The New York rapper’s tenth album showcases his turn from athletic feats on the mic to more expressive modes, backed by some of his best production yet.

Integrated Tech Solutions

Aesop Rock opens his tenth album with a parody of Silicon Valley corporatespeak. “ITS is a system of industry applications designed to curate a desired multi-experience,” he says over a pastiche of ’80s synthpop. “Using a unique hybrid of machine learning and on-site scrum sessions, our specialists have redefined tech-centric problem-solving. Disrupt. Innovate. Refine.” The technobabble pokes fun at both TED talkers and Aesop Rock’s reputation for verbosity. A Def Jux alum and Rhymesayers signee, he knows the taste of word salad. He also knows none will be served on Integrated Tech Solutions, a smorgasbord of stories, images, and textures. The record builds on Aesop Rock’s decade-plus of rehabbing his style, which has shifted from gnarled abstraction to bug-eyed omniology.
Aesop Rock still raps in lurching torrents of interlocking syllables and layered rhymes, but his delivery has grown more rhythmic and laid back, more conversational than combative. His production has come a long way, too; what was once functional scaffolding has become a pillar of his music. He’s now more interested in rap as expression than athletic feat, a turn that has made his songs more deliberate and searching. With this refined skill set and vision, he’s made subjects as trivial as skateboarding at night and as fantastical as a superpowered bullfrog feel engrossing and personal. That casual fluency drives Integrated Tech Solutions, an album loosely about life under technocracy. In a world where artists have been reduced to brands and data points, Aesop Rock asserts his multiplicity.
The record boasts some of his most fully realized songs. “Living Curfew,” a song about the magic of golden hour in a city, darts from a stoop to a Flatbush Avenue bodega to the bloodwork from Aes’ latest doctor visit, each detail rendered in 4K yet propelling the verse forward. The images accumulate like a Katamari ball, swelling into “Whirlwind country/A world flushed from the brush pen of Kim Jung Gi/Swirling, junkyard tires and loveseats and house pets/All swept up into one beast.” The trip-hop beat’s crawling bassline and looped moans heighten the flood of details; the song feels like wading into a mural. And that’s before billy woods sweeps in with an equally omniscient verse about witching hour, that other magical time of day.

Single “By the River” is just as exquisite. Rapping over a loop of soft percussion and a jazzy horn, Aes confesses his love of rivers. East, Hudson, Amazon, Willamette, Susquehanna—he admires them all, communing with a beaver and the ghost of his departed friend Camu Tao in a winding verse that’s broken up by the simple declaration, “I like rivers, I like rivers.” It’s the rare concept song that is as revelatory as it is intricate.

Aes does a lot of storytelling on this album, extolling the beauty of pigeons on “Pigeonemetry,” memorializing his late grandma on “Vititus,” and narrating a bizarre home invasion on “Aggressive Steven.” The latter gets unwieldy as the story drags on, but Aes’ rhythmic virtuosity shines in this narrative mode. He’ll often insert an exclamation or aside to imbue a line with color, or to transition into a different flow or rhyme scheme. “Mr. T is fucking real?” he spit-takes on “100 Feet Tall,” channeling the astonishment he felt when his family ran into the celebrity in the ’80s. On the Watchmen-referencing “Salt and Pepper Squid,” a monologue about mentoring younger skaters sidles into a conversation: “I like to help the younger rippers clip up/A little hype to reignite the nimbus when they hiccup/How’s your weekend?/Is it house on a beach with a view, and tea for two?” Elite technique is clearly second nature for him at this point, but he’s constantly in search of ways to rap his ass off without showboating.

The production is just as accomplished and purposeful. Outsourcing just one beat, he goes full mixmaster. On “Infinity Fill Goose Down,” chopped and scratched vocals, squiggles of funk guitar, and an arcade cabinet’s worth of synths fade in and out over nimble percussion. Pigeon coos undergird the ornithological paeans of “Pigeonometry;” porch-stomp drums thunder over reverbed electric guitar on “Bermuda”; a burping bassline loops over a crisp breakbeat on “All City Nerve Map.” He’s long been an omnivorous producer, but he’s recently learned to emphasize rhythm as much texture. (This applies to his verses too: His odes to junk food on “Time Moves Differently Here” straddle the bass notes like a lover, his slowed flow drawing out the pleasure of every delicacy.)

As on Spirit World Field Guide and The Impossible Kid, a fear of mortality lurks beneath the levity and wonder. In addition to his typical jokes about being a hermit and living fossil (“Aes from before the first Star Wars/I survived Action Park, I survived lawn darts),” he also ponders the legacy of his art. In an interlude, he considers the arc of Vincent van Gogh, who was considered a failure in his lifetime. Van Gogh is the patron saint of flop eras; people evoke the Dutch painter when they need validation during perceived downturns. But for Aes the prolific post-Impressionist is interesting because he was productive, period. Even if his art hadn’t survived, he still made it, a devotion that inspires Aes. Integrated Tech Solutions illustrates how that commitment continues to deepen even as Aesop Rock eyes the clock. “O death, o death, could ya please hold a moment?/I am so in effect,” he raps on closer “Black Snow.” He’s got more to say.


The Detroit rapper’s latest EP is more polished than anything he’s made before but shines best when he sticks to his Midwest roots.

Unfuckwitable

Detroit isn’t the same place it was five or 10 years ago. Back then, the city’s brand of wicked punchlines and cheap-sounding pianos would rarely receive widespread recognition outside of towns with familial ties like Milwaukee, Columbus, and Oakland. However, behind a run of hit singles—Tee Grizzley’s “First Day Out,” Sada Baby’s “Whole Lotta Choppas,” and 42 Dugg’s duet with Lil Baby, “We Paid”—there’s no longer a career ceiling on the quintessential Detroit rapper.
A cornerstone of this flourishing scene is Babyface Ray, who raps about the most inconsequential parts of the most eventful moments. On “Meg Thee Stallion,” he’s being trailed but is more concerned about whether his outfit is fly enough for photos. On “Trill Spill,” he imagines a scenario about death, though not the actual dying part—just what type of suit he’d have on at his funeral. Almost every Ray song feels like a collection of fleeting thoughts built off frivolous details and delivered with the indifference of a person making small talk with a DMV teller.
Unf*ckwitable, Babyface Ray’s new EP, is the product of the city’s musical boom. It’s cleaner, polished, and mixed better than anything he’s made before, but the brief seven-song collection also feels like a transparent marketing move. Not many things are less fun than hearing a rap record that makes you aware of the business of it all. It’s inescapable on Unf*ckwitable, which, in adopting a heavier Southern influence than his past music, is an unsubtle attempt to introduce Ray to an audience less familiar with Detroit rap and to stumble into playlist ubiquity.
It’s hard to blame Ray; after all, almost every rapper wants their music to eventually live in those influential Atlanta clubs. Last year, 42 Dugg seamlessly blended melodic Atlanta flows and production with the stylistic foundation of Detroit, and it made him a breakout star. With Ray, this transition is less natural. There’s a way to make this leap without watering down his homegrown sound. That path might be longer and more frustrating, but at least it would avoid songs like “If You Know You Know,” where Ray trades forgettable punchlines with Memphis streaming juggernaut Moneybagg Yo—over a thudding cowbell-heavy beat that seems as if it was supposed to be sent to DaBaby’s inbox instead. Similarly, the Hit-Boy-produced “Allowance” has the most brutally generic hook; it badly wants to be a strip club anthem.
The traditional Michigan mixtape intro, “Real Niggas Don’t Rap” seems like Ray’s way of bargaining with fans. But the trade-off is worth it just to feel like you’re sitting around a campfire listening to Ray rattle off stories about how there’s nothing to do in the pandemic but get money, or about the time he spotted a woman in the airport with a “Coke-bottle shape.” When Ray is focused on filling in small lyrical details instead of the big picture, his music shines. “Pink 10s,” a conversational back-and-forth with rising Louisville rapper EST Gee, is another upbeat record to go along with “If You Know You Know,” except here, Ray isn’t trying to escape his Midwest roots. It’s time to move past the mindset that you have to temper your regional flair to advance your career. A Detroit rapper can be a star while sounding like a Detroit rapper.

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The Minneapolis rapper-producer duo Atmosphere over-share on their sloppy and tedious new album, though it still contains a few gripping moments.

Fishing Blues

For nearly 20 years, the Minneapolis rapper-producer duo Atmosphere—Slug (Sean Daley) and Ant (Anthony Davis), respectively—have been trying to find a balance. The alt-sloping founders of the indie rap stable Rhymesayers have been teetering between identities as idols (to a cult-like following of passionate fans) and beleaguered hand-wringers (to everyone else). They’ve earned an “emo rap” tag by delivering plainspoken pleas in spoken-word cadences that saunter through dusty MPC loops, and they cornered the market on a specific subset of pre-internet rap by fearlessly divulging to anyone who’d listen.
Slug and Ant have always functioned well as a duo because they’re in search of the same thing: shared feelings. Ant once said he’s a “sensitive fucking person” who’s “totally just about truth,” peddling his emotions through a blues-tinged soundboard, and Slug is a working class MC who shares every painstaking thought from deep in his tortured soul. But we’re now reaching the point (or maybe we’re past the point) where thinking out loud has turned the corner into over-sharing. On their latest album, Fishing Blues, Atmosphere make rap just for the sake of making it. This thing has no function or utility.
Atmosphere albums haven’t been interesting (or necessary) for a few years. The two partners worked at a distance for the first time on their last one, 2014’s Southsiders, which was their second dad-rap record (following The Family Sign). Southsiders tried to sort out exactly what Atmosphere songs inspired by fatherhood and domesticity might sound like. The results were predictably lame. The ideas were overwrought, gracelessly executed, and sometimes just straight-up boring. Fishing Blues makes a lot of the same mistakes, only it’s way longer and even more uneven. This is the Atmosphere take on the vanity project where even the self-deprecation is half-assed: On “No Biggie,” Slug raps, “Take a photo with the number one loser/Trying to get used to living in the future.” Take that lyric at face value and it says Slug is having trouble adjusting to what’s current, which would explain some of this album’s dated choices—e.g. its lead single is called “Ringo.”
But as proof this isn’t just an age or longevity problem, there’s “When the Lights Go Out,” a song that features rap veterans Kool Keith and DOOM in different roles. Both deliver admirably. DOOM gets a verse, and though it’s far from his best, it’s more than enough to stand out here. Aesop Rock, who just this year proved the adventurous Year 20 indie rap album was possible, pops up. pops up for a chanting outro, but he doesn’t get to do any serious rapping on “Chasing New York,” which he could’ve salvaged.
Fishing Blues has no stakes—with or without this record, the Atmosphere legacy is cemented—and the sloppy writing, disinterested rapping, and overall conservative artistic decisions seem to reflect that. Some of the lines are bad (“We on a spaceship, crash land from above/We on a lazy river, fly fishing for love” from “A Long Hello”) and a lot are lazy (“She was encyclopedia thick” and “attitude of a hot bowl of cat food” from “No Biggie”). This is a tedious listen with little replay value, where the only reprieve from the droning is a laugh from a clunker.
It should be noted that Slug is a very good rapper and Ant a skilled producer, so any Atmosphere record, even the most purposeless one, is bound to get it right at least some of the time, especially on a release with 18 tracks. The most gripping moments on Fishing Blues either step way outside the parameters of traditional Atmosphere, like the electro-fused “Seismic Waves,” or double down, like on “Besos,” which accents a boxy breakbeat with flutes. There are a handful of really intricate rhyme structures scattered throughout (On “Everything”: “I got the coldest shoulder in the solar system/I know because I drove around this whole existence”). The second verse of “Besos” is a technical marvel, an unconscious performance with tightly-written scheming. Slug does some of his best rapping about race and heritage on “Perfect,” with self-aware bars like “Some say that I pass, none say that I'm passive/White trash with a fraction of blackness” and “Irish name, Scandinavian frame/I'm a Rubik's cube, I'm the American dream.”
Politically-charged and socially conscious records might the next frontier for Atmosphere. In “Seismic Waves,” there’s a great lyric about Trayvon Martin and Ronald Reagan. And Fishing Blues’ saving grace, the only song with any real passion and continuity, is one about police brutality written from the perspective of the officer. In the hands of a less capable thinker and lyricist, this concept would be an epic fumble, but Slug pens an expert indictment of a militarized police force: “It all depends on how you fit into my spectrum/From lectures, to handcuffs, to beat downs, to death wish/I was told to tell a one-sided story, and that's why I had to eliminate your perspective.” It’s one of the few times you get the sense that he still has reason to rap, and it’s a reminder that Atmosphere can still make great music, when given the proper motivation.


On their fourth solo release in three years, the former Women member strikes a provocative balance of ’60s pop bliss and horror-show unease.

What’s Tonight to Eternity

Two-thirds of the way through What’s Tonight to Eternity, the stakes are laid plain. In a spoken-word sample of religious testimony, a woman describes finding herself abandoned by Jesus, stuck in a kind of purgatory where she can neither live nor die. Fed up, she resolves to reject Satan, even if that means being cast into the ether. “I would rather spend eternity in nothing,” she declares, “than to spend eternity with you.”
On their fourth solo release as Cindy Lee in three years, Patrick Flegel sounds far more ambivalent. Equally seduced by shrieking noise and devotional beauty, What’s Tonight seesaws between joy and despair, body and spirit, heaven and hell. Many of its most infernal songs are also its most corporeal, grounded by throbbing baritone synths and bodily basslines. More optimistic tracks are either falling apart at the seams or sound as if a breeze might turn them into dust. It is a vision of two similarly unappealing choices: a physical world suffused with evil, and a spiritual escape that threatens to obliterate the self.
Cindy Lee emerged from the ashes of the Calgary quartet Women, which at the end of the aughts put out two workmanlike albums of psych-friendly lo-fi that sailed on the prevailing winds blowing out of Georgia and Montreal. Flegel eventually picked up the gender play of Women's name and ran with it, with a new musical identity to match. “Ugh, I’m so bored of being a boy in a fuckin’ guitar band,” they’ve said about the birth of Cindy Lee, a project that sounds haunted by guitars, rather than built around them. “Last couple years it’s been just me, traditional drag-style.”
Women sometimes flirted with oppositional elements, shimmering guitar melodies joined by feedback glare. But as Cindy Lee, Flegel has vastly expanded these countervailing palettes of divine harmony and clamorous decay. With their brother Andrew joining on drums, What’s Tonight delivers these sonic qualities with more precision and more instability than any Cindy Lee record yet, refusing to settle for the reductive conclusion of an easy extreme.
What’s Tonight begins in Youth Lagoon-esque territory of lightly psychedelic whimsy, with blooping whale sounds over serene keyboards and a dash of smooth-jazz saxophone beamed straight from some 6-CD changer. Soon, though, the already decaying audio will be overwhelmed by shrieking static and aggressive squawks that, with an added beat, sound like they could go viral on TikTok—as if the placid recording studio were suddenly torn apart by a tornado. But, like Dorothy being whisked away to Oz, the storms that pepper the album lead somewhere fantastical. The epic “I Want You to Suffer” is a capsule of the album in song, with cherubic backing vocals that heel-turn into screams of trauma before ultimately dissolving into ecclesiastical organ.
Another, non-biblical carpenter has provided salve and solidarity for many who feel excluded and abandoned by the powers that be. As Karen Tongson wrote in Why Karen Carpenter Matters, the “profound despair underlying an intense California sunniness” in Karen Carpenter’s music, and her personal struggle with the anorexia that eventually claimed her life, turned her into an unlikely icon for many people who might feel otherwise alienated by the mainstream culture she was supposed to personify. This includes Flegel, who cites her story, artistry, and the musical magic she conjures “in the negative space, out of exclusion” as an inspiration for Cindy Lee.
The characteristic intimacy of Karen Carpenter’s voice is absent here, with Flegel’s earnest falsetto often rendered as a galactically distant echo. Instead, the singer’s presence is felt through other aesthetics often associated with her, like Richard Carpenter’s saccharine string arrangements and doo-wop-inspired backing vocals. Flegel has spoken about the way that performing in drag as Cindy Lee allows them to adopt a “diva fantasy,” and perhaps a protective costume of sorts is the key to surviving What’s Tonight’s hellish world. “Plastic raincoat,” they sing on the opening track, “protect me from rot.” But the retro fetishism here isn’t only limited to the cheerful. Cindy Lee also dabbles in the baroque horror-show affectations popular throughout the 1960s, with clomping harpsichord parts both baleful and strident.
Though suspicious of pat closure, the album’s final third ultimately realizes a middle path between nothingness and the pain of the world. The ruminative electric piano on “Speaking From Above” sutures the song’s harsh distortion to its fleshy bass, finding a satisfied groove amid the ongoing discomforts of being alive. And “Heavy Metal” filters this internal conflict through a parodic costume of girl-group fadeout, reaching a tentative rapprochement between these many selves. All dolled up in the past, the sacred and sinister can coexist—for now.

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Composer Daniel Wohl specializes in pieces that bridge the divide between acoustic and programmed elements; at their best, his works confuse your sense of what is played live and what is manipulated. His new album Holographic features singers Olga Bell and Caroline Shaw.

Holographic

With 2013’s Corps Exquis, composer Daniel Wohl offered a set of concise, punchy pieces joining glitchy electronic verve with traditional chamber music lyricism. At some points, the digital manipulations were identifiable as processed versions of parts being played by the musicians, and at others, they operated independently of each other. In the best moments, you couldn’t tell what was live and what was pre-programmed.
On his follow-up, Wohl includes a pair of two-movement works that show how suited he is to larger canvases. A slowly moving, two-note drone launches "Replicate, Pt. 1," and operates in the background throughout, while the live musicians work with pitched percussion figures that build on themselves slowly. Brisk electronic beats introduce the piece’s second half—though the composition never scales the frenetic peaks of Corps Exquis.
This comparative restraint pays off when a gorgeous vibraphone ostinato emerges in the closing minutes of "Replicate, Pt. 2." Wohl playfully manipulates the groove, letting the tempo quicken and slack unpredictably. "Holographic," another piece that stretches across two tracks, also builds its momentum in a natural, relaxed fashion, underlining the subtler chops of the musicians who make up the often-clangorous Bang on Can All-Stars group.
The album’s initially deliberate, patient air ensures that its hyperactive set piece registers strongly. With an evident love for unusual, junkyard sonorities and febrile rhythm, "Progression" brings the maverick sound of mid-century American composer Harry Partch into the electro-classical present day. And its tightly interwoven writing for strings and percussion also suggests that Wohl could compose just fine in purely acoustic settings if he wanted.
In between these pieces are a few items that sound slight next to the more ambitious material. It’s not difficult to imagine how the singers who show up for "Source"—Olga Bell and Pulitzer-prize winner (and Kanye West collaborator) Caroline Shaw—might inspire Wohl, though the meeting winds up sounding merely pleasant. Elsewhere, the Mivos Quartet—the same group who pairs up so winningly with Mantra Percussion on "Progression"—have much less to do during "Formless." Still, the electro-acoustic balance on these tracks is expertly handled. It just happens to be the case that this notoriously hard-to-perfect blend might not be Wohl’s greatest talent, after all.


After dying at the age of 45 in a California hospital in 1986, Robbie Basho's reputation as a pioneer of finger-picked acoustic guitar passed like a shadow behind the music and myth of his friend John Fahey. After more than three decades out of print, his 10th album, 1978’s Visions of the Country, is back in circulation, and it serves as an ecstatic testimonial for a guitarist in need of a popular resurrection.

Visions of the Country

Robbie Basho died in a California hospital room more than 27 years ago. His vertebral artery ruptured during a visit to a chiropractor’s office. He had a stroke, slipped into a coma and, at the age of 45, passed away. In the decades that have followed, his already-wavering reputation as a pioneer of finger-picked acoustic guitar experimentation has passed largely like a shadow behind the music and myth of John Fahey, Basho’s old pal who released several of his earliest albums.
It should be remembered that Fahey experienced a renaissance in the 90s. The music press famously championed his early work and helped goad him from semi-retirement. He followed the laurels both with a string of strange, daring records and a brilliant new record label, Revenant, which advocated alternate strains of the avant-garde and the hillbilly music that had helped inspire his own. Basho, being dead, enjoyed no such revival. In fact, a large chunk of his catalogue now languishes out of print, serving as grails for collectors rather than essential bits in a narrative much broader than Blind Joe Death. And that’s a shame: Nearly 30 years after his death, and after multiple waves of guitarists have risen to revive the mantle Fahey and Basho both helped shape, Basho’s manic, hyperkinetic approach to playing, singing, songwriting and living in general have very few peers. Basho’s tenth album, 1978’s Visions of the Country, was the fifth album Windham Hill Records ever released. After more than three decades out of print, it is finally back in circulation; on its 35th anniversary, it serves as an ecstatic testimonial for a guitarist in need of a popular resurrection.
Basho’s relative anonymity isn’t only a byproduct of his untimely death, of course: Even when he was alive, his allegedly inscrutable personality and debated quirks kept him a bit at arms length. Those same strange traits are part and parcel to his music. He did not aim for Fahey’s steady, solemn gaze or Leo Kottke’s eccentric approachability. Rather, Basho’s music was a blunderbuss of feeling, tied to unstoppable technique. He whistles loudly over the Keith Jarrett-sized piano clouds of “Leaf in the Wind”, as though it were his aim to spoil the song’s billowing beauty. And he ends Visions of the Country by urging listeners to “follow the Milky Way-- home!” in a voice that suggests Mr. Rogers.
Indeed, Basho’s singing generally wasn’t what you’d call pretty or subtle. During “Night Way”, from the second side of Visions of the Country, he obscures the wonderful ribbons of his six-string guitar with singing generously described as zealous. He wails a ceremonial Navajo chant, his voice locking into and falling from falsetto, its vibrato smearing the track with warble. For the listener, the guitar is the star here, but you have to peer past the bleat to find it. During “Orphan’s Lament”, he slurs and nearly screams his tribute to the poor and peripatetic above sheets of stacked piano notes, delivering empathy like a bar-side Irisman. These aren’t songs you’d really put on during a party or in a mix for a love interest. Basho’s sound is dramatic and yearning and very personal, altogether unapologetic for the way he saw the world.
What’s most remarkable about Basho is how busy and emphatic but absolutely effortless his songs could feel, especially when he touches the guitar. At once, Basho could appear to be laying it all on the line and simply breezing through the notes. During “Rocky Mountain Raga”, he practically howls as he sings “Oh, you grand Rockies,” pretending that he’s an opera star. But even so, his fingers are frantic and unfailing, delivering a perfect and convoluted stream of notes that never loses momentum just because he’s now got something to say. Early in his career, Basho was a rather plainspoken folk musician. A natural roamer, though, he developed an enthusiastic embrace of world religion and music-- from India to Ireland, from Native American lore to Sufi teachings. On Visions of the Country, those polyglot tendencies allow him to slip Middle Eastern accents and chamber ensemble flair into “Variations on Easter”, a four-minute fantasy that’s as close to a “simple” acoustic instrumental theme as he ever really got. Conversely, he’s comfortable singing a pretty song over somewhat plain chords, too. On “Blue Crystal Fire”, he sustains that falsetto, his voice curling like that of Antony Hegarty in a song that’s coincidentally about natural wonder-- “Smooth singing sunshine/ wrap your blanket around me.” Basho constructed his ecumenical complications above solid foundations. Visions of the Country uniquely shows every layer.
Gnome Life’s reissue of Visions of the Country won’t be enough to resuscitate Basho’s reputation, to turn him, like Fahey, into shorthand for adventurous acoustic guitar. But that’s OK. Basho will never have the same broad appeal or the same cyclic story as Fahey. His music is, at first, rather off-putting, but ultimately, he imagined modes for the guitar and composition that we’re still reconciling. Marnie Stern sometimes maneuvers against her instrument in the same way, and James Blackshaw explores the same nebulous majesty. But Robbie Basho’s music mostly remains a pan-everything oddball, and Visions of the Country is, at last, once again living proof.


Recorded at Nashville’s famed Butcher Shoppe, Vile’s lovely and bittersweet new EP mixes covers and originals, including a duet with the late John Prine.

Speed, Sound, Lonely KV EP

Kurt Vile and John Prine were natural collaborators. In addition to their  knack for using observational humor to magnify pathos and pathos to magnify humor, both have talents that have been largely overlooked. Prine is such a remarkable and idiosyncratic songwriter that his lyrics often overshadow his innovative guitar playing, which involves a two- instead of three-finger picking style. Vile is such an ingenious guitarist that his playing often overshadows his equally imaginative songwriting. In recent years they’ve shared stages together in Philadelphia and Nashville (including the Grand Ole Opry), and earlier this year, just months before Prine’s death, they even recorded a song together. Vile calls himself a fanboy; Prine called him a “mellow rock and roller in a stroller.” I have no idea what that means, but it sounds true.
The song they recorded during their joint session, a cover of Prine’s “How Lucky,” off 1979’s Pink Cadillac, anchors Vile’s new EP, which serves as a loose tribute to his hero. There’s also a solo cover of the 1986 tune “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness,” which Vile covered with Prine on Prine’s final tour, and Prine’s spirit lingers in the two new originals. But speed, sound, lonely (kv) is also an ode to the city of Nashville, to all the amazing musicians there, and to the spirit of collaboration that still thrives in the city after so many revolutions within the music industry. Vile booked sessions at the Butcher Shoppe, the studio and hangout owned by producer David Ferguson, known for his work with Prine, Sturgill Simpson, and Johnny Cash. In addition to Matt Sweeney and Dan Auerbach, his backing band was stocked with some of the finest musicians in the city, representing generations of country artists: keyboardist Bobby Wood, bassist Dave Roe, mandolin virtuoso Pat McLaughlin, and drummer Kenny Malone.
Recorded over several years during several visits to Nashville, the EP could easily have turned out like vacation photos: interesting to those who were there and a snooze to everybody else. But these songs not only sound great—mostly acoustic in their arrangements, crisp and warm in their production, and lively in their performances—but that sense of camaraderie draws out something essential in Vile’s singing and playing. As a guitarist, he’s fine at monologues, but he’s a better conversationalist. On these songs, he reacts to these veterans and lets their ideas swim around in his head for a little bit. That comes through on “Gone Girl,” his cover of a deep Cowboy Jack Clement cut. Vile savors the eccentricity of the melody, but he seems fascinated by the parallax overlay of instruments, how they snap together tightly but loosely, especially during the long sing-along outro.
This is an EP full of lengthy outros, where the band just keeps on playing. Closer “Pearls” even includes a false stop; the music kicks up again almost of its own accord. There’s no purpose to it other than simply enjoying the sound. Vile loves small moments like these, everyday joys that might go unnoticed. He even gets a full song out of a simple dandelion: “You can blow on ‘em or you can just hold ‘em,” he sings, finding beauty in the fleeting moment as McLaughlin’s mandolin trills like those little white tufts caught in the breeze.
Vile’s music can be reassuring and, at its best, transporting. Featuring both men singing and picking together, “How Lucky” considers all the glorious details in the world that greet us every day, but acknowledges there are infinitely too many for our brains to catalog and archive. The point is, you’ll never run out. “There was all these things that I don't think I remember,” they sing together on the final verse, before realizing, “Hey, how lucky can one man get.” It doesn’t feel quite as momentous as you’d expect from a meeting of these two mellow rock and rollers, and that’s okay. It’s sweetly minor, much like the other songs on here. That might not be enough to sustain a full album, but it’s lovely for an EP.

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Cleaners From Venus, the lo-fi pop project of the English musician Martin Newell, offered a mix of rough edges, distanced vocals, definite hooks, and unexpected mixing choices. This box set features the first three 1980s cassette-only efforts with liner notes, flyers, buttons, and unreleased tracks and photos.

Cleaners From Venus: Blow Away Your Troubles / On Any Normal Monday / Midnight Cleaners

The album art for these rereleases by UK stalwarts the Cleaners from Venus reproduces the covers of the first three early 1980s cassette-only efforts released by core figure Martin Newell and his sole bandmate during that time, Lol Elliott. They're almost almost an inversion of the perceived Instagram model for photographs: instead of artificially aging the now, it's the past blown up and made precise, the gaps in the ink strokes made readily apparent along with the clear signs of where further coloring stopped. For any cassette release from that time that's received a retrospective celebration, whether via Messthetics, Minimal Wave, or something else again, that feeling always seems to hang heavy over the end result, at once strange and slightly humorous, like it snuck into something bigger by accident.
Doubtless Newell, long settled into a continuing career of poet, essayist, and musician as a kind of across-the-Thames cousin of the admittedly more scabrous Billy Childish, feels like that would be perfectly appropriate. As the liner notes describe, it wasn't that Newell and Elliott didn't want to keep their work hidden from the world but they probably didn't expect that efforts initially dubbed at home a few at a time would ever have more than a fleeting attention paid to them by similarly minded souls. Considering how immediate so much on these three albums are, though-- and, quite simply, how fun they often sound, regardless of lyrical intent at points-- it's almost hard to think they wouldn't have found some wider audience one way or another.
In retrospect, though, what's clear even from the start of Blow Away Your Troubles' "Swinging London" is how perfectly positioned the Cleaners' sound, or even more crucially their overall aesthetic was, in terms of a break between past and future. No measurable listening audience in 1981 beyond the DIY underground would have expected anything to sound like this did, with a mix of rough edges, distanced vocals, definite hooks, and unexpected mixing choices, plus interjections and diversions that harkened back to the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and "The Goon Show" among other sources. (Not to mention songs that fully embrace those routes-- "Alien", with its recurrent dialogues between human and outer-space visitor, is one of the most ridiculous things around.) It's theoretically new wave if you squint, but not the major label or even most indie label kind.
Of course, as the double-vinyl Blow Away Your Troubles, originally released in 1981, rapidly establishes, it wasn't about obscurantism for its own sake-- it's a stretch to say that it would be obvious in later years that Andy Partridge would end up producing Newell based on the evidence of songs like "A Blue Wave" or the piano-and-metronome-paced "Wivenhoe Bells" telling of small incidents in a small town. But in its weird way Newell arrived first where XTC would end up, an implied tension having relaxed to allow strange humor, political unease, and breezy rather than frenetic melodies and choruses to set a new course. A song like "Modern TV", a kind of relative-across-the-water of Black Flag's "TV Party", is all about serenely catchy surf-derived choruses and distant keyboards, while a sense of something epic and mournful is all over "Marilyn on a Train", achieving a kind of casual grandeur on its verses in particular that any number of post-punk dreamers would probably have loved had they heard it. Even something like "A Minimal Animal", an attempt to tackle reggae via several kind of distances down to stretched-out and echoed vocals and the utter pisstake "So This is Modern Jazz, Is It?"-- more like a bizarre scat-singing attempt from a long dead lounge-- all works perfectly in context.
On Any Normal Monday, released in early 1982, found the Cleaners in slightly changed circumstances, its liner notes talking about Newell's acquiring a four-track machine and Elliott's increasing personal attention elsewhere. It's not quite the Newell solo show yet (especially considering that he put out both a stand-alone tape and an archival one pre-Cleaners with the Stray Trolleys soon thereafter), but things are a little clearer, a touch crisper, and maybe inevitably a touch less frenetic, though a newer version of "Marilyn on a Train" retains its elegant sweep. Admittedly songs like "European War" aren't meant to be giddy regardless, but the humor of "Be an Idiot Popstar" seems a touch less goony in all senses of the word.
By the time of Midnight Cleaners, which also came out in 1982, Elliott's appearances were even more sporadic and the genteel TV-theme feeling of "This Rainy Decade" heralds something that was increasingly Newell's own particular flag of convenience. Hearing a bit of winning guest saxophone as it first appears in the extended introduction to "Corridor of Dreams" seems strangely monumental in context, even if it was only a year since the duo's debut effort. But if songs like "Only a Shadow" and "Time in Vain" are more polished and straightforward power-pop efforts with a crisp, slightly thin sound and steady drumming as opposed to the wiggier songs that helped inaugurate the band to start with, there's always the slightly cryptic spoken word, sax, and beat mix of the title track and the shimmering rush of "Factory Boy" in contrast. Meanwhile, a new version of "Wivenhoe Bells", with bells, phone samples, and children's voices added to the energetic flow of the arrangement, nicely squares not-too-distant past and present.
Newell's later efforts as the Cleaners from Venus and in other ventures would continue to explore the possibilities of home pop/rock recording, much as other figures worldwide as Chris Knox and the stalwart R. Stevie Moore would, though the resultant flood that's followed has almost overwhelmed that past to a large degree. It's nice to see this tip of the hat back via these reissues, though, an acknowledgement that it came from somewhere and from someone who followed his own inspired logic toward an end result with the tools to hand.


milo's so the flies don't come is wonderful, laidback California rap. But don't let the aesthetics fool you—he's a fierce lyricist with a killer sense of humor. A perfect album for weird days and off kilter listeners.

so the flies don't come

Some of the best and weirdest alt rap in the country is coming out of Hellfyre Club, a Los Angeles-based collective founded in 2011 by California battle rapper turned rapper’s rapper Nocando. The roster boasts a host of eclectic wordsmiths like Project Blowed associate Open Mike Eagle, L.A. veteran Busdriver, and NxWorries member Anderson .Paak, who recently started to garner public attention after being prominently featured on Dr. Dre’s Compton. In 2013, the collective’s 17 track compilation, Dorner vs. Tookie, spotlit yet another featured lyricist: milo, aka Scallops Hotel, a Wisconsin transplant who carves poetry out of multisyllabics, scheming in micro-bursts and tightly woven yarns.
Last year, milo (whose real name is Rory Ferreira) released his refreshing debut album, a toothpaste suburb, which delivered wisecracks with a straight face, matching sharp barbs into sequences and carefully squeezing in references to Harry Potter, Jean Genet, Clementine Hunter, Kant, and Kim Kardashian—and that was just the opener. milo has a deadpan he uses to serve up witticisms that often double as smart jokes (and sometimes crude ones). Not all of his bars are one-liners, but they are all connected to at least one tangentially.
His latest album, so the flies don't come, is his most fascinating work to date, filling weird, side-winding productions that deflate and wheeze with tumbling lyricism delivered in near spoken word cadences. The project is entirely produced by electronic-leaning hip-hop producer Kenny Segal and the two have a real chemistry, with a shared inclination for the off-kilter and the oddball. Segal’s beats, synth-heavy abstractions that turn chords into cushions, make fitting soundbeds for milo’s staggered raps. Occasionally milo nestles into the sidewalls, like on "souvenir", and then quickly lurches out into pockets of dead space before retreating back. His blank, sometimes wooden demeanor is often betrayed by the snappiness of his writing, which somehow manages to capture Nietzche-esque nihilism with the comic simplicity of the shrugging emoticon.
milo has a knack for using quips as a lens through which to stare into the void, but his greatest strength lies in his very particular way with words. Songs like "an encyclopedia" and "napping under the Echo Tree" tell stories in their own language, something milo himself seems to understand; on the former, he opens, "No one taught me the language of rap song/ I was born speaking it." With such an innate understanding of rhythm and timing, it certainly sounds like it. His speech patterns vary, not so much abiding by the restraints of production as acknowledging them before ignoring them.
When milo isn’t playing around with funny phonetic sounds or fidgeting with tricky taunts, he’s just making flat out great hip-hop. The song "going no place" proves he’s capable of adhering to conventional rap standards with compact verses. On the closer, "song about a raygunn (an ode to Driver)", he gives a critical reading of aesthetics, something like a thesis: "Parse good from the nonsense/ Never let the form dictate what's the content/ It's never art for art's sake/ Despite whatever the corpse of a Marxist thinks." He closes the thought—and the album, with, "I guess I'm stupid/ Following a rule is just too hard for me/ It's hardly me." But if there’s one thing milo isn’t, it’s dumb. It’s his inability to follow the rules that makes his music so smart.


It's a bit of a stretch, but a while ago I compared Boards of Canada's seminal Music Has ...

Geogaddi

It's a bit of a stretch, but a while ago I compared Boards of Canada's seminal Music Has the Right to Children with Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. I wasn't saying anything about the similarity or relative quality of the actual music, of course; I was just making an observation about how each album has a remarkably wide appeal that stretches beyond fans of its respective genre, while simultaneously carrying great weight with more experienced and discerning listeners. Because of this dual nature, both records are considered ideal "first purchases" for those curious about the musical world they come from. The comparison fails in other respects, but there's no doubting the consensus of opinion that has formed around these records, shared among both newcomers and schooled aesthetes.
The reputation of Music Has the Right to Children has everything to do with why Geogaddi is one of the most anticipated records of 2002 for indie and electronic music fans of all stripes. It's been four long years since this Scottish duo's landmark debut, and during this time, we've seen an uncountable number of "kind of like Boards of Canada" bands drifting by, with only a toddler's handful of new material released by the Boards themselves-- namely, the In a Beautiful Place out in the Country EP, released in late 2000. As Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison toiled away in secrecy in their Hexagon Sun studio and remote artists' compound, fans speculated about possible new directions: where would they go next?
Geogaddi provides a clear answer: not so far, really. As similar as this album is to the rest of the band's catalog, it seems a safe speculation that the concept of "reinvention" is not part of the Boards of Canada M.O. Their exceptionally distinctive and oft-imitated sound emerged fully formed on the early EPs, and for now, at least, they're sticking with it. While some will complain about Boards of Canada's failure to cover new territory, which puts them apart from the praised eclectic "searchers" of the music scene (Miles made only made one stab at Kind of Blue before moving on, after all), the rest of us will delight in what we see as a very accomplished album packed with great music.
When it comes to discussing records, though, similarities are boring, so let's talk about what makes Geogaddi different. The first thing that comes to mind is the shift in mood. While the band continues to traffic in childhood and nostalgia, the atmosphere on this album is a shade darker than on previous releases, and comparatively tense with a noticeable thread of paranoia. Boards of Canada have always had a disorienting cast to their music, in part because of their proclivity for the quivery modulation of their analog synths. But where the warbles once seemed designed to evoke the sensation of strained memory, the distortions now have a disturbing undercurrent, suggesting that something frightening might lie beneath the surface.
Part of this darker trend comes from a thicker production environment and apparent aversion to unused space. On Geogaddi, Boards of Canada have replaced silence with the drone, and the master tapes are saturated with the sounds of the duo's customized machinery. There's none of the wistful airiness of a track like "Turquoise Hexagon Sun," nor the lighthearted warmth of a Music Has the Right to Children track like "Aquarius." Gone, too, is the gentle pastoralism of In a Beautiful Place out in the Country.
In its place, we find the swirling claustrophobic winds of "Julie and Candy," menacing swells of feedback anchoring the rhythm of "Dawn Chorus," and the lonely, isolated Nuno Cannavaro-isms of "The Devil Is in the Details," whose two sampled voices are a crying baby and a monolog given by a woman who might be drowning. Some of the beats on Geogaddi compliment this new, darker undercurrent and stand out from previous work. The pummeling, mechanized drum loop that drives "Gyroscope" is downright violent, and seems squarely aimed at the distorted child's voice in the background. And on "Alpha and Omega," hints of tabla mix with multi-layered percussion, lending an intriguing live band feel to an otherwise unremarkable track.
So, yes, the Boards have implemented their trademark tools on Geogaddi, but in the service of a slightly gloomier vision. Granted, the familiarity of their sound could prove to become a liability on their future releases, but it's easy to see why Eoin and Sandison have played this record so close to the vest. If you'd perfected a sonic playground like this, you'd probably want to explore it a while longer, too.


Composed by the director himself, the score for Mark Jenkin’s experimental folk-horror film floats ambiguously between beauty and dread, creating tension through mystery.

Enys Men (Original Score)

Behind the isolation and terror at the heart of Mark Jenkin’s second feature film Enys Men is a clever act of deception. The film, the title of which is Cornish for “Stone Island,” follows a volunteer ecologist living on a small piece of land, studying the growth of a unique set of flowers. As she goes about her lonely daily routine of taking measurements and observing the world, her mental state begins to fray; she experiences disturbing, reality-blurring visions of violence and ghostly workers inhabiting a long-abandoned mining operation. While the main character’s existence appears solitary, in actuality, there’s a bustling, noisy farm right next to her home. The island itself is a work of fiction, its craggy landscapes composed of shots of mainland Cornwall.
This cinematic illusion is a testament to Jenkin’s artistic approach: He looks at the world and digs out the horror lurking amid everyday scenery. This penetrating disquiet is echoed in the film’s score, composed by Jenkin himself, which collects dreary ambient pieces, placid field recordings, and clipped radio static that float between beauty and dread. As the cues billow and evolve, it can be hard to tell what they’re meant to evoke, which only makes them more unsettling.
The record’s 10-and-a-half minute opener “Enys, Pt. 1” illustrates this uneasy duality. It’s built around a droning synth melody, which twists softly and slowly as if being nudged by a breeze; with each fuzzy repetition, it starts to feel a little darker, a little more strange. Its flirtations with silence evoke both serenity and sorrow in a way that recalls William Basinski’s thoughtful tape work or Fennesz’s texturally rich ambiance. Much of the score is composed of these richly suggestive and emotionally opaque pieces. “Goelann,” for example, is a short cue that weaves together woodwind-like electronics with the gentle roiling of the wind and sea. It’s wispy and elusive, and then it’s over, which only adds to its mystery.
The score ventures to more explicitly foreboding places, like on the grayscale loop of “Hunros, Pt. 1.” Like a sonar blip warped on old tape, the piece rumbles and whirrs until a distant threat comes into view, culminating in a distress call over a crackly radio on the following track. “Knoukya Knoukya” evokes similar fear through seasick bass drones and clipped conversation, before building to a flurry of noise. These are momentary diversions, but they’re enough to make listening to the record and watching the film a tense experience.
Enys Men could be described as a horror film, but it’s more slippery than what the label traditionally evokes. It’s like a daydream, languidly tracing scenes and images with a meditative logic—and sometimes taking you to a darker place than imagined. The music is built to accompany that kind of journey, both in the film and outside of it: Each delicate synth line guides listeners into hypnotic reverie, then each burst of static snaps them violently back to earth, leaving them on terra firma for a moment until a vision begins anew.


Jim O’Rourke, Crys Cole, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Mark Fell, and Ricardo Villalobos all join Ambarchi on a dense and rewarding album that never succumbs to the weight of its collaborators.

Hubris

Since the late ’90s, Australian multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi has composed drone metal and free jazz, sculpted ambient soundscapes and collaborated with many (if not most) of experimental music's biggest names. Over his prolific career, Ambarchi has toured with Sunn O))), played with Boris and Merzbow, drummed with Keiji Haino—and that's just a drop in the bucket. In many ways, Ambarchi is a quintessential musician’s musician: an adept drummer and guitarist, hugely respected within his own scene, whose fans study his work like stoned math majors pouring over a Mandelbrot set. Whether inspired by krautrock, metal, or jazz, Ambarchi’s work demands patience and attention, but along with his singular musicianship, Ambarchi's work reaches for the extremes of human experience, the sorrowful, the sublime.
On his latest album, the three-part, forty-minute Hubris, Ambarchi teams up with an army of avant-garde musicians, among them Jim O’Rourke, Crys Cole, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Mark Fell, and Ricardo Villalobos. O’Rourke is a frequent collaborator with Ambarchi (together the two made 2011’s Indeed and last year’s Behold) and his presence is felt throughout the record. Both musicians are experts at locking into grooves, then breaking out of them in strange, unthinkable ways. On “Hubris Pt. 1,” Ambarchi lays down an arpeggiated guitar loop which serves as a baseline for his collaborators to play off and the track’s 22-minute runtime provides an ample canvas. According to Ambarchi, the composition was inspired by New Wave and disco—particularly Wang Chung’s soundtrack to the 1985 thriller To Live and Die in L.A.—but its sound and structure owe much to the patient loops of minimal techno.
As with some forms of meditation, where practitioners are taught to focus on subtle differences in the body’s perception of the world, Ambarchi and his partners introduce ripples that swell into waves. While it's hard to parse who is responsible which sounds, O’Rourke's guitar-synth stands out, evoking retro graphics, John Carpenter soundtracks, and William Friedkin thrillers. Similar to the Field, Ambarchi’s loops instill a sense of wonder with their unflagging momentum, but while Axel Willner has a tendency toward big crescendos, “Pt. 1” stays rooted. Tension is heightened, but there's only a small release, just a fading sense that something beautiful is gone.
“Pt. 3,” which includes contributions from Villalobos and DNA’s Arto Lindsay, is a different sort of beast—as unhinged and electric as anything Ambarchi has recorded. Villalobos, a godhead in the minimal techno arena, once sampled a small portion of Christian Vander’s “Baba Yaga La Sorciere,” turning it into 17 minutes of rhythmic ecstasy. Similarly, Villalobos, along with drummers Joe Talia and Will Guthrie, bring a circularity to “Pt. 3,” with Lindsay's guitar adding a no wave edge to the funk-prog undercurrent.
Similarly, Villalobos, along with drummers Joe Talia and Will Guthrie, bring a similar circularity to “Pt. 3,” with Lindsay's guitar adding a no wave edge to the funk-prog undercurrent. Unlike “Pt. 1,” which stays within set confines, “Part 3” sheds formal constraints gleefully. By the time for Ambarchi’s guitars join Lindsay's, the track has become a maximalist hurricane of weird.
Taken from a distance, Hubris is shaped something like an hourglass, with “Pt. 2” serving as a connector between the two halves. Tranquil guitar and sampled voices serve as an homage to Albert Marcoeur, a French art rocker known for sampling nursery rhymes, paints a pastoral picture. The track serves as a palette cleanser between the ethereal momentum of “Pt. 1” and the chaos of “Pt. 3.” It also puts a spotlight back on Ambarchi’s guitar, which is ostensibly what he is most famous for. In some ways “Pt. 2” is a synecdoche for Ambarchi himself. Few artists could assemble a group of musicians like that those found on Hubris at all, but Ambarchi lets everyone do their part, then fade into the background. It's the difference between hubris and vision.


Following the viral success of her Pharrell-approved hit “Alaska,” this young singer-songwriter searches for an original sound on her major label debut EP.

Maggie Rogers: Now That the Light Is Fading

Now That the Light Is Fading

Maggie Rogers’ “Alaska” was born with the kind of serendipitous discovery story entire TV series are commissioned to replicate. She was one of many students at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, a school with enough largesse to commission Pharrell Williams for a masterclass. That half-hour listening session made it to YouTube in its entirety, but the highlight was obvious. Eighteen minutes in, when Rogers played an early demo of her song “Alaska,” a star was born: Rogers, in a casual sweater and jeans, eyes averted, wincing in that way one does when hearing their own voice; Pharrell, moved to tears, invoking Stevie Wonder and the Wu-Tang Clan in his praise. The video went viral on the musical enclaves of Reddit, always ready to laud anything that sounds acoustic or authentic, and thus followed everything virality brings: getting signed, a headlining North American tour, the interview circuit, and hundreds of thousands of fans from the get go.
Like most famous discovery stories, though, this one doesn’t quite start at the beginning. Though she’s since been fêted around as an entirely new voice, Rogers has four releases on Bandcamp dating back to 2012. Recorded in high school, they show great promise in a specific genre: banjo- and ukelele-driven folk indebted to Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith. There are hints at Rogers’ current expanded direction on these early tracks, in the cirrus flicks of synths on “Drift” off 2014’s Blood Ballet, the cello-enhanced “Satellite,” or the entirety of The Response, a remix album of 2012’s The Echo that proves Rogers’ music is amenable, at least in theory, to dance. But for the most part the Bandcamp material provides thoughtful examples of a genre that’s simultaneously thriving and, unless your surname is Mumford, deeply, deeply unmarketable.
Rogers credits her new, synthier direction on “Alaska” and subsequent five-song EP Now That the Light Is Fading to a year of clubbing in Europe, but an equally apt explanation may involve facts of the marketplace. Pharrell said “Alaska” was like nothing he’d ever heard, but in 2017 it fits right in: a gently lilting beat that vaguely evokes tropicalia (or, for that matter, the Neptunes in their prime) along with a falsetto pre-chorus that vaguely evokes R&B. The result isn’t far off from Broods, or early Ellie Goulding, or, to go back to the last time folktronica blew everyone’s minds, early Beth Orton. Follow-up single “Dog Years,” dotted with pan flutes, comes across as the exact midpoint of Peter Gabriel, Lorde, and “Bleeding Love,” and while no one’s done that particular intersection lately, the industry’s certainly revived everything in the vicinity.
Perhaps this is why Now That the Light Is Fading feels transitional, as if Rogers is unsure how far from trad-folk she wants to stray. On one end of the spectrum is “Color Song,” which consists of bird chirps, Rogers’ multitracked choral vocals, and not much else. The track’s melody drifts up and down the scale like an old hymn or trad-Americana cut as the lyric lingers on certain evocative details (when she sings the word “creeping,” her vocals are tracked a split second off one another, letting the consonants crackle in the air), and nothing anywhere suggests Pharrell’s involvement, spiritual or otherwise. “On + Off” floats Rogers’ voice above a choppy, Flume-like backing track and insistent piano loop, and “Better” lets her sink amid a drone; both directions are promising, but in separate ways that don’t quite cohere. Rogers is a promising songwriter when unattended—“Alaska” in particular is full of understated heartbreak, sort of like a PG take on Tori Amos—but the poppier tracks here often dissolve into soft-rock nothingness.
A lot of this might resolve itself in time. Rogers is still very young at 22, after all, and she takes several game attempts at subtlety throughout the EP—the pan flute, the guitar line rippling through “On + Off” like wind chimes, the featherlight harmonies. She has a platform. She’s got ideas. But like all discovery stories, the real reward lies in what comes next.


The new project from the head of XL Recordings features collaborations with Sampha, Kamasi Washington, and Ghostface Killah’s son.

Everything Is Recorded: Everything Is Recorded by Richard Russell

To best understand Richard Russell, watch him play “Please Forgive My Heart” in the studio with Bobby Womack. Outside of a few taps on his MPC, Russell’s almost not there, but as piano, bass, and drums move around the legendary soul survivor’s voice, his invisible touch provides the song’s underlying heartbeat. That unobtrusive quality helps explain how Russell has helmed XL Recordings into one of the lone record label success stories to be had in the 21st century, from signing a teenager named Adele to serving as the imprint that notoriously fussy artists such as Thom Yorke and Frank Ocean trust to press up their music.
While Russell put his own creative work on the backburner for decades, when he was diagnosed with the rare autoimmune disorder Guillain-Barré syndrome in 2013, he decided to focus on making music again. That didn’t necessitate a move from the background towards the spotlight. For his latest project, Everything Is Recorded, Russell has surrounded himself with the XL Junior Varsity Team—meaning no Adele or Vampire Weekend, let alone Frank or Thom, but a few appearances from Sampha, Ibeyi, and Young Turks-signed Kamasi Washington. The bigger names that do appear on this album follow a similar attention-deflecting strategy to Russell’s, with the likes of Peter Gabriel and Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside near impossible to pinpoint without a credits list. The ultimate effect of all that ego sublimation is a somewhat scattered album with quietly stunning highs, if not much of a centering force.
Russell’s niftiest trick is take the premise that “everything is recorded” to heart, relying on his sampler to make voices from generations past duet with new artists in the present moment. But “Close but Not Quite” winds up being too on the nose. The song springs from a studio session where Russell paired Sampha with a snippet of Curtis Mayfield, finding a common ground not just in their heavenly, heart-breaking falsettos, but also their “gentle soul[s], in an era where a lot of soul artists were quite macho,” as Sampha put it in a New Yorker profile. The juxtaposition of string-laden early ’70s soul with 21st century machine rhythms is intriguing, but when both gentlemen address the theme of “speak[ing] the unspoken,” they end up undifferentiated, their messages redundant across the span of time.
Russell does better when he chops up a sample of Keith Hudson, whose haunting, brooding music in the ’70s and early ’80s earned him the nickname “The Dark Prince of Reggae,” for “Wet Looking Road.” The gloomy atmosphere and desolate vocal from Hudson provides an ink-black backdrop for British rapper Giggs. Similarly, when Russell utilizes the slink of Grace Jones’ “Nightclubbing” for “Mountains of Gold,” the sparseness of the track allows space for Sampha, Ibeyi, and Ratking’s Wiki all to operate effectively around Ms. Jones.
The surprise sax solo from Washington that closes “Mountains of Gold” feels like an afterthought, though, tacked on to the end of the song. The same goes for “She Said,” which pairs Washington with recent Rising subject Obongjayar. It’s a more nimble showing from Obongjayar than the abrasive song on Everything Is Recorded’s 2017 EP wherein Obongjayar shrieked over a distorted din from the Bad Seeds’ Warren Ellis. Yet once again, Washington’s bold playing is reduced to a non-descript sax solo, made to grapple with a flatulent digital bassline from Russell.
The slower that Russell moves, the better for allowing the disparate components of Everything Is Recorded to settle into something exquisite, as on the gorgeous “Bloodshot Red Eyes,” an R&B ballad adrift in outer space. Quivering electric keys and a simple clap, plus a smattering of synthetic strings, are all that newcomer (and son of Ghostface) Infinite needs to send the track soaring. His voice transubstantiates heartbreak into something approaching the beatific.
The album’s other standout is “Be My Friend,” which also foregrounds Infinite, his voice layered this time so as to become a choir. Russell brings in a sample of Dallas preacher TD Jakes talking about the illusion of solitude: “It is possible to be alone and not live alone/It is possible to feel alone and not work alone.” It’s a poignant insight, but the same sample crops up multiple times across the album, so that by the time it lands here, it sounds like a rare miscue from Russell—a heavy-handed move from someone who’s trained us to expect a light touch.


On the jazz trumpeter’s fifth album, Akinmusire and his extremely tight band are after your immediate emotional response. It’s music that seeks peace not just despite a world of unrest, but within it.

Ambrose Akinmusire: on the tender spot of every calloused moment

Ambrose Akinmusire’s fifth studio album opens underwater and drowning. Midway through “Tide of Hyacinth,” Akinmusire starts to clip the ends of phrases on his trumpet; the pulse speeds up behind Justin Brown’s tense drumming; Sam Harris’s piano grows into threatening waves; Harish Raghavan’s bass notes escape in small clusters like bubbles frantically rising to the surface. As the track runs out of time, the featured vocalist and percussionist Jesús Díaz enters, singing in the West African dialect Yoruba with a soothing tenor as if to beckon you towards a light.
A virtuosic trumpeter who’s also plenty decorated as a bandleader and a supporting player (he’s played trumpet for albums by Esperanza Spalding and Kendrick Lamar), Akinmusire goes great lengths to present his albums as visions that transcend instruments and improvisation. He chooses titles that read more like stray Shakespeare excerpts than names of songs or albums: The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint; “The Garden Waits for You to Match Her Wilderness”; “The Lingering Velocity of the Dead’s Ambitions”. He invites guest vocalists to take the mic on occasion, or even for an entire album. We can only imagine what he sees behind his eyelids as he closes them for the portrait on the album’s cover. Judging strictly by the sound of on the tender spot of every calloused moment, it must be a thorny but magnificent picture.
Akinmusire obsesses over the musical particulars as much as the presentation ones—even, for example, swapping in Díaz late in the process for “Tide of Hyacinth”’s original planned singer, Akinmusire’s own father. on the tender spot... seeks what Díaz achieves in that moment: peace not just despite a world of unrest, but within it—a light while submerged in the dark. The nimble, selfless interactions between the four main players here suggest that human connection is where to find it. Akinmusire, Harris, Brown, and Raghavan have now been playing together for more than a decade, and they embrace a new level of strength as a unit. On “Moon (the return amplifies the unity),” Akinmusire ends phrases by stammering on one note like a skipping record; Harris rolls over the same four-note pattern with accentuating chords in different places each time; Brown absolutely loses his shit on his drum set. “Roy,” on the other hand, finds them in complete agreement, solemnly harmonizing beneath Akinmusire’s golden vibrato for a slow, deferential salute to the late great trumpeter Roy Hargrove.
This gesture of meeting the listener halfway, of delivering a plainly beautiful moment for every one where they completely break free, reinforces the sense that Akinmusire and his band are after your immediate emotional response. Tonality, space, studio shenanigans—none of these things matter to them if the songs don’t also shed some blood or tears. It’s cerebral jazz music that doesn’t care about the synapses in your cerebral cortex as much as the air in your lungs. Harris, in particular, steps into the core of their sound with several gut-punching moments. As the band snaps together at the peak of “An Interlude (that get’ more intense),” his piano seeps and swirls like dark blue ink, into which Akinmusire dips the pointed quill of his scribbling solos.
It comes to a traffic-stopping conclusion with “hooded (read the names outloud),” which has no vocals, no bandmates, no trumpet even—just Akinmusire alone at a Rhodes keyboard, playing simple intervals. It’s a funeral procession. On past albums, Akinmusire has included tribute tracks, which spoke the names of Black victims of police murders out loud. This time, he says them with silence. It’s hard not to think back to the drowning sensation that opened the album. As his heart grows heavier, his Rhodes only gets lighter, twinkling as he walks his fingers further to the right of the keyboard; it sounds like a music box on its last rotation, plucking out its faint final notes. For maybe the first time, his melody leads the ears: As it reaches a high seventh, you know that the root is coming next to mark the album’s end. It lands, right on time, and it feels like a breath.

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While his diehard fans await his long-delayed Man on the Moon III*,* Kid Cudi opted instead to release a 90-minute, double-disc rock album. Unfiltered, unpolished, and uncomfortable, the album is a failure, and not even a noble one.

Speedin' Bullet 2 Heaven

Is Kid Cudi serious? This is the first thing I asked myself listening to Speedin' Bullet 2 Heaven, and it's not as snide a question as it sounds; it's genuinely hard to tell. While his diehard fans await his long-delayed Man on the Moon III*,* Cudi opted instead to release *this—*a 90-minute, double-disc rock album, unfiltered and unpolished even compared to his 2012 side-project WZRD. Cudi is not a very good singer or guitarist, and his artlessly blunt lyrics are even more exposed in this context. So what are we to make of this? It's tough to guess the motives of someone who commissions Mike Judge to wedge painful "Beavis and Butthead" skits in between songs about self-harm with nihilistic lines like "I’m feeling I’m a goner."
There is something morbidly compelling about the tenacity of this project: "Wedding Tux" plods along for two-and-a-half minutes on two chords and has a hook that goes, "everything, everyone sucks" until it almost grows mesmerizing. "Judgmental Cunt" sounds an awful lot like self-laceration ("look at you, dumb stoner little boy") with Cudi breaking his voice while screaming. On "Trauma," he offers this: "When I was eleven I saw my dad’s corpse." The discomfort level might be high enough to inspire rubbernecking from people who wouldn’t otherwise care about a new Cudi record.
But Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is interesting the same way a friend getting a dramatic bad haircut is interesting: Once the shock wears off, you still have to look them in the eye and level with them. The album is a failure, and not even a noble one. Cudi insists on calling the album "alternative," and with the "Beavis and Butthead" narration, the shout-out to Cobain on "Man in the Night," and a flat drawl that curls into awkward Layne Staley or Scott Weiland impersonations, it’s clear his approach to making a "rock album" is even more dated than Lil Wayne’s, grounded in ideas and sounds that are now two decades old.
There are fleeting moments, here and there. On single "Confused!," he manages one of the album’s more memorable lines, repeating "hate the drugs but I love the numb." When he hits on a nice guitar tone or melody or lyric, the songs are so simple that they assume a semi-meditative quality. The title track is the best song here, with a nostalgic breakbeat and Cudi softly singing about manic depression: "If I crash, or when I land, no matter the case, I’m all smiles." It’s a simple but effective tone poem.
And sometimes the songs are so uncomfortably direct it feels wrong to be evaluating them at all: How do you judge the value of "Fuchsia Butterflies"' chorus "I’ll be happy getting shitfaced by myself?" It might be a confessional, but again Kid Cudi undercuts himself: If he is committed to this direction, and the album’s flaws are just the result of his limited voice and guitar skills, why include "The Nothing," a song that’s a riff on "Mary, Mary Quite Contrary"? Moments like this only reinforce the impression that the whole project is one long failed joke, a comedian bombing onstage trying to will it into performance art. So again: is he serious? Either way, Speedin' Bullet is a remarkable flop, and there is a certain amazement whenever something this self-indulgent and messy gets released on a major label.


Field Music Play… pulls together covers of songs by Syd Barrett, Pet Shop Boys, Leonard Cohen, Roxy Music, the Beatles, and others. Musically and curatorially, it showcases the duo as pragmatists with an impossibly dry sense of humor.

Play...

There's always been a Rosetta Stone quality to the pop song cover. Hearing a group's version of an established tune can reveal things about each via comparison, like setting a decoder ring to the proper coordinates between two acts. When I heard that Field Music were applying their prim British Invasion melodies and jazz-derived rhythms to a set of interpretations, I dialed in my hopes to the usual suspects: the Kinks, Sparks, something from The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, perhaps, maybe an early Talking Heads cut, a take on Kraftwerk's "The Model", or XTC's "Making Plans for Nigel". I didn't imagine Syd Barrett's "Terrapin" or Leonard Cohen's covered-to-death "Suzanne", nor the Ringo-sung White Album cut "Don't Pass Me By". Expectations successfully subverted, the Field Music Play… compilation, which pulls together these and five other covers, manages to be more than worthwhile, while teaching two important lessons about the group's approach. Musically and curatorially, the duo are undeniable music pragmatists with an impossibly dry sense of humor.
The pragmatism extends beyond the compositions and to the reasons for even considering some of the cover choices. The duo is reluctant to call Play an album; the majority of these versions were done for other projects. The well-trod modern standard "Suzanne" and left-field choice "Terrapin" were done for special issues of Mojo Magazine. As for the latter, David Brewis told me via email that he was much more in favor of covering Barrett's "No Good Trying", but it had already been scooped up by J. Mascis. That would explain the approach they took to "Terrapin"-- a folksy dirge far outside of their wheelhouse-- shoehorning it into the group’s twangy take on George Harrison-styled classic rock. Their version of Roxy Music's "If There Is Something"-- originally recorded for a School of Language B-side-- is a more successful translation. They swap out the glam pioneers' bluesy swagger for hospital corners and modernist lines, but manage to retain the original's sense of self-aware oddness, while highlighting the similarities between Brewis' and Bryan Ferry's vocal styles (perhaps a result of their geographical affinity).
But even when the covers here are a matter of picking from the leftovers, Field Music manage to create original versions invested with their own arid humor. Two cuts, originally issued as a 7" for 2012's Record Store Day, are drawn from the Pet Shop Boys' classic Actually, complete with with a tongue-in-cheek title (actually, nearly) and re-appropriation of the original album's cover photo. The thematic connections shared by PSB and Field Music are a revelation in their own right, but it certainly helps that the Brewises nail their version of the ever-great "Rent". It's not just a matter of the groups' mutual perspective that links love with financial necessity, either: "I ended up singing it as half gay love story and half love/hate open letter to Field Music itself," Brewis told me. "You pay my rent, but only just."
The highlight from Play is easily the duo's version of the Beatles' anti-classic "Don't Pass Me By", which would seem like an ironic jab at the British pop canon were it not a lemon-into-lemonade scenario in which they took a funny and quite inventive approach to the Fab Four's catalog. Also selected from the already picked-over for a Mojo compilation, the Brewises took the Residents' approach to the tune, mixing in elements from throughout the Beatles' discography. On the chorus, they lapse into "Don't Let Me Down", in a hilariously literal gambit. Listen closely (it's worth it), and you'll also hear bits of "Blackbird", "A Day in the Life", "Strawberry Fields Forever", and "Yer Blues". Here lies the lesson of Play, and one of the core truths of Field Music's rewarding discography: There is dark humor and interesting angles-- even joy-- to be found in basic realities and mundane commitments.


This 3xLP box set surveys the influential New York group’s long career, reinforcing their post-punk bona fides and tracing their evolution over the course of four decades.

Bush Tetras: Rhythm and Paranoia: The Best of Bush Tetras

Bush Tetras never wanted to be pigeonholed as a no wave band. Though guitarist Pat Place co-founded the group after leaving no-wave luminaries the Contortions in 1979, bringing roadie Laura Kennedy as Bush Tetras’ original bassist, they outlasted the short-lived but deeply influential NYC underground movement, evolving through multiple eras. In a 2019 interview, late drummer Dimitri Papadopoulos (better known as Dee Pop) explained that they consider themselves to be “part of the lineage of great bands that evolved from the CBGB’s scene” such as the Ramones, Television, or Patti Smith. Across 29 songs (plus two digital-only bonus tracks), this chronologically organized 3xLP box set compiles highlights from each of Bush Tetras’ periods of recorded output—the early 1980s, late 1990s, and late 2010s—revealing just how vital they remained in each decade.
While Bush Tetras can and should be considered a quintessential New York band, Dee Pop is the only member who grew up in Queens. Place moved to the city from the suburbs of Chicago with aspirations of becoming a visual artist, joining the Contortions after playing guitar for only three weeks. Kennedy arrived in NYC from Detroit, and singer Cynthia Sley from Cleveland, both drawing on inspirations from Motown and James Brown. Sley recalled Bush Tetras hanging out in the Harlem hip-hop scene with rapper Fab 5 Freddy, who teamed up with Blondie for the Christmas-themed remix of their song “Rapture.” Thanks to these diverse influences, they arrived at a sound fusing no wave discordance with relentlessly funky post-punk and mutant disco, zipped up as tight as a leather jacket.
Bush Tetras’ debut single, “Too Many Creeps,” has been their calling card since it hit the streets in 1980. Following Glenn Branca’s Lesson No. 1 as the second release from tastemaking NYC label 99 Records, this timeless classic laid out the quartet’s approach with a rumbling bassline and tough-as-nails attitude. Sley has described the song as an “anti-anthem” about how they were forced to “dodge the dangerous creeps who were both hitting on us or hassling us about our androgynous looks.” She returned to this lyrical theme on the dubby “Das Ah Riot,” released the next year on a 7" from UK label Fetish, delivering a thinly veiled threat: “When the heat pick up the street/You’re gonna hope we never meet.” Over a groove that moves like a freaky trip to “Funkytown,” her empowering words point to a place beyond frustration on “Stand Up and Fight,” as Sley urges listeners to “Come on and take control/Lose your body/Lose your soul.”
Even when they set their sights on the dancefloor, Bush Tetras offered ultimatums. “You Can’t Be Funky,” another signature song from the band’s 1981 Rituals EP, cuts aspiring suitors to the core: “Your eyes are shallow/And your glance is cold/You can’t be funky if you haven’t got a soul!” This 12", released by Stiff Records and produced by the Clash’s drummer Topper Headon, marked a striking divergence from Bush Tetras’ earliest material as they blurred the line between no wave and new wave. Sley’s quivering vocals on the cowbell-clopping “Cowboys in Africa” are reminiscent of Jello Biafra, while the title track, “Rituals,” drifts into a spookier psychedelic sound, hinting at the music Dee Pop would make with the Gun Club several years later.
As they moved into the ’90s, Bush Tetras squabbled over creative directions. Prior to his time playing with free-jazz bassist William Parker and saxophonist Andy Haas, Dee Pop’s inclinations had already shifted from punk to avant-garde, while Place remained interested in a different alternative. “How are we going to meld Soundgarden with Albert Ayler?” he wondered. They didn’t end up sounding much like either. “Page 18,” from a 7" produced by Henry Rollins, is supercharged with screams hair-raising enough to make Lydia Lunch shake in her boots. “Mr. Lovesong,” featuring the legendary Darlene Love, is an unlikely collision of girl-group pop and groovy death rock. This era culminates with “You Don’t Know Me,” the squealing standout of Bush Tetras’ second album, Happy. Sounding just as pissed off as anything from the previous decade, Sley sarcastically comments on a veteran underground artist’s place in the pantheon: “I’m nailed/Hailed/Impaled/Then forgotten.”
In a 2015 interview, Sley remarked how Bush Tetras’ snarling exterior and determination to speak their minds set them apart from many of their peers: “You see the other bands with women up front, like the Go-Go’s and the Bangles, and we were totally alien compared to them.” On their best songs from recent years, such as 2018’s “Red Heavy,” Bush Tetras still sound like nobody else. New bassist Val Opielski lays down a mesmerizing, slow-moving groove as the founding trio thrashes and bashes like it’s done for the past four decades.
Sadly, Dee Pop passed away just one month before the box set’s release, making it as much a monument to his life as to the band’s legacy. Until this collection, keeping track of Bush Tetras recordings spread across labels, continents, and decades has felt like a daunting task. Rhythm and Paranoia provides a definitive overview of their trajectory, integrating influences from each era while balancing on the twin pillars of tough and funky. They might never become household names, but Bush Tetras’ place in the New York lineage has been cemented.

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The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die have become a cause célèbre as emo reemerges as a viable genre of independent rock rather than a pejorative adjective. The Connecticut collective's ambitious debut LP is powered by an almost frightening will to live.

The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die: Whenever, If Ever

Whenever, If Ever

By the time you've finished reading the name "The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die," you've likely made two assumptions about this band and both are warranted-- yes, they identify as "emo" and yes, they have little to no use for restraint and understatement. Though on a much, much smaller scale, TWIABP resemble Arcade Fire prior to Funeral, having made their name on a promising EP and unpredictable, cathartic live performances that feature nearly a dozen people making music at the same time. But the greater similarity lies in Whenever, If Ever being a rare debut that’s powered by an almost frightening will to live, a desperation that strongly suggests the people involved have no other option to deal with what's inside of them-- when Thomas Diaz screams “let's hope that this works out/ this has got to work out!" during the frantic conclusion of “Fightboat”, you realize “this” means everything.
TWIABP have already become a bit of a cause célèbre as emo reemerges as a viable, visible genre of independent rock rather than just a pejorative adjective. Understandable, even if there wasn’t anything like them the first time around-- for one thing, they’re from Connecticut and roll about 10 deep, switching vocalists on the fly and utilizing strings and horns to create textures that are more based in post-rock or mid-00s indie rock. And at the risk of revisionist history, I’m just going to put this out there: Cap’n Jazz, Jazz June, and all that other jazz was never this melodic, never this instrumentally tight, and never this well-produced. But if that sound meant everything to you at some point or if you’ve been waiting for a comeback for the sole purpose of airing out old grievances, Whenever, If Ever suits your needs.
They have a weakness for the emo trope of singing being the truest form of self-expression, an act even purer if you don’t have any kind of studied vocal capability-- "we sang songs/ but we never learned your words or melodies", "and when our voices fail us/ we will find new ways to sing," things like that. And on first proper track “Heartbeat in the Brain”, TWIABP sounds like the kind of band where you get the lead vocals simply by wanting it more-- there’s the adenoidal guy, the screaming guy, someone named "Shitty Greg" who might not be either of them, and they sometimes sing in tandem, initially exaggerating their hiccuping modulations to a degree that feels like trolling; you’ll know pretty quickly if you’re built for this stuff if “Kinsella” is your safe word. There are the musical cues as well-- searching arpeggios over palm-muted clean chords, spastic drum fills, nasal Casio synth leads. Hell, “Fightboat” might even cause squabbling amongst the old heads as its introductory horn line recalls the one from American Football’s “The Summer Ends”, which some people still complain about to this day.
It takes a little while for Whenever, If Ever to get going, but once it does, TWIABP establish they are not an emo revival act, but more of a spiritual descendent of Danielson Famile or an early 00s Saddle Creek band, a community whose albums serve as a time capsule, a documentation of their lives. It’s unclear exactly when that click happens, but it’s definitely during “Picture of a Tree That Doesn't Look Okay”. Perhaps it’s the part where Greg Horbal asks over desiccated, detuned guitars, “Do you think the landlord’s pissed?/ We left a car parked on the lawn again”-- it’s an inside joke that doubles as a conspiratorial invitation, indicating that you’re welcome to join in and, hell, maybe you were there the whole time (the car ends up on the lawn again by the very next song). Or it could be the point where Whenever, If Ever starts to incorporate clever segues to establish a chronology and continuity to the story-- a delayed guitar resembles a bong rip as “Picture” drifts into “You Will Never Go to Space” and the final line of that song ("Did we dream when we were skeletons/ or did we just wish for our skin?") becomes foreshadowing for “The Layers of Skin We Drag Around”. Or, maybe it’s after the pace picks up and TWIABP shake off the slowcore rust, a drum roll crescendo leading into a rousing call and response coda where the hooks work out their kinks and become singalongs.
Either way, once “Picture” passes, TWIABP already have accrued the confidence and wisdom to do things they seemed incapable of only minutes prior. “Ultimate Steve” distills the band’s post-rock and emo extremes into concentrate, an all-together-now, 30-second shoutalong bookended by a gorgeous build and fade. During the revolutionary final third, the stakes and consequences of this life pursuit start to push back on TWIABP. “Gig Life” bears the record’s most instantly memorable melody and lyrics, an acoustic power ballad that would’ve been intolerable if performed with the same abandon from earlier. Diaz sings, “You ran away/ You were afraid to make mistakes/ but that's the biggest one you made." It’s unclear to whom it’s pointed (a former bandmate? A high school friend? An ex?) or where "somewhere to the west, I suppose" even entails, it could be New York City or the next town over for all we know. But “Gig Life” establishes that TWIABP understand the sacrifices and the rewards of their chosen gig life and are saddened at losing this person, that it might be a personal failure on their behalf. Still, being stuck in West Virginia with the same old Rival Schools albums and food from the nearest Sheetz are their occupational hazards; those of your “gig” might entail water cooler talk and the occasional bagel, but it's still a gig. Are you satisfied?
“Low Light Assembly” follows as a solemn, final hymn ("the parking lot where we lay is more than home now") before the stunning closer “Getting Sodas." A brooding, minor key bassline gives you pause to realize just how far TWIABP have come in barely a half hour-- they’ve established a community, this one’s for an audience. And it’s big room stuff: the guitars peal and ring rather than hang and drone, the low end is heavier and reverbed, the screaming sounds aimed rather than scattershot. And it closes on a chorale that the band created itself to express: "The world is a beautiful place/ but we have to make it that way... and if you're afraid to die/ Then so am I."
Yeah, it sounds like Arcade Fire and it sounds like Bright Eyes too, but the intent of those words is more crucial. It reminds me of Win Butler promising to build tunnels as the world collapses around him and his lover, Conor Oberst demanding the tape roll so that he and his friends can document their love for each other. It’s a spirit available to everyone and possessed by no one, yet so few bands choose to pursue it even as those that do tend to be rewarded-- it’s a realization that you can be ambitious and striving with kindness, pushing against a palpable resistance without turning existence into an "us vs. them" zero sum game. Whenever, If Ever fights against fears, societal expectations, preconceptions, and the metaphysical for the greater good of society, and I mean, for crying out loud, the cover just says jump right in and do it. And sure, TWIABP make mistakes on Whenever, If Ever because they’re scared of not doing so, but it’s flawed in a way that can make a listener feel like it’s theirs, something that might inspire them to make a more perfect version of it. Whenever, If Ever probably won't ever be Funeral or Lifted or Ships or Diary on a mass level, but you know TWIABP feel like it’s their best shot at it and don’t care whether a dozen or several thousand people end up feeling the same.


The second entry in the band’s Vivaldi-inspired quartet of EPs gives a perfunctory nod to the concept before resuming Weezer-by-numbers.

SZNZ: Summer

At this point in their career, Weezer are the musical equivalent of The Simpsons. Hacky, pandering, and decades past their best work, they relentlessly strive to remain relevant with feeble attempts at becoming a meme. Anything that succeeds feels like an accident, and engaging with it critically is rarely worth the effort. Thirty years on from their first demo tape, the Californian quartet led by the perpetually dorky Rivers Cuomo have released the second entry in a series of EPs based on Vivaldi’s violin concertos, The Four Seasons. The concept tastes stale even before you hear the songs, which Cuomo has described as “21st-century ’90s.” Overproduced to the point of sounding completely generic, SZNZ: Summer is yassified butt-rock with cringe-inducing lyrics that aren’t half as clever as they think they are.
As a teenager, Weezer’s mix of nerdy self-deprecation, sexual frustration, and ripping guitar solos spoke to me. Then I grew up a little bit and realized “Across the Sea” is disgusting. Cuomo has called Pinkerton “a hideous record,” and has been attempting some kind of squeaky clean return to form since 2001’s Green Album. There are decent songs sprinkled through the last 20 years of their discography, but it’s mostly been one embarrassing joke or half-baked concept after another. Their glossily produced gimmicks now come across like an unholy combination of OK Go and Oliver Tree.
Repeating the trick of “Opening Night” from SZNZ: Spring, “Lawn Chair” begins the second EP with violins interpolating a melody from Vivaldi. Many people have compared his early 18th-century compositions to heavy metal, thanks to the way their dramatic chords evoke the images of a “violent storm” or “stinging winds” in the accompanying sonnets. This makes sense as a source of inspiration for Cuomo, who once styled himself like a member of Stryper, but an album-length exploration of orchestral metal would have been much more interesting. Instead, they give us a perfunctory nod to the concept before resuming Weezer-by-numbers.
The beefy riffs of “Records” travel the well-trod path of “Hash Pipe,” “Dope Nose,” and a million other variations on a tired formula. Vinyl scratches add a literal interpretation of the song’s lyrics, which also include lazily rhymed references to Lana, Rihanna, and Nirvana. The choruses about a record spinning “round and round” are almost as incessantly annoying as Blue October’s “Jump Rope.” Then, just when you think it can’t get any worse, we get “Blue Like Jazz,” as Cuomo begs someone to teach him how to be “cool like that” with a pained falsetto and corny shredding that sounds like Evanescence.
The band has described SZNZ: Summer as an “angrier, indignant scorcher of an EP” compared to the “light-hearted tone” of SZNZ: Spring. This is most obvious on “What’s the Good of Being Good,” a Stanley Ipkiss-style incel anthem about nice guys finishing last with “no loving wife to smile at me/No daughter to dote on with pride.” Sadly, Cuomo seems like he hasn’t learned anything in the 26 years since he sang about a woman who should be attracted to him even if she’s not interested in men. If Weezer ever wants to evolve, they should start by reflecting on why they still write songs like whiny teenage boys.