When they first stepped out in the mid-90s, The Roots were regarded by many as an interesting but quaint novelty ...

Phrenology

When they first stepped out in the mid-90s, The Roots were regarded by many as an interesting but quaint novelty act. Although other hip-hop groups had used live instrumentation, The Roots were the first well-publicized, full-fledged hip-hop band, thus providing fans with a comeback when our culturally obtuse friends or relatives would say "rap isn't music." The Roots were also one of the first acts to speak out against the hip-hop tendency toward hyper-capitalism, a criticism which reached its zenith in the hilarious video for "What They Do". But, to paraphrase Biggie, things done changed in the hip-hop game. Now live musical accompaniment is becoming increasingly prevalent-- The Neptunes donned a backing band for NER*D-- and while political consciousness is still an important component of hip-hop, it's hardly unique, and no longer en vogue in an increasingly conservative cultural climate.
So what are the pioneers to do when they find that their style has been played to the extreme by half-assed imitators? What any true artists would: Submerge themselves in the lab for three years and come out with a new, airtight sound, awash with challenging-- but not too challenging-- deviations from their formula. For Phrenology, The Roots supplement their trademark loose and light jazz palate with harder, more aggressive tones, eschewing their "organic" sound and using the studio as an instrument. On "Rock You", The Roots open with a snarl, as a jagged and spare arrangement backs Black Thought's aggressive flow. As with many songs on Phrenology, "Rock You" is accented by decidedly inorganic electro flourishes, with a noticeable absence of the smooth jazz keys that made hippie hip-hop headz cream their collective jeans back in the mid-to-late-90s. Unfortunately, the track contains album's weakest hook, with Black Thought screaming, "We will rock you/ Rock You!/ ROCK YOU!" Which is exactly what they do on the acerbic, 24-second Bad Brains knock-off "!!!!!!", a straight-up, raw-as-fuck punk track which I respect for its sheer boldness, even if that it had me covering my ears.
In sharp contrast, "Water" clocks in at well over ten minutes, and is perhaps the first clear cut example of mainstream prog-hop. For hip-hop purists, it's easy to dismiss this song-- which deals with former band member Malik B's struggle with addiction-- as needlessly bloated, but given its personal subject matter, it's understandable why ?uest and crew indulged themselves in a dark, expressionistic foray into the mindset of a drug addict. We can only hope that Malik gets the message.
But despite these two extremes, Phrenology can't be boiled down simply to superfluous experimentalism or a complete abjuration of their previous work. It manages to incorporate all the elements that have characterized The Roots' sound; they revisit the old-skool hip-hop template on the "apache"-laced "Thought @ Work", where Black Thought approximates the rapid-fire cadence of Kool G. Rap (one of many examples on Phrenology that have Thought switching up his flow to compensate for the loss of Malik B). For "WAOK (Ay) Rollcall", The Roots once again enlist Ursula Rucker to give a brief spoken word piece, in which she namechecks the architects of hip-hop culture. However, there's also the overtly political number, "Pussy Galore", which may be one of the most vapid, boring examples of political consciousness ever recorded by a major hip-hop group, and the weakest spot on the album by a long shot. Hopefully, it won't become another source of ammunition in Coca-Cola's campaign to represent/co-opt "real" hip-hop.
Structurally, there's the now-expected spoken word bit at the end (this time performed by the esteemed and controversial poet Amiri Baraka), and a hidden track featuring Talib Kweli. It's preceded by two red herrings, twenty-second-long tracks of silence, and followed by a brief techno burn that's sure to have fans scratching their heads. Like "What They Do" from Illadelph Halflife and "You Got Me" from Things Fall Apart, the current single, "Break You Off", is an obligatory three-word R&B; crossover number, replete with guest vocalist Musiq's nu-soul crooning, four cellists, a noir concept video, and a $300,000 budget. Despite the obvious radio pandering, it's a beautifully smooth and melodic song, featuring some of their warmest production ever.
To The Roots' credit, they utilize their guest appearances better than on any of their other previous efforts. "Seed (2.0)", a cover of a track from L.A. crooner Cody Chesnutt's recent Headphone Masterpiece, is the most immediately satisfying track on the album-- which is surprising, since it's an orgiastic garage funk number with a blazing guitar riff that feels lifted from Sticky Fingers-era Stones.
Regardless of how you feel about The Roots' aesthetic-- I tend to gravitate toward the traditional two turntables and a microphone hip-hop paradigm-- you have to give these guys credit for making an album that so successfully combines ambition and experimentation with accessibility. Phrenology completely realizes The Roots' talents and potential, maintaining its cohesiveness despite its many disparate elements. It's a stark rebuke to those who say hip-hop artists can't turn out solid full-lengths: For its few negligible missteps, Phrenology has more than enough momentum to sustain an uninterrupted listen.


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 explore Raekwon’s game-changing 1995 debut, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx….

Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...

In 1995, critics saw in Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... the same things that fans of the record celebrated. It invented “mafioso rap” and glorified mass criminality; its songs were paeans to those hardworking souls ducking RICO charges. The album was a blueprint for narrative in gangsta rap albums. It profoundly influenced Jay-Z, Nas, and the very sound of New York rap, thanks in part to RZA’s extraordinary beats and the introduction of Raekwon and Ghostface as a legendary rap duo. But the record could be all those things, could be influential, without being widely listened to today. It could simply be an artifact of its time. Cuban Linx remains relevant not because of its violence or the way it changed rap history, but for what it really is: an anthology of brotherly love stories, framed by the deep connection between its two stars.
You don’t need to have taken a course in masculinity studies to acknowledge that American men have been socialized to avoid overt displays of emotionality. So to tell stories like the ones that Raekwon and Ghostface Killah tell on Only Built 4 Cuban Linx..., you needed to disguise the narrative. The plot needed to be cryptic and bloody. All the gangsterisms, everything that made the album so palatable to many fans, those violent elements color the story. But they are all deeply intertwined with the tenderness at the record’s core, which stands in contrast to the gritty image associated with the Wu-Tang Clan.
That said, in 1995, Raekwon had no problem talking about what Ghost meant to him. “That’s my heart right there,” he told Jeff “Chairman” Mao that year, shortly before the record was released, the third Wu solo album to follow 1993’s group debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). “We think so much alike. Like I’ll say something and he’ll be like, ‘Yo, I was just gettin’ ready to say that, son.’” RZA brought the pair together. The sage of the Wu-Tang clan had known Raekwon since second grade and was living with Ghost in the early ’90s. He saw the couple as a natural fit, notorious stick-up kids, former rivals raised in different parts of Staten Island, Ghost from the Stapleton projects, Rae from Park Hill. “They kinda hooked up and seen that similarity in them, and that’s how it went down,” he told XXL. “They didn’t know each other as well as they knew me—it was my concept.”
For RZA, the concept of Cuban Linx was business-oriented as was so much else with the Wu-Tang: the order that solo records would be released, who would appear on each song, and countless other decisions were made with the bottom line in mind. (In 1996, a Harvard Business School professor, James Cash, said the Wu were at “the head of the class in terms of strategy development.”) The album was to be designed for a specific demographic, the street guys, who the Clan had never addressed quite so directly. And for Raekwon, a full-time rap career was simply the sensible option. He had been a hood, and he was tired of that life. “I had a name for myself on that street, so my time, my sand was running out,” he told Mao. There was ample opportunity for a lateral move. He had honed his skills through battle rapping and was already recognized as one of the strongest MCs in the crew. He and Ghost took the first pair of verses on Enter the Wu-Tang, and his leadoff verse on “C.R.E.A.M.”—“I grew up on the crime side/The New York Times side”—was a minted classic.
Raekwon established a unique rhyming style on Cuban Linx. He uses short staccato bars laced with internal rhymes to deliver fragmented stories, ones for which there is a range of interpretations. His lyrics are precise and diffuse, digressive and focused, thematically consistent but constantly roving. It’s not that the narrative doesn’t add up, it’s that two dedicated listeners can disagree on exactly what happened in a verse, bar or song, without one of them being proven wrong. (It was 2016 when the rapper finally cleared up whether he had said “who sons who” or “who Sun Tzu” on “Incarcerated Scarfaces”.) On “Knowledge God,” in one of the greatest rap verses that exists, he describes a rich man named Mike Lavonia in intimate detail. It only takes Raekwon 150 words to give him a soul.
The lyrics don’t always look like much laid out: “Mafia flicks, tying up tricks/Was his main hobby/Teaching his seed, Wu-Tang karate/Mixing drinks in clubs, hairy chest with many minks.” But they are alive on record, and you come away from the verse aware of Raekwon’s affection for and knowledge of this petty emperor, Lavonia. He names his pipe Sandra (which is kind of adorable!) and claims that New York is ancient Babylon. What you may not realize is that Raekwon’s character has killed Lavonia by the time the verse begins. This man—portrayed lovingly, wistfully, and in full—is already dead.
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... is stacked with little stories like this, more an anthology than a record with a master narrative, though RZA would tell you otherwise. His inspiration for the album came from The Killer, the John Woo film in which an assassin and a police detective team up (dialogue from that film and Scarface (which was partly where that began) is sampled throughout the album). RZA has said that the narrative of Cuban Linx follows a similar path, as two characters from rival neighborhoods team up to pull off one last job before leaving the criminal life forever. But Rae and Ghost only halfway engaged in that narrative, which makes RZA’s enduring contribution not his concepts (which could be dicey!), but his ability to bring like-minds together over the most finely tuned collection of beats he ever provided for a single album, recorded in the basement of his Staten Island home. As a producer, he refused to let a simple loop carry any given song, and so classic tracks like “Criminology” and “Wu-Gambinos” are laced with additional instrumental flourishes, separate melodies that guide the tracks to a higher plane. The loop on “Ice Water” is already perfectly proportioned and RZA still can’t help but to drop scratches, switch up the rhythm of the vocal sample, and play with a half-dozen other ideas, granting the listener the simultaneous pleasures of minimalism (in repetition) and maximalism (in the number of elements at play).
Raekwon was capable of living within those intricacies, angling his words to fit pockets created by the instrumental churn. And while Ghost was his equal in terms of pure ability, he was more liable to just bulldoze through everything, letting his intuition, aggression and unmatchable sense of humor guide his bars. While many of Rae’s verses are relatively stoic (see “Incarcerated Scarfaces”), Starks brings an unparalleled energy: On “Criminology,” he talks about being “trapped by sounds/Locked behind loops,” and his verses often feel like he’s giving his all to just get the hell out of the booth, out of the basement. Even on the relatively peaceful “Wisdom Body,” ostensibly a love song, Ghost’s vibe is all wrong for the lyrics, his need to be over and done with everything just bleeding through the track, poisoning what should be a smooth, relaxed, loverman take. He was drunk when he recorded the verses to the song—as he was while recording much of the album—and you can hear him slurring. Several times, the track seems to flinch, as RZA substitutes one take for another. Even fucked up, you can hear why Ghost is a match for his partner; lines like, “Your eyes sparkle/Just like glass in the sun,” are beautiful, piercing, and sad. “I was going through a lot of real internal shit during Cuban Linx” Ghost told XXL. “I was drinking my pain away every day.”
Cuban Linx makes explicit use of that pain on songs like “Rainy Dayz,” on which an agitated Ghost spells out his troubles, fuming after he’s just been robbed. On tracks like these, his chemistry with Rae is most obvious. After he calls himself ungodly at the end of his verse, Rae extends a helping hand, kicking his verse off with wisdom from the Nation of Islam and eventually guides Ghost away from the edge of total derangement. “Half of us’ll try to make it, the other half will try to take it,” he reasons, and his rational acceptance of the random gyres of misfortune that life throws at us is the yin to Ghost’s agitated yang.
You might think, given their chemistry, that other features might slow the momentum of Cuban Linx. But fraternal affection isn’t a zero-sum game and the posse tracks on the record are as strong as the solo performances. There are sterling features from the Wu-Tang underclass, Cappadonna on “Ice Water”; U-God on “Knuckleheadz.” And Cuban Linx features the first cameo from a rapper outside of Wu Corp. on “Verbal Intercourse.” Nas shows up, in his prime, holding forth with the roving camera eye that was already familiar from his 1994 debut, Illmatic, the one New York album that consistently outranks Cuban Linx on the list of all-time great rap records. You can see why. Illmatic’s verses are far more straightforward, which makes them more accessible. Take “One Love,” where everything Nas writes to his friend in prison is intelligible to the casual listener. Compare it to the opening verse of “Knowledge God,” where the idea of writing to a friend in prison comes in halfway through, Rae reflecting on club nights when he remembers that Cousin Reek is upstate, and pivots to address Reek directly.
This is Cuban Linx: so much is jumbled, digressive, filled with ambiguous meaning, down to the title itself, which was shorn of an extra word. It’s a code, a puzzle, and a bible. Much like the slow pace of baseball was perfectly suited to the era of radio, the album owes much of its reputation to its release in the mid-1990s. This, of course, was before the iPod, when listeners who had purchased individual records wanted to sit with them, get their money’s worth, and would spend weeks if not months listening to an album, deciphering every last word. It was also before Twitter, where Rae could just solve the record’s decade-long riddles. Because the prophets weren’t available to interpret their scriptures, the members of early online forums devoted hours to hashing out the record’s Talmudic qualities, and in doing so, spread the Wu gospel.
There was a religious aspect to Rae’s raps. His slang was borrowed equally from Staten Island and the Five Percenter movement, which branched off from the Nation of Islam in the 1960s and which Raekwon associated with when he was still a kid. But he certainly wasn’t looking to alienate listeners; he was simply trying to make enough money to eat. Rapping for him was about escaping the life he had lived, exchanging criminality for criminology, and poverty for a full belly and a flute of Cristal. He was happy to move away from authenticity, and he says as much several times on Cuban Linx. “I’m out,” he says on “Knuckleheadz.” “My raps play the part like a ‘Get Smart’ secret agent,” meaning, essentially, that he was happy to be a fake James Bond, if it alleviated the risk and he could make some ends.
And then there was the added joy of having partners, people who could help you up and hold you down. Listen to the beginning of “Wu-Gambinos,” where Rae is jubilant to have an extended crew around him. Method Man’s chorus reflects that delight in the posse’s presence: “Wu roll together as one/I call my brother Son cause he shine like one.” The song is famous for the crew names, the AKA invention that would soon sweep rap. (A year later, Nas was already calling himself Nas Escobar on It Was Written.) As Rae put it to Mao: “People seen that we came in with nothin’ and left with something…. If you one of them niggas that’s just all about money, there gotta be love first. Love your niggas that you rollin’ with. Love them.”
The record ends as the crew disappears and Rae and Ghost are together, the partners rhyming in tandem, reminiscing about old robberies. Raekwon addresses the overlap directly, acknowledging their closeness: “We connect thoughts.” As the outro rolls, they lament the fragility of life, mourn dead friends, and shout out their collaborators. The guns, the bullets, the semi-fictionalized dispatched enemies: They fall away, leaving only the real world, and the realest fact of their world is love for their brothers.


Released just 10 days after Steve Albini’s death, the trio’s sixth record closes the book on the band and serves as a reliably excellent epitaph.

To All Trains

To All Trains is a Shellac record. Expectedly, thankfully, obviously, unapologetically, unremarkably a Shellac record. A 180-gram Touch and Go Records—“made with 100% Recyclable Material which is PVC & Phthalates Free and uses 79% less CO₂ to produce”—Shellac record.
Of course, the crucial difference with this particular Shellac record, their sixth, is that frontman Steve Albini passed away from a heart attack at age 61, just 10 days before its release. It’s hard to wave away the tragic circumstances clouding it, especially when it concludes with a track called “I Don’t Fear Hell” where Albini delivers the smiling-through-clenched-teeth lines, “Something something something when this is over/Leap in my grave like the arms of a lover/And if there’s a heaven, I hope they’re havin’ fun, ’cause if there’s a hell I’m gonna know everyone.” Yet To All Trains is not an album overcast by death: It’s just one more example of how someone chose to live their life.
Leading Big Black, Rapeman and, finally, math-rock trio Shellac, Albini spent 40 years dedicated to a singular vision of underground rock music that was no frills, free of overdubs, constructed with analog tools and constantly nattering with guitar tone that started shrill and slowly evolved into Morricone metal. Eminently dependable, Shellac were the Honda Civic of alternative rock—modest, reliable, generally affordable. You knew the drill. There was a new album every so often, but never too often, whenever the mood struck prolific studio engineer Albini, prolific mastering engineer Bob Weston, and working drum instructor Todd Trainer.
Most of the things that made Shellac a great band in 2000 and 2007 and 2014 were already firmly bolted into place on their 1994 debut, At Action Park: the growl ’n’ skwonk, the bludgeoning repetition, the best-sounding drums around. They’re still here, too. Unlike similarly minimalism-minded rock bands like the Ramones, Motörhead, or AC/DC, you never had to worry that Shellac were going to fall prey to the creeping influence of modern production techniques or genre trends. Shellac songs would vacillate between rancorous and caustic (2000’s “Prayer to God"), hypnotic and caustic (2007’s “The End of Radio") or funny and caustic (2014’s “All the Surveyors”), but no one was ever going to file a complaint to the Better Business Bureau about the ingredients on the label.
To All Trains naturally walks the same path and, had circumstances permitted, would likely have been appreciated simply as little more than Shellac’s sixth excellent record. At a lean 28 minutes, it’s their shortest and most instantly rewardable—no instrumentals and none of the longform post-rock indulgences of 1998’s Terraform or 2007’s Excellent Italian Greyhound. Elements of the Minutemen were always lurking in Shellac’s music, but they seem especially pronounced in the groove-spiel of “Chick New Wave,” the sharp pauses of “Days Are Dogs” and the pro-labor screed “Scabby the Rat,” which plays like a funnier, less anxious version of Double Nickels on the Dime’s “West Germany.”
Like all good minimalism, the changes are small, so the highlights are subtle. The blown-out noise-rock coda of “WSOD” is outrageous, like a half-minute Brainbombs blast. “Days Are Dogs” is a cowbell-slamming Nazareth song for about five seconds. Albini’s guitar slowly distends like gelatin at the end of “I Don’t Fear Hell.” “Scrappers” stomps along as if Pussy Galore had bothered to learn how to play their instruments. Shellac’s lyrics are as cryptic as ever, so it’s fun to imagine the Weston-sung “How I Wrote How I Wrote Elastic Man (Cock & Bull)” as a belated clapback to the Fall’s Mark E. Smith, who playfully dissed Albini on “50 Year Old Man” in 2008. Shellac’s photorealist recording strategy and silence-heavy compositions mean there are lots of places to admire things like cymbal decay and snare drum ring. In fact, Trainer is probably the album’s MVP, thanks to his artful, muscular, musical little drum solos across many of the open chasms.
To All Trains closes the book on the band and serves as a perfectly respectable epitaph; it’s exemplary, just like the five Shellac records that preceded it. The band’s legacy will blare on in noise-rock bands like Couch Slut, Chat Pile, Metz, KEN mode, Whores, and the Austerity Program. Weston will likely be mastering more of your favorite records, and it’s possible that some of your favorite new drummers will be trained by Trainer. Most importantly, Albini’s dogged, outspoken adherence to high-quality audio fidelity, equitable working conditions, and DIY grind will probably be an inspiration for some time, even as the very economics of “indie rock” are increasingly unsustainable for bands both new and veteran. This is a sad fuckin’ song, but it’s by no means finished.


Fripp & Eno: No Pussyfooting / Evening Star

No Pussyfooting / Evening Star

Brian Eno, Roxy Music's art-schooled keyboard and tech wizard, and Robert Fripp, King Crimson's mostly self-taught guitarist, convened in Eno's home studio in 1972. Both were conceptually inclined: Eno called himself a "non-musician," while Fripp claimed to be tone deaf and rhythmically impaired when he began playing. Both of them would go on to reinvent their chosen tools-- Eno the studio, Fripp the guitar (he would eventually devise his own standard tuning and picking techniques)-- to suit their unique talents and visions. The two LP-length collaborations they recorded in the 70s, now remastered and reissued by DGM, laid the groundwork for each musician's most iconic works.
One technique is central to both records: the use of two Revox reel-to-reel tape recorders as a primitive looping system, wherein sounds recorded to the first deck resurfaced unpredictably when the tape passed through the second deck. Eno and Fripp didn't pioneer this technique; Terry Riley, among others, had used it before. But Eno would master it in his Ambient albums, where it became an end unto itself, not a background. As Eno refined the technique for the studio, Fripp refined it for the stage in his "Frippertronic" performances, which prefigured the use of looping pedals among arty rock bands today. Even in these two early works-- 1973's No Pussyfooting and 1975's Evening Star-- we can begin to track the process's rapid evolution.
On No Pussyfooting (the parentheses that originally enclosed the title are dropped on the reissue), we hear Eno and Fripp discovering the process-- it was the very first thing they recorded together in this vein. The album bursts with a sense of spontaneity. "The Heavenly Music Corporation" sequence is raw and rambunctious, resolving in long deep waves of aggression, with Fripp's molten, fluent guitar leads putting his rock prowess on display. The effervescent "Swastika Girls" strikes a contrast. In fact, "The Heavenly Music Corporation" and "Swastika Girls" seem designed as opposites-- the former gooey, deep, and broadly rolling, the latter effervescent, high, and cramped with wiry spirals. Of course, these tracks lack the sophistication of Eno's later ambient work, where pristine clarity became his focus. Clutter and impulsiveness haunt the margins, especially on "Swastika Girls", and Fripp's leads seem to stand somewhat apart from Eno's manipulations on "Heavenly". But whatever Pussyfooting lacks in subtlety, it compensates for with sheer mojo.*
Evening Star* demonstrates how quickly Eno and Fripp evolved-- it's confidently serene where No Pussyfooting was brashly assertive, and bears a closer resemblance to the 2004 Eno/Fripp collaboration The Equatorial Stars. Fripp's guitar is less often recognizable as such; we frequently hear what resembles clouds of bowed strings drifting through each other. When it is recognizable, as on the title track, the guitar phrases seem deeply interwoven with the surrounding sounds rather than roaring over them. The album opens with a quartet of naturalistically themed pieces, evoking water, wind, and sky, before delving down with a six-track sequence called "An Index of Metals". Not only did Eno and Fripp hone their technique on Evening Star, they erected a thematic architecture, which was absent from No Pussyfooting and would be crucial to Eno's subsequent work.
The only disappointing thing about these reissues is the bonus content. There's none on Evening Star, and No Pussyfooting comes with a second disc of reversed and half-speed mixes. There's an historical precedent for this: Miscuing a tape, John Peel played tracks from No Pussyfooting backwards on his radio show (and it says a lot about this kind of music that only Eno noticed the error), while the slowed-down versions recreate the experience of playing the album, which was originally released on vinyl, at the wrong speed. That's cool, but would have made more sense on a commercial release in 1975. Now that listeners who want to hear music at different speeds can create the effect themselves in a matter of seconds, the bonus disc seems anachronistic.
In his review of The Equatorial Stars, Dominique Leone correctly downplayed the idea that anything was invented on these albums. As previously mentioned, the technique that informed them predated Eno and Fripp. And while Eno made great strides in building a theory of ambient music, the basic challenge-- to make music that took an evasive stance toward form and content-- wasn't new; many modernist composers had already been approaching it in a variety of ways. But art always evolves that way, with old ideas recombining into new forms, embodied in but not created by specific individuals. Eno and Fripp invented something more tangible than an abstract cultural movement here: They invented themselves, and a way of thinking about music that was not so much novel as perfectly of the moment, alive to its unique technological and conceptual possibilities. They irrevocably altered the course of art music in the process.


After a self-imposed exile from the music industry, the Ottawa singer-songwriter is clear-eyed and serene, writing just for the thrill of discovery.

Total Freedom

Near the end of Total Freedom, Kathleen Edwards sings a song for her dog. Narrating in the second-person to Redd, her golden retriever, the 42-year-old songwriter reflects on the day they first met: “You were so sweet, immediately.” She goes on to describe their walks together, the compliments they received from neighbors, and the place she eventually buried his ashes. It is a quietly emotional and personal narrative, weaving in a thread about her own habit of self-medicating with alcohol. But more than any of these novelistic details, what’s most striking is her serenity, the focus in her delivery and peace in her voice as she quietly breaks your heart. It is a love song for a lost friend: the kind of thing you might sing alone, at home, when no one is listening.
This is the tone of Total Freedom, the Ottawa songwriter’s first album in eight years. And if it sounds like the work of someone who had a lot of time to focus on the things that matter, that’s because it is. Beginning with 2003’s Failer, Edwards released a string of expertly written records on the edges of heartland rock and alt-country, building a tight knit fanbase (which includes Maren Morris, who asked her to co-write a song on her most recent album). But after 2012’s atmospheric Voyageur, produced by Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, Edwards found herself disillusioned with the industry. Playing its songs every night was destroying her voice, and the shows themselves had become draining and financially unsustainable at a point when she hoped to be crossing over. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, no one cares. I’m just not good enough,” she reflected. “The only reason I sold two hundred tickets is because Bon Iver fans are coming to see if Justin might show up.’”
All of this was on her mind when she drove past a storefront for lease near her hometown. An inside joke with a friend became a life preserver, and she decided to retire from the music business and open a coffee shop. She called it Quitters. Located in the small town of Stittsvile, Ontario, it evolved into a local fixture with a loyal clientele—multiple Yelp reviews note the stellar music in the shop—and Edwards found a hard-won, person-to-person sense of gratification. She felt fulfilled. She spent more time with her dogs.
Slowly, the songs came back. There was “Who Rescued Who,” the one about Redd, and “Ashes to Ashes,” a plainspoken eulogy for one of her Quitters customers. But the one that got the ball rolling was “Glenfern,” a breezy rock song that filtered her past life as a touring musician through frank new perspective: “Now when I find myself looking back,” she sings calmly, “I think of all the cool shit that happened.” (Of course, she wasn’t totally ready to chase away those demons: “We bought a rock and roll dream,” she confesses, “and it was total crap.”) If Edwards’ work once recalled the dark, pastoral story-songs of Lucinda Williams, her writing here feels more akin to recent work from Mount Eerie or Sufjan Stevens—memoristic folk songs that scour hard memories for new lessons.
The production matches her clear-eyed realizations, and the resulting album feels like a creative breakthrough, written solely for the thrill of discovery. (Or as she put it to the New York Times, “I mean, what’s going to happen? I go back to working at the cafe? OK, sounds good!”). “Bird on a Feeder” is a gorgeous song about solitude, played on acoustic guitar with subtle flourishes of piano. In each verse, she follows the same pattern of thought, counting each passing season and reflecting on the ways her internal atmosphere has changed. She concludes each chorus with a brief observation—“no one to need”—and her delivery could be affirming, inquisitive, or hopeless with each repetition.
Other songs refuse to be misinterpreted. In “Hard on Everyone,” Edwards sings about the dynamics of an emotionally abusive relationship, revisiting the gravelly texture of her early work to summon the strength to fight back. “Fools Ride” travels similarly rough terrain, as she reflects on a long series of warning signs ignored with the hopes of finding contentment: “Here comes the red flag flying in the shit parade,” she recounts as a dizzy-sounding rhythm section tumbles behind her.
These are unsparing accounts of tough subjects, but Edwards navigates each song with tenderness and humor, allowing her to tear apart old idioms (“Love is blind/Whoever bought that line must be a real sucker”) or invent new ones (“Love is simple math/I can be a total pain in the ass”). Listening to her reckon with these complicated emotions, it occurs to me how many people dream of finding this kind of wisdom: stepping away from the daily rituals, imagining themselves happier and lighter in the aftermath.
Through these songs, you hear that freedom, but Edwards also reminds you how the past lingers, how actual escape is more elusive than it seems. In a virtual live set earlier this month, she covered the Neil Young classic “Comes a Time,” a decades-old song about how the world moves on despite the small catastrophes that happen every day. She heard it on the radio a few nights earlier and found herself humming it while walking the dog. It seemed to suit the times, so she learned to play it when she got home. As tree branches blow outside her window, for a minute, the future seems simple enough.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


On Cam’ron’s first full-length album in four years, he sounds disengaged. The beats don’t pop and the fun has drained from his lyrics.

The Program

Cam’ron is supposed to be retired by now. In 2014, he announced that he was calling it quits and that the sequel to his 2004 epic Purple Haze, then scheduled for a 2015 release, would be his last album. He told Miss Info it was “time to move on” and later told The FADER he was “winding down,” segueing into a career in film and television. His heart isn’t in rapping anymore. Maybe it never really was. He always seemed almost hilariously bored by it, no more wowed by the perks of rap pageantry than he was impressed by his own showmanship. But he’s still here, seemingly begrudgingly so: Reuniting with long lost Dipset compatriots for the tryhard throwback “Once Upon a Time,” prepping a sequel no one asked for of 2006’s Killa Season, and sharing his first full-length in four years, a mixtape called The Program. These are the raps of a man with nothing left to prove and nothing left to earn. “Let me tell you rappers something/Look man I don’t need you/I never was a rapper, mane/I’m a get money nigga, I do this for leisure,” he raps on “Hallalujah” [sic]. Uncoincidentally, he’s never seemed less engaged than this.
Cam’ron is a man who once rapped “My earring is nice, the price: Three townhomes in Delaware” and bragged about drinking sake on a Suzuki in Osaka Bay after shooting at his rivals. His verses were so blasé, hyper-specific, and subtly comical, with details odd enough to make the bizarre seem believable: random asides like holding a Spanish timeshare for nine years for time away from Times Square while your girl forged checks for him by the Port Authority. In fact, a debate over a colorful Cam’ron bar is what led Ilan Zechory, Tom Lehman, and Mahbod Moghadam to start Rap Genius. But these days Cam’s raps are less wordy, less mind-expanding, and frankly, less fun.
In the years since 2009’s Crime Pays, Cam’s last solo studio album, he has slowly become a much less interesting writer, one that’s far less self-aggrandizing. Perhaps adulthood has finally overtaken his surrealist world, and reality has set in, but there isn’t the same artful absurdity to his rapping. Before, he merely seemed apathetic toward the lifestyle he led; now his indifference is aimed squarely at the audience. On “Coleslaw,” he gives Kanye bad PR advice, one ex-Roc rapper to another, before veering into aimless and sometimes senseless machismo. On “Hello,” his cornier punches are a letdown following Don Q, who rips off the tape’s densest schemes: “Had to get my respect, it was past due/Through with my past, I just reminisce when I pass through/Moving them bags, tryin’ to get ‘em flipped ‘til my stash grew/Shooters that blast over the nonsense when the cash blue.” The pen that once drew up the most fantastically farcical story designs in rap has all but dried up.
That isn’t to say there isn’t some of that old Cam charm under all the bluster. “Uwasntthere,” originally planned for his proposed retirement album, is an autobiographical and vivid rags-to-riches story, comprised of neatly-stacked raps that fool around with phonetic sounds (“Some was unfortunate, pine box or orphanage/Watching your siblings turning into foster kids”). “Lean,” where a child choir hums Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me” behind him as he raps loyalty and camaraderie, is full of signature Cam quirks. This is the closest he gets to digging deep, enjoying himself, and satiating listeners. But far too many moments on The Program make you wonder why this mixtape was made in the first place: If not for him, then certainly not for us.
For fans of Cam’s delightfully goofy interpolation of Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles,” there’s “Dime After Dime,” a rework of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” turning the soft rock staple into a drug anthem. The rest of the production is stymied by a lack of imagination. The beats that aren’t flashbacks to older variations of Cam songs are derivative or straight up copies. The AraabMuzik beat for “The Other Side” is a simple rip of a Lex Luger beat, “Kiss Myself” jacks Rick Ross’ “I Love My Bitches,” and “Chop It Up” is a by-the-numbers recreation of Scarface’s “On My Block.” Beat jacking is a cornerstone of mixtape culture, but none of these songs live up to their samples and Cam delivers forgettable performances on all of them. And that’s The Program’s biggest issue in a nutshell: Cam has been many things in the past (daffy, lazy, sometimes even cringe-worthy), but never forgettable. These songs are just hallmarks of a rapper all out of ideas, seeking a reason to stay.


Lou Barlow and John H. Davis’ first body of new work in 25 years applies a fresh coat of paint to the droning indie rock sound of the duo’s formative years.

Walk Thru Me

The Folk Implosion certainly wasn’t the first 1990s indie rock act to tinker with the sample-based structures of hip-hop, but their approach to genre fusion may have been the most prescient. “Natural One,” the duo’s unlikely Billboard-charting hit and best-known contribution to Larry Clark’s Kids soundtrack, was a reaction to recently released major label debuts by Portishead and Beck, translating the group’s usual plunking bedroom recordings into a beat-driven context while consciously avoiding the sardonic tone of a track like “Loser.” As Lou Barlow and John H. Davis grew into their new sound, their experimentation became increasingly distinct, particularly on their last album, 1999’s One Part Lullaby, which fully realized their blend of glitched-out electronic composition, gritty drum breaks, and whispery emo pop. From a contemporary perspective, the album’s title cut and the vocoder-infused “E.Z. L.A.” feel like an embryonic version of recent work by brakence or Jane Remover: intimate, yet futuristic in equal measure.
Following the release of 2023’s Music for KIDS compilation—a retrospective look behind the scenes of the soundtrack sessions that inspired the Folk Implosion’s embrace of electronica—Barlow and Davis have returned with their first body of new work in 25 years. Walk Thru Me, written remotely before the pair hit the studio with producer Scott Solter, is a return to the group’s roots as penpals. They’ve also largely abandoned their hip-hop influences, dusting off the droning indie rock sound of the band’s formative years and giving it a fresh coat of paint. While early Folk Implosion outings like Take a Look Inside and Palm of My Hand were patchwork affairs comprised of crunchy thrash, stoned jam sessions and bite-sized lo-fi pop gems, Walk Thru Me lacks their mercurial mystique. Davis, who is currently studying Persian music, incorporates stringed Middle Eastern instruments like setar, oud, and saz into his songwriting, though he and Barlow stick to a familiar formula throughout, noodling and down-stroking over leisurely, mid-tempo drum patterns. Without the Folk Implosion’s typically unpredictable energy, the duo’s knack for conjuring surreal harmonic atmospheres is dampened by boilerplate beats and song structure.
The shift toward more polished, fleshed-out songcraft finds greater success on the lyrical front. On “My Little Lamb,” Barlow grapples with his approach to parenting, weighing his protective instincts against the wisdom that “they’ve gotta wonder on their own.” With a conversational cadence that recalls Jad Fair, Davis’ turns at the mic are painstaking snapshots of adult ennui, describing the numbing effects of robocalls and televised sports on “Bobblehead Dolls,” and trying to put himself in the neurological headspace of his late father on “The Day You Died.” Earlier Folk Implosion material reveled in abstract expression, balling up scribbled pages of adolescent catharsis on songs like “Daddy Never Understood” or “Mood Swing” and chucking them into oblivion. The fragmented lyricism suited the dashed-off, DIY quality of Barlow and Davis’ mid-’90s output, but here their angst translates to full storytelling quite naturally.
Many of the cuts on Walk Thru Me, like “Moonlit Kind” and “Crepuscular,” swirl formlessly, riding spin cycles of fingerpicked acoustic guitar, twangy slides, and reverb-laden riffs. But when the duo ratchets up the BPM, their ideas coalesce into a tight, krautrock-inspired groove that recalls the first two DIIV albums. “O.K. to Disconnect” wields tension and dissonance masterfully, coiling nimble guitar leads around a motorik rhythm section and letting them venture into cryptic atonality during instrumental breaks. “The Fable and the Fact” also makes ample room for Barlow and Davis to jam between verses, bouncing wriggling peals of distorted guitar off of springy low end. The contrast between the duo’s understated vocal presence and their turbulent improvisational chemistry is most potent when they’re moving fast, letting rushed melodic phrases spill over the song’s margins. Chaos is still encoded into the Folk Implosion’s DNA, but Walk Thru Me’s idiomatic alt-rock composition feels too stable to properly channel it. At their best, Barlow and Davis wrestled with seemingly opposing interests in the primal and futuristic: After a long period of inactivity, they’re still finding their footing in the present.


Amid the rich textures and hushed production of this playful, soulful six-song EP, the San Bernardino native radiates sensuality—and fun.

Sophcore EP

When Moses Sumney sings, “I am not a woman, I am not a man” in something close to his speaking voice on “Hey Girl,” I thought, Right on. He is himself and his artistic forebears too—namely, the Prince who offered a similar affirmation in “I Would Die 4 U” Then the kicker: “I am an amoeba.” The San Bernardino native of Ghanaian parents sings over squishy, squirrelly tracks whose post-Maxwell R&B foundations accommodate damaged rock rifflets and modest gospel overtones; you might imagine him practicing vocal runs in the bedroom before church. The six-song EP Sophcore—a curriculum vitae outlining his robust laryngeal resources—recaps Sumney’s achievements and sets up what audiences might expect from a new full-length statement. It’s a tease in the best sense.
Four years ago, on his breakthrough album, grae, Sumney expressed the yearnings of a soul sonic force who loved being, as he sang on one of its most powerful tracks, “neither/nor.” That album’s “Virile,” a collaboration with industrial rock act Yvette, regarded masculinity as a land worth invading with a conquering army. To master such whisper-to-a-scream dynamics requires a sense of self that eschews bluster but is plenty assured.
A collaboration with Portland producer Graham Jonson, who goes by quickly, quickly, yields Sophcore’s prettiest and liveliest moments. “Gold Coast” begins as a sensual, puttering thing indebted to Bjork’s Vespertine. Sumney’s chalky falsetto complements and works against the plucked guitars, distorted multi-tracked vocals, and synths; his impressionistic lyrics (“Talk in tongues, testify/Sunrise skin, color of clay”) say no thanks to coherence, bless them. A symphony of gurgles and music-box melodies cushions “I’m Better (I’m Bad),” in which Sumney recreates with louche delight a dialogue between himself and a feminized object of desire.
Over Sophcore’s recombinant grooves, Sumney radiates a sense of fun. Confidence in his vocal talents doesn’t congeal into self-regard. Turns out he’s right: Trills and melisma suit arrangements that swell and contract like protoplasmic organisms. The finger-snapping rhythm track on the closing “Love’s Refrain” is almost an afterthought, a metronome to remind Sumney that his fascinations remain earthbound despite the stratospheric vantage point of his vowel experiments. “I was in my world, you were in yours too,” he coos, “so let’s refrain.” From what—independence or romance? Duetting with himself into infinity, he deepens the enigmas.


Breezy, uplifting, and never forced, the Jamaican reggae star’s debut imbues the ennui and uncertainty of this epoch with much-needed positivity.

Gifted

Midway through summer 2020, the young Jamaican reggae artist Koffee released her single “Lockdown” and dreamed of life after the pandemic. “Where will we go/When di quarantine ting done and everybody touch road?” she sang over an Afrobeats-tinged riddim, imagining a relationship’s future once she and her boo could finally progress past FaceTime. Its video was similarly optimistic: Koffee at home, relatably, in sweatpants; then Koffee hitting the beach with a crew of friends, blessedly communing out in the world. “Me ah go put you pon lockdown/Put yuh body pon lockdown,” she crooned—pandemic stasis begging to become summer spontaneity. As the Delta variant spread, though, the anticipated end of isolation deflated like a party balloon. Rather than languish in her jammies, Koffee got to work: Gifted, her first album and the follow-up to her Grammy-winning Rapture EP, is by definition a pandemic album, imbuing the ennui and uncertainty of this epoch with a positivity it could surely use.
The relatively short career of Mikayla “Koffee” Simpson is a feel-good story about a rising star: A YouTuber from Spanish Town, Jamaica, discovered at 17 after Usain Bolt posted her tribute to him, “Legend”; collaborating with millennial reggae heroes like Chronixx and Protoje and signing to a major label at 18; winning the Grammy for Best Reggae Album at 19, for a five-song dancehall EP, her first, making her the youngest person and only woman to earn such a distinction. Her accomplishments and accolades are well deserved, but it’s also the kind of uplifting trajectory the music industry loves, and the narrative tends to flatten Koffee’s message. Her joy is rightly celebrated, but she also tells real stories about her life, including critiques of the Jamaican government’s complicity in structural poverty and gun violence (most explicitly on 2019’s crunchy dub “Raggamuffin”). And so Koffee’s COVID-era album, upbeat as it sounds on its face, is not a spiritual turnaround—in March she told Zane Lowe that her writing process was in part a way of encouraging herself out of her low points—and belies that she’s had any cheerier of a pandemic than many of us. She ultimately lands on a gratefulness that reads as hope, simply because to do otherwise doesn’t seem much in her nature.
Gifted veers from the contemporary dancehall of her prior acclaim and into the breezier realm of roots reggae: Low-end edges are burnished in favor of a trebly midtempo that centers guitars and the surety of her voice, a clarion tone about which she once sang, “Inna mi zone/Alto to baritone.” The last two years focused her thoughts inward—as they have for many of us—and Koffee, now a sage 22, is surer in both her talent and what matters most to her. As the title track, “Gifted,” suggests, she’s contemplative about her upbringing in Spanish Town, and the album is full of paeans to her single mother, a Seventh Day Adventist who raised her daughter in the church choir. (“I just try to make [my mom] feel the impact of what she’s done for me,” Koffee told The Gleaner in March.)
In combining traditional influences like acoustic guitars in major keys with the contemporary diaspora—the Afroswing experimentation of the British musician J-Hus, with whom Koffee has collaborated, comes to mind, and they share a producer in Jae5—Koffee bridges history with her Zoomer present. She references Jah and her mom, ’Raris and Rovers, Babylon and Benzes, sometimes in the same stanza. (If there is a person who can describe wearing Prada and Balenciaga without sounding ostentatious, Koffee is it.) The juxtaposition, meted out easily in Koffee’s genial alto, is a meditation on where her life has taken her so far. Several tracks take on the intimate patina of prayer. On “Gifted,” for instance, she invokes an oft-decontextualized Black American spiritual: “Pray to di Father, seh, ‘Kumbaye’/Full up mi plate and bruk my tray, yeah.”
Koffee’s humble wisdom underpins her songwriting, with songs like “Defend” and “Shine” contemplating gun violence and poverty with that same peaceful aspiration, her voice strong and true as she recounts sociopolitical realities and offers herself as a bulwark against them. “Koffee defend them case,” she sings on “Defend,” and on “Shine,” she beseeches the youth to “just stay alive… I’ve got to shine, you’ve got to shine.” The relaxed pace of “West Indies,” with its screwed-down outro, feels like the joyous memory of a party replayed in slow motion, a romantic counterpoint to the slow-grind lovers rock of “Lonely.” There’s a proud and pure undertone to her music, not least because of her inviting vocal timbre, which gives the impression that she’s open-hearted and open-minded too. For the churlish among us, uplifting music can tend to grate rather than inspire, but Koffee hits a satisfying midpoint, free of didacticism and never forced; she’s simply inviting us into her world. It’s sunny there, and I, for one, could use it.


The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is a declaration of independence. With it, Ms. Hill put the entire genre of hip-hop on blast and elevated heartbreak to spiritual proportions.

Lauryn Hill: The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is a declaration of independence. It is a breakup letter to the bullshit routine of dealing with men who can’t stop hurting the women who love them. And it is a love letter to the liberated self, the maternal self and to God. It is an album of junctures: between adolescence and adulthood, between Lauryn as ⅓ of the Fugees and Lauryn as a woman on her own, between being a child and being a parent. (She conceived of the album at 22 years old, single and pregnant with her firstborn.) Musically it arrived as the conceptual confluence of three of the most powerful musical ideas in all of Blackness: hip hop, Motown-era soul and reggae. Doo-wop harmonies and the flushed distortion of voices singing their pain were cast over taut snares and hard boom-baps. The lo-fi production and warm, thickly muzzled bass tones purposefully recalled vintage vinyl on a rainy Sunday afternoon. After having written for Whitney Houston, having traveled to Detroit to sit with Aretha, it makes sense that Lauryn Hill returned to look upon the Fugees and their hard, brick-city, midnight-winter rap with a newfound skepticism.
Ms. Hill’s background (and perhaps her most developed skill set) lay in hip-hop, and Miseducation had the effect of putting the entire genre on blast. The mid-’90s had seen the ascendency of the genre to corporate-level sales numbers, aided in large part Bad Boy Entertainment, their bromidic disco samples and unrepentant tales of jewelry and gunplay, their rallying cry of “tits and bras, ménage à trois, sex in expensive cars.” Meanwhile, regional acts like N.W.A. and Geto Boys had introduced an incidental violence so extreme that it mutated into horrorcore, and even reigning king Nas, once known as the sharpest and most conscious of project prophets, had ridiculously rebranded himself “Esco” and was spinning elaborate drug tales in juvenile heist raps. The Fugees entered into this mayhem first to settle the score. But it was Lauryn Hill who came to re-educate the whole people.
Soul and hip-hop aside, Miseducation is most deeply fueled, spiritually and musically, by reggae. Six years before, the release of the immensely popular Songs of Freedom boxed set pushed the Marley legacy once again forefront of urban youth culture. By 1998, every halfway-conscious hip-hop head knew at least the basics of Marley’s primary theology: That Black people had been subject to centuries oppression at the hands of the un-righteous, but that God was on the side of the oppressed. This meant that you were to live in peace and love with all things, for this is part of your covenant with God, but you were also not to take no bullshit from no oppressor lying down.
Ms. Hill didn’t just gain inspiration from this philosophy; she quite literally inherited it. Half of Miseducation was recorded in Jamaica at Marley’s own Tuff Gong Studios. The baby she carried was conceived with Rohan Marley, son of Bob. From this regal lineage, Miseducation strikes out with the lionhearted courage of a crusader. But it can’t stay there. Metaphors of God soldiers and Lions of Judah are good as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough. The problem is that such a worldview is fundamentally male, which is to say more ubiquitous than correct. Lauryn Hill was tasked with something more difficult than that: to walk a series of intertwined tightropes specific to young Black women. To be vulnerable, but fearless. To tell the truth, but look beautiful in doing so. To be driven by love, but ready to fight. To be soft enough to mother a newborn, but hard enough to protect her family. At 23 and pregnant, she was too young to be responsible for this much. It’s just that most people didn’t notice it, because on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, she handled these competing drives so beautifully.
The first track is the hard “Lost Ones,” a resentful fuck-you over tight snares with a hook loosely based on Sister Nancy’s heavily sampled 1982 dancehall classic “Bam Bam.” The song does everything short of calling Wyclef out by name, but Ms. Hill is in full battle-rap mode, putting her former partner on every type of blast: “L been this way since creation/A groupie call, you fall from temptation/Now you wanna bawl over separation/Tarnish my image in the conversation.” While “Lost Ones” is about the dissolution of a business and artist relationship with Wyclef, “Ex-Factor” is about the loss of a personal one. Here, the approach highlights Ms. Hill’s soul mode, the instrumentation and background harmonies drawing heavily from Aretha’s Capitol sessions. It’s maybe the album’s most successful evocation of this concept, milking the two-chord chart for all its attendant melodic variants while a stellar guitar solo (still a valid trope in 1998) calls to mind Muscle Shoals session man Wayne Perkins’ rousing turn in the overdub of the Wailers’ “Concrete Jungle.”
Hearts, and the men who break them, are a primary theme of Miseducation, but Ms. Hill’s implicit liberation theology elevates this commonly-visited issue to spiritual proportions. When she partners with Mary J. Blige on the affecting “I Used to Love Him,” she spells out the universal interconnectedness of heartbreaker and victim in plain terms. “I see him sometimes and the look in his eye/Is one of a man who’s lost treasures untold.” These songs are the spiritual forebears of Beyoncé’s Lemonade. The sentiment is echoed when Bey sings “When you play me, you play yourself”—why, these women ask, would you hurt a woman who is fighting for the liberation of your people?
Ms. Hill’s other mode is the raw, smoky rhyme delivery on tracks like “Doo Wop (That Thing),” “Superstar,” and “Final Hour.” Somewhere around 92 bpm had become the standard tempo of golden-era East Coast hip-hop, and Ms. Hill’s flow—confident, determined, and creeping deliberately just a hair behind the beat—is absolutely resplendent at this pace. It breathes a stunning, martial life into razor-sharp bars like “And when I let go, my voice echoes through the ghetto/Sick of men trying to pull strings like Geppetto/Why Black people always be the ones to settle/March through these streets like Soweto.” At her best Lauryn Hill flirts with legitimate prophet status, digging to her deepest to harness the power greater than herself; a power we all need to survive and overcome. She offers it to us. I’m out here, she seems to say; you can be out here, too.
Even though this is when Ms. Hill is technically at her best, these songs don’t comprise the highlights of the album. The heart of Miseducation is too vast, too imperative to find its complete representation in a series of slick punchlines. This is what separates Lauryn Hill from her male contemporaries, and why it feels that the album almost demands to be more rooted in song than verse. Rather than an iteration of Nas, she is Stevie Wonder merged with Joni Mitchell over classic East Coast beats. It is true that her vocal skills are stretched to their limits on numbers like “Everything Is Everything” and “To Zion,” but what does it matter? Like the winsome classroom interludes woven throughout it, this is an album about learning to love. On “To Zion” she is breathless, learning love of God through love of her child; on “When It Hurts So Bad,” she learns (painfully) about the love others, and on the title track, she reaches the apogee of this cycle by learning love of self. “Deep in my heart,” she sings over a swell of Hathaway-esque strings, “I made up my mind to find my own destiny.”
The thing about destiny, though, is that we never know what it is until it happens. Ms. Hill could not have predicted that this wildly successful album would plunge her into an ugly legal battle about credit and compensation with New Ark, the amateur production team she partnered with to make it. Her immense personal drive made it too easy to cast her in the public eye as a megalomaniac intent on hoarding all the accolades for herself. When two people who are used to being fucked over (Black men and Black women) get together, the collective trauma makes it highly likely that each will feel the other is taking unfair advantage. The ensuing court case, with all its finger-pointing, shady interviews, and painful depositions, took a tremendous psychic toll on Ms. Hill, whose subsequent retreat from the public eye effectively continues to this day. Bad business practices (the parties signed no agreement before work began) no doubt contributed to the squabble, but a bigger factor may have been that the 23-year-old Hill, girded up for a liberation battle, and fleeing from what she felt was an oppressive partnership with Clef and Pras, perhaps believed that everything she made from that moment forward, for justice’s sake, belonged entirely and exclusively to her.
On Miseducation, Lauryn Hill demonstrates that she was one of the coldest MCs of her era. It has always been the case, however, that a woman could rhyme ridiculous and still never be considered the best of them all. In a way, it didn’t matter. Even if she wanted to, Ms. Hill could not have spent a career talking about crooked cops, gold chains and project come-ups. Being a woman meant that she had to, for a time at least, talk about the truth of her self. When your body is the very weapon of your oppression, it sometimes must be through the art of self, soul, and spirit that you create your freedom.


The rapper's next comeback LP, this is meant to trace Em's journey out of depression and drug addiction and back into the peak of his powers.

Recovery

Watching Eminem attempt to re-situate himself in the pop landscape the past year or so has been a bizarre spectacle. He roared out of his post-Encore slumber in early 2009 seeming almost puppyishly eager to rap again, spitting verses for anyone who put him in front of a mic with a desperation that suggested he was making up for lost time. Relapse, his 2009 comeback album, found him trying to scratch and claw his way back into the body of 1999-era Slim Shady, but the effect was similar to Metallica trying to revisit their thrash years with 2008's Death Magnetic: The sound was there; the fury, long gone. No matter how many starlets he tortured and killed in his lyrics, Em couldn't rewrite the intervening years and the enervating effect they've had on his spirit.
So now he's back again, with the follow-up to Relapse, and as its title suggests, Recovery is meant to be triumphant, tracing Em's journey out of depression and drug addiction and back into the peak of his powers. Out of all the depressing aspects of Recovery, the worst is the realization that for listeners the album takes the opposite arc-- the more he motors on about having reclaimed his passion for hip-hop and finally figured out who he is, the more draining the album becomes. Eminem has never really known who he is, which has resulted in one of the most wildly erratic discographies of any major rap artist; at this point, the number of times he's sounded rudderless on record are catching up to the times he's sounded alive. At his best, he has always made a fascinating scramble of his internal turmoil, but the guy rapping on Recovery just sounds devoid of any noticeable joy, personality, or wit.
Not that he's not trying. As on Relapse, Em almost passes out showing us he's still got it, rapping in double and triple time, piling tricky syncopations on top of each other, constructing whole verses with end rhymes buried in the middle of phrases-- basically any kind of pyrotechnical trick he can think of to wow the kind of rap listeners who venerate technical skill above all else. And yet for all the rattling-around-inside-the-beat syllable pileups here, there is almost nothing worth quoting. He reels off an astonishing amount of cringe-worthy lines, on the order of, "Girl, shake that ass like a donkey with Parkinson's." On the menopausal, Diane Warren-esque uplift anthem "Not Afraid", he actually strings together the excruciating lines, "Okay, stop playin' with the scissors and shit, and cut the crap/ I shouldn't have to rhyme these words in a rhythm for you to know it's a wrap." Eminem spends nearly half of Recovery insisting he's the best rapper alive, but for the first time in his career, he actually sounds clumsy.
He can't even coexist meaningfully with a beat-- every producer he works with seems to give him the most attenuated version of their signature sound possible and back away carefully. The liner notes will tell you that Recovery features production by Boi-1DA, Jim Jonsin, DJ Khalil, and Just Blaze along with the usual suspects Mr. Porter and Dre. But your ears will tell you it's the same click track Em's been rapping over since time immemorial-- the only times the beats elbow to the fore are with DJ Khalil's characteristically chunky and unwieldy rap-rock hybrids. Em just sort of drifts through these productions, as haunted and disembodied a presence as 2Pac on a posthumous release.
The only winning moment on the record comes early, with "Talkin' 2 Myself", where Em admits he contemplated dissing Kanye and Lil Wayne out of jealousy. "Thank god that I didn't do it-- I'd have had my ass handed to me," he raps, in a rare moment of wry honesty. The climax of the song sees him shouting out Wayne, Kanye, and T.I. in a show of solidarity, but the truth is Em doesn't even inhabit the same universe as these guys. He lives in a world all his own, and for the most part, that world doesn't allow for visitors. When Wayne shows up on "No Love", a po-faced duet built on a sample of Haddaway's "What Is Love", the point is hammered home-- the two rappers' verses don't even seem to belong to the same song. Marshall has never played all that comfortably or well with others, but here his solipsism is so overwhelming it negates whoever or whatever else is going on around him. He sucks the air out of the room just by stepping into it.


Prodigious talent Pat Grossi displays an aptitude for the grandeur and grace of M83, OMD, and Animal Collective on this new EP.

Curtis Lane EP

Pat Grossi's a harpist, an ex-choirboy, an Active Child; precious, no? Nah, not really. Grossi's gauzy, twinkly Active Child songs feel at once rather humble and astronomically huge. Bits of Animal Collective's stacked harmonies, Dazzle Ships' askew shimmer, and M83's post-New Order epic pulse coalesce in Grossi's tidy yet titanic sound, stretched out over six songs and 30 minutes on the Curtis Lane EP. Precious? More like prodigious.
Tracks here comes in a couple of varieties: there's the hazier, sultrier, slower numbers, and the ones you can dance to. Grossi's smart to keep the two sides in balance, but while the thumpier numbers have their charms, they seem a bit timid next to the others' sky-streaking grandeur. "I'm in Your Church at Night" seems to stretch on forever, matching Grossi's heaven-sent falsetto to a lush rumble not unlike a screwed'n'chopped "In the Air Tonight". His compositional skill is really something, moving beats and harp plinks and negative space in and out without disrupting the majestic scope of the tunes. His falsetto, a touch meek on its own, has a dreamy incandescence when piled on top of itself. The harp's far from the focus here, but coupled with his voice, it provides a organic counterpoint to the synthetic sounds constantly shuffling underneath him.
Grossi's hand as a dance producer isn't quite as steady; deft as he is at matching sounds, there's a reason you don't hear much harp in house music, and the throb he throws under half the tunes here never quite seems to knock hard enough to actually enter the realm of the danceable. Perhaps that's not the point, but the reedy "Take Shelter" doesn't have quite as much vitality as the stretchier stuff, sounding at times like any number of bedroom Bernard Sumner. A stuttery sample of Grossi's voice makes head-nodder "When Your Love Is Safe" the best of the dancier bunch, but "Weight of the World" is bogged down by too much thump and a sharp vocal downshift; his falsetto's lovely, his tenor not so much. It's not that Grossi oughta give up trying to get people to move, but his dance music's just a smudge too cerebral, and besides, the more extravagant numbers are moving enough as is.
Grossi's limited means seem to have pushed the cosmic, stately side of these tracks to the forefront; these tunes might be huge in effect, but they're fairly modest in execution, and one hopes Grossi can maintain that homespun feel should bigger and better things befall him. And they oughta; lord knows if I were charged to soundtrack the big smooch in a teen movie I'd snatch up the rights to "Wilderness" or "I'm in Your Church at Night" post-haste. These songs just feel climactic, durable, far greater than the sum of their parts. If this guy can almost get you to dance to harp songs, just imagine what he might be capable of creating.


The Chicago drill rapper Lil Durk follows up his muddled 2014 Def Jam debut Remember My Name with some of his strongest work. Focused, direct, and poised, he sounds like the rapper Def Jam thought they were getting.

300 Days 300 Nights

When the major labels descended upon Chicago in hope of landing the Next Big Thing during 2012’s great drill uprising, Lil Durk was among the most promising prospects: a melody-driven, phrase-warping dynamo who turned a trio of mixtapes into a deal with Def Jam and a sizeable national buzz. His breakthrough project, 2013’s Signed to the Streets, produced a catchy street hit ("Dis Ain’t What U Want") and spotlighted his particular brand of Auto-Tuned warbling, equal parts soothing and seething.
After a rough 2014 marked by spotty appearances on the Coke Boys 4 mixtape, a lukewarm Signed to the Streets sequel, and the murder of his cousin, OTF Nunu, things continued to nosedive for Durk in the months leading up to and immediately following his Def Jam debut, Remember My Name. His manager, OTF Chino, was killed last March and his debut, which arrived shortly thereafter, grappled with the same gun violence that took his friend and colleague, only with minimal affect and an uneven, often shoddy, delivery.
Lil Durk, however, soldiered on and earned back some musical capital with the rap ballad "My Beyoncé" featuring Detroit rapper and long-rumored girlfriend Dej Loaf, which perfectly married their similarly cleansing uses of Auto-Tune—for Durk, it purges impurities; for Dej, it makes her vocals smooth and measured like pressing wrinkles from a garment. The duet was the first taste of Durk’s latest mixtape, 300 Days 300 Nights, a 19-track offering that manages to sustain interest for its duration, presenting a reinvigorated Durk, who’s the sharpest he has been in years. "Ever since I built my buzz, I don’t get the same love," he raps on "Mud." He raps like he’s trying to earn that favor back.
The main knock on Durk is that his use of Auto-Tune renders him a prisoner to melody, which, in turn, renders him one-dimensional, but he proves himself capable on bustling rap-first songs like "On Em" and "Make It Back," where he packs some of his most ferocious bars together ("Can't stand the smell of that work, that's why my brothers cook it for me/ 30k a show don't call my phone, just book it for me.") He sounds good in both traditional drill productions (courtesy of staples Chopsquad DJ and DJ L) and spacious songs with distorted vocal samples (like Christian Rock band BarlowGirl’s "Never Alone").
The unsung hero behind many of the best cuts on 300 Days 300 Nights is producer C-Sick. The Chicago beatmaker has done most of his notable work for King Louie, but he and Durk have a palpable chemistry. On "Gunz N’ Money," Durk bops through a punching track as the bottom drops out, exposing chillingly direct warnings: "Word to Nuski killer/ Word to Chino killer/ Word to Moski killer/ We know we gon’ kill ya." Durk raps about leaving the safety of his own home and venturing out into the streets on "Jump Off," which winds layers of chords into a cocoon. The tone-setting intro, led by a monologue from his father, who has been locked up since Durk was an infant, is built around a pitched-up sample of Lori Perri’s "Up Against the Wind," which seems like a fitting representation for the tumultuous environment that Durk comes from. 300 Days 300 Nights could’ve benefitted from some sort of executive producer cutting it down to its 13 strongest songs, but songs like "Believe It or Not" and "Street Nigga" are solid as far as filler goes. Few moments lack Durk’s captivating and crushing bellows or his blunt writing. This is the rapper Def Jam thought they were getting.


Yoko Ono’s radical influence on pop history has inspired generations of visionary musicians. Deeply rooted in Fluxus, Ono’s newly-reissued early albums help to detail her broader artistic intentions.

Yoko Ono / John Lennon: Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins / Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With the Lions / Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band

Courting confusion is part of the job description for anyone working in the avant-garde. Some experimenters meet this requirement with the equivalent of a shrug, while others take to the task with more evident relish. For over half a century, the singer and visual artist Yoko Ono has found herself in the latter camp, gleefully scrawling her new approaches into the official ledgers of cultural production.
The editors of the recent volume Fluxbooks credit Ono’s 1964 Grapefruit as being “one of the first works of art in book form.” Ono’s early short films likewise helped expand cinematic practices. In the years before she started dating a Beatle, Ono sang with one of John Cage’s most trusted musical interpreters, and turned a New York loft space into a contemporary-art destination that drew the likes of Marcel Duchamp to her door.
Yet this multimedia artist’s most notorious act of provocation was her approach to becoming tabloid fodder. She took one of the world’s most popular musicians and hurried along his engagement with the experimental fringe (an attraction already evident in John Lennon’s work, as early as 1966’s Revolver). In some quarters, she’s never been forgiven for this. But Ono’s radical influence on pop history has also inspired generations of visionary artists.
The Lennon/Ono collaborative albums were a critical part of their take on celebrity coupledom. Their first two LPs carried the series title “Unfinished Music,” a conceptual gambit with deeper roots in the aesthetic of the Fluxus art movement than in that of the British Invasion. The first set to be issued, subtitled Two Virgins, was a sound-collage set reportedly produced during their first night together. The album’s name, and the full-frontal nudity of its cover, referenced the couple’s sense of innocence in approaching a new beginning—as well as the fact that the recording took place just prior to the consummation of their relationship.
As the product of a first date, Two Virgins is fascinating. As a sound artifact from the initial decade of Fluxus-inspired activity, it has plenty of competition. Casual clips of the couple’s conversations—mixed in alongside Lennon’s tape loops—blur the distinction between the private and the public-facing. This approach recalls efforts by some of Ono’s contemporaries, like Charlotte Moorman and Benjamin Patterson. But what makes Two Virgins distinct is the range of Ono’s voice. In the opening moments, she contributes some pure-tone humming, which sounds downright companionable amid Lennon’s meandering keyboard motifs and reverb tape-effects. Four-and-a-half-minutes in, Ono unleashes the first of her extended yelps, from the top of her range. Even if you know it’s coming, this sound always registers as shocking.
This aspect of Ono’s musicianship confused (and enraged) large portions of Lennon’s audience. Despite her purposeful variations of timbre and her ability to hit notes cleanly, Ono’s recourse to this proto-punk wail was often decried as unmusical. And after the White Album’s “Revolution 9”—a much tighter collage created by Lennon, Ono and George Harrison, now sometimes interpreted by classical musicians—she was often accused of being the driving agent behind the Beatles’ breakup.
Tensions from Beatlemania carry over into the couple’s second, less idyllic “Unfinished Music” release, subtitled Life With the Lions. Corporate tussles between the Beatles and their record label provide some of the inspiration for “No Bed for Beatle John,” a piece recorded in Ono’s hospital room, following a miscarriage. The album’s dominant track, though, is the side-length workout “Cambridge 1969,” a live recording driven by Lennon’s guitar feedback and Ono’s harshest vocalizations.
In failing to create much interest over its 26 minutes, “Cambridge 1969” reveals something important about Ono’s art. The performances of hers that work don’t do so merely because she can kick up a unique noise. Instead, the takes that have true liftoff usually find her switching up those extreme textures with greater frequency. Unlike some of the composers she hung out with, circa 1961, Ono is not a drone artist. She’s an expert in subtle variations, carved from blocks of seeming chaos.
Her 1970 album Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band is a triumph, in part, because it sounds fully aware of this reality. It’s also iconic because it contains some of Lennon’s most aggressive guitar work. Opener “Why” hurtles from its needle-drop opening, with slide guitar swoops and febrile picking that anticipate the variety of Ono’s vocal lines. When the singer enters, she wastes no time in applying a range of approaches to her one-word lyric sheet. Long expressions full of vibrato give way to shorter exhalations, rooted in the back of the throat. Spates of shredded laughter communicate the absurdist good humor that’s often present in Ono’s work. The minimalist pounding of drummer Ringo Starr and bassist Klaus Voormann is there as a foil, propped against all the invention on offer from Ono and Lennon.
“Why Not” inverts this script by arranging similar licks inside a slower tempo. Ono’s voice becomes more pinched and childlike, while Lennon’s guitar lines have a bluesier profile. Elsewhere, Ono puts a new spin on an “instruction” piece from her Grapefruit book, with the echo-laden “Greenfield Morning I Pushed an Empty Baby Carriage All Over the City.” Here, in another surprise, Ono’s voice sounds stolid and more traditionally “correct.” That feel is subsequently obliterated by the noisy middle section of “AOS,” a track Ono recorded in ’68 with saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s band. The Lennon-led backing group returns for the final two pieces of the original LP configuration, which have a comparatively calmer air.
Like Lennon’s ’70 solo album of the same name (and near-identical cover), Ono’s Plastic Ono Band initially scans as acerbic, yet manages to create a supple variety of song-forms from that opening template. Ono’s absorption of her new husband’s sonic language was only beginning to pay dividends, too. As Sean Lennon’s Chimera imprint and the Secretly Canadian label continue to reissue her catalog, Ono’s subsequent experiments with rock and pop formats will come into clearer view for audiences that have only heard rumors about her craft. Still, these opening reissues—which come complete with era-appropriate B-sides and outtakes—all manage to reflect a key aspect of Ono’s broader artistic intentions, as defined in a 1971 artist’s statement: “I like to fight the establishment by using methods that are so far removed from establishment-type thinking that the establishment doesn’t know how to fight back.”


The dub techno duo’s first new record since 1999 is a submerged wonder. Its stirring, bold elements steer the tracks into murky, unexpected places.

Anguilla Electrica

There’s a certain level of artistic passivity associated with dub techno. This is in large part because stoned minimalism is the style’s modus operandi, but also because so many of the synthesizers and software programs people have used to make techno throughout the years seem tailor-made to spit out ghostly snare hits and sub-aquatic bass. Your Roland Space Echo is not going to have an off day.
Porter Ricks, the German duo of Andy Mellwig and Thomas Köner, has always made music tangential to basic dub techno—they were there in the beginning, on the seminal Chain Reaction label, as Basic Channel laid the ground rules that still govern the style. But Porter Ricks have always seemed more dynamic and wily than their stylistic peers, and if so much dub techno is sending depth charges to the ocean's bottom, then Anguilla Electrica, the duo’s first new record since 1999, is the moment when whatever’s lurking down there comes up to play.
What this means, functionally, Mellwig and Köner have taken a pretty typical techno framework—kick drums on every beat, snares and claps in familiar places, and with plenty of echo—and focused the energy anywhere but that scaffolding. This is not an album about perfectly tuned kick drums or the transients of snares bathing in reverb; it’s about the mechanistic bass-worm that burrows through “Shoal Beat” or the shark-y way that white noise seems to circle “Scuba Rondo.” Each of Anguilla Electrica’s six tracks contains stirring, bold elements that steer the tracks into murky, unexpected places. (And if you think “has memorable moments” is a low bar for any piece of music to clear, you may be underestimating how long certain people will listen to a minor chord drift into the ether.)
Dub techno invites a lot of philosophizing because it naturally deals with time and decay and repetition (and because it pairs well with drugs). Mellwig and Köner, despite some digressions into the duality of the mind and body, seem chiefly concerned with “nuanced sonic experiences,” something that is borne out during Anguilla Electrica.
Porter Ricks share an indelible quality with tricksters like Aphex Twin: artists who, despite building tracks with the same elements as everyone else, consistently manage to sound more slippery and idiosyncratic. You hear this in the static that cloaks “Sandy Ground,” which seems to take on a technicolor aspect as a melody emerges. Even, “Prismatic Error,” the most traditionally dubby track here, idles in a kind of harmonic glow. There’s very little techno music—very little electronic music in general—that sounds like Anguilla Electrica, and that includes previous Porter Ricks albums.
The six tracks here feel labored over—for four years, according to the duo—which, again, is no minor distinction amid techno’s chillest and jammiest substrata. In turn, they ask for your attention, for you to puzzle over the massing overtones and darting basslines with the same intelligence and care their creators did. The distinctions between Anguilla Electrica and workaday techno can sometimes feel subtle, but that’s kind of the point: Mellwig and Köner love techno too much change it, just as they love techno too much to not to.


On a five-song EP accompanying the British National Maritime Museum’s “Polar Worlds” exhibit, the Inuk experimental musician joins landscape, culture, and resistance.

Toothsayer EP

There’s an Inuktitut word, “ajunamat,” that translates to “it cannot be helped”—a concept that embodies many Inuit people’s adaptive way of living, given the unpredictable weather conditions of their homeland and hunting grounds. The researcher Tom Artiss has written that Inuit music in the 21st century lives at the intersection of ajunamat and sappulik, a word that means to “never give up.” To pair the two ideas is to join acceptance with resilience. This is certainly true of the Inuk artist Tanya Tagaq’s work. When Moravian missionaries traveled to Canada in the late 18th century, they prohibited Inuit drumming, dancing, and throat singing. Tagaq, on the other hand, fuses them with an array of contemporary styles of music, from downtempo rap to industrial rock to contemporary classical.
The adaptability and indomitable spirit of her people are present in Tagaq’s politics, which encompass firm, assured stances on environmentalism, women’s rights, and indigenous rights. Those themes permeate Toothsayer, a companion to the “Polar Worlds” exhibit at London’s National Maritime Museum. Bearing a title that suggests both prescience and defiance—“We are going to have to get our fists up and our teeth out to carve our way to survival in this world,” Tagaq explained—Toothsayer is both a love letter to the Inuit and a call to arms for the preservation of their culture.
“Icebreaker” kicks off the EP in devastating fashion. An ominous drone is soon joined by slow, insistent drumming, suggesting something steadily chipping away at indispensable ice. Above the mechanistic beat, Tagaq’s voice oscillates between gasps and growls. It doesn't just sound like a portrait of the merciless Arctic winter, but a meditation on the ecological crisis at hand. Like “Icebreaker,” the rest of the EP’s songs communicate without lyrics. And while much of the instrumentation is thoughtful (the Iranian-British electronic musician Ash Koosha contributed to the delicate “Snowblind” and the raging “Submerged”), nothing is as potent as Tagaq’s voice.
Her virtuosity is impressive—she’s able to move between high-pitched squeaks and guttural bellows, gnarly cackling and fierce howls. What’s most affecting, though, is when we hear katajjaq—the vocal game traditionally played among Inuit women while men are away hunting. It involves two women standing face to face, exchanging repetitive vocal motifs until one fails to keep the pattern going. In older recordings of katajjaq, it’s easy to sense just how entertaining they were: Many games end with laughter.
The katajjaq we hear across Tagaq’s discography is different—it’s performed solo, and she’s not laughing. On “Icebreaker,” the technique runs through the song only to be suddenly silenced—a suggestion, perhaps, of the impending extinction of many traditional practices—and the way she executes her vocalizing on her own feels like a somber foreshadowing of a time when others won’t be present to join her. On “Submerged,” her katajjaq is delivered over simple, repetitive percussion that’s reminiscent of Inuit drumming. When the song reaches its climax, Tagaq swerves into piercing shrieks that are bolstered by electrifying guitar-like sounds. The message: Calamity is near, and the Inuit are its victims.
“Polar Worlds” is about the history of British exploration and scientific enquiry, but it is also about the effects of climate change on the region—a topic central to Tagaq’s work. The issue is serious: Winters are becoming shorter, the weather is getting harsher, the Arctic ice pack grows ever smaller. The livelihood of Inuit people is at stake, and the sustainability of their culture is in danger—the effects of climate change have meant fewer opportunities for younger generations to learn skills their forebears used. If the fury of songs like “Icebreaker” and “Submerged” is keyed directly to the impending crisis, the same is also true of the melancholy cast of the EP’s quietest songs. In “Hypothermia,” her katajjaq takes on the desperate cadence of someone panting, while the crystalline harmonies of “Snowblind” are both a vivid evocation of landscape and a bittersweet expression of pain—the pain of knowing that this could all be gone.


Portland band Blowout's exuberant debut conveys the sense of being so overwhelmed by frustration, excitement, or any feeling really, that it must be acted on, coordination be damned.

No Beer, No Dad

Anyone who’s heard a second of Rainer Maria, the Promise Ring or the Anniversary is likely to hear their influence in the Portland band Blowout’s exuberant debut LP. Consider the most identifiable similarities: The coed vocals that can’t be bothered with the order of “call and response” and just pile on top of each other instead; a spring-loaded rhythmic section; group chants that feel like more of a product of musical theater than punk. These are the qualities of a certain itchy, impatient brand of ‘90s indie rock, one that was so exasperated by its more staid and slack peers that a song like “Do the Standing Still” felt necessary call them out. This was music that conveyed the sense of being so overwhelmed by frustration, excitement or any feeling really, that they simply had to act on it, coordination be damned. So from a certain angle, *No Beer, No Dad *is an indie rock band making one of the most irresistible dance albums of 2016.
I mean, it’s emo as hell too: “Indiana” double-dips in the genre’s favorite tropes by using a geographic signifier for a hook on a song about having a pet for a best friend. When Laken Wright breaks into a barrage of “ba ba bas” on “Cents Cents Money Money,” it could be heard as direct homage to the Promise Ring’s “Why Did We Ever Meet?” even if the inspiration is entirely different: rather than being incapacitated by infatuation, she’s at a loss for words to describe how bored she is with your bullshit. There’s a wild streak of pop-punk pissiness as well in the tart edge of Wright’s vocals, the between-song banter about beer and cheap guitars and the general attitude: “Indiana” is a love song about a pet, but Wright only gets to this point after admitting, “People just bore me.”
Even if inspires some odd contortions at basement shows, *No Beer, No Dad *appears to have the same goal of *traditional *dance albums: release from the problems of the straight world. And while they’re young, Blowout are going to make the most of out of having the energy to take on the universe while absorbing the resistance of the universe pushing back with its incessant demands; jobs, money, relationships, parental guidance, all of that annoying shit. Fittingly, the hookiest songs are the ones that speak to Blowout’s ambitions to get up, get out and find success or failure on their own terms. During the riotous “Guts Grown Up,” the entire bands yells “I left it all!” and they could not sound more excited to get drunk, sleep on ratty couches, engage in doomed sexual encounters, and in general do all the things that will probably inspire their more considerate, *mature *second LP. If they get there, they'll hopefully discard the bafflingly unflattering production that serves as their strongest current similarity to Promise Ring circa -30 Degrees Everywhere.
It’s not like anyone should expect a band this young and energetic to sound like they walked out of Daniel Lanois’ studio; but No Beer, *No Dad *doesn’t sound raw or lo-fi like it’s trying to accurately capture a young band’s live energy. The problem is more concrete: often times, you can barely hear the vocals at all. Wright too often struggles just to be heard, and these aren’t songs where the vocals are meant to function as texture. This becomes even more pronounced during *No Beer, No Dad’*s second half, where Blowout veers towards looser song structures that can sound like instrumentals with incidental studio chatter. It isn’t enough to negate the exceeding promise Blowout has right now, but maybe it's just a part of their “dance like no one’s watching” attitude: they’re going to express themselves right now, polish and nuance be damned.


The Atlanta label home to Migos, Lil Yachty, and a squad of up-and-coming rappers showcases their year on top with a 30-song victory lap of minor-key flexers and foamy delights.

Various Artists: Quality Control: Control the Streets, Vol. 1

Patience has finally paid off for Quality Control, the Atlanta label founded by Coach K, a long time rap mentor and manager to trap mavens Gucci Mane and Jeezy, and local hustler Pierre “Pee” Thomas, now the company’s chief executive. Led by Migos and Lil Yachty, the brand is stronger now than ever. There was a No. 1 single, a slew of brand partnerships, and a high-profile proposal consolidating rap power. After a year of hits and wins, the label was recently featured in The New York Times, and K was profiled in The New Yorker. The name Quality Control implies a focus on nurturing talent, and that developmental style has reaped dividends in 2017, with fans and analysts taking notice. “There’s some artists we could’ve signed if we were trying to get some right-now money, but we’re trying to build something for the long run,” Pee told The New York Times. The QC executives have chalked the burgeoning label’s success to a local-first, street-focused approach to roster-building and music making, even though they’re home to some of the most internet-friendly acts out. “If I’m being honest—and it might sound ignorant—I don’t own a computer. I’m really out here in it,” Pee said. K echoed the sentiment in his profile: “We did it in the hood, man.”
But the truth lies somewhere in-between: there is an organic, streets-first mentality to the infrastructure, but there’s also a memeability and virality to the label’s biggest stars, like Yachty breaking out on syncs from a viral comedy sketch or Migos getting an impromptu, word of mouth shout from Donald Glover live during a Golden Globes telecast, boosting their Spotify stats by 243%. (They must understand this, for the upcoming Migos video will parody a viral feud with the cast of the web series “Everyday Struggle.”) Quality Control scored huge in 2017, bridging the gap between trap ideology and traditional business mechanics, hood recruiting and economics, and viral marketing. Control the Streets, Vol. 1 takes stock of the Quality Control empire, particularly the Migos explosion, recapping the year that was and looking to establish future stars.
The message here is unmistakable: “The street that you walking on, we control it/Quality Control this shit,” Quavo raps on the intro before adding, “YRN, throwin’ up QC/We got trap stars and we on TV.” The evidence supports his claims. On “South Africa,” he raps, “Ice chain, QC keep on spinning,” presenting the project’s more general idea: Quality Control has arrived, they can’t stop and they won’t stop. If there was any questioning Migos’ value to QC, they establish themselves as the label’s flagship act on its compilation: a member of the trio appears on 22 of a possible 30 tracks and they mix them in with guests, individually and together, to create all kinds of unique pairings and match-ups. They each have have their strong individual showings—Offset on “Violation Freestyle,” Takeoff on “We the Ones,” and Quavo on “She For Keeps” with Nicki Minaj—but they got here as a unit, and that’s still how they best operate.
They luxuriate in their raps, enjoying their toys and taunting their skeptics, and when their verses stack neatly into each other, they’re particularly effective. “Bosses Don’t Speak” addresses lesser stunters while “Thick & Pretty” takes measurements of the models and strippers they surround themselves with. Both songs are filled with acrobatics and simple but effective one-liners like “My bitch so bad she walk around being mean.” Then there’s “Too Hotty,” which warps Eurielle’s “Carry Me” into a spooker. “Pull up in the Poltergeist/Hundred thousand on me, yikes!” Offset raps. Takeoff takes things big picture: “Migos but move like the mafia/Can’t see it, you need some binoculars.” The jump cutting and flipping would be dizzying if the ideas weren’t so easy to latch onto; nearly every phrase gets its own life, performed with such gusto that everything is constantly magnified. They ad-lib each other’s bars and cut in unexpectedly. Each sentence ends emphatically with an exclamation point. Even as they settle into a routine, honing their execution in the process, there is still a spontaneity to their songcraft. At every turn, one of the three is popping up and making their presence felt.
Migos owned 2017, but the most improved artist on QC has been Lil Yachty. Control the Streets, Vol. 1 is a much his showcase as anyone else’s. On the keyboard-flickering “Holiday” he likens randomly paying someone’s rent to gifting them an extra vacation, each full-throated exclamation inducing further celebration. “Movin’ Up,” a team-up with Ty Dolla $ign, adds an sweet, airy falsetto to Yachty’s bubblegum range. He’s right in his wheelhouse for the Young Thug duet “On Me,” which returns to playhouse synths and melodies; he’s clumsy where Thug is graceful, but that juxtaposition is the whole point. His writing still has room to improve, but it’s becoming far less grating as he continues to practice, and there are more memorable zingers like “If my diamonds had a voice it would sound like Fantasia” or “Flex so hard had to invest in fitness.”
Other Quality Control signees get their spotlight moments: Lil Baby gives a taste of his Too Hard mixtape on “Sides,” City Girls make a snappy first impression with the MajorNine-produced “Fuck Dat Nigga,” and Kollission’s “Space Cadet” lives up to its title. These exhibitions are scattered throughout the tracklist on Vol. 1, but never seem out of place among songs from the stars, in part because of consistently compelling beats. The production features many of the usual suspects working in trap circles—808 Mafia co-founder Southside, Murda Beatz, Da Honorable C.N.O.T.E., and Ricky Racks, especially—but it’s more of a showcase for in-house beatmaker Quay Global, frequent Yachty producers Digital Nas and EarlthePearll, Migos’ DJ Durel, and even Quavo. Some are wonky and others are straight boomers. Minor key flexers are offset by foamy delights, thanks in large part to Yachty and his crew. Highly technical arrays give way to rich, Auto-Tuned melodies. Everyone does their part. This is the compilation of a label with a clear vision and the personnel to execute. The Quality Control annual report is in, and the forecast looks bright.