The L.A. rapper’s dead-eyed hustler tales are grimier and druggier than ever. It’s a harsh toke, but the crackling production gives it the energy it needs.

F.U.N. T.O.Y.

On F.U.N. T.O.Y., the voices surrounding Sideshow—parents, peers, pastors, sidewalk philosophers—appear between the songs like a Greek Chorus of damnation. They offer no hope or encouragement. Instead, they detail the myriad ways Sideshow and his generation are doomed. One such voice opens the record by explaining that “the young people are not gonna make it into heaven,” another issues hyper-specific death threats, and another shruggingly concedes that violence is “in his blood.” Sideshow doesn’t push back on these ideas much. His dead-eyed hustler tales indicate someone who is resigned to his fate.
Sideshow has a utilitarian, disarmingly personal writing style, an approach that feels less concerned with theatrics or manipulation of language than blunt force. His verses are collections of starkly composed snapshots, brief scenes of terror or heartache rendered in vocals that suggest Boldy James and Oddisee drained of all color; even when his delivery becomes frenetic, like the paranoid flow he deploys on “Bad Friend,” his voice still moves with a slippery codeine crawl. It gives his songs a hypnotic quality, making it easy to miss brutal passages like “All my life I been stepped on/God put both feet on me/I cried, my cries they get ignored” on initial listens. There’s a thick air of inevitability in Sideshow’s work, the kind of malaise that comes from always—unfortunately—being proven right about the world.
In previous albums, Sideshow’s relationship with selling and consuming drugs occupied the margins like a distant stormcloud, affecting the atmosphere without being at the center of it. Here, substances play a more central role as ubiquitous numbing agents needed to get through the day. Lean is his narcotic of choice. “I’m just tryna put a thousand dollars in one styrofoam,” he raps on “How to Kill a Man”,” following up on that thought later in the song: “Only codeine gives me purpose.”
In contrast to Sideshow’s deadpan vocals, the beats he chooses are active and skittish, tumbling over themselves like loose truck tires racing down a hill. Popstar Benny’s contributions are full of colorful, pixelated synths zigzagging around plugg drums, while chameleonic Chicago producer Ayochillmannn provides shuffling, futuristic Southern funk. When combined with Sideshow’s droopy intonations, it all has a crackling, circuits-frying energy. It’s tactile; you can almost smell the frayed wiring.
“Villain in Your Story (Still UA)” is a particularly harsh toke of a closer. Marc Rivera’s trudging beat is the perfect backdrop for Sideshow’s unblinking honesty (“You ain’t know I’m a fucked up dude?” he raps, less of a question than a sneer). But after 30 minutes of unrelenting darkness, Sideshow changes perspective. During a spoken-word outro, he explains that as a Black person in America, he can’t be depressed. He’s oppressed; there are systems in place designed to keep him trapped under problems engineered to be insurmountable. The bleary drug abuse, the ambient threat of violence, and the voices preaching downfall are part of a purposeful cycle. If everyone and everything around you only speaks prophecies of doom, you might eventually become a doomsayer yourself.


The experimental musicians’ first full-length collaboration gives the impression of life, fertility, and verdancy. It’s one of the most sumptuous works of either artist’s career.

William Basinski / Janek Schaefer: . . . On Reflection

. . . On Reflection

William Basinski will probably be associated with death, decline, and decay for the rest of his life. His breakout series of albums was constructed from fraying tape loops, and most of his music sounds submerged and ancient, as if it’d been bottled from the distant past. You’d imagine his first full-length collaboration with Janek Schaefer, a sound collagist who works with vinyl (and a Guinness Book of Records-certified three-armed turntable), would be a celebration of physical media that show their scars as they age. Yet the strongest impression of . . . on reflection is one of life, fertility, and verdancy. It’s one of the richest and most sumptuously sound-designed works of either’s career, and a highlight in both catalogs.
The two musicians spent eight years raiding their undoubtedly vast archives of piano loops and stitching them into the backbone of the five-track, continuously flowing record. To anyone familiar with either artist’s catalog, it’s shocking how pristine the piano sounds, and we expect that it’ll eventually be submerged in vinyl crackle, tape hiss, and effects. But aside from the occasional burst of dubby echo, the piano remains unblemished. The real story unfolds in the margins: field recordings of birds, machines, vehicles, distant murmurs of crowds, shouts of children, a spooky little metallic shimmer every now and then.
If Basinski hadn’t already called an album The River, it would’ve been an apt title for this one. The piano seems to cut through the landscape, revealing layers of history previously unseen; it suggests a time-lapse of a canyon being created, or of a civilization growing along the banks of a river. A lot of the best recent ambient albums make heavy use of field recordings, often to create a sense of relatable, everyday domesticity or reflect the artist’s specific memories. . . . on reflection thinks on a bigger scale; it seems like it’s about everything.
Because we’re really just hearing two things here, piano and field recordings, it’s easy at first to overlook how complex this music is. The piano loop sounds stagnant at first, and it might take a few listens to notice how many different little vamps and motifs have been Frankensteined together. If you’re listening to . . . on reflection outside, letting the sounds of your own environment blend with the music, you might not process or even notice how much is going on in the back of the mix until you give it a focused listen in a quiet place. That’s not to say there’s one “correct” way to listen to it. It works well as an “experiential filter,” as a past review described Basinski’s music, or you can really focus on it and track its movements as a piece.
. . . on reflection has an interesting structure. Though it’s really one piece, it’s split into five numbered tracks; the two tracks that bookend either side of the record are based on piano, but in “. . . on reflection (three),” the piano cuts out and we’re greeted by a deep, meditative organ drone. Little electric zaps flit across the stereo field, as if we’ve suddenly stepped into a clearing in a forest and can observe comets shooting through a vast night sky. Then, not even six minutes later, the piano loop reassembles itself, and the album proceeds as if nothing has happened.
It’s a little frustrating at first to not be able to spend more time in this space, but . . . on reflection doesn’t really seem to adhere to human instincts. Like so much of the best ambient music, it feels like something that’s just happening rather than something that’s been meticulously assembled, which is why it might take a few listens for the level of its craftsmanship to sink in. Because it lacks Basinski’s usual layers of lo-fi murk or Schaefer’s predilection for harsh sounds, it’ll be more easily accessible to newcomers than most of their work. Yet it doesn’t seem to care if you like it or not. It just flows on, impassively, as the great confusing tumult of life goes on around it.


The Stockholm producer offers a bewildering yet comforting gateway to his tragicomic worldview on an ambitious set of complementary albums.

LUZ / Quest for Fire

What distinguishes Axel Boman’s music from other house music may be obvious to the ears, but it can be hard to put your finger on. The Stockholm producer avails himself of the same materials as many of his peers in the European dance underground—spongy synth bass, sharp-edged drum hits, filtered disco samples—but even when hewing to convention, Boman’s bouncy, brightly colored tracks stand out as though sprinkled with fairy dust. His productions are a little cartoonish, a little dreamlike, a little off-kilter. Like his occasional labelmate DJ Koze, Boman knows that there’s a fine line between a knee-slapper and a tearjerker: His music harbors both a sly sense of humor and an unmistakable melancholy, and the former often feels like a coping strategy for the latter.
In the nine years since his debut LP, 2013’s Family Vacation, the Studio Barnhus co-founder has mostly busied himself with singles and EPs, developing his idiosyncratic style on songs like “1979,” a bittersweet draught of sentimental deep house, and the more rambunctious “Voodoo,” which might elicit the mental image of elephants carousing on a merry-go-round. Two years ago, on Le New Life, he stretched slow-burning deep-house tracks to 12 and 13 minutes, the better to sink listeners into eyes-closed bliss. Boman has never been afraid to fiddle with format: He’s made music out of gamma radiation and released a 12" of nothing but locked grooves.
LUZ and Quest for Fire make for an especially unusual proposition. On streaming services, they’re presented as two distinct yet complementary albums. The physical edition bundles them together and spreads them across six sides of vinyl—or one and one-half discs per album. The inner sleeves of the 3xLP package are printed with an absurdist short story by the Swedish artist and “internet antiquarian” Erik Lavesson. The story revolves around a fictional remake of the 1981 caveman film Quest for Fire that ends in bankruptcy, madness, and stateless elephants roaming Iceland’s volcanic plains. (In a separate text about the story, Lavesson expounds at some length on the subject of Ulam, the guttural caveman language that Anthony Burgess invented for the 1981 film, and notes his interest in writing something that could connect the language to Boman’s music.) Over their cumulative hour and 23 minutes and 18 tracks, the two albums offer the fullest picture yet of Boman’s tragicomic worldview.
Across both albums, sampled choirs billow, sub-bass rumbles, and strings and synth pads tremble like spring blossoms in the breeze; vintage easy listening daubs many songs with a trace of sticky-sweet sap. There’s a real sense of physicality to Boman’s sounds, which he applies in thick, gloopy brushstrokes; if you could run your fingers across his virtual canvas, you’d detect nubby congas and midrange swirls and tiny pinprick hi-hats that bristle to the touch. Quirky details are woven into the fabric of the music: In the silky, ecstatic “Grape,” a hard-panned thwack positions you smack in front of the net in a table-tennis game; in the spangled disco epic “Sottopassaggio,” Boman spins the knob on his delay unit so hard that space-time threatens to pull apart at the seams. Tempos range from languid slo-mo to cocaine fast, but mostly it hangs in the midrange, Latin accents and disco shimmer fleshing out its contours; steady son clave patterns pepper both albums like conga-line Morse code. What if, Boman seems to be asking us, cruise ships were actually cool?
Luz is, by a slim margin, the more lighthearted of the two records. On the dubby breakbeat house anthem “BHUKA,” South African vocalist Kamohelo (of the Barnhus-signed group Off the Meds) raps in gravelly triplets over starburst arpeggios; the plunging bassline evokes the feeling of walking on air, suggesting a spiritual kinship to “Purple Drank,” Boman’s woozy 2010 breakout hit. In the narcotized “Gröna Dalen,” blown-out bass sucks like quicksand at the lite-funk squelch and harp glissandi of soft-focus Swedish romance flicks; on “’Atra,” rollicking cowbells and a sun-warmed saxophone solo encapsulate the record’s feel-good vibes. Boman veers closest to going full gonzo on “Out Sailing,” a jittery pastiche of yacht rock and French house whose giddily yowled refrain (“My love is out sailing!”) is the only potentially divisive moment on either album; as with frozen blue daiquiris, you may wish to moderate your intake at first, to see how it sits with you.
Not everything on Luz is so tongue in cheek; the enveloping, bass-forward “Edgeware Road” feels almost like an attempt to craft a fast-techno version of one of Yo La Tengo’s most patient and sensitive ballads, and on Quest for Fire, Boman gets even more sentimental. “One Two” plays skippy hi-hats off somber chords, recalling French house eccentric Pépé Bradock’s starry-eyed lullabies; “Stone Age Jazz” sets bird-like trills against rosy background vocals and lawn-sprinkler hiss, a perfect picture of poolside idyll. Quest for Fire is home to much of the slower material—like “Cacti Is Plural,” a shadowy acid track in the tradition of the early-’00s duo Closer Musik and, before that, the eerier ends of the Rephlex catalog—but it also features the fastest: “Jeremy Irons,” a hard-driving cut that turns a truncated disco loop into one of the heaviest techno behemoths of the year.
Why Boman decided to release LUZ and Quest for Fire in this way, as conjoined twins rather than a conventional double album, is unclear. So, too, is the precise relationship between Lavesson’s odd short story and Boman’s own music, whose cheeky reference points are more space age than stone age. Both albums prove more bittersweet than some of their more whimsical overtones might suggest. Even the sunniest tracks, like “Sottopassaggio,” have an element of wistfulness. This emotional duality, so easy to miss when the tempo is high, comes to the fore on “Hold On,” the lilting song that closes LUZ. Over chiming, major-key chords and little tendrils of guitar, an uncredited Baba Stiltz sings, “Don’t be scared/Even if it’s been scary for a while/Lift your head up/Give yourself a smile.” He goes on: “When the going gets tough, it sucks/That’s why you got to hold on.” The sentiment is a hair’s breadth from being hopelessly hokey, but for whatever reason, it just works. Chalk it up to the spiritual and psychic exhaustion of the past two years, or to his agreeably low-key tone, or to the funny assonant rhyme between “gets tough” and “it sucks,” setting up the latter to land like a good-natured punchline. Boman may comport himself like a tattooed trickster, but at its most sincere, his music feels like a warm embrace.


Balancing lush ambience and sharp electronics, this cross-continental collaboration addresses the climate crisis with musical interpretations of land under assault.

Merzbow / Vanity Productions: Coastal Erosion

Coastal Erosion

Masami Akita and Christian Stadsgaard—who create music as Merzbow and Vanity Productions, respectively—each hail from countries highly susceptible to damage from climate change. Akita is from Japan, where beach loss in the near future is projected as high as 79 percent; Stadsgaard is from Denmark, where coastlines are eroding by four meters each year. In both nations, the majority of the population is situated along the coast.
On Coastal Erosion, their debut collaborative album, the two artists address the crisis with musical interpretations of land under assault. Merzbow’s haphazard noise is buoyed by Vanity Productions’ spectral synth pads, and the balance of lush ambience and sharp electronics recalls the work of Tim Hecker or Fennesz. One may also be reminded of Merzbow’s 2016 album Kakapo, where discordant noise was more meditative than head-splitting, and profits benefited a critically endangered New Zealand parrot. While Coastal Erosion isn’t linked with a specific conservation program, it’s still a work of environmental activism. By welcoming listeners into a catastrophic sound world, Akita and Stadsgaard invite us to experience the destruction occurring in their home countries in a way that reading statistics may not always accomplish.
“Erosion Japan,” the first of the album’s two extended tracks, begins with dreamy synth pads that lull listeners into a turbulent sea of noise. Though it’s never quiet, one grows accustomed to the onslaught, a process that serves as a damning reflection of climate apathy. A sudden and dramatic obliteration of a country’s coastline would turn heads; a more gradual and consistent process is easier to ignore. But like waves crashing against shorelines and barriers, the song’s rhythmic noise batters the defenses without interruption.
The second track, “Erosion Denmark,” follows the same formula but is noticeably tamer. Though its constituent components are similar, the sound is less unwieldy, and the mood is consequently more grim. If the previous track instilled an understanding of coastal erosion through a palpable sense of immersion, this one does so by presenting its aftermath. In Denmark, archaeologists have warned that erosion could lead to the disappearance of cultural heritage and legally protected sites situated along coastlines. Even if people start to move inland, swaths of human history will be lost. Listening to the cold synth pads and bleak atmosphere of “Erosion Denmark” feels like gazing across that rubble-strewn wasteland.
In an era of climate anxiety, Coastal Erosion stands out as one of the year’s most relevant experimental albums. By crafting music that attempts to illustrate the severity of the situation at hand, Akita and Stadsgaard offer a space to reckon with fear and panic. Their cross-continental collaboration is indicative of what the problem requires—that people from around the world see eye-to-eye. But by engaging with these songs, one is forced to recognize that such extended periods of reflection are a temporary luxury. Coastal Erosion’s greatest success is in showing how we have failed.


On his new mixtape, the Vallejo upstart sounds a little too eager to break out of his home base.

Nef the Pharaoh: Mushrooms & Coloring Books

Mushrooms & Coloring Books

Nef The Pharaoh is a rapper in the finest Vallejo tradition, making music that simultaneously pays tribute to and transcends his regional ancestors. History doesn’t weigh Neffy down, it drives him: “I’m the closest thing you’re going to get to Mac Dre,” he boldly announces on the intro to “Drought,” from new tape Mushrooms & Coloring Books. Line up their music on the same playlist, and it’s easy to make an argument that Nef is the heir apparent, but he also seems primed for stardom beyond his home base.
Regrettably, the latest tape shows growing pains, mostly due to the potential blockbuster tracks flat-lining. Take the single “High Voltage”: Guest rapper Tyga’s voice scrapes off producer DTB’s creeping beat like sandpaper. Worse still, Tyga’s cretinism seems to have infected Nef, who makes transgender people a punch line and drops dumb lyrics like, “Even when I’m at the house I’m paranoid/I don’t trust you if you don't fuck my boy.” “Rockstar” finds Nef envisioning big-time living—dodging paparazzi, clashing with label executives, and that’s before you get to the sex and drugs—but the fantasy deflates over a soft music-box beat. He sounds like he’s trying to force a breakthrough hit, and it dims his usually strong instincts.
But when you block out the misjudged moments, Mushrooms & Coloring Books features some Nef’s most exhilarating songs yet. Nef shouts out his favorite liquor store and calls out the local cops over DJ Fresh’s Cali funk on “South Vallejo.” And the star quality he has been searching for is all over “Love Got Us Beefin,” with Nef shuffling through vocal styles to decry a collapsing relationship with his high-school sweetheart over a glittering beat that recalls Prince’s “Diamonds and Pearls.” You can just feel how eager he is to break out nationally, and you can’t help but want it for him. Maybe next time he will dial down the impatience and keep his heart at home.


Chilean tech-house star Villalobos follows his fantastic and varied Alcachofa LP with a record that displays a monkish, almost classical degree of top-down restraint.

Ricardo Villalobos: Thè au Harem d'Archiméde

Thè au Harem d'Archiméde

I suspect that a lot of this tech-house stuff is easy to make. Perhaps process shouldn't be a determining factor in the opinion of a final product, but nevertheless I respond pretty consistently to Kompakt and Force Tracks and especially Perlon releases in part because the tracks just sound more thought-out and labored over. If anything, they're extremely detailed. Sometimes detail work makes us dance harder, and on rare occasions it can even give a track some unexpectedly human quality: Michelangelo Matos talks about the thread of pessimism that courses through Luomo's Vocalcity, for instance. Whatever gives icy tracks like "Tessio" or Jan Jelinek's "Tendency" such emotional depth, Fruity Loops definitely doesn't have a preset for it-- at least just yet.
Blame the detail work, the drugs, or the greasy long hair in his eyes: Ricardo Villalobos' Thè au Harem d'Archiméde is the sound of paranoia, a ticking bomb that never quite goes off. Nine well-carved tracks fidget violently within a remarkably controlled spectrum of sound. While tech-house in 2004 widened its scope for bigger sounds, trading computers for synths and hard grooves for genre and song structure, Villalobos approaches Thè au Harem with a monkish, almost classical degree of top-down restraint. It seems as if the Chilean-Berliner sticks to only seven or eight percussive sounds throughout the whole album, running them through every possible permutation, milking them till they're miraculously warm and woozy. Villalobos gave us great hooks on 2003's Alcachofa; here he stalks us in a sweaty haze of Amazon rhythm, challenging us to find the hooks ourselves.
Dizzying and sometimes nerve-wracking, Villalobos is hardly a shyster though, hooking up Thè au Harem's hardest working listeners with fantastic payoffs throughout the mix. While the first three tracks flaunt grooves as tightly-wound as Maurizio twelves, Villalobos still finds an unsettling amount of wiggle room for wind-chime strings in "Hireklon", swashbuckling slurps in "Serpentin", and noirish synth accents in "For All Seasons". As the album progresses, tracks become livelier and more unpredictable, each building on the rhythmic developments of the one before. Lush pun-on-title-track "Thèorème d'Archiméde" is the tipping point, thereafter Villalobos insisting on increasingly chaotic routines: "Temenarc 2" spins like a shattered Tiefschwarz record, and follow-up "Temenarc 1" all but bats its way out of an aluminum trash can. By the time the aptly-named "True To Myself" finishes out Thè au Harem, Villalobos has become quite the derelict, offering 14 minutes of weary chants and ghostly yelps. Think Dani Siciliano in Downtown 81 drag, chasing us through the jungle.


The Brooklyn rapper’s vivid storytelling and golden flow have inspired emcees for nearly 30 years. But his new album pales in the shadow of 2021’s momentous Doe or Die II.

Truth Be Told

“No one can define you,” AZ says solemnly in the introduction to Truth Be Told, his 10th studio album, over a scant drum track and angelic vocals that throb like a heartbeat. “The moment you allow them to define you, you allow them to become your God.” It’s a fitting proclamation for the Brooklyn rapper who, after spitting an iconic guest verse at the start of Nas’ 1994 single “Life’s a Bitch,” has spent the last three decades reaffirming why he was offered the spot in the first place. His distinct nasal tone, vivid storytelling, and golden flow have inspired rappers from Joey Bada$$ and Rome Streetz to Rae Sremmurd’s Slim Jxmmi; not to mention he’s one of a handful of former major-label stalwarts who successfully went independent years before Roc Marciano and Griselda popularized the approach. Doe or Die II—the 2021 sequel to his 1995 solo debut—doubled as both a victory lap after its 12-year gestation period and a solid meat-and-potatoes rap album from an emcee who, at the time, was pushing 50. Now approaching 52, AZ still brings that cognac-in-an-easy-chair reminiscence to Truth Be Told, only this time, the ice has slightly melted and the stories are beginning to run together.
Doe or Die II was thrilling as a showcase of AZ’s impressive skill and perspective. The down-on-his-luck capo from the original had not only come up from squalor but outlived his demons, and the way that story dovetailed with AZ’s own journey through rap helped the celebratory air feel earned. But while Truth Be Told has some exciting moments, there’s less meaningful reflection than its title implies and more spinning of the wheels. These are either stories we’ve heard before or ideas he’s executed with more flair elsewhere. That isn’t to say AZ has fallen off entirely. At its best, that Brooklyn slur of his is still gripping, riding through the contours of beats like a bucket with 150,000 miles on it. “Still Got It” and “The GOAT” are the sharpest examples: AZ fully locks in with the drums to talk about coming up from nights on the park bench and finding his place in rap history between Big Daddy Kane and Lil Wayne. But more often than usual, his flow gets a little slippery, derailing the momentum of some songs. And when that is combined with weaker storytelling and retreaded subject matter, like the bland paeans to Black capitalism on “Don’t Go Astray” or the career SparkNotes that is “One of the Greatest,” the illusion is broken.
Producer and longtime collaborator Buckwild tries to inject a sense of pomp, but even the man behind Biggie’s “I Got a Story to Tell” offers up a mixed bag. Buckwild mixes his usual sampling chops with a live-band hip-hop sound that, at its worst, is staid and boring. “Reintroduction” and closing track “Respect Mines” are serviceable but anonymous beats that sound ready for an NBA highlight reel—they have no personality or sense of urgency and are Air Force 1-generic to their core. The one exception on the brighter end is “Amazing,” whose string plucks and lush bass bring the best out of AZ, who interpolates Mitch’s infamous basketball speech from Paid in Full. But the beats sound better when they get moodier. Take “Go Time,” which flips ominous horns and violin shrieks into a haunted playground for AZ and guest Pharoahe Monch to tear rhyme schemes to shreds. AZ sounds completely in his element here, navigating this thumping terrain with gusto: “No halves, I whole key it/If we clash, then so be it/Hoes see it, the haters know it, they favorite poet/Paid it forward for me and mines, a major moment.”
AZ has accomplished a lot and stayed the course through almost 30 years of constant rap evolution. The fact that he’s still here, and that people still care, isn’t lost on him, and he sounds genuinely grateful to be able to spit for an audience, even when it’s about going to get his prostate checked (eat your heart out, André 3000). Following up a gargantuan project like Doe or Die II was always going to be a challenge, and AZ and Buckwild’s Truth Be Told answers the call with a middling jog through faded memories.
Correction: A previous version of this review claimed that AZ is from Queens. He is from Brooklyn.


The Beijing-based post-punk duo stack garage instrumentation, Ali Farka Touré melodies, and dissonance without a whiff of the baroque.

Gong Gong Gong 工工工: Phantom Rhythm 幽靈節奏 (幽霊リズム)

Phantom Rhythm 幽靈節奏 (幽霊リズム)

A couple of misfits and a brash bouquet of sound: These are the building blocks from which rock’n’roll sprang. Beijing-based Gong Gong Gong slot directly into the canon—the streamlined duo of Tom Ng and Joshua Frank use two of the most familiar instruments in the rock pantheon, a rhythm guitar and a bass, to create Phantom Rhythm 幽靈節奏. The result is a novel pastiche of post-punk, West African blues, Bo Diddley, and distortion.
Ng and Frank started playing together in 2015 under their adopted city’s underpasses and in DIY spaces. Even with crisp production, this record (their first, after 2018’s Siren 7") indicates a pair capable of holding its own in a repurposed warehouse or shipping crate. Their divergent backgrounds—Ng grew up in Hong Kong, and Montreal-born Frank has lived in Beijing off and on since childhood—yields a complementary chemistry. Adding drums or keys would be an intrusion. Gong Gong Gong stack garage instrumentation, Ali Farka Touré melodies, and dissonance without a whiff of the baroque. Opener “The Last Note” casts an ominous, unrelenting spell, building steadily towards Ng’s deadpan Cantonese intonations. It’s a refusal to capitulate on multiple fronts—language, fervor, unnecessary flourishes. By minute four, the fervent, interwoven riffs evoke the sinews of a charging beast.
The album reaches its zenith midway through, where standouts “Wei Wei Wei” and “Some Kind of Demon” follow in succession. These songs follow a similar structure as most others—an insistent, galloping rhythm overlaid with guttural cries and a sinuous riff. “Wei Wei Wei”’s opening fuzz leads into a faux-casual plod, charting a steady ascent into rhythmic abandon, order teasing at chaos. It’s music that engages one’s entire body. “It’s a pity/As long as/Can only/But not/Still,” Ng yelps on “Some Kind of Demon,” the choked lyrics in direct opposition to the music’s metronomic swagger.
In its spareness and meticulousness, Phantom Rhythm 幽靈節奏 leaves so little room for missteps that every reverberation proves to be an act of curation and collaboration. If there’s a critique to be made here, it’s that some tracks (“Moonshadows,” for instance) pale in comparison to their freakier counterparts, whose jazzy rhythms elevate them beyond their component parts. Even so, Ng’s screech in the second half of “Moonshadows” is a fork stuck into a live outlet. At their best, Gong Gong Gong point towards a future where (porous) borders and a vast palette of influences facilitate interesting collaboration. When they’re plugged in, driving towards a chorus or bridge, they sound like an engine of revelation.

Buy: Rough Trade
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With tangled riffs and lyrics that read like fridge-magnet poetry, the Baton Rouge duo makes mischievous art punk with a gleefully absurdist spirit.

Infinite Hatch

Baton Rouge oddballs SPLLIT make records that clatter and bleep like an arcade crammed with rowdy kids. The duo’s members, known simply as Urq and Marance, approach their tunes like madcap chemists tinkering with acidic formulas. On their debut release, 2019’s XX_HANDLE // SOAR THROAT, Urq and Marance split their duties down the middle; each member penned half of the LP, writing and recording their respective batch of songs in less than a day. On that project, they spotlit their distinct styles—Marance’s skewed art punk, Urq’s scuzzy garage rock—but their music’s wattage only intensifies when their powers are combined. SPLLIT’s impish new LP Infinite Hatch is packed with abstract verses, angular guitars, and an arsenal of animated squeaks and skronks.
In under 30 minutes, SPLLIT tear through 12 songs that range from heat-warped indie rock (“Bevy Slew”) to lippy new wave (“Growth Hacking”) to muted psychedelia (“Time Passing Dirge”). The band cites Captain Beefheart, the Fall, Deerhoof, and the Raincoats as inspirations, but you can also pick out traces of the Waitresses, Devo, and DRINKS, Cate Le Bon’s off-kilter duo with Tim Presley. On the wonky outlier “Curtain Lift,” they even recall Leisure-era Blur, slipping bent guitar riffs and hushed drumming under their most fluid vocal melody. But even with all of this input swirling around in their brains, SPLLIT shred and reassemble their influences rather than rubbing off carbon copies.
Infinite Hatch’s songs are built like scrappy, neon-flecked collages; some edges are torn, others cut into crisp corners. Their lyrics also can feel snipped from magazine copy and rearranged like effortless fridge-magnet poetry. On “Growth Hacking,” the product of a 45-minute songwriting exercise, Marance blurts out a string of seemingly unrelated words over squiggles of synth and pin-pricking guitar. “Hunch hard shake… change hack rake,” they sing in staccato bursts. The sheer sound of the words outweighs their possible meanings; their harsh consonants land like a heavy chain clunking to the floor, link by link.
While writing “Fast Acting Gel,” SPLLIT plucked random idiomatic phrases from the internet for lyrical inspiration. Marance rattles off clichés (“a dime a dozen,” “break a leg”) before decoding them (“something common,” “good luck”). The bluntness of Marance’s definitions makes everyday phrases feel like alien codes. “Shine Sheen” offers a less wordy look into the absurdity of language; amid high-pitched, cartoonish whizzes and digital crickets, SPLLIT refer to talking as a “speech reflex” that occurs despite a “mind body disconnect.” Lines like “Tip over a filing cabinet/Just to scatter all my regrets” only enhance the delightfully bizarre nature of SPLLIT’s dual braintrust. By inverting the mundane and poking around in its detritus, Urq and Marance create a strange haven of their own. It feels at once calculated and lovingly cobbled together.


Eight years after bidding farewell to the traditional album format, the Norwegian duo returns with a sprawling multimedia project whose best material feels, ironically, like a return to form.

Profound Mysteries

For more than two decades, the Norwegian electronic duo Röyksopp made their mark on svelte electro pop and sprawling, atmospheric soundscapes alike, with recognizably clean production guaranteed along the way. After five albums, Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland grew weary of the grind, and they billed 2014’s The Inevitable End as a “goodbye to the traditional album format.” If the sendoff seemed vague, that was the point; the duo didn’t really retire, instead opting to plumb their archives for their Lost Tapes series and turn to film and theater collaborations. In the interim, nevertheless, Röyksopp created an entire new album’s worth of material. “Let’s just say that we have to go back on a promise we made in the past,” they conceded in a post to fans this past January.
The resulting Profound Mysteries contains both music and a multimedia project, including a cryptic website, images, and 10 videos made by the film production company Bacon that attempt to expand on the collection’s larger theme, which grapples with the unknowability of the universe. All of the clips (which the band call “films”) are surreal and oblique; however pivotal to the project they are meant to be, they’re hardly necessary viewing. The actual songs vary from sleepy piano interludes to moody, charging electro pop. The back-and-forth doesn’t always work, but Röyksopp still land on some of their most energizing floor-fillers to date.
They have recruited an inspired roster of guest artists, availing themselves of Alison Goldfrapp’s hypnotic soprano and Susanne Sundfør’s folky croon. The singers’ lightweight voices give the project a welcome unifying thread, as though each is gently stepping in to bolster the duo’s barreling electronics. On the brooding “Impossible,” Goldfrapp murmurs about rolling thunder and a world on fire over a gummy synth reminiscent of Daft Punk; the song is a solid reminder that Goldfrapp remains a quietly powerful force who can control a dance song with little more than a breathy sigh. The seven-minute highlight “This Time… This Place” takes a harder approach, opening with breakneck techno before paring back into a sturdy, clean beat for singer Beki Mari. By the time it hits the six-minute mark, the song devolves into a swirl of Mari’s voice, dreamy synth lines, and a shuffling drum beat, evoking the gauzy, after-hours feeling of watching the sun rise over the dancefloor after a late night out.
When the musicians decompress with midtempo, instrumental tracks, the buzzing, high-octane effect of the other songs dissipates. Both “(Nothing But) Ashes” and “There, Beyond the Trees” are guided by sedate piano and synth melodies that are detached rather than affecting. On “The Ladder,” Röyksopp fare slightly better, unspooling a loose, space-age synth line over pattering drums to create a light stroll through the kind of gentle synth pop that the pair have all but mastered at this point.
The best songs on Profound Mysteries operate within those comfort zones, making it more of a return to form than even The Inevitable End, but Röyksopp still trip themselves up. While the euphoric, ascendant melodies gesture toward otherworldly grandeur, the drifting instrumentals and forgettable, abstract lyrics keep them from quite scaling those heights. But then, trying to capture a subject as hefty as the mysteries of the universe is bound to be an unwieldy pursuit.


On a pair of EPs, the young Chicago band captures the kinetic energy of its live show, walking a thrilling tightrope between abrasion and melody.

Lifeguard: Crowd Can Talk / Dressed in Trenches

Crowd Can Talk / Dressed in Trenches

Lifeguard have a spry, freewheeling, and continuously evolving sound, emblematic of the scene that birthed them. The Chicago trio met as members of the self-declared “Hallogallo Kids,” a loose constellation of local teenagers who attended classes at School of Rock and the Old Town School of Folk Music. Lifeguard built up their repertoire by playing live together, letting improvisations take shape as songs. Before the pandemic, they met on weekends so one member could attend high school out of state and released a 10-minute jam, “Tin Man,” recorded in a basement. On their debut duo of EPs for Matador, Dressed in Trenches and Crowd Can Talk (initially released last year by Born Yesterday), Lifeguard capture the kineticism of their live show, pushing their instruments to their limits without sacrificing melody.
All between the ages of 16 and 18, the members of Lifeguard are already seasoned musicians with deep connections in the city’s DIY scene. Drummer Isaac Lowenstein has performed with his sister, Penelope, in the jangly noise pop group (and fellow Matador signees) Horsegirl. The father of vocalist and bassist Asher Case is FACS frontman Brian Case, who also played in now-defunct Chicago rock acts like Disappears and the Ponys. Vocalist and guitarist Kai Slater makes music concurrently with fellow Hallogallo Kids in Dwaal Troupe and publishes the Hallogallo zine, an unofficial guide to an ever-expanding scene that also includes newer acts like Friko and Post Office Winter. While having a father in a successful indie rock band isn’t exactly a golden ticket—“I always tell Asher the only thing I can give you is this record collection and this advice,” Brian Case told Talkhouse in 2019—it granted the band access to the city’s rich musical history. Not every tweenaged trio, after all, records their debut at Electrical Audio with the engineer who once recorded Jim O’Rourke.
For 2022’s Crowd Can Talk and this year’s Dressed in Trenches, the three returned to Electrical Audio, this time with engineer Mike Lust, and doubled down on improvisation as a writing tool. “We started realizing that when we would play shows, the songs would kind of just take different shapes,” Slater said. The result is controlled chaos: On “Fifty Seven,” Lowenstein adroitly carries the band through a series of rhythmic change-ups; by the end, the gnarled knot of cymbals and guitar in the coda barely resembles the tight snare hits of its intro.
Things get even looser on their 2023 EP: For the first minute, “Ten Canisters (OFB)” crackles with the feedback and one-off drum fills of a band warming up, before taut guitar chords come crashing in. Lifeguard play confidently with atonality, wielding it like a weapon on the foreboding “Shutter Shutter,” and as a foil to their more pop-forward instincts. On “17-18 Lovesong,” Case’s monotone speak-singing establishes dissonance before Slater’s wistful counter-harmonies take hold. It can be tempting to draw comparisons to Case’s dad in FACS, but while the bands overlap in their post-punk sensibilities and British-leaning vocal inflections, Lifeguard cull from a wide avant garde lineage. It’s easy to hear Chicago’s Shellac and the Jesus Lizard in Slater’s screeching guitars, and unsurprisingly for a scene that takes its name from a Neu! song, there’s a heavy Krautrock influence in their motorik basslines.
Lifeguard’s dynamic is a constant power play: On “Typecast,” it’s hard to tell if the bass or drums are leading the charge, but Slater’s vocals meet the rhythm in the middle, marching forward with his unmodulated vocals. Lyrics are secondary; filled with coded acronyms, the words are more sign than signal, a mere shape for Case and Slater’s barking to take. It’s hard to parse more than loose vowels and taut consonants on songs like “Alarm,” but pay attention to every word and you’ll miss the point. As their screams grow louder on the closest thing to the song’s chorus, they become another layer of noise, building on Lowenstein’s percussion to an emotional crescendo that seems to come from all directions.
The band walks a thrilling tightrope between abrasion and melody throughout these EPs. Even in the harshest moments, songs retain a central logic, as when “New age (I’ve got a)” gallops from feedback into a surprisingly straightforward rock song, its main guitar motif reminiscent of more pop-leaning groups like Bully or the Beths. Case and Lowenstein bonded over a shared love of Tortoise when they were 11, and much like those Thrill Jockey legends, they’ve carved out their own community playing loud, polyrhythmic rock in Chicago. Combining post-punk’s propulsive rhythms with progressive rock’s winding melodies, Lifeguard channel the verve and manic energy of making art with like-minded peers and the rush of sharing your bespoke musical world.


On his first album in six years, Tom Krell shrouds labyrinthine songs in distortion and slips down referential rabbit holes. The extremes can be daunting, but the highs are ecstatic.

I Am Toward You

For nearly 15 years, How to Dress Well has resisted simple pleasures. On Love Remains, Tom Krell’s 2010 breakthrough under the alias, he drowned R&B melodies in dense production, obscuring straightforward sounds with reverb, distortion, and disjointed lyrics about death and desire. Even at his most accessible, Krell’s approach to pop music has been outré. His two best albums, 2012’s Total Loss and 2014’s “What Is This Heart?”, twisted songs that Whitney Houston could’ve sung into skittery, ethereal gems, like imaginary Top 40 hits encountered in a dream. A skilled deconstructionist, he dismantles familiar forms and pop archetypes, repurposes their core parts, and uncovers labyrinths buried beneath.
Krell’s latest album, I Am Toward You, is his first release in six years and undoubtedly his most difficult yet. He constructs an idiosyncratic world of field recordings and ephemera, muffled soul singing and glitchy guitar samples, mournful melodic detours and buzzing electronic drops. It’s frequently blissful and self-consciously beautiful, yet its hooks are elusive—you won’t find a new “& It Was U” or “Repeat Pleasure” here. Lead single “No Light” is dominated by a harshly distorted lead riff that offsets the magic of its dance-pop backbeat, the vocals overdriven to the point of erasure. Even when his choices are less abrasive and more tuneful—like the straight-line strutter “On It and Around It” or the hymnlike a cappella “The Only True Joy on Earth”—the songs have an opaque, hazy quality. They seem to creep their way to transcendence, as if they’ve been floating in memory and are just now announcing their presence.
But like any How to Dress Well project, I Am Toward You asks to be accepted on its own terms, free from preconceptions. A number of breathtaking moments offer inroads to immediacy even during strenuously experimental stretches that otherwise may keep you at arm’s length. Krell uses his raw falsetto less than he used to but still deploys it to powerful effect on “nothingprayer” and “A Secret Within the Voice.” Standout “Song in the Middle” is a slow-building accretion of loops that evokes a surge of strong emotions—anxiety, longing, hard-earned optimism. “A Faint Glow Through a Window of Thin Bone (That’s How My Fate Is Shown)” features a string and piano breakdown that’s as moving as anything in the How to Dress Well catalog. Even in its quieter passages, I Am Toward You discards clean, predictable patterns to judder and zag with obsessive intensity.
In an eight-page, 4000-word exegesis Krell wrote to accompany the album, he describes it as a “transcendental poetic effort of great contemplation, confusion, unknowing, and prayerfulness… populated by birds, stones, contingencies, confusion, God, and fate, which takes up the task of becoming oneself, the intergenerational transmission of trauma, the meaning and experience of art and music, the mediation of all of this by technology.” Krell's lyrics are as impressive as they are disorienting, crammed with social critiques, psychoanalytic formulations, poetic wordplay, Greek myth, and Bataille references. “I guess I once confused the German word for face with the word for history/Just change one little letter, see your fate in the mirror,” he sings on “Contingency/Necessity (Modality of Fate),” a meditation on the interplay between historical narrative and personal experience.
Krell earned his Ph.D in philosophy in 2022, writing a 400-page dissertation on the possibility of non-nihilistic metaphysics. He has since spurned academia, saying he had “to leave academic philosophy in order to save the true value of philosophical life from the nihilistic jaws of professionalization.” He had a similar falling-out with the “music industrial complex,” as he calls it. After making 2016’s Care, a record his ex-manager insisted be more commercially viable (it was co-produced by Jack Antonoff), Krell grew disenchanted. While touring his most recent album, The Anteroom, in 2018, he realized he needed to “leave the music industry” in order to save “the sacred meaning of music for my life.”
I Am Toward You feels like a decisive step away from institutions and industries where art and philosophy are packaged as commodities, with Krell reemerging refreshed into an artistic life free of compromise or creative constraint. The album may not foreground the sort of open-hearted melody Krell once penned with such astonishing ease, but in its insistence upon breaking open old forms to find new truths, it remains faithful to How to Dress Well’s inquisitive—and provocative—spirit.


How? It's a question elicited by any great album, but one that accompanied Sonic Youth's 2002 return to ...

Sonic Nurse

How? It's a question elicited by any great album, but one that accompanied Sonic Youth's 2002 return to glory, Murray Street, in particular, and will likely arise in response to any remotely decent effort from the group herein. It might have dawned on some fans only after hearing Murray Street that Sonic Youth's mean age was then roughly 45, and that the group arguably hadn't produced a record of such caliber since they were in their late 20s. And while age is certainly unavoidable, as sensitive fifty-something poets constantly remind us, it shouldn't come as any great surprise that the band still pack some alternately-tuned potency in their aging physiognomies: There are manifold examples of musicians in most every genre, besides younglings rock and hip-hop, who have continued playing, if not composing, masterfully, well into their 70s.
Like the best jazz musicians, Sonic Youth have turned their love for experimental rock into a habit; perhaps more so than any other band, they've transcended the temporality of quality output in rock music. While bands like the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead continue to take the stage in a larkish clamber, Sonic Youth are still alive in the studio, where the process of making music is somewhat more draining than regurgitating old hits every once in a well-publicized while. With centenarianism becoming more of an improbable reality and less of a tall tale, it's no longer inconceivable that rock composers might thrive into their latter days, especially now that the relatively young genre has been given time to produce a few elder masters. In short, Sonic Youth aren't an exception; they're a pioneer example of a nascent rule.
That said, while Sonic Nurse isn't quite as strong as its predecessor, it's equally as imbued with instrumental dexterity and impressively coherent ideas. Unlike Murray Street, the album isn't so much an expansion of form as a return to it: Here, Sonic Youth harken back to the noisome atmospherics of their late-80s work, only handing it a more crystalline production treatment that smacks of more recent releases like A Thousand Leaves. Whether the implications of the line are intentional or not is difficult to say, but when, on "Paper Cup Exit", Lee Ranaldo sings, "It's later than it seems," the band seem to be keenly aware of their age and relevance. That self-awareness, both of an appreciably long canon and the four lives it has traversed, makes Sonic Nurse all the more remarkable.
Throughout their career, Sonic Youth have indulged in as much avant-garde experimentation as they have ground out formal studio albums. If anything, the lesson taught by mishaps such as the infamous NYC Ghosts & Flowers is that Sonic Youth are best at being themselves. Fortunately, that "self" is an enormously vibrant and sophisticated entity, capable of evoking a broad range of moods and tones, and continually learning from its mistakes. As atrocious as NYC Ghosts & Flowers was, they never repeated its missteps, and for that it can be conveniently forgotten. Conversely, when the group hits their stride, they know to run with it, as they do here, swimmingly riding the ample momentum generated by Murray Street.
"Pattern Recognition" opens, touching down on a well-trodden playing field of heady, arpeggiated riffage. After a brief, almost proggy intro, the song descends into a perilous odd-time build redolent of "Candle", as Kim Gordon brays "you're the one" in wontedly Daydream fashion, forgoing the bloodless beat poetry whining that often made her presence an annoyance in recent years. 16 years later, her pipes are still as seductively smoke-tinged as they were on "Kissability", and the opener marks the first of several pleasant appearances by Gordon on Nurse. "Unmade Bed", the record's only sub-four-minute endeavor, recalls the nocturnal second half of Murray Street, casting beacons of beautifully melodic guitar as it builds to a gloriously intertwined climax. As with many of the band's best songs, it takes a few listens for the riffs to sink in, but once they have, they're indelible.
Dynamically, however, not every track on Sonic Nurse is as striking as the band have proved themselves capable. Murray Street's "Rain on Tin" was a euphoric rollercoaster ride that seemed to capsulize to the band's entire career. "Stones", perhaps this album's closest parallel to that song, erupts with an insurgent guitar melody after a rocky climb, and features more than its fair share of strong riffs. Yet, while doubtless a strong number, the track isn't nearly as dramatic as career highlights like "Washing Machine" and "Expressway to Yr Skull". Additionally, "Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Handcream" is a more traditional Kim Gordon screed that extends about two minutes too long in its monotonous din to be as effective as Murray Street's similar "Plastic Sun".
However, while those tracks do belabor the flow of the record slightly, their impotency is more accurately attributable to Sonic Nurse's questionable sequencing. While many of these songs exemplify the band in top form, they're sometimes inhibited by the record's somewhat scatterbrained narrative arch. "Peace Attack", in particular, suffers from mishandling. Played in isolation, the track is clever and wistful, but in its role as closing song, it feels awkwardly contrived and anticlimactic. Meanwhile, "Pattern Recognition", another one of the band's finest recent tracks, seems too bold an opening statement for this deeply cogitative collection. And unlike Murray Street, which was anchored by the towering middle track, "Karen Revisited", this issue lacks a similar axis to corral the disparate tones and give them direction.
Of course, considering these minor bones of contention, Sonic Nurse is hardly what one might call a disappointment. "The Dripping Dream" adheres to the familiar tension/release/jam formula typified by "Rain on Tin", but manages to keep fresh with a reliably brilliant guitar apex before receding into a hazy wash that recalls the deliquescent waning minutes of "The Sprawl". "I Love Golden Blue" features a formless, protracted intro that points to the band's one-time relationship with seminal avant-garde composer/no-wave icon Glenn Branca. And "Peace Attack", despite its placement, is quietly poignant in contrast with erstwhile monoliths such as "Trilogy" and "The Diamond Sea".
Even the staunchest pundits should find something to like on Sonic Nurse, while steadfast devotees are well accounted for by the record's sheer canonical breadth. Though its ultimate placement in the band's legacy is a debate waiting to happen, Sonic Nurse is certainly on a plane with some of Sonic Youth's better work. Indeed, it is later than it seems. And for a band to live up to that proclamation on its 19th album is awesome.


Like Ford trucks, J Dilla-influenced beatmaker/MC Black Milk uses dependability as a selling point. Here he hooks up for an album with fellow Detroit MC Fat Ray.

The Set Up

Like Ford trucks, Detroit beatmaker/MC Black Milk uses dependability as a selling point. His 2007 debut, By Popular Demand, was one of the year's most consistent, if not terribly innovative, rap records, and he's arguably the brightest star in the post-Dilla Fat Beats/Stones Throw constellation; you'd be hard-pressed to find a wack beat with his name attached to it. However, there was something of a telling moment thrown into the extravagant instrumentation of "Luvin' It", namely Milk uttering, "This is the shit I wanna make, man." Since major-label hip-hop is about as financially stable as mixed martial arts or original internet programming, even the bigger names have gone underground, but is the basement getting too crowded?
Like most producer/MC double-bills, The Set Up traffics in lowered expectations so as to let either party go off on a tangent that might otherwise be considered too curveball on a real release. For those looking for Popular-er Demand, Milk lays out his cards in quick fashion-- the wildly flanged "Lookout" comes out of nowhere, a Diwali-ish club rumbler straight off of So Addictive (albeit without a particularly sturdy hook). It's even more glaring sandwiched between the relentless Ironman boom of "Flawless" and "Bad Man", so mid-1990s, you probably need to wear 40 Below Timbs and Triple Fat Goose just to fully appreciate it.
From there on out, it's more along the lines of what we've come to expect from one of the most tireless producers working right now: weeping soul samples ("Nothing To Hide"), dusty breakbeats, the occasional string loop, the Foreign Exchange-on-HGH of "Take Control"-- it all sounds pretty fantastic. What ties most of these tracks together is Milk's shattering, presently anomalous drum work. Be honest with yourself; between Kanye West popularizing chamber pop and European club techno and the prominence of southern synth merchants, when was the last time you heard a drum track knock?
But if there was a reason why Popular Demand was really good instead of great, it's an issue of what some would call consistency and the more skeptical listeners would call complacency. Maybe it's just projection on my part, but there seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy of "real hip-hop" superiority due to the mere fact that they're rappin' on Music House about something other than the sort of topics that are deemed taboo on Okayplayer. Though clearly ambitious behind the boards, Milk and nearly everyone else don't seem all that interested in challenging themselves lyrically or revealing what makes them tick other than a metronome. Clocking in at nearly 40 minutes, The Set Up was likely meant as snack food, but as much as it can sate the listener, its impact doesn't last very long beyond the tantalizing proposition of what more versatile rhymers could've done with it.
In terms of flow, the main characters are certainly nice with theirs: Milk can be likened to Kanye with baggier clothes, and as for Fat Ray, he sounds like someone who learned the craft by listening to Re-Up Gang tapes and fast-forwarding through the Clipse. But whether it's coke puns or B+ battle raps, refusing to ever leave your comfort zone can only result in diminishing returns. The two are hardly subpar on the mic, but they stay in cruise control to the point where you only notice the speed bumps (mostly coming from Fat Ray)-- "better make room like Fiddy's crib," "we don't smoke squares, n***a-- rectangles," "you see how we stack chips like Chester Cheetah."
Taken as a full experience, The Set Up ends up as a great beat tape and a pretty good full experience that, in a sneaky way, seems to dismiss the talents of the people involved. While Guilty Simpson does a pretty good job of roughing up his sixteen bars on "Bad Man", Beanie Sigel might've dug 'em a deep grave. What about finding the cave MF Doom is hiding in to lace up the syrupy keys on "When It Goes Down"? There's more than enough in Black Milk's track record that justifies him wanting to work with the best and having the best seek him out. And he may just be a part of something truly great in the future, but he'll have to decide whether his name will be on the spine or in the credits.


Louisiana rapper Kevin Gates is a star on par with Lil Boosie around his stomping grounds in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, but he hasn’t had much luck in popping nationally. His mixtapes peruse an emotive, melodic style that often gets him lumped into the same milieu as introspective lady-killers like Drake and Future.

The Luca Brasi Story

Louisiana rapper Kevin Gates is a star on par with Lil Boosie around his stomping grounds in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, but he hasn’t had much luck in popping nationally. Gates got a taste of nationwide notoriety after inking a deal with Lil Wayne’s YMCMB imprint a year ago but spent most of his tenure there on ice with YMCMB’s well-populated roster of benchwarmers. It’s a shame they couldn’t find a use for him. Gates’ mixtapes peruse an emotive, melodic style that often gets him incorrectly lumped into the same milieu as introspective lady-killers like Drake and Future. His similarities to those artists starts and ends with the fact that he’s a capable rapper and singer. He’s more technically gifted at both than Future, whose acerbic croak is often cloaked in a mist of Auto-Tune, and he’s more weathered and streetwise than Drake, whose background in soap opera acting undercuts his talk of hardship of its relatability. Gates has been at it at least as long as either of them, and his new mixtape The Luca Brasi Story imbues trap’s claustrophobic bleakness with an emotional nakedness, capable lyricism, and melodic certitude many of its recent breakout stars have lacked.
Gates openly plays off the complexity of his character in naming the mixtape after The Godfather’s Luca Brasi, a brutal but unerringly loyal contract killer whose first scene in the film adaptation shows him mulling over how best to present a gift to the don’s daughter at her wedding. Gates shares that devotion to matters of the heart and matters of the street, and The Luca Brasi Story oscillates wildly between the two poles. Street anthems like “Paper Chasers” and “Weight” hold court with tender tales of love under duress like “Arms of a Stranger” and “Twilight” (yes, that Twilight). That might sound like a strange brew, but Luca Brasi’s portraits of lonesome lotharios and traphouse paper chasers all teeter over the same the brink of collapse, and the intensity and break in Gates’ voice make it the perfect vehicle for these stories of desperation. He’s got his method down pat, so The Luca Brasi Story really lives or dies on the kinds of songs he chooses to apply it to.
The Luca Brasi Story soars on upbeat productions like Swiff D’s “Paper Chasers” and Nard & B’s “Hero”, which apply Kevin Gates’ sing-song cadence to 808s and frenetic synth runs. Gates is also at home on the moodier stuff: the twinkling keys and trance vibes of “Hold Ya Head” and “Twilight”, and the ethereal, pulsating bass of “Neon Lights” and the spectral keys of “Arms of a Stranger” all provide the perfect space for him to examine his shortcomings and insecurities. The only real problems arrive when Gates gets more conventional trap sounds to work with. “Weight” and “Flex” both overlay ominous hood gothic beats with vocal performances that are a touch derivative. “Weight” proposes a clever nutrition metaphor, but Gates plainly approximates Young Jeezy’s asthmatic wheeze on the song’s guttural, multitracked chorus. “Flex” finds Gates co-opting Gucci Mane’s smooth but subversively verbose flow when guest Terrance Hines isn’t hammering away at the song’s grating chorus. 22 tracks is a few too many opportunities to flounder, and while The Luca Brasi Story’s misses are mercifully scant, there’s maybe just a little too much of it to go around.
Kevin Gates is a gifted, pliable songwriter figuring out how to reconcile the cold embrace of street life with a longing for companionship. On The Luca Brasi Story, he mostly settles for ping pong, cordoning off its more contemplative fare from its tough talk and shifting radically in tone from one song to the next. It isn’t really until the mixtape’s closer “IHOP (True Story)” that we get a glimpse of what Gates can do without barriers. “IHOP” is a winding story-song rapped a capella with what sounds like Gates tapping out a rudimentary beat on his chest. It recounts a story of a man at wits end from relationship troubles who stumbles into a set-up and survives to coldly execute a revenge attack. It’s a chilling bit of dopeboy determinism that digs deeper than the self-aggrandizing boasts of invincibility that anyone who lived it would have every right to express, instead examining the outward stimuli that coerce us into losing control. You immediately get the sense that there’s more to Gates than he’s even letting on, that The Luca Brasi Story’s deft exercises in adjoining pop sensibilities to trap are just Gates working out the kinks, and that something special is just over the horizon.


On their first album in seven years, the New York fusionists tap into a welter of global styles; the result is soft-edged and idyllic, yet hides a subtle political undercurrent.

Kazuashita

With their magpie musical fusion and love of global pop sounds, you might expect Gang Gang Dance to feel right at home in a world where Drake peppers his work with Nigerian Afrobeat, London grime, and Jamaican dancehall, and where K-Pop is a global phenomenon. Yet there remains something charmingly out of bracket about the New York band on Kazuashita, their first new album in seven years, as if they had teleported in from a benevolent pop universe where Sigur Rós and Cocteau Twins rule supreme and the pursuit of musical beauty is an end in itself.
There is, it soon becomes clear, nothing sharp, stark, or edgy on this album. Instead, everything operates as if shaded by the most ecstatically blurry Instagram filter, like an album viewed from the corner of your eye after a long day on the beach. “Snake Dub” borrows from dancehall rhythms but bathes their teak-tough rhythmic snap in soft-focus synth and echoing vocal effects, while “Young Boy (Marika in Amerika)” uses drum-machine rhythms that nod to trap, blunting their cutting edge against new-age synth chords, noodling guitar, and percussion that sounds indebted to the Tsifteteli rhythms of Greece and Turkey.
This gorgeously gentle approach puts a paradoxical strain on the band’s compositional powers. Melody has to do the heavy lifting on Kazuashita, with harmonic beauty fighting to rescue the album’s smooth edges from the slippery fingers of the bland. Frequently, they pull it off. There are moments of incredible musical splendor on Kazuashita, including singer Lizzi Bougatsos’ Elizabeth Fraser-esque vocal swoops on “J-TREE” and the fabulous lead track “Lotus,” which marries Art of Noise’s “Moments in Love” to the swooning guitar rush of shoegaze.
These highlights are enhanced by the casual way in which they seem to arrive. Gang Gang Dance borrow from the sprawling musical tradition of bands like Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and the Orb in that their music seems to drift into existence. Fusing together different styles the way they do—and on Kazuashita you can hear everything from techno to prog to reggae, frequently within the same two-minute stretch—can be a tricky business. But Gang Gang Dance make it sound effortless, as if they scratched up these moments of delight in an early-morning jam session before settling down to breakfast. The effect is like finding a pristine rose in the dirt, rather than protected in a botanical garden.
Beauty and blurred edges may not sound particularly 2018, but Gang Gang Dance don’t so much ignore the sharp political realities of today as approach them in their own distinct way, one that concentrates on the hope—and even joy—that an optimist can find beneath the toxic surface.
Bougatsos recently revealed that “Young Boy (Marika in Amerika)” is about “the wrong people getting shot… and the fact that police should not shoot children,” while “J-TREE” features a recording of Shiyé Bidzííl of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe talking about the deployment of “tear gas, riot gear, weapons, rubber bullets” against protestors at the Dakota Access Pipeline. Both songs address authoritarian repression, a theme that has increasingly permeated music in this era of police brutality. But where Fatima Al Qadiri’s exploration of protest on 2016’s punishing Brute was carried out in nauseous sonic detail and Kendrick Lamar’s critique of police violence, in the video for “Alright,” was grim, “Young Boy” unfurls above a pillowy soft bed, while Bidzííl’s words on “J-TREE” funnel into a chorus of massed vocal ecstasy, creating the feeling that things might, somehow, end up OK.
When the band’s fluffily melodic approach fails, as on the promising (but ultimately dull) title track or the Sigur Rós-lite album closer “Salve on the Sorrow,” Kazuashita ends up saccharine and pompous, like music designed to soundtrack bad wildlife documentaries. Thankfully, these missteps are rare on an album that proves Gang Gang Dance aren’t so much of the moment as of a different moment, an alternative and rather more pleasant one. You could call their through-the-looking-glass approach unrealistic. But Gang Gang Dance show that sometimes unreality is a great place to be.


Okkervil River keyboardist Jonathan Meiburg takes the reins on the latest record from this side project, resulting in the group's best effort to date.

Palo Santo

If you've previously written off Shearwater as an Okkervil River side project, now is the time to reevaluate that stance. The band once split the difference between OR's frontman Will Shelf and keyboardist Jonathan Meiburg, each pulling 50/50 songwriting duties. You may wonder where Sheff has gone on this record, but you won't miss him. The push-pull between Sheff's croaking and Meiburg's lilting falsetto is gone, forcing the less-experienced vocalist to dial it up and find newfound strength in his vocals. With Meiburg in charge, Shearwater make several leaps from their previous albums: Did you want stark backwater hymns with PJ Harvey-levels of catharsis? Palo Santo has that (opener "La Dame at La Licorne"). Hiss-soaked tributes to some heretofore lost or imagined side of the radio dial à la M. Ward? That's here, too ("Palo Santo" and "Sing, Little Birdie"). Even if mid-tempo Bruce Hornsby piano ballads are your bag, Meiburg has that nailed down ("Seventy-four, Seventy-five" and "Johnny Viola".)
Those aren't even the highlights of Palo Santo. The records puts its best feet forward early: The banjo-plucked folk of "Red Sea, Black Sea" is overwhelmed by a strange backward pulse of keyboards throughout the verses, recalling the Southern Gothic twinge of R.E.M.'s early material. It's then lifted by sparse but stern percussion and Meiburg's ranting vocal turn in the chorus, powerful but frayed on every edge. That keyboard throb pushes the song one notch further into uncomfortability, building a sense of impending danger, but it's Meiburg's voice that makes you want to hear it again (and again). "White Waves" is perhaps where Sheff could have sat in on a duet, but instead makes for a rather catchy moment of schizophrenia. Meiburg's falsetto promises he "won't go traveling tonight," and more chillingly, "there's something singing in the ice in the deepest part of the wood." That's before the song sprouts an unexpected riff, a few chords lurching back and forth in syncopation, while his voice bursts and implores himself not to go over the guitars that rise and vanish at the whim of Meiburg's wavering delivery.
While Meiburg's voice and a guitar, piano or banjo are at the center of most of these tracks, the instrumentation has suddenly fallen into place, intuitive now where it once diverted attention from previous albums' monotonous mood. Palo Santo is no less dark, certainly, but the songs breathe and swell much more naturally, with some of Meiburg's sharpest melodies yet. The more fragile arrangements from the Shearwater of old appear now and again, but where you'd once expect an intimate performance, songs like "Palo Santo" hint at empty space beneath that's nearly bottomless. Will Sheff has been writing narrative songs for years, but Jonathan Meiburg has written the soundtrack worthy of his own, or anyone's, images.


The latest collaboration between Cluster and Harmonia visionary Hans-Joachim Rödelius and American composer Tim Story is a meld of neo-classical and ambient composition that both soars and stumbles.

Hans-Joachim Roedelius & Tim Story: Inlandish

Inlandish

It's almost impossible to ignore the still-fresh imprint that keyboardist and composer Hans-Joachim Rödelius has left on electronic music. The influence of his groups with Dieter Moebius, Cluster and Harmonia (the latter also included Neu!'s Michael Rother), is difficult to overstate. But now, at 74, Rödelius seems just as comfortable plonking out Satie-like piano themes as he is touring the States with Cluster, now ambient celebrities. In the midst of said tour, Rödelius has released Inlandish, his latest collaboration with American composer Tim Story.
This time, Rödelius left much of the electronic arrangements to Story, spending only ten days in the studio laying down piano before letting the American elaborate on his themes with neoclassical synths, cellos, and oboes. The result often fronts a certain contemplative neutrality (or as the two composers term it, "emotionally ambiguous soundscapes"), which might otherwise be mistaken for the pretense of new age serenity. But there's no affected or meditative agenda hidden in the fluttering synthesizers, save perhaps that Story's treatments sometimes borrow a little too much from his collaborator's best works. More often, Tim Story's treatments add a sort of melodic counterbalance worthy of previous HJR associate Brian Eno.
It's a stark contrast from their last collaboration, 2003's Lunz, which heavily featured Rödelius' piano work and relegated his American disciple's embellishments to second-chair groundswells. Here, the collaborators let the piano lines form a supple backbone while Story's arrangements continually extend the work: sinuous synthetic flesh built upon a delicately evolved frame. And while Cluster and Harmonia were always known for their centripetal force, wrapping tight progressions around ever-changing repetitive themes, Rödelius melds his best ambient works with a patience gleaned off his looser works of the 1980s and 90s. Each piece unfolds methodically, each pulsating rotation of Rödelius' theme sloughing off another layer of Tim Story's arrangements, themselves playing out like the elegant evolution of a rock or blues solo.
The "rock thing" is a funny observation, since Tim Story says that Rödelius came to his attention just as he was searching for an alternative to rock music. But Inlandish certainly carries within it a rockish underpinning-- at the very least, consciously acknowledging post-rock luminaries like Tortoise as well as their progressive rock ancestors. It's intriguing that Rödelius and Story are perceived as guys who try to breathe life into a form that protests the cold rock'n'roll machine, because it seems like Tim Story is sometimes playing pop god with his German collaborator's delicate essence. While it's true that he sometimes overpowers his subject and crushes that little spark with dated beats ("Riddled") or melodic fusions of new age and ambient forms ("Downrivers"), the two composers nurse their supple little creation, their fragile little life form, charged with the empirical DNA of the same electronic figures Rödelius once revolutionized.


Mary Timony and Christina Billotte’s early band operated for less than two years, but the appeal of their jagged, math-rock-adjacent punk has lasted decades longer.

Autoclave

The mythos of the Dischord Records band Autoclave is similar to that of one-season-wonder TV shows like Freaks and Geeks or My So-Called Life: Most of the players are discussed in relation to the more mainstream, but equally beloved, work they’ve done since. More importantly, despite their relative obscurity while active, their appeal has lasted decades longer than the band’s actual lifespan. Autoclave never released a debut album, but rather two EPs that were eventually compiled in a self-titled CD-only release in 1997. Now, for the first time, Dischord has remastered and reissued that compilation (with a rearranged tracklist) on vinyl.
Fronted by guitarist Mary Timony—now of Helium and Ex Hex fame—and bassist Christina Billotte, later of Slant 6 and Quix*o*tic, the quasi-math-punk quartet operated between 1990 and ’91, mostly during Timony’s visits home to Washington, D.C. while on break from Boston University. Their growth as a band was ultimately stunted by the distance, but they did manage to play shows with now-iconic groups Nation of Ulysses, Fugazi, and Beat Happening (all of whom probably could have been considered then-iconic, too—as a pre-Bratmobile Erin Smith wrote in her Action Teen zine about a 1991 show featuring all four bands, “This is your Altamont”).
Despite Autoclave’s close ties to Bratmobile—Billotte once filled in on drums at a Bratmobile  show—they were not a riot grrrl band. “We definitely thought of ourselves as female,” Timony said in a 2016 interview with Washingtonian, but Autoclave’s musical ethos seemed light-years from the punk-rock-feminism-rules-okay truisms of riot grrrl proper. Timony is a classically trained guitarist, and Billotte, drummer Melissa Berkoff, and guitarist Nikki Chapman are clearly highly skilled musicians as well. Their lyrics were rarely, if ever, explicitly political, and they tended toward androgyny in their language. Perhaps no name could have suited as well as that of the autoclave, an industrial pressure chamber, to convey their blend of technical precision and urgency.
Billotte articulates that sound on the spastic opener “Dr. Seuss”: “Going down a one-way street/Don’t look back, just keep the beat.” Autoclave’s resistance to categorization as straight punk is due in large part to her voice; low and melodic, Billotte’s singing tends more toward power-pop than conventional punk. (It’s striking now to hear how similarly distinct she and Timony sounded at the time; at first listen, it’s often nearly impossible to tell them apart, especially knowing how much deeper Timony’s voice is now, when performing with Ex Hex.) “Dr. Suess” makes a more inviting opener than that of the 1997 CD, “Go Far,” which though impressive in its musicianship is comparatively impenetrable in its intensity. “I’ll Take You Down” features the kind of noodly-yet-calculated guitars that came to classify Autoclave as math rock-adjacent, as does the only song sung by Chapman, the jagged and winding “Bulls Eye.” The intricate fretwork throughout the album is Timony’s doing, a result of her classical training and a high-school obsession with virtuoso guitarists Steve Vai and Joe Satriani.
The reissue includes two demos: “Summer,” a Timony-sung track that was originally released via Simple Machine’s 1992 Lever compilation, and “Paper Boy,” a cover of the theme song for the NES game of the same name that somehow manages to avoid excessive cheekiness. Both songs were also released on the 1997 compilation. The reissue doesn’t include any “special” exclusive materials, but considering the difficulty of finding other physical Autoclave memorabilia (at the time of publication, there’s a single copy of the CD available on Amazon and it costs $100.26), the tangible album feels special and exclusive enough.
Regardless of listening medium, the highlight of the Autoclave catalog has always been “Hot Spurr.” The only other song on which Timony sings lead, it’s by far the band’s most leisurely. Autoclave’s chord progressions here are closest to conventional college alt-rock (though they still maintain a slightly off-kilter time signature), and in context sound like the unspooled culmination of Timony’s many tightly woven riffs. Of the titular character, she sings, “He shoots words faster than bullets and you got riddled in the fire.” In some ways, it’s a fitting epitaph for Autoclave itself, a group of whip-smart young women who, though maybe less brash or forthright than their punk contemporaries, were equally biting. With maze-like instrumentation and a proclivity for cryptic lyrics, every Autoclave song feels like a sneak attack.
It’s hard to take a pure critical eye to Autoclave at this point, when the band feels nearly impossible to separate from Billotte’s and especially Timony’s later work. Any criticism of their modest discography could be rebutted by the sheer fact of their ages: It’s impressive how nuanced a group of 20-year-olds were in conveying their anxieties. Autoclave’s music didn’t seem like an outlet for its members’ angst, but an embodiment of it. There is very little breathing room on this album, and sometimes the lyrics are too inscrutable to provide any real catharsis, but that mysteriousness is also what, nearly 30 years on, makes Autoclave far more than a footnote in its members’ careers.


The man who took us to church tries to take us to the same church, again, 14 times, six years later.

Wasteland, Baby!

Like a desperate magician guessing card after card until he arrives at the one in your hand, Andrew Hozier-Byrne spends much of his second album stumbling through a simple trick. To kick off his first full-length in five years, the platinum-selling Irish singer-songwriter celebrates the legends who spoke truth to power, as he shouts out a veritable VH1 marathon’s worth of greats: Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, John Lennon, James Brown, Joni Mitchell, Mavis Staples, Patti Smith, Marvin Gaye, and more are name-checked during the opening song “Nina Cried Power.” The message is simple. All of these people made a difference, and, whoever you are, wherever you are, at least one of them probably means something to you. Why dwell in hopelessness when you can join the choir?
It’s a well-meaning call to action that’s paid dividends in the past. “Take Me to Church” is both the title of Hozier’s career-making 2013 single and also his imagined purpose as a songwriter—a purveyor of good will, packaged in radio anthems designed to be sung at the top of your lungs. In his music and interviews, the soft-spoken 28-year-old is passionate about noble causes, from LGBTQ awareness to the Irish nurses’ strike and the opioid crisis. Standing at six-foot-five, with chiseled features and the occasional man-bun, the mononymic singer even has a kind of Christ-like aura, or at least downmarket Russell Brand. His mother, the visual artist Raine Hozier-Byrne, designed his latest album cover in a process that involved submerging her son underwater for extended periods of time: “I had said to mum,” he joked dryly, “Just try to think of the album sales if I do die on this shoot!”
Another thing: he’s got a gorgeous voice. Booming and effervescent, it’s an instrument that communicates passion, adventure, and wisdom, all to the extent that transcribing his lyrics seems to be somewhat missing the point. There’s a reason why most people didn’t realize that “Take Me to Church” is a protest song about the Catholic Church. Like Foster the People’s similarly out-of-nowhere smash “Pumped Up Kicks,” it seemed to ascend the charts solely on hummable hooks and crowd-pleasing adrenaline. Such strengths are a sweet but elusive currency. Analyze a beautiful day and it’s already over. At 14 tracks in roughly an hour, Wasteland, Baby! falls prey to the humdrum, all its power wrung dry.
The record’s pitfalls are nothing new for major-label artists attempting to follow a surprise hit. Nearly every element of “Take Me to Church” is isolated and recycled here in the hopes of crowning a successor: God is not in the house. The aid of a gospel choir doesn’t make the awkward one-word refrain of “To Noise Making (Sing)” sound like something worth singing along to, just as the slow-build, stomp-clap murk of “Movement” mostly invites you to avert eye contact from the back of the room. Even just the central refrains of these songs—Sing! Move! Now!—suggest an unbecoming directness. Rock stars make us want to join in on the fun; wedding singers and youth group leaders demand it.
Hozier has always had a subtle dark streak, and you can sense him trying to wield his moods in new ways. He now deals in spacier arrangements, heavier guitars, and harsher lyrics. (“No Plan” takes aim at the “screaming, heaving fuckery of the world.” Hoo-ah!) Most successful is a ballad called “Shrike” that also appeared on last year’s Nina Cried Power EP. It’s stark and fingerpicked, with gestures toward traditional Irish folk music. His bellowed vocals exude a down-home intimacy that makes me consider the strange path that led us toward pop music that sounds like this. It maybe begins with the Black Keys and Danger Mouse’s lite psychedelic blues and weaves through the Lumineers’ audience-participation folk-pop; it rides in the sidecar of Adele’s torch ballad supernovas and stops just short of Alabama Shakes’ riotous pearly gates. It wants badly to sound timeless but it already feels like a moment that’s passed. Ed Sheeran and James Bay, two of Hozier’s peers, have attempted to evolve by writing fake Rihanna songs and cutting their hair, respectively. Hozier’s unease about the future is palpable.
The way Hozier tells it, he wrote Wasteland, Baby!’s title track after reading how threats of nuclear war caused the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move our doomsday clock ahead 30 seconds—an event that resulted in the BBC using the word “apocalypse” in a headline. And yet, he sees a little light. “All the fear and fire of the end of the world,” he sings gently, “Happens each time a boy falls in love with a girl.” He’s not the first songwriter to lament the small apocalypses that occur every day, or how love’s temporal nature is also what makes it special. And to hear him sing it—his voice coated in an unearthly burble atop humble, fingerpicked acoustic guitar—is to hear him acknowledge his limitations. After all, churches are where we celebrate life’s fiery beginnings and endings, but the truth is, we spend most of our time somewhere in the middle, consumed by an earnest and unglamorous everyday kind of searching. Without meaning or direction, it might, given a voice, sound something like this.


The mighty Sleater-Kinney return a decade after their last album, 2005's The Woods, and they haven't lost a step. No Cities to Love is the band's most front-to-back accessible album, amping their omnipresent love of new wave pop with aerodynamic choruses.

No Cities to Love

Now is the time: breaking the decade of relative silence that followed Sleater-Kinney's prodigious supposed finale, 2005's The Woods, the girls are back in town. We have arrived at the critical reappraisal and celebrated comeback of music's most revered feminist saviors of American rock'n'roll. It is 2015 and we are staring down Sleater-Kinney's wise eighth album—exactly 50 years removed from the birth of "R-e-s-p-e-c-t", exactly 40 years removed from the birth of Horses, exactly 30 years removed from when Kim Gordon first yells "brave men run away from me" in the Mojave desert, exactly 20 years removed from Sleater-Kinney, a primal, insurrectionist warning shot from the margins. Ever since, we have had Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein, and Janet Weiss to soundtrack our societal chaos and progressing zeitgeist: tangled agitation, pummeled norms, principled wit, sublimity, sadness, friction, kicks.
Nowadays, there is a prevailing notion that we ought not want such epochal bands as Sleater-Kinney to reunite, because why tarnish the legend of "Best Band in the World" acclaim and a perfectly ascendant seven-album streak? But if any band in the past two decades has proved they've got the intellect, skepticism, and emotional capacity to deserve this—to keep living—it's Sleater-Kinney. No Cities to Love is a disarming, liberationist force befitting the Sleater-Kinney canon. Fervent political leftism has been implicit to this Olympia-born trio since they first inverted Boston's "More Than a Feeling" on a 1994 comp and that goes on here as well; we desperately need it. It is astonishing that a radical DIY punk band could grow up and keep going with this much dignity and this many impossibly chiseled choruses. No Pistol, Ramone, or unfortunate mutation of Black Flag could have done this.
The necessity of change—the creative virtue of ripping it up and starting again—remains a crucial strand of Sleater-Kinney's DNA. This is still them: low-tuned classic rock tropes resuscitated with punk urgency, raw and jagged like Wire compressing crystalline Marquee Moon coils. Weiss' massive swoop is still the band's throbbing heart, pumping Sleater-Kinney's blood. But Brownstein has said they set out to find "a new approach to the band" and that is true of No Cities to Love. It is no less emphatic and corporeal than punk classics Call the Doctor and Dig Me Out. But unlike their last two albums of monstrous combat rock, No Cities to Love keeps only the most addictive elements—if Sleater-Kinney are still taking Joey Ramone as a spiritual guide, this is their mature, honed, and clean-sounding Rocket to Russia. Catchy as all-clashing hell, it's Sleater-Kinney's most front-to-back accessible album, amping their omnipresent love of new wave pop with aerodynamic choruses that reel and reel, enormously shouted and gasped and sung with a dead-cool drawl. The album has the particular aliveness of music being created and torn from a group at this very moment—tempered, but with the wild-paced abandon that comes with being caged and then free.
As ever, empathy is Sleater-Kinney's renewable energy source. They have always made a kind of folk music—songs of real people—and opener "Price Tag" is an honest example of this, fueled by Tucker's motherly responsibility. In concrete detail, it describes the struggle of a working class family in the context of American capitalism and financial crisis (it rings of the high cost of low prices). Real life power dynamics permeate No Cities, among the rubbery synth lines of the otherwise venomous "Fangless" (which I know will frighten off a couple to-the-bone punk purists, like garlic wards off evil) and the anxious post-hardcore lurch of "No Anthems", which Albini could have produced. On the glammy "Gimme Love", Tucker plainly wants more of that four-letter-word for girls and outsiders (she seems to wish, in the words of de Beauvoir, "that every human life might be pure transparent freedom"). Brownstein, meanwhile, sings some of the most elliptical and oblique lyrics of her career: "I was lured by the devil... I'll choose sin 'til I leave," she hollers like a Bad Seed, clenched and possessed. In lighter moments, it's heartening to hear Tucker and Brownstein in unison at the record's sing-song center: "No outline will ever hold us/ It's not a new wave/ It's just you and me."
Sleater-Kinney began work on No Cities in earnest around May 2012, they have said, but especially on the anthemic title track and "Hey Darling"—the first two songs they wrote—you can hear echoes of that decade of pause, an airing out of just why. The titular phrase is abstract enough, but considering Brownstein's vocal incompatibility with the van-show-van-show tour-life void—and her lines, here, about "a ritual of emptiness"—it plays like a direct take on the complicated reality of the rootless rock band and its scattered tribe. On "Hey Darling", one of Tucker's gummiest melodies becomes a letter to fans, reasoning her hiding: "It seems to me the only thing/ That comes from fame is mediocrity," and then, "Sometimes the shout of the room/ Makes me feel so alone." The slow-burn of "Fade", the closer, also takes on Sleater-Kinney's hiatus. Tucker is like a Robert Plant putting her supernatural quasi-operatic range on display over epic, minor-key hard rock, switching from sly-voiced ballad to high-pitched inflection: "If there's no tomorrow/ You better live," she sings of a dimming spotlight, her slipping self-perception. It's the closest No Cities gets to The Woods' feminist rewrite of '70s rock grandeur, and yet sounds like nothing on that record. Sleater-Kinney's discography is full of songs delivering meta-commentaries on what it means to be women playing rock; No Cities is more purely personal and explicitly political, evidence enough that in the context of family, middle-age, and multiple careers, it is possible to have everything.
For the first time in 21 years, Sleater-Kinney have written an album without a proper stomach-twisting tearjerker; no wistful confessions, breathless breakups, or dying lovers, no "Good Things", "One More Hour", or "The Size of Our Love". But I predict Sleater-Kinney will be making more people cry this year than ever before—maybe Lena Dunham, maybe Perfect Pussy's Meredith Graves, definitely Fred Armisen (tears are highly subjective, and yet my claim is substantiated). "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Joan Didion famously wrote, and we align ourselves with the potent narratives of great bands for the same reason. Their songs guide us through the restless process of figuring out who we are. We search for meaning in rhythm and couplets and distortion, and if a band is grounded with as much purpose as Sleater-Kinney, they charge our consciousness, occupy space in our relationships, symbolize what we want to become. Sleater-Kinney's music still does this. It tells us—women or anyone who has ever felt small and othered—the truth, that even when the world seems to deny it, we are never powerless. Now the story goes on longer; it didn't have to end.


Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones, Nirvana/Foo Fighters drummer Dave Grohl, and Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme resurrect the hard rock supergroup.

Them Crooked Vultures: Them Crooked Vultures

Them Crooked Vultures

There was something almost quaint about watching Them Crooked Vultures' recent performance at Washington D.C.'s 9:30 Club. Yes, the music was punishingly loud and, sure, the chops on display were near godlike, but a bunch of dudes pumping their fists to a hard-rock supergroup? Once the domain of the Claptons and Crosbys of the music world, the supergroup seems to be coming back into vogue. From the Jack White-helmed Raconteurs and Dead Weather to the multi-bearded onslaught of Monsters of Folk, it feels like the confines around a musician's "main band" are looser than ever. Which makes sense: the majors' slow death and the general grab-bag atmosphere of the industry makes these collaborations easier than ever. And, of course, they open a new revenue source and creative outlet for the parties involved, so why not?
Well, history is littered with plenty of reasons why not (Velvet Revolver or Zwan ring a bell?), but even those dubious of these projects couldn't help but register excitement for Them Crooked Vultures, the much-talked-about alliance of Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme, Nirvana/Foo Fighter Dave Grohl, and John Paul Jones, who once played bass for this band called Led Zeppelin. (Also recording and touring with the band is QOTSA's Alain Johannes, let's not forget.) A few of those being, y'know, some of the greatest rock groups of all time and each player a fierce instrumentalist in his own right, the stage seemed set for these gents to join together, like Voltron, into some kind of indestructible hard-rock juggernaut. That happens occasionally on their self-titled debut, but the band also tussles with some of the same problems that have befallen many a supergroup before them.
As he's done with past iterations of QOTSA and his long-running Desert Sessions project, Homme takes the lead here, serving as frontman and steering the musical direction. The record features all the trademarks of a Homme-led affair-- druggy, mutant blues, loud/soft dynamics, songs about sex, and regular forays into the silly and absurd. The musicianship throughout is as phenomenal as you'd expect, and on a gut level it's thrilling just to hear these three men play together-- the way Grohl's snapping drum hits ricochet off Jones' rapid-fire bass notes on songs like "Scumbag Blues", for instance. (Grohl, in particular, is excellent throughout, affirming once again his destined place in a rock band.) And the guys themselves are clearly having fun. Amidst all the technical shredding, there's a looseness at play that seems to stem in part from Homme and Grohl getting to live out a boyhood fantasy. Oddly that becomes kind of a problem on the record.
One of the negative aspects of a supergroup is that the presence of multiple stars tends to disrupt the natural hierarchy of a band-- meaning that there's no one to shoot down bad or unnecessary ideas. If you're Josh Homme and John Paul Jones or Dave Grohl wants to take a bass or drum solo, you let him. And Them Crooked Vultures often feels overstuffed with the weight of too many ideas. This is especially true on longer cuts such as "Elephants" and "Warsaw or the First Breath You Take After You Give Up", the latter nearly eight minutes of prog-fueled, time-signatured madness that closes with an extended instrumental outro. Sure, these guys have earned the right to do that, but that doesn't make it a good song. Yet for each of these trying numbers, there's a muscular hard-rock track like "Dead End Friends" that helps make up for it. And if you simply want to hear Homme/Jones/Grohl sync into a furious, interlocking groove, there are songs like "Gunman" that offer that too. Having said that, Them Crooked Vultures still feels like a record to be checked off a list rather than one to live with and fully invest in.