Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the Byrds’ 1968 album, the best and most cohesive project from a classic rock band in constant flux with the changing times.

The Notorious Byrd Brothers

As darkness fell across the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, David Crosby decided it was time to get real about the Kennedy assassination. Over the course of his three years playing guitar with the Byrds, Crosby had fallen in with the emergent counterculture of the 1960s, transforming from a clean-cut Beatles lookalike into a mustachioed, long-haired, acid-dropping proselytizer of free love. He’d become a true believer in a pop artist’s ability to shift public attitudes toward a groovier equilibrium; decades later, he would earnestly claim that the Woodstock music festival—which he hated to be asked about but never failed to talk about—was the first falling domino that led to the end of the Vietnam War.
Stepping toward the microphone before the Byrds could launch into “He Was a Friend of Mine”—a traditional folk song that they’d reinterpreted to lament the late JFK—Crosby snuck in a conspiratorial spiel about the real killers on that Dallas afternoon. “When President Kennedy was killed, he was not killed by one man,” he declared, to a somewhat confused audience. “He was shot from a number of different directions, by different guns. The story has been suppressed, witnesses have been killed, and this is your country, ladies and gentlemen.”
Eventually, Crosby’s theory would be supported by a slow trickle of government documents, the work of Oliver Stone and Don DeLillo, and several podcasts recommended by your dad. At that moment, though, his bandmates were mortified. Privately, Byrds leader and guitarist Roger McGuinn agreed there was something to the conspiracy, but he believed the best way for a musician to promote their political ideas was through their music, not by harshing the vibe on stage. The next day, Crosby filled in for an absent Neil Young during Buffalo Springfield’s set, deepening his band’s suspicion that he was growing sick of the Byrds. When everyone reconvened the next month to start work on their next album, it wasn’t long before Crosby instigated another petty fight—the latest in a long, long string of petty fights—forcing McGuinn and bassist Chris Hillman to conclude that change was necessary. After becoming one of the biggest bands in America, the Byrds were beginning to sputter commercially; creatively, they couldn’t get on the same page. The first order of business, clearly, was getting rid of the guy who was writing way too many songs about threesomes. About the day he was officially fired, Crosby would remember nearly a decade later that “Roger and Chris drove up in a pair of Porsches and said that I was crazy, impossible to work with, an ego-manic—all of which is partly true—that I sang shitty, wrote terrible songs, made horrible sounds, and that they would do much better without me.”
Just two years earlier, the Byrds—composed initially of McGuinn, Crosby, Hillman, singer/songwriter Gene Clark, and drummer Michael Clarke—had achieved instant fame by becoming the first American act to marry the fizzy energy of the Beatles and the British Invasion with the reverential harmonies of the folkies. Their debut single, an electrified version of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” had shot to No. 1 on the charts and placed them at the center of the Hollywood scene, where they held court for celebrities like Jack Nicholson and Jane Fonda at the buzzy Los Angeles night club Ciro’s. The appellation “folk rock” was instantly coined by Billboard to describe their sound, built around a catalog that drew from the works of Dylan and Pete Seeger, and the way McGuinn seemed to evoke the bloom of spring with every strum of his 12-string Rickenbacker guitar. They also connected on another important, primordial level: being very cool. “Not to be too shallow, but they also were just the best-dressed band around,” Tom Petty once wrote for Rolling Stone. “They had those great clothes and hairdos. That counted for something even then.” Michael Clarke had been recruited for his resemblance to Brian Jones, which overruled the fact that he didn’t own a drum kit.
But musical trends moved lightning fast during this period, and by the time Crosby was fired in 1967, the Byrds already seemed like yesterday’s news. (An essay on the back cover of a Greatest Hits LP, released that summer, noted that their impact had come “three or four generations ago.”)  Their Los Angeles fanbase had gravitated toward the Doors, who openly embraced the carnal extravagance of sex and drugs that was at inherent odds with the Byrds’ utopian invocation of sex and drugs—so much that singer Jim Morrison was unafraid to literally take his penis out at concerts. They’d worn out their repertoire of Dylan covers, which were especially redundant now that Dylan himself had gone electric and begun to reject his entire folkie mythology. Gene Clark had quit in 1966, defeated by his fear of flying. And now that the mobs of adoring women were beginning to shrink, Michael Clarke—who had never become that great of a drummer—seemed to have a foot out of the door.
The Summer of Love was over, and winter approached. The revolutionary aspirations of the political left, and the bohemian idealism of the hippies, had not transformed the American people. Soon, the electorate would turn away from the Great Society imagined by Lyndon B. Johnson and toward the paranoid indulgences of the Nixonites. And though it remained unpopular, the government would further commit to the morally catastrophic Vietnam War, sacrificing thousands more American and Vietnamese lives for the false cause of anti-communism.
This darkening mood, coupled with the band’s search for clarity, would fuel the Byrds’ fifth and best album, The Notorious Byrd Brothers. The recording had started not long after the Monterey debacle, with Crosby, not yet fired, angling more intensely for his songs to take precedence. Crosby was the resident enfant terrible, the LA-born son of an Oscar-winning cinematographer who’d given up a child for adoption in his early 20s. He wore a perpetually knowing smirk that, even in his babyfaced years, seemed to telegraph his interest in walking on the wild side—a self-fulfilling prophecy that would bear out over the next several decades as he went to jail for cocaine possession, became a sperm donor to Melissa Etheridge and her partner, and tweeted a lot about his sex life. Though he was a born provocateur, he had a natural instinct for constructing angelic harmony vocals, magnifying his bandmates’ austere voices into a powerful choir. At the same time, he’d grown into a more bullish songwriter, thrusting his songs onto the band’s LPs whether or not anyone else liked them. (Everyone hated the interminable “Mind Gardens,” from their fourth album Younger Than Yesterday, which is really saying something considering how much acid they were taking.)
Regardless of his conspicuous personal shortcomings, Crosby was the most attuned to how the kids were processing the fissures spreading throughout polite society, a perspective he increasingly inhabited in his songwriting. One of the many new songs he’d written for the band was “Tribal Gathering,” inspired by a jam-packed hippie festival called the Easter Sunday Love-In at Los Angeles’ Elysian Park, where he crooned about vibing with a faceless crowd of free spirits over a swinging jazz beat from Michael Clarke. Hillman had stepped up as a backing vocalist after Gene Clark left the band, and he sang in a bluegrassy baritone better suited for low harmonies, lending an air of perfumed mystery to Crosby’s wandering lyrics. As McGuinn scribbles off some languid guitar leads over the chorus, the rhythm section suddenly roars into a thick groove, conjuring the jet engine rumble of a potent trip. The Byrds rarely made explicit reference to illegal substances in their lyrics, but they were often stoned; they’d actually purchased their own Winnebago RV for touring, so they could smoke pot while traveling between shows. Though they couldn’t say it out loud given the social stigma, they made music to take drugs to, and much of The Notorious Byrd Brothers zips with the airy energy found after lighting up a joint on a bright day.
Crosby also brought in a song called “Draft Morning,” which McGuinn and Hillman agreed was the best of his tracks. After pushing him out they decided to record it anyway, but because they couldn’t exactly remember the lyrics they improvised their own verses and didn’t even write a chorus. Though they kept his credit, Crosby was understandably pissed off when it showed up on the record; still, it’s the most beautiful song he ever contributed to the Byrds. As McGuinn and Hillman chose to finish it off, “Draft Morning” is cinematic in its telling of a soldier ambling through the Vietnam jungle, the sun hot on his face, anticipating the moment he’ll have to break the tranquil morning and kill an enemy combatant. Michael Clarke, who’d managed to get it together for the session, opens up with a crescendo of cymbal crashes that give way to a serene arrangement, guided by Hillman’s loping basslines and McGuinn’s high, keening vocals. The peaceful atmosphere is interrupted by a cacophony of skronking instrumentation, meant to simulate the horrors of combat, contributed by a chaotic improvisational troupe from the radical Los Angeles scene called the Firesign Theatre. The anti-war movement would become a fixture of late-’60s pop music, but the Byrds’ take isn’t gimmicky or confrontational; it reaches for rare empathy with the occupying soldier, statistically likely to be a confused teenager conscripted into fighting and dying for an unethical war.
While Crosby was still in the band, he was pointedly irate over the idea that the Byrds might record material by outside writers, as they had on all their records, since he was coming up with his best work. When producer Gary Usher floated the idea of trying out some songs by the Brill Building songwriting duo Gerry Goffin and Carole King, he was the one member who refused outright, dismissing them as pop schmaltz. With respect to the late Crosby’s ego, he was completely off the mark. By 1967, Goffin and King had spent nearly a decade writing dozens of hit singles that perfectly articulated the inner lives of millions of American listeners. “Goin’ Back” was first recorded in 1966 as a slow, orchestral ballad by Dusty Springfield—perhaps that’s why Crosby balked, but the underlying songwriting was remarkably flexible. After the Byrds reentered the studio without the irascible guitarist, they stripped down the stately arrangement and enlisted pedal steel expert Orville “Red” Rhodes to add a touch of pastoral twang.
McGuinn was an unusually grounded bandleader, a devout Christian who in his mid-20s had already rejected the excesses of rock’n’roll, and embraced family life. Unlike rock contemporaries such as Lennon, Jagger, and Morrison, he was not a forceful singer—he possessed a tender, kind voice that seemed to glide for miles with the softest push. His emotional instincts were contemplative, a sensibility that fueled the anti-war and pro-nature songs they were gravitating toward. On Younger Than Yesterday, they’d been coaxed by management into recording a serviceable but uninspiring cover of  Dylan’s “My Back Pages,” a defiant song about rejecting the strident beliefs of adulthood and embracing more elemental truths about life. Now, they strummed a similar guitar pattern, pitched downward ever so subtly as if to communicate their matured understanding of what this rediscovery process actually entailed, to open their take on King and Goffin’s song: “I think I’m returning to/The days when I was young enough to know the truth.”
While thematically similar, “My Back Pages” is flecked with anger and defiance. The Byrds were more temperamentally aligned with Goffin and King’s lyrics, which reach for subtle revelations: They look backwards in order to move forward, and they find a fuller appreciation of life in the here and now. “Thinking young and growing older is no sin/And I can play the game of life to win,” McGuinn sings, his voice wistful and forlorn, as if he’s unlocked something profound about how to approach the future while also coming to terms with how much time has already gone by. There’s a gentle, dreamy momentum to his and Hillman’s playing, and as they sing about tapping into this reservoir of youthful perspective, their voices flower into a gorgeous la-la-la harmony, levitating their earthly concerns toward the heavenly unknown.
By the band’s own account, Gary Usher was the first producer who seemed interested in nudging them toward new artistic frontiers, rather than generating as much material as they could. (Their first four albums had been released in a blistering 20-month stretch.) With so many band members coming and going—Gene Clark even returned for a brief spell, only to disappear just as fast—the producer was empowered to experiment as much as possible. He employed some neat studio tricks, like connecting two eight-track recording machines so that the band could double the instrumentation and effects on any given song. For “Artificial Energy,” the crackling opener about the perils of taking speed, he ran McGuinn and Hillman’s vocals through a Leslie organ speaker in order to make them vibrate, as the Beatles had done on “Tomorrow Never Knows”; you can feel the nerves and jitters of the lyrics, which describe the miserable experience of being way too stoned on an airplane. He pushed them to futz more with the Moog synthesizer, a then-novel piece of equipment used heavily on the hallucinatory “Space Odyssey,” where McGuinn, inspired by an Arthur C. Clarke story, fantasizes about taking a trip to the stars.
By the time the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in May of 1967, rock bands had begun to conceive of their albums as unified statements rather than a collection of disparate singles, and Usher’s best idea concerned the sequencing. Much of The Notorious Byrd Brothers feels like one unending track, as the middle section was edited so that each song would flow directly into the next with no pause. The cosmic frippery of “Natural Harmony,” Hillman’s one solo contribution, is suddenly brought to earth by the opening cymbals of “Draft Morning,” whose meditative outro slowly breaks into the jaunty pace of “Wasn’t Born to Follow,” another Goffin-King song.
Though this wasn’t necessarily their intention, it takes on the shape of a concept record about one man’s journey to find authentic meaning within tumultuous times: He embraces the wonder of nature and love, only to be sent into war, which disrupts his inner peace and makes him realize he isn’t meant to take orders about how to live his life. Maybe he’ll go back to taking speed; maybe he’ll exit society, and move to a commune. But after the band freaks out in the middle of “Wasn’t Born to Follow,” they settle back into a pleasant rhythm as McGuinn sings about the many astonishing things—the sacred mountains, the glowing moon, the clear and jeweled waters—that he’d like to see while he’s still alive. As he’s imagining all this, a door slams shut and our imaginary narrator doubles back to catch a plane to London on “Get to You,” ready to recommit to love rather than roam the world alone. Hal Blaine, a fixture during these sessions, undergirds McGuinn’s affecting vocal performance with an insistent 5/4 drum beat that builds a sense of anticipation, as if our traveler is watching the clock tick down at the airport, waiting for the moment he’ll soar through the skies.
The album’s most transformative moment happens midway through “Change Is Now,” where McGuinn—whose playing had become increasingly influenced by John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar, the latter of whom he would introduce to George Harrison—uncorks a wonderfully psychedelic guitar solo that sounds like some strange thing trying to break free from a chrysalis. This hard-won triumph is immediately followed by the galloping “Old John Robertson,” which is notable for a bunch of reasons: Crosby, not Hillman, plays a nimble bassline; the momentum is abruptly broken by an interlude of strings, the first the Byrds had intentionally deployed them on record; Gary Usher slapped a flange effect on the second half of the song, which in layman’s terms made everything sound real spacey and weird. But “Old John Robertson,” whose storybook lyrics describe an aging cowboy that everyone makes fun of, also just sounds free, coming after that transformative chrysalis moment. They pursue spiritual enlightenment on “Change Is Now”; unburdened of their woes and faced with miles of metaphorical hills and fields, they begin to sprint as though the day might never end.
Upon release in January 1968, The Notorious Byrd Brothers was well-received by critics; Robert Christgau called it “simply the best album the Byrds have ever recorded.” It failed to halt their commercial freefall, however, nor did it provide a measure of clarity about the band’s future. After entering the studio as a four-piece, they exited as the duo of McGuinn and Hillman, having decided to fire Michael Clarke due to his technical and personal inconsistency. (In the end, he’d played on just five of the record’s 11 songs.) They started planning a quick follow-up, one that McGuinn intended to encompass the evolution of American music: folk and bluegrass, psychedelia and jazz, country-western and rock’n’roll, and the nascent electronic sound they’d explored with Gary Usher. Working in an era when rock was not yet an endlessly commodified, billion-dollar industry, McGuinn could never pick just one identity or sound for the Byrds. But while they were recruiting new members, they fell in with a charismatic 21-year-old named Gram Parsons, who shortly convinced the band to go all-in on country.
Inspired by Dylan once again, they moved down to Nashville in the spring of 1968 to record Sweetheart of the Rodeo, an artistic masterpiece but total chart failure that was not only reviled by the country establishment, but further distanced themselves from the hip rock scene. Not long after, Hillman would join Parsons in forming the Flying Burrito Brothers, leaving McGuinn behind as the only original member. The reconstituted Byrds carried on for a few more years, morphing into a lean country-rock live act and cranking out a handful of OK-to-forgettable albums—one of which included the theme song for the groundbreaking New Hollywood film Easy Rider, in which actors Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda respectively based their wayward protagonists on Crosby and McGuinn. Finally, in 1973, the original members would reunite for what turned out to be a dismal self-titled record—produced by Crosby, who provided the exact level of behind-the-boards stability and maturity you might expect—before calling it quits for good, less than a decade after releasing “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
But something lived on, beyond their own discography: What McGuinn would offhandedly call “the jingle-jangle thing” influenced a gigantic family tree of artists topped by superstars like Tom Petty and R.E.M., and stretching all the way to 21st-century bands like Beach Fossils and the Clientele. (Peter Buck’s playing seems so obviously beholden to McGuinn that an extraordinarily inconsequential claim to make after drinking two beers is that without the Byrds, the entirety of college rock—and, from it, indie rock—wouldn’t exist.) The Byrds themselves, though, would be relatively muted presences in contemporary pop culture. Gene Clark and Michael Clarke would both die young in the early 1990s, permanently foreclosing the possibility of any more reunions of the original lineup. Crosby, who died earlier this year, would become far more associated with the supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, his legal troubles, and his Twitter account. McGuinn and Hillman released many more records, and are even active on social media, but their new work doesn’t garner much mainstream attention, and hasn’t in a long time.
Perhaps that’s a facile and clinical way to think about art—to judge it by the amount of press coverage, tweets, and Spotify monthly listeners—but as culture has continued to cannibalize nostalgia for classic rock bands, it feels notable that the Byrds themselves haven’t benefited from the same wave of retroactive goodwill. You can float your own guesses why, but here are some: They never rocked as hard; they never had a cool logo; they never had one singular frontman who developed a cult of personality; their shifting sound made it difficult for them to become an easily reducible brand to later generations; they lacked one mammoth single to endure across eras of rock radio and pop culture soundtrack placements like “Stairway to Heaven” or “Won’t Get Fooled Again”; their interpersonal drama was too uncontroversial (even Crosby admits he was a giant jerk, and Hillman and McGuinn seem to agree on how everything else went down); the records were too aesthetically indebted to the 1960s, and just don’t sound as good to modern ears.
But the ease with which McGuinn and Hillman appear to have welcomed their trajectories raises another question: Well, who cares? More meaningful than any made-up benchmarks of success is their embrace of change—not only in the way they shuffled through musical styles, but in life itself. Despite all of the adventurous and fascinating work that followed, their defining statement is from the early years, when they were still packing the room at Ciro’s. In 1959, Pete Seeger had taken a verse from the Book of Ecclesiastes and turned it into a ruminative folk song. “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” which got the full-blown folk-rock treatment from the Byrds into something both upbeat and introspective, is still moving in its sincerity and its call for genuine reflection about the passage of time. It’s a message that resonates through the band’s winding, open-hearted catalog and a lesson that came into clear focus on The Notorious Byrd Brothers. There is a season for all things—a time to be born, and a time to die—and accepting this can give you the confidence to move through the world and all its insurmountable realities, open-eyed and unafraid about what comes next.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review misidentified producer Gary Usher as Greg Usher in one instance. It also credited Hal Blaine as the drummer on “Tribal Gethering,” It was Michael Clarke.


Never did Kate Bush sound more grounded, more in control of her songwriting than on her sixth album from 1989, featuring stories that play out like intimate vignettes rather than fantastical fairy tales.

The Sensual World

Kate Bush had already set Molly Bloom’s breathless soliloquy from the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses to music when she discovered she couldn’t use it. Without his estate’s permission, and after his grandson snubbed her requests for a year, she rewrote it in her own words. By the time she’d finished, the title track to Kate Bush’s sixth album wasn’t just Molly’s memory of an erotic frisson: It was the sound of her busting out of her prison, her coming-of-age transformed into a coming-off-the-page.
It might seem like an uncanny echo of her debut single—another literary character overcome by desire, fantasizing about rolling around in fields—but Bush wasn’t the same singer who’d loaded the gothic romance of “Wuthering Heights” with the life-and-death fervor of teenage lust. “Someone said in your teens, you get the physical puberty, and between 28 and 32, mental puberty,” she said in 1989. “It does make you feel differently.”
The Sensual World is not a work of po-faced realism or post-Neverland dowdiness. Bush sings about falling in love with a computer, dressing up as a firework, and dancing with a dictator. She’s still in thrall to love, lust, loneliness, passion, pain, and pleasure. And she’s still fond of strange noises; listen closely to the title track and you might hear her brother, Paddy, swishing a fishing rod through the air.
But she’d never sounded more grounded than she did on these 10 songs, most of which are about regular people in regular messes, not disturbed governesses, paranoid Russian wives or terrified fetuses. It was, she said, her most honest, personal album, and its stories play out like intimate vignettes rather than fantastical fairy tales. Unlike the otherworldly synth-pop-prog she pioneered on 1985’s Hounds of Love, she used her beloved Fairlight CMI to produce lusher, mellow textures, complemented by the warm, earthy thrum of Irish folk instruments and the pretty violins and violas of England’s classical bad boy, Nigel Kennedy. Even the album’s artwork depicted a less playful, more serious Bush than the one who’d fondled Harry Houdini on 1982’s The Dreaming and cuddled dogs on Hounds of Love.
There’s no Hounds-style grand narrative thread on The Sensual World. Bush likened it to a volume of short stories, with its subjects frequently wrestling with who they were, who they are, and who they want to be. She was able to pour some of her own frustrations into these knotty tussles: She found it more difficult than ever to write songs, couldn’t work out what she wanted them to say, and hit roadblock after roadblock. The 12 months she spent pestering Joyce’s grandson were surpassed by the maddening two years she spent on “Love and Anger,” which, fittingly, finds her tormented by an old trauma she can’t bring herself to talk about. But by the end, she banishes the evil spirits by leading her band in something that sounds like a raucous exorcism, chanting, “Don’t ever think you can’t change the past and the future” over squalling guitars.
Even its most surreal songs are rooted in self-examination. “Heads We’re Dancing” seems like a dark joke—a young girl is charmed on to the dancefloor by a man she later learns is Adolf Hitler—but poses a troubling question: What does it say about you, if you couldn’t see through the devil’s disguise? Its discordant, skronky rhythms make it feel like a formal ball taking place in a fever dream, and Bush’s voice grows increasingly panicky as she realizes how badly she’s been duped. As far-fetched as its premise was, its inspiration lay close to home: A family friend had told Bush how shaken they’d been after they’d taken a shine to a dashing stranger at a dinner party, only to find out they’d been chatting to Robert Oppenheimer.
It’s more fanciful than most of The Sensual World’s little secrets. To hear someone recall formative childhood truths (the lush grandeur of “Reaching Out”) and lingering romantic pipedreams (the longing of “Never Be Mine”) is like being given a reel of their memory tapes and discovering what makes them tick. On “The Fog,” she’s paralyzed by fear until she remembers the childhood swimming lessons her father gave her, his voice cutting through the misty harps like an old ghost. Relationships on the album can be sticky and thorny. “Between a Man and a Woman” is half-dangerous and half-sultry, its snaking rhythms mirroring the round-in-circles squabbling of a couple. When a third party tries to interfere, they’re told to back off. This time, unlike on “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” there’s no point wishing for a helping hand from God.
But if there are no miracles, there are at least songs that sound like them. For “Rocket’s Tail,” Bush enlisted the help of Trio Bulgarka, who she fell in love with after hearing them on a tape Paddy gave her. The three Bulgarian women didn’t speak English and had no idea what they were singing about, but it didn’t matter. They sound more like mystics during its a capella first half, and when it eventually blows up into a glammy stomper with Dave Gilmour’s electric guitar caterwauling like a Catherine wheel, their vocals still come out on top: cackling like gleeful witches, whooping like they’re watching sparks explode in the night sky. Its weird, wonderful magic offered a simple message: Life is short, so enjoy moments of pleasure before they fizzle out.
Perhaps that’s why there are glimmers of hope even in the album’s most desperate circumstances. “Deeper Understanding” is a bleak sci-fi tale about a lonely person who turns to their computer for comfort, and in doing so isolates themselves even more. But while there’s an icy chill to the verses, Trio Bulgarka imbue the computer’s voice with golden warmth. Bush wanted it to sound like the “visitation of angels,” and hearing the chorus is like being wrapped in a celestial hug. She pulls off a similar trick on “This Woman’s Work,” which she wrote for John Hughes’ film She’s Having a Baby, although her vivid, devastating interpretation of its script has taken on a far greater life of its own. It captures a moment of crisis: a man about to be walloped with the sledgehammer of parental responsibilities, frozen by terror as he waits for his pregnant wife outside the delivery room, his brain a messy spiral of regrets and guilty thoughts. Yet Bush softens the song’s building panic attack with soft musical touches so it rushes and swirls like a dream, even as reality becomes a waking nightmare. “It’s the point where has to grow up,” said Bush. “He’d been such a wally.”
She didn’t need to prove her own steeliness to anyone, especially the male journalists who patronized her and harped on her childishness as a way of cutting her down to size. Instead, The Sensual World is the sound of someone deciding for themselves what growing up and grown-up pop should be, without being beholden to anyone else’s tedious definitions. It gave her a new template for the next two decades, inspiring both the smooth, stylish art-rock of 1993’s The Red Shoes and the picturesque beauty of 2005’s Aerial. Like Molly Bloom, Bush had set herself free into a world that wasn’t mundane, but alive with new, fertile possibility.


Upon its release in 1977, Rumours, now reissued as a 4xCD/DVD/LP box set featuring live recordings, alternate mixes, and studio outtakes, became the fastest selling LP of all time, moving 800,000 copies per week at its height. Its success made Fleetwood Mac a cultural phenomenon and also set a template for pop with a gleaming surface that has something complicated, desperate, and dark resonating underneath.

Rumours

Fleetwood Mac's Rumours would never be just an album. Upon its release in 1977, it became the fastest-selling LP of all time, moving 800,000 copies per week at its height, and its success made Fleetwood Mac a cultural phenomenon. The million-dollar record that took a year and untold grams to complete became a totem of 1970s excess, rock'n'roll at its most gloriously indulgent. It was also a bellwether of glimmering Californian possibility, the permissiveness and entitlement of the 70s done up in heavy harmonies. By the time it was made, the personal freedoms endowed by the social upheaval of the 60s had unspooled into unfettered hedonism. As such, it plays like a reaping: a finely polished post-hippie fallout, unaware that the twilight hour of the free love era was fixing and there would be no going back. In 1976, there was no knowledge of AIDS, Reagan had just left the governor's manse, and people still thought of cocaine as non-addictive and strictly recreational. Rumours is a product of that moment and it serves as a yardstick by which we measure just how 70s the 70s were.
And then there's the album's influence. Though it was seen as punk's very inverse, Rumours has enjoyed a long trickle-down of influence starting from the alt-rock-era embrace via Billy Corgan and Courtney Love to the harmonies and choogling of Bonnie "Prince" Billy and the earthier end of Beach House. Rumours set a template for pop with a gleaming surface that has something complicated, desperate, and dark resonating underneath.
Setting aside the weight of history, listening to Rumours is an easy pleasure. Records with singles that never go away tend to evoke nostalgia for the time when the music soundtracked your life; in this case, you could've never owned a copy of it and still know almost every song. When you make an album this big, your craft is, by default, accessibility. But this wasn't generic pabulum. It was personal. Anyone could find a piece of themselves within these songs of love and loss.
Two years prior to recording Rumours, though, Fleetwood Mac was approximately nowhere. In order to re-establish the group's flagging stateside reputation, in early 1974 Fleetwood Mac's drummer and band patriarch, Mick Fleetwood, keyboardist/singer Christine McVie, and her husband, bassist John McVie, moved from England to Los Angeles. The quartet was then helmed by their fifth and least-dazzling guitarist, the American Bob Welch. Not long after the band's British faction had relocated, Welch quit the band. Around the same time Mick Fleetwood was introduced to the work of local duo, Buckingham Nicks, who'd just been dropped by Polydor. The drummer was enchanted by Lindsey Buckingham's guitar work and Nicks' complete package, and when Welch quit, he offered them a spot in the band outright.
The group, essentially a new band under an old name, quickly cut 1975's self-titled Fleetwood Mac, an assemblage of Christine McVie's songs and tracks Buckingham and Nicks had intended for their second album, including the eventual smash "Rhiannon". It was a huge seller in its own right and they were now a priority act given considerable resources. But by the time they booked two months at Record Plant in Sausalito to record the follow-up, the band's personal bonds were frayed, there was serious resentment and constant drama. Nicks had just broken up with Buckingham after six years of domestic and creative partnership. Fleetwood's wife was divorcing him, and the McVies were separated and no longer speaking.
While Fleetwood Mac was a bit of a mash-up of existing work, Lindsey Buckingham effectively commandeered the band for Rumours, giving their sound a radio-ready facelift. He redirected John McVie and Fleetwood's playing from blues past towards the pop now. Fleetwood Mac wanted hits and gave the wheel to Buckingham, a deft craftsman with a vision for what the album had to become.
He opens the record with the libidinous "Second Hand News", inspired by the redemption Buckingham was finding in new women, post-Stevie. It was the album's first single and also perhaps the most euphoric ode to rebound chicks ever written. Buckingham's "bow-bow-bow-doot-doo-diddley-doot" is corny, but it works along with the percussion track (Buckingham played the seat of an office chair after Fleetwood was unable to properly replicate a beat a la the Bee Gees' "Jive Talkin'"). Like "Second Hand News", Buckingham's "Go Your Own Way" is upbeat but totally fuck-you. He croons "shackin' up is all you wanna do,"-- accusing an ex-lover of being a wanton slut on a song where his ex-lover harmonizes on the hook. Save for "Never Going Back Again," (a vintage Buckingham Nicks composition brought in to replace Stevie's too-long "Silver Springs") Buckingham's songs are turnabout as fairplay with lithe guitar glissando on top.
"Second Hand News" is followed by a twist-of-the-knife Stevie-showpiece, "Dreams", a gauzy ballad about what she'd had and what she'd lost with Buckingham. It was written during one of the days where Nicks wasn't needed for tracking. She wrote the song in a few minutes, recorded it onto a cassette, and returned to the studio and demanded the band listen to it. It was a simple ballad that would be finessed into the album's jewel; the quiet vamp laced with laconic Leslie-speaker vibrato and spooky warmth allow Nicks to draw an exquisite sketch of loneliness. "Dreams" would become Fleetwood Mac's only #1 hit.
Though Fleetwood Mac was always the sum of its parts, Nicks was something special both in terms of the band and in rock history. She helped establish a feminine vernacular that was (still) in league with the cock rock of the 70s but didn't present as a diametric vulnerability; it was not innocent. While Janis Joplin and Grace Slick had been rock's most iconic heroines at the tail-end of the 60s, they were very much trying to keep up with boys in their world; Nicks was creating a new space. And Fleetwood Mac was still very much an anomaly, unique in being a rock band fronted by two women who were writing their own material, with Nicks presenting as the girliest bad girl rock'n'roll had seen since Ronnie Spector. She took the stage baring a tambourine festooned with lengths of lavender ribbon; people said she was a witch.
Like her male rock'n'roll peers, Nicks sang songs about the intractable power of a woman (her first hit, "Rhiannon") and used women as a metaphor ("Gold Dust Woman"), but her approach was different. At the time of Rumours' release, she maintained that the latter song was about groupies who would scowl at her and Christine but light up when the guys appeared. She later confessed that it was about cocaine getting the best of her. In 1976, coke was the mise of the scene-- to admit you were growing weary would have been gauche. Nicks' husky voice made it sound like she'd lived and her lyrics-- of pathos, independence, and getting played-- certainly backed it up. She seemed like a real woman-- easy to identify with, but with mystery and a natural glamour worth aspiring to.
It's almost easy to miss Christine McVie for all of Nicks' mystique. McVie had been in the band for years, but never at the helm. Her songs "You Make Lovin' Fun" and "Don't Stop" are pure pep. "Songbird" starts as a plaintive ode of fealty and how total her devotion-- until the sad tell of "And I wish you all the love in the world/ But most of all I wish it from myself," (an especially heart-wrenching line given that McVie's not quite ex-husband was dragging a rebound model chick to the sessions and Christine was sneaking around with a member of the crew). She didn't hate her husband, she adored him, she wished it could work but after years of being in the Mac together, she knew better. Throughout, McVie's songwriting is pure and direct, irrepressibly sweet. "Oh Daddy", a song she wrote about Mick Fleetwood's pending divorce is melancholy but ultimately maintains its dignity. McVie, with typical British reserve, confessed she preferred to leave the bleakness and poesy to her dear friend Stevie.
As much feminine energy as Rumours wields, the album's magic is in its balance: male and female, British blues versus American rock'n'roll, lightness and dark, love and disgust, sorrow and elation, ballads and anthems, McVie's sweetness against Nicks' grit. They were a democratic band where each player raised the stakes of the whole. The addition of Buckingham and Nicks and McVie's new prominence kicked John McVie's bass playing loose from its blues mooring and forced him towards simpler, more buoyant pop. Fleetwood's playing itself is just godhead, with effortless little fills, light but thunderous, and his placement impeccable throughout. The ominous, insistent kick on the first half on "The Chain", for example, colors the song as much as the quiver of disgust in Buckingham's voice when he spits "never."
In the liner notes to the deluxe Rumours 4xCD/DVD/LP box set, Buckingham describes the album-making process as "organic." Rumours is anything but, and that is part of its genius-- it's so flawless it feels far from nature. It is more like a peak human feat of Olympic-level studio craft. It was made better by its myopia and brutal circumstances: the wounded pride of a recently dumped Buckingham, the new hit of "Rhiannon", goading Nicks to fight for inclusion of her own songs, Christine McVie attempting to salve her heart with "Songbird." That Fleetwood Mac had become the biggest record Warner Bros. had ever released while the band was making Rumours allowed for an impossibly long tether for them to dick around and correct the next album until it was immaculate.
Given the standalone nature of Rumours, it's difficult to argue that any other part of the box set is necessary. The live recordings of the Rumours tour are fine, lively even (perhaps owing to Fleetwood rationing a Heineken cap of coke to each band member to power performances). Only a handful of tracks on the two discs of the sessions outtakes lend any greater understanding of the process behind it. One is "Dreams (Take 2)", which is just Nicks voice, some burbling organ, and rough rhythm guitar gives an appreciation of her fundamental talent as well as Buckingham's ability to transform it; it makes the case for how much they needed each other. Another is "Second Hand News (Early Take)", which features Buckingham mumbling lyrics so as not to incense Nicks. The alternate mixes and takes (more phaser! Less Dobro! Take 22!), by the time you make it to disc four, just underscore the fact that Rumours did not hatch as a pristine whole. One does not need three variously funky articulations of Christine's burning "Keep Me There" to comprehend this.
Nevertheless, it is difficult not to buy into the mythology of Rumours both as an album and pop culture artifact: a flawless record pulled from the wreckage of real lives. As one of classic rock's foundational albums, it holds up better than any other commercial smash of that ilk (Hotel California, certainly). We can now use it as a kind of nostalgic benchmark-- that they don't make groups like that anymore, that there is no rock band so palatable that it could be the best-selling album in the U.S. for 31 weeks. Things work differently now. Examined from that angle, Rumours was not exactly a game changer, it was merely perfect.


Armed with a diverse bag of tricks, the 25-year-old L.A. singer offers some of the best R&B of the year on these three fearless EPs.

Art Dealer Chic, Vols. 1-3

For much of the past decade, contemporary male R&B has been the genre of the calling card, of familiar songwriting perspectives, sounds, and vocal tics being plumbed by prolific auteurs until a song is unmistakable even on first listen. But the fall in popularity and prolificacy of stalwarts like R. Kelly, The-Dream, and Ne-Yo has dovetailed with R&B's embrace of-- or forced marriage to-- David Guetta's brand of house music, which in turn has elevated safe and malleable singers like Usher and Chris Brown above the genre itself. Even Trey Songz, the current male R&B star who has seen a rise in popularity despite foregoing a move towards dance music, is oppressively vanilla. The niche has been filled partly by rappers like Drake and J. Cole, who let their love of R&B and songwriting seep deep into their music, with the former, of course, often singing himself.
If there's any light in the tunnel, it isn't coming (yet, at least) from artists like the Weeknd and Frank Ocean, both of whom have presented singular points of view, but have only flirted with the radio and are still regarded by mainstream audiences as curios. But there is Miguel, a 25-year-old Los Angeles native who is currently a minor pop star trying to prove his staying power. He isn't a callback, though, to guys like Kelly or The-Dream, who, at least temporarily, reworked the lexicon of R&B. In fact, the most unique and magnetic thing about Miguel's music is how hard it is to pin down, and just how deep and diverse his bag of tricks seems to be. This became starkly obvious on three fantastic singles (released across summer 2010 and spring 2011) from his debut album. "All I Want Is You", the lead, was dark and dusty in a way that recalled when hip-hop and R&B started to approach each other in the 1990s; "Sure Thing", its follow-up and his biggest hit to date, nodded at neo-soul without losing its modernity; and "Quickie" refixed reggae into something distinctly post-coital.
The key with Miguel's music is that nothing comes off as an experiment. Instead, he leaves you with the impression that he loves music and exploring his own mind equally. It's an approach that is refreshingly uncynical, and he carries it over to Art Dealer Chic, his recently released series of EPs. The three volumes comprise nine songs and just about 30 minutes of music, and despite a total throwaway track and two others that he reprises from earlier mixtapes, they contain some of the best R&B music of the year, as well as further evidence that the man with no calling card isn't about to get lost in the shuffle anytime soon. Across the releases he's lovestruck, horny, self-centered, insecure, apocalyptic, and suspicious, and he impressively traverses almost enough sonic territory to match (although Prince does loom large).
Let's hit the showstoppers first. "Adorn", the lead track off volume one, has the slink, sheen, and falsetto of the 1980s, but it's the way in which Miguel cuts through the grinding, whirring bass with radiant backing vocals that makes the song so beguiling. At just over two minutes it's a straight rush of endorphins. Then there's "Arch n Point" and "...ALL", the first two tracks from volume two, which encroach a bit on the Weeknd's cornering of dark, conflicted R&B. The former is the project's sexiest song, with Miguel imagining fishnets and bottle service. It's built on stacked, heavy guitars that he softly ratchets up in intensity toward a subtle climax that indicates a confidence in his own songwriting (a more unsure artist probably would've unleashed an ill-advised solo). "...ALL" is Miguel's take on clubby R&B, but instead of opting for the meathead bleat of Dr. Luke, he dips into organ-house as he finally turns his pen on himself, singing about his thirst for sucess, then questioning whether he's selfish before finally concluding, "fuck it, everybody's selfish."
Volume three doesn't quite scrape those heights, but it shows that Miguel can retain his singularity even when he's at his most referential. "Party Life" is a rather overt homage to Prince's "1999", but the track is constructed and sung in a way that acknowledges the Purple One fandom without donning a white blouse. There's also "Candles in the Sun, Blowin' in the Wind", a political, Marvin Gaye-ish track that wins out over its slight hamhandedness by using the vocabulary of hip-hop and approaching something like political corruption in the first place. The third volume, like the other two, contains one track that isn't up to snuff, and it's only that forgettable one-third that drags the entire collection down.
But the highs here are very high, and in whetting the appetite for his presumably forthcoming sophomore album, Miguel has maybe inadvertently set expectations sky-high. But if there's anyone who can handle it, it's this guy. While his peers are mostly either shamelessly chasing trends or burrowing deep underground, Miguel is straddling the line with songwriting that achieves singularity through its unpredictability. On "…ALL" he belts, "I ain't afraid to fail/ Can't you tell?" and very rarely do you see an artist sum up his or her own appeal so succinctly. Everyone in the major-label music business is scared as hell of failing; Art Dealer Chic is what happens when you're not. What a breath of fresh air.


This promising project from Toronto is indebted to the atmospheric dream pop of Atlas Sound but manages to carve out its own identity.

Foxes in Fiction: Swung From the Branches

Swung From the Branches

While people were waiting anxiously for Merriweather Post Pavilion to leak at end of 2008, Bradford Cox of Deerhunter and Atlas Sound encouraged people to channel their anticipation into creativity. "My advice to those who are so desperate for AC's album to leak is to pick up instruments and make your own version of what you would want it to sound like," he said on his blog. I think Cox might find a kindred spirit in Toronto's Warren Hildebrand, who records as Foxes in Fiction. Not only was Swung From the Branches initially released only on cassette, but with its narcotized indie pop cast and song titles like "15 Ativan (Song for Erika)", "Operating Room", and "Visiting Hours", it almost seems like Hildebrand was making the follow-up to Logos he couldn't wait for.
If Hildebrand learned anything from Cox, it's that it's good to err on the side of generosity. His MySpace page gives an origin story for every track from Swung From the Branches, and the tape itself is a monster to get through-- 22 tracks, 71 minutes, and sequenced more like a hard drive dump than a cohesive first statement. In fact, for the first 20 minutes, you might think Foxes in Fiction were strictly a drone act. It's all pretty (if undistinguished) major-key swells broken up by crumbled drums redolent of Boards of Canada at their most downtempo ("Coffee Cups That Won't Break Down") and culminating in "8/29/91", a seven-minute backdrop for a rambling Bukowksi soliloquy that is somewhat at odds with what is otherwise an hour of almost exclusively serene sounds.
In a vacuum, the static-laced "Mialectric" wouldn't signify a noise-to-signal transition, but within the context of Branches, it's the first sign of the dreamy, lo-fi looped pop that subtly breaks Branches wide open. At first, the reverence in Hildebrand's more traditionally structured pieces can be tough to overlook-- amongst others, the downy prom nighter "Snow Angels" and "Jimi Bleachball" have near-exact DNA matches in certain Deerhunter and Atlas Sound songs. But while his loops have a certain sonic cohesion, ranging in timbre from hollowed synths to springy guitar, the difference lies in their scale and intent. Both "To Go Home" and "Memory Pools" trigger a hypnotic stasis, but the former feels borne of staring into the sun, the latter at a pinwheel. "New Panic Cure" and "15 Ativan (Song for Erika)" also work as two interpretations of the same idea: both find footing into two chords and Hildebrand's washed-out vocals, but the slow-motion arpeggios make "Cure"'s waltz sound of unsettling sedation, whereas the flickering African guitar figure in "15 Ativan" lends a strange optimism into a story of failed overdose.
But for all of Branches' compositional charms, its main draw is something that almost exists outside of the music. Some feel that information overload has robbed the music-making process of mystery, but do you want artists or magicians? Hildebrand is as transparent as it gets. As a lyricist, he prefers function over poetry, but you can find poetry on his Blogger page as well his own mixtapes filled with songs from the exact type of artists you'd expect (Bibio, Benoît Pioulard). And that's the greatest strength of Branches-- it short-circuits the feeling-out process you're used to from new artists and communicates its creator's view of the world directly. It's not always thrilling, but it's consistently absorbing, and for over an hour, you really do get an idea of what's going on in Hildebrand's head. I get the feeling we'll be hearing a lot more of it.


Given a leg up by Roc Marciano, the veteran rapper returns with his own take on classic, streetwise East Coast rap: tales of nefarious business delivered in painstaking, and often chilling, detail.

Flintlock

Calling yourself the “first gangster to rap over Neptunes beats” is a bold claim—but it’s just one in a series of industry boasts Knowledge the Pirate has amassed in an under-the-radar career that goes back to the 1990s. The rapper, who splits his time between Harlem, Philadelphia, and New Jersey, was originally discovered by Will Smith’s de facto bodyguard, Charlie Mack, in a rap battle. He was flown to Hollywood to attend the Jack the Rapper industry convention, where he impressed new jack swing pioneer Teddy Riley and signed a short-lived deal with Interscope. Knowledge moved on to rhyming over early beats by Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo before Clipse became the Neptunes’ dope boys of choice; he also notched up ghostwriting credits on Will Smith’s Born to Reign. Throughout his musical moves, Knowledge maintained his street reputation, which allowed him to later brag, “I’m a real street dude. I’m not really bullshitting. I took Biggie Smalls’ girl.” But despite having his talent noticed by influential names, Knowledge grew impatient and distanced himself from the music world.
During this hiatus, Knowledge struck up a friendship with Roc Marciano, who persuaded him to pick up the mic again and offered him guest spots on his albums. Roc is now enshrined as the figurehead of a revered strain of East Coast hip-hop that layers shadowy, backstreet vignettes over quietly menacing, soul-sampling production, and it’s this canon of contemporary thug-rap mood music that Knowledge’s long-coming debut, Flintlock, adds to. Roc handles a third of the production duties himself—along with dropping a guest verse on the celebratory, almost gloating “Cant Get Enough”—and the rest comes courtesy of in-camp allies Elemnt and Mushroom Jesus. Together, they create a grainy, soul-saturated backdrop that complements Knowledge’s gravel-voiced dispatches from the crime world.
Knowledge’s declarative style is key to Flintlock’s appeal. He’s like a beat reporter: There is no room in his lyrics for overly tricksy wordplay or abstract ambiguity, just the cold restatement of facts detailing various nefarious and often brutal situations. If Roc Marciano is the slick-talking one in the room, Knowledge is the guy who very clearly warns everyone else what will happen if things do not go precisely to plan. There’s an ellipsis of violence in the steady tone of his voice even when he’s not documenting specific acts of retribution.
Case in point: “Wrinkled Feathers” is bedded by an Elemnt beat that mixes sinewy organ lines with flashes of guitar twangs as Knowledge introduces himself, “Hand on my nine while I’m taking these orders.” He proceeds to deliver the latest report: “So many died swimming in these waters/They found that nigga last night, body parts stuffed in the storage/Now his team is stagnant and dormant/When they seen it on the news that that nigga was a government informant.” Going forward, Knowledge mandates his team carry out background checks before striking up new business relationships. It’s a logical solution to a dramatic scenario.
The absence of gangsterized flights of fancy stamps Flintlock with an authentic feel. The understated way Knowledge relays tales of firearms and contraband—and alludes to the morals of the hustling game—heightens the tension. On the bluesy “Beers, Bullets & Bloodshed” he shows a keen eye for sketching a crime scene. A pit stop at a bar unravels to reveal a “musketeer over there standing on the stairs”; the young guns sitting at the back of the bar swigging vodka, we learn, are plotting to “knock ’em out they rocking chairs.” The nervy setup unfurls like a camera slowly panning to illuminate the scenario in painstaking detail. It’s this steady, mature hand that ultimately defines Flintlock—and gives credence to the potential that the Neptunes and Teddy Riley saw all those years ago.


The Chicago rapper’s second album is a transcendent coming-of-age tale built around cosmic jazz and neo-soul, delivered by a woman deeply invested in her interiority and that of the world around her.

Room 25

If Noname’s 2016 debut Telefone was the musings of a young woman trying to write her way into a sense of place and self, then Room 25 is the blazing soliloquy that spills out after putting the pen down to live a life. Almost immediately, we’re met with one of the greatest lines of the year: “My pussy teachin’ ninth-grade English/My pussy wrote a thesis on colonialism.” It goes on, a modern coming-of-age tale, the now 27-year-old rapper examining her triumphs and shortcomings with sharp commentary. Acutely aware of her fallibility as both subject and narrator, she avoids falling into the trap of painting a blemish-free portrait of herself. And it's this sincerity that allows her music to connect: cheap perfection may go down easy, but sitting with the truth is transcendent.
Reared in Chicago's poetry community, Fatimah Warner’s flows are less breakneck spitter and more delicate spoken word—soothing but imbued with purpose, soft but commanding. On Room 25, she enlists fellow Chicagoan and frequent collaborator Phoelix, whose resonant live production bathes Noname's lyrics in a haze of cosmic jazz and smooth neo-soul. When she raps “Somebody hit D'Angelo/I think I need him for this one” on the vulnerable “Don't Forget About Me,” it solidifies the connection between generations of organic, mindful, black music: Room 25 is the stylistic lovechild of Common’s Like Water for Chocolate and Erykah Badu’s Mama's Gun—genre-marrying albums as transformative for listeners as they were the artists that created them.
With this record, Noname takes a metamorphic period in her life and shapes it into music. She details the courage of allowing a lover to trace the geography of her body and the heartbreak that followed; the gratification of realizing of a dream and the responsibilities that came with it. She is an enigma parading as an open book, and the details she chooses to divulge seem to hide as much as they reveal. But in the absence of oversharing, there is something universal in her work. She fashions herself an everywoman, and her words become scripture for simply moving through it.
On the charged “Blaxploitation,” she takes the broken politics of the country to task in a flurry of multisyllabic rhymes. She opens her verse breathlessly: “Penny proud, penny petty, pissing off Betty the boop,” the consonants falling on top of each other. The production, a looping confection of funky drums and bass, is the kind of beat that is constructed for the sole purpose of showcasing how Noname can punish it into submission. Quotes from ’70s films Dolemite and The Spook Who Sat by the Door surround her on either side. Along with the more mellow “Prayer Song,” it is the most explicitly political moment on an album that is powered more by subtle observation than outright attacks. She seems to smile and wink through lines, sometimes belying the gravity of them. “I’m struggling to simmer down, maybe I'm an insomni-black,” she suggests, her voice sounding like she just delivered the punchline of a joke that wasn’t really a joke.
But Noname isn’t laying claim to any “woke” labels just yet. She can do the bravado thing with the best of them or take off her cool and catch an orgasm or two. Her multitudes give her depth—something real for us to latch on to. “Ace” is a good ol’ fashioned victory lap for a trio of Chicago rappers who, over the past few years, have seen their star power continue to grow; Smino's soulful vocals on the hook bend the track towards R&B, while Noname and Saba snap back with verses celebrating their personal successes and that of other artists coming from their hometown.
The sunny “Montego Bae” also stands out as one of only a few truly lighthearted moments on an album of humble prayers and solemn reflection. Chicago singer Ravyn Lenae's voice flutters atop the keys, percussion, and low end, as she and Noname fantasize about a Caribbean fling. Evidence of Noname's sexual awakening is on proud display here: “I know my nigga like me, I know he cook his curry spicy/I know he eat me like I'm wifey, you know my hotel over-pricey/So he gon' fuck me like I'm Oprah.” Still, the sting of heartbreak lingers. Sometimes it comes out as fiery barbs (as on “Self”) and sometimes it’s more matter-of-fact. “I know you never loved me but I fucked you anyway/I guess a bitch like to gamble, I guess a bitch like to lonely,” she confesses on the radiant “Window.”
Through the existential dread of “Don't Forget About Me,” she grapples with immortality and the feeling that some demons follow you no matter where you go: “Welcome to Beverly Hills/Welcome to Vicodin, I took the pills/I think they save lives.” What is pain is also affirmation—her best and only proof that we are not alone in the dark. And in the album’s final minutes, she finds some semblance of peace. She is reborn on the guitar and piano-laden track “no name,” clear-eyed and steady, exposing the things that make her unbreakable and reminding us that after a tumultuous year on the road and a personal transformation, what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger.
Noname doesn't exist in contrast to other popular women rappers or to the narratives of violence that have plagued her hometown. She's not interested in exceptionalism, only in her interiority and that of the world around her. And Room 25 reconciles expectation with result, the choice of others versus self. It's the kind of album you make when a new place and a fragile heart threatens to unravel you and when you inevitably cobble back together the pieces that, it turns out, were never lost. She relieves herself of the need to answer her own tough questions—about her career, her relationships, about who she is as a person—and allows herself a gentle acceptance. Room 25 is quarter-life crisis turned breakthrough, a balm through which Noname offers a taste of the simple sort of heaven that she's still searching for herself.


The New Jersey rapper returns with a supreme sense of confidence. He glides effortlessly over grainy beats, putting his skill for meandering but meticulous raps on full display.

#RICHAXXHAITIAN

Mach-Hommy has accomplished a rare form of anonymity in the digital age. He’s rarely seen without a mask or Haitian flag bandana adorning his face, plus it’s borderline impossible to find his government name online. But even in candid moments, he keeps his cards close. Mach’s virtual listening event for #RICHAXXHAITIAN, which was designed to welcome listeners into his world, felt shrouded in intentional secrecy: A pair of streams that ran the album once, with no fast-forwarding or rewinding available, no lyrics provided, and buffering and skipping to be expected. The brand of confidentiality he’s built as part of his public persona—marked by a refusal to explain himself, instead letting his knowledge and skill say it all—is akin to a tenured professor who is allergic to slowing down as they blister through lectures. Only if you engage with the material with attention and care will the image of Mach become a little clearer.
#RICHAXXHAITIAN is Mach’s first solo venture in nearly three years, since the critically acclaimed Pray for Haiti and Balens Cho (Hot Candles) dropped in 2021. The list of collaborators is packed with familiar faces: Fellow underground darlings, like Sadhugold, Conductor Williams, and Quelle Chris, help out on production duties, while Tha God Fahim, Your Old Droog, and other guests contribute verses. But the close-knit circle doesn’t mean Mach needs to rely on old tricks; instead, he’s thrillingly meticulous, putting his talent for daisy-chaining raps and concepts on full display. #RICHAXXHAITIAN is his most expansive project since 2016’s HBO (Haitian Body Odor); it’s an opus executed with a level of precision that’s come to be expected of the prolific rapper.
Mach has cemented himself as a shapeshifter, contorting his voice to rap, sing, and glide over the grainy surface of his beats. And while #RICHAXXHAITIAN is a quintessential Mach-Hommy project—the mixing makes his words garble through the muddiness as if they’re hazy memories, similar to previous records—the production landscape is vast enough to evoke all of his vocal personalities. The percussive crashes and soothing scales from the hands of pianist Georgia Anne Muldrow create the perfect foil for Mach’s morose bars on “Sonje.” His crooning against the accordion on “The Serpent and the Rainbow,” the storybook piano loops of the Quelle Chris-composed “Copy Cold,” and the trudging drums of “Antonomasia” are perfect for headphones on a sub-zero day in Newark in 1997. All register as adventures born out of ease and supreme confidence.
His meandering style turns his verses into close reading exercises. Mach’s raps are effective because of his trilateral approach: The man possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of cultural touchstones, an innate sense of timing that catches the listener off-balance, and a gallows humor that is ripe for comical punchlines. Even if some seem unspectacular in a vacuum (“Flip you on the track like Tyshawn Jones,” he spits with delight to open “Padon,” and “blue cheese” bars on “Gorgon Zoe Lan”), the precision and detail with which he strings the references together is one of his strongest artistic gifts. When you recognize the wordplay hidden in the depths of “Antonomasia,” or lose yourself in the parallelism of “Guggenheim Jeune,” you’ll realize that Mach is a master manipulator of structure. Like a virtuoso of martial arts, his flurries of bars are not aimless swings or lucky punches—but pinpoint jabs that land harder with every hit.
Across its 17 tracks and 47 minutes, #RICHAXXHAITIAN feels like the closest to a biographical work for Mach-Hommy. That’s not to say the album is rife with sordid details and tell-all tales. His signature caginess and opacity remain; personal histories are contained to topics already known to fans, like his immigration journey from Port-au-Prince to New Jersey. As on previous projects, he’ll launch into Kreyòl without a lick of concern about the potential need for translation. But the choice causes his more forthright statements and vignettes to land with more vigor, especially when he delivers them with a bristling rancor. There are hooks about the International Monetary Fund and interludes about how the scourge of late-stage capitalism is keeping Haiti from achieving revolutionary change. When Mach spits, “White phosphorus fell on civilians in Gaza/Troglodytes squadron yelling epithets in a jogger,” with ferocity on “POLITickle,” it lands with the impact of an expanding bullet. A particular line rings in your ears on “Lon Lon,” as his rambling brushes against the angelic flute of the 1970 Archie Whitewater sample; it’s a proclamation of who Mach is and why he does this: “I’m not your token Nigger boy rapping/I’m a charming-ass composer.”
For long stretches of its runtime, #RICHAXXHAITIAN cruises around like a victory lap, for better or for worse. Mach spars with Roc Marciano, Tha God Fahim, and Black Thought, the legendary emcees blistering over sample loops stride-for-stride, as if their chemistry sliders are turned up to the max. The album is not without missteps, like a regrettable Your Old Droog verse on “Empty Spaces” and a Kaytranada-produced single that would have been better as a loosie. But enough peaks overcome the project’s shallow valleys. Take the finale, “Holy ___,” with its lush choral arrangements and decadent orchestral strings, which feel like a biblical exaltation of his journey as an artist and adherence to the values that have allowed him to retain his soul. Mach departs with final pieces of wisdom about the realities of the streets he grew up in, sneaking in a sly qualifier: “Just an observation from a Haitian teaching all the Yanks,” he raps. It arrives with an aimless shrug, as if Mach holds all the truths you may need. He doesn’t care about what direction you believe his sound should go into, or if you’re convinced about the gospel he’s doling out—the moment his voice hits your eardrum, he will command your full attention.


The London band's new record appears to be an exercise in propaganda for their combined health: Alluding to the bond between the band's members and having reached the fourth LP in their catalog, Four feels like revisionist history in action.

Four

The smart money says the title of Bloc Party's new album is a reference to the fact that it's the fourth album made by the original four members. Less likely is the possibility that it's also an acknowledgement of the four contentious years that have passed since their last LP, Intimacy, which included rumors that the band was breaking up or even considering moving on without Kele Okereke. The implicit solidarity pledge makes sense since the bulk of Four is built from the same elements as 2005's Silent Alarm, by far their most popular album-- sharp, pugilistic dual-guitar interplay, Okereke's S.O.S. vocal mannerisms, a jittery human rhythm section rather than a drum machine. But everyone appears to have lost a slight but significant step over the past seven years, and Four conveys the experience of watching an athlete reliant on explosive physicality realize that his body is betraying him.
Take "He Begins to Lie" and "Team A", the sort of Bloc Party songs that once could have stopped and cut on a dime but now just awkwardly slam into the chorus. Too often on Four, Okereke and Russell Lissack forgo serrated guitar hooks for blunt grunge riffing, and the rhythm section has become a wholly reactive entity, unable to push a song if and when the melodies fail. While Okereke's voice is recorded curiously low and subject to numerous filters throughout Four, he's still "got it" to an extent: His unhinged belting saves the otherwise unmemorable "3x3", and a spirited "we can feel it in our bones!" cuts through the plodding "Kettling". But otherwise, the effort's there without the inspiration, and when he peppers his lyrics with hashtag hopefuls like "snitches get stitches," "the empire never ended," "let me show you how we do in my hood," and "you can be the one percent if you wanna!" his sloganeering morphs into something closer to non sequitur.
But even if they don't have the physical stamina to properly recreate Silent Alarm, that's no reason to hold them back. Bloc Party started to prove that they were becoming more adept at being lovers than fighters, and past highlights such as "I Still Remember", "Blue Light", and "Signs" were gushing love songs as spirited and gripping as their ones about gas prices and such. While Four is just about there rather than noticeably bad most of the time, any suspicion that its biggest crime is not being as good as Silent Alarm can be quelled by the utterly dumbfounding "We Are Not Good People" and "Coliseum", which respectively find Bloc Party breaking their rusty cage and running to touch, peel, and stand at the intersection of MTV "Unplugged" and "Headbanger's Ball". There's nothing wrong with finding new influences, but it's unfathomable that these were two of the best 12 songs they came up with over the span of an Olympiad. That said, they are the only times where Bloc Party actually sound like they're having as much fun as they want you to think they are.
It's all unconvincing because out of the post-punk Class of 05, Bloc Party were the ones voted "most likely to succeed" while the likes of Futureheads and Maximo Park were actually out partying. Bloc Party's 2007 album *A Weekend in the City *was personally revealing, sonically bold, and sorely underappreciated, and while Intimacy was rushed and not particularly strong, it at least had a sense of direction. Combined with Okereke's actual dance-focused solo album The Boxer and his work with Hercules and Love Affair, it's clear Silent Alarm was a launching pad, not a nest. Maybe that's the message of this record's best song: "V.A.L.I.S." describes the kind of man you hate to see your ex with, one that plays by the rules and has things figured out. Okereke tellingly admits before Four's sole effortlessly catchy hook: "He's not the real me." It's ultimately debatable whether or not Four is the "real" Bloc Party, but revisionist history isn't supposed to be a duller version of the real thing.


The rising Oakland rapper and the Connecticut-raised beatmaker team up for a short and ridiculously fun tape about football, talking shit, pimping, and more football.

ALLBLACK / Kenny Beats: 2 Minute Drills EP

2 Minute Drills EP

Not everyone can discover new ways to say they’re going to beat somebody’s ass, but Oakland’s ALLBLACK never has an issue. There’s a point on 2 Minute Drills, his collaborative project with the inescapable Kenny Beats, where ALLBLACK is fed up with the haters in his DMs and aggressively sends out this threat: “Stay the fuck out of my DMs and quit stalkin’ my page/Before my kids Whip and Nae Nae on your fuckin’ face.” The visual of ALLBLACK not caring enough to handle the business himself, but sticking his kids on his critics, to hit moves from a Silentó music video on their dome, is the type of creativity that makes rap threats a treasure. And while 2 Minute Drills isn’t about ALLBLACK sending shots, the line is indicative of a rapper taking standard Bay Area hip-hop and making it all his own.
Bay Area pimping raps go back to the days of Too $hort (and beyond), and similar to the West Coast legend, ALLBLACK comes from the world of pimping, beginning when he was just a teenager. But ALLBLACK never glorifies it and rarely spits about it outright. On 2 Minute Drills, he uses football analogies to speak about his experiences as a pimp. It’s a heavy topic that ALLBLACK doesn’t shy away from throughout the eight brief tracks, and the darkness is offset by ALLBLACK’s charismatic personality and Kenny Beats’ instrumentals that are ready for the next Marshawn Lynch touchdown celebration.
Every song on 2 Minute Drills, hovers, naturally, around the two-minute mark, as ALLBLACK enters, gets to the point, and then is out. He never stays on one topic for long, and behind his onslaught of football references is a gruff and animated flow, with his closest parallel being the absurdity of Detroit’s Sada Baby (the Oakland-Detroit connection is storied). ALLBLACK hardly wastes a second on the project. After some simple football metaphors, he gets to “3 Point Stance,” where Kenny Beats captures the Bay Area bounce and ALLBLACK wrestles with a moral dilemma. He doesn’t valorize the practice of pimping, but defends it as a hustle, saying, “Ass clapping, thank you appreciate it/Word to bitches that really out here bag chasin’.” He even criticizes others on their high horse, “Talk down to a stripper, but you on the Gram naked.” It’s an inner-conflict that ALLBLACK works out in the span of 119 seconds on a track tailor-made for West Coast strip clubs. But he never gets too preachy, always circling back to his belligerent ad-libs, the ones that keep everything here in the fun realm of ridiculousness.
ALLBLACK is having a moment that radiates so much star power he even overshadows the impact of Kenny Beats. The Connecticut-raised producer’s latest transformation is as a Bay Area beat wizard. He can drop in instrumentals that incorporate the snaps and funky melody made for cruising down the sizzling streets of Oakland like “76 Buccaneers.” Then he’ll switch it up and let his hi-hats rattle for a function-starter like “Weigh Ins.” But when the project is finished it’s all about ALLBLACK, who raps, walks, and emits the energy of a Bay Area star. Just stay out him his DMs if you aren’t talking sweet.

Play Runners Association  / D.O.T.S. / Empire


This box set collects remastered versions of Scott Walker's first five solo albums. For those who know Walker's music through his avant-garde material from the last 20 years, these highly arranged and orchestrated pop records seems to come from another world. But the dark and strange themes were already there.

Scott Walker: Scott: The Collection 1967-1970

Scott: The Collection 1967-1970

The story of the singer Scott Walker is typically split into three parts. The first is of his brief career with the melancholy orchestral-pop group the Walker Brothers, who for a couple of years in the mid-1960s were famous enough to be a front-cover concern on Tiger Beat magazine and have their car overturned by fans while they were still sitting in it. Walker quickly became uncomfortable with this, and in 1967 went solo with four theatrical and increasingly dark albums, all called Scott. "GOING SOLO IN A MONASTERY!" a headline in Melody Maker read-- a monastery Walker had to leave because fans started banging on the door looking for him.
The Scott albums-- now remastered and collected into a box set with 1970's 'Til The Band Comes In-- are the fulcrum of Walker's career: You can hear where he'd been, and in retrospect, where he was going; his third act was emerging after 20 years of almost total silence with Tilt, The Drift, and Bish Bosch, released between 1997 and 2012. Walker's latter-day albums are fearless and violent, featuring wailing donkeys, moans, scrapes, and famously, the sound of someone punching meat. They seem to have been written in another language entirely.
The Scott albums, however, remain part of a tradition of highly arranged, rock-free music that valued old songs over new sounds and professionalism over innovation. "I don't wanna see my fans walking around like drugged zombies," Walker told a journalist around the time Scott came out in 1967, a rejection of the psychedelic culture prevalent at the time. Instead, he embraced conventionally gorgeous, string-heavy music targeted at housewives and elderly people. At the same time, he fell headlong into existentialist literature and European art-house cinema. He appeared on variety shows, and remained either at or near the top of the charts. He also developed a pitch-black sense of humor, and in his rich, mocking baritone explored songs about Soviet dictators and the spiritual poverty of men who only feel human in the company of whores.
"Jackie", the single released in advance of Scott 2, was banned by the BBC. When the album came out, it went to Number 1. It remains the first recorded instance of the hyphenated adjective "stupid-ass" that I can think of. By 1969 Walker was writing epics about Ingmar Bergman movies featuring dissonant choir arrangements and trumpets blowing through canyons of reverb. Around this time he was also given his own television show, where he performed all your toe-tapping and heart-rending favorites in black sunglasses, without smiling.
This is the Scott Walker of the late 1960s: As passionately invested in covers of Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra hits as in singing the word "gonorrhea"; voted "Mr. Valentine" by Disc & Music Echo the same year he released a song about a young man routinely raped by military officers. His best performances convey the deep tragedy of their subjects while managing to laugh at them with a cruelty and indifference available to only the most total of douchebags.
The essential contrast in his late-60s albums is between easy-listening music and forbiddingly difficult subject matter. It's a dichotomy that has always made Walker seem more like an outsider artist than a mainstream one. It's also fodder for a case that Walker was "subversive," an accolade for alternative-music fans who, especially now, can recast him as some kind of mole inside the machine, exposing the innocent people of Britain to material that would make their middle-class spines shiver. This isn't untrue. But it also smoothes over the fact that the Scott albums are different pieces of music that leave different impressions. Any attempt to lump them together is more a matter of laziness or historical convenience than anything else. If you look at the credits from Scott onward, what you see, essentially, is Walker taking over the show: on Scott, he wrote three songs among its 12, the rest covers; by Scott 4, he wrote them all.
Walker's choice of covers essentially falls into two camps: Easygoing heartbreak music and songs by the Belgian writer Jacques Brel. The latter's impact on Walker can't be understated: Walker covered him nine times on his first three albums, and some of the most elegant expressions of Walker's romantic but poisoned worldview are his. Take "The Girls and the Dogs", from Scott 2, a psychopathically chipper song about how men are longing, women are fickle, and dogs are lucky to not care either way. "The dogs, well you know the dogs, they lift up a leg as they see it end/ The dogs, well you know the dogs, and maybe that's why they're man's best friend," goes the refrain. "And yet," Walker sings toward the end, "it's because of the girls, when they've knocked us about and our tears want to shout/ That we kick the dogs out." Over the course of about 10 seconds, his voice hardens from drippy sympathy to resolute meanness, and as the song fades out, he defers to a choir of trombones that sound like they wandered out of a burlesque show. In essence: The world is a monochromatically cruel place, so ha ha ha, fuck it.
Walker's own songs are more ambiguous. From Scott 2, "The Amorous Humphrey Plugg" tells the story of a deflated husband who finds his peace of mind wandering thorugh the red-light district at night. "Leave it all behind me," he sings, sailing away on a tide of violins. "Screaming kids on my knee and the telly swallowing me/ And the neighbors shouting next door/ And the subway trembling the rollerskate floor." Like good satire, Jacques Brel's songs cue you to laugh then startle you with reality. Walker puts you in the uncomfortable position of wondering whether to laugh in the first place, or to just lean back and allow these characters a glory that eludes them in their own lives.
Then there are songs like the simple, country-influenced "Duchess", from Scott 4. The same singer who rejected psychedelia started writing the kind of impressionistic lyrics whose nonsense is more penetrating than anything more literal could be. "It's your shiftless flesh and your old-girl's grace," he sighs. "It's your young girl's face that I'm breathing." In both sound and lyric, Walker's music became more and more evocative, leaving behind the easy gratification of his earlier albums for broad, cinematic arrangements and stories that end not on punch lines, but question marks.
There are defenders of 1970's 'Til The Band Comes In. I am not one of them, and for what it's worth, neither was Walker. Reportedly puzzled by the fact that his audience wasn't interested in dense songs about hookers and child abuse, he made the humble mistake of trying to will himself back to popularity. It has redeeming moments-- like the eulogistic "Joe"-- but not many. Its worst songs are embarrassing: In an irony Walker could probably appreciate in time, he'd become one of the gloriously desperate people he'd sung about only a year or two earlier.
For anyone who hasn't heard Scott Walker before, the prospect of buying a five-album box set like The Collection is ridiculous. For fans that already own these albums, it's absurd. The recordings are, of course, "remastered," which I can discern only in fleeting moments. And unlike the now out-of-print In Five Easy Pieces, whose discs were organized by theme, The Collection goes for a straightforward archival treatment, with a nice selection of period interviews and a beautifully synthesized essay by Rob Young, an editor at British experimental-music magazine The Wire.
It is ultimately yet another example of a record company attempting to re-brand material still available to consumers. Walker is a cult artist, more obscure than he ever was in the late 1960s but also more intensely beloved. You can almost hear the saliva of marketing teams hitting conference-room desks at the prospect of issuing 180-gram gatefold vinyl. Still, there are worse artists to focus the effort on. In a 2008 interview with the Guardian, Walker blamed some of his ugly output in the 1970s on label pressures to "stay in the game"-- a convenient story coming from an artist, but if there's any truth to it, The Collection is a simple but elegant way of repaying some of the debt.


This collaboration between L.A. producer Adrian Younge's soul-steeped live band and Ghostface Killah tells the story of Tony Starks, an enforcer for the DeLuca crime family, who's murdered by his former employers after striking out on his own.

Ghostface Killah & Adrian Younge: Twelve Reasons to Die

Twelve Reasons to Die

When I saw Ghostface perform with Adrian Younge at SXSW last month, it seemed like the two hadn't figured each other out at all. Younge's band would launch into thrilling versions of classics like "Buck 50", then lurch to a halt while Younge demanded we pay our respects. Ghostface stood by, looking bewildered and clearly just wanting to rap. After several false starts, Younge asked Ghostface if he wanted to rap over vinyl; "I'll do anything you want," Ghostface said, somewhat plaintively. Nonetheless, the team-up between the two soul-steeped musicians seemed sound on paper, and I remained optimistic that they would eventually lock into a groove.
They might yet still-- judging from their performance on Fallon recently, they've already hit a new plateau*.* And Twelve Reasons to Die, their collaborative album, has a crazy-promising conceptual framework; playing off of Ghostface's well-worn persona, it tells the story of Tony Starks, an enforcer for the DeLuca crime family, who is murdered by his former employers after striking out on his own. His remains are melted in vinyl and pressed into a dozen LPs that, when played, resurrect him as the Ghostface Killah, a force for revenge incarnate. Ghostface has unparalleled storytelling instincts; he might be the best, most colorful storyteller rap has ever seen. The prospect of him letting his imagination pour itself into the album's four-color-panel universe is enticing. Adrian Younge's band is incredible, rifling through psychedelic soul, Stax, spaghetti western, and more.
And yet Twelve Reasons feels, frustratingly, like a really good idea from extremely talented people that needed more time. Ghostface's lyrics, for one, are uncharacteristically flat and literal, narrating the story's turns in clunky exposition like "I declare war/ War on the DeLucas" and "I want mothers and sons/ I want to murder they daughters/ Revenge, all I see is blood in my eyes/ Like the rise of your worst nightmare, come alive." There are livewire lines scattered here and there, but Ghost sounded more alive, and packed more Tony Starks mojo, into the low-stakes pre-holiday-rush Wu-Block project and his verse for Cruel Summer's "New God Flow" than he does into most of Twelve Reasons. And even for a project specifically intended to lovingly burnish Ghost's mythology, there are so many bald Wu-Tang references -- "Too many enemies is out there, son, trying to bring the ruckus," he says on ("Enemies All Around Me")," making "swarm of killer bees" references on "Rise of the Ghostface Killah" and the very next song-- that it grows distracting.
Still, Ghostface sounds incredible over Adrian Younge's band, which fits him like a custom-designed Starksmobile. "Revenge Is Sweet" opens with high voices singing wheezily over a murky, gutted snare tick and piano, channeling the enervated atmosphere of  Sly Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On before Ghost rips into the track. "Rise of the Black Suits" and "Beware of the Stare" both expertly mimic the texture of RZA loops while warming up the music's edges with cinematic touches: The howling backup singers are the aural equivalent of slow-mo widescreen. On "The Sure Shot, Pts. 1 & 2", the drummer tosses off tight, showy fills without pushing against Ghost's voice, while dirty transistor-amp guitars honk nastily in the background. Sometimes live bands can swallow a rapper with over-enthusiasm, but Younge and his crew stay restrained.
Their chemistry is so apparent that it's a shame the final product isn't better. It reminds me of Freeway's The Stimulus Package, another seemingly can't-miss proposition from two phenomenal talents that fell just short. Like a lot of what Ghost has done in the past few years-- Apollo Kids, The Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City, and Wu-Massacre-- Twelve Reasons to Die basically feels like a victim of haste. Ghostface has kept up a fiendish pace even this late into his career, but at this stage, his dogged clip is hurting his output. Now that he and Younge have had some rehearsal time, at least the live show for this record is almost certain to be phenomenal. And there are more than enough positive moments here to make the pairing feel worth that effort. In the end, Twelve Reasons is generous comfort food for Ghost's fanbase, a group slowly being whittled away by time and creeping indifference.


The minimal dub-techno landscapes that Jacob Long makes as Earthen Sea carry a sense of refinement and grace. Each element of his Kranky debut is radiant.

An Act of Love

It’s rare to have any vocals appear on of the fog-enshrouded landscapes that Jacob Long devises as Earthen Sea. But earlier this month, Long cleared out his hard drive with A Serious Thing, a nine-track compilation of tracks recorded in the past three years (with all proceeds going to the International Refugee Assistance Project, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the National Lawyers Guild). Less than a minute in, the voice of firebrand gay Harlem intellectual James Baldwin emerges from the mists and speaks of the crucial role of dreamers in their respective societies. “The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us,” Baldwin said. “Soldiers don’t, statesmen don’t, priests don’t, union leaders don’t. Only the poets.”
And while there are no words and no voices that appear on An Act of Love, Long’s debut for Kranky, that poet’s search for an undeniable truth powers the eight breathtaking tracks that appear here. A hardcore veteran who’s played in D.C. bands like Amalgamation and Black Eyes, Long later played bass in the adventurous punk act Mi Ami. Over time, that trio mutated from art-rock towards the sounds of Chicago house and Jamaican dub, soon splintering into three separate electronic acts: drummer Damon Palermo became Magic Touch and guitarist Daniel Martin-McCormick became Ital.
Long himself took the foundations of dub as the starting point for his next iteration, Earthen Sea. Much like the godfathers of minimal techno—Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus, Vladislav Delay circa Multila, the entire Chain Reaction roster—Long realized there was sublimity to be had in endless reverb, delay, and its sonic residue. And with 2014’s Mirage, released on Martin-McCormick’s Lovers Rock label, Earthen Sea’s aesthetic solidified. An Act of Love is a continuation of that effort, though there’s a feeling of refinement and awareness that gives each element here a heightened radiance. Even in the buzzing static and air organ chords that comprise beatless opener “The Present Mist,” there’s a sense of grace, of deep breaths being drawn musically that makes it standout from other ambient noise of its ilk.
Earthen Sea makes minimal dub techno, but while Long’s components are suggestive of dance music—especially the 707 that drives most of the tracks—the context for each programmed hit seems to not be a packed club. Rather, Earthen Sea could soundtrack a depopulated metropolis, each beat bouncing off of concrete. A squelchy kick drives “About That Time” and other elements wash in: a canned clap, a tapped ride cymbal, a piano line as contemplative and sonorous as that of Harold Budd. But underneath all of that is a gloriously slow swell of white noise, which rises and falls like an incoming tide and is mesmerizing in and of itself.
The muffled “Apparent Lushness” sounds as if it was recorded four feet underwater, its pretty melody reminiscent of something off of Jürgen Müller’s Science of the Sea, shining through the ripples. It segues into the centerpiece “Exuberant Burning,” with Long taking a flare of feedback and making it arc across the sky like a vapor trail. A bass throbs along with the beat, and these elements all hover in place before Long adds live drums and cymbals, and moves the track forward again. A sound not unlike the distant roar of passing cars on a highway comes up, giving the track an uncanny sense of space.
After a brief interlude, the album peaks with the muscular kick of “The Flats 1975,” breaking out of the noirish mood of the previous tracks and offering up a sense of much-needed physical release. In the press materials for the album, Long noted that the months leading up to the recording of An Act of Love were “the most emotionally difficult and stressful year in my life,” which might be a sentiment shared by most people in the calendar year of 2016. But despite the darkness that intrudes in on the album—from the inky cover to the gloaming sounds within to the despairing environment in which it now enters our present day—there’s nevertheless a small kernel of hope to be gleaned. Long goes on to discuss the inspiration he got from empty city streets in the dead of night and the realization that regardless there are still people all around, as well as “the openness and possibilities that [they] can bring.” While Long only uses a steady beat and some deeply resonant chords to convey this revelation, he nevertheless moves like a poet to unearth that heartening sense of truth here.


Announced just two months ago, the Radiohead frontman's modest solo debut hits stores this week.

The Eraser

No band of the last 15 years has seen its individual players revered to the same extent as Radiohead's. Whether or not you subscribe to the church of the blinking bear, it's hard to argue against the incredible good fortune that's seen them blossom from the nebbish and resoundingly ordinary young group On a Friday. While Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood will always stand at stage center, you barely need 10 minutes with a Radiohead record to understand how readily the band shifts its weight from one member to another; so strong are their individual voices as musicians that you can practically hear the pistons moving underneath their songs.
But we're coming up on seven albums now, each one of them (if you believe the soundbites) an utterly excruciating process. That, combined with Yorke's headstrong affinity for laptop music and his MP3 era-friendly motto of expediency, has pried the door open for a solo quickie. So, on the heels of the news that Radiohead's vaunted seventh full-length wouldn't be ready any time soon, Yorke carpet-bombed fans in May by announcing The Eraser.
That was a little over seven weeks ago, and you can be sure the window between name and release was purposely kept small so as to mitigate against the weight of expectation. We know this because, for all their No Logo sloganeering, Radiohead have never been afraid to deploy a marketing juggernaut to herald their imminent return. If the message being transmitted here is a modest one, it's because The Eraser is a modest record. Contrary to some of the band's prior releases (and, perhaps, their legacy), it's not an attempt to remake the wheel, but rather, pretty much exactly the kind of thing you'd expect Yorke to make in his bedroom-- glitchy, sour, feminine, brooding, imperfect. It's also strikingly beautiful and thuddingly boring in maddeningly equal measure.
Let's start with the good stuff: Opener "The Eraser" rests on a hiccuping piano sample, a bubblebath of bloops and some gently insistent vocal acrobatics. "The more you try to erase me/ The more that I appear," sings Yorke, in the first of the album's many lines that could just as easily be about environmental crises as personal. Next up is the skittering "Analyse", which marries a twinkling piano lead to a breakbeat made of crushed glass. Lyrically, Yorke is in solid form, singing about algebra, candles in the city, and "no light in the dark." He's not nearly as sharp on the sleepy-eyed "Atoms for Peace" (how's this for a clanger: "Peel all your layers off/ I want to eat your artichoke heart"), but it provides some of the album's most serene moments, wherein he sets his falsetto against a wall of discordant keyboard drones to gorgeously vertiginous effect. Better still is the closer "Cymbal Rush", which comes off as "The Gloaming"'s moonstruck cousin. A wash of digital burbles and woozy drones, the song's second half relents to a set of galloping piano chords and complex rhythm tracks, making it, from a producerly standpoint, the most accomplished thing here.
Where The Eraser sags is in the middle, with tracks 3-5 falling particularly flat. Like too many of Radiohead's new songs, they contain a single weak idea dragged on interminably. "The Clock" is a tuneless clatter of insect noises and acoustic guitars that never changes course; "Black Swan" is a swampbucket "I Might Be Wrong" retread that barely even flaps its wings (nevermind gets off the ground); and the horrorshow talkie "Skip Divided", with its cursory arrangements and total absence of melody, feels like second-rate performance poetry.
On a smaller scale, the problems afflicting these tracks afflict the album as a whole; even allowing for the better-crafted songs, there's little-to-no dynamic range on The Eraser. As a listening experience, it's claustrophobic and compressed, and with rare exception, offers little in the way of wide open space. What little breathing room there is usually comes courtesy of Yorke's vocal, and while it's nice to see him once again testing the limits of what he can do naturally with his voice, it might not be enough to save the record for some.
The word 'gray' will be used to describe The Eraser, and with good reason-- unless you're predisposed to loving everything Yorke sets his voice against, you mind fight this an oppressively dreary affair. My totally catty suggestion: Don't bother with this unless you've already worn out the grooves on Jonny Greenwood's much less-heralded but completely brilliant Bodysong soundtrack. Or maybe, if you're really jonesing, set up two stereos and play both solo records at once, Zaireeka-style. I wouldn't be surprised at all if that worked.