Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we explore the solitary sound of the incomparable Nebraska.

Nebraska

Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 solo album Nebraska has been called a folk album, and that’s true to an extent in both its acoustic setting and, on some of the material, in the construction of the songs. But folk songs in the traditional sense are in part defined by how they travel through culture, typically by being played in person for other people. Nebraska invites no such feeling of communion. These songs aren’t part of a shared language that people in a room might speak to each other, they are one-way transmissions from a distant, lonely place. But the signals that come through on Nebraska crackle with electricity—sometimes it’s just a hum, and sometimes it seems like a circuit is going to explode.
In early 1982, Bruce Springsteen was living in a rented house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, recuperating from a year-long tour following his 1980 double album The River. His band played 140 marathon shows and were on their way to becoming one of the biggest rock acts in the world. During this period, Springsteen tasked his guitar tech, Mike Batlan, with buying a simple tape recorder so that he could tinker with some new songs and arrangements without having to bother with renting studio time. Batlan picked up a Teac Tascam 144 Portastudio, a then-new device that was the first piece of equipment to use a standard cassette tape for multi-track recording. The new machine arrived in Springsteen’s life at the perfect moment, during what was arguably the most fruitful songwriting period in Springsteen’s long career, one that would produce enough material for two albums (1982’s Nebraska and 1984’s Born in the U.S.A.) with dozens of additional songs to spare. On it, he would craft what is still the most singular album in his catalog.
Nebraska remains an outlier for Springsteen, a record that sits uneasily in his discography. Instead of making an impact upon release, Nebraska has been accruing weight gradually over the last four decades, becoming a marker of its socioeconomic era as well as an early document of the later home-recording revolution. It stands alone partly because Springsteen didn’t tour behind it—his work is ultimately about his connection to his audience, and that connection is felt most intensely when he’s performing onstage—and partly because the record itself is kind of an accident, something that fell into place before Springsteen knew what to do with it. “I had no conscious political agenda or social theme,” he later wrote of this time in his autobiography, Born to Run. “I was after a feeling, a tone that felt like the world I’d known and still carried inside me.”
Springsteen’s initial burst of material in Colts Neck clustered around isolation and disillusionment. There were connections to his earlier work in these new songs—two tracks on The River, “Stolen Car” and “Wreck on the Highway,” conveyed a similar feeling of despair—but the new work was different. Springsteen seemed both emotionally closer to his characters but also less interested in judging them. These songs had no heroes and no villains, everyone in them was making their way with what they were given, every grim or brutal scene had its own context and its own internal logic.
Early in his career, Springsteen’s work thrived on personal instinct, but in isolation, it became more reliant on specific inputs. He’d transform ideas he discovered in books and films and the news into frameworks for songs: the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, which detailed the harsh lives of people living on the margins; Ron Kovick’s Born on the Fourth of July, in which a gung-ho soldier becomes deeply scarred by the actions of his government. At some point, he saw Terrence Malick’s Badlands on television, a film based on the 1957–58 killing spree of Charlie Starkweather. The Starkweather murders were meaningless, and the randomness of that violence and inability to explain it fit with the mood of Springsteen’s songwriting.
Once the new songs recorded on the Portastudio began to gel, Springsteen selected some of his favorites, ran his simple arrangements through a Gibson Echoplex unit to add some reverb and echo, and mixed them down to a boombox he had laying around the house. He sent the tape to his manager, Jon Landau, with handwritten notes on the songs and ideas for how they might find their way on to a new record. Springsteen’s letter to Landau, reproduced in his book of lyrics, Songs, suggests that the album that was emerging was mysterious even to its creator. “I got a lot of ideas but I'm not exactly sure of where I'm going,” he wrote. He didn’t quite understand what he had, but he did feel he was entering new territory with his work.
Springsteen carried around the cassette in his pocket as he tried to figure out what to do with his new collection of songs. The initial assumption was that his E Street compatriots would flesh them out. There were recording dates with the full band who tried to give the pieces life like they had so many other songs Springsteen had written on his own. And when that didn’t work, there were sessions of Springsteen alone, trying to capture the stark feel of the original tape in a professional studio with proper fidelity. Springsteen never could recapture the atmosphere that imbued the demos; eventually, the choice was made to put it out as-is.
The power of Nebraska’s whole comes from Springsteen’s blend of fiction and memoir—some songs are personal and intimate with details drawn from Springsteen’s own life, others are the stuff of novels and cinema. “Nebraska” was Springsteen's re-telling of the Starkweather saga, and it begins, as the film does, with a shot of a young girl twirling her baton outside her house. From the innocence of this image—boy meets girl in the heartland—the song moves quickly and seamlessly to the narrator’s description of the killing spree. The fact that we’re living in a world where these things can coexist in such proximity is terrifying, and it suggests that the symbols and structures that we think exist to protect us may, in the end, offer us nothing.
The album’s violence continues. “Johnny 99” describes an act of murder that is the product of blinding desperation; in “Highway Patrolman,” a cop protects his violent brother even though doing so goes against everything he believes. “Atlantic City,” the only song released as a single, is a masterpiece of withheld information, a story of an out-of-luck character who is about to perform an unnamed act that he hopes will rescue his life from oblivion. Springsteen never personally experienced these scenes, but he renders them with such care and detail, he puts the listener squarely in the center of them.
In contrast, “Used Cars,” “My Father’s House,” and “Mansion on the Hill” draw from Springsteen’s past, particularly his complicated relationship with his father. “Used Cars” and “Mansion on the Hill” are written as memories and “My Father’s House” is told as a dream. But all are permeated by a deep yearning for connection, a wish that the unexpressed could be finally be spoken, and that barriers erected over a lifetime could dissolve. In the world of this record, these are the small and quiet tragedies that can nudge you down a path leading to larger and more explosive ones.
On paper, this is Springsteen at his most novelistic, trying to get into the heads of murderers and corrupt cops, or diaristic, revisiting detailed scenes from his childhood. One writer even turned the songs’ narratives into a book of short stories. But the record’s most lasting power comes not from its words or melodies but from its sound. The atmosphere in the room and the grain of Springsteen’s processed voice scramble notions of a fixed time and place. To put on Nebraska and hear its world of echo is to enter a dream. As Bruce Springsteen songs go, these are very good ones, but their true meaning came out in the presentation.
Nebraska is above all a sonic experience, which explains why he could never get the songs right in a proper studio. “A lot of its content was in its style, in the treatment of it,” he said in an interview in 1984. “It needed that really kinda austere, echoey sound, just one guitar—one guy telling his story.”
The atmospheric processing on Nebraska, the vast majority of which was imparted by the Echoplex during the mixdown stage, is crucial to the album’s meaning. The slapback echo present on some of the songs conjure early rockabilly (the technique, which thickens sound by folding a slight delay onto the signal, was pioneered by Sam Phillips at Sun Studio and can be heard in all its glory on the sides Elvis Presley recorded there), and the heavy dose of reverb has been present in all kinds of music, from Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” to any number of country hits. But rather than invoking a certain era, genre, or style, the sound of Nebraska brings to mind the radio, the medium through which these techniques were first widely distributed.
The right amount of reverb and echo can make a cheap speaker in a car’s dashboard sound lush and dreamy. Nebraska’s homespun production reinforces the notion that recorded music happens across vast amounts of time and space. The guy playing and singing alone in this rented room in 1982 is connected to the person hearing it by invisible forces moving through the air. That separation, underscored by the arrangements, give the album its force.
A few songs on the record contain references to transmissions, and these people often find themselves connected to each other in the most distant ways, often by wireless. Roads are littered with radio relay towers, radios in dark cars are choked with talk shows, a cop is called to action by the crackle of the radio. “State Trooper,” a song directly influenced by “Frankie Teardrop” by the synth-punk band Suicide, is Nebraska’s atmosphere reduced to its essence, just an ominous repeating guitar and a voice that sounds like a howling ghost. A Springsteen song like “Darkness on the Edge of Town” shares thematic elements with the songs on Nebraska, but the quiet/loud motif is designed for the stage, where Springsteen and his listeners could share in the energy. “State Trooper” might as well be beamed in from an orbiting satellite—there’s the song and then there is silence.
“State Trooper” also illustrates how the automobile, central to Springsteen’s work throughout his career, functions a bit differently on Nebraska. On Born to Run, the car represented escape, while on Darkness on the Edge of Town and parts of The River it was used to define boundaries, to mark the places where the dramas of life unfold. On Nebraska, the automobile is a kind of isolation chamber, a steel husk that keeps its passengers apart from the world. “Used Cars,” a comparatively gentle song inspired by Springsteen’s own life, finds a child experiencing the shame of class difference. The family is each inhabiting their own world, the father and son unable to connect and share with each other what they might be feeling in the moment. The boy knows only by what he sees, not what his father tells him; the father, consumed with his own shame, has no sense of the boy’s experiences.
Springsteen wrote that he wanted Nebraska to consist of “black bedtime stories,” and the album almost seems to take place during one long night. Those who have jobs are working the night shift. Coming as it does at the end of the album, “Reason to Believe” feels a bit like a sunrise. Suddenly there’s a crack of light, a bit of humor; we can take a breath. The levity comes not from the details of the song, which include two shattered relationships and the death of a dog and a relative, but from the perspective of the person telling the story. Perhaps life, rather than being grim and hopeless, is merely absurd.
In the arc of Springsteen’s career, Nebraska is still a blip. It’s an essential record in the history of home recording, but it was sort of a cul-de-sac for Springsteen himself. He has returned twice to the general format of the record, releasing the mostly solo and mostly acoustic albums The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) and Devils & Dust (2005), but neither comes close to the alchemy of Nebraska. This one just happened. Springsteen covers the entire episode of the record in just a few pages in Born to Run, and there isn’t a lot to say. He wrote the songs, he put them down on a demo, and that demo became the record. It didn’t sell particularly well and got no airplay. “Life went on,” is how he ends the section of his book on the record. And so it does.


The debut album from the meteoric pop star lives in a world of its own: gothic, bass-heavy, at turns daring and quite beautiful.

Billie Eilish: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

Billie Eilish has suddenly become an obscenely famous pop star—the kind with 15 million Instagram followers, sold-out shows around the world, a haute modeling contract, and couch time with Ellen DeGeneres. Her brilliance is an obvious truth; just ask any teenager in America as they wait patiently for the rest of the world to catch up to their consummate taste in pop music.
Of course, the 17-year-old Eilish is still waiting for her teeth to straighten out. This fact trumpets the arrival of her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?: For its intro, Eilish removes her much-loathed transparent braces in a series of lightly gross, ASMR-worthy slurps, and proclaims, “I have taken out my Invisalign, and this is the album.” She then dissolves into heaving cackles, the kind that alienates any onlookers too prissy to partake. There are several more oddball moments like this—absent-minded humming to a track, giggling asides—that remind us she’s still a precocious, creative teen girl on this rocket, and all her gothic proclivities don’t cancel out how much she’s enjoying the ride.
Her rise has been striking: At 14, she put the song “Ocean Eyes” on SoundCloud, a glassy, straightforward ballad with tearful synths and woozy, Lana Del Rey–indebted crooning. She snared a young fanbase with her hooks and raised her middle finger to pop’s status quo; here was this music that shifted between genres—from pop to trap and EDM—made by a lawless young female singer sporting baggy, androgynous clothes. She cast her bored, listless eyes upward instead of batting them at the camera. She filled her videos with flowing black tears, plunging needles, and arachnid hors d’oeuvres instead of twirling around sleek cityscapes. Eilish’s creepy eccentricity feels so removed from the pop formula; it helps distance her from the music industry’s historically lewd maceration of teen idols. Eilish just seems sharper, meaner, more self-sufficient—a young star from Los Angeles, in the grand tradition, but one that could only have come along while its hills are burning.
The best moments of When We All Fall Asleep play firmly into this formula. Inspired by Eilish’s frequent night terrors and lucid dreams, the album juggles dark compulsions with grim eulogies, balancing her feathery vocals with deep, grisly bass. Like her spirit animal, the spider, Eilish can weave something that is at once delicate and grotesque: In “You Should See Me in a Crown,” she lulls the listener into a false idyll with her murmured lilt, then leaps off the cliff of a tectonic dubstep bass drop, her sneer fully audible. (That the title is cribbed from Moriarty, the beguiling psychopath of television’s Sherlock, also speaks to her pull toward the sinister.)
“Xanny” plumbs sincere anxiety over more marrow-shaking bass, the kind that could blast apart a few pairs of headphones. Eilish’s voice crossfades over the narcoleptic beat, and slips into full despair, whimpering her most self-aware lines on the record: “Please don’t try to kiss me on the sidewalk/On your cigarette break/I can’t afford to love someone/Who isn’t dying by mistake in Silver Lake.” Eilish’s lyrics wonderfully underscore how all teen angst is both fiercely sincere and an affect of being only partially informed.
A similar spirit drives “Bury a Friend,” another early single. Despite the vocoder-style distortion, Eilish’s voice feels even more intimate as she hisses, “Step on the glass, staple your tongue” in a farcical singsong. Eilish has namechecked Tyler, the Creator as one of her greatest influences; in her slightly jazzy trill, too, she also nods to her clearest pop progenitor, Lorde, who cleared much of Eilish’s path with her autonomous creative control, heavy-lidded social observations, and blithely goth aura.
Still, all Eilish’s weaponry can’t stop her most overtly pop track, “Bad Guy,” from going stale. A snappy pulse launches Eilish into a litany of taunts against her partner. Over the rubbery electro beat, she says she’s the “make-your-girlfriend-mad type/Might-seduce-your-dad type.” It gave me pause because it suggests that perhaps Eilish isn’t so far removed from the teen pop continuum as we’ve come to believe: How different is her bragging about statutory rape, culturally, from trussing up 16-year-old Britney Spears in pigtails and plaid? Even if it’s a teen girl’s decision, entirely, to flaunt her sexuality (or engage in provocative role-play), the line crosses a boundary plenty of adults were happy to cosign.
The quieter moments of When We Fall Asleep nod more to Eilish’s past, and to mixed results. Much like her first EP, 2017’s Don’t Smile at Me, they skew glum instead of macabre, even briefly twee. “Wish You Were Gay” spotlights Eilish’s vocals, which deserved better than being spackled with canned studio laughter and self-involved lyrics in the lamentable lineage of Katy Perry’s “Ur So Gay.” Minimalist, mournful piano ballads like “Listen Before I Go” and “When the Party’s Over” further prove her vocal talents amid larger inertia. Throw in a cheeky, extended riff on an episode of The Office on “My Strange Addiction”—which smatters in clips of the Dunder Mifflin crew reacting to Michael Scott’s own contentious creative efforts—and you have an album as widely collagist as a teen’s bedroom wall.


The double-disc second album from all nine rappers can feel bloated and disjointed, but it is also the greatest distillation of the Wu at their most chaotic and functional.

Wu-Tang Forever

In the summer of 1997, the Wu-Tang Clan were in the midst of their mafia movie montage—you know, when life is sweet and it seems like it’s always going to be that way. That summer, the nine Staten Island goons went on tour with one of the premier rock bands on Earth, Rage Against the Machine, blowing cash and sipping champagne on airplanes. They got a $960,000 budget for the special effects-ladened music video for “Triumph,” the famous, reckless, hookless posse cut. And at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, the Wu headlined Hot 97’s Summer Jam, when the station was still a king-maker. Yet instead of kissing the ring, the Wu flipped them off.
“Fuck Hot 97, we listen to Kiss FM!” is what Ghostface Killah yelled out to the crowd that night, annoyed at sound issues. He followed that uppercut with a haymaker, a flip on the station’s slogan—“Hot 97, where hip-hop dies!”— and eventually got the audience to chant along. Meanwhile, Method Man flung a battery at DJ Big Dennis Rivera and Funkmaster Flex backstage. For years after, the station shut the Wu out, refusing to spin their records as a group or solo. That would eventually hurt them, but at that moment, the Wu didn’t need the rap world—they had created their own.
The party records, big-money samples, and sleek R&B hooks of the Bad Boy shiny suit era were on the horizon, but in the years before the summer of ’97, the Wu went on a storybook run unlike any other group in rap history. From their instant classic 1993 debut Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) to a string of five solo albums between 1994 and 1996, a raucous crew of forgotten borough rap purists had become mega-stars.
By 1997, the world of the Wu was as deep and insular as professional wrestling. They fully established their own mythology and language: lingo remixed from Park Hill and Stapleton projects in Staten Island, an endless pool of aliases, nearly indecipherable inside references, and lyrics lined with allusions to kung fu flicks, Five-Percenter ideology, and ultra-specific New York City geography. That June, the group reunited for the 36 Chambers follow-up Wu-Tang Forever, with “Triumph” as the lead single. The sprawling, gloriously messy, double-disc album makes no concessions. It’s almost two hours of bars dunked in the Fresh Kills Landfill, dense wordplay, twisted humor that blurs the line between reality and fantasies told on the corner, and RZA’s unrelentingly dark production with a polished spin. Naturally they dethroned the Spice Girls for the No. 1 album in America, reaching the peak of their popularity as a collective.
On Forever, nobody can tell the Wu-Tang Clan shit. Part of the appeal is that they’re completely high on their own success. While 36 Chambers is a masterpiece—the raw energy of the raps is kinetic and RZA’s soul samples crackle like burning wood—it’s so air-tight that it doesn’t feel like the truest Wu-Tang experience. The Wu-Tang Clan are messy; if there’s a rule they’re going to break it, just because. Yes, Wu-Tang Forever is bloated and disjointed, but also the greatest distillation of the Wu at their most chaotic and functional. That it was made in such a contentious and uninspired environment is not completely unsurprising, given how goosed-up their egos were.
When Raekwon reflects on the writing of his 1995 mafioso rap epic Only Built 4 Cuban Linx he tells it like it was an Eat, Pray, Love-style excursion of self-discovery. Holed up for weeks in Barbados and then Miami with his spiritual confidant Ghostface, the pair wrote relentlessly, motivated by the warmth, ocean breeze, and a bond built over John Woo heroic bloodshed pictures and Wallabees.
The making of Wu-Tang Forever was far more clinical, as if they were clocking in after putting in their two weeks’ notice. A divide had grown between the members of the group who got the opportunity to release solo albums (Rae, Ghost, Dirty, Meth, and GZA) and those who didn’t (Deck, Masta Killa, and U-God). In an effort to reawaken their former camaraderie, RZA, the architect of their vision, brought everyone to L.A. to stay in separate rooms at one big apartment complex. That was no Barbados. A flame was not ignited; hardly anyone hung out with each other, most guys showed up hours late to sessions, and usually Ol’ Dirty Bastard disappeared altogether.
In the meantime, tensions flared over who was in control of the Wu brand, mostly directed at their manager and RZA’s older brother Divine. The more popular members felt the money was being divided up unfairly, and not everyone was psyched about the affiliate crews like Killarmy that RZA was stamping with the Wu logo. These frustrations boiled over in frequent arguments and a diminishing trust in RZA’s iron-clad grip on the sound.
Given the unrest, it’s a miracle that the rapping on Forever is so exciting. When they rap the brotherhood is alive, even if the friendships aren’t. It might be because of RZA’s magic on the backend, stitching together loose threads as only he can. It might be because pretty much everyone was a more skilled rapper than they were four years earlier. But I like to believe that it’s in tune with the Hong Kong action movies they worshiped. In those films sometimes blood and non-blood brothers engage in a sword duel or point handguns at each other’s faces, but when they finally team up, the connection is almost mystical.
Though the album has the runtime of a movie, it’s the brief moments that reestablish their one-of-a-kind chemistry. On “Deadly Melody,” when GZA so smoothly interrupts Masta Killa and U-God for two lines of his evocative imagery: “Fifty caliber street sweeper/Shots from Shaolin that go to Massapequa.” How Method Man floats in the background of Raekwon’s intensely delivered street politics on “Cash Still Rules/Scary Hours,” before brightening the mood with his smooth singsongy gibberish. How tonally connected Dirty and honorary tenth member Cappadonna are on “Maria”: Dirty howls wistfully about this fine woman who gave him gonorrhea and Capp reveals he has the pick-up game of Michael Cera in Superbad. It’s ridiculous as hell.
“Maria” goes off the rails because of a RZA verse tacked on at the end, where he sounds bitter about being dumped or something. RZA does that a lot. There is probably too much of him on Forever, a sign of how much control he had, but the way he raps every line as if it could change your life is magnetic, even when it’s not as deep as he thinks. He’s so engaging that even when he parts the seas so he can monologue for a couple of minutes, it’s mesmerizing. “Yo this is true hip-hop you listenin’ to right here/In the pure form, this ain’t no R&B with a wack nigga takin the loop,” he says on the intro to disc 2, so convincing that he probably could have made C. Delores Tucker believe in the magic of hip-hop for a split second.
On the production tip, RZA’s beats still have this grimy soul to them, but lag behind much of his other work during this peak period. Slowly he was moving away from samples and stripping back his sound, going for a more cinematic style; unsurprisingly, two years later he composed his first film score. He splits the difference comfortably on the first disc, his stronger side: the funk of “As High as Wu-Tang Get,” the slight distortion on the sample of “For Heavens Sake,” the forceful piano on “Severe Punishment” feels like it could soundtrack a chase scene in a Blaxploitation thriller. As for the second disc, the bloat of the more than a hour runtime is only an issue because the production isn’t urgent enough. There are lulls that ruin the groove, like the plodding sound of “Little Ghetto Boys” and 4th Disciple’s drab backdrop of “The City,” which is nowhere nearly as colorful as Inspectah Deck’s rhymes.
In the mid-1990s, there were two floods in RZA’s basement where it was said he lost more than 500 beats. But the most substantial loss was Inspectah Deck’s debut album. He would start again from scratch, and after some label nonsense, his redone debut eventually hit stands in 1999. It’s aight. But that lost album made during RZA’s creative apex has become mythical. Its status is only boosted by how his dazzling wordplay and buttery delivery stands out among larger personalities throughout Forever. “Yo, in the housing, thousands seen early graves/Victims of worldly ways, memories stays engraved,” Deck opens on “A Better Tomorrow.” His words are slick, but without sacrificing the scene setting that captures it all like a drone shot. Then there’s his star turn on “Triumph”: The song is kinetic throughout its nearly six-minute runtime despite contributions from the whole crew, and Deck’s thickly layered yet clear-eyed opening verses rises above the rest. It’s like watching Kyrie Irving dribble in slow motion.
“Triumph” closes with the one-two punch of Ghostface and Raekwon, who are on some shit on Forever. Coming off the combination of 1995’s Cuban Linx and 1996’s Ironman—Ghost was a couple years away from reaching rarified air with Supreme Clientele—it’s like they believe all of their words should be enshrined. I wouldn’t say that’s always true—Ghost’s sex chronicles on “The Projects” could have stayed in his journal and Rae nosedives his “Duck Seazon” verse with homophobia. But for the most part, their writing is full of so much imagination and detail that on posse cuts it’s hard to pay attention to the verses that come before or after them. Sorry to Masta Killa, but his solid mathematics-driven words are overshadowed by the mystifying Rae verse on “Visionz.” And Method Man’s voice owns “Cash Still Rules/Scary Hours,” but only until Ghostface struts in reminiscing about robberies with a glimmer in his eye like he’s talking about his Little League memories.
When Ghost and Rae have the Wu around the firepit telling stories that may or not be truth, Forever doesn’t get much better than that. There is “Impossible,” which is a heavy-hearted Ghost chronicle so vivid that it feels like the framework for a memoir. The mood is a lot lighter on Ghost and Rae’s concept track “The M.G.M.” about attending a boxing match between Julio César Chávez and Pernell “Sweet Pea” Whitaker. They finish each other’s lines, have a conversation about The Supreme Wisdom, and spot celebrities, all while moving the story along with lines that never stop the groove. It’s like they’re Statler and Waldorf, high on dust.
The big disappointment of Forever is Dirty. He’s funny on “Maria” and his intro to “Triumph” is iconic, but he’s largely an afterthought. This was around the time when his reliance on drugs and alcohol was getting worse, and his communication with the Wu suffered. He feels detached from the group, and his half-assed solo track, “Dog Shit,” has none of the natural charisma of his 1995 debut.
“Dog Shit” is the nadir of the second disc, which is overstuffed with solo tracks nobody ever asked for (Tekitha?!), sketches, and B-tier posse cuts, but it’s that excess that gives the album so much of its personality. On a more concise album, Ghost and Rae wouldn’t have gotten a chance to clear out for a couple of minutes of paranoid crime fiction. An editor may have told Deck to save his solo spotlight for his debut. A rational group would have told U-God to keep “Black Shampoo,” his borderline soft porno ode to massages with peppermint oil and fragrances in the drafts. But they probably didn’t even think twice about it. They were the Wu-Tang Clan and if they said it it was hot. That’s amazing; you couldn’t tell them shit.
Soon after, their invincibility wore off, and their slow plateauing was mostly self-inflicted. By the time they reunited for 2000’s The W, which still features lots of great rapping, the group was even more fractured as faith diminished in RZA’s ability as a producer. Meanwhile, the lack of financial transparency created a rift that would never be properly mended. When the 2010s came around, Raekwon was communicating with the group through representatives and RZA was bleeding the Wu brand dry with gimmicks like 2015’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin: A stitched together full-length with pre-recorded Wu verses that were pressed onto one copy, put into a custom silver box, and auctioned for $2 million to infamous pharma dude Martin Shkreli.
But if it had all gone smoothly, that wouldn’t have been the Wu-Tang Clan. Humility be damned; keep that shit elsewhere! Forever is the Wu-Tang Clan spitting their asses off. They wholeheartedly believed they were the most important artists in the world; for a moment it was nearly true, and they did it without giving an inch to the music industry, no matter how powerful. RZA wasn’t lying. Wu-Tang Forever is hip-hop in its purest form, for real.


Tied to a film-related renewed interest in the band, Joy Division's three formative, formidable works get cleaned up and reissued in deluxe form.

Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures / Closer / Still

Unknown Pleasures / Closer / Still

Rock history is jammed with messy, stupid, and tragic ends to promising starts-- plane crashes, overdoses, gunshots-- but Ian Curtis' death is still striking. Sometime early on the morning of May 18, 1980, Ian Curtis, at the age of 23, watched Werner Herzog's Stroszek, played Iggy Pop's The Idiot, and hung himself in the kitchen.
It's easy to say, in retrospect, that people should have seen it coming. His marriage was falling apart, his epilesy was worsening, and at their most uplifting, his band's lyrics set new benchmarks for melodrama, paranoia, and depression. "This is the way, step inside," intones Curtis at the start of the group's posthumous sophomore release Closer, an album title whose double meaning imparts almost as much menace as the fact that Curtis already sounds like he's singing from beyond the grave on the sepulchral lead track "Atrocity Exhibition".
On the other hand, Joy Division's popularity was on the rise. The group was about to embark on a U.S. tour with the Buzzcocks. A month after Curtis' death, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" would become the group's first hit. And unlike such dead-before-their-time predecessors as Nick Drake and Chris Bell, Ian Curtis was a bona fide star in the making whose impact was already being felt throughout the underground, and whose presence was being picked up on by such prescient mimics as Bono. ( "A Day Without Me", a single from U2's 1980 LP Boy, was allegedly inspired by Curtis' suicide.)
And then there's the music, a conflation of tribal primitivism and sophisticated art-rock that set the template for those twin poles of post-punk. A lot of credit goes to eccentric producer Martin Hannett, and it's the production-- not Curtis's well-parsed words or the band's suddenly ubiquitous biopic cachet-- that benefits most extensively from cleaned-up deluxe reissues of the band's two utterly essential albums, Unknown Pleasures and Closer. Simply put, the group's debut full-length Unknown Pleasures, released in 1979, sounds like little that came before it. At its most familiar, it vaguely approximates the cold claustrophobia of Iggy's The Idiot or David Bowie's Low, but from the first notes of "Disorder" on, the music is almost as alien as its iconic cover art.
It's one of the most perfect pairings of artist and producer in rock history, but that shouldn't undersell the band's input. Joy Division, like many of their Manchester peers, were inspired by the DIY anti-ethos of the Sex Pistols; they just didn't know what to do with it at first. So, shaped and prodded by notorious provocateur Hannett (who would turn the heat in the studio down low enough for everyone to see their breath), the group embraced space, ambience, and an imposing austerity. It's noteworthy how many songs on Unknown Pleasures fade in like something emerging from the shadows. It's also worth noting how heavy songs such as "Day of the Lords", "New Dawn Fades", "Shadowplay", and "Interzone" are, while sinewy anthem "Disorder" and the discordant anti-funk of "She's Lost Control" are glorious anomalies in both their precision and concision.
Closer is even more austere, more claustrophobic, more inventive, more beautiful, and more haunting than its predecessor. It's also Joy Division's start-to-finish masterpiece, a flawless encapsulation of everything the group sought to achieve. The hypnotically abrasive "Atrocity Exhibition" leads to the relentless yet somehow still economical "Isolation", the group more capable in its playing and confident in the arrangements. The dirge "Passover" implies that the band is every bit aware of its morbid power, while "Colony" marks a return to the heavy riffage of Unknown Pleasures.
Then, after such an auspicious start, Closer really clicks into gear. "Means to an End" is death disco before the fact, buoyed by a surprisingly rousing (and wordless) chorus. "Heart and Soul" is a remarkable collision of atmosphere and minimalism, the stuttering drum beat, synth and Peter Hook's melodic bass lead linked to one of Curtis' most subdued performances. "Heart and soul," he sings, as the stark instruments intertwine and twist together. "One will burn."
"Twenty Four Hours" briefly tries to pry free from the album's looming inevitability before "The Eternal" and "Decades" draw the music back down and the listener back in to Curtis' world. "The Eternal" is the bleakest thing the band ever recorded, and if "Decades" comes off a relative respite in comparison, the lyrics quickly quash that idea. "We knocked on the doors of Hell's darker chamber," moans Curtis. "Pushed to the limit, we dragged ourselves in."
The re-release of the collection Still is a little more frustrating, especially considering the singles collection Substance-- the only single disc on which you can find "Love Will Tear Us Apart", "Atmosphere", "Transmission", as well as several early tracks, some of Joy Division's most beautiful and brutal work-- is not included in this slate of reissues. (Perhaps the assumption is that older fans already have the awesomely comprehensive Heart and Soul box.) Still, originally released in 1981, a month before the surviving Joy Division members issued their first New Order album, Movement, is a ragged, enigmatic coda, an uneven odds-and-ends collection of lost tracks that fills in some gaps in Joy Division's history and legacy. Yet for a band that recorded so little, it's hard to quibble with the availability of more, especially when that means such songs as the actually uptempo "Ice Age", "The Kill", "Glass" (B-side to "Digital"), the metallic "The Sound of Music", and the immortal "Dead Souls".
The rest of Still is Joy Division live, for better and for worse-- captured mostly at the group's final appearance in Birmingham High Hall. Most notable is the presence of "Ceremony", eventually issued as New Order's first single. As tempting as it may be to project parallels with Joy Division's near-future incarnation as New Order, they're really not there, at least not beyond the most vague and nascent of stylistic precursors. As the band progresses, more synths make their way into the soundscape, and Peter Hook's bass creeps higher and higher, but there's otherwise little from Joy Division that ports over to New Order (though in a pinch, "Decades", which concludes Closer, could be the missing link between Power, Corruption and Lies and a track like "Elegia" from Low-Life).
In true "deluxe" fashion, each of these reissues is packaged with live disc that, while hardly pristine recordings, serve an important purpose. In fact, the furious sets documented-- 7/13/79, 2/8/80, 2/20/80-- prove that, free from the constraints but also the polish of the studio, Joy Division could be a decidedly aggressive beast. In these recordings, their chilly veneer melted away with visceral guitar slashing, Hook's no-nonsense bass, and Stephen Morris' spastic drums. The group also proves itself ruthlessly effective despite the conspicuous lack of proficiency. In the studio, Joy Division and Hannett could meticulously craft the album, note by note. Live and unleashed, they were undeniably powerful-- especially Curtis, whose Mancunian Jim Morrison croon fills each respective hall with foreboding-- but also pretty sloppy (it's no wonder the surviving members of the band later hitched themselves to drum machines and sequencers).
Yet the live sets are vital reminders that these purveyors of almost indomitable gloom were also human. Lest one forget, these were just young men caught up in the excitement of punk. They covered "Sister Ray" and "Louie Louie". They tried out then-new songs and trotted out staples for their growing legion of fans. They were making it up as they went along, and to an extent, still are. Only Curtis knows how the story really ends, and he's not talking.


The Texas singer uses experimental vocal collages set against actual Lynchian backdrops to create a uniquely off-kilter kind of evanescence.

Chrystabell / David Lynch: Cellophane Memories

Cellophane Memories

The presence of director David Lynch’s name atop the new Chrystabell album, Cellophane Memories, will attract curious ears it might not have otherwise. After a few listens, however, you may wonder less about what Lynch brought to the table, and more about why Chrystabell, a Texas-based singer, is credited just once. Cellophane Memories should be attributed not to Chrystabell but to Chrystabells, plural. The greatest virtue of this beautiful album is how it layers her voice over and over—and over—again.
The opening of“With Small Animals” is a prime example of this collage effect—her vocal lines spin free from their ambiguous origin point like threads of an ever-fraying fabric. On “The Sky Falls,” the effect is more strategic, vaguely resembling a classical canon; the pacing of overlaps is ambiguous but still calculable. A synthesizer backdrop lends it an almost irritating texture, giving this seeming evanescence a uniquely off-kilter quality.
Cellophane Memories may be pretty, but it’s not easy. On “Reflections in a Blade,” the vocal bits are harshly clipped, providing a fractured view of an uncertain whole. They flicker by, the patterning delicious, forming a jumbled mess of voices. Behind the chorus a lone synth hums, interspersed with what sounds like someone breathing through a saxophone. The majority of the songs have just an instrument or two in the background, but each selection reflects exquisite decision-making. And each production element firmly reflects Lynch’s presence.
As a filmmaker, Lynch suffuses his work with sound, from the lush scores that Angelo Badalamenti provided for Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, to the essential presence of pop songs, like those of Roy Orbison in Blue Velvet and Chris Isaak in Wild at Heart, all the way back to the radiator drones of his debut, Eraserhead. Lynch’s sonic hallmarks are everywhere on Cellophane Memories, from the earnest treacle of Badalamenti’s backing pads (the composer died in 2022, but is spiritually present here), to the tremolo-thick guitars of Orbison and Isaak, to the haunting rumble favored in his film sound designs. There are also mechanized rhythms—bone machine beats, à la Tom Waits—that bring to mind other Lynch pop forays, most notably his work with the late Julee Cruise, who died the same year as Badalamenti.
Chrystabell doesn’t merely sing back-up for herself: The dovetailing of her vocals means you don’t always know what’s the main line, what’s an echo, and what’s an eerie backmasked premonition. Vocally, it’s clear that Cellophane Memories owes a debt to numerous gloomy and dreamy pop concoctions of the past, like Mazzy Star, Cowboy Junkies, Kate Bush, and Nico. There’s also a strong influence of art-pop forebear David Sylvian—whose dramatic, self-correcting melodic arcs she follows as if she wrote a dissertation on the subject.
It’s difficult to listen to the layered vocals on Cellophane Memories and not think of the roles that mirrors and fractured identities play in Lynch films. The layering is so persistent that it’s unclear if that consistency signals conceptual coherence or extended sameness. As a listener, I came down a little more on the latter end of that continuum—over-consistency is the album’s main, perhaps sole, demerit—but it makes up for that sameness in countless other subtle, subconscious ways.


The Virginia duo’s sparse, meditative indie folk songs grapple with the impermanence of life and the disorientation of grief, evoking an aching stillness.

Sides

Lean Year’s songs move at a glacial pace, their melodies diffuse and hollow, their arrangements sparse. The Virginia-based duo of Emilie Rex and Rick Alverson sometimes sounds like an ambient, slowcore version of the xx, while at other times their piano plucks and saxophone whiffs recall the quietude of a documentary score. Their defining mood is melancholy, their color palette monochrome. On their eponymous 2017 debut, Rex sang of loneliness and isolation over minimalist folk-rock, her voice barely elevated above the guitars and jazz percussion and slow-burning Wurlitzer. The pair made their latest album, Sides, amid personal tragedy: Alverson’s parents passed away, Rex’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, and the couple’s dog died. Add the pandemic to the mix and you get a bleak, meditative collection of songs that grapple with the impermanence of life and the disorientation of grief.
With the kalimba-led opener “Legs,” Lean Year set the template for Sides: a looped pump organ or synth or piano riff offset with improvisational horn and piano flourishes, anchored by Rex’s steady, sorrowful voice. “Friends, they just don’t know/About the big thing up ahead,” she and Alverson mutter together before the song breaks open in a storm of saxophone and piano. Between the droopy kalimba and Rex’s careful cadence, the first half of “Legs” sags, but it’s cathartic when the composition erupts into a contained sort of chaos. Similarly, on “The Trouble With Being Warm,” a dreary synth underpins Rex’s plodding vocals until, near the end, she unleashes a run of gorgeous, feral coos. Sit with Sides long enough and you’ll learn to live in its aching stillness, its pleas for annihilation, its horror in a future so barren and broken.
It may sound like an unbearably intense listen, but Lean Year err toward aloofness. Even when saxophone and piano wiggle in and out of the frame, the album’s instrumentation is decidedly flat. These songs communicate dense, thorny emotions without always eliciting them directly. “Nitetime” is rife with stale clarinet, keys, and bass melodies; the saving grace is Rex’s silky falsetto. The predictable structures and moody vocals owe something to alt-R&B, but the pallid, monotonous production whirrs in ambient minimalism, even when, like on “Bad Woman,” the bones of less opaque melodies beg for release.
Before making Sides, Lean Year were devising a concept record about conflict. After experiencing so much trauma, they began writing around themes of loss and grief instead. Yet a lingering tension remains on Sides: adhere to conceptual consistency or explore the unknown parameters of pain? A song like “Panes” seems designed to fit within the album’s architecture without standing apart from it, while “End” dares to venture beyond familiarity. A dainty piano and lumbering saxophone are all Rex needs to capture the depth of her mourning: “Left me with my troubled mouth/Watched the sense run out/Don’t know where I am/Don’t know where I’ve been.” Sides shines when it’s both melodically limber and emotionally poignant, when the numbness bordering the edges of these songs finally burns away.


Beyoncé's little sister issues her second album, most of which rides the classicist Motown framework repopularized by Amerie and producer Rich Harrison.

Solange: Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams

Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams

The landscape of contemporary R&B is littered with the bones of self-styled mavericks-- Imani Coppola, Lina, even Kelis of late. So it's with trepidation that I endorse Solange Knowles' second album; its cryptic, wordy title already promising a fatally over-ambitious statement at odds with the more mercantile concerns of mainstream pop.
In reality, Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams is more familiar than its title and cover-art might suggest, most of it riding the classicist Motown framework repopularized by Amerie and producer Rich Harrison. Instead, Solange's vision and, depending on how you look at it, pretension manifests in an aesthetic of excess: On "Would've Been the One", the sudden rhythmic contortions, the dizzying chord progressions, the too-bright dazzle of Solange's vocal and the excesses of her harmonies combine to form something gloriously surplus-to-requirements. Likewise, the conflicted "T.O.N.Y.", with its circular lyrical fixations (the one-night-stand that got away) and lurching groove, at first feels somehow top-heavy before snapping into place with a charming short-circuit of restless confusion and explosive conviction.
At her least, Solange can be too mannered, knocking out flawless period pieces that float past without leaving a trace, her wispy voice, plush arrangements, and oblique, counter-intuitive hooks offering too much of a good thing-- no one except nu-soul enthusiasts wants that much studious classiness. And there are times when everything gets surprisingly arch: the toe-tapping jazz-ballet patter of "I Decided, Pt. 1" sounds a bit like an off-Broadway paean to Motown, its deliberate facsimile of a facsimile of soul signifiers relying on Solange's declamatory performance to carry it to victory. But it's when she abandons the rigorous structures of soul revivalism that this too-clever vibe can get a bit too much-- see "Cosmic Journey", a soft-centred glitch-pop ballad whose swooning loveliness is tarnished slightly by its heavy-handed title and unnecessary "psychedelic" techno-trance coda.
Many will applaud the daring of the handful of electronic tracks here-- album closer "This Bird" is even built around a Boards of Canada sample-- but I'm afraid we'd consider this same thing juvenile from, say, Imogen Heap. In fairness, Solange isn't lapsing into cliché here: The arrangements are unpredictable, and the lyrics even more so; on "This Bird" she sighs over how "your dad drives a foreign car and your momma looks like a beauty queen," in an inscrutable tribute to Gershwin, before delicately advising the listener to "just shut the fuck up." But there's a tinge of diaristic adolescence in the way she inevitably fuses these sonic journeys with a thematic obsession with boundlessness, her incomparable surpassing of all expectations and limitations.
Predictably, then, it's when Solange slows down and lets the world catch up that she's most arresting. On "I Decided, Pt. 2", a straight-to-the-point remix of its predecessor by erstwhile commercial house merchants the Freemasons, she unabashedly embraces streamlined pop form, her sassy performance somehow finding a new urgency amidst the very anonymity of the song's sugary, Phil Spector-meets-glam arrangement. Call it "generic," but here the term is a compliment: Any hint of eccentricity would be a blemish marring the song's perfectly proportioned, irresistibly svelte figure.
It's not a case of Solange performing best when she jettisons her ambition, but rather her need to find a way to let her avant inclinations work with rather than against her pop instincts, and maybe the best way for that to happen is to let the former emerge organically through the latter. Only marginally behind "I Decided, Pt. 2" in terms of impact (and, perhaps, marginally more loveable) is "Sandcastle Disco" its light-as-a-feather summertime funk strut leavened by an utterly magical chorus. A bid for chart success? Undoubtedly, but Solange makes it her own with a crescendo performance like a bubble of terrified elation swelling up in your chest. When she can do scrunch-faced joy so purely, so superlatively, why bother with window-dressing?


Long considered an outlier in her catalog, Nina Simone’s newly reissued 1982 album is an intimate and immense portrait, a culmination of Nina Simone’s frustrations molded into a jarring personal statement.

Fodder on My Wings

“I’ll tell you what freedom is to me,” Nina Simone once said: “No fear.” If many of the most important records of the soul icon’s career were about political freedom, her 1982 album Fodder on My Wings, newly reissued, was about personal freedom—about liberating herself from her past and finding the liberty to create as she pleased. It was Simone’s means of working through fear—of death, manipulation, discrimination—in search of joy and self-discovery.
A marvel of self-expression, Fodder on My Wings is a culmination of Simone’s frustrations molded into a jarring personal statement. At times manic, at times depressive, she shares many different sides of herself in vignettes that make up a portrait both intimate and immense. Although it does not achieve the unrivaled brilliance of the performances on her albums for Philips, it marks her creative apex as an artist, somehow both her most worldly and her most introspective work.
Even in Simone biographies, Fodder on My Wings is usually represented as an outlier in her career. But it is a strange, captivating document that helped capture what a complicated person she was, the tumultuous life she’d led, and the nature of her travels. Some songs she sang in English, some in French, and on others she alternated between the two languages. The album contains some of the most poignant ballads of her entire catalog, some songs that could double as rallying cries, and others that feel like fun sketches made for her own amusement. It is a record as unsteady, daring, damaged, and sensational as she was.
For a while, it didn’t seem like Simone would be back in a studio again. Her 1978 album Baltimore had soured her on the recording process. She butted heads with CTI producer Creed Taylor, recording all that record’s vocals in a single hour-long session on the final day of taping. “The material was not my personal choice, and I had no say whatsoever in the selection of songs. It was all done before I could make any decisions,” she later claimed. Simone was not fond of the album’s reggae-tinged sounds and rhythms (“What is this corny stuff,” she asked CTI arranger Dave Matthews). The album recreated songs by Randy Newman, Judy Collins, and Hall & Oates, and while it is often hailed as a late-career highlight, Simone said that she felt forced into making it.
After the experience with CTI, Simone sought greater authority in recording Fodder on My Wings. She always exercised some measure of control over what she recorded, but this was different. She was adamant about composing and arranging nearly every song, and she wanted it known that she had done just that. She played all of the piano parts. She enlisted African percussionists Paco Sery and Sydney Thaim—who played congas, bells, timpani, and woodblock—and bassist Sylvin Marc. All three men sang backup. This band produced what Simone liked to call black classical music, parlor music which drew on soul sounds and calypso rhythms. It was the sound of her recent travels.
The album’s title track puts this odyssey into perspective. Simone portrays herself as a bird that fell to Earth, landed in human debris, and was irrevocably changed. “Although it was able to survive, it couldn’t fly. So it walks from country to country to see if people had forgotten how to live, how to give,” she explained. “Most of the people had forgotten.” The metaphor was reflective of how Simone saw herself (a damaged songbird), the world (ungiving), and the world’s impact on her (harmful to her fragile psyche). Many of the album’s songs carry stories or lessons from this journey, things she’d picked up living in Switzerland, Liberia, and France.
Simone had enormous respect for France and French people. In her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You, she described them as a people with “a lot of respect for serious artists” and Paris as a safe haven for African exiles. “I would be able to create my own Africa in the heart of Europe, Africa in my mind,” she imagined. After a rejuvenating trip in the 1970s to Liberia, Simone’s ancestral home, which was settled and made independent by free blacks from the American South, the singer had reconnected with her romanticized idea of Africa. But that Liberian pilgrimage produced a difficult loss, too: After Simone left, there was a coup in 1980, and her former lover, the local community leader C.C. Dennis, died of a heart attack two weeks after his son Cecil was executed by the military.
The album is deeply touched by the experiences of these trips, full of African spirituals sung in French, musings on black spirituality and the hereafter, and attempts to recalibrate and recapture a glow lost in the wake of personal losses. “Fodder in Her Wings” is a song about this meandering journey to Africa with “dust inside her brain.” Simone takes a second crack at the hymn “There Is a Balm in Gilead”; the version on Baltimore, performed leisurely in English and like reggae, sucked the character out of her voice. As if to spite Taylor, “Il y a un baume à Gilead” maintains the island sway of the original but lines its edges with a more nuanced vocal take. She reintroduces the spiritual “Thandewye,” first recorded for the 1974 live album It is Finished, pushing even deeper into divinity.
Simone’s voice could open the sky or scorch the earth. Despite reports that her vocal cords were decaying, her contralto described as having “deepened into a mannish baritone,” she had lost little of her power. Her own characterization, as recorded in the 2015 Netflix documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone?, was still more accurate: “Sometimes I sound like gravel and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream.” In the lighter moments, the feathery French of “Gilead” or the crescendos of “I Sing Just to Know That I’m Alive,” she exudes grace and poise. In the dark ones, like “Thandewye,” she plays into the harshness of her tone. She is a master of dynamics, knowing when to hurt and when to heal.
“What I did on this album was try to get myself deep into joy,” she wrote in the liner notes. On the triumphant opener “I Sing Just to Know That I’m Alive,” she reaffirms her belief in the sacred power of performing. The repeated refrain of “Color Is a Beautiful Thing” feels like something she’s trying to internalize, a coda to 1969’s “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black.” “Liberian Calypso” channels the night she felt most free, naked and drunkenly blissful, table-dancing her way through an African discotheque. All of these effervescent songs feel like they’re swirling around the tragedy at the heart of the record.
At the center of the reissued Fodder on My Wings is “Alone Again Naturally,” Simone’s stripped-down response to Gilbert O’Sullivan’s 1972 hit of the same name, in which she recounts the events surrounding her father’s death a decade earlier. (Its place on the tracklist has shifted over the years.) She was glad to learn he was dying: he had betrayed her when she needed him most, and in dying he’d taken her mother with him. Suddenly, the song grows somber, and in the closing minute, she reveals that losing this man was, in fact, a devastating blow. No one was closer to her. No one else understood her. She points to his loss as the impetus for all subsequent struggles. The specter of his death casts a pall over the album’s pursuit of joy. One moment, her father’s death makes her question God’s existence; the next, when singing a reassuring song her father introduced her to (“Heaven Belongs to You”), she embraces heavenly salvation. This is the push and pull throughout the album: the weight of pain and the beauty of faith.
Together, all these songs become a memoir. She wasn’t just singing to know that she was alive; she sang also to reflect on how she’d lived and what she might learn from it. The haunting piano solo “Le peuple en Suisse” revisits her time in Switzerland, among a people she believed to be cold, but not before waxing poetic about moving forward. “Let no one deceive you/You have so little time/So let the corpses molder/To live your life is bolder/To waste it is a crime,” she sings, as though trying to convince herself. She didn’t want to be trapped, least of all in her role as performer.
Nina Simone spent much of her life on stage, and it was in those moments that she really seemed to become the High Priestess of Soul, but by the 1980s, her shows had developed a reputation for devolving into chaos as much as for achieving excellence. “Her performances have the aura of sacramental rites, in which a priestess and her flock work to establish a mystical communion,” wrote the critic Stephen Holden in 1983, during her first show back in the States to perform songs from the album. As if cognizant of such a spiritual relationship with her audience, there’s “Vous êtes seuls, mais je désire être avec vous” (You are alone, but I want to be with you), a song that seemed to be an olive branch to crowds around the world. She chants the phrase over and over until the words completely disarm and overwhelm, until she felt exonerated. (Nicole Cerf-Hofstein wrote that, for many in attendance when Simone first performed the song at the New Morning, it was “a missed rendezvous.”) The song seems indicative of her ongoing battle to overcome both internal and external demons. Even her deepest explorations of self were made in conversation with her public.
Simone was privy to the way the world at large saw her and sought to sideline her, as evidenced in songs like “I Was Just a Stupid Dog to Them” and “They Took My Hand,” but she was optimistic she could make a better future by learning from the past. “Now, everything will change!” she exclaims on the former; “You took my teeth/You took my brains/You try to drive me so insane/And now you’re trying to take my eyes/But it is finished/Because I’m too wise,” she sings on the latter. With Fodder on My Wings, she found new freedom in song, seeking out new heights as she left her fears far below.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


The long-awaited Cruel Summer is a crew album, a chance for all of the rappers Kanye West has signed over the past few years (former greats like Pusha T, half-decent punchline rappers like Big Sean, and entourage bottom-feeders like CyHi the Prynce) to momentarily feel like they own the place.

Various Artists: Kanye West Presents: GOOD Music - Cruel Summer

Cruel Summer is not Kanye West’s record; listening to it, I found a certain peace in reminding myself of this. Cruel Summer is a crew album, a chance for all of the rappers he's signed to his G.O.O.D. imprint during the past few years to momentarily feel like they own the place. They range from former greats like Pusha T to half-decent punchline rappers like Big Sean to entourage bottom-feeders like CyHi the Prynce, and spending a long time in their presence can feel like being trapped in a reality-TV house. Kanye drops by occasionally, but he mostly feels a million miles away. Kanye’s career has been built on maniacal quality control, but Cruel Summer feels uncharacteristically disposable.
Even the title is botched. The album arrives on September 18, with school in session and the season’s cruelest days far behind us. This day late/dollar short feeling persists throughout. The production is often cluttered with unnecessary effects, like the vocal “whoa-oh-oh” synth pads West threw on his remix of Chief Keef’s “I Don’t Like” when he couldn’t figure out how to improve it. Songs take ill-advised turns. After verses from Raekwon, Common, Pusha T, 2 Chainz, and CyHi the Prynce are hurled at you like a handful of action figures on "The Morning", the song inexplicably changes key so that Nigerian singer D’Banj can warble in Auto-Tune. “Sin City” starts out with a generic dubstep low-end before transitioning into a mortifying slam-poetry performance by Malik Yusef. And then when that’s over, who should come along next but... CyHi the Prynce. Again.
If Kanye had resisted the temptation to stuff Cruel Summer with his LucasArts production magic, it might have worked as a pure bid for rap radio’s dead center. With “Niggas in Paris,” West got closer to that center than he’d been in a while; My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, for all its accolades, struggled to find its foothold on the pop charts. There are a handful of hits here, and they range from the pretty good to the fantastic. You’ve probably heard them all by now, and they will outlive this comp; they are are the reason the record deserves to exist.
Cruel Summer’s secret MVP is Hit-Boy, the producer who brought Kanye the “Paris” beat; he shows up on with “Cold” (formerly known as “Theraflu”), a sleekly coursing West solo track in which he hashes out the increasingly silly details of his life—his jealousy towards Kim Kardashian’s 72-day husband Kris Humphries; his adventures go-karting with Polish models—with his trademark aggrieved sense of urgency. Hit-Boy also offers up “Clique,” a transfixing, Timbaland-like collection of hiccups and synth strobes. “Clique” is haughty, spotless, and coldly perfect; it sounds like bottle service. West takes the opportunity to sneer at former CIA director George Tenet’s car.
Apart from Hit-Boy’s contributions, there are three tracks from Hudson Mohawke, the rising Glasgow producer whose compellingly fractured beats have caught the ear of hip-hop figures like Just Blaze. His contributions—“To the World,” “The One,” and “Bliss,” which makes use of 2009’s “Ice Viper”—don’t sound like anything off of his riotous Satin Panthers EP, but they are welcome signs that Mohawke is moving into high-profile hip-hop territory. “To the World,” a track featuring R. Kelly that’s built off a slightly stiff drumline beat and swarms of string plucks, benefits from an animated turn from Kanye, who mangles Francis Ford Coppola’s name hilariously and taunts Mitt Romney in a nagging singsong for failing to disclose his taxes.
But once the early run of singles are out of the way, things start to go south. By the time you get to Kid Cudi’s dribbly alt-rock solo turn “Creepers” (actual lyric: “If I had one wish, it’d be to have more wishes/Duh... Fuck trying to make it rhyme”) it seems like even the artists involved have left the room. Pusha T huffs and snorts a lot, but drops lines like “wherever we go, we do it pronto.” You’d never guess from his performance here that he was once a member of Clipse. Big Sean, who's shown flickering signs of wanting to actually rap lately, sits back and offers terrible puns on the word “ass.” R&B singer Teyana Taylor comes nowhere near her work on Twisted Fantasy.
It’s the sense of Event, which has become as much of an art for Kanye as his music over the years, that is most blatantly missing here. The only people who seem to recognize what’s at stake are the old-timers. Ma$e, of all people, shows up out of nowhere on “Higher” to lick shots at his former Bad Boy rival Loon: No one cares, but he still sounds slick. And then there’s Ghostface, who roars to life at the end of “New God Flow,” a track based off his own “Mighty Healthy” from 2000’s classic Supreme Clientele. Ghost’s appearance is an obvious prestige-casting move, but still a perfect one, and he makes the most of it, reliving his Pretty Toney days one more time. A handful of guests aside, though, none of G.O.O.D. Music’s personalities do much to justify their newfound prominence. If Cruel Summer is meant to be an argument for the label’s other talent, it makes a weak case.


Emerging from hip-hop's brief and fruitful collision with jazz at the turn of the 1990s, Digable Planets' second album is a love letter to Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood. On Blowout Comb, they made a proto-crate-digging approach feel completely organic, and integrated with their broader goal of deepening rap's connection to music history.

Blowout Comb

Around the turn of the 1990s, hip-hop had a brief and fruitful collision with jazz. “You could find the Abstract listening to hip-hop/ My pops used to say, it reminded him of bebop,” said Q-Tip on 1991‘s The Low End Theory, an album that included contributions from legendary second-Miles Davis Quintet bassist Ron Carter and featured a song called “Jazz (We’ve Got)”. A year earlier, Spike Lee had followed his landmark Do the Right Thing, a film closely connected in spirit to the hip-hop street, with Mo Better Blues, a film whose main characters were sharply dressed jazz musicians trying to figure out how their work fit into the modern world. Guru of Gang Starr started a side project called Jazzmatazz, which found jazz legends playing alongside MCs; Us3 looped Herbie Hancock to create a global smash. Hip-hop jazz was now a thing, and one of the small, brilliantly burning sparks to emerge from this tiny explosion was the Brooklyn-based trio Digable Planets.
To understand the music of Digable Planets, it helps to remember the cultural landscape of the early 1990s. The crack epidemic was in full swing and violence was at an all-time high. (We’re rightly horrified at the 506 murders in Chicago last year, but in 1992, there were 943.) Coming off of 12 years of Republicans in the White House, Ronald Reagan and his successor, George H.W. Bush, had turned the country rightward, and each had scored political points by exploiting racial prejudice. The youthful energy of the civil rights generation was fading; young people who might have seen Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X speak in person were well into middle age. Hip-hop was well established and rapidly growing in popularity, but it wasn’t yet a global cultural force.
So what did “jazz” mean in this hip-hop moment? It went beyond just sampling grooves and instrumental accents from the Roy Ayers catalog or the groove-based hard bop of the 50s/60s Blue Note catalog (though there was a lot of that too). Part of it can be found in that Q-Tip lyric: This is my music, and my father hears his music in it. It was a way to connect a thread of African-American culture to the earlier generations, to affirm a sense of shared experience and tradition. “My father always told me jazz is the black person’s classical music,” Digable Planets MC Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler told writer Ann Powers in the May 1993 issue of SPIN. So jazz as an idea in hip-hop was a story of tradition and shared knowledge, of connecting a younger cohort to the radical art of their parents’ generation. And in the tense era of the 80s and 90s, there was comfort to be found in that continuum, of positioning this new music in the context of an earlier sound that had changed the world.
If Digable Planets were the product of a specific time, they also came together in a specific place. Blowout Comb, their second and final album, which was first released in 1994 and now returns in the form of this gorgeous and beautiful-sounding vinyl reissue from Light in the Attic, is practically a love letter to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Fort Greene. It’s a part of the borough with a long history (Walt Whitman lived here), and not all of it was rosy (in the 1970s and 80s, crime in the area was endemic). It’s also a neighborhood of African-American families, and it has been known as an incubator of creativity. Spike Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule office is based here; jazz musicians young (Branford Marsalis) and old (Cecil Taylor) called the area home. As described in Brooklyn Boheme, a film by Fort Greene resident and writer Nelson George, during the late 1980s and 90s Fort Greene was a nexus of African-American cultural activity, to the extent that George calls it the late-century Brooklyn version of the Harlem Renaissance. It was a good place for Digable Planets, none of whom were native Brooklynites, to set up shop.
The group’s debut album, 1993’s Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space), is very good, but all the promise of the project was realized with its follow-up. Blowout Comb is an album of forces pulling in different directions, exerting tension and stretching into new forms. On a purely sonic level, the music, produced by the group, is beautiful and goes down so easily it’s almost disconcerting. The mixture of soul and jazz samples and live instrumentation paints an eminently listenable late-night atmosphere: there are clouds of vibraphone, drum loops firmly in the pocket, creaky Fender Rhodes lines, tasteful horn accents, all of it anchored by warm, snug, and instantly memorable basslines. The general sonic approach became more prominent as the 90s wore on, as these kinds of crate-digging, rare-groove types continued to mine old soul and jazz records for samples, eventually transforming into a kind of supper-club trip-hop (Kruder & Dorfmeister, Thievery Corporation). But Digable made the approach feel completely organic and integrated with their broader musical goal of expanding rap’s reach and deepening its connection to music history.
Digable also found an approach to rapping that fit perfectly with their musical ideas. The three MCs-- Butterfly, Craig “Doodlebug” Irving, and Mary Ann “Ladybug Mecca” Vieira-- rap with confidence, skill, and force but they also sound relaxed, unhurried, close to the microphone, and intimate. “No stars, just bars,” Doodlebug raps on “The May 4th Movement”, and his words serve as a good explanation for what’s going on here. Because the vocalists take a similar angle on rapping, they feel like a true unit, individuals who are comfortable giving over a certain amount of their personality to the project as a whole. Ladybug often takes the first verse on a given track, and since the three MCs truly feel like equals and there’s not much in the way of macho posturing, lines between masculine and feminine also seem porous.
But if the sound and vocals are decidedly chill, the lyrics are alternately celebratory, searching, and anxious. There is a strong thread of black nationalist consciousness (Butler's father is a professor of African-American history) but it’s often presented impressionistically. “Black Ego” opens with a spoken exchange that finds Butterfly being arrested and shaking off a racial slur with a “here we go again,” and later finds him transcending the situation with a mix of affirmations and escapist Afro-futurist imagery (“My shit's, a natural high, the man can’t put no thing on me/ Now catch me when my mind stretch out, it's astro black/ Time reaching into end, nappy Afro-blue”). “Dog It” has references to out-jazz genius Eric Dolphy, Marvin Gaye, bell hooks, and raised fists; elsewhere we find Five-Percent National imagery and mythology (see Ladybug’s “68 inches above sea level/ 93 million miles above these devils” on “9th Wonder (Blackitolism)”. Mixed in with the political observations and mysticism are joyful observations of everyday life, of soaking in the texture of the streets and feeling happy to be young and motivated and creative. Anyone who has felt even the slightest romantic pull of bohemian living can recognize the youthful assuredness mixed with wide-eyed wonder that pervades the record.
So Blowout Comb is a modest hip-hop classic that thrives on contrast. It’s both dated and timeless, angry and laid-back, smooth and prickly. It’s one of the easier albums in pop history to put on and enjoy and vibe out to, but it has a rich undercurrent of history and thought. It’s also something of a cul de sac. Though Butler did pick up some of these threads and combine them with more abrasive and abstract music as Shabazz Palaces, Digable Planets as a project did not endure. Culture moved on and rap moved on with it. But Blowout Comb, a richly rendered world with so much to explore, is still there and is accepting visitors, and it has a lot to teach us on whatever level we choose to listen.


On his second collection of melancholic 80s-inspired pop odes, the 27-year-old singer/songwriter/producer Devonté Hynes, aka Blood Orange, channels vagabond emotions into something universal and inviting. His Cupid Deluxe is an album that tenderly details heartbreak through the language of longing.

Cupid Deluxe

Every night in New York City, around 4,000 young people face the darkness without a home. Many are teens. A disproportionate amount are gay, lesbian, or transgender, shunned by their families or the world at large. Some close their eyes under trees in Central Park. Some sell sex downtown. Others go underground and lean their heads on the dulled metal of subway trains traveling along the ACE line, from the top of Manhattan to the bottom of Queens. According to "Netherland", a harrowing New Yorker story from last year that chronicled the city's young, homeless, LGBT underground, the ACE is known to some lodgers as "Uncle Ace's house." This comforting nickname provides the title and inspiration for "Uncle Ace", a key track from singer/songwriter/producer Devonté Hynes' second album as Blood Orange.
Starring the kind of battered-but-resilient souls who stroll through the city in the dead of night, the impressionistic song has Hynes switching between a low and high singing voice, subtly accentuating the androgynous characters within. It's mysterious, desperate, empathetic. "Not like the other girls," he offers, possibly taking the purview of a woman who feels like a man, or vice versa. Hynes shines a careful light onto his vulnerable subjects, inhabiting their travails with grace, all while a disco pulse and smoky saxophones harken back to his beloved 80s, when Times Square was a misfit's home away from home. The outcasts that live inside of "Uncle Ace" are Hynes' people. As the London-raised, New York-based 27-year-old has hopped from project to project and style to style over the last 10 years, he's maintained the air of an outsider. With Cupid Deluxe, he channels those vagabond emotions into something universal and inviting—an album that tenderly details various heartaches through the language of longing.
Growing up, Hynes was bullied and beaten up enough to end up in the hospital on more than one occasion. He first directed his angst into Test Icicles' spazzed punk as a teen before moving onto Morrissey-style tragic confessionals with Lightspeed Champion. His first album as Blood Orange, 2011's Coastal Grooves, traded in Lightspeed's orchestral folk-pop for slick new wave and funk, streamlining his once-unwieldy songwriting in the process. But it wasn't until he co-wrote and produced two songs from last year—Solange's "Losing You" and Sky Ferreira's "Everything Is Embarrassing"—that he found the most suitable vessel for his melancholic odes to expired love. Both tracks are propelled by springing 80s beats that are tugged down by minor chords and wounded lyrics; the upbeat drums suggest good times past, making the reality-check vocals hit that much harder. Given the blaring nature of modern pop, the subtlety of these hollowed-out songs was genuinely refreshing; not just "indie" for the sake of it, but affectingly human.
Cupid Deluxe largely (and winningly) follows the formula set forth by those modest hits, while bringing them forth on a full-length scale. Across the album, Hynes sings, writes, produces, and plays guitar, bass, keyboards, drums, synths. But this is hardly a solo act. In fact, one of the record's greatest strengths lies in its pitch-perfect deployment of guests. Not only does each member of the Cupid Deluxe team seem to fully understand the overarching wistfulness of the whole, but many of them show off heretofore unheard facets of their talent. While Hynes' girlfriend and Friends frontwoman Samantha Urbani and Kindness leader Adam Bainbridge exhibited tentative skills with their respective groups' debut albums last year, they make the most of their spotlights here; Urbani often sounds like she's mimicking the sultry chirpiness of an absent Solange, but her clear chemistry with Hynes makes the substitution more than adequate.
Meanwhile, Dirty Projectors' David Longstreth and Chairlift's Caroline Polachek have never sounded more soulful. Typically ominous rap producer Clams Casino contributes light, skittering drums to the Longstreth showcase "No Right Thing", which could fit snugly into any Vampire Weekend setlist. Even the set's two rap cameos, from Queens' Despot and London's Skepta, are anything but your usual in-and-out 16-bar guest shots—both MCs are given plenty of space to weave tales that are tactile and intimate, while Hynes' vocals take on a more ghostly role on the tracks' edges. And while the inclusion of a bubble-funk remake of Britpop curio Mansun's pompously overwrought 2000 single "I Can Only Disappoint U" sounds almost comically random on paper, Hynes' Fat Boys scratches and Urbani's featherlight vocals make it fit into the album's loose after-hours milieu. Such awareness and selflessness consistently pays off, making all involved sound that much better.
Especially Hynes, who's in complete control. Each drum machine snap, snippet of errant barroom chatter, Malcolm McLaren sample, and moist-eyed, questioning chorus snaps together to form a midtempo mixtape for the high-school dance you never had. The first-blush glances. The slowed mirrorball twinkle. The push and pull. "Baby are we on the line/ Tell me baby are you mine?" he sings, knowing full well that if you have to ask the question, you probably know the answer.
Like many Manhattan iconoclasts before him, Hynes holds director Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary of NYC gay and transgender ball culture, Paris Is Burning, very dear. While everyone from Madonna to Lady Gaga has taken inspiration from these events—one of the few safe havens for participants to revel in their true selves without having to worry about the judging eyes of society—they often focus on their more outrageous or empowering aspects (see: "Vogue"). But Dev Hynes' music is more suited to the film's beautiful and wrenching quiet moments, like when transgender model Octavia Saint Laurent confesses her desire to "be somebody" or is seen worshipping cut-outs of supermodels taped to the walls of her bedroom. The message comes full-circle on the Michael Jackson demo of a closing ballad, "Time Will Tell", which repurposes some of Hynes' own lines while a refrain of "and it keeps on running back" underlines the repetition. Gay, straight, man, woman, black, white, or anywhere in between: Heartbreak is real. It won't stop.


Thirty five years ago, while Mick and Keef injected the final doses of Jack and junk into Beggars Banquet\n ...

Think Tank

Thirty five years ago, while Mick and Keef injected the final doses of Jack and junk into Beggars Banquet out in Los Angeles, Brian Jones sucked a deep hit of kif and hopped a cab down the coast from Tangier to Larache with engineer George Chkiantz and girlfriend Suki in tow. From Larache the group hiked halfway up a mountain to the village of Jajouka, where for ages masses of drummers pounded under a chorus of reed ripping rhaita players as part of the Bou Jeloud ritual dance. Jones dreamed of expanding the Stones' sound beyond their American roots influence. Easily bored, he'd already exhausted sitar, vibraphone, dulcimer, and "the bloody marimbas" (as Keith called them) two years earlier on Aftermath.
As Jones' health famously sagged along with the bags under his eyes, The Rolling Stones found less and less use for his experiments. "Moroccan drums" pop up on "Midnight Rambler", but the band would never hike that mountain for the elusive Jajouka fusion. That is, not until they mattered little, in the late 80s, for "Continental Drift", a cut hidden deep in the career nadir of Steel Wheels. By then, looking to Africa for a muse had become AOR cliche, thanks to Paul Simon and Sting. Even the derided Paul McCartney overcame bubblegum balladry for Band on the Run, recorded in Lagos amidst studio shortcomings and legendary knife-point muggings.
Which brings us to Blur and their long-developed Think Tank, recorded in Morocco without founding guitar icon Graham Coxon. Rock 'n' roll precedent begs certain questions. Will the loss of Coxon equate to the loss of Brian Jones (or Mick Taylor) or a hypothetical loss of Keith Richards? Will Think Tank be another Cut the Crap, The Final Cut, Dr. Byrds and Mr. Hyde, Carl and the Passions (So Tough), Good Stuff, And Then There Were Three, Wake of the Flood, Mag Earwig, Stranded, One Hot Minute, Face Dances, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, Other Voices, Squeeze, Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age, Ultra, Drama, Slow Buildings, Road Hawks, Now and Them, or Chinese Democracy? Or more along the lines of Sticky Fingers, Back in Black, XTRMNTR, Adore, Up, In the Studio, Movement, Everything Must Go, Soft Bulletin, Power, Corruption & Lies, First Step, Damaged, Green Mind, This Is Hardcore, Coming Up, Full House, and ...And Justice for All?
With the exception of a year back in 1995, Blur have never rested on their laurels. Unlike their peers, they've delivered each album dipped in a drastic new element while keeping a consistent melodic heart. Albarn has always taken his shots, and thirteen years on seems to savor the challenge. Take, for instance, 2002's Mali Music, his rich, ethereal solo equivalent to Brian Jones' The Pipes of Pan at Joujouka: not content to simply document the musical heritage of the locals, Albarn stepped in alongside Afel Bocoum, protegé to Ali Farka Toure, humming his melodica during Niger-side jams and later reassembling the results in London as a montage of British-pop sensibilities with post-production special effects and punches of guitar, bass, and keyboard. The ambience and dust of the Malian excursion settles heavily over Think Tank, and notably, Albarn seems to have picked up more guitar skills from Bocoum than Coxon. The majestic, snaking "Out of Time" relies less on the lugubrious, Gibraltar-docked solo than the vast, four-dimensional environment surrounding it. One gets the sense that even if Graham Coxon had caught the flight to Marrakesh, Think Tank wouldn't have turned out much different.
Of course, all this focus on Damon and Graham discredits Alex James and Dave Rowntree, who really push Think Tank through the sand. The two both preempted the critics by perfectly describing the new music in interviews. James claimed Think Tank "has hips," while Rowntree simply said it's most similar to Parklife. James goes the furthest in giving Blur hips, beyond often posing with his protruding-- with the focus off Coxon, his brilliant bass playing will finally be seen as the vital element in Blur. It gave "Girls and Boys", "Parklife", "Coffee and TV", and "Song 2" their major hooks, while Graham hammered away on minimal riffs. If you're air-playing anything along to those tracks, it's the air-bass you're wriggling your index and middle fingers to. Likewise, Think Tank is laden with creative bass leads.
"Brothers and Sisters" pounds along like contemporary Primal Scream revisiting Screamadelica. While Damon twists away like the Konda Bongo Man on guitar and hammers "Rockit" Hancock keyboard blurts, James freaks out like a Funkadelic foray into post-punk on "Moroccan Peoples Revolutionary Bowls Club". Rowntree, meanwhile, switches between locking the beats into motorik molds or loosens them up into Bou Jeloud punk. But Think Tank is by no means "Blur gone dance" (ironically, the two Fatboy Slim songs, "Crazy Beat" and "Gene by Gene", are, if anything, Clash-inspired)-- what was "Girls and Boys" but a disco rock track seven years before it was fashionable? Even "Battle", "People in Europe", "Death of a Party", "I'm Just a Killer for Your Love", "Entertain Me", "On Your Own", and "London Loves" used loops or drum machines.
Incidentally, despite my earlier, tenuous attempts to link Blur to the Stones in some sort of sacred, afro-spiritual rock history, Blur worship more at the altar of Bowie. The Bowie element has, of course, always been there, from "Bugman" to "M.O.R."-- the latter emulated Lodger's "Boys Keep Swinging" to such an extent that Bowie was given songwriting credit. Here it seems that Albarn must idolize Lodger, in particular, as Think Tank follows the overlooked album closely in spirit. In "Fantastic Voyage", "African Night Flight", and "Yassassin", Bowie found a fractured, minimal sound affected by Middle Eastern and African music without blindly throwing a robe and bongo on while inviting Ladysmith Black Mambazo to sing. In contrast "DJ" and "Boys Keep Swinging" offered jittery, pre-new wave dance-rock.
Combat Rock, too, stands as an obvious parallel. "Car Jamming", "Straight to Hell", and "Overpowered by Funk" inspire the most daring Think Tank tracks-- "Me, White Noise" (with Phil Daniels standing in for Ginsberg), "Jets", and "Ambulance". But, ah, remember Dave Rowntree saying this was like Parklife. In basic sound, as you may have gathered, no. Parklife was the defining BRITISH album of the 90s, ushering in an unintentional wave of newly patriotic blokes who failed to see it as satire, like "Born in the U.S.A." blaring at Reagan rallies. Likewise, Think Tank sounds like Britain today-- a Britain where Panjabi MC's "Mundian to Bach Ke" and Audio Bully's "We Don't Care" outchart Athlete's modernized Britpop. It sounds like Notting Hill, where American media-skewed preconceptions are both confirmed by the enormous white townhomes and shattered by the multi-ethnic markets. Damon Albarn is more likely to find bootleg dancehall CDs spread across a Pakistani carpet outside his Honest Jon's Records shop than Heathen Chemistry.
Then again, Think Tank does sound like Parklife, as it contains Albarn's best ballads since. "Sweet Song" plucks an echoing piano and rusty guitar under a lake of pure, clear melody, and "Caravan" cracks like a last lament transmitted from an imploding submarine on crunchy sonar pulses and disintegrating guitar from a deep P.A. as Albarn announces, "You'll feel the weight of it," before breaking the surface in dulcimer-drenched sunshine. Oh, and Graham does pop up once, on "Battery in Your Leg", which opens sounding eerily similar to Eno and Bowie's Berlin output before Coxon makes his guitar twang like high tension wires snapping and erupts in Saturn-rocket blasts.
Like being plopped down in Morocco for the first time, or Covent Garden for that matter, Think Tank takes some reorienting. To answer the questions posed earlier, the album is laughably miles better than every album on the first list, and surprisingly better than, or just as good as, every single one on the other. But don't just judge it as an album by a band coming off a major line-up change. You won't need to.


Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst team up for a tight-knit folk-rock album about alienation, solitude, and our potential to better ourselves against bad odds.

Better Oblivion Community Center: Better Oblivion Community Center

Better Oblivion Community Center

When Conor Oberst first heard the sad, conversational songwriting of Phoebe Bridgers, he felt compelled to get in touch. “It’s nice to know you are out there singing this stuff,” he told the 24-year-old Los Angelean after she sent an early version of her breakthrough debut, 2017’s Stranger in the Alps. “I think lots of people will find good comfort in your songs. They are soothing and empathetic, which I know I need more of in my life.”
He wasn’t kidding. After some trying years, Oberst’s recent work has been a vessel for stark, existential unburdening. On 2016’s Ruminations and its 2017 companion Salutations, he funneled first-person accounts of grief, depression, insomnia, paranoia, court appearances, and hospital visits into his most vivid and unsettled music in years. Drawing a direct line to the shaky downer anthems that made Bright Eyes an influence for so many young artists—Bridgers included—these newer songs sounded exhaustive and raw, like there was a punchline at the very bottom of all his anxieties and he’d dig through them like a pile of dirty laundry to uncover it.
For Bridgers, this was essentially square one. Her songs, hushed and patient, often seek in-the-moment honesty over retrospective wisdom. She’s equally adept at capturing an omnipresent fog of melancholy and the cosmic joke looming just outside our periphery. Her debut was filled with odes to friends who died too young and woeful retellings of her stoned, late-night regrets, all sung with a lightness that made her worldview seem both chaotic and consoling. Late in the album, she invited Oberst to sing on a ballad called “Would You Rather.” Voicing the troubled family member who helped make Bridgers’ childhood survivable, he echoed her fluttering whisper in a low, empathetic wheeze: “I’m a can on a string/You’re on the end.”
The duo’s first full-length collaboration, Better Oblivion Community Center, continues their conversation. It’s a tight-knit folk-rock album about alienation, solitude, and our potential to better ourselves against bad odds. Despite its loose concept about a dystopian wellness facility and its elaborate rollout—complete with cryptic brochures and a telephone hotline—it’s not a bracing political statement like 2015’s Payola, Oberst’s pre-Trump rallying cry with his old punk band Desaparecidos. And unlike Bridgers’ recent EP as one-third of the supergroup boygenius, these songs don’t seek collaboration as a means for full-throated emotional escapism. Instead, Better Oblivion is a collection of quiet, wandering thoughts: the sound of twin souls burrowing deeper into their common ground.
Despite the laid-back atmosphere, the songwriting focuses on characters pushed to breaking points. Many of the songs revolve around destinations of wellness and escape: vacations, silent retreats, “little moments of purpose.” Such ideas have fascinated Oberst since his 2007 pivot-point Cassadaga, and they’ve never really left his work since. As an artist who depicted himself on his last album cover drowning face-down in a swimming pool on a beautiful summer day, he remains skeptical of taking it easy. “All this freedom just freaks me out,” he sings, sounding genuinely freaked out, in “My City.” The track ends with the album’s most primal vocal performance: a long note that the duo holds in unison before getting snuffed by a steady, clipped drumbeat. It’s a centering moment, like removing your earbuds and realizing how serene the world around you is compared to what’s in your head.
Because of their uniquely emo vocal styles and their tender subject matter, both Oberst and Bridgers are typically characterized as confessional songwriters, which can belie the complexity (and humor) of their work. In these songs, they push each other to write more in character. The opening “Didn’t Know What I Was in For” is an imagistic story-song that spirals out from dreary contentedness. Observing a friend who “says she cries at the news but doesn’t really” and eavesdropping on poolside conversations that start polite but “always sounds so cruel,” Bridgers implicates herself in a generational sense of helplessness: “I’ve never really done anything for anyone,” she sings over a mournfully strummed acoustic guitar.
Better Oblivion is dotted with refrains that sound breezy but read like last-ditch confrontations long after the spark has died (“Is this having fun?/It’s not like the way it was,” “I loved you/I wore you down,” “Why don’t you want it anymore?”). The radiant “Dylan Thomas” gallops forward with its impressive rhyme scheme, but the words mostly highlight a shared tendency toward fatalism: the couple at the party who get along best when they’re pointing out how pathetic the whole endeavor is. Along the way, Bridgers sneaks in what sounds like a jab at her critics (“They say you’ve got to fake it/At least until you make it/That ghost is just a kid in a sheet”) and Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner shows up for some woozy solos, like a hungover take on Springsteen’s “No Surrender.” Suddenly, their pact to “go it alone” seems somewhat triumphant.
For each declaration of acceptance, there’s a bleaker attempt at finding closure: doomed visions of digging people up from the ground or driving until you feel different. In “Chesapeake,” the album’s slow-burning centerpiece, Bridgers and Oberst share a formative memory, sitting on someone’s shoulders during a concert: “We were the tallest person watching in Chesapeake,” they sing in harmony. Bridgers has written before about finding meaning with the music blasting—crying in the crowd with the teenagers, drowning out the sadness with a car radio. Here, she sings it like a lullaby, as Oberst’s familiar quiver helps guide toward a lonely conclusion. Sparsely attended and tepidly received, the concert they’re singing about seems kind of like a drag, and any revelation it inspires is short-lived. Soon they know that the music will be over, the crowd will disperse, and the world will be louder and more confusing than ever.