The duo of Khaela Maricich and Melissa Dyne venture into modular synthesis for the latest the Blow album. The change is not entirely positive, but it glimmers with some promising moments.

Brand New Abyss

The Blow has always bundled electro-pop, twee-punk, and performance art into spindly confessionals, but it has done so in three distinct incarnations. First, as the millennium turned, it was Khaela Maricich’s solo project, lo-fi and artsy-cuddly in the K Records tradition. Second, in the mid-2000s, it was a sleeker collaboration between Maricich and YACHT’s Jona Bechtolt, like mussed up Metric for northwestern punk kids. And third, since around 2007, the Brooklyn via Oregon band has been the combined effort of Maricich and Melissa Dyne, a conceptual installation artist who initially enhanced the Blow’s concerts and then began to work with Maricich on the music.
This iteration of the Blow is behind its first new album in four years, Brand New Abyss, in which Maricich’s spiky sensitivity comes in a redesigned container. Moving away from digital composition, the duo ventures into modular synthesis, patching together a rig of analog oscillators and filters and then half teaching it to speak, half learning its language. It makes a huge difference that the music is grounded more in space and time. Unfortunately, it’s not an entirely positive change. It seems that bouncy samples mutate into loquacious indie pop more readily than rudimentary analog synthesis does. Maricich doesn’t always adapt her grid-forged singing style to fit these blurrier compositions, and two odd cover choices cast long, puzzling shadows.
When it comes to covers, intention—as expressed through the rendition—matters. We need to feel there’s an idea beyond the wan rush of hearing a familiar song in a new context. But it’s hard to fathom what the Blow intended with their out-of-focus cover of Eagles chestnut “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” The production is thin and simplistic. The vocal melody is tentative, as if Maricich hadn’t completely decided how to phrase it before recording. One wants to read something subversive into her take on lyrics about “what a woman can do to your soul,” but the arch, quizzical tone doesn’t feel subversive. This isn’t an errant deep cut; it’s the album’s first song, and it sets an emotionally inscrutable frame around everything that follows.
“Dark Cold Magic” is much more appealing and legible, though the vocal line still can’t help but feel a little desultory with such sparse harmonic and rhythmic material to work with. This is an ongoing issue; the compositions are too often limited to a big bass plodding out a slow, simple melody under a thin scrim of atmospheric effects. But “Dark Cold Magic” and “Think About Me” are affecting performances of intimacy, sure to cast a starry mood at concerts. They showcase Maricich’s insightful, ambitious lyrics about obsession, heartbreak, and reconciliation, in which, through protracted puns, rhetorical overreach is transmuted into relatable vulnerability.
A cover of “The Greatest Love of All,” popularized by Whitney Houston, sits in the center of the album like a stone. The vocal arrangement, again, seems listless and haphazard. The approach to the material betrays neither joy nor relish; the song is neither met on its glorious terms nor stripped down to reveal something hidden inside it. You’d almost think the Blow were just mocking a cheesy pop song, relying on a twinge of ironic recognition, but that can’t be right (punk and indie bands have been covering pop songs for decades). Still, the decision to emotionally cauterize an anthem that connects with millions is truly confusing.
But then, at the halfway point, the record starts to find its stride, divulging exciting glimmers of a fully formed new direction. The Laurie Anderson-like sprechgesang of “The Woman You Want Her to Be” makes so much more sense with the sparse sonic palette than strained R&B vocals do; it’s like Maricich stops fighting against the music and feeds it the texture and language it’s starved for. Full of acute emotional shades and vivid social scenes, it’s also genuinely funny. The same is true of “Get Up,” which nudges into rap, and the album starts to inflate with a confidence and ease that is scarce on the first half.
If the Blow were to retire right now, Maricich could make a claim few can—she wrote a perfect song. “True Affection,” with that unforgettable lift in the vocal line during the chorus, was a flawless example of the burbling warmth and immediacy of Postal Service-era electro-pop. This was 2006, when Bechtolt’s suave electronics aided Maricich in toying with pop idioms from bounce rap to soft rock with a lot of musicality and a minimum of winking. Brand New Abyss, by its exploratory nature, doesn’t aspire to such great heights. But this valiant yet flawed endeavor feels more like a false start than a dead end, if the Blow keeps watering the ideas seeding the back half and stays away from karaoke.


The Ecuador-born songwriter’s second album is a study in time, examining aging as a continuum of death and regeneration with a light, whimsical touch.

Envejeciendo

Maria Usbeck wrote her second album in response to finding her first grey hairs. If her 2016 debut Amparo was a study in place, Envejeciendo is a study in time, examining aging as a continuum of death and regeneration with a light, whimsical touch. On Amparo, the former Selebrities singer returned to her native Ecuador (and a number of other places over three years of travel) to sing in Spanish and indigenous languages including Quichua, Rapa Nui, and Bribri. She pieced together ambient recordings from three years of travel, new-wave production, and instruments like the Andean quena flute, harp, and tumba drum to recover a native language.
On Envejeciendo, Usbeck uses these same tools to cultivate a richer emotional terrain. She treats the concept of aging as if it had no endpoint, observing the process in real time. Each sound bleeds into the next. On “Obscuro Obituario,” it’s a layering of human sighs that gives way to a haunting refrain in the voice of one losing their memory: “Recuerda que yo te puedo ver” (“Remember that I can see you”).
The examinations of aging on Envejeciendo run the spectrum from heartbreaking to ascetic. On “Amor Anciano,” a forest of synths breaks into an interlude of wind instruments and crickets as Usbeck’s grandmother recalls a bygone romance: “Le queda a una el recuerdo, el recuerdo lindo, de esos años preciosos de la ilusión….” she trails off. (“One is left with the memory, the beautiful memory, of those precious years of infatuation.”) “Retirement Home” imagines the fun retirement homes of the future, and “Secret in Japan” ponders the traditional laundry list of a healthy life: eating well, exercising, getting enough rest. “I think the secret to our longevity is….” Usbeck begins, naming several of these items before finally admitting: “I actually don’t know.”
Most of the album is similarly detached, with a lyrical economy that allows for a variety of readings. It opens with “Adios a Mi Memoria,” a goodbye to memory as blithe as a wave from a passing ship. The five-line song moves from Spanish to simple English, the voice of a bilingual brain no longer policing the language of its thought.
Usbeck also uses the mundane—like the dissociation that comes with learning a new technology—to encapsulate more existential displacement. On “The Machine,” she speaks as an elder learning to use a computer, the voice chopped and stretched as if downloaded over a bad connection. Pulsing synths and heavy reverb recall the aesthetics of the primitive internet, juxtaposed with the disembodied voice of a virtual assistant explaining artificial intelligence—the past and the future meeting in a conflicted present.
Usbeck’s quiet can inspire moods that range from casual observation to painful flashback. The album seems meant as exactly that: a slip in self-consciousness brought on, as Usbeck explains on the final track, by the active and passive mind: “Será que es nostalgia/Talvez es la vejez” (“Maybe it is nostalgia/Perhaps it is old age”). Both states cause memories to embalm and deteriorate without our permission. Yet Envejeciendo provides the distance necessary to think of aging as an old map navigated with intention. With eight concise tracks, Usbeck invites the listener into the kind of brief, dissociative fugue that lets you see all these selves at once.


Nearly a decade into their reunion, the shoegaze titans refuse to pander to fans clamoring for their classic sound. Their stubbornness is admirable—if occasionally frustrating.

Interplay

Nine years and three albums into their reunion, Ride refuse to pander to their classic sound. Their stance is frustratingly laudable—a creative obstinacy to be admired with a slightly heavy heart. The Oxford band may not have invented the shoegaze palette of swirling guitars and dreamy vocals, but in the early 1990s, when the genre first started to take hold, Ride were the shoegaze poster boys, their sharp songs and good looks taking the Thames Valley sound to the upper reaches of the UK charts. And if Slowdive have surpassed them in popularity post-reformation, you can still hear the vaporous drive of Ride’s debut album, Nowhere, in the music of nu-gaze bands from Hotline TNT to For Tracy Hyde.
Ironically, the shoegaze revivalists often sound considerably more attached to classic Ride than Ride themselves do these days. The band’s first post-reunion album, Weather Diaries, bore distinctly modern production touches, while 2019’s This Is Not a Safe Place was a broad-ranging church that encompassed electro pop and acoustic jangle in its eclectic sweep. The group has framed Interplay as the album that brings it all together, uniting the different sides of the Ride narrative. But it’s not really Ride enough for that—more the sound of a band trying on different styles to see what fits, hindered by some mediocre songwriting.
Ride, at their classic best, married haunting vocal harmonies to pillowing walls of guitar, like the Byrds via My Bloody Valentine. But distorted guitar is missing from most of Interplay, and its absence is felt more keenly than at any point since the group’s reunion. Instead, the unexpected sound that hangs heavily over the opening half of the album is that of New Order. “Last Frontier” is the spitting image of Manchester’s favorite sons in their rocking mode—Peter Hook-style I’m-in-control-here-lads bassline and all—while the chiming guitar and simple synth chords on “Monaco” (which even shares a name with a Hook side project) hold a mirror up to New Order at their ’90s glossiest.
Interplay is not, then, the work of a group unduly concerned with fan service. Instead, the album continues in the liberated lineage of This Is Not a Safe Place, where a reunited band free of the crushing strain of legend status gets on with doing whatever the hell it likes—see also the Jesus and Mary Chain’s happily all-over-the-place 2024 album Glasgow Eyes. As on Weather Effect, the odd modern production effect sneaks through, such as the filtered fusion of French touch and shoegaze on “Peace Sign,” along with the psychedelic guitar whimsy (the charming “Last Night I Went Somewhere To Dream”) and dreamy acoustic strum (“Stay Free”) that their two previous albums did well.
The album also goes way further out into the weeds. “Sunrise Chaser” is a glittery wink away from being a disco record, with its funk bassline and what sounds like a Nile Rodgers-style guitar chuck; “I Came to See the Wreck” is kindergarten Depeche Mode with none of Dave Gahan’s pervy intensity; and the shuffling breakbeat and cinematic guitar effects of “Essaouira” suggest the trip-hop acts that followed Ride into the charts three decades ago.
Ride’s willingness to try all of this is admirable. That they do it competently is no surprise for a band driven by two excellent guitarists (Andy Bell and Mark Gardener) and one of the best rhythm sections in ’90s indie (Loz Colbert and Steve Queralt). But New Order themselves have been doing New Order perfectly well since reforming in 2011, while Rodgers has hardly been shy about lending his guitar skills to contemporary records. What’s more, nobody quite does yearning Nowhere-style shoegaze like Ride do yearning Nowhere-style shoegaze, an impression underlined by the excellent “Portland Rocks,” the album’s only classically Ride skyscraper, all soaring guitars and soul-soothing drum thrash, a song that could close their gigs from now until eternity.
Interplay does just about enough to keep everyone happy: Shoegaze fans get a sonic-cathedral finale, while Ride follow their creative whims. Without many truly great songs, though, Ride might have been wise to play to their strengths, rather than coveting someone else’s.


The veteran UK band continues to re-locate itself on this, its second album since the departure of three of its original six members.

Falling Down a Mountain

On the Tindersticks website recently, there was a video splash page announcing the new album that featured footage of the band playing its title track and introducing them one at a time. The first member mentioned was keyboardist and co-founder David Boulter. He's one of the architects of the band's sound, and his piano and organ have been signatures of the band for almost 20 years. And in the video he was playing... tambourine. His big moment on camera didn't show him doing what he does best. There is something perversely appropriate about this-- Tindersticks have always made music that thrives on their lack of egos, and here Boulter was just doing what the song asks for.
The track in question is an odd one, opening the band's eighth album (not counting soundtracks), and in terms of vocals it's more of a mantra than a song. There are three lines of lyrics, sung over and over in different combinations by smoky-voiced Stuart Staples and bassist Dan McKinna as the band provides jazzy drumming and wiry guitar figures. Longtime collaborator and satellite band member Terry Edwards plays sputtering trumpet, and the word is that he wasn't allowed to listen to it while playing-- they just told him what it sounded like. That kind of creative process-- encouraging the happy accident-- and the overall dialogue-ish approach to building a song that marks Falling Down a Mountain as an attempt to re-energize the veteran band.
This is their second album since half of the original sextet quit. Its predecessor, 2008's The Hungry Saw, exhibited some of the same tentativeness. They are, in a sense, a new band living in the long shadow of an old one. Their first three albums were difficult masterpieces, their next few strange explorations of soul music, their sixth a summary and a farewell. Albums seven and eight have been relaxed and seemingly unconcerned with besting the old stuff. That's probably for the best, as it lets them crank out the kind of simple pleasures that seem to flow naturally from them. On this album, that's evident on low-volume lullaby "Keep You Beautiful", which is like a Willie Mitchell production stripped to its barest, topped by a guy with molasses for vocal chords. Elsewhere, "Factory Girls" is a simple but lush piano-led ballad that lets Staples play around in his upper register as he licks romantic wounds and ruminates on aging. It stays sparse until its final minute, when the whole band comes in to lift him up.
McKinna and the other new members, drummer Earl Harvin and guitarist David Kitt, provide Tindersticks with something they've never had before: a backing vocal section that can go call-and-response with Staples. They do it best on "Black Smoke", a Velvet Underground-type groove that features plenty of backing harmonies and a crazy sax part that sounds like it wandered off from a Roxy Music session. The Latin-flavored "She Rode Me Down" is another standout, pulling the band together into a rhythmic juggernaut. At the complete opposite end of things is "Peanuts", a spartan duet between Staples and singer/actress Mary Margaret O'Hara that never gets anywhere-- it's sparse to the point of boring, and next to past duet highlights like "Travelling Light" it pales completely.
Especially during its quietest moments, this album is almost more like the memory of a song than the song itself. It leaves a very hazy, almost spectral impression when it ends. But it's also warm and in some ways comforting, and it improves the more you listen to it and tease out the details in the songs. Tindersticks Mk II seems to be hitting its stride and discovering where its real creative chemistry lies.


The Nigerian singer has the writing and vocal chops to best most of the leading men of Afropop. But his self-proclaimed transformation feels like a talented artist simply conforming to trends.

Catch Me If You Can

Even before he cemented his transformation from urban highlife to Afropop, Adekunle Gold was conscious of how his audience perceived him. With his first two albums, Gold and About 30, the Nigerian singer-songwriter earned recognition in the culturally specific niche of highlife, but it was clear he had grander ambitions. Those deliberate steps toward the mainstream coalesced on 2021’s Afropop Vol. 1, where he completed the makeover. Gone was the specificity of Yoruba highlife—the prominence of the talking drum, the language, those distinct vocal strains, and adire fabric. In its place: a new nickname (AG Baby), digital production, silk shirts, and lyrics sung in English.
With Catch Me If You Can, AG refines the pop formula he introduced last year, closing the chapter on his past self. The result sounds less like a creative transformation than a talented artist simply conforming to trends. In 2016, WizKid made a star turn alongside Drake on “One Dance,” the most-streamed song on Spotify that year. Burna Boy—the first of his generation of Afropop stars to win a Grammy—reached new levels of visibility with his hit single “Pree Me,” and Davido crowned himself the “Coolest Kid in Africa.” In this lineage, AG’s self-proclaimed transformation feels like the comfortable, unimaginative end-point of a well-tread path.
Even when working with familiar templates, AG has the writing and vocal chops to make better music than most of the leading men of Afropop. On the God-praising “Mase Mi,” his voice shines without the help of audible digital tuning. “More Than Enough” pleasantly nods to the highlife of his past in the lilt of its simple melodies, call-and-response vocals, horns, and soft guitar. “Selah” is a tale of toxic love, with almost every aspect of the production muted, and it reaches higher levels of emotional depth than any track here. When everything clicks, these songs feel like welcome additions to the pantheon of Afropop hits.
An overemphasis on efficiency and restraint, however, makes the bulk of this record feel more like a completed to-do list of Afropop trends than a cohesive album. Romance, check. Sex, check. Hustle, check. Amapiano, check. The otherwise enjoyable “One Woman” is a blatant TikTok play: When Ty Dolla $ign breaks mid-song to intone, “Wait… she’s really hot,” you can practically see the before-and-after jump-cut of a TikTok user’s visual transformation from bare face to full makeup.
There are two sides to African popular music that breaks internationally. On one end are artists like Youssou N’Dour, the Kuti sons, and Angélique Kidjo, who capture old-guard music critics and concert halls; on the other are those like WizKid, Davido, and Amaarae, who light up the clubs and social media. The gap between the two often feels unbridgeable, and yet it’s not impossible to cross: Burna Boy triumphed with his last two albums. But few other artists have the range to attract both audiences. What’s frustrating about Catch Me If You Can is this missed opportunity. Rather than bringing himself closer to pop, AG could have brought pop closer to highlife, broadening the scope of the genres and, in effect, transforming them.


With heavy electronic textures, Brooklyn noise trio White Suns add a fresh wrinkle to their catalog on the vertiginous Psychic Drift.

White Suns

Existential despair is the core currency of Brooklyn noise trio White Suns. It informs every jaundiced note this group mangles or ruptures, regardless of whether or not lead vocalist Kevin Barry happens to supply a narrative anchor. It’s there among distorted swells on “Flesh Vault,” from 2012’s Sinews, an interior monologue resolved thusly: “The way is unmarked/But the map is in me.” It’s in the naked burst of jealousy igniting “Voyeur,” off 2011’s Waking in the Reservoir, and in the clamorous attempt at self-actualization that is “Cathexis” from 2014’s Totem. But it’s also present in the post-hardcore holler of early rager “Don Mattingly,” and in the swampy electronic jams on 2012’s inchoate HQ Tape Series Vol. 5. Uncertainty is their specialty.
What guitarist/singer Barry, drummer Dana Matthiessen, and guitarist Rick Visser—who all chip in with electronics—establish is an ignominious sub-industrial alchemy. It’s a doomed space where doubt reigns, where it becomes difficult to separate instrumental components. White Suns’ initial embraces of scum rock and scuzz punk gave way, over time, to a heavier, more chaotic crunch, as the band moved from cassette imprints to labels (Load, ugEXPLODE, the Flesner) for its LP and CD releases. It’s the band’s earnestness—its self-reflexive sincerity—that’s remained steadfast throughout.
Psychic Drift adds a fresh wrinkle to the catalog, limiting proceedings to just four extended meditations and swapping out guitars for tangles of synths, samples, and field recordings. The results feel overwhelmingly claustrophobic at moments and misleadingly thin at others; any time a song seems poised to peter out, a dark surge is almost inevitably en route. This vertiginous feeling fits the album’s loose lyrical theme: a modern societal apocalypse, nearly normalized. While Barry has shuttled between spoken word and screaming before, he leans harder on the former here—even as the surrounding sludge threatens to drown him out.
Groaning drones and electrical crackles open “A Year Without Summer,” as though a massive machine is rumbling back to life. Keening streaks of noise pierce the spectral din, as Barry’s vocals grind the distorted churn or strain to escape turning gears. These are evocative scraps, pieces to a puzzle for us to assemble: “I am listening, I am listening,” “lay your head down,” “...of transferred energy.” The blunt and desolate “Pilgrim” juxtaposes the deafening bustle of tugboat horns and railroad crossings with a profound, suffocating emptiness. A noisy squeal swells within the sonic frame, summoning the line, “Washed up on the shore of civilization/Waves break across my chest/I’ve brought nothing to an empty place,” which yields to “beaches iced over” and “no echoes here.” Closer “Medicine Walk” suggests incidental warehouse sounds remixed into a sloshing, sinister raga, punctuated by muffled vocals. The starkest of these—“My voice dies 10 feet from my mouth”—is the most direct sentiment Psychic Drift has to offer.
Opener “Korea” is the clincher—nearly 15 impenetrable minutes spent under what sounds like a highway overpass. The song feels cramped, a crush of atonal scales, sampled voices, and howling feedback throbbing relentlessly. What we hear matches what is sung: “Wandering under a foreign highway, searching for a place to sleep/...Static roar of cars overhead.” And then Barry adds, “His face is like a fear mask, with nothing behind.” Shortly thereafter, the aural avalanche gives way to what sounds like dozens of backyard trampolines being simultaneously struck far beyond their safety limits. “Korea” seems destined to shake itself into pieces. In all its cluttered information overload, it sounds like the end of the world.


Simian Mobile Disco perform with a series of analogue synths, a 909 drum machine, and effects pedals, and their live show exhibits a deep understanding of tension and release. Live is a one-take, unedited recording of their gig at the Philadelphia show of their summer 2012 U.S. tour.

Live

At the end of last summer Deadmau5 wrote a now infamous post on his Tumblr titled "we all hit play". His gleeful reveal was that the live performance of EDM was not about talent; he and his contemporaries in the EDM world were simply “button pushers”. So what if his off-the-peg, risk-free “live” shows were a pantomime? The real magic, as he saw it, happened in the studio and that’s what drew his fans to the show. There’s an interesting point in there somewhere about the tension between the creation and presentation of electronic music, which was picked up and eloquently dissected by Elite Gymnastics’ James Brooks on his own Tumblr; noting: “all of the really interesting things about my creative process are happening inside my head, there’s no way for me to show you that the way that a rock musician can.”
While Brooks identified the escapist value in occasionally being “bullshitted” by mainstream music, Deadmau5’s post was ultimately born of a frustration with deception: “But to stand up and say youre doing something special outside of a studio environment, when youre not, just plain fuckin annoys me.” Again, it’s a fair point and one that brings semantics into play: what does “live” electronic music mean today? Is it simply the act of being present and hitting that button? Is it a straight recreation of the album in a public arena? Is it a translation of computer compositions for a live context? Or is it an extension of the music, seeing the tracks as a loose framework within which to experiment and give birth to new versions?
It’s a question that, while perhaps not intentionally, long-serving UK techno duo Simian Mobile Disco provide their own answer to with their new album. Live is a one-take, unedited recording of their gig on the Philadelphia leg of their summer 2012 US tour. SMD are big gear heads-- they perform with a series of analogue synths, 909 drum machine, and effects pedals-- and see their live process as a route to freedom: “On this tour, the setlist was pretty much the same each night, but the way we played the tracks varied. Because of the way we have everything set up, we can easily jam out individual tracks depending on how the we and the crowd are feeling,” they recently explained.
The result, as with any live album, is not one you can really dip into at random, admittedly a tall order for today’s skip-attuned instincts. But commit to the flux and flow of this 68-minute journey and the reward of riding it is great. Featuring select tracks from across their back catalogue of studio albums-- Attack Decay Sustain Release, Temporary Pleasure, Delicacies and Unpatterns-- Live is a deft exhibition of SMD’s deep understanding of tension and release. They build and stoke steadily throughout the first 15 or so minutes of tough techno rhythms, an immersion that serves to tease impassioned response to the delicate, soaring melody of “Cerulean”. There are audible crowd cheers at the decaying close of their Beastie Boys-evoking number “It’s The Beat” and the bleepy-bloopy beginning of “Skin Cracker” that provide their own joyful reminder of the album’s context.
“Wooden” has some gorgeous cascading keys that evoke the spirit of the UK’s second summer of love and the birth of rave culture a quarter of a century ago. But it’s the segueing of “Seraphim” into “Cruel Intentions” that provides the seductive heart of the record, a sensual reminder of ecstatic possibilities of a half-time beat and a pure house vocal. As with any live set there are points in which you fully inhabit the music and others where your body is so caught up in its motion that your mind wanders. That’s no bad thing. It’s all about context with Live: each moment is a build to and release from the next. However electronic music continues to evolve and grow, for Simian Mobile Disco the clue’s in their name: the studio might be the starting point but their music is most alive on the road and in the live moment.


Wild Beasts' Boy King replaces the ornate detail of its predecessors with machine-tooled funk and pitch-shifted gasps. It's by no means a disaster, but it is a disappointment.

Boy King

Over four albums, Wild Beasts’ snaky percussion, kaleidoscopic guitar lines, and equally comic and self-lacerating regard for masculinity gave them a unique standing in the British indie scene: just as beloved by beery gig-goers chanting their riffs as by those who wouldn’t usually touch a four-piece guitar band with a big stick. So it’s odd that their fifth album arrives with co-frontman Hayden Thorpe telling reporters, “We’ve become the band we objected to being”: The swaggering American rockers that they rebelled against in their schooldays. During a period of heartbreak, Thorpe realized that he’s just as bad as the macho beefcakes they’ve often lampooned, and saw two possible paths stemming from the electronic intricacy of their last record: lab-coat music, or to “don the leather jackets and embrace the chaos and carnal force of rock‘n’roll,” he said. “And it was always going to be the leather jackets route.”
Boy King was made in Dallas with John Congleton (St. Vincent, Swans), and replaces the ornate detail of its predecessors with machine-tooled funk and pitch-shifted gasps, aiming to marry Justin Timberlake’s groove with Nine Inch Nails’ aggression. Whereas 2014’s Present Tense extolled the spiritual fulfillment that can come from sex and love, their sole lyrical concern here is destruction at the hands of desire. The need to keep things fresh five albums in is understandable, and Wild Beasts should be smart enough to adapt.
But Boy King is their first misfire, bringing a sledgehammer to a nut-cracking party. Their outlook is facile and incurious: Sex is always deadly transgression; men tremble before the dominant women they idolize, like the “Alpha Female” who Thorpe would not hold back, “simple as that, yeah,... ooh-ooh-ooh.” In the past they often counterbalanced sincerity by warning of the evil inside, a relatable nod to the nastier tendencies that linger within most normal people. Here, their motives are one-dimensionally “evil.” “Do I dare to disturb the universe?/Lest I crush the softest among us?” Thorpe wonders on “He the Colossus,” as he contemplates an illicit shag. Wild Beasts’ wordiness has always been part of their charm, recasting beery street scenes as Hieronymus Bosch paintings and heartache as opulent palaces, but on Boy King, the overstatement is mostly facade, stripped of the subtlety and emotion that made their absurdity so appealing.
There’s something to be said for switching sides to know your enemy—even the enemy within—but references to a “virgin killer, ”a woman fluttering her “come-to-bed eyes,” and Tom Fleming seeing “death up the skirts of the world” are weak. Wild Beasts’ records until now had followed a linear trajectory from horny youths to confident men: Limbo, Panto’s firecracker libido matured into Two Dancers’ debonair lotharios, who had their hearts broken on Smother. After the adult intimacies of Present Tense, Boy King feels like a middle-aged man buying a motorbike to prove that he’s still virile, grunting lustily and making “ooh matron” double entendres about sex and commerce. Is “Big Cat” a criticism of untouchable corrupt businessmen like Donald Trump and Philip Green, or an admission of dominant sexual tendencies? (“Won’t be your house cat, are you okay with that?”) Is “Get My Bang” about rampant Black Friday consumerism or getting your kicks at any cost? Either way, the orgiastic gasping and hammy outrage doesn’t constitute “a sense of threat,” as Thorpe has described it, but a turn-off. The gimmickery only magnifies their palpable fear of becoming repetitive or predictable.
Now and then, Wild Beasts break beyond the surface to offer a few sharper observations. “Now I’m all fucked up and I can’t stand up so I better suck it up like a tough guy would,” Thorpe oozes on “Tough Guy,” illuminating the toxic expectations of machismo: “the old path to a new hell.” That song references Steinbeck’s observation that “all of men’s vices are a shortcut to love,” a predicament that traps Fleming on “Ponytail,” where he pleads for love in a moment of lust. It’s Boy King’s best song: a pitch-shifted, barely decipherable cry of “hold me by my, hold me by my” hovers like a mosquito whine; a ringing cash register punctuates the transactional nature of the experience; Fleming’s baritone steers its soft, perilous desperation. That forlorn quality also animates “2BU,” Fleming racing an arpeggiated synth as he warns a girl, “When I come calling, let’s hope that I don’t find you first.” Even if the lyrics are underwhelming, the band and Congleton match the moods well—the restraint of “Big Cat” and “Get My Bang” reinforces the trap of desire that imprisons them, and “Tough Guy” struts convincingly—though too many of the songs pound the same phrase into oblivion and rely on suspense rather than hooky payoffs.
Boy King is by no means a disaster, but it is a disappointment. It’s hard to think of a guitar band better at singing about sex than Wild Beasts were on their first four albums—sex as caper, as competition, lust, ritual, sadness, redemption. For every extreme, a nuanced undercurrent: the sweetly silly dance moves that accompanied the sincerity of “A Simple Beautiful Truth;” the sense of being so overpowered by romance that comparing your love to Shelley and Frankenstein seems perfectly logical. Here, they’ve inhabited their concept so fully that it disappears and becomes a single dimension. Their version of oversexed, rutting sleaze is better than a lot of bands who pull that trick—and it’s refreshing to hear men singing about being wrong without resorting to Drake-ian self-effacement—but that doesn’t stop the record from sounding thin. Perhaps it works on a meta level: On Boy King, Wild Beasts’ attempt to sing about being consumed by desire consumes them in turn.


On their second major outing for a label other than their own, the eternally enigmatic producer uses frantic EBM and lurid synths to cast a shadow as dark and deep as their reputation.

Untitled II

Before Burial stepped out of the rain-slicked darkness or Redshape donned his corny red plastic mask, Pom Pom anonymously churned out brute, functionalist techno for their eponymous label, one untitled, unmarked, all-black 12" at a time. Since 2001, long before mystery artists were a fetishized entity and favored marketing strategy in electronic music, Pom Pom have issued 50-plus releases. The facelessness of the operation—along with the outward interchangeability of the releases themselves, without cover art, titles, or even center stickers—has made Pom Pom feel like a metonym for techno itself. The onomatopoeic alias doesn’t hurt.
There was a lull in Pom Pom’s output during the middle of this decade, but things picked up again in 2017. Last year, in their first major outing on a label other than their own, Pom Pom turned up on Berlin’s A-Ton—a fitting place, given that A-Ton’s parent company, the iconic nightclub Berghain, is itself synonymous with techno. The new Untitled II, their return to A-Ton, picks up the general palette of last year’s five-track EP Untitled, in which analog drum machines and unvarnished synths swam in chilly reverb and skin-chapping distortion. Though clearly intended as a companion to the preceding EP (Untitled II’s sequentially numbered tracks begin with “Untitled 6”), these eight tracks are moodier and more diverse. Where Untitled was largely geared toward pummeling, peak-time play, Untitled II skulks around dance music’s edges.
Instead of the digital precision of much contemporary dance music, Pom Pom’s beats lumber and lurch, elephantine and unsteady, ungainly and strange. The clubbiest track here, the only one that feels like a boom-ticking DJ tool, doesn’t last three minutes. The lengthiest cut, “Untitled 10,” is also the most unfocused: seven minutes of drainpipe clank, black-metal drone, and the tentative thud of drums untethered from their timekeeping role. In between those, Pom Pom explore John Carpenter-esque synth arpeggios, electronically generated cricket buzz, and glowering ambient.
For all the wintry sonics, this isn’t a curl-up-on-the-couch listen: “Untitled 9” is a whirling barrage of double-time EBM, a real post-punk nail-biter. The major-key chords and icy melody of “Untitled 11” create a queasy sense of contrast with the somber surroundings. Despite the omnipresent gloom, Untitled II isn’t averse to allowing the occasional manic grin, so that what can look monochromatic reveals an oily iridescence.
As for Pom Pom themselves, their mystery abides. The music offers few fingerprints that might be traced back to other artists. There are scads of people out there making shadowy, post-punk techno with a similar grimness. Untitled II almost deliberately seems to eschew auteurism, though, preferring to fall back on the hallmarks of genre itself—tweaking the proportions of a carefully rounded kick drum, say, or offering teasing throwbacks to the vintage bleep techno of Warp Records’ early years. That’s ultimately the album’s chief pleasure: Like techno at its most visceral, it requires no justification and no explanation. This is dark music for dark rooms and dark moods. While its effects may not linger, when the record’s on the platter, it casts an impressively deep shadow.


There’s more than meets the eye on Richard D. James’ first new EP in five years, a slim collection of percussive bruisers with a woozy, inscrutable mood.

Aphex Twin: Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / in a room7 F760 EP

Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / In a Room7 F760 EP

To the casual observer, Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James might appear miserly with his output. Since 2014’s Syro, which marked the veteran electronic trickster’s return after 13 years of (near) silence, he had until now put out only six official releases, all EPs, and three of them essentially marginalia: One gathered sketch-like experiments with drumming robots, while another compiled unreleased club tracks, and a third dusted off a 1995 Peel Session. Whole electronic subgenres have flourished and cratered in the five years since the latest of his post-Syro EPs, 2018’s Collapse.
But to the legions of fans who obsessively follow James’ every move, we’re in a wildly fecund era of Aphexeana. Since Syro, visitors to the Aphex shop have been treated to Drukqs outtakes, archival rarities, and even a cryptic set of ambient-adjacent etudes. Most enticingly, he’s dangled occasional tour-only drops for showgoers in Japan, Houston, London, Manchester, and Barcelona. Some of those, like the scintillating Field Day album, eventually made it to the online store; others remain vinyl- or cassette-only, and rare as hen’s teeth. Through it all, he’s kept up an irregular stream of SoundCloud releases from his bottomless vaults. Three more tracks went up just last week, right around the release of the new Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / in a room7 F760 EP. (This ridiculously meticulous chart on Reddit details James’ gray-market output since Collapse: 37 new or remastered tracks, plus anywhere between 14 and 41 live debuts. That’s pretty prolific for someone who gives the impression of lying low.)
How does James decide when a given set of tracks will receive a wide release? For his first major output in half a decade, Blackbox Life Recorder appears a little thin at just four tracks long, especially since one of those, “Blackbox Life Recorder 22 [Parallax Mix],” is an alternate take. It’s more than just a question of quantity. There was a clear sense of purpose to other recent EPs of new material: Cheetah was an egghead’s love letter to a notoriously arcane synthesizer, Collapse a tour de force of drum programming. But it’s hard to find a comparable organizing principle for this one.
In general, these tracks are big, bruising, and percussion-forward. Whatever gear he’s used this time—internet sleuths have noted that the sleeve of the new EP features graphics from the Sequentix Cirklon, a hardware sequencer that he cited in two Cheetah titles and a previous interview—the drums have unusual oomph. He leans heavily on vintage-sounding drum machines: dampened snares, scratchy hi-hats, flammy toms, a rimshot worthy of Prince. His programming is as knotty as ever, but it’s the treatment of his drums that stands out. On “zin2 test5” and “in a room7 F760,” the hits are dry and unvarnished, as though recorded in a studio lined with blankets. “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f” is more complex: Some beats are muffled, others trail off into shimmery reverb tails. One kit simultaneously seems to occupy two very different positions in space, to subtly dizzying effect.
What the tracks share, mainly, is a certain inscrutable mood. The synths are woozy and watery, soaked in rapid-fire vibrato and prodded by occasional tritones. “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f” boasts a lovely melody that wends its way through the background, a beguiling ghost in glowing robes. In “zin2 test5,” softly sighing chords temper the surly bassline and nervous drum fills. And “in a room7 F760” starts with the kind of melancholy chiming synth lead that James canonized with Selected Ambient Works 85-92, then blows everything wide open: weird stereo panning, flayed hi-hats, “I need more cowbell” levels of cowbell. No matter how hectic the going gets, he suffuses it in miasmatic synths that sound like a much sadder version of New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies. If that weren’t affecting enough, “Blackbox Life Recorder 22 [Parallax Mix]” swaps out beefier drum sounds for hissing, rollicking cymbals in a classic “Xtal”/“Pulsewidth” vein, playing up the song’s spooky, phantasmal properties.
This being Aphex Twin circa 2023, the story doesn’t quite end there. On his web shop, the digital release of Blackbox Life Recorder contains four extra tracks. The bonus material turns out to be the same four tracks, just mastered differently by James himself “with specialist analog” hardware. (“Neither is better,” James explained, not entirely helpfully, in a comment on SoundCloud: “The louder ones are fuller, bigger but the quiet ones are way more punchy and cleaner if you turn the volume knob up high.”) Only very keen ears may be able to tell the difference, but “blackbox life recorder 20 ambient 760” is another matter entirely: That’s a mostly beatless version of the song that intrepid Redditors armed with Aphex Twin’s augmented-reality app YXBoZXh0d2lu and a facility for Python code located lurking on a Google Drive alongside a selection of promotional material. (Given that the enclosing folder is titled “WHILE STOCKS LAST,” it was presumably meant to be found.) It’s tempting to speculate that there are more versions like that out there, just waiting to be discovered. Blackbox Life Recorder, the EP, might seem relatively modest, but the black box that is Aphex Twin’s extended universe remains delightfully unfathomable.


Gorguts' first record since 2001 features founding member Luc Lemay surrounded by members of Krallice, Dysrhythmia, and Origin. Colored Sands, an album of breathtaking detail and scope, contains some of the thorniest, most aggressive death metal ever issued under the classic Quebec band's name, as well as moments of stunning textural beauty.

Colored Sands

Like any respected underground band staging a comeback, Gorguts have a lot to live up to. In order to understand why expectations are unusually high for Colored Sands-- the first new LP since 2001 from this Quebec death-metal institution-- you have to look back to 1998's Obscura, one of the most pungently progressive albums ever made, in or out of metal. Obscura didn't just register as technical; it sounded downright excruciating, as if its shuddering blastbeats, doleful bellows, and deliriously inventive guitarwork were being torn straight from the chests of its makers.
But as brilliant as Obscura was, and as wide as its influence has spread-- it holds a hallowed place not just among discerning death-metalheads, but in open-eared jazz circles as well-- it wasn't exactly a definitive Gorguts release. The band made their name playing in a very different style. Their first two LPs, 1991's Considered Dead and 1993's The Erosion of Sanity, demonstrated impressive tightness and a flair for involved composition, but they were very much of their time-- unrelentingly intense dispatches descended from the bulging-vein aggression of 80s thrash. Conceived as early as 93, but not issued until 98, Obscura shocked longtime listeners, who couldn't believe the madness the band's lengthy gestation had birthed.
That chapter of Gorguts was short-lived, though, as guitarist/vocalist Steeve Hurdle-- a key co-architect of Obscura, who died tragically last year at age 41-- left the band in 1999. On the next Gorguts LP, 2001's sorely underrated From Wisdom to Hate, founder and sole constant member Luc Lemay streamlined Obscura's demented sprawl, yielding a less outlandish yet equally distinguished statement. This was a wise move; there would've been no way to out-weird Obscura.
Fans have known for a while that the next Gorguts record was shaping up to be another fresh start. When Lemay revived the group in 2009, after a suggestion from Hurdle that he commemorate Gorguts' 20th anniversary, he took a new approach to bandbuilding. Gorguts had always been a locally sourced project, staffed by musicians from Lemay's Quebec home base-- including Hurdle, bassist Steve Cloutier and current Voivod guitarist Daniel Mongrain-- but this time, he set about assembling a North American progressive-metal all-star team. This band, which appears on Colored Sands, includes two NYC luminaries: bassist Colin Marston, of Krallice and Behold… the Arctopus, and guitarist Kevin Hufnagel, Marston's bandmate in Dysrhythmia. The drummer is John Longstreth, best known for his work in Kansas's hypertechnical Origin. It would be reductive to peg any of these players as members of a post-Gorguts generation, but their work during the past decade embodies the same spirit that drove Obscura: a conception of metal as art music, not in the Sunn O))) sense-- where the genre commingles with drone, noise and other abstracted forms-- but in the sense of a creatively restless pursuit, a union of unfettered imagination and rigorous virtuosity. Like Luc Lemay, Marston, Hufnagel, and Longstreth have each established themselves as master players driven to expand their idiom without assailing its core tenets.
The highest compliment you could pay Colored Sands would be a simple description of what it is: a fully formed outing from an outstandingly pedigreed new incarnation of an already legendary band. Thanks to Lemay's trademark anguished roar and dark-prog riff savvy, Colored Sands feels unmistakably like a Gorguts record, but the compositions-- most by Lemay, with Marston and Hufnagel each contributing a single song-- don't mimic any particular chapter of the band's past. The record's greatest strength is its vast dynamic range. On one hand, it contains some of the thorniest, most aggressive death metal ever issued under the Gorguts name; on the other, it includes moments of stunning textural beauty. That duality is a perfect fit for the album's surprisingly specific lyrical theme: the way Tibetan culture encompasses both ancient majesty and modern despair.
It seems odd to praise a Gorguts record for its prettiness, but some of the most memorable passages on Colored Sands are also the subtlest-- transitional sections that punctuate the band's signature gritted-teeth shred. Opening track "Le Toit du Monde" orbits a hypnotic, clean-toned motif-- a waltz-time riff marked by chiming harmonics-- and Hufnagel seasons his extraordinary "Absconders" with a dreamy interlude, an oasis of eerie calm in the middle of a churning epic. Other pieces thrive on adrenaline. Marston's "Forgotten Arrows" features a thrillingly complex central theme, which seems descended both from Dysrhythmia's intricate chiaroscuro riffs and the blastbeat-driven turbo-prog of Behold… the Arctopus. On the other hand, Lemay's title track-- a doomy plod that trades math-metal daredevilry for hard-grooving 4/4-- is one of the most straightforwardly headbangable tracks in the Gorguts discography.
Diverse approaches aside, all the songs here share a rare coherence: they're as info-packed as the pieces on Obscura or From Wisdom to Hate, but their construction feels especially logical. While not the most extreme compositions Gorguts have issued, they might be the richest and most memorable; the patiently unfolding arrangements-- complemented by a spacious, full-bodied production job that contrasts sharply with the harsh, brittle sound of Obscura and From Wisdom-- give each idea room to really sink in.
There's also a strong band unity at work here, honed onstage over the past several years. No Gorguts album has grooved harder than Colored Sands, a fact that has a lot to with John Longstreth, who excels at making dauntingly proggy riffs feel sprightly and pliable. His rapid-fire snare/hi-hat stutter on the verse sections of "Ember's Voice" and the chopsy yet remarkably relaxed post-fusion fills he busts out during the "Absconders" outro exemplify how technical flourishes can enhance a song's momentum rather than hinder it. During moments when the full quartet digs into a meaty pattern-- the sci-fi thrash episode in the middle of "Forgotten Arrows," the lurching slam breakdown in "Enemies of Compassion"-- you're hearing four expert players uniting with Voltron-like purpose: not just a provisional assemblage but a real band at work.
At the same time, Colored Sands is, like each of the four Gorguts albums that precedes it, a personal statement from Luc Lemay. For those inclined to read liner notes and follow a lyric sheet, there's a hefty amount of thematic data in the margins of this record that gives it a very different feel than any of the band's prior efforts. The first two Gorguts albums dealt with standard-issue death-metal topics (disease, corruption, madness); Obscura turned inward, tackling depression and spiritual crisis; From Wisdom to Hate was a topical grab-bag, covering religious delusion, political megalomania, and the fascination of antiquity. Here, simply put, Lemay has Tibet on the brain. An admitted outsider to the culture, he nevertheless taps into some profound emotions, touching on the deep spirituality of Tibetan Buddhist tradition, as well as the region's purgatorial struggle with Chinese rule.
The idea of a death-metal vocalist howling about sand mandalas and snow lions might look iffy on paper, but the concept sticks, thanks to the dynamism of the music and the conviction Lemay brings to every line. The frontman isn't holding Tibetan culture at arm's length; his seething bellows on tracks such as "Reduced to Silence" come off as a kind of rigorous method acting, as though he were revisiting personal trauma in an effort to comprehend the Sisyphean ordeal of the culture he's depicting. It's admirable that just as Lemay has regularly renovated the Gorguts sound, moving ever further from death-metal orthodoxy, he's also worked to find fresh thematic approaches like the one that unifies Colored Sands.
Lemay also shows off his creative breadth on "The Battle of Chamdo", an instrumental piece for string ensemble. Previous Gorguts albums have featured classical-style intros and interludes, cluing fans in to Lemay's training as a violinist and composer, but "Chamdo" is the first full-length stand-alone track of this type issued under the band's name. The composition's strident, martial rhythms and mournful melodies give it a distinct soundtracky quality, as though Lemay were narrating rather than simply evoking China's 1950 invasion of Tibet. "Chamdo" appears at the album's midpoint, and while the piece isn't as arresting as the metal-oriented material that surrounds it, it serves as a smart palate cleanser.
Obscura found Gorguts reemerging in bizarrely mutated form; Colored Sands represents a subtler yet similarly striking evolution. Just as he did on Obscura and From Wisdom to Hate, Luc Lemay has chosen expert collaborators here and given them the freedom to leave their mark on the band's legacy. With Colored Sands-- an album of breathtaking detail and scope-- he, Marston, Hufnagel and Longstreth pay fitting tribute to Gorguts' remarkable history. Instead of reclaiming the past, they've pooled their resources to create a new present.


The logic of this release escapes me completely. For those unfamiliar with Gang of Four's discography, let me first explain: This reissue compiles the band's second and fourth albums onto one disc, in reverse chronological order. I wish I could say its failings were predominantly linear, but the cruelty of this juxtaposition runs much, much deeper.

Gang of Four's initial artistic trajectory (pre-reunions) can best be defined as tragic. They announced themselves to the world in 1979 with *Entertainment!*, one of the best debut albums ever released, and a powerful statement, encapsulating radical politics in a supreme assembly of accessible, Spartan

Hard/Solid Gold

The logic of this release escapes me completely. For those unfamiliar with Gang of Four's discography, let me first explain: This reissue compiles the band's second and fourth albums onto one disc, in reverse chronological order. I wish I could say its failings were predominantly linear, but the cruelty of this juxtaposition runs much, much deeper.
Gang of Four's initial artistic trajectory (pre-reunions) can best be defined as tragic. They announced themselves to the world in 1979 with Entertainment!, one of the best debut albums ever released, and a powerful statement, encapsulating radical politics in a supreme assembly of accessible, Spartan punk-funk; it almost single-handedly gave birth to the post-punk aesthetic still widely mined today. The original lineup went on to record Solid Gold and the Another Day/Another Dollar EP, which both count as towering releases in their own right.
Unfortunately, the band's material suffered as their lineup shifted; the departure of bassist Dave Allen, who went on to form Shriekback with former XTC keyboardist Barry Andrews, fundamentally changed Gang of Four's dynamic on their third LP, Songs of the Free. That album still has some classic moments, but it's far less incisive than either of their first two albums, and the rhythmic intensity that drove the band early on was all but lost. No disrespect to ace bassist Sara Lee, but she was no replacement for Allen, whose style was far more direct. Next to go was drummer Hugo Burnham, which left only Jon King and Andy Gill to create the band's final studio album in their first wave of work, Hard, which relied heavily on drum programming.
In light of where the band started out, Hard wasn't just a letdown, it was an outright travesty. The would-be ironic title wound up a joke King and Gill played on themselves; in execution and content, the album is anything but its namesake. The female backing vocalists who open the album chanting, "Is it love?" are so overproduced, they sound practically synthesized, and the drum programming is straight-up Oingo Boingo. But the really sad thing about Hard is that it seems a blatant attempt to sell out.
Hard does offer one or two decent moments, mostly hip-swinging grooves and Gill's guitar parts; Andy Gill was such a unique guitarist to begin with, it's no surprise his contributions are still fresh, even as he backed away from the slashing, confrontational style he made his name on. King doesn't fare nearly as well: He comes off sounding utterly disinterested at almost every turn, the urgency of his old, oft-imitated declamatory style completely lost, as he allows himself to become a conventional singer.
About the only thing I can say for the folks at Wounded Bird is they at least distinctly separated the two albums, making it easy to skip straight to Solid Gold. Listening to the whole disc straight through, the transition between these records couldn't be more jarring, as the ultraslick pop of "Independence" is wiped clear aside by "Paralyzed", with its sputtering slow-motion funk and eerie spoken vocals. The intense grind of "What We All Want", the sheer propulsive force of "Outside the Trains Don't Run on Time", and the wry, anti-consumerist humor of "Cheeseburger" paint a vastly different picture of the band that went on to record Hard.
Ultimately, it's extremely difficult to recommend a disc like this, but I can't give it a full thumbs down: Solid Gold is a canonical record, and for anyone with even a passing interest in the post-punk era, it's a must-own. Unfortunately, the comprehensive Infinite Zero reissue from 1995-- which appended the classic (and concurrent) Another Day/Another Dollar EP-- is out of print and uncommon in used bins (I won't be selling my copy anytime soon). Why that disc couldn't have been reissued intact is beyond me.
Regardless, there's no real reason a disaster like Hard needs to be on the market while the band's definining moment, Entertainment!, remains out of print; presumedly, Wounded Bird couldn't afford the rights to issue that record, or chose to stretch the return on Hard by affixing it to one worth buying. It would have made more sense to pair Hard with Songs of the Free-- they're more stylistically similar, and the latter is also out of print-- but obviously that would hurt sales. If this is your only means of owning Solid Gold, you have to buy it, but exhaust other possibilities first, as Hard is nothing more than a grotesque exhibition of a once-great band on its last legs.


On an alternately deliberate and exploratory new record, the guitarist and composer finds flashes of beauty at the heart of each instrumental tale.

Still Here

There are, broadly speaking, two types of pieces on Still, Here, Marisa Anderson’s latest album of guitar instrumentals. One half of the album consists of traditional songs, so to speak, though they have no words. The likes of “Waking” and “The Crack Where the Light Gets In” are compact and deliberate, with clear trajectories of melody and form. Some are uplifting, others melancholy; their commonality lies not in any one emotional tenor but in the feeling of purposeful motion. The other pieces are more like exploratory missions, not motivated by the promise of a destination, but instead by the impulse to simply see and hear what’s out there. They are evocative rather than declamatory; setting scenes rather than plotting courses. Listening to “The Low Country” or “Night Air,” you get the sense of Anderson working out her ideas as she records them, trying out phrases and then refining them or putting them aside.
As on past releases, Anderson makes use of a wide array of styles, and of instruments with which to execute them: layering electric, acoustic, and pedal steel guitars; mixing steel strings and nylon; and augmenting several pieces with piano and electronic keyboards. Her fingerpicking is alternately reminiscent of Piedmont blues and Spanish flamenco. “In Dark Water,” the transfixing opener, has gradually expanding and contracting arpeggios that recall the early music of Philip Glass, and occasional interjections of rawboned slide guitar that sound more like Mississippi Fred McDowell. Though the album’s prevailing influences are from folk and classical music, “The Crack Where the Light Gets In” makes room for the sun-drenched hooks of 1960s California pop. Each track has its own sonic identity, but the album isn’t a smorgasbord, in large part due to Anderson’s distinct tone as a player, which shines through no matter the instrument or setting. She articulates each note with delicate command, knowing when to dig in and when to back off, never applying more force than she needs. Even the simplest chords, in her hands, carry a mysterious glow.
Anderson is also a gifted composer, equally adept with the thorny intricacy of “In Dark Water” and the spacious tunefulness of “The Crack Where the Light Gets In.” This makes the balance and sequencing of Still, Here’s deliberate and exploratory modes faintly puzzling. Why, after the masterfully shaped opening number, do we get three consecutive tracks that come across like solitary jam sessions? “The Fire This Time,” “The Low Country,” and “Night Air” all share the same essential arrangement conceit, with one guitar outlining two or three chords in ostinato while another couple of overdubbed instruments trade unresolved fragments of melody atop. All three pieces are somber and meditative; their open-ended approach, at its best, edges toward something ineffable, a grief too big to be named. Taking them in all at once, so near to the top of the album, can be tough going. Anderson finds flashes of beauty even when she seems to be casting about for something to say; were she a less graceful guitarist, this stretch might derail Still, Here’s momentum entirely.
The album finds its form again with the elliptical “Waking” and the exuberant “The Crack Where the Light Gets In,” which even in their titles convey the sense of emergence from a long darkness. After that warm respite, it closes with Anderson’s instrumental arrangements of “La Llorona” and “Beat the Drum Slowly,” two folk songs, one Mexican and one American, both about flawed characters who meet untimely deaths and the people who love them despite their failings. Anderson’s exquisite playing on this final pair of tunes reminds me of Ahmad Jamal’s dictum that musicians should know and feel deeply the lyrics to any ballad they’re playing, even in instrumental renditions. Her clear and straightforward lines, her warm and sympathetic tone, carry the dignity, regret, and faintly glimmering hope of redemption at the center of each tale. Without a word, she sings.


The dirty little secret about Chan Marshall is that she may actually have her shit together. As a recent *Harp* magazine interview pointed out (in between Marshall's musings on interest rates, real estate, and finances), she's spent the past decade building a successful career without even employing a manager. It's a feat that few, if any, of her contemporaries have been able to pull off-- and given that, at this very moment, a significant portion of the indie music world is salivating for tomorrow's release of the seventh Cat Power record, it would seem she's pulled it off quite well.

Of

The Greatest

The dirty little secret about Chan Marshall is that she may actually have her shit together. As a recent Harp magazine interview pointed out (in between Marshall's musings on interest rates, real estate, and finances), she's spent the past decade building a successful career without even employing a manager. It's a feat that few, if any, of her contemporaries have been able to pull off-- and given that, at this very moment, a significant portion of the indie music world is salivating for tomorrow's release of the seventh Cat Power record, it would seem she's pulled it off quite well.
Of course, the Cat Power allure has always been tied up in Marshall's notoriously seasick live performances. In 2001, the woman who jumped into the audience mid-performance and shoved me aside while tearfully fleeing the Irving Plaza stage certainly didn't seem capable of balancing a checkbook, let alone single-handedly negotiating a more generous contract with her record label (as the Harp article alleges). But then, the public-vs.-private tightrope-walk is as old as marketing itself: Johnny Cash never shot a man in Reno, either. Still, it's impossible to ignore the pull of the Beautifully Tortured stereotype, no matter what reality lies behind it. But if we didn't want Beautifully Tortured, we'd be obsessing over Norah Jones.
That brings us to The Greatest. Not to knock Norah, but she isn't tortured-- and neither is this album, which, if Nic Harcourt or VH1 get their hands on it, could be battling "Don't Know Why" for airplay supremacy on Mom's car stereo in the coming months. Like all Cat Power records, The Greatest is a mostly sad, heartbroken, hopeless, rainy-day affair; it just isn't damaged. For that reason, it's also going to gain her a lot of new fans.
The Greatest was recorded in Memphis, with several of that city's veteran studio musicians serving as her backing band, including Mabon "Teenie" Hodges on guitar, his brother Leroy "Flick" Hodges on bass, and Steve Potts on drums. These soul legends have played with Al Green, Booker T. and the MG's, Aretha Franklin, Neil Young, and more; in other words, they don't seem like the kind of dudes who'd stand much tortured diva bullshit from some no-name white girl off Matador Records. These are first-rate professionals, and their contributions-- a far cry from those of Steve Shelley and Dirty Three, or even Eddie Vedder and Dave Grohl-- add as much to the album as they detract.
The title song opens the album with the same halting, thick-fingered piano style Marshall has relied on since 2000's The Covers Record, but here it's swathed in Henry Mancini strings, teary delay effects, gently nudging drums, and Marshall's own multi-tracked voice echoing her lead vocals like Mary and Flo on the Supremes' loveliest ballads. "The Greatest", with its evocative lyrics of nostalgia and regret is, like "Colors and the Kids" and "Good Woman" before it, bleakness at its most pristine.
But Marshall doesn't wallow long, following the track with "Living Proof", Cat Power's most conventionally sexy song yet. As it swaggers on lazy horns and careening "Like a Rolling Stone" organ, you can almost picture Marshall in a pair of tight jeans, swinging her hips in front of a jukebox. "Lived in Bars" retains that Southern-fried sensuality in its back half: After beginning as a late-night smoky bar lament, the song lifts off on shoo-ba-doo harmonies and a bouncy beat; all of a sudden, it's getting hot and heavy in a pickup truck.
The marriage of Marshall's offbeat musical sensibility to her new backing band's in-the-pocket playing bears its most successful fruit on those three songs. At heart, they're smooth, accessible lite-R&B; tracks-- as close to Chan in Memphis as the album gets. Still, if that's what adult-alternative sounds like in 2006, sign me up for the AARP.
But the middle chunk of The Greatest just feels old. It's beyond "adult": These songs seem musty and outdated, like stuff my grandparents might have danced to during The War. "Could We", "Empty Shell", "Islands", and "After It All" are all finger snaps and jazz hands, Marshall twirling her umbrella in the park as Fred Astaire woos her with clicked heels and a top hat. "Thank you/ It was great/ Let's make/ Another date/ Real soon/ In the afternoon," Marshall purrs over call-and-response horns and hotel bar piano. "After It All" even features whistling and the kind of cabaret melody Nellie McKay drops into a song right before she threatens to kill you.
Worse is "Where Is My Love", the album's rock-bottom low. Marshall moans the title ad infinitum (interspersed with "bring him to me" and stuff about horses galloping and running free) in some sort of high school musical approximation of Nina Simone. She's accompanied only by Cheez Whiz piano scales and those same heart-tugging strings from "The Greatest", only this time they sound creepily manipulative, not heartbreaking or beautiful. I envision Marshall in a fluffy white gown with a plunging neckline singing this song out of a balcony window. At the end, a dove lands on her outstretched finger. This is not what I want from Cat Power. It's not what I want from anybody, not even Norah Jones.
The Greatest regains its composure as it nears the finish line, ending with a pair of songs that wouldn't have seemed out of place on any Cat Power album since What Would the Community Think. "Hate", the only track that might scare off newcomers while delighting her original fanbase, is Marshall alone with her guitar, playing stark, cutting riffs, and murmuring "I hate myself and I want to die." "Love and Communication" is the album's first three tracks as viewed through a fun-house mirror: Instead of the Memphis crew welcoming Marshall into their world, the closing track sees Marshall luring the studio vets down her dark, claustrophobic alley. The strings, horns, and organs press forward in deliberate staccato stabs, advancing on the ear as if programmed by Dr. Dre.
The biggest challenge of this album isn't going to be commercial success; just stick "Could We" on the soundtrack to a hip romantic comedy, and it'll take off on its own. The difficult part will be proving to longtime fans that Chan Marshall is the one in control here. She's made an album that, for the most part, is polished and accessible. For better or worse, she's stretched her musical horizons far beyond the close-knit indie rock world-- a world that likely doesn't want her to change.


Assembled in a year-long process of file-swapping between Berlin and L.A., this hazy, collage-like album takes the form of a wordless conversation. It’s uncanny, familiar, and warmly evocative.

Tim Koh / Sun An: Salt and Sugar Look the Same

Salt and Sugar Look the Same

When the multi-instrumentalist and visual artist Tim Koh was three or four years old, Elvis Presley’s 1973 concert from Hawaii played regularly on the family’s newly acquired color television. “I had a fuzzy, round pillow that I’d stand on as a stage and pretend to perform [on],” he told the Talkhouse. Eventually, he found actual stages to play on and spent some two decades working with fellow travelers including Animal Collective, Hieroglyphic Being, DJ Harvey, and No Age. Now based in Berlin, Koh recently began a kind of email-based game of exquisite corpse with L.A.-based graphic and sound designer Sun An, who’d been releasing his own music for over a decade.
Salt and Sugar Look the Same unfolds the results of their back-and-forth across some 18 miniatures that sound like half-overheard conversations only half-remembered. Sine waves ripple and snap; warm whooshes of melody float tropically in the mist; voices sing at uncanny speeds. All this is nothing exactly new—deja vu put to disc has a legacy going back at least to Erik Satie, passing through the eternal Éliane Radigue hum and still unparalleled otherworldliness of early Boards of Canada records. But part of the point of this kind of communication is the generous recognition of the familiar. Friendship sprouts from common ground.
Opener “Bye Bye Betty” sends a voice message, made mechanically variable in pitch and speed, over wires of acoustic guitars; by “Besafe Airtel,” the wires tangle into brambles. Tracks like “Old Plates and Desirable Traits” and “Drawing to Relax and Pass the Time” build little worlds of acoustic and electric sources, the former with a bit of new-wave froideur and the latter so warm and wet you could get bitten by all the little buzzing things flying around. It’s a rare bit of muchness on an otherwise restrained record: “The Maybes Are Endless” distills everything to two chords strummed on an electric guitar, a rocking chair blues.
There are also synesthetic aims. “Yume-No-Yume” curls in the air like its namesake incense, often a combination of plum and cherry blossoms and lavender designed to help the sniffer remember dreams. “Incense Holder,” with its glinting glitches, also plays as it’s named, a faceted structure to hold ineffable sound. And the golden plumes of “Lemongrass Citronella” are powerful enough to keep those biters at bay.
It’s not all bliss, though. “Today Only Happens Once” approaches a kind of industrial unease that seems equally nostalgic for Throbbing Gristle and the occult grooviness of Scooby Doo soundtracks. Some tracks plank—the drone of “Somewhere in Time,” for example, suspends itself with rickety strength and the echo of sweat—and others, like “Twice” ache like the memory of exertion. A high-pitched whistle cuts through foggy closer “Expected to Fade” like a tea kettle—time to wake up—before a thick blanket of hiss drags you under. This is music more for giving in than letting go.
Across these 38 minutes, Koh and An are talking to each other, talking to themselves, and listening in. I heard ghosts from my own past and saw projections of what I imagine their lives might be, to the point where I felt like I could draw my own notes into the folds. Contained within are noises of pleasure and of pain; of wrapping an arm around the warm shoulder of a lover and letting go of a friend hypnotized by their rage; of stoned teenage pals and hallucinating adult companions and the comedown of middle age; and, above all, the curious grief of childhood, when being a kid seems to only mean finding out how big the world is and how little say you have in it. For me, it’s all in “Can’t Stand in the Past,” which shifts unsteadily on drums so epically slowed that their skins become fuzzy, round pillows, little islands, miniature ersatz stages for us to perform our own remembering and becoming.


This overdue anthology of Seger’s earliest recordings preserves a handful of singles by a young Detroit garage-rock band that blended rock’n’roll and R&B, party music and passion.

Bob Seger & The Last Heard: Heavy Music: The Complete Cameo Recordings 1966-1967

In the 1960s, the land was littered with bands like Detroit’s Bob Seger & the Last Heard: industrious combos that worked their local circuit with dreams of making it as big as the Beatles, or at least the Beau Brummels. History has tagged these groups “garage rock,” a label embraced by keepers of the flame like Little Steven Van Zandt, who has an entire SiriusXM station devoted to the stuff. But garage connotes the primitive, pounding, aggressive strain of rock’n’roll made by somebody who just picked up a guitar and still isn't sure how to fret a third chord.
Bob Seger & the Last Heard could hit hard, but they grew up in the shadow of Motown, so they could also swing—a rarity among garage rockers on the whole, but not those from Southeastern Michigan. Working in the same scene as MC5 and ? & the Mysterians, the Last Heard needed to play R&B as if it were rock’n’roll (or perhaps vice versa) because they needed to get the teens on their feet. Bands were expected to make the audience dance, especially at the Hideout, a series of clubs scattered throughout the metro Detroit area that garage rockers called home. The Hideout was Seger’s stomping ground long before the Last Heard, back when he was playing in Doug Brown & the Omens, one of the better groups on the Ann Arbor and Detroit circuit in the mid-’60s.
Almost nobody outside of Michigan knows much about Doug Brown & the Omens, but they’re central to Bob Seger's rise, providing him with his first released record and catalyzing his first meeting with Punch Andrews, the Hideout impresario who would become the singer’s manager. In addition to running the club with partner Dave Leone, Andrews was behind Hideout Records. He set up the winking subsidiary Are You Kidding Me? Records in 1966 to release “Ballad of the Yellow Beret,” a send-up of Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets” written by one “D. Dodger” and performed by the Omens under the pseudonym the Beach Bums, with Seger on lead vocals.
“Yellow Beret” didn’t make it onto Heavy Music: The Complete Cameo Recordings 1966-1967, an overdue anthology of Seger’s earliest recordings (though it can be found on the massive set ...Next Stop Is Vietnam: The War on Record 1961-2008, not to mention YouTube. Its absence is due to a technicality—it never appeared on a Cameo 45—but it seems safe to assume no one was too broken up about omitting this mildly embarrassing novelty with questionable politics. The song’s silliness and snide attitude toward hippies were not out of character for the Last Heard. “Persecution Smith,” a raving rip of Bob Dylan’s thin, wild mercury sound, sneers at a Vietnam protester. This wasn’t standard for rockers in 1967, but the politics don’t feel considered as much as reactive, even mocking: They come from the same instincts that made the Last Heard spoof the Beach Boys with jokey spring-break anthem “Florida Time” and parody James Brown on the giddy holiday single “Sock It to Me Santa.”
Such irreverence, which also surfaces on the grooving “Chain Smokin’,” underscores why the Last Heard trafficked in singles, not LPs. They were a hard-working band that remained firmly planted within their own backyard, where the 45 was their best route to regional radio and larger clubs. It was music for a moment, but Seger also showed flashes of the insight and songwriting talent that would propel him to stardom in the late ’70s: He wrote “East Side Story,” the 1966 song that moved him from songwriter to performer, for the Underdogs, another act on Hideout, but the label thought he’d do a better version. While Underdogs’ recording has since been lost, Seger’s rendition is a wonder, a mini-melodrama of inner-city troubles set to a wailing organ.
The rare garage single that sounds multidimensional, “East Side Story” nearly finds an equal in “Vagrant Winter,” a ferocious, coiled two minutes of bargain-basement psychedelia. But Seger and his band weren’t interested in expanding the mind; they were aiming for the gut, which is precisely where “Heavy Music” lands. A high-octane R&B number that blends a Motown beat with a proto-punk attack as vicious as early MC5, it was the pivotal early Seger, the place where he blended passion with party music.
Primed to be a career-making single, “Heavy Music” rocketed to the top of the Detroit charts and was poised to enter the Billboard Top 100 when Cameo/Parkway went under. Seger would soon sign to Capitol Records, where he recorded Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man with his new outfit the Bob Seger System, then toiled away for seven years before finally breaking into the mainstream with the double-live album “Live” Bullet in 1976. Recorded at Detroit’s Cobo Hall, it found him playing “Heavy Music” to an appreciative hometown crowd. The song may have survived that long, but Seger never again looked back to the singles he made with the Last Heard. (He also consigned his first seven albums to the dustheap of history, leaving many terrific records out of print.)
He had no say in the release of Heavy Music, but this isn’t juvenilia that tarnishes his reputation. The Last Heard were a vibrant, funny, invigorating rock’n’roll band, and their ephemeral nature is key to their appeal. They weren’t playing with posterity in mind; they just knocked out single after single, riding and bucking trends in equal measure, all with the hope of winning just a few more fans.
This mentality means that Heavy Music doesn’t quite play as an album, even by the loose standards of compilations: The B-sides for “Heavy Music” and “East Side Story” were both extensions of their respective flips (the former reiterates its A side, adding some vocals, while the latter is a straight instrumental), and if you skip them, the total runtime is only about 20 minutes. That may not be a lot of music in terms of time, but in terms of impact, these tracks still pack a wallop, delivering more thrills than many ’60s LPs that were twice as long.


Building on the legacy of ’90s riot grrrl and queercore, the Massachusetts punks’ debut album is a galvanizing thrill that insists on naming what some would ignore.

Dykes to Watch Out For

The easiest analog to DUMP HIM’s debut LP, Dykes to Watch Out For, is ’90s riot grrrl and queercore—the Massachusetts punk quartet named their label after a Team Dresch song. But easiest doesn’t mean exact, and while DUMP HIM borrow from and build on a legacy, DTWOF traffics in internet-age subjects: climate anxiety, Alison Bechdel (the album shares its title with her long-running comic strip), and self-preservation in the face of disenfranchisement. Earnest and referential, it’s a 23-minute elegy for past selves, a fuzzy, distorted paean to loss and regeneration.
DTWOF is built on the same four(ish) chord progressions that have powered many a power-pop anthem, but the lyrics are as sharp as touching a bruise. These are songs to scream with, and their elegant expressions of rage sound like arguments rehearsed for weeks in the shower. “Vilify, refuse to contemplate possible mistakes,” Jac Walsh sings coolly on “Ache,” “but keep making your own, it’s okay.” Terms like trauma, detachment, and embodiment might sound like pop-psych jargon in less capable hands, but the band weaves them seamlessly into depictions of angst and pain. This is heavier than pedestrian heartbreak.
Like Gauche, another queer outfit addressing the junctures of the personal and political, DUMP HIM blend contemporary omens with private dramas. “Panic over now-pointless archives/The fragility of our ability to thrive/Doomsday prepping in my bedroom/Breaking down over what we can’t do,” Walsh sings on “Judi Bari Almost Died for Our Sins,” an homage to the Earth First! activist who narrowly survived a 1990 car bombing that was never solved. It’s easy to lose these lyrical pearls in the musical fury, but all the more rewarding to excavate them over multiple listens. Matched with the songs’ furious pace, the references urge a confrontation with history: Who do you remember? Who forms your canon?
Though the majority of tracks burst with a similar fervor, closer “Don’t Kiss Me, I’m in Training” is a sweet, refreshing exception. Backed by harmonist Briar Lake, Walsh and Mattie Hamer’s duet sounds like a ’50s ballad at a radical prom. “It isn’t easy to be around people/When people have caused all the hell that you’ve been through,” Hamer sings. The tempo picks up as Walsh and Hamer consider the ways trauma—yes, that word—warps our ability to love the people trying their best to love us back.
The individual songs on DTWOF might not sear quite as hot as they do together. But each is a galvanizing thrill, insisting on naming what some would ignore. DUMP HIM offer recognition, a sound and voice for the ways the world shapes and silences those of us on the margins.


The sequel to the Memphis rapper’s 2020 tape embodies the spirit of Southern rap without trading in nostalgic aesthetics or noticeable samples.

Yellow Tape 2

Key Glock’s Yellow Tape 2 doesn’t have a single feature. In fact, featurelessness has become a defining trait of the 24-year-old South Memphis rapper’s work; aside from a supporting turn by fellow Paper Route Empire upstart Jay Fizzle on 2017’s Glock Season, none of Glock’s solo releases for the independent label owned by Young Dolph have included other voices—just the effortlessly confident Glizock all by his lonesome. He’s hesitant to offer his own services to other artists too, occasionally showing up on releases from Gucci Mane’s New 1017 but otherwise keeping his circle tight. As he explains on this album’s “Eve,” “They like, “Why you don’t do features?” ’Cause I don’t like meetin’ new n****s.”
Glock seems almost uniquely disinterested in playing games, kissing rings, or otherwise seeking approval, and defines himself as “in the streets, not industry.” Songs like “Ambition for Cash” lyrically reflect that emphasis on self-reliance and standing on one’s own. That’s not to say he’s allergic to collaboration: He’s proven his mettle as a tag-team specialist alongside his mentor, Dolph. The pair are more equal partners than teacher and student, their smooth flows interweaving with ease. If Dolph is the self-proclaimed King of Memphis, then Key Glock is somewhere between Merlin and Rasputin, a mysterious man of influence who keeps a low profile but pulls more strings than you’d think.
Without trading in nostalgic aesthetics or noticeable samples, Key Glock embodies the spirit of Southern rap more easily than any of the countless contemporary rappers who cite Three 6 Mafia as a formative influence. With a tiptoeing piano line and a little soul sample in the mix, the Juicy J-produced “Gangsta” is right out of the classic Hypnotize Minds songbook; it sounds like it could have been an unused beat from Project Pat’s Mista Don’t Play. Bandplay comes through with church organ swells on “Juicemane” that, befitting the title, sound straight out of a late-2000s OJ da Juiceman mixtape.
The drum patterns frequently follow a standard Memphis formula—a series of clean and sturdy kicks and claps, with a dash of trap hi-hat—but Glock’s beats are deceptively complicated, almost baroque, as liable to feature a harp or flute as an 808 cowbell or lighter click. There’s a sense of unease to the piano line 808 Mafia affiliate Pyrex builds “Da Truth” around, a scattered rhythm with sudden pitch shifts. “Can’t Switch” adds dubby drums and a little bit of reggae echo on the keys, not entirely switching up the genre but experimenting with the flavor. When guitars infrequently show up, like on “Luv a Thug” or “Quarterback,” they add a sultry, sensual flavor—a much-needed reminder that the history of Memphis rap is just as much soul music as it is horrorcore. It’s on a song like “Quarterback” where Key Glock demonstrates his greatest strength, not as a pure MC or lyricist but something close to a bandleader, slickly flowing over a clean bass guitar and traces of flute. The Dun Deal-led instrumental feels more like a studio session than a Logic project file.
Where another rapper might use a guest feature to effect a vibe change—an R&B singer on the hook of a slow jam, or an out-of-state MC to switch up the flow—Key Glock can encompass multiple moods with his voice alone. In some moments he’s overflowing with sensuality, while his flow on “Bill Gates” is slower and blunted, almost vocal fried. On more menacing numbers like “Ya Feel Me” he draws you in closer with a 21 Savage-esque croon, hardly speaking above a whisper, quietly walking us through the weights on his back and the voices in his head. Glock’s bars are seamless and looping in a way that is literally repetitive but doesn’t sound like it; they’re intricate without being dense, complex without drawing attention to themselves. If the metaphors and lyrical imagery aren’t always the most imaginative, Glock overcomes them with the kind of gritty aura that can only be earned through experience.
More than sound or delivery alone, it’s Key Glock’s palpable confidence that distinguishes him. But look closely and you’ll see faint cracks in the stone-faced persona, where brief but frank bars about family trauma and codeine dependency slip between the boasts and bold determination: “All these dead presidents, I hope that shit don’t haunt me.” There’s enough confessional honesty to make the music feel real, but Glock still keeps his guard up, simultaneously enigmatic and unabashed.

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Singer-songwriter Paco Cathcart taps into mysticism on his newest release as the Cradle, something fantastical, folky, and intensely imaginative.

Bag of Holding

Bag of Holding tells a hundred stories, like the loving little scraps that make up the whole of a quilt. It feels, by design, both small and large, crafted by the intensely imaginative Brooklyn native Paco Cathcart who works under the name the Cradle. Across 30 Bandcamp releases (some of which are incognito poetry collections), the Cradle has shapeshifted many times—from scuzzy tape disturbances to serene, skeletal folk songs, each often grounded by a guitar—resulting in a vast and disparate self-recorded collection. If diving into such an output seems too daunting, have no fear: Bag of Holding, is his most ambitious, accessible, and accomplished songwriting yet. It is not a patchwork in the sense that sounds or styles are fused together but in that it weaves together many lives and observations into one cohesive whole.
Cathcart’s poetic ruminations do not adhere to traditional song structures and there’s nary a proper chorus here. His songs are tugged along by a faithful acoustic guitar undercurrent and a voice that offers the gentle security of a weighted blanket. Cathcart spins sprawling, meticulous stories with recurring motifs (uncertain futures, miscommunication, our increasingly unrecognizable world) while inspecting small, everyday details. It’s an approach that neatly coheres to the record’s title, which is a reference to a Dungeons & Dragons accessory that magically expands to hold items larger than itself; the grand and the miniature can take up the same space and be appreciated equally. It’s not as if Cathcart is a nitty-gritty obsessive like Balzac, but when he picks apart, say, a seemingly mundane encounter at the 7-Eleven as he does on “A Thought That Deletes,” he allows the potential for transcendence. Rather than brushing off a “case of mistaken identity,” the clerk is truly distressed by the encounter. Though Cathcart delivers the saga in the same steady tone as usual, the orchestration turns just slightly darker, and occurrence is transformed into a situation that will keep you up at night.
Bag of Holding’s greatest shift from earlier Cradle releases is its focus on guest contributions. Here, string and woodwind arrangements composed by longtime Cradle collaborator Sammy Weissberg compliment Cathcart’s intricate fingerpicking, and the three members of experimental punk band Palberta (whose records he has engineered) provide delicate backing vocals. Like Phil Elverum as the Microphones, pairing lush instrumentation with the humble imperfections of an analog recorder can give even the most humdrum of happenings cosmic degrees of emotional significance. On the glorious “Cell Games and Beyond,” Cathcart’s romantic anxieties are punctuated by sudden surges of clarinet and swooning harmonies. As a minor D&D infraction spirals into the decision to join a priesthood in Peru on the title track, a cello and violin saw away in the background creating a well-intentioned but ominous scene. On as Cathcart sings about losing control of his mind and body on “Rememerer’s Heaven” as bulbous strings rudely interrupting his idyllic guitar.
The tendency to attribute power to fate floats through the Cradle’s work, most notably in a series called “The Opposite Way,” which began on 2017’s Little Missionaries. On “The Opposite Way Pt. 3,” the protagonist traverses classic American landscapes dotted with rundown silos and gas station signs. It’s the type of image typical of folk music, but the saga sounds rich with the addition of violins. Closing track “St. Pete Station” contains the hallucinatory drama typical of a Safdie brothers film: a chance meeting with a stranger turns into a story of synthetic drugs, incarceration, and ends with an odd proverb: “What can’t you buy a kid online? Her first fish.” Such is the mysticism of the Cradle: folksy, vaguely fantastical, and so dedicated to the hidden potential of the ordinary that at times it feels surreal.


Electronic beats and dub effects put a heady, psychedelic spin on traditional Ugandan Royal Court music.

Ennanga Vision

In the early 1980s, the meeting of African music with electronics often made for thrilling hybrids, like Cameroonian singer Francis Bebey’s New Track and Zazou/Bikaye/Cy 1’s visionary Congolese-Belgian masterpiece Noir Et Blanc. Today, there’s no shortage of such exchanges. In the past year alone, a number of heady synergetic blends have cropped up across the African diaspora: Mikael Seifu and the 1432 R label’s Ethiopian-laced dance music; the LA musician Sudan Archives' digitally enhanced fiddle; Malian singer Oumou Sangaré's merger of ngoni with synth-pop; Luka Productions' West African-inflected New Age; and various recordings on Uganda's Nyege Nyege Tapes label.
One of that label’s most electrifying releases comes from that country’s legendary electro acholi singer Otim Alpha, and he is also part of the group Ennanga Vision, alongside former Ugandan royal musician and multi-instrumentalist Albert Ssempeke and London producer Jesse Hackett. Hackett is no stranger to border-crossing ensembles, having brought together Kenyan players and British beats as a member of the Owiny Sigoma Band. This album posits the project as “deconstructed Royal Court music from the forgotten kingdoms of Buganda,” though it takes a while for the participants to settle on an identity and get to the music’s most fruitful moments.
Ssempeke’s talents on a wide array of traditional instrumentation stand out across turns on the ngindidi (fiddle), amadinada (xylophone), kiganda harp, and endere flute. He brings bounce and nimble melodic turns to the electro blips of “Otim’s War” and elegance to “Abbanna Kange (Children of My Father).” The album’s trickiest beat comes on “Kampala Auto Chase,” in which Alpha’s voice is slurred and stretched out as Ssempeke’s instrumentation weaves in and out of the programmed drums; “New Sunshine” pairs an agitated bowed ngindidi with slow, bucolic electronic organ chords, pulling in two directions at once.
The album’s most overtly pop moments also wind up sounding like the chintziest. The hyperactive arpeggios and claps that power “Like a Football” resemble Nozinja’s dizzying Shangaan electro productions, but the sticky-sweet synth sounds lack the South African artist's force. When Ennanga Vision drifts towards the slower, stranger end of the sound spectrum, the results drastically improve. Alpha’s growls are digitally garbled and set against arcade bleeps on “Amadinda Eyeball,” while Ssempeke adds a graceful counterpoint to Hackett’s electronic noises with garlands of xylophone and harp. “Killing Ghosts” again draws on the sound of the ngindidi, though Hackett now slathers on spacious dub effects as it bounces around a gurgling hand drum pattern, and the dubby, distorted processing of the voices makes for a satisfying, gooey sound. While “All This Blue” has a similar timbral palette, the overall effect feels decidedly more ethereal even if it’s more uptempo.
Most beguiling of all is the album’s closer, “Jaja (Grandmother).” While some of the album’s other lyrical moments fall flat, there’s a sense of restraint here on this beatless track, the vocals cloaked in echo. It’s suggestive of a sublime space that pays tribute both to our elders and—thanks to an effective use of children’s laughter—also anticipates the future.


Bounce queen Big Freedia is teetering on the brink of reaching a mainstream audience, and Just Be Free is her attempt to bring her music to that level. With help from producer Thomas McElroy (Madonna, En Vogue), Freedia and longtime producer BlaqNMilD reworked her trademark sound to make it cleaner, fuller, more nuanced, and more befitting a pop diva.

Just Be Free

When Big Freedia began getting booked on the rock club circuit outside of New Orleans a few years ago, her then largely white, hip-focused audience lacked a specific context for the aggressively glitchy lo-fi electronic music she rapped over—never mind the fact that it was a six-foot-tall, regally poised black person of indeterminate gender who was doing the rapping. To those in the know, there was legitimate concern that her new fan base might have been motivated by the novelty of the latter aspects, but Freedia's powerful, indelible charisma nonetheless transformed rooms full of normally staid indie rockers into a mob of sweaty, ass-shaking maniacs. With a seemingly never-ending series of tour dates and a reality show now entering its second season, it’s clear that Freedia's natural star power, rather than any identity-based quirks, drive her popularity. She’s teetering on the brink of reaching a mainstream audience, and Just Be Free is her attempt to bring her music to that level.
Freedia’s earlier material possessed a redlined sonic aesthetic that matched its manic energy, resembling a drum machine on the verge of a speed-driven breakdown through a maxed-out PA. Its raw, frenetic charge was a good match for her outsider status, but as they’ve charted a course for crossover success, she and longtime producer BlaqNmilD have changed their approach appropriately. With help from producer Thomas McElroy (Madonna, En Vogue), they’ve reworked Freedia’s trademark sound to make it cleaner, fuller, more nuanced, and more befitting a pop diva.
Much of Just Be Free is aimed squarely at an EDM audience that so far has somehow eluded Freedia, despite the fact that bounce has steadily grown in that world's presence—largely thanks to Diplo and Nicky Da B's “Express Yourself”. “Turn Da Beat Up” expands Freedia’s sonic vocabulary to include Prodigy-style breakbeats, precipitous bass drops, blatting low brass, and a four-on-the-floor breakdown that invokes both house music and arena-rock. “Dangerous” is festooned with filter sweeps, dubsteppy synth bubbles, and sub bass tuned for a large-scale sound systems. “Lift Dat Leg Up” has the epically scaled melody suited for the apex of a big-room DJ set. Most notably, the album’s lead single “Explode” is a riot of overclocked drum machines and Freedia’s joyously hollered commands to lose yourself in her music. Just the idea of hearing it in a DJ set is enough to make you sweat.
As much as Just Be Free is intended to facilitate Freedia’s big break, it doesn’t neglect the fans who’ve followed her up to this point. While she makes some big strides here as an artist, she’s also made sure to keep one foot planted firmly in the style that some of us consider nearly perfect.