Slipping between stark realism and meditative reflection, this is the South London experimental musician’s most intensely introspective album yet.

Frozen

Klein is a collagist who finds the beauty in pieces that shouldn’t fit together. Though often working with fragments of recognizable melodies—she cites both Beyoncé and Pavarotti as inspirations—the South London experimental artist isn’t interested in simply entertaining. “Anyone can do pop, innit? What sonically I want to hear for myself is stories,” she once said. Her stories don’t shy away from darkness or taboo. In her 2018 musical Care, which she wrote and starred in, she depicted a group of children living in a state-run foster home who stumble upon a Narnia-like fantasy world. She made the case that these hidden parts of our society deserve fairytales, too—albeit distorted ones. On her self-released album Frozen, she is as unflinching as ever, riding that slippage between brutal realism and escapist, meditative reflection.
It is, for the most part, an intensely introspective record. On her first two albums, ONLY and Lifetime, Klein’s music was woven from the fabric of the world around her: church services, R&B songs, covert recordings of conversations between mates, and fractured snippets of drums that give the impression of standing outside a club. Her carefully controlled cacophonies stood on the fringes of dance music, but Frozen immediately feels like a more internal landscape. There are no collaborators in the credits; a number of songs were single takes recorded in her bedroom on her guitar.
The murky, industrial first half is the equivalent of lying face down on your bed and letting out an existential groan. It can feel oppressive, like having the weight of the world on your shoulders. The minimalist “U got this,” 15 minutes long, hinges on a scratchy guitar riff and a rush of what sounds like traffic, and it progresses infinitesimally. Two short, jagged songs that follow break the meditative mood. “My friend I just buried him/Another grave,” Klein’s serene, somber double-tracked vocal intones on “another dust,” before reverb-drenched guitar thrashes out her anger on “grit.” Throughout, she pulls listeners in close, then pushes them away, never allowing them to get comfortable. After a half-hour stretch in which it feels like we are alone with Klein, she abruptly introduces other voices via the cut-up crowd noises of the 50-second interlude “reveal itself.” And at the record’s very end, she crashes out on a moment of dissonance with the abrupt, three-second-long “tribute.”
In her most unexpected maneuver, Klein turns the lens outward on the listener. “mark” is a tribute to Mark Duggan—the man who was killed by London’s Met police in August 2011, sparking a week of riots in the UK—and 10 of its 11 minutes are silent. It’s a powerful moment, inviting listeners to reflect on Duggan’s death and the scant progress that the UK has made toward racial justice in the years since it occurred. It’s a brave move for an artist to make in a culture ruled by the skip button, and a testament to Klein’s unyielding commitment to looking directly at tragedy.
Surrounding that emptiness is some of Klein’s most beautiful work. The silence is gradually replaced by a mournful guitar melody and slowed-down cries of “No justice, no peace,” which eventually blur into choral tones. With her vocals buried deep in the mix, Klein sounds ghostly. She creates a vast amount of space in the mix, giving the listener the feeling of standing at the lip of a cavern. It’s beauty with an underlying threat, always just on the brink of overwhelming, but with Klein remaining in control.


Baltimore’s Dope Body are prolific, averaging one release of scuzzy, groovy noise-rock per year since they started in 2009. Kunk is more of a prolonged howling squall than its direct predecessor, Lifer: They seem to be stretching themselves on this record, searching to create something meaningful in an ugly world.

Kunk

Baltimore’s Dope Body are prolific, averaging one release of scuzzy, groovy noise-rock per year since they started in 2009. On each successive release, they seem to be trying to find their undeniably unique voice by mixing bits and pieces of '90s AmRep brutality and funky alt-rock (Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and so forth), a mix that makes a peculiar sort of sense if you also grew up in the D.C./Baltimore area with local freeform-turned-Infinity Broadcasting alt-rock radio titan WHFS in one ear and any number of college radio stations in the other.
Kunk is more of a prolonged howling squall than its direct predecessor, Lifer, though the filters on Andrew Laumann’s vocals are still set to "cargo shorts." Opener "Casual" is nearly all hair dryer guitar, that gated-distortion squeal that is guitarist Zachary Utz’s specialty; it’s the interplay between Utz’s looped noise and powerful drummer David Jacober that makes Dope Body so gnarly. The first single, "Old Grey", is another standout; Laumann’s refrain "I’m living in a trash can" is a pretty descriptive phrase for Dope Body’s ethos, and the track bumps and screeches and spins, lurching forward at regular intervals, crashing into itself spectacularly as Laumann asks himself what this band’s life, what their particular brand of destruction, has wrought.
There are sludgier, heavier moments ("Goon Line" and "Obey"); here, Dope Body feel genuinely precarious, unhinged, and uncomfortable. This is a good move for them; they’ve always been known as a wild band, but to focus on their riffs and the hefty panic a good noise-rock rhythm section can give make Dope Body more powerful and interesting than the never-ending in-joke they could be characterized as. This contextual balance between paranoiac music and absurdist lyrics was something Dayton's Brainiac, a band Dope Body are often compared to, excelled at.
The instrumentals on the album ("Dad", "Ash Toke", "Pincher") are Dope Body’s version of rap skits—little unfinished goofs—and somewhat of a breath of fresh air in that they are sketches, pictures of the band figuring out their directions together. They seem to be stretching themselves on this record, searching to create something meaningful in an ugly world, realizing that there are limits to their subgenre-referencing sound and if they are to grow they’ve got to push themselves.


The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's new record is a eulogy for the seedy New York City where Spencer first earned his notoriety—amid the early-'80s triangulation of hardcore, rap, and the avant-garde—and an attempt to come to terms with the gentrified version that exists today. But it’s also an album that rarely forgets the first three letters of "funeral" are f-u-n.

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion: Freedom Tower-No Wave Dance Party 2015

Freedom Tower-No Wave Dance Party 2015

"Come on fellas, we got to pay respect!" These are the first words we hear Jon Spencer shout on the new Blues Explosion album and it’s a surprisingly conciliatory statement from a guy who built his reputation on blasphemy. Whether horking up scum-punk phlegm balls like  "Cunt Tease" and "You Look Like a Jew" with Pussy Galore, or treating Blues Explosion songs like 1-900 hotline advertisements for his sexual stamina, the Jon Spencer of old was never too concerned with exchanging pleasantries and making friends. But for Spencer, indecency and sincerity were the same thing, fuelled by a devout belief in the sort of primal, provocative, persona-driven rock'n'roll embodied by everyone from Little Richard to Iggy Pop to James Chance. The Blues Explosion name was an both an assertion of tradition and an act of treason, reconnecting '90s post-hardcore indie rock with a history it had disowned, trolling blues purists who assumed the band was mocking the form, all while pissing off their own garage-punk base by importing raps from Beck and beats from Dan the Automator.
Alas, since regrouping after a six-year hiatus in 2010, the Blues Explosion now exist in a world where the context that made their past work so outrageous has all but evaporated, while even a horndog come-on like "baby, baby, you sure like to fuck" seems downright chivalrous at a time when pick-up lines have been replaced by Snapchat dick pics. The Blues Explosion are fully aware that their moment has passed—that line quoted at the top of this review leads off a song called "Funeral", which sets the thematic tone for a record that essentially functions as the Blues Explosion’s answer to To the 5 Boroughs. Freedom Tower-No Wave Dance Party 2015 is a eulogy for the seedy New York City where Spencer first earned his notoriety—amid the early-'80s triangulation of hardcore, rap, and the avant-garde—and an attempt to come to terms with the gentrified version that exists today. But it’s also an album that rarely forgets the first three letters of "funeral" are f-u-n.
Compared to 2012’s commendable if conventional comeback effort, Meat and Bone, Freedom Tower-No Wave Dance Party 2015 more easily locks into the singularly gritty groove the Blues Explosion patented circa 1994’s Orange. ("Funeral" is pretty much "Flavor" squeezed into a tapered set of "Bellbottoms", and destined to usurp the latter as the band’s entrance theme of choice.) And if the No Wave in the album title is a bit of a misnomer—this ode to NYC is more DMC than DNA—they at least get the Dance Partypart right, with an infectiously upbeat energy that keeps that action moving at a brisk clip (albeit without the speed-freak menace that once brought out their berserker best). But even if it mostly avoids the scratched-up boom-bap of the band’s past hip-hop nods, Freedom Tower could very well be the band’s most overtly rap-inspired record to date—it’s just that, instead of absorbing the texture of hip-hop into the album’s production, they cop its cadence in the punky performances.
It’s not hard to detect the influence of early Chuck D on Spencer’s "Wax Dummy" spiel, while "The Ballad of Joe Buck"—powered by Russell Simins’ thundering "Halleluwah"-sized beat—sees the frontman assume the nursery-rhyme flow of a circa-'79 block party MC. But these modes are natural fits for Spencer’s maniacal, motor-mouthed mojo, infused with a playfulness that undercuts the chest-beating posturing endemic to rap-rock. And as far as minimalist three-piece rock bands go, Spencer, Simins, and Judah Bauer are at their most intuitive when acting like cut-and-paste producers—they’re still less interested in songwriting than song-writhing, constantly contorting and distorting a track’s trajectory to maximize the endorphin rush. On frenzied, byzantine workouts like "Born Bad" and "Dial Up Doll", the Blues Explosion cycle through the history of rock'n'roll like one of those YouTube videos that summarizes a season of "Game of Thrones" in two minutes, stripping out stuff like character development and emotional arcs and stitching together only the most essential riffs, rhythms, and one-liners.
Spencer turns 50 this year, a factor that’s less audible in Freedom Tower’s spirited swagger than in the frothy dad-worthy humor that occasionally rises to the fore—like the proud Rufus Thomas-inspired "world’s oldest teenager" boast on the roadhouse funk of "Do the Get Down", or the urban-cowboy blues of "Down and Out", a light-hearted requiem for a modern-day, overpriced New York where even "a million dollars ain’t gonna last you but one year." And while Freedom Tower isn’t exactly a concept album, it can belabor the NYC-nostalgia angle: From the titular nod to Run-DMC’s breakthrough single to the CBGB shout-outs to the archival JSBX interview snippets, "Tales of Old New York: Rock Box" is practically a VH1 special in miniature. But the album’s backward-gazing perspective doesn’t detract from the fact that Freedom Tower contains some of the Blues Explosion’s most inspired, vital music since their mid-'90s peak. And in a world where brawnier but decidedly humorless blooze-belters like the Black Keys and Royal Blood still fill arenas, the Blues Explosion’s cheeky, scrappy brand of rock'n'roll is still something to cherish in the here and now.


The career of the new age deity has been defined by a string of radiant collaborations. Here, with his longtime partner and a synth trio, he again lifts off.

Laraaji / Arji OceAnanda / Dallas Acid: Arrive Without Leaving

Arrive Without Leaving

Long before he was reborn as the new age deity Laraaji, Edward Larry Gordon’s career depended upon his ability to react. He was initially an actor and stand-up comedian, crafts that thrive or die through a performer’s response to crowd and circumstance. That talent has aided Laraaji in most every aspect of his work, making him a magnetic leader of laughter meditation workshops and a particularly generous musical collaborator. This was as clear on his career-making 1980 masterpiece, the Brian Eno-produced Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, as on subsequent documents of such miraculous meetings. Whether playfully rapping over Japanese dub artists Audio Active on 1995’s The Way Out Is The Way In or melding minds with psychedelic duo Blues Control for the FRKWYS series in 2011, his commitment to working together has spawned much of his best work. Arrive Without Leaving—the next great union in the now 75-year-old’s sprawling discography—again bridges new age generations to create something that sits serenely outside time.
The record follows a March 2018 concert at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust, where Laraaji and longtime collaborator and fellow music healer Arji OceAnanda shared the bill with a younger synth trio from Texas, Dallas Acid. They vibed and, the next day, headed to a nearby studio to jam. OceAnanda collaborates with Laraaji on records and in laughter workshops so frequently that they feel like extensions of one other. In addition to chimes, digital flute, and Peruvian seed pods used as subtle shakers, she adds a great deal of mbira here, the African thumb piano that has become one of Laraaji’s signatures. She was uncredited in the title of FRKWYS Vol. 8, though she was as present and essential then as now, where she rightly gets her due. Dallas Acid—Linda Beecroft, Michael Gerner, Christian Havins—play a similar part to Blues Control: younger experimentalists inspired but not contained by new age, eager fans to their temporary bandmates. Their six-hour studio session was edited into Arrive’s concise 36 minutes, a focused, sunny sequence that hits the body and mind like a concentrated shot of B vitamins.
The quartet opens with its longest track, the 10-minute cleanse of “Evening Reduction.” It outlines Arrive’s tranquil vocabulary before building on it during four more soundscapes. “Full Moon Serenade” continues the slow burn with distant chimes and angelic vocals courtesy of Laraaji, twinkling together over synths and birdsong. The album blooms during centerpiece “This Much Now,” which capitalizes on the electric zither sweeps that have defined so much of Laraaji’s music. As with his classic album for Eno’s Ambient series, its folk-dance melodies are almost too lively to fit the famous “ignorable as it is interesting” ethos, but they alter perceptions just the same. Synth washes and seductive strums vibrate the ears and sooth the mind with the same precision that Laraaji’s laughter exercises pinpoint parts of the brain and body.
As the album moves into “Somewhere Here,” the group’s pieces fuse, all their layers cohering into one. It begins simply with a single flute melody before growing into a virtual sound bath, where the beginnings and ends of every instrument blur like acid trails and seamlessly bridge into the climactic “This Much More.” Laraaji’s virtuosic playing can often make him sound like multiple people, but what’s remarkable about Arrive is how this new age mini-orchestra eventually sound like a singular being. Some of that credit belongs to Jeff Zeigler, the veteran recording engineer and kindred experimentalist given the Herculean task of mixing Arrive. But Laraaji provides the one-of-a-kind unifying presence he always has. Whether working with old friends or new collaborators, he can turn any jam session into a day of radiance.


On J. Cole’s fourth album, he wrestles with the fragility of life and the importance of family ties.  He also sands down some of his worst impulses.

4 Your Eyez Only

Some time this March, a SWAT team descended on a home in a wooded, well-to-do North Carolina suburb. According to the producer Elite, helicopters vultured overhead as armed officers broke down the front door and raided the house, presumably acting on a tip from a neighbor who believed the occupants were manufacturing or selling drugs. There was no one home; masked and bulletproof-vested men kept pouring inside. Instead of a grow-op, officers found a basement littered with recording equipment, the bones of a creative hideout that had filled the community with little more than some errant blunt smoke.
The house was J. Cole’s. It wasn’t the native North Carolinian’s only property holding: he’d previously purchased his childhood home, at 2014 Forest Hills Drive in Fayetteville, with plans to turn it into a rent-free safe haven for single mothers. On his last solo effort—which was named after the Fayetteville house—he rapped about his adolescent fantasies of white picket fences surrounded by trees, by quiet. The SWAT experience, recounted on “Neighbors,” the best song from Cole’s fourth album, 4 Your Eyez Only, is a grim perversion of those dreams, and it anchors a record that wrestles with the fragility of life and the importance of family ties.
For long stretches, Eyez is a rumination on death. Cole frequently invokes other points of view, including that of his late friend James McMillan, Jr., who was killed at 22. The album is peppered with references to his murder, and a testimony from a young girl in Fayetteville, which appears at two points on “Ville Mentality,” echoes the reality faced by McMillan’s own daughter. Cole is himself a new father (“She’s Mine, Pt. 2” is about his wife and newborn child), and the title track, which closes the album with a missive for those young girls, is anchored by his personal anxieties, making for some of Cole’s most affecting writing to date.
He also comes to life on “Immortal,” which sounds as if someone played Cole an unheard 2Pac song from the Makaveli sessions and then dared him to recreate it from memory. The song’s narrator feeds baggies through a burglar bar, watches Bic lighters wave under spoons, wakes up early to hit the Bowflex. It’s details like that last one that set “Immortal” apart from so much of Cole’s early work: you can see the speaker bathed in the artificial light of 3 a.m. infomercials, figuring he needs to put some weight on. He equivocates—“crime pays like a part-time job” is the sort of evocative, economical phrase that has eluded Cole so often in the past. And when he rattles off rhetorical questions (“Have you ever seen a nigga that was Black on the moon?/Have you ever seen your brother go to prison as you cry?/Have you ever seen a motherfucking ribbon in the sky?”) he’s working in a long tradition of rappers and writers knocking a grave present against against its opposite. To that end, at the song’s most defiant moment, Cole nods to his real life: “If they want a nigga, they gon’ have to send a SWAT team.”
At its lowest points, 4 Your Eyez Only rehashes Cole’s worst tendencies. “No Role Modelz,” a breakout hit from 2014 Forest Hills Drive, tried to cast crass, regressive ideas about women as a moral struggle; “Deja Vu” is its mopey inverse, where Cole shouts over the music in a club to ask “Who in their right mind letting you out the house alone?/Tell me, is your house a home?” The song also lapses into some of the album’s laziest writing, like “On a scale from 1 to 10, that girl’s a hundred.” It’s like “Marvin’s Room” for guys who brought their high school letter jackets to college. (It’s worth noting that while “Deja Vu” and Bryson Tiller’s massive “Exchange” share a sample and, at points, have similar drum programming, producer Vinylz claims that he and Boi-1da produced “Deja Vu” before its beat was stolen and repurposed for the Tiller version.)
Speaking of production, that’s the one area where Eyez falls far behind Forest Hills Drive. After “Deja Vu,” the album slips into a three-song lull of pale, ornate music—unfortunate because the songs grapple with the early death of parents, Cole’s love for his wife, and McMillan’s death, respectively. “Ville Mentality” in particular plays like an interlude, and it might in fact be better served with just its hook and the aforementioned words from a young woman. Eyez sorely misses the type of serrated edge given to Forest Hills Drive by tracks like “03’ Adolescence,” “G.O.M.D.,” or “Fire Squad.” For this record, Cole leans more heavily on his singing voice than ever before—a welcome change at points, but it pushes the middle section of Eyez onto the sleepier side of the ledger.
Aside from the moments when he taps into something greater (“Immortal,” “Neighbors,” “4 Your Eyez Only”), Cole’s most marked improvement comes by sanding down the more grating parts of his style. There is less moralistic grandstanding, and no lines about bodily functions or leftover Italian food. In their place are references to airbrushed RIP shirts and private prison shareholders. That said, a dutiful focus on the album’s central storyline means there aren’t big swings or long tangents in any direction, and aside from that trio of great tracks, Cole seldom sounds like he’s leaving it all out on the field.
But Eyez often feels like a natural extension from the more overtly political tone of Cole’s public comments since his trip to Ferguson in August of 2014. This isn’t a protest record in the acute sense, but it’s unavoidably the product of the types of oppression that beckon SWAT teams into suburban homes on nothing but hearsay. In that vein, the most quietly radical decision Cole makes here is following “Neighbors” with a song called “Foldin’ Clothes,” where he and his wife shirk the outside world for Netflix and almond milk. That domestic stillness—stillness that might be interrupted at any moment by helicopters or an evening news report—is fragile, and that fragility is its own devastating statement.


The collected songs from the infamous show would have been better served as a random Weeknd posse album meant to launch the promising minor pop career of Lily-Rose Depp.

The Weeknd: The Idol: Music From the HBO Original Series

If you would like to listen to the music from the first season of The Idol—HBO’s infamous, incendiary show about a young female pop star as told through the eyes of its creators, Sam Levinson (Euphoria), Reza Fahim, and Abel Tesfaye (the Weeknd)—you could sit through all five tedious episodes and see the songs come together in bits and pieces, performed diegetically by the musician-actors in the cast. If you maybe want to enjoy the music from The Idol, you’re better off just listening to it without finding out why it exists in the first place.
To put it simply, The Idol is a mess, a poorly written show that—spoilers for the entire first season to follow—graphically uses a sleazy club owner/talent manager named Tedros (Tesfaye) to abuse its main character Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) only to reveal in the end, Scooby-style, that—surprise!—she was the abuser all along. That’s how season one ends, with an incoherent twist framed as an incoherent critique of pop stardom and the music industry machine. With the particular disadvantage of having seen every episode, some songs that deserve better, such as a beatific Troye Sivan covering George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” are now sullied by association—in this case, “My Sweet Lord” appears in an interminable scene of aspiring stars performing for vampiric label suits in Jocelyn’s living room, a mini-showcase that only serves to underscore how little The Idol has going on in the way of plot and character development.
Taking on the show’s self-serious baggage, a sweet song like “Crocodile Tears,” Suzanna Son’s rendition of a misfit’s sorrowful internal monologue, is marred forever with the image of her underage Squeaky Fromme-type character, Chloe, singing butt naked at a piano, for some reason. “Get It B4,” a true jammer on which the Princely Moses Sumney gospelizes his lust, is now forever connected to Tedros using a shock collar on Sumney’s character in order to—and this is implied with nary a hint of irony—deepen his pelvic thrusts. These are intrusive thoughts you do not want while just trying to enjoy some songs.
It may leave you pondering how The Idol feeds into anti-#MeToo backlash (a minor and undeveloped plotline involves a jealous Tedros conspiring to falsely accuse Jocelyn’s ex-boyfriend of rape) for the sole purpose of—what? Exorcising Tesfaye and Levinson’s fundamental misunderstanding of their inspiration, director Paul Verhoeven, while painfully lacking his sense of fun and self-awareness? Revealing that these dudes have possibly never had sex? Maybe, as some have predicted, The Idol will age like fine camp, as Verhoeven’s Showgirls has. I have doubts, but more pressingly for our purposes: This soundtrack would have been better served as a random Weeknd posse album meant to launch the promising minor pop career of Lily-Rose Depp.
The soundtrack, released as a series of six standalone digital EPs corresponding to each episode, opens with Mike Dean’s “The Lure,” the show’s theme, which is built on spare chords and mournful humming by the Weeknd, the sonic embodiment of a fog machine. As erotic thriller themes go, it stays true to its inspirations, setting up a decadent noir mood with a plinky synth stab and strings that owe as much to Ennio Morricone as the Stranger Things and Drive soundtracks. It, too, deserved a better show, and sets the tone for the songs to come, all sexual synth tracks that deploy dramatic minor chords to hint at a seamy undertone.
”Devil’s Paradise,” another Dean instrumental, reprises the themes of “The Lure” with a midnight sax solo that evokes walking through a dark alley circa 1987, maybe bumming a smoke off a skeptical-looking guy in a blazer who just happens to be leaning against the wall. As a score, it’s effective, and transitions into “Double Fantasy,” the Weeknd and Future’s dispatch from the boning phase of a toxic relationship, a serviceable first single with awkward lyrics and a fine bassline courtesy Metro Boomin. “The Lure”’s mien threads through each song here, particularly those by the Weeknd: “A Lesser Man” is a mid-tempo gaslighter from the perspective of Tedros, couching threats in supposed feebleness; a cover of “Jealous Guy” on a bed of John Carpenter-lite arpeggios curdles John Lennon’s original into an ominous threat. “Take Me Back” completes Tedros’ textbook abuser script by begging for forgiveness and blaming it on his childhood, with the Weeknd singing in a hurt warble on a cresting ocean of synthesizers. Its melodrama is slickly beautiful, which might not be enough for a life outside The Idol’s claustrophobic universe—particularly when followed by Sumney’s glittering “Get It B4,” which positions seduction as a much less complicated proposal.
Depp fares better here, as a first-time pop singer whose light rasp is believable, even while singing lines like, “Spit in my mouth while you turn me out,” as she does on the Weeknd’s “One of the Girls,” which can’t be saved even by BLACKPINK’s Jennie. Depp works with what she’s been given on “Dollhouse,” a Lana Del Rey-style sex dirge about submission that ends with the lyric, “Am I playing all right now, daddy?” The song lives in a rare pre-camp space, in that it’s unclear whether it’s meant to be hilarious, though it certainly is on some level. (It should be noted here that the show preemptively sniffed at this criticism via a throwaway line from someone on Jocelyn’s team about Live Nation employees who walked out in protest of Jocelyn’s “misogynistic” lyrics, though it’s unclear whether viewers were supposed to hate the staffers in Jocelyn’s defense or to hate her Live Nation liaison for dismissing their concerns.)
The sexual popsploitation works best when it’s not trying to be deadly serious, as on the soundtrack’s pièce de résistance, “World Class Sinner / I’m a Freak,” a camp filmic single in the grand tradition of Ally/Lady Gaga’s “Why Did You Do That?” from A Star Is Born. Co-written by the Weeknd and Asa Taccone, who had a hand in the Lonely Island’s “Dick in a Box” and “The Weeknd’s Dark Secret” from American Dad!, its lyrics scan just absurd enough—“I’m tryna find someone to bang”—that it lets us in on the joke. The show positions this song as a pop throwaway that necessitates Jocelyn creating some real art, which gives away The Idol’s whole dilemma: It doesn’t know how to have fun, muddling its already troubled thesis (the music industry is rife with users) with scenes like the one where Mike Dean emerges herbishly from his custom Tesla holding a giant bong and a blunt with a second blunt tucked behind his ear. The creators of The Idol seem to look down their noses at its viewers for consuming what it spent millions to feed us: Mass-produced pop that’s somehow even more odious and cynical than the industry that it’s meant to critique.


The duo’s three-part score for showrunner Damon Lindelof’s sociopolitically fraught story of vigilantism is their strongest and most direct since The Social Network.

Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross: Watchmen (Music from the HBO Series)

Watchmen (Music from the HBO Series)

How committed are Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to their nominal side gig of composing for film and television? Here’s how: In the middle of releasing their sprawling three-volume score for Watchmen, the HBO adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ landmark superhero comic, they dropped a 77-minute soundtrack for Trey Edward Shults’ indie drama Waves, too. Clearly, the bug that bit the duo circa The Social Network in 2010 hasn’t let go. Based on the quality of their music for Watchmen, that’s great news. Their score for showrunner Damon Lindelof’s sociopolitically fraught story of vigilantism is their strongest and most direct since The Social Network—or even Reznor’s soundtrack for the 1996 video game Quake.
The horror-movie atmospherics of Quake are the closest reference point for Watchmen’s first and strongest track, “How the West Was Really Won.” The show’s unofficial theme music—it recurs repeatedly in the series’ most frightful moments, including the ripped-from-the-comic image of a gigantic alien squid in the ruins of Manhattan—it’s the sound of Reznor and Ross going full John Carpenter, with a simple synth hook that seems to swallow up more of the world around you with each repetition. Its melodic structure recurs throughout the score, in the gently acoustic “Watch Over This Boy” at the end of Volume 1, the jazz throwback “Nostalgia Blues” on Volume 2 (co-written and performed by John Beasley), and the major-key weightlessness of “The Waiting Sky” on Volume 3. The original song is resilient enough to mutate in this way, showing off the duo’s skill with leitmotif as well as their considerable range. It’s the theme music Nine Inch Nails fans have been waiting for them to deliver.
It also starts off the soundtracks with a bang rather than a simmer, a mood maintained through much of Volume 1. “Nun With a Motherf*&*ing Gun” pulses and clangs like a reimagined version of Nitzer Ebb’s “Join in the Chant,” while “Objects in Mirror (Are Closer Than They Appear)” and “Kattle Battle” share a sleazy, slithering bass groove. While the bangers largely vanish by the time the quieter, more ruminative Volume 2 comes around, they return in a big way with Volume 3’s leadoff track, “Doomsday Prepper,” which comes fully loaded with scuzzy Nine Inch Nails guitar.
Reznor and Ross even work covers into the show’s repertoire. The trilogy ends with a quiet, reverent piano cover of “Life on Mars?”, the world-beating ballad by Reznor’s late friend and mentor David Bowie. But the pair are equally reverent toward Wham!’s “Careless Whisper,” which they reconfigure into Volume 3’s “No Rhythm.” To my ears, there’s even a tip of the hat to Bernard Herrmann’s jazzy Taxi Driver theme at the start of the big-band pastiche “The Way It Used to Be.” That’s not to say they’re incapable of love themes all their own: “Which Came First” is a wistful piano ballad that mutates into sci-fi synth; its melody returns with a full choir in “Lincoln Tunnel” several tracks later.
In keeping with the disorienting tone of Lindelof’s show, the albums are peppered with dialogue snippets lifted from the series, from teasers for fictional TV shows (“American Promo Story,” “A Man Walks Into an Intrinsic Field”) to pharmaceutical infomercials (“The Elephant in the Room”). Taking this several steps further, as is the Reznor way, the vinyl version of each release comes disguised as an album from within Watchmen’s world: Volume 1 is the latest release by the fake rock group Sons of Pale Horse, Volume 2 is the score for the Ryan Murphy–esque TV show American Hero Story, and Volume 3 is an old album by “The” Nine Inch Nails, the genuine article’s fictional equivalent.
But as has been the case with other Reznor/Ross scores, you needn’t be sold on the show, or even familiar with it, to enjoy the score. Taken together, Watchmen Vols. 1-3 play like a dispatch from some other weird world, one that feels like Reznor and Ross’s alternately paranoid and plaintive music. In other words: a world much like our own.

Buy: Rough Trade (Vol. 1) (Vol. 2) (Vol. 3)
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Without any of the gothic production flourishes that put him on the map, the producer and songwriter’s latest album is gloomy, on edge, and disappointingly hollow.

Optimist

In a recent, live interview for the New Yorker, Billie Eilish was asked to recount how she had experienced the onset of the pandemic. She was on tour, busy and oblivious to the news, she said; she didn’t notice what was happening until she was canceling shows. “I wasn’t looking at my phone,” she explained. Seated next to her in the Zoom frame, her brother Finneas O’Connell piped up: “I was.”
Finneas has something he’d like you to know: He’s been paying attention. Finneas acknowledges his privilege and his whiteness; he’s caught up on politics, has thoughts on cancel culture, and wonders if our phones are poisoning our brains. Finneas is young, only 24, but perhaps he has some wisdom to share: Make the most of your finite time on this earth. Also, call your parents.
These are some of the talking points on Optimist, the misleadingly named debut album from the songwriter and producer best known for his ongoing creative partnership with his younger sister, one of the biggest pop stars in the world. Without any of the gothic production flourishes that put him on the map, Finneas—single-handedly, as its sole producer, writer, and, on 12 out of 13 tracks, instrumentalist—made an album that’s gloomy and on edge, encumbered by the alienation of life in the digital era as magnified by the distorting lens of fame and new money.
Optimist enters into dialogue with recent albums by other young stars disenchanted with success and the world that gave it to them: Lorde, Clairo, and, of course, Eilish herself. Aesthetically, these records are united in their movement away from pop bombast and towards softer, slower sounds with less commercial traction. Finneas is on board, to some degree—about a third of these songs are piano ballads; one is an instrumental interlude that does little besides demonstrate his proficiency. The O’Connell siblings share a well-documented fondness for mid-century standards, and Finneas sings in a warm, searching baritone—often double-tracked for maximum texture—that performs nicely in songs indebted to them.
But while bidding for timeless and universal appeal, Finneas sometimes comes up with hollow platitudes. “Only a Lifetime” cautions us not to “waste the time you have/waiting for time to pass,” while “What They’ll Say About Us” lays plans to “take the world and make it better than it ever was.” These are pleasant but toothless sentiments, fit to print in frilly cursive on plaques sold at Home Goods. Occasionally, he hits on something more stirring, like on “Love Is Pain” when he recalls waking in tears from a dream about his parents’ death—demonstrating the very real consequences of getting older rather than vaguely fretting about them.
Finneas’ exercise in restraint has its limits: These subdued songs are surrounded by highly produced, pointedly topical ones. On the hyperpop-y “The 90s,” Finneas longs to retire from the internet and return to the decade of his birth (“when I was not a problem yet”). When he sings, “Now my head feels so heavy,” his voice is glitched out, producer-speak for “I feel alienated.” “Medieval” laments the churn and burn of the celebrity machine with a snarling vocal delivery over a percussive rumble; the playful, plinky “Happy Now?” stumbles on the revelation that fame and money and a “douchebag car” isn’t a recipe for happiness.
Listening to an album that hits such extremes of texture and tone is jarring, much like contemporary digital existence. Maybe that’s the point. Whether intentionally or not, Finneas replicates these all-too-familiar conditions without submitting anything new to the discourse. “The 90s” uses an idea that has been passed around by some other pop (and pop-adjacent) singers—but without the developed narrative arc of Sam Hunt’s take, or the self-aware camp of Charli XCX’s, it falls flat. The satirical intent of “The Kids Are All Dying”—a smarmy song that, it must be said, contains the biggest groaner of all in “I’m whiter than the ivory on these keys”—is undercut by the song’s lack of a target. Instead of scrutinizing one culprit with rigor and bite, Finneas gestures wildly to the ether, citing climate, war, capitalism, gun violence, Twitter activism, and fake news, his narrator slipping between the voice of the critic and that of the criticized.
As a critic, Finneas can do much better. And he has: He co-wrote “Your Power,” a clear-eyed, affecting indictment of abusers on his sister’s recent album, Happier Than Ever. The unavoidable context for Finneas’s debut is, of course, the magnitude of what he’s already achieved. So when he sings, “Now all your memories feel more like films/… /You wonder why the bad ones paid the bills,” on “Someone Else’s Star,” I can’t help but think how much more eloquently Billie captured her own curdled relationship to art and commerce: “Things I once enjoyed/Just keep me employed now.” Maybe it’s unfair to foist this comparison upon Finneas, but he does seem to invite it by dropping his album mere months after Billie’s, with a noticeably similar title.
Very much to his credit, Finneas has shaped some of the past decade’s most memorable pop music. Three years ago, he sampled a dental drill and an Easy-Bake Oven on a song that would go triple platinum—choices that felt freaky, unexpected, and daring. Now, on “Someone Else’s Star,” he’s sampling rainstorms, dampening an already dreary track with a too-obvious signifier. The biggest risk that Finneas takes on Optimist may just be invoking inflammatory topics to which he brings limited insight. By the end, it’s all a wash anyway; Finneas throws up his hands and goes out on “How It Ends” (sigh), a disco-lite track that hinges on timeless pop wisdom about dancing away the pain. Bop away while you shield your eyes from the news.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Lykke Li’s intimate, ghostly fifth album takes a stripped-down approach to the all-too-familiar devastation of heartbreak.

EYEYE

Lykke Li has a master’s in sadness—“I’ve always had a broken heart since I was a kid,” she recently said. Her music is a companion to sorrow in the same way the sun is a companion to the morning, and on her latest record EYEYE, the Swedish romantic continues her studies in misery with complex supercuts of tear-soaked memories. Reuniting with Peter Bjorn and John’s Björn Yttling, her main collaborator throughout her first three records, Li committed to eight stripped-down songs in an attempt to “break up with the breakup album.” But in the absence of escapist melodic thrills, EYEYE serves as a kind of bloodletting for the heartache that’s nagged her throughout her career.
Loosely based on the concept of a loop, EYEYE opens with the squeak of reversed tape and concludes with a jumble of vocals that suggest Li is being rewound, too. But instead of maxing out her grief with trap beats and double-time delivery as she did on so sad so sexy, or returning to the wall-of-sound production and cathartic choruses of I Never Learn, she turned to her phone. The lo-fi and unselfconscious sound of the voice memos she’d recorded seemed just right, and so EYEYE was ultimately recorded in her bedroom, harnessing the intimate energy of a space that’s integral to dreams, sensuality, and crying in private.
As Li thrusts us into her heavy, moody headspace, background sounds bleed into the music; crickets chirp at odd moments, and subtle white noise fills in pauses. Blurry, underwater guitars accompany her wounded delivery on the first couple songs: “And I know I hold on/To someone not here/But you won’t go away,” she sings breathily on “You Don’t Go Away,” admitting to the dissonance between lost love and lingering romantic feelings. As her voice ascends to a soft soprano, the exhaustion creeps in; the whispered approach is somehow louder than the enraged cry of songs like “Sadness Is a Blessing” and “Gunshot.” But Li isn’t cultivating nostalgia for this former relationship—she’s begging the feelings to leave. “It doesn’t go away/Every night I pray,” she pleads.
Though these heart-in-her-hand lyrics take center stage, the production across EYEYE is both entrancing and bizarre. The album balances mourning and meditation, filling its vast, gelatinous sound field with phantom backing vocals, floorboard creaks, spaceship synths, and eerie, carnivalesque melodies. Midway through the album comes one enlivening, misleadingly playful outlier: “Carousel” captures the sound of an abandoned amusement park ride as Li reflects on the tendency to repeatedly return to a hurtful relationship. “Flying and I can’t come down/Yeah, I’m high as hell,” she sings, stuck on a malfunctioning ride yet hoping it might once again bring some kind of pleasure. At the outro, bioluminescent synths trickle downward like soap bubbles.
It’s after “Carousel” that Li’s conceptual intention comes into full focus. The most devastating aspect of heartbreak is in the way its cyclical ache—the replayed memories and bad habits—shatters the fantasy of a different outcome. “Is it only in the movie you love me?” she asks on “5D.” On closer “ü&i,” she watches a lover walk away and refuses to allow their turned back to become the relationship’s final scene. Instead, she closes her eyes and pleads, “Turn around, yeah you/The movie is you and I.” It’s the greatest conviction Li displays on EYEYE: to command a different ending, even if only in her mind. That dreamy between-worlds effect turns this record into a cinematic opus, even as these painful memories sometimes feel too close for comfort. But you don’t get a master’s in sadness by avoiding your studies.


After the suicide of bassist Sean Stewart last year, the no wave-leaning art noise duo pushes forward with its second full-length. Here they sport a noticeably minimal sound, with dark groaning and clanking that draws from coldwave and a host of other creepy signifiers.

Work (work, work)

Bands that find their voice quickly are the lucky ones. Of course, you run a greater risk of repeating yourself in the future, but by and large the hardest part is already out of the way. HTRK (pronounced "Hate Rock") aren't what you would normally consider lucky, both professionally and personally. Formed in 2003, the trio's no wave-leaning art noise found them playing alongside deities like Alan Vega and Lydia Lunch. In 2009, their debut LP, Marry Me Tonight (co-produced by ex-Birthday Party member Roland S. Howard), landed them a few high-profile opening slots for the likes of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Liars.
And it made sense: Marry Me is doomy and romantically languid, with a pop-smart crispness that spoke of potentially good things to come. But when bassist Sean Stewart took his own life in March of last year, vocalist Jonnine Standish and guitarist Nigel Yang were left to pick up the pieces and push forward with their second full length, Work (work, work). While dark and otherworldly, much of Work doesn't feel like it has much to do with death, but everything to do with sex. But they've shifted their sound, and in the current climate they come over as zeitgeist chasers without much character.
The music of the past year or so has been hot for dark and moody sounds, from the fleeting pulses of the witch house craze to the dread-stoked, depressive underpinnings that pervade various electronic and R&B offshoots. HTRK also seem to have noticed, inflecting their sound with creepy, crawling signifiers that feel currently cool or just past their expiration date. The crucial distinction is that HTRK have a noticeably minimal sound, funneling their groaning and clanking through no wave and coldwave instead of the viscous twitch-and-bounce of witch house proper (though the drum programming suggests the Three 6 Mafia presets came stock) or the lurid, lukewarm comeliness of jj or the xx (though both of these artists are good for a name-check at just about any moment on the album).
So needless to say, Work is heavy on atmosphere, and while the attention paid to those aforementioned post punk totems could have set them apart (at times it feels as if HTRK could pull off a lounge-y mix-up of Sade and Suicide), there simply isn't enough to sink your teeth into. Occasionally constructed of some interesting parts (the processional G-funk organ squiggles on single "Eat Yr Heart", the pressure-crunched submarine hull moans of "Slo Glo"), nothing seems properly supported. The music feels unappetizingly narcotized and drab, not to mention uncomfortably claustrophobic despite all of the aimless sprawling and spreading the music does. The pair seems to have been so focused on creating a mood that they forgot to attach any songs along the way.
Perhaps most anesthetizing of all is Standish, whose coquettish, layered vocals make all the chic disaffection feel even more purposefully (and problematically) clouded. There's nothing especially bad here, but once the smoke clears from their bland, bassed-out ambiance, HTRK are another band without a sound to call their own.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Beck’s ramshackle 1994 album, a quintessential piece of alternative rock, experimental folk, and hip-hop that felt magically displaced in time.

Mellow Gold

If you were around to hear Beck’s “Loser” in the early 1990s, you probably felt the plates shift a little. Maybe you heard it on local radio in Los Angeles, where it arrived without context or marketing. Maybe you heard it in Seattle, where, six months after Beck had ad-libbed it in a cramped living-room studio, it became the most requested song on KNDD’s nightly People’s Choice Countdown, beating out the most recent single by Pearl Jam, who at the time may as well have been on the city’s tourism board.
Or maybe you, like me, heard it on MTV, where it seemed like a cool breeze blowing through the abstract pain of mainstream alternative music. When, in July, 1994, an interviewer from Spin magazine suggested that Beck’s backstory—poverty, an eighth-grade education, bouts of borderline homelessness—felt like fodder for darker sentiments, Beck, 23 and blindsided by his own new fame, pitched his voice up and whined, “You just gotta rage against the appliance, man. The toast is burning, and you just gotta rip it out and free it before it fills the house with smoke.” For Vedder, hearing “Loser” lap you on the radio must’ve felt like getting hit in the face by trash thrown from a passing car.
Much of Mellow Gold was recorded in the home studio of a guy named Carl Stephenson. By “home studio,” I mean a tape recorder set up in such a way that Beck later remembered having to finish vocal takes before Stephenson’s girlfriend wanted to get in and cook dinner. Stephenson had grown up playing in youth symphonies around Olympia, Washington, before quitting his grocery-store job and moving to Houston to work at Rap-A-Lot Records, then home to the Geto Boys. Rap-A-Lot was hardcore; Stephenson was not. He loved watching DJ Ready Red strip samples from old funk and soul records, but he was uncomfortable with the violence and misogyny of the material. He soon moved to Los Angeles, where he struggled to plant his homey, psychedelic productions in an increasingly gangsta market.
The way Stephenson remembers it, Beck Hansen was a street busker with a bad haircut. But he had a mischievous sense of creativity and no attachments to his own artistic self-image, and when Stephenson—alongside co-producers Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock, who ran the small Bong Load label—suggested they pair his rudimentary folk songs with Stephenson’s loops and grooves, Beck went with it. After all, he liked rap—the immediacy, the beat, the sense of performance. In the same Spin interview where he raged against the toaster, he remembered the communal warmth he felt as a teenager riding the bus on L.A., hearing Grandmaster Flash playing on some kids’ boombox from the back, how people from all different parts of the city seemed to absorb the sound, some even getting up to dance.
Mostly though, fashioning himself as a kind of rapper was a chance for Beck to undermine the sanctity of what it meant to be a white guy with an acoustic guitar. That he understood hip-hop as an extension of folk music rather than a betrayal of it—the way rap spun meaningful, entertaining stories out of everyday life using equipment anyone could get their hands on—felt insightful, even subversive, especially at a time when we were starting to digest the reality that grunge was just classic rock after all: the same quest for glory, the same macho, self-serious dream. In press coverage from the time, you can feel the ache of boomers hungering for the next Bob Dylan, but in reality, Beck was more like Tone Lōc or Mississippi John Hurt, or an asexual cousin to the Beastie Boys: a funny, self-styled dope just geeking out on the scene.
Compared to the rest of its 1994 class—Green Day’s Dookie, Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, Hole’s Live Through This, Soundgarden’s Superunknown, and Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York—Mellow Gold was both weirder and lower to the ground. It could be direct—the roughness of the production, the visceral noise of some of the songs—but obscure, too, a knot of words that didn’t immediately register as metaphor or reality. And as vivid as it was, it also felt magically displaced in time. The compacted ’70s soul of “Fuckin’ With My Head” and “Sweet Sunshine”; the deadpan folk of “Nitemare Hippy Girl” and “Steal My Body Home”: listening to Mellow Gold was like finding a fossil from the future.
Part of the fun and frustration of encountering Mellow Gold was figuring out what, if any of this, Beck took seriously. His mother, Bibbe, had been in some Andy Warhol movies and later played in a band called Black Fag with the drag performer Vaginal Davis. His grandfather, Al Hansen, was a member of Fluxus, a conceptual art group whose most well-known pieces—Hansen’s Yoko Ono Piano Drop, for example, in which a piano was pushed off a five-story building—functioned less like art than an attempt to make the viewer confront what they think art is in the first place. Mellow Gold wasn’t quite so high-concept, but Beck certainly seemed more interested in the currency of cultural images than the supposed truths of his own dark mind. That said, if you were the kind of listener who heard lines like “my time is a piece of wax falling on a termite who’s choking on the splinters” as nonsense instead of poetry, he was your ideological punching bag come to life, a portrait of the artiste as the charlatan who throws shit at the wall and leaves it to you to figure out what it means.
The funny thing about his classification as a “slacker” was just how hard the content of his music could be. Where punks of generations past responded to dwindling prospects with angst, the slacker supposedly shrugged. Like the millennial 25 years later—another figment of the warped boomer mind—the slacker was ultimately anchored by entitlement: They didn’t not-perform because they couldn’t, but, like Herman Melville’s famous protagonist, Bartleby, because they preferred not to.
And yet here we have a piece of supposedly quintessential slacker art that is mostly about jobs: working them, losing them, the cyclic ruin that comes from not being able to get one and the capitalistic grind that keeps those clinging to them underfoot: “I was born in this hotel/Washing dishes in the sink” (“Whiskeyclone, Hotel City 1997”); “Fourteen days I been sleeping in a barn/Better get a paycheck tattooed on my arm” (“Soul Suckin’ Jerk”); “I quit my job blowing leaves/Telephone bills up my sleeves” (“Beercan”).
Even when work isn’t in the picture, poverty is the frame. The stories on Mellow Gold take place in trailer parks and subsist on credit and suitcases of cheap beer. They are ground-down, washed-up and loving it, “dancing on the roof, shootin’ holes in the moon.” The music sounds like junk because junk is what he sees from his window. And the punchline of “Loser” isn’t that he lost, but that he didn’t have a chance in the first place.
Listening to Mellow Gold, I’m always left with the same image: a child at play in the ruins of a dying world. “Tonight the city is full of morgues,” goes the first line on “Pay No Mind,” “and all the toilets are overflowing.” We’re at song two. (Or, as the tape-warped vocal at the beginning of the song puts it, “This’s song two on the album. This is the album right here. Burn the album.”)
Between here and there lies mountains of garbage and unpaid bills, the purgatory of menial work, screaming neighbors and rivers of shit and the well-moisturized ghouls who profit from it all and tell you it’s fine. Where some writers synthesize their inner worlds from the insulation of an armchair or desk, Beck seemed to be out there with rubber gloves and a second-hand hazmat suit, bagging up southern-rock compilations and rap mixtapes, reporting live from the brink with a crappy dictaphone. By the time I make it to “Nitemare Hippy Girl”—her giant tofu, her radiant self-obsession—it doesn’t sound like a diss, it sounds like a safe haven. Maybe even a koan: If the world ends outside your window but you’re too stoned to notice, does it still end?
I’ll spare you the fairytale about how this album helped make mainstream music better or more interesting. It did seem like good things came from it, including widening the avenues of conversation between hip-hop and indie-rock, and a weakening of distinctions between what was considered alternative and what was mainstream. In the years to come, labels like Matador, publications like the Beastie Boys’ Grand Royal, bands like Cibo Matto and Cornershop and even Björk and Air all made the kind of cultural omnivorousness Beck demonstrated feel like part of a general push away from old myths toward something more eclectic, more effervescent, maybe even more feminine. And as a young white man, I have to say it felt good to see someone up there who wasn’t so invested in their own darkness, especially with Kurt Cobain pointing to where all that darkness went.
Mellow Gold was actually one of three albums Beck released in 1994: Another, One Foot in the Grave, was a lo-fi album of blues and folk, while Stereopathetic Soulmanure—released a week before Mellow Gold—was more fragmented, noisy, and tossed-off. Both, ironically, produced songs later covered by the kinds of classic-rock standbys whose universality Beck seemed to offer an alternative to: “Asshole” by Tom Petty, and “Rowboat” by Johnny Cash. They are both great songs, two of his best, as is “Satan Gave Me a Taco,” in which a luckless young man gets food poisoning from Satan only to discover that his life is in fact a music video. After an odyssey ascending the mountain of fame he is committed to hell, where he starts a taco stand with Satan—“just to smell the smell.”
You could hear the old blues there, the big American yarn of hustlers and idiots and someone trying to sell something and someone else getting his ass burned. Years later, Spin would call Beck a generation’s consolation prize after the death of Kurt Cobain. But I always heard him as more of a cheerleader, maybe even a coach. Yeah, the world’s a trash heap. Let’s climb it and watch the sun set.


Former Be Your Own Pet members add shades of Weezer-like power-pop to their economy-sized psych-rock.

JEFF the Brotherhood: We Are the Champions

We Are the Champions

Nashville's JEFF the Brotherhood are two brothers, Jamin and Jake Orrall. One's on guitar and vocals; the other mans the drums. They also co-run Infinity Cat Recordings with their father, singer/songwriter Robert Ellis Orrall, the only man in the world that can say he wrote songs for Shenandoah and Lindsay Lohan. JEFF's been an ongoing concern since 2002, but the brothers Orrall have logged time in plenty of bands, including the earliest incarnation of Be Your Own Pet. Like Pet, JEFF was fond of the fuzzy spastic two-to-three-minute punk-pop tune, but they were also fond of being unpredictable. Jamin and Jake were just as likely to say their peace in 30 seconds as they were to stretch things out for 14 minutes.
After numerous tours and releases, 2009's Heavy Days saw the Orralls focusing their powers and presenting themselves as an economy-sized psych-rock outfit, an Eagles of Death Metal with one less mouth to feed and a lot more pot in the glove compartment. Big and heavy but still quick on its feet, Heavy Days was a step forward that could please both longtime fans and those new to the party.
That said, anyone who's been tracking the moves the Orralls have made might be thrown off a bit by the way We Are the Champions kicks off, and I'm not talking about the rap-radio-exclusive airhorn that sounds off at the start of "Hey Friend". It's the song proper, and its remarkable similarity to what good Weezer sounds like, which might surprise. Everything about the tune-- its loping mid-tempo cadence, Jake Orrall's Cuomo-like vocals, even the tune's simple-simon sentiments ("I've been thinking about your mom/ You can tell me if it's really wrong")-- makes it sound like a Weezer Blue Album demo. Some might see that as a step backwards for JEFF, but I mean that comparison as a complement. The tune's aw-shucks silliness is as charming as its earworm of a melody is inescapable.
There's a fair amount of Heavy Days' brand of amp damage to be found on Champions-- you'll want to skip to "Cool Out" or "Ripper" to get that fix-- and one sitar-flecked tune ("Health and Strength") that'd fit right in on a Thee Oh Sees album, but the aforementioned poppier M.O. is the way the majority of this album goes. "Bummer" was JEFF's contribution to a split single with Best Coast, but plenty of tunes from Champions, from the gently rumbling "Diamond Way" to the awkwardly confident "Wastoid Girl", could stand toe-to-toe with anything Best Coast had to offer. It's only fitting that this album signals the beginning of a business partnership between Infinity Cat and the Warner Music Group. We Are the Champions might disappoint some diehard fans, but it's also proof positive that JEFF the Brotherhood can play with the big boys.


At heart, the music of Hamburg-based producer DJ Koze is warm and joyous, designed to make you feel good. His entry in the long-running DJ-Kicks series is remarkable not just because it's structured so well and flows so seamlessly as an album, but also because it offers insight into its mixer's mind, feeling a bit like an autobiography in sound.

DJ-Kicks

The music of Hamburg-based producer DJ Koze offers an unusual collision of the blissful and precise. In his singles, albums, and remixes, the immersive sensation of shoegaze and psychedelia meets the pointillist precision of minimal techno. So while his affinity for beautiful surface textures conjures feelings of drifting ecstasy, his crisp percussion and fondness for 4/4 propulsion concentrates those airy feelings into diamond-hard bursts. His music can get disorienting and even a bit creepy, but the darker effects feel more like the inevitable result of wandering, like a child taking a wrong turn in one of Grimm's fairy tales. At heart, Koze's music is warm and joyous, designed to make you feel good.
There's a strange kind of alchemy at work on the best DJ mixes, where the sensibility of the music and the connections between the tracks have so much integrity that it's if the person mixing made the music on their own. Koze's entry in the long-running DJ-Kicks series is remarkable not just because it's structured so well and flows so seamlessly as an album, but also because it offers insight into its mixer's mind, and feels a bit like an autobiography in sound. As it moves from a front half heavy on blunted hip-hop (as a kid in the '80s, Koze was a competitive hip-hop DJ) into deliciously weird singer-songwriter turns and finally ends with gorgeous selections of gentle house and techno, you begin to hear Koze's music emerge out of the music of others. Along the way, he tinkers subtly with the tracks, transforming them via remixes and edits to make the whole feel like one long suite.
In the record's early stretch, Koze draws heavily from the Stones Throw catalog. On the evidence here, he favors producers that can isolate samples from the '60s and '70s—a guitar pattern, a swoop of strings—and warp them into a hypnotic loop that offers a kind of commentary on sound and memory. Madlib is one master of this approach, and Koze includes the former's collaboration with Freddie Gibbs, "Shame", along with his beat on Strong Arm Steady's "Best of Times". But work from Mndsgn and Swiss producer Dimlite mine a similar vein, a woozy post-Dilla environment heavy on groove with a deep interest in sonic detail.
The first half also shows Koze's fondness for expressive, unusual voices. On the Boards of Canada remix of cLOUDDEAD's "Dead Dogs Two", verses sit uneasily between nerd-rap and twee, while Homeboy Sandman's vocals on "Holiday" sound more like one half of a slurred conversation than a declaration. The slapback echo of Trish Keenan's vocals on Broadcast's "Tears in the Typing Pool" dislodge the song from time, making it resemble a '60s-era Disney animated feature rather than a 2005 album on Warp. And the mash-up of Hot Chip side project the 2 Bears with an instrumental from Cincinnati producer Hi-Tek, putting the bedroom soul vocals front and center, offers the perfect transition from the album's beat-head opening to the dreamier electronics that come later.
The set builds and becomes more interesting as it goes, and Koze takes a firmer hand, tweaking house tracks by Session Victim, Frank & Tony, and Marcel Fengler to bring out their inner Koze-ness. The moment late in Fengler's "Jaz", when the sleek techno opens into a clearing and the wistful piano of Portable's 2014 masterpiece "Surrender" enters, is one of the most breathtaking mix segues in recent memory. And the fact that Koze can make a William Shatner song produced by Ben Folds ("It Hasn't Happened Yet", from Shatner's 2004 album Has Been) sound logical in this context is a testament to his magical ear.
Marker Starling's "In Stride", another odd highlight, like the Broadcast cut, sounds like it could come from one of four different decades, but it actually came out in 2010 on Tin Angel. It's easy to assume that lovely songs like this, first released on a small indie label during a time of vast musical abundance, are easily lost forever, banished to the forgotten tip of the long tail. But Koze finds home for these misfit songs, and by doing so gets you thinking about possibilities, what else that might be out there waiting to be rediscovered.


Corrections House is a sort of supergroup of underground metal: Neurosis founder Scott Kelly, Eyehategod frontman Mike IX Williams, producer Sanford Parker, and saxophonist Bruce Lamont. Anyone whose formative years as a music fan involved Skinny Puppy or the Wax Trax! label at its peak will feel right at home.

Corrections House: Know How to Carry a Whip

Know How to Carry a Whip

Two years ago, Neurosis founder Scott Kelly, Eyehategod frontman Mike IX Williams, producer Sanford Parker, and underground metal's most prominent saxophonist Bruce Lamont formed Corrections House, a sort of supergroup that turned out to be defined as much by its intentionally haphazard improv streak as its members' heavy reputations. The music they produced combined easy-to-predict elements—like Kelly's churning, doomy guitars and Williams' Burroughsian spoken-word rant-poems—with surprising ones, like the industrial streak provided by Parker's electronic beats.
Despite its seat-of-the-pants beginnings, the group's found equilibrium, and on their second studio album, they're chasing down new ideas with a new confidence. Know How to Carry a Whip brings the electro-industrial elements to the forefront and also pushes into their most unexpected terrain yet—songs with distinct pop structures and even catchy melodies.
While it isn't going to spoil the group's esoteric reputation, Whip's a record that you could feel comfortable passing along to casual heavy music fans. In its first half, the album has headbangable beats, grinding Sabbath-y guitars, and actual hooks. The opener, "Crossing My One Good Finger", might be the catchiest cut any member of the band has ever been involved with, with Neubauten-inspired drums, thunderous guitars, and a fist-pumping chorus (even if the lyrics seem to be about suffocating on toxic fumes). You could actually dance to "White Man's Gonna Lose", as long as Williams' unhinged nihilism doesn't crush your buzz.
All of the catchy and danceable parts are covered in layers of sonic grime, expertly rendered by Parker, one of the world's leading experts at making records sound really bad in a really good way. They are also shot through with the searing misery that only Williams can really bring to a song. As a group, they remain obsessed with destruction and decay; fans looking for more of the nightmare poetry readings that defined Last City Zero should be perversely pleased by tracks like "I Was Never Good at Meth" that frame Williams' feverish, imagistic stanzas in washes of junkyard noise.
Last City Zero positioned Corrections House as one of the more interesting participants in the industrial music resurgence, and Know How to Carry a Whip places them in the lead. Feral and unrelentingly hostile, it's a ragged-edged, rusty shank plunged deep into the ribs of the modern day. Anyone whose formative years as a music fan involved Skinny Puppy or the Wax Trax! label at its peak will feel right at home.


Shaken-Up Versions is an album of the remixes taken from the setlist from the Knife's Shaking the Habitual tour. It makes a serviceable substitute for the live experience, and it's also a fine snapshot of where the Knife’s music is at right now: often challenging, at times a little frustrating, but at its core a thrilling body of work.

Shaken-Up Versions

The Knife’s tour behind last year's Shaking the Habitual was, depending on who you ask, one of two things: that Emma Goldman quote about dance and revolution put into radical, sweat-all-night action and tricked out with top-notch lights and choreography, or a canned and confusing mess of lip-synching and interpretive dance, an expression of social justice as told by the cast of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. This probably had as much to do with your stance on Shaking the Habitual as your spot in the crowd, because from Silent Shout on, the Knife have commanded a massive fanbase who have been waiting almost a decade to finally see them live. Shaken-Up Versions, an album of the remixes taken from the tour's setlist, makes a serviceable substitute for the live experience, and it's also a fine snapshot of where the Knife’s music is at right now: often challenging, at times a little frustrating, but at its core a thrilling body of work.
Like most live albums, the material captured on Shaken-Up Versions loses something when taken offstage, since choreography and charged atmosphere is lost in the transition from arena to wax. Fortunately, these remixes don’t need context. Shaking the Habitual, like the theoretical texts it cites, often seems like it’s been praised and referenced more than listened to in full, so it would have been easy for the Knife to aim for easy accessibility—but the reworks rarely smack of obviousness. On record, “Without You My Life Would Be Boring” possessed one of the stronger hooks on Shaking the Habitual—a quietly nagging synth line, percussion like rattling speakers, gonzo humor, and the rallying cry: “What if we can’t make it/ But we say that we can?”—but the Shaken-Up version takes things in a more challenging direction by puréeing the hooks and pushing the dissonant flutes and vox up front. Without a live crowd to prompt you, the remix is paradoxically easier to be studied than danced to, but it’s the Knife, so the polyrhythms and layers give you lots to work with.
The remixes collected on Shaken-Up Versions aren't quite inaccessible, though. The rework of “We Share Our Mother’s Health” takes on a handclap-buoyed, infectious shuffle, with synths like airhorns, vocals pitched forward, and everything engineered to get butts out of seats. Silent Shout's disturbing title track is transformed into a seven-minute breakdown that shudders with an even more anxious energy, Karin’s new vocal frayed and tentative in place of the original's gravitas. The two deepest cuts are the most excitingly recontextualized, both in terms of the Knife’s current sound and general outlook. “Got 2 Let U”, from 2003's Deep Cuts, loses its strident oboe sample and gains a tempo injection—think 2010's Tomorrow, in a Year as UK garage—while lo-fi synth fairytale “Bird”, from the band’s self-titled 2001 debut, practically jitters here, with lines like “But you wanted me to be a girl/ Without feathers, without urge” taking on extra symbolic meaning when paired with Shaking the Habitual’s message.
Shaken-Up Versions truncates the Shaking the Habitual setlist, so for those familiar with the stage show, the omissions are inevitable. and here they’re both obvious (Jess Arndt’s galvanizing spoken-word “The Body Possum” that appeared in the middle of the show), and puzzling (Silent Shout cut “One Hit”, a creepy track that would have nice company here). Yet, it’s a credit to the Knife’s craft that Shaken-Up Versions regardless feels like a complete statement; there’s a logic to the sequencing (Silent Shout’s singles bookend the album, while Shaking the Habitual’s statements of purpose make up the deeper cuts) and a throughline to the remixing choices that make it work on its own.
Shaken-Up Versions doesn’t threaten replace anything in the Knife’s catalog, but it does highlight the levity that’s always been present in their music—yes, even on self-consciously, unsubtly Important Albums like Shaking the Habitual. The centerpiece of both that record and this new one is one line: “Ready to lose the privilege.” To do that, it helps to lose your inhibitions, and you just might need a good beat, too.


The Los Angeles band Warpaint's three-years-in-the-making second album, featuring cover art from acclaimed video director Chris Cunningham, was produced by Flood and mixed by Nigel Godrich.

Warpaint

It's a rare feat to see an indie rock band as stylishly presented as Warpaint is on their self-titled second album. The Los Angeles quartet's 2010 debut The Fool certainly got them to an admirable level of success, albeit one where having either Flood produce or Nigel Godrich mix the follow-up would be a serious coup; nearly three years in the making, Warpaint has both. Acclaimed video director Chris Cunningham is on board as well, contributing the arresting visuals for first single "Love Is to Die" as well as the cover art. Judging from the talent involved, this all sounds like a massive, star-making rollout from the second Clinton term and unfortunately, Warpaint plays the part too well. Digging in the used CD crates to exhume hours of rightfully ignored post-OK Computer paranoid androids, catatonic trip-hop, and gluttonous Francophile ambience, Warpaint spends 2014 remembering everything 1999 tried to forget.
But for all of Warpaint’s fashionable aesthetics and packaging, they're a most square thing: a jam band. And not even a jam band in the fairgrounds-conquering sense most understand it, where typical verse-chorus structure serves as a jumping off point for indulgent, technically flashy solos. The thrill of seeing Warpaint’s uncanny, egoless instrumental interplay in a live setting didn’t always translate on The Fool, though the record did serve as a good preview. There, Warpaint went past mere jamming, conjuring music into existence, hazy vistas of desert blues, cavernous post-punk, and disembodied, ghostly vocals, summoned to create alluring mirage rock.
But on Warpaint, the band goes from raising spirits to the embalming business, adding layers and layers of polish to lifeless stiffs. To their credit, they haven't changed their compositional approach; though the sound is vastly more lustrous, expansive, and expensive, each individual player is emphasized in a manner that emboldens the group collectively. In her first record since joining the band, drummer Stella Mozgawa is mixed as a lead instrument, and Lindberg’s bass is often tasked with not just the melodic framework, but the actual melodies. Meanwhile, the vocals of Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman are given crystalline spaces of their own to act as texture, while their guitars are either padding or swapped out for whooshing synthesizers. It’s a total inversion of pop music, which seems to have been the point.
And like every guitar-based band as of late, Warpaint have stressed that they’ve spent the past four years listening to anything but guitar-based music, seeking out as much R&B and hip-hop as possible. They’ve called Warpaint a mashup with Jay-Z. They also called Warpaint their Dark Side of the Moon. They’re not exactly wrong—the ponderous, bottom-heavy tempos of Warpaint are a triangulation point between space-rock and rap. But while trip-hop has long been derogated as functional lifestyle music, it began as a forward-thinking deconstruction, and the difference between the titans of the genre to which Warpaint has been errantly compared (Portishead, Massive Attack) and the forgotten second tier were the same things that guide pop music from time immemorial: a compelling vocal presence, innovation, a perspective, or more briefly, songs.
The way Warpaint hopscotch through the tricky guitar figures on “Keep It Healthy” is satisfying from a technical standpoint, as is the syncopated, hollowed-out riff of “Biggy” or any number of their muscular rhythmic structures—it’s all the work of accomplished musicians, a rare proficiency that never devolves into showmanship. But the arrangements twist themselves into knots Kokal and Wayman can’t untie—vocal melodies invariably bob, weave, dip and dart, trying so hard to find a sliver of space that they never resolve into a memorable pattern. For the most part, Warpaint take the path of lesser resistance, lapsing into the same layered coos that defined The Fool, but now that they’re mixed to be a focal point, the melodic inertia makes Warpaint’s 51 minutes feel three times as long.
“Teese” slumps its way towards a chorus that recalls Dot Allison’s “Colour Me”, though I’m not suggesting that Warpaint are trying to pull a fast one on us. The problem is that “Teese”, like so much of Warpaint, instantly reminds one of a third-wave chillout chanteuse. “Love Is to Die” stands out for having some kind of verse-chorus structure, as well as the most discernible bit of ineffectual relationship balm (“Love is to die/ Love is to not die/ Love is to dance”). There’s almost no way to make a smooth segue towards that gawky, tuneless hook, and yet, the pivot from the key in the verse is especially awkward.
More troubling than the lack of hooks is the way Warpaint operate in their new, immaculate surroundings like they’re worried about a security deposit, barely leaving a fingerprint on these air-streamed synths, let alone getting their hands dirty. They try to create atmosphere in an airlock, lumbering instead of fostering groove, failing to generate any heat or friction as nearly every interesting turn on these songs happens within the first minute. Even with Godrich and Flood at their disposal, Warpaint work within a limited dynamic range, relying on a busier cymbal pattern or the introduction of a slightly different synth to instigate a tonal shift, but never a crescendo. Their melodic and textural limitations are even more pronounced when during their protracted genre experiments. The M.I.A.-style enunciation and warping vocal effects of “Disco // very” are every bit as forced as the titular pun, but rigorously scheduled playtime is better than none at all. “Drive” similarly makes its source material all too obvious, and it sounds even more dated than its surroundings, a big-budget rendering of the handcrafted, Italo-inspired dark pop whose moment just disappeared in the rearview.
Even those sympathetic to what Warpaint are doing have all but admitted this album lacks hooks, grooves, or even a pulse most of the time—relying on the idea of it as “grower” or an “immersive experience.” But the question never gets answered: to what end are we indulging these jams? As pop, it’s unconscionably tuneless, as transportive space-rock, it’s not analog enough to be charmingly retro, and certainly not futuristic. The lyrics are symptomatic of Warpaint itself, failing to impress or even engage, assuming distance and emotional vacancy necessarily equal “mystery.” So even as a proxy for makeout sessions, it fails—it sits completely still and makes you do all the work. It fittingly does make its demands in a very late-90s way, assuming its status as a limited resource (i.e., a big-budget rock album from an up-and-coming band) for a captive audience either tuned into MTV, the local alternative radio station, or just $17 in the hole and demanding some kind of return on investment. But as the saying goes, time is money and Warpaint is the sound of both disappearing into the void.


This live album, recorded in 2017 at the venerated Toronto concert hall, shows the duo sounding reliable and downright professional. It’s missing the wild utopian energy that characterizes their albums and their best performances.

Massey Fucking Hall

Right before launching into his set closer on Massey Fucking Hall, Japandroids frontman Brian King takes a moment to thank “you guys up front... [for] making us feel a little bit more like it’s a normal Japandroids show.” Up until this, he and David Prowse had been playing the most not-normal Japandroids show in history. The duo were facing a larger crowd than any they’d seen from the second leg of 2017’s Near to the Wild Heart of Life tour, in their nation’s most venerated concert hall, less than a week after the death of Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie, the People’s Champ of Canadian rock. What followed King’s nervous aside is the most normal thing to happen at a Japandroids show: they end with “The House That Heaven Built,” a song that King has admitted he cannot sing for the life of him.
Even Japandroids’ most evangelical fans know that King and David Prowse can’t really pull of most of their vocals live; those “whoa”s and “yeah”s don’t quite hit the same when it’s really two guys doing it, as opposed to two guys overdubbed to sound like 250. Japandroids were capable of live transcendence, but only if they weren’t completely trashed by the time they got on stage or at a point during their marathon tours where King has inevitably blown out his voice. Their reputation as hard-drinkin’, hard-rockin’, hard-lovin’ punk vagabonds ran up against their reality as a couple of studio perfectionists, and Massey Fucking Hall lays this dissonance bare.
The live album reveals a Japandroids that became reliable, downright professional. Or at least practical—here, “Younger Us” truly sounds like it’s being sung by someone older and wiser; “Fire’s Highway” steps off the gas to avoid the daredevil melodic bridge jump of its chorus, staying safely in the carpool lane. The chorus of a Japandroids song is written to be yelled like hell to the heavens while surrounded by hundreds of people who will drown you out. But those people didn’t have to do it all over again two nights later, like King did, and you could hear those calculations creep inevitably into their playing.
The Post-Nothing cuts fare best; they had fewer moving parts and thus didn’t suffer from being played sloppily or off-key. King riffs on the Stooges’ “1970” at the top of “Heart Sweats,” recasting one of their least-essential album cuts into the lineage of brilliantly braindead rock, while “Sovereignty” still thrums on the desperate days when they couldn’t draw a dozen people outside of Vancouver.
The songs on Near to the Wild Heart of Life began to integrate the sort of things that make songs work in 3000-capacity venues—slower tempos, synthesizers, backing vocals and lyrics about the road that were based in reality—but if they added new personnel on stage or had a stage setup that distracted from King’s three amp stacks, they wouldn’t be Japandroids anymore. The steamrolling momentum of setlist highlight “Arc of Bar” redeems the surrealist hokum of King’s most divisive song, but even if you could watch it set to Japandroids’ modest light show, it still can’t quite compete with the Be Here Now-level excess conjured by the studio version.
Despite its flaws, Massey Fucking Hall serves a monument for a band whose vision of non-toxic masculinity remains utopian and inspiring. It’s a world full of wild urges, but also one in which  romantic fulfillment serves as the highest form of self-actualization (see: “Continuous Thunder,” “No Known Drink or Drug”). Massey Fucking Hall documents thousands of people bearing witness to two unpretentious guys playing unfashionable rock songs about ordinary people willing to push themselves to extraordinary places in their relationships. If Massey Fucking Hall underwhelms, it ironically functions as the greatest possible endorsement to see Japandroids in person, if that opportunity ever exists again.

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L.A. producer  Seth Haley remains devoted to spacey slow-funk synth excursions with a whiff of ’80s nostalgia.

Silicon Tare EP

As Com Truise, Los Angeles-transplanted producer Seth Haley uses a narrow palette, but it works on a remarkable variety of canvases. Early EPs such as 2010's Cyanide Sisters and 2011's Fairlight introduced a project devoted to spacey slow-funk synth excursions with a whiff of ’80s nostalgia— an approach Haley continued on Com Truise's 2011 fine debut LP, Galactic Melt, and 2013's rarities grab bag In Decay. Over the years, though, this "Com Truise sound" has seemed equally suited to remixes for pop stars like Charli XCX or Maroon 5 as well as for Ghostly International labelmate Tycho. PARTYNEXTDOOR even sampled Galactic Melt's "Hyperlips" for the highlight of the Drake protégé's self-titled 2013 debut.
Working with other artists gives Haley a vocal presence that can go in front of his cleanly designed backdrops. Plenty of instrumental or nearly instrumental music can dominate the foreground, of course, but listening to Com Truise often feels like listening to a movie or videogame score. Which makes sense: Haley has described these releases as "like a film score... from the mind" for a storyline involving the interplanetary journey of "the world's first synthetic/robotic astronaut." On Galactic Melt, samples of dating advice ("Brokendate") or orgasmic moans ("VHS Sex") served as additional entrypoints, and the standout on 2014's Wave 1 EP was a guest vocal turn that had Ford & Lopatin's Joel Ford sounding like a cyborg Scritti Politti ("Declination"). Follow-up EP Silicon Tare sounds once again like vintage Com Truise, but it would have benefited from having more of a focal point.
The five tracks here differ from their predecessors only by degrees, so if you liked the previous records there's little here to find too upsetting, but as an EP it feels like a stopgap ahead of the next Com Truise album. Most enticing, unsurprisingly, are the two tracks shared in advance: the drifting, jittery flicker of "Diffraction" and the languid sweeps of the title track. But opener "Sunspot," with its busy drum programming, and the subsequent "Forgive," punctuated by squeals of synth, are of a piece. The closest the EP comes to an outright failure is the draggy finale, "Du Zirconia," which at six minutes takes too long to shift from its high opening bleeps to its eventual midtempo groove. What's a shame is that these tracks do little to expand on their initial ideas, let alone do more than set a vague, unblinking mood for their ostensible subject, the robot astronaut on its voyage through space.
Artists whose work shifts only subtly between releases have some welcome precedents, this year alone including the likes of Julianna Barwick or the Field. What raises bigger questions about Com Truise is the durability of this particular sound. From the soul and funk records that became "disco" to the varied post-punk sounds later boiled down into "alternative," genres often have more to offer before they've become codified; the homebaked synth-funk of Neon Indian or Washed Out didn't really have a name in 2009's deadbeat summer, but popular opinion coalesced around the name "chillwave" by the time Com Truise came to embody many of that YouTube-retro style's basic points. With Neon Indian — Com Truise's former tourmate — recently resurgent, Lindstrøm mastering similar sounds from more of a disco angle, and Chromatics dutifully parceling out dusky gems every several months, how much room is there for ’80s-harking synthscapes?


On her second album, the 24-year-old solo guitarist’s unique style finds inspiration from unexpected places and sounds untethered to any tradition whatsoever.

Urban Driftwood

Yasmin Williams has described her approach to acoustic guitar as a kind of creative problem-solving. Drawn to the instrument after mastering Guitar Hero 2, she dreamed of tapping along the fretboard like rock virtuosos before her. Unable to replicate their style, she laid the guitar on her lap, tuned the strings in harmony with each other, and played it like a keyboard. Drawing from a love of hip-hop, she sought an underlying rhythm throughout her wordless, melodic compositions. Without an accompanist, she attached a kalimba—a type of thumb piano—at the bottom of her instrument, plucking it with her right hand while her left navigated the strings.
Williams’ inventive style, which has also involved wearing tap shoes and taking a cello bow to her instrument, has made her stand out in the field of solo guitarists. But the power of her music is its immediacy. The 24-year-old is not only a skilled technician but also an instinctive songwriter, penning memorable compositions that, even at their most open-ended, proceed in a loose verse-chorus structure. Her smooth and immersive playing belies the complexity below the surface. It is this talent that allows her to, say, cover a Swae Lee and Post Malone song, and have it sound as natural and spellbinding as her own work.
While Williams’ 2018 debut Unwind felt like a showcase for her versatility as a guitarist, her second album, Urban Driftwood, presents her more fully as a composer. It is more focused and fleshed out than its predecessor, with Williams complimenting her acoustic guitar playing with West African instruments like the kora and djembe. She has described the album as an abstract diary of her year in 2020: Opening with the light optimism of “Sunshowers,” it darkens into knottier, more contemplative material over the course of 10 songs. Pensive and bittersweet, the mood can recall William Tyler’s sonic storytelling or Mary Lattimore’s serene harp experiments.
Williams’ songwriting fits into an ongoing trend of instrumental music that more closely recalls the new age-leaning mood music of the Windham Hill label than the droning, pastoral fingerstyle approach of figureheads like John Fahey. But part of the thrill of Urban Driftwood is how untethered Williams sounds to any tradition whatsoever: She has a gift for penning melodies that feel as catchy as pop songs, as in the lightly descending refrain of “Juvenescence,” but her approach to the instrument also allows her to confound expectations, making you question the source of each overtone and rhythm.
The most dazzling moments are often the most intricate. In “Swift Breeze.” Williams uses everything at her fingertips like a percussion instrument, from the harmonics high along the fretboard to her persistent knocking against the wood of the body. In quieter songs like “Through the Woods” and “Dragonfly,” she finds melodies in repeated, hammered-on notes like cycles of birdsong. The clear, keyed-in production makes for a uniformly serene listen but Williams’ performance is masterfully physical; her strumming can sound like brushes on snare drums while her fingerpicking can echo like gentle taps across cymbals.
Other than a mournful violin accompaniment from Taryn Wood in “Adrift,” the only presence besides Williams arrives late in the album. Djembe player Amadou Kouaye offers a steady pulse through the title track, as his hand-drumming guides the album toward its narrative climax. “‘Urban Driftwood’ is more like the music I grew up listening to than any other song I’ve released so far,” Williams said in a press release, explaining the importance of paying homage to her heritage as a Black guitarist. As her kora blends with Kouaye’s rhythms, the collaboration offers a natural evolution for Williams’ music: Within these interlocking grooves, she is both listening and performing, finding her place in a vast history and fearlessly pushing forward.

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Executive-produced by Johnny Jewel, this Madonna tribute album transports her iconic singles to the boutique label’s seedy, neon-lit lounges.

Italians Do It Better

Madonna debuted the phrase “Italians Do It Better” on a T-shirt in the 1986 video for “Papa Don’t Preach,” the song that opens a new compilation of Madonna covers, also called Italians Do It Better, executive-produced and released by synth auteur Johnny Jewel, whose record label, you’ll recall, is called Italians Do It Better. If you’re familiar with Jewel’s boutique musical curation—or his band Chromatics, whose other members unexpectedly announced their split last month—you know what to expect: Italians Do It Better filters some of the most iconic pop songs of all time through seedy, neon-lit lounges where obscure musicians with names like Orion and Desire hover around giant crystal ashtrays.
The Madonna influence is baked into the Italians Do It Better label in more ways than one, and the covers collection is idol worship as label showcase. Many artists here also appear on the Italians Do It Better roster, and on previous comps like 2020’s After Dark 3; Maltese songwriter and sound designer JOON, who sings “Papa Don’t Preach,” and Australian saxophonist turned pop singer Jorja Chalmers, who performs a dark and smoky version of “Justify My Love,” have both issued recent albums through the label. Perhaps you’ve been waiting for someone to put you onto Belarusian post-punk trio Dlina Volny, whose Molchat Doma-esque sense of ennui is the perfect match for the American Life track “Hollywood,” or Los Angeles singer Glüme, a sort of Angelyne for the TikTok era, who covers, of course, “Material Girl” as a waltz.
As a curation project, Italians Do It Better favors familiarity over deep cuts, and with the exception of “I’m Addicted,” from 2012’s MDNA, every one of the original tracks was released as a single. The two MDNA selections, “I’m Addicted” and “Gang Bang,” represent a predictable weakness, and while Vancouver quartet In Mirrors manages to work “I’m Addicted” into a satisfying industrial churn, longtime IDIB associate Farah’s version of “Gang Bang” never gets there. A personal favorite Madonna song was the biggest disappointment: Russian duo Love Object’s dour version of “Frozen” (from 1998’s Ray of Light) trades the original’s weightless trip-hop hum for a flat-affect vocal and blown-speaker growl that lands like a lead balloon.
The subtractive production approach works much better: Sally Shapiro’s angelic “Holiday” retains the original’s synth bass and cowbell, but long instrumental passages and lighter vocals open space for fluting synths and a disco pulse. The most reverent performances become a way to hear old songs for the first time again, and to rediscover a sense of daring that recedes with decades’ worth of familiarity. The percussive finger snaps and JOON’s ASMR-like whisper on “Papa Don’t Preach” evoke its story of teen pregnancy with fresh vulnerability; the only act to receive two slots, Brooklyn-based ex-Latter Day Saints sister duo MOTHERMARY, offer synthy choral takes on “Like a Virgin” and “Like a Prayer,” choices that feel spiritually attuned to Madonna’s own history of religious provocation.
Madonna is famously a generalist, while Italians Do It Better, the label, is specific: faintly narcotized electro-pop, big beats, the streaky nostalgia of VHS tape. Even with 19 contributing artists, Italians Do It Better, the compilation, takes a narrower dynamic and aesthetic range than its inspiration. The effect is dreamier, less full-bodied, more charged by synthesizer arpeggios than sexual innuendo, a mood that carries through to French singer Lou Rebecca’s minimalist, baby-voiced rendition of “Burning Up” (and momentary “Hung Up” mashup) and Bark Bark Disco’s gently exquisite version of “Borderline.” Between the strength of the source material and the singular, streamlined production, Italians Do It Better’s long list of singles approaches the self-contained atmosphere of an album. But at 20 tracks, we might as well have one more, so allow me to suggest: the Italians Do It Better version of “Over and Over.”

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