Thirteen years after their breakthrough hit, the K-pop icons are now elders in the scene. On their first album in five years, they combine effortlessness with versatility.

FOREVER 1

Few K-pop songs are as representative of the genre as Girls’ Generation’s “Gee.” An electro-pop sugar rush reminiscent of turn-of-the-millennium idol pop and Shibuya-kei, the 2009 single immediately established the girl group as a force in the industry. That wasn’t the original plan, though. SM Entertainment wanted “Dancing Queen”—a remake of Duffy’s “Mercy”—to be the lead single, but it was pushed back to 2012. That song might have felt like a response to Wonder Girls’ Gloria Gaynor-esque “Nobody”; in comparison, “Gee” was entirely modern, and would cement Girls’ Generation as history makers responsible for the major ur-text of second-generation K-pop cuteness.
The problem was that they couldn’t pull off the shtick forever—if not because their aesthetics needed to match their age, then because they were tasked with being constant trend-setters. The years that followed resulted in a slew of diverse chart toppers, including “Run Devil Run” (originally a Kesha demo), “I Got a Boy” (an imperial genre-hopping masterwork), and “Mr.Mr.” (a slick nu-disco scorcher). Their seventh album, FOREVER 1, is Girls’ Generation’s first in five years, but it feels more like it’s been decades, given K-pop’s countless stylistic detours in the interim. Still, they pull off a concise record that’s among their best, and prove that their solo ventures haven’t stymied their coherence as a group.
Curiously, the key to Girls’ Generation’s success here is that they sound uninterested in being at K-pop’s forefront. They’re elders in the scene now and, much like they did on their previous album, Holiday Night, opt to sound incredibly comfortable—the effortlessness is the point. The title track and lead single showcases this well. It’s all EDM buildups and soaring vocals as they make declarations like, “Girls, we are forever.” Such lyrics may seem inauthentic, since erstwhile member Jessica recently penned two fictional novels hinting at in-group drama, but that doesn’t matter as long as the drums pound and the synths wobble—the current eight-member roster is here to deliver pure pop, and sometimes that means mindless, unrelenting euphoria.
If Girls’ Generation don’t have a particular musical identity on FOREVER 1, it might be because they’re from an era before SM tied specific sonic qualities to their groups. One can trace a throughline in the career arcs of Red Velvet and NCT’s different subunits, but it often felt like Girls’ Generation were constantly adapting to new sounds. The same holds true across these ten tracks. “Seventeen,” for example, is a sweet R&B song about carrying the same giddy feelings for someone after many years, but its repeating piano chords recall “Still D.R.E.” Before long, Hyoyeon starts rapping, and though her technique is shoddy, it’s heartening for the way it embodies teenage silliness and bravado. Then there’s “Villain,” which sounds like their younger labelmates Aespa due to its futuristic sheen and lyrics that retroactively shoehorn the group into the SM Culture Universe. Even though Girls’ Generation sound like they’re being forced to sing about the mythological Kwangya, they’re having enough fun that it goes down easy.
Such chameleonic tendencies are on exceptional display in “You Better Run,” a merciless pop song about revenge. As they sing about kicking someone to hell, proggy synth melodies coarse brashly through the track in unwieldy, circuitous zig-zags. Tiffany’s performance is a highlight; she sells newfound confidence in both anthemic and introspective passages. The album’s final three-track run is also impressive. “Summer Night” is FOREVER 1’s most playful R&B song, using bubbly synths to manifest the cozy feelings of being in love—as they sing of holding hands and locking eyes, you can feel the assurance underlining their honeyed vocal deliveries. “Freedom” treats romance in more musical terms, aiming for smoother, funk-lite grooves to present a relationship’s “perfect rhythm.” “Paper Plane” closes the album on an even more hopeful note, explaining the bright futures that lay ahead for the group’s members. Its bridge employs a flurry of colorful, arcade-ready synths that suggest a mature version of the ebullience characterizing “Gee.” Thirteen years on from their breakthrough hit, and 15 from their debut, Girls’ Generation are as versatile as ever. It’s just that now, their flexibility is a signpost for the unexpected joys of growing older.


The Miami singer moves through her debut album with a sense of self-assurance that doesn’t allow her to look into the rearview at missteps.

Division

Jenevieve was born with an old soul. In interviews, she’ll talk about how her library is filled with oldies because of her parents and geek out over Zhané. One of the first songs she remembers hearing as a child is Joe’s “Stutter,” and her enchanting, Anri-sampling breakout single, “Baby Powder,” pulls from that same emotional well. “Baby, don’t feed me false,” the 23-year-old sighs with a heart-piercing coldness. Both songs are snapshots of the exact moment where the singers realized their partners were playing them for fools, but there’s no time for dramatic explanations or Mystikal-assisted reconnaissance missions on “Baby Powder.” Jenevieve shrouds the breakup ballad in aloofness, making it gentle enough for passive listening but tender and revealing on closer inspection.
Division, her debut album, plays out like a tribute to her parents’ collection of burned CD mixes, time-traveling through decades of music with carefully selected references filtered through producer Jean Benz, who also serves as Jenevieve’s songwriting partner. “Medallion” is a slinky hip-hop soul vow of protection; the walking bass of the swooning “No Sympathy” recalls an ’80s Whitney Houston; the aqueous “Exit Wounds” might sound indebted to Miguel or Marvin Gaye depending on the age of whoever’s listening. Rather than aesthetic-scraping gestures, these songs come off as modernized interpretations of the music the Miami singer grew up idolizing. R&B artists continue to mine the late ’90s and early 2000s for inspiration when they aren’t making smoky Trap&B or sliding on slick Soulection-inspired production. Division doesn’t completely escape those trappings, but by looking beyond that timespan, Jenevieve finds a set of sonic textures that shake things up.
Jenevieve learned how to talk about love from the past, but she finds ways to add modern flourishes to her songs and tweak established formulas. On the swaying post-chorus of “No Sympathy,” flashes of Doja Cat appear when she coos “Don’t cry.” When she cuts herself off from rhyming “over” with “Rover” on “Nxwhere,” it’s done with a rapper’s mischievous smirk—she doesn’t want her writing to be that predictable. Mainly, her vocal tone is reminiscent of Syd’s untempered cool. The album opens in the middle of a misty daydream where she sings of a sky on fire, riding into Atlantis, and eternal love. Then the grooving bassline of “Midnight Charm” breaks that dream sequence to talk about something more realistic, like “celestial vibes.”
At times, Jenevieve will come with lines that prioritize vibes and imaginative scenery over tangible descriptions, as if she’s fallen in love with the sound a word makes rather than its meaning. When she sings of “melanin swims,” it’s like listening to a roommate who just got into astrology ramble on about rising signs and zodiac houses. Jenevieve’s woozy style finds a home in the emotive, realist standouts “Blameless” and “Résumé.” It’s on these two tracks where she spends the most time on Earth, speaking directly so her feelings don’t get lost in a sea of metaphors. “Have you ever loved someone?” she asks. “Who put you down and made you feel like you’re not enough?/Dear God, let it go.” Even at their most grounded, her songs drift between fantasy and reality.
Jenevieve moves through her satisfyingly consistent debut album with a sense of self-assurance that doesn’t allow her to look into the rearview at missteps. Following up a song as arresting as “Baby Powder” has to be a little intimidating, but Jenevieve doesn’t seem to be fazed by it. Her whimsical songwriting isn’t as interested in replicating that moment as it is in creating new ones. She sees doves in bright black skies, soulless souls, and mellow eyes that hypnotize, not exes she’s lovesick over. “I have emotions/I can’t describe,” she laments on the lullaby-like closing track, which functions as a sort of ode to the misunderstood and ignored. “It’s hard to see it through these eyes.” Jenevieve spends much of Division lost in her own mind, writing about emotions she’s experiencing at the same time she’s processing them. When given enough time to wipe her eyes, Jenevieve leaves no room for misinterpretation.

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The latest Warp Records full-length from disheveled mastermind Tom Jenkinson finds him nudging away from the breakbeats with which many listeners identify him and embracing organic textures on a concept album about a rock band's "ultra-gig."

Just a Souvenir

A decade or so ago, Tom Jenkinson-- the disheveled mastermind behind jazz-cum-drum-and-glitch mishmash Squarepusher-- described his music-making process as a sort of technological vision quest, with the end product "a souvenir of your time in this psychic space." Looks like it's a sentiment that he's taken with him. Over the course of 11 albums, he's been embroiled in some sort of existential conundrum, if not crisis, as he's attempted to reconcile a background in formal jazz with the manic possibilities afforded by sequencing and sound manipulation. A veritable thesaurus of musical experimentation, Jenkinson has pushed a spitfire chorus of fully formed studies in blending fusion with breakbeats, acid with funk. But whether this litany is meant to be enjoyed or simply admired is up for debate. It's true that his work (and of course his bass and drumming virtuosity) is due respect, but the intersection of his hardcore appreciators (tweaked tech-heads and staid jazz appreciators) might just as soon stroke their chins as develop emotional reactions to it.
Just a Souvenir could just bridge Jenkinson's longtime appreciation gap. Heck, it's just about the Squarepusher equivalent to Sgt. Pepper's. Souvenir is ostensibly a concept album, complete with a cockamamie yarn Jenkinson has spun about its woozily constructed device: "a daydream about watching a crazy, beautiful rock band play an ultra-gig" centered around a giant neon coat-hanger. Into his vision enter guitars that can manipulate space-time, Eskimos, chainsaws, and Cro-Magnons. At the conclusion, Jenkinson laments that his memory of the scene is his only souvenir-- add a dash of humility, and you've got a title! And although it's 2004's Ultravisitor, with its ever-present crowd samples, that sounds like a live album, Souvenir leaves distinct impressions of an otherworldly rock spectacle.
True to concept, the record as a whole sounds more organic than any Squarepusher release dating back, perhaps, to Music Is Rotted One Note-- excepting Souvenir's obvious counterexample in "A Real Woman", whose vocoded robot narrator bemoans its cluelessness in the ways of the human female. Jenkinson announces his newfound humanity right off the bat with opener "Star Time 2", which sedately re-imagines the track "Coopers World" that opened his seminal Hard Normal Daddy. The drill-and-bass salvos that slashed across "Cooper" and many of Jenkinson's canvases of old have been toned down or eradicated-- only minimal echoes of the signature Amen Break beat show up, with comparatively little sequenced percussion remaining. Tom still wails on his bass, capably delivering a master class in funky fills, but its delivery through the riffy, frenetic math-punk of "Delta-V" and "Planet Gear" is most surprising. By recasting his relentless, aggressive textures into rock, he's breathed a curious new life into them, imbuing a sort of alien quality to what in less capable hands could have turned out as reruns of someone else's garage rock or funk-punk.
As the languid classical guitar that dots the album brings it to a close, it hits that this 44-minute opus is perhaps more inviting, and more melodic, than anything Jenkinson has done in a long time. It's certainly an easier listen than 80 minutes of Ultravisitor or an hour of Hello Everything. Souvenir, comparatively, is a demure beast of wistful robot voices framing jazz improvisation, alien rock jams evoking the aging belligerence of breakbeats, and pastoral drone backdrops adorned by jerky guitar ballads. But Souvenir isn't just an outlet for nonfans to "get" Squarepusher. By abstractly distilling the principles that guide Squarepusher, the record arrives readymade for the chin-stroking die-hards out there to endlessly theorize about the connection between the music maker, the music, and his/its audience.  If indeed music is the only souvenir gained from these trips to the unknown, then this disheveled spitfire, once lost in his little world of glitches and jazz scales, might have unearthed this particular bauble on the journey to meet the rest of us halfway.


Portishead's Geoff Barrow and his side project Beak> back European chanteuse Anika on a mix of covers and originals.

Anika

The most refreshing part about Anika's eponymous debut album is just how unambitious it is. You'd be right to be skeptical of Portishead's Geoff Barrow linking up with another European singer with a deadpan, dramatic voice, but Anika isn't an attempt to capitalize on past glories. Instead, it's a further delving into Barrow's record-nerd fantasies after 2009's krautrock-isms with his band, Beak>. Recorded quickly, and live, Anika preens like high art but eventually reveals itself as a loving and minor pet project.
Barrow and the rest of Beak> back Anika, a Berlin/Bristol-based journalist who stumbles and fusses with a Nico-like charm. She doesn't have a fantastic voice, but she's patient and plays a very specific role-- the emotionally detached European chanteuse-- without ego. That's key too, because this type of muse-pop is usually conducted in the interest of star-making (see: Nico, Brigitte Bardot). Anika and Beak> instead focus on teasing the emotional intricacies out of old songs and styles by pairing them with rougher, niche sonics. The majority of the tracks on Anika are covers, leaning heavily on 1960s pop and folk.
Beak> augment Anika's droll talk/sing with a dubby, beat-driven noir that borrows from minimal wave's chunky rhythms and post-punk's spindly verve. "Terry" and "End of the World" transform teenage naïveté into lingering fear, though the group is better when the strangeness of the material-- Yoko Ono's "Yang Yang"-- is on par with the music's obscure referents. (An exception: an airy, organ-led rendition of Ray Davies' "I Go to Sleep" closes the album on its most tender note.) The group's two original productions-- the paranoid "No One's There" and the punky "Officer Officer"-- are lyrically tenser than their counterparts and not as rewarding, but they allow Beak> to build some noisy, industrial momentum. The group's biggest and most prevalent misstep is a seven-minute cover of Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" (never Dylan's most tuneful or clever song), one they repeat with a dub version (this begs the question: do dub-leaning bands really need dub edits?). Beak> turn it into a call-and-response bass epic but can't escape its ham-fisted politics, however fitting they must seem.
It's tempting to accuse Barrow of formalism-- Anika sounds just that familiar-- but he's earned the right, and moreover, the treatments here are clever and well executed. Beak>'s productions will jar and quiver in a good pair of headphones, and Anika presents herself as a faithful cipher rather than a Brand New Talent. Anika is shortsighted in the best way: it's a tribute, an exercise, the charming kind.


While Young Thug’s creative choices after about 2015 have had little sway over emerging trends, Punk suggests that the place he now occupies is one that allows him more room to experiment.

Punk

Young Thug’s new album, Punk, opens softly and strangely. The acoustic, drumless “Die Slow” was recorded in a Venice hotel room two years ago; before Thug starts rapping in earnest, he notes people “riding past on boats” through the canals below. He goes on, in that ad-libbed intro, to wobble back and forth between pride and shame, reporting that he only consumed one pint of lean on his most recent tour, but that tour kept him from attending his son’s birthday. (Punk occasionally resembles 2017’s Beautiful Thugger Girls, and that birthday aside, in particular, recalls the line: “I’m so busy, it make me feel like I’m in and out my kids’ lives.”) “Die Slow” then gives way to a verse about his brother’s narrow escape from a life sentence and his mother’s brush with death—but that verse is interrupted only six bars in when Thug’s take unravels into an unstructured monologue about his parents’ breakup, a shooting, a hit-and-run, and what sounds like two different sheriff’s deputies.
The monologue is surprising and idiosyncratic in a way that Thug’s writing has seldom been in recent years. (The way he clears his throat before rushing through the detail “a deputy sheriff that my mom was fucking with” is both comic and a little pained.) The quality of his work never cratered—2019’s So Much Fun delivers on its title—but his lyrics have become less distinct, less singular, designer labels enjambed against violent threats in a playful, knowing way. This autopilot continues across much of Punk, Thug and his personal shoppers in suspended animation. What’s fascinating is how he breaks out of the fugue. Where he once overpowered songs by stretching his tics into main vocals or going on dazzling, hyper-technical runs, his best verses on Punk are in step with the album’s often delicate production.
Speaking of which, Punk’s title is a misnomer. Its guitars are often acoustic and almost uniformly gentle. When Thug grows meticulous, he burrows into those guitars. His rolling verse on “Recognize Real” (also drumless) retains both the glee that has always dotted his writing (“I told my teacher I’ma buy more watches ’cause I was tardy”) and his inimitable phrasing, like when he warns that he’s about to take over “like cancer.” On “Contagious,” he raps about swearing to a judge that he was “faking,” then breaks into a strange qualifier: “But I know it’s in my heart, and I feel it, baby.” And while “Yea Yea Yea” plays like a sketch, its disappearing-within-itself focus recalls some of Thug’s most celebrated experiments.
But there are too many songs on Punk. This has less to do with the actual length—it has enough ideas to justify its 63 minutes—than with the way its musical and emotional arcs are flattened, lost in inferior iterations of similar ideas. The notion to break up stretches of acoustic delicacy with more conventional rap beats is an interesting one, but too many songs from the latter group are rote, anonymous: “Droppin Jewels,” “Road Rage,” the tinny “Scoliosis.” The TV movie-climax gloss of “Insure My Wrist,” with its pianos and preening electric guitar, might work as a spot of catharsis were it not a diminished-returns retread of “Peepin Out the Window,” an excellent Future collaboration slotted four songs prior.
Sometimes Punk becomes more animated. “Rich Nigga Shit,” a duet with the late Juice WRLD, has both the album’s most sinister beat (from Pi’erre Bourne and Kanye West) and Thug squawking like a chicken during the chorus. “Bubbly,” which enlists Travis Scott and Drake for the album’s biggest commercial play, is just strange and dark enough to complicate playlists. Perhaps most fascinating is the Doja Cat collaboration “Icy Hot,” which sounds like what Thug’s fans and detractors both thought, in 2013, he might eventually do to pop radio: yank it up into a neon, near-falsetto haze. While Thug’s stylistic descendants (Gunna, Lil Baby, and so on) are at the forefront of pop rap, and while Thug remains very popular, his creative choices after about 2015 have had little sway over emerging trends. Punk suggests that the space he now occupies—one adjacent to but not precisely in rap’s center—is one that allows him more room to experiment.
At its worst, the album sounds like Watch the Throne if “We Are Young” really had been saved for it (Nate Ruess, Jeff Bhasker, and Gunna’s maudlin “Love You More”) or a campfire singalong at Arizona State (the A$AP Rocky- and Post Malone-assisted “Livin It Up”). But it comes to a close in a way that effectively reframes the subdued tone that dominates the album. “Day Before,” a Mac Miller duet so named because it was recorded one day before Miller died in September 2018, seems to be Punk’s acoustic big bang, the Pittsburgh rapper trading verses with Thug over a guitar and little else. It’s eerie and tremendously well-executed. Thug is vibrant and engaged; Miller is “swimming in the linen like the deep end.” But the title pulls the listener out of the song itself and asks them to consider death; what might have seemed, on the album’s A-side, like a soft malaise, now scans as wistful, even mournful. It sounds pretty, and like it’s barely there at all.

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Pop and noise make for strangely suited bedfellows on an album, by turns colorful and crushing, steeped in physical and psychic pain.

Black Dresses: LOVE AND AFFECTION FOR STUPID LITTLE BITCHES

Like many noise musicians, Black Dresses have a lot to say about pain. Over the last couple of years, the Canadian duo of Devi McCallion and Ada Rook has screamed, rapped, and moaned about the lasting impact of trauma and the indescribable psychic effects of existing in a world that wants you dead. The music that has accompanied those feelings has been appropriately twisted. Their 2018 debut, WASTEISOLATION, felt like pop radio being pulled into a black hole, stretching and destroying the connective tissue that held together the memorable melodies.
Across their many solo efforts and side projects, they’ve often worked with fellow pop mutators like Katie Dey and  100 Gecs’ Laura Les, which might give you an idea of the overwhelming sort of music you’re in for with their songs as a duo. And if it doesn’t, they’ve recently been tweeting about the parallels between Kesha and early Nine Inch Nails, seemingly conscious that their music falls somewhere in the murky Venn diagram between those two wildly different acts.
Since WASTEISOLATION, they’ve released a second full-length album, THANK YOU, as well as a pair of EPs and a smattering of one-offs and side projects. Their music has adopted a variety of tones and moods, but it’s been almost universally heavy, a pool of emotional sludge that they can’t help but coming back to swim in. This prolific run has been exciting to follow for those who appreciates work that interrogates, like, the weightiness of existence, but it’s easy to see how such work might take a toll on its creators. They’ve said recently that they don’t even like to think about the events that inspired their earliest songs. “It’s not useful for me to stew on [the topics that informed earlier records],” they wrote on Twitter earlier this month. “So we moved on.”
That’s the headspace in which they released their third album in two years, LOVE AND AFFECTION FOR STUPID LITTLE BITCHES. The title alone hints at how different their disposition is this time around. Many of the songs are about enduring pain, but they’re also about finding camaraderie and friendship through it all—a reminder that “compassion” comes from the Latin words for “suffering” and “together.” The record opens with a song called “STATIC” that starts, appropriately, with wheezing electronics and a scream shredded enough to induce sympathy pain, but it’s a bit of a fake-out. As McCallion and Rook trade verses, it’s clear that there’s something more complicated going on. The lines that peek through the maelstrom feel almost hopeful. In the chorus, they offer something of a thesis statement for the record: “So fucked up but honestly/I’ve never felt more alive.”
The record is still incredibly heavy. “HERTZ” is a grinding track about enduring a life of physical and psychic pain. On “CARTOON NETWORK,” they wish their real lives were just a TV show so they could just watch the troubling narratives unfold and tweet about them. “DROOL” features a sternum-snapping industrial breakdown that’d make Pharmakon proud. On “MY HEART BEATS OUT OF TIME,” Rook describes her body as a “rotting shell” and the world as a “fucked-up hell.”
But the spirit of the record is triumphant; the crushing sounds are surrounded by more colorful, uplifting moments. They haven’t given up on the gloom or the fuzz, but there’s this feeling that even if the clouds never pass, peace, or something like it, is possible. McCallion puts it nicely on “MUSIC,” a meditation on how their art won’t necessarily deliver them from evil. “The pain’s still loose in my head,” she sings. “But that’s ok.”


Peter Matthew Bauer, bassist and organist in the Walkmen, fuses Eastern spirituality with the sound of heartland rock on his latest solo album.

Peter Matthew Bauer: Mount Qaf (Divine Love)

Mount Qaf (Divine Love)

In the five years since the Walkmen released their most recent album, Heaven, bassist and organist Peter Matthew Bauer has been a busy man. During what Bauer has called the Walkmen’s “pretty extreme hiatus,” he has released a solo album (2014’s Liberation!) and launched a hybrid label/management/production company called Fortune Tellers Music. He also began the Laurel Canyon Center for Consciousness Studies, an outlet for exploring astrology and Eastern philosophies. His newest solo effort, Mount Qaf (Divine Love), seems to draw from all three of these ventures.
Unlike Liberation!, which bounced between genres, Mount Qaf (Divine Love) finds Bauer leaning almost entirely on Americana indie rock, skillfully threading his heartland rock’n’roll sound with esoteric lyrics. The decision to maintain a more homogenous sound and modern indie rock sensibility keeps the focus on Bauer’s lyrics, which are where he shines. The result is an album that could variously soundtrack a deep philosophical discussion or the cross-country freight train hopping adventures of a bygone era.
Opener “Wild Light” might recall the likes of Kurt Vile or the War on Drugs, with a tinny guitar riff that builds from subdued to anthemic; its backing piano and handclaps provide a campfire warmth that sticks around for the rest of the album. “Khidr (American Drifter Music)” feels like a cautiously optimistic call to arms, as Bauer sings “Lay down your heart, let it lay broken/Don’t let the doom set in, don’t let yourself give in.” The song’s title is the album’s most obvious reflection of its own duality—and Bauer’s—referencing al-Khidr, a servant and advisor to God in the Quran. On his website, Bauer describes al-Khidr as “that invisible angel or guide that you search for in these moments,” alluding to moments of great uncertainty. This context enriches Bauer’s lyrics, which encourage self-growth, subtly guiding the listener towards a better place.
Not unlike the introspective traveling this album clearly aspires to accompany, there are moments of stillness that can seem contemplative or just a bit stodgy. The hamfistedly titled “Divine Love to Kill Fascism” takes over four minutes to pull itself out of a droning and slow build. For a song seemingly aspiring to something grand, it falls flat, disrupting the record’s momentum right as Bauer is picking up steam. “I Ching (Àlam al Mithal),” named for the ancient Chinese text, trods along for over half of the song. It barely shifts from a pleasant but relatively uninteresting guitar riff while Bauer ruminates on the hexagonal way of thinking taught in I Ching.
The teachings of the I Ching brought about the concept of yin and yang—the idea that things that may seem to be unalike can in fact compliment each other and create a harmonic balance. Bauer’s Eastern wisdom and Western-hearted sound lacks a perfect symmetry, but he strikes an unexpectedly effective balance. Flourishing in his own way outside the Walkmen, Bauer has found a method of combining two dissimilar passions into art that honors them both.


Full-length debut by Seattle singer-songwriter Jesy Fortino shares certain qualities with early Cat Power and Joanna Newsom, but Fortino's sense of yearning is less romantic and more spiritual.

Hands Across the Void

Occasionally mentioned in the pre-release press for Jesy Fortino's first LP as Tiny Vipers is her stage fright-- hands trembling while tuning her guitar, that sort of thing. Her trepidation, however, doesn't come from a lack of faith in her material as much as her avoidance of eye contact with the imminent indie inebriants impatiently waiting for a sort of music they're not going to get. Fortino, who included a 30-minute song on an early CD-R, distances herself from the confessional singer/songwriter idiom with more than just her serpentine bandonym, creating music more appropriate for gallery spaces than indie clubs. Hands Across the Void is, in the non-imbibing sense of the term, as sobering as folk music gets: patient, resonant, and perhaps most importantly, curious.
Early copy has also frequently mentioned two predecessors for Fortino's approach: early Cat Power and Joanna Newsom. Chan Marshall is the obvious mark in terms of Void's spaciousness and solitude, and both women do well to push listeners out of their comfort zones, but Fortino's sense of yearning is less romantic and more spiritual. Newsom's Ys comes to mind through "Shipwreck"'s madrigal melody, but the resemblance is superficial, evidenced most clearly in the song's refrain: "We want to struggle and survive/ We want to live 'cause we know that life is beautiful/ Though surreal at times." The distinction lies not in the simplicity of the lyrics, but their qualification-- instead of celebration-- of the world's occasional inexplicability.
Void's music is as gently inquisitive as the artwork that accompanies it. Across a series of six photographs in the packaging, Fortino explores various dimly illuminated locales, accompanied only by a lantern. The record's title most likely refers to the sort of reinforcement that helps with the imperceptible problems of life. Important in that description, however, is Fortino's personal journey. Her accompaniment throughout is deliberate and twilit: a self-taught guitar style foregrounding the metallic thrum of its strings; an ashen voice harmonizing with a younger version of itself, often simply with vocabled "oh"s; inexplicable trills of sound filtering in from nowhere.
On "Campfire Resemblance", Fortino draws an analogy between a campfire's function-- warmth first, then vision-- and that of a lantern, which illuminates only its most immediate surroundings, allowing the cold comfort of careful, measured exploration. The Gaelic-tinged "On This Side" follows, and she searches for the fortitude necessary to dig her way "through the dust": "Ride on my sailors/ Deep in my mind/ I've always believed in you/ Now throw me a line."
Untethered, fire's destructive potential can be devastating, and also transfixing to take in. "Forest on Fire", the first of Void's two epics, traces the continuum of terror and captivation. The last four of the song's six minutes are wordless, occupied only by a simple, climbing and repeating guitar figure and a looming sense of disquiet. The acoustic guitar comes to resemble a resolutely flickering flame slowly morphing into, and eventually overtaken by, swirling, discordant noise. The song devours itself, and there's no good reason to turn away.
Void's liner notes thank "the people of Tibet and their struggle against the Chinese occupation," and Fortino reclaims a Dharmic cultural icon on the nearly 11-minute album summit "Swastika". The symbol's earliest and most widespread incarnation was as a sign of good luck, and a sense of hope pervades the song, which is divided into two equal parts. The first half is a series of Zen-like koans: "If dark were overthrown by the light/ Would the light turn to day/ Would it all turn to gray?" During the second section, the guitar takes on a chiming timbre, accompanied by an otherworldly drone of indistinct purpose: is it a sign of transcendence, or an admonition to pay closer attention? "You got a lot to carry," Fortino informs, "but once you're there, you stay." She refuses to offer any information as to whether that outcome is actually a good thing, but casts a blessing regardless.
Jesy Fortino's music is and will continue to be classified using adjectives like "spare" and "haunting," but those terms fail in terms of its emotional content. The 24-year old is publicly coming to terms with her interpretive skills as well as her own demons, and is doing it through an intensely vulnerable medium to boot. In that regard, Hands Across the Void, in its myriad attempts at radiance, is actually quite inspirational.


On their first new record in 17 years, the music of dub techno pioneers Porter Ricks has hardly changed, and really, that's for the best.

Shadow Boat EP

Porter Ricks, the duo of Andy Mellwig and Thomas Köner, weren’t around for long, but they left an indelible stamp on the legacy of what came to be known as dub techno. Ironically, there was never very much dub in their work—not in the way that you could hear it ricocheting through the work of their colleagues Basic Channel, for instance, upon whose Chain Reaction label Porter Ricks released their debut album, in 1996. In Basic Channel’s music, dub is a root, transplanted from Jamaica, that will eventually branch into the full-scale reggae of their later Rhythm & Sound project. In Porter Ricks’ music, dub is less a root than a route, a way of tracing the path a sound can travel through the convoluted guts of the recording studio.
In Porter Ricks’ short, largely bulletproof catalog—save for a few exploratory detours on their second album, into hip-hop and Chicago house, that probably would have been better left untaken—drum machines are run through maze-like circuits until nothing remains but the infrared signature they have left in their wake. Their commitment to conjuring whole worlds out of little more than crackle and echo cast a long shadow, even though they put the project on hold after three short years. Without Porter Ricks, it’s hard to imagine Pole, Shackleton, Burial, or any number of artists working in the most densely crosshatched corners of electronic music. Their last album was 1999’s Symbiotics, a split LP with Techno Animal (the industrial duo of Kevin Martin, later known as the Bug, and Justin K. Broadrick, a veteran of a host of bands like Napalm Death, Godflesh, and Ice) on which their gravelly sound came to resemble something alive and malevolent, their synths’ jagged waveforms glinting like the teeth of a snarling animal.
On their first new work in 17 years, not much has outwardly changed—and really, that’s the best possible scenario. When they called it quits, they were still in the process of pushing their sound forward, so for them to pick up where they left off is a welcome development. Shadow Boat consists of just three tracks, but they cover a considerable amount of ground. “Harbour Chart” creeps ahead at 60 beats per minute, faint kick and hi-hat all but subsumed in a maelstrom of foghorns and static. “Bay Rouge” is faster, a brisk andante of glancing chords and metallic textures. The timing of the release couldn't be more perfect, given the way the track's movements mimic kicking up piles of dry autumn leaves; the whole thing is crisp, chilly, and brooding. “Shadow Boat” is the longest, quickest, and most intense of the bunch, a headlong tumble into a wind-tunnel rave, its synths rattling like a broken screen.
Porter Ricks always excelled at sketching out sweeping, subaquatic expanses—ironically, their name comes from a character on the 1960s television series Flipper, a children’s show about a dolphin, even though there’s nothing cuddly about their music—and that continues to be the case here; the sense of space suggested by all three tracks is immense, practically unbounded. For years, most dub techno records have concerned themselves with nothing more than dub techno itself, but Shadow Boat tackles bigger ideas: Its main subject is the interplay of uncontrollable forces. All three tracks, balancing four-to-the-floor beats with unpredictable explosions of sandblasted tone, explore the tension between steadiness and turmoil. On the one hand, the certainty of timekeeping; on the other, things ripped loose from their fixtures. (“Shadow Boat” would have made a great soundtrack to Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, playing the regularity of the spacecraft’s orbit against its spectacularly violent pulverization.) Ultimately, it’s not about chaos, exactly, but something like it: unpredictable, dubwise chain reactions that leave us cowed and awestruck—patterns whose complexity we can scarcely begin to apprehend.


On its first album in seven years, the Philly band jams and shreds and searches for a groove.

Drag on Girard

Back in 2009, Mike Polizze was sitting at home in Philadelphia staring down a pile of solo recordings when he decided to slap the name Purling Hiss on them like a provincial flag. It wasn’t until he got a chance to tour with Kurt Vile that he wrangled some bandmates and turned his one-man psych garage-rock tunes into sprawling jams. Fourteen years and seven albums later, though, it appears Polizze is more at home going solo as a singer-songwriter or reviving his longtime cosmic rock trio Birds of Maya than he is channeling the crunchy distortion of his early project. Drag on Girard, Purling Hiss’ first studio album in seven years, picks up where the classic rock-indebted sound of 2016’s High Bias left off. Along the way, they settle into feel-good grooves and simple riffs that gradually lose their edge.
Recorded with Philly go-to Jeff Zeigler (The War on Drugs, Kurt Vile) on vintage outboard gear, Drag on Girard settles on the scuzzy, faded sound of a nicotine-stained dollar bin find from the ‘70s. The songwriting lives up to the production value, pleasant but lacking much purpose. Purling Hiss lean on rudimentary chord progressions and winding guitar solos, as they have for years, but this time the trio swaps the vibe from kicking back with some friends and a cooler of Yuenglings to the fizzled-out conversations at the end of the party. This lackadaisical approach means songs like “When the End Is Over” and “Baby” play out like brainstorming sessions, no matter how much Polizze’s desert island distortion pedal adds to the mood.
Purling Hiss are at their best when they layer exaggerated garage rock with motifs drawn from classic rock and power-pop. “Something in My Basement” pins up ragged guitar and a blistering rhythm section with vocal harmonies that channel the Beatles. Exuberant opener “Yer All in My Dreams” is Dinosaur Jr. appreciation done right: a blast of feel-good fuzz, unabashed fretboard worship, and disaffected vocal delivery. “There’s a song in every note I play,” Polizze sings, and as the track rides out with a radiantly joyful guitar solo, it’s easy to believe him. On the unexpected slow burner “Out the Door,” an elongated guitar solo, buried in distortion, casts a lonesome shadow over the solemn strums in the foreground. If they’re better known for capturing the bliss of the burnout lifestyle, Purling Hiss are capable of tenderness, too.
If only they kept sight of that potential more often. The album’s highlights can’t help but draw attention to its moments of unfocused filler. On “Drag on Girard,” the most aimless cut, a grimy guitar riff and Polizze’s shouts about driving all night extend to nearly eight minutes, like a jam session waiting for someone to take the lead. In a sense, that’s indicative of Polizze’s creative process: “It’s like I’m fishing. I’m just waiting for something to come along and if it sticks, I caught it,” he told Aquarium Drunkard. Watching an iridescent lure bob in the water is relaxing if you’re in the right mood, and there’s a thrill in witnessing something rise to the surface from below. But for the most part, it’s a lot of waiting for something to happen.


The Brighton electronic musician’s third LP belongs to a proud tradition of English satire, plumbing the depths of the nation’s psyche and twisting it to wryly discomforting ends.

Pastoral

In Kingdom Come, the final novel by the late British sci-fi author JG Ballard, the London suburbs fall under the spell of fascism. This isn’t the old-school fascism—born from the street, or the ballot box—but the product from a new and unexpected source: that cathedral to consumerism, the shopping mall. On its release in 2006, Kingdom Come felt somewhat fanciful. It functioned as an arch satire of capitalism, but seemed a little too far-fetched to feel like a warning of things to come. In 2018, viewed from a United Kingdom rent in half by the Brexit vote and beset by right-wing demagogues pushing prejudice from behind a mask of populism, it feels, if anything, a little too on the nose.
Two years ago, Elizabeth Bernholz, the Brighton musician who records brittle, unsettling electronic music under the name Gazelle Twin, brought Kingdom Come to the stage in the form of a theatrical performance. Her take on the novel located the horror in Ballard’s vision, but also the pitch-black humor. In it, a pair of power-dressed office workers pounded gym treadmills into the depths of a nightmarish, deserted mall. Bernholz wasn’t on stage as part of the Kingdom Come performances—partly, she explained, as a way of expanding the Gazelle Twin project into new conceptual realms, and partly because she gave birth to her first child shortly after its debut. But Pastoral, her third official full-length, picks up where Kingdom Come left off. Its 14 tracks form a manic state-of-the-nation address that finds Bernholz identifying the dark impulses coursing through the English psyche and then twisting them to her own ends.
The England that Bernholz pictures on Pastoral feels like hell itself: a rainy fascist island of regressive tradition and hate-peddling tabloids, callous and bigoted and drunk on curdled dreams of empire. One by one, she identifies its demons and then embodies them, her voice electronically twisted into a cruel, androgynous leer. “Better in My Day” is about the meanness of nostalgia, that refusal to relinquish cultural capital to younger generations. “Just look at these kids now,” she chants, as drums beat out a queasy, off-center tattoo. “Dance of the Peddlers” is an unsettling confection of trilling pipes and ticking percussion; its lyric interpolates lines from William Blake’s “The Tyger” with allusions to medieval torture and the phone-hacking scandal that embroiled many of the UK’s tabloid newspapers at the start of the decade. “Dieu Et Mon Droit” is a grim vignette of poverty delivered in a twisted operatic tenor: “Eating from bins outside supermarkets/Kicked into the curb like empty Coke cans.”
Pastoral echoes these disturbing themes with a disturbing sound, an uncanny mix of the ancient and the modern. Its production is crisp and electronic, all nervy drums and synthetic textures, but melodies are often played on old English instruments—recorders or harpsichords that are distorted or chopped up. “Over the Hills” mixes dreamy synths with a recording of a puppeteer singing the traditional British folk song “Over the Hills and Far Away,” a romantic paean to foreign invasion. This unnatural mash of signifiers is replicated in Gazelle Twin’s visual aesthetic. In the video for “Hobby Horse,” Bernholz trots out in her new stage costume: a sort of nightmare court jester sporting Adidas Gazelle trainers and riding a hobby horse pilfered from the bedroom of a Victorian child. It’s a genderless getup—all that’s visible of Bernholz’s face is a chilling Cheshire Cat gin—and the whole ensemble is colored in the visceral red of the St. George’s Cross, the English flag that has of late replaced the Union Jack as the favored symbol of right-wing pride.
Anxiety is a thread that runs through Gazelle Twin’s music. Her 2014 album Unflesh grappled with themes including miscarriage, euthanasia, and body dysmorphia. Pastoral is more outward-looking, but Bernholz’s status as a new mother feels key to understanding this record. One touchstone might be the debut album by Karin Dreijer’s Fever Ray project, another record that tackled the headspace of the post-natal experience. Both share a fascination with hideous make-believe, beset with visions of monsters crawling out of the woodwork. Both, too, have used vocal processing to elude or obliterate their makers’ identities. Dreijer applied pitch-shifting effects to make her voice androgynous, but Bernholz goes further, twisting her voice into something not quite human.
If Pastoral fits into any lineage, it’s the long tradition of English satire. There’s a similar spirit in Gazelle Twin’s music—a dangerous mischief, a fascination for the grotesque—to that which you’d encounter in a William Hogarth illustration or a Chris Morris sketch. You will find no comfort here. But it’s the job of an artist to capture something of the tenor of the age they live in, and Pastoral fits the bill: a mad jig along a cliff edge.


Paper Days is a four-piece outfit from San Diego with an unadorned "California sound" in an era when the sound of Southern California has become increasingly hard to define. The overarching sound here is wave-washed rock from a bass, drums, and two-guitar configuration.

Fun for Family & Friends EP

Paper Days is a four-piece outfit from San Diego with an unadorned "California sound" in an era when the sound of Southern California has become increasingly hard to define. Brothers Niko and Xander Sitaras, Jordan Graham, and Nathan Blake were previously-known as "the band who opened for Mac DeMarco at the show where he was arrested at in Santa Barbara," and now they’ve released a debut EP: Fun for Family & Friends, an ode to the exact kind of synergy with an audience for which that show is remembered.
This isn’t to say that Paper Days are reckless, or that their music is unhinged. Their EP was recorded without overdubs in an homage to the live-show experience; this is a group that wants to sound like they’re in the room with you, playing at a house party the likes of which Paper Days have channelled into something of a mini-cult following in SoCal (thus the name of their EP: Fun for Family & Friends). The overarching sound here is wave-washed rock from a bass-, drums-, and two-guitar configuration. "Kind Guidance" and "Sweet Destiny," the band’s two lead singles, are beach-friendly and melodic, but percussive and turbulent in their messiest moments thanks to Graham’s forceful timekeeping and the synergy between Blake and the Sitaras bros’ kaleidoscopic guitar tones (Xander Sitaras plays bass).
There’s an atmospheric feel in Paper Days’ music, and singer Niko Sitaras uses this context as a means of both poetic conveyance and care-free musing. "I had to be a believer to know when I was wrong," he croons on "Kind Guidance," before rejoining, more explicitly: "You had your back/ Against the wall for me, baby." There’s a slickness to lyrics like this that feels more social than angsty; "Boy"—which is inspired by Caitlyn Jenner—is a reflection on gender stereotypes that still manages to sound fun-loving despite the embedded provocations in the lyrics ("For a boy to be a man/ He’s gotta learn it with his hands"). Here, Sitaras' vocals, which were written collectively by the band, seem to mirror the binaries of the music itself; at points his voice is vigorous and gruff, yet during the bridge ("It’s alright to be okay/ (Are you?)")—it soars up in the register to a high falsetto that is the sonic equivalent of a gentle caress.
The entire EP is loose and layered, with several elements that occasionally feel too cluttered to cohere (cc: "Lightning Cola")—but then again, some of the cuts here, like the title track, are single, raw takes meant to emulate that "living room" feel that often defines small-town bands. Lyrically speaking, Paper Days’ EP could benefit from a stronger narrative arc—something to make each song, with each of their frenetic sonic elements, feel like pieces of a larger puzzle (rather than mini-narratives unto themselves). Paper Days have a personality that asks to be teased out with a more resonant point of view. Instead of being part of Mac DeMarco’s story, he could be part of theirs.


With the glow-up of a bigger indie label behind them for their second album, the UK punks ride again with burly bravado, but it’s notably the work of artists eager to show that they contain multitudes.

The Mutt’s Nuts

Chubby and the Gang’s Speed Kills was a joyous debut—one of the most unrelenting rock’n’roll albums of 2020 stuffed with upbeat Oi! rippers that all hinged on the band’s law-defying self-mythology. The London band’s far-left politics amplified the brash caricature they embodied—a switchblade-carrying British gang who pledged to never stop creating chaos no matter how many times they get locked up. With the glow-up of a bigger indie label behind them for their second album, the gang ride again with burly bravado on The Mutt’s Nuts’ opening title track like nothing’s changed. They return in full-on theme-song mode, outright stating the band’s name, proclaiming they’re the best—or more specifically: “The mutt’s nuts”—and letting you know that they do what they want. Frontman Charlie Manning Walker even lifts a phrase from Slim Shady to underscore just how confident he is in heralding the band’s return: “Guess who’s back, back again?”
Their assurance is bold considering just how high they set the bar with Speed Kills—an album full of fire and devoid of duds—and “The Mutt’s Nuts”’ introductory punk rock piss and vinegar is slightly misleading. The band is still rowdy across the majority of the record, and Walker spends a lot of time shredding his voice with harsh shouted performances, but it’s notably the work of artists eager to show that they contain multitudes. When Walker gently sings a loving ode to his city with “Take Me Home to London,” his sentiment and tone land with significance and weight. It’s a beautiful song and a massive contrast to his usual screams about the city’s mayhem. As the album winds down, there are two straight-up pop songs about his deeply broken heart: “Life’s Lemons,” a twinkling ballad that sways like a late-’50s doo-wop record, and “I Hate the Radio,” a swooning power-pop showstopper about hearing an ex’s favorite song. It’s a bittersweet truth—sometimes when you’re the mutt’s nuts, you also feel like dog shit.
The slower, vulnerable, and more subdued songs are some of the best this band’s second album has to offer, which puts the album’s more aggressive material in a difficult spot. There’s this diptych early in the album, “On the Meter” and “Beat That Drum,” which illustrates the respective joy and stress from Walker’s past as a minicab driver. These songs also illustrate the limitations of Walker’s more aggressive vocal style. At its best, his voice is a bludgeoning, angry force lashing out about worker exploitation, crooked cops, and a broken criminal justice system. “Beat That Drum” suffers because the hook is repetitive and Walker’s instrument was wielded much more effectively across several preceding songs.
While The Mutt’s Nuts was never going to slot perfectly into place for anyone looking for Speed Kills 2, a suite of three songs on the B-side scratch that itch. All under two minutes long, they implement the same wildness and breakneck pace that defined their first album. The overwhelming joy in the power chord barrage of “Someone’s Gunna Die” is paired with Walker shout-growling about the casual, routine way people get murdered in the city late at night. Walker elatedly interpolates the Ramones on the anti-work anthem “Overachiever”: “I-I-I-I-I-I-I just wanna have nothin’ to do!” Then there’s the searing guitar solo and sing-along hook from “Getting Beat Again,” a translated cover of the Finnish punks Eppu Normaali’s 1978 song “Poliisi Pamputtaa Taas”—a catchy jam about police brutality in any language or decade.
Between the introductory braggadocio and the closing heartache, Chubby and the Gang spend a couple songs on The Mutt’s Nuts letting everyone know that they, too, lived through 2020. Walker invokes a fiery Minneapolis and urges the listener to “say their name” on the crawling almost-blues “White Rags,” while “Pressure” is a belligerent illustration of a breakdown in isolation that ends with a psychedelic guitar solo freakout. On an album where they expanded their approach, they managed to shed some of the Speed Kills caricature. The old formula was successful, but in subverting it, they embraced their rage and still left room for their vulnerability. It’s like the album’s theme song says—Chubby and the Gang do as they please.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Adapting a Hans Christian Andersen fable, the Bang on a Can co-founder has produced the most profound and emotionally resonant work of his career.

David Lang: The Little Match Girl Passion

The Little Match Girl Passion

Composer David Lang, one of the founders of the art-music collective Bang on a Can, made his name in the late 1980s and 90s penning spiky blasts of music that dared you to hang on for the ride. Early works like "Cheating, Lying, Stealing" were statements of intent-- the bristling sort that artistically inflamed young men are prone to making-- and they encapsulated much of downtown New York's hardy oppositional spirit. Twenty-some years later, they are foundational texts for an entire new generation of gleeful polyglots who can't wait to mix their avant-punk, art-rock, electronic, and whatever-else records in with their childhood classical training.
In 2008, this lifelong iconoclast won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for The Little Match Girl Passion. The 35-minute oratorio brought mainstream institutional acceptance to a career defined, at least in part, by its absence, and Lang seemed equally grateful and nonplussed by the honor. The Little Match Girl Passion is a breathtakingly spare and icily gorgeous adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name, and on the surface it couldn't be further from the punky provocations of Lang's youth. It is scored for only four voices-- soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, with the occasional addition of hand bells and percussion-- and the resulting sound world has more in common with Renaissance sacred music or English madrigals than the hip post-minimalism Lang is known for.
To some of his acolytes, this sort of thing might look suspiciously like softening with old age. But Lang hasn't softened so much as deepened. Over the last 10 years, he's been increasingly pairing his brasher works with hesitant, quietly spiritual pieces that open up onto more expansive internal vistas, and his Passion is the culmination of this tendency. The Hans Christian Andersen fable is fantastically dark, one of those children's stories that still startles in its brutality. The titular little girl is sent out by her abusive father on New Year's Eve to sell matches, but finds herself ignored by passersby. Unable to return home without money, she tries to warm and distract herself by lighting matches, which summon comforting memories of her grandmother's house on Christmas morning. As she slowly freezes to death, the memories and visions become more vivid until they envelop her. She is found dead in the morning, clutching a handful of burnt-out matches but wearing a beatific smile.
Lang has taken this story, with its impossible-to-miss religious overtones, and cast it as a Passion play. The piece is specifically modeled on Bach's St. Matthew Passion, which interrupts the story of Jesus' death with other texts that reflect and comment on the action. This treatment might sound ripe for egregious emotional manipulation, but Lang has nothing of the sort in mind; his gaze is clear-eyed and subdued. In interviews about the work, Lang has alluded to watching the Zapruder film and being struck by how its slow-motion graininess and silence amplifies the tragedy of the Kennedy assassination by placing it behind glass. It doesn't matter which frame of that fated motorcade you see; they are all equally devastating. By breaking up the timeline of the little match girl's suffering with choral lamentations, he has accomplished something similar. From Passion's opening moments-- a slowly accumulating round of voices chanting rhythmic variations on the words "come" and "daughter"-- the tragedy of the story's end is already present.
The work is relentlessly minimal, though it feels too unstuck in time to be pegged as "minimalism." With an almost ascetic discipline, Lang builds the piece out of tiny melodic cells-- four- or five-note fragments that he wraps around each other again and again, until they produce a haunting and evocative hall of echoes. The heart-stopping "Have Mercy My God", for instance, is composed of just two minor chords, broken into five pitches each, which reiterate endlessly and tangle slowly at the edges. Most sections make use of a similar number of notes, the ones that you can find on the piano under one hand without stretching. This humble insistence on economy reinforces the work's theme; Lang seems to be determinedly chiseling away at his music, tuning out outside clamor to hone in on a more elusive inner transmission. In its own quizzical, probing way, The Little Match Girl Passion is as much a devotional piece as the Bach Passion it is modeled on, and with it, Lang has produced the most profound and emotionally resonant work of his career.


The weirdest of all ATL weirdos returns with more songs about hippos and sex.

Barnacles

Of Atlanta’s abundance of rap weirdos, the 23-year-old SahBabii is by far the weirdest. One of his most well-known songs is about falling for a voluptuous anime girl. When he is off in his world, he only really cares about two things: sex and animals. Separately, those two things are fine, but nothing gets him quite so worked up as when they’re put together, as often happens in a Sahbabii song: “And my bitch real thick/I’m fucking on a hippopotamus,” he croons sweetly  on 2018’s lush “Squidrific,” sounding like a sedated Young Thug.
Since his 2016 breakout song “Pull Up With Ah Stick,” SahBabii has noticeably been removed from the Atlanta rap scene: he’s only done a handful of features and works mostly with his older brother, T3, and producers he finds online to provide him airy beats that could work in Chrono Trigger. He’s become so unpredictable that when he threatened to retire in 2019, people believed him. But instead he put out Barnacles, another Dayglo rundown of his unrelenting horniness and his favorite animals.
“Giraffes and elephants/Giraffes and elephants/We fucked giraffes and elephants,” sings Sah on the cleverly titled “Giraffes and Elephants.” This is the third song on Barnacles, and it captures Sah, for better and worse. Out of context (or even in it), his lyrics make absolutely no sense. But in SahBabii’s universe, nothing really needs to make sense. His raps don’t feel like they take place in Atlanta or anywhere on Earth, really; it’s a complete demented fantasy.
If SahBabii has anything in common with Atlanta’s rap scene, it’s that everything he says is delivered with complete seriousness. “My pockets pregnant/Nut in her mouth, got her tongue pregnant,” is the hook on “Pregnant,” and it’s sung in the casual cadence most other rappers would use to talk about their favorite pair of jeans or their latest jewelry purchases. But the classic ATL rap dream of designer fashion and fast cars doesn’t mean much to SahBabii. On “Trapezoid,” he’s elated to have found a girl that is built like the shape mentioned in the song’s title (“Small top with a big bottom”). And on “House Party,” Sah reflects about jumping a dude at a party with the warmth of someone remembering their favorite childhood birthday.
It takes a lot, but SahBabii can cross the line and sound like a parody of himself. Typically it’s when his songs are too on-the-nose, like “Purple Umbrella,” where he interpolates the Scooby Doo theme into a questionable hook and delivers such a relentless onslaught of raunchy punchlines that they lose their shock: he compares his latest sexual conquests to Sweet Baby Ray’s sauce, Elmer’s glue, and a waffle cone. Weak production choices suck the life out of his adventure, too: “100 Round Drum” and “Soulja Slim” sound like the kind of rudimentary instructionals you could easily find on any SoundCloud page.
But listening to his music is like binge-watching an animated sitcom; it’s easy to forget the lackluster parts. How could you possibly come away from Barnacles thinking about anything else but SahBabii wailing, “Hippo booty bouncin’/Rhino booty bouncin’/Elephant booty bouncin’” on “Double Dick,” or when he turned a reference to mozzarella sticks into a threat on “Pregnant,” or when he dissed his haters on “Racist” by calling them “rats” and “Donald Ducks”? (The only animals SahBabii could ever speak about negatively.) Yes, SahBabii’s imagination is disturbing, but somehow, the more time you spend with him, he starts sounding kind of wholesome.

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Blending prairie guitars and chirruping synthesizes, the Edinburgh psychedelic band's eponymous debut is rendered in two basic colors (natural and synthetic), but the scenarios it conjures are significantly more multifaceted.

Django Django

The artwork for Edinburgh-via-London band Django Django's eponymous debut perfectly sums up the record's basic contrast: the clash of the dustbowl against some futuristic, swirling alien presence. Prairie guitars with heavy-thumbed top strings sidestep and shuffle around chirruping synthesizers, sonar-shaky womps, and krautrock plains in a fashion not dissimilar to Beck's more recent releases. However, one of the joys of Django Django is that even though it's rendered in two basic colors-- natural and synthetic-- the scenarios it conjures are significantly more multifaceted.
There's a boyish sense of adventure and emotion to this album. Following a mechanical introduction that sounds like the theme to a 1980s science educational video, "Hail Bop"'s airless, stabby twang recalls a sci-fi terror sequence-- desperately trying to diffuse a ticking time bomb, or escape a compressing trash compactor. The ensuing burbling synths, arid Dick Dale-indebted guitar and unpredictable squelches recall the kind of landscapes conjured by the Super Furry Animals, rolling hills perfect for boisterous psychedelic trips, with the conspicuously blankly chanted lyrics set among hillocks and vast skies, too. A potentially romantic figure "appear[s] from the hillside... a funny look in your eye," before darting off again in spite of the onlooker having been "waiting here so long."
The scene sets the tone for an album where what appears to be a disintegrating relationship is rarely described in human or adult emotional terms; rather it's as a tricksy Rube Goldberg device where the parties race to reassemble and disassemble the partnership as part of a game of emotional one-upmanship and obstacle-planting. Former single "Default" is a wickedly neurotic stompbox-powered chant with voices intermittently gargling and hissing in cuckoo clock rhythm. "We just lit the fire and now you want to put it out," Dave, Vincent, Tommy, and Jimmy chant. "Take one for the team/ You're a cog in the machine/ It's like a default." The itchy "WOR" starts with a murkily obfuscated motif from "Misirlou", rumbling into a rubbery, lurching funk that sets the pace for another competitive move: "I took a chance on you and it's time to ring the bell."
The unrelenting chanted singing style can make Django Django sound a bit sterile and passionless, building to a brassy sheen that defies the eloquent frustration of a song like "Storm": "You are a storm; you are my little storm/ I watch the wind change to find out where you've been blown." The group has been lazily compared to the Beta Band, largely due to their Fife-born drummer and production whizz David Maclean being the younger brother of John Maclean. But whereas that band married Lennon-like vocal calm with bucolic, occasionally piqued backing, Django Django seem more akin to Hot Chip in approach: a bunch of comparative straights going doolally in a studio, using their dispassionate vocal layering as the foundation from which to paint in entertainingly bold strokes. "Firewater", a song about getting legless on booze in the desert, gambols and struts like a drunk precariously skirting the edge of a campfire; "Skies Over Cairo" gets weirder, the sound of a Saharan-influenced Kraftwerk careering over a huffing rhythm seemingly comprised of samples of recorded water. Despite jangling on past its shelf life, the opening of "Zumm Zumm" fizzes and clanks like an ancient fairground attraction, with hyena yaps punctuating oblique exclamations about unexpected, never-before-seen occurrences.
That same sense of vivacity can't be applied to the song that follows it, "Hand of Man", whose dull country roughage creaks out beneath a numbed appropriation of the melody from the Shins' "New Slang". Thankfully, however, Django Django picks up again with "Love's Dart", a bandy coconut canter which urges that goals-- romantic or otherwise-- can be more than just a mirage if you keep them firmly in mind. Django Django are bursting with ideas and an intriguing aesthetic that would suggest that their own goals are very keenly defined-- the result of working on this album for over two years, perhaps-- with the artwork's simplicity acting as a red herring to their boundlessly imaginative, considered complexity.


Dreams in the Rat House combines the off-the-cuff hijinks and threadbare fidelity of Shannon and the Clams' debut, I Wanna Go Home with the songwriting focus of their great second effort, Sleep Talk, while exhibiting the fine art of making it all look easy.

Shannon and the Clams: Dreams in the Rat House

Dreams in the Rat House

Oakland trio Shannon and the Clams have a broad musical vocabulary that belies their simple, trad setup. Their sound contains lo-fi's distorted treble, the gruff tumble of rockabilly, the soaring heights of R&B balladry, and the weirdness of mid-60s psychedelia. Their albums have the feel of a freeform AM station whose DJs and programmers get their jollies from being gleefully unpredictable, the kind that wouldn’t think twice about following up a tender oldie like “Oh Louie” with a punkabilly romp called “Cat Party”.
Songwriters Shannon Shaw and Cody Blanchard frequently switch duties as lead singer, sometimes within the same song, which is testament to both their differences and the clarity of their shared vision. They’re singers whose range and timbre often makes it difficult to tell which of them is singing lead (which is more interesting than it is negative), but they're sharp lyricists with very different writing styles. On Dreams in the Rat House, Shaw’s “Ozma” is a touching eulogy about her dearly departed dog, while Blanchard’s “Heads or Tails” is a fictional narrative about a vagabond with a coin in his pocket that he flips whenever he needs to make a critical life decision.
Dreams in the Rat House combines elements of their debut, I Wanna Go Home (particularly the off-the-cuff hijinks and threadbare fidelity), with the songwriting focus of their great second effort, Sleep Talk. Songs like “If I Could Count” and “The Rabbit’s Nose” toy with complex melody and song structure while exhibiting the fine art of making it all look easy. “Rip Van Winkle” takes a generations-old fable and turns it into a monologue from a heart-struck woman waiting for a lover to return to her, and has a glittery lead guitar part and a soaring chorus that combine to far more than the sum of its parts. In the number of years they’ve played together, Shaw and Blanchard have learned how to disassemble the parts and rebuild them in a way that sounds both classic and wild at the same time.
But their chief attribute is how fun their songs sound. They can do sinister, ghastly garage-punk like the Mummies (“Bed Rock”) or throw faux-ghoulish noises that suggest parody but never cross that line (“Rat House”) without coming across as a novelty act. Blanchard and Shaw are dedicated enough to songcraft to the extent that it’s evident they’re not just fucking around.
One common misconception about certain corners of garage rock is that there's a lack of serious-mindedness among its proponents. But there’s a broad line between having a good time and making a joke out of something. When Shannon and the Clams pull out a ballad as affecting as “Unlearn”,  it becomes apparent that they’re just as good at tugging heartstrings as cackling after tracking those googly noises in “Rat House”. When they craft a goodbye as poignant in its simplicity as “I Know”, it’s like Shaw and Blanchard know you’re going to realize you’ve underestimated the emotional resonance of their songwriting. And that’s when they know they’ve got you hooked.


Jesca Hoop’s fourth album Memories Are Now sounds like her most complete and refined statement yet, a boisterously declarative album that’s urgent and at times seditious.

Memories Are Now

“Animal Kingdom Chaotic,” the centerpiece of Jesca Hoop’s fourth album, opens with a sound that may take a moment or two to identify. That clacking rhythm certainly sounds like an old-school typewriter rather than a computer keyboard, which may be her slyest joke in a song about life lived online. “I say it is possible,” she sings, then answers herself: “…but your computer says no!” That phrase becomes a testy mantra, its cadence growing trickier with each repetition. As Hoop’s guitar provides a nimble, eye-rolling commentary, sounding more and more like an African mbira, the song resembles a folkie take on Laurie Anderson’s giddily eccentric art-pop arrangements. Computer screens, the implication goes, have turned us into a population of proxies who simulate doing things more than we actually do things.
Hoop can’t be accused of not doing things. In the last ten years, she has released four official studio albums, plus a handful of acoustic compilations, although readers may know her from Love Letter for Fire, her duets record with Sam Beam. But Memories Are Now sounds like her most complete and refined statement yet, a boisterously declarative album that’s urgent and at times seditious. As such, it can be unruly and unfocused, full of ideas half- and wholly formed, the occasional jarring transition, and a few interminable passages (“Simon Says” is just over three minutes, but sounds like it will never end.)
However, from such disorder springs an animating sense of outrage: a readiness to take on the world from every angle of attack. That comes through most boldly on the title track, which opens with a slowly revving guitar and moves at an imperturbable crawl, subdued yet taut and disciplined. Hoop’s vocals are much wilder: “Memories are now!” she exclaims, defiantly. She might be arguing about the temporal displacement of online life (the internet is a recurring character in these songs), where the past and the present fuse together and the future never quite arrives. Or she’s trying to get at something a bit more banal: Every moment is precious and has the potential to become a memory.
Hoop is making memories, whether you like it or not: “I’ve got work to be doing,” she declares. “If you’re not here to help, go find some other life to ruin.” If the melody weren’t so intricately snaky, if the hook didn’t depend on her odd phrasing, that chorus might be the kind of thing you’d chant while marching on the White House—especially when she gets to the line, “Let me show you the door.” Memories Are Now, perhaps more than anything she has done in the past, is closely engaged with the present moment, yet so lyrically and musically idiosyncratic that it never sounds overtly political. The best moments possess a sense of intrigue, a subterranean conspiracy, as though she’s imparting dangerous knowledge to you.
Hoop’s most visceral assault is “The Coming,” which opens with a few measures of ambient guitar noodling, as though she’s gathering her thoughts or summoning her courage. As the song sprawls and contorts, Jesus resigns as Messiah and laments a tenure defined by double standards and misunderstood instructions. If there was nothing but this performance review, the song would be merely clever, but it takes on tremendous gravity the more personal Hoop gets: “I refuse to think that my best friend’s going to hell anymore and condescend to offer her a key to salvation like it’s something that I have and can afford,” she sings, but she’s past singing by this point. Instead, she’s testifying about a “spirit-rattling scare”: the realization that the moral code that has defined America for so long has curdled into something grotesque and virulent. Hoop has the temerity to fight against it, and if you’re not here to help...well, you know.


Bright, noisy, and 10 years in the making, the long-awaited second album from the internet’s original viral pop star leaves little impression beyond smooth-brained confusion.

Sunshine Factory

In early 2006, 18-year-old Anna-Catherine Hartley arrived with her debut single as Uffie, the boastful, baby-voiced novelty rap “Pop the Glock.” MySpace virality led to bonafide underground stardom: Uffie signed to trendy French electro label Ed Banger, and another song, “Robot Œuf,” was included in the soundtrack for a Pedro Almodóvar film. But as her fame inched closer to the mainstream, Uffie disappeared from view. Her debut album, Sex Dreams and Denim Jeans, arrived in 2010—three years behind schedule—with a guest appearance from Pharrell. In February 2012 she announced that she was working on a second album, but just over a year later, she declared her retirement.
Sunshine Factory, Uffie’s long-awaited second album—10 years delayed, to be exact—marks a self-appointed departure. “I’m really getting frustrated with being associated with bloghouse,” Uffie told NYLON (which identified her as “a bloghouse-era icon”). “I know that’s where I started and I know I took a break, but I am putting out substantial work with dope people.” Produced mainly by chillwave heavyweight Toro y Moi, Sunshine Factory steps away from the self-effacing sleaze of Sex Dreams into a purgatorial nightclub haze. Uffie explains it, rather vaguely, as a nightclub-themed fantasy of post-pandemic “escape”: an “alternate reality” in which “all the misfits can gather.” The album’s barrage of incongruous alt-rock guitars and convulsive electroclash synths is dizzying enough to open up a wormhole, but in all its bright, noisy, unfocused glory, Sunshine Factory is undeniably a good time.
Throughout the album, indie rock and shoegaze influences butt heads with electro-house beats and avant-LMFAO lyricism. It works often enough: Though opener “mvp” never builds to the satisfying intensity of its Strokes-esque bassline, its pulsing rhythm is undeniably catchy. At other points, it falters; the shoegaze-y crunch of “prickling skin” falls apart once Uffie’s fuzzed-out vocals enter the picture. Her aughts-core, reverb-heavy sing-raps feel anachronistically out of place, particularly when the instrumentals lean toward ’80s and ’90s indie rock. It’s when Uffie breaks away from these self-imposed genre constraints that her music really takes on new life: The frenzied drums and breakneck babbling of standout “dominoes” imbue the song’s ’00s teen-movie guitar licks and fizzy hi-hats with an unexpected hyperpop sparkle. Peaches’ introductory voicemail embraces the hilarity of being the messiest one at the function: “Hey Uffie…I’m not gonna make it to the party. I got my dick stuck in the door and I can’t get it out! Ughhh.”
Uffie’s lyricism, however, remains scattered at best. Moments of surprisingly blunt lucidity (“I’m not against it/I just don’t want to remember it” on lead single “Cool”) are quickly lost in the pages of her pop culture Rolodex, from which she spits reference after reference as if from a cash cannon. Madonna, Obama, and the Jetsons are but three of her inscrutable shoutouts; “Sophia” seems to nod to Yaeji (“Make it rain girl get it soon”) and SOPHIE (“Shake it up and make a smoothie”) as it simultaneously wipes the dust off the Migos’ “bad and boujee.” Clichés about Bonnie and Clyde, or the urge to “get away” when “things been too crazy,” feel strangely self-serious on an album whose opening line is “We cum at the same time.”
This wavering between don’t-give-a-fuck honesty and debatably intentional genericism makes the album difficult to process. Song to song, Uffie can’t seem to fully commit to a tone or even to pastiche. Album closer “crowdsurfinginyoursheets” zags from tender piano ballad to echoing vocals with all the charm of a Spotify advertisement, before finally veering into a forgettable “lo-fi hip-hop beats” track. Sunshine Factory’s biggest weakness might be its sense of under-commitment to any concept at all—the very thing that once made Uffie stand out. “Pop the Glock” was garish, but Uffie’s first and most lasting impression was that of an artist committed to the bit and unconcerned with the reception. As maximal as Sunshine Factory is, it ultimately feels dilute, leaving little impression beyond smooth-brained confusion.


On her fourth album, Divers, Joanna Newsom comes down in size if not scope. A love letter in the form of a reckoning with death, Divers deals with making tangible the huge mass of impending doom about the loss of love. You know, the small stuff. It's a gorgeous record, full of her usual harp wilyness and baroque rhythms.

Divers

Joanna Newsom's Divers is an album about a profound love, but it hardly features any love songs. The singer/songwriter recently explained to Uncut that her marriage in 2013 had invited death into her life, "because there is someone you can't bear to lose," she said. "When it registers as true, it's like a little shade of grief comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it." There is only one domestic vignette on the record, towards the end of "Leaving the City", where Newsom and her love go running on a beautiful day. Immediately, though, her high dims: "The spirit bends beneath knowing it must end." 2010's Have One on Me traced the death of a relationship as Newsom tried and failed to defeat a proud man's human nature. On Divers, she attempts to defeat time to stave off death.
To bear the weight of its subject, Divers fits to scale, ornate and roaming after the intimacies of Have One on Me. The arrangements—tackled by Newsom along with eight different musicians, including Nico Muhly, Ryan Francesconi, Dirty Projectors' David Longstreth, and her brother Pete—cover the ground of all her past work in a fraction of the time, making this her most dynamic and exhilarating album. The first half in particular veers between baroque poise, jaunty blues, and rococo beauty, as if searching for answers in disparate places. Landlocked between the dry, acoustic arrangements of "The Things I Say" and "Same Old Man", the lilting harp and piano of the title track casts her lover as a deep sea diver and measures the distance between them, "how the infinite divides." The meticulous internal rhymes in the chorus of "Leaving the City" contract against the tug of her harp, a cascade of tiny parts that form a huge, billowing whole, like tiny bones in a vast wingspan. "The longer you live, the higher the rent," she sings inside the frenzy.
Divers makes a landscape out of this abstract fear of loss. On the courtly "Anecdotes" and "Waltz of the 101st Lightborne", she is part of a battle fought by birds to try and wrest control of time. "You Will Not Take My Heart Alive" is the most Ren Fair piece here, on which Newsom contemplates ascension to some transcendent plane, "[severing] all strings to everyone and everything." Its sister song "A Pin-Light Bent" descends sadly back towards reason and reconciliation of her unsuccessful quest to outrun time. "In our lives is a common sense/ That relies on the common fence/ That divides and attends," she sings with palpable mourning, accepting that her life, "until the time is spent, is a pin-light, bent." Where this kind of cosmic existentialism could come off like a stoner marveling at the moon, Newsom pulls it off with balance of poetry and reason. Her fantastical world is sometimes hard to get your head around, but it brings surreal, sometimes sci-fi delight to a record that's otherwise often lyrically despairing.
Where Newsom's second and third records each overhauled what came before, Divers is a refinement that draws on elements of each of its predecessors. The shapes of her records often get misinterpreted as concepts themselves, rather than the sign of a writer attuned to her work's needs. Ys from 2006 was the five-song suite; Have One on Me from 2010, the three-disc opus. On its surface Divers is more conventional, a single disc where nine of its 11 songs are under six minutes long, but it also happens to be a wild, genuine concept album. The final song, "Time, As a Symptom", ends with Newsom in raptures, commanding white stars, birds, and ships to "transcend!" On the very last burst, she clips the word to "trans—". The first word on opener "Anecdotes" is "sending." It is a perfect loop.
Most artists on their fourth album settle into atrophy, or at least comfort, Newsom delivers such complex, nuanced music, filled with arcane constructions, that she is only her own yardstick. (In a recent interview about Divers, David Longstreth cited The Milk-Eyed Mender as one of the reasons he quit college: "[What] am I doing here if someone is already out there making music like this, on this level?") Her consummate craft is a given; what surprises every time is her ceaselessly renewing sensitivity for life's vicissitudes and the fantastic ways she finds to express them. D**ivers is not a puzzle to crack, but a dialog that generously articulates the intimate chasm of loss, the way it's both irrational and very real. Nothing will stem the fear of a loved one's death, which western culture does little to prepare us for until the very end, but by pulling at the prospect of mortality from every angle, Newsom emerges straighter-spined, and invites you to stand alongside her.


Lupe Fiasco's fifth album, Tetsuo & Youth, is the most focused, thoughtful, and satisfying project he's offered since 2007's The Cool. Whatever set the stage for him, he dives back into rapping for its own sake like it's a big dusty novel he's been waiting to pick back up for years.

Tetsuo & Youth

Lupe Fiasco seems exhausted by his own career. "I think I had my peak and now I am coming down in relevancy," he told Billboard recently. "It's not a sad thing for me...I can't compete with a Wiz Khalifa for the attention of a 12-year old." This doesn't make for inspiring promo copy, but there's no arguing that his run has been a wearying one: From 2006's Food & Liquor, which suffered from leaks and a Billboard mishap misreporting his first-week sales, to 2011's reviled Lasers, which his fans had to storm Atlantic’s gates to get released, Lupe is forever swimming upstream, his hands tied behind his back.
Of course, many of Lupe's problems stem directly from Lupe—he was pointing out flaws in F&L even before it was released, and he’s perennially signing off Twitter, announcing his retirement, scheduling and canceling albums. And yet something feels different this time around: If Tetsuo & Youth is any indication, something has shaken loose in Lupe, because it's the most focused, thoughtful, and satisfying project he's offered since The Cool.
What’s shifted? Well, for one, the album serves as the end of his tortured contractual obligation to Atlantic. Even then, he wasn't let off the hook without a fight: Depending on whom you believe, the world might owe Tetsuo's existence to the hacker group Anonymous, which publicly threatened Atlantic if the album was not given a release date. The label's official announcement came swiftly afterwards, and Lupe tweeted a simple "V" as a wordless gesture of thanks.
Whatever set the stage for him, he dives back into rapping for its own sake like it's a big dusty novel he's been waiting to pick back up for years. He opens after an intro track with "Mural", which lets him rap, endlessly, for nine minutes, with no hook. He remembers browsing his brother’s porn stash and contemplating the back pages, where you could find "ad space for rubber girls." He poses enigmatic rhetorical questions like "Now what’s a coffin with a scratched ceiling?" The question has no specific meaning, but the image, and its ghoulish riddle formulation, makes you ponder a lurid scenario for a half-beat longer so that it sinks in.
Fiasco has talked about his love of painting (he painted the album’s cover), and his way with language has always felt painterly rather than writerly, more concerned with how one word shades the next than with literal coherence. The words sound and feel gorgeous, and Tetsuo & Youth bursts with ripe, beautiful lines, like "Sanskrit dance on the page of the dead book," from "Body of Work", or "High as the angel on Dikembe’s shoulder" from "They.Resurrect.Over.New". Following his darting thoughts has always been a thrill, and Tetsuo is a gratifyingly clear transmission.
His longer, more ambitious gambits connect, too, mostly because they preach to no one. He has earned a reputation for sermonizing, but his best songs, like "Hip-Hop Saved My Life", eschew sermons for empathy: Even the KKK member he namechecked on on F&L's "American Terrorist", who "can't burn his cross because he can't afford the gasoline," was worthy of pathos. On Tetsuo's "Prisoner 1 & 2", Lupe examines the prison-industrial complex, wriggling his way into multiple characters' heads, including the prison guard who has to work at the prison "or it's no lights" and feels a pang of jealousy every time a prisoner walks out. On "Deliver", a pizza delivery car serves as a metaphorical vehicle to explore neglected neighborhoods and the semi-mythical status of "the hood." Neither song hits a single strident, or forced, note.
Unfortunately, the same weakness that always hobbles Lupe albums—namely, the music—continues to dog him here. His in-house production team consistently surrounds him with a flavorless, vaguely rock-derived backing, while hook singers like "Australian Idol" winner Guy Sebastian and St. Paul singer/songwriter Nikki Jean croon the anonymous choruses. The placid, flat-footed rhythm is a poor match for Lupe's lively, elastic flow. Ironically, one of his recent "label concession" singles, the spry Ty Dolla $ign-featuring "Next to It", would have livened up the album's sound considerably. It's not on here, leaving Lupe in his own universe. It’s a pleasant place, but often a little flat.
Lupe has always been most exciting when he's somewhere outside his comfort zone, engaging directly with the commercial-rap epicenter he criticizes so shrewdly. He has a naturally subversive mind, but a subversive working outside the mainstream has very little to examine or tweak, and he's thrilling when he’s wriggling on the hook of a big, fat, contradiction—pushing against his audience’s idea of him with Bun B's "Swang on 'Em", for instance, or grappling with magnetism of rap cliches on "Daydreamin'". "Chopper", produced by DJ Dahi, pairs Lupe with Trae tha Truth, Billy Blue, Buk of Psychodrama, Trouble, Fam-Lay, and Glasses Malone, a never-to-be-repeated line-up and a ferocious standout.
Of course, sometimes when Lupe engages with the mainstream, you get strident messes like Lasers' "Words I Never Said". You just never know. He's mercurial, as likely to strike gold on an obviously corporate-mandated single or an inward-burrowing indulgence. It’s tough to imagine his best-case scenario for creating: He always seems to be interrupting himself mid-sentence. In a recent New Yorker profile of Chris Rock, hip-hop critic and author Nelson George affectionately dubbed Rock the "Duke of Doubt," pinpointing the skepticism that makes Chris Rock’s comedy hardy and evergreen. If Lupe has a similar wellspring, it is ambivalence. It's a tricky muse, but every Lupe project has found a way to harness at least 15 or 20 minutes of his fluid, fleeting mind. Tetsuo & Youth is the most generous gulp he's managed in years.


On their fourth full-length, Jacuzzi Boys’ ongoing transition from garage rock to slick pop remains hampered by their vacuous attitude.

Ping Pong

The fourth full-length by Miami trio Jacuzzi Boys begins with frontman/guitarist Gabriel Alcala imagining a feeling of intoxication from leaving the house while carrying a knife: “These days, everything’s too nice/Walk around, it’s another day/Goin’ out with my lucky blade.” If he has an issue with things being too prettied-up for his liking, he still chose to express himself with a song drenched in a polished, edgeless sheen. And other than a stylized hint of violence, the song’s psychedelic pop exterior and trailing “oohs” leave us with no deeper an impression than a passing daydream.
It’s not like Ping Pong’s sound de-fangs the passion of Jacuzzi Boys, but there’s certainly no sense of danger or even friction hidden in the album’s grooves. In strictly musical terms, Alcala’s smooth vocal facility gave him a “mature” aura early on in Jacuzzi Boys’ career. These days, he’s developed into a more-than-capable singer. The problem is when he asks, “Do you feel what I feel?/I feel it every day,” he doesn’t give us any inkling of what he’s feeling, nor does he really entice us to figure it out.
If Alcala and his bandmates consider their music a kind of blade that protects them and serves as their sword against generic uniformity, they need to be more honest with themselves about how unthreatening their music actually is. The band’s name conjures images of party times in frothing hot tubs, but the music itself has a richness of mood that’s sold short by the band’s vacant imagery, which even had a hint of daft charm when Jacuzzi Boys were barely out of their teens. Now in their early-to-mid thirties, the subject matter has them sounding stuck.
On “Can’t Fight Forever,” Alcala sings, “I don’t know how I really feel/Sometimes it’s really hard to feel,” over a slinking groove that bassist Danny Gonzales and drummer Diego Monasterios deliver with an impeccable balance of push and reserve. You can close your eyes and picture huge crowds bopping hard to the song, but the resignation that underpins and deflates it is actually alarming. “Sometimes, when I’m not fine,” Alcala continues, “I go looking for a cool time/Waking up is a such a trip/Like the sound of a hard whip.”
It’s just that Alcala sounds no more impassioned singing about attraction than he does about antifreeze. When he manages to deliver lines that at least have the potential to intrigue or provoke—“Girls like love and boys like blood” is a phrase Gonzales would repeat to his mother as a child—he and the band squander that potential by making you feel as if their understanding of human behavior derives entirely from 1980s music videos.
Jacuzzi Boys started trading-in their traditionalist garage-rock approach for slickness with their second album, 2011’s Glazin. At times, they’ve come close to straight synthpop. But they’ve navigated that change without actually watering down their music—something so many other bands have failed at. Not unlike the Dandy Warhols did over a three-album run from 1997 to 2003, Jacuzzi Boys have already proven they can keep their feet in guitar-driven rock and pop while maintaining their balance, which would suggest ample possibilities for future work.
Unfortunately, their sun-zapped slacker outlook drags them back, miscasting themselves as a modern-day answer to hollow, overly attitude-conscious acts like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. They don’t have to. As a rock band swimming against Miami’s dance and Latin currents, surely they have more interesting stories they can tell us. Their own music deserves it.


The Australian band delivers a jarring, dissonant record of non-linear death metal filtered through a necro black-metal screen, with a crisp high end that brings out every jagged turn.

ION

“Then I bid you farewell, and I fucking wish the best for you,” said ex-Pantera vocalist Phil Anselmo as he concluded his introduction of the Australian death-metal band Portal at the 2014 edition of his Housecore Horror Festival in Austin. It’s not exactly the kind of stage banter likely to get a crowd pumped up for experimental death metal, yet there isn’t much else he could have said to prepare the audience for them. Portal, a nightmarish embodiment of figures that seem barely humanoid, have always been the abstract extension of Australia’s norm-obliterating, sometimes accidentally avant death-metal scene, which includes Sadistik Exekution, Bestial Warlust, and Impetuous Ritual (led by two Portal members, drummer Ignis Fatuus and bassist Omenous Fugue). Their fifth record, ION, dispenses with murk and brings their sound into the sunlight, letting it burn in agony. It is their clearest, and as a result, most terrifying effort.
ION is non-linear death metal filtered through a necro black-metal screen, heavy on a high end that brings out every jagged turn of guitarists Horror Illogium and Aphotic Mote, whose playing resembles Morbid Angel’s Trey Azagthoth if he took guitar lessons from DNA’s Arto Lindsay. Turbulence has long been their forte, though now the choppier edges are much more prominent. They swarm and peck with a chaotic logic only they truly understand, not far off from Luc Lemay’s slashing cross-riffing method on Gorguts’ 1998 album Obscura. Since Portal aren’t submerged in bass as much as before (not that it was a detriment to them in the first place), the Curator’s vocals glide through, his whispers even more ominous. Though he’s the star of Portal’s live show, with his outrageous costumes—most recently his “Bride of Cthulu” getup—he serves a more supporting role on their records, a balm for the rest of the band’s spasmodic outbursts.
ION also reveals what Portal take from modern classical, particularly repetition and atonality. Horror Illogium creates spirals of squalls. “Crone” takes a trance-inducing black-metal passage and strips any ambient pleasantries from it. “Phreqs” is a master class in tension; in the song’s second half, Horror Illogium’s lead floats behind Aphotic Mote’s escalating rhythm, a vocal-less howling driving it off a steep cliff. There aren’t many death-metal bands with that command of dynamics, and fewer who take them to such bizarre ends as Portal do.
Portal are extreme beyond extreme, and they are also genuinely weirder than many of their Australian peers. The exception here is “Spores,” a short, nearly static wall of riff noise that is as close as they get to sounding straightforward. They stay in a consistent mode here, where the rest of ION shudders like a cosmic pinball machine where your brain is the ball. In unconventional metal, it’s often brief moments of familiarity that fuck with you the most. “Spores” makes you think Portal might let up, that they’ll throw in a classic, late-1980s death-metal riff for comfort. But Portal aren’t about reassurance. They are exploring death metal’s possibilities as unconventional and even uncomfortable music. Death metal’s beginnings lay in taking thrash to the next level; in that sense, ION both honors and transcends its origins.