The NYC rapper, having left his label, shakes off the pressure of his tumultuous last few years with a set of straight-ahead, grimy rap songs.

OOFIE

With his sprawling XL debut No Mountains in Manhattan, Wiki seemed primed to break out of the NYC underground he had spent so long toiling in, but the years that followed would prove tumultuous. He formed the indie rap supergroup Secret Circle with Lil Ugly Mane and Antwon but disbanded it in disgust after Antwon was accused of sexual assault, shelving years of work in the process. And he left XL Recordings—the British label that signed him to his first record deal with his group Ratking—releasing his last song for them (“Cheat Code”) in February.
So while Oofie is Wiki’s second full length, it finds the 26-year-old MC weary, reflective, and somewhat mature. The gap-toothed hoodrat who used to revel in drunken debauchery now favors nights at home with his girl and their cats. He sounds almost contrite recounting the night in Stockholm when, hyped off a DMX song, he punched a window out in a club and spent a night in jail (“Dame Aquí”).
His last LP was a high-water mark, distilling concepts he’d been exploring his whole career into a clear and forceful statement. But he’d become disillusioned with life at the label that launched Adele’s career and counts Radiohead and Sigur Ros among its roster, telling DJ Booth he felt like “a small fish in a big sea.” Rather than shop for a new label, he went independent, availing himself of his old label’s basement studio as he got to work returning to basics, which for Wiki means beats and bars, as raw as possible.
If NMIM was Wiki’s magnum opus, Oofie is just Some Rap Songs. It’s less ambitious but just as focused, with tight, diaristic raps and vignettes and grimy production. His departure from XL seems to have been amicable; Much of the album was recorded at XL’s studio in Manhattan by the label’s in-house producer Alex Epton, but Brooklyn’s Tony Seltzer makes frequent appearances (“Pesto,” “4 Clove Club,” “Back Then,” and “Dame Aquí”), as does the drummer Michul Kuun, who performs as NAH. The muddy production is sparse but never simplistic, often disguising nuance that reveals itself on repeated listens, like the security alarm on “Downfall,” or the tamboura lurking in the shadow of a squeaky trumpet on “Freaks.”
Lyrically, Wiki seems to hint at a mid-life crisis, which sounds strange until you realize he’s been recording since he was in high school. He laments how critical acclaim doesn’t always equal a massive audience (“Reviews strong, not enough views on the songs,” he raps on “Pesto”), and notes on “Promises” that he can’t afford to rest on his laurels (“I still ain't made enough for my ass just to stay indoors”). New York City is still a main character, but he’s not so much crowing about the city’s supremacy as he is artfully exploring its mundane details with a microscope, the minutiae that makes it unique, the signifiers of what makes it his home as well as his muse. The sentiment is clearest on “Back Then,” in which he resists the urge to romanticize its past at the expense of its future, joining Queens’ Lansky Jones in reminiscing on both the good (“We knew the delis that sold you brew”) and bad (“You never got ass then/You was always sad then”).
If there’s any disappointment to Oofie, it’s that it finds Wiki running in place, flexing his considerable lyrical chops without extending himself. In a way, it’s a step back from his debut, though that step is clearly intentional—an attempt to shake off the pressures of a label while he figures out his next steps. The record would likely feel stronger if sequenced with some of the loosies he’s dropped in 2019, namely the filthy Madlib production “Eggs” or “Fee Fi Fo Fum.” But that would seem almost beside the point. If the album has any concept, it’s one of perspective; those songs are in the past, and Wiki’s gaze is firmly planted forward. Because as strong as it is, Oofie still feels transitional, a waystation for a rapper still plotting his next move.


After an auspicious debut in 2016, the young R&B enigma looks for ways outside of the sound that has become her trademark—and gets lost in the process.

I Used to Know Her: Part 2 EP

At the age of 19, Gabi Wilson seemed to arrive fully formed as H.E.R., an emotive but guarded R&B artist with songs that keyed in on supernatural perspective, profound vulnerability, and what felt like decades of experience. Upon arrival in 2016, the songs on H.E.R. Volume 1 were instantly familiar, and not just because they were so indebted to the likes of the Weeknd. They felt lived-in—intimate, personal, infectious, so much so that you began to internalize the words with one spin. During Volume 1’s glittering opener, “Losing,” H.E.R. sings as if she were mid-sentence, and we just happened to overhear: “My ambition is attractive/My aggression isn’t passive/I promise with you/The butterflies in my stomach are active,” she tells a lover with the ease of rare self-assurance.
In 2017, both Volume 2 and a handful of assorted tracks confirmed that H.E.R. wasn’t a fluke, but those songs didn’t hint at much growth or many next steps, either. August’s I Used to Know Her: The Prelude offered a serviceable retread of old ideas that likewise failed to produce a grand statement. But if that EP’s lack of urgency suggested H.E.R. was starting to tire of her trademark sound, this month’s I Used to Know Her: Part 2 feels like a complete existential crisis. Uneven and occasionally confounding, this is the work of an artist trying to slip from her pigeonhole style but struggling to find a viable exit. Remember how it took trial and error for the Weeknd to learn how to translate what made his 2011 trilogy of mixtapes into something with broad appeal? H.E.R., it seems, is stuck in a similar moment of creative transition.
Quiet-storm drums, melancholic synths, and magnetic R&B hooks defined Volume 1 and Volume 2, recalling the best of SWV and Toni Braxton. H.E.R. was also convincing over uptempo instrumentals that ferried along bits of nostalgia and melodrama. I Used to Know Her: Part 2 trades much of that for acoustic guitar. Yes, she sounded radiant on last year’s “Best Part,” her breakout acoustic collaboration with Daniel Caesar, but the arrangements here aren’t morning strums of glory. Instead, these guitars conjure Florida Georgia Line and an open-mic night in a college town. They warp the dynamism and depth of H.E.R.’s voice into an adult-contemporary mess.
During “Carried Away,” H.E.R. sings blandly about loneliness over perky, hoedown-ready licks and handclaps. It is a beat better suited for Natasha Bedingfield, and it yields the worst H.E.R. song yet. This carries over to “Can’t Help Me,” which at least shows some mercy with the help of 808s and more evocative songwriting. “Sorry that I’ve been yelling at your face/I know you hate when I speak to you this way,” she sings. The guitar comes closest to sounding natural and conducive to H.E.R.’s voice during “Hard Place,” produced by legendary R&B architect Darkchild. It threatens to soundtrack some finding-myself montage in an upcoming rom-com, but there’s at least a measure of tension and an enormous chorus.
Questionable sequencing otherwise plagues I Used to Know Her. The 15 collected songs of Volume 1 and Volume 2 bled into one another, a collage of intimate snapshots inside the H.E.R. orbit. But these eight tracks have no business being in the same room. When she’s not trying to honor Sheryl Crow, H.E.R. returns to her roots on “I’m Not OK” and “Take You There,” sharing narratives that remind you what a special lyricist she can be: “Feel a little guilty/I feel like it’s written all over me/Tryna find a balance/Trusting you, trusting me,” she sings on “I’m Not OK,” examining the effects of a decaying relationship with audible desperation. Alongside the bland guitar of “Can’t Help Me,” though, such throwbacks are so out of place they grate.
I Used to Know Her: Part Two ends with the jumbled “Lord Is Coming,” where Wilson, now 21, ponders social ills from war and religious persecution to economic anxiety and inequality in a miserable spoken-word preamble. “It’s a World War III, corruption versus greed/Not you versus me/But do we ever think of the need for inner peace?” she asks before talking about the price of one’s soul. It’s cringeworthy. The growing pains are evident. But at least H.E.R. is venturing into new subject matter. Despite the major-label contract and the devoted fanbase, she isn’t afraid to take some kind of stand or chance, even if the result is her first full flop.


With production flourishes from Mark Ronson, Josh Homme leads the band's most accessible album in decades. It’s equal parts disco inferno and devil-may-care experimentation.

They don’t make anti-heroes like Josh Homme anymore. The Queens of the Stone Age mastermind is not so much a musician as he is the all-American badass incarnate. His is a persona shaped by the blasphemous gospel of your typical truck stop bathroom stall: white lies by day, regular Johns by night, and of course, drugs by the songful. Just like the Gadsen—the spirit animal for the live-free-or-die crowd—Homme would rather eat dirt than bow to anyone else’s standards, musical or otherwise. His stark commitment to independence (and by extension, his open embrace of the subversive) fueled the Queens’ rise to infamy at the tail end of the 1990s. With its abundance of soft, lilting vocals and coolly-phrased fury, 1998’s debut Queens of the Stone Age bravely, subtly defied hard rock’s arch-masculine roots, putting a refreshingly witty spin on a genre regarded by many as brutish and boneheaded. The name says it all.
Nearly two decades later, Queens of the Stone Age are one of the biggest names in contemporary hard rock. Aside from Foo Fighters and Nine Inch Nails—whose figureheads, Dave Grohl and Trent Reznor, have both appeared on past Queens albums—you’d be hard-pressed to find a group of comparable critical or commercial standing. Further buttressing the group’s ubiquity is Homme’s many collaborations, seen in the frontman’s resume of side projects (Desert Sessions, Eagles of Death Metal, Them Crooked Vultures) and production/performance stints (Arctic Monkeys, Iggy Pop, the Strokes offshoot CRX).
Their foundation intact and their reputation secured, Queens now move to hit the reset button in 2017 with Villains, their seventh LP. The daring nine-track album sees Homme in company old and new: guitarist and creepy synth expert Troy Van Leeuwen, who joined the band for 2005’s Lullabies to Paralyze; axesmith/keyboardist Dean Fertita and bassist Michael Shuman, who first appeared on 2013’s ...Like Clockwork; and newly minted drummer Jon Theodore, previously of the Mars Volta. Together, they’ve streamlined Queens’ hulking arena gloom into carnivalesque, chrome-plated boogie rock with the help of British producer and “Uptown Funk” architect Mark Ronson. Villains is disco inferno and devil-may-care experimentation all wrapped up into one—not to mention their most immediately accessible record since their magnum opus, 2002’s Songs for the Deaf.
Scandalous as their creative partnership might seem to purists, Homme and Ronson make a rather uncontroversial pair on Villains. Consider first single “The Way You Used to Do” a primer on the album’s claustrophobic trappings; the drums hiss and thump like a Camaro in overdrive, further compressed by the guitars’ animalistic thrust. In the afterglow of ...Like Clockwork’s post-apocalyptic melodrama, this palette feels a bit paltry but refreshingly upbeat. Fans who’ve stuck with the group since the days of 2000’s Rated R and Songs for the Deaf will undoubtedly find the lack of a thunderous, dynamic rhythm section a bit off-putting. Moreover, the static mix renders Shuman and Theodore—a pair of bona fide dynamos onstage—more or less anonymous, although the former gets his chance to shine on “The Evil Has Landed,” a Zep-flavored barnstormer powered almost single-handedly by Shuman’s thunderstruck arpeggios.
The album’s predetermined angle of Ronson-assisted simplicity is ultimately a red herring. Villains’ songwriting is just as, if not more, devious than anything in the band’s discography. Homme builds each track elliptically, rather than linearly: “Instead of a song that is like a merry-go-round, where you go around in circles and you know what’s going to happen, I want it to be more like a bus stop–you get on and you get off at a different location, and you’re kind of along for the ride,” he told The New York Times.
So Queens spend most of the record playing the long game. With the exception of “The Way You Used to Do” and the psychobilly freakout “Head Like a Haunted House,”almost every track on the 48-minute Villains runs into overtime: songs clock in between five and six minutes, and a third of them extend even further. “Future tense meets middle finger/We take the long way home,” Homme sneers on epic, ass-shaking opener “Feet Don’t Fail Me,” and thank God for that. Villains is at its most thrilling when the band explores their own back-roads on their own terms, making time for new discoveries along the way.
“Domesticated Animals”  rides a severed groove off into mucky oblivion, jeering at the beleaguered masses as they go. “All for one, all for naught/Perish, baby/Perish the thought,” Homme muses, his falsetto syllables soft and sardonic. Over on the flip side of the sonic spectrum, there’s “Hideaway,” a lye-soaked lounge-rock ballad. The closing “Villains of Circumstance” becomes a slow-burning reflection on a long-distance relationship that culminates in an unsettling orchestral swell, the sound of a cabaret ablaze.
Villains isn’t always so smooth and several sections fall flat, like the staccato-spiked funk that surfaces midway through “The Evil Has Landed” or the melodically static refrains on “Fortress.” Nevertheless, the stalled moments don’t detract from the fun of the ride. Queens’ final destination is what matters—and a beeline into the unknown sure beats another go at the merry-go-round. Villains reaffirms what makes this band so special to begin with: their willingness to blow up the status quo as established by their riff-rock brethren, and even themselves.


The First Nations songwriter receives his overdue recognition with this brilliant and troubling anthology, which shows the breadth of his skill. Nearly every song is remarkable, and nearly any of them could have served as a breakthrough.

Willie Dunn: Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology

Give one listen to his 1971 song “I Pity the Country” and you will know Willie Dunn. Over a winding, fingerpicked acoustic guitar melody, the First Nations songwriter uncovers layer after layer of hard wisdom in his deep, solemn voice. “I pity the country/I pity the state,” he sings of the colonialist system working against him and the agents it employs, from politicians to prisons to portrayals of Indigenous people like him in films and TV. In under three minutes, it is a protest song that seems to capture an entire lifetime and philosophy, condensed in a few simple lines.
If this fearless and unflinching vision is what made Dunn’s music so compelling, it also kept him from playing along with the music business. In producer Kevin Howes’ extensive, illuminating liner notes for a new posthumous anthology, Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies, you will find stories of Dunn turning down early attention from Columbia Records (they wanted to market him as some rebellious cowboy archetype), smashing a guitar in defiance during a potentially career-making tour with Glen Campbell (he thought his tourmates were “a bunch of phonies”), and whispering an insult to Queen Elizabeth while filming her for a documentary with his activist group (“We are not your children anymore”).
When it comes to career-spanning anthologies, there are those that dazzle you with the directions one artist was able to explore in their lifetime, and then there are the more troubling ones like this. Featuring 22 tracks in just under 80 minutes, it serves as a meditation on all the things Dunn was capable of but unable to pursue. Nearly every song is remarkable, and nearly any of them could have served as a breakthrough—say, “I Pity the Country,” or the humorous but hopeless satire of “School Days,” or the Moby-Dick epic “The Pacific.” “You know, I’m a good fisherman,” Dunn once said of his career-long desire to get his music out there, “but there are no fish.”
Because of his flat, searing baritone and his ability to infuse basic folk melodies with mystic, allusive poetry, Dunn was often compared to Leonard Cohen. Like Cohen, Dunn came up around Montreal’s downtown scene. In this community of artists, he opened a coffeehouse, called the Totem Pole, after dropping out of school at grade 10 and finding work as a chef on a passenger train. Inspired by American folk singers like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, he began writing and performing protest songs, appeared frequently on Indigenous programs on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, and signed a record deal in 1970. Many of his best songs from this era feature accompaniment solely from guitarist Bob Robb, but he soon experimented with fiddle, harp, and hand drum players as his writing grew more ambitious.
As he was finding his voice as a musician, Dunn became equally focussed on activist work. His first brush with success arrived when he combined his two passions, writing long, narrative songs based on the characters he encountered in his studies. Placed as the opening track on Creation Never Sleeps, the ten-minute “Ballad of Crowfoot'' was his first introduction to the mainstream. Originally composed for the CBC’s Indian Hour radio show, it is one of several of Dunn’s songs that plays like equal parts archivist work and songwriting, presenting the heavily researched story of the Blackfoot leader through a series of haunted, harrowing verses. “Why the sadness? Why the sorrow?,” he asks in each chorus. “Maybe there’ll be a better tomorrow.”
For a long time, this song would be Dunn’s most lasting legacy, largely due to its film accompaniment, often hailed as Canada’s first music video. A collage of photos and artwork corresponding to the narrative, it was used to teach Indigenous issues in classrooms throughout North America, and it received attention from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, furthering Dunn’s reputation as a leading political voice. Despite his growing acclaim, Dunn’s music career stalled, and he was frequently imprisoned for attending protests. As the decades wore on, he became disillusioned with the industry, battling long periods of depression as his records went out of print and tour offers stopped rolling in. “I play his tapes, and the audience always writes in to ask if the songs are on records,” says early supporter, CBC host Johnny Yesno, in the liner notes. “They’re not… Most of the time you can’t even find him.”
Over the course of his career, Dunn released only four studio albums: 1971’s self-titled debut, a remake of the same album one year later for charity, and two records from the ’80s that attempted to expand his sound into more atmospheric and conceptual arenas: Sometimes this meant reciting poetry by Shakespeare over accompaniment from Akwesasne musicians, as in “Sonnet 33 and 55 / Friendship Dance,” and sometimes it meant singing peaceful, melodic folk music over field recordings of birdsong, as in the gorgeous “Pontiac.” In “The Pacific,” he delivers a spoken-word meditation as the band jams on a beautiful, dusky melody that sounds a little like the Grateful Dead’s “Ripple.” You could imagine this being his show-stopping closer on tours to come, showcasing his art at its most boundless and communal.
In the decades since these recordings, Dunn’s story traveled through the Indigenous artists he inspired—from the folk-rock duo Kashtin, who recorded his song “Son of the Sun” in 1991, to the author and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who covered “I Pity the Country” on her latest album this year. Still, his most identifiable work remains in the style of “Crowfoot”: acts of historical bookkeeping that strike a deep emotional chord, far beyond their original time and context. One of those songs, “Charlie,” tells the true story of an Ojibwe child, failed by the Canadian school system, who ran away at age 12 and never returned home. Shortly before his death in 2013, Dunn was asked to perform the song as Light in the Attic was preparing the pivotal Native North America compilation, a release that would bring his music to wider audiences and newfound acclaim. At the time, Dunn refused to play “Charlie.” “It’s just too sad,” he replied. Now, Creation Never Sleeps will do the singing for him.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The UK’s Trees were not scholarly devotees of the folk tradition but enthusiastic recent converts who brazenly experimented with traditional forms and never missed the opportunity to jam.

Trees (50th Anniversary Edition)

Some new sounds emerge gradually, as like-minded artists circle similar ideas over time. Others arrive with the bang of one great record. British folk rock, a misty and elusive thing, almost entirely distinct from its jangly West Coast American counterpart, belongs mostly to the latter category.
In the late 1960s, Fairport Convention, a talented young London band enamored of Bob Dylan and the Byrds, recruited Sandy Denny, an amber-voiced troubadour in the city’s folk revival scene, as their new singer. Denny brought to the band a deep interest in the traditional songbook of the British Isles, and in 1969, they recorded a stunning 11-minute version of the 18th-century ballad “A Sailor’s Life,” setting its lyrics about doomed lovers to electric instrumentation that churned like a gathering storm. This recording is widely seen as the first to render traditional English folk song in the rhythmic and timbral vocabulary of rock. Along with Liege & Lief, a Fairport Convention album released later that year, “A Sailor’s Life” inspired interest in folk history among a generation of English rock bands who found that the canon’s archetypal tales of blood and magic resonated anew amid the hippieish mysticism of their early-1970s era.
Trees were one such band. Like Fairport Convention, they performed mostly electrified renditions of traditional songs, peppered with a few originals in the same idiom, which untrained listeners would have trouble distinguishing from the genuine article. In Celia Humphris, they had a singer, like Denny, whose ethereal presence seemed like an extension of the ancient characters she inhabited and addressed in song. In Barry Clarke, they had a lead guitarist who was plainly influenced by the articulately lacerating style of Fairport’s Richard Thompson. He is not shy about admitting it. “There’s no doubt Richard Thompson [led] all of us down the path of the English lead guitar style,” Clarke is quoted as saying in the liner notes to Trees (50th Anniversary Edition), an excellent box set from Earth Recordings that compiles the band’s brief recorded legacy, amounting to two studio albums released in 1970-71, a short BBC session bootleg, and a handful of demos and alternate mixes.
Trees may have appeared in Fairport’s wake and quickly flamed out, but their music is well worth appreciating on its own. At their best, they seemed to grasp at something just beyond themselves, beyond even their forebears. Clarke’s acknowledgement of Thompson’s influence comes with an important caveat: “He showed us the ways and means… but in truth the understanding we all shared was simply to get in the car and put our foot down! We were nothing if not instinctive.” The members of Trees were not scholarly devotees of the folk tradition but enthusiastic recent converts whose appreciation of the old songs came pre-filtered through modern interpreters. Their dilettantism was no hindrance; it freed them from the burden of reverence to traditional forms, which they mixed brazenly with open-ended instrumental passages and hard-rocking riffs. Fairport’s classic lineup, after the epic journey of “A Sailor’s Life,” tended to unleash its improvisational power only at carefully chosen moments; Trees, on the other hand, never missed an opportunity to jam.
The Garden of Jane Delawney, Trees’ debut, and On the Shore, their final album, arrived within nine months of each other. The band itself didn’t last much longer than that. The two albums have long been cult items among a certain sort of listener, for whom stumbling on Trees for the first time may feel like wish fulfillment from an alternate universe. What if Fairport Convention went fully psychedelic? Or the Grateful Dead formed in Norfolk instead of the Bay Area, and put their cosmic touch on the Child Ballads instead of American bluegrass and R&B? In highlights like “She Moved Thro’ the Fair,” from Jane Delawney, and “Sally Free and Easy,” from On the Shore, Trees achieve communal interplay on par with the Dead’s, using the songs’ simple modal melodies as scaffolding for elaborate spontaneous compositions in which no one voice holds the lead for too long. Bias Boshell, primary writer of Trees’ few original songs, is the rare rock bassist whose style seems to follow Phil Lesh’s. Rather than adhering to any recognizable pocket, he fills the low end with circuitous melodies, lending the music a feeling of unsettled searching in even its heaviest moments.
The Garden of Jane Delawney has a ramshackle charm that anticipates indie-minded psych bands from the 1990s onward. (After listening, you may wonder whether Woods chose their name as a subtle homage.) “Nothing Special,” the opening track, consists of little more than a simple two-bar ascending pattern from one guitar and near-constant soloing from the other. “Snail’s Lament,” the tender closer, features harmonized male and female vocals pledging humble mutual devotion: “Live another life on me/When you find it hard to cope/Take my eyes if you can’t see/Give them back when you find hope.” Its sweetness is undiluted, and maybe even heightened, when the two voices fall occasionally out of alignment, or Humphris reaches for a high note and just misses it in the final chorus. “The Garden of Jane Delawney” is eerie and emotionally complex, its surreal stillness suggesting the aftermath of a murder by the titular character without ever directly acknowledging her crime. Boshell has said that he wrote it in a kind of trance and he’s still unsure of the story he was trying to tell with the lyrics. The song’s haunted atmosphere is so convincing, you almost want to believe him.
Despite its status as the title track of Trees’ debut, the darkly sophisticated “The Garden of Jane Delawney” is more aligned with the sensibility of their second album, as the band’s founder and acoustic guitarist David Costa points out in the liner notes. On the Shore is more confidently rendered than Jane Delawney, and more like a fog borne on heavy wind than a ray of sunshine. At several points the album seems to pick up directly where Fairport Convention left off with “A Sailor’s Life,” a richly ambiguous vein of improvisation that neither group explored much further—Fairport because they moved on to other concerns, Trees because they’d effectively broken up by 1971.
On the Shore’s take on “Geordie,” a folk song about an honorable man who has been condemned to death, is steadfastly minimal, with Humphris’ laments swirling in the negative space between tumbling bass and swells of guitar. Gnarls Barkley sampled the song on the title track of their 2006 smash album St. Elsewhere, prompting Costa to reflect on what his band shared in common with Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo Green. “We never engaged in any heavy dialogue about the authenticity of the tradition,” Costa admitted in the liner notes to a 2007 reissue of On the Shore. “We were only sampling, too. I’m not a great folk musician. What I loved was those aberrations and accidents, and the weird things that could happen when the tradition was really alive and subject to all and any other influences.”
Costa is remarkably clear-eyed about what Trees embody for contemporary listeners. Like the makers of many other great “lost” albums, they leave something more than a historical footnote but less than a major legacy, with a mystique that draws some of its power from the fact that they simply didn’t produce very much work. “Part of what people love about Trees is that as a band you were in, and out, and then gone,” the guitarist says in the box set liner notes, paraphrasing a remark his son once made. Fifty years on from their beginnings as psychedelic rockers running amok through the English folk tradition, they have themselves passed into history and become fodder for younger musicians and record collectors who are as excited as they were by the prospect of finding something new in dusty old sounds.
In 2018, a decade after the death of drummer Unwin Brown, Costa and Boshell gathered some of these younger musicians and performed a concert of songs from Trees’ repertoire as the On the Shore Band. A few recordings from this show are included along with the ’70s material in the box set. They sound spirited and alive, if a bit slick compared to the original, updating the sprawling Trees sound with additional instrumentation and occasional electronic textures that would have been difficult for a rock band to employ in their time. The COVID-19 pandemic stifled plans for a further reunion, according to the liner notes. Then, in mid-January, Celia Ford Drummond, née Humphris, died of undisclosed causes, having lived just long enough to witness this latest loving tribute to the band she fronted for a few years as a young woman. For better or worse, Trees may remain forever an aberration, the way David Costa’s son described them: in, out, then gone.

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On the third release from its ongoing reissue series, the BBE label continues to excavate the hidden wonders of Japan’s post-WWII jazz scene.

Various Artists: J Jazz Volume 3: Deep Modern Jazz From Japan

One of the many hidden narratives of post-WWII Japan is its long-running jazz scene. This taste for the most American of art forms intensified after the war, when a crackdown on what was considered the music of the enemy ended, the interests of stationed U.S. troops helped reignite the scene, and, later, touring legends found a willing market. From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, Japan was a hub of jazz invention, even if much of the music recorded was released on severely limited runs or private presses, meaning it barely traveled within the country, let alone beyond it. A half century later, the period is a cave of wonders for even for the most dedicated genre fanatic. The breadth of it may be beyond full encapsulation—thankfully, collectors Tony Higgins and Mike Peden are giving it a shot.
Working with British label BBE—probably best known for releasing records by J Dilla, Madlib, Pete Rock, and other bohemian rap artists—Higgins and Peden have spent the past few years reviving hidden Japanese jazz for Western audiences with a series of reissues under the banner of J Jazz. Though the collection includes full-album reissues—I’m partial to the Tohru Aizawa Quartet’s Tachibana and Koichi Matsukaze Trio + Toshiyuki Daitoku’s Earth Mother—it’s the J Jazz compilations that have provided the pillars of Higgins and Peden’s preservation work. Here, for the third time, the pair have assembled a comprehensive set of vintage cuts to help capture the scope of that crucial 1960s to 1980s period.
J Jazz Volume 3: Deep Modern Jazz from Japan opens with Yasuhiro Kohno Trio + One’s “Song of Island” and a storm of solo piano keys. When the rest of the band enters and the full arrangement kicks in, Kohno’s delightful playing sits perfectly next to guest Masahiro Kanno’s smooth vibraphone as the pair take turns in front. The cymbals don’t so much crash as hum in the background. Like many of the selections in this set, “Song of Island” was recorded live—polite applause greets the end of the solos—and the mastering work at Carvery Studio in London preserves a warm, organic sound. This edition is probably the strongest evidence yet that the Japanese jazz drew not just from its American counterparts, but from an array of global sounds. Plenty of compositions roam far beyond conventional jazz borders, and some of them push the limit of the term’s meaning: Hiroshi Murakami & Dancing Sphinx’s “Phoebus,” recorded in 1978, features driving West African rhythms; Hideo Shiraki’s “Groovy Samba” (a CD-only bonus track) lives up to its title. Maybe nothing encapsulates the genre synthesizing better than Eiji Nakayama’s “Cumorah,” which features a Spanish guitar lead before developing into a full flamenco workout, while the song’s title, surprisingly, refers to a hill in Ontario County, New York, on which Latter-day Saints say their prophet Joseph Smith discovered the golden plates that would inspire the Book of Mormon.
Experimental moments are balanced by more traditional arrangements. “Song for Hope”—cooler than the hymn-like title suggests—is by Aki Takase Trio, an outfit led by a pianist said to be the compositional disciple of Charles Mingus and one-time Lester Bowie collaborator. An equally impressive performance comes with “Planets” by Masaru Imada Trio +1, a soothing late-night number that drapes the lead piano in elegant double bass and drums. Kohsuke Mine’s looping “Morning Tide” shows how young Japanese players were pivoting at the end of the 1960s to post-modal and free jazz forms.
There are occasional dips in quality—the guitars on the second half of Tatsuya Nakamura’s “1/4 Samba II” sound detached from the rest of the arrangement; the isolated double bass and drum solos on the lengthy “Acoustic Chicken,” by Koichi Matsukaze Trio featuring Ryojiro Furusawa, just kind of hang around like kids on a street corner. Still, no song feels unworthy, and Higgins and Peden have offered another loving composite of their chosen era. The vinyl release even includes an obi strip, a band of paper typically wrapped around Japanese records, for an extra sense of authenticity. These details solidify another worthy introduction to a nation’s jazz music treasure chest.

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Xiu Xiu's tribute to the music of Twin Peaks is one of their most haunting and beautiful LPs in years.

Plays the Music of Twin Peaks

Xiu Xiu are an archetypally "difficult" band. Hard to measure and, at times, hard to digest, they are experimental in the most literal meaning—not musicians exploring "experimental genres" of music, but ones who actually experiment, leading to music whose ideas travel the map so broadly as to be deemed unclassifiable when put together. This approach has led the band to develop passionate followers but also put themselves in a position where these constant new approaches not only alienate the mainstream but past fans as well.
Given this perspective, the band’s latest release, Plays the Music of Twin Peaks, makes a lot of sense. It’s easy to see parallels between Xiu Xiu and David Lynch—both are challenging, uncompromising artists unafraid of real experimentation or the uneven results that come from it. Though the passing of time (and specifically the post-Mulholland Drive afterglow) has seen public view of the man’s work elevated to near-canonical status, for much of his career Lynch was seen less as a genius and more as a fascinating but flawed artist obsessed with the '50s and the death of the American Dream.
Perhaps nowhere is this mix of "Wow!" and "Ungh :-/" on display more in Lynch’s work than in 1990’s groundbreaking show "Twin Peaks." "Twin Peaks" was a watershed moment—the first time anyone had attempted to port sinister art-house cinema vision to Big Three television, that mainest of mainstreams—but despite What It Did and What It Meant, "Twin Peaks" was still a messy failure that devolved into a soap opera slop—James’s search for meaning, Dick Tremayne, BILLY ZANE!!!—difficult for even diehard fans to stick by. But if you "got it" anyway, it just didn’t matter. You just put on headphones, kept watching and felt ok knowing it made you feel ok.
One of the reasons why Lynch’s work always hit hard was his way with music and sound, particularly his partnership with Angelo Badalamenti. The score to "Twin Peaks" is arguably Badalamenti's crown jewel, and Xiu Xiu do it justice. Their success here is twofold: Not only do they capture the haunted spirit of the show, they also provide Xiu Xiu fans with one of their strongest releases in awhile.
The simple, live-in-the-studio recorded feel helps keep the band grounded and the sound uniform, giving it the sense of a live performance. They skip the obvious choice of "Falling" as opener--the vocal version of the famous theme, the first music you hear on the show and "Twin Peaks"’s most recognizable number--and opts for the instrumental "Laura Palmer’s Theme," which begins not with the famous Moby-sampled synth but instead a very portentous tom drum thud followed by sustain-pedaled piano notes.  The choice here indicates upfront that they intend to evoke something deeper and more resonant than simple nostalgia.
"Laura Palmer’s Theme" is followed by "Into the Night," the album’s best track, and one of three with vocals. The original, featuring Julee Cruise, is hard to top, but this version is bold and ominous, propulsive and mysterious. In a way, Stewart's manic delivery suits this material better than it sometimes does on his own. On the last vocal number, "Sycamore Tree," they take a tune originally sung by jazz legend Little Jimmy Scott and bring it closer to "a Xiu Xiu song" (if such a thing exists, I guess), than anything else on Plays. Stewart channels the dead Scott with a caricatured capital-P Performance  that succeeds without feeling fake or contrived. On “Falling,” Stewart relies on the soaring, heart-tweaking power of the song without overselling it. While Stewart’s singing in Xiu Xiu often feels like it's been appended on top of or along side of the music it accompanies, on these three it feels threaded into its fabric. I even found myself yearning for a Xiu Xiu version of "Just You," the corny and inexplicable '50s ballad sung by Laura Palmer’s boyfriend James.
The instrumentals are nearly as strong, including "Packard’s Vibration," which begins as a vibraphone-led jazz number before the distorted guitar and shimmering synths help it achieve lift-off. The only real misstep is the closer, "Josie’s Past," which adds spoken word readings of entries from "Laura Palmer’s Diary" by band member Angela Seo.  The vocals, spoken in stilted, accented English, only call attention to the terrible cheesiness of the writing—and, god, at nearly eight minutes, it nearly dares you to stop listening before the end. Stewart gives a perfectly ridiculous thirty second reading of the '40s song "Mairzy Doats" (sung by Laura’s dad Leland Palmer on the show) five minutes in and the whole track would have worked better as a 60 second bit with just that.
These are minor gripes, though. Appreciators of the uncanny, the beautiful, the upsetting, the uncomfortable–all groups that contain hardcore Lynch and Xiu Xiu fans—will find something here. In evoking Lynch and Badalamenti, Xiu Xiu have made one of their most beautiful and listenable albums, one that highlights everything the band does well while shaving down the rough edges that often turn away foes and friends alike.


Krautrock, psychedelia, and a DJ’s flair for track sequencing come together on an album that proves this Tokyo trio is more than just a revival act.

With Dim Light

Since their formation in 2014, Tokyo’s Minami Deutsch have tried to strike a balance between honoring the musical styles of yesteryear and creating something new. These self-described “repetition freaks” cite psychedelic rock and minimal techno as guideposts, but—as evidenced by a band name that is Japanese for “South Germany”—they’re really obsessed with krautrock. Lead guitarist and vocalist Kyotaro Miula has said that they gravitate toward this sound because it’s music for people who want to innovate. On their second album, With Dim Light, Minami Deutsch start delivering on that claim.
Plenty of Japanese bands have been inspired by the motorik pace of early-’70s German outfits, but Minami Deutsch focus on a very specific period in krautrock history. Their earliest releases and self-titled 2015 debut album drew on the scene’s primordial days, particularly the locked-in rhythms of the first two Neu! albums. On record and in live settings, they excel at reproducing this sound—it’s not shocking to learn that they’ve jammed with Damo Suzuki. Listening to Minami Deutsch, though, you can start longing to hear the pioneering sounds of Neu! 2instead.
With Dim Light doesn’t minimize the band’s influences—“Tunnel” is like a motorik training exercise, with Minami Deutsch studiously testing the limits of repetition. But now they’re allowing some original flair into their songs. “Concrete Ocean” starts the album with a familiar, driving drum beat and bassline but takes its time settling into a groove. When Miula’s guitar finally enters the mix, it speeds up the tempo slightly while lending a sly, melodic prettiness to the trio’s often hard-edged sound. “Tangled Yarn,” a knot of criss-crossing electric guitar melodies and softly sung vocals, brings to mind the psych-rock slow burners of their Guruguru Brain labelmates Kikagaku Moyo; that band’s drummer, Go Kurosawa, happens to be one of four guest percussionists on the album who help to give each track its own character.
While Minami Deutsch’s eagerness to explore novel sounds makes them more than just revivalists, it’s the structure of With Dim Light that makes their experimentation powerful. Beyond the repetitive beats dance music takes from krautrock, it can be tough to pinpoint the techno influences that the band has talked up, but the sequence of the new album evokes the peaks and drops of a great DJ set. After two relaxed opening numbers, “Tunnel” picks up the pace. Then, centerpiece “I’ve Seen a U.F.O.” fuses a simple, speedy rhythm with distorted guitar bursts and Miula’s murmured vocals, in a career highlight whose psychedelic wildness dilates time and conjures an unnerving tension at once. “Bitter Moon” offers an acoustic comedown before sliding into nine minutes of tuneful oblivion on closer “Don’t Wanna Go Back.”
The band makes the most of repetition on this last track, letting new guitar and bass arrangements slowly emerge as a steady beat maintains the song’s momentum. “I’m tired,” Miula starts chanting, about five minutes in—and he’s earned that fatigue by the end of an album that rarely settles for mimicry. If krautrock was all about ingenuity, then With Dim Light takes Minami Deutsch one step closer to following in the footsteps of their German heroes.


Buried somewhere in this overstuffed, 80-minute crew compilation is Gucci’s best album in years.

So Icy Summer

Since his 2016 release from prison, Gucci Mane has been more of a self-help guru than a trap star. The ventures that he prioritized this year are a new book called The Gucci Mane Guide to Greatness and the label compilation Gucci Mane Presents: So Icy Summer, featuring a brand-new roster of artists on his revamped imprint The New 1017. The two projects seem to share a principle: providing insight to those who might benefit from it. “I’m in a better place than I ever been in my life, even though the world deteriorating around me,” he told XXL. “I want to share [with new artists]. I feel like I got a lot of knowledge. That’s what you can be charitable with.” It’s an admirable cause, and one reflective of the new and improved Gucci, who has become a model of rehabilitation. But on the compilation, his charity comes at his own expense, as an otherwise-inspired Gucci album is bogged down by his attempts to uplift lesser rappers.
Most of the music Gucci Mane has released in his second act feels like a supplement to his narrative, and not the focus. It has been easy to ignore and easier still to forget, especially for a prolific rapper with a massive back catalog of impressive mixtapes. The music centering him here is the first to feel essential to his rap legacy since he came back from jail. He writes and raps like a veteran recounting war stories, reliving the glories of victory and the traumas imposed by violence. Buried somewhere in this overstuffed, 24-song, 80-minute crew compilation is his best album in years.
When Gucci was first released, there was a ridiculous (albeit hilarious) conspiracy theory that the newly healthy and fit Guwop was actually a clone. The unsavory implication was that a problematic rapper can’t change unless genetically modified. The truthers needn’t look any further for proof of his realness than this album, which finds him refining longtime tendencies and dwelling on pre-prison life and its ramifications for his post-prison self. Flanked by the cousins Young Nudy and 21 Savage on “Nasty,” he reminisces about his days in the drug game, half-nostalgic, half-relieved that it’s over. His stacking rhyme schemes are densely packed (One bit from his verse on “Gucci Land”: “Send a bail in the mail/Fuck the judge and the jury and the jail and the muthafuckin’ cell/Know Chanel, and it’s Gucci, you can tell/You can smell, I’m a player, pull up in a V12”), and he sounds like an elder statesman settling comfortably into a new role. But any momentum built is soon derailed by the other voices he’s amplifying.
The compilation is divided into halves: the Gucci-led opening section, which functions like a filler-free comeback album, and the twelve songs affixed to it, which gives his new artists free reign. The second half feels a bit like watching a G League exhibition after an NBA playoff game. The rappers Gucci is grooming for The New 1017—particularly, Foogiano, Pooh Shiesty, and Big Scarr—never escape his looming shadow and never really get the chance.
To Gucci’s credit, he has been one of rap’s most underrated A&Rs, and there’s reason to believe he’s onto something with this crew, too. Foogiano sounds right at home with Gucci and Future on the Zaytoven-produced opener “Step Out,” his babbling Auto-Tuned flows cascading down the synth arrangement. Pooh isn’t doing anything Yo Gotti couldn’t do better, but on songs like “Monday to Sunday” he displays an adequate eye for detail (“Got twenty shots left up in the K, thought I shot the whole hundred/Pay tithes at church from hustlin’, even the pastor know we thuggin’”). The two women on the roster, K Shiday and Enchanting, team up for one song; Gucci has been adamant that they aren’t a group, but as the So Icy Girlz on “Left On Read,” they channel fierce City Girls energy. The comp could’ve used far more of them.
Instead of feeling like a big break for The New 1017, So Icy Summer just feels like a missed opportunity for Gucci. On “Iran,” he uses his unwillingness to get drafted as aframe for the injustices suffered under a racist American government. “Lifers” channels the dark world of Three 6 Mafia, and he sounds confident there: “Them suckers them, what’s up with them?/I buck on them, scuff up them Timbs/Petty hustles, predators, pressure them then they crumble them,” he raps. But all of this he-man virility builds to the somber “Still Remember,” an introspective finale about an inability to shake all of the things he’s seen, how the memories of his past life still haunt him. It’s the fitting climax to a resurgent moment. Everything that comes after feels incidental.

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On his fourth album, the expert producer comes into his own as a solo artist with a hushed, finely tuned album that showcases his unassuming voice and impeccable songcraft.

Mutable Set

Blake Mills is a virtuoso guitarist who can’t stand the typical trappings of the phrase “virtuoso guitarist.” Even though his playing has earned him praise from boomer rock icons like Eric Clapton and Jackson Browne, the 33-year-old’s style is understated and eclectic, always in service of the song, not the ego. In his 20s, he caught the ear of Los Angeles’ songwriter intelligentsia, playing with the likes of Jenny Lewis and Fiona Apple, becoming the guy keen artists turned to when they wanted to add a layer of striking, yet subtle, musicality to their work.
He could have spent his career as a secret-weapon guitarist, but he pivoted to solo work and production; his debut, 2010’s twangy Break Mirrors, doubled as a calling card that showed off his humble, affecting voice and burgeoning skills behind the boards. After producing albums for Alabama Shakes and Perfume Genius that redefined those artists’ sounds, he is now the clearest successor to turn-of-the-century studio sophisticate Jon Brion. And he brings all of that know-how, experience, and taste to his fourth LP, Mutable Set, a hushed collection that floats through the subconscious like a tender dream.
Mills’ first two solo records were largely made up of country-rock tales of wounded love, sung by a rootsy obsessive who had seemingly spent thousands of hours commiserating with Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, Ryan Adams’ Heartbreaker, and Wilco’s Summerteeth. They contained moments of brilliance, like the disarming and plainspoken “Don’t Tell Our Friends About Me,” a duet with Apple from 2014’s Heigh Ho, but they could also be too referential, like a graduate paper stuffed with citations yet lacking in original ideas.
With Look, from 2018, he decided to remake his own sound. That album revolved around Mills’ experiments with vintage guitar synthesizers, and featured five wordless tracks that brood and flutter with the widescreen grandeur of a Terrence Malick movie. Mutable Set splits the difference between Mills’ two sides—the unassuming singer and the ambient wanderer. It’s song-based, but it’s not just another singer-songwriter record. Its arrangements are slippery, and it’s often hard to tell if what you’re hearing is a keyboard, a guitar, a saxophone, or something else entirely. It’s never clear exactly where this album will go next, but there’s no doubt an expert hand is guiding the way.
Opener “Never Forever” starts where Look left off, slowly amassing a fog of tones for more than two minutes before Mills starts to sing atop a soothing fingerpicked figure. The song points out how modern human connection is so often thwarted by a society hellbent on wasting our time with the mundane, but its touch is featherlight. Here, the Southern California native trades in the drawl he used on past albums for a shrugging murmur that can recall L.A. ambassadors Randy Newman and Elliott Smith. Mills’ musings are more intriguing, and more oblique, than before too. Perhaps this is because he wrote about half of Mutable Set, including “Never Forever,” with Cass McCombs, who’s spent nearly two decades making sidelong folk-rock that always avoids the obvious. Throughout the album, the pair prove to be wonderfully complementary lyricists, with McCombs’ dark poeticism adding another dimension to Mills’ folksy groundedness. Another Mills/McCombs composition, the stunning ballad “My Dear One,” mixes the comfort of lasting companionship with existential dread. “My dear one, shelter my heart,” Mills sings, sweetly, over a lush backdrop. Then the arrangement suddenly empties, leaving only an unsettling dissonance, a lonely heartbeat thump, and a nagging creak. As the song draws to a close, Mills repeats, “The sky has grown dark.” The effect is ominous, bringing to mind a dinghy in the middle of a vast sea, with the worst still to come.
Such vivid images of loss—“a bedroom with a bed that isn’t there anymore,” fish flopping on a beach ravaged by climate change—are in concert with the album’s equally spare and tactile  production. Mutable Set pours out of the speakers. It unfurls like lilies in a garden. The album was mainly recorded at L.A.’s famed Sound City Studios, where everyone from Neil Young to Nirvana cut classics, and Mills tunes it for maximum intimacy. Every bass pluck and keyboard wash, every acoustic guitar chord and string flourish is rendered with loving clarity. But Mills isn’t aiming for air-tight perfection. There are little choices, like how you can sometimes hear the moving parts of a piano chugging or fingers squeaking over guitar frets, that accentuate the overall sense of living, breathing humanity. And though Mills may not be the most naturally arresting singer, the way his somber croon sits in the mix, as if his mouth is inches from your ear, makes these mostly drumless tracks feel both eerie and reassuring.
Aside from the haunting instrumental “Mirror Box,” which sounds like something Nina Simone could have sung over, the album’s only real guitar spotlight comes at the end of the six-minute centerpiece “Vanishing Twin.” As the shadowy track builds from a whisper to a rumble, Mills stops singing about a flickering doppelganger, and his guitar slowly fills the void. He proceeds to let loose a stream of feedback and mangled notes, as trilling strings prettify the air around his signal. It’s a melted solo, abstract in its power. At points, it barely sounds like a guitar at all.

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As heard on this 6xLP box set, the UK classic rockers were artier than their reputation suggests, with a subdued sense of adventure that propelled the group throughout its career.

Dire Straits: The Studio Albums 1978-1991

The Studio Albums 1978-1991

Stats don’t lie, but the tales they tell can be misleading. Take Dire Straits, who were by any measure one of the biggest rock bands of the 1980s. Their 1985 LP Brothers in Arms was a blockbuster on par with Thriller, Born in the USA, and Purple Rain; for nearly a decade, it held the title as the best-selling British album ever, before being dethroned by Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?. Yet singer and guitarist Mark Knopfler’s fame quickly eclipsed the rest of the band, including bassist John Illsley, the only member who stood alongside him in every one of the group’s incarnations. Musicians came and went with regularity during the group’s heyday, the cast changing as Knopfler and Ilsley refined their silvery, slithery hybrid of British progressive rock and American country—a curious, improbable fusion that Dire Straits made seem logical, perhaps even inevitable. In doing so, the group acted as the bridge between the ’70s AOR and ’80s MTV, shepherding a transition from faceless arena rockers to flashy video stars.
Brothers in Arms benefited greatly from MTV. The network placed the computer-animated video for “Money for Nothing” into heavy rotation, sending the album into the upper reaches of the charts, a place it would call home for the better part of a year. The video’s success could be called a fluke, but the album appealed to legions of sophisticates who couldn’t be bothered with MTV. Its novel production—a DDD affair, in the parlance of the times, meaning it was recorded, mixed, and mastered digitally—appealed to audiophiles, and its reputation for sumptuous sound helped make it the first million-selling compact disc. But beneath the digital gleam, Dire Straits’ debt to roots rock was evident, particularly in Knopfler’s mellow growl and clean, deft guitar solos.
A tension between polish and grit was evident from the start, as the 2020 box set The Studio Albums 1978-1991 illustrates. Containing nothing but straight reissues of the six studio albums the group released during its lifetime, the set contains nary a frill. (Regrettably, the 1983 EP Extendedance Play, with its giddy new-wave single “Twisting by the Pool,” isn’t here, nor 1984 live 2xLP Alchemy.) But that modesty helps draw connections between records, tracing the band’s growth while underscoring its constant attention to detail. Heard collectively, these albums suggest that Dire Straits were a far artier band than their reputation suggests, with a subdued sense of adventure that propelled the group throughout its career.
Artiness was not a quality associated with Dire Straits back in 1978, when the band released its eponymous debut; the UK was in the thick of punk rock, yet Dire Straits were tagged a pub-rock band. There was some truth to that label. Knopfler and drummer Pick Withers both played in the regrettably named Brewers Droop, who managed to go not much further than their hometown of London during their brief lifetime in the early ’70s. And Charlie Gillett, a renowned London DJ whose Honky Tonk show was one of the pub-rock scene’s epicenters, gave early airtime to Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing” demo, an act of generosity that quickly led to a record contract for the band. “Sultans of Swing” certainly had a tinge of country rock; Knopfler skated up and down his fretboard with ease as he growled half-spoken lyrics about a group playing Dixieland jazz and Creole music in South London.
“Sultans of Swing” is their self-titled debut’s snappiest number by some margin—its only rival in hooks is “Setting Me Up,” the record’s tightest cut and also the one song that could be comfortably be called country—but it also contains much of what makes the album beguiling: Knopfler sketches scenes, setting his ambiguous, evocative scenarios to vamps that hint at both melody and groove without quite coalescing into either. Ghosts of an imagined American West float through Dire Straits, but despite the imagery, rhythms, and instrumentation, the album keeps drifting towards an amorphous atmosphere that betrays the group’s British roots. It hints at other styles and sounds without quite committing to either earthiness or mind-expansion. The elusiveness is one of its pleasures: the band’s identity lies within these margins.
Once “Sultans of Swing” turned into an unexpected smash on both sides of the Atlantic, Dire Straits rushed out Communique, tentatively expanding their reach while Knopfler honed his songwriting and co-producers Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett stripped away some of the slipperiness producer Muff Winwood had brought to the debut. Their rhythmic evolution is immediately apparent as the album bounces into focus with the reggae lilt of “Once Upon a Time in the West.” The band’s dreaminess is less apparent here, but it surfaces on “Portobello Belle,” a lovely, relaxed character sketch that shows Knopfler’s growth as a songwriter, as does “Lady Writer,” a “Sultans” rewrite that’s sharper than it should be.
Knopfler wasn’t the only one so enamored with “Sultans of Swing” that he wanted to recapture its magic. Bob Dylan enlisted the guitarist and Withers for support on his 1979 gospel makeover Slow Train Coming, and Steely Dan hired Knopfler to play on “Time out of Mind,” a highlight of their 1980 magnum opus Gaucho. Dire Straits were now operating in the big leagues, and they chose a correspondingly big-league producer for 1980’s Making Movies: Jimmy Iovine, the producer behind big hits by both Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty.
Working with Knopfler at his side and AOR airwaves in his sights, Iovine gave Making Movies considerable muscle. The album reaches its apex with “Sold Rock,” a macho bit of hard rock that leans into its rock’n’roll puns, but the record’s heart lies within its first side, where the triptych of “Tunnel of Love,” “Romeo and Juliet,” and “Skateaway” realizes Dire Straits’ most romantic, cinematic tendencies. None of the three are love songs in the traditional sense; they’re songs of longing, songs whose bittersweet nature suggests better times. The sentiment runs throughout Dire Straits’ catalog, and Iovine’s canny production gave it definition and direction. The closing “Les Boys” muddies their rose-tinted glance at the past, however: A jaunty bit of after-hours vaudeville, the song is meant asa sideways salute to post-war Germany’s gay cabarets, yet the lyrics’ stream of stereotypes and Knopfler’s audible sneer undercut any claims of affection for his subject. It’s a sour note on an album that otherwise finds Dire Straits hitting their stride.
Instead of pursuing the AOR direction of Making Movies, Dire Straits took a leftward detour with 1982’s Love Over Gold. Apart from the lively “Industrial Disease,” Love Over Gold abandons any lingering pub-rock vestiges for a full immersion into prog rock. Frontloading the album with the 14-minute “Telegraph Road”—the remaining four songs are all shorter, but usually only by an order of half—the band positions itself way out in space, a journey assisted by the addition of keyboardist Alan Clark and rhythm guitarist Hal Lindes. The additional musicians allow Knopfler and Ilsley to drift, pushing texture into the foreground and underscoring the group’s often unspoken debt to Pink Floyd—an inevitable comparison, thanks to the crawling keyboards and dextrous single-note guitar solos. In places, Dire Straits sound almost like they were working toward a rock-oriented spin on new-age music, one where the sonics overwhelmed the songwriting.
Songs came crashing back into the spotlight on Brothers in Arms. Stripping away the excesses of Love Over Gold, Dire Straits distilled a shimmering, atmospheric sound that could withstand industrial-strength rock’n’roll, cowboy laments, and heartache alike. That delicate balance between songcraft and austere atmosphere is key to the album’s phenomenal success: It could appeal to traditionalists and modernists alike. Some of Knopfler’s sturdiest songs are here, such as the pining “So Far Away” and “Why Worry,” a tune so lovely the Everly Brothers covered it soon after its release. Listening to Brothers in Arms decades later, its moodiness is striking, particularly when Knopfler’s guitar glides atop Clark’s keyboards; this is the sound modern acolytes like the War on Drugs and Jason Isbell have adopted as their own.
Brothers in Arms is also home to “Money for Nothing” and “Walk of Life,” a pair of smash singles that helped sustain Dire Straits’ popularity into the 1990s. Like “Industrial Disease” before it, “Walk of Life” is the rockin’ anomaly on Brothers in Arms, but its cheerful, old-time rock’n’roll became a standard on screen and in sports arenas alike. As popular as it was, “Walk of Life” was overshadowed by “Money for Nothing,” a screed against music videos cannily given a cutting-edge video that made it a staple on MTV. Sung from the gruff perspective of a blue-collar appliance installer who can’t believe musicians draw a paycheck, the song theoretically gives the songwriter license to portray his character’s homophobia in the third person, but the song’s verse about the “little faggot with the earring and the makeup” is jarring and distasteful. Heard in close proximity to “Les Boys,” it’s hard to hear it as simply Knopfler singing in character, the way his idol Randy Newman did on “Rednecks."
Some critics did call out Knopfler about this “Money for Nothing” verse back in 1985—Robert Christgau noted the singer-songwriter somehow got the word on the radio “with no static from the PMRC”—and Canadian radio ultimately banned the song in 2011. The controversy may dog Dire Straits, but it’s never quite tarnished the group, possibly because Brothers in Arms was simply too big: It was certified platinum 14 times in the UK, nine times in the U.S. The record’s success afforded the group the opportunity to take an extended hiatus, allowing Mark Knopfler to pursue his country-rock busman’s holiday the Notting Hillbillies and cut a duet album with his hero Chet Atkins in 1990.
A year later, Dire Straits lurched back into action for On Every Street. The archetype of a ’90s mega-album, On Every Street was bigger than its predecessor in every way: longer, louder, slicker, steelier. Outwardly, it announced itself as a big deal, but its pleasures were modest. Dire Straits seemed to come to life when Vince Gill picked up his guitar on the rollicking novelty “The Bug,” and they took full advantage of George Martin’s arrangements on the knowingly nostalgic slow-dance number “Ticket to Heaven,” but when they attempted to conjure a bit of “Money for Nothing” swagger on “Heavy Fuel,” they sounded listless. This sense of fatigue runs throughout On Every Street, its enervation accentuated by the album’s CD bloat; where earlier Dire Straits albums wrapped things up at an efficient five or seven songs, this rambled through 12, overstaying its welcome.
Somehow, Knopfler sensed Dire Straits had overstayed their welcome, too. He pulled the plug on the group in the mid ’90s, pursuing a decidedly understated solo career and never once getting lured back for a reunion, despite the prospect of larger paychecks. When the band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, he never acknowledged the honor publicly. His brother David, who played with the band at the outset, also sat out the festivities, as did Withers: instead, Illsley accepted on behalf of the group, with Clark and Guy Fletcher in tow. Knopfler’s absence carried the message that Dire Straits belonged to the past, a band to be relegated to anthologies like this one. Beyond the box set’s nostalgic charm, what’s interesting about the group’s collected catalog is what it says about their genre and era. Over the course of six studio albums, Dire Straits evolved from eccentric oddities into smooth commodities, neatly encapsulating classic rock’s own journey from the fringes to the center of the establishment.

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The latest record from the Austin trio is split in two halves: elaborate, hellish metal and dissonant chamber music.

Devil Music

There are so many ways music can make people uncomfortable, and Portrayal of Guilt have tried nearly all of them. The Austin trio’s journey from screamo to blackened noise culminated in last year’s Christfucker, where new levels of extremity and ugliness were amplified by the band’s command of dynamics: It could make blank space sound just as terrifying as wall-to-wall static. Devil Music is a more straightforward and refined version of the same idea, an exploration of the greening skeleton beneath Christfucker’s rotting skin.
On Devil Music, whose two halves present the same five songs in radically different arrangements, Portrayal of Guilt bring their energy to bear on composition and form as much as the actual performance. These songs are elaborately plotted, moving efficiently from section to section, though played with a ferocity that makes them feel like they’ve been belched out spontaneously. Their complexity is made plain by the album’s second half, in which the songs from the first are presented as chamber music, re-arranged predominantly for cello, french horn, and tuba. Symphonic metal has existed for nearly as long as metal itself, but these resurrected versions don’t invest the music with a greater drama or make Portrayal of Guilt’s evil feel like anything more cosmic than the product of a few misanthropic dudes.
Portrayal of Guilt sound firmly in control, even when they’re playing warp-speed black metal, and the album’s most moving moments are the result of subtle changes. There is none of the blitzing antsiness of grindcore, none of the torpor of sludge; they’re focused enough to know when these songs feel naturally ready to move on—then they hold onto them for a moment longer. Opener “One Last Taste of Heaven” ramps from strutting nu-metal to anxious blast beats and into a muddy groove in its first 30 seconds, each change articulated by drummer James Beveridge’s shifting of the beat. He’s everywhere on Devil Music, digging deep trenches, foaming up into maximalism, executing wind-sprints; the perpetual ringing of his cymbals surrounds the music like a brassy, acidic container.
Even the more obvious moves feel novel. Singer and guitarist Matt King has spoken frequently about his love of horror movies and his desire to create musical jump-scares. As in film, the quick cut from relative calm to burning chaos can be gimmicky, but when the seething, repetitive industrial grind of “Burning Hand” is snipped by the opening maelstrom of “Where Angels Come to Die”’s black metal, it’s genuinely terrifying, and a reminder that even the most brutal sounds can become a comfort if you sit with them long enough.
King’s vocal roar blots out much of what he has to say as a lyricist, but what comes through seems to have been written from deep within the thickets of anxiety—or while being fucked by satan on a bed of nails. There’s a morbid tenderness to his songwriting, and at times he sounds like Anaïs Nin describing a Cannibal Corpse album cover: “The cold touch grazes my cheek before her fingers enter my mouth,” he sings in the title track, and his coo of “No one will ever hurt me the way you do” over a thick Hum riff in the song’s fadeout is Devil Music’s one purely angelic moment.
By stripping away much of the distortion, the songs’ sense of interdependence becomes more obvious during the second half of the record, giving the album the topography of a symphony with none of the majesty. The chamber versions are smaller and leaner, and the clarity of the sound shows the warts and abrasions in King’s riffing; his melodies bulge and shrink at unexpected moments. Cellist Rachel Gawell mimics most of King’s guitar parts, sawing open “One Last Taste of Heaven” and “Untitled” in a way that reveals the latter’s riff as an echo and elaboration of the former. You can hear elements of Jonny Greenwood’s There Will Be Blood score in how Gawell plays her cello so tightly it sounds like it’s choking, and elsewhere she briefly nods toward Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score. But she and french horn player Rachel Drehmann and tuba player Joe Exley use the natural midrange and bass registers of their instruments to keep this music close to the earth. Like Lingua Ignota’s Caligula, Devil Music recognizes that there’s just as much horror and pain to be found in the light of day as there is in the darkest crevices. It’s dirty, smudged music, bitter with the terroir of suffering.


Inspired by a move into Manhattan, the adventurous drummer fuses worlds of avant-jazz and electronica in a dozen restrained pieces that feel like streetscape scores.

Stadium

For more than a decade, experimental percussionist and sound artist Eli Keszler has dismantled the idea of what a drum can be and how it should sound. He’s done this on enormous scales, turning Boston’s Cyclorama building and a Louisiana water tower into makeshift monolithic instruments. When Keszler pares down to just a drum kit, even those massive installations begin to feel small. For 2016’s Last Signs of Speed, he rendered a seemingly infinite array of sounds—hits, taps, scratches, rattles, creaks, clinks, thuds—from a kit, the results skirting the edges of techno, jazz, and modern composition. That adaptability has made him a stellar collaborator for experimental greats, from Keith Fullerton Whitman and Oren Ambarchi to Laurel Halo and Oneohtrix Point Never. On Laurel Halo’s Dust, for instance, he sounded as excellent melting into her electro-symphonic vision as he did joining her in a stripped-down duo. Keszler’s intricate playing suggests he could take on an army of Aphex Twin’s computer-controlled acoustic instruments, barehanded.
On Stadium, an album inspired by his recent move from south Brooklyn to Manhattan, Keszler makes music as expansive as the borough itself. Though geographically close, the areas are worlds apart, and the record matches the latter’s bustle at every step. Listening to Keszler’s music in a place like Manhattan has previously seemed daunting; try navigating overcrowded streets and clogged subways while hearing the disorienting “Sudden Laughter, Laughter Without Reason” without getting the spins. But Stadium begins with the feather-light jazz of “Measurement Doesn’t Change the System At All,” where cool drum leads and synth splashes that recall Bitches Brew glide like a subway leaving its stop. For an hour, his dynamic highs and lows match the unpredictable velocity of a place where something wondrous, tragic, hilarious, or simply frustrating seems to linger behind every corner.
Even as moments skew lively or contemplative or purely abstract, pieces like “Flying Floor for U.S. Airways” and “Lotus Awnings” reveal subtle complexities in flux. The latter lifts things early with nimble polyrhythms and a sprightly Mellotron hook, but Keszler shifts between tension and release as uneasy pianos and percussive drones drift into focus from behind. By the end, the piece flirts with atonality, that melodic loop now outnumbered and swallowed. Those two tracks bookend Stadium’s devastating epic, “We Live in Pathetic Temporal Urgency,” where Keszler’s percussion spreads out like a skyline. The drums are restrained for most of the song’s seven minutes, hanging still to let the layers of synths and horns haunt. It’s a bleak passage, capturing the daily communal that traveling strangers share in their “pathetic temporal urgency.” This triptych is only one example of the album’s brilliant sequencing. The delicate trio of “Which Swarms Around It,” “Fifty Four to Madrid,” and the horn-dappled “French Lick” rest in the center of the album like a valley. Those constant shifts in velocity align Keszler perfectly with Manhattan’s coherent chaos and place Stadium’s elastic rhythms comfortably between Autechre’s Confield and the free jazz odysseys of Milford Graves.
For all the complexity of Stadium, its true genius lies in understatement and how a thousand small sounds build into a larger vision. The album ends on its lightest note with “Bell Underpinnings,” where vibraphones twinkle over a submerged bed of subtones. Recalling exotica king Martin Denny at his most atmospheric, this is Keszler at his most playful. It should blend perfectly with the winter New York streets when jingling bells from charities soundtrack busy sidewalks. It’s one of the many instances where you can picture this music adapting to any season, city block, or neighborhood. That’s ultimately Keszler’s greatest accomplishment: He doesn’t try to make sense of a subject as cacophonous as Manhattan so much as he simply frames it.


Awkward titles are a given at this point, but the legendary hip-hop outfit brings the musical goods this time out, resulting in their best album in years.

Public Enemy: How You Sell Soul to a Souless People Who Sold Their Soul???

Entering their third decade of hip-hop proselytizing and nation-building-- lest history forget, they were blasted by students in city squares during the overthrow of the former Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic-- Public Enemy has entered a productive reclusion on their 11th full-length.
A far cry from their recent self-indulgent pouts, 2002's Revolverution and 2005's New Whirl Odor, How You Sell Soul to a Souless People Who Sold Their Soul??? gets at the finicky emotional recipe for P.E.'s success. Instead of pretending to strut and rage à la those aforementioned mid-1990s old grey mare trudges, How You Sell Soul (there is no way to cleanly truncate most P.E. titles) revisits instrumental blueprints from Fear of a Black Planet and It Takes a Nation of Millions, enshrined intros-- "The brother don't swear he nice/ He KNOWS he nice!"-- and plays the self-referencing cards with aplomb. Because when piss and vinegar is your blood type, there's no such thing as tempering. Old age is just a new window to shoot from.
The band combats "age" with disclosure: The liner notes sprawl like yearbook memories, thanking old AC/DC records for inspiration alongside Chuck's hand-holding descriptions of just how and why each song was constructed-- sample history, just WHY he respects KRS so much and just needed him for "Sex, Drugs & Violence". Chuck D even tones down his still-glorious solo megaphone riot and concedes: "Thank you for letting us be ourselves/ So don't mind me if I repeat myself/ These simple lines be good for your health" ("Harder Than You Think"). Simple chestnuts they are: kids gotta read, governments gotta be questioned, and gangster rap is fine, as long as you know it's rap, not reality.
And the skeletal disclosure works. Aside from a few ungainly, obvious missteps-- trying to play the Scott Storch melodic game on "Amerikan Gangster", wasting the KRS run-in on a track that sounds like a D12 refuse pile ("Sex, Drugs & Violence")-- the album is finely sequenced. Newsreel-ish interludes punctuate the album into thematic thirds (rebirth, bitches!/appraising the day/stumping for the apocalypse). The nakedly obvious structure loosens everyone's valves. Chuck worries about images and phonetics-- "watch the masses move as a mass of switches," "Botswana to Watts and Queens." The best melodies are given the space (Read: minimal Flav howling, Chuck pays attention to breath control) to breathe-- see the stubble-funk trash on "Frankenstar", the Commodores sample on "Escapism", and, the album's best track, Redman's burbling production and winsome guest verse on "Can You Hear Me Now?"
When How You Sell Soul rounds the corner into its raging final third, there's a nice little epiphany. With the way we now appreciate and consume music, P.E. may never be able to change America again (they probably have a bigger contemporary fanbase outside this continent), but they still can light up a few souls. No matter their pop "relevance," they refuse to, and refuse to let their listeners, be complacent. Read Orwell, beat Yung Joc with a trashcan, don't watch CNN. Just. Do. Something. When the apocalypse is finally unveiled, don't be the hollow man Joc-ing your way toward Bethlehem.


The singer-songwriter pays tribute to Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, Arthur Russell, and more on a set of covers that play like quiet seances.

Covers Vol. 1

Shannon Lay has always had an intimate connection with her heroes. On “November,” from her 2019 album August, she pondered the fate of Nick Drake and tried to consider him as a flesh-and-blood human rather than just another influence: “I think of him often,” she sings softly. “Wonder if he’s listening/I wonder if a voice so quiet could ever die.” For Lay there is consolation in the notion that Drake might live on in the songs he left behind, and perhaps even in her songs, whether they mention him or not.
It's telling that more than half of the artists on Lay’s first covers album are dead: Nick Drake, Elliott Smith, Jackson C. Frank, Arthur Russell, and Lou Reed. Lay’s versions of their songs are seances, a means of direct communication, but her music is never overly reverent or indulgently ghostly. Rather, she respects the quietness of the originals, that undying quality, and Lay knows that restraint can focus the melancholy of Sibylle Baier’s “I Lost Something in the Hills” and sharpen the barbs of Russell’s “Close My Eyes.”
Nothing here is as transformative as Lay’s live cover of Black Box’s “Everybody, Everybody,” which recasts the ’90s dance banger as an indie-folk call-and-response—without the back-patting irony of so many cross-genre covers. Rather than grand or ambitious, her interpretations rely on subtle changes, things you might not pick up the first time around. She distinguishes her version of Frank’s “Blues Run the Game” from the many, many, many others by employing a more forceful vocal to give it an unexpectedly optimistic tone. Rather than a lament like the original, hers is a rumination on interconnectedness: It becomes oddly reassuring to know that everybody everywhere is motivated by the same blues.
Lay can’t quite muster the spite and bitterness of Smith’s “Angeles,” but through her deft fingerpicking and Debbie Neigher’s piano flourishes she recasts the song more as a question than a statement. Drake’s “From the Morning” ends with a coda cribbed from the instrumental “Horn,” also from Pink Moon. It’s a nice, knowing touch that reminds you that she’s drawing inspiration not only as a singer and songwriter but also as a guitarist.
Among these heroes, it’s especially interesting to hear her tackle songs by her peers. Lay has toured as a guitarist with Ty Segall, so she’s intimately familiar with his sense of melody and lyrics, with his own set of heroes. “The Keepers,” from his 2013 album Sleeper, settles comfortably among these older songs, with Lay adding a new layer to its exhortation to radical creativity: “We can still dream and shake our hands /And sing a song so grand.” By contrast, she drains the psychedelic queasiness from OCS’s “I Am Slow,” replacing it with a halting guitar theme that sounds like an ellipsis at the end of this collection. It’s not the most satisfying conclusion, but it does remind you that Covers Vol. 1 is not a self-contained album but the first installment of a larger project. These recordings suggest Lay isn’t merely cataloging her influences: She is showing us how she continues to live with them.


These 1981 devotional recordings for voice and Wurlitzer, meant to guide meditation through chanting, offer an alternate version of the cosmic jazz visionary’s synthesizer masterpiece, Turiya Sings.

Kirtan: Turiya Sings

In 1981, Alice Coltrane sang on record for the first time, at the behest of God. Having lived many musical lives—church organist, bebop pianist, cosmic jazz visionary, intrepid experimental composer—she was by then serving as spiritual director for her interfaith Vedantic Center in Southern California, seeking new modes of transcendence. It would be a couple of years before Coltrane opened her Sai Anantam Ashram in Agoura Hills, but already she was deep into a personal journey in consciousness. She had begun a transfiguration following the death of her husband John in 1967, and her auspicious meeting, not long after, with guru and counterculture icon Swami Satchidananda.
“Several years ago, following a long period of elementary meditating and reading of some of the diverse books on spirituality and world religions, I felt the deepest transcendental longing to realize the Supreme Lord,” Coltrane wrote in her spiritual autobiography, Monument Eternal, in 1977. “This longing within the depths of my heart was soon acknowledged, for within a short period of time I experienced the first rays of illumination and spiritual re-awakening.”
Coltrane is still best known for her 1971 record bearing Satchidananda’s name, which mixed cascading harp and droning tanpura with Pharoah Sanders’ expressive saxophone. But a sense of spiritual awe suffused her music from her 1968 debut as bandleader onward. Whether in her glittering post-bop or her orchestral proto-noise psychedelia, Coltrane’s compositions make you feel connected to yourself and the world with preternatural clarity. They make you believe things you otherwise wouldn’t; they may even facilitate the process of temporarily suspending fear. Coltrane spent the second half of the 1970s releasing revelatory albums like 1976’s Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana and 1977’s Transcendence, which fulfilled and challenged her major-label recording contract with manifestations of her Universal Consciousness.
Turiya Sings was the first album she made alone. Having left the commercial music industry behind, she released these uncanny compositions based on Hindu devotionals, or bhajans, on cassette through her Vedantic Center’s publishing imprint, Avatar Book Institute. Luxuriating in every prayerful syllable, naming deities like Krishna and Ramachandra, Coltrane made a small number of the tapes available to her students and Vedantic Center visitors. Though she used relatively spare components—the subtitle of the original album cover read, “Devotional Songs in Original Composition with Organ, Strings and Synthesizer”—they contain an unusual, self-contained grandeur. In the aching shimmer of these hymns, which evoke both South Indian classical music and the Black church, you can hear Coltrane’s life coursing through: her journey from gospel accompanist to jazz prodigy, the drama of the European classical music she loved, the soulful melodies of her Detroit youth, grief and exaltation. Yet the power of this music is elemental. The tone of the original Turiya Sings is as certain and spectral as anything associated with the Coltrane name. Her voice hovers distantly above the mix as if she’s floating, or astral projecting—which she wrote about extensively in Monument Eternal—like a woman actively inhabiting a higher dimension.
The recordings of Coltrane’s ashram period have taken on a mythical status in her catalog over the past decade, particularly Turiya Sings, which has circulated online and on bootleg cassettes, never officially re-released. The 2017 Luaka Bop compilation of Coltrane’s ecstatic music included no tracks from Turiya Sings. If there is reluctance to make those particular recordings commercially available, it’s understandable: The music emerged at the very moment Coltrane was trying to divorce herself from the material world. On a more technical level, according to a label representative, the original Turiya Sings remains formally unreleased because the Coltrane family has never found its master synthesizer recordings.
What Coltrane’s son Ravi did find—around the time of his mother’s final album, 2004’s miraculous Translinear Light—were 1981 recordings she made of Turiya Sings featuring only her voice and Wurlitzer electric organ, an instrument that she once said came to her in a divine vision. (“In one meditation… the precise instrument I should get was revealed to me,” she said in an interview. “I didn’t need to do any research; it was just conveyed to me.”) These pared-back tracks of Coltrane’s most minimal music are now released as Kirtan: Turiya Sings, like seeds of the cassette that also, in some sense, expand it. As Ravi Coltrane writes in a producer’s note, this is “functional music,” meant to guide the practice of chanting: creating vibrations inside of oneself in order to transcend, like embodied meditations. During a call-and-response kirtan performance, the leader sings devotionals, typically with a harmonium pump organ, and the audience joins in collectively. Despite the surge of interest in kirtan in the U.S. in the 1990s—and Coltrane’s groundbreaking fusion of gospel and jazz elements into the form—her spiritual music remained little known in the U.S., as scholar Franya J. Berkman notes in her 2010 Coltrane biography, in considerable part because she didn’t perform it outside of her ashram.
Where before, the stately music of Turiya Sings had evoked celestial bodies, inquisitive synth lines whirring as if in accordance with their own cosmology, now there’s the tactility of earthly reality. The click of the organ on “Jagadishwar” makes its soul-stirring melody—which Coltrane reimagined unmistakably on Translinear Light as well—feel newly intimate, and she enunciates each word with enlightened precision. It puts you in the room, into electric air. By this point, Coltrane had been playing the Wurlitzer for a decade, having first used it on 1971’s mind-bending galactic trip Universal Consciousness. Her subtle flourishes of extra notes make the compositions bloom and groove anew. Her mystic organ lines seem attuned to the drone of the universe.
Coltrane’s singing is rich and stoic, putting stillness, humility, and conviction into every incantatory curve. Many of these Sanskrit chants are about non-attachment, channeling the ancient wisdom found in such sacred texts as the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas, and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Through a resolute melody on the liturgical centerpiece “Charanam,” she praises a “Supremely unattached/God of Gods,” and on “Jai Ramachandra” she delivers “Victory to Ram, who destroys worldly ties.” Her newly autonomous sound was one of self-liberation, delivering a direct line to healing. The fact that Coltrane is able to command so much movement with such stark instrumentation, as on the sweeping, 11-minute “Rama Katha,” or in the deep, wild melodic contours of the closing “Pranadhana,” is enchanting and entrancing. This was a woman who had a decade prior conducted her own 25-piece orchestra, distilling all of that singular majesty into a solitary voice for the purposes of collective rapture.
Listening to the Kirtan: Turiya Sings recordings feels less like discovering a hissy cassette lost in time than what it must have been like to experience Coltrane leading the songs at one of her legendary Sunday services. Each composition steadily ascends with a charge of aliveness. “Music can be very complex, very technical, very experimental, but it can also be very spiritual,” Coltrane told Yoga Journal in 1982. “Out of all of these considerations, spirituality, as music, is what I appreciate the most.” Like a great sacred text, the music of Kirtan: Turiya Sings is concentrated and rigorous, yet simple and full of ease. Like the original Turiya Sings, it’s also a pleasure. The cover of the 1982 album depicts a devout portrait of Coltrane surrounded by deep unclouded blue. Once, she wrote in Monument Eternal, the Lord said to her, “Hey Turiya [...] be so big, that sky will learn Sky.” Listening is an act of expansion. But to really understand Kirtan: Turiya Sings is to answer its call with your voice.

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Deerhunter guitarist makes his solo debut, a hazy bedroom reverie that shouldn't surprise listeners accustomed to his main band. Bradford Cox guests.

The Floodlight Collective

It'll be a shame if Lockett Pundt's solo debut gets lost in all the light and heat coming from his main band. But it won't be surprising. In a rare interview, the shy Deerhunter-er told blog BBQCHICKENROBOT that he started recording his album at the beginning of 2007. Since then, Deerhunter has released Cryptograms, the Fluorescent Grey EP, and last year's Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.; lead singer Bradford Cox's Atlas Sound has released Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, plus a staggering number of mp3s, mixes, and non-album tracks. At shows, Pundt can be seen strumming wordlessly, staring toward his effects pedals.
And yet the sole figure behind Lotus Plaza has had a huge-- and all too often unacknowledged-- role in establishing Deerhunter's hallucinatory sound. The Atlanta band's chaotic 2005 debut, Deerhunter aka Turn It Up Faggot, gets kind of a bad rap, no doubt in part because Cox disavowed the thing. But it shows that Deerhunter didn't turn into the shoegaze-drenched dreamweavers we know and love until after Pundt joined. Pundt wrote the music for some of Deerhunter's most indelible songs-- "Strange Lights", "Like New"-- and made his singing debut on Microcastle. The Atlas Sound album, which features Pundt's guitar on "Cold as Ice", is dedicated to him.
So that the first Lotus Plaza album, The Floodlight Collective, is a hazy bedroom reverie shouldn't surprise listeners accustomed to other Deerhunter-related projects, the hypnotic solo work of Panda Bear, the lonesome longing of Jeremy Jay, or to a lesser extent the introverted homemade racket of Wavves and Dum Dum Girls. Produced by Brian Foote of Nudge, the album submerges plaintive vocals in layer after reverb-washed cloud layer of ethereal guitar atmospherics, achieving a woozy and sometimes barely intelligible prettiness. That can best be heard on tracks like the tambourine-jangling "Whiteout"-- its gentle melody gaining force on repeat listens-- or the squealing, Quickspace-esque rocker "What Grows?" (it does, an abstract Yo La Tengo). Pundt plays all instruments, except for Cox's turn on Factory-ready drums for the sweet dream pop of "Different Mirrors"; a bouncy Supremes beat gives way to outer-space Roy Orbison on "Quicksand". The krautrock pulse and piano-dripping radiance of seven-minute centerpiece "Antoine" sound like a Stereolab disciple starting to come into his own.
As with bashful Blur guitarist Graham Coxon on his own solo debut more than a decade ago, Pundt at times lets his diffidence get the best of him. For all the subtle detail in a track like the mournful, pitch-shifted "Sunday Night"-- which vaguely recalls Atlas Sound's "Bite Marks" in its nostalgic main riff-- with Pundt's melodic and conceptual strengths so submerged, the album can begin to run together. That's probably the point: From the washed-out cover art to the few discernible lyrics, The Floodlight Collective is obsessed with the indistinctness of memory, the dazzlement of bright lights. Opener "Red Oak Way", maybe Pundt's "Hazel St.", longs for "sunny Saturdays watching cartoons in the living room," warm rays shining through the windowpane. So The Floodlight Collective is a mostly elegant listen, and one whose failings are part of its theme: Like a vague recollection, it's still a little hard to hold onto after it's over-- pretty albeit somewhat ephemeral. Memory knows before knowing remembers, sure, but too much light makes the baby go blind.


The Australian duo Jagwar Ma’s gleeful debut Howlin’ evokes Madchester in its heady swirl of baggy beats, unabashed Beach Boys melodies, and charmingly silly lyrics. It's a backwards looking record about loving the present moment.

Howlin'

Let’s take account of Madchester’s enduring images: a heavy-lidded Ian Brown moaning “I wanna be adored” but not sounding like he wants to be awake. Bez freaky-dancin' his way through the Happy Mondays' prime and not even being the most loutish guy in the group. The rumors that Shaun Ryder ditched a meeting with EMI to score heroin, which was referred to as "KFC" by the band. And the sweaters. Point being that while the clash of ecstasy, acid house, and rock'n'roll resulted in a brief period of brilliant, forward-thinking music, the leading lights of the scene were never all that bright. That hindsight puts an interesting perspective on Australian duo Jagwar Ma’s gleeful debut Howlin’; their early singles cast them as the purest Madchester revivalists in some time and the full-length delivers on that promise. The music is a heady swirl of baggy beats and unabashed Beach Boys melodies, while the lyrics are wholly uninterested in anything intellectual. It’s silly enough to cause skepticism and charming enough to make you wonder what kind of scrutiny Screamadelica or Thrills, Pills & Bellyaches would meet if they were released in 2013.
The album gets its title from a line on the shambling “Uncertainty”: “When you’re gloomy/ Howlin’ looks so good to me.” The characters within Howlin’ are gloomy, they’re certainly not depressed; nothing that a little howlin’ couldn’t fix. They howl because they’re confused by loneliness, and unlike fellow Australian psych pop space cadets Tame Impala, solitude isn’t bliss; it can be externalized and rendered as a goofy Austin Powers-pop trifle on “That Loneliness”. They howl because it’s women, not drugs, that offer transcendence and Jagwar Ma needs the hook up; fluid breakbeats and classic psychedelic effects (backwards guitar, naturally) drive “Man I Need” and “Come Save Me”, tart and hooky songs too bashful to be overbearing. This is festival stuff, the movements coming off a bit drunk and a little wearied by the sun. The beat-driven tracks, “What Love” and “Four”, aren’t actually dance music, per se-- they lack the precision and rigor of proper electronic music. When Gabriel Winterfield yells “exercise your chemistry!” it's meaningless, but at least lets you know this isn’t rocket science.
In that sense, Jagwar Ma’s guilelessness works in their favor; they’re hardly the first guys who’ve banged the drums on Madchester's behalf, but they avoid the shamanistic mock profundity that resulted in a similarly positioned band named the Music making a song called “The People”. Ewan Pearson’s mixing is sweet, slick, and colorful as Skittles shells, meaning Jagwar Ma avoid the leathery cock-rocking that marred the Big Pink; the latter boasted “these girls fall like dominos,” whereas when Winterfield yelps “let me show me you babe just all the man I can be!” he sounds ready to pull a bouquet of flowers from behind his back. Only on the last two tracks do Jagwar Ma aspire to “serious” artistic ambitions, and the result is a preview of Howlin’s “darker,” “introspective” and duller sequel. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
It’s possible to be incredibly ambitious and disarming at the same time, and in that way, Howlin’ isn't that different in approach to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories-- a backwards looking record about loving the present moment, a big-tent affair that can be misunderstood as a reactionary record. (It's no less reactionary than Noel Gallagher claiming Howlin' to be more important than an Oasis reunion.) From the moment “What Love” fades in with its loose-limbed, floppy rhythm, Howlin’ ensures everybody will be dancing, few will be doin' it right, but they'll all be feelin’ alright regardless.