What could’ve been a victory lap for two Southern rappers on top of the game was instead a transcendental funk fantasia, an unequivocal commercial and artistic triumph.

Stankonia

They always had chips on their shoulders, a grievance born of their distinctive authorship mixed with the civic pride of scrappy underdogs. They were André “3000” Benjamin and Antwan “Big Boi” Patton, but they went by an increasing array of colorful names—like Possum Aloysius Jenkins and Daddy Fat Sax—which seemed to exist only to expand minds and expectations while capturing the ideas that emanated from their craniums. They had emerged from southwest Atlanta with styles that were unforeseen, but quickly copied—the Kangol hats they wore in the video for “Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik” were soon seen atop the domes of Sean “Diddy” Combs and the Notorious B.I.G. after having been out of vogue for years. On the intro to Stankonia—their fourth album, a thrill-pushing auricular splattering of mindfunks and ideascapes—they mimicked those copying them by playfully reinterpreting the Atlanta “bounce” that had been spreading as the distraction of babies. Big Boi exhaled smoke and lamented, “Niggas ain’t even from the A-Town.”
Identity and location—and defining and observing the two on their own terms—have always been key with OutKast. All of their albums began with a disembodied intro track as a prelude, followed by a State of the OutKast declaration that proved that, as André would famously go on to say at the 1995 Source Awards, “the South got something to say.” Tellingly, André confessed, “I gots a lot of shit up on my mind,” on “Myintrotoletuknow” from their 1994 debut Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. Their voices spat out harsh rhymes and stretched out melodic moments, but they also spoke about things widely and deeply, respecting and commenting on everything going on hip-hop, largely by ignoring everything going on in hip-hop. Their sonic brashness and directness had Public Enemy’s Chuck D in its DNA, their fashion had antecedents in the Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five meeting Afrika Bambaataa’s Soul Sonic Force, the subversive whimsy of De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest were their forebears, giving the group a musical intensity and breadth incomparable to any other major hip-hop act before or since. Those are weighty statements, but OutKast was OutKast—singular, inimitable, and unpredictable.
Their debut was an album bursting with the funk descended from the Isley Brothers, Isaac Hayes, and Curtis Mayfield in a way that was smoother than Dr. Dre’s G-funk stylings, more organic than Puff Daddy’s wholesale sampling of ’80s R&B, and more fluid and adventurous than hometown icon Jermaine Dupri’s sleek soul and pop arrangements. It was the music of Southern hip-hop, the “country rap tunes” pioneered by the late Pimp C, outfitted to a weary worldview that was cautious and specific about local dealings and paranoid about the greater world, but ultimately hopeful on universal levels—or, at least as hopeful as “Crumblin’ Erb” while “niggas killin’ niggas” can be.
Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik was a revelation to hip-hop: Two dope boys in a Cadillac rapping just as well as, if not better than, just about anyone around them, sharing untold tales of Atlanta slums and Georgia red clay and opining on race in a way that introduced the concept of the Dirty South a year before they’d give it a name with the Goodie Mob. OutKast’s arrival was as eye-opening as N.W.A.’s had been in the late ’80s and their next project, ATLiens (1996) quickly vaporized any notions of sophomore slumps song-by-song, rhyme-by-rhyme. With their third album, Aquemini (1998)—a total fuck-you to any ideas of limitations on what a street-rooted hip-hop album could sound like, think like, and talk about—they ascended to rare air: musical acts who have been able to pull off a hat-trick of commercial and critical hits with their first three releases.
In this way, 2000’s Stankonia was set up to be a victory lap—the group really had nothing left to prove. Each album had further refined their mastery; each one was a tour de force in its own right. But where Aquemini seemed to be rejecting most radio leanings with sprawling jam-session numbers like “SpottieOttieDopaliscious,” “Liberation,” “Synthesizer,” and “Chonkyfire,” Stankonia found OutKast catering to a mass market without seeming to give it much thought. The album’s two most indelible hits—“So Fresh, So Clean” and “Ms. Jackson”—are unrepentant earworms that feel like natural extensions of the group’s sound, not crossover attempts. Both songs are full of layered and complex intonations: “So Fresh” simply speaks on haberdashery and hoes, while “Jackson” went on to win a Grammy, despite being a somewhat heady and sincere dedication to their baby mama’s mamas. Produced by their longtime collaborators and mentors Organized Noize, “Jackson” is one of the best radio singles they’ve ever produced as a duo.
It has to be mentioned that the group, along with their longtime DJ, Mr. DJ, had begun handling the bulk of their production with Aquemini and it sounded as if their longtime producers, Organized Noize—who had stunned on Goodie Mob’s debut, created one of TLC’s defining songs with “Waterfalls” and produced En Vogue’s biggest hit, “Don’t Let Go (Love)”—had actually been holding the duo back musically. Stankonia was an orgy of sonics leftover from Lee Perry’s Black Ark and George Clinton’s Mothership that sounded like drugs without sounding druggy. It was the acoustics of outer space talking about inner spaces; a self-driving Tesla in the body of a Cadillac Fleetwood; it was Wakanda. It’s no coincidence that former OutKast satellite Killer Mike’s group with rapper-producer El-P, Run the Jewels introduced the fictional nation in the first trailer for Marvel’s Black Panther—OutKast was at once retro and futuristic, veteranized and new school, otherworldly yet street, out of time and timeless, and their impact is evident in the biggest rap acts of today, from Migos to Kendrick Lamar.
There is so much going across Stankonia—the coordinated confetti of noises on “Gangsta Shit,” the uneasy meditation of teen pregnancy that is “Toilet Tisha,” the playful lasciviousness of “I’ll Call Before I Come,” the melodic menace of “Red Velvet,” the skits that spoke in metaphors to the subconscious via hood tongues, the arrangements and progressions that felt capricious, but totally natural. The backing tracks weren’t soundscapes as much as they are aural murals graffitied on the cosmic underpasses where abandoned tricked-out space shuttles rest, stripped of their Brougham rims. It was music that was tangential to crunk, a predecessor to trap, indebted to hip-hop, electro, funk, rock, and anything alternative—the type of music that usually succeeds on intellectual levels and rewards nerds, but not readily equating to an album that would sell more than 4 million copies. Yet OutKast is probably best defined by defying parameters and expectations.
Stankonia is easily the group’s most expansive and abrasive effort. It’s more accomplished than their biggest seller, the double-disc Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, which lacks the tension and dichotomy of André and Big Boi locked in a studio, warring with each other and themselves to the extent that created numbers like “Humble Mumble,” Stankonia’s breakbeat-ish, Caribbean-tinged track where Big Boi admonishes a simp with “Sloppy slippin’ in your pimpin’, nigga/You either pistol whip the nigga or you choke the trigger,” before André recalls speaking with a rap critic: “She said she thought hip-hop was only guns and alcohol/I said ‘Oh, hell naw!’/But, yet, it's that too.”
OutKast had always consisted of a politically conscious pimp and a spiritual gangsta, but on Stankonia, those identities came to the fore with a greater distinction that paradoxically allowed them to sound closer together than they had since their inception—even as André sat out songs like “Snappin’ & Trappin’” and “We Luv Deez Hoez.” On Stankonia’s first proper song, “Gasoline Dreams” Big Boi raps about their clout and the limits thereof—“Officer, get off us, sir/Don’t make me call [my label boss] L.A. [Reid], he’ll having you walking, sir/A couple of months ago they gave OutKast the key to city/But I still gotta pay my taxes and they give us no pity”—while André throttles out a brainy hook: “Don’t everybody like the smell of gasoline?/Well burn, motherfucker, burn American dreams.”
Stankonia is an album about many things and full of epigrams; so ahead of the curve that one of its many double entendres—“I got a stick and want your automatic”—is now a bona fide triple entendre. It’s about sounds as smells and music as sex, but mostly it’s about two black kids from Southwest Atlanta, boogieing with chips on their shoulders, making Molotov cocktails of songs that sound like a revolution’s afterparty. It’s peppered with personal narratives and small slips of autobiography, and it tackles big ideas both directly and obliquely. But, ultimately, it sounds like two artists going pop on their own terms while trying to make sense of, and change, the world around them. Closing in on two decades after its release, Stankonia remains loud as bombs over Baghdad and humble as a mumble in the jungle.


Andrew Taggart and Alex Pall isolate the essential elements of their EDM-pop style and cut out everything else, including guest features. The result is easily their most enjoyable front-to-back listen.

So Far So Good

The Chainsmokers carry themselves like a startup company. They talk like finance bros, call venues “properties,” and have admitted getting laid is as much of an impetus for their career as anything else. Yet Andrew Taggart’s songwriting has always stood at a right angle to the crass commercialism of their overblown EDM-pop. He doesn’t write about mindless hedonism and all-night hotel parties but unglamorous hookups, backyard brawls, and the feeling of walking in the club and thinking everyone hates you. They’ve smartly aligned their writing with pop-punk and emo, whose mainstream revival was just underway when the duo put out their full-length debut Memories… Do Not Open in 2017. It’s not for nothing that “Closer,” their biggest and best song, name-drops Blink-182—nor that Blink-182 would return the favor by appearing on “P.S. I Hope You’re Happy” from 2019’s World War Joy.
The Chainsmokers’ fourth album, So Far So Good, is their first with no features, which might seem like a cheap ploy for authenticity. The guest-heavy hits from Memories were as much triumphs of A&R as anything else, so what better way to prove that you’re a real band than to ditch your famous friends and do it yourself? (Well, not entirely: Akon, T-Pain, and Chris Martin are credited songwriters.) Yet So Far So Good is their first album that seems to stand outside of the zeitgeist. Though they’ve chalked the album’s content up to post-tour burnout and depression, they haven’t yoked it to any prevailing trend in confessional pop music but have instead chosen to burrow deeper into their own sound. It’s as if they’ve isolated the essential elements of the Chainsmokers style and cut out everything else. The result is easily their most enjoyable front-to-back listen.
The core Chainsmokers style, per So Far So Good, consists of chugging synthpop verses and sticky-sweet drops. Usually, these elements combine into songs that sound massive enough to dominate pop radio or hangar-sized clubs, yet So Far So Good sounds weirdly…small. The dynamic range is flattened, so the drops on songs like “Riptide” and “Maradona” feel like part of the song’s fabric rather than payoffs after endless anticipation. Songs meander and take the scenic route: “Maradona” slows down spectacularly in its second half, like “Nights” on steroids, while “Cyanide” concludes with more than a minute of nebulous synths and garbled Auto-Tune. The duo might scoff at So Far So Good being their “pop” rather than their “club” album, but this is their first album whose tracks might feel out of place at one of their Vegas residencies.
To spend a whole album with Taggart, never the most likable or tactful of pop frontmen, might seem exhausting. Yet he, too, seems to be looking inward along with his band’s sound. While he bellowed and over-pronounced his lyrics in the past, reinforcing the Chainsmokers’ connection to pop-punk, he prefers a croon or a falsetto here, as if he’s trying to sound like Swae Lee. Gone are odious half-apologies like “Honest” or manipulative guilt trips like “You Owe Me.” When he’s begging a girl to come back on “I Love U,” he’s begging like a Temptation, not playing a sociopathic mind-game. He hasn’t suddenly abandoned his douche-bro persona: this is a man whose idea of self-care is flying to Italy to find his “Maradona energy,” and how much you can empathize with him depends on how much you can empathize with that. But So Far So Good is the rare “mature” pop turn where the artist actually seems like he’s growing up.


What happens after you set the world on fire? On six Blue Note LPs following landmark albums The Shape of Jazz to Come and Free Jazz, the mercurial saxophonist endeavored to find out.

Ornette Coleman: Round Trip: Ornette Coleman on Blue Note

Ornette Coleman revolutionized modern jazz with the six records he released on Atlantic Records between 1959 and 1961. Liberating improvisation from the confines of chordal changes—a shift accentuated by his omission of the piano, an instrument that had been an anchor in hard bop—the alto saxophonist pushed jazz into mercurial territory. His habit of allowing his tone to drift off center, as he found the space between notes, heightened the music’s melody-forward spontaneity. Producer Nesuhi Ertegun convinced Coleman to name his Atlantic debut The Shape of Jazz to Come, a title that carried a sense of prophecy. Indeed, an entire subsection of jazz would name itself after Free Jazz, the 1961 album where Coleman encouraged two quartets to tangle with each other. Groundbreaking at the time, the Atlantic albums can sound relatively conventional to modern ears; many musicians inspired by Coleman’s sense of exploration kept venturing further out. Such is the fate of a pioneer: Innovations become part of the shared vernacular.
Conversely, the six albums Ornette Coleman made for Blue Note between 1965 and 1968—two live sets, three studio sessions where he was a leader, and another where he was a sideman—still sound unusual, surprising in their sound and conception. Much of their oddness lies in the fact that it took a while for Coleman to re-emerge after releasing Ornette on Tenor in 1962. Coleman retreated from the spotlight after closing out his Atlantic contract, exhausted not from the act of creation but the nature of the record business. He spent those years in seclusion, woodshedding, pursuing a primal sound on his alto while teaching himself trumpet and violin.
Coleman’s work for Blue Note still carries a visceral jolt. Maybe these experiments and exercises don’t have the gravity of Coleman’s Atlantic records but their oddness is often invigorating, especially when they’re heard as a distinct body of work, as they are on Round Trip: Ornette Coleman on Blue Note. The box set is part of Blue Note’s boutique vinyl reissue series Tone Poet, an all-analog line curated and produced by Joe Harley and mastered by Kevin Gray of Cohearent Audio. As the first box set in the Tone Poet series, Round Trip is in keeping with the imprint’s emphasis on cult classics, rarities, and curios—the kind of records Coleman released on the label.
Coleman dispatched with the classic first, releasing the two-volume At the “Golden Circle” Stockholm, a live set recorded with his Ornette Coleman Trio in December 1965. Supported by bassist David Izenzon and drummer Charles Moffett, Coleman sounds vigorous and unpredictable here, his tone deeper and edgier than on the Atlantic sessions, which were three years in the past at the time of its recording. The first volume of At the “Golden Circle” Stockholm bristles with energy; the rhythm section provides a propulsive kick that allows the saxophonist to circle between melodic phrases and out explorations. On the second set, Coleman introduces his rudimentary trumpet and violin on “Snowflakes and Sunshine,” and, coming after the full-blooded first set, the effect remains jarring: By using these instruments as noisemakers, he aims to unsettle, and he succeeds.
Trumpet and violin are at the forefront of The Empty Foxhole, a 1966 set that marked Coleman’s first studio session for Blue Note. He enlisted his old colleague Charlie Haden on bass to round out a trio that featured his ten-year-old son Denardo. At the time, many observers believed the decision to record with Denardo was little more than a stunt, yet the boy’s playing, while rough, suits Ornette’s unschooled trumpet and violin explorations. The elder Coleman’s violin may grate, but his trumpet playing has a raw, visceral quality that enlivens The Empty Foxhole even if the album remains a curio: a record where the pursuit means more than the destination.
Comparatively, the last two albums Coleman led on Blue Note feel much more grounded. Culled from the same 1968 date, New York Is Now! and Love Call amount to a passing of the torch of sorts, as John Coltrane’s bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones support Coleman and tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman. Where Coltrane spent his last albums pushing at the outer reaches of the free jazz Coleman pioneered, Ornette spends his time with Garrison and Jones returning to Earth, grounding their improvisations in a heavy blues mode that allows him to dig into a fierce interplay with Redman. The earthy approach benefits Coleman’s trumpet more than the violin, which is heard only in passing on New York Is Now!. Both albums contain exciting passages yet feel strangely terrestrial, as if the music is chafing against its constraints.
That can’t be said of the real gem of the bunch, New and Old Gospel, a 1968 album by the steely hard-bop saxophonist Jackie McLean. One of the few established jazz artists to enthusiastically embrace Coleman’s adventurous sounds, McLean edged into out territory here without abandoning blues architecture, a tension that thrives on the side-long medley “Lifeline.” Much of the crackling tension lies in the exchanges between the saxophonist and Coleman, who plays trumpet on the entire record. Coleman’s visceral horn complements McLean’s flinty style, making for a robust and invigorating session.
As a collected work, Round Trip isn’t as satisfying or nourishing as Beauty Is a Rare Thing, the classic Rhino box containing all of Coleman’s Atlantic work. It’s nevertheless challenging, its willful detours and half-realized ideas provoking genuine emotional reaction; they may not have always hit the mark, but Coleman wound up with records that still feel alive and human. As a box set, there’s no denying Round Trip is a luxury item, providing exquisite remasters and handsome packaging that almost seems at odds with the feral music inside. It’s a testament to the power of this misshaped, heartfelt music that it still sounds vital and when presented as a high-toned audiophile set.

Buy: Rough Trade


The self-described “poor man’s Traveling Wilburys” features members of Franz Ferdinand, Grandaddy, Band of Horses, Travis, and Midlake in an effort to collectively seize upon their best traits.

Volume 1

It’s been 17 years since Travis took home NME’s Artist of the Year award, right smack between two album releases that sold millions in the UK alone. Some 15 years have passed since the characters took a shopping break during their fight against zombies in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later to the tune of Grandaddy’s “A.M. 180.” Nearly 13 years ago, Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out” topped the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop poll for singles, becoming an alternative radio staple in the process. And barely more than a decade has passed since Band of Horses made “The Funeral” their first single, eventually reaching ubiquity through features in movies, television, and a particularly inescapable commercial for the Ford Edge.
For Midlake, the fifth band associated with new supergroup BNQT, there isn’t a similar time peg to note a crest of success. Since forming in 1999, their career arc has been slower and steadier than all the aforementioned artists, with bandleader Eric Pulido describing a workmanlike cycle of “write, record, tour, repeat” that can be seen as both a privilege and a vocational rut. So, while touring Midlake’s last album Antiphon, Pulido conceived of BNQT. He would share songwriting duties on the new project with the leaders of bands he had met over the years, each crafting two songs apiece from their respective camps and piecing the elements together both remotely and inside a studio in Denton, Tex.
BNQT (pronounced “banquet”) is not a push outside the comfort zone for those involved, but further indication of restlessness from a collection of indie rock lifers, each of whose primary acts made their dent in the blog-rock boom and find their relevance dimming. At that, the optimistically titled Volume 1 serves more to elaborate on its characters than it does to recapture past glory. Midlake’s McKenzie Smith, Joey McClellan, and Jesse Chandler are the chameleonic house band, taking cues from the songs’ originators and finding cohesion in fully-realized arrangements. But it’s the songs themselves that are thin. Pulido is the only artist bringing A-level material with his vaguely-psychedelic “Restart” and his best nod to buoyant ’70s AM radio “Real Love.” They are a pair of songs geared specifically as singles, despite the lack of platforms for such singles to thrive. Travis’ Fran Healy steps out as a caricature of collective recording, with “L.A. on My Mind” begging for a sync with its titular geotag, hand-clap rhythm, and flexing guitar bravado. Band of Horses’ Ben Bridwell doesn’t fare much better, as “Unlikely Force” is content with personality-free breeziness and “Tara” buries Bridwell’s best asset, his voice, with muddy harmonies and an uninspired vocal performance.
It’s only Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle and Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos that find success under the BNQT banner. Lytle’s usual recordings are so deeply insular that there is something to be gleaned from hearing him apart from his busted-keyboard sonics. His whisper-singing stands up to the orchestration of “Failing at Feeling” and “100 Million Miles” is one of the only songs of the collection that dares to drift beyond classic rock nostalgia. Kapranos, on the other hand, gleefully swims in the opportunity to get weird. Just the word “banana” rolling off his tongue on “Hey Banana” argues for adding smoked-ham lounge singing to his resume.
“I think we could all use a restart,” Pulido claims on the album opener, a song that readily admits that he’s “older now” and “broken but soon on the mend.” It’s a sentiment that could umbrella all five songwriters that have never struggled with maturity but are now toiling with getting old. Where lesser people might simply buy sports cars, musicians do these hapless projects that are more fun for the artists involved than for the listeners, like their own boring social scene. So when Pulido describes BNQT as “a poor man’s version of the Traveling Wilburys” in a press release, there’s some solace in everyone knowing where exactly where they stand. It gives the project the inability to disappoint. Aim low enough and you’ll never fail.


Last September's weary, autumnal Elysium didn't offer much hope for the future of Pet Shop Boys. So, it's a surprise that Electric is their most immediate, jubilant record in at least a decade.

Electric

Last September's weary, autumnal Elysium didn't offer much hope for the future of Pet Shop Boys, so it's a bit of a surprise that they've whipped up its sequel in under a year. (Or, rather, its companion, including some songs they started at the earlier sessions). It'se even more of a surprise that Electric is their most immediate, jubilant record in at least a decade-- a return to a couple of elements of their work that had been lying fallow for too long.
Most notably, this is the first time in a while that Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have borrowed from what's going on in dance clubs in the service of pop songwriting, with help from veteran producer Stuart Price. ("Shouting in the Evening" even nods to dubstep.) Electric isn't quite electrifying in the way that Very and Introspective and "What Have I Done To Deserve This?" are, but nearly every track has a moment or two that ignites seemingly long-gone enthusiasm.
Sometimes, that's because the Boys are using specific tricks that have worked for them before. "Love Is a Bourgeois Construct" is another in their string of modified classical pieces, taking its countermelody from Henry Purcell's King Arthur (by way of Michael Nyman's "Chasing Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds"), and its sour-grapes premise from a line in a David Lodge novel. And "Thursday" might have recalled 1986's "Love Comes Quickly" even without a synth-bass-and-bells introduction that makes it sound like that song's fraternal twin.
The one thing Tennant and Lowe arguably do better than anyone else, though, is queering pop-- finding ways to recast seemingly sexuality-neutral musical ideas as specifically gay. "Bolshy"-- slang for "uncooperative" or "belligerent," roughly-- isn't ordinarily a gendered word, but it sure is in the song by that name here, and its connotation of Bolsheviks fits in with the Pet Shop Boys' fascination with all things early-Soviet. Electric's sole cover is a brilliant recontextualization: "The Last to Die" is a 2007 Bruce Springsteen song, whose chorus quotes John Kerry's 1971 condemnation of the Vietnam war. Tennant and Lowe scarcely change a word of its lyrics, but arranged and sung as a Pet Shop Boys song, it abruptly and unmistakably becomes a song about gay culture's transition from the AIDS crisis of the "West End Girls" era to its current focus on domesticity. That's quite a feat.
In place of the leavetakings of their past few albums' final tracks, Electric ends with "Vocal", a fantasy of hearing exactly the kind of music you've always wanted to hear, in the perfect club. "I like the singer/ He's lonely and strange/ Every track has a vocal," Tennant muses in his lonely, strange voice. It's a bit unusual to hear so many vocal tracks in a club these days, he knows, but he's imagining that his songs could save some kid the way other people's songs once saved him.


QOTSA's sixth studio album foregrounds an aspect that's been lingering in their music since the beginning: beneath all that volcanic riffage, Josh Homme has always been a sucker for a pretty pop song. He's abetted here by the likes of Sir Elton John, Alex Turner, and James Lavelle.

Like Clockwork

Deep into the new Queens of the Stone Age album, Josh Homme blithely declares, “I blow my load over the status quo.” Missions statements don’t come cockier than that. But Homme can get away with it because the status quo he’s referring to could easily be his own band. Since launching Queens of the Stone Age from the ashes of the almighty Kyuss in 1998, Homme has treated hard rock and metal as soluble materials; his band’s music is mercurial, its membership highly fluid.
By QOTSA's unconventional standards, a six-year layoff between albums doesn’t even feel like an unusually long hiatus, but more like the natural amount of time it takes for a new incarnation of this ever-shifting band to settle into place. Of course, Homme was never far from the headlines in the interim: He’s done everything from form a new band with a member of Led Zeppelin to produce an underrated Arctic Monkeys record to survive a near-death experience. Along the way, the Queens have shed long-time members (Joey Castillo, whose departure was announced partway through the ...Like Clockwork sessions; he appears on four tracks) and reacquainted themselves with some old friends: Songs For the Deaf-era sticksman Dave Grohl, go-to growler Mark Lanegan, and, most surprisingly, Nick Oliveri, who was ousted from the band in 2004 (and in the ensuing years, narrowly avoided jail time for domestic violence, drugs, and firearm-related offences). All the while, Homme lined up a guest list for ...Like Clockwork*--* including Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears, Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner, U.N.K.L.E.'s James Lavelle, and even Sir Elton John-- that threatened to make the band’s previous revolving-door records seem grossly under-populated.
But if all that suggests a return to the scatterbrained lunacy of the band’s early-2000s releases-- and the band’s exodus from Interscope to Matador would seemingly encourage a left-field foray-- ...Like Clockwork presents another curveball__.__ Queens of the Stone Age’s first album for an indie since their debut is actually more polished and melodically focused than anything they ever released on a major__;__ you’d be hard pressed to classify 80 per cent of it as hard rock. But ...Like Clockwork simply foregrounds an aspect that’s been lingering in the Queens’ music since the beginning: beneath all that volcanic riffage, Homme has always been a sucker for a pretty pop song.
Queens have flashed their softer side before-- see: Rated R’s “In the Fade”, or Era Vulgaris’ “Make It Witchu”-- but there’s always been a self-consciousness about their slow jams, like someone not unsubtly dimming the lights and pretending to stretch their arm to sidle up closer to their date. ...Like Clockwork, however, is more committed in its intent to invest the Queens with extra grandeur and grace, and all of the aforementioned guests are essentially accomplices in Homme’s regal aspirations. (In other words, you’ll need liner notes to figure out most of the cameos). And don’t expect any party-crashing intrusions like “Quick and to the Pointless” from Oliveri; his duties don’t extend beyond backing vocals on a few tracks, as if his return to the group is on a probationary basis.
Fittingly for a band that’s spent the past few years retooling itself, it takes some time for Queens to shake off the cobwebs and get back to full strength: The leaden, one-note trudge of “Keep Your Eyes Peeled” makes for a rather listless re-introduction, "I Sat By the Ocean" doesn't fully deliver on the seedy promise of its "Telegram Sam" strut, while “The Vampyre of Time and Memory” strains too hard in its attempt at an early-70s John Lennon piano ballad. But like Jack White (with whom Homme occasionally shares custody of keyboardist Dean Fertita), Homme knows how to reinvigorate well-worn classic-rock influences by filtering them through his peculiar personality, and this is where ...Like Clockwork really comes alive: The monstrous groove of “If I Had a Tail” imagines how Zeppelin would have turned out if they had survived disco, while the moonage-daydreamy verses of “Kalopsia” are deviously upended by a Ziggy-wiggy, stardust-covered crunch. Bowie looms large on another album highlight: “Smooth Sailing”-- the song of load-blowing bravado-- assumes a Scary Monsters-style robo-funk bounce to bolster brilliantly nonsensical lines like, “I’ve got bruises and hickeys, stiches and scars/ Got my own theme music, plays wherever I are.”
Queens haven’t fully abandoned brawn and ballast (combustible lead single “My God Is the Sun” is up to their usual paint-stripping standards), but those qualities are now being harnessed for greater emotional impact, particularly on the penultimate “I Appear Missing”. It's a power ballad that perfectly bridges the divide between Queens’ hard and soft extremes, pitting Homme’s crestfallen melody against a sleeping giant of a chorus that proves to be as raging as anything in the band’s repertoire; when Homme shifts to falsetto for the song’s calamitous closing minute, it’s less a show of cheekiness than vulnerability. Homme initially chose his band name to subvert the machismo inherent to hard rock and__,__ more than any of their records before it, ...Like Clockwork feels like the ultimate realization of that mission. To invoke an old glam proverb, it kicks like a mule even when it dresses like a queen.


Because it’s not beholden to some overarching conceit, the latest album from the Toronto-based singer-songwriter sounds looser, a bit wilder, more lackadaisical in a sadsack sort of way.

Wilds

Andy Shauf’s most recent records were concept albums about social anxiety, vividly conceived and self-contained. In 2016, the Saskatchewan-born, Toronto-based singer-songwriter released The Party, a collection of songs all set at the same get-together and filled with awkward encounters and bouts of crippling self-doubt. His follow-up, 2020’s The Neon Skyline, sat with the denizens of his favorite bar for one night, eavesdropping on their conversations and laughing at their tortured pick-up lines. Both have gained added poignancy now that such gatherings are much more fraught. Wilds, his surprise-released new album, was originally intended to take a similar shape: he wrote a handful of songs that followed the Skyline barflies forward a few years, just to see where their lives took them. He soon abandoned that idea and instead started writing about one character’s ex-girlfriend, a woman named Judy. But that longer character study got scrapped, too.
Wilds combines those two ideas into something that’s neither/nor. It’s not strictly a sequel, but it’s not completely unrelated either. It’s all part of the Andy Shauf Extended Universe. Despite such tortured origins, the album works surprisingly well. Because it’s beholden to no overarching conceit, the music sounds looser, a bit wilder, more lackadaisical in a sadsack sort of way, its arc less predetermined and its themes emerging more organically. By ceding control, Shauf allows the songs to wander wherever they want, paying their tab at the Skyline and heading out into the world.
Even as he extends his universe, he pares his songs down to their barest bones. Shauf has described it as a collection of demos, but that might actually be underselling it, because there’s as much wit in his playing as in his songwriting. Forgoing the lush sound of previous albums, Wilds is lovingly, wryly minimalist, and he arranges these instruments—most of which he played himself—as though blocking a short play with a small cast. An electric guitar punctuates his worries on “Call” with a single funereal strum, then disrupts “Green Glass” with a riff as unruly as a cowlick. And the rhythm section seems to be mocking him on “Jeremy’s Wedding (Wilds),” especially that “Walk On the Wild Side” bassline. It’s a fine setting for his distinctive voice, which chews on his consonants and wrings his syllables into unusual shapes.
Shauf can be clever, but like John Darnielle—another writer given to self-imposed songwriting conceits—he’s never merely clever. There’s always some dark fear or gnawing anxiety just under the surface of his songs. “Jaywalker” is like one of those gruesome old highway safety films, except the danger here is reckless moping rather than reckless driving. “Jaywalker with your head hung down, never saw it coming,” he sings over a marching beat, “it” being the car that slams into the protagonist who is so lost in his worries that he’s oblivious to oncoming traffic. He’s less concerned about the root of such melancholy and more interested in its effect in the real world. The humor underscores the pathos, and vice versa.
There’s a hint in the lyrics that the doomed jaywalker is actually Judy’s forlorn ex, the same guy who narrated “Where Are You Judy” on The Neon Skyline, and it’s not a stretch to think he’s nearly killed just as he’s leaving that bar. All of these songs and their wayward characters are connected, but you don’t have to be familiar with any of Shauf’s previous albums to find something relatable and powerful in these new songs. You don’t have to map out that social network to be struck by the desperation of the lotto-playing lovers on album opener “Wilds (Judy)” or by the sadness of the unanswered questions on album closer “Jeremy’s Wedding (Wilds).” At heart these are songs about living with the weight of sadness, about the accumulation of severed relationships and missed connections and regrets both big and small. Change all the names and the album can still hit you like a speeding car.

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This grimy new EP from the Gary, Indiana producer has the unfinished edge of a sketch, pointing toward the dancefloor while showcasing her twin forces of invincibility and vulnerability.

Embryo EP

Jlin’s music is rooted in the rhythms of Chicago footwork the way an interstellar mission begins on Earth—it provides the origin point, yes, but as the mission expands ever outward, that shrinking blue dot in the rearview hardly seems relevant. In the years since she broke through to a mass audience with 2015’s Dark Energy, her work hasn’t so much changed shapes as hurtled through light years. 2017’s Black Origami conducted a survey of drum sounds and rhythmic patterns so complete it played like a curtain call for every percussive sound on Earth. The score she composed for Wayne MacGregor’s 2018 ballet Autobiography had more in common with Philip Glass than RP Boo. By now, the Gary, Indiana producer is less a musician than a one-woman genre, absorbing and repurposing whatever dark energies she finds.
And yet, despite her reinventions, there is a pit of bad feeling residing at the center of her work—an alkaline edge of fear, a mingling of arousal and mortal terror—that is inextricable from footwork. She carries this shadow from project to project, even as she furiously sheds skins, accepting commissions from the Met and the Kronos Quartet and collaborating with modern dancers. Footwork battles often resemble bodies contorting themselves through minefields, celebrations of invincibility that carry inside them admissions of extreme vulnerability. These twin forces—vulnerability and invincibility—face off in Jlin’s music like competing weather systems, and you can hear them roiling from the first seconds of her new EP, Embryo.
By her own admission, she wrote these pieces in between commissions, and they have the unfinished edges and openness of sketches. It’s fun to listen to her toying with corroded sounds, degraded outputs: Jlin’s never sounded quite this grimy before. The title track is shrouded in blasts of distortion, like modular synths with a faulty wire, while the thudding beat seems to open a hole beneath your feet. It points towards a dancefloor that some of her recent music has angled away from—you could dance to Black Origami, but with so much furious cross-cutting motion, finding and following a pulse sometimes felt like driving into a blizzard.
The tools here are more tarnished, the world the music conjures danker and more septic than usual. The pistoning drums on “Auto Pilot” and the sepulchral silences surrounding them suggest Detroit techno, a genre where the metaphorical landscape looks a lot like Jlin’s hometown of Gary, Indiana—post-industrialized, made of more emptied-out buildings than people. This sense of solitude is crucial to Jlin’s music: “I have never been to a Chicago footwork battle, ever,” she declared to Red Bull Music Academy, with something like pride. She was too busy working 96-hour work weeks and making tracks in her bedroom.
The final track on the EP is called “Rabbit Hole,” and it starts with a few early-techno blurts into dead space before beginning its descent. The track mimics the act of rabbit holing itself, which has become internet shorthand for the lonely and monomaniacal acquisition of absurdly specific knowledge. Rabbit holes are tiny, cramped, dark, and by nature, they can only accommodate you. You have to emerge to share anything about what you learned—but the act of learning it will forever belong only to you. That is how Jlin’s music explodes in your synapses: a thousand tiny, lonely revelations, yours alone.

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Originally released as a limited-run cassette, this collection of synth pieces from the former Emeralds member is a staggeringly beautiful career highlight.

Imaginary Softwoods: Annual Flowers in Color

Annual Flowers In Color

The cult-favorite trio Emeralds—comprised of John Elliott, Steve Hauschildt, and Mark McGuire—spent the late 2000s fusing drone, New Age and kosmiche better than any band of their time. Despite putting out more than 40 projects before disbanding in 2012, Emeralds left behind a lingering sense of unrealized possibilities—strands of which its members have been exploring in their solo careers. Though Elliott continued with projects like Mist and Outer Space, his focus has increasingly shifted to running his label Spectrum Spools, an off-shoot of Editions Mego that trades in the cutting-edge club sounds of Container and Second Woman and experimental gems like Donato Dozzy Plays Bee Mask and Motion Sickness of Time Travel.
If Elliott’s own solo output slowed, the success of his label always felt like an understandable trade-off — but there may be another reason. Annual Flowers In Color is the album he has been writing, editing, living with and returning to since the final days of Emeralds. The album is credited to Imaginary Softwoods, a moniker that stretches back to 2008 and often explores the side of Elliott’s synth work that might have been crushed under the weight of Emeralds’ drones. The album originally surfaced in 2016 as a small-run cassette collecting unreleased material, but he kept pruning the recordings over the years. Now released in finished form nearly a decade after its earliest recordings, Annual Flowers emerges from its chrysalis a wounded, staggeringly beautiful statement that feels like a new high point in his career.
This new edition is expanded by a lush remastering for vinyl, but it’s just as noteworthy for what’s removed—nearly a third of the original album. He trims some tracks to brief interludes and omits others altogether, but each decision enhances the original’s cathartic power. “Cloud Damage” opens with Angelo Badalamenti-style organ that swells before being swallowed up in a hard-cut instant by the chiming, chromatic synth loop of “Positive Ruin Court Garden.” The effect is jarring, but not unpleasant, like being awakened from a nightmare by birdsong.
The pieces set the stage for “Aura Show,” the first of two epics, where Elliott generates synth waves so soothing that the pensive melody of its second half feels like a spontaneous discovery every time. It compliments “Another First/Sea Machine,” which builds hypnotic ripples of arpeggios over a nearly 11-minute arc that peaks with the kind of endorphin-pumping rush that defined Does It Look Like I’m Here’s best moments. What sticks out most is Elliott’s care in framing his tracks with the subtlest elements: the quiet rattle of what sounds like a stalling motor, a spoken-word snippet by Japanese artist Yuri, or the gentle room-shaking rumble of a passing train running through heartbreaking closer “The Imminent Collapse Department,” a haunting fusion of music-box melodies and crumbling sound design that recalls Broadcast’s final work with The Focus Group.
Even the tracks cut from Annual Flowers (all of which are remastered and included as digital bonus tracks) are quite good, which only makes Elliott’s editing job more difficult. “Positive Ruin” and “Aura Show,” tracks that flow perfectly together, were originally separated by the lively “Multiple Discovery” and “Calendula,” but their absence ultimately strengths and focuses everything around it. Elsewhere, the mournful synth flickering through “The Geranium Room” is cut down to a minute-long interlude, a crucial choice that reframes it as the heart of the album. It all creates a gravity-shifting power that makes the album sound like it couldn’t have been constructed any other way. What may have begun as demos and sketches in 2011, and an overlooked highlight in 2016, has aged to perfection in 2020.


Los Angeles folk musician Kayla Cohen turns a two-month spell in the New Mexico desert into a meditation on place, nature, and the passage of time.

Spring

“Who knows where the time goes?” Fairport Convention’s Sandy Denny sang in the late 1960s, and in the five decades since, folk musicians have continued to pluck their way toward an answer, their music an acoustic yardstick for life’s seasons. In the measurements taken by contemporary troubadours like Meg Baird or Daughter of Swords, change is both incremental and cyclical, and Itasca’s Spring is further evidence that certain sounds quaver through the years like sunlight, impervious to a world that would hurry it along.
Steered by Los Angeles’ Kayla Cohen, Itasca traffic in dreamy, vaporous ballads anchored by acoustic strumming and occasional strings or piano, each added layer a complementary gilding. Cohen spent two months recording the album in a century-old New Mexico adobe, and Spring is both a product of and tribute to these origins. Like the desert, the record’s structure feels like a symbiotic balancing act—each component part placed just so, lest the whole system come apart. In the particularly lovely “Cornsilk,” Cohen sings of going to “think across the Rio Grande,” swimming in the canyoned river where you can “put your feet out under the sky” and “there are traces in the air of your time laid bare.”
Cohen’s most salient talent is evocation—trapping place, weather, and physical presence like a butterfly pinned beneath glass. Every track is reverent, as hushed as a church penitent. This proves particularly effective when she wrestles with binary oppositions: natural versus artificial; the solitude of the desert versus participation in the manufactured world. “Watched the white flower bloom/The land of harvest here,” she sings on “Comfort’s Faces.” “Thought it was a good luck charm/But a silk flower instead.” With assists from fellow psych and folk practitioners including mix engineer Chris Cohen and drummer Marc Riordan (Sun Araw), the record gives the distinct impression that it was shepherded into existence by a team of people vibing on the same high, natural or otherwise.
Though picturesque, the record meanders, and the pace can feel drowsy. Its consistency is one of its few weaknesses, and it teeters occasionally between meditation and sluggishness. Opener “Lily” falls into this liminal ground, as does “Blue Spring,” and while these tracks don’t seem pointed towards anything particularly urgent, their instrumentation (like the rest of Spring) remains rich and resonant, each component part augmenting the others.
Surely Itasca won’t be the last outfit to metabolize the natural world through a set of strings and a collection of images, navigating life’s metaphorical seasons in order to be more present in its literal ones. The desert might seem sparse to a cursory traveler, but look longer and harder and it’s a teeming landscape, exemplary of birth, death, and the time passing in between. So too is Spring, which imbues a much-used musical frame—the folk travelogue, an earthy meditation on the state of things—with novel horizons.

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The 17-year-old digicore producer’s debut centers them as a vocalist and songwriter, mapping out feelings of insecurity and loneliness against production that is perpetually in motion.

Teen Week

Editor’s Note: Jane Remover came out publicly as a trans woman in 2022. This review is presented as it was originally published in 2021 and uses their prior artist name and pronouns.

Back in January, dltzk’s “52 blue mondays” tore through the digicore scene like a comet. The SoundCloud-based community, which emerged in the late 2010s from online rap circles but pulls from a wide range of influences, has seen its profile rise in the last year, with co-signs from Charli XCX, Phoebe Bridgers, and Trippie Redd. On “blue mondays,” dltzk (pronounced “delete Zeke”) ropes what feels like 25 moving parts—sampled screams, waves of synths, drums that snap like chattering teeth—into something unwieldy and beautiful. Their voice is bitcrushed and blown out but cuts through when it matters most, like a perfectly snarled, “Fuck you, let me do me.” The song is a bomb site, noise so noisy it sounds ambient, a massive piece of digicore architecture that, at the end, comes crumbling down—how could it not?
“blue mondays” is the centerpiece of dltzk’s immersive debut Teen Week, which charts a course from where this “post-genre” music comes from to where it might go. It also serves as an introduction to dltzk, the 17 year old from suburban New Jersey. A prodigious producer who cut their teeth making type beats and lending a hand to other artists, dltzk centers their voice as a vocalist and songwriter here, mapping out feelings of insecurity and loneliness through evocative images. On the gorgeous ballad “cartridge,” dltzk is triggered by a tweet that reminds them of their dad. “Sorry I’m not what you wanted, I know you can’t try again,” they sing, over a delicate 8-bit composition you might hear while leaving home in an old Pokémon game.
Home—both in its online and IRL forms—occupies a central space on Teen Week. Both worlds come together on the soaring closer “seventeen,” where dltzk sings about spending their days scrolling and feeling jealous of artist friends with bigger followings, but also about being perceived disdainfully at school. They sink into their sweater with the A/C off; they’re “mad over tiny letters.” When they sing, “I wish I blew up like yesterday,” it’s less about material aspiration than it is about becoming.
Much of this album is about that process of leaving people, places, and past selves behind. In conveying how they feel, dltzk sometimes leans into rote Tumblr fodder—“If you died on social media would anyone know?” goes one line. More often, though, their words are strikingly personal and affecting. It helps that dltzk sings with the kind of feathery warble that makes Drain Gang’s Ecco2k sound so honest and compelling. (Teek Week pays direct homage to Ecco2k several times, sampling his 2019 song “Blue Eyes.”) Occasionally their admiration turns to limp imitation, like on “let down” and “dysphoria,” but other times, it carries the intimacy of someone giving you a personal concert.
A key element of “52 blue mondays” and several other songs on Teen Week is the Amen break. One of the most historically significant drum loops, it’s recently reached digicore producers, who’ve taken to weaving it into their glitchy compositions like it’s an energy-boosting cheat code. Digicore’s fascination with dance music isn’t new, but this particular flavor of breakbeat craziness, likely inspired by internet drum’n’bass artists like Sewerslvt, steps away from the pure chaos of canonical songs like “Pressure” and “movinglikeazombie” towards enveloping, atmospheric textures that feel more in step with the scene’s Plugg origins.
When dltzk unleashes it, it’s as powerful as ever. The two-song run of “beast friend” into “woodside gardens 16 december 2012” is electric; the latter practically explodes into an Amen break after two minutes of delirious buildup. dltzk has a strong ear for motion, assembling sound in structures more akin to escalators than conveyor belts. With each track, they push this genre further from its roots towards something more complex, more definitively of its own substance.

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The Japanese ambient pioneer’s well-deserved revival continues with a reissue of this 1986 cult classic, which feels like an inviting frame in which to project your own feelings.

GREEN

In 1967, the Canadian composer and philosopher R. Murray Schafer wrote, “The ear is always open.” He didn’t mean metaphorically: Unlike the lidded eye, the ear cannot close itself off to unwanted stimuli, leaving us particularly susceptible to intrusive sounds. Schafer’s observation turned up again in the liner notes to Hiroshi Yoshimura’s debut album, 1982’s Music for Nine Postcards, a contemplative ambient soundtrack composed for Tokyo’s Hara Museum of Contemporary Art. Echoing Schafer’s preoccupation with the rising volume of the industrialized world, Satoshi Ashikawa, whose Sound Process label first released Yoshimura’s album, wrote, “Presently, the levels of sound and music in the environment have clearly exceeded man’s capacity to assimilate them, and the audio ecosystem is beginning to fall apart.” Encouraging a “more conscious attitude” toward sound, he offered Yoshimura’s music—delicate Rhodes figures trailing pastel shadows, their spiraling as aimless as a slowly twisting mobile in a large, empty room—as a kind of palliative.
Yoshimura, who died of cancer in 2003, was a polymath par excellence: composer, designer, historian. Most of his work existed in the overlap between sound, architecture, and everyday life, including installations and commissioned work for museums, hotels, runway shows, an aquarium, a sports stadium, the Tokyo and Kobe subway systems, and Osaka International Airport. Yoshimura’s activities made him one of the central figures of kankyō ongaku, or environmental music, a homegrown style that drew upon Erik Satie’s “furniture music” and Brian Eno’s ambient investigations, as well as centuries-old ritual traditions, to fashion a new kind of site-specific sound uniquely suited to Japan’s post-war economic boom.
Yet listeners outside Japan remained largely ignorant of Yoshimura’s legacy until the past decade, when people like Spencer Doran, of the Portland, Oregon, duo Visible Cloaks, began advocating for his work. In 2017, Doran and Maxwell August Croy’s Empire of Signs label reissued Music for Nine Postcards, helping kick off what has become a broad revival of formerly obscure Japanese ambient and electronic music; Doran also curated Light in the Attic’s 2019 compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990. GREEN, originally released on Kazuo Uehara’s AIR Records in 1986, is not just a welcome addition to that retrospective catalog; a cult classic of growing acclaim (a YouTube upload of the album has been played more than two million times in just four years), it is crucial in fleshing out the portrait of a musician that many Westerners are only beginning to understand.
Many of Yoshimura’s early releases were soundscapes designed to heighten listeners’ perceptions of the spaces around them. Music for Nine Postcards, written with the Hara Museum’s luminous interior in mind, was inspired by scenes glimpsed from the composer’s window—a kind of landscape drawing in sound, translating the movements of clouds and tree branches into simple, gestural motifs. In his notes to 1983’s Pier & Loft, the muted soundtrack to a fashion show held in a warehouse on the Tokyo Bay, Yoshimura wrote obliquely of nostalgic views of a disintegrating city. Cosmetics maker Shiseido commissioned 1984’s barely there A・I・R (Air in Resort) as the sonic complement to a fragrance, while 1986’s lulling Soundscape 1: Surround was distributed as the almost imperceptible soundtrack to a tastefully designed line of prefab homes.
All of these recordings share certain sonic characteristics: They tend to be soft, unobtrusive, and meditative, dissolving like sugar on the tongue. But GREEN is different: lush and layered, with a sense of purpose that makes it unique in Yoshimura’s catalog. The shift in complexity is palpable from the very first track, “CREEK,” in which mallet-like arpeggios rise from a thrumming, struck-bamboo pulse like a flock of colorful birds bursting from the rushes. It feels more elaborate than Yoshimura’s previous work; it feels more musical, with a greater emphasis on harmonic surprise.
This sense of movement ripples across the album, but it remains quietest at its center: The stretch of songs across “SLEEP, “GREEN,” “FEET,” and “STREET” reprises the abstracted mood of Music for Nine Postcards—an impression reinforced by the fact that “FEET” and “STREET” are essentially variations on a theme. Still, even at its most sedate, GREEN boasts an inviting array of timbres and textures. In one song, the gentle bite of an overdriven Rhodes keyboard jumps to the fore; in another, a buzzing FM bass tone bristles faintly. Yoshimura favors pentatonic scales and tends to avoid major or minor thirds, and as a result, GREEN often feels like an inviting frame in which to project your own feelings. Happy, sad, blue, agitated: It welcomes all comers, promises serene uplift when needed, and offers to sand the edge off any unwanted extremes.
Curiously, all of GREEN’s song titles share an assonant ee sound. The titles were written in English on the original sleeve, along with a cryptic acrostic descending down the musical stave: “Garden River Echo Empty Nostalgia/Ground Rain Earth Environment Nature.” In the liner notes to the original release, Yoshimura wrote, “GREEN does not specifically refer to a color. I like the word for its phonetic quality, and song titles were chosen for their similar linguistic characteristics. I hope that this music will convey the comfortable scenery of the natural cycle known as GREEN.” By treating “green” as a phoneme, Yoshimura taps into the musicality of language, which lies beyond mere signification. However anyone else might hear this music, Yoshimura clearly believed his pieces belonged to the key of ee, and developed an evocative synesthetic world to accompany his mental images of that sound.
If Satoshi Ashikawa saw Yoshimura’s work as a necessary corrective to the modern world’s persistent and worsening din, perhaps this is an opportune time to reconnect with the Japanese composer’s work. Numerous reports have detailed the ways that the world has quieted during the pandemic. With fewer cars on the road, seismologists can detect earthquakes from further away; even in the busiest cities, birdsong is once again audible. This pause opens up a space for Yoshimura’s music to fulfill its purpose: recalibrate our relationship with the sonic world around us.
When GREEN was licensed to the American new-age label Sona Gaia for release on CD and cassette, the sounds of running water and birdsong were added, presumably as a selling point for the American market. Light in the Attic’s reissue restores the original edition, which, Doran says, is the version that Yoshimura preferred. Light in the Attic plans to reissue the adulterated “SFX Version” on streaming platforms this summer, alongside the original; eventually, you can compare for yourself. For a long time, the Sona Gaia version was the only one I knew. But in the past couple of months, I’ve been listening to the Light in the Attic reissue, sans nature sounds, while sitting outside on my porch, where the music mingles with the actual sounds of birds, neighbors’ voices, and the breeze through the trees, plus the occasional motorcycle revving rudely, a few blocks away. These sounds turn out to be the perfect complements for Yoshimura’s music, opening up its dimensions. The ear is always open, and all the world’s a stage.

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After languishing on Island Def Jam, this Odd Future member and Justin Bieber songwriter (!) put out his debut R&B LP for free via Tumblr.

Nostalgia, Ultra.

Frank Ocean is a 23-year-old New Orleans-born, Beverly Hills-based singer who's in the gleefully hedonistic hip-hop collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. Frank Ocean is also known as Christopher "Lonny" Breaux, a songwriter who has helped pen tracks for Justin Bieber, John Legend, and Brandy over the last few years. He's the latest example of why the major label system is crumbling at the knees of Twitter and Tumblr, too. After getting signed to Island Def Jam about a year ago, the label proceeded to ignore him. Until February 16, that is. That's when Ocean decided to give away his debut album, Nostalgia, Ultra, for free on his Tumblr.
Venting about his decision to drop the record his own way, he took to Twitter on March 1: "i. did. this. not ISLAND DEF JAM. that's why you see no label logo on the artwork that I DID. guess its my fault for trusting my dumbass lawyer and signing my career over to a failing company. fuck Def Jam & any company that goes the length of signing a kid with dreams & talent w/ no intention of following through. fuck em. now back to my day. i want some oatmeal and toast. brunch swag."
The mini-rant sums up this singer's demeanor well-- openly passionate and heartfelt, but also attractively off-center and humble. Nostalgia, Ultra finds Ocean singing over a mix of original pop-leaning R&B beats courtesy of big-ticket producers like Tricky Stewart (Rihanna's "Umbrella", Beyonce's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)") and Midi Mafia (50 Cent's "21 Questions", Justin Bieber's "Down to Earth") as well as some eclectic remakes of songs including Coldplay's underrated 2009 single "Strawberry Swing", MGMT's "Electric Feel", and, most surprisingly, the Eagles' "Hotel California". Ocean's experience within the major-label hit machine comes through-- his casually hook-y voice is akin to Usher or Jamie Foxx's, and at least three of the album's songs could (and should) slot in comfortably on a R&B or even Top 40 radio station near you any day now. There are distinct elements of Drake's melancholic paranoia and The-Dream's high melodrama, too. But there's also a heady surreality surrounding Nostalgia, Ultra that makes it unique. The cover-- showing a bright orange 1980s BMW (Ocean's "dream car") hidden in plain sight amidst lush greenery-- is perfectly indicative of what's inside.
The record is held together by tiny interludes named after 1990s video games in which the unmistakable sounds of a cassette player rewinding, fast-forwarding, and stopping are heard. The old-school touch lends Nostalgia, Ultra the feel of a personal, friend-to-friend mixtape rather than one made by a name-dropping hip-hop DJ. The impressionistic, fingerprint details don't stop there. On the brief segue "Bitches Talkin'", a loving snippet of Radiohead's "Optimistic" is heard while Ocean sincerely laments how "all bitches want is Jodeci, what the fuck?"-- not exactly the type of sentiment you'd expect to hear on any sort of R&B album.
Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman's adulterous bedroom soliloquy from Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut can be heard underneath the murderous "Lovecrimes", adding a sense of manic dread. The film is once again referenced on the nightmarish, Stewart-produced "Novacane", which has Ocean losing his senses in the company of a wannabe dentist/porn star he met at Coachella. And if that sounds kind of ridiculous, that's probably the point; the atmospheric track almost reads like a knowing parody of Kid Cudi's fame-as-drug diatribes. The shout outs to Kubrick's mysterious and lusty final masterpiece aren't just artsy braggadocio-- they make sense within Ocean's trickily complex world, too. Like on brooding highlight "Swim Good", where he steers his Lincoln Town Car straight into California's crashing waves. "I'm about to drive in the ocean," he sings, heart-battered. "I'ma try to swim from something bigger than me." He lightens up on the self-reflexive pop winner "Songs for Women" and the MGMT-sampling Garden of Eden fuck ode "Nature Feels", but, no matter the mood, this songwriter is always quick to add fine particulars that make his songs his songs.
At 23, Ocean is a few years older than his mostly-teenage friends in Odd Future. And his maturity is apparent not only in his vastly more laid-back style but also in how he deals with the underlying sense of abandonment and rejection that ignites much of Odd Future's bloody, cuss-laden vengeance. "Fuck a deal, I just want my father's e-mail so I can tell him how much I hate him in detail," seethes crew leader Tyler, the Creator on the title track of his album Bastard. Ocean grew up fatherless too, according to his wrenching revamp of Mr. Hudson's "There Will Be Tears", but he handles his feelings differently. "My friend said it wasn't so bad/ You can't miss what you ain't had/ Well, I can-- I'm sad," he wails, letting his guard down completely. And the fact that Tyler and Frank are smart enough to see their thematic kinship beneath all the aesthetic disparities bodes well for both.


This Kentucky-born singer-songwriter is a quester, intrigued by the metaphysics of spiritual experience and wondering aloud if the Bible and a handful of ’shrooms will lead you to the same religious epiphany. Regardless, there are no extraneous sounds or ideas on his new album, nothing that’s not battened down to a carefully structured set of lyrics and melodies.

Sturgill Simpson: Metamodern Sounds in Country Music

Metamodern Sounds in Country Music

Sturgill Simpson saw Jesus juggle flames and met the devil in Seattle, or so he sings on “Turtles All the Way Down,” the opening track on his second solo album. Just when you think he’s slinging the same Biblical imagery Johnny Cash foretold on “The Man Comes Around,” Simpson adds that he “Met Buddha yet another time/And he showed me a glowing light within.” Rather than parrot the same Christian ideology that most country musicians consider integral to the genre, this Kentucky-born singer-songwriter is a quester, intrigued by the metaphysics of spiritual experience and wondering aloud if the Bible and a handful of ’shrooms will lead you to the same religious epiphany. This isn’t country music to put on when you want to stare at your hand for three hours—well, it is, but it’s more than that.
Simpson’s true subject isn’t the “reptile aliens made of light” who “cut you open and pull out all your pain,” although that’s a great line for a country song. Instead, he’s much more preoccupied on “Turtles” and throughout the nine songs that follow, with a much more earthly and everyday emotion: “Love’s the only thing that ever saved my life.” Perhaps it’s because his steely voice turns surprisingly tender when he sings that line, or perhaps because his Mellotron player provides a bed of strings as nebulous as the Milky Way—but somehow Simpson pulls it off without sounding pretentious, schmaltzy, or dangerous.
With a sharp mind to match that Hag burr of a voice, Simpson not only owns the best name in current country music but comprehends the genre as a vehicle for big, unwieldy ideas about human consciousness and the nature of life. He got Pope portraitist Jason Seiler to do the cover art, and Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking are thanked in the liner notes. Nashville rarely sounds so trippy as it does on Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, whose title alludes to Ray Charles by way of Seth Abramson. It’s heady stuff, and potentially insufferable, too, if Simpson wasn’t able to keep everything down to earth. He favors clear melodies, careful structures, and riffs that draw on Nashville and Bakersfield traditions without sounding revivalist. Nothing else on Metamodern is quite so bold or quite so dense as “Turtles All the Way Down,” but Simpson comes across as a man deeply dissatisfied with the easy answers country music typically passes along as wisdom.
As “Long White Line” dissipates into a blast of spacey distortion, Laur Joamets’ slide guitar sounds like a spacecraft taking off, but the song itself is tightly structured and moored to some dusty honky-tonk on Planet Earth. Only on the penultimate track does he really blast into the cosmos: “It Ain’t All Flowers” begins as a stark self-reckoning at the bathroom mirror, then dissolves into a bizarre sci-fi jam full of backwards guitars, parallel-universe synths, and fragmented drum beats. Immediately after that song fades, Simpson launches into the hidden bonus track, “Pan Bowl,” which drops us back in some remote Kentucky holler. It’s the most traditionally nostalgic moment on Metamodern Sounds, full of soft-focus memories of four generations of Simpsons, and the acoustic austerity only underscores sharpness of the songcraft and the vividness of the details. He may be a big thinker, but when it comes to the primacy of the song in country music, Simpson is a traditionalist. There are no extraneous sounds or ideas here, nothing that’s not battened down to a carefully structured set of lyrics and melodies.
As a result, the best moment here may be the most unlikely: a cover of the 1988 post–New Wave hit “The Promise” by When in Rome. Simpson slows it down to a crawl, yet this isn’t one of those reinterpretations that purports to find deeper meaning through a more tasteful “Mad World” reimagining. The melody is tricky, especially divorced from that familiar piano line, but Simpson delivers it with gentle stalwartness, testifying powerfully to the magnitude of love. The Mellotron string section swoops in to add some earthly drama to an emotion that might just explain the entire universe.


The Bronx rapper’s full-length debut leans into a hard-nosed drill sound and features some of her most dynamic and abrasive bars to date.

Y2K!

Ice Spice has described the year and a half between “Bully Freestyle” and “Munch” as taking “forever,” but things have moved a little faster since her breakout single: trending on TikTok, charting on Billboard, PinkPantheress collab, Nicki Minaj collab, Barbie soundtrack placement, Taylor Swift collab, four Grammy nominations. All of this has happened on the back of startlingly little music—last year’s Like..? EP essentially tripled the size of Spice’s discography with its 11-song deluxe version—but those songs have generally pointed towards a smoother, more emotive strain of NYC hip-hop, equally influenced by the Bronx and Top 40. Whether barrelling through a soul drill beat in her On The Radar freestyle or swooping and floating in AutoTune over the sparsely whirring “be a lady,” Ice Spice has mixed boilerplate tough talk with tossed-off vulnerability, positioning herself as relatably aspirational (or aspirationally relatable).
Where Ice Spice has so far been happy playing the wide-eyed protagonist of a raunchy teen movie, Y2K! suggests that perhaps she’s been waiting to get mean this whole time. Save for a pair of DayGlo singles, these diabolical tracks thump, roil, and seethe their way into testing the limits of your subwoofer. Gone are the coyly romantic maneuverings of “Boy’s a liar pt. 2” and “Gangsta Boo;” ditto the softened ambient grooves of “In Ha Mood” and “Actin a Smoochie.” Following in the footsteps of “Munch (Feelin’ U)” and “Deli,” the instrumentals on her debut album are abrasive and unapologetic, and Ice Spice attacks them with her most dynamic vocals to date: whispering and barking, shouting and sneering. Having earned her pop laurels, Ice Spice comes across as totally uninterested in convincing her unbelievers or even feeding her fans: She just wants to drill.
Incredibly, Y2K! succeeds even though her much-maligned “lyricism” has only gotten worse. Ice Spice has always been able to sell groan-inducing punchline bars (“I’m standing on shit like a floor mat” or “He eat it up like Pac-Man”) through committed delivery, but her fixation on a new nickname pushes the limits. Scatological rhymes are pretty blase for hip-hop, but “I’m Miss Poopie but I never smelt” and “I’m Miss Poopie like I need a diaper” are the sort of claims that would get you laughed out of daycare. Spice has said that she wants her lyrics to be “super simple” and “digestible,” but that can veer into insipid repetition, whether on interminably chanted hooks (“Oh Shhh…”) or recycled rhyme schemes (“clappers” and “slappers” is a go-to). Three-quarters into the album, she throws off the clunker, “Bitches switchin’ but they wasn’t trans.”
Ice Spice has never been much of a lyrical rapper, but these moments are extra frustrating on Y2K! because they distract from a genuinely exciting and ambitious album. Individually, any one song here could be analogized and explained. This verse shows the Nicki Minaj influence (“Phat Butt”), this beat sounds like the Opium label (“Plenty Sun”), this track lowkey gives Kay Flock (“Gimmie a Light”). Collectively, this album sounds like nothing her peers could make, swerving from one sonic inspiration to the next. Even when bars are fumbled, Y2K! finds its footing thanks to Ice Spice’s agile and adaptable flow, assembling simple syllables into unusual cadences.
At each turn, Ice Spice stretches her distinctive lower register to new timbres. There’s the 40-grit rasp of “Bitch I’m Packin’,” where Ice Spice wheezes, “His bitch ride it really good but I got better knees,” and the booming Young Chop soundalike “Popa,” where she affects a drawl that brings to mind Young M.A and Bktherula. She sounds incredibly annoyed demanding men sign NDAs before she cheats with them on “Plenty Sun,” then pops up like the demon emoji on “Did It First,” somehow managing to sound even less apologetic about infidelity than Mr. “Lucky for me I deleted the message” Central Cee.
Drawing on drill’s decade-plus history between Chicago, New York, and London, as well as trendier Jersey club and rage beats, Y2K! doesn’t just surprise from track-to-track, but recasts the poppier singles as irregular components of a cohesive aesthetic vision. The silly Mike Dean synth breakdown on “Phat Butt” makes more sense as a Graduation-indebted album intro; tucked near the album’s close, a cheat code Sean Paul sample feels less like nostalgia bait than a flag proudly repping her sample-drill and Caribbean roots. Day one collaborator RiotUSA is behind the boards on every track, and Y2K! is a testament to the strength of their long-running creative partnership. Its weakest moments are those featuring outsiders—Gunna and Travis Scott just get absolutely rinsed here.
What makes Y2K! so instantly memorable is Ice Spice’s refusal to be pigeonholed. Undaunted by the scrutiny of Swiftie affiliation or the pressure of living up to her previous sales peaks, Spice doubles down on the sounds she loves without compromise or quarter. A non-zero number of fans turned this album on because of PinkPantheress and “Karma (Remix)” only to be met with some of the gnarliest 808s on the planet. She already knows her Munchkins love the bops: Now she wants to see them mosh.


Pretty Girls is the most fulfilling 2 Chainz album to date. He switches on a dime from dark to hilarious to laid back, cooly landing punches while lounging at the yacht club’s VIP section.

Pretty Girls Like Trap Music

The last song on Pretty Girls Like Trap Music opens with a disembodied voice, no introduction, no instrumental. "As I met 2 Chainz a few minutes ago—as I gazed into his face—I felt that I was in the presence of royalty," the voice says. The voice goes on: “There’s a certain power presence that he gives off.”
This voice is not from a polite radio DJ, or from an eager Def Jam employee. It belongs to Louis Farrakhan, the longtime Nation of Islam leader, which means there’s exactly one degree of separation between Tity Boy and Malcolm X. When the minister finishes, 2 Chainz raps, "‘Cause you got a deep title, don’t mean that you deep," laments his “codeine kidney,” points out that he willed the Bentley truck into existence, and recalls his mother’s issues with addiction. He mulls over the NBA career that could have been. And when he finally pauses to catch his breath, he says to the audience, “Right now, if you hear this, you’re a miracle. I want you to know that.”
Trap music’s roots date back to the early Clinton years, and it's been a presence in rap’s mainstream in various forms since at least the beginning of the first Iraq war. In the 2010s, it became the dominant commercial mode for rap, with other regional sub-genres—drill, for example—mutating its meanest, grandest elements into something new. Pretty Girls certainly falls within trap’s ever-expanding parameters, but it's supremely laid back, nearly 180 degrees away from the maximalism of the Flockaveli and Lex Luger era. This is trap music that your uncle will dance to while he barbecues, taunting you and spilling sauce on his white linen suit.
And that's appropriate: 2 Chainz is 39 years old. Barely over a minute into the album, he barks at you to get off his lawn; at another point he fires shots at quote-unquote mumble rappers. Mercifully, these are the only two moments of grousing. The Tity Boi from Pretty Girls is a motivational speaker, a testament to grit and hustle and the power of self-belief, Tony Robbins if Tony Robbins was friends with Raekwon. This is the culmination of an eight-year second-wind. It’s also the most complete 2 Chainz album to date, and places him where he belongs: in the upper echelon of rappers from this era.
The tone on Pretty Girls is a little bit darker than last year’s insane, freewheeling Daniel Son; Necklace Don. The absurdism is still there, but there’s a pernicious sobriety that never goes away. Take "Poor Fool," where Swae Lee channels 2 Chainz’s mom on the chorus. Tity raps about how addictive the rice at Benihana can be and says he should have a tattoo on his stomach that says “PRAWNS ONLY”; he also pleads with his mother to quit smoking and sighs, “If I’m not successful, ain’t nobody gon’ come and console me.” This is the song where he namedrops Scarface, then clarifies: he’s Al Pacino and Brad Jordan in equal measure.
Part of this is the perspective that comes with age. To jump back to trap’s first heyday: Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101 begins with Jeezy walking into his kitchen, hitting the lights, and seeing marble where there once were cockroaches. That record’s arc was powerful but short—the roaches were gone and there was too much money coming in to worry about stashing some Raid for a rainy day. Pretty Girls Like Trap Music opens with a kitchen tour, too, but where Jeezy saw cash machines and million-dollar advances, 2 Chainz sees ghosts. "This a new kinda kitchen," he raps, “marble countertops, see-through fridge/Three-thousand for the microwave, touch-screen stove.” Which all seems very luxurious, sure, until the turn: “Please don’t make me relapse/Make me start back trapping.”
That song, "Saturday Night," is itself a balancing act between promethazine habits and chauffeurs with questionable etiquette. At one point, 2 Chainz asks three rapid-fire questions (“Have you ever seen a homicide? Have you ever seen your partner die? Have you ever been traumatized?”) and then coolly details his bracelets for the day. There’s no hand-holding. Even a shot at his one-time label boss, Ludacris, comes and goes without being made into a parable about self-reliance. For long stretches, Pretty Girls is the sorting of venting you might hear if you were eavesdropping on someone’s therapy session, so long as that person had razor-edged pop instinct and said things like, “Used to drive a Porsche till I found out it was made by Volkswagen.”
Speaking of Jeezy, Thug Motivation 101 comes back on Buddah Bless’s thunderous "Trap Check," which opens with a sample from “Get Ya Mind Right” (and closes with one from T.I.’s “ASAP”). 2 Chainz also pays tribute to Wayne, his long-time friend and collaborator, mentioning him on “Good Drank,” “Saturday Night,” and “4 AM,” where he raps, “I dropped Collegrove out the sky/In a group with the best rapper that’s alive.” When Nicki Minaj shows up, for an extended appearance on “Realize,” she calls herself “Dwayne Carter of the North.”
While the guests acquit themselves nicely in supporting roles, the guy at the top of the marquee isn’t budging. 2 Chainz is "all up in the crowd, Frank Lucas fur coat" (“Door Swangin”); he “moved that blow out like we were Afrocentric” (“Burglar Bars”). On “OG Kush Diet,” a song buried deep on the album that would be filler in almost any other case, he’s mourning his friend’s death all while he cackles in the yacht club’s VIP section.
That’s the sort of focus you simply can’t fake. Pretty Girls Like Trap Music’s penultimate song, the one before Farrakhan, is a Pharrell duet that sounds as if it was parachuted in from another, much softer album, one you’ll hear in a fast casual restaurant seven years from now, just like the penultimate song from The Blueprint 3. 2 Chainz is exactly the same age today that Jay Z was in 2009. But where Jay was running out of steam, 2 Chainz sounds like he’s finally hitting his stride. If not royalty, then the next best thing.


As U.S. Girls, Meghan Remy makes haunted highway songs packed with eerily infectious hooks. Her newest record playfully appropriates the debauched excess of glam rock to achieve its own singular vibe.

GEM

Meghan Remy makes haunted highway songs. Her records, which she releases under the name U.S. Girls, conjure a moment deep in the bleary-eyed hours of an overnight drive, when you've stumbled upon an eclectic radio program hosted by somebody too hypnotizingly weird to be trusted with a primetime slot. (If they belong in any David Lynch movie, it's Lost Highway, no doubt.) The plural noun in her moniker is Remy's droll idea of a joke; you can tell without peeking at the liner notes that this is a project born of solitude and isolation, a catalog of one person's varied enthusiasms. But Remy has a way of teasing out the common undercurrent in all her source material, creating a surprisingly cohesive sound out of no wave's corrosion, glam rock's hedonism, and pop's direct, gut-wrenching emotion. She's also got a gift for eerily infectious hooks: the melodies (on tracks like "Island Song", "State House (It's a Man's World)", and a deliciously creepy cover of "The Boy Is Mine") that bubbled up out of the smoggy ambience of her last and best record U.S. Girls on Kraak felt uncanny, imagined, too good to be true. You'd wake the other people in the car to listen, if only you were entirely sure you hadn't hallucinated them.
Despite her lo-fi leanings, Remy's music has always given off a warped glamor. But what makes Gem feel like a such step forward (and such a straight-up enjoyable romp) is the way it playfully appropriates the debauched excess of glam rock to achieve its own singular vibe. The terrific "Slim Baby" (an ode to co-producer Slim Twig, who makes records that share Remy's fascination with the theatrical) takes a T. Rex-worthy riff and a bleacher-stomping beat, but as ever, Remy finds a way to filter the familiar through her own idiosyncratic sensibility, slowing the tempo to just a hair below calisthenic. The result's an infectious and oddly sweet song ("My slim baby, won't you be just a little more close to me?") that moves like a cheerleader on Quaaludes. But even when she's doing her best Bolan, Gem's structure echoes no glam-related reference point more than Here Come the Warm Jets. It's uncannily early Eno in its attention to texture, love of affect and-- most of all-- its spirit of genre-hopping adventure. A sound collage of gurgling vocal samples preceded by an unexpectedly buoyant rendition of "Down in the Boondocks"? Sure, says Remy, why the hell not?
On repeated listens, though, elements that initially scan as haphazard hodgepodge take the shape of something deliberate. With the ghosts of glam rock and pop crooners past as her guides, Remy's free to play around with different personas, characters, and genders. She dreams of being Jack the Ripper in a mesmerizing cover of Brock Robinson's "Jack", while "Rosemary" is a yearning, sea-sick elegy for the title character's affections. Her music doesn't gesture toward a deeper meaning below its surface so much as it glories in the weirdness, pleasure, and resonance on the surface of things. Which is how Remy's voice-- which sounds like Elvis' sneer caked in cherry red lipstick-- can be as simultaneously cartoonish and deeply affecting as it is on songs like "Rosemary" or her ode to her own project's isolated process, "Work From Home".
Perhaps just as much as she channels the theatrical androgyny of Bolan or crooner Billy Joe Royal, U.S. Girls makes me think of Cindy Sherman's photographs. They make similar inquires into identity, artifice, and the underbelly of glamor, and, like U.S. Girls, they conjure a state of being that seems like an ever-so-slightly off-kilter version of reality. "Rather than being about understanding," Jerry Saltz  wrote in a review of the photographer's recent retrospective, "[Sherman's pictures are] about coming to grips with the state of mind that produces them." The same could be said of Meghan Remy's songs. You're tempted to call them Lynchian, but they're singular and personal enough to warrant their own adjective. Remyesque?


Bloc Party vocalist Kele Okereke’s second solo album represents an even more headlong dive into dance music than 2010’s The Boxer. On it, he’s swapped aggression for subtlety, embracing  lush, seedy big-room house music.

Trick

More than a few eyebrows were raised last year when Bloc Party lead singer Kele Okereke released a two-track EP of functional dance music, Heartbreaker, on London club-house institution Crosstown Rebels. On the surface level Okereke’s stepping out as a dance producer was curious; it's not every day one of the more visible faces of 2000s UK indie steps behind the boards and starts churning out honest-to-God dance music on an honest-to-God dance label. But when it comes to explaining their existence alone, Heartbreaker and this year’s Crosstown-released Candy Flip EP make more sense when situated in what Okereke’s been up to over the last six years. Bloc Party’s 2008 effort, Intimacy, flirted with dancey textures to varied effect; two years later, Okereke stepped out on his own with proper solo debut The Boxer, a grab-baggy collection of aggressive dance-rock that, at points, presaged the stomping fare that Skrillex and other American dubstep auteurs would popularize a few years later.
The Boxer wasn’t a very good album, but it was a hell of a lot better than Bloc Party’s defeated-sounding fourth record, the 2012 effort Four. A brittle, dry rock record that sounded as if the guys who made the youthful, comparatively bright Silent Alarm seven years previous were battling a wicked hangover, Four made the breakup rumors that surrounded Bloc Party at the time sound appealing. It also suggested that, at least for the time being, Okereke had fallen out of love with rock music, an assumption bolstered by his second solo album, Trick. The record represents an even more headlong dive into dance music than The Boxer, with a decidedly different tone: Okereke’s swapped aggression for subtlety, embracing the type of lush, seedy big-room house music that, fittingly, Crosstown Rebels has made its name on.
Trick is, by far, the most listenable and, at points, enjoyable music Okereke’s made this decade. Rock musicians dipping their toes into electronic waters isn’t new, but rarely do they make the transition sound effortless, and even more rare is the musician who can capably turn out stuff that sounds like it’s been blessed by the scene’s fixtures. That Okereke can claim success on both levels is, in itself, a small victory; compositionally, the ten tunes are sound and smooth, and if they were played for a listener under the false guise that Okereke simply contributed vocals to an established producer’s tracks, that listener would be none the wiser.
That said, the mode of dance music Okereke is working in on Trick is one frequently criticized by both dance aesthetes and genre newcomers as sounding faceless, and so it follows that Trick is nice with atmosphere, but largely a non-entity when it comes to hooks. The few memorable hooks it has, too, are unfortunately the album’s weaker points: “Year Zero”’s insistent, whining chorus isn’t made better by Okereke’s somewhat cringe-worthy lyrics. Okereke’s vocals have long possessed a stridency that worked well in the context of Bloc Party’s spiky, stylish post-post-punk, and when he breaks into the upper register in more subdued environs like the soft clicking thump of “My Hotel Room”, the effect is grating. There are moments of vocal subtlety as well, though, that fare much better: dusky closer “Stay the Night” radiates sensuality, Okereke’s upper register taking on a tone that’s a few shades darker to match his surroundings.
Trick is a curious solo album because Okereke is more than content to take the backseat on his own tracks. Yasmin Shahmir, who’s previously collaborated with post-Disclosure UK house-pop duo Gorgon City, laces the percolating opener “First Impressions” gracefully, while vocalist Jodie Scantlebury takes the lead on the wistful, winding “Closer”, one of a few highlights and a tune possessing a chorus that smacks of something Todd Terry might have come up with in the early 90s. These inspired collaborations, along with more textural moments like the snappy diva shouts embedded in “Silver and Gold”, suggest that Okereke’s a capable, considerate producer that, next time around, might do even better with more time behind the boards and less in front of a microphone.


The Chicago-bred singer and producer’s homegrown R&B meditates on hurt, longing, and self-protection, embracing the kind of resolute realness that can only happen outside the major label gaze.

Forever, Ya Girl

Ever since an artist once known as Lonny Breaux decided to defy his label Def Jam and deliver his debut, Nostalgia, Ultra, straight to the internet, the textures of popular R&B have become increasingly homegrown. Whether it’s the lithe heartbreak workout of LE1F affiliate Rahel’s 2015 album Alkali or the collaborations of singer Alexandria and producer Ethereal, there’s been a bounty of music for those who crave soulful vocals over beats from somewhere underground.
On her debut album Forever, Ya Girl, the Chicago-bred, New York-based singer/producer/multi-instrumentalist KeiyaA merges Earl Sweatshirt-ish grime and the grit of deconstructed club with hints of psych and funk. It’s easier to find a singular sound when you’re working on your own, which KeiyaA did almost entirely—she poses for Instagram portraits cradling a microKORG synthesizer—with occasional production assists from rapper MIKE under his DJ Blackpower moniker. It’s even more natural to work mostly alone when your lyrics are laments on loneliness.
“Who is supposed to ride or die for me if not I?” she asks on “Negus Poem 1 & 2,” but not with a de rigeur sense of self-empowerment. It’s one of the many inquiries into the disquiet of being alone that KeiyaA proliferates through discordant synth lines and disembodied voices. She uses that POV to turn the music of others on its head, too. “Forreal???” opens with, “Before I put this pussy on your sideburns/I need to check in with my heart and mind,” a reference to Nicki Minaj’s verse from the Young Money bubblegum bedroom cut “Bed Rock” that turns shock-baiting coquettery—Nicki follows her sideburn remark with, “He say I’m bad, he probably right”—into a self-affirming mantra of protection. When KeiyaA covers Prince’s funky kiss-off “Do Yourself a Favor,” she quiets it to the volume of an internal monologue by someone still enmeshed in a painful end.
On one of the album’s highlights, “Hvnli,” KeyiaA sings, “Gone for so long, I prefer to spend time alone with my pain/Gone for so long, I can barely recall, the last my phone rang.” Its stinging specificity is only part of what makes it so special. She builds on that hurt and longing by speeding up synths in places, repeating the lyrics in plainspeak with alternating intentionality, hanging on to the lines, “I can barely afford to eat/But my love is heavenly,” as a reminder of what soothes. It’s an embodied sound, imbued with the knowledge of what it’s like to fuck up and be fucked up and live to sort through the psychic trash of both things being true. This resolute realness, the album’s plurality of wanting—whether privacy (“I! Gits! Weary!”) or pineapple-pear juice (“I Want My Things!”)—can only happen outside the major label gaze.
KeiyaA seems to be telling the listener that, too, in her use of samples from a TV commercial for the 1986 compilation Hey Love… (The Classic Sounds of Sexy Soul). In the ad, three men and three women sit on separate couches, bored at a small house party, until the host puts on a new album he’s just received in the mail. Pairs form and begin a stilted slow dance to songs like “Betcha by Golly, Wow” by the Stylistics and “Yes, I’m Ready” by Barbara Mason. Before the 800 number fills the screen, one of the partiers says, “Fantastic album, man. Let me borrow it.” The host replies, “No, my brother, you’ve got to buy your own.” When KeiyaA samples their dialogue at the end of “Way Eye,” leading into “Rectifiya,” it’s not just a reference to some of her genre forebears, but a truth about working in your own creative ecosystem: The sound on Forever, Ya Girl belongs to her.

Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music.


On his third record for 4AD, John Darnielle axes his fictional sketches and explores his own personal life, specifically an abusive stepfather.

The Sunset Tree

Oh me oh my, The Sunset Tree has thrown me into a mini-crisis. That might seem like a big statement for such a small record, but rewind a decade: That's me, there, in a "Welcome to the Inland Empire" silk-screened Shrimper tee, unwashed hair, and horn-rimmed glasses, obsessing over the Mountain Goats' The Hound Chronicles cassette while stacking loaves of bread at a Southern New Jersey convenience store. Every night I'd steal a Snapple and drive home through the pines and deer alleys in my broken Chevy Impala with the windows down, blasting the Mountain Goats, Paste, Nothing Painted Blue (or whatever), on my tiny portable boom box.
That teenage idealism followed me to college, too, when I gave the by-then hard-to-find Hot Garden Stomp cassette to a friend because he carried a picture of John Darnielle in his wallet-- I felt he deserved it. For years, the Mountain Goats' Sweden was my main signifier for that country. Whenever I saw the Swedish flag, I'd hum "The Recognition Scene". But as 2000 rolled around, I'd forgotten Darnielle existed. (Actually, in a way I thought he'd transformed himself into Rick Moody, or they were somehow a ghost-writing tag team.)
My general loss of interest isn't meant to dismiss or simplify Darnielle's accomplishments. It's just that after memorizing the shivers induced by "the most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it's you and that you are standing in the doorway" perhaps I've already experienced the apex of Darnielle's poetics at my own personal ideal time/place. I no longer even own a car or a boom box and I rarely steal iced tea from the local bodega.
And no, I'm not a low-fi purist, so it doesn't at all bother me that he's upped the production. In fact, the accompaniment of Peter Hughes, John Vanderslice, Franklin Bruno, Scott Solter, and Maldoror fan Erik Friedlander open things up here (as on his last few records), allowing Darnielle more space to take some breaths, work on atmosphere, introduce catchy piano trills, some distorted grinding noises, and cello swells.
But yet my first few listens to The Sunset Tree, the Mountain Goats' third 4AD full-length and follow-up to last year's We Shall All Be Healed, left me cold, even though Darnielle axes his fictions and explores his own personal life, specifically an abusive stepfather.
As one would hope from a songwriter as smart as Darnielle, "The Sunset Tree" comes from a 19th-century religious song, "The Tyrolese Evening Hymn" and as reported in Pitchfork news some time ago, "Darnielle says he took it from a scene in Samuel Butler's semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh, where a clergyman beats his young son bloody because of a speech impediment that prevents the son from enunciating clearly while singing the hymn." Still, even as said stepdad chucks a glass at mom's head and young JD runs up into his room to hide the shouts with dance music, the familiar staccato of those comforting cadences lulled instead of enlightened.
Something I subconsciously learned when I was younger that I'm just now understanding is that the Mountain Goats' sound best after obsessively replaying each track until they become as familiar as your own personal memories. Accordingly, after a thousand and one listens, while I can still do without much of the second half of The Sunset Tree, on its first four songs Darnielle locates a stride, crafting a perfect four-part diorama. It's quite an accomplishment.
Opener "You Or Your Memory" is a lonely motel-room, bare-foot epiphany fueled by St. Joseph's baby aspirin, Bartles & Jaymes, and a mirror. "Broom People" develops the domestic scenery for the album's drama: '36 Hudson in the garage, junk in an unattached spare room, "white carpet thick with cat hair," dirty dishes, lots of ice cream in the freezer, "friends who don't have a clue/ Well-meaning teachers," suicide notes in a spiral-ring notebook, and the girl who makes him feel alive: "In the long tresses of your hair I am a babbling brook."
With a fast-car thematic that's an odd collision between Tracy Chapman's urgency and the romanticism of Jawbreaker's "Chesterfield King"-- and brandishing the triumphant chorus, "I'm gonna make it through this year if it kills me"-- "This Year" finds 17-year-old Darnielle breaking free from his "broken house" on a Saturday morning to play video games "in a drunk haze" while holding hands with a girl named Kathy. Of course, teenage celebrations come to an end: "I drove home in the California dusk/ I could feel the alcohol inside of me hum/ Pictured the look on my stepfather's face/ Ready for the bad things to come."
Then there's the wonderful "Dilaudid", a coil of nervous energy and teenage thrill-seeking. Darnielle's backed by a full-on string crew and the bows are used in a quick/jaunty way, matching the machine-gun rate of hi claustrophobic and creepy salvos (i.e. teen horniness fueled by pain killers): "Hike up your fishnets, I know you. If we live to see the other side of this, I will remember your kiss, so do it with your mouth open. And take your foot off of the brake, for Christ's sake."
After that, besides a cleaning-out-my-closet sing-a-long "Up the Wolves", The Sunset Tree loses steam. The late-period references to Kurt Cobain's suicide feel cheap and easy. Pieces of it go by unnoticed. Bits either blend into one another or wander. Oddly, at times it seems like Darnielle works more movingly and astutely when he's inventing his tales rather than partaking in personal anecdote and/or trauma. Then again, invention often possesses a more beautiful narrative arc than retreating to your bedroom to block out a parental argument. Really, though that first quartet is a wonderful example of what Darnielle can do when he's on-- draw characters and plot better than just about anyone holding a guitar.