuned riffs you’d expect to hear from the most menacing-looking customer at your local Guitar Center. The twist is that guitarist/singer Steve Brooks grew up obsessing over the Melvins instead of Metallica (he once said that the former band’s 1991 album Bullhead “ruined metal for me”), which helps explain the band’s sludgy sensibility. A great Torche track, like 2015’s “Minions,” doesn’t wow you with speed or exhaust you with unchecked aggression. It bludgeons you slowly and patiently, giving you time to marvel at its punishing repetition before you succumb.
This basic strategy has served Torche across 15 years, numerous line-up changes, five labels, and at least one intraband fistfight. The group perfected the approach on 2008’s subversively melodic Meanderthal, while refining it and enlarging its following on 2012’s Harmonicraft and 2015’s Restarter. Admission, Torche’s new album and first in more than four years, retains the sludgy ferocity of their best work while broadening their sound to include elements of shoegaze and dream pop, to mixed success.
The most striking departure here is the title track, an uncharacteristically dreamy meditation on self-induced isolation. If you’re a shoegaze nut, the song’s introductory siren of guitar might strike you as familiar—it is startlingly similar to the main riff in Ride’s 1990 gem “Dreams Burn Down.” That’s not a reference point that would have applied to Torche’s previous albums, but it does indicate the band’s growing interest in using lead guitar as an engine of atmospheric grandeur. (Admission is the first Torche album that finds longtime bassist Jonathan Nuñez switching over to guitar duties.) On “Slide,” this results in a slippery, reverb-tinted solo that lacks the agility and laser precision of the Meanderthal solos.
Torche aren’t growing soft. From the sputtering machine-gun power chords that open the record (“From Here”) to the chugging doom of “On the Wire,” Admission doesn’t skimp on the band’s well-established propensity for brutalizing riffs. The latter is a highlight of teeth-gnashing sludge, as is “Infierno,” which uses discordant rumbles of low-end guitar noise to illustrate its vision of fiery devastation: As Brooks repeats the words “on fire,” the amp sounds as though it’s literally overheating. That song locks into a thunderous groove before Torche close out the album by dialing up their melodic sensibilities on “Changes Come,” which boasts faint echoes of a synth line and the album’s only trace of an optimistic lyric (“I’m alright/The kid isn’t gone”). Brooks is the rare metal vocalist who sings more than he shouts, here especially so.
Those moments are impressive. But for the most part, Admission doesn’t amount to Torche’s most compelling songwriting, especially when you consider the four-and-a-half-year wait between albums. “Times Missing” is another dalliance with shoegaze wall-of-sound density, but the song plods around for five minutes in search of a central idea. “Reminder,” with its staccato jolts of electricity, makes an admirable racket but never quite locks into a groove. And the record’s two punkish interludes, “From Here” and “What Was,” feel as truncated and perfunctory as their titles. Neither pass the 90-second mark. That should still be enough time to produce a hook.
Pop-metal, stoner rock, doom metal—whatever amalgam of buzzwords you favor, on Admission, Torche remain a reliable supplier of grizzled riffs to test the low end on your stereo. The stylistic guises don’t always fit, but that’s a function of the group’s creative restlessness.

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Once lost in the major label trend-chasing of the ’90s, the soft, slow, and sad trio gets its rightful due in an essential box set that reissues all of their studio albums.

I’m still waiting.

For a band whose touchstone would soon become obdurate slowness, Acetone certainly began on the record industry’s fast track. In the early ’90s, when music executives were quick with cash, the unproven trio of California students inked a deal with a nascent Virgin imprint on a demo alone. On the prowl for the next alt-rock crossover phenomenon, Vernon Yard—named for the English enclave where Virgin began two decades earlier—offered Acetone $400,000 (nearly a million today), making them the inaugural act on a roster that would soon include the Verve, Low, and David Gray.
There were promotional budgets, tours with Oasis and Garbage, and the growing realization that their pained, gorgeous, and patient records could never actually recoup those kinds of post-Nirvana costs. This was not music for MTV but instead for a meditative and melancholy cloister, folks with the time and temperament to sit still with these graceful testaments to existential ache. After Vernon Yard dropped Acetone into a legacy of penury, they made two of indie rock’s most exquisite albums for Neil Young’s new Vapor label. Still, those didn’t take. And in 2001, at 34, bassist Richie Lee—whose twilit voice and heroin woes had been Acetone’s angel and devil—died by suicide. Ever since, Acetone have continued their descent into cultish obscurity, their records long out of print and mostly not streaming, a band on the fast track to the record industry’s wasteland.
At last, I’m still waiting. puts Acetone on their proper pedestal as one of their generation’s most hypnotic acts. They are like Bedhead without the morning-time stiffness or Mojave 3 with more earworm ease, a band wrongly forgotten among contemporaries they often bested. A titanic 11xLP box set that collects almost all of Acetone’s recorded work, I’m still waiting. doubles as a love letter for three kids—Lee, drummer Steve Hadley, and guitarist Mark Lightcap—who were lured inside a vicious system that did not know what to do with their muted wonder except write it off as a loss. For the first time ever, their four LPs will be available at once (as a set and as standalone records) and eventually on streaming, having outlived both Vernon Yard and Vapor in aptly tragic fashion. Three decades after Acetone accepted that $400,000 check, their music still radiates a hangdog sort of hope, holding on even as the idea of letting go beckons.
Amid the big-game hunt for the next Nirvana, Acetone looked and sort of sounded the part—Lee’s dirty grunge curls, the beautiful Hadley’s thousand-yard stare, Lightcap’s steely glower. Their Acetone EP, released in 1993, is a fiery baptism of distortion and dynamics, the first three songs grinding through Big Muff riffs and splenetic solos but pausing for uncanny spans of pillowed harmony. “D.F.B.,” a four-minute excoriation of a dead asshole, called “next” during a Stone Temple Pilots/White Zombie Rock Block. But then there’s closer “Cindy,” an imaginative and enigmatic eight-minute devotional about virginity or black-widow-like sacrifice or narcotized oblivion. The song is a seesaw, rising into heavy outbursts before falling repeatedly into quiet passages so vulnerable and delicate that they suggest rehearsal tapes, at least until you notice how intentional the playing is. No faint note is out of place, no twinge of dissonance accidental.
Acetone’s next eight years—that is, nearly their entire oeuvre—unspool from that locus, on four albums that descend toward low-volume silence before rising again for one last outburst. In fact, “Cindy” became such a touchstone that they named their 1993 full-length debut for it without including the track itself. Blistering bits of rock speckled Cindy’s 55 minutes, like the tube-screaming “Pinch” or the space-rock ascendance of “Endless Summer.” But they are mere blisters, aberrations on a surface so wide and smooth it’s easy to get lost there. A plea to a lover set on leaving, “Louise,” moves with doo-wop grace, subdued until it twinkles as faintly as a distant star. Low would not release I Could Live in Hope for another year, so “No Need Swim” gets to their paradigm—gentle but insistent harmonies that dovetail so well they sound like one voice and its shadow, over a rhythm that hides inside that heat—first. “I’m a molecule of water, flying over Niagara Falls,” they sing, masterfully framing existence as a free fall into someone else’s inescapable reality.
Indeed, they did soon descend into the merciless pit of the music industry and its endless grind for commercial attention. Hadley and Lee surrendered to heroin, perhaps informing the astral gaze and icy pace of what was becoming their best work but not necessarily helpful for writing more of it. Decamping to a modest Nashville studio for an extended stay, they managed only to make parts of two records. The results were, artistically, worth the expense: I Guess I Would, a brilliant country covers EP, relaxes into the work of George Jones and John Prine like a featherbed, indulging in these little tragedies. A setting of William Blake’s “How Sweet I Roam’d from Field to Field,” earlier attempted by the Fugs, is so hazy it feels like ascending heavenward through clouds, life itself just a memory.
They revel in that languid state for 1995’s If You Only Knew, having finally accepted how they wanted to sound. The distortion and vim of just two years earlier appears here only as aberrations, little ripples on a seemingly placid pool where the real drama lurks beneath the veneer. A song so still its melodic motion barely registers, “Esque” is pure heartbreak, a confession from an addict who can’t quite register some bad thing that might have happened yesterday. “When You’re Gone” is another transmission from the edge of confusion, now turned toward a future Lee isn’t sure he has. Guitar and bass lock into a slow-motion death waltz. This is Acetone at the lip of an abyss, where the view is grand but the stakes are grander still.
Turmoil soon ensued between Acetone and Vernon Yard, then entangled in a lawsuit from Verve Records about the use of the name the Verve, just as that band became Vernon Yard’s star. Lee accused the label of not working hard enough to promote the band’s record, not pushing it into enough stores. On the other hand, what was Vernon Yard to do with a big investment who had gone so quiet they’d barely be audible through a car’s FM receiver? Lee rightly rejected grunge as Acetone’s scene and got flustered when folks called him the next Gram Parsons or suggested Acetone were “the new kings of the No Depression movement,” a coronation that vastly overestimated the stylistic boundaries of that scene. What were Acetone trying to be, anyway? Vernon Yard didn’t stick around to find out, cutting them loose after If You Only Knew spiraled toward the cutout bin.
And so, as though in retribution, they made their masterpiece for Neil Young. The 12-track Acetone is focused and intentional in a way the band had never been, sorting through the suffering of survival with tenderness and intensity. “All You Know” is a warped country nightmare, slide guitar and smeared notes underscoring lines about going onward even as everything goes badly. Vaguely threatening and entirely enchanting, “Might as Well” deploys the notion that no one really cares about anyone else as a strange romantic lure. It’s an invitation to disappear completely into being unknown.
All of the record goes on in this way: a quiet quest for the silver linings that come with continuing, in spite of the struggles. This is the last record Acetone would self-produce, and the lessons of their Vernon Yard tenure serve them well. Everything is mic’d so closely that it often feels as if you’re resting your head on Hadley’s snare or Lightcap’s amplifier, that they’re whispering to you as Lee sorts through notebooks of soft blue feelings. Acetone chafed at subgenres, “slowcore” in particular. But Acetone is both apogee and access point for the form, its effortless sense of melody turning its shuffles and sways into vortices.
It is tempting to reduce Acetone’s end and even existence to Lee’s suicide—“to [overwrite] creative and contingent decisions with a fatal trajectory that seems both inescapable and unverifiable,” Drew Daniel of Matmos writes in this set’s empathetic and incisive liner notes. But Acetone’s final album, 2000’s York Blvd., suggests that they had already reached their cruising altitude, that they were now gilding a wonderfully gray lily. (Prime Cuts, a newly compiled potpourri of demos, lost tracks, and live recordings, confirms that sense.) Vapor enlisted Eric Sarafin, who had previously mixed several Ben Harper records, to helm the sessions, while Acetone brought in Jason Yates to add subtle organ lines. Lightcap even plays trumpet. Much of that old crunch returns alongside a dash of outright soul, both marketing hooks in waiting. But the best songs, like “Stray” or “One Drop,” are archetypal Acetone: methodical drifts toward a future that may not even exist.
York Blvd. begins with “Things Are Gonna Be Alright,” a sunnily titled song for a country still lingering in the afterglow of “You Get What You Give.” But it was a feint for a tune that, like Acetone’s music at large, soon went quiet and dark. “You may try and try again/Not to be unsatisfied, just squeezing by one more time,” they sing as the riff ricochets repeatedly, vaguely peppy despite what’s coming. “But how long do you go on/Believing things are gonna be alright?”
As with most things Acetone ever made, it is simultaneously disarming and unsettling, a balm for the ears that also registers as a lump in the throat. Hearing Lightcap and Lee sing those lines now, it’s hard not to grieve the way it all went down for Acetone, their striking music lost to the shuffle of major labels and ephemeral trends. At least you can hear it now, in this box of absolute treasure salvaged from the collective cultural jetsam of the ’90s.


On the third album he made with his biggest band, Glenn Danzig lived up to his larger-than-life metal-god myth in ways he’s rarely done since.

Danzig III: How the Gods Kill

Glenn Danzig’s career is a case study in the unsustainability of rock mythologizing. Given the way he built himself up in his first decade of public life, he was bound to fall sooner or later: Danzig presented himself as a smooth-voiced demon, a guy with a library of occult tomes and an endless supply of primal lust—the very stuff of Parental Advisory label hysteria and banned MTV videos. His music was tight and muscular, and he made sure he and his band appeared that way, too, particularly after he moved from New Jersey to L.A. But this macho posturing had its limits. In time, many fans went from exalting “Tired of Being Alive,” the down-and-out rallying cry from 1990’s Danzig II: Lucifuge, to actually being tired of his conspiracy-minded nonsense and questionable art direction. No metal god is truly immortal, infallible, or devoid of humanity, so perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised to find by the mid-’90s that Danzig, at his core, is the sort of guy who gets bummed that kids didn’t trick-or-treat at his house. Before all that, though, there was one album that lived up to the mighty image he’d built: 1992’s Danzig III: How the Gods Kill, where the classic lineup of his solo band in its prime found an emotional maturity unmatched by any record he made before or after. It’s Danzig at his most sinister, yet also his most human.
Danzig’s voice has always carried a hint of tenderness, and in How the Gods Kill’s slower tracks, that quality comes to the fore. The title track poses a heavy question in a soft tone: “If you feel alive/If you’ve got no fear/Do you know the name/Of the one you seek?” The implication is clear: Are you ready for power you may not be able to comprehend? Are you ready to go to the next level? He and his bandmates surely were. Throughout the album, Danzig, guitarist John Christ, bassist Eerie Von, and drummer Chuck Biscuits achieve a bigger, denser sound than they’d previously had. Danzig’s subtle croon only intensifies the effect of the blaze—stoked by desperate longing, he sounds that much more demonic. The nickname “Evil Elvis” had been lobbed at him ever since his 1988 solo debut, largely due to the way he packaged ferocious energy in accessible charm and his deep, roaring vocal delivery. But Roy Orbison is a more important spiritual influence on Danzig’s style, at least on this album, even if “Evil Roy” doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Orbison was goth before goth, draping himself with darkness not just in his black-on-black look, but in his lovelorn voice and his tales of sorrow. You can hear his music echoed clearly in “Sistinas,” a sincerely romantic love song where vibrato guitar and delicate strings back Danzig’s somber words (“I lost my soul, deep inside/Oh, and it’s so black and cold”). Orbison’s shadow is there, too, on “Anything,” a sweet ballad that ripens into a rager. On Gods, Danzig isn’t the shape-shifting, demonic wolfman of his earlier records. He’s a devil who feels, thinking about the one that got away while he sits on a throne of skulls.
Elsewhere, the bluesier tracks get even more juiced up than usual, largely a result of Danzig taking on an increased production role alongside Rick Rubin. The slyly seductive 1988 track “Mother,” which would become a hit after being remixed a year after this album’s release, remains Danzig’s calling card, but “Dirty Black Summer” is the song that perfects the form. Despite its name, it’s an elevated dirtbag rocker for all seasons, with Christ channeling every beer-soaked ’70s guitar hero into one of his most jubilant riffs; “Summer” swings faster, burns harder, and revs up to a hallucinatory peak.
Christ’s guitar playing was easily the most irreplaceable aspect of this era of the band. On Gods, he was in sync with the early 1990s’ disdain for flash, yet far closer to a raw blues tradition than, say, the industrial crunch of White Zombie’s Jay Yuenger or Prong’s Tommy Victor (who would go on to play with Danzig starting in 1996 and join the band permanently in 2008). A lot of his style at the time had to do with Danzig‘s interest in pre-rock blues and pop music—Christ has said that his personal taste is more driven by classical and jazz—but he’s still a crucial reason why Danzig’s first four albums, especially Gods, are revered today. Lately, even Danzig himself seems to have come around to appreciating Christ’s contributions to his sound: His two most recent albums, 2015’s Skeletons and this year’s Black Laden Crown, both sounded as though Victor was aiming to recreate Christ’s looser approach (with some success, particularly on Crown). All of this only makes it more obvious how important Christ was circa Gods. He shouldn’t have to settle for teaching gigs and weddings in Maryland—and it’s worth noting that he seems amenable to playing with Danzig again.
Gods marks the moment when Danzig transcended his punk origins and staked out a deeper place in the modern music canon, patching together the influences of Dixon, Orbison, and Howlin’ Wolf into something grand. It’s a record about confronting your inner strength, testing if it’s enough to endure heartbreak and uncontrollable lust; it’s about feeling that God is failing you, and wanting the power of a god all the same. Danzig himself would never again be able to seek higher truth in his music quite like this without devolving into trite spirituality. By 1995, the classic lineup of his band had collapsed. Various hardcore sidekicks came and went in Danzig’s ranks in the years that followed, and while that kept him on the road, the gleam in his eye circa Gods was often missing. A quarter-century after this watershed album, he’s still at it, even if recreating the howls of “Bodies” and “Dirty Black Summer” is more labor-intensive these days. Will someone show him how the gods kill again?


Twenty years on, Radiohead revisit their 1997 masterpiece with a deluxe reissue. The bonus material includes familiar B-sides and a few previously unheard recordings that hint at an intriguing road not taken.

Radiohead: OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017

OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017

As they regrouped to figure out what their third album might be, Radiohead faced, if not a crossroads, then an unusually open stretch of road. They had toured with Alanis Morissette in support of their second LP, 1995's The Bends. They had appeared, pale and blinking, before tanned and greased hordes on “MTV Spring Break,” wailing the chorus to a massive runaway hit that was now fading in their rearview. On their first two records, they had worked with two different conventional rock producers, and now they itched to cut tether from professional studios altogether. They had earned the freedom to thrash around, to spend some record label money and burn some of the industry goodwill they’d accumulated pursuing whatever they wanted. So what would that be?
It’s still funny to think, two decades later, that Thom Yorke’s first answer to that question was to create Radiohead’s first “positive” album. No more iron lungs, or songs inspired by brutal gun rampages, he swore: This time, he told NME, “I’m deliberately writing down all the positive things I hear or see.”
It’s unclear what happened to that album. OK Computer obviously wasn’t it. But there has always been a tantalizing alternate-history version of Radiohead’s third LP lurking behind the finished product. Their sessions weren’t exactly a deep-dive into hell, despite the record’s now-concrete reputation as a piece of digital-age prophecy. For every dour “Paranoid Android” thunderclap, there was a shimmering, lighter “Melatonin” as its B-side. More than 20 songs were winnowed down to 12, in fact, and the narrative the discarded tracks suggest has been kept under quite deliberate lock and key by the band. But now, years on, they are cracking open its vaults, perhaps to slyly underscore the point that they were always more human, and connected to good old hoary rock music, than their reputation suggests.
OKNOTOK is something a little more interesting than a remaster with tacked-on B-sides and rarities, even if that’s technically what it is. The “rarities” included here have never been all that rare, and many of the songs included on this set (“How I Made My Millions,” “Polyethylene”) live in readily accessible digital eternity on Spotify and have been performed live for more than a decade. Radiohead have always treated these songs, the ones that came before OK Computer truly took shape, with a wry sort of kid-brother affection: The storied B-side “Lift,” which finally sees inclusion here, was once seen as a “bog-shite B-side,” in the words of Ed O’Brien. It’s a lovely, weightless strummer of a song, and watching them send it shimmering out over a field of blissed-out stadium concertgoers in 1996 is the clearest mental picture you can get of this alternate history come to life.
But “Lift’s” reputation for positivity might be a little confused; in the song’s lyrics, the title is a noun, not a verb. The protagonist is stuck in an elevator, a piece of mundane modern technology that has suddenly halted and trapped us inside it. That lilting chorus of “Today is the first day of the rest of your days” isn’t a promise; it’s a death sentence, and the hapless soul inside it is doomed to expire soundlessly in the intestines of some soulless corporate edifice. The song doesn’t land all that far away from the chiming lullaby “No Surprises,” then, with its job that slowly kills you and the bruises that won’t heal.
The most fun to be had with OKNOTOK is in these line-blurring moments, hearing how the lost material informs the original album. After The Bends, Radiohead were briefly lumped in with the other bands in the “Britpop” scene, an association they never relished. If “Palo Alto” had seen official release, it would have stamped them with the brand for life; with the lava-lamp psychedelia of its winding central guitar riff, it is very nearly a Kula Shaker song, and it also happens to be the song that gave OK Computer its name. The same goes for “Pearly,” in which Yorke leers about “vanilla milkshakes” and moans “use me, darling, use me” over a nearly-Led Zeppelin III-sized stomp with an arpeggiated coda straight out of “House of the Rising Sun.” It was “a dirty song for people who use sex for dirty things,” Yorke used to joke when introducing the song in concert.
This fondness for camp and schlock has always been latent in Radiohead’s music, and teasing it out doesn’t take too much detective work. The original “Paranoid Android” closed with a wild, straight-outta-Deep Purple keyboard solo that, Jonny Greenwood joked to Rolling Stone recently for an oral history, is hard to get through “without clutching your sofa for support.” Alongside the earliest live versions of songs like “No Surprises” and “Let Down,” they often treated audiences to a plaintive, reverent cover of Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better,” the AM-radio theme to the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me.
The ghost of Bond followed them once they decamped from their self-built studio Canned Applause to set up shop in a 16th-century Bath mansion owned by Jane Seymour—she played a Bond girl in Live and Let Die. And it has followed them ever since: It’s worth remembering that Radiohead were tapped to write a Bond theme for Spectre, and obliged, only to have their offering vetoed. The lyric “Kill me Sarah/Kill me again/With love” (“Lucky”) feels tailor-made for a suggestive title sequence full of undulating silhouettes. Many songs on the original OK Computer feel written for a desk-drone, earthbound version of England’s most famous fictional spy, the sort of soul who whistles “bring down the government, they don't speak for us” while dutifully hitting “Zoom” on government surveillance footage. “In an interstellar burst/I am back to save the universe !!” Yorke sang, ironically, on “Airbag,” a line that could be mocking or hopeful or just wistful—like Pink Floyd, the classic rock band often mentioned as an aesthetic forebear to OK Computer, Radiohead succeeded in part by writing superhero themes for introverts.
Radiohead have been at least as brilliant at packaging and positioning themselves, step by step, as they have been in making and sequencing albums. They have always been studious draftsmen who seem to intuit on a cellular level when a song is “ready,” both as a compositional and a brick in their narrative. This is how their catalog ends up with ghosts hovering over it: When “Nude” finally appeared on 2007’s In Rainbows, Radiohead superfans felt the gratifying chill of recognition—this was the classic “Big Ideas,” played for years at gigs, finally given flesh.
Now that they have arrived at an autumnal, valedictory stage in their career arc, they are mining drama from gestures of release and resignation. “True Love Waits,” Yorke’s most unguarded song, finally appeared as the closer to their sumptuous, open-hearted ninth album A Moon Shaped Pool. And they have restored “I Promise,” a pure beam of sunlight that had no room on either The Bends or OK Computer, to this edition, another note in an ongoing song about throwing open doors and embracing surrender. “I won’t run away no more/I promise” Yorke sings on the song, the dewy, angelic falsetto of his ’90s years miraculously restored. Years removed from its source, its impact is multiplied tenfold. In 1996, it was a path towards adult-contemporary pop radio; today, it’s an exquisitely faded Polaroid.


RJ’s music comes from the heart of Los Angeles, and his latest for YG’s and DJ Mustard’s label bumps and snaps like summer in a way only West Coast artists can portray.

MrLA

Regionalism in hip-hop is one of its greatest achievements. These sounds and signifiers tie together generational experiences like time capsules of micro-cultures contained within a larger unique one. Though the homogenized internet has rendered some regional (mostly southern) sounds ubiquitous, West Coast hip-hop hasn’t wavered. From L.A. to the Bay, their respective styles, both characterized by funky lowrider basslines, have outlasted commercial assimilation without getting swallowed up and regurgitated ad nauseam. It is in this lane, along this open stretch of California highway, where RJ shines.
The Los Angeles rapper first captured his city with a slew of local hits—the biggest being his 2015 single “Get Rich”—that proved his mettle without a major label or blog cosigns. Now, with steady assists from his 400 Summers label heads YG and DJ Mustard he uses MrLA to expand his sound, replacing some of the street-acclaimed grittiness of his O.M.M.I.O. mixtapes with radio-ready selections. He’s aiming for clubs far beyond Cali when he declares he “came a long way to ball in your section” on lead single “Brackin.”
*MrLA *feels like summer in a way only West Coast artists can portray. It’s spacious and carefree but never far removed from the season’s more sinister side. It opens with a FaceTime call inviting him to the set with the promise of dice games and other festivities. As RJ heads out of the house, a souped up car starts as “Blammer” morphs into the soundtrack of rolling through the hood, windows down, the sun beaming. The single-note piano and stripped down g-funk courtesy of DJ Mustard and frequent collaborator Authentic coupled with RJ’s cautionary melodies set the perfect scene—at once laid back and urgent.
Authenticity bleeds through RJ’s lyrics, never betraying the truth of his own tangled existence for better and worse. On “Want Me Broke,” he confesses being “stuck swinging in between unity and egos,” a recurring theme throughout. He isn’t encouraging trouble, but he’s prepared for it nevertheless, always one foot in and one foot out. It’s fitting for an artist who, in a 2015 interview with L.A. Weekly, acknowledged the potential for stereotyping. “People have different moods and do different things in a regular day, so why judge them in only one light?” he said. “I’m not just a gangsta rapper. I go through different moods, and the music reflects that.”
MrLA resists the urge to stay in only one pocket. The Ty Dolla $ign-assisted “Is It Mine” ventures towards the breezy pop lands Ty and Mustard are already familiar with. “Blindfold,” which shares half of its real estate with Migos’ Quavo, finds RJ dabbling in dirty south swagger he undoubtedly picked up from his time in Atlanta. Unsurprisingly, he’s at his best when’s basking in hometown pride. The “Gin and Juice” sample and Schoolboy Q feature on “Hennebeeto” are shameless in its dignified L.A. rap roots to create one of the album’s more memorable tracks. The sturdy production of RJ mainstays Larry Jayy and Swish, the latter who also anchored YG’s Still Brazy in Mustard’s absence, also help give the album continuity.
The bittersweet quality of regional rap is knowing that no matter how loud you play it or how hard it rattles the speakers—or, worse, earbuds outside of car-centric cities—it’s not hitting the way it does at home. RJ’s music, like that of his predecessors, is an esoteric experience, a vehicle thrusting listeners into a world not their own but just accessible enough to enjoy. Fleeting as the summer, MrLA is over quickly—the details become fuzzy and only standout moments remain as nostalgia sets in. Fortunately, in this case, a 270-day wait isn’t required to run it back.


On their first non-soundtrack album in seven years, original member Daddy G returns and Damon Albarn, Hope Sandoval, and Elbow's Guy Garvey guest.

Heligoland

For their first three albums, you could count on Massive Attack to make music that was as intense as it was graceful. As the moods of their albums gradually transitioned from refined soul to grimy abrasion on Blue Lines, Protection, and Mezzanine, they used that balance to toy with the emotional structure of their sound. The result was some of the decade's most haunting, forward-thinking music. Depending on how and when you listen, the same Massive Attack song can creep you out, fill you with sorrow, or send you into a deep reverie. The best ones do it all at once.
Many fans consider what little music Massive Attack released since Mezzanine to be a retreat of sorts, and it's true that they may have lost something with each original member that split off-- namely the hip-hop sensibility of Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles and the frigid snarl of Grant "Daddy G" Marshall. Their next release, 2003's 100th Window, seemed like a creative holding pattern brought on by the group's personnel situation, but it did have a few moments of sinister beauty. Heligoland-- the first non-soundtrack Massive Attack album in seven years and the first with Daddy G back on board in 12-- misses that quality. The undercurrent of menace and sadness that defined Massive Attack's best music is largely absent, replaced with a drowsy, half-formed gloom that, if anything, suggests resignation instead of dread.
Last fall's Splitting the Atom EP offered a couple of warning signs that reappear on this album. "Pray for Rain" is a woozy, overlong dirge redeemed only by Tunde Adebimpe's rich voice, the only instrument that bothers with anything approaching dynamics. And the EP's title track, which reunited the voices of Daddy G, Horace Andy, and Robert "3D" Del Naja over achy-kneed downtempo electro, just blithely rotates in place alongside a dead-eyed organ riff like a beat-to-shit merry-go-round. The potential of both these tracks-- strong vocalists carrying a sense of weariness over bleak ambiance-- is sabotaged by the music's unwillingness to rise, crest, and fall, to shift momentum or volume, to do anything more than sulk in the background with its hands in its pockets, kicking at the ground.
That problem becomes more obvious throughout the rest of the album, especially when you're hit with one of its exceptions. "Girl I Love You" is a bracing embodiment of everything that made those classic Horace Andy-fronted Massive Attack tracks so great: a half-Reznor, half-Gaye backbeat; ghostly filtered guitars and snarling blasts of brass; that exceptional voice transfusing vintage lover's rock into harrowing cries for help. It completely annihilates nearly everything else on the album: the watery, choppy acoustic guitar loops that underpin Martina Topley-Bird on "Psyche", which sound like something Dan Deacon would come up with if he was scared of being abrasive; the listless half-skank of Hope Sandoval spotlight "Paradise Circus"; the Damon Albarn-feels-sad moment "Saturday Come Slow", which sounds kind of like Blur's "Sweet Song" with all the hope drained out.
And note those names, 90s icons all-- they're a quick and easy shorthand if you need to point out how little Heligoland engages with current music. Since 100th Window, the post-hip-hop landscape of bass music has extrapolated into an endlessly creative nebula of dubstep, wonky, UK funky, Balearic, and other rich veins of style. And how does this album engage with it? By closing out with a track, "Atlas Air", that sounds kind of like Aeroplane bliss-disco trying to be as creepy as the Knife. Elsewhere, we get a flimsy New Order pastiche ("Rush Minute") and glitchy quasi-jungle ("Babel") to show for it. Burial's been given these tracks for a potential No Protection treatment, so there's that, at least, but it's a shame to think that it'll take an outside producer to salvage this stuff rather than simply reinterpret it.
So what does an album this defeatist-sounding have to say? It just so happens to come at a time where defeatism feels pretty natural, and ironically that makes these songs feel even harder to relate to. When Daddy G mutters despairingly how there's "No hope without dope/ The jobless return/ The bankers have bailed" on "Splitting the Atom" or Elbow's Guy Garvey moans fearfully about home insecurity on "Flat of the Blade", it feels of-the-moment-- but part of a moment you want to break out of because the malaise feels suffocating. Anxiety is one thing, hopelessness is another entirely. And when your whole world can feel, in the words of "Pray for Rain", like a "dull residue of what once was," it's probably better to wait for an album that can't be described the same way.


The debut from k.d. lang, Neko Case, and Laura Veirs isn’t a springboard or a resting place for any of these vets. It's an exquisite tribute to connection and reflection on the things that bind us.

case/lang/veirs

“Supergroup” is a flawed term, implying a Justice League of musicians banding together to use their powers for good. Most newly minted collaborations shy away from its grandiose implications (and perhaps you'd be right to suspect the motives of any who didn't). In reality, these projects often start from much smaller stakes: a chance to escape your natural creative instincts, and ultimately better understand them.
The debut album by k.d. lang, Neko Case, and Laura Veirs has been compared to Trio, the 1987 effort from Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris, and the parallel makes sense in a way—there are few precedents for female solo artists banding together, and Americana is the black sheep on country’s family tree. But the titular Trio were at the height of their commercial powers in the late 1980s. Although titans in their respective fields, case/lang/veirs aren't really capitalizing on anything here. lang met Case and Veirs after she moved to Portland, and thought they’d be perfect for the punky girl group she wanted to form. She emailed them, simply stating, “I think we should make a record.” Within half an hour, they had both replied saying yes.
Rather than bring finished songs to the studio, they honored the spirit of collaboration, with Veirs and lang taking the bulk of the work, and Case, who lives primarily in Vermont, joining them when she could. These are three of the strongest voices in their field—lang the full-voiced seductress, Case the hurricane, and Veirs the wry storyteller—so things could easily have become overcrowded. Instead, they give each other space to take the lead on group-authored material, which wound up veering from lang’s original punk Ronettes template in favor of dusky songs about devotion, heartache, and awe at the simple power of human connection and creativity—the kind that underpins a project like this. “I Want to Be Here” is one of a few songs written by all three musicians, and finds them praising a misfit artist friend who “lost a front tooth, can’t keep a job,” Veirs sings, reassuring them, “but the things you make are so beautiful / They bring me joy / Don’t you ever stop.” Singing as a meditative campfire choir, they avow that “the hungry fools who rule the world can’t catch us / Surely they can’t ruin everything.”
case/lang/veirs makes a few subtle political statements about the human cost of being an artist. “Our life savings aren’t enough / Have to love you hard and make it up, make it up,” Case sings on realist heartbreaker “Supermoon,” where strings and the odd rumble of thunder lend forlorn drama to a heavily thumbed acoustic guitar. Veirs’ “Song for Judee” gives dignity to the late singer-songwriter Judee Sill, elucidating the harsh realities of her life with empathy and warmth. They dismiss preconceptions about youth determining the value of women artists on “Atomic Number,” dividing the opening lines into a three-part sunrise. “I’m not the freckled maid / I’m not the fair-haired girl / I’m not a pail of milk for you to spoil,” they declare, as pattering percussion pushes their elegy for innocence into a golden chorus. “Why are the wholesome things the ones we make obscene?” Case asks later on.
Although lang has said they didn’t start with a theme, much of case/lang/veirs stems from this idea of relationships as wholesome forces. More than once, the presence of someone else is a revivifying power, peeling whoever’s singing away from the ledge, up off the rug. And despite each artist’s unique individual approach, they share a sensory approach to singing about these intimacies that’s completely intoxicating and oftentimes driven by natural imagery (like much of Case's best work). “Why does the heart of the flame burn blue? / Why do January cherries bloom? / Why do blue fires burn in me, yet not in you?” lang croons over tumbling jazz piano on “Blue Fires.” Case’s “Delirium” takes place in bed, her sleeping lover’s skin smelling like fireworks. The “Greens of June” flood in and make Veirs “want to live like I never have before,” while “laundry on the line, truckers passing on the right” remind Case of all the beauty there is to live for, driving “Down I-5” with her shoulder burning in the window.
Loveliest of all is lang’s “Honey and Smoke,” where she watches other people fawning over her lover—“I watch as they pour honey in your ear”—with confident devotion. It’s a dreamy western slow dance, until lang too is overcome by infatuation. “Unaware of just how beautiful you are from within / Uncontainable / Exquisite to the detail / It hypnotizes people / Robs them of their social graces / Swarming to your glow / Fanning with phrases,” she sings with rapt intensity, losing her cool for a moment and showing her hand. Even when they sing about being emotionally closed-off, on “Behind the Armory,” they can’t help but make it beautiful: “Flies in amber / Sand in soap / Air trapped in the glass,” Case yearns.
The sweetness of their gaze only makes the melodies on case/lang/veirs seem more familiar, resonating deep within some distant memory while still sounding fresh. The hooks are mostly vocal-led, but producer Tucker Martine and the small band of players (including Glenn Kotche on percussion) color them perfectly. In “Best Kept Secret,” Veirs calls on a friend in California to lighten her mood, accompanied by a gold-rush fanfare of horns and guitars. Woodwind tentatively dots the edges of “1000 Miles Away,” where lang anguishes about the distance between her and the woman standing right next to her. “Why Do We Fight” finds elegance in defeat, lang questioning the point of “spit and punches” amid streams of pedal steel and soft piano. The attention to detail is just as evident in the small production touches—the subtle plucks and scrapes that make these songs feel lived-in and alive, like the barely perceptible mechanical glimmer that gilds the edge of the steady fingerpicked pulse in “I Want to Be Here,” or the muted line of firecrackers that skitters down the chorus of “Honey and Smoke.”
What are the stakes with a collaborative record like this? It probably won’t yield a follow-up, but it’d be a gift if it did. None of the participants had suffered a lapse in her powers and needed reviving, though the newsworthiness of the collaboration should hopefully introduce a generation of listeners to their respective deep catalogues (particularly lang's). case/lang/veirs isn’t a springboard or a resting place—it's a tribute to connection, communion, and reflection on the things that bind us. And it feels particularly significant and sanctuary-like for the fractured times that we live in. “I just want, I wanna be here with you,” they sing in unison. “Not bracing for what comes next.”


Norwegian songwriter and producer's excellent, Smalltown Supersound-issued debut is crisp, bright, airy, and shot through with light.

Feil Knapp

Oslo's Smalltown Supersound recently released a lovely and (so far) overlooked label sampler/mix CD called Sunkissed. In addition to tracks from Pitchfork favorites like Lindstrøm and Serena-Maneesh, the set features two tracks from Bergen, Norway's Bjørn Torske, both of which can be found here on his first full-length album since 2003's Trobbel. Of all the possible names for a compilation on which to find Torske, it'd be hard to think of one better than Sunkissed; though he has range as a producer and works in a fair number of different moods, everything here is crisp, bright, airy, and shot through with light.
Torske is obviously in love with dub, and has a fondness for understatement. His music is often danceable and clubby, but there's never a sense of menace and it never seems like a soundtrack to hedonism. Instead, throughout Feil Knapp, Torske seem concerned with spaciness and warmth, and, above all, on creating a subtle but palpable sense of uplift. There's also a consistently engaging and playful sense of musical humor at work. "Spelunker" begins with some squeals and blips from a vaguely familiar video game-- 8-bits, maybe not even-- and then uses the sound effects to build a melody for deep, bottom-heavy, but still nimble dub. It's goofy but also terrific fun, as he essentially uses the game noises as high-pitched focus place of, say, Augustus Pablo's melodica. "Kapteinens Skjegg" is another dub excursion, but more driven and heavier, its insistent 1-3 upstrokes providing the foundation for all manner of echo and flange-laden percussion fills. Torske's palette retains roots reggae's earthiness while remaining happily unconcerned with any sense of authenticity.
When Torske ups the speed, he keeps the dubby bass out front but adds jazzy chords and all manner of organic percussion untethered to the 4/4 grid. The snappy "Tur I Maskinparken" almost has a post-rock cast-- like a TNT-era Tortoise remix, say-- the way it blends elements like a quickly tapping drum machine with electric piano vamping. "Loe Bar" is much more danceable, as easy on the ears as mellow retail-ready house but far more engaging, incorporating drama with some yearning new wave synth chords and combining a hypnotic bounce with a striking tunefulness. The eight-minute "God Kveld", which was also on Sunkissed in abbreviated form, has a Miami-to-Brooklyn electro feel, with a synth melody ready to drive a Jan Hammer instrumental wedded to congas, acidic bass, and loose, rubbery drum percussion with the timbre of hand-claps. The breakdown in the song's middle is wonderfully odd and unpredictable, as Torske (or his digital proxy) seems content to bang on things just for the joy of hearing them make noise.
A little while ago we highlighted "Møljekalas", the relaxed mid-tempo cut here that is both uncommonly blissful and clear-headed. On days when the sun is bright but the mercury is still reasonable and the humidity remains in check, not a whole lot from this year sounds better. Feil Knapp is a sense an easy record to overlook, since it contains little grit, zero angst, and next to no dark shading. It is, then, the perfect album for a certain kind of mood, a mood one hopes to find oneself in now and then as July turns to August here in the Northern Hemisphere.