Colin Meloy's theatrical and hyperliterate band makes an unexpected move to Capitol Records, and delivers a record that matches the ambition of its new imprint.

The Crane Wife

For a few years now, the Decemberists' stagey, hyperliterate folk-rock has played well at indie labels Hush and Kill Rock Stars. The quintet has occupied a small community-theater space with gleefulness and confidence, but now it's accepted a scholarship to Capitol Records, which means a larger stage and a bigger audience. Can the band still project, or will its voices be lost in a cavernous auditorium, rejoined only by crickets and barely stifled coughs of boredom? Will nine-minute mariner epics play in Peoria?
Given the band's graduation from minor to major leagues, The Crane Wife may prove to be the most crucial record the Decemberists will release in their lifetime. Fortunately, their fourth album further magnifies and refines their strengths. Winsomely balancing frivolity and gravity, the Decemberists assemble an oddball menagerie of the usual rogues and rascals, soldiers and criminals, lovers and baby butchers-- but they've got a lot more tricks up their sleeves than previous albums had hinted. The Crane Wife employs an impressive variety of styles and sounds to tell Meloy's imaginative stories: There's the band's usual folk-rock, honed to an incisively sharp point, but they also deploy a smuggler's blues ("The Perfect Crime"), a creepy lullaby ("Shankill Butchers"), a Led Zep stomp ("When the War Came"), and, perhaps most divisively, a multipart prog track ("The Island") that stretches well past the 10-minute mark. No epic chantey this time, though.
Meloy's inventive songwriting is the binding force, emphasizing character but remaining ever in thrall to stories, savoring the way they always play out to the same conclusions. Along with the homosexual undertones that have informed Decemberists songs from every album, he jettisons most of the archetypes that inspired Picaresque and cuts his characters loose in their own tales. They still do what they're fated to do-- the thieves thieve and run amok, the lovers love and die tragically, the soldiers soldier on and pine for peaceful homes-- but they seem to do it more out of free will than authorial design.
Meloy focuses mainly on matters of war ("But O did you see all the dead of Manassas/ All the bellies and the bones and the bile?") and love ("No, I lingered here with the blankets barren/ And my own belly big with child"). On the duet "Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)", Meloy plays the part of an errant, possibly dead Civil War soldier while singer-songwriter Laura Veirs cameos as his "sweetheart left behind." It's Cold Mountain writ poignantly small, its sweet, wordless chorus perfectly life-size. Lumbering menacingly, the martial march of "When the War Came" smells of gunpowder and singed hair, although it sounds like it's anchored in Neverland despite trying to comment on real-world events.
Meloy's taletelling will always define the Decemberists, but The Crane Wife puts as much weight on the music as on the lyrics, and here the band gels into a tight, intuitive unit. The musicians give each song a particular spark and character, not just reinforcing the lyrics but actively telling a story. They create a breezy eddy of guitar strums and piano chords to enhance a windborne melody and an undercurrent of peril on "Summersong", and the tragedy of "O Valencia"-- any good song about star-crossed lovers must end in death-- is countered by the pep of the music, especially Chris Funk's ascending and descending guitar, which seems to take a particular glee in the inevitable denouement. The band isn't just able-bodied, but ambitious to boot. It makes the brainy prog of that monster second track, a distillation of the musical reach of their 2003 EP The Tain, sound like a natural extension of their base sound. They troll confidently from the rumbling overture and heated exposition of "Come and See" to the final rueful notes of "You'll Not Feel the Drowning". The song is chockablock with progisms-- organ runs, dampered cymbals, laser synths-- but manages to shake off the genre quote marks as the band jam with convincing menace.
Their range allows them to be precociously diverse, but everything fits naturally. The Crane Wife sounds like their most shapely album to date, resembling a spirited story arc in its set-up, rising action, climax, and resolution. In this structure the three title segments, despite essentially bookending the tracklist, form the album's thematic centerpiece, the music and story meshing gracefully and tenderly to retell a Japanese fable. "The Crane Wife 3" opens the album with a ruminative flourish as John Moen's drums push the sensuous thrust of the music and Meloy's delivery of the lines "each feather it fell from skin" colors the resignation of "I will hang my head hang my head low." It opens the album en medias res, setting up the subsequent story-songs as the narrator's rueful reminiscences.
"The Crane Wife 1 and 2" comprise a medley towards the album's end, starting slow and soft but gradually reaching crescendo in an unfurling finale, with Meloy breaking the word "heart" into multiple syllables over an unraveling drum beat. Restrained yet resonant, the song's (and album's) climax is a remarkable moment. As it segues into the rousing coda of "Sons & Daughters", the Decemberists sound like a band that knows exactly where they're going and won't be satisfied until you come along for the trip.


On his wonderful and grief-stricken new album, the Bronx rapper pays tribute to his late mother and proves that his voice grows stronger even in sorrow.

Weight of the World

The essence of MIKE’s music remains his late mother. She’s mentioned often on his wonderful and grief-stricken new album, Weight Of The World, after being the centerpiece of last year’s Tears of Joy, released not long after her passing. The 21-year-old MC is still very much battling the pain and confusion that comes with losing a parent, and he uses World to dig further into the fragmented memories of their past. It’s a raw and captivating glimpse of a young artist whose pen has grown sharper as his heart has grown heavier.
MIKE presents that heaviness through a familiar lo-fi lens. He and his sLUms associates have developed a distinct vision by now, centered on samples that sound like they were downloaded over a dial-up connection. (MIKE produces 12 of the tracks here himself under his dj blackpower pseudonym.) They rap in methodical deadpan, no doubt inspired by the drawl of Madvillain-era DOOM (MIKE’s first-ever verse was written over the instrumental for “ALL CAPS”). The combination can be both mesmerizing and misleading, as it doesn’t necessarily alert the listener when something special occurs.
But that’s why you’ll always be rewarded for listening closely to MIKE. On the self-produced “alert*”, he evokes his pain over a bare-bones piano riff: “Back then my diet was shrooms if it wasn’t herbal/And threw some violence towards the blues 'cause the wound eternal.”  Later, on “delicate,” he paints a childhood spent between London, Philly, and New York, rhyming, “We used to freeze up in the winter, the summers, we rose/From nights we used to sleep through dinner, and others we toked.”
So much of World is centered around his family. His dad worries about his sadness and substance abuse (“Papa knows it’s doom I need to work through,” he says on “alert*”). Siblings and old friends are protectors who helped him navigate life on the street. “Brodie got the .30, only clean 'em with detergent,” he raps on “222,” adding “hope I never need the service.” Just a few lines later on the same song, he describes the moment his mother passed: “Walked her out the Earth, just me, a couple nurses.” He circles back to her departure often at the end of verses, sometimes sweetly, like how their laughs were the same. Other times, he just breaks your heart, as when he recalls her shouldering much of the family’s burden. “And you still grievin’ over moms,” he raps on “Weight of the Word,” like he’s being accused of being unable to let go.  “Nah, I’ll never forget,” he declares with pride in his voice.
Amongst all the pain, MIKE’S confidence still seeps through in his artistic growth. “get rich quick scheme” may be one of the most immediate songs MIKE has ever released, with a crushingly fierce beat provided by the Chicago-bred producer and singer KeiyaA. And Earl Sweatshirt, the man who turned to MIKE and sLUms to craft the sound of his masterful third album, adds some star power to the project by finishing it off with a long, heady verse. On World you feel for MIKE, but you never quite worry for him. Even in sorrow, his voice grows stronger.


Soul Jazz has released two new anthologies of Ohio proto-punk, punk, and post-punk from the late '70s and early '80s: Burn Rubber City, Burn! (centered on Akron) and Extermination Nights in the Sixth City (centered on Cleveland). Together, they portray less a scene than a free-for-all mix of inspired amateurs, ambitious opportunists, and serious, self-styled artists.

Various Artists: Punk 45: Extermination Nights in the Sixth City / Punk 45: Burn Rubber City, Burn!

"East Coast, West Coast, you can jump in the sea/ I don't need no ocean, I got industry." So sneers Rod Firestone, frontman of Akron, Ohio's seminal punk band Rubber City Rebels, on the group's self-titled theme song. "Rubber City Rebels" also appears on The Akron Compilation, a platter issued by England's legendary Stiff Records in 1978 in an attempt to capitalize on the growing notoriety of Akron's most infamous weirdos (and Stiff signees), Devo. But "Rubber City Rebels" represents Akron circa the late '70s far more passionately. Where Devo started out with a noise that was simultaneously punky and abstract, Rubber City Rebels had zero trace of art in their DNA. Their theme song says it all: Firestone's big "fuck you" to both coasts celebrated Ohio's flyover status and admittedly crumbling industrial infrastructure, boosting the Akron scene in much the same way the Stooges and the MC5 did for Detroit a decade before in the process.
Soul Jazz has released two new anthologies of Ohio proto-punk, punk, and post-punk from the late '70s and early '80s: Burn Rubber City, Burn! (centered on Akron) and Extermination Nights in the Sixth City (centered on Cleveland). Of the two, Burn Rubber City, Burn! has a clear blueprint in Stiff's The Akron Compilation. Four songs from the Stiff disc have found their way onto Burn Rubber City, Burn!, but that slight overlap isn't enough to make the album redundant. Instead, the record fleshes out the portrait of Akron past. Bizarros and Rubber City Rebels blurred the line between bluesy, hard-rocking, keyboard-spiked proto-punk; in particular, Bizzaro's own slithery theme song, "I Bizarro", dramatizes the shift between Detroit stoner-snarl and punk's frantic animosity. And although "Rubber City Rebel" doesn't appear on Burn Rubber City, Burn!, the group is well represented by "Kidnapped" and "Such a Fool", two tracks taken from their '77 split with the Bizarros that demonstrate the no-holds-barred ethic of the time, before punk became petrified by its own image; the former is a raw, blistering spasm that predicts the coming hardcore storm, while the latter sounds as if it could be a raucous Alice Cooper demo.
Any Akron comp without Devo, however, would be disastrously incomplete, and Burn, Rubber City, Burn! includes the 1974 demos of "Mechanical Man" and "Auto Modown". Robotic, withdrawn, synth-twiddling, and playfully bleak, these two songs set the tone for later comp highlights such as Chi-Pig's "Apu Api" and "Ring Around the Collar". Neither would have been out of place on a contemporaneous Rough Trade comp, and members of the Slits-esque Chi-Pig would go on to co-write Devo's "Gates of Steel". (Mark Mothersbaugh, meanwhile, penned the lyrics for the group's "Ring Around the Collar".) Their presence helps pinpoint the big bang of Akron's more experimental contingent.
But for every gem like Jane Aire & the Belvederes' "When I Was Young"—in which Aire belts out gutsy and righteous tirades over jerky math-punk—there are oddities like "Narrow Road" by 15 60 75 Numbers Band—a listless, jazz-fusion meander that seems to have been listed for historical purposes only, seeing as how the group's lineup consisted, at one point or another, of Gerald Casale of Devo as well as Chrissie Hynde, an Akronite who moved to England and launched the Pretenders just before the Akron scene took off. It's unfortunate, also, that this completist spirit didn't spill over to the Cramps, who recorded a definitive batch of punkabilly demos in Akron in 1979 and whose frontman Lux Interior was a native.
Akron has been honored with two documentaries about its punk heyday—2003's It's Everything, and Then It's Gone and 2005's If You're Not Dead, Play. Cleveland, meanwhile, has had none (with the exception of 2007's Cleveland Screaming, covering the city's '80s hardcore scene). Yet Cleveland's leading band of the era, Pere Ubu, were every bit as trailblazing as their Akron counterparts Devo. The fresh context of Extermination Nights in the Sixth City gives the anthology's two Pere Ubu selections—"Heart of Darkness" and "Final Solution", plucked from their first two singles circa 1975 and '76—even more stark power. Leader David Thomas was still going by the ominous moniker Crocus Behemoth, and his mystique pervades these remarkable documents, which foreshadow the poetic tension and asperity of post-punk before punk itself had even solidified. Pere Ubu's predecessor, Rocket from the Tombs, gets a single song, "Life Stinks", but that's all they need; the anti-anthem remains as haywire and nihilistically disjointed as the day it crawled out of Thomas' feverish brain.
Cleveland contained plenty of protean talent besides Pere Ubu and kin. The Dead Boys, featuring former members of Rocket from the Tombs, may have broken out of Cleveland and headed for New York's CBGB scene, but plenty other punk-rock provocateurs stayed behind and flourished like blacktop weeds. Among them were the Pagans, Cleveland's answer to Rubber City Rebels. Their pulsing, Iggy-like conniptions are represented on Extermination Nights by three raging tracks, most notably the garage-rock-on-glue-fumes desperation of "Dead End America"—a beer-swilling, blue-collar rallying cry in the midst of socioeconomic collapse.
The artist side of the Cleveland scene finds expression on Extermination Nights, too. The Electric Eels, trafficking in punk savagery on "Splittery Splat" and avant-rock deconstruction on "Bunnies". The Mirrors' jangling, atmospheric "Hands in my Pockets" parallels Television's dreamy vistas as well as England's Swell Maps; Poli Styrene Jass Band's twisted "Drano in Your Veins" is a fit of Syd Barrett-meets-Frank Zappa whimsy. These quirks help make for a more solid, consistent listen than Burn Rubber City, Burn!—a higher batting average aided by the fact that Pere Ubu's tracks here reflect some of the best and most important music the group ever created, while Devo's contributions to Burn Rubber City, Burn! amount to mere marginalia.
Ironically, one of the most popular bands to emerge from the collective ooze of Burn Rubber City, Burn! and Extermination Nights in the Sixth City were the Waitresses. The quirky, lackluster, blues-rock oddity "The Comb"—which appears on both The Akron Compilation and Burn Rubber City, Burn!—in no way prepares us for the new-wavers who eventually charted with "I Know What Boys Like", performed the theme song to "Square Pegs", and were covered by the Spice Girls and on "Glee". Their success underlines the lack of cohesion to the Akron and Cleveland scenes. They were a free-for-all mix of inspired amateurs, ambitious opportunists, and serious, self-styled artists. In that way, Ohio wasn't all that different from any other place, then or now.
Still, there's an underdog pride and a furious invention to this music that unites these anthologies. The ache of doomed ambition, of a creative spirit pushed to the limit of endurance, and often well beyond, is palpable. Industrialized civilization may have been crumbling in the Rust Belt in the late '70s and early '80s, but Burn Rubber City, Burn! and Extermination Nights in the Sixth City prove just how much decay, disenfranchisement, and the specter of encroaching dystopia can fuel the fiercest of sounds.


Liam Howlett returns with his first album since 1997's smash Fat of the Land was hailed by mainstream media as the future of "electronica." Kool Keith, Juliette Lewis, Princess Superstar, and brother-in-law Liam Gallagher guest.

The Prodigy: Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned

Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned

A handful of industry insiders and media outlets expected The Prodigy's third album, 1997's The Fat of the Land, to alter America's pop landscape. Those prognosticators were correct: The album (which, fact fans, debuted at #1 in the same week that Radiohead's OK Computer bowed at #21) was a significant modern rock signpost, albeit not for the expected reasons. At the time, The Prodigy had been billed-- along with the Chemical Brothers, Orbital, and Underworld-- as the leaders of the mainstream media's regretfully named "electronica" movement, a moment in which electronic dance music was going to finally crossover to MTV and radio in the U.S.
However, instead of inspiring you and your band to trade in your guitars for turntables, The Prodigy-- along with unlikely and otherwise unrelated contemporaries such as Korn, Nine Inch Nails, and Rage Against the Machine-- laid the groundwork for the string of mostly limp rap-rock/nu-metal bands that dominated modern rock throughout the late 1990s and into the new millennium. In retrospect, The Prodigy may not have become America's Great Electronic Hopes but "Firestarter" could be the world's greatest nu-metal single, a rousing anthem for the Mook Era that was unfortunately taken to heart at Woodstock '99, the abandoned festival that served as rap-rock's peak in popularity and its cultural nadir.
OK Computer, "electronica," Rage Against the Machine, Woodstock '99-- it may seem like ancient history, but that divide is the uphill battle The Prodigy face after a seven-year gab between records. The good news is that calling the band "they" is more misleading now than it has been in recent years: The Prodigy's fourth album, Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, is mostly the work of musical linchpin Liam Howlett. Dancer Leeroy Thornhill left the group years ago, and neither Maxim Reality nor Keith Flint is featured here. Flint's bleating on The Prodigy's 2002 comeback single "Baby's Got a Temper"-- a cringe-worthy attempt at provocation (it's an ode to "date-rape drug" Rohypnol) that is thankfully not included-- may have been his final bow with the group.
Instead, vocals are provided by Kool Keith, Princess Superstar, and Juliette Lewis (among others), a roster that hints that the seven-year wait between records is less a result of going back to the drawing board as it is trying to coax a finished product from years-old ideas. (One could add Liam Gallagher to that list of past-their-sell-date vocalists, but as Howlett's brother-in-law his appearance could be as much a familial decision as a musical one.) Of the guests, only an underutilized Twista lends the album an air of timeliness.
Even more disappointingly, Always Outgunned is a mess of unfocused energy and uncomfortably irrelevant sonics, an odd mix of cartoonish immediacy and tired youth-cult ideas that would be the perfect soundtrack to Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie: The Movie. The results are even more regrettable because they're coming from Howlett, whose string of singles and first two albums with The Prodigy are still crucial and enthralling.
Howlett's run of solid singles does remain intact with "Girls", a delicious red herring of electro and breakbeats that stands head, shoulders and torso above the rest of the album. It leads into Princess Superstar collab "Memphis Bells" and "Get Up Get Off", the next closest things to album highlights. The latter features the yeoman-like Twista, who wisely slows his cadence rather than being tempted to race alongside BPMs which-- although hardly pummeling-- are much higher than, say, a Kanye West or R. Kelly production.
"Hotride"-- one of two Lewis collaborations-- is a heavy-handed re-imagination of The Fifth Dimension's "Up, Up & Away" (no, really) that aims for sexual but simply isn't sexy. Howlett also reaches back into the 1960s on "Phoenix", which liberally samples of The Shocking Blue's "Love Buzz", a vain, lifeless attempt to rub shoulders with the current wave of retro 60s garage rock. It's perhaps the record's most telling moment: long-time innovator Howlett aligning himself with the most necrophiliac elements of contemporary rock. The record's ungainly, knuckle-dragging nu-metal trappings overshadow any other pleasant sonic accoutrements-- the bassline from "Thriller" that loops throughout much of "The Way It Is" or the playful, subtle beats of "Memphis Bells".
"Your time is running out," Liam Gallagher sneers on album closer "Shoot Down", and it's unfortunately a fair warning for The Prodigy themselves. For a record that presumably took seven years to create, Always Outnumbered sounds unsurprisingly outdated but oddly lazy. Perhaps if Howlett officially disbands The Prodigy he can rediscover freedom and inspiration recording under his own name or another moniker, but if this "it goes to 11" take on rap-rock is all he's managed to digest and engage with during his absence, it's possible he needn't bother.


The Danish songwriter’s ghostly chamber pop experiments form their own foggy landscape, inviting you into a creeping mist where vocals and piano smear together.

Myopia

Since 2010, Danish songwriter Agnes Obel has produced ghostly, moody chamber pop with configurations of piano, strings, and her own voice. Myopia, her fourth album, represents a new peak for her lush melancholy. Raised in Copenhagen by musical parents (her father was an instrument collector and former jazz guitarist, her mother a talented pianist), Obel studied music in high school, eventually dropping out to attend a program for budding producers. As with her three previous albums, she wrote, recorded, mixed, and produced Myopia at her home studio in Berlin.
Myopia means “nearsightedness,” a title Obel chose to reflect her insular approach to music. Where some children might keep a private diary, Obel played solo piano: “I always had a different style of music I liked to play just by myself,” she’s said. Myopia lives in this solitude, inviting you into a creeping mist where vocals and piano smear together. Myopia uses vocal manipulation and murky instrumentation for ambient effect, painting the gloom in hues of rich blue and grey.
The effect is present from earliest moments on the album, as on “Broken Sleep,” where Obel’s voice dips in and around plucked strings as she instructs, “Dream me a dream soft as a pillow.” She passes the phrase “dream me a dream” back and forth with herself, alternating between a long e, like dreem, and a short e, like drem. Elsewhere she experiments with textured vocal layering and muddled, rippling warbles. On “Promise Keeper,” pronunciation takes a backseat in favor of delicate vocalizations. At times her voice leaps over itself, like cresting dolphins. When Obel sings the album’s title on “Myopia,” the word simply melts into the rain of compressed drums and strings, barely detectable.
Myopia recalls the gauziness of Grouper, or the poetry of Kate Bush, but the way the album forms its own strange landscape suggests that Obel is more interested in her own musical planet than any shared reality. She’s motivated, perhaps, by what she’s described as a discomfort with social media and the pressure of a culture where “we expect everyone to be open and made of glass.” Myopia, with its atmospheric piano, shadowy vocal effects, and persistent tension, resists this kind of visibility. These songs are obscured like frosted glass, as meticulously pretty and faintly unnerving as a porcelain doll. Though the album ends almost as quietly as it began, Obel’s whispery ambient fog lingers far longer.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Glaswegian producer/DJ Alex Smoke excels at making rich, moody techno that isn't exactly meant for dancing. On his latest, Smoke tightly packs a myriad of concepts and ideas, ranging from ontology to lost love, the carceral state to Edward Snowden.

Love Over Will

Glaswegian producer/DJ Alex Smoke (aka Alex Menzies) has never made techno you were supposed to dance to. In his more than decade-long career, his mixes and productions have veered far from the main drag of club and dancefloor appeal. More important for Smoke, in all of his work, was emotional exploration. It’s obvious that he has the disposition of a sensitive soul, and on his first outing with R&S Records, Love Over Will, Smoke swings for the fences, trying to complete a vision which could really create a puncturing and memorable experience.
Apparently the title of the album is a playful inversion of British occultist Aleister Crowley’s law of Thelema, a thoroughly ambiguous holy writ. In similarly opaque and broad terms, Smoke has described the album as "a statement on the times we are living in, but with an optimism relating to ways forward that are possible." But does he deliver on such lofty statements? Probably not, but in over 13 tracks and 33 minutes, Smoke tightly packs a myriad of concepts and ideas, ranging from ontology, loss love, the carceral state, and Edward Snowden. The resulting project is contemplative, relaxing, and elegant on a sonic level, but often uneven and clunky lyrically.
The unevenness comes from Smoke’s heavy reliance on his singing, which cannot carry the album's thematic weight.  His vocals dominate, featuring in eight of the 13 songs. Throughout, he sings in a low register, mostly in a monotone, and his voice is always Auto-Tuned or pitch-adjusted. Sometimes the vocals are the perfect complement to his sparse, buoyant productions, and at other times they are far too brittle and inflexible to match the rich sounds around him. The freezingly tender and liquid wall of sound in the album’s opener, "Fair Is Foul," favorably recalls Mica Levi’s palette of quavering synths for Under the Skin, but the track is nearly ruined by the interjection of lines like "I never really care about you anyway/ You’re always on the way."
When his songwriting and singing fit together, Smoke comes very close to the emotional resonance he is striving for. In "LossGain," as he whispers "Don’t tell me how I feel when I’m myself," there is an aching sense of strength and affirmation amidst the melancholy. When he sings "All my atoms/ Struggling to fight them" in "All My Atoms," the blunt lyrics propel the energy of the song’s bright keys. Smoke is a sentimentalist at heart, and in the album’s best track, "Dust," he submits to old desires and calls out to a lover: "Don’t want to be with anyone else/ Don’t want to be separate."
Like Holly Herndon and Jam City, Smoke attempts to politically radicalize his music. Unlike the other two artists, he is hesitant to go full hog, and only devotes two tracks to explicitly political themes: "Fall Out" and "Yearning Mississippi." "Fall Out" is partially inspired by the trials and tribulations of hacker folk hero Edward Snowden. As he sings "you’ll never know they’re watching you...you’ll never even see," his voice is drowned out by a landscape of computer sounds, not unlike the ones featured in Laura Poitras' film about Snowden, Citizenfour. As the album’s final track, it serves as an almost cheerful acquiescence to the grand scariness of the surveillance state, in favor of ruminating on less dizzying concerns. For "Yearning Mississippi," he explored ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s Cultural Equity Archive and sampled prison songs from Mississippi. This is an interesting detail, but it would be impossible to notice on its own, making the potential critique of the prison system miss its mark.
Overall, Smoke still gets over on his ability to craft rich, moody soundscapes, although almost all the tracks on the album would have worked better as standalone instrumentals. Unlike his last project, Wraetlic, a woefully dreary and depressive piece, Love Over Will projects a hopeful sense of growth for Smoke. The sadness here is somehow more buoyant and more comforting. It leaves a kernel of warmth on otherwise very cold days.


Everything about Young Thug remains inimitable. He steeps himself in smooth R&B guitars on his latest, distilling the chaos of young love and lust into vital, undeniable pop.

Beautiful Thugger Girls

Maybe Young Thug is supposed to be caught in a loop, arguing with Lyor Cohen over his recording habits and whether he has to sit politely next to Jimmy Fallon twice a year. Since “Stoner” hit in 2014, Thug has seemed like an ascendent star. But aside from “Best Friend,” which yielded him a Platinum plaque, and “Pick Up the Phone,” which might have been lifted out from under him anyway, Thug has yet to truly break through to the A-list. His only entries into the Top 40 have been the Rich Gang single “Lifestyle” and guest spots on Usher and Rae Sremmurd songs. His three records from 2016 all got kind, if muted, receptions and generally failed to move the chains much at all. For all the breathless adulation, the last eighteen months of Thug’s career have been like Groundhog Day for people to whom Travis Scott owes royalties.
Beautiful Thugger Girls, released with little ceremony last Friday, wouldn’t appear at first glance to be the blockbuster that can change all of this. It came out the same day as 2 Chainz’s album, and Future’s HNDRXX, which is Thugger Girls’ closest recent analogue, has mostly vanished from the zeitgeist, unless a new summer single reveals itself. Nevertheless, this is Thug’s clearest step forward since 2015’s Barter 6, and perhaps his most compelling experiment in pop.
As far back as his formative I Came From Nothing mixtapes, Thug’s music has bent toward chaos, even formlessness. What made Barter 6 so surprising to longtime fans and newcomers alike was how precise and restrained it was. Thugger Girls has all of that record’s control, but swaps out the subtlety for bleeding declarations of love and fidelity. The emotional stakes here seem impossibly high. It also applies the type of focus used on last year’s JEFFERY, where each song aimed to embody the voice of a titular influence. Instead of loosely connected, compelling fragments, each track was self-contained and had a distinct tone. That naming device is gone, but more often than not, the cuts on Thugger Girls work as single-song exercises.
Though it’s been referred to by Thug himself as his “singing album,” Thugger Girls is not a radical departure for him, stylistically speaking. As with most of his material between Barter 6 and now, the question seems to be less what Thug is writing and recording at the given time and more what he’s decided to curate from the archives. Some of these songs date back to 2015 and have been teased on Snapchat and Instagram for nearly as long, and almost all of them have prototypes from earlier in his career.
But these songs are more developed, even when “developed” means reduced to the core elements. The climax of Thugger Girls comes with Thug staring at a screen “masturbating to your nudes” and by the time you get to that moment on the record, it seems like the only possible conclusion. Rather than dress up his basest, most deeply-felt emotions, Thug lays himself out in the rawest form possible. But just as Barter 6 succeeded by paring Thug down to his most minimal, Thugger Girls strips away all the clutter, leaving his best-developed melodies and most evocative songwriting to date.
The clarity doesn’t come right away. The opening tracks, “Family Don’t Matter” and “Tomorrow Til Infinity” play like a brooding, half-sober prelude. Thugger Girls really opens up on its third song, “She Wanna Party,” an exuberant cut co-produced by Rex Kudo, the architect of Post Malone’s “White Iverson.” Where “Iverson” was washed out and wistful, “Party” is unrestrained joy. The same could be said about “Do U Love Me,” where Thug dangles Benzes and Rolexes and hundred-dollar bills, but reserves most of his excitement for his clipped, repeated pleas: “Do you love me?”
Those two songs are split by “Daddy’s Birthday,” a co-production by London On Da Track and the somehow still-producing Scott Storch. Thug pauses for a beat and considers the toll of his career: “I’m so busy, make me feel like I’m in and out my kids’ lives.” This is an underrated aspect of Thug’s songwriting—whether he’s adhering to a bigger concept or mumbling an aside, he goes for compact, declarative phrases that carry all the emotional weight for him. (From Rich Gang’s “Freestyle”: “I ain’t never been in love, I don’t know how pain feels.”) When he says, on “For Y’all,” “I didn’t write this song, I just went right in,” it’s difficult not to take him at his word.
If the A-side feels like a bachelor party planned by Sun Ra, the B-side is more minimal. “On Fire” and “Get High” are tightly wound, the latter blessed by a superb Snoop Dogg verse where he deploys a handful of different flows and calls Young Thug “cuz.” “Me or Us” and “You Said” are what Rebirth could have been if Rebirth wasn’t Rebirth. And “Oh Yeah” sounds like a futuristic funeral dirge; at one point Thug says he’s “drunk off your love, and I just stood by the sink.” We’re used to seeing Thug in motion: leaving thousands of dollars in taxis, crudely repurposing limousine curtains, L-E-A-N-I-N-G. Seeing him rendered inert is entirely new.
But speaking of Future, the elder Atlantan’s appearance on Thugger Girls might go the furthest in clarifying the headliner’s intent. On the hook for “Relationship,” Future says he’s “in a relationship with all my bitches,” which is more or less the conceit of the song, something each rapper can agree on. But Future, who’s eight years older than Thug, quickly adds a second thought: “I need to cut some of ‘em off, I need help.” This has been the thrust of his music for a while now, the drive toward hedonism and the emptiness it leaves you with. Thug’s not there yet; he’s peeling off gleefully mischievous lines like “I got your bitch in a backpack.”
While he does pledge his undying love to his long-time girlfriend over and over again (and has throughout his catalog), at many moments on this record, Thug really does seem capable of being in a relationship with all of those women at once. Beautiful Thugger Girls is a twenty-something bouncing from club to yacht to attic and back again, feeling everything as deeply and as nakedly as possible along the way. These feelings, more often than not, are distinctly ephemeral, where time extends as far back as the Uber to the club and as far ahead as the Uber home. Unfiltered urges (“Fuck me, suck me”) rub right up against grand gestures (“Fall deep in love, love, love with me”). There’s little of Future’s jadedness. If in the past Thug has made everyday experiences seem chaotic and formless, his achievement here is distilling the murky waters of young love and lust into vital, undeniable pop.


On his promising solo debut, the Memphis rapper punches well above his weight class and firmly positions himself as the top dog of the New 1017.

Shiesty Season

About a year ago, Pooh Shiesty was lying in bed when an Instagram DM from Gucci Mane popped up on his screen. He didn’t believe it was real until he hopped out of bed and bolted to his dad’s house to show him the text. Shiesty wasn’t flooding the streets with mixtapes—Gucci had only heard one song of his: the Tay Keith-produced “Main Slime.” But here Gucci Mane was, reaching out with the intent to sign him to the New 1017.
Shiesty made his formal introduction on the label compilation Gucci Mane Presents: So Icy Summer, with immediate standouts “7.62 God” and “Monday to Sunday.” It was clear that Pooh Shiesty was the best in his recruiting class, but a solo record was nowhere in sight. After months of anticipation, the Memphis rapper finally tries his hand at a full-length project with Shiesty Season.
Pooh Shiesty has proven himself to be a supercharged battery on singles, and the massively front-loaded Shiesty Season doesn’t give you a chance to forget that. The opening one-two punch of “Shiesty Season Intro” and “Back in Blood” sets a high bar to clear for the remaining 15 tracks. Pooh and Lil Durk form an Edge & Christian-level tag team on the latter. The combination of a looped piano scale and drums on “Back in Blood” makes for one of the album’s simplest yet most memorable beats. “Yeah, you know who took that shit from you/Come get it back in blood,” Pooh Shiesty taunts, punctuating the line with his signature “blrrrd” adlib. Durk doesn’t just match Shiesty’s bravado—the Chicago rapper takes complete control. “His ass playin’, bitch I’m really icy/Pooh Shiesty that’s my dawg, but Pooh, you know I’m really shiesty,” Durk smugly raps. “Back in Blood” was far from unknown when it was originally released in November, but the music video tossed gas onto the flames, making it his first Billboard charting single and No. 1 on Apple Music Charts after passing “the license girl.”
Apart from Durk, Shiesty stands his ground when sparring against big-name features like his label boss and 21 Savage. The down-tempo “Box of Churches” is a surprising mid-album highlight where he reflects on his come-up and refusal to let go of what puts him at ease. “Know I’m a hood nigga, I mismatch designer with the J’s,” he raps. “Though I’m still posted on the block, eat a box of Church’s before a steak.” He goes right back to talking shit with Veeze and frequent collaborator BIG30 on the following track. Veeze and Pooh may sound like they’re in a competition to see who can lean back the furthest in a recliner while murmuring threats over the brassy fanfare, but their love of wordplay (and gunplay) keep your head nodding.
In the album’s later stretches, you start to notice Pooh Shiesty trying to reuse some of his earlier tricks in hopes we already forgot about them. “Take a Life” is practically a remake of “Back in Blood,” all the way down to the bare-bones production and Foogiano’s own shiesty punchline. “Guard Up” is an awkward clash of styles that nearly throws the album off course; Pooh Shiesty sounds like he’s strumming his Draco like a guitar while walking around a beach. These slight fumbles are the issues you’d expect an artist to have when they’re still experimenting with different styles, but Pooh’s confidence never wavers; he’ll approach even the most routine song with the same intensity he would another.
Despite Pooh Shiesty’s visible growing pains, Shiesty Season punches well above its weight class as his solo debut and cements his position as top dog of the New 1017. It may be difficult for him to escape Gucci’s shadow—it’s easy to imagine a younger Shiesty feverishly downloading Wop tapes off DatPiff. But he’s already growing into his own, rarely leaning on tired clichés, overused bars, and callbacks for writing material. If Pooh Shiesty keeps on this path, he won’t be hearing those comparisons much longer.

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Now back on a major label after an independent stint, this long-developing hip-hop star releases a surprisingly cohesive full-length.

Rolling Papers

Hip-hop's era of sport is officially over. East Coast rap battles are irrelevant. Beef is null. Competition is nada. Instead, we are enduring the age of languor, and nowhere is this more apparent than on Rolling Papers, the major label debut of Wiz Khalifa, a long-developing star forged in the Snoop Dogg fire. But whereas Snoop took a decade to mellow into rap's avuncular marketing boss-- 1994's grim, ruthless Murder Is the Case remains an oft-overlooked marker in his career, to say nothing of a stint on No Limit-- for Wiz the journey to calm was never far.
Wiz has managed an unusual trajectory, rising from a modest army brat to a squelched major label deal at Warner Bros. and back to the independent route. He was prolific-- perhaps too prolific, releasing nine mixtapes and two officially sanctioned albums before this major-label lunge. By 2010's Kush & Orange Juice, an exceptionally laidback and tasteful mixtape that made him a star, Wiz solidified his identity: affable smoker, limited rapper, inspirational survivor, melodic genius. And all before the age of 23.
Now signed to Atlantic Records, home to compromised contemporaries Lupe Fiasco and B.o.B, Wiz runs the risk of having his loose, gliding style trampled by this new partner's A&R department. That's not quite the case-- Rolling Papers is a singular document with just a handful of exceptions. The album's lead single, the Super Bowl-adopted anthem "Black and Yellow", is a driving song, but Wiz seems dazed in the delivery. He has never been a complicated writer, but on a song meant to whip up some frenzy, he is shockingly relaxed. "Stay high like how I'm supposed to do/ That crowd underneath them clouds can't get close to you/ And my car look unapproachable/ Super clean but it's super mean."
These are an abysmal few bars from the song, but they (or any of his lyrics, really) do little to explain Wiz's appeal. He does atmosphere, and the team of producers here-- a varied bunch that includes Norwegian mercenaries StarGate, Wiz's in-house crew I.D. Labs, and the Floridian pop-rap savant Jim Jonsin-- has given this album surprising cohesion. It cascades, never rushing into anything. Opener "When I'm Gone" ambles along, a somber piano line playing out softly for nearly a minute before introducing the propulsive guts of the song. Only when Wiz attempts to burst forward, as on disjointed closer "Cameras", is he susceptible to his own limitations. Ambitions low, tone lower.
There's an urge to throw weed metaphors around a Wiz Khalifa review-- it is his love, his leisure, his reason for living. Taking his time is only a product of this blunted life. Which is a boon on "The Race", the best song here, a luxurious, decadent ode to success that couldn't sound more like a vacation. But weed is also his curse. Consider the Sublime-like "Fly Solo", also produced by I.D. Labs, which is pure dorm-room junk. Or "No Sleep", a shameless bid for Benny Blanco-produced house-rap glory. No one could be less suited to this sort of thing than Wiz. Still, if you seek texture and assurance, there are few recent songs as masterfully casual as "Hopes and Dreams" and "Rooftops", the latter of which features his friend and sonic compatriot Curren$y (one of just three guest spots on this album). The rippling opening notes of "Hopes and Dreams"-- a far-off guitar strum, a stuttering drum machine, Wiz's dank voice-- are all vibe, all presence, all persistence. Call it mood music for the mindless.


Speedy Ortiz's latest EP features two unreleased tracks from Foil Deer as well as two remixes of “Puffer,” one featuring a verse from rapper Lizzo and one by Open Mike Eagle.

Foiled Again

Speedy Ortiz have done great things with the extended play format. 2012’s excellent Sports foreshadowed the big statement that their full-length debut, Major Arcana, would make in 2013. 2014’s Real Hair EP, in between Major and 2015’s Foil Deer, pressing the point that Speedy were to be taken seriously even further. Each of their EPs feature completely new material and usually stand alone as solid little gems. Their latest output, Foiled Again, switches up the routine a bit and acts as an epilogue to 2015’s Foil Deer by serving “Puffer” two ways in addition to a pair of outtakes.
To some extent, “Puffer” was the oddity of Foil Deer, trading hyper, zig-zagging guitars for lurching tension. Singer and Guitarist Sadie Dupuis wrote the song while swimming at Puffer’s Pond in Amherst, where she would listen to Kelis and compose tunes inspired by the “Bossy” queen. “Puffer” was the result, though as she told Pitchfork, it “came out a little more like krautrock” than R&B. Therefore, perhaps it is an act of fate that “Puffer” would be reborn as two slinky, club-ready bangers, perfect for the crew who has always wanted to hear Speedy at their local dance institution.
The first rework is directed by Doomtree collective member Lazerbeak and features Lizzo, with whom Dupuis (as Sad13) previously collaborated for the Google Docs-sponsored song “Basement Queens.” “Puffer” a la Lazerbeak isolates Dupuis’ vocals and places them over smooth dings, snaps, and bells. The track drops for Dupuis’ most complicated verse, the sing-song “Poseying in prose again, Mount Toby friends are make pretend.” Lizzo chimes in throughout the song before offering her own verse near the end, bringing a spark of life to a track that was otherwise becoming forgettably hypnotic.
The Open Mike Eagle remix is built upon the “So I’m the god of the liars” line, with the occasional whisper of “Poseying in prose again.” The remix could work well as a meditation soundtrack, allowing the listeners’ minds to melt away while they consider what being the god of the liars truly means. It’s an underwhelming way to end an EP, but also allows the two original tracks to truly shine.
The title of opener “Death Note” is an allusion to a Japanese manga series about a notebook that kills anyone whose name is written within its pages. Speedy Ortiz leave the supernatural references at the start; the notebooks mentioned in “Death Note” are tools to work through melancholy. There’s an undeniable heaviness to the track, especially when Dupuis seems to corner the unknown subject and pleads, “How often can I say it until you believe?/They were all love letters/These are all love letters to me.” “A death note can be [a] kind of love letter to yourself, “ Dupuis has explained. This paradoxical logic nails, lyrically, what makes Speedy Ortiz so special: their ability to flit between worlds of darkness and light.
“Emma O” continues Foiled Again’s transition into the dark side, especially once one considers that Emm-O is the Japanese judge of the dead. It’s a slow tale of forced time spent with a lover and the ambivalent feelings that follow. There’s a wallowing bit of distortion near the middle of the song like a gray cloud over a cartoon character, just a perceptible reminder that the song is dark. Shortly after comes the line “Your 27, Emma-O you read the masters but you still don’t know about love” which manages to be heartbreaking while also eerily resembling a Belle and Sebastian lyric. Like “Death Note,” which ends with the reassurance that “These are all love letters to me,” “Emma O” ends with the aphorism “I never wanna come for you again/I only want your comfort.” Speedy Ortiz are careful about which lyrics they choose to turn into mantras, and the brief punch offered by those in “Death Note” and “Emma O” are more enriching than “Puffer.”
Foiled Again is a mixed bag. On one hand, there are two great tracks that, for whatever reason, didn’t make it onto Foil Deer and are now seeing the light of day. Then there are the two remixes, one of which is considerably stronger than the other. Combining these four songs results in a strange listen; the two new songs could stand on their own as singles, same with the remixes. Nonetheless, Foiled Again confirms that Speedy Ortiz are exploring new territory, and it will be exciting to see how they break their own molds next.


Chicago’s Disappears return with a more eclectic album. Here they grab the more anemic sounds of Clinic and Liars, while keeping the forward momentum of their most obvious influences, Spacemen 3 and rough-edged Velvet Underground.

Era

Chicago’s Disappears would like you to believe that their fourth LP, Era, stands for a new beginning. Well, they’re only half right. The album marries their previous releases in one noisy, polyamorous black wedding that shows promise for the future, but is more a celebration of the past. Think about the band’s 2012 LP Pre Language, and their song "Minor Patterns" where singer Brian Case sneers, “Why bother, it’s been done.” That defeatist phrase must be something that sticks in the craw of young psych acolytes. The well-worn motorik highway now seems too predictable, calling out for more hairpin turns, off-road detours, and above all some better scenery. On Era, Disappears begin to pave a path to transcendence that's a little more varied, grabbing the more anemic sounds of Clinic and Liars, while keeping the forward momentum of their most obvious influences Spacemen 3 and rough-edged Velvet Underground. They know they trade in the business of the past and work within confined musical language, but they play on, middle fingers scratching their eyebrows.
In the macro scope of Disappears’ catalog, Era is the moment when the groove finally locks into place. To call it a new beginning would be a disservice to the somewhat ill-advised territories the band has ventured into, especially with their EP Kone, released earlier this year. Kone's title track seems like a 15-minute flavorless psych wafer in contrast to the spritely but unfulfilling Pre Language. But it all starts to come together on Era: the post-punk propulsion, the protracted kraut rhythms born out of the negative spaces of no-wave, the macabre baritone croons. It’s been done before, but now it’s being done like Disappears.
Era swirls around its centerpiece, the nine-and-a-half minute “Ultra”. It's the song Disappears have been angling toward their career. If Swans ever decided to replace their bolo ties with skinny ties, they might’ve written something like it. After the departure of Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, Noah Leger lends a new energy to the band. He lays back in the pocket right with bassist Damon Carruesco for a rhythm section that sounds like it’s trying to be the extroverted kid but can’t stop sulking in the corner. So often Era sounds like an indictment of dance music with an industrial bent, a Ciroc martini served with a black beetle crawling around the rim.
Placed around the load-bearing “Ultra” is a family of tunes cut from a familiar cloth. “Elite Typical” is the burlier brother with a similar four-to-the-floor beat, while “Girl” opens the album like a starter canon, a one-song best-of compilation of the band’s shorter noise-rock tracks. There was always an unfulfilled desire with their songs on Lux and Guider, that sense that you wish the band would extend these songs out because if they’re just gonna cruise they might as well try to jam. With “Girl”, the band finally writes a shapely rock song in under four minutes.
Case’s sour baritone on Era is the final piece of the puzzle. He mirrors the band and obsesses over oblique phrases like, “Does it end together/ Does it end soon” on “Ultra” or “A new house in a new town” on the closer “New House.” Even with all his lyrical repetition, his words tend to crumble around the music, leaving only hints of something about fists answering first and waking up to a girl's touch. There’s a slice of glam sexuality to it in that disconcerting Birthday Party kind of way, though, like its lyrics, some of the music can veer into the murky waters of unspecificity. When Disappears don't shape their songs, like the unremarkable “Power”, they end up loitering in the space somewhere between air-drumming and space-tripping. Mostly, though, Era showcases all the work Disappears have done cutting and splicing and regathering their sound together to regain their identity. It’s still lurking in the shadows, but finally, it's there.


While there’s plenty of his melancholic, drug-induced staples, what you won’t find here is the Atlanta rapper stretching or surprising himself.

Future: Future Hndrxx Presents: The WIZRD

Future Hndrxx Presents: The WIZRD

Future’s career has reached its plateau. He’s still popular, still relevant, still scoring hits, and rap, as it exists now, has been remade in his image, with at least three artists on the Billboard charts making their name out of repurposed bits of his style. But the minute you’ve peaked, rap music starts waiting impatiently for you to disappear. Many rappers before Future have faced this moment—T.I. in 2007, Kanye West in 2015—where, as far as their public is concerned, their hero’s story is concluded and they are free to cede the stage. It’s a difficult corner to fight your way out of: There is no obvious adversary and you are still revered around the world. But all that lavish praise must begin to feel suspiciously like someone throwing your retirement party for you.
Future Hndrxx Presents: The WIZRD, Future’s first full-length studio album since 2017’s dual chart-toppers FUTURE and HNDRXX, isn't the first time you sense the relentlessly productive and innovative artist might be treading water. But it is one of the first moments you could be forgiven for wondering when rap’s remorseless current might finally leave him behind. Over the album’s 20 tracks, we are offered top-shelf or near-top-shelf versions of a variety of Future staples: The grinding and amoral banger (“Baptiize,” “Faceshot”); the strangely melancholy anthem about how lonely it feels to customize your Bentley (“Ain’t Coming Back”). The production is muted, minor-key, and consistently beautiful, conjuring the familiar Future Moods: rain-streaked neon signs, drug-induced stupors inside of clubs at 3 a.m. If you are content to live inside this lonely little world Future has made, he is still keeping it nice for you.
What you won’t find on The WIZRD is the sound of Future stretching or surprising himself. There isn’t anything like the divisive, nervy little “la-di-da-di-da” mouse-squeak he tried out on “King’s Dead.” He is running some of these routines back for the tenth or the hundredth time, and there are a few moments on The WIZRD where he sounds downright bored: “Jumpin on a Jet” is a pretty rote rundown of his spoils, a song he has made countless times, and it’s hard to hear any investment in this version of it. He sounds relieved the second it’s over.
Part of this problem is that if you’re playing a depraved heel, you had better play it to the hilt—a half-hearted villain is just an everyday asshole. Future still talks about women in a way that makes it hard to not taste bile in your throat sometimes: “Real fine mixed-breed, I can’t wait to hit it,” he says on “Goin Dummi,” while “Temptation” subjects you to the line “She gave more head than a tumor.” These moments are reprehensible without being compelling, which is another problem Future runs into every few years.
Still, Future’s throwaway images are crushing and vivid. “Fucked around, parked the ’Vette, and didn’t even get back in it,” say, or, “I just took an AK to a dinner date.” “Nobody done notice till the jet was in the sky,” he sings on “Never Stop,” an arresting little snapshot of missed opportunities.  He knows how to stick phrases directly into your brain grooves: “Diamonds in the face, crushed up: I can see it.” No one in rap makes you see it quite like Future does. The production is fearsomely potent, and a few of the best tracks turn on the “mid-song beat switch” trick that is popular again, likely thanks to Travis Scott—“Baptiize” and “F&N” turn from pretty to menacing inside one heartbeat, to thunderous effect.
The WIZRD is too long, of course, and not sequenced in any significant way. But at roughly the halfway point, Future indulges in a classic veteran-artist trope, the song where he declares himself a father figure to the sniveling, ungrateful new batch of copycats. The song is called “Krazy But True” and on it, he points out—correctly—that he is the reason for “your socks, rings, and your lean/The way you drop your mixtapes, your ad-libs and everything.” So it’s disorienting and somehow a little deflating when, a few songs later, one of those copycats, Gunna, pops up alongside Young Thug on a track called “Unicorn Purp.” Hearing the three of these artists, one after the other, is like watching a nesting doll of influence unpack itself before you. Later, Travis Scott appears, another artist who sprung partly from Nayvadius’ rib. These are his children, he is their idol, and someday, one of them is going to A.I. him for their survival.


The debut album from DMX is the Dante’s Inferno of rap. His infamous stage presence and aggression gave a voice to the voiceless in the streets of New York and overnight changed the course of hip-hop.

It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot

Earl Simmons suffered a lonely and abusive childhood where as a troubled kid he would sometimes wander the streets and befriend stray dogs. Uprooted from his native Baltimore at a young age, the Yonkers transplant did several stints in New York’s Children’s Village group home, where he first started fiddling with drum machines and beatboxing as a means of escape. He segued from DJing to rapping as a young adult, taking the name DMX from the drum machine he used. The young rapper made a name for himself on New York’s battle circuit with a commanding voice and overwhelming tenacity. Aggressiveness would become his calling card as an MC, a defense mechanism held over from when the days when armed robbery helped him survive on the streets. His battles to live and cope both in and outside of rap would lead to 1998’s It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, his haunting debut, a tragically clear-eyed criminal manifesto that dared to greet damnation with defiance and a psalm.
Rocking a skull-embroidered hat, DMX the Great appeared in The Source’s Unsigned Hype column in January 1991, garnering comparisons to LL Cool J, PMD, and Hit Squad’s K-Solo (whom DMX had met in prison). The earliest DMX demos were tedious, without the defining presence he’d grow into. But it was in the ring that he truly built his rep, making an indelible mark on the underground scene with heavily rhythmic flows and a battler’s bluntness. When he traded bars with Jay Z in a cramped Bronx pool hall in the late ’90s, head bobbing violently, cigarette in hand, he proved himself to be a raw, almost boorish alternative to Hov’s shifty slick talk. The energy in the room clearly favored X’s style. Jay would later ask industry maneuverer mutual friend Irv Gotti, “You think he’s better than me?” to which Gotti replied, “If you look in the hood, there’s less niggas like you and more niggas like him.”
The Unsigned Hype column was known for producing deals. True to form, DMX signed to Columbia Records imprint Ruffhouse in 1992 and immediately cut a promotional single called “The Born Loser.” The track introduced his depressive tone, an ominous and confessional space that would later bring life to his most discomforting scenes. But true to its title, it failed to generate any buzz or airplay, and his overbooked label let him off the hook. (DMX claimed he was under-promoted because of groups like Kris Kross and Cypress Hill.) A few years later, Puff Daddy, head of the burgeoning Bad Boy Records, took interest in X and fellow Yonkers corner boys the LOX, but in the end chose to sign the latter over the former, deciding that X had no commercial prospects. “One thing I respect about Puff, at least he told me to my face what he felt,” DMX told “Drink Champs.” “‘His voice is too rough, he’s not marketable.’” DMX returned to the underground scene, emerging on LL Cool J’s 1997 album Phenomenon with a verse on the now infamous posse cut “4, 3, 2, 1.” Buzzing once more, he followed Gotti to Def Jam.
When Gotti pushed for Def Jam to sign DMX in his first meeting, he got laughed out of the room. “I remember when I left the office, [A&R executive] Tina Davis said, ‘if DMX don’t sell, your ass is fired,” Gotti remembered in an interview with Complex. He didn’t seem to fit with the rap moment. This was a year dominated by Puff Daddy and Bad Boy, who landed six of the seven highest-charting rap songs, delivered a huge critical and commercial success in Harlem World, and won Best Rap Album at the Grammys for the 7x-Platinum album No Way Out (famously and controversially defeating Wu-Tang Clan’s Wu-Tang Forever). Putting money behind DMX would run counter to Bad Boy’s “shiny suit” era of glam rap.
But X brought Def Jam executive Lyor Cohen up to Yonkers for an early Ruff Ryder session and convinced him to sign the MC. At the time, DMX’s mouth was wired shut because of an altercation he’d had with some guys he was accused of stealing from. In an interview with DJ Vlad, Ja Rule remembered the ferocity through which he ripped through the wiring: “He had got into a fight or somebody got jumped... and he was rhyming with the fuckin’ wires in his mouth. Crazy shit. Like the shit about to pop. I was like ‘Okay, I like this dude.’” When they left, Cohen turned to Gotti and proclaimed, “We got the pick of the litter.”
Through his connections at Bad Boy (namely, his friends the LOX and Ma$e), DMX began working on his debut album with a producer from Harlem named Dame Grease, a fellow Yonkers product named P.K. (or P. Killer Trackz), and Grease’s unknown protege from the Bronx, Swizz Beatz. Under direction from Irv and Lyor, Grease, P.K., and X worked up a single called “Get at Me Dog” in ’97, and released it in February of ’98. It functioned as an abrasive prelude, but was at least partially aimed at X’s longtime rival K-Solo. They brought the song to Hot 97 DJ Funkmaster Flex, who aired it and added it to the first volume of his Big Dawgs mixtape. It soon took off, peaking at No. 39 on the Billboard Hot 100 that May. Gotti remembers the video as the turning point: “We back to the hood, and X is the leader of this revolution.” Filmed at New York’s Tunnel nightclub, packed, sweaty, and shot in black and white, X’s crusade is articulated in its opening seconds: “Let’s take it back to the streets, motherfuckers!”
“Get at Me Dog” set the stage for It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, which explores the furthest depths of the human experience. But there is no more fitting introduction to the album than the Swizz Beatz-produced “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem,” a confrontational, fang-bearing mark of ferocity. The song functions much like a warning shot: Cross this threshold at your own peril. “It’s about to get ugly/Fuck it dog, I’m hungry,” he snaps. The song was a defining moment for both DMX and Swizz Beatz, but it almost didn’t happen. Swizz made the song in Atlanta when he was just a DJ and then moved back to New York to join the Ruff Ryders. DMX didn’t like the song initially, claiming it was some “rock’n’roll track” and he needed some hip-hop shit: “I’m not doing that. It’s not hood enough,” he told the producer. But Swizz and other members of the Ruff Ryders team pushed him to make the record, and it became the theme song of a movement.
It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot was not only the springboard for the Ruff Ryders campaign—launching the careers of Swizz Beatz, Eve, Cassidy, and Jin—it was the catalyst for a greater shift on the New York rap scene and beyond. It was a reset button for street rap, setting the stage for runs from 50 Cent and G-Unit and Cam’ron’s Diplomats crew. “Hittin’ niggas with gashes to the head/Straight to the white meat but the street stays red/Girls gave me head for free cause they see/Who I’ma be, by like 2003,” X rapped on the intro. It didn’t even take that long.
Like Dante’s Inferno, DMX’s It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot is a fiendish epic that explores the nature of sin, highlighting acts of violence, wrath, greed, treachery, and lust. The album exposes an internal struggle waged between a man and his demons—a man searching for one light in an all-consuming darkness. He has a talk with god (“The Convo”), but the devil is constantly whispering in his ear and wearing him down. He’s unsure whether his rhyme skills are the product of a contract with the devil (“I sold my soul to the devil, and the price was cheap”) or the generosity of a loving creator. It’s this duality that makes up one of the most gripping psychological studies in all of rap lore: What happens when a God-fearing man makes the devil his ally?
The centerpiece is “Damien,” a winding back-and-forth saga between X and his Hadean accomplice. The album builds to this moment, where X is seduced by his greatest admirer. In the throes of his own greed and pain, DMX embraces wickedness as a fair price for freedom from destitution. By the end, the song becomes a parable about the dangers of giving into desire when Damien coerces X into crimes he doesn’t want to commit: “Either do it or give me your right hand, that’s what you said,” he threatens. “I see now, ain’t nothing but trouble ahead.” Traces of “Damien” can be heard throughout the “Lucy” thread on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, which also examines the points where fame and sin meet. (Kendrick has cited It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot as a major influence.) But “Damien” is even more tightly wound, the relationship more clearly articulated and its energy more affecting. The dynamic “Damien” is a microcosm of It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, which is either in constant motion or disclosing ongoing conversations—whether internal, interpersonal (“How’s It Goin’ Down”), or divine (“Prayer”).
It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot debuted atop the Billboard 200 in May and was certified platinum by June. DMX quickly released his sophomore album, Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood, in December of ’98, and it was double platinum by January. In between the two, he starred in Hype Williams’ directorial debut, Belly, alongside Nas, and the film almost immediately became a cult hit among rap fans. So in a grand total of eight months, DMX became the biggest rapper on the planet. His moment was so colossal that in 1999 Jay Z boycotted the Grammy ceremony (the year he won Best Rap Album for Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life) because DMX was not nominated. As Nas remembered in a 2013 interview with Pitchfork, “That was the year DMX took over the world.”
Nearly 20 years later, there is still no album like it. So many of the songs on It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot document violent crimes and the flood of emotions they induce. They move swiftly, jerking around corners and through alleyways, simulating a rising heart rate and a racing mind. His peers were shooting stills, but X was dealing in savage action sequences (“ATF”) and the shadows they cast (“Let Me Fly,” “X-Is Coming”). Everything about the music—from the harshness of his voice, to the murkiness of his beats, to the bruising nature of his flows—was in service of a supreme hardness. In ‘98, the biggest MCs on the New York scene were narrators using radically different sounds to tell their stories. Busta erupted with pure energy. Big Pun enchanted with an effortless fluidity. As Wu-Tang swarmed, Tribe was in the midst of their love movement. Black Star were a conscious voice for hood theorists. Jay Z brought business acumen to the drug trade. All were reporting live, sharing their powerful perspectives from different city blocks.
But DMX wasn’t a rapper in the trenches; he was a messiah in the gutter, painting a portrait of a community laid desolate by corruption, and the sociopaths its conditions were breeding. He was the voice of the street corners and the graveyards, telling stories of the lost and the damned. From on high, he demanded empathy for man, who were cold to murder and unapologetic for their crimes because he knew it’s hard to be good in a world this broken. “There’s a difference between doing wrong and being wrong, and that ain’t right,” he says on “Let Me Fly.” He breaks the moral compass, then drags you into the abyss.
CORRECTION: The original version of this review included a quote by Nas that was misleading, misattributing some of his comments about a Lauryn Hill album.


Producer Dayve Hawk, who has created dreamy electro soundscapes as Memory Cassette, Weird Tapes, and Memory Tapes, arrives with a striking new album.

Seek Magic

No one ever wants to admit that summer's totally over, but it's even tougher this year considering how fun it all was-- seems like every other day, an evocatively named band would come about and contribute to this glo-fi/dreambeat/chillwave thing that was perfect for those unbearably humid August nights rife with possibility, imagining an alternate universe where the narcotic of choice in danceclubs were Galaxie 500 and Saint Etienne records.
More than a few of these singles came from Philadelphia's Dayve Hawk in the guise of either Memory Cassette, Weird Tapes, or Memory Tapes. To this point, he'd served as something of a microcosm for this sound, which has created intriguingly hazy, wistful but beat-informed one-offs and EPs, but nothing weighty enough to get it past "something we did that one summer," as if it were a road trip or ill-fated romance recalled years later. That was before Seek Magic, a record of achingly gorgeous dance-pop that captures both the joy of nostalgia and the melancholic sense that we're grasping for good times increasingly out of reach.
Initially, Seek Magic's power derives from an intensely personalized ability to unlock hidden chambers in our memory banks. The half-submerged guitars that introduce "Swimming Field" suggest this is as a soundtrack for a restless evening, but between its F-G chord progression and aqueous thumb-piano and panflute synths, I'm reminded of scorching July days vibing out to Wilco's A Ghost Is Born. Instrumental breaks "Pink Stones" and "Run Out" recall the unconventional beauty of Apehx Twin's Richard D. James Album. "Green Knight" smacks of Police's "Wrapped Around Your Finger" in its verse and any number of mid-80s light funk with its guitar licks, the sneaker squeak in the instrumental break is one of the most evocative found sounds I've heard in a while.
Seek Magic is something of an inhabitable universe that proves there's far more to Hawk's sound than a way with reverb and passing familiarity with dance loops. The rubber-smacks-road beat of "Bicycle" would be content to mirror its titular vehicle, but nearly every minute packs some sort of detailed compositional surprise: the widescreen breakthrough where Hawk's androgynous vocals shake lo-fi two minutes in, the bass breakdown that soon rights itself into the second half's backbone, and the choral coda that lays a euphoric vocal sigh over wave-running New Order guitars. By comparison, "Plain Material" is streamlined, but not by much-- the way Hawk's voice hits the fuzzed-out guitar chords, you might think this was an unearthed Flaming Lips track, and at first, it sounds like the first time on Seek Magic that he'll adhere to a standard verse-chorus structure. It does, but only after a drum beat cribbed straight from Organized Noize turns in a bridge of teen screams imported from In Ghost Colours' nastier breakdowns.
And yet in Seek Magic's centerpieces, you sense a nocturnal unease usually attributed to more spare albums. "Stop Talking" could've been content to ride out its gummy bass riff to infinity, but it morphs through so many phases in its seven minutes that the half-time post-rock finale doesn't feel tacked-on. On the following song, "Graphics", Hawk offers an unnervingly lonely sentiment-- "I don't even recognize the sound of your voice, the feel of your touch, you could be alone even though I'm here by your side." Lyrics are mere suggestions through most of Seek Magic, but Hawk lays out an "I can't go on, I'll go on" vibe throughout. One second, he sighs "this is the last time" and immediately thereafter, "one more time, baby, one more time." It's a sentiment that's underpinned great works of art from Daft Punk ("One More Time" natch), F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise), Kanye West ("Why can't life always be this easy?"), and um, Old Milwaukee-- the times where you think "it doesn't get any better than this," and it's simultaneously the happiest and saddest thing you can say.

Sincerely Yours / Acéphale / Something in Construction


The audacious Detroit rapper with a strangled voice and a penchant for depravity transforms his jagged edges into a compelling and immersive universe. Brown's voice is uniquely suited to conveying wild-eyed, loose-cannon insanity, and the rising note of panic in it makes every mention of snorting crushed Adderall hurt.

XXX

Danny Brown is a Detroit rapper with a strangled yap of a voice that you could politely call "distinctive." Depending on the moment, he either resembles a Doberman whose paw has been stepped on or a cross between Jello Biafra and South Park's Terrence & Philip. For a rapper, choosing an abrasive honk like this as your instrument is an audacious move; it all but demands that you come well-equipped with compelling reasons for your listeners to hang on.
But Danny Brown is an unusually audacious rapper. He proudly rocks skinny jeans that, to hear him tell it, cost him a G-Unit label deal all by themselves, and he has lately settled on the kind of wildly asymmetrical haircut that can invite savage beatings in certain areas. He belongs, in other words, to a proud lineage of mangy underground-rap weirdos. There are many rappers vying to claim this spot, but none of them is as talented or as three-dimensional as Brown, and his latest mixtape, XXX, finds him transforming his quirks and jagged edges into a compelling and immersive universe.
That universe is haunted by drugs, both sold and consumed. XXX's grubby production, laced with trashy electro, evokes a heart-pounding clamminess that will feel instantly familiar to anyone who's weathered a spiky high on cheap stimulants. Brown's voice is uniquely suited to conveying wild-eyed, loose-cannon insanity, and the rising note of panic in it makes every mention of snorting crushed Adderall hurt. To hear him tell it, he is a Hoover for illegal substances; on "Die Like a Rock Star", he catalogs the various undignified ends he expects to meet, invoking Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix, and others and leering, "Experimented so much it's a miracle I'm livin'."
His penchant for depravity might remind listeners, at least initially, of Odd Future. But Brown's depravity, unlike OF's, comes burdened with real-life stakes; at age 30 (the mixtape's title indicates Brown's age besides suggesting sex and drugs), Brown has lived through some genuinely awful-sounding shit. On "Scrap or Die", he flips the chorus of Jeezy's "Trap or Die" so that it becomes about stripping houses for scrap metal to sell to factories. He takes a perverse joy in grabbing your neck and shoving your face in some vividly unpleasant places: "I done served fiends on they menstrual/ Ain't even had pads, stuff they panties with tissue!" he yelps on "Monopoly". His shock rhymes on XXX are like horrorcore stripped of cartoon fantasy, and they carry the moral weight of experience. On "Pac Blood", he calls his lyrics "shit so personal my mom can't listen to," and you believe him.
If XXX was nothing but debauchery and desperation, it would quickly devolve into an endless slog. Thankfully, Brown is also hilariously funny, an endlessly inventive rapper driven to cook up outrageous variations on standard rap boasts. At one point, he claims to be getting as much pussy as Teen Wolf-era Michael J. Fox; at another, he brags he can "get pussy like loofahs." On "Adderall Admiral", he tells a rapper he is "softer than Flanders' son." In a recent interview with writer Andrew Nosnitsky of Cocaine Blunts, he revealed himself as an omnivorous rap nerd, the kind of guy who went through heavy No Limit and Def Jux phases, and his palpable joy in his craft is infectious. "Words that rhyme together just appear all in my head," he raps on the title track, sounding astonished and grateful. His gleeful love of words not only elevates some pretty heavy subject matter; it also helps distinguish XXX as one of the most compelling indie rap releases in an already strong year.


The megastar producer enlists Future, 21 Savage, James Blake, and more in a wobbly attempt to create another synergistic pop moment in the animated Spider-Man franchise.

Metro Boomin: Metro Boomin Presents Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Soundtrack From and Inspired by the Motion Picture)

There’s a simple reason that “Sunflower,” a single from the soundtrack to 2018’s Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, became an Earth-conquering smash hit: It works outside of the context of the movie. In that film’s opening scene, our protagonist Miles Morales sings the song very off-key before he’s interrupted by his parents. It’s a nifty start to the coming-of-age story that endears him to the audience in a matter of seconds. Other songs tackled the movie’s themes of identity and adolescence in ways subtle and blatant, but without references to swinging, masks, or arachnids of any kind, Post Malone and Swae Lee’s “Sunflower,” a track about two strung-out dudes leading a girl on, took on a life of its own. (It wasn’t even originally supposed to be in the movie: the team initially wanted Miles to sing Childish Gambino’s “Redbone” but after Jordan Peele’s 2017 breakout Get Out used the song in a similar way a year prior, they picked “Sunflower” at the last minute from a batch of already completed songs sent by Republic Records.)
Into The Spider-Verse became an adored modern classic of the superhero genre and its soundtrack, a cohesive if overbearing album in its own right, went on to chart at the top of the Billboard 200, thanks in no small part to the runaway success of “Sunflower.” That left its sequel, this year’s Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, with some humongous Jordan 1s to fill. The film itself comes with more ambitious animation, a more mature plot that deconstructs the Spider-Man character’s archetypal DNA, and a boatload of comic book Easter eggs. For the soundtrack, they’ve come with something equally inspired, at least on paper: Atlanta superproducer Metro Boomin is its executive producer, doing for the Spider-Verse what Kendrick Lamar did for Black Panther and Wakanda back in 2018 (complete with his own in-movie cameo). Fresh off the success of his recently platinum-certified 2022 comeback album Heroes & Villains, Metro takes a serviceable stab at crafting music to swing to.
Metro’s music has always had a cinematic flair to it. Whatever sound he’s toying with, there’s a grand spectacle to his beats that can power a party anthem or bolster a bars-first exhibition. On opener “Annihilate,” co-producer Mike Dean’s synths flood Metro’s canvas of drums and samples like food coloring in a glass of water, creating a foreboding and jumpy digital atmosphere. They bring the same pomp to “Am I Dreaming,” their synthetics meshing well with orchestral string section flourishes—it sounds like an end credits song (which it is) in the best possible way.
For all the excitement, some of the beats skew extra generic, even by soundtrack standards. Synths and drums have been Metro’s bread and butter for years, but even he gets stuck in a rhythmic tar pit every once in a while. The hi-hats and plodding groove of “All The Way Live” sound as catatonic as the Future hook warbling through it, not to mention how the minimalism of “Self-Love” would tip over into sleepy territory without Coi Leray’s chirpy vocals keeping things lively. Metro and his band of co-producers get their best work off when they broaden their horizons with some experiments. They warp guitar strings (“Home”), bounce colorful synths off Afrobeats drum programming (“Link Up”), and punch holes through the middle of beefed-up samples (“Nas Morales”) to dazzling effect. Metro’s eye for direction gives the better songs here a big boost.
Things really begin to wobble when it comes to the features and their many references to crawling walls and slinging webs. Some find a good balance, like A$AP Rocky putting himself in Miles’ shoes on “Am I Dreaming?” (“Count up my ones, lacin’ up my favorite 1s…Kiss my momma on the forehead ‘fore I get the Code Red/And swing by 410, beef patty, cornbread”) or Lil Uzi Vert digging at Spider-Man’s outcast nature on “Home.” Some, like Lil Wayne’s marathon verse on “Annihilate,” pack as many references to spiders and Spider-Man characters into 13 bars as possible (“I give an opp arachnophobia,” “She’ll turn to Spider-Woman if I bite her”) like he’s being watched by a radioactive Sony A&R. Others just barely register—it’s remarkable how bored Metro regulars Offset and 21 Savage sound on their combined five verses across the album.
But the one song where theme and music blend together perfectly is James Blake’s “Hummingbird.” Over a pitched-up sample of Patience and Prudence’s “Tonight You Belong To Me” that eventually pitches down and melts into a gooey drum pattern, Blake coos a story of unrequited love that, while easily applicable to Miles and Gwen Stacy, hits at universal truths about love and acceptance with those ghostly wails of his (“Pen pal on a night shift/She’s who I get away with/Realizing she might/Be all I need in this life”). It’s no “Sunflower,” but it matches the dim intimacy of the scene it underscores while also sounding just as eerily beautiful on its own.
Across The Spider-Verse is a sequel to an IP-driven box-office hit that doubles as an arm of the Sony/Disney/Marvel industrial complex, but it’s also about defying the status quo. It deconstructs the superhero’s relationship to tragedy and features a web-slinging T-Rex. There’s drama and humor in this multiverse of madness, and Metro Boomin’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse soundtrack captures those qualities in fleeting doses. Nothing here feels as unorganized as the last Black Panther soundtrack or the shill-tastic hollowness of the Space Jam: A New Legacy companion album. However, only a few songs will live outside their cinematic context, and some land like unfinished leftovers from previous Metro projects. Some strands in the web are stronger than others.


A popular bootleg now receiving official release around its 26th anniversary, this set documents the Clash's famed performance opening for the Who at the soon-to-be-demolished Shea Stadium.

Live at Shea Stadium

While the Sex Pistols' "no future" became the bumper-sticker slogan of choice for first-wave UK punk rock, their London rivals the Clash built their program on an edict of "no past." As Julien Temple's recent documentary, Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, illustrated, the titular Clash frontman went to great lengths to distance himself from his well-established pre-punk/pub-band roots, and perhaps as a result, the Clash railed against classic-rock hero worship harder than most, by taking names ("no Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones in 1977!"), stealing sacred riffs (the Who's "I Can't Explain" bastardized into "Clash City Rockers") and redesigning pop history in their own image (the Elvis-swiped cover art of London Calling). So surely these detractors of "phony Beatlemania" must've had a good ol' laugh at the prospect of conquering one of the key sites of the real Beatlemania.
Of course, it would take a tour invite from the Who to get the Clash into Shea Stadium on Oct. 13, 1982, but in a way that just makes the story all the more rich: the punks meet the godfathers-- the former at the peak of their commercial ascendancy, the latter on the way to the first of many retirements. But while the two bands were born of different eras, both had followed similar trajectories, having each made their own escapes out of garageland to pursue more ambitious musical plans. And yet Live at Shea Stadium (a popular bootleg now receiving official release on its 26th anniversary) marks something more than just the passing of the torch between two generations of kindred spirits; it also documents the first time class-of-'77 punk-rockers graduated to the American stadium circuit, and the pyrrhic victory contained within. The Shea show was not the biggest the Clash ever played in America (that would be the US Festival in 1983), nor the most incendiary (see: the legendary 17-show string at New York's Bond Casino in 1981), but the set most vividly captures the Clash's most enduring qualities: the triumphs and tribulations of being populist punks.

Fittingly, the Clash's Shea Stadium coronation would come in a downpour of very English rain. But where the Who might use such a backdrop to dramatize a typically blustery version of "Love, Reign O'er Me", for the Clash, the soggy weather was an ideal way to make a ballpark feel more like a sweaty dive. Following a humorously crowd-baiting opening spiel from Clash cohort Kosmo Vinyl, Joe Strummer introduces "London Calling" by declaring "welcome to the Casbah Club!" It's the first of many quips that Strummer uses to downsize the stadium spectacle into more club-like dimensions ("shhh… would you please stop talking at the back, it's too loud!"), and he's also careful not to turn his elevated podium into a pulpit; rather than use the spotlight to educate the American masses on the urban unrest that inspired "Guns of Brixton", Strummer simply offers, "If you don't know what's goin' on, just ask the person standing next to you."
Foreshadowing the BBC Radio Global a Go-Go broadcasts that would define his later career, Strummer sounds happiest playing cruise-leader to his band's genre tourism, talking the audience through a live mash-up of Sandinista's rap-rock prototype "The Magnificent Seven" and Willie Williams' reggae standard "Armagideon Time" like he was holding a bus megaphone: "This is a black New York rhythm we stole one night...so while we're here doing our little thing, I'm gonna take you to Jamaica...so hold on, fasten your seatbelts, extinguish all reefers!"
But while Strummer's stage banter frequently highlights the seeming absurdity of the Clash playing a venue the size of Shea, the set list more than justifies their promotion to it, adhering as it does to the time-honoured stadium-rock tradition of playing the hits and playing them often; even the band's current release at the time, Combat Rock, is represented only by its two popular singles (which means there's no "Straight to Hell" to lure in newly arrived "Paper Planes" chasers). Highlighting the staggering procession of classic singles the band had amassed in just five short years, the incredibly well-preserved (or greatly refurbished) Live at Shea Stadium recordings make the contradictory concept of stadium-punk seem like a natural state: if anything, the lock-and-load riffs of "Tommy Gun" and the shout-and-response reworking of Eddy Grant's "Police on My Back" sound like they were originally designed with the bleachers in mind.
Live at Shea Stadium, however, also provides a glimpse into the existential quandaries that would afflict agit-punk progeny from Rage Against the Machine to Against Me! onward: that is, the inherent difficulty of reconciling your activist politics with your growing bank balance. As the lone Clash original featured from their 1977 debut, "Career Opportunities" seems like a particularly odd choice to play at Shea, if only because these sorts of gigs forever distanced the Clash from the dole-line doldrums detailed within (a notion the Clash themselves seemed to have already addressed with Sandinista!'s cheeky kiddie-choir cover version). You can also hear the band's simmering tensions play out in the rather hollow version of "Rock the Casbah", which suffers from both the physical and spiritual absence of Topper Headon, the drummer who came up with the song's rhythm and its indelible piano-rolled hook, but whose chronic drug problems got him ousted from the band on the eve of the Combat Rock tour (to be replaced by original Clash drummer Terry Chimes). As a result, the Clash's most effortlessly funky tune is rendered as a rather joyless, standardized guitar rocker-- one that betrays the flagging enthusiasm that would eventually send Mick Jones packing less than a year later, and force Strummer to deep-six the band for good following 1985's roundly derided Cut the Crap, the only band that matters silenced with barely a mutter.
In a cunning premonition of their own impending collapse, the Clash bid Shea Stadium adieu with their signature cover of the Bobby Fuller Four's "I Fought the Law", the ultimate fight song for those who got no more left in them. The Clash may have showed up at Shea to inherit the Who's torch and create a new model of the thinking person's rock star for the 1980s, but they ultimately flubbed the hand-off-- and a group of Irishmen were more than happy to swoop in from the sidelines and run away with it.


On his debut album, the talented South London rapper Dave explores family and identity with the unguarded catharsis of a therapy session.

Psychodrama

Three years ago, Dave started to gain a reputation for his freestyle videos. The young wordsmith, also known as Santan Dave, would stare into the camera and relay fierce reflections about his tumultuous life, using them as a lyrical crowbar to pry open the doors keeping voiceless Londoners in the dark. On “Thiago Silva” he proved he could hold his own at a grime tempo, and fans soon discovered he played the piano, too. It was difficult to fathom that he was only a teenager. Now Dave is 20, and his debut album, Psychodrama, is one of the most significant bodies of British rap music in a generation.
Psychodrama is a form of psychotherapy in which patients role-play events from their past to heal and make sense of themselves. Dave uses the term as a cathartic glue to bind heavy themes together, bringing listeners into his therapy room while he grapples with societal injustice, industry contradictions, and private pain. The album starts and finishes with songs “Psycho” and “Drama,” respectively, and the latter includes a touching dialogue with his older brother, who is serving a life sentence in prison. This haunting backdrop has long bled into Dave’s lyricism—“Never had a father and I needed you to be the figure,” he cries in the album’s closing passage—but its impact is more closely examined across Psychodrama than ever before. Over 11 songs and much hypnotic piano playing, Dave sets his conceptual limits, and then fills them with an urban opera that blends his desire to exorcize demons with old-soul musical wisdom and youthful performativity.
When the single “Black” was debuted on BBC Radio 1 as Annie Mac’s Hottest Record in the World, it garnered backlash from listeners who missed its nuanced critique of language as a limiting construct on racial identity, expression, and diversity. But the song—on which Dave shares his piano bench with acclaimed producer Fraser T. Smith, whose influence can be heard throughout the album—is not just a proud race anthem. As political and media establishments in Britain continue to fall short in representing ethnic minority experiences (in one recent case, a centrist politician found herself unable to avoid even a basic faux pas), “Black” doubles as a manifesto for responsible phraseology, and against anachronistic stereotyping. “A kid dies, the blacker the killer, the sweeter the news/And if he’s white, you give him a chance, he’s ill and confused/If he’s black he’s probably armed, you see him and shoot,” Dave assesses.
Songs like “Screwface Capital” and “Streatham” stick closely to Dave’s formula of conscious, modern UK rap, delivering hard yet emotionally available odes to the cold city that birthed him. These are highlights for purists seeking thumping beats to match Dave’s anger, and each verse is laced with its own string of intricate wordplay and admissions—sometimes cheeky, often sullen. “Tell me what you know about a bag full of bills/And your mom crying out, saying, ‘Son, I can’t take it,’/And then staring in the mirror for an hour/With a tear in your eye like, ‘I gotta go make it,’” he spits. Softer, poppier offerings like “Purple Heart” and “Voices” will appeal to Dave’s increasingly diverse audience of older fans and newcomers seeking easy access to London’s unforgivingly hardline rap scene. What’s more, by teaming up with afrobeat star Burna Boy and celebrated British-Ghanaian hitmaker Jae5 for “Location,” and fellow London boundary-pusher J Hus on “Disaster,” Dave stretches the album’s reach to absorb upbeat diasporic influence, movement, and color.
But the gravitational pull at the center of this magnum opus is “Lesley,” an 11-minute deep dive into the life and abusive relationship of a woman Dave meets on a train, as if colliding “two different worlds in the same location.” It is a microcosm of Psychodrama’s refusal to contain itself as a work of art, instead reaching for emotional intimacy and therapeutic resonance. By its end, “Lesley” becomes a passionate call-to-action; as Dave puts it, “a message to a woman with a toxic man” who he is “begging… to get support if you’re lost or trapped.” In a world craving artists who use their influence for good, Dave offers a road map for inspired musicians and inquisitive listeners alike.
“Lesley” closes on the disembodied voice of Dave’s fictional therapist, who expresses relief as his client nears the end of the album’s psychodramatic course. “I’m just happy you’re at a place now where you feel you understand your emotions, and are in control,” he says. A different kind of hero’s journey through the musical mind, Psychodrama feels less like a platform for clout than a starting point for self-help and paradigmatic change.


Swedish singer/songwriter is making a name for himself with his Nick Drake-like classical guitar and vocals, and an acoustic cover of the Knife's electro-pop gem "Heartbeats".

Veneer

It's taken two years for the debut album by singer/songwriter José González (Swedish, obv.) to reach these shores, and it's easy to see what nudged it here. González's sparse recordings showcase hushed, double-tracked vocals, haunted imagery, and a clearly gifted classical guitarist. His gripping acoustic cover of countryfolk the Knife's electro-pop "Heartbeats" was even a minor hit in his homeland. An ethereal, sometimes-aloof troubadour, González will sing you to sleep and then dash off under cover of night, leaving only cold-sweat nightmares and an unopened bottle of sweet vermouth.
Yup, two years, and on Veneer, González suggests he'd kinda like to stick around for a few more. Permanence is a pressing concern: With bongos and a hint of bossa nova, "Remain" emphasizes perseverance, while the scant lyrics of handclap-enhanced "Lovestain" complain of the marks you can't just shout out of you heart, maaan. The arrangements are full of Nick Drake-style open tunings ("Stay in the Shade", in particular, can't escape the shadow of that introvert-folk patron saint) and only a forlorn trumpet on closer "Broken Arrow" disrupting the guit/vox/maybe-tasteful-percussion train to Starbucks-comp paydirt.
As with like-minded songstress Emiliana Torrini, González is at his best when he forces a personality onto his faceless raw materials. The distinctive finger-picking on "Crosses", the best original song on the disc, rises like the spires of a Gothic cathedral, giving form to lyrics about a redemptive light in the darkness (any religious inferences, meanwhile, are left entirely to the listener). By comparison, sotto voce opener "Slow Moves" tries a little too hard to sound like its quiet-is-the-new-loud forebears, with a meta-chorus too wispy to hold tight 'til morning: "My moves are slow/ But soon they'll know".
González's aforementioned "Heartbeats" cover is nearly as spine-tingling as the original, if not its frenetic Rex the Dog remix. Echoing M. Ward's "Let's Dance", Iron & Wine's "Such Great Heights", and Frente!'s "Bizarre Love Triangle", González strips the electro-pop down to an acoustic lullaby, laying bare a powerful melody and deceptively evocative lyrics about love, regret and nostalgia. González has also covered Kylie Minogue's "Hand on Your Heart", and the gulf that remains between these must-hears and his self-composed material is significant. González knows a great song when he hears it, and he plays a mean guitar, but in 2003 he was still more raw than the overseas buzz suggested; Veneer is nice, but it may just scratch the surface.