Singer, songwriter, pianist, and bandleader Joe Bataan took boogaloo to its peak with Gypsy Woman, combining soul, mambo, and traditional Latin tunes and became a mainstay for the famous Fania label.

Gypsy Woman

To be young, gifted, and brown in 1960s East Harlem: On the stoop, you might hear the sound of chá-chá-chás and pachangas chattering down the block. Up in apartment hallways, young men harmonized together, fantasizing about becoming the next Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. Musical movements were in flux, least of all in Uptown. The mambo palaces of the 1950s were a fond but fading memory, doo-wop and early R&B were giving way to soul, and most importantly, a cohort of mostly Puerto Rican Americans—Nuyoricans—were coming of age, seeking a stake for their generation’s sonic sensibilities. Into that moment strode Joe Bataan, knife in hand.
He was born Bataan Nitollano, son of a Filipino immigrant father and African American mother. He would later self-describe himself, on an album title no less, as “Afrofilipino,” but as a kid, he ran deep with the Nuyorican crowd around 106th and Lexington. In his teens, he helped lead a local Puerto Rican street gang called The Dragons, but a few stints in the pen encouraged him to seek a different path. He turned to music.
One day in 1964, when he was in his early 20s, Bataan found himself among a squabbling group of teenage musicians from P.S. 13. They were in the auditorium, debating who should lead the band and Bataan settled things by pulling out a knife, stabbing it into the top of a piano, and declaring, “I’m the leader!” Thus was born The Latin Swingers, which he claims was the youngest Latin band in New York at the time.
The group’s trombone player and second-in-command was Joe “Chickie” Fuente and on their business card, interested parties were told to “Call Joe or Bataan.” A promoter misread that and thought the band’s leader was “Joe Bataan.” The name stuck. The group landed a steady gig with the Tropicoro Ballroom in the Bronx and in an alternate universe, that may have been the most notoriety they ever achieved. But in 1966, a “new breed” of Latin music was bubbling up in New York that would enrapture Bataan and his band: boogaloo.
A brief primer: Boogaloo began as a dance craze, similar to the watusi, jerk, twist, etc. before it. The most common version of it involves throwing your head and arms back and forth; James Brown once described it as “one of the hardest dances in the world, I used to get dizzy doing it.” As lore has it, the Chicago/Detroit duo of Tom and Jerrio saw it being performed at a sock hop and wrote their single “Boo-Ga-Loo” in homage. Their song became a runaway hit throughout the spring and summer of 1965, begetting a string of copycat recordings by other R&B artists: “In a Boogaloo Bag,” “My Baby Likes to Boogaloo,” “Boogaloo #3,” etc. By 1966, the dance had made its way into New York ballrooms and it was here that Nuyorican house bands began to tinker with it, giving birth to a distinctive Latin boogaloo style.
The fact that English lyrics were central to the boogaloo’s popularity proved fateful for Joe Bataan. During his band’s residency at the Tropicoro Ballroom, the Latin Swingers mostly played traditional Latin dance music, with Spanish-language verses. That meant it was singer George “Joe” Pagan, not Bataan, who was the dominant voice. However, Pagan’s thick accent wasn’t ideal for English lyrics so as the boogaloo began to bubble up, Bataan took over on vocals.
Though he was a proficient enough piano player, Bataan’s best instrument was his tenor. Unlike other English-language cantantes like Jimmy Sabater of the Joe Cuba Sextet, Bataan didn’t croon in the hushed, smooth tone of a Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett. His chops, full-throated and intensely emotive, bore the influence of the doo-wop and R&B records he grew up on. That voice proved key to drawing the interest of a young record executive trying to get his new Latin label off the ground: Jerry Masucci of Fania Records.
By the 1970s, Fania would become synonymous with salsa music, but boogaloo helped keep the lights on during its early years. In the mid-’60s, George Goldner’s Tico and Al Santiago’s Alegre were the dominant Latin labels in New York and to gain an edge on them, Masucci gambled on younger, unproven musicians including trumpeter Bobby Valentin, pianist Larry Harlow and a teenage trombonist named Willie Colon. With Bataan though, Masucci found more than just a musician; here was a voice that could sell to black, white, and Latino audiences. Fania signed Bataan and put him on the path to recording his debut album, 1967’s Gypsy Woman.
On the album’s liner notes, author George Rosas writes, “Today…music has gained a new ingredient. This new ingredient has become a binding force of youth and music throughout the world…This ingredient, as you must have gathered by now, is called ’Soul’…It is difficult to indicate the type of ’Soul’ which expressed, so beautifully, by Joe Bataan. It is a hypnotizing, yet a swinging and vibrant sound.” Clunky diction aside, Fania clearly wanted to position Bataan as the label’s premier Latin soul artist.
Fittingly, the first single Bataan recorded for Fania nodded to an earlier soul classic: The Impressions’ 1961 hit, “Gypsy Woman.” However, Bataan’s “Gypsy Woman” wasn’t a cover version. Beyond an opening line that riffed on Curtis Mayfield’s songwriting, Bataan changed everything else: the lyrics, the arrangement, the instrumentation, etc. Whereas The Impressions’ mellow original had more in common, aurally, with a bachelor pad exotica record, Bataan’s song was ferociously uptempo and unmistakably Afro-Cuban, opening with a lively piano montuno and background singers yelling, “She smokes, hot hot, she smokes!”
Bataan himself comes in after a five bar intro, his voice carrying a touch of smokiness and a burr of vibrato when he elongates his vowels. Other boogaloo breakout hits in 1967, including Pete Rodriguez’s “I Like It Like That” and Johnny Colon’s “Boogaloo Blues,” boasted memorable hooks but the singing was middling at best. By comparison, on “Gypsy Woman,” Bataan demonstrated that he could be a quadruple threat: singer, songwriter, pianist, and bandleader.
”Gypsy Woman” was an auspicious way to launch Bataan’s career but when it came time to assemble the Gypsy Woman album, Fania was wary of going all-in on the boogaloo. The budding craze may have been a crossover hit with black and white audiences, but Fania couldn’t afford to alienate Latin music traditionalists. Many of those conservative fans saw the boogaloo as a dilution of “pure” Afro-Cuban traditions; Latin jazz star Eddie Palmieri famously derided the style as “bubblegum.” As a hedge, labels would commit to a handful of boogaloo songs on an album but also balanced things out with an array of conventional Latin dance tunes.
The Gypsy Woman album includes, for example, a pair of frenetic mambos (”Fuego” and “Campesino”), a guaguanco (”Sugar Guaguanco”), and most interestingly, “Figaro.” The latter begins as a standard cha-cha-chá but midway, slips into a Spanish-language guajira with a slinky montuno laid over a 4/4 backbeat: basically, a boogaloo. In “Figaro” we can hear the past giving way to the present; it’s like the band decided halfway through to hit ’em with the new style.”
For the dancers, the aptly named “Fuego” offers up six-and-a-half fiery minutes of parquet-pounding goodness, capped by a stellar piano performance by Bataan. George Pagan handled Spanish vocal duties on all these traditional Latin cuts, but Bataan reclaims the mic on the album’s four boogaloo songs: “Gypsy Woman,” “So Fine,” “Chickie’s Trombone,” and “Too Much Lovin’.” Of the batch, “Gypsy Woman,” is the clear standout but “Too Much Lovin’” would prove influential down the road. The fast hand claps that open the song would return on one of Bataan’s definitive boogaloo hits, “Subway Joe,” from the 1968 album of the same name.
Gypsy Woman ends with the enduring Joe Bataan classic: “Ordinary Guy.” Despite the light Latin percussion, it’s also a soul ballad at heart, the lament of a forlorn lover suffering from an epic case of self-pitying blues: “I don’t have thousands to spend or a seaside cottage for the weekend/I’m just an/Ordinary guy/You left behind”
The song would prove so popular that between 1967 and 1975, Bataan re-recorded four different versions for three albums and a single. The last is the most obscure of the bunch and though it’s not much different from the album version, it opens with guest pianist Richard Tee doling out a melody reminiscent of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Your Precious Love.” Whether the Motown nod was deliberate or accidental, this version of “Ordinary Guy” placed Bataan within the traditions of soul music even as he was also pushing an emergent boogaloo sound.
After Gypsy Woman, Bataan would become one of Fania’s most prolific artists, releasing seven more albums over the next five years before acrimoniously splitting from the label over royalty disputes in 1972. During that time, boogaloo flew high and then, depending on who you believe, either burned itself out or was deliberately killed off by the Latin music industry in order to clear the lane for salsa. Regardless, in that brief time, boogaloo’s appeal went global. Latin music artists in countries such as Puerto Rico, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela cut their own interpretations of boogaloo and in a marvelous full circle, musicians in West African countries such as Benin, Senegal, Nigeria and others also embraced the style. Boogaloo was always a melding of different musical threads spooling from the African diaspora and here it was, a prodigal Afro-Latin-American son, returning home.
For Bataan, the ’70s were far kinder to him than many of his boogaloo-era peers whose careers rose and fell with the style’s fortunes. Ever keeping his ear to the street, he went onto release two popular disco-era albums, Salsoul in 1973 and the aforementioned Afrofilipino in 1975. He even recorded a pioneering disco rap single, “Rap-O, Clap-O” in 1979, just months after “Rapper’s Delight” had introduced hip-hop to the world.
When his career began to wind down in the early ’80s, he took it as an opportunity to focus on his family and for decades, he worked as a youth counselor at the very juvenile corrections center where he had spent quality time as a teenager. Latin soul fans rediscovered him a generation later, sparking a career revival that began in the late ’90s that’s allowed Bataan to return to a prolific touring schedule. I’ve seen him perform a slew of times and at all his shows, however else he mixes up the play set, “Gypsy Woman” and “Ordinary Guy” remain in constant rotation. The former shimmers with verve, the latter is soaked in pathos, but both remain important legacies from the moment where boogaloo broke out of el barrio and took flight across the world.


A reissue of the Downtown fixture’s 1981 debut album is a reminder that despite his striking look, campy repertoire, and operatic range, the onetime Bowie collaborator was no novelty act.

Klaus Nomi

Klaus Nomi is an easy artist to eulogize. The German-born East Village fixture’s striking, self-made look and soaring operatic countertenor—in layman’s terms, he sang really, really high—brought him to the attention of culture vulture supreme David Bowie. Nomi famously performed with the Thin White Duke on “Saturday Night Live,” hoping for a full collaboration that never materialized. A deal with Bowie’s label RCA, however, enabled Nomi to release two albums abroad before his death, from complications due to AIDS, in 1983. From ANOHNI’s angelic warble to Janelle Monáe’s sci-fi tuxedos, it isn’t hard to find Nomi’s legacy in pop’s outer reaches.
Klaus Nomi, his 1981 debut album, affords us an entirely different opportunity: celebrating Nomi’s music rather than his myth. When an album’s repertoire goes from Man Parrish to Chubby Checker to Camille Saint-Saëns, it’s hard to look anywhere but the music. As beautiful as Nomi was, it’s worth peeling your eyes away from the ghost-white makeup, mountain-range hairstyle, and Tristan Tzara tux to see the truly gifted musician beneath.
A trio of pop covers displays Nomi’s interpretive range even within narrow bounds. Take his handling of Lou Christie’s cloying AM radio hit “Lightnin’ Strikes” as a starting point. (Here it’s titled “Lightning Strikes”; the informal contraction feels beneath Nomi’s dignity.) Working off an arrangement by Kristian Hoffman that plays the song relatively straight, Nomi uses his piercing voice to subvert the lyrics’ smarmy, swinging-bachelor heteronormativity—hearing Klaus Nomi sing “Every boy wants a girl” is never not funny—and the very idea that America’s postwar culture comprised the full range of human experience.
But in covering Lesley Gore’s teen-feminist anthem “You Don’t Own Me,” Nomi lets the power of the original do most of the talking for him. From his pointed delivery of “Don’t say I can’t go with other boys!” to singing “I’m free and I love to be free” even higher than Gore did, he’s simply making the same points in a shifted context. There’s more that unites his struggle and Gore’s than divides them.
“The Twist,” which via Chubby Checker became one of the biggest dance crazes of all time, gets a much more thorough reimagining. Nomi slows it down into a bass-driven space-out, using his upper range and Germanic diction to make one of the most overplayed songs of all time sound disorientingly unfamiliar: “Come on humans,” he science-fictionalizes, “let’s doooooooo the Twist!” By the time you realize he’s transforming the original song’s subtext into text, turning Checker’s hip-shaking anthem into an alien’s plea to understand what we humans call “sex,” it’s already too late!
Nomi’s originals also show an impressive thematic and tonal scope. Suffused in ominous synth washes by electro godhead and frequent Nomi collaborator Man Parrish, “Keys of Life” is the most Bowiesque thing on the record. A message from an otherworldly visitor that’s both messianic and apocalyptic in intent, it’s his “Oh! You Pretty Things,” “Ziggy Stardust,” and “Station to Station” all rolled into one. “Nomi Song,” by contrast, is a much warmer affair, a tender self-portrait of a man desperately and doubtfully seeking acceptance (“If they saw my face, could I still take a bow?”), while “Wasting My Time” feels like a rejoinder from the woman to whom the cad in “Lightning Strikes” was singing infidelity’s praises.
Finally, the nuclear panic of “Total Eclipse” wouldn’t feel out of place on a Devo record, except of course for the singing. Terror about the seemingly inevitable atomic apocalypse was thick on the ground in those early Reagan years, but Nomi was one of the few artists who could sound like an air-raid siren when he sang about it. Which is not to say the song’s sentiment is at all dated. Exhibit A, the opening line: “Big shots argue about what they’ve got, making the planet so hot, hot as a Holocaust.”
But the songs from Nomi’s operatic oeuvre, which open and close the album’s second side, are the showstoppers. “Cold Song” is based on an aria from baroque composer Henry Purcell’s King Arthur; the melody is evident in Giorgio Moroder, Michael Nyman, and Hans Zimmer’s themes for Scarface, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, and The Crown respectively, but it’s forever Nomi’s. His daring transformation of the original bass vocals into his most urgent and terrifying countertenor work (“I can scarcely move or draw my breath/Let me, let me freeze again to death”) is a career pinnacle, as footage from a performance a few short months before his death demonstrates.
Nomi’s rhapsodic, album-ending interpretation of Saint-Saëns’s “Mon cœur s’ouvre à la voix” aria, “Samson and Delilah,” is heartbreaking in a wholly different way. It’s a song about doomed love, sung from the perspective of the still-loving person who dooms it; Nomi embodied the role powerfully enough to poleaxe an audience full of cynical scenesters when it was part of his New Wave Vaudeville act.
It’s this kind of multifaceted musical intelligence that belies any attempt to write Nomi off as a novelty act or one-trick pony. Depending on the context, Nomi’s singular voice could cut right to the bone of operatic compositions, drawing forth their desire and despair like some kind of glowing quicksilver ichor. Or it could make like an inverted-triangle tuxedo and turn the conventions of pop upside down, pointing out their inadequacies while celebrating their strengths. Yes, his voice, and yes, his look, and yes, his tragic story—you get it, I get it, we all get it. But he’s so much more than merely interesting. He was, and on this album he remains, a spectacle in the best sense. The album’s overwhelming impression is of outsized emotion, and that’s precisely the spectacular thing that Nomi’s spectacle was designed to convey.


A mixtape from Houston’s worldly psych trio digs deep into funk classics, spiritual jazz, and unusual finds from South Korea, Belarus, and Nigeria.

Late Night Tales

Like most of the world, Houston slow-jam trio Khruangbin had big plans for 2020: a collaboration with Leon Bridges, a new album, a worldwide tour with fellow slow-psych purveyors Tame Impala. The pandemic waylaid their globe-trotting (though they still managed to make the cut on a former president’s summer playlist). Mark Speer has said of the enforced downtime that what he missed the most, aside from the live show, was DJing after-parties, where he might fold in cuts that reflected the band’s coordinates that particular night, like Serge Gainsbourg sleaze in Paris or funky molam in Bangkok.
Khruangbin’s entry in the esteemed LateNightTales series closes a circle of sorts. It was on Bonobo’s own 2013 mix for the franchise that much of the world was introduced to Khruangbin via their hushed, meditative “A Calf Born in Winter,” the clear standout of the set. That instrumental sowed the seeds for their own global rise, so it’s fitting that a group prone to making eclectic, exploratory radio shows and playlists would finally take the LNT reins themselves. The time-loosening, un-placeable qualities generally associated with the band apply to the mix itself. Spanning from the early 1970s to the past year, the trio’s 15 worldly selections favor a hazy, sun-bleached sound: Every new track conjures the image of a thousand dust motes spilling into the air as the record is pulled off the shelf.
Much of the mix is rooted in their hometown, from local artists to a spirit of eclecticism that reflects the diversity of the city itself. They feature the city’s dub-and-vocoder outfit Brilliantes del Vuelo as well as Kelly Doyle and his ponging drum machine and exotica guitar; the spoken-word piece that closes the set comes from another Houstonian, Tierney Malone, paired with a banjo version of Erik Satie’s “Gnossienne.”
Another portion nods to their live set. Onstage, Khruangbin have long played a medley that weaves together old funk and hip-hop rhythms, slotting Kool & the Gang’s jazz-funk classic “Summer Madness” alongside tunes like “Nothin’ but a G Thang” and “Electric Relaxation,” and they finally record a studio version of “Summer Madness” here. Fully inhabiting the song’s mellow haze, Speer’s guitar captures the psychedelic soaring of the original’s Arp and Mellotron.
Elsewhere, the group ranges far and wide. They open with “Illuminations,” Alice Coltane’s mystical 1974 collaboration with Carlos Santana, the one corner of her catalog that hasn’t experienced a renaissance yet. It’s a baffling entry point on the surface, packing more drama, dissonance, and ornate opulence than anything in the Khruangbin aesthetic. But in Santana’s long, sustained strings, one can hear the careful pacing of Speer’s own guitar work.
Playful motifs run across the mix, like the big, chewy bass tones of South Korean trio Sanullim, Ethiopia’s Roha Band, and Nigerian boogie singer Maxwell Udoh (the latter doing an excellent job of repurposing the whispered come-on of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” for a more upbeat setting). The detached cool of Nazia Hassan’s Bollywood disco classic “Khushi” echoes in the deadpan disco of Justine & the Victorian Punks’ “Still You,” a delirious cut from downtown composer and Arthur Russell collaborator Peter Gordon. Sensuous, sax-laced, inscrutable, sprawling, and woozy, it’s as mysterious now as it was back in 1979.
As to be expected, some of Khruangbin’s digs are ludicrously deep, like the cassette-only Latin pop tune from crooner David Marez or Gerald Lee’s lo-fi soul number from the never-released soundtrack to blaxploitation film Black Shampoo (IMDB keywords: “pubic hair,” “mafia,” “barbecue party”). But after a few times through, smooth yacht rock from Japan and Belarus loses its luster and just sounds like yacht rock. And even though the tempo barely tops 100 bpm, all the far-flung fusions of Asian pop, Nigerian reggae, and Korean boogie leave Khruangbin’s set feeling a little like a busy touring schedule on the international festival circuit: both awe-inspiring and exhausting.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On her debut album, Coffman leaves behind the indie-prog of the Dirty Projectors for sunny kaleidoscopic pop that reveals how love and loss are tied inextricably to the music of our youth.

City of No Reply

On her debut solo album, Amber Coffman erects an altar to the shine and glow of ’90s pop-rock and R&B. The former Dirty Projectors vocalist noted in an interview with The Guardian this year that the women of ’90s R&B “partially raised” her through a tumultuous childhood. That heritage lives in every nook and cranny on City of No Reply, which sparkles in part thanks to the production hand of Coffman’s former bandmate Dave Longstreth. Despite his assistance on the album, though, Coffman’s debut wholly belongs to her: It wears little of the shaggy indie-prog that characterized her albums with the Projectors, and instead opens up plenty of space for her clear, smooth vocals to blossom under her confident songwriting.
Though the swinging instrumentals and Coffman’s abundantly multitracked voice might make the album sound like an easy companion to Haim’s work, City of No Reply embraces more laser-cut quirk than the L.A. sisters, edging Coffman closer to the stylings of How to Dress Well or Carly Rae Jepsen. In place of traditional percussive sounds rain down snakes, squiggles, and skitters galore. One particularly hypnotic beat, on “If You Want My Heart,” prominently features the sound of champagne flutes clinking. While four out of five synthpop bands seem to have settled on a comfortable pastel ’80s palette replete with big drums, gushy keys, and downpours of reverb, Coffman instead fixes her lens on a vision of the ’70s refracted through the ’90s she grew up in. Her sunny and anxious pop songs tackle love, loss, and the hideous farce that is navigating through your late 20s and early 30s.
Having come of age in the era of Top 40 radio mélange that juxtaposed Toni Braxton and Melissa Etheridge, Coffman twirls those memories into a saturated kaleidoscope of her own making. The lovestruck single “No Coffee” wears echoes of Etheridge’s 1994 hit “Come to My Window” in both structure and tone; “Brand New” owes some of its moody slink to Sade’s Love Deluxe period; and album highlight “If You Want My Heart” takes cues from Mary J. Blige while simultaneously mirroring the if/then lyrical construction of Spice Girls’ “Wannabe”: “Baby, if you want my heart/First you gotta come through the door.”
That Coffman is able to cut the veneer of her soul idols with slices of bubblegum is a testament to just how deeply the radio sank into her bones. The various threads that make up City of No Reply don’t just get woven in for nostalgia’s sake, though. In her lyrics, Coffman stares down encounters that, given enough charge, can become life-altering: the dissolution of a long-term relationship, the sparks that fly across a new one. These moments of vulnerability can feel unprecedented, as if they have no context save for the music that first taught you how to get desire and disappointment and pubescent angst out of your body and into your head. Even in adulthood, mapping those insecurities onto the music of our youth can be a way of clinging to the only lifesaver that’s always kept you above water.
In those moments, an unreturned text can grow to the size of a whole city, a labyrinth of self-doubt with no visible exit. The only way out is found by retracing your steps: through who you’ve been before, and the songs that made you. Coffman doesn’t necessarily transcend the cornerstones she’s sampling on City of No Reply, but she’s not aiming to.


The six-piece BANANA features members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Warpaint, as well as the singer Cate Le Bon. LIVE is a playful, energetic session, influenced by Arthur Russell and Jon Hassell.

LIVE

In March of last year, six musicians congregated in a house in Los Angeles, intent on making something original. Their band, BANANA, originally assembled as an opening act and backing group for the singer Cate Le Bon, included members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Warpaint as well as Le Bon herself, coming off of her excellent 2016 release Crab Day. The ensemble was helmed by Josiah Steinbrick, a producer and fixture of the L.A. music scene who’s collaborated with Devendra Banhart, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Tim Presley of White Fence.
The musicians had gotten familiar with each other while touring Crab Day, and it seems that they were in an even looser mood than usual when they came together to record what would become LIVE, a mix that uses original compositions by Steinbrick as a jumping-off point for the rest of the musicians to improvise over. Influenced by the recordings of the trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell and incorporating the work of Arthur Russell, the playful, energetic LIVE was originally recorded as a special for the online radio station Dublab. But it proved to have staying power, so Leaving Records has issued it as a standalone album this month.
LIVE is comprised of four tracks named for the first four letters of the alphabet, and runs 24 minutes its length. Its tracks are predicated not on guitar, piano or drums, but on loops of vibraphone and woodwind, with other instruments chiming in wildly, a rainforest cacophony layered over the slower, deeper patterns of a lush musical ecosystem. Tracks don’t develop in a linear fashion but instead grow outward in strange, unexpected directions. On “A” and “B,” this growth is segmented, as a second loop tags in to replace the first at the midpoint of each song. “C” and “D” are more coherent and as a result, more easily digestible.
Depending on the listener’s mood, the record’s early going can be frustratingly chipper. All those plinking mallets and that farting brass come to feel grating, a forced smile that stays on too long. But occasional moments of shade dull the insistent sunshine, providing some relief as you delve further into the record. Plaintive strings on the back side of “B”  and the sudden jangle of piano two and half minutes through “C” cool things down,  and “D” by far the shortest track here, is decidedly the darkest, introducing a somber note that anchors an otherwise escapist record in the real world.
The compositions here forsake Western divisions of major and minor keys. This gives all the tracks a modal, somewhat hard-to-place flavor, particularly the baroque “B,” which makes use of ceremonial music from Southeast Asia and incorporates a minimalist piece from the Estonian composer Heino Jürisalu, before morphing into a tribute to Arthur Russell’s ’70s work that includes a yearning sample of electric piano from Russell himself.
Steinbrick has said that he wants the music to sound “exotic” and “pleasant,” both characteristics that LIVE nails easily. But after a half dozen listens, despite some of its more outré qualities, LIVE starts to sound familiar, even tightly controlled. The members of BANANA know each other well, and on the record, they seem capable of anticipating their tourmates improvisational tendencies, like a conversation at the family dinner table where it’s always obvious who’s going to speak up next. That makes for a strikingly coherent improvised album. But it also dulls some of the surprises that LIVE might have otherwise offered, making something that was supposed to feel fresh and alive, seem occasionally, if not unhappily, predictable.


The Chicago DIY star is capable of presenting even the most technically difficult music as a casual, catchy pop song. His Secretly Canadian debut makes for an ideal introduction.

Please Have a Seat

NNAMDÏ should be exhausted. He’s a bottomless well of creativity, the type of musician who resides at an imagination boot camp and isn’t satisfied until he’s wrung out every possible idea. In the two years since BRAT and Krazy Karl, the experimental pop multi-hyphenate underwent wrist surgery, toured with Wilco and Sleater-Kinney, released an EP, and was named a Chicago Tribune Chicagoan of the Year. By the time NNAMDÏ was ready to prop his feet up for once, he couldn’t even do that. “I fought my way in for a seat by the throne/Looked for a space but it was already gone,” he begins Please Have a Seat, his sixth official album and first for Secretly Canadian. After that two-minute exhale of an opener, he takes off running. Billed as an exercise in being present, Please Have a Seat casts NNAMDÏ’s trademark restlessness in a new light, loosening up the ecstatic absurdity of his songs and rethinking what it means to be accessible without sacrificing passion.
Written, produced, and performed entirely by NNAMDÏ, Please Have a Seat is perhaps the best introduction to his catalog for the uninitiated listener. The album is a revolving door of genres, unified by slick production that sets the glitchy rap of “Anti” alongside the unassuming piano of “Careful.” NNAMDÏ mixes a trap beat with Röyksopp-style electronica on “Touchdown” and twists regal orchestral strings into downtrodden indie rock on “Lifted.” He showcases equal skill on the drum kit during “Dibs,” launching into a burst of thrash metal before pivoting to anthemic, spaced-out fills. Sprinkled in between are commercial-style skits. It’s unpredictable and also exactly what you’d expect from a guy who’s as devoted to Sum 41 as he is to Blake Mills. The only thing consistent about NNAMDÏ is that he thrives on inconsistency.
The best songs on Please Have a Seat indulge the playful, hybrid picking style of math-rock guitar (even if NNAMDÏ bristles at the term). Album highlight “Smart Ass” layers glittery, pitch-shifted vocals and guitar noodling akin to finger exercises, like if Owl City covered Emergency & I. It’s a vibrant song that summarizes what makes NNAMDÏ such a singular artist and a worthy tourmate for eccentric rockers like Black Midi: He blends genres the average listener may find off-putting and turns them into something not just palatable, but fun. He’s the people’s nerd, an artist who can present even the most technically difficult music as a casual, catchy pop song.
With his musical growth and rising profile, NNAMDÏ could be considered on the cusp of fame by now. But he’s not waiting around. On Please Have a Seat, he repeatedly critiques his ascent: If he’s going to be a celebrity, he’ll take the opportunity to cash in and share the wealth with his community. “Fuck being popular/I want the bread,” he raps. “312 love me/Ain’t no man above me/So pull up a seat/I’ll make you a plate.” On lead single “I Don’t Wanna Be Famous,” he grapples with his career stature, acknowledging the hustle for playlist placement and cringing at outlets that once dubbed him “too weird” to be taken seriously. He may get to hang with the Miley Cyruses of this world, but he’s ambivalent about the attention that comes with it.
An indie musician at the middle tier of fame is in a strange position: too big to duck the pressure of public perception, too small to be able to afford to ignore it, and busy touring all the while. If he’s running on fumes, not only is NNAMDÏ not showing it, but he’s turning them into his own brand of renewable energy. On Please Have a Seat, his gusto is as unrelenting as the blistering jazz drumming on “Anxious Eater.” Wrangling together dozens of technical ideas and arranging them with idiosyncratic flair, NNAMDÏ enters this challenging middle zone without compromising his priorities. It’s what makes Please Have a Seat the best he’s ever sounded.


The D.C. death metal band attacks with pummeling force and socially pointed lyrics, in the tradition of Bolt Thrower and Incantation.

Order of Torment

Washington D.C. has had a storied impact on heavy music in this country, from the hardcore that emerged from the city itself to the doom metal from its outlying regions in Maryland and Virginia. You have to wonder why there aren’t more death metal bands from the area, too—if evil and corruption are your trades, there’s no shortage of inspiration, to say the least. Genocide Pact are a death metal trio from the capital who are out to change that. Their second record, Order of Torment, takes from Bolt Thrower’s bull-headed charge and anti-establishment outlook and Incantation’s death-doom, creating another crushing altar to the early Nineties that also revels in some aspects of the genre missed by less politically-inclined revival bands.
As with a great deal of modern-retro American death metal, Genocide Pact veer towards less complexity and more pummeling. This is in part a result of the band members’ hardcore backgrounds: Guitarist/vocalist Tim Mullaney and bassist Michael Nolan also play in Disciples of Christ, while drummer Connor Donegan bashes in Red Death and has filled for Power Trip live. Bolt Thrower were the most punk-connected of the early death metal bands, and that quality lives on in Torment. Opening track “Conquered and Disposed” moves with a pulverizing efficiency, setting a tone for the album as it finds a common ground between primeval murk and combat-like flexibility.
Genocide Pact’s inclination is to remove some of the cryptic nature of Incantation’s music, leaving behind a time-warping ooze. Torment feels slower than it actually is, submerging you in a slo-mo apocalypse you can only marvel at. Even when the band speeds up, as with Donegan’s blast-beat drumming on “Spawn of Suffering,” they still sound like they’re sloshing through a mile of damning tar. “Pain Reprisal” trudges along like sludge and teases out a melody so pained it’s practically crying against its own existence. Mullaney starts “Ascendency Absolved” with a chugging rhythm that morphs into a Bolt Thrower thrust at half-speed, throwing in a lead riff that hardens into something more torn by battle than exalting it.
If Torment feels like a hellworld encroaching with the heat swelling, that’s also thanks to Mullaney’s lyrical direction. He deals in violence and destruction like many death metal songwriters, but uses those themes to explore deceptive power dynamics, a decision that dates back to when he formed in the band in college. (This lyrical stance is Genocide Pact’s biggest debt to Bolt Thrower, a band that revelled in battle lore as a way of criticizing the nature of power.) “Decimation Grid” puts the costs of war in personal terms: “Victims of a lie, a truth that never was/Pitted against those, who similarly starve/Used by greater fools, who laugh at your pain/Promised a dream,  but receiving terror.” “Authoritarian Impulse” is even more blunt, opening with “Paranoid filter/Obscures the horizon/Of oppression and deceit.” Mullaney uses death metal as a way to lift the veil on society. And while his imagery is general enough to apply to many historical eras, it strikes particularly deep now.
Social commentary wasn’t unusual in death metal’s late Eighties/early Nineties heyday: Carcass’ gore lyrics were tied to their animal rights stances, Napalm Death have openly leftist politics, and death-grind band Brutal Truth had songs like “Anti-Homophobe,” the pro-weed “Choice of a New Generation,” and “K.A.P. (Kill All Politicians).” Even with a post-2010 groundswell in the genre, though, there hasn’t been a lot of notable death metal that criticizes power as of late. Torment is a welcome exception, attacking with such force that it makes the bands who don’t tackle these issues feel like the real outliers.


An outlier on the outlaw country scene of the 1970s, Terry Allen's Juarez is a bawdy song cycle that alludes to the fall of the Aztec Empire, Jesus, and motel sex. It retains its kick 40 years on.

Juarez

To best understand the impetus that drives artists ranging from the Neanderthals to an outsider artist like Judith Scott to a small town fellow like Terry Allen, consider this line: “Everyman he got to leave his mark/So I got my pencil and I got my chalk/and there ain’t a rock made I can’t make talk.” It’s a verse from the piano-pounded “Writing on Rocks Across the USA” from Allen’s 1975 debut album, and in the next verse he scales a cliff in the midst of a Galveston hurricane with a pencil in hand, boasting: “I scribbled down some of the mysteries and I stopped that howling wind.” Is there a more succinct image of artistic futility than graphite put to granite amid gale winds?
That artistic impulse must have felt like an alien transmission for someone like Terry Allen, who was raised in a small Texas town. Like fellow Lubbockians Buddy Holly and Waylon Jennings, Allen had to get the hell out to realize his vision, though even when he was at art school in LA, he was haunted by a cast of characters that he soon set to a song cycle and series of lithographs titled Juarez (and subsequently as a screenplay and sculptural and video installation).
Pressed up in minuscule quantities the same year that another Texan, Willie Nelson recorded his own spare song cycle, Redheaded Stranger, Juarez was an outlier even on the “outlaw country” scene: a hand-darned film noir that alludes to the fall of the Aztec Empire, Jesus, motel sex, and the purgatory that is the Rio Grande border. It's now regarded as a touchstone in alt-country but even still, it has more in common with Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, Mexican folk art, and Terrence Malick’s Badlands than anything in the country genre. And while Juarez has been reissued a few times over the decades, only with Paradise of Bachelors’ deluxe new reissue are Allen’s peculiar visuals again wedded with the music.
Now Allen is more prominently known as a sculptor, painter, and conceptual artist who has been awarded NEA grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship, to where his songwriting takes a backseat to these other practices. But Juarez retains its kick 40 years on. Centered around Allen’s by-turns barrelhouse and contemplative piano playing and his Texas twang (with glints of mandolin, pedal steel, maracas), Allen tells the story of two couples—one a sailor on shore leave with a Tijuana prostitute, the other a pachuco with his girlfriend—and how their encounter ends in bloodshed.
His way with the ivory and his coyote howl of a voice can best be appreciated on the six-minute “Cortez Sail,” seguing from seemingly unconnected scenes in a manner that approaches fine cinema: a rainy highway out of Los Angeles; the landing of Cortez in Mexico; an APB for an outlaw on the run in Colorado, a gun in his lap. Allen is impressionistic and cinematic in his details, such as the image of lightning that tears clouds and then closes that tear in that same instant.
His sparse yet driving music and the trenchant visual work accompanying are noteworthy elements of Allen’s four decades as an artist, but what stands out in revisiting Juarez now is the stunning poetry of the lines themselves. Allen’s words are a piquant kick throughout: raunchy, pithy, and richly redolent. Of course there are quirky lines like “Today’s rainbow is tomorrow’s tamale” at the end of “Radio…And Real Life” that brings a chuckle every time, as does a fantasy about a tryst in the desert, which includes “anal with whipped cream” as jackalopes look on.
But other lines quiver with a raw vision rarely heard in folk or country. On the rollicking “Border Palace,” Allen yowls how “my skinny body slip[s] like a knife into her perfume,” while the sweet “Honeymoon in Cortez” features the image of the TV’s glow glimpsed between toes. And on “There Oughta Be a Law Against Southern California,” Allen threatens with a real ripsnorter: “I’m gonna turn your asphalt back into brimstone.” Whether it’s the side of a cliff or on those tiny black rocks, Allen and his pencil leave quite the mark.


Actress’ sixth LP reaches deep into both Darren Cunningham’s clubbiest and most avant-garde impulses, exploring language and Afrofuturism while maintaining a musicality that holds the listener close.

AZD

Several regional dance music scenes feed into the work of Darren Cunningham, aka Actress. His singular, ever-evolving breed of experimental techno has precedents in Detroit, Chicago, and his native London, though none of these cities explain Cunningham. Rather, his music—which has grown conceptually weighty over his past few releases—imagines and perhaps even conjures another place, a new home for itself. In Kodwo Eshun’s *More Brilliant Than the Sun, *a collection of essays considering electronic music through an Afrofuturist lens, he writes “Everywhere, the ‘street’ is considered the ground and guarantee of all reality, a compulsory logic explaining all Black Music, conveniently mishearing antisocial surrealism as social realism.” The phrase “antisocial surrealism” is an excellent term for the broadly-drawn but inward-leaning world Actress creates.
On his last full-length, 2014’s Ghettoville, the place conjured was dusty and post-apocalyptic; the songs were intensely evocative, but also dragged under heavy bad-signal fuzz. That album’s press materials led many to believe it was Cunningham’s last release as Actress, but with AZD, he returns, though his persona has evolved. Its first single “X22RME” stoked hope that Cunningham might return to the project’s less abrasive, more club-oriented early sound, but it’s for the best that AZD (its title, pronounced “azid,” an anagram for Cunningham’s childhood nickname Daz) forges ahead on its intensely contemporary path.
While AZD moves between modes and styles, reaching deep into both Cunningham’s clubbiest and most avant-garde impulses, it maintains a clarity of vision. With the fuzz of Ghettoville dialed back a bit, the tracks’ skeletal structures come into relief: it’s generally easy to hear the distinct components of each and to meditate on the album’s  juxtapositions. Actress’ plaintive music-box melodies and shuffling beats can loop unchanging for a pop song’s length. “UNTITLED 7” combines a tense synthesized-string passage with a sticky ascending bassline; halfway through, the strings are traded for hi-hats, a small change that relocates the track entirely. “FANTASYNTH” loops a liquid melody over the crunchy pulse of a beat, with some tinny, whirling sounds moving between.
The late New York artist and musician Rammellzee, sampled in “CYN,” looms over AZD. And his language-building (or language-deconstructing) projects seem a particularly useful point of reference. Rammellzee’s “Gothic Futurism” manifesto drew a link between medieval monks and graffiti artists, positing the latter as regaining some multi-dimensional power in the Roman alphabet that, he thought, had been previously quashed by the development of Western culture. Though Cunningham uses words sparingly, mostly in partially-lodged samples, he’s also concerned with the limiting and liberatory possibilities of language. If we think of the structure of a song as itself a vernacular language—guiding us, in the case of dance music, through the builds and drops of a track—Cunningham then develops his own forms, sinking us deep into a soundscape through relentless repetition, and overlaying that space with alternate ideas so that we’re stretched in a few directions at once.
Cunningham’s structures also disintegrate, and those moments of collapse are key. One of AZD’s stated themes is chrome, that highly reflective plating that has intense black-and-white contrasts. Little about this album is aesthetically crisp. Cunningham’s deliberate use of hiss gives the lovely impression that parts of these tracks are playing through an old car stereo—and, more broadly, contributes a sense of space outside of the neutral confines of the club. But when tracks come undone, it’s precipitated by metallic elements breaking apart. “DANCING IN THE SMOKE” maintains a churning pace, a sampled voice instructing or observing: “Dance, hear my record spin.” As another vocal sample interjects to repeat the phrase “the future,” sharp atonal accents pierce through aimlessly. This leads into “FAURE IN CHROME,” which came out of his collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra earlier this year. Passages from Romantic composer Gabriel Fauré’s “Requiem” are interlaid with glitchy squeals, which erode the melancholic tones to reveal new frequencies below.
But for all its artfully-deployed discordance, AZD maintains a musicality that holds the listener close. Sometimes this comes through in more danceable techno moments, like the single “X22RME” or the 80s-leaning synth-driven track “RUNNER,”; elsewhere, it’s in the  emotive minimalist breaks of “FALLING RIZLAS” or “THERE'S AN ANGEL IN THE SHOWER.” Cunningham participates in a futurist tradition, following an arc set by artists and writers like Rammellzee and Eshun. But that futurism isn’t predictive, something yet to come; rather, his combination of science fictions, music histories, and socio-spatial realities feels deliriously adjacent to the world we’re listening to it in.


The New York singer-songwriter deftly captures indie-pop longing, though her musical gestures can feel a bit lifeless.

Remember the Silver

Online, thirsty people take masochism to delightful extremes. They honk for their crushes to punch them in the face, steamroll them with a car, or batter them with a 16" cast-iron skillet. New York singer-songwriter Emily Yacina makes this type of boiling, uneven desire sound prosaic: “Yeah I need you to swallow me,” she sings mildly over bobbing chord progressions on “Arcades & Highways,” as if rattling off a grocery list or picking lint off of a sweater. The mousy and withdrawn indie-pop on Remember the Silver, her new album, rests on this crooked pairing. On one hand, there’s a longing so all-consuming that it threatens to extinguish her; on the other, a dry and often listless delivery.
The title of the album originates from a Dana Redfield book about alien abduction. Like a UFO, Yacina implies, love can disappear in an instant, but it was real; you must remember how it felt. And so, Remember the Silver dwells on these tender ache of romance, at once swooning with promises to “wait forever” and whimpering at lost intimacies. Wisps of past loves slip between her fingers: She imagines them on the beach, on 96th Street, in her bedroom. “Time is a silk web tangled in pleas/I choke to move on,” she admits over muted, scratchy guitars in “Bleachers.”
But who is she straining to move on from? The sources of her anguish are as blank as paper dolls; it’s like they’re not real people, but only closed-off figments of her memory. The closest we get to specificity are gestures to “the most perfect face” or “all the little things you’d say to cheer me up.” Instead, her lyrics tend toward flat lines of monosyllabic words, vague and impressionistic notes bound up in juvenile rhyme schemes. On “Secret Drawers,” she concocts a spell to lure in her crush: “With a drop of blood, I say your name/Like I knew it would, it makes a stain.” On “Better Off,” she tackles self-delusion with fairy tale references to birds singing and prayers to the sky. Her attempts at profundity devolve into fluff: “I feel my angels stretch me soft/Whisper to myself that I’m better off.”
Of course, even the most seemingly understated, opaque lines can be rescued and imbued with larger meaning. “Southern Sky” by frequent collaborator (Sandy) Alex G, on which Yacina contributes gentle vocals, spins in her same universe of swallowed-down emotional realities. The two artists share a language: dreams and skies, blues and greens. But the vivid landscape of “Southern Sky,” with its ensemble of wheezing violins, tambourines, and jaunty piano keys, makes a simple observation like “You and me/These are titles I can hardly speak” ache with nostalgia. By contrast, the emotions in Remember the Silver feel weakly brewed; the slow-moving, monotonous arrangements do little to reveal any expressive subtlety. Yacina’s papery singing rarely elevates above a murmur, often blending into the dinky and minimal instrumentation: some drums, some lightly pawed-at guitars. Occasionally, there is a sprinkle of trombone or electronic whirrs like a quickening heartbeat. But mostly, everything is rendered in the same pallid shade.
Remembering that you are a young woman with real, unregulated emotions is mortifying; it can make you want to eject yourself straight into the mouth of a great white shark. As I listened, I kept searching for a sharper, more complex female subjectivity—a perspective to match Frankie Cosmos’ weird and existential wit, Sidney Gish’s offbeat self-deprecation, or Soccer Mommy’s snarling cool. I wanted a deeper sense of how slippery, heady, and frightening new love can be, at a time when young women have turned out in droves to describe that experience beautifully. There are refreshing glimpses at the mundane humiliations of having a crush on songs like “Only,” whose sly opening line—“Desexualize my soul/I want to be a piece of paper”—scans as a more composed way of saying “fuck my life.” And Yacina’s trembling moans on “96th Street,” manage to bathe the listener in a quiet grief, despite the song’s generic lyrics. But as a whole, Remember the Silver is crumbly and pale like a bouquet of dried flowers. I wish I’d been given more to remember.


The producer known as Ahnnu is affiliated with L.A.’s beat-music scene, but his sounds are swirling and gelatinous. Rhythms never unfold quite the way you might expect them to on his hypnotic new LP.

Special Forces

That the Los Angeles producer Leland Jackson tends to get lumped in with the so-called beat-music scene is partly a question of proximity: When the Richmond, Va., native moved out to LA, early in the decade, he linked up with Knxwledge and Mndsgn, musicians deeply entrenched in the city’s sampling-centric experimental hip-hop community. But the music Jackson records as Ahnnu rarely features much in the way of actual beats; you’d be hard-pressed to find anything as clear-cut as a boom-bap backbone in Ahnnu’s gelatinous swirls of sound. On 2013’s World Music, incidental scraps of piano and percussion tumble like agates in the tide, and easy-listening vibraphones pool in pastel puddles. The 2013 LP Battered Sphinx and 2015’s Perception slink closer to ambient music’s vaporous atmospheres, suffusing beat music’s repetition in elliptical tonal loops and the fuzzy gait of the runout groove.
His new album, Special Forces, is clearly related to its predecessors, but it also feels like a major step forward—in two opposing directions at once. On the one hand, rhythm and pulse are more deeply woven into the fabric of the music than we’re used to hearing from Ahnnu. Rather than a freeform sprawl, the music is ordered by a sense of deep structure, held together by properties that feel almost physical, like mass and gravity. At the same time, the album travels far from beat music’s percussive stomping ground.
Jackson has said that one technique that informed the record was attempting to make percussive tracks with only melodic sounds. It’s not a new idea for him: Way back in 2013, Jackson discussed his interest in moving away from drums. Across the 13-track, 35-minute album, there are almost no audible drums at all, save some loose-wristed tom rolls and scattered ride-cymbal hits on “Laughing,” a woozy album highlight fueled by bursts of clarinet. For rhythmic bite, he turns to gurgling synths, muted balloon squeaks, and the occasional blast of white noise, and much of the time, the forward drive comes from soft sounds, not hard ones. In the opening “Passing Through a Horizontal Slit,” thick, gloopy loops of tone churn like two adjacent boat engines bobbing in the waves, their interplay an impossibly complex equation. In “Senseless,” electronic insect chirps mark time against a backdrop of radiophonic fizz. “Two Squares” is a curved metal maze lined with dripping icicles, and “Pluck-jump-freeze” sounds like a chorus of rubbed wineglass rims tuned to an alien scale and played back at a fraction of its original speed. Honing in on his twin obsessions—hypnotic repetition and subaquatic sound design—the slowly spinning “Bubble Horn” is part Steve Reich and part whale song.
Adding to the music’s hypnotic qualities, ironically, is the fact that Jackson’s rhythms never unfold quite the way you might expect them to; that unpredictability has the way of pulling the listener even deeper into the music. Just listen to the slow shudders of “The Terrible One,” whose gravelly synths recall Actress, three or four discrete loops all spinning slowly out of sync. There’s no one master clock holding it all together, and the individual elements resist teasing out, collapsing into a wet, wooly tangle. The same could be said for the album as a whole: It flows together as one long piece of music, with longer, more composed pieces stitched together with 30- or 60-second sketches of abstract sound. There is no magnetic north once you’re inside its disorienting span.
Wherever Jackson has sourced his sounds from, your guess is as good as mine. “Laughing” reveals scraps of free-jazz drumming and what might be a sample of Jon Hassell’s chorused horn; the unstable waveforms and quavering pitches that predominate across the album suggest that Jackson may be sitting on a treasure trove of early electronic recordings from pioneers like Luc Ferrari and Tod Dockstader. Ultimately, though, the pleasure of this music isn’t so much trying to figure out where it comes from as where it takes you. Understated and counterintuitive, Special Forces exerts a powerful grip on the senses. Like any alien world, its gravity and its atmosphere are different from those of the planet we call home.


Did you know that one of Erykah Badu's collaborators made what could very rightly be called an opera about Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks? Well, he did. Composer Ted Hearne's productions have tackled George W. Bush and Katrina and now the tale of Manning and what led to her 25-year prison sentence. A complex, beautiful piece of theater, Hearne has pushed to make The Source succeed as a piece of music.

The Source

More than a few of the vicious old debates in "new classical" music have been settled. In 2015, a composer isn’t obliged to choose melodic minimalism over atonal complexity, or vice versa. If she wants to write something that "addresses the times," there’s no set aesthetic to follow. Execution is what the community of listeners has (generally) pledged to judge.
You can hear this relatively new, pan-stylistic freedom quite clearly in the music of Ted Hearne. As a political animal, he’s a liberal populist; as a composer, he’s a fan of preexisting texts and musical maximalism. His 2010 protest song-cycle Katrina Ballads set real life excerpts from an American tragedy—think of George W. Bush’s famous assessment "Brownie you’re doing a heck of a job"—to a richly textured musical backdrop that blended jazz and classical vocal approaches with aggrieved electric guitar and frenetic chamber scoring. In 2013, Hearne provided Erykah Badu with well-judged orchestrations of songs from New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War), which Badu performed live with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. (We’re still waiting for a proper studio recording of those.)
With this album, Hearne gives us a distillation of an experimental stage work about Chelsea Manning (and WikiLeaks) that was presented in 2014 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Composing once again atop found texts—including logs of Manning’s chats and leaked government documents that were selected and edited by the novelist Mark Doten—Hearne’s latest project gives us some of the composer’s most intriguing music yet.
In the song "s/as boy/as a boy", Hearne scores one of Manning’s haunting pre-arrest concerns—"i wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life/ if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me.../ plastered all over the world press.../ as boy"—by way of a somber cello-and-guitar riff that is frequently interrupted by percussive slaps. (The discrete instrumental parts swirl together with an affecting unease, circa Manning’s line, "I'm just kind of drifting now.")
Another highlight is "Julian in a Nutshell", in which Doten creates lyrics from shards of questions delivered to Julian Assange by reporters. At first, Hearne pairs Doten’s documentary cut-up fragments with airy individual string and vocal lines. As the journalistic narrative is better established—demanding that Assange define himself as either a "journalist", an "anarchist", or the victim of a "smear campaign"—the vocal lines settle into sunnier harmonies. It’s the sound of the press finding an angle, though Hearne’s subtly clattering orchestration isn’t as sold on the quality of the conversation.
Inevitably, this audio-only version of The Source also omits some key aspects of the "multimedia oratorio", occasionally rendering an abstract production even more conceptually opaque. In director Daniel Fish’s filmed excerpts from the original staging, we can see that The Source originally included a chorus of silent observers that surrounded the audience, on video-projection screens. Looming large over the proceedings, that visual chorus adds a measure of ghostly gravity to the long chunks of leaked military cables that Hearne’s actors recite through vocal filters.
These bureaucratic passages certainly deserve grimly robotic accompaniment. (Think of lyrics like: "An IED detonation was reported by C co 1-327 INF to Task force SPARTAN, in the Salah Ad Din Province, Ad Dawr, vicinity. 38S LD 8930 1490.") But on the album version, these long stretches of war-euphemism can wear thin. Without the ability to conjure the silent witnesses on a recording, Hearne instead references the wider culture by inserting drops from pop songs. At best, these feel unnecessary. At worst, they’re distracting: Liz Phair’s "Girls! Girls! Girls!" isn’t contemporaneous with the WikiLeaks era, nor is its consideration of gender politics particularly relevant to Chelsea Manning’s worries about being misgendered while serving some future prison sentence. This version of The Source could have benefitted from some stronger editing, though when it connects, it can still resonate as some of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory—from any genre.


Sergio Sayeg’s unhurried nylon string guitar and softly danceable rhythms put a smooth, minimalist flourish on the vibrant musical heritage of Brazil.

Estrela Acesa

Sessa’s terminally chill music sounds like he’s been lounging on the beach or just smoked a joint before entering the studio. Yet on his second album, Estrela Acesa (Burning Star), the São Paulo-born artist moves past the honeymoon phase of his 2019 debut to express both passion and pain. Paying tribute to the music of Brazil in the classic styles of Caetano Veloso or Antônio Carlos Jobim, Sessa augments his nylon string guitar, softly danceable rhythms, and airy vocal harmonies with understated orchestral arrangements. There aren’t many contemporary artists replicating the sounds of tropicália, bossa nova, or MPB as immaculately as Sessa does, but he favors minimalist flourishes over the madcap approach of a band like Os Mutantes. Singing in Portuguese, Sessa’s unhurried voice hovers in space like his hero Leonard Cohen.
Sergio Sayeg (aka Sessa) grew up in São Paulo’s isolated Sephardic Jewish community, beginning his musical education in the synagogue. In high school, he joined the band Garotas Suecas (Swedish Girls) before his father’s work brought the family to New York City. Throughout the mid-2010s, Sessa joined Israeli rocker Yonatan Gat on bass, while spending his days working at the East Village record shop Tropicália in Furs. It was here that he immersed himself in the vibrant musical heritage of Brazil, as his debut album Grandeza gradually came together. Over six or seven different recording sessions between Yonatan Gat’s globe-trotting tours, Sessa gathered whoever was available to join him in the studio with only the briefest of rehearsals.
In comparison to the patchwork of Sessa’s first album, Estrela Acesa is silky smooth. Its 12 short songs were primarily recorded on the island of Ilhabela, off the coast of São Paulo, where percussionist and co-producer Biel Basile set up a studio early in the pandemic. The album’s orchestral arrangements by Simon Hanes and Belarusian composer Alex Chumak flash back to the subtle psychedelic sound of Arthur Verocai’s 1972 debut. This is perhaps most evident on Estrela Acesa’s melancholy instrumental, “Helena,” with shivering strings, timpani swells, and wordless vocals swirling around a gently strummed guitar. As the song drifts towards its conclusion, it feels like watching ocean waves lapping onto the sand.
The mood is so copacetic that, without a working knowledge of Portuguese or access to the translated lyrics, it’s almost impossible to know what Sessa is singing about. On the breakup song “Que Lado Você Dorme?” (“On What Side Do You Sleep?”), he intones “I love you, I hate you, and everything in between” without a trace of emotion. “Dor Fodida” (“Fucking Pain”) similarly bottles its feelings with pissed-off lyrics about commonplace struggles delivered softly and sweetly. “Pele da Esfera” (“Skin Sphere”) settles into a winding groove like the dance party it describes, though Sessa’s words sound more romantically direct on the page than they do coming out of his mouth.
“Canção da Cura” (“Song of Healing”) is a breakup song as well, with a bubbling pace that matches its lyrics about “consuming” a loved one “to the sound of the drums.” Sessa returns to the healing properties of sound on both “Música” and “Você É a Música” (“You Are Music”), explaining how songs fill the “head, flesh, heart.” Many artists have explored this kind of meta-commentary (including Cohen), but Sessa might be the first to call music “the sluttiest country.” On the closing title track, there is finally a small lilt in his voice as he shares a feeling of contentment (“One day without another without end/They say love’s like that”). The languid sound of Estrela Acesa is certainly consistent, but it could use a few more moments of heart-on-sleeve emotion to make Sessa’s euphoria stand out from his ache.


Juice WRLD’s second posthumous album attempts to be more of the same, highlighting the best and worst qualities of a generational talent gone too soon.

Fighting Demons

The most affecting part of the first annual Juice WRLD Day celebration was when his former DJ, Mike P, went out into the crowd to talk to fans about how the late Chicago rapper changed their lives. They said they discovered Juice in high school and credit him for helping them overcome depression and mental illness. One fan showed off a tattoo of lyrics to the song “Life’s a Mess” on her arm. Several were on the verge of tears while sharing their memories. “Whenever I need a high, all I need is to play some Juice WRLD,” one said as the crowd of thousands erupted.
Though he’d been creating music since at least 2015, the impact Juice left on the world within only a year and a half—his breakout single “Lucid Dreams” debuted on May 4, 2018, and he passed away from an overdose on December 8, 2019—is nothing short of remarkable. He utilized rap, pop-punk, and emo just as that combination became the go-to formula for a new generation of rising SoundCloud stars. His songs were often juvenile but always honest; they were the nexus for his raw unfiltered emotion.
The universal appeal of Juice WRLD’s music never came at the expense of abandoning his rap roots or rebranding himself as an artist. The reverence he paid to the struggles that he and his fans endured has persisted in the music released since his death. 2020’s Legends Never Die largely avoided the pitfalls of the average posthumous rap album: Most songs used felt as close to complete as possible, features were kept to a minimum, and its promotion was tame and respectful. Fighting Demons—the second posthumous Juice album—can’t necessarily claim that third part, since its release is tied to both an Amazon-sponsored concert and an HBO documentary. But musically, Demons is attempting to be more of the same, highlighting the best and worst qualities of a generational talent gone too soon.
Demons was culled from the same pool of thousands of intense and deeply personal songs Juice recorded before his death. His voice is expansive and tumbles through melodies and raps about life passing him by in a haze of drugs, suicidal thoughts, and thoughts of living forever through his own reckless actions. At one point, on “Already Dead,” he admits his fans and his music are the only things keeping him alive. It never becomes any less harsh or challenging to hear Juice exorcise these demons, and there’s value in the way his bluntness continues to connect with listeners. At its best, on songs like “Wandered to LA” and “Doom,” the hurt feels close, like you can touch it. At its worst, moments can become bland (“Feline”) or descend into punchline silliness that doesn’t suit the heaviness of the material (“From My Window”). None of the songs sound like demos scraped from the bottom of the barrel, but there’s little connecting them to each other outside of the fact that they were previously unreleased.
Both Legends and Demons were put together by his estate and collaborators after he passed, but Legends was a well-defined statement about Juice’s legacy; its intent and purpose were clear. For all the pomp and circumstance, Demons feels like little more than a collection of songs put together for its own sake. The songs sound complete but there’s no rhyme or reason to their sequencing. The few features are solid—Justin Bieber’s coda on “Wandered to LA” and BTS member Suga’s verse on “Girl of My Dreams” being clear standouts—but unnecessary, names tacked onto an old vision board. No individual song tarnishes Juice’s reputation, but there’s no defining moment—no crazy posthumous verse or unearthed profundity about Juice as a person—to latch onto, either.
You can fill a posthumous album with good songs, but if there’s no reason for it to exist, then its only purpose is to sell an image. Mac Miller’s Circles was at least a companion piece to 2018’s Swimming that he was actively working on before his sudden death. Ditto the late Philadelphia rapper Chynna, whose very solid posthumous album Drug Opera went overlooked this year. Those albums had purpose and vision. Fighting Demons is too polished to be considered a total flub and its heart is in the right place, but it’s difficult to look at it as anything more than another product falling off a long assembly line powered by dead rappers.

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The L.A. rapper teams with producer ewonee for a lean and low-stakes album, but its strength is in its brevity.

Yungmorpheus / ewonee: Thumbing Thru Foliage

Thumbing Thru Foliage

Yungmorpheus has been kicking around Los Angeles for a few years now and has come to exemplify the sound of the eccentrics that reside in the city’s subterranean bomb shelters—the sound of Madlib, of Earl Sweatshirt. The blissful, dimly lit Thumbing Thru Foliage is already Morpheus’ second album of the year after the very fine States of Precarity. But unlike previous Morph albums, Thumbing Thru Foliage is entirely produced by ewonee, a native of Mount Vernon and disciple of DJ Premier and DJ Ron G, who makes chilly beat tapes and posts them to Bandcamp. Together, the pair have created an elemental rap record: lots of casual rhymes—no hooks—over shards of old-soul vinyl. At less than half an hour, Thumbing Thru Foliage is lean and low-stakes, but its strength is in its brevity.
ewonee finds grubby samples with a distinct character and hardly dresses them up to create the beats. On “The Rat Race” and “Sovereignty,” Morph raps over vocal loops that sound like they’re being played through an inch of dust. There’s the one-two punch of “Middle Passage,” a slick boom-bap jam, and “Harbour Blvd” which harnesses something that sounds like retro sci-fi to form a DOOM-style beat. “Ride Dirty” features a gritty funk bassline and twangy 1970s-style guitars. It’s easy to imagine most producers discarding the neat drum fills of the track, but ewonee harnesses the inventive percussion to really put the button on Morpheus’ rhymes.
Yungmorpheus isn’t what you’d call a powerhouse rapper; his permanently deflated voice hangs in the air like a cloud of smoke. Morph is the guy still sitting in the corner at the end of the party with the laid-back demeanor, a little more weed-resistant than most, getting chatty. His name, in fact, is said to have been inspired by two things: an old set of circular sunglasses similar to the eyewear sported by The Matrix character, and because at every function “he’s smoked out, talking mad shit.” In true stream-of-consciousness style, Morph will drop a bar about privilege and oppression one second and before completing the thought admit he’s sold fake molly. On “Table of One,” he raps about eating smoked fish, reveals a penchant for Bay Area legend Mac Mall, and muses on the pleasure violent dreams give him. Enlightened moments emerge through a conversational haze so quickly you might miss them.
There is some gentle gesturing to L.A. rap history. On “Johnnie Cochran,” Morph sets his voice to a deeper, more menacing style that resembles MC Eiht. It’s also the closing track and ends somewhat abruptly, meaning the album kind of falls off a cliff. But the point here isn’t some filmic arc—it’s to put a bunch of entertaining raps over head-noddin’ beats and move on quickly. There’s a thin line between off-the-cuff prolificness and shoddy workmanship. Yungmorpheus and ewonee never crash into the latter.

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The Andalusian singer’s debut brushes electronic beats and R&B melodies over a flamenco canvas. It is a masterful meditation on ancestral struggle that looks back to find a way forward.

Ultrabelleza

Growing up in the sierra of Andalusia, María José Llergo gained an education in the musical discipline of flamenco, surrounded by the community and spirituality of the people who helped create it. Her skill and technique are exceptional, evidence of her classical training at the Catalonia School of Music, which she attended after leaving her hometown of Pozoblanco. While flamenco is known for being technically complex and often mythologized under the domain of lone icons, in the lyrics and the expansive atmospheres Llergo crafts, she honors the genre’s heart. The folkloric style was consolidated in the region of Andalusia, and it has served as a vehicle for Romani migrants who have faced rampant discrimination in Spain to voice their struggles.
That resilient ethos appears in Llergo’s own Romani heritage and Andalusian upbringing, a vital component of the music that is too often lost in the flamenco that becomes most commercially successful outside of Spain. Her vision, this time with a more explicitly experimental bent toward electronic music and R&B, succeeds because it builds from this context instead of shedding it. Llergo’s full-length debut Ultrabelleza, which translates to “ultra-beauty,” reflects a lyrical and musical command of the form that many spend decades trying to understand—and emulate.
Her first project, the 2020 EP Sanación (Spanish for “healing”), launched her as an avant force in the genre. Her commitment to the practice of healing is present in every element of the writing here. Lyrics feature recurring motifs of flying, wind, and water—symbols of purification and liberating movement. But these lofty images are grounded in discussion of the struggles with poverty and discrimination that she’s faced in her life. She lingers in propulsive beats and extended, reflective melismas, as if the music itself is an exercise in repair.
The album opens with a prayer to her grandmother played on a cassette; the sound of it loading into a tape deck transforms sublimely into the clatter of feet on the ground, a traditional zapateo that introduces the following track, “Aprendiendo a Volar.” On “La Puerta Está Abierta,” she sings of a childhood grief that may be difficult to remember or recognize. Singing is the portal from then to now: “Cuando se abra la puerta, cuando se alce mi voz/El aire cruza la sierra de esta habitación.” (“When the door opens, when I raise my voice/The air crosses the sierra, from this room.”) On the standout “Superpoder,” she visualizes flying over overdue bills and neighborhood whispers that she’s “broken,” finding strength in the music that sustained her. She sings, “Aprendí a llorar cantando/Aprendí a cantar llorando.” (“I learned to cry while singing/I learned to sing while crying.”) At times, her warm voice literally reverberates against sleek drum machines and string sections, blending the timelines of past and present. As heavy as these introductory tracks are—they each feature a ghostly Hammond organ, which disappears as the album builds in intensity—they encapsulate the hope that exists on the other side. For Llergo, singing offers an opportunity to bear witness to healing in all of its incarnations.
Though this is only her debut album, she’s already embodied the archetype of the artist as creator and animator. Throughout the record, the act of creation becomes urgent, almost holy—a death-defying practice of survival. On the flashpoint “Visión y Reflejo,” she identifies herself as a killer of death, an all-seeing eye, flame and wax, and “the history of those who survived,” all over a copla-turned-bass-driven flow. “Rueda Rueda,” much like the rest of the record, turns on objects in revolution: repeated incantations, rotating wheels, the orbiting moon, world tours. This movement is the source of life in a literal sense; she says she will die if she stops spinning. That story of personal growth and forward motion is only amplified by the arrival of more polished, experimental beats across the record. Both aesthetically and lyrically, Ultrabelleza reflects a newfound conceptual complexity for Llergo.
The album’s reverence for flamenco history is never framed in opposition to its imagination for the future. “Novix” is a playful interlude and the most straightforward flamenco track on the album. It addresses the narrator’s boyfriend and girlfriend, using a traditional form to subvert dated and heteronormative family expectations. “Tanto Tiempo” interpolates the classic bolero “Sabor a Mí” against a backdrop of palmas, or hand claps. “Juramento” is a hand-to-heart oath between lovers, an image reminiscent of Chavela Vargas’ “Macorina.” She places these styles in a fresh context, using them to address the present-day forms of oppression her Romani ancestors faced. These touchpoints are gorgeous reminders that liberation has been the project of folk music for centuries, a language preceding the call for a future of justice.
In a recent interview with Vogue Spain, Llergo said, “Para mí, los andaluces son luces que andan.” (“For me, Andalusians are lights that walk.”) The Spanish singer knows that her roots are a beacon—that by reaching back into the sounds of her forebears, she may find a way forward. Even then, she is still rooted firmly in the present, illustrating that constant reinvention—and the hard work of living through it—carries its own potential to create everlasting life.


The pop singer’s second album captures the thrilling feelings of experiencing love, but it becomes so universalized that it blurs it out of focus.

Romance

Love is an ambitious concept and Camila Cabello has spent the latter half of the year testifying that she’s in it. Her second album, Romance, follows the same pristine pop cues of her 2018 debut Camila and imbues them with a vision about love so universalized it blurs it out of focus.
There’s love and there’s the performance of it, and Cabello is motivated by both. A Spotify playlist called “The Romance Experience,” interspersed with spoken tracks in which the 22-year-old singer discusses the experiences of love, sex, and heartbreak that inspired the album, sums up the album’s conceit: to explain a familiar experience rather than trust you to feel it yourself. Romance is to romance as Rory Gilmore is to journalism; its depiction is a simple kind of complicated, punctuated with acceptable failures, a simplification that reassures you that your life might be better if you were more beautiful and moral.
This illusion is part of Romance’s appeal. And there are many genuine glimpses into Cabello’s experience as a young woman navigating love and sex within that fantasy. She succeeds in tracks that capture love’s fleeting minutiae. “Shameless” begins as a hesitant statement, the flashpoint at which a young woman steps out of herself to embrace love’s abandon. The howl of her refrain—“Show me you’re shameless”—is equally a challenge to oneself as it is to another. By “Cry for Me,” a bright spot on Romance’s fizzling second half, Cabello is long past the point of shameless, leaning into a self-love that demands someone else’s tears in place of her own.
The trouble comes when Cabello seems obligated to cover the waterfront of love songs rather than push further on any one feeling. Her effortless “that’s funny” over twinkling acoustic guitar on “Should’ve Said It” feels written for a different project than “Living Proof,” which is driven by the stomping rhythm of stylized female empowerment à la “Fight Song.” Even when motivated by a compelling story, like the guilt of harboring feelings for someone else on “Bad Kind of Butterflies,” the song itself often doesn’t match its pain or power.
Though the album’s biggest song, “Señorita,” inhabits Cabello’s real-life relationship with Shawn Mendes, it’s of a piece with 2017’s “Havana,” a similarly Latin-influenced jaunt. Just as the “Havana” video was structured around a regular girl’s dream of starring in a telenovela, “Señorita” stars a waitress who dreams of a bad boy in a leather jacket. But the flirtation at the surface of “Havana” veiled nostalgic romance for a birthplace signaled in each note. “Señorita,” which also appeared on the deluxe version of Mendes’ self-titled album this year, is a harmless gesture toward Latin-ness for exotic effect, rather than a needle-mover. At worst, this impulse results in Ed Sheeran’s “South of the Border,” on which Cabello featured this year: a pastiche of disembodied “Brown eyes/caramel thighs,” misplaced flutes, and Cardi B’s “You never lived until you risk your life” that points to the underlying callousness of the music industry’s embrace of the “Latin” sound. Cabello’s willingness to assist in its caricature elsewhere distracts from the otherwise interesting Spanish-classical and Santana-esque riffs on Romance.
The production of Romance is inconsistent. “Feel It Twice” uses gentle minor-key guitar plucking and castanets that allow Cabello’s melody and dynamic voice to fill the space with the hurt of hurting someone else. The R&B ballad “This Love” builds off the kind of lilting ’50s dreamland riff deployed by so many saccharine love songs and repurposes it for a stream-of-consciousness attempt to process an emotionally abusive relationship: “You know how to fuck [pause] me up, then make it OK.” But at 14 songs, the album leaves too much space where Cabello is overshadowed. Even as they are ostensibly meant to show off Cabello’s range, the overproduced “Easy” and “Dream of You” lose her incredibly skilled voice in needless Auto-Tune. (The latter, for instance, shortchanges Camila’s range with a breathy “dree-HEEM” in the chorus, a note she can reach in organic, full soprano.)
The closer, “First Man,” is Romance’s outlier: an unpretentious piano ballad dedicated to Cabello’s father that transforms the driveway of her childhood home into a runway to the end of girlhood. It’s the only song on the album that stretches its conception of romance beyond the boy-girl material we’ve heard so many times before, and it’s easily the most emotionally affecting track. By the end of “First Man,” it’s hard not to wish that vulnerability would have arrived sooner. The easy ripple and control of Cabello’s unedited voice and her story as a Cuban-born, first-generation American pop star don’t need an arcane concept to feel complete. But maybe that’s what some romances teach you.

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The singer and guitarist’s debut solo album offers an introspective blend of R&B, hip-hop, & lo-fi pop but feels reluctant to claim the spotlight.

Apollo XXI

Though seldom acknowledged, there’s long been a kinship between hip-hop and bedroom pop, two genres whose music is often given life by bored teenagers in home studios cobbled together from egg cartons, bedsheets, and cracked copies of FL Studio. There are clear differences between the two styles, of course, but the aesthetic features of DIY hip-hop and lo-fi pop are often products of necessity. Steve Lacy’s music is where those two musical traditions intersect.
Lacy’s only 21, but he’s put together an accomplished resume as a member of the Internet and a contributor to tracks by Kendrick Lamar, Vampire Weekend, Blood Orange, Mac Miller, and Solange. Lacy got interested in music as a kid through Guitar Hero, which encouraged him to start playing a real guitar. He’s gotten a lot of attention not just for his young age, but for his distinctly youthful method of making music. Lacy started out making beats on his iPhone, and that’s how he produced almost all of his 2017 debut EP Steve Lacy’s Demo, as well as “Pride” from Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN.
Apollo XXI is less funky than Lacy’s work with the Internet, operating in a relaxed indie-pop mode that makes it obvious why Ezra Koenig would keep Lacy in his Rolodex. Lead guitar dominates as much as bass, if not more, with gentle synths along the edges. Lacy’s voice is often laid-back, sometimes lethargic; other times it gently ascends to the higher plane alluded to in the album’s title. There’s more crispness to his delivery when he’s rapping, like on “Outro Freestyle/4ever,” but the straight-up hip-hop here isn’t his most compelling mode.
As Lacy has a history of recording vocals on his phone, sometimes words slip by, uncertain and unnoticed. But there are moments when his intentions are clearer. The album’s clear centerpiece is the second track, “Like Me,” which marks Lacy’s coming out not only as a solo musician but also as a bisexual man, which he has discussed in interviews but never explicitly in song. In a spoken introduction, Lacy reveals that he had felt timid about touching on the subject of his sexuality. “I just want to relate to everyone,” he says, before launching into the song: “I only feel energy/I see no gender.” It’s a fairly straightforward plea for connection and acceptance; over and over again, Lacy asks how many of his listeners have struggled like he has. As if in front of a mirror, he uses the repetitive plea of the song’s chorus—“How many out there just like me?”—as a way to try on his identity and see if it feels comfortable, turning the conventional, hook-based structure of pop music songwriting into a powerful method of introspection.
In spirit, “Like Me” could have been the album’s first track, a proper introduction to Lacy’s ambitions, anxieties, and identity. But it also sounds like a closer, with several clear tonal shifts that turn the song into a multi-textured pop suite. After the catchy, chorus-heavy first third of the song, we shift into a trippy, Thundercat-like instrumental; then silence, a musical sequence centered around a glockenspiel, then silence again before Lacy, his guitar, and a gentle drum pattern serenade us for the song’s final minute. Beyond the serious themes addressed in its lyrics, the curious structure of “Like Me” is further proof of Lacy’s skill, even if his artistic voice is still developing.
“Like Me” features a verse from the vocalist DAISY, which I admire in intent—Lacy answers his call for relatability by bringing in another artist to share their own similar journey to sexual and personal self-acceptance. But it’s also the only credited appearance from a guest vocalist, and Lacy’s quest for togetherness needs more than just one more extra voice. That’s ultimately the problem with Apollo XXI: For an album whose highlight is a song about the urge to extend beyond the limits of your own experience and find solace in collective acceptance, it all feels surprisingly timid. Apollo XXI is centered on the interior self, but it’s not self-centered—it just seems a little weighed down by Lacy’s still-palpable reluctance to claim the spotlight his talents warrant.


Gold & Grey

It is intimidating thing to sit down with a new Baroness record and try to understand its contours. There’s just so much to take into account. This Savannah DIY metal band turned scattered progressive rock collective are an entirely different beast than they were back when Red came out in 2007 and every bike messenger in West Philly was rocking their shirts; or when Blue dropped in 2009 and hipsters caught wind of their promise; or when 2012’s Yellow & Green elevated them to a new tier of progressive acclaim; or when 2015’s Grammy-nominated Purple presented a band who had quite literally been through hell, and returned bearing iridescent riffs. With their fifth album, Gold & Grey, the shape-shifting outfit hands us the latest frayed chapter in their evolution, its words and notes illuminated like a medieval manuscript. Demons still hide in the margins, but divinity radiates.
Baroness have lived many musical lives since the band first formed in 2003, and cheated death in 2012, when a terrible bus crash derailed their ascent and led to the departure of two members, drummer Allen Blickle and bassist Matt Maggioni. Seven years on from that traumatic accident, they’ve experienced a great deal of healing and growth—both planned and unexpected. This process was first explored on Purple, a barely-closed wound of an album that concealed a certain rawness of spirit, and now, on Gold & Grey, it’s mellowed into acceptance, the scars still prominent, but smoothed with time.
The addition of new guitarist and backing vocalist Gina Gleason completes a lineup that includes bassist Nick Jost, drummer Sebastian Thomson, and vocalist and guitarist John Baizley (an accomplished artist who’s equally deft with a paintbrush as a sheet of composition paper). It can’t be easy to be the new kid in a band with so much history behind it, but Gleason is a natural fit. She makes her presence felt from the onset in the album’s ambitious guitar work; her vocals on tracks like the strange, dreamy album closer “Pale Sun” add both lightness and depth, and harmonize beautifully with Baizley's earnest croon.
Gold & Grey is not quite a double album, though it sure flirts with the idea. Seventeen tracks span just over an hour, with a startling amount of variance between them. Synthesizers play an important role, but so does old-fashioned improvisation; here, Baroness convince their disparate influences to gel beautifully without lapsing into the homogeneity (or self-indulgent drudgery) that remains a common defect of long, proggy albums. The second half is noticeably quieter and spookier than the more bombastic first half, easing down gently into more melodic and even acoustic fare. Post-rock, space rock, prog rock, psychedelic rock, grungy Alice in Chains-eyeing hard rock—it’s all here, and since it’s Baroness, it works.
The album narrowly avoided being dubbed Orange; as a color, orange signifies oversaturation, an upbeat brightness verging on mania. The final title is far more fitting, as Gold & Grey is none of those things; its palette is muted, a muddle of earth and sky tones. Its lighter moments are sunny but not blinding; its tempo generally treads a middle road, even on more sprightly tracks like “Throw Me an Anchor,” with its splash of noisy synth, or in the barely restrained acid freakout of “Can Oscura.”
Baroness have never been afraid of a big rock riff, and they’ve made room for radio-ready songs like opening track “Front Towards Enemy” and “Broken Halo” (underpinned by an immensely satisfying classic heavy metal stomp) on an album littered with stranger offerings. More outré songs like the gorgeous, raw-boned acoustic ballad “I’d Do Anything,” the ghostly electronic wash of “Blankets of Ash,” and the dewy minimalism of “Assault on East Falls” add texture and balance, ensuring that, while Baroness have certainly matured, they’re still plenty weird. Spitfire percussion on “Seasons” hints to the band’s more metallic past; one riff sounds like a spiritual cousin to “March of the Fire Ants,” by fellow Georgia metal turned prog luminaries Mastodon. “Pale Sun,” with its space rock phasers and epic vocal harmonies, feels like both a primal scream and a sign of what’s to come.
All this is a far cry from the Baroness of a decade ago, churning out sludgy doom salvos in sweaty basements. If you’d cryogenically frozen a fan from back then and handed them a copy of Gold & Grey upon defrost, they’d be more than a little confused. Fortunately, Baroness trust us to grow along with them.

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Originally composed for a pair of soundtracks, Qasim Naqvi’s expressive new LP toggles between pure electronic sound design and minimalist composition.

FILM

It has been a banner couple of years for synthesizer music of all stripes—both enveloping excursions like Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s multidimensional epic The Kid and stripped-down investigations like Alessandro Cortini’s focused, meditative Avanti. Qasim Naqvi’s Chronology, released a year ago, fit into the latter category: Its six exacting studies of tone color and stillness were composed and recorded entirely on a temperamental Moog Model D, an analog synthesizer from the early 1970s. The Model D, also known as the Minimoog, is monophonic, which means it can only play one note at a time. But its sounds are so rich, that constraint isn’t as limiting as you might expect. Instead of availing himself of the kinds of more traditionally musical ideas that are typically facilitated by chords, Naqvi approached his sounds like a sculptor, lavishing attention on his buzzing, glistening waveforms’ texture, heft, and sheen.
Those familiar with Naqvi’s work in the jazz trio Dawn of Midi may have been struck by one notable omission on Chronology. He is a formidable drummer capable of both quartz-powered motorik grooves and expressionistic detailing in the deepest corners of the rhythmic grid. But the ambient Chronology featured no rhythms at all, or at least none steadier than the brief explosions of fibrillation generated by microtonal harmonies hovering in close proximity.
Naqvi’s new album, FILM, represents a step up in complexity. In addition to upgrading his Moog from a capricious ’70s model with a mind of its own to a more stable contemporary reissue of the instrument, he fleshed out his setup with an ARP Odyssey synthesizer and a modular rig. The result is a palette even richer than before: an array of coppery drones, gravelly bass, and sleek, impenetrable reverb marbled with the ghosts of sounds it has swallowed. The move to a modular system, with its emphasis on cycles and sequences, has allowed him finally to wade into rhythmic waters on a few tracks driven by steady pulses and rippling arpeggios. FILM is also, curiously, a more noticeably musical album than its predecessor: The opening “The Cast” is led by a stately bass progression that helps frame its wild backdrop of quivering sinewaves and sad foghorn bleats; “Sputnik” follows a curious, major-key chord progression along its graceful interstellar path. There’s a touch of melancholy retro sentiment to the latter, but the slippery tunings infuse its otherwise homey harmonies with a distinctly alien air.
The music on FILM was originally composed for a pair of soundtracks: The first six tracks were made to accompany Naeem Mohaiemen’s three-channel video installation “Two Meetings and a Funeral”; the final four are taken from the score to Mohaiemen’s film Tripoli Cancelled, the fictional account of a man stranded in an abandoned airport for 10 years. It’s easy to see how this material would work in a visual context. Influenced both by the films’ ruined architectural spaces and by classic, synthesizer-driven film scores of the 1980s, FILM toggles between pure electronic sound design and minimalist composition; it strikes a balance between suggestive scene-setting and subtle drama. It’s possible to detect traces of John Carpenter’s ominous example in brooding miniatures like “The Cast,” while the tumbling arpeggios of “Aligned” recall the playful, liquid pinging of Laurie Spiegel’s “Appalachian Grove.”
Mostly, though, the focus is on Naqvi’s expressive and unpredictable approach to shaping sound. In “The Cast,” small eruptions of tremolo gradually expand to fill the frame, a shift in scale that suggests fractal patterns. In “Algiers,” a similar process of dislocation takes place, as a reverberant crackle—the sound of moisture dripping off stalactites in a vast cavern, perhaps—gives way to the faraway drone of small planes circling high overhead, the combined vibrations creating intricate pinwheels of buzz-within-buzz. The record’s clear emotional climax comes with “Wreckage,” a sketch for arpeggio and reverb that sounds like Stars of the Lid heard through a very long train tunnel, or the Field sent plunging to the depths of the ocean. But the delicate “Mannequin” is just as moving: Each breathy, silvery tone in the track’s slow, painstaking progression feels like an existential sigh that has been frozen in midair. Like the protagonist of Tripoli Cancelled, these tracks are in no hurry to reach any particular destination. Naqvi’s carefully rendered tones make a tentative entrance, stretch their limbs, explore the ruined panorama for a short while, and slink away again, leaving little trace. Caught between accident and expression, it is a sound whose ephemerality makes it all the more haunting.


In the late 1980s and early '90s, Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds, along with songwriting partners Daryl Simmons and L.A. Reid, developed a form of pop soul that's as geometrically precise as it is weightless. His new album draws from that era, less a throwback than a micro-adjustment of an enduring formula.

Return of the Tender Lover

In the late 1980s and early '90s, Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds, along with songwriting partners Daryl Simmons and L.A. Reid, developed a form of pop soul that's as geometrically precise as it is weightless. Songs like Toni Braxton’s "Breathe Again", Madonna’s "Take a Bow", and Boyz II Men’s "Water Runs Dry" occur in a seamless universe, all undisturbed surfaces that relentlessly shimmer. In 1995, "Water Runs Dry" itself seemed the most formally perfect incarnation of one of Babyface's primary pop expressions, the vaporous ballad; it’s gently animated by a brushed snare and an acoustic guitar, over which the members of Boyz II Men weave their voices together in fluid braids.
Babyface’s aesthetic is a distant refinement and elaboration of Prince and, beyond that, Curtis Mayfield, both of whom condensed pop and soul into irreducible collage. He’s capable of elastic funk and vast balladry but both are organized by an unusual pop sensitivity. Return of the Tender Lover, his first solo album of originals in 10 years, is part a period of renewed productivity for Babyface. Last year he released an album with Toni Braxton called Love, Marriage & Divorce, which described the length of a relationship through both gliding surfaces and reduced, raw circumstances; this year he contributed minimal blossoms of acoustic guitar to the Ty Dolla $ign single "Solid". But his new album is a kind of retreat—Babyface reduced to plush textures. Though Return of the Tender Lover deliberately references his sophomore album, 1989’s Tender Lover, nothing here is as dry and muscular as "It’s No Crime", or generously expansive as "Whip Appeal". In their place is buoyant, effortless pop soul.
It sometimes feels like a conscious inversion of Love, Marriage & Divorce; where that record was often capable of a fluorescent hostility, Return of the Tender Lover almost exclusively communicates security and support. "We've Got Love" and "Love and Devotion" convey an inflexible confidence, and the songs also seem supportive in their structure, as if engineered for maximum uplift. Babyface’s voice is as smooth as it's ever been, but it’s also always been somewhat granular in design; it sounds like a bloom of smoke.
El DeBarge appears on "Walking on Air", his first duet with Babyface since 1994’s "Where Is My Love"; like Babyface, DeBarge has been minimally present in the music industry over the past ten years, except for a solo album, Second Chance, in 2010, and in brief flourishes on DJ Quik records. His presence here is satisfying both texturally and textually, and "Walking on Air" is as rich and vivid as their previous collaborations. DeBarge’s voice is miraculously preserved, an incandescent peal capable of infinite ascent; in "Walking on Air", it seems to land somewhere in the troposphere. The only other collaboration on the record is with After 7, an R&B group from the '90s that contains two of Babyface’s brothers. On "I Want You", they supply harmonies, adding considerable weight to Babyface’s nimble vocal, and repeating the title until it melts into a kind of plural exhalation.
The collaborations on Return of the Tender Lover and the design of its production feel traditional, in the sense that they don't attempt to update Babyface's sound and instead lean comfortably on a long, established career. This dedication to tradition and honoring of his craft is less a throwback than a micro-adjustment of an enduring formula.