Sam Cook-Parrott returns to his beginnings as a solo artist, an experiment that yields playful piano compositions and introspective lyricism.

Radiator Hospital: Sings Music for Daydreaming

Sings Music for Daydreaming

From his bedroom in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Sam Cook-Parrott has grown Radiator Hospital into a fully fledged four-piece, a project that culminated in 2017’s dense, noisy Play the Songs You Like. Over power chords and raucous drum fills, he sang about one-horse towns, unrequited love, and existential dread; it turns out an energetic backing band can mask even the most despondent lyricism. On Sings Music for Daydreaming, Cook-Parrott returns to his beginnings as a solo artist, an experiment that yields playful piano compositions and introspective lyricism. While he’s eschewed harsher sounds in favor of a folksier aesthetic, Sings Music for Daydreaming finds him no more optimistic.
A dependable hallmark of recent Radiator Hospital albums was guitar—played fast and wired through fuzz pedals, it set a textured, vibrational backdrop for the band’s lilting vocalists. By contrast, Sings Music for Daydreaming opens with a few deceptively chipper piano chords, dulled by Cook-Parrott’s sleepy singing. He eventually adds a sparse, fingerpicked guitar and layered vocals, which circle into a round as he sings an inversion on Jim Morrison: “You don’t light my fire.” The song ends even quieter than it began, his voice trailing off until it blends into the next track. Percussion, as a general rule, is either muted or out of the picture.
Writing slow songs is no crime for a bedroom pop act. But with 14 tracks that easily bleed together, the record seems to creep; though it’s only 35 minutes, it can feel twice as long. “Alright Again” moves at a glacial pace, as if the ennui of Cook-Parrott’s lyrics had spread to his fingertips. “Personal Truth” and “Dark Sound” feel like riffs on the same tune, with the respective additions of a reverb pedal and bluesy piano, but even these flourishes can’t prevent them from fading into the background. As a result, the bright spots feel hidden behind a hazy facade. At their brightest, as on “Weird Little Idea” and “For Daydreamers Only,” they showcase Radiator Hospital as a jangly folk band, one that pairs hand-clap rhythms and tambourine shakes with warm major chords plucked out on piano and guitar.
With production from Philadelphia stalwart Jeff Zeigler, who also worked on Play the Songs You Like, the instrumentation feels polished and robust. “I Never Dreamed,” buried 12 songs in, injects a welcome bolt of energy, with jumpy rhythms and a creaky, off-kilter vocal harmony. It is a notable exception to the rule, and it’s followed by “Hot Mess,” where drowsy vocals are mixed so low in the background, it’s as if Cook-Parrott is singing from two rooms over.
Cook-Parrott’s lyricism is at its sharpest when it aims for specifics. Most songs on the record miss that mark, landing instead on general memories of young love: “I wanna hold your hand again,” or “I never dreamed I’d get caught in the tangled web you spin.” “Corner Booth,” a dramatic confessional set at a diner, sketches a clearer picture. “It’s the deepest, darkest thing inside me. I could never spit it out,” he mumbles, outlining a tragic narrative that sneaks up on you after the song ends: “Then I say a thing I can’t take back, and open up my eyes to see you react.” There is a world of small stories inside Radiator Hospital, but you might drift off before you catch a glimpse.


When Nina Nastasia's latest record groans into view, it sets you up to expect the gloomiest entry in an ...

Run to Ruin

When Nina Nastasia's latest record groans into view, it sets you up to expect the gloomiest entry in an already dark catalog: the mourning strings and her opening line00 "We never talk about the things we witnessed"-- suggest an album detailing the rural nightmare so many (urban) art-folk songwriters dwell in, where the men are monsters, the women are widows and the graveyards are above average.
But just when the album's ready to fall prey to clichés, it turns into something far more intimate and complex-- moodier, yet more subtle than her previous outings. On last year's excellent The Blackened Air, Nastasia-- an acclaimed New York singer/songwriter in a world that thought it had too many-- wrote songs that were cool and dusty. Her lyrics confined her as a spectator, or at best, the victim of longings; the action kept happening to other people-- her dad chased a man down the highway, her dog was the one dying violently, and it was always someone else buried in that graveyard. But on Run to Ruin, the distance dissolves: Nastasia inhabits these songs and slowly surrenders to the material, as the graceful arrangements of her last album become messy and passionate.
As before, Nastasia matches her acoustic guitar with a striking chamber string section and odd folk instruments like dulcimer, accordion, and no more than twenty notes twinkled on a piano. The strings grind and weave through "We Never Talked" and angrily swell across "I Say That I Will Do", while Jim White of Dirty Three-- a perfect drummer for this group-- intuitively balances timekeeping with colors that sputter like rain on soil.
The emotions flare and subside, and so do the styles that Nastasia switches between: this is far more exotic than the straighter folk and country stylings of her earlier work, and she's writing longer songs with more room to breathe and swell. The meaty, gypsy melody of "On Teasing", the accordion weaving around the swarthy strings, is as unexpected as the tiny singing and almost too-precious arpeggios on "The Body".
But the most striking improvement is her singing. She's a stronger vocalist, her almost-plain tone rising into higher registers, and her usual range has grown more earthily gorgeous. But more than anything, she demonstrates a new expressiveness: her singing at an even keel, but around the edges you can hear her start to let go. Like an anti-diva, Nastasia inches through her feelings instead of flaunting them.
She can sound cutting and ironic, like the dry hatred in "You Her And Me", a song whose flat lyrics come to life in a delivery that resembles the smartest loner from high school. And she's gripping at her most vulnerable: the album's strongest track, "Superstar", at first sounds like a reasonable Cowboy Junkies-like ballad, until she draws us in with how lost and helpless she sounds. She sings the key line "I'm a superstar" in a voice that's almost delirious with fatigue, repeating it again and again in weakly ecstatic surrender.
As with her two other records, Nastasia recorded Run to Ruin with Steve Albini. Once again he claims he "documented" the record instead of producing it, and although it's expectedly close-miked and sonically flawless, Albini gets credit for capturing what happened, then backing off. It would be too easy, say, to shine up the handful of perfectly sentimental piano notes on "The Body", but Albini lets them speak for themselves. He leaves Nastasia's beautifully arranged ensemble to make its own mood: the dynamic extremes aren't smoothed over, and nobody polishes the mood or smudges this into a genre. More importantly, nobody tries to be Nastasia's drama coach-- nobody dictated how she should open up on these songs. While her voice was just a part of the tapestry on her last albums, she has finally become the emotional core, and half the attraction of this record is hearing her stretch out and make these discoveries while we listen.


On his first Entrance LP in a decade, Guy Blakeslee’s songs are newly exposed and intimate, telling a story of love and loss with folk, pop, and echoes of Laurel Canyon.

Book of Changes

Guy Blakeslee’s career has drawn no straight stylistic lines. After breaking from the knotty psych rock of his Baltimore band the Convocation Of… in 2002, Blakeslee reemerged in the early ’00s with a series of warped records and a new identity: a haunted Delta blues conjurer called Entrance. In the years since, he staggered and sometimes stumbled through brooding stoner rock with the Entrance Band and, more recently, alternated phases of anemic indie and instrumental escapism under his given name. He has seemed, through it all, inquisitive and impressionable, responding in real time to sounds that piqued his interest as a listener first and a musician second. But Book of Changes, his first full album in a decade under the Entrance moniker, is one of the most inviting sets of songs he’s ever made.
At its best, Book of Changes feels like a natural resting point for a songwriter who has spent the better part of two decades searching restlessly for the perfect sound. Somewhat surprisingly, it is a rather conventional distillation of folk, pop, and rock, dipping its toes into the echoes of Laurel Canyon and occasionally lifting its head to the narcotic heights of Roky Erickson or Love. There are traces of Phil Spector’s trademark Wall of Sound, Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra’s anxious romantic kismet, and the Zombies’ subtle psychedelia, all wrapped around songs that share the windfalls and pratfalls of a year lost to love, presented in chronological order. “Time will pass if you laugh or if you cry,” Blakeslee sings in full vibrato during “The Avenue,” the album’s pop-symphonic centerpiece of emotional uncertainty. “And the best of friends have to part sometimes/So why not you and I?” Turns out, Blakeslee traveled a long way just to ask old questions in unexpectedly simple ways.
Book of Changes is quite the production, though. It was recorded over a year and in nearly a dozen different studios on two continents with the help of some high-profile friends. There’s Pixie Paz Lenchantin and producer and engineer David Vandervelde—who cut a series of sterling albums a decade ago that align with Blakeslee’s ramshackle, anthemic aims here. There are passels of drummers, backup singers, and string players.
But Blakeslee is clearly in control, playing as many as a half-dozen instruments on some songs. That’s him with the perfectly pealing xylophone-and-piano lines during “Always the Right Time” and the mystic autoharp during the exasperated “Leaving California.” More importantly, he foregrounds his own love-and-loss story, dividing it into 10 acts of wide-eyed enthusiasm, waiting-by-the-phone unease, severe depression, and hopeful perseverance. He shares those feelings most effectively when the songs become a sort of pop music pulpit, a place for him to relay his story in open, verse-chorus-verse splendor. That happens during “Always the Right Time,” “Winter Lady,” and “Revolution Eyes,” the three songs that do the emotional heavy lifting and share the saturated sounds of Spector’s successes. “Revolution Eyes” even borders on heartland rock, like John Mellencamp forced into the studio with the War on Drugs. It is direct and disarmed in a way that Blakeslee’s music has rarely been.
Book of Changes is a good record built with occasionally great songs, especially that suite of Spector-like pop, but it ends with the same vexing questions about Blakeslee that have marked his entire career: Who is he? And will his output ever be more than a series of sometimes-marvelous conjurings, where he channels the ghosts of his influences (whether they be Neu! or Harry Nilsson) for an album or two? After all, even on this set, he slips into bolero camouflage (“I’d Be a Fool”), ambient musings (“Warm and Wild”), and western cover (“Molly”). At least these guises now feel like part of something bigger. Book of Changes is refreshingly exposed and intimate, as if Blakeslee has found a lingua franca for writing when it really matters. Perhaps Book of Changes is the start of Entrance in earnest, the beginning of a career that feels like more than a string of confidently executed echoes.


On the Olympia death/doom band’s unrelenting second album, everything sounds beefier. This music grabs you by the shoulders and shakes you to attention.

Preserved in Torment

Mortiferum’s music exists in near-total darkness. The Olympia death/doom quartet builds labyrinths out of suffocating atmosphere, pounding drums, and churning squalls of detuned guitar. Only when your eyes adjust can you see an occasional sunbeam penetrating the gloom—a snaking, melodic lead or a clatter of cymbals that interrupts the slow march and sends the band into a headlong hurtle. Preserved in Torment, Mortiferum’s second album, is like one of Rothko’s Black-Form paintings. Its inky brushstrokes seem impenetrable at first, but entire universes lurk in the depths.
Mortiferum belong to a musical lineage that started in Finland in the early 1990s. The bands in that scene blurred the lines between death and doom metal with abandon, wringing deep emotions from elemental riffs and dragging stately melodies down into the catacombs. On Preserved in Torment, you can hear traces of the demented death metal of Rippikoulu and Demigod, as well as the more graceful strains of funeral doom acts like Thergothon and Skepticism. Mortiferum stick close to their influences, but what they lack in innovation they make up for in sheer heaviness. “We want it to sound murky and disgusting, and low and fucking gross,” vocalist and guitarist Max Bowman told Decibel earlier this year.
The murky and disgusting sound of Preserved in Torment is one of several areas where Mortiferum have improved on their debut album, 2019’s Disgorged From Psychotic Depths. The production on that record occasionally felt thin, like the mixing board was struggling to keep up with the seismic weight of the band’s playing. Everything is beefier on Preserved in Torment. You feel the rumble of the bass in the pit of your stomach, the punch of the multi-layered guitars in your chest. Even Bowman’s agonized vocals, though still mostly indecipherable, are brought forward in the mix. The denser sound helps emphasize the brutish physicality of the music. The feeling that the walls are closing in isn’t accidental; the band is pushing them in on you.
The melodic guitar passages that punctuate the oppressive atmosphere fit one of two profiles: aching, minor-key runs anchored in the fundamentals of doom; or frantic death metal solos that send the band off into wild paroxysms. Most songs include both. A little less than two minutes into opener “Eternal Procession,” a mournful lead edges out the main riff, underpinning a moaned vocal part. A minute later, it’s replaced by a frenzied, Incantation-style guitar solo. When the song returns to the crushing wall of riffs, it feels like it’s gone through a whole journey. Mortiferum deploy their biggest melodies sparingly, but when they do, it’s in service of elevating the drama. Considered along with their flawlessly executed tempo shifts—jumping from funeral doom crawl to midtempo lurch to breakneck gallop in the space of just a minute or two—it’s clear that the band strives to create songs with narrative arcs.
The first sound we hear when the needle hits wax on Preserved in Torment is a death growl, and the closing track, “Mephitis of Disease,” ends abruptly, almost mid-riff, as though we’ve dropped in on the band in medias res and there’s music at the periphery we don’t get to hear. Thoughtful choices like these help Preserved in Torment feel thrillingly present. Even the most competent atmospheric death/doom can sometimes fade into the background, but Mortiferum wants to grab you by the shoulders and shake you to attention.

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I rented the film Ravenous last weekend. I'm not going to mention any\n\ spoilers, but it told a ...

The Cold Vein

I rented the film Ravenous last weekend. I'm not going to mention any spoilers, but it told a good tale. The transition from period-piece to straight-up action flick was disappointing, though, because I liked the occasional attempts to address the historical context. Soon after one character talks about the relentless American drive for westward expansion in the 19th century, a stereotypical chase scene occurs, as a merry banjo instrumental plays in the background. I couldn't figure out what they were trying to achieve-- each time the track popped up, it ruined an otherwise visceral clarity.
Cannibal Ox don't have that problem with their debut LP on Def Jux Records, The Cold Vein. "Iron Galaxy," which originally appeared in 2000 on a split EP with Company Flow, begins the album. Vast Aire and Vordul rap an abstract refrain, "My shell, mechanical found ghost/ But my ghetto is animal found toast," a taste of the tortured environment they document in their hometown New York City. Vordul grabs the mic and busts for 2\xBD minutes, beginning with the end of life and ending with a near-hopeless call for peace. Vast Aire then takes a microscope to the street, descending into prose so dense and depraved that the stomach lurches. I don't want to ruin the surprises lurking around every corner in this verse, but imagine the sonic background, served up by Company Flow CEO El-P, who's taken the duo underneath his wing and produced the album: looped beats remain discrete while UNKLE-like synth chords bubble upwards, colliding with an old-school video game sample that accelerates until the last few seconds of the song sound like a Richie Hawtin rave-up.
"Ox Out the Cage" brings a more trad rap feel, complete with the "I'd like to introduce... " narrative. But both MC's strive to pronounce flows in incredible salvos, rarely using chorus lines. Prose is the game here, and Vordul deals in rapid-fire verses that skip every other break to rhyme with the next-- Wu-inspired, but who isn't? Vast prefers a slightly slower pace, all the better to fight the war in his brain between concrete detail and mastermind abstraction. He delivers verses with a rising inflection that recalls RBX's self-impressed swagger, but this doesn't distract from lines like, "I grab the mic like Are You Experienced/ But I don't play the guitar, I play my cadence." Power chords accent the mix, but this ain't some crossover cock-rock revival. The rhythm here is aggressive; it turns caddy-slacking P-funk samples into hors d'oeuvres, shoves aside all those Jeep-ish Timbaland hi-hats and snare drums and devours the RZA's sinister string lines. The Cold Vein is like a musical negative, an inverse reflection of hip-hop history, full of everything DJ's cast aside, from Sega sound effects to electro-industrialism, gear-work grooves malfunctioning, synthesizers belching, a menagerie of digitalia.
The group has more facets than their brutality, though. Don't flinch when "Battle for Asgard" betrays its epic title by breaking up each verse with an interlude that sounds like circus music. There's room for humorous self-criticism in this relentless debut, but it works best in "Raspberry Fields," where Vast Aire cuts his flow short with, "Oh shit, I said a word twice," and starts again from the beginning. Eventually, all but the most hardcore heads will appreciate a break from the intensity. Two of the best tracks on The Cold Vein ease up just enough to show some humanity beneath the tough skin. In "A B-Boys Alpha," Vast Aire narrates a personal account of his life, from Freudian birthing trauma to the streets where "my first fight was me versus five boroughs." A booming choir of distortion wells in the background, strangely conjuring up reminiscence. "The F-Word" cools it down just enough to tell the story of a b-boy reluctant to fall in love; El-P keeps it real gritty with an urban melody that recalls Method Man's "All I Need."
Ultimately, Cannibal Ox inherit the mantle of the Wu-Tang Clan: you can polish your rhetorical teeth endlessly, but when your appetite is for violence you stay mired in the muck you rose from. At times you can't tell whether they want to break conventions or heads, or whether it's an either/or proposition. But witness the transition from disgust to critique here: "With beats that have to be registered as sex offenders before presented to the public/ I'll exfoliate your face with the acid inside my stomach/ Binge and purge/ We live in thirty-second blurbs/ And if consumers stop existing we forget how to use words/ Just fuckin' eat each other 'til the next ice age occurs. " Here's to Cannibal Ox transcending the Wu's paranoid conspiracy theories and truly dropping critical science. But enough of the bullshit, The Cold Vein is going to be on everybody's year-end list of the best underground hip-hop. Consume it, just watch it doesn't consume you.


The dynamic Atlanta rapper Trouble’s year-in-review mixtape is a smart flex, featuring collaborations with Young Thug, Fetty Wap, Quavo, and others.

Year in 2016

The Atlanta rapper Mariel Semonte Orr, aka Trouble, released his first mixtape in 2011, aligning himself with the nascent locals of Duct Tape Entertainment, a label founded by rappers from the same Edgewood Court section of East Atlanta. DTE hasn’t launched a full-fledged star from its roster, but over the last couple years, Trouble’s name has been popping up a bit more conspicuously. Trouble now seems like the imprint’s best chance at a resurgence; he has been earning the attention with some of the most interesting music of his career. His latest mixtape, Year in 2016, is a hasty year-in-review project, and functions as a fan-service document as well as an open invitation to catch up.
In 2015, Trouble made the best of an appearance on Young Thug’s Slime Season 2 mixtape: He slunk into bar-trading stride with one of hip-hop’s squirrelliest vocalists and helped to slur out the “Thief in the Night” hook, which propelled that banger in the first place. The appearance wasn’t an exhaustive come-up, but it suddenly cast Trouble in a newly capable, vital light. Trouble has been nurturing that collaborative spirit for years, and he’s become an increasingly reliable Atlanta team-player. Accordingly, Year in 2016 hosts enough Atlanta rappers to scan like a local studio sampler. The posse cut “Watchu Doin,” one of several here culled from Trouble’s 2016 mixtape Skoobzilla, corners him with Quavo, Young Thug, and Skippa Da Flippa. Quavo and Trouble co-pilot a tumbling, charged-up hook; on a busy beat with some big personalities, Trouble sounds indispensable, never like an add-on. It’s not an isolated occurrence: Trouble holds his own through a handful of other crowded tracks here, too.
More than ever, Trouble has opened up as a rapper, having long since retired the slow-talk flow he barked out on clunky early songs. Trouble is now more likely to channel the audacity and emotion of his bars in snappier ways. There’s still something endearingly awkward about the way he ladles his voice: sometimes shouty and yelping, others mumbling or singing a slur.
Lyrically, “Ahh Man” may be Trouble’s most depressing banger ever, in which he sours a piano loop with downright gloom. He moans about not wanting to answer his phone, justifies drinking because of his father’s health, and cops to copping pills for his grandmother in legitimate need. (“I guess the system just ain’t showing no love/I got her a pack off the street though,” he fesses.) He contemplates his uncertainties: “Sometimes I be blaming myself/For the doubt I brought down on myself.”
On “She in Love Wit Trouble,” another solo track with some wonky trap synths dancing in the background, Semonte plays the boastful homewrecker; he flips his own name into an easy pun for a playful melody. If there’s a lasting effect of this tape, and Trouble’s recent success, it’s that he’s become an increasingly adept hook slinger—prone to staying in pocket melodically, but versatile and daring in every other sense.
Not all the songs on Year in 2016 originally belonged to the headliner, but when Trouble plays the featured artist, he’s dynamic enough to make an impression. Still, a pair of Fetty Wap collaborations fall flat, not for lack of chemistry so much as a missed mark to begin with. And only one of Young Thug’s three appearances marks a return to their banger’s duet style. That track, the Goose-produced “Respect,” stands out early in the tape: Thug’s no-filler second verse might be the attention grabber, but the song belongs to Trouble from the moment he lists his bonafides in the hook.
Year in 2016 rounds up the best of Trouble’s best year yet, but it presses too much into a single compilation for a gratifying continuous listen. Still, an overloaded comp feels like a smart flex for Trouble, ample proof that he’s suddenly, quietly launched an urgent second act. If you haven’t been keeping up, Trouble is the type to remind you he’s been here all along.


Recording as Alex G, Pennsylvania native Alex Giannascoli's gnarled, wobbly, unfailingly melodic guitar pop evokes Big Star, Elliott Smith, and Built to Spill, as well as more recent low-key breakouts like Youth Lagoon and Jackson Scott. His new album DSU is worthy of its moment, a 13-song set of warped, idiosyncratic sketches, each capable of wending its way to a distinct place into the hearts of anyone who ever warmed to the idea of "indie rock".

DSU

An unspoken ideal behind the quest for below-the-radar music is that somewhere out there, a random stranger might be churning out homemade songs that're better than the ones you can find through more established channels. The methods of discovery, the sub-genre descriptors, and the artist names change, but that faith in some undiscovered loner who defies the odds and draws a diehard following (at least somewhat) independently has remained constant. In 2014, one of the most enticing of these bedroom singer/songwriters is Alex Giannascoli, a Temple University student who has built up an audience through putting material out there on the internet.
Recording as Alex G, the Pennsylvania native's gnarled, wobbly, unfailingly melodic guitar pop evokes Big Star, Elliott Smith, and Built to Spill, as well as more recent low-key breakouts like Youth Lagoon and Jackson Scott. His first-ever mastered full-length, DSU, also happens to be one of the first vinyl releases for Brooklyn's fledgling Orchid Tapes, which already this year has offered the emotion-wracked electronic dreamscapes of Ricky Eat Acid's Three Love Songs, along with the label comp Boring Ecstasy. DSU is worthy of its moment, a 13-song set of warped, idiosyncratic sketches each capable of wending its way to a distinct place into the hearts of anyone who ever warmed to the idea of "indie rock".
The elements here are fairly limited, with spidery electric guitar, shambling acoustic guitar, and a smattering of watery keys joining rudimentary bass and drums to frame Giannascoli's sometimes pitch-shifted, fragile coo as he delivers sparse, impressionistic lyrics about the mundane. But what's impressive is the array of potent songs Alex G wrings from those basics, his self-recorded stone soup. There's the strummy innocence (and ambivalence about success) of "Harvey", the feedback-streaked pleading of "Black Hair" ("It's not what you are/ It's just what you did"), the barbed howls of "Axesteel". But there's also the PBR-spilling post-chillwave groove of "Promise", the frosty regret of "Sorry", and the stair-spiraling guitar anti-heroics of "Serpent Is Lord".
Giannascoli's voice is definitely of his do-it-yourself idiom; a comparison that strikes me is Joan of Arc member Bobby Burg's Love of Everything project, so the arguably superfluous chipmunk'd effects on songs like the cavernous "Icehead" will probably be one of the record's more divisive decisions. But it's heartening that Alex G's willing to make off-kilter choices like that one, especially when he veers off into the oddball crackle at the end of "Rejoyce". Even the songs that are closer to fragments have memorable turns, like the wordless harmonies of "Skipper" or the piano goofing of "Tripper".
The most powerfully appealing song on DSU doesn't arrive until the end. "Boy" is one of the album's gentler tracks, a stray-dog reflection centered around piano and acoustic guitars; you could almost imagine it as some forgotten post-Beatles remnant that might've appeared on an early Wes Anderson soundtrack. "I am not the boy you knew," Giannascoli insists. Fact is, he's another in a long line of young people who've found their own weird way to (only slightly) left-of-center acclaim. But his project, like the guy himself, has clearly reached, if not maturity, drinking age at the least. If Alex G keeps it up at this rate, the next round'll be on him.


On their collaborative record, Superchunk frontman Mac McCaughan and harpist Mary Lattimore lead each other through misty, evocative improvisations.

Mary Lattimore / Mac McCaughan: New Rain Duets

New Rain Duets

Mac McCaughan has made an ambient album. It sounds unthinkable based on the restive pop and punk the indie icon has made with Superchunk for so long. It’s like someone tried to tell you Paul Banks from Interpol had a hip-hop side proj—oh, shit. That actually happened. But McCaughan’s excursion into pop-ambient is a much classier, more compelling affair than Banks’ basement beats, as he follows a dauntless guide, the experimental harpist Mary Lattimore, off into the electro-acoustic wilderness.
Lattimore, who lives in Los Angeles, composes and improvises on a concert grand with loops and delays, as captured on spellbinding albums like Hundreds of Days and Ghost Forests with Meg Baird. Lattimore has deep connections to McCaughan’s home base, North Carolina: raised in the state’s western mountains, she worked at McCaughan’s label, Merge Records, in the nineties. Now, N.C. label Three Lobed Recordings, which previously released a live Lattimore recording from Raleigh, is putting out their mist-shrouded harp-and-electronics record, which does not stint on the promised rain.
New Rain Duets is a structured improvisation recorded live at the McColl Center in Charlotte, N.C., in 2017, though its polish and variety could easily pass as studio work. In four lengthy movements, the music courses and ripples like rain sheeting down a windowpane. Circuitous but purposeful, the first track meanders through space rock, ambient pastoral, and electro-baroque modes. Lattimore scouts the trail, finding long, thoughtful routes through both the harmonic landscape and exploiting her instrument’s broad expressive capacity, from glimmering hums to full-bodied sweeps. McCaughan follows alertly, exploiting the many voices of his vintage and repro analog synths, adding textures and shading to the harp and sometimes drawing the scattered harmonic material together in catchy melodic scraps that remind us he’s a pop musician.
After the atmospheric first track, the second shifts toward modern classical, centering on an uncertain harp theme that develops as McCaughan gusts in low, faintly jazzy harmonies. The third movement descends into a tense, quiet dark-ambient realm: as synth tones curl up like scraped metal and animalistic noises whisper from the darkness, harp notes drop and ring like silver pins. And in the last movement, a psych-rock interlude inflates to epic proportions.
This is all home territory for Lattimore, but it’s new ground for McCaughan, whose prior excursions beyond pop-rock and punk have been easier to account for than this, even when they got a little weird. (Remember Portastatic, from when all the cool indie rockers were sort of into elevator music?) This adds an element of surprise to the familiar electro-acoustic pleasures of New Rain Duets, an interesting cultural frame through which to hear it. It’s wise that McCaughan doesn’t sing on it, not because he’s a bad singer, but because his vocal timbre might be the least-ambient sound imaginable—and, most important, because he’s too intent on listening.


Following a sinister, hallucinatory handful of one-off tracks, the charismatic N.Y. poet and performance artist Michael Quattlebaum's first Mykki Blanco full-length is a grab-bag of experimentation tailored to 2012's increasingly blurry rap landscape.

Mykki Blanco: Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss

Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss

Early this year when I interviewed Michael Quattlebaum, the New York poet and performance artist who raps as Mykki Blanco, he explained: "I would rather be famous like Insane Clown Posse than like A$AP Rocky". He spoke of his childhood adoration of Eminem and his preferred "shock-rock" tactics in approaching art and rap music-- an ideology that synced up nicely with the sinister, hallucinatory handful of Mykki Blanco tracks that had been posted on SoundCloud. But shocking listeners is a tall order in 2012, and adopting a Lolita-doll rap persona and snarling verses about doing mushrooms and "white boys with them yarmulkas/ Model chicks with a million followers" will earn a glowing profile in the New York Times Style section sooner than it will drop jaws. So it follows that Cosmic Angel: Illuminati Prince/ss, Mykki Blanco's first full-length release, is a grab-bag of experimentation tailored to today's blurry rap landscape and transgression is only part of the mix.
Like many of her contemporaries have in recent months, Blanco employs a host of electronic producers who usually work without rappers, sometimes to striking effect. Upstart underground names like Brenmar, Gatekeeper, and Sinden offer up a broad, scrappy palate of beats crafted to get people moving. The Brenmar-produced "Wavvy", for instance, is a clear standout, weaving Mykki at her clearest and most urgent through an infectious slice of tropicalia. Sinden and Matrixxman's sinister "Haze.Boogie.Life" beat invokes the image of gooey liquid dripping through industrial pipes, mimicking the sorts of basement-performance settings that brought the rapper to life over the last couple of years, but made brighter and shinier and more danceable.
That's not to say she's only well-served by more straightforward hooks-- the second half of the album pulls heavily from Mykki's lo-fi early days, when the performance-art aspect of the project dominated. On the Katy Perry-referencing "TeenageDream" she's murderous and imaginative, hissing: "Eighteen/ Mykki Blanco, teenage dream/ Homecoming queen, stroking woodies/ Toy Story/Denying me the black card?/ Oh, now it's statutory" like she's at a poetry reading hosted in a grimy underworld. It's that sort of psychedelic, stream-of-consciousness flow looped through cartoonishly girly vocal filters that brought Mykki Blanco character to life initially, the character she described as having "two sides: cute and criminally insane." When both personas bubble out of Blanco in fierce equal measure in a verse, it's gut-punching. Somewhere, Roman and Martha Zolanski are furious.
Where Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss falls short is in the bloated middle ground between club and camp. There are a handful of downbeat tracks here that meander aimlessly, and some of the mixtape is rickety, as though it would crumble to dust under a little bit of pressure. Here you can hear Blanco's raps occasionally grow fumbling and flat, like on the washed-out drum-and-bass/metallic lighter-flick beat of "Squanto": If you make it to the end of the song's four minutes, you can pick out rhymes of "solution" and "resolution" through the mumblings, but there's little to make you want to rewind and decipher a meaning. You'd probably just as soon skip forward and revisit "Betty Rubble", one of Blanco's earliest tracks. There she raps, "You think I was a mink the way these dogs was sniffin'/ You'd think my name was Homer Simpson  to these Peter Griffins/ They hangin' off my angry word/ Damn these fucking Angry Birds"-- a raw reminder of how thrilling her character can be at its unfiltered peak.


The New York City songwriter meets the hardest of feelings with uncommon compassion. Their second album’s singsong ditties and openhearted ballads play like new standards.

I’ve Got Me

Joanna Sternberg’s music often sounds as though they’re performing a one-person show to an audience of plushies and bedroom clutter. They possess a humble loneliness that is utterly without charm, which of course, somehow, makes their songs helplessly charming. On I’ve Got Me, their second album and their first as a drummer and string arranger, Sternberg balances unvarnished emotion with meticulous craftsmanship. They never offer advice, just a little space for emotion and self-reflection.
They favor kindness and directness over bravura, constructing a musical world of unapologetic idiosyncrasy and tenderness. “When I look back, look back on the years/I see all of the time that I wasted on tears,” they lament on “Mountains High,” pitching the notes like they’re singing in a lo-fi Broadway musical. Sternberg’s deep compassion radiates across I’ve Got Me. By album’s end, they come to feel like a friend—one who’s trying their best not to repeat the same mistakes, but still texts you from their ex’s place in the middle of the night.
Sternberg’s 2019 debut, Then I Try Some More, drew from a stark palette of pain and pity, bordering on self-annihilation. I’ve Got Me—true to its title—is a project of self-reclamation. Almost all of its songs are written in a major key. If on their debut Sternberg surrendered themself wholeheartedly to bad people and destructive relationships, here, they try to unpack those inclinations with quietly defiant insight. “I’m so glad I met you/You helped me see/Just how very much I hate me,” they sing on “People Are Toys to You,” a withering takedown of a former friend. “You said you stayed ’cause you felt bad for me/How sweet of you to call me charity.”
Resilience and overcoming are sometimes equated with artistic merit—but that’s not what’s happening here. On I’ve Got Me, Sternberg culls from a broader emotional range and an expanded musical vocabulary. From the percussive jangle of “People Are Toys to You” to the lovelorn ballad “Right Here,” their compositions are steady scaffolds built from warm acoustic guitar, Brill Building- and bluegrass-inspired string flourishes, and reassuring plucks of upright bass. Whether the combination of piano in unison with steel guitar on “She Dreams,” the electric guitar vamp on “Human Magnet,” or the spare strums of “Stockholm Syndrome” and “The Song,” I’ve Got Me doesn’t sound hushed or intimate. It’s just there, present, as if something obvious suddenly revealed itself to you.
Sternberg’s songs, so frank and free of pretense, may recall the Magnetic Fields, or the anti-folk of Kimya Dawson or Jeffrey Lewis. Unlike those artists, though, Sternberg writes unmediated by neurotic or self-aware humor; this is pain and joy without a punchline. Think of this album like an oblong version of Carole King’s landmark 1971 album Tapestry: Sternberg is presenting a new canon of inverted love songs, each one so sturdy and true that they could withstand being covered by the lowliest of bands and still sound like gifts. Their words are both the dark voice in the back of your head and the friendly one urging you to buck up. “All my faults and flaws and lies/Are no one’s fault but mine,” they sing on the title track, a song that climbs up and down the scales, mirroring the ambivalence of a phrase like “I’ve got me.” Yes, it’s true: We have to live our entire lives with ourselves. At least we’ve got company.


The moody debut album from the Chicago-born producer is a layered, lo-fi set that ripples with ambient terror.

Àlááfíà

Honour’s sisters were frightened when they first heard his music. “They said it was dark,” the anonymous producer recalled in a recent interview with Crack Magazine. “But it could get a lot darker.” Throughout Àlááfíà, his moody debut album, the PAN-signee parses the loss of his grandmother as well as their shared cultural heritage and spirituality. At times sounding like a series of warbled and crackling FM dispatches, Àlááfíà dips and weaves between jazz, gospel, trip-hop, and subdued rap production. The inclusion of field recordings, burrowed deep into gritty and impressionistic electronic sequences, give a sense of memories smudged by grief.
As he puts it, Honour didn’t just record Àlááfíà: He “built and destroyed” it via a time-consuming method that spanned three cities—London, Lagos, and New York. Using a demo version of Ableton, Honour was unable to revisit songs after he initially tracked them. “I’d have to screen-record it then take it back in,” he told Crack. Though arduous, the process yielded a layered, lo-fi effect that leaves the listener in a constant state of anticipation, as if these simmering tracks will boil over at any point.
The fluctuating levels and grainy finish of Àlááfíà recall hypnotically dialing between radio stations, likely a nod to Honour’s grandmother, who had one of the first radio shows discussing Itsekiri culture on the Western Nigerian station WNTV. The static that ripples and swells across the album does so like the memory of lost loved ones. But aside from this familial homage, a sense of ambient terror creeps through the core. It manifests in the echoed cackle and motorcycle revs on “Hosanna (Greeting2MYPPL)...” and a loop of kids singing “Ring Around the Rosie” emerging in the middle of “First Born (Redeemed).”
The latter song is disrupted by gunfire, a cue for a sudden U-turn; what begins as a shadowy collage of found sounds liquifies and warps into splattered drum fills and pitched-up vocal bursts. The payoff is sublime—if short-lived. A number of songs on Àlááfíà don’t make it past the two-minute mark, but considering their eerie and mournful melodies, it can feel like just the right dosage. “Pistol Poem (Lead Belly)” is a kind of grit-smeared rap that sounds as if it’s been submerged in earth and gravel for a decade. But curving around its rough edges are a weeping sax sample and falsetto coos that could trace their shape across a chapel ceiling.
Tracks like “Whip Appeal V6 (PIPN8EZ)” and “U&Me (decemberseventeen),” both built on trappy, trip-hop loops of synth, samples, and percussion, have their own gut-clutching melody at the center. Honour has a knack for these gorgeous, liquid vocal passages, but he contrasts them with sharp, tinny percussion and distortion instead of playing them straight, striking a balance between impressions of beauty, violence, and decay. Àlááfíà is full of field recordings, snippets of sped-up conversations, and references to an artistic pantheon that includes bell hooks, Sun Ra, DMX, Robert Johnson, and Richard Pryor. In a way, Honour tries to examine these themes as an emotional archivist. Collecting life in great, messy heaps, he sifts through the debris and arranges new shapes with the few shining things that can be salvaged.


After breakout beats for Kendrick and Earl, the New York producer flexes his range on a new mixtape stacked with lesser-known talent.

#HEAVENSGATE

Before Evilgiane ever made music, he was a skater. It’s how the producer’s New York-based collective Surf Gang got started: linking up under the Manhattan Bridge and sharing trick videos set to vaporwave. Since 2018, the crew has fractured and morphed, and their profile soared when Giane scored beat placements for Earl Sweatshirt and Kendrick Lamar that represented both rappers’ best releases of last year. But on his new mixtape, #HEAVENSGATE VOL. 1, he still flourishes within a posse, inviting hyper-regional talent to slide over a collection of exquisitely fine-tuned beats that position him as a superproducer in the making.
Giane is used to staying focused with plenty of producers in the studio. Surf Gang’s 2021 release SGV1 packed a more robust iteration of the group onto a tape bursting with ideas while remaining loyal to a discernible vision—pattering polyrhythms held down by 808s so sleek they hit like a high diver entering the water, no splash. But he hasn’t yet tested himself on this scale, recalibrating his signature technique to a features roster the size of a summer camp soccer team. It’s a lofty task and he mostly nails it.
None of the vocalists here have the name recognition of a Kendrick or an Earl, so Giane’s delicate touch is a vote of confidence. When it’s Massachusetts singer-songwriter Lucy on the track, clipped synth flares and a racing hi-hat match his chatty delivery. Atlanta’s K$upreme tests Young Thug-style ad-libs over what must be a lost Twilight Zone theme on “Lil Wayne”; Harto Falión’s dreamy laments on “Ugly Pretty” float over synth melodies that could’ve come out on Leaving Records. “Informants” casts Georgia shape-shifter and character aficionado Slimesito in a rainy nighttime neo-noir via trilling drill snares and an undulating synth like a string section bowing a mile underwater.
Sometimes, Giane makes these brief, poised compositions out of extremely raw material. When Atlanta’s Bear1Boss—recognizable, in some circles, as the young man who shouted out God for booking him in the same jail as Playboi Carti in a viral clip—takes the mic on “IDK Nun,” it’s not a standout verse. But Giane’s gossamer net of chimes catches him every time he falters, draping around Bear’s yelps and whispers and bringing to mind the exquisite open space that closes another early Giane production highlight, Babyxsosa’s “Who You Love.” He doesn’t steamroll Bear’s point of view, but he doesn’t leave him out to dry among more experienced stylists either. As lovely as they get, Giane beats make good armor too.
Giane isn’t actually the traveling pants of producers, and he’s occasionally out of step. The 03 Greedo-featuring “Sip Sip” has some appealingly drippy synths but it’s unmemorable overall. “40” with xaviersobased and Nettspend deserves credit for onboarding some older heads to New York’s newest underground heroes, but the beat could’ve played more on Xav’s own out-there party style. And Rochester’s Rx Papi, perhaps the least suited to Giane’s vibe despite the great thing he’s got going with similarly nimble producer Gud, overwhelms the stormy “Pap Shiesty” instrumental with his fierce bark.
Giane needs an artist who can bounce off his taut and sharply referenced tracks, like Milwaukee-indebted rapper Durkalini on album closer “Glamorous.” A synth that sounds like a cartoon duck discussing its day draws out a loop over spacious 808 claps and bass on the Woesum-assisted beat. Durkalini’s honeyed one-liners lead into the most soulful interpolation of Fergie’s “Glamorous”—and sure, that bar is low. But Durkalini finds understated ecstasy in his falsetto “flossy,” a from-the-chest moment that feels as casual as karaoke (and revisits Giane’s impish habit of proudly sample-snitching in track titles). This is exactly the juice that had Kendrick Lamar and Baby Keem clowning their way around Dodger Stadium into a Grammy nomination. Giane follows his instincts to music that pulses with untapped kinetic energy, always teetering at the lip of the bowl.


These are the only known recordings of the legendary improvising guitarist and the celebrated jazz drummer. Though wildly abstract, their playing also feels like a conversation between friends.

Derek Bailey / Paul Motian: Duo in Concert

Duo in Concert

In 2002, three years before his death, Derek Bailey explained his secret to a life of sustained creative practice. “It’s through other people,” he said. “There are improvisers who like to work regularly over decades with the same people. I’m not one of them.” The simplicity of the English guitarist’s answer belied the depth and intensity of his discipline. Bailey started improvising with other musicians in the early 1950s, and performed with bassist Gavin Bryars and drummer Tony Oxley during the 1960s. But during the first half of the next decade, he spent much of his time playing alone. The move was intentional: He believed that with a foundation in solo improvisation, he could play with anyone. During this exploratory phase, he traced the outer limits of his instrument, searching for “a language that would be literally disjointed” and “more open to manipulation.” The goal, as he stated in his 1980 book Improvisation, was “perpetual variation.”
He held steadfast to that objective. Drop into any album from his gargantuan catalog and something new comes to light. On 1988’s Cyro, Bailey’s guitar frolics with bells, shakers, and friction drums, highlighting the percussive range of his every pluck and scrape. In 1981’s Views from 6 Windows, Christine Jeffrey’s extended vocal techniques subtly oscillate between textural utterances and something more melodic—a mirror to Bailey’s own traversal of the guitar’s expressive and austere registers. He’d even play along with pirate radio stations, enticed by the speed of jungle tracks; at their best, these exercises reveal the thrill in spontaneity underlining all his works, regardless of tempo. The new release Duo in Concert unveils even more. It contains the only shows pairing Bailey and American drummer Paul Motian: one in Groningen, the Netherlands, and the other in New York City. Recorded in the early 1990s, these performances capture two improvisational titans at the height of their powers, their collaboration a conduit for novel modes of artistic expression.
At the beginning of their 35-minute concert in Groningen, the two seem to be feeling out their instruments. Bailey lets chords ring out before darting around with spangled melodies, and Motian taps a cymbal before employing drum rolls that fade into one another. It’d feel like a scrappy soundcheck if they weren’t obviously riffing with each other. Their chemistry is immediate, and it makes sense: When Bailey was in his trio with Bryars and Oxley, they’d listen to the Bill Evans Trio, which counted Motian and bassist Scott LaFaro as members. On a song like “All of You,” Motian’s brushwork provides the backbone for piano and bass to zigzag across the landscape. That happens in this show too, but at the micro level: For about 50 seconds, early on, he offers a similarly quiet and propulsive beat while Bailey matches its pace, stumbles out of it, and then strums chords with charming nonchalance. They’re in complete concentration here, but the music feels like a loping conversation between longtime friends.
Motian once reflected that when performing in the Bill Evans Trio, he was “more in the supportive role rather than one-third of the voice.” That’s never the case here; he and Bailey are in a constant, impressionistic dialogue. Three minutes in, he taps on an opening hi-hat and hints at something of a swinging groove, but it glides into something harder to pin down. His erratic strikes make way for Bailey’s own agitated chords, and the two work in tandem to come out of this clanging with balletic grace.
Their synchronicity embodies two key ideas that excited Bailey for decades: a love for silence, and “an impatience with the gruesomely predictable.” Bailey and Motian treat silence, ultimately, as a third instrument. After 10 minutes, Bailey hits a series of circuitous melodies that Motian pounds his toms alongside, but then they play at a much lower volume. With Motian’s soft ride cymbal and Bailey’s squirming guitar, our ears are attuned to the relative quietude—the way it takes up the space and makes the instruments feel subordinate to its presence. That attention to dynamics has an uncanny parallel with the underground rock music of its time. One can draw a straight line from the duo’s poetic noodling to records from Jackie-O Motherfucker and Storm & Stress. A lot of it can be chalked up to Motian’s jazz-inflected drumming, but it’s also the result of the even-keeled, genre-agnostic atmosphere.
Duo in Concert also features a second gig that took place in New York. It is only on the digital version of the record, and perhaps understandably so, given its low fidelity. Its appeal isn’t far from Bailey’s Music and Dance, where one is confronted with not just the space that the artists are in, but the distance between listener and performance, as mediated by subpar recording equipment. In these 46 minutes, the room tone looms, the mixing is unbalanced, but an evocative intimacy pokes through. The two still play with thoughtfulness and verve, but everything is draped in an everyday veneer, like you’re hearing them from a bar at the other end of a venue. It paints the recording not as a Holy Grail, but as an extension of their normal practices. “I do the same thing more or less every day,” Bailey once remarked. “And sometimes I go out and do it in public.”
When “Duo in Concert (New York)” ends, it does so without any big climax. There’s a moment of pause before people clap, and it’s presumably so people can be sure the set is actually complete. That moment of uncertainty speaks to Bailey’s modus operandi, as he saw improvisation as a “segment of a continuous process.” He even declared that playing the end of any piece made him feel disgusted. It’s a dramatic proclamation, but one that speaks to Bailey’s and Motian’s lives as artists—their animating force is their ongoing commitment. Duo in Concert is consequently phenomenal not just because the music itself is great, but because every second constitutes a moment of instinctive, instantaneous decision-making—a lifetime of improvisation distilled into every measure.


Blur's Damon Albarn and artist and designer Jamie Hewlett, having teamed for two top-selling albums as Gorillaz, have now adapted a 16th century Chinese novel into a modern opera. This album, in which they've re-arranged and re-articulated the production's music, is much better than the description would lead you to believe.

Journey to the West

After two top-selling albums created under the guise of a cartoon band, artist and designer Jamie Hewlett and Blur's Damon Albarn followed Gorillaz with, no shit, Monkey. The simian in question is the lead character in Journey to the West, one of China's oldest and most endearing stories, a tale originally written in the late 16th century that's considered one of the country's four great novels. Oh and, with the help of director Checn Shi-Zeng, Albarn and Hewlett adapted it into a modern opera.
On paper these ideas-- audacious, uncommercial, completely uncool-- should bomb. But Albarn has always had a conceptual bent to his projects, and after successfully acting as a conduit between African and Western music, heading a supergroup that actually worked, and the shock success of Gorillaz, it might be time to stop underestimating him. Albarn's detractors, granted, have plenty of ammunition-- after years of tabloid celebrity at home, he's aimed to turn himself into a panglobal everyman, a process that raises specters of cultural tourism and inauthenticity. Yet even if one were to sniff at his musical output, it's difficult to locate the mercenary or imagistic motivations in issuing low-key compilations of African music on his Honest Jon's label or attempting to tackle Chinese opera-- where's the superficial reward there?
And yet despite being relatively leftfield to the British public, this collection of Anglo-Sino music, Journey to the West, debuted in the UK top five. With African music en vogue throughout the West, and with the possibility China could dominate this century, Albarn's cultural eye seems more prophetic than exploitative. In any event, one listen to Journey-- a record that, even by Hewlett's admission you might only want to listen to once a year-- should dispel the notions that this is some sort of token nod.
Wisely choosing not to release a soundtrack of their actual opera, Albarn and Hewlett (in conjunction with the UK Chinese Music Ensemble) have instead re-arranged and re-articulated the production's music for this CD release. The project still has the feel of an accompanying piece, with titles referencing the dramatization of the Chinese story and plenty of incidental music, but it also works on a satisfying level as an experimental work or as art-pop. Written in the rigid five-note pentatonic scale that dominates many ancient folk musics (including China's), the record is inherently offkilter to those accustomed to more backbeat-oriented rock. Albarn leans heavily on electronic tones, giving the record an agile sound even at its darkest.
It's also surprisingly easy to locate Albarn's melodic gifts within these songs, whether in the more passive tracks or underneath both the guttural vocalizations of "Confessions of a Pig" or the languid tones of "The Living Sea". Some of the more interstitial tracks bear more obvious Albarn touches-- the panoramic "Sandy the River Demon" or the electro-noir of "O Mi to Fu" could fit on a Gorillaz record, while "I Love Buddha" lightly recalls the knees-up oomp-pa instrumentals that colored Blur's Britpop-era work. The set works best, however, when it hews closest to Western pop-- the stirring "Heavenly Peach Banquet" could actually be a blog hit, and "Monkey Bee" bears the fingerprints of many of the modern art-rock bands we champion.
This ability to weave his stylistic tics into his now heavily collaborative projects functions almost as breadcrumbs for those still willing to follow Albarn from record to record. Rather than writing from the perspective of a band-- or a brand name, as he arguably did with Blur-- his more exploratory instincts and nimbleness have lately come to the fore. In a sense, Blur threatened at one point to run headlong into self-parody and it seemed at the time (and still does) that it was guitarist Graham Coxon who most deftly steered them away from that dead end. If so, perhaps it was a lesson Albarn absorbed, and relatively outside of the public eye-- either by hiding behind the mask of Gorillaz or working with others, he now seems more free to carve a musical identity rather than a celebrity one. (Ironically, this was a frequent complaint I heard about The Good, the Bad & the Queen project-- a record that, to my mind, remains sorely underappreciated because its tones, pace, and tenor was closer to an Albarn solo record than the work of its creators.)
Albarn wound up moving from articulating the decay of Great Britain on GBQ to exploring the roots of an ascendent cultural and political force, and the resulting album is often difficult, completely unexpected, and at time precious; with increased spins, it becomes a rather settled, even comfortable, listen. "If you don't know it now, then you will do," Albarn warned on GBQ's "History Song", and one gets the same feeling from Monkey-- that while this is likely to be an introduction to the unfamiliar for many of those who buy it, we'll all become much more versed in Chinese culture over the next two or three decades.


The Lawrence brothers’ third album of glossy yet gritty disco pop suggests that their true lineage is the Y2K chart-house sound once ubiquitous on UK airwaves.

ENERGY

Guy and Howard Lawrence make the kind of songs you can take anywhere: meticulously crafted and comfortably danceable, ready to serve the biggest festival slots and uppermost playlist spots with instant, PG-rated thrills. When their debut album made these two fresh-faced English brothers world famous, dance snobs sneered, as dance snobs must, yet the songs were undeniable. So when their slowed-down, R&B-glossed second album failed to ignite, the Lawrences must have been left scratching their heads. As the all-caps title suggests, ENERGY is a manic attempt to relight the fire, as well as a confetti-strewn soundtrack for a world tour that never was.
Parts of the duo’s original, world-beating formula remain unchanged. ENERGY is powered by a massive array of high-wattage guests, from veterans like Kelis and Common to newer voices like Channel Tres and Kehlani. It starts promisingly enough, with several moments in the first half that deserve the full smoke-and-lasers treatment. “My High” is Disclosure at their concentrated best: full-fat bassline, rackety garage-house drums, and sleazy rapping by Aminé through a distorted mic, resembling vintage Timberlake. The track can’t even be spoiled by a guest verse from British rapper slowthai, who’s been on a time-out since disgracing himself at an awards show in February.
Also on the future-sex tip, Channel Tres brings his purring monotone to “Lavender,” a hip-house-meets-filter-disco romp that touches on the glitz of Daft Punk and the Neptunes. Kelis avoids our gaze in the club as she dances over a stretchy bassline on “Watch Your Step”; again the distorted mic, again a Neptunes connection. All these tracks, the best on the album, seem rooted in a kind of glossy yet gritty, post-millennial disco pop—a sound that would have made sense at any time in the past 20 years. When the Lawrences reconvene with Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara for the gentle grooves and generous filter sweeps of “Douha (Mali Mali),” it’s a further twist to a successful recipe, recalling UK chart hits of the early ’00s from once ubiquitous names like Modjo, Room 5, and the Shapeshifters. That Y2K sound—a jumble of vintage vocals, scuffed breakbeats, and sweeping disco lights—is Disclosure’s true lineage. Perhaps this is what “timeless” really means for British millennials?
Unfortunately, ENERGY peters out in the second half. The title track reunites Disclosure with the NBA’s favourite motivational speaker, Eric Thomas, whose booming voice appeared on 2013’s “When a Fire Starts to Burn.” This time they slap his inspirational flimflam over a noisy samba band sample and a burst of silvery chords—effective enough, but it feels like reheated glories. Despite having written more than 200 songs for ENERGY before whittling down the final tracklist, they reserve two of the album’s 11 tracks for “interludes,” as they’ve titled them. “Fractal” is innocuous boom-bap and “Thinking Bout You” is a dreamy, post-Donuts flip of an obscure ’70s soul single, Lady’s “You’re Still the One.” Both are pleasant, but it’s hard to believe there wasn’t something punchier among the 190-odd tracks on the cutting room floor.
Kehlani and Syd get together on “Birthday,” a twinkling slow jam that sounds like something those two would write with no one else around; the brothers start to fade into the scenery. “Ce n’est pas” curls into wallpaper, missing an opportunity to forge a catchy hook out of Cameroonian singer Blick Bassy’s vocal. “Reverie,” finally, is a damp sign-off that has nothing to do with the preceding 40 minutes, leaving Common to deal out lines as forgettable as lockdown’s unchanging days (“When freedom calls, we gotta listen”) over an undercooked soul loop. Rather than inviting the rap elder into their world, the brothers try, unsuccessfully, to recreate his—as if they’re happy being assistants on their own production. Seven years after their precocious debut album, one that set the standard for a whole wave of mid-’10s dance pop, Disclosure seem only slightly closer to working out what it was they got so right the first time round.

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The session musician and leader of Nat Turner goes big on his first official LP, creating a spiritually rich and soulful autobiographical story.

Monologue

The Cleveland-born and D.C.-based musician Aaron Abernathy is best known for his work as a session musician and the leader of Black Milk’s live band Nat Turner, the band that played behind Milk's recent jazz-rap album The Rebellion Sessions. Now standing center stage, Abernathy goes solo on his new LP aptly titled Monologue, which blends the weathered tropes of soul with his own formative life experiences. It’s a big, autobiographical conversation that also allows listeners to identify themselves in Ab’s life story.
The album tells the true tale of Abernathy’s teenage summer love affair just before to his freshman year at Howard University. As with many first loves, it consumes everything in Ab’s life, which leads to the album’s most significant theme of isolation. Ab notes at the start of the album that he’s the “Son of Larry” and that his mother is his “Favorite Girl,” but, like many post-high school kids, he’s conflicted between his parents and his friends who he may never see again. Furthermore, he’s confronted with choosing between his old friends, his new girlfriend, and his piano lessons. As he sequesters himself over 11 tracks, he discovers another weathered soul trope: love, music, and expressing his appreciation of both in song creates the greatest strength and most significant creative power.
The album’s DNA is largely comprised of three iconic moments in soul music. Just take the soaring guitar solo on Prince’s Sign ‘O’ the Times* *slow-jam “Adore,” the organic acoustic soul of early *’*70s singer-songwriters like Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack, and André 3000’s most earnest and lovelorn moments on his half Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, and the table is set. The lead single “I See You” handles the Prince component with an interplay between Abernathy’s own squawking falsetto, the chopped synths, and soaring lead guitar moments that rise from the mix. Abernathy himself notes that this song is supposed to create a sense of “crushing on someone.” However, there’s so much honest sensuality here that the song gently cascades over the edge into something much more erotic in nature.
Phonte and Abernathy’s frequent collaborator Black Milk appear on “Bachelorette,” which alongside “I See You” perfectly articulate the quasi-romantic victory of wooing a girl into your father’s car to drive her home from the mall. That it takes roughly nine minutes and 30 seconds is maybe a bit problematic. On The Love Below, André 3000 does what Abernathy attempts in roughly half the time with “Spread,” and the “Where Are My Panties?” skit, which unlike Abernathy’s album, adds some humor to balance the serious sexuality. Abernathy mimicking Andre’s ability to know exactly at which heartstring to aim his stylings is impressive, but he hasn’t quite figured out the right tone or pacing.
The moment that best encapsulates the album’s emotional core lay within the acoustic guitars and thick organic drum breaks that drive “I Need to Know.” Abernathy lays his soul bare and the lyrics’ spiritual essence animate in your mind’s eye. There’s no synths, no Prince-fetishization, and no early 2000s neo-soul to be found. Rather, there’s just Ab delivering what teenage life at the confluence of heartbreak, depression, and a slight fear of the unknown feels like.
On an album that oftentimes veers into overwrought sentimentality for the purposes of hammering home Abernathy’s desire to spiritually connect with the listener, “I Need to Know’” is brilliantly simple in composition. It leaves enough space for the listener to feel Abernathy’s questioning delivery of lyrics like, “Am I running a race that I can’t win?” Of late, from Miguel to Bryson Tiller, there have been many soul albums released that inspire love-making. In veering towards sex but staying well-rooted in the ultra-emotional moments of discovering love (or heartbreak, we never quite find out), Aaron Abernathy has grounded himself in a lane that feels familiar but still carries you to new places.


On the Baltimore duo’s fourth album, Ed Schrader and Devlin Rice trade their formerly frenetic energy for ’80s sounds and danceable beats.

Ed Schrader’s Music Beat: Nightclub Daydreaming

Nightclub Daydreaming

Abrasive post-punk was once the modus operandi for Ed Schrader’s Music Beat. On early releases such as 2012’s Jazz Mind and 2014’s Party Jail, the Baltimore duo created bite-sized vignettes rather than full-blown songs. Tracks such as “Televan” and “When I’m in a Car” burst like fireworks, evaporating into the air not long after the fuse was lit. With the Dan Deacon-produced Riddles, however, those serrated edges had softened, and Ed Schrader’s Music Beat expanded their sound. Four years later, vocalist Ed Schrader and bassist Devlin Rice have returned with their fourth studio album, Nightclub Daydreaming, and they have mostly relinquished aggressive post-punk for sleeker, more danceable sounds.
Rice has said that their intention for the album was to craft a collection of “sunny disco bangers.” Although the album sounds more akin to Suicide than Donna Summer, Ed Schrader’s Music Beat take a subtle turn toward the dancefloor. Punchy tracks such as “Eutaw Strut” and “Echo Base” evoke classic new-wave acts like the B-52’s and Talking Heads but with their own Music Beat twist. Propelled by a driving bassline and motorik drums, “This Thirst” is among the most ebullient in the duo’s catalog. Schrader’s echo-soaked vocals, meanwhile, often summon the gloomiest aspects of the ’80s, recalling groups like the Sisters of Mercy.
In a recent Instagram post addressing their gender identity, Schrader announced, “I’ve decided to give you the full me… the me I’ve been repressing in hopes of not making other people feel uncomfortable.” They added, “In your art, you can’t lie. That’s why I have always chosen riddles and cryptic lyrics.” Their writing remains as mysterious as ever, packed with dense imagery and mythic resonance, and laced with references to coded meanings, “buried steps,” and a switched-out lock and key. But there are glimpses of Schrader’s search for their identity: In “Black Pearl,” they sing, “I’m a foreigner even home now/I shut in vaults to heal you,” tracing the lower limits of their register. Their guttural delivery brings their former tourmates Future Islands to mind, and the chorus strikes a cathartic moment on a record that could benefit from more of them. It’s one of their best songs to date. On the following track, “Echo Base,” modulated, Disintegration-esque guitars give way to a slightly monotonous, repetitive hook with little payoff. The drums are so busy that they ultimately distract from the otherwise hazy aura.
The band’s earlier records were nicely varied, with caustic songs broken up by downtempo intermissions, but Nightclub Daydreaming, aside from the centerpiece ballad, “Hamburg,” often sounds homogenous. Regardless, it’s refreshing to hear Schrader and Rice attempt something new a decade into their career when many artists would want to stick with what already works. While they’ve shed the frenetic energy that once defined them, they bring a refined sense of intensity even to their newly unburdened beats. It was difficult to imagine dancing to Ed Schrader’s Music Beat back in 2012, but with Nightclub Daydreaming, that notion is no longer so far-fetched.


In the 1990s, Stars of the Lid's Adam Wiltze and Brian McBride were making druggy and internally-focused drone music. On the East Austin, Tex., duo's sophomore album, reissued here on remastered vinyl, they did away with voices and followed their drones to a place where words have no meaning.

Stars of the Lid: The Ballasted Orchestra

The Ballasted Orchestra

In the 1990s there were a few artists tucked into out-of-the-way corners of the United States making music defined by its vastness. In Richmond, Va., were Labradford, whose slow-moving and cinematic pieces showed how much could be wrung from simplicity and repetition. Up in Dearborn, Mich., Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren were making sensual drone music inspired both by the endless held tones of Lamonte Young and the textural romanticism of 4AD. And down in East Austin, Tex., there were Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride, who made druggy and internally-focused drone music as Stars of the Lid.
Stars of the Lid's 1995 debut was called Music for Nitrous Oxide and it had a track called "Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy"; those two phrases offer a serviceable definition of what SOTL's early music was all about. Working at home and recording on their Yamaha MT-120 and Tascam Portastudio 424, Wiltzie and McBride were patiently mapping a new terrain for experimental music. Along with groups like the previously mentioned Windy & Carl in the United States and UK groups like Flying Saucer Attack and Amp, they were taking the tools of D.I.Y. culture (recording at home, getting the word out through print zines, releasing music on smaller, specialized labels, demonstrating a fondness for cheap and easy cassettes) and using them to make abstract music for deeply immersive listening. Music For Nitrous Oxide mixed metallic drones and feedback with the sounds of strange voices; the effect was something like tuning into two radio stations at once, hearing strange disembodied phrases mixed with weird music that floated across the plains. For their third album, 1997's The Ballasted Orchestra, which has been out of print for some time and has now been reissued on vinyl by Kranky, they did away with the voices and followed their drones to a place where words have no meaning.
The Ballasted Orchestra is four sides of shifting guitar-based drone, with textures that range from thick and menacing to thin and ethereal. For those more familiar with SOTL's work from the last decade (ambient music classics And Their Refinement of the Decline and The Tired Sounds of...) what's most striking about Ballasted is how raw and ragged it sounds, in the best possible way. As the the SOTL project matured, the music grew more pristine, incorporating strings and horns and drawing inspiration from carefully composed music by artists like Arvo Part. In 1997, when these tracks were recorded, Wiltzie and McBride were firmly committed to seeing how much feeling they could wring from guitars and effects pedals.
Turns out it was quite a lot. Some psychedelic drone music seems like it's designed to soundtrack a trip through the cosmos; Stars of the Lid invites you to close your eyes and explore your own mind. And the range of sensations and moods is surprisingly wide. The disorienting "Sun Drugs" mixes thin tendrils of wavering drone with trebly guitar notes that feel random like wind chimes. "Taphead" is closer to the airy drift of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois' Apollo while "Fucked Up (3:57 AM)" is tensely cinematic, with overlapping chords that are finally interrupted with a cavernous bass that sounds like a tuba blast echoing through an empty gym.
But the highlight and centerpiece is the side-long "Music for Twin Peaks Episode #30", which is split into two parts. David Lynch's television series ended its two-season run with episode #29, so the clever title (and Stars of the Lid have always had good ones) affirms that they're using their imaginations to soundtrack a fictional world. And while the work of frequent Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti's work has been an inspiration to Wiltzie and McBride (see "Mullholland" on The Tired Sounds of), at this point the connection was more thematic than sonic. If anything, the piece is more likely to bring to mind the industrial soundscaping of Lynch's sound design partner Alan Splet. But SOTL's speculative soundtrack is absolutely masterful, a drawn-out throb of drone that feels vividly alive. At high volume it taps into the oceanic quality of shoegaze, dissolving boundaries between the listener and the listened-to.
The "Twin Peaks" nod helps explain why Stars of the Lid still feel so relevant and why this music, while deeply connected to the wide-open world of 90s tape-based psychedelia, still feels so current. We'll never stop soundtracking our space and creating virtual worlds. It might happen with a YouTube or an installation but in 1997 there were 4-track tapes recorded by friends in dark rooms that somehow found their way to other people who understood the transmission.


This reissue of the electronic composer’s first album, made in his early 20s, rings thin and hollow compared to the dark genius of his later work.

Opalescent

After completing his A-levels and graduating from secondary school at 17, Jon Hopkins joined Imogen Heap’s band as a keyboard player. He played with them for about a year and was on his way to becoming a bit of a nomad, moving from project to project, slowly developing his voice. He garnered pockets of attention in the latter half of the ’00s for his work in film, particularly with Brian Eno on Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, but his solo work was second to that of his film scores. It took him four albums before he hit the mark with Immunity**, a relentlessly brooding and stark collection of songs. *Immunity *invented a visceral electronic world, decidedly claustrophobic and blindingly loud. His music took years to find this sensibility, and in his debut *Opalescent, *he was prone to mistakes that seem rather curious in the light of his recent work. He released *Opalescent *in 2001 when he was barely 22 years old, and it remains a strange record of Hopkins’ own youthful dalliances. To commemorate the long, circuitous journey Hopkins took to prominence, Just Music has reissued the album to celebrate its 15th anniversary.
*Opalescent *was generally well-received at the time of its release. User reviews from Amazon dating back to 2001 tell a small story of ecstatic reception. One reviewer said they became obsessed with one of the tracks after hearing it on a new age sampler, which should give you a sense of where the album could be categorized. It’s classic chill-out music, the kind of stuff that came free with Windows XP, perfectly wrought for early visualizer technology. *Opalescent *is quite forcefully an extremely milquetoast album of vibes, filled with cheesy guitars and saccharine synthesizer flourishes. Other than the amount of time since its initial release, it is a bizarre choice for a deluxe reissue that hardly speaks to Hopkin’s current aesthetic sensibility. Why reissue this album in the first place?
Standing at almost an hour, *Opalescent *is a bit of a slog. It starts inauspiciously with “Elegiac,” a mishmash of acoustic guitar plucks and computer start-up chimes. It sets the tone for the album—a tone similar to that heard in American malls circa 2001 during the heyday of Sharper Image. Hopkins’ songs are sleek, smooth, but lifeless—essentially simulations of emotional and meditative experience as opposed to something actually trance-inducing. “Halcyon” is shudderingly cheesy, a mess of mellow electric guitar and synth that brings up all the polite snark of a Dyson vacuum cleaner commercial. “Apparition” contains looped piano chords and ambient sputter that are so bland as to be anonymous. “Cold Out There,” one of the album’s highlights, is at least hesitant, impressionistic, and works on some fundamental level. Yet it’s not like you forget that you’re listening to music, it’s that it feels like that you've been on hold with a customer service representative for an entire hour. The album, while well-produced, becomes akin to muzak.
Songs from Opalescent were also featured heavily in the last season of “Sex and the City.” Incidentally, the final season of the show is also the one that has aged the most poorly. Is it any surprise that prominence of *Opalescent *in late “Sex and the City” soundtracks coincided with the emergence of one of the shows more maligned and ridiculous characters: the cheesy artist, Aleksandr Petrovsky? Hopkins’ music was used during several key dramatic sequences during the last season: “Halcyon” appeared in “Let There Be Light” to introduce Carrie and Aleksander’s blooming relationship, “Cold Out There” soundtracked their breakup in the series finale. The early-career “Sex and the City” bump helped fund his later and better work, and it is a strangely appropriate footnote for the album. It became a means to an end, more than an actual piece of art Hopkins might think fondly of now.
In an interview with Red Bull a few years ago, Hopkins said of the album, “I like about half of it now … I wish I could remove them from history. I was young and the best thing that came from it was that it managed to set me up to write the second one, because I earned a bit of money.” And that would seem to be that. A decade later, he would become a permanent fixture in electronic music. But in *Opalescent *we can see that rough drafts, even the one’s we let the world see, are blind to the future. Why *Opalescent is getting a reissue if Hopkins himself said he would literally like to remove it from history is a confounding question. *If anything, it offers a more coherent and detailed portrait of Hopkins’ progression. It is a moment of youthful fallibility, but one of the most extreme proofs of artistic growth.


About 10 years ago, already well into a flourishing career, the bluster and self-evisceration of the early records Slug made with producer Ant as Atmosphere suddenly bored him. So he started penning compassionate character sketches while Ant warmed and loosened up their sound with live instruments. Southsiders extends the "quietly durable" phase of the Minneapolis duo's lifespan.

Southsiders

About 10 years ago, already well into a flourishing career, Sean Michael Daley decided to start moving the furniture around inside of his music. The bluster and self-evisceration of the early records Daley (aka Slug) made with producer Ant as Atmosphere suddenly bored him, so he set it aside and started penning compassionate character sketches while Ant warmed and loosened up their sound with live instruments. The results strayed from rap towards gently rambling spoken-word territory, but miraculously, the duo didn't lose their audience: 2008's resonant When Life Gives You Lemons You Paint That Shit Gold sold the most of any Atmosphere release and marked an unlikely new chapter in an already-unlikely career.
Southsiders extends the "quietly durable" phase of the Minneapolis duo's lifespan. The 2011 album The Family Sign, which featured the upraised fist of Daley's newborn second child on its cover, told stories that were close to his home while not being strictly about him—there were upsetting and finely detailed narratives of spousal abuse and breakups, but few first-person pronouns. Southsiders dials in closer: opening track "Camera Thief" finds him in his kitchen with his children. "I still kick it with angels, the only difference is/ Instead of the bar, I'm at my kitchen table," he raps. The line obliquely references "Angelface", a track from 2005's landmark You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having that detailed tour conquests with self-loathing and relish. It establishes the creative challenge of Southsiders. Daley has two children, a kitchen table, and a domestic existence of sorts, and he's trying to figure out how to make an Atmosphere record about that.
The awkward, uninspired construction of that line hints at the creeping problem: Contentment is damnably hard to write about. For most of us, contentment is a gift, a welcome reason to rev down the whirring of our mental engines. We analyze our bad feelings because we're trying to figure out how to banish them, but we simply enjoy our good feelings. Daley is smart and self-aware enough to diagnose this problem on "Camera Thief": "I don't need my defensiveness/ I keep to myself, my family and friendships/ I got enough people I could disappoint/ If you disagree, I think you missed the point," he raps, defensively. But pointing to the problem doesn't dissolve it, and when he follows up with ""Now pull up a chair/ Let me tell you about the last few years," it's hard to muster a lot of excitement.
More distressingly, a spare tire of flab has developed around Slug's usually chisel-sharp writing.  "Gotta be a model civilian/ And get your name printed on a bottle full of pills, and/ Spill your guts into a Dixie cup/ Give no fucks, kiss no butts," from "The World Might Not Live Through the Night", is a stretch that would never have made it onto an earlier Atmosphere record. "If everybody on the comet agreed/ We could set the clock to whenever we wanted it to be" is a nice sentiment, but not a terribly incisive thought, and when he throws it out on the gently bumping "Fortunate," it's hard not to flinch a little bit.
But even working at half-capacity, Daley hits some powerful nerve clusters. On "Arthur's Song," there are freeze-in-place images to savor like "Train tracks underneath the faceless moon" and some of his trademark writerly details: "Been a few years since the last cigarette, but if you put your finger inside the flask, it's still wet." "Time flew/ Like it's designed to do", from "Star-Shaped Heart," has a lovely, jewel-like simplicity.
There are a few moments where Slug revisits earlier versions of himself. On the curiously titled single "Kanye West", he revisits some well-trod codependency-addiction territory ("She said she want somebody she could take care of/ And right then is when we paired up"), and on the title track he throws out goofy battle raps ("Show me a player who's mad at this/ And I'll show you a hater and a masochist") like it's still 2005. The pinched fury of that era is long gone from Slug's voice, and the song feels downright affectionate, like a high-school picture, a fond look back at his "Whoever put out album must've needed write-offs" era.   They foreground the album's lack of focus: For the first time in Atmosphere's long career, the stakes feel low, and Southsiders feels both pleasant and noncommittal, like it isn't even convinced of its own right to exist.


The shapeshifting producer's latest is a concept album that recalls not only the Afrofuturist tendencies of early techno, but the heady positivity of '90s pop culture, when science fiction trafficked more in sensory manipulation than dystopian paranoia.

The Phoenix

When King Britt's Presents Fhloston Paradigm first appeared on Hyperdub in 2012, it seemed a fairly gritty offering from a producer known mostly for emotive house. But the Philadelphia-born DJ, who got his start touring with Digable Planets, is also something of a shapeshifter: with his “King Britt Presents…” projects, he’s shuffled through a number of styles with seemingly unstoppable energy—he’s mixed classic disco-funk with jazzy chill-out textures under the name Sylk 130; another project consisted entirely of re-mixed vocals from New Orleans gospel singer Sister Gertrude Morgan. One of the threads through this eclectic catalogue is an underlying Afrocentrism; another is Britt’s studied approach to meticulous genre emulation.
His new album, which sees Britt assuming the name Fhloston Paradigm as a full-on alias, revisits and fleshes out the same territory as the EP, which functioned as a kind of alternate soundtrack to Luc Besson’s pop-art sci-fi flick The Fifth Element (the name Fhloston Paradigm itself originated with “Fhloston Paradise,” the futuristic resort Bruce Willis’ character visits in the film.) It’s a concept that recalls not only the Afrofuturist tendencies of early techno, but the heady positivity of '90s pop culture, when science fiction trafficked more in sensory manipulation than dystopian paranoia. Britt carries it off with a sonic precision that can be dazzling, but at times strays into territory that feels blinkered by nostalgia.
The menacing, back-to-basics EP cut “Chasing Rainbows” reappears, and its slowly downshifting melody remains the most memorable earworm here. The rest of The Phoenix distances itself from the gear-grinding analog techno of the EP, applying that track’s mutant-pop gravitas as a schematic for something more dramatic. The production sounds more expensive, and the arrangements more elaborate, with six of the tracks featuring guest vocalists.
As a producer, Britt is in fine form here, and listening to the album on a good pair of headphones reveals truly beautiful details—the expressive drumming on “Letters of Past”, the subtle, woozy dissonance that emerges from the immersive clouds of album closer “Light on Edge”. Surprisingly, Britt’s melodic sense is easier to appreciate on the fully instrumental tracks—see the icy synth lines on the dizzying “Race to the Moon”, an early highlight. By contrast, the sung melodies sound simplistic, and when there are discernible lyrics, they’re more distracting than atmospheric. It’s hard to hear Natasha Kmeto’s appearance on “Light on Edge” without thinking of Fhloston Paradigm’s fantastic, seductive remix of her track “Deeply”, which saw him embellishing around a straightforward vocal line to hypnotic effect.
The pinnacle of the album comes on the nine-minute title track, its mutating rumble of drums and ominous chords anchoring a teased-out jumble of synth notes that eventually emerges as a bee-sting-precise melody. There’s nothing more absorbing on the album, or sweeter on the ears. It’s a massive-sounding elaboration on burnt-out techno, and inventive enough to explain why a somewhat backward-looking project would find a home on Hyperdub, a label that’s always seeking to push dance music into the future.
Unfortunately, the rest of The Phoenix has a tendency towards the anodyne, a flaw that lies more in the languorous composition than the execution. “Tension Remains”, which features operatic vocals from Pia Ercole, sounds like a fairly explicit call-back to Besson’s famous blue-skinned diva, but The Phoenix lacks the narrative quality to make it anything more than an amusing reference. The album is also an hour long—short by film score standards, but for an album with several leisurely ambient stretches, it’s a commitment to sit through. Fhloston Paradigm’s continued association with The Fifth Element makes sense: that film’s vision of the future was more concerned with the surface-level pleasures of gaudy costumes and kinetic choreography than developing a deeper subtext. The Phoenix is a similar beast, simultaneously muscular and fluffy, a well-polished album that sometimes feels perplexingly one-dimensional.


On her second album, recently reissued for its 20th anniversary, the lone woman of Ruff Ryders took the reins and made the loudest statement of her career.

Scorpion

Eve’s debut album cover emphasizes her crew’s name and her position in bold type: “Ruff Ryders’ First Lady” looms right above her paw-print chest tattoos. More than just their resident woman, though, she was easily their most versatile member, a hardcore softie adaptable enough to perform beside street cliques like Cash Money or with pop acts like Nelly and Jessica Simpson on a TRL tour. Her range made her marketable, but what Eve really offered for women in rap was proof of dimension. All she wanted for her second album was the freedom to show it.
Though in interviews at the time, Eve danced around calling herself a feminist, Scorpion is one of the most explicit pro-woman declarations in rap. “My goal is to be known as a strong independent woman who stands up for what she believes in, who stands for something other than taking your money or having you pay my bills,” she told XXL in 2001. “I’m Eve, and there’s no man in the world who can ever speak or try and write (for me).” Mass-appeal party records like “Who’s That Girl?” and “Let Me Blow Ya Mind” double and triple as power anthems and kiss-offs that affirm Eve as a multifaceted, enterprising rapper, singer, and pop star with a high emotional IQ. The cover image fittingly blends three shots of Eve: a front-facing, a profile, and a closeup of one eye gazing outward.
Within a few years of her debut, Philly’s self-professed “pitbull in a skirt” had gone double platinum and become only the third female rapper to earn a No. 1 album. She began scoring invites to fashion events like the Chanel boutique opening and invested in stock. She had enough income at then-22 to buy a house for her mom and one for herself: a lavish three-bedroom in New Jersey that was soon occupied by a live-in boyfriend, Steven “Stevie J” Jordan, a member of Bad Boy’s unstoppable Hitmen production squad who’s now better known as a sleazy reality TV player. Eve’s own real-life intersecting conflicts—her work ambitions, love spats, and efforts toward self-sufficiency—exist in equilibrium on the album.
Media celebrated Scorpion as Eve’s declaration of independence; The New York Beacon ran a review under the actual headline “You Go, Girl!” And in fairness, the first half is a total coming-out party amped up by call-and-response records like “Cowboy,” where Eve methodically lists her achievements and lays out future ones. As Swizz Beatz plays hypeman over his typically exuberant production on “Got What You Need,” Eve cautions women to demand more of aspiring ballers, ending her first verse with a shrug: “If he actin’ cheap then, fuck him, you ain’t need that.” Her flow is relentless and newly melodic across the album—she harmonizes and sings most of the hooks, and proves herself more than capable.
The album’s timeless centerpiece, lead single “Who’s That Girl?” starts with a rhythm that evokes Morse Code: nine short horn bleats, the ninth note elongated, then two quick ones, and the cycle repeats before the beat hardens into a vibrant Mardi Gras-style collision of bells and bass, all produced by Teflon. (The deluxe reissue comes with three additional remixes, the best being a dreamy, mellowed-out version by C.L.A.S.) In this one song, Eve raps enough affirmations to adorn a SheEO merch line. The lyrics might sound like empty slogans in a post-girlboss world, but in Eve’s voice, they become smooth mantras. She can fend for herself financially (“Eve want her own cash, fuck what you bought her”), that she has influence (“Power moves is made every day by this thorough bitch”), and the world is her oyster (“Bottom line, my world, my way, any questions?”). In “You Ain’t Gettin’ None,” she entertains lust for a guy while making it clear that the decision to go further is hers. “Should I give in? Ready to open my garage/And let you park in the dark,” she raps, later deciding, “Dinner was lovely, but I really gotta go.”
When Eve brags about writing her own rhymes on “Let Me Blow Ya Mind,” it’s both a boast and a reality check: this is a job, and songwriting earns her royalties. Dr. Dre’s workhorse beat pairs with breezy Scott Storch keys to produce a classic pop-rap earworm. It was Eve’s idea to collaborate with Gwen Stefani, who later said Dre was so hard on her in the studio that she cried afterward. The meta-hit about the power of a hit song somehow only peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 but won the Grammy’s first-ever Rap/Sung Collaboration award, solidifying Eve as a household name. The album reissue adds a summery Stargate remix that underscores how well the original beat amplifies Eve’s swagger.
As always, her music lands firmly on the side of scorned women. Stevie J appears on Scorpion as both a rose and a thorn in her life; he figured prominently in her interviews at the time. (In a Rolling Stone profile in 2001, he gauchely reveals Eve’s spending habits, claiming, “She spent a hundred grand real quick.”) The couple’s on-again, off-again tension manifests in a skit and a breakup anthem, “You Had Me, You Lost Me,” where Eve sounds legitimately fed up as she vents about the audacity of a cheating partner. “You fucked around and played around and now you’re feeling sad,” she croons in the chorus above a dub of herself singing the familiar playground taunt “na-na-na-na.” Ironically, Eve had reunited with Stevie by the time the album dropped, making the song’s heartfelt fury more relatably tragic. The song lives on as a document of her growing pains.
Scorpion’s backend is a collection of boutique collaborations meant to showcase Eve’s range: a laid-back reggae cut featuring Stephen and Damian Marley sits alongside a duet with soul legend Teena Marie about resilience. The records feel like icing on an already decadent cake, but they’re the sum of Eve’s parts that helped her step so fluidly into pop on her own terms. On the crew anthems—a staple on all her albums—labelmates DMX, Drag-On, and The Lox appear as shadows in her journey and risk eclipsing her message even as they line her path toward independence with flowers. Solidarity is nice. But at that point, she didn’t need the backup.

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