On their second album, the Doylestown, Penn., quintet Balance & Composure have made an unapologetically old-school alt-rock record of jet-engine guitars, impotent rage, and searing, soaring vocals-- it isn’t about teen angst, it just sounds like it.

Balance and Composure: The Things We Think We're Missing

The Things We Think We're Missing

If you’ve resolved every resentment you’ve carried from high school, are in a conflict-free relationship with your significant other, and have not taken a minute in the past few months trying to figure out in literal terms what the fuck is wrong with you people*?*, then by all means, carry on. There’s nothing to see here. Since most of you stuck around, let’s consider Balance & Composure’s second LP The Things We Think We’re Missing. The Doylestown, Penn., quintet have made an unapologetically old-school alt-rock album of jet-engine guitars, impotent rat-in-a-cage rage, and searing, soaring vocals-- it isn’t about teen angst, it just sounds like it. As such, this record looks to fill a void for people seeking popular rock music more stylish and emotive than, say, Avenged Sevenfold, but aren’t really in a position to opt out into counterculture. In other words, it’s “alternative rock” in exact terms and nothing about this will make you feel cool or more connected to the zeitgeist. It’s even better if you don’t care about that shit at all, so the only question is, are Balance & Composure good at what they do?
On lead single “Reflection”, the answer is tacitly an emphatic fuck yeah, though I don’t sense that emphatic positivity is something it would cop to. But as a genre piece, it’s damn near perfect. Upon hearing it, a colleague of mine with more refined tastes said, “I’ve never felt that way in my entire life.” It’s a testament to “Reflection” when that way can be identified so quickly. There’s no conflict here, just pubescent confusion of encountering growth and emotions you don’t have the ability to process. A gorgeous lead riff from Andrew Slaymaker (real name, no gimmicks) introduces “Reflection” and is bodyslammed into altered shapes by two pounding chords. Meanwhile, Jon Simmons’ despondent vocals are softened with slightly flat harmonies-- he can’t decide whether to be feared or to be loved or whether he’s just in fear of being loved. A drum roll leads to what sounds like what should be a chorus of epic emotional venting, yet the band effectively renders the straightjacket of one’s self by thrashing in place. As far as the lyrics go, they’re filled with self-loathing, envy, judgment, anger, fear, pretty much everything that registers as a character defect to an adult. And yet “Reflection” reminds you of how those qualities can feel like survival skills at an age when every social setting feels like a warzone.
It’s a powerful formula and one B&C wisely try to replicate throughout The Things We Think We’re Missing. There’s a strange quirk where it sounds like the band is trying out new guises in two-song chunks: during the opening duo of “Parachutes” and “Lost Your Name”, B&C are a plutonium-powered emo band relying more on force than finesse, on slowly cresting melodies and sustained vocal howls rather than sharp hooks. They’re inversions of Sunny Day Real Estate’s “Circles”, forgoing grunge dynamics entirely by lunging out of your speakers and using the chorus as respite before another tidal push. They provide an easy segue into the more traditionally structured, car-friendly hooks of “Back of Your Head” and “Tiny Raindrop” and as Things progresses, B&C have subtly involved into a band that learned enough from their heroes to troubleshoot some of their mistakes. “When I Come Undone” asks what if the Cure’s Ross Robinson-produced album wasn’t some kind of forced primal scream therapy? What if Billy Corgan realized that he could rock a trenchcoat, pancake makeup, and a Stratocaster at the same time during his goth phase? Enjoy “I’m Swimming” and forget Silversun Pickups ever existed.
That said, The Things We Think We’re Missing is overwhelming four minutes at a time, galvanizing in 10 minute spans, and utterly exhausting taken as a whole. There are cracks in the brick wall of radio-adjusted compression-- hints of acoustic jangle peek through the stormy romanticism of “Tiny Raindrop”, “Ella” and “Cut Me Open” incorporate reverberating drone, and while the acoustic solo performance of “Dirty Head” works against just about every single strength of B&C, it’s probably what they meant when acknowledging the influence of Neutral Milk Hotel. Problem is they’re all mastered at the same extremely loud volume, negating the idea that Things is a record meant to be listened to sequentially rather than strip-mined for singles.
Simmons encounters similar issues with flexibility and nuance as a vocalist. When he’s going full blast, his tone articulates more than his actual words and standard issue angst (“I need a spark to light this house so dark and deep”) detonates into nuclear catharsis. When he tones down his delivery, a bratty, nasal edge puts an unfortunate spotlight on lyrics that draw from the usual sources for sensitive dude poetry-- Morrissey’s auto eroticism (the night drive fantasies of “When I Come Undone” and “Tiny Raindrop”), Microsoft Word thesaurus (“I need you on my garments/ come at me horrid eyes that seep into my system”) and Robert Smith’s playful surrealism, only without the playful part. The most wincing lyric here (“I’m the spider in your room/ and I got eight eyes all on you”) is taken from a song whose title projects the emotional tenor of the entire record: “Notice Me”.
It’s understandable, since B&C are in a position where they do have to beg for recognition. The Things We Think We’re Missing is a strong alt-rock album when such a thing is about the least fashionable thing imaginable, and its practitioners and fans are largely ignored-- their sonic ideals about punk and indie are sourced from Nirvana, but at a time when the platinum polish of Nevermind has become weirdly undervalued compared to the more ethically admirable In Utero. It carries on the tradition of alt-rock records that were crucial entry points for young listeners while being scoffed at by their older siblings: Siamese Dream, the Cure albums that got MTV airplay, Foo Fighters’ The Colour & The Shape. Not to mention their modern analogues, Deftones’ White Pony, Brand New’s The Devil and God Are Raging Inside of Me, Thursday’s A City By The Light Divided, artful and ambitious heavy pop-rock albums that respectively transcended three genres that triangulate B&C’s coordinates (nu-metal, pop-punk, emo and/or screamo) and were still treated with hostility if not ignored entirely by ostensibly open-minded indie rock fans based on prior reputation. B&C aren’t at that level, but considering the leap they’ve made from their pedestrian debut Separation, The Things We Think We’re Missing serves notice that we shouldn't be surprised if they get there.


The Scottish band's fourth album avoids the escapist tendencies of their previous records to confront social and emotional turmoil with startling bite. And production from Leo Abrahams, a longtime Brian Eno collaborator, breaks through the sluggishness that had marked their recent releases.

Pedestrian Verse

Growing up in Selkirk, Scotland, Scott Hutchison was a shy boy. Left in a room with other kids, he would go quiet, and for this, the story goes, his mother called him "her frightened rabbit." Years later, less shy, he began to write songs and sing them live, then along the way he added friends to the act-- two guitarists, a bassist, his brother on the drums-- and with them made albums on which he howled and drank and fucked and fought, every chord seeming to push the memory of his skittish namesake further and further away.
Yet the shy little boy remains. If a single thread can be spun from Frightened Rabbit's first three albums, it's Hutchison's chronic tendency toward escape: into and out of relationships and the past, down through the bottom of uncountable whiskey glasses. "Let's call me a Baptist, call this a drowning of the past/ She's there at the shoreline, throwing stones at my back," he sang on "Swim Until You Can't See Land", an easy favorite from 2010's The Winter of Mixed Drinks, the band jangling along behind as he disappears into the sea-- in search of rebirth, perhaps, or at least a change of scenery.
But Pedestrian Verse, Frightened Rabbit's fourth album, finds Hutchison and his crew in different waters. Opening track "Acts of Man" immediately disarms. "I'm that dickhead in the kitchen, giving wine to your best girl's glass," Hutchison breathes in a nasal falsetto over a gentle piano; the song seems poised to continue as some porcelain lament, but then begins its slow zoom out, from the kitchen to the street to the bar down the way, the percolating guitar and heartbeat drums rolling out as Hutchison notes the bar fights, the date rapes, the coward's festering pride. "Man, he breeds although he shouldn't/ Breeding just because he comes/ Acts the father for a minute/ Until the worst instincts return," he seethes. "I am just like all the rest of them," Hutchison sings, and he offers no apology, begs no forgiveness, slings no blame. This is a considerable step forward for the dude who once sang of a mangled breakup, "My clothes won't let me close the door/ 'Cause my trousers seem to love your floor."
Some sort of heartbreak skulks in the background here, too, though it's balanced with hints towards a similar split with religion. In "Late March, Death March", Hutchison is on the outs with both God and a girl; it's clear he's already given up on one, and the other's not faring much better. Assuming personal responsibility isn't exactly the stuff rock 'n roll fantasies are made of, but it sure as hell makes for better living-- and, in the right hands, better songs. As a lyricist, Hutchison's strength is increasingly proving to be lucid assessments of social and emotional turmoil; he can't push away the darkness completely, but he can feel around in every nook and cranny to get a full topography of the shadows.
More readily apparent than this new emotional maturity is how Frightened Rabbit has really shined up as a band. Earlier records had a certain cozy, shambolic feel: acoustic and electric guitars pushed along by dusty organ moans and piano lines that sounded plunked out in a dimly-lit barroom. It was charming, and occasionally bracing, but by 2012's State Hospital EP, the band's second release for Atlantic, they seemed bored by it all. Here, producer Leo Abrahams, a longtime Brian Eno collaborator, has come in and jumpstarted things. The quietly fierce drumwork of Grant Hutchison now forms the backbone around which guitars needle and prod; unexpected textures are layered deep into the tracks, with horns and string swells rippling against gauzy curtains of distortion. The chorus dynamics err on the side of restraint, avoiding Arcade Fire's apocalyptic urgency or Mumford and Sons' tweedy bombast. As always, Hutchison's rhotic howl is a pleasure all its own, but here he especially seems to knead and pull at his vowels.
The precise ecstasy of the production buoys the record through its few sluggish patches. There are the kernels of at least three great songs buried in the wonky diptych of "Housing (In)" and "Housing (Out)", and "Nitrous Gas" loses some lovely moments amidst a muddly anaesthetic metaphor; Hutchison's songwriting is best at its most emotionally specific. Frightened Rabbit isn't a perfect band-- and nobody knows this better than the lead singer. Of all the harsh truths he reminds himself of in Pedestrian Verse, the most endearing comes on the closing track, "Oil Slick", where he retraces his steps back to The Winter of Mixed Drinks just to gawk at his own maudlin tendencies. "Took to the ocean, in a boat this time," he sings over a rubbery electric guitar lope, a little smile in his voice. "Only an idiot would swim through the shit I write."


The full-length debut from the New York folk-rock duo addresses the nonlinear nature of healing with a gentle and deliberate touch.

Light Moving Time

In the fog of emotional turbulence, Babehoven’s Maya Bon holds onto everyday reminders that time moves on. Bon and her collaborator Ryan Albert explored the theme of healing earlier this year on Sunk, an EP that offered an insulated glimpse into grief and acceptance, narrated through suspended, patient songwriting. Their full-length debut, Light Moving Time, expands on Sunk’s musical and thematic foundations, addressing the often illogical and nonlinear nature of healing with a gentle and deliberate touch.
Blending folk and indie rock with the occasional glaze of shoegaze guitars, Babehoven ornament tender, consonant acoustics with subtle dissonance. Take “Do It Fast,” a track that touches on feelings of hopelessness. A free-moving, horn-like synth emerges in the background, accompanied at one point by what sounds like a taser sweeping the stereo range, and distortion overtakes Bon’s vocals as she sings about how she’s “been thinking about how a hurricane was named after you.” These cautiously unsettling features make it impossible to feel entirely comfortable while listening to Light Moving Time.
Even tracks that point toward hope like “I’m on Your Team” are lined with blue. The song begins with Bon’s vocals doubled by the guitar line, a moment of musical solidarity that embodies the concept of being alone but not lonely (or perhaps hiding it well). “Choosing pain when it’s clean/Learning how to be angry but not be mean,” she sings against a persistent guitar chug, suggesting a sense of personal responsibility that comes with time. Though Bon’s lyrics champion support systems and search for “a way out,” her wistful tone gives the song a melancholic air. The conflicted emotions reflect how trauma rarely disappears but continues to inform our lives in subtle ways; on time-halting closer “Often,” Bon speaks to it directly as a physical presence in the backseat of her car.
The pain of redefining our relationships to others threads through the record, like in uptempo standout “Stand It.” It’s a head-bobbing meditation on choosing distance from a loved one when it’s in your best interest: “I’d rather stand outside in the cold/Than walk the way back to my home,” Bon sings. “I love you, but I hate you anyway.” The following track, “Circles,” is its haunted afterimage, illustrating how walking away is easier said than done. Against processed vocals and reverb-heavy production that sounds like trying to stargaze at dusk, Bon sings, “I might be on my knees by sunrise/Begging for some way to stand.” Searching for a place to land, the single syllable of “I” wanders and winds like a pastoral flute.
Light Moving Time is especially evocative at its most expansive. On the highlight “Pockets,” Bon enhances lyrics like “You’re hoping that if there is a God/That they don’t search your pockets at heaven’s gate/And find the vices that drove us apart” with short melismas and sky-reaching notes. Her vocal range has chill-prompting potential, but more often it tends to stay within a certain radius. There are moments where the album’s circular melodies and chugging guitars feel too repetitive, like on “Break the Ice” and “June Phoenix” (which includes a rare wink at the audience: “I am trying to write something funny to get a good rating this time”). Light Moving Time could afford to lean more into dissonance. While the music can feel safe and overly reserved, Bon’s adventurous lyricism is what makes the record so lovely: at once diaristic and philosophical, disarming and inviting, introspective and far-reaching.


Frequent Kendrick Lamar collaborator Anna Wise's The Feminine: Act I boldly presents the plight of the everyday woman. If it's corny at times, it's clever at others. Those triumphs make it worthwhile.

The Feminine: Act I

Many knew Anna Wise as one-half of the duo Sonnymoon, as the siren who provides the Yin to Dane Orr's Yang. However, her celebrity kicked up a notch once she became Kendrick Lamar's go-to vocalist, lending her ethereal vibes to his projects Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City, To Pimp a Butterfly, and untitled unmastered. If Anna Wise had any perfect moment to step forward to her podium, then that time is certainly now.
She arrives armed with a message that many if not most have trouble effectively communicating. In 2014 a video circulated of a woman walking the streets of New York City amidst a diverse array of male cat calls. The video introduced a dichotomy that manifested itself in every Facebook comment section. Half of the viewers were offended (though many women were also unsurprised) and the other half rolled their eyes. The mixed reaction to that very video is exactly what Wise is speaking to on her EP. The project opens with a snippet of a dissertation on the feminine, and its need to be understood clearly. It pours into the delicate "Precious Possession," which at first listen channels all the romantic vibes of early Erykah Badu, but placed within the context of the project could arguably be completely sardonic. "I wanna be your princess," Wise gently coos. "Will you call me your girlfriend?" That's not to say women should exist as stoic figures shrugging at the sight of flowers; she's simply displaying the layers of the feminine psyche, which at times can be self-minimizing in the presence of love.
An interlude "How Would You Call a Dog?" reflects on the dual catcalling of both types of "bitches," as Wise snatches the derogations for "BitchSlut," a laundry list of absurd ways women are called both terms. It's empowering, but this topic has been talked into mastication. Still, when Wise cites reasons for being a "bitchslut," including "Cause your hair's long/ Cause you shaved it off," there's a tongue-in-cheek air of brilliance. "Decrease My Waist, Increase My Wage" is laid out similarly to a song by a group like the Coup, where the important lyrics are woven so tightly into a basic-sounding song that the stop-and-listen effect solicits an inevitable "Oh shit."
Any reference to women on anything is oftentimes an abrasive subject to broach, especially at a time when many are just learning to embrace the word "feminist." What Anna Wise attempts with The Feminine: Act I is to serve this realness with a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. While it's still a jagged little pill to swallow—and the proof is in the EP's parts that traipse into cornier territory—Wise does present a degree of transparency that many attempt but wind up losing half their audience in the process. This isn't simply a project to make women nod and smirk; it's a work to hand over to men who assume every aspect of a woman's life is a gift with no curses.


The hybrid jazz drummer and producer’s latest album uses his familiar post-production techniques but feels more deftly orchestrated and rhythmically complex.

In These Times

In These Times opens with a rhythmic ostinato, a smattering of applause, and a quote from Harry Belafonte. It’s a sample of a radio interview that the folk singer and scholar gave with Studs Terkel, in which he discusses his interpretation of the John Henry story. In Belafonte’s view, the legendary rail tunnel worker was not necessarily against the steam drill that overseers wanted to bring in to finish the job of digging the Big Bend Tunnel on the C&O Railroad, or the human progress it represented. He only wanted to preserve the dignity of those who had given their lives to the tunnel. “I ain’t really opposed to the machine, I just feel that the machine can’t take the place of the soul and the sweat for the many men who died to help build this tunnel,” Belafonte says, speaking in Henry’s voice. “And we got to finish it, and it just ain’t no two ways about it.”
It’s easy to understand the resonance of this quote for Makaya McCraven, a drummer and composer who has spent his career thus far working by hand and by machine, fusing live-in-the-room jazz improvisation with the electronic manipulations of hip-hop. On albums like 2015’s In the Moment and 2018’s Universal Beings, that meant recording open-ended concerts and then taking a digital scalpel to the tapes of his ensembles’ performances: cutting, looping, rearranging, and occasionally overdubbing new parts; sculpting melodic themes out of stray bits of improvisation and whittling down rhythms to their hypnotic essences. In a series of remarkable performances after the release of Universal Beings, McCraven and his band recreated the album for the stage, playing meticulous arrangements of the bandleader’s hybrid creations and elaborating upon them with even more improv, as if he’d charted them out that way in the first place. The music had started fairly recognizably as jazz, then assumed a mutant electronic form, then came out the other side as jazz again.
In These Times, McCraven’s latest album, reminds me at times of the Universal Beings live show. (Putting numbers to his discography is difficult: not unlike a rapper’s, it is filled with mixtapes, collaborations, and expanded editions that can be just as vital as his “official” albums.) Though it uses some of the same compositional techniques as previous records, it is clearly the product of more deliberate work done in advance of the musicians picking up their instruments. For the first time, it sounds mostly like they are reading notation from a score. And yet it retains the unmistakable rhythmic imprint of hip-hop. McCraven favors meters that are just a sliver of a beat shorter or longer than you’d expect, which gives the effect of a looping sample that has been cut at slightly the wrong length. Like the Universal Beings live players—many of whom appear on In These Times—the musicians are imitating the sound of a chopped-up recording, playing with extreme precision that masquerades as a certain cobbled-together sloppiness. It often recalls J Dilla, who, in declining to quantize his beats to the rigid rhythmic grid that governed other producers’ work, brought new human unpredictability to the instrumental sound of ’90s and 2000s rap.
On the album-opening title track, McCraven deftly switches between emphasizing the asymmetrical jaggedness of the meter and downplaying it. At first, the band is shredding through obviously technical and difficult material; then, at the drop of a hat, they are practically playing a waltz—albeit one with a little limp in its step. The pulse hasn’t changed, but the feel of the music is on a different planet.
If that makes In These Times sound dry and academic, it isn’t. The title track is anchored in its first half by a wistful theme for string quartet and in its second by a breathtaking solo from alto saxophonist Greg Ward, neither of which requires any knowledge of arcane time signatures to get its hooks in you. Whereas most difficult music is imposing at first, and requires repeated listening to reveal its pleasures, In These Times works in the opposite fashion. It is groovy, tuneful, and approachable; only after careful study might you apprehend the music’s astounding intricacy, if you care to discover it at all. I came to deeper engagement with the album after listening closely to the rhythms, but I can imagine someone else delighting primarily in its lushly arranged melodies. You could play it at a dinner party without raising an eyebrow.
The best moments of In These Times come when an outburst of individual spontaneity is allowed to briefly rupture the album’s luxuriant surfaces and highly ordered inner workings: Ward’s sax solo on the title track; McCraven’s own quietly thunderous drumming on “This Place That Place”; a showcase for Matt Gold on “The Knew Untitled,” one of the most exhilarating guitar solos of recent memory, in any genre. McCraven’s previous albums were nearly all spontaneity. Even after his meticulous reorganization of the source material, there was no telling, on first listen, where a particular track might go. In These Times is more elegant, and more ambitious. Its rhythmic experiments represent a genuinely new development in the fertile interzone between hip-hop and jazz. But the album suffers slightly from its own sophistication. I found myself wishing to hear something that would raise an eyebrow at a dinner party: something like “Atlantic Black” a feverish group improvisation from Universal Beings—the sound of a band in unknown territory, in danger of collapsing with one false move.
You can read the title of In These Times in a few ways: as a gesture at the uncertainty of our era, an acknowledgement of the music’s resolutely contemporary nature, or a sly joke about its dizzying array of time signatures. Deliberately or not, it also reads like metacommentary on the broadening of McCraven’s music since In the Moment, the album that gave many listeners their first exposure to his blend of composition and improv. In 2015, he was capturing moments; in 2022, he is speaking to the times.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review misattributed the guitar player on “The Knew Untitled.”


The Beyoncé-approved sister act are fearless on their debut album, reshaping pop and R&B in their own images until even the highest-profile co-signs seem beside the point.

The Kids Are Alright

The description on Chloe x Halle’s YouTube channel still reads “just two girls who love making music in our living room.” Perhaps it stands as a monument to their humble beginnings, or maybe it’s as true today as it was 12 years ago, when they launched the page. Of late, though, that description feels far too modest to explain the talent and ambition heard on their debut album The Kids Are Alright.
The Bailey sisters, who grew up in Atlanta, started out covering an array of pop songs on YouTube at ages 13 and 11, respectively. The sheer power of their voices was undeniable, so much so that their 2013 cover of Beyoncé’s “Pretty Hurts” landed on the pop star’s radar. She signed them to her Parkwood imprint in 2015 and took them on the road as an opening act on her Formation tour, providing them with a ready-made audience, which Chloe x Halle have expanded by landing a co-starring role as twins on the “Black-ish” spinoff “Grown-ish.” But despite having one of the biggest artists in the world in their corner, Chloe x Halle aren’t banking on success by association. Their musical style is fearless, reshaping pop and R&B in their own images until even the highest-profile co-signs seem beside the point.
As soon as the album begins, they give us a taste of their intricate vocal arrangements. “Hello Friend,” the opening track, is a crash course in tonality and harmony done the Chloe x Halle way. Without a single stray note, they fill the space with layers upon layers of their angelic voices, soul and joy radiating everywhere. They follow that with the title track, an ode to the youth that is equal parts encouragement and a statement to adults that the future rests in good hands. It’s an especially prescient statement as society continues to bear witness to youth-led movements against gun violence and other socio-political ills—and a reminder of the importance of just letting kids be kids. “If I’m in the mood, I’ll get as ratchet as I wanna/Turn around and show you I can bless you with some culture,” they sing, making their case with even more ornate harmonies powered by tribal percussion and a chorus of themselves.
Their inventiveness is further amplified by the fact that Chloe x Halle write and arrange all of their songs; Chloe is the masterful producer on all but three here. Throughout the album, they excel when they push their artistry to its limits. “Down” highlights Halle’s operatic range while “Galaxy” is as otherworldly as its title. By the time the gorgeous ballad “Cool People” or the anthemic acrobatics of “Baby on a Plane” roll around, they might as well just be showing off. They shine, too, on a pure songwriting level. Chloe x Halle are a total package: There are sitcom themes (the lighthearted “Grown,” from “Grown-ish”) and soundtrack music (“Warrior,” from Ava Duvernay’s A Wrinkle in Time) fitting into a consistent whole with the rest of the album. “Hi Lo” is the album’s banger, with deep bass and racing hi-hats courtesy of Chloe and co-producer Pluss, who also worked on Beyoncé’s “Formation” and Kendrick Lamar’s “HUMBLE.” alongside Mike WiLL Made-It. “You can try to point out all my flaws, that’s okay ’cause I still love them all,” they sing before GoldLink offers a suave verse of affirmations.
Chloe x Halle’s music exists in its own right, and speaks to and for a generation nearly two decades their mentor’s junior: Chloe is 19, while Halle turns 18 this week. The Kids Are Alright feels like a coming-of-age moment for the sisters, conveying the experience of having to figure out this music thing while still figuring out life. There are songs about self-discovery and lessons learned the hard way, but there's also a childlike innocence and sense of virtue blanketing the album. Chloe x Halle are a burst of optimism in a world of cynics.
Toward the end of the album, there’s a slow-burning meditation called “If God Spoke” whose tone gets to what’s so special about The Kids Are Alright. There is divinity in the way these ladies are unafraid to be hopeful and comfortable as themselves, and in the way they project that gift outward. The vocal layers make two women sound like an entire choir, as their voices wind around each other to unlock small pieces of heaven. Listening to their debut, it’s easy to believe that if God spoke, she would sound like Chloe x Halle.


Thirty-five years after African Head Charge's debut album, My Life in a Hole in the Ground, Adrian Sherwood's deconstruction of the music of Africa, Jamaica, and Great Britain might have finally found its proper decade and century. The first four albums, now reissued by Sherwood on his On-U Sound imprint, increased the vernacular of adventurous producers in the decades ahead.

African Head Charge: My Life in a Hole in the Ground/Environmental Studies/Drastic Season/Off the Beaten Track

There's a telling line to be found on the back cover of African Head Charge's debut album, My Life in a Hole in the Ground: "Another 1991 On-U Sound Creation." That's all well and fine, except the album was made in 1981. It's a playful admission that what African Head Charge was doing to dub, post-punk, Afrobeat, industrial, and world music might make more sense 10 years down the road.
It's now 35 years later and Adrian Sherwood's deconstruction of the music of Africa, Jamaica, and Great Britain might have finally found its proper decade and century. With pop stars like M.I.A. grabbing at Brazilian baile funk; dubstep practitioners like Mala and Pinch favoring tracks that sound like pulled taffy; and the spare electronic contortions of Arca, Oneohtrix Point Never, and the Fade to Mind crew, Sherwood’s tracks are more relevant than ever. Last year, his On-U Sound imprint revived itself and began reissuing a wealth of material, from a survey of Sherwood's decades of dub-punk productions to the dizzying Trevor Jackson-curated Science Fiction Dancehall Classics comp. The music could have dated from 2015, no problem.
Now comes the reissuing of the first four albums of his most heady and vital project, AHC. Taking issue with (or maybe just the piss out of) Eno-Byrne's fake ethnography My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Sherwood created a studio entity along the lines of Eno’s oft-used quote for a "vision of a psychedelic Africa." In much the same manner that Fela's greatest bands had Tony Allen set as the heart, AHC's pulse comes from African percussionist Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah, Sherwood’s co-conspirator throughout AHC. And titling their debut album My Life in a Hole in the Ground was no euphemism, as Berry Street Studios, the space that Sherwood utilized for his early work, was below street level.
Sherwood's work in UK punk and Jamaican expat dub is crucial to understanding post-punk of that era (around this same time, he produced the Fall and many others), and he was at his finest in African Head Charge. The first album is by far the most experimental of the bunch. Take "Elastic Dance," the opening track on My Life in a Hole in the Ground. A jaw harp twangs and flanges, a sinewave wheezes up and down, a skittering and skeletal drum and bass pattern emerge. And then all of it gets bandied about the stereo field by Sherwood. Always stretching his components to the breaking point and finding rubbery new spaces between these elements, Sherwood used dub techniques to explore the outer regions of punk, reggae, Indian classical, belly dancer motifs, and more.
And once you're this far beyond a certain genre's gravitational pull, Sherwood realized that these disparate forms could be melted back together into fucked-up shapes. Years later, "Far Away Chant," featuring the vocals of thunder-throated Prince Far I, even appeared during a violent moment in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. The emphasis on negative space is such that when Ground standout track "Stebeni’s Theme" recently came on my ear buds during rush hour, the introduction of two percussionists on the train blended into that rubbery beat no problem.
Environmental Studies appeared the next year and was also recorded underground, yielding a similarly claustrophobic, dank feel. More so than the first album, Studies scans as the nexus between free improvisation and dub reggae, less interested in melodic fragments and more about exploring the dark space between the two musical forms. The rotating assemblage of players included Jamaican session players like saxophonist "Deadly" Headley Bennett and drummer Style Scott, who was part of the riddim team that backed everyone from Gregory Isaacs to Black Uhuru, but it also made room for members of the Pop Group and Rip Rig + Panic, as well as UK free improviser Steve Beresford. "Beriberi" showcases a swinging horn line that’s as close to ska as the virtual group ever got while "Crocodile Hand Luggage" pits Bonjo’s nyabinghi drums against the sounds of running water and animal cries.
By the time of Drastic Season, their third album in as many years, Sherwood, Bonjo, and cohorts had moved above ground, setting up at Southern Studios and exploring the digital hardware the studio provided. By then, Sherwood had moved beyond the dub template and began to mince the sounds into ever-smaller pieces. The croak of an actual fish becomes the central element of "I Want Water," as Sherwood drowns it in all sorts of severe, whiplashing effects. Even the smallest of musical gestures, such as the short bass figures and drum taps of "African Hedge Hog," get amplified until they become labyrinths. At times, the tracks scan more as experiments.
Off the Beaten Track struck the perfect balance between the mad professorial experiments of Sherwood and the crack live band that had Bonjo at the helm, but it also marked the end of the group for the next five years. The dub explorations hewed closer to the rhythms now, a sound that would soon be called "ethno-beat" and "tribal." Didgeridoos and gypsy violins get turned into gnarly buzzes, African chants turn into incants, Prince Far I’s chopped declamation mixes into Bonjo’s big beat drums, and the barking dog of "Some Bizarre" is the most psychedelic canine until that ‘shroom-chewing coyote.
Without as many heavy FX at Sherwood’s mixing desk (but an uptick of Fairlight and Synclavier noises), the grooves come to the surface. Here’s the clearest correlation from here to the early-'90s post-rock of Tortoise and HiM, the spacy throbs perpetuated by the Orb, and the illbient wooziness of WordSound’s roster. "Language becomes an instrument of reasoning in the true sense of the word," goes the chorus of "Language & Mentality," voiced by none other than Albert Einstein. While dealing with sounds over words, Sherwood’s work across these early African Head Charge albums nevertheless increased the vernacular of adventurous producers in the decades ahead, sounding all the more resonant in the 21st century.


Team Sleep was the first side project from the Deftones' Chino Moreno, and featured contributions from Mary Timony and Zach Hill. Ten years after the project's only album, the group has gathered to perform an intimate collection of album tracks and unreleased material recorded in front of a small live audience.

Woodstock Sessions, Vol. 4

Team Sleep was Chino Moreno's first major side project, and the ones that came after were almost exactly like it—well-intentioned, admirably executed, and intermittently interesting amplifications of a trace element in Deftones' music. But upon the celebration of Team Sleep's 10th anniversary this past May, the band's only record, released in 2005 on a now-defunct major label, has taken on a Wet Hot American Summer-style, retroactive "wow" factor, both for its mere existence and the subsequent accomplishments of its already impressive cast. It now serves as the common link between Rufus Wainwright, Pinback, Ex Hex, Death Grips, Hole, and Faith No More (Melissa Auf der Maur and Mike Patton's contributions never made the final cut). That alone justifies revisiting Team Sleep, which is the ostensible purpose of Woodstock Sessions, Vol. 4. An intimate collection of album tracks and unreleased material recorded in front of a small live audience, the result is much more cohesive record than Team Sleep. It is also a less compelling one.
Mary Timony, Rob Crow, and producer Greg Wells (responsible for the Wainwright and, um, Mika connection) did not make it to upstate New York. It's just as well. Team Sleep was slapdash by default—it was nearly 10 years in the making and reconfigured after its planned 2003 release was scuttled by a leak. Downsizing the personnel rips out much of the inert stuffing that padded out Team Sleep's nearly hourlong runtime—Timony's solo cut ("Tomb of Liegia") was proof enough that any vocalist can sound fairly anonymous doing Sneaker Pimps-style deadpan trip-hop, while the explosive anti-chemistry on "King Diamond" showed how much Moreno can embarrass himself without actually rapping. And while Zach Hill's participation technically qualifies Team Sleep as a retroactive Deftones/Death Grips supergroup, his metallic, skittering breakbeats mostly worked against Moreno rather than with him—the Deftones songs after which Team Sleep was modeled ("Teenager", "Lucky You") tended to be muted, free of distorted guitars and all the better for it.
Hill has been replaced by Gil Sharone—a former member of the Dillinger Escape Plan who already has experience replacing a percussive maniac in a high-profile, alt-rock side project due to his time in +44. He ably recreates Hill's parts, but the wise selection of Team Sleep cuts ensure this is meant to be a more traditional rock record. Prior highlights "(Ever) Foreign Flag" and "Princeton Review" unlock themselves from a machinistic grid and take on an airy, major-key expansiveness that Moreno never quite achieved with Palms, even if they were focused on doing just that. Likewise, "Blvd. Nights" is angular, angry, and alive, while "Live From the Stage" stretches out to become the massive show closer it never had the chance to be.
While the Mo' Wax-worship on Team Sleep can be now seen as both its definitive feature and inherent flaw, the same could be said of Moreno's vocals on Woodstock Session**s. No matter the context, as long as Moreno is singing, you will be forced to compare it to Deftones. Dude can't help it—he's one of the most immediately identifiable stylists in mainstream rock from the past two decades, his vaporous, wavering melodies nearly impossible to trace and usually conveying a highly identifiable mix of sensuality and menace. This is even more true of Team Sleep than it was in ††† and Palms, so even the best work here ends up sounding like a weakened version of "Tempest" that wouldn't be capable of soundtracking Furious 7.
Such is the nature of Moreno's non-Deftones work: Moreno's outside projects do one thing, whereas Deftones are successful synthesists, playing up dynamic contrasts that come off as innovations. Woodstock Sessions is the third Moreno-fronted record to be released since Koi No Yokan, and it's the first where a new Deftones album is within view—though the when is unclear, they had promised a September due date back in March, and they officially finished recording about a month ago. As such, it's hard to feel disappointed in Woodstock Sessions or view it as a distraction. It just confirms what we keep finding out about Moreno's music outside of his main gig—it sounds either too much like Deftones or not enough unlike them.


The Hold Steady frontman's second solo album is a character-driven record that's a few shades darker than his last solo outing. It's also driven by acoustic guitar, which puts even more focus on Finn's words.

Faith in the Future

Through his work first with Lifter Puller, then with the Hold Steady, and later as a solo artist, Craig Finn has created a universe as big as America, a stage that stretches from Minneapolis to Ybor City, from the bars of Chicago to behind bars in Memphis. It’s a world populated by hoodrats and club kids, by dealers and party girls, by guys who look like André Cymone and women named Robbie Robertson ("but people call me Robo"), by the financially desperate and the spiritually confused. Each new song and each new album expands that universe significantly, implicitly or explicitly adding new chapters to ongoing stories as Finn hangs out off to the side, narrating from the periphery of the scene.
It can be forbidding to pick up these narrative strands at this late date, but at his best Finn’s songs swallow you up in that word entirely. His lyrics continually provoke a spark of recognition, as he invites you to connect the dots between a new song and an old one. Listening to "Sarah, Calling from a Hotel", from his new solo album, is a bit like eavesdropping on a friend who has landed on rough times. "Hadn’t seen her since the races at the ending of last summer," Finn sings over a sparse coffeehouse strum. "We watched the horses run up on each other/ She looked pretty." Is this the unnamed subject of "Chips Ahoy!", from the Hold Steady’s 2006 breakthrough Boys and Girls in America, the clairvoyant who "can tell which horse is gonna finish in first"?
If so, the tone of chapter is much darker and more dire than migraines and emotional detachment. Faith in the Future is a character-driven record, even if it doesn’t restore Finn to the heights of his mid-2000s heyday. It’s full of prominent proper names: Sarah and Maggie, Christine and Sandra. St. Peter even shows up, because this is a Craig Finn album. The names are mundane, not exotic. You probably don’t know anyone named Charlemagne, but you’re likely Facebook friends with a Christine. There’s not a single hoodrat on Faith, but there are plenty of people caught between the youthful indiscretions of the past and the adult consequences of the present.
That pretty much describes Finn these days. Even during the disastrous Bennigan’s gig in "Roman Guitars", he comes across as more grown up, imbuing his narrators/stand-ins with a maturity that pushes them even further into the margins—the fate of all thirty- and fortysomethings. He’s no longer talking to the kids, and he’s not coming up the stairs or coming from the streets. Instead, he has entered what you might call the Peter Wolf phase of his career, when the old band has sputtered out and the frontman tries to re-establish himself as a serious songwriter. And if you don’t know who Peter Wolf is, well, then you’ll realize there is a certain unglamorous anonymity that comes with respectability.
The catch, of course, is that the Hold Steady and the J. Geils Band were great groups—exciting and clever and bold and even fun as they wallowed in rock’s less reputable urges. Downplaying riffs in favor of texture, Faith in the Future plays it much safer, which means there’s more emphasis on the words than on Finn’s delivery of them. Finn’s solo debut, 2012’s Clear Heart Full Eyes, attempted to match his songs to amiably twangy arrangements, which in retrospect was an intriguing experiment, but there’s no comparable strategy in place for enlivening these songs. There’s a lot of bland acoustic strumming, as though the austerity of the arrangement were meant to reinforce the slice-of-life songwriting, but anyone who has ever skipped "Citrus" or bristled over Live at Fingerprints knows that acoustic isn’t Finn’s best setting. He doesn’t always have to have a rousing bar band behind him, but he does need something that will lend his lyrics more immediacy and higher stakes.
The best songs succeed despite the music, not because of it. "St. Peter Upside Down" may be the most compelling song of his solo career, a sharp juxtaposition between romantic regret and religious sacrifice that somehow grows more burdened, more beat down with every iteration of its chorus. Finn has, of course, plumbed similar territory in the past, but instead of redundant, it plays like the culmination of his obsession with Catholicism, as though he’s adding an epilogue to his previous spiritual inquiries. As it proceeds, Faith in the Future becomes more and more a benediction for the scene, a goodbye to all that. The perfectly titled "I Was Doing Fine (Then a Few People Died)" sounds impossibly world-weary, as Finn gets drunk with an old friend (possibly, hopefully even Sarah herself). "She said some nights I wonder if anything means anything," and the only consolation he can offer is, "I never said I was Jesus."


It's not very exciting behind the scenes at Pitchfork. Writers wearing button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled up don ...

The Moon & Antarctica

It's not very exciting behind the scenes at Pitchfork. Writers wearing button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled up don't hustle around a maze of cubicles while Ryan chews out rookies in his office. We have converted no lofts into spacious playpens loaded with iMacs and Nerf hoops. No interns yet. (Unless Ryan's holding back on me.) Mostly we sit around discussing music. And this isn't even done in the photogenic setting of a stoop or a coffeeshop. We talk about music constantly on the Internet, which, admittedly, is geeky. Plus, we're not even trying to sell anything on the Internet, further compounding our stubbornness. (Some lady beat us to the punch with our farming equipment site at Pitchfork.com, but we're still looking into eRakes.com.)
Yet every so often-- whether due to astronomical occurrences, economic fluctuations, or inherent quality cycles (which have all actually been debated at one point)-- an album comes along that inhibits our serotonin uptake, cleans our ears, palpitates our hearts, ignites our passion, and justifies our existence. I've argued that this occurs approximately every three years, due to slight financial recessions. It's that time again. At this point, I think the world agrees on OK Computer as the last major event in album rock. For at least a few months, the world can stop waiting for Radiohead's next album, and start wondering how in the hell Modest Mouse will ever top the monumental, ground-breaking, hypnotic, sublime The Moon & Antarctica.
Somebody just snickered. Modest Mouse generate a divide between the venerating and violent like few other bands. The latter of which currently questions my ascertations. Wipe the slate clean. You officially have not heard Modest Mouse until you have heard their major label debut. The growth, bravery, and confidence are staggering for a trio that most recently hammered through a song about "doin' the cockroach." Producer Brian Deck of Red Red Meat conjures the supernatural. Layers upon layers of treated and raw sounds blend into a thick headtrip. Piano, cello, sleighbells, keyboards, chimes, and more can be excavated from the mix. Singing guitarist Isaac Brock constantly obsesses over the afterlife, and with Deck's help he's found it, far out in space and inside his clouded, scattered brain.
"3rd Planet" opens the record innocently enough. Isaac plucks a lovely fluttering acoustic bed before he admits, "Everything that keeps us together is falling apart," tersely summing the human condition and the theme of the record in ten seconds. Suddenly, echoing, truck-sized drums stomp over the ebow-dripping chorus as Brock repeatedly pronounces under a sheet of reverb, "The universe is shaped exactly like the Earth/ If you go straight long enough you'll end up where you were." Those failing to find the brilliance inherent in Modest Mouse at this point, please check in your Xanax at the window and an agent will escort you to the Target music department.
By the time track two, "Gravity Rides Everything," begins with backwards drums, strums, and plucks, it's quite evident Mouse Mouse have traveled well beyond their past. The song's percussion relies on jacked drumstick claps and electro-bongos as no less than five guitar tracks float on aching melodies. Deck's hands keep the affair shimmering and clear, in what will undoubtedly vault him into the echelon of Fridmanns and Godriches. Laser guitar lines and Brock's wrath blare over violins and undulating bass on the massive "Dark Center of the Universe." Structurally, it's still classic Modest Mouse up to this point, excepting the volume of warped effects.
"Perfect Disguise" quietly kicks off the otherworldly passage of Moon. A chorus sighs "Broke my back" over delicate pickings, sleepy kickdrums, accentuating banjo, and oddball guitar pings. Looping tones usher a nasty bassline and disco rhythms as "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" ceremoniously kicks listener ass. Sinister vocal doubletracking bursts into crackled shouting. Those familiar with Modest Mouse's live show will instantly recognize this as a trademark moment for Brock screaming into his guitar pickups. This heavy march, driven by Jeremiah Green's hissing breaks, sounds wholly unique and creepy.
"A Different City" sits like the obvious single. Flanged riffs pump Pixies-ish glee in Modest Mouse's tightest punch to date. After this brief foray into crunching pop, "The Cold Part" stretches out to infinity. Chiming guitar, strings, over-dubbed echoes, deteriorating machines, and thumping drums fill a dark, beautiful void as a ghostly Brock laments, "So long to this cold, cold part of the world." Any of Brock's prose is instantly quotable. "Alone Down There" announces, "Hello, how do you do?/ My name is you," uncomfortably close to the inner ear. As the song crescendos with building, buzzing guitar, Modest Mouse distills Built to Spill's essence in two minutes. "I don't want to you to be alone down there," Brock pleads. Angelic harmonies grant him his wish.
The epic "The Stars are Projectors" furthers the future of rock in grand gestures. Shifting between acoustic interludes and searing guitar over pounding drums, lyrics postulate the Descartian notion that our world is merely an elaborate dreamscape. Pretty sharp for Northwestern punks. The pace soon accelerates as the song swirls into a sonic twister. Through studio trickery, warbling drums sound as if winds howl outside, prying the roof from above to snatch you into a maw of shrill violins and sheer feedback.
A stripped death ballad peppered with accordion provides perfect comedown on "Wild Packs of Family Dogs." Thus begins the third movement of the record. "Paper Thin Walls" pops along in blue-collar fashion on cowbells and and woodblocks like fIREHOSE, while still injecting the haunted flourishes of the album. If Nirvana played folk with Massive Attack it might end up a bit like "I Came as a Rat." Standard power chords melt into astral tape manipulation. The calm, beautiful respite before the closing snarl comes in "Lives." "It's hard to remember you live before you die," Brock sings over weeping strings. "My hell comes from inside," he reminds. Back comes the resigned aggression. "Life Like Weeds" jangles and bows with still more poignancy. Most grand, expansive, experimental albums of this sort are expected to end with a quiet snuff. Modest Mouse explode into the noisiest, fastest piece to close the record. "What People are Made Of" cuts abruptly on fuzzed bass, clashing cymbals, and attacking guitars-- an ideal ending for a record centered on death and the inability to understand.
So I've just taken you through the entire album. As a fan, I know this sort detail is expected of hallmark albums. In anticipation of the next masterpiece, we all soak up as much info as we can get. Getting geeked up is part of the drama. For the first time, Modest Mouse craft an album, not a collection of songs. That they manage to go beyond any other rock band out there is staggering. The sequencing weaves a dramatic ebb and flow of emotion. Every song is packed with fantastic sounds that reach out for space and salvation. The band is now precise and broad. Eric Judy's fluid bass quietly escorts the ear subconsciously through the appropriate moods. Green's drumming is playful and inventive. There is no way Modest Mouse will ever pull this off live. The space, equipment, and personnel needed seems limitless. Yet this scale rockets the album instantly into Vahalla.
An intoxicating mix of uncertainty and confidence, The Moon & Antarctica constructs hallow approximations of heaven, hell, and deep space-- most of which exist vividly in Isaac Brock's questioning mind. OK Computer must be mentioned, for Modest Mouse just got invited to the same club. They can chat existentially in the sauna. But unlike's Radiohead's unease at technology and quickening society, Modest Mouse grapple with the general conjectures of humankind. The title aptly entails the whole of the album. Sometimes the most spooky, alien places are not too far off. Similarly, our immediate surroundings and internal environment feel even more otherworldly. Modest Mouse seek salvation in God, death, and relationships. Fortunately, the rest of us can sometimes find it in records.


On a new mini-album, the K-pop group known for bold summer hits returns with refined, verdant dance-pop better suited for springtime.

Red Velvet: The ReVe Festival 2022 - Feel My Rhythm

The ReVe Festival 2022 - Feel My Rhythm

For the first half of their career, Red Velvet gave equal attention to both halves of their name: “Red” for eye-catching pop confidence, “velvet” for classy restraint. Titles of their past releases, The Red and Perfect Velvet, were prosaically clear about which side the music played for, but since the explicit blend of the two on 2018’s The Perfect Red Velvet, the genre-bending girl group have merged their dueling components with increasing abandon. On their latest mini-album, The ReVe Festival 2022 - Feel My Rhythm, released just a fortnight before the eerie glimmer of Japanese full-length Bloom, Red Velvet return with a verdant dance-pop sound. Clothed in Pre-Raphaelite finery in the era’s artwork and videos, the queens of bold summer hits deliberately make their comeback with a refined springtime landscape in tow.
Feel My Rhythm is colored in blooming detail: A promenade from purple and green to yellow and blue in the swooning “Rainbow Halo,” the tranquility of fluttering “petals” in “In My Dreams,” billowing “confetti” across the hook of “Feel My Rhythm.” Bold and stylish, “Feel My Rhythm” is one of Red Velvet’s finest title tracks. Reminiscent of the elegant darkness of their 2019 hit “Psycho,” “Feel My Rhythm” is based on a wistful sample of Bach’s “Air on the G String” layered with a clangorous EDM trap beat. But the song’s frisson isn’t based on the shallow spectacle of the two genres’ contrast. Instead, “Feel My Rhythm”’s contradictions serve to elevate the harmony, playing as smooth and lush as the similar pop concept on the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” Irene’s blunt opening line—“We’re blowing up this fancy ball”—verbally protests while sonically agreeing, and Yeri’s spoken delivery of “Grab me in your motion/G-give me another direction” stutters in time with the detonating rhythm behind her. She sounds unharmonious but skillfully sidesteps discordance.
The sauntering “BAMBOLEO” plays at a five-pronged intersection of nations—its title likely derives from a Spanish-language song by a French band, its K-pop melody ornamented with Japanese city pop stylings, its hook declared romantically in English. But it primly avoids chaos, sounding as evenly dreamy as a Tokyo-tinged cut off of K-pop contemporary YUKIKA’s 2021 EP Timeabout. Only “Good, Bad, Ugly” feels underwhelming in the context of the mini, tepidly and unmemorably strolling through well-trod R&B. Similarly, “Beg for Me” declares itself sensually commanding but is fairly chaste in execution. The chanted invocation of “Dance for me, work for me, beg for me, die for me” and murmured request of “bring out your freak” are amusingly sterile—only Wendy and Joy’s rap glimmers with any real sultriness, delivered with a dark smirk and whispered haste. But the luxurious, balmy closer “In My Dreams” brings a more complex conclusion. Despite all the ornate bravado and glamor across Feel My Rhythm, the ballad centers on a surprisingly tender admission of rejection: “In my dreams, you love me back”.
In the video for “Feel My Rhythm,” the members of Red Velvet drape themselves in the visual beauty of Western classics—Seulgi seated in striking Stygian stylings, Joy raptly posed as John Everett Millais’s “Ophelia,” Irene arcing across the frame in a diaphanous recreation of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s famous swing. But it’s the less conspicuous Bosch references that ring truest. “The Garden of Earthly Delights” isn’t as immediately Instagrammable as Monet’s lilies, but its phantasmagorical presence—the triptych’s surreal details strewn across a landscape of monstrous set pieces—feels like an appropriate metaphor for Red Velvet’s mythical stature in the modern landscape of K-pop. Despite stumbling on last year’s Queendom, Feel My Rhythm stirs awake from complacency and reinstates the group’s regality without compromising their principles. Resolutely elegant and vocal amid a flashy, Blackpink-influenced fourth generation of girl groups, Red Velvet shrug off trends and embrace their signature idiosyncrasy.


On her debut record, Santogold enlists an all-star team of producers for this inconsistent (if occasionally stunning) blend of dub, new wave, and hip-hop.

Santogold

Santi White used to work in A&R, which gives her put-downs on debut single "Creator" a professional air: "Sit tight I know what you are/ Mad bright but you ain't no star." As Santogold, White is putting her knowledge of star quality into practical effect. At its best, her album's cross-genre confidence is dazzling, combining dub, new wave, and hip-hop to create some of the year's freshest pop. At its worst, it feels annoyingly overthought.
The central questions of Santogold's first single, "Creator" (who's real and who's fake?), seem to nag at her, but its stunning follow-up, "L.E.S. Artistes", returns to the topic of creativity, hype, and integrity, with the singer sinking her teeth into Lower East Side poseurs and wannabes. White's also walking a line herself: She's a professional songwriter, and talked to the BBC earlier this year about writing for Ashlee Simpson. "It's like two different hats that I have to wear. It's like the difference between writing fiction and writing ad copy. It's like a formula versus your art."
That's fair enough. It's not unlike the age-old compromise of film directors-- a movie for the studio, and a movie for me. The problem is that when you compartmentalize formula and art, you risk creating a formula for your art, defining it by what it isn't rather than what it is. Santogold's second half seems to fall into this trap, with a series of tepid dub-influenced tracks that kick her obvious pop gifts-- melody, hooks, and bounce-- to the curb. On "Anne", the usually fiery White sounds muted and apathetic; "Starstruck" is a patience-eroding mess of keyboard fuzz; and the grating "Unstoppable" feels like being lectured by a parrot.
"Unstoppable" is also the track which sounds closest to White's friend and collaborator M.I.A. Hers is the name you'll think of first when you hear Santogold: They share co-producers Diplo and Switch, as well as a taste for bass and a forthright vocal style. The more you listen, though, the shallower the resemblance seems: Santi White can do M.I.A.'s tongue-swallowing bark if she wants to, but she's just as comfortable with the gentler registers her melodies require. And while M.I.A. uses global club music to project a future pop blueprint, Santogold explores how they integrate with renegade music of the past.
For much of Santogold, White is channeling and recombining a series of indie icons: Debbie Harry, Kim Deal, Ari Up, Joe Strummer, and Karen O. On "My Superman" she captures the imperious swoop of Siouxsie Sioux and drapes it over the kind of stern electro Goldfrapp used to make. "I'm a Lady" marries ska-pop verses to a strutting Elastica chorus. "Lights Out" finds a fascinating middle ground between the Pixies and the Go-Go's.
This could turn the record into a spot-the-reference game, but White glues it together first with the backing harmonies she uses to sweeten most tracks, and second with her love of space and echo. The early 1980s fascinate her, and I'd guess a big part of why has to do with the era's cross-breeding of rock, punk, and reggae. A trio of songs-- "You'll Find a Way", "Shove It", and "Say Aha"-- evoke that moment when rock's aggression met reggae's drive and depth, and it makes for Santogold's most thrilling sequence. "Say Aha" in particular is perfect new wave bubblegum-- 2 Tone keyboards, phaser effects, a stomp-ready chorus, and a surf guitar solo to finish. As if to ward off accusations of revivalism, it leads into "Creator", a grimy arcade funk jam that's Santogold's heaviest and most successful electronic move.
"Creator" has already soundtracked more than one commercial, and if "L.E.S. Artistes", Santogold's best song, gets similar exposure it could be inescapable. It already sounds huge, with its soaring chorus that should resonate with anyone facing change: "I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up." In Santi White's case "it" is stardom, and "L.E.S. Artistes" might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The irony of this song about compromise is that, like the other great tracks on Santogold, it shows exactly why she's in demand with Ashlee or Lily Allen: She's a consummate pop songwriter. Santogold might try to separate formula and art, but her album catches fire when she blasts that distinction into irrelevance.


The most mysterious group in hardcore pull back the curtain to reveal: a rock band. If their new album sounds like something you’d hear on alt radio, that’s the point.

Perfect Saviors

Oh, the irony of transforming into action figures only to get scooped by Barbie. For all the promotional and physical muscle the Armed have flexed during the rollout of their own summer blockbuster, none of the pull quotes—“a chocolate cake full of broken glass,” “the real story is more confusing than any lie”—has the snap of Greta Gerwig boasting of Barbie that “I’m doing the thing and subverting the thing.” On Perfect Saviors, the Armed are no longer a collective or a project, but a big ol’ rock band with superproducers, magazine covers, clean choruses, and slick videos, all in the service of meta-arena rock that critiques the concept of rock stardom itself. Artists call this sort of conflict “juxtaposition,” diehards might call it compromise. The Armed appear to see it like Gerwig does, that the only way that mass entertainment can reconcile art and commerce is to make the latter finance its own roast.
In that sense, Perfect Saviors finishes the job started by 2021’s ULTRAPOP, a thrilling album that mostly operated in the theoretical realm. “Pop” referred less to melody or cult of personality than a general ideal of instant gratification and the many hours that go into the science of eye and ear candy. “All futures, destruction!” was a good hook; so was having a bodybuilder named Clark Huge hulking over a bank of synthesizers, or singer Cara Drolshagen in triplicate wearing Juggalo makeup. The Armed bypassed the personal disclosure and parasocial identification now expected of superhero films and pop stars to satisfy an eternal tenet of entertainment: Normal people want to watch extraordinary people do cool shit that they couldn’t possibly do themselves.
The Armed’s new album requires less conceptual heavy lifting. There is no prerequisite knowledge of Guy Debord or Andy Kaufman, of the fake “Dan Greene” or the real Dan Greene, or of Frank Turner this time around. The Armed’s unified theory is that everything is wrestling and ball is life. Scene-chewing opener “Sport of Measure” presents the objective side of this philosophy, alluding to basketball, capitalism, or the technical metal and hardcore that defined the Armed’s past work: gamified pursuits where the winner is bigger, better, faster, and just more than the other guy. Lead single “Sport of Form” is an intricate mini-suite that ropes in Julien Baker and Iggy Pop to represent subjective competitions like figure skating and gymnastics and art, the pursuits your coworker with the Barstool shirt doesn’t think are real because they’re judged and probably rigged. In between are things like boxing and the stylized, shockingly straightforward live performance video for the GNC-glam stomper “Everything’s Glitter”: Victory can be achieved by knockout or just looking really damn good.
And so Perfect Saviors dares to be conventionally attractive—the first time where the Armed’s actual songwriting isn’t meant to be judged on a curve, relative to other metal or hardcore bands. The first seconds bring Tony Wolski’s denimed drawl out to the front, exposing the florid turns of phrase that got buried in static on ULTRAPOP: “Take my fill of these ambrosia nights,” “I’m drama in these khaki towns.” If “Everything’s Glitter” and “Liar 2” are comparable to something currently playing on California’s alt-rock mainstay KROQ, that’s the whole point. What do you think they brought in Alan Moulder and Justin Meldal-Johnsen and former members of Zwan and Red Hot Chili Peppers and half of Jane’s Addiction for?
Perfect Saviors excels in a more conventional sport of measure, expanding the physical capabilities of radio rock just a few degrees beyond the previously acceptable standard. Think of a yoked Strokes, or Queens of the Stone Age if “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” replaced its lyrics with the ingredients in Premier Protein. Yet compared to the concept of rock that the Armed once crafted in their own image, it feels vaguely unsatisfying. Unlike the full integration of melody and melee on “All Futures” and “An Iteration,” the Armed-ness here can feel grafted on like producer tags; a blast beat where a drum fill might suffice, a surge of power electronics rather than synth swells. Perhaps this is where the concept of ULTRAPOP meets critique on Perfect Saviors: With enough effort, anyone could achieve a radio-rock banger just like they can get rock-hard abs.
The Armed reference “An Iteration” numerous times throughout Perfect Saviors, establishing continuity within the franchise and unwittingly drawing out its fundamental flaw: While a vivid, imaginative way of doing the arena rock thing, their means of subverting it feels like a repetition of established talking points. You know the syllabus by now: the allure of false idols, the hollowness of fame, the numbness of information overload, the unreliability of the news, “pretend kings with plastic lives in big clone houses,” “this ain’t the same fucking thing you’ve been sold before.” Mind-blowing stuff if first encountered as a teen via Nothing’s Shocking, or Zoo TV, or “The Dope Show,” less so when once-indie artists like Arcade Fire and St. Vincent occupied the same meta-arena rock platforms decades later. Still, the lack of novelty in the Armed’s message doesn’t make it any less true.
When the Armed veer off message during the second half of Perfect Saviors, they’re reborn as a band who promised limitless possibilities, especially applying their physicality to more limber forms of music: Madchester melon-twisters (“Burned Mind”), angular dance-punk (“Liar 2”), and jazz-fusion (“Perfect Grieving”). The redemption of Perfect Saviors is less a matter of muscle or metal than it is mischief and misdirection, none more jarring than the quietest song they’ve ever made. “In Heaven” does the acoustic ballad thing and doesn’t attempt to be the Armed’s answer to “I’m Just Ken.” The Julien Baker harmonies, a possible Smashing Pumpkins reference, and a saxophone solo are all presented earnestly, as is the single most vulnerable lyric Wolski’s ever sang: “My new body waits for me in heaven.” Not exactly “I’m here to see my gynecologist,” but still an admission that these He-Man are human after all.


Gold Panda's warm and exuberant new album sounds quite unlike any of the electronic music being made in 2016, and is refreshingly unfashionable in that way.

Good Luck and Do Your Best

Two years ago Gold Panda made a series of trips across Japan with the photographer Laura Lewis to gather visuals and field recordings for what was supposed to be “a sight and sound documentary,” perhaps not unlike Chris Marker’s quiet and thoughtful film essays. So far the documentary hasn’t been made, but the impressions of the trips during the fall and spring of 2014 led to his first album in three years, Good Luck and Do Your Best. Apparently the moment of inspiration and the album’s title came from a chance interaction with a taxi driver who wished them luck, saying those very words as they exited the cab. He wrote the album in Chelmsford, using Laura's photos, their colors and experiences, as catalysts for the album’s 11 tracks.
It is decidedly brighter, more low-key, and less dance-oriented than his previous outing *Half of Where You Live**. *Instead this newest album seems to fit more into the structure and mood of his debut *Lucky Shiner. *The same spirit of nostalgia, pleasantly handmade feel (which comes from his expert use of MPCs), and wistful joy pervades *Good Luck and Do Your Best. *It sounds quite unlike any of the electronic music being made in 2016, and is refreshingly unfashionable in that way.
The best tracks capture the short-lived exuberance of the photographer's golden hour. When the sun is on the cusp of setting, if you’re lucky, streetscapes will be awash in an exceedingly warm golden light. It makes whatever you photograph seem more buoyant, colorful, and evanescent. The bright drum-pad meditation of “In My Car” and the understated string arrangements in “Time Eater” all speak to this kind of feeling. Gold Panda is at his best making lush and ambulatory compositions, and the relaxed itinerancy of a vacation is most evident in his more minimal sound studies, like “Unthank” and “I Am Real Punk” which rely on just a few elements, like the repetition of plucked strings or a single synth looped.
Those songs in particular reminded me of the producer Suzanne Craft, or the compositions by the Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita. They have same ability to create a grand feeling atmosphere out of minimal ingredients. This album only doesn’t work when it gestures towards faster paces. “Song for a Dead Friend” stands out as a one of the album’s true missteps, a seemingly juke-inspired track that twists an ankle and falls flat.
In terms of samples used, the Japanese inspiration seemed to come mostly from the use of string instruments, but otherwise it’s more muted than the story suggests. Two music videos were released in advance of the album (for “Pink & Green” and “Time Eater”) and the videos try to give an idea of what the documentary might have been. In “Pink & Green” in particular we find Gold Panda and Laura in the midst of the vacation. They walk the streets, gaze at the sights, eat at McDonalds. They take the train and laugh at dinner and sing karaoke, as tourists must feel compelled to do in Japan. There’s a kernel in the visual aesthetic and silent narrative that might not mean to point to Lost in Translation, but it’s hard to avoid. How can you appreciate a vacation in a foreign place, thoughtfully and gracefully? Missteps seem inevitable.
Listening to this album, I wondered if Gold Panda set out to explore some of these thoughts from the pads of an MPC. Does archiving a vacation in sounds or pictures, making art of it, do justice to the essential passing of things? Is nostalgia destructive or generative? At the end of it all, the music escapes the expectations its creators imbue it with. As its title suggests Good Luck and Do Your Best is a modest and heartfelt attempt to celebrate a memory and place that you continue to love even at a distance.


Art-rock collective ringleader Daniel Smith transforms his tangled song fragments and inimitable vocal style into a highly contagious, beautifully ramshackle record.

Ships

One of the great everlasting indie rock adages: "If this band ever got on the radio, they'd be huge." I mean, why couldn't Sonic Youth have been the best selling group of the 1990s? What did My Bloody Valentine record if not great pop songs? Wolf Eyes is a classic singles band! Sad but true: This old wisdom doesn't fly. Though it's harbored its share of forward-thinking songwriters and producers, independent music isn't traditionally thought of as user-friendly. And although its recent ascent in popularity has allowed its most accessible bands brief bouts with commercial success, the culture is still mostly populated by artists whose music is too difficult, challenging, or in some cases, annoying, to appeal to anyone but the smallest minority.
In his decade-long run as the ringleader of art-rock collective the Danielson Famile, Daniel Smith has practically defined the term "cult artist." His records-- most of them highly conceptual paeans to God-- can be exhausting, barraging listeners with surprise twists and turns and tangled song fragments. Smith himself has an inimitable vocal style: a twisted melange of bleating, twinging yelps, whoops, and screeches. Yet Smith's discography has yielded him a small but unflaggingly loyal congregation, drawn to music that, above all else, is uninhibitedly gleeful, celebratory, and rallying-- the kind of inspired communal rejoicing that's highly contagious.
Though I've long admired Smith's idiosyncratic vision, navigating his music's quirks and structural obstacles hasn't always been wholly rewarding. But after two years spent refining his approach in his Clarksboro studio, he's re-emerged with an album that serves as the resolution of his recorded output: the spectacular Ships. Harnessing a work ethic so steadfast its presence is felt throughout the album's entire duration, here Smith distills the best and most unique attributes of his sound, and marries that creative concentrate to a grander, more cinematic sensibility. The result is staggeringly triumphant-- the blustering, ambitious consummation of all he's worked toward.
Initially recruiting likeminded noise-pop explorers Deerhoof as his backing band, Smith's ambitions for the album eventually found him corralling a total of 20 musicians, including all Famile past and present, Anticon alumnus Why?, members of Serena Maneesh and Half-Handed Cloud, and longtime Danielson acolyte Sufjan Stevens. So many mismatched contributors could have turned the album into a chaotic melée of disparate ideas. Instead, the sound only grew greater and more colossal with every added hand-- one more instrument in a superdense wall of beautifully ramshackle orchestration that creaks and groans beneath its own enormous weight.
That weight is Ships' cornerstone. None of Smith's previous records-- and in fact, very few indie releases this year-- have flat-out rocked like this one, with blaring trumpets signaling snares to exact their force beneath sweeping multitracked vocal choruses that simply won't stop crescendoing. On standouts like "Ship the Majestic Suffix" and "Bloodbook on the Half Shell", the music builds to such immense heights, and increases tension so far past the expected breaking point, that the inevitable release is nearly dizzying. But Smith also grasps the inherent malleability of such a sizable ensemble, and though he most often uses it to breathe life into the album's darkly apocalyptic overtures, he also wisely crafts shimmering psychedelic passages that prevent it from becoming too claustrophobic.
Of course, while vastly more accessible and streamlined than Smith's other outings, Ships is, in that same vein, very much a cult record. And like other recent, successful cult records-- the Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat, Animal Collective's Sung Tongs, and earlier this week, Scott Walker's The Drift-- the elements that make it so refreshing and exciting to some listeners are certain to put off others. Smith's vocals, for instance, are significantly calmer and less abrasive here than ever, but his charismatic chirps and squawks may be an obstacle for even some seasoned fans of yelpy indie rock. And while they offer Smith the opportunity to achieve a number of unusual melodic feats, the unpredictable song structures may initially throw some listeners for a loop.
Still, the fact that it lacks some of the broader appeal of independent music's more orthodox practitioners also allows more room for the kind of weirdness and experimentation that makes Ships such a fascinating listen, and indeed, such a watershed in Smith's development as an artist. It's the kind of album he may spend the rest of his career trying to top-- and in the closing track, charmingly titled "Five Stars and Two Thumbs Up", he seems to recognize it. With wide-eyed bewilderment, amidst the clash and clang of cymbals and triangles, butterfly flutes, manic guitar strums, ascending eight-part harmonies, and surprise key changes, the euphoric message is reiterated: "Thanks, thaaaaaanks, thaaaaaaaaaanks!!!!"


The four-man Bay Area rap crew delivers a breathless, irresistible, and highly defined record that hits your gut and your shoulders at the same time.

Gangin

The four members of SOB x RBE are from Vallejo, California, home to the iconic rapper Mac Dre. And like Mac Dre—both back in the ‘90s and later, at his thizzed-out zenith—SOB x RBE can be, in the bones of their songwriting, contemplative and grim while making music that’s constantly propulsive, punishing, joyous, fun. Dre would rap over the phone from prison about police brutality and about babies born addicted to crack, but he was doing it with a sort of bounce and levity. It was heavy, but it wasn’t.
SOB x RBE’s latest album, Gangin, follows this lineage, an irresistible record full of songs that hit your gut and your shoulders at the same time. The group (the “x” is silent) was formed when friends Yhung T.O. and DaBoii—who cut their teeth by rapping into their phones and putting it over a beat through a Playstation—fused their efforts with fellow teens Slimmy B and Lul G. The “SOB” is for “Strictly Only Brothers,” the “RBE” is “Real Boi Entertainment.” They’ve spent most of the time since that 2015 merger as a minor phenomenon, both in the Bay and online. Just weeks ago, when Interscope rolled out the TDE-helmed soundtrack for Black Panther, one of its highlights was the skull-rattling “Paramedic!” where each SOB x RBE member bounces his voice off of Kendrick Lamar’s.
About the voices: Yhung T.O., the group’s potential breakout star, is slick and melodic; Slimmy B is an abrasive counterpoint, force to T.O.’s finesse. At some point in their formative stages, the members decided to play with the structure and lineup of each song: Instead of shoehorning all four onto every track, they appear in a variety of orders and combinations, both here and on last year’s lean, self-titled mixtape. This has allowed for Lul G to excel in spot duty, and for DaBoii to develop into a magnetic presence, as brash as Slimmy and with just as much bite to his voice.
This fluidity lets Gangin weave in and out of different sonic lanes without feeling perfunctory or out of place. “Anti Social” is as silky as “Can’t” is confrontational, but the progression from one to the other sounds like a good DJ mix as opposed to an A&R-mandated box-check. The quartet’s youth, their relatively short time rapping together, and commitment to each hairpin turn in tone lends their music the feel of experimentation and discovery and in real time.
That’s good, because there’s a certain breathlessness that their style requires. SOB x RBE fit comfortably into Vallejo’s rap lineage, which includes pioneering stylists like Dre and E-40, and peers like Nef the Pharaoh—whose music seems to be in constant conversation with his city’s forefathers. By contrast, SOB x RBE’s music is less lyrically referential to those predecessors, instead looping back to the lush, up-tempo production traditions from Vallejo and Oakland. As vocalists, they draw obvious inspiration from Detroit’s street rap scene (see: Doughboyz Cashout), though that comes across less as imitation and more as the sort of cultural exchange that has long run between Bay rap and rap in the Midwest and South.
The heart of Gangin is a four-song run on the backstretch where each member is allowed his own solo cut. DaBoii’s “Paid In Full” is almost comically no-frills, and reveals him as an acrobatic technician; “The Man Now” casts Lul G as a villain, sneering and Grinch-adjacent; “Y.H.U.N.G” relocates T.O. to an undisclosed Caribbean villa.
The real jewel is “God,” where Slimmy raps uninterrupted for more than two minutes—it’s not exactly in prayer, more like an explanation to some unseen third party about why he might be praying. There are benedictions for piles of money and humble requests for more; there are hopes for healthy sons and mothers. From there, the song shifts its focus outward, and Slimmy lashes out at some of those who have hurt him. There’s his friend who stole from him, and his father (”I love your ass to death, but don’t ever think I owe you”). The whole thing happens at a brisk pace, stuffed with asides like, “Niggas dying every day, who the fuck this shit fun to?” What makes “God” so arresting is how it reveals the ghosts chasing and invisibly shaping Slimmy’s writing—that just below the surface, torturous thoughts like this are always simmering.
All four members of SOB x RBE let shards of this world-weariness cut through, and to the audience, it seems to bind them together: Not only is there a powerful musical chemistry, but these four redeem one another in perpetual motion as they sort through anger and frustration and wild ambition with a three-man safety net beneath them. It helps that they are all outrageously colorful writers who give the music an overwhelming kinetic energy. They breathe deep life into music with young lungs. Gangin is not explicitly a record about platonic love and the irreconcilable tension between youth and mortality, but it’s that, too.


Paired with drones from strings and struck bowls, the multimedia artist’s vivid readings from The Tibetan Book of the Dead offer the possibility of solace in sound itself.

Laurie Anderson / Tenzin Choegyal / Jesse Paris Smith: Songs From the Bardo

Songs from the Bardo

When his brother-in-law died in a refugee camp in India, Tibetan singer and musician Tenzin Choegyal joined his sister in mourning. Tibetan Buddhists believe that when someone dies, their consciousness wanders through an in-between phase called the bardo for seven weeks before transitioning to a new life. This journey can be disorienting and frightening. To help guide his brother-in-law’s consciousness toward rebirth, Buddhist monks read aloud from The Bardo Thodol, also known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, over the course of 49 days. “The ritual performance and recital of The Bardo Thodol by the monks transformed my sister from a devastated person to someone who gained conviction in her life again,” Choegyal writes in the liner notes for Songs From the Bardo. “The whole process was as therapeutic as anything I have ever observed in my life.”
Over the past 15 years, Choegyal has explored the power of The Bardo Thodol in a variety of musical projects. Songs From the Bardo is the latest manifestation and finds Choegyal in collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson and composer Jesse Paris Smith. Anderson acts as the guide, reading passages from The Bardo Thodol translated into English by Choegyal. The unknowable expanse of the bardo is invoked by Choegyal and Smith through vibrations summoned from a variety of particularly resonant instruments.
Resonance is the closest that sound gets to touch. Lyrics can describe a caress, but reverberation can move air and bodies in ways that viscerally recall the breath of a loved one on the nape of the neck. Throughout much of Songs From the Bardo, it is the soothing drone tones of Choegyal’s Tibetan singing bowls and Smith’s crystal bowls that hold the space. The album’s songs flow into one another with little regard for beginnings or endings, just as The Bardo Thodol describes the journey of the consciousness through death to the next life. On “Heart Sutra Song – Gone Beyond,” Choegyal’s plucking of the dranyen, a Tibetan stringed instrument, provides a grounding counterpoint to Anderson’s inquisitive violin and guest musician Rubin Kodhel’s brooding cello. Over the strings, Choegyal sings part of the Heart Sutra in Sanskrit; his natural vibrato makes for one of the most stirring moments on the album. Elsewhere, Anderson’s recital is also deeply resonant. Her words often hang in the air for a split second after they leave her mouth. Over Smith’s gently rousing piano on “Lotus Born, No Need to Fear,” Anderson imbues each description, including “a fish rolling in hot sand,” with such emotion that it floods the mind.
“Listen without distraction” is a refrain that Anderson repeats throughout Songs From the Bardo, and one that occasionally made me wonder if the album would have benefitted from using her gift for spoken word more sparingly. The interplay between the three collaborators’ instrumental contributions is so absorbing that maybe it doesn’t always need the narration; the spiritual guidance is apparent in the resonance itself.
That said, dissonance plays as an important role as resonance on the album, especially in its second half. On “Dancing With the Crescent Knife,” Choegyal’s low chant rolls underneath creaking strings that, along with Anderson’s theatrical storytelling, bring to life the most disconcerting phase of the bardo. The spoken word on Songs of the Bardo, it is important to note, draws exclusively from the Chonyid Bardo, the part of The Bardo Thodol that describes the various spirits, including “blood-drinking wrathful deities,” that one’s consciousness encounters in the bardo. “Natural Form of Emptiness” illuminates those spirits further. Choegyal plays the lingbu (a Tibetan bamboo flute) like the guiding call of a bird, as if to say, This way, this way. Then the repeated crash of a gong signals a warning, but Anderson encourages the listener to hold their ground. “Awakened one, when projections appear like this, do not be afraid,” she recites. Then, later, “They only arise out of the spontaneous play of your mind.”
The spontaneous play of your mind. These words hold particular weight at a time when systemic injustice, existential crises, and self-commodification pull the psyche in a thousand different directions at once. Anxiety, stress, depression, and a general sense of paralysis are common complaints of everyday people, and are without fail capitalized on by the very institutions and corporations that purport to support us. Insomnia, a smaller but related complaint and something I’ve experienced recently, can feel like being trapped in an in-between state. I listened to Songs of the Bardo on repeat when my eyes were burning and my head felt clogged, and it helped. The album’s contemplative pace—designed for listening in solitude, not playing in the background—cracked open just enough mental space to provide relief, and for that I am very grateful. While based on a text to help the recently deceased reach rebirth, Songs of the Bardo is very much an album about life; a salve as much as a guide.

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By 1976, Fagen and Becker pushed their music to feel as grotesque as their words. The result is the bleakest and most narratively vivid album of their career, as well as their most misunderstood.

The Royal Scam

For decades after their initial discovery in 1868, scholars dismissed the Paleolithic cave paintings of Altamira, located in the north of Spain, as forgeries. The use of cracks and shading to create perspective, and abstract images created out of ghostly impressions of handprints, all seemed too advanced to be the work of prehistoric Homo sapiens. But after similar designs were discovered at nearby sites in France and Cantabria, a French historian published an apologetic paper in 1902 affirming Altamira’s authenticity. In the first half of the century, cave painting blossomed into a major field of scientific study, and in 1976, the caves were fully legitimized, finally, when Steely Dan named the best song on The Royal Scam after them.
The narrator begins by remembering a visit to the Spanish caverns as a child—how the animal figures on its walls and ceilings seemed to come to life when he held a candle up to them. He remembers that he “understood” something after leaving the caves—a latent meaning in the “sad design”—but what was it? “Before the fall/When they wrote it on the wall/When there wasn’t even any Hollywood,” the chorus begins, and the question lingers: Why does it matter that Hollywood, specifically, didn’t exist the Paleolithic era?
“Sentient life in Los Angeles is a distinct rarity,” Walter Becker sneered to journalist Richard Cromelin in a 1976 interview for Sounds. As New York expats working in West Hollywood during an era that they felt out of step with—“Not much of a decade,” Becker said of the 1970s—nothing in the work or public comments of the increasingly reclusive studio team of Becker and Donald Fagen suggested they thought humankind had progressed much since the prehistoric days their protagonist had fantasized about. If anything, perhaps, we’d gone backwards.
Answering fan questions for the BBC in 2000, Becker claimed “Altamira” was about the narrator’s “loss of innocence,” and the rest of The Royal Scam seems to dramatize that descent across a series of more modern case studies. The narrators on the album are the most dissolute bunch Fagen and Becker ever assembled: Kid Charlemagne the washed-up acid guru, the suicidal criminal in “Don’t Take Me Alive,” the kleptomaniac in “Green Earrings,” and the violent cuckold in “Everything You Did,” among others. Recorded somewhat reluctantly at ABC Studios, where the noise reduction system had fried the sound quality of Katy Lied in the previous year, The Royal Scam found Fagen and Becker using their burgeoning studio budget—and the continuing absence of other obligatory collaborators—to create knotty, darkly playful arrangements that animated their dismal fables. The result stands as the bleakest and most narratively vivid album of their career, as well as their most misunderstood.
In interviews at the time, Fagen and Becker expressed their disenchantment with a perceived 1970s monoculture, as if working their hardest to nail in their reputation for being sneering curmudgeons. If today we view the decade as one of the most stylistically variegated time periods in popular music—one in which, after all, a band as weird and iconoclastic as Steely Dan could thrive commercially—Fagen and Becker still seemed to view the industry as one big, vapid dance party. “It’s a lot like the ’50s,” Fagen grumbled to Sounds. “The same music on the radio. I think the Four Seasons, when they started really slamming out this current string of hits, that was the capper.” Still, no matter how they might have felt about “December 1963 (Oh What a Night)” and its ilk, modern dance music still seeped into their arrangements. The sound of the rhythm sections on Scam, as much as anything, firmly places the music in 1976, and far away from the band’s roots in more conventional, upbeat radio-rock and harmonized guitar leads. Becker and Fagen consciously wanted “a more live, rhythmic sound” on the record, as Fagen described it to Melody Maker in 1976, and began recording songs with six or seven different rhythm sections.
Ultimately, Fagen and Becker used veteran session drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie—the namesake of a very particular kind of shuffle beat, purveyor of chattering hi-hat patterns—on all but two tracks. Purdie was a key collaborator during the band’s career, going on to define the groove-based sound of 1977’s Aja and 1980’s Gaucho. On Scam, though, “The Fez” was the closest thing to an attempt at disco, and it seemed to be satirizing itself, incorporating an eerie, vaguely Eastern European synth lick, a short aberrant lyric—either an extended metaphor about the importance of condoms or an unambiguous statement of purpose from someone who insists on only having sex while wearing a Shriner’s hat—and moments of jokey complexity that threw the groove. All of this felt fairly remote from “Play That Funky Music,” to say the least.
Although Scam was Steely Dan’s slickest album to date, it was also, in some ways, their ugliest. Its arrangements are a jungle of Rhodes stabs and the most aggressive—and finest—guitar work on a Steely Dan album since 1973’s Countdown to Ecstasy. On “Don’t Take Me Alive,” Larry Carlton seems to take up most of the space, snarling, feeding back, advancing the simmering tension at the song’s stakeout (in a 1979 radio interview, Gary Katz said they’d directed the guitarist to play as “nasty and loud as possible.”) In “Sign in Stranger,” Elliott Randall’s erratic guitar breaks jostle for space with Paul Griffin’s bluesy piano—hard-bop comping in double-time. Together, they seem to mimic the crooked vendors vying for customers in the song’s marketplace, which Fagen claimed to have modeled on the “Sin City/Pleasure Planet” trope from some of his favorite sci-fi stories.
Techniques like these illustrate how Fagen and Becker pushed the music on Scam to feel as grotesque as their words—to be vignettes musically as well as lyrically. This tendency toward the theatrical is most apparent in the album’s queasy emulations of reggae and Carribean music. “I think Duke Ellington’s whole exotic jungle trip contributed a lot to our tropicality numbers,” Fagen told Melody Maker in 1976. “It’s an idealized, exotic atmosphere...Showtime, Ricky Riccardo stuff. More I Love Lucy than Bob Marley.” There is the rock-steady backbeat of “Sign in Stranger,” with a closing horn line that sounds like Cuban jazz pouring in from somewhere outside of the song.
On the more extreme side is the white elephant in the room: “Haitian Divorce,” complete with an intermittent Jamaican accent and a talkbox-treated guitar that sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher. Allegedly inspired by tracking engineer Elliot Scheiner’s attempt to finalize a divorce in a matter of a couple of months through a Central American loophole, it was a cinematic bit of storytelling, and Fagen and Becker framed it explicitly as such: “Now we dolly back/Now we fade to black.” It would be easy to write off as a misguided aberration if it didn’t rank among the record’s musically inspired moments: The song’s central modulation when the backing vocalists enter makes for one of the most satisfying chorus drops they ever recorded. It was also the band’s highest-charting single in the UK to date.
The song is a microcosm of what makes The Royal Scam both singular and frustrating: a combination of sharp songwriting, a resourceful approach to narrative, piss-take musical references, and willfully poor taste. More than on any album they ever released, Fagen and Becker foregrounded their jarring stylistic pivots, tying them directly to their lyrical scenarios; Aja and Gaucho, on the other hand, would create a sleek musical surface that functioned just as well apart from the sordid narratives. The Royal Scam is the Dan album where the music doesn’t allow the listener to escape the mindset of its characters and their stories’ grim implications: real progress is rarely possible, and we are doomed to repeat our worst behaviors over and over again.
Nowhere on The Royal Scam does this feel more apparent than on the title track and closer, a plodding epic about Puerto Rican immigrants in New York City. With little in the way of vocal melody, verbose phrasing inspired by the King James Bible, and a beat that never really seems to kick in, it sounds like a smooth-rock version of what it might have felt like to row a Viking warship. It is based around harsh melodic cells traded back and forth between Fagen’s Rhodes and Carlton’s guitar, with a few solo horn interjections. The motifs feel oddly mechanistic—a process that never gets anywhere. The corruption and abuse that crop up throughout the rest of the album descend on the undeserving populace. “The Caves of Altamira” may be about a loss of idealism, but we never see the fallout; here, Fagen and Becker shove our faces in the characters’ dashed dreams. In the album’s final moment, they perpetuate the scam they fell victim to like a game of telephone, crafting fabricated success stories for their relatives at home: “The old man back home/He reads the letter/How they are paid in gold/Just to babble in the back room/All night and waste their time.” By all indications, the cycle of hope, subjugation, and destruction will begin again.