Bootlegs! They're not just Maxell XLIIs with fuzzy recordings of that acoustic Smashing Pumpkins Tower\n\ Records appearance anymore ...

2 Many DJs: As Heard on Radio Soulwax, Pt. 2

As Heard on Radio Soulwax, Pt. 2

Bootlegs! They're not just Maxell XLIIs with fuzzy recordings of that acoustic Smashing Pumpkins Tower Records appearance anymore! Bootlegs! Compilations of which are finding their way onto even the most esteemed criticos' mid-year best-of lists! Bootlegs! Their pissing-on-copyright-laws approach poetically mirrors-- and is, one might argue, made possible by-- the wonders of digital file-sharing! Bootlegs!
Quasi-anonymous 2 Many DJs are the kings of the bootleg mountain. Otherwise known as Soulwax, the Belgian duo (brothers Stephen and David Dewaele) has released some of the genre's most popular MP3s, many of which sprang to notoriety after being posted to Boomselection, the web's primary resource for this new music. As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt 2 is their first full-length release as bootleggers (they actually started out as a rock band), but genre classification aside, the album is really just a very cohesive, hour-long DJ mix. This incarnation of the 25-year-old artform, however, seems to be kicking up quite a bit of fuss amongst those 'in the know.' But what's the big deal? According to my analysis, four incredibly deep, insightful conclusions can be reached from the album's content:

All popular music is, by definition, pop music.

This has been the manifesto of the bootleg movement from day one, or at least since the Freelance Hellraiser's "A Stroke of Genius" started making the Internet rounds. Effortlessly merging the biggest hits of Christina Aguilera and The Strokes played a galactic prank on the hipsters of the world, showing that their latest pet band was just a few mouse clicks away from being the latest teenie pop sample loop. Nothing on Radio Soulwax is quite so subversive, but the integration of the thick-glasses crowd's favorite bands-- the Velvet Underground, The Breeders, The Stooges-- into what's basically a club house mix might ruffle some feathers. Who would've known "I'm Waiting for My Man" was just a Sly & The Family Stone tambourine away from being a party anthem? Who'd've thunk "No Fun" or "Cannonball" wrapped so perfectly around aged rap tracks from Salt N' Pepa and Skee-Lo? Nobody, actually, and that's part of the fun.

DJ mixes are not just a novelty.

Beyond this valiant mission, the dexterous wrists of 2 Many DJs appear to strive for even higher, more artistically lofty accomplishments with their mix. Witness, for example, the middle 20 minutes of the album, a movement largely devoid of mainstream-recognizable tunes. Dropping music from the household-name likes of Funkacise Gang, Alphawezen, and Zongamin, the duo slaps rhythm against rhythm in calculated haphazardry, creating new sounds sure to earn ever-more-arcane classifications from the self-appointed genre taxonomists. You might argue such experimentation is instant death to the album's boogie-boogie purpose, and is even  a bit middling. Or you might argue that I and others are convincing ourselves of this objective's presence in order to wax intellectual about a pop music collection. On certain occasions, I'd be obliged to agree with you.

DJ mixes are just a novelty.

Because really: Dolly Parton into Rokysopp? Early New Order vs. house sleazeballs Detroit Grand Pubahs? These are combinations designed to provoke disbelief and mirth on the first listen-- which they do, admirably. But thereafter, as with the vast majority of DJ mixes, the Law of Diminishing Entertainment Returns applies more readily-- these krazy kombos are certainly worth the download-time to hear at least once, but the audio trickery wears out fast. Compounding the problem is the inclusion of fairly pointless pre-processed kitsch, like the techno covers of "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and ELO's falsetto favorite "Don't Bring Me Down". Choosing to include the electro-fied versions of other mixing board pranksters is surely an odd decision, and resembles smirking in a hall of mirrors, with all the fun-or-headache debate that implies. So what's the real, overarching über-purpose?

Hire us for remixes!

And hell, don't assume from our web address that I think there's anything wrong with a little self-promotion! 2 Many DJs show off their renovatin' stuff on Radio Soulwax, and their stuff ain't too shabby. Witness Destiny's Child's TRL fave "Independent Women Pt 1," transformed into a 70s lite-funk groover by the addition of 10cc's "Dreadlock Holiday." (Mere coincidence that Beyonce's movie-driven first solo step had similar funktastical leanings?) The duo also definitively proves that nothing goes with the gleefully self-aware over-the-top house of Basement Jaxx like the hilariously oblivious prog of Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The hybridization of "Where's Your Head At" and a live take on "Theme from 'Peter Gunn'" has got BANG!-- you can already envision Pringles' ad execs riffling their Rolodexes.
Despite all my hypothesizing and yelling about stuff, I concede that Radio Soulwax is a good time. I don't know that it's groundbreaking, beyond the fact that whatever this bootlegging craze is the start of could eventually yield fantastic results. At this point, though, all I hear is a temporary house-party enhancer that, while fun for a while, isn't the kind of thing you're going to come back to in five years (or even two) to find that it's withstood the test of time. Enjoy it while you can.


Vessel is one of many names used by Bristol-based "non-dance dance music" producer Seb Gainsborough. The series of 12"s he released over the past year didn't offer an indication of just how wide open his vision would become on this debut full-length.

Order of Noise

A number of Bristol artists have soundtracked the early morning waning of post-club buzz over the years. Vessel, part of Bristol's Young Echo collective, feels like someone who's been there and experienced those hours many times over. Vessel is one of many monikers used by Bristol resident Seb Gainsborough, who has gained some momentum via a series of 12"s released over the past year. None of those offered an indication of just how wide open his vision would become on this debut full-length. His music falls roughly into the tenuous category of "non-dance dance music," although he's not averse to constructing tracks that are eminently danceable. This album's "Court of Lions" offers up a quietly euphoric type of mazy techno that feels made for huge sound systems.
Of those prior releases, 2011's Wax Dance EP occasionally circled the plastic haze of chillwave, perhaps offering a clue as to why Gainsborough ended up releasing Order of Noise on Tri Angle. Many of those rougher edges were smoothed over on the title track of the Standard EP from earlier this year, although Order of Noise goes some way to reclaiming them. Gainsborough's music as Vessel has already gained comparisons to Actress, and it's not hard to see why. Like R.I.P., this is an album that requires listeners to put in some work, to extract their own sense of logic and rhythm from its scattershot surface. The path from the leaden bong fug of "Stillborn Dub" through to the light and bloopy "Lache" isn't apparent at first, especially as the latter veers off on so many tangents; around the midway point, it feels like an entirely separate track has encroached, ushering in a whole wave of contrasting feelings.
That particular part in "Lache" offers a useful entry point into Order of Noise as a whole, highlighting how adept Gainsborough is at subtly warping his vision in unexpected ways. It's the type of approach that can easily end up unfocused, with separate strands set in motion that end up dangling in the ether. But tiny motifs emerge that tie everything together. The processed sighs that pockmark "Silten" give it a sluggish feel, something that loops around again later in the barren slo-mo grind of "Villaine". And Gainsborough is fond of stretched-out mood pieces. "2 Moon Dub" is the embodiment of that malaise at finding a club winding down for the night after endlessly plodding through puddled streets under the promise of something better. "Aries" goes even further, dredging up feelings of desperate 4 a.m. glances between strangers across a rapidly emptying bar.
There's no overall sense of narrative to Order of Noise, but the depth of the production leaves itself open to interpretation. Dig past the early Warp stylings of "Scarletta", and there's an intriguing mesh of industrial noise and balmy ambience. Some of those tweaks occasionally bear an Aphex-like fondness for tinkering. On "Plane Curves" it initially sounds like Gainsborough has mixed a percussion loop far too high in the mix, only for it to become a wonderfully cantankerous center on multiple plays. That desire to bring agitation into an unexpected realm is a particularly Bristolian trait, whether it's in Mark Stewart's aggro-funk workouts or through Portishead adding an unanticipated analog bite to their sound circa Third. Order of Noise subtly pulls on similar feelings of antagonism, in the process splitting open some welcome cracks in a well-traveled path.


A new compilation surveys the period in Japan when Jamaican influences mixed with the opulent melodies and high-production gloss of city pop.

Tokyo Riddim 1976-1985

In the 1980s, as Japan became an exporter of both culture and technology, budding scenes in the once insular nation began creating a local home for foreign sounds imported from afar. Among them was a collection of artists creating homegrown reggae music that honored the genre’s Jamaican roots. Tokyo’s leading disciples of Trenchtown included drummer Masahito “Pecker” Hashida, who recorded at Tuff Gong with Bob Marley himself, while the band Mute Beat drew heavily from reggae and dub to forge a sound that presaged acid jazz and trip-hop. The new compilation Tokyo Riddim 1976-1985 is not a snapshot of that scene. Instead, it’s a valuable collection of more pop-aligned, pseudo-reggae music masterminded by artists and producers who envisioned Caribbean influences amalgamating seamlessly with Japan’s own city-pop sound. These songs are more analogous to the English cod reggae artists of the same era—think UB40, the Police, and Paul McCartney—than the Jamaican pioneers they pilfered from.
Often this influence manifests as simply a vibe, as though all involved were attempting to recreate the feeling of a half-remembered concert they had attended while journeying through Kingston. Tokyo Riddim 1976-1985 even begins with the sound of crashing waves, setting a seaside mood, before Miki Hirayama’s “Tsukikage No Nagisa” (“Moonlight Shadow at the Beach”) mixes the singer’s sophisticated vocal, typical of city pop, over some lazily strummed reggae guitar. A lot of the set moves at a similarly easygoing pace: On “Music,” Chu Kosaka—a rock artist whose reggae credentials include citing Jimmy Cliff’s House of Exile as his favorite album—deploys an appropriately hazy falsetto and voluptuous saxophone lead over a bassline as heavy as the setting sun.
The producers are clearly unconcerned with adhering to the core tenets of reggae, and in some brashly experimental moments they blur genre lines even further. The second of two Hirayama tracks, “Denshi Lenzi” pinches the rhythm guitar and bassline from Marley’s “Natural Mystic,” but sets them against vocals doused in futuristic robo-pop vocoder effects. “Hittin’ Me Where It Hurts,” by Marlene, a Filipina singer tapped by Japanese talent recruiters to become a pop star, includes airy ba ba ba harmonies that evoke Latin jazz, adding hints of arcade electronica, clattering percussion, brass, and trippy vocal effects that fray Marlene’s flashy big-band-style performance into a fantastical, cross-cultural melange.
As with a lot of city pop, the lyrics—some of which are in English—often come off as enjoyable, if lyrically imprecise, pastiches of Western love songs: Izumi “Mimi” Kobayashi’s “Lazy Love” includes such crumpled wordplay as, “Yes, I’ll let you go, yes, I’ll make you come/Baby, I’ll set you free, baby, I’ll make you leave.” Unexpectedly, Junko Yagami’s “Johannesburg” addresses South African apartheid by noting that the city’s beauty is betrayed by the injustice meted out on its people. Mostly sung in Japanese, the song nonetheless emulates Marley’s social-justice soul. It’s difficult to discern from Tokyo Riddim 1976-1985 alone if political engagement was a common thread of this odd corner of the city-pop sound—at just eight songs, the album offers only a glimpse. But within a broader narrative, these cuts showcase the omnivorous nature of a scene that repudiated Japan’s isolationist history and created exciting new hybrids in the process.


Alchemist and Oh No approach Gangrene's You Disgust Me as an excursion into weed-hazed hip-hop psychedelia. The two complement each other, and the Gangrene project allows both of them to subvert their well-worn sounds.

You Disgust Me

When you hear an Alchemist beat, you know it. He's refined his style over 15 years and hundreds of productions, from Prodigy's thug-rap high-water mark Return of the Mac to brilliant loosies for Dilated Peoples ("Worst Comes to Worst"), Nas ("Book of Rhymes") and Raekwon ("Surgical Gloves"). His sound moves between two poles. There are the loops woven out of all manner of sample fodder, like the superior Israeli Salad instrumental suite he released earlier this year that excavates records purchased during a trip to Israel. Then there's his coldly synthesized gangster music, best displayed on Mobb Deep's mid-'00s hit "Got It Twisted", and seemingly inspired by New Wave pop and '80s crime soundtracks like Giorgio Moroder's Scarface and Tangerine Dream's Thief.  Both types are clipped and chopped like vintage DJ Premier, yet rumble at a leisurely West Coast tempo.
Alchemist does consistently entertaining work, but it's become predictable after over a decade and too much music—so far this year, he's dropped Israeli Salad and Retarded Alligator Beats joints, and now comes Gangrene's You Disgust Me. Yet Al's Gangrene project with Oh No gives both a chance to subvert their well-worn templates into something more dynamic. The two complement each other: Oh No likes to flip vinyl from exotic sources, too, whether it's Dr. No's Ethiopium or Exodus into Unheard Rhythms, the latter built around Galt MacDermot's catalog. He tends to be underrated—it's unlikely that most people who heard Dr. Dre's Compton and its "Issues" track know that Oh No also sampled Turkish folk singer Selda's "Ince Ince" with his 2007 track "Heavy", which Mos Def used for his 2009 single "Supermagic". And while his dependence on traditionalist sample loops runs deeper than Alchemist, he uses rhythm more dynamically.
Both Alchemist and Oh No approach Gangrene's You Disgust Me as an excursion into weed-hazed hip-hop psychedelia: Snippets of whacked-out voices, culled from some late night VHS videodrome, dudes talking greasy over crate-digger's delights. (RIP Sean Price, who drops a jewel on "Sheet Music" alongside Mobb Deep's Havoc.) It's a formula that Gangrene established over its two albums, Gutter Water and Vodka & Ayahuasca, light themes that bracket the usual backpack thuggery. The thirteen tracks add up to just under 40 minutes, and often seem to blend in with one another. Peaks like “Noon Chuckas,” its ominous big band buildup smoothing out into a female voice’s hypnotic glissando, sound indistinguishable from knuckleheaded errata like “Driving Gloves,” with Action Bronson’s brain fart about needing "a bitch with a pussy like like a Little League glove."
As rappers, the words Alchemist and Oh No say are less interesting than the sound of their slangy, chippy voices riffing over the blappers.Their peak You Disgust Me moment arrives on "The Man with the Horn", which draws equal inspiration from Miles Davis-styled melancholy and New York noir vis-à-vis Travis Bickle samples. Al visualizes himself as a loner wandering the streets, "stumble out the bar, vision blurry/ Humphrey Bogart, face underneath the rim of my derby." Oh No adds, "It's looking like a scene out of Vegas/ It's nighttime, and the jazz jukebox is playing." It offers a glimpse of what Gangrene could be if it was more than just headnod music stuffed with weed jokes. Both are more than capable of crafting memorable hip-hop music, even if they're too focused on cranking out bangers at an industrial rate to notice whether anything they've made stands out.


Grimes’ first project as a bona fide pop star is more morose than her previous work, but no less camp. Her genuineness shines through the album’s convoluted narrative, and the songs are among her finest.

Miss Anthropocene

In 2011, Grimes was eager to say in an interview that she had “been studying pop stars.” Since emerging 10 years ago as a DIY ingénue out of Montreal’s freewheeling music scene, Claire Boucher has become known for her experimental production that often traded discernible lyrics for otherworldly and synthetic vocal textures. The words she sang didn’t figure into what made her music so fascinating—it was how she used her vocals to mimic whalesong or aliensong, a futurist reimagining of the transfixing voices of Enya and Mariah Carey, over irresistible melodies. Yes, Grimes always wanted to be a pop star, but on her own creative terms.
Miss Anthropocene is Grimes’ fifth album and her first as that bona fide pop star—the result of widespread acclaim for both 2012’s Visions and 2015’s addictive and upbeat Art Angels. With this new celebrity, accelerated by her relationship with tech billionaire Elon Musk, Grimes wants to talk about the climate crisis—although she doesn’t use that more accurate phrasing herself. “I wanted to make climate change fun,” she’s said in interviews and on her Instagram. Meaning, Grimes is using her preferred lenses of fantasy, villainy, and pop iconography to attempt to engage with reality.
The result is a record that’s more morose than her previous work, but no less camp. Art Angels was the result of a decade spent feverishly honing the tenets of songwriting, production, and engineering in order to show listeners who she was, and what she could do (be a pop star). Miss Anthropocene is the willful destruction of that self-conception. Grimes calls the sound “ethereal nu metal,” and the vibe is more honest to the pensive, sometimes cynical, public persona Grimes has shared in public over the last decade.
In November 2018, Grimes released “We Appreciate Power,” a collaboration with her best friend HANA, and a cunningly meta prelude to Miss Anthropocene. Though the propulsive, guitar-driven track didn’t end up on the album, it reveals the aesthetic cynicism behind it: a beckoning chant about capitulating to A.I. supremacy from the perspective of a girl group, the ultimate vessel for artifice and propaganda. Surprisingly—or not, given Grimes’ track record of being more outspoken on Twitter and Tumblr—the 10 tracks that make up Miss Anthropocene, are lyrically more ambiguous about this ambitious theme. Instead, we’re left with a convoluted  narrative about personifying climate change through a fictional cosmology of demons and villainesses giddily celebrating global warming as a force of good. In that sense, Miss Anthropocene reflects the creative state in which it was made: “negative, aggressive, and isolating.”
When Grimes veers away from high concept toward examining intimate and relational forms of human erosion, Miss Anthropocene finds some clarity. “We don’t love our bodies anymore,” she intones over the droning wasteland of “Darkseid,” which also features metallic vocals by the Taiwanese-rapper 潘PAN (formerly Aristophanes). “So Heavy I Fell Through The Earth,” introduces this conceit, weighed down by a simple drum pattern. It’s a lament about the ways in which women are domesticated through patriarchal forms of control. “Specifically how when a dude cums inside you, you become in their thrall,” she said in an April 2019 interview, alluding to her relationship with Musk, who is now thought to be the father of her expected child. “Love can be this beautiful thing, but then love is the thing that’s fucking up my career. The biggest change … is losing my hardcore masculinity. I used to just be free of all this bullshit all the other girls were going through, and now I feel like I’m not.” (She’s more besotted, jubilant even, on the winsome closer “IDORU.”) And on “Delete Forever,” she shifts focus to addiction, vocals high and clear in the mix as she sings over a freakin’ banjo: “I can’t see above it, guess I fuckin’ love it.” It’s a sublime, mood-perfect vignette of self-destructive nihilism. Grimes wrote it the night Lil Peep died of an accidental overdose.
Miss Anthropocene thrills when it reveals a refined, linear evolution of Grimes’ long-standing interest in rave nostalgia and alluring pop music from around the world. On “Violence,” a vocal trance banger co-produced by Deadmau5 affiliate i_o that’s destined for a RuPaul’s Drag Race lip-sync, Grimes gives one of her most dynamic performances. Through gauzy overdubs and steady four-on-the-floor drums, she flips between whimpering and a snarl to delineate perspectives of an abusive relationship. And “4ÆM,” which she teased two years ago as an “ethereal chav jam that’s like a cyberpunk interpretation of the [Bollywood historical fantasy blockbuster] Bajirao Mastani,” delivers on the mind-bogglingly referential impulse. It’s Hollywood futurism: an Orientalist fantasia colliding with a revved-up hook; the soundtrack to a John Wick fight scene.
So much about the actual music of Miss Anthropocene succeeds that the choice to bury it below a warped—and yes, misanthropic—concept about “The Environment” makes it hard to connect with who Grimes is as an artist today. Standing in the way of humans reckoning with climate emergency are multiple delusions: that wealth brings freedom, that boundless acquisition and unchecked growth remain tenable, and that political and economic institutions are inherently trustworthy actors. Grimes sounds like the pop star she’s worked very hard to become, but her imagination seems diminished—or, like many of her celebrity ilk, is cordoned off in a bubble floating above the rest of humanity. In 2020, revolutionary pop stardom might try to clarify, rather than obscure, the havoc that systems wreak when it comes to, say, gender roles and social compliance, technology and surveillance capitalism, nationalism and land exploitation, or whiteness and pathological denial.
And that’s the obstacle, the slimy mouthfeel, standing in the way of Miss Anthropocene offering genuine catharsis: Grimes, the self-taught, self-possessed iconoclast, as insincere. In this very specific political moment rendering climate crisis as dystopian aesthetic is privileged and indulgent, and perhaps even more frustrating given Grimes’ stage wink of an album title. Who exactly is the subject of her misanthropy? Having achieved recognition and acclaim for what she can do with Visions and Art Angels, the question remains: Who is she now? And so, some footnotes from Grimes’ life feel useful here: childhood ballerina, daughter of a former accountant and former Crown prosecutor-turned-journalist, and in a relationship with a man whose real-time net worth literally jumped from $41 billion to $44.2 billion between drafts of this review. Sometimes it is important to be reminded that celebrity is also a system, a way of distracting the powerless and nurturing ruling class values through notions of exceptionalism and vanity. Perhaps, before she was a pop star, Grimes might have made a statement with this album—but what the world needs now is less obfuscation, not more.
Correction: An earlier version of this review erroneously stated that Grimes was managed by Roc Nation, a company that had ties to the National Football League. This reference has been excised. The review has also been updated to clarify the career of Claire Boucher’s father. He is a former accountant.

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On her full-length debut, Brooklyn-based songwriter Nicole Schneit wrings a range of feelings from simple, ramshackle guitar pop.

Dungeon Dots

"I'm alive," sings Nicole Schneit of Air Waves on the jangly, major-chord shuffle of Dungeon Dots opener "Knock Out", "I'm on fire, for the first time in my life." When that line is lifted out of its context, it reflects where the Brooklyn-based songwriter is in her career. After spending the entirety of 2010 (and even a sizeable chunk of 2009) building buzz, playing alongside Real Estate, and serving as Dan Deacon's favorite band, the release of Air Waves' debut serves as a boost to Schneit and her band's already-quick sprint out of the gate.
In context, the lyrics of "Knock Out" paint the portrait of love as a boxing match, surveying the opponent ("Can you put all your teeth out/ So we know just how you fight?") over the vintage bounce of a sock-hop floor-filler. The darker "Radio" carves a vignette of the demise of a relationship out of an economy of lyrics, clanging, strummed guitar, and a resilient bassline. Schneit has a weather-beaten alto reminiscent of folk songstresses Jana Hunter, Bosque Brown, and Scout Niblett, and her thin but charming voice often strains to hit high notes that are just a hair out of reach.
While "Humdrum" takes minimal musical elements and blends them together to create something surprisingly full sounding, "Sweetness" succeeds wildly with just two chords. Throughout, Dungeon Dots displays slapdash pop charm; it sometimes feels as though the running times of the songs are the exact length of time it took her to write them, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. The rudimentary song structures can get plodding on "Fort Tilden", but even then, Schneit manages to add a simplistic-but-infectious element-- in this case, the "ooh-oohs" during the chorus-- that carries it over.
There is a sense of melancholy that courses through the fiber of the record, and this is no more apparent than on the two songs that bookend Dungeon Dots. "Waters" is a waltz that serves as the highlight of the record, featuring glittery guitar work, sweet spot-hitting harmonies from Sharon Van Etten, and some of the album's best lyrics ("Wear your purple shirt, boy/ But blue hangs on your sleeve"). Picking both the saddest and most climactic way to end the record, closer "Bisous" starts as a minor-key ballad and turns quickly into a driving climax, evoking a lonely night drive with fog hanging low on the street, while Schneit dejectedly sings, "We wait for a change, but that change never came." There is a rawness, both musical and emotional, in the best moments of Dungeon Dots, proving that the simplest ways to communicate feelings are sometimes the most effective.


On her second album, the London singer-songwriter examines personal growth, romantic upheaval, and the trials of young adulthood through an astrological lens.

Saturn

Saturn, the second album from London singer-songwriter Nao, is based on the Saturn return, that specter haunting all horoscopic astrology nerds in their late twenties, when the planet Saturn comes back to meet the same spot it was at your birth. Nao, loosely within that age bracket, is a shrewd observer of the phenomenon, which is said to leave all kinds of interpersonal grief and transformation in its wake. As the astrologer Chani Nicholas explained earlier this year, the Saturn return is a time when “we aren’t so innocent, unformed, or new anymore”—a time when, “if we are lucky, we realize that no one is going to save us. And if they tried it wouldn’t feel right.”
The album drifts through a mindset in flux, largely focusing on heartbreak and the regenerative bliss that comes after. Following her 2016 debut, For All We Know, Saturn draws from R&B, pop, and funk influences with considerable self-assurance. It also reveals a newfound precision in her production, choice of collaborators, and the fine-tuned intimacy of her lyrics—all of which throw the album’s themes of personal growth and astrology into sharp, gorgeous relief.
Nao’s voice, capable of quickly shifting between a husky lower register and a mellifluous, piercing falsetto, remains a vitalizing force over Saturn’s meditations on love and loss. On “Orbit,” the album’s shapeshifting centerpiece, she traces the state of mental unsteadiness that follows a breakup, anchored by plucked electric guitar and spacious programmed beats. The track takes its time meandering from a sung, broad-stroke depiction of the end of a relationship (“I lost you in dreams, now I’m falling”) to a pitch-shifted rap that chisels its failings down to minute detail (“I don’t care about this dog and you know I can’t afford it”). Unsparing yet emotionally generous, “Orbit” adds a new wrinkle to Nao’s songwriting without sacrificing any of its tenderness. That she calls out D’Angelo here (“You can give me the voodoo/Like D’Angelo said, ‘How does it, how does it feel?’”) seems especially apt—“Orbit” moves with the same pointed intention as the neo-soul forebear’s most balanced compositions.
But Nao doesn’t wallow for long. Highlights “If You Ever” and “Yellow of the Sun” are balmy, sunlit odes to dizzying romance, while the proto-funk of “Gabriel” and the icy, restrained “Curiosity” explore sultry new depths. Tapping familiars like Mura Masa, LOXE, and GRADES for production duties, with background players ranging from Daniel Caesar to the Chineke! Orchestra, Nao enlists musicians that help her deftly transition between lean future-pop and sparse, levitating R&B. She even indulges listeners with radio-oriented fare like the silky, SiR-featuring, straight-R&B cut “Make It Out Alive.”
Regrettably, when Nao slows things down too much the occasional clumsy turn of phrase becomes obvious. The title track, despite a lovely vocal feature by UK singer-songwriter Kwabs and an expansive, strings-enhanced backdrop, doesn’t add much nuance to the album’s astrological motif, and its lyrics are graceless: “Your constellation circulating me/Like a Capricorn, you’re hard to release.” Nao trips over a similar problem on the forgettable “Drive and Disconnect”: Over a guitar line and insistent Afropop beats, she vaguely intimates an escape from “too many crimes” while elaborating on approximately none of them.
Yet even for its sometimes awkward lyrics, Saturn is tempered with enough dynamic songwriting that these instances feel less like artistic failures than growing pains. Between Nao’s lush voice and the album’s glossy production, it’s easy to get lost in Saturn. A worthy successor to For All We Know, it homes in on a specific, if occasionally ham-fisted, conceit while expanding on her sound in clear, vibrant ways.


Produced by Adrian Sherwood and since-deceased Roots Radics drummer Style Scott, the eighth album by singer/songwriter Jeb Loy Nichols has an ease about it that stems from Nichols’ long familiarity with both Jamaican dancehall and American country music.

Long Time Traveller

Looking at the respective states of American bro-country and Jamaican dancehall, it's hard to imagine that these genres ever had anything to do with each other. But in the 1960s, the harmonies of country music were big in Jamaica, as can be heard most explicitly on comps like Noah Found Grace. Or, as the owner of reggae specialty shop Deadly Dragon Sound once explained: "You can always tell when a collection of Jamaican LPs is bona fide when you come across a copy of Marty Robbins' 1959 smash hit Gunfighter Ballads." This strange hybrid continues on in the work of multitasking singer/songwriter Jeb Loy Nichols.
Nichols—born in Wyoming but now based in Wales—boasts a peculiar skill set that includes doing artwork for the reggae reissue imprint Pressure Sounds as well as curating the Country Got Soul series. So it’s no real surprise that country and reggae commingle on Nichols' eighth album Long Time Traveller, previously only issued in Japan in 2010 and now re-released on On-U Sound with a second disc of alternate mixes. Produced by Adrian Sherwood and since-deceased Roots Radics drummer Style Scott, Traveller has an ease about it that stems from Nichols’ long familiarity with both forms.
A dribble of keys and guitar upstroke introduce "To Be Rich (Should Be a Crime)," a song that replicates the classic sound of Studio One right down to the Jackie Mittoo-esque keyboard solo taken midway through. Nichols’ drawl is just behind the beat, as easeful as classic rocksteady crooners like Ken Boothe or Errol Dunkley. So closely does Nichols replicate the music of that bygone era that the songs can sound like standards, even though they are primarily originals. Nichols and his mates backing him up aren’t trying to push the envelope so much as just enjoy a mild, swaying lilt, as on "97 Miles." It’s relaxed to the point of narcolepsy, and while the cool ruler Gregory Isaacs no doubt figures into Nichols and his vocal delivery, he often just sounds drowsy. There’s a sprinkle of dub effects added to the drums of "Salt of a Fallen Tear," while there’s a dash acoustic guitar twang on "Lonely King of the Country," but rarely do Nichols’ country and roots actually entwine. It avoids the weed-infused gimmickry of Willie Nelson’s own stab at reggae on Countryman, but Traveller could stand either more splinters or more spliffs on its too-smooth moves.


On his new solo album, the Tortoise guitarist blends loops and improvisations in dazzling ways. It sounds like jazz but moves like a soft techno dream.

Forfolks

After a quarter-century as a linchpin of Chicago’s overlapping experimental jazz and rock scenes, the guitarist Jeff Parker finally made his solo debut in 2016 on the aptly named Slight Freedom. For years, Parker had embedded his chiseled guitar leads within the sophisticated post-rock of Tortoise and played in audacious jazz-oriented ensembles like the Chicago Underground Duo. But in 2013, Parker split for California, leaving behind those familiar musical contexts. The move offered him the opportunity to bask uninterrupted in his rarified guitar tone and snaking sense of rhythm, an impetus for Slight Freedom. Parker still seemed reserved, though, as if negotiating his newly solitary relationship with the guitar was an ongoing process.
In the years since, Parker has issued two complicated and compelling full-band albums, his jazz verve turbocharged by funk drums and a thrilling sense of juxtaposition borrowed from hip-hop’s quick cuts. You could hear him springing away from his longtime roles back east, expressing a more robust version of his musical freedom. He brings the gusto of those recent albums to Forfolks, his spellbinding second LP for solo guitar and a new highlight of an already-rich career. For these eight sublime pieces, Parker capitalizes on solitude to make music that sounds like classic guitar jazz but often moves like a soft techno dream.
The basic premise of Forfolks is simple enough: As the tape rolls, Parker creates loops from tiny snippets of his coruscant electric guitar tone or stretches single notes into long drones that wobble like an old pump organ. He then improvises to those loops in single takes with no overdubs, creating instantaneous guitar duets for one player and his pedals. The results might last 80 seconds, as with opener “Off Om,” or nearly 11 minutes, as on its showpiece, “Excess Success.” This isn’t a novel idea, of course—you’ve likely seen a self-indulgent instrumentalist in the corner of a bar, riffing atop loops generated by the ubiquitous green Line 6. Forfolks, however, never feels showy or vain; it’s joyous, Parker delighting in the ideas he unearths as he plays along with the sound of himself.
The results often feel dazzlingly complicated, as though these songs were built through some greater studio sorcery, like cobbling together various takes or recording the layers one at a time. The points where the loop ends and the playing begins are often unclear, so distinguishing what is new from what is repeating can be like trying to discern the individual spices in a delicate soup. During “Suffolk,” for instance, Parker generates a pattern of flitting notes and then flits around it himself in staccato bursts. He adds a floral hum and inscribes the hovering tone with a bittersweet melody, the guitar sighing with the warmth of an oversaturated sunset photo.
The repetitive elements of his faithful take on Thelonious Monk’s “Ugly Beauty”—blurred notes that glue together its brief sections—appear, disappear, and reappear so seamlessly you may wonder if they’re even there. Its inclusion feels like an homage to the way that Monk would twist and tease rhythms, long before such looping technology was widespread. Parker also interprets the standard “My Ideal,” but he forgoes any sort of loop, dancing alone with a beautiful tune. Just as a house cat excitedly slapping at a ball of yarn will stop and stare at it once in a while, Parker holds his plaything still and marvels.
Forfolks evokes a who’s-who of jazz guitar. Parker, for instance, embraces enthusiastic snippets of repetition like Wes Montgomery. His incisive lines move with the effortless grace of Grant Green. Hearing Parker settling into his solo role recalls the similarly singular tone of the late Jim Hall, always identifiable from the first note onward. What’s more, mixing engineer Graeme Gibson took care not to clean up these pieces, which he captured during two days in June. There is fuzz and static and room sound, so Forfolks indeed sounds like a relic salvaged from another era. You could slip it into a stack of jazz classics at a dinner party, and no one would likely notice this modern anomaly.
But just as Parker makes the lines between his loops and his improvisations fuzzy, Forfolks as a whole gets its power by making fuzzy the distinction between the contemporary and classic. The games he plays with rhythm and repetition feel like a frontier, a suggestion of new spaces to explore for solo guitarists indebted to minimalism, drone, and electronics. There is no better example than the album’s epic, “Excess Success.” Parker approaches its chiming loop like a patient electronic producer. He sometimes dances around it, adding a tizzy of extra notes. And then, he’ll pull back entirely, letting the beat ride as if to emphasize the work he’s been doing. It conjures the wild-eyed improvisations of Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 and the coziness of the Field’s From Here We Go Sublime, rather unexpected references for modern jazz guitar. Hearing a long-consummate instrumentalist well into his 50s grapple so clearly with the future of his own idiom is plenty inspiring; the quiet confidence with which Parker proclaims there is something else to say with just six strings and a few effects feels like a revelation, for himself and the form.

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On Francis Starlite’s third album, his music turns spare and stark as he comes closer to his finding his essence as a songwriter.

Just for Us

So far in his career, Francis Farewell Starlite’s impressive production credits and stable of collaborators have somewhat eclipsed his output as a solo pop star. The artists he works with as Francis and the Lights—be it Chance the Rapper, Drake, or Frank Ocean—all have songs that have benefited from his ghostly electro-soul and propensity for wispy, space-age synthesizers. Even his two biggest hits from 2016’s uneven-but-promising second album Farewell, Starlite!, the low-boil R&B jam “Friends” and the Afro-pop jam “May I Have This Dance?,” enjoyed heightened visibility by featuring Kanye West and Chance, respectively. Some musicians thrive in a collaborative setting, but while he’s chock full of good ideas, it can feel as if Starlite’s best efforts are behind the mixing desk rather than in front of the mic.
What’s refreshing about Francis and the Lights’ surprise third album, Just for Us, is that it sheds so much of what Starlite has made his calling card—the big features, the glossy posturing that borderlines on trying too hard—and instead comes closer to the essence of what makes him a genuinely talented songwriter. Dropped without fanfare on the last Friday of 2017, Just for Us’ stark simplicity might give the impression that it was released almost as an afterthought, a little holiday treat for hardcore Francis fans. But in reality, this is the most honest that Starlite has even been, and the brief collection of 10 tracks speaks ably to what he can achieve as a solo artist.
Previously, the bleating heartache Starlite portrayed on some of his more balladeering tracks was consciously performative, as he tried on the role of the lovelorn pop singer. Here, on a track like “Faithful,” his doubt in romance is painful and palpable. Over a simple, bare piano melody, Starlite sings: “If there was no god and nothing to do/I could be faithful to you.” Clocking in at two-and-a-half minutes, the message is straightforward and inescapable: Caught between love and desire, he just doesn’t know if he has what it takes. It’s a gut-punch, certainly some of his most affecting songwriting thus far.
Organic synth-pop might seem like an oxymoron, but that’s what Starlite goes for—mixing somber pianos and his trusty electronic production, Just for Us’ general sound sways gracefully between understated vulnerability and giddy emotion. Compared to tracks like “Faithful” and the album’s opener “Morning” (the melody of which, it must be said, sounds not unlike the theme from “Cheers”), the title track “Just for Us” is basically a stomper, even if it maintains the album’s icy pace. Its driving snares and bubbling keyboards are complemented by frequent Francis collaborator Bon Iver’s falsetto on the chorus, carrying the song above the Prince-lite style of Starlite’s funky talk-sing.
Speaking of ’80s influences, it’s hard to speak of Starlite’s singing without referencing Peter Gabriel’s wild tenor and staccato phrasing, but on “Tear It Up” the resemblance is downright uncanny, if not a conscious homage. It works as song, but is so on the nose it’s distracting. His major problem here is editing—for the most part, the songs are short, but the album could essentially be boiled down to a really solid EP instead of a bunch of interesting tracks that get obscured by what could be considered sketches or studies, like “I Won’t Lie to You,” which, in less than two minutes, doesn’t really do or say much. On the other hand, after years of injecting his songs with a more-is-more ethos at just about every level, Just for Us is a welcome window into Francis and the Lights’ soul, without smoke, without mirrors, just a man and his keyboard.


The obsessive studio work of Adam Granduciel creates a hermetic experience like no other. A Deeper Understanding is his most layered and meticulous album, a twilight world in which to lose yourself.

The War on Drugs: A Deeper Understanding

A Deeper Understanding

In his early songs, Bruce Springsteen wrote about machines. Cars were always there to the point of cliché, but he also wrote about howling factories and creaky amusement park rides and record players and undefined contraptions filled with flame that waited for you ominously on the edge of town. His interest is easy to understand. Machines take you places and inflict things upon you, and machines also rust and break down and remind you that time is passing and death is always near.
The singer and songwriter Adam Granduciel, who leads the War on Drugs and who is often compared to Springsteen, arrives at similar terrain from another angle. If so many of Springsteen’s songs were about machines, War on Drugs’ music is a machine. Granduciel’s work finds its meaning in the totality of its sound, in how writing and arranging and perfecting every detail in the studio is part of building music that carries you with it. His way of understanding the world is to use that sound machine to excavate and explore his interior life and hopefully shape it into something listeners might understand, even when he’s not entirely sure where he’s going.
True to the project’s nature, the War on Drugs’ albums aren’t reinventions, they’re more like a new model in an established line—a Mark IV that adds a few features and continually refines the engineering. On A Deeper Understanding, his first album for Atlantic, the synths get an extra twinkle, the bass-led builds get another octave of rumble, and some songs have a dozen instruments on them where they once might have had seven or eight. “Holding On” is packed with piano and celeste and a chugging acoustic, but the entire song is wrapped around the heavenly slide guitar from Anthony LaMarca and Meg Duffy, which uncurls like a plume of smoke and steals the song like a Robert Fripp solo. The arrangements throughout are mind-boggling, and if Granduciel leans slightly away from the explosive anthems punctuated by an echoing “Whooo!” that made Lost in the Dream so special, the extra attention to craft makes up for it.
A Deeper Understanding is also a fascinating study in influence; it’s hard to think of a band with more obvious touchstones that also sounds so original. Over his last two records, Granduciel has chosen a very particular slice of music history—mid-’80s rock made by baby boomers with synthesizers—repossessed it, and built a new world within it. Like the music from that era, A Deeper Understanding is all about contrast, the push and pull of rock grittiness and authenticity, while the layers of keyboards and studio sheen give the music a dreamier quality, suggesting the kind of imaginary spaces dreamed up by future-obsessed ravers. There’s a thread of Granduciel’s music that extends from something like Talk Talk’s ”I Don’t Believe in You“ from their 1986 album The Colour of Spring and winds through later incarnations of sun-kissed guitar pop, or even producer M. Vogel’s opulent edit of Springsteen’s “Tougher Than the Rest.”
So yes, Springsteen, Dylan, Tom Petty, and Neil Young all made songs between 1983 and 1988 that sounded something like the War on Drugs, but they often had these booming gated drums, a technique Granduciel mostly avoids. Instead, he favors a steady, muted pulse evocative of krautrock’s motorik groove. The arrangement of “In Chains” hums and explodes but the drums plow ahead with barely a fill or an accent, precisely marking the passing time. The approach to rhythm highlights the glide of the arrangement, creating a long rope of sound bound together so tightly it could never be pulled apart.
Springsteen had his E Street Band, Petty had his Heartbreakers, and Young had Crazy Horse. But A Deeper Understanding isn’t a “band” record in the same way. It’s very much the product of Granduciel’s obsessive vision. He plays roughly half the instruments on the album, in addition to producing and engineering it. Beneath the lush surface, songs focus on loneliness, alienation, private suffering, and the rare moments when you can leave that all behind. The intricate production and subject matter lend a feeling of hermeticism; the album is a place you hide inside, not a tool for exploring the world.
Granduciel doesn’t create fully-drawn characters (other people are phantoms or wishes or memories in his lyrics) but there’s always a desire for connection, and he lets in just enough light to make it seem possible. The album’s first single was the epic 11-minute travelogue “Thinking of a Place,” with a glowing synth swell reminiscent of Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 and a patient tempo that suggests a slow walk through the woods in the dark, the kind where you keep your hands out in front of you, feeling for branches. It turned out to be an appropriate introduction to this record because “thinking of a place”—somewhere where you can lose yourself, get out of your own head, somewhere else—is what the whole record is ultimately about. A different songwriter—someone like Neil Young, say—might sketch out what this place looks like, tell us about who we might find there. But Granduciel can’t, or doesn’t want to. And that lack of articulation, that inability to identify the source of pain and the path to redemption, becomes another of the record’s themes. But all that happens beneath the surface, almost subliminally; it’s the impossible sweep and grandeur of the music that tells the real story, of how a rush of sound can take us somewhere we can’t explain.


The New York duo jump-starts iconic disco label West End Records with a love letter to classic dance, but the mood is strangely sour.

Work

Holy Ghost! have been making music for nearly twice as long as the golden era of disco, boogie, and 1980s AOR that their sound invokes. Their longevity is a testament both to Alex Frankel and Nicholas Millhiser’s dogged ambition and the everlasting fertility of the style they’ve adopted. Their third album, Work, opens in a familiar mood: a tasteful cocaine-Koyaanisqatsi bed of sequencers, a sturdy piano riff, and a guitar gurgling like champagne bubbles, all gently rising in a 30-second intro just long enough to let you powder your nose and hit the floor.
But on Work, it sounds like the champagne’s corked. “There’s nowhere really left to go,” Alex Frankel sings on “Epton on Broadway Part I.” The track chugs along. “There’s nothing really left to say/…but if you want, if you want we’ll stay.” Later, the brief “Epton on Broadway Part II” vamps in a filter-disco style for two minutes, then runs out of gas.
Throughout the album, the New York City duo adopts a defensive slouch. The record is expertly mixed and produced: It brims with fully realized moments, like a synth bit on “Anxious” that conjures the exact feeling of seeing an ex like someone else’s post on Instagram; the portamentos on “Slow Burn” should come with a vertigo warning. But the album’s mood is just sour. “You can say we’re stupid, stupid, stupid/But we’re not about to let go,” goes the chorus of “Do This,” which then offers a bit of Imagine Dragons-y festival chanting as if to demonstrate why someone would say such a thing. “Heaven Knows What” is basically “I Keep Forgettin'” plus Frippertronics and icky lyrics like, “I think that I’m moving on/Say I’m kept, look at the company you keep.” The amiably elegant swing of “Nicky Buckingham” offers strings and crisp drums, a la Metro Area, but the macho posturing (“Trash talk/The neighborhood got too busy, didn’t it/Too soft”) is a poor fit.
Authenticity is a bore, and clearly not something Holy Ghost! give a fuck about. This is the band, after all, that pulled off a scene-for-scene remake of New Order’s “Confusion” video. But also a bore is unpersuasive rabble-rousing like “Heaven Forbid,” in which Frankel intones “Get up/You can follow my lead/Sit down/You can take a seat” while the hook from Daft Punk’s “Veridis Quo” floats by. In “Soon,” a flaccid take on the guitar hook from “I Was Made for Lovin' You” joins an unswaggering iteration of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and Frankel sounds really in his feelings about it:

Can’t believe what I said
Good as new
Good as dead
Silent auction in the back of the room
Don’t happen too often and it just couldn’t happen too soon
We’re making this harder than it used to be
It’s true
Don’t get us started, don’t start with me

Two icons of 20th-century American culture adorn Work’s cover. The first is a piece by the crucial conceptual artist Agnes Denes, documenting what she reaped in convincing the Public Arts Fund to let her grow two acres of wheat in the landfill that once lay between the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty. The second is the logo of West End Records, Mel Cheren’s disco label that, while Denes was plowing and sowing, was hard at work releasing holy queer scripture like Loose Joints’ “Is It All Over My Face?” and other tracks that expanded the possibilities of dance music, like the filter-dub fantasia of Betty LaVette’s “Doin’ the Best That I Can.”
It takes nerve and good taste to conscript those auras. It takes some kind of chutzpah to leave the closest thing the 2000s had to a West End, DFA, in order to convince West End itself to relaunch. And it is a goddamn public service to convince the very inventor of the remix, Tom Moulton, to work his magic on one of your tracks, “Anxious,” then put it out on a 12" benefiting GMHC and LIFEbeat in honor of Cheren, who died of AIDS in 2007. Especially when the remix—as breezy as a Sound Signature boot, as witty and wise as Róisín Murphy’s epics—embodies the sound Holy Ghost! insist they will not stop chasing, and when closer “Escape from Los Angeles” proves the duo can still can catch it. But too often on Work, Holy Ghost! mostly sound like they resent not being allowed to go out and play. What’s stopping them?

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The Tennessee rapper’s latest four-song EP is a concentrated burst of energy with perfectly paced flows and a vibe that’s always ready for the dancefloor.

Cherrytape EP

For someone who announced her retirement last August, Brittnee Moore (aka Bbymutha, aka Bigmutha) has been putting out music at an amazing clip. She returned in October with “Idiedtoday,” and she’s since released a string of four EPs, each stronger than the last. Cherrytape, the latest of these, is her hardest hitting, most focused project to date.
Muthaland, Moore’s 2020 full-length debut and farewell to hip-hop (if only for two months), was a universe in itself, but it lacked a gravitational center. In its 62 minutes and 25 tracks—20 songs and five skits—there are barely any weak spots and an abundance of standouts: “Dream Sequence,” “11:11,” “Drowning Pool,” and “Pink Poop Emoji” among the best of them. But much like its fun yet forgettable recurring frame—a game show “from the fiery depths of hell”—the record is more a collage of anecdotes than an arcing narrative.
Moore takes the opposite approach on Cherrytape. At four tracks and just over 10 minutes long, it’s as succinct as Muthaland is sprawling. Her flow is perfectly paced, and she delivers every line so confidently in her comfy Tennessee drawl that her self-esteem becomes contagious. Moore’s lyrical prowess was never in question, but she’s particularly sharp here, whether she’s being metaphorical (“He gon’ slit his wrist on my thorns tryna water my rose”), cathartic (“I just wanna go outside and shake it on a rainy day”), or just horny (“He know when I bounce it I buss it/He shakin’, he cummin’, we kissin’ and cussin’”). She’s playfully repetitive on the clubby refrain of “Eatcherrysoda!!!” (“My back hurtin’, my skirt too tight/My booty bouncin’ from the left to the right”), and self-referential on “Indian Hair (Better Install),” a remodeled version of one of her earliest cult hits.
Rock Floyd—the Vegas-born, Chattanooga-raised, Atlanta-based DJ and multi-instrumentalist who’s credited on nearly all of Moore’s EPs and who co–executive produced Muthaland—deserves much of the praise for Cherrytape’s futuristic, free-flowing sound. In their years of collaboration, this is the first of Moore’s projects Floyd has handled alone, and his constant presence creates a cohesion absent in her previous work.
Moore has always had a preternatural knack for party music, but this is her first project that’s dancefloor-approved all the way through. The beat on “Rainyday:)” sounds like something Drain Gang producer Whitearmor might make if he’d split his childhood between Stockholm and the South Side of Chicago. “Indian Hair (Better Install)” has a deep funk synth straight from the UK, and “Eatcherrysoda!!!” takes that sound back to its Midwestern roots, setting it to a footwork drumline that draws on the same raw materials.
Despite the geographically diverse elements of Floyd’s production, it’s automatically, subconsciously apparent that these beats come from the same well. The drum sounds stay constant across tracks, and the arrangements have a tongue-in-cheek quality that makes each instrumental feel like it’s letting you in on a new inside joke. Never is this truer than on Cherrytape’s last and best track, “Wrist.” The beat sets up a satire of Soulja Boy’s production on “Crank That,” which Floyd drives home by adding some well-placed background “yuuuuuuus” to the mix shortly after Zelooperz, the EP’s only guest performer other than Moore’s young daughter, name-checks Soulja Boy directly in his verse.
Bbymutha and Zelooperz—the Detroit-based Danny Brown protégé who’s stepped out of his mentor’s shadow in the past few years and self-released a strong album of his own last month—had already joined forces over Rock Floyd’s production once on Muthaland and again on Muthalificent 2, both times to great effect. Their sounds are drastically different, but they share a rebellious streak that’s led them both to reject hip-hop’s norms. On “Wrist.,” Bbymutha’s even-tempered flow and Zelooperz’s wild delivery are perfect foils, as are her gritty, realist tales and his madcap, post-modern declarations. Floyd bridges the gap between their seemingly opposite styles, injecting his own personality in a way that both enhances the dissonance and makes it less jarring.
Given how arduous Moore found the making of Muthaland, her recent bite-sized tapes have been perfect outlets for her continued growth and experimentation. Cherrytape is a concentrated burst of energy, evidence of her continued dedication to the craft she almost abandoned less than a year ago.

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After a six-year hiatus, the Chicago math-rock-turned-pop-rock act returns with a deceptively upbeat album inspired by the death of singer-guitarist Dave Davison’s father.

Maps & Atlases: Lightlessness Is Nothing New

Lightlessness Is Nothing New

For a band whose name denotes tools used to find and be found, Maps & Atlases seem more fascinated by absence and its aftermath. Across their debut album, 2010’s Perch Patchwork, and its follow-up, 2012’s Beware and Be Grateful, the Chicago math-rock-turned-pop-rock band examined the loss of love, youth, and even self using polyrhythms and muscular fretwork. If the exploration was going to be layered, so, too, would the music.
On their first album in six years, Lightlessness Is Nothing New, the band tackles a different kind of absence: the death of a parent. In 2012, singer and guitarist Dave Davison lost his father and began working through that ordeal as a solo artist, after Maps & Atlases ebbed toward a natural, if unofficial, hiatus. Eventually, however, he turned to drummer Chris Hainey and bassist Shiraz Dada to help flesh out what he’d written. (Guitarist Erin Elders made an official exit in 2015 to concentrate on his band Wedding Dress.)
Now a trio, Maps & Atlases connect the roller-coaster guitar fretting and weighted timbres of their earlier albums with frenetic synth touches. In addition to working with their longtime producer Jason Cupp, they brought in Scott Solter (the Mountain Goats, Okkervil River), who pushed their sound further in the direction of pop-rock and streamlined the band’s tendency toward striation. The polished result is their most accessible album to date, touching on Peter Gabriel’s fizzy pop proclivities and reaching for TV on the Radio’s early grandness.
Even though it was set in motion by death, it’s reductive to understand Lightlessness as an album solely about grief and its lapping wake. Where grief is conspicuous, the band dramatizes it as a tug of war between Davison’s dour, diaristic lyricism and their coruscating melodies. Standout “Fall Apart” finds the trio working together to create a staccato beat that enlivens the song's stifling imagery. Gloomy thoughts aren’t always best served by gloomy sounds.
More often, the band explores the confusing and confining ways a person’s absence can transform a dialogue into a monologue. Throughout Maps & Atlases’ catalog, Davison has often held conversations with friends or lovers who have moved on. But the singular loss of his father brings him face-to-face with larger doubts. An astute lyricist capable of bending a phrase to his whimsical metaphors, Davison moves away from that density and creates his own echo chamber on Lightlessness. “Ringing Bell,” “Learn How to Swim,” and “Fog and the Fall” run red with repetition, as Davison’s vocals race along at a manic clip, underscored by sinewy synths and nimble guitar fretwork. “Where do we go?” he repeats on the latter.
Davison doesn’t concern himself with finding answers because the questions he poses are not meant to end in understanding. On “Violet Threaded,” a song that invokes both Gotye and Gabriel, he sings, “We dug our histories in the mud/And then a crescent smirked across the stars and gave it all a name.” Meaning becomes random after events that shatter everything we think we know about the world. “We might never find love/We might never find life here,” Davison notes in the chorus. The only certainty in life is uncertainty, but that doesn’t make the march forward any easier. The ten tracks on Lightlessness nestle into that discomforting truth.
Uncertainty eventually transforms into self-doubt as the album progresses. Closer “Wrong Kind of Magic” pangs with the revelation that the absence of a central force in Davison’s life mirrors some larger absence in himself. One of the record’s slower songs, it winds and weaves toward lament, concluding with the declaration, “Sometimes I can’t see what life there might be/Sometimes I can’t see beyond the flood.” It’s not just that Davison isn’t sure meaning exists—it’s that, even if life does have a purpose, he doesn’t trust himself to find it. Without the dialogue he craves, he’s left asking “Am I doing this right?” but receiving no response.
Maps & Atlases have always dreamed big when it comes to their sound, and they infuse their third album with heady, melodic production that spotlights the complex experience of absence. More than focusing on a lack, though, Lightlessness Is Nothing New captures how absence can become a radiating presence that infiltrates and upends every aspect of life.


Shabazz Palaces’ Sub Pop debut Black Up breathed indelible soul into the Seattle duo’s formidable style, but the duo of Ishmael Butler and Tendai Maraire have since decamped to parts unknown. Lese Majesty boasts 18 songs grouped into seven suites, with a subtle science fiction theme; if that sounds proggy, get used to it.

Lese Majesty

Shabazz Palaces’ Sub Pop debut Black Up breathed indelible soul into the Seattle duo’s formidable style, an assemblage of chaotic grooves that spun out, pivoted on a crafty turn, and hightailed it home along the back roads. The 2011 album cut former Digable Planets member Ishmael Butler’s opaque mysticism loose on a palette of intricate, dreamy soundscapes provided by resident producer Tendai Maraire, sacrificing traditional songwriting conventions like verses and choruses to sojourn to rap’s frayed edges. Ish’s musings on love resonated in their leveraging of heady imagery with wizened world-weariness; his songs triumphed in their arrangement of familiar ideas into peculiar shapes.
Rather than mining Black Up’s fertile retrofuturist boom-bap further, the group have since decamped to parts unknown. The duo’s latest album Lese Majesty boasts 18 songs grouped into seven suites, with a subtle science fiction theme. If that sounds a bit Close to the Edge, get used to it. Lese Majesty aims to free the group’s songwriting apparatus from its trademark purposefulness, to chart a course that zags where earlier work zoomed. While the opening suite “The Phasing Shift” leads with three straight cuts in the spirit and form of Black Up, the record doesn't stay in one place for long. From the moment “They Come in Gold” fades into the undulating drone of “Solemn Swears”, it's clear that, for the duo, space is the place.
The “Touch & Agree” suite is a good primer for what to expect from Lese Majesty. “Solemn Swears” builds on a bed of synth pulses and a playful riff from Ish before collapsing into “Harem Aria”, a disorienting romp whose upbeat never hits where it’s supposed to. “Harem” becomes “Noetic Noiromantics”, which peels a few layers back to tease a hook out of the maelstrom only to dissipate as quickly as it congealed. Lese’s individual tracks aren’t so much songs as ramshackle ideas subject to crumble or explode into something unfamiliar at a moment’s notice. The passage through these movements feels like an itinerant drift, a conscious rejection of the methodical drive of its predecessor.
Lese’s moves aren’t always subtle, though; the album gets shiftier as it progresses, dispensing with the comfort of thematic unity. The run from “#CAKE” to “Mind Glitch Keytar Theme” flies through tribal drum vamps, Miami bass, horror soundtrack synths, and a frayed 190 BPM house workout in just a few minutes, ramping up the intensity before easing off it with the album closing chillout suite “Murkings on the Oxblood Starway”. This is a producer’s album, constructed to showcase a versatile sound architecture the same way Black Up highlighted Ish’s way with words.
Sometimes that means Ish's vocals are a tool in the production arsenal, distorted and distended rhythmic elements instead of guiding points. In Lese’s more erratic passages, Ish is content to toy around with an intriguing turn of phrase instead of unfurling the impressionistic poetry that electrified Black Up, but that doesn’t mean this is just an assortment of chants and sketches; Ishmael’s showcases are a grounding force for a body of songs fixated on the cosmos.
“Lèse-majesté” is a capital crime in stricter monarchic societies that loosely translates to "the offending of royalty." It's an appropriate title for the network of verses Ishmael presents here, which glibly taunt the kings of the modern rap mainstream for slacking on the job. Questioned about Shabazz Palaces' overarching purpose in a recent NPR interview, Ish retorted, "Make no mistake, this is an attack," and cuts like "Suspicion of a Shape" ("All you guys are quantized") and “...down 155th in the MCM Snorkel" (“The type of MC you’d be back then is ‘sucka’”) are rife with bile for feted lesser talents.
Similar to recent albums by the Roots and Common, Lese Majesty is an Armageddon-esque suicide mission to crash into rap's consciousness in hopes of tipping it away from a dangerous path. While its peers have set about their objectives this year with a staunch, unblinking seriousness of purpose, Ish is more forgiving. The Rucker reminiscence "...down 155th in the MCM Snorkel" recalls the days of doorknocker earrings, Dapper Dan suits, and fair ones without pining for a time machine or hawking staid old school invective. These aren’t condescending “Real Hip-Hop” platitudes: this is a call to arms for hip-hop’s creative fringe to snatch the reins from a power structure more interested in self-preservation than the advancement of the culture. The soul of Shabazz Palaces is pairing next-gen sounds with classic brass-tacks show-and-prove emceeing, and Lese Majesty tugs those extremes as far as they've ever been pulled; that it never shows signs of wear speaks to the strength of the bond.


Taken from his first two post-Buffalo Springfield solo acoustic concerts, Neil Young's new archival material finds the singer locating his voice-- which, even at 23, sounded weathered and experienced.

Neil Young: Sugar Mountain: Live at Canterbury House 1968

Neil Young has always sounded simultaneously young and old. His creaky voice conveys innocence, but it also feels wise and nostalgic, as if its fault lines developed over centuries. That's why, in his mid-twenties, Young could get away with singing that he was a lot like an old man-- it sure sounded like the truth. On most of Young's recordings, the balance between age and youth skews toward the former. He experienced so much so early-- reaching success at age 21 with Buffalo Springfield, then quickly launching a prolific solo career-- that wisdom was branded on him immediately. By the time people even knew who Young was, he sounded more like a wily veteran than a green youngster.
Sugar Mountain: Live at Canterbury House 1968 offers a chance to hear Young with the scales tipped the other direction. It's taken from his first two post-Buffalo Springfield solo acoustic concerts, performed in a ministry on the University of Michigan campus. Unheard until now, these shows have gained legend due to one song from them, "Sugar Mountain", popping up on B-sides and the Decade compilation. Made just weeks before the release of his self-titled debut and only a few days short of his 23rd birthday, this recording reveals an eager, nervous version of Young-- a version that existed briefly, soon gone in the flash of his subsequent solo success.
Not that he was uncomfortable on stage. Young had played to bigger crowds as part of Buffalo Springfield, whose success he gently mocks in between songs, scoffing at their huge amps and, as he puts it, "ra-ta-ta-ta" stage act. But he had yet to prove himself alone, and the weight of a public solo debut adds a little more quiver to his voice, a little more self-deprecation to his rambling stories.
In fact, Young was reportedly terrified, in part because he feared he didn't have enough material to sustain a full performance. Of the 13 songs included here, nearly half were previously recorded with Buffalo Springfield. To compensate, Young fills each gap with jittery, candid banter. "Nothing I say up here is a lie," he claims with a stutter. "I never ever have told a lie onstage." His true stories are consistently endearing, covering everything from taking "diet pills" to get through his previous life as a bookstore clerk, to writing Buffalo Springfield songs while stuck at a diner at 4 a.m., to learning what residuals are and buying a classic car with them.
The songs on Sugar Mountain are delivered with similar earnestness and vulnerability. After an introducer admits that the audience is larger than expected, Young offers a fragile version of "On the Way Home", his timid chords and cracking voice besting the speedier version found on the final Buffalo Springfield album, Last Time Around. Later, he sings "The Loner" in a bashful near-whisper, and the delicate guitar of "If I Could Have Her Tonight" alternates between approach and retreat. As things progress, Young's confidence grows, culminating in the "The Old Laughing Lady", which hits a rushing peak of forceful strums.
Musically, Sugar Mountain isn't Young's best live solo album. On that count, it's outshined by another recent archival release, the Massey Hall performance that happened three years later, and sounds much bolder and wider-ranging. But as a portrait of this ageless artist as a truly young man, Sugar Mountain is an invaluable document-- and a pretty compelling one, too.


On his fifth album, executive-produced by Q-Tip, Danny Brown ascends to a sort of hip-hop classicist nirvana and remains one of the most inventive and dimensional rappers working today.

uknowhatimsayin¿

Danny Brown’s breakout album came the year he turned 30. Now that he’s closing in on 40, he doesn’t seem to be settling into an elder-statesman role; judging by his new album uknowhatimsayin¿, he hasn’t settled at all. “Never look back, I will never change up,” he chants repeatedly on the first song—a vow to never let a groove become a rut, to stay the same without repeating yourself. It’s a lonely sort of promise, but it’s one that he’s kept: He remains as defiantly hard to situate now in the rap landscape today as he was in 2011.
Back then, he was ostentatiously weird, a gap-toothed Detroit rapper with a hyena voice who forever altered the smell and taste of Cool Ranch Doritos, a weirdo fashion plate back when something as mild as skinny jeans could cost you a label deal. Now that he looks like an original X-Man to SoundCloud rap’s New Mutants, he’s still an outlier: His devotion to punchlines and similes makes him sound almost rigid in the melted, borderless landscape of current rap. But this is the joy and pain of being a three-dimensional human in your records, over and over again; if you do it correctly, you’ll never quite fit in anywhere, ever.
When he announced that Q-Tip was going to executive-produce his new album, he reaffirmed that he was a classicist at heart, an old-school formalist in freak’s clothing. They are an odd pairing, The Abstract and The Hybrid; Q-Tip’s music has always felt comfortable and lived-in—wipe your feet on the rug, relax yourself, please settle down. His aesthetic is built on leaving space while figuring out how to make the quietest sound the most interesting one. Danny Brown’s most compelling music, meanwhile, has usually felt ready to leap out of its own skin, full of scraped nerves, nosebleeds, migraines, grinding teeth.
Working with Tip, Brown doesn’t tone his style down so much as modulate it, dotting his voice across these tracks like wasabi blobs. He mostly forgoes the downward-spiral theatrics of 2016’s Atrocity Exhibition and 2013’s Old, opting for punchlines and vivid images and creative cadences—trace over the jagged rhyme patterns of a song like “Negro Spiritual” and you might prick your finger. He stagger-steps around the looped guitar so nimbly it might escape your notice that he rhymes “on par,” “rental car,” “centaur,” and “Pat Benatar” within one 20-second gulp of breath.
Brown usually lunges out of beats, but here melts into them, making himself just another bright leaping dot on a cartoon assembly line. Individual production credits come from longtime collaborator Paul White, JPEGMAFIA, Flying Lotus, and Q-Tip himself, who coaxes and calms these nervy beats into a free-flowing suite, full of irregular rhythms and snipped edges. The snare snap on JPEG’s “3 Tearz” hits either a half-second later or sooner than you expect, prompting the loosest and most unpredictable verses from Killer Mike and El-P in years. Q-Tip’s own “Dirty Laundry” basically loops a full minute of “Aurora Spinray,” a quivering instrumental from the early-’70s psychedelic group Syrinx, and destabilizes the rhythm so much that listening to it feels walking across a waterbed.
These are the kinds of tactile pleasures uknowhatimsayin¿ offers. Brown has never sounded more musical, natural, or locked-in. He reels off quotable lines everywhere; “Henny got me wetter than whale piss/I’mma die for this shit like Elvis” from “Combat” is a particularly rich one, as is, “I ignore a whore like an email from LinkedIn” from “Savage Nomad.” Structurally, at least, he’s a punchline rapper, and from this angle, producing him might not be that different from producing a happy pugilist like Phife Dawg, who similarly wanted to fill whatever small container he was given with the maximum amount of his personality. As he trades bars with Tip over the trilling horn loop on “Combat Zone,” it sounds like Brown has ascended to a sort of hip-hop classicist nirvana, a place where every kick drum lands just-so, every sample clears effortlessly, every loop cuts off exactly where it should.
If there’s anything missing from uknowhatimsayin¿, it’s a sense of mortal stakes, a feeling that this music matters to Brown on a gut level. His best music has always been overwhelmingly personal, and when he declared that he would be the “greatest rapper ever” on XXX’s “30,” the implication was that he might die if he failed. It is an unqualified good thing that he is not rapping about suicidal thoughts, depression, isolation, and drug abuse anymore, but whatever else is in his head is missing. There is no moment where Brown grabs your lapels and demands you to feel what he’s feeling, whatever it may be. He has called uknowhatimsayin¿ his “standup comedy album,” and the mastery on display is that of the comic going out there and killing. But the best-loved and most enduring comedians left their own blood out on the stage, too.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Read Dominique Leone’s review of the album.

Sung Tongs

At the break in “Winters Love,” from Animal Collective’s feral, sentimental Sung Tongs, when the guitar picks up and Avey Tare and Panda Bear’s voices flail like children who know they’ll never die, it occurs to me that youth isn’t always wasted on the young. This is an old cliche, about how kids can never really appreciate the finer aspects of immaturity—in fact, it’s their immaturity and naivete that all the gray adults crave like zombies. It’s a child’s lack of self-conscience and “common sense” that make them holy, just as it’s an adult’s knowledge of their own mortality that makes them a little bit dead. However, even if the sickly, aching adults might long for days spent wasting precious time and forgetting precious lessons, most of them wouldn’t turn back the clock if given the chance. Youth isn’t wasted on the young at all, because only kids on holiday could afford to leave their hearts exposed for so long, to sing as loudly and to take so much for granted. Rather, wisdom is wasted on the old.
Since their first release, Brooklyn’s Animal Collective have soundtracked the surreal, manic experience of “immature” euphoria. In fact, the Tare/Bear duo responsible for Sung Tongs is the same that issued 2000’s Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished, a singular, idiosyncratic take on fairy tale folk and starchild pop. Fairy tales and star-children: These are impressions of “The Beyond” for imaginative children, and it’s this mentality that Animal Collective explore and evoke. It might seem whimsical or silly, but only in the sense that these perceptions are the birthrights of all children, and this band have such facility with their musical environment that they manage to turn something primal into something almost timeless. Rather, grace is wasted on the elegant.
Unlike last year’s impressive Here Comes the Indian, Sung Tongs opts for folky ambience and late-night, summer camp sing-alongs to carry the weight (or weightlessness) of its strains. Campfire Songs, which followed Here Comes the Indian, suggested a similar kind of sprawling, communal minstrel-craft, but without much of Sung Tongs’ flair for soaring melody and delicate, buoyant pace. As it happens, the last third of the new record does return to more of an open-ended, exploratory rote, but there it seems less a part of an endless ballad than the comedown from scenes of a jungle almost too fantastic to imagine. And despite its eclecticism and relatively Dadaist leanings, Sung Tongs is a romantic album; romantic in its celebration of innocence and nonsensical shared knowledge, and the sweet, trusted idea that everything will be fine—as if it hadn’t always been.
Musically, Animal Collective sound more “pop” here than they ever have, which is to say most of the songs have clear melodies that beg to be doubled and tripled by you or anyone else who cares to join. In songs like “Leaf House,” “Winters Love,” and “College,” the duo stake a direct claim to the ideal American folk of the Beach Boys and Simon & Garfunkel, as their harmonies are pure, without suggesting perfection. As Tare and Bear leap over each other in wordless, sparkler-trail counterpoint, I think about the already-gone ambitions of “Cabinessence” and Smiley Smile. However, as Brian Wilson’s visions were damaged symphonies to God, Animal Collective don’t stop down long enough to mire in the dust left behind.
“Who Could Win a Rabbit” revels in a thousand parts of some giant timepiece, as the pair of delirious children slide over screws into a bright green den of gears. The acoustic guitar rings in the start of this race with a fanfare, major chord strum, and just after the chimes cheer in pandemonium, harmony vocals spit out as many syllables as possible to describe who knows what country fair, bread-and-butter game. Sometimes their voices cross, or fly so near each other for long stretches that what seems like intricate polyphony approaches unhinged, acrobatic maneuvering. Above all, a sense of overwhelming happiness at having discovered this strange place abounds.
Elsewhere, the music is more reflective. “The Softest Voice” layers clear-toned guitar figures upon each other, as Tare and Bear whisper in harmony above, as if singing to the vision peering back at them from the skin of a backwoods creek. The rustic, secretive manner of their voices and the barely disturbed forest around them suggests that whatever ghosts inhabit these woods are only too happy to oblige a lullaby or two. Likewise, the epic “Visiting Friends” gathers in faceless, mutated ghosts (i.e., oddly manipulated vocalizations from the duo) to hover over their dying fire in visage of nothing better than the tops of trees. The constant strumming moves alongside the voices, helping to keep them afloat, but never suggesting they should organize themselves into anything recognizable or predictable. It’s windy, and if it rains they’ll get wet and continue to play.
The ritual dance “We Tigers,” passing like a pagan baptism for children in war paint, gives way to a trilogy of almost formless ballads, beginning with the erratic hymn “Mouth Wooed Her.” Here, Animal Collective, no longer satisfied to keep their enthusiasm in check via tribal drums or faintly Brazilian guitar figures, glide through scenes with impressionistic glee. Wordless coos and birdcalls light up the song, and the pair eases into their narrative with wispy, echoed melodies, before running into each other headfirst and pouncing on their guitars like real savages. This is how Sung Tongs communicates; in place of organized chaos, there are chance meetings and reunions, and plenty of celebratory dances and momentary epiphanies. In truth, it may be too much for some people to take, especially if they’re too far removed from this strange environment. For others, it’s a wonderful place, as these guides know only too well.


Dave Grohl gives himself over to arena-sized grief, reckoning, and resolve on the band’s most propulsive and purposeful music of the last two decades.

But Here We Are

Dave Grohl opens the 11th Foo Fighters album with a realization: “It came in a flash/It came out of nowhere/It happened so fast/And then it was over.” The line likely refers to the shocking death of beloved, longtime drummer Taylor Hawkins in 2022, or possibly the quiet passing, several months later, of Grohl’s mother, Virginia, at the age of 84. For some, death is not for singing about or making into art, those selfish little pursuits that turn pain inward, where it cannot be transformed into the substance of a mass healing ritual. For the Foo Fighters, it is for the Kia Forum, for Wembley Stadium.
Acknowledge this, and the pivot from eulogy to the pure rock’n’roll revivalism of “Rescued” feels inevitable and life-affirming. Whether or not people thought of Hawkins when they heard the song on the radio, “Rescued” must also acknowledge its purpose as the starting gun for Foo Fighters’ marathon live show for the next three years. “I’m just waiting to be rescued, we’re all waiting to be rescued tonight!” Grohl shouts in his indefatigable growl. Bono might endlessly roam the desert and Bruce might drive until there’s no road left in search of spiritual deliverance, but Foo Fighters are more practical and efficient—most of us have work in the morning.
But Here We Are does not change the Foo Fighters’ aesthetic in any meaningful way; it is not their grave, lonely album about loss. Rather, the most impressive thing about the album is how death is gracefully absorbed into this long-running franchise to reinvigorate the band. The album matches its tragic, highly public circumstances with the band’s most propulsive and purposeful music of the last two decades—a burned-out Christmas display that illuminates the entire neighborhood after someone finally finds the missing bulb.
“My Hero,” the most enduring anthem of the “Everlong”-era Foos, is the template upon which the near entirety of But Here We Are is based. And though spiritually that song channels the memory of Grohl’s former bandmate Kurt Cobain, its legacy lies more in how people have transposed “My Hero” onto their parents, 9/11 first responders, high school football highlights, buddy cop comedies, and Dragon Ball Z montages. It’s a populist anthem so broad and undeniable that it got co-opted by a Republican campaign, prompting the band’s own, more modest explanation of the song as “a celebration of the common man and his extraordinary potential.”
And throughout But Here We Are, this eternal pitch of humility and generosity is like the threat of the bus going below 50 miles per hour in Speed—as sure as “getting colder” rhymes with “over my shoulder,” as sure as an A-E-D chord progression signifies power-pop, Grohl steers Foo Fighters away from the maudlin and insular, offering earnest hope, fond reminiscence, and skyscraping choruses as if the band’s continued existence depended on it, because it almost certainly does. “Wouldn’t it be dangerous/If nothing was restraining us?” Grohl screams on the truly aggro outlier “Nothing at All,” though Greg Kurstin’s reliably cushy production keeps the band in a padded rage room. “Under You,” an MTV Buzz Bin throwback fizzy enough to sustain an entirely new set of Footos commercials, is as specific as things get: “Pictures of us sharing songs and cigarettes/This is how I’ll always picture you,” Grohl sighs, because my hero—my bandmate, my friend—he’s ordinary.
For the band themselves, “Under You” is a means of connecting with the naivete of their 1995 self-titled debut, coming full circle while acknowledging the distance en route. There’s no honest way to recreate the guileless genre-hopping of Foo Fighters, so But Here We Are puts a charming spin on the band’s current status as a benevolent rock conglomerate—the Foo Fighters’ starting lineup has expanded to include former members of Sunny Day Real Estate, the Germs, the Wallflowers and, with the addition of Josh Freese, nearly every legacy rock band of the past 30 years. It’s still MOR, but there are more lanes than ever on the sonic highway, and fewer detours into cartoon metal and unconvincing funk. “Show Me How” is a welcome return to the shimmering shoegaze Grohl hinted at on “X-Static,” exchanging a zonked-out Greg Dulli for the sympathetic harmonies of daughter Violet Grohl. Whereas the Cure tended to keep their arena rock and frosty post-punk separate, “Hearing Voices” evokes both within four minutes. The fractious title track is probably what major label A&Rs heard in their head while handing six-figure deals to Jawbox and Shudder to Think.
Yet these all feel like prelude to the final two songs of But Here We Are, which cement the album as the most inspired Foo Fighters record in recent memory. If the first eight tracks serve as Foo Fighters’ Back in Black—reacting to unthinkable tragedy with a blustery reiteration of formula—“The Teacher” and “Rest” are their Wish You Were Here. Taking up nearly a third of the 48-minute runtime, both are sincerely moving outpourings of grief and empathy for a lost soul, albeit without Pink Floyd’s withering cynicism towards the music industry and its complicity. Though Foo Fighters covered “Have a Cigar” with Taylor Hawkins on vocals, there’s no way they’d ever write a song like that themselves.
The circumstances around Hawkins’ death are profoundly sad and messy, and bring up a lot of uncomfortable questions about ambition, addiction, and the utter lack of meaningful mental health support for artists, even at the upper echelons of the music industry. These questions are perhaps best answered by organizing and policy changes, and not within the lines of a Foo Fighters song. Because what the band does best is honor a dear friend by turning a crowd of 90,000 into a puddle of joyous tears over the span of six hours. Maybe “Rest” would’ve been just as convincing had it remained a stool-bound acoustic ballad, but when it bursts into distortion halfway through, Foo Fighters acknowledge that, even as a set closer, it will probably be followed by “Monkey Wrench” or “I’ll Stick Around” in the first encore.
The one phrase that sticks with me the most owes to a tossed-off conjunction. Grohl sings: “I gave you my heart, but here we are,” which feels less accurate than if he sang, “I gave you my heart, and here we are.” It’s a more honest assessment of how this album is meant to be received—one man’s outpouring of grief, shared at the same altar as their triumphs.


Tink is a teenage singer and rapper from the south Chicago suburb of Calumet City who has put out four mixtapes of varying tone and quality since early 2012. She stakes out a distinctively young, female voice whether she's expressing the frustration of dealing with flaky lovers or playing at and winning that boys' rap game of pretending you're a drug kingpin.

Winter's Diary 2

This winter marks two full years of Chicago hip-hop attracting national attention. During this period, many people have been eager to assign the city a clear narrative, from the half-dozen or so documentary film crews that have stopped through to the pundits who use Chicago rappers as part of their rhetorical agenda. And while one consistent narrative has emerged—Chicago rap is violent!—the scene has evolved rapidly and dramatically. It's now marked by a fragmented patchwork of genres, microgenres, and individual artist movements—drill, bop, soul trap, acid rap, alternative trap, several types of waves and waviness—that have defied or redefined the narrative completely.
Among the artists who have most resisted easy categorization is Tink, the teenage singer and rapper from the south suburb of Calumet City who has put out four mixtapes of varying tone and quality since early 2012. Her first effort, Winter's Diary, made when she was a junior in high school, introduced her as a sort of potential long-lost member of TLC (never mind that she hadn't even been born during the group's breakout years), a talented, soft-voiced singer with an ear for contemporary rap and an astute emotional awareness. But her first glimpse of success came that summer with the brash, clever rap of “Fingers Up”. Eager to show she was a double threat, Tink then put out Alter Ego, a mixtape full of technically adept but generic raps that, "Fingers Up" aside, abandoned much of the unique viewpoint and subject matter that made her such an immediately electrifying presence.
Playing around in the areas between these two poles has helped Tink retain an edge of unpredictability and cater to a broad audience: She's proved her rap bona fides over and over with surgically precise verses like last summer's widely acclaimed “Versace” freestyle. She's shored up her Chicago credibility through collaborations with Lil Durk and Sasha Go Hard and established herself as part of the wave of successors to drill music by aligning herself with hard-edged lyrical whiz kids Lil Herb and Lil Bibby. She's captured the attention of the internet's avant-garde, spawning collaborations with artists like producer collective Future Brown and New York rapper Junglepussy. And she's continued to stake out a distinctively young, female voice whether she's expressing the frustration of dealing with flaky lovers or playing at and winning that boys' rap game of pretending you're a drug kingpin.
Winter's Diary 2 doubles down on this last point, offering both the most clear-cut perspective and the most accomplished sound of any Tink release yet, delivered with casual charm and easy emotional honesty. The characters in Tink's songs navigate complicated, intimate, and frequently disappointing romantic relationships. They are overtly sexual—take “When It Rains”, a slinky celebration of riding out thunderstorms in bed, which borrows the kind of subject matter normally reserved for grown and sexy album cuts by artists in their 30s (but equally felt by younger people).
They also often find themselves butting up against the gendered expectations of a hip-hop and hustler culture. On the brilliant “Money Ova Everything”, Tink flips the title catchphrase into a couple's joint pursuit, a promise and ultimately a kind of lament. And the back-and-forth of “Talkin' About” with Lil Herb—its lyrical tradeoff and narrative welcome 1990s throwback trope dressed up in modern flows and production—finds a couple arguing about the effects of the guy spending time on the block on their relationship (“I buy my own Prada, man, that's not the problem!” Tink exasperatedly snarls at the suggestion of whose hustling is keeping things afloat). “Dirty Slang”, the clearest pop highlight with its twinkling, synth-driven beat and muscular, Auto-Tuned hook, is a triumphant and flirtatious celebration of a guy who likes hitting the strip club.
Tink's seamless blend of rapping and singing is likely to call to mind Drake or Lauryn Hill, who are similarly interested in dissecting relationships, but the closest sonic equivalent might be Elle Varner, whose taste for R&B laced with acoustic guitars is echoed here. Like all three, Tink has a strong instinct for finding the emotional core of modern crises. This strength is particularly clear when she's discussing heartbreak, as on the arresting, guitar-backed first single “Treat Me Like Somebody” or in the high, plaintive mantra of “please don't break my heart” on “Fight It”. But it also rings true in other contexts, like the romantic, artfully Auto-Tuned “Lullaby” or the carefully spit celebration of intimacy “Your Secrets.”
On the other hand, Tink's singing style, which is slight and breathy, lacks power, and her voice can grate when it gets stuck in the same groove for too long. This type of meandering R&B is fine for building a fan base, but it's almost resigned to always being a hit away from stardom. While Tink's choice in production is mostly smart and inoffensive, her skill set would be immensely well-served by collaborating with an A-list producer. And it would be a smart move for one to pair up with her, too. Not only does she have a strong and unique perspective, she has the willingness to write her own story that has helped Chicago's recent breakout stars defy the efforts at categorization and speak to a broad audience. A city's scene is made not so much by having many artists who stick to the same sound but by having many who break out of it, and Tink is a new voice doing exactly that.