The English musician and actor’s second album places her spectacular vibrato front and center, shadowed by subtle but effective orchestration. Listening feels like a bracing walk through winter moorland.

Limbs

Few records have so palpably captured the sense of a life in wreckage as Keeley Forsyth’s 2019 debut, Debris. Sifting through it, it was hard to glean exactly what caused this turmoil. But you got the broad shape of it: a trauma so vast it was paralyzing. The title of Forsyth’s second album, Limbs, feels similarly appropriate. Listening to it feels like watching a body slowly dig itself out from a pile of rubble. “Let me begin again,” she sings on “Bring Me Water,” first at a whisper, then at a cry.
If you’ve watched primetime television in the UK, you may not know Forsyth’s name, but you will probably recognize her face. A veteran actor from Oldham, Greater Manchester, she has appeared in drama and soaps (Happy Valley, Holby City, Waterloo Road), bringing to the screen a pale-eyed gaze that is both vulnerable and strangely penetrating. Forsyth says she has long made music in private. But it was the events documented on Debris, in tandem with a blossoming creative partnership with the pianist and composer Matthew Bourne, that prepared her songs for wider consumption. Her voice is a spectacular thing: a cut-glass vibrato that brings to mind ANOHNI, or the unearthly tremble of late-period Scott Walker. Limbs places her voice front and center, shadowed by subtle but effective orchestration from Bourne and new collaborator Ross Downes—a cluster of piano notes here, an icy sheet of synth or a slow rhythmic pulse there.
Limbs feels like a bracing walk through winter moorland: cold yet undeniably alive. Like Debris, it is often lyrically oblique, opening wide to emotion while remaining discreet about the details. Forsyth roots certain moments in the domesticity of parenthood. On “Wash,” a hollowed-out dub filled with fearful sounds from percussionist Evelyn Glennie, she sings words of threadbare comfort, keeping it together through a sense of duty to another. The presence of a baby banishes dark thoughts; somewhere nearby, a pan boils over.
But Limbs contrasts these glimpses of home and family life with more protean imagery. On the title track, she first sings, then recites words that set her body against the elements: “Skin becomes divorced from air/Gravitation becomes apparent/Nobody sees these limbs underwater.” She addresses the following “Land Animal” directly to another, tracing out the vague shape of something threatening; an intrusion. “A foreign element/Metaphor,” sings Forsyth, as synths wrap and twirl around her like smoke.
Forsyth’s grounding in the theatrical arts feeds directly into her music. There’s no sense of pretense on Limbs—quite the opposite. But her training seems to give her the command to channel difficult emotions with the steely composure of a ballet dancer. Talking of “Bring Me Water,” Forsyth mentioned the influence of Pina Bausch, the German dancer and choreographer whose dramatic, physical pieces drew their power from the raw material of trauma. You can hear that sense throughout Limbs; that drama of the everyday, accentuated into something carefully measured but utterly intense.
This is not a particularly warm record, so when a flicker of sentimentality creeps in, the effect is shocking. Debris ended with a glimmer of hope in the shape of “Start Again,” and Limbs does much the same. “Who will be my friend? As the day comes to a close,” she sings on “I Stand Alone” to a gentle wheeze of harmonium. It’s the one moment on the record where you feel she is inviting affection, treating love as something reciprocal. Throughout much of her music, we hear Forsyth grappling with what it is to be human. Here, for a minute, we hear her simply be.
Limbs is not always easy to untangle. In places, it feels like it is running on instinct, an enigma even to itself. It is short, just 26 minutes, and a few songs feel rather lean. “Blindfolded,” a procession of dislocated nature imagery, rests a little too heavily on the sharp contours of Forsyth’s voice. But she could sing a shopping list and make it emotionally resonant. If in places the album feels somewhat transitory—a sequel to Debris, rather than a new statement in its own right—it lands with a grace and power that’s hard to deny.


Five years after Camera Obscura’s last album, Tracyanne Campbell returns with a new musical partner and a more mannered, slightly cautious sound, but her voice is as singular as ever.

Tracyanne & Danny

Camera Obscura are synonymous with the lonesome voice of Tracyanne Campbell, so it’s a little startling to remember that their identity formed around duets. Near the turn of the millennium, they were a cuddly new indie-pop band with two singers, a woman and a man. This was in the Glasgow of Belle and Sebastian, to whom Camera Obscura were incessantly compared, especially because Stuart Murdoch cosigned their early efforts. Even when the two bands’ paths diverged, they ran parallel. In 2002, as Belle and Sebastian shed their female side, Isobel Campbell (no relation to Tracyanne), Camera Obscura shed their male side, John Henderson, who left after finishing their beloved second album, Underachievers Please Try Harder.
Both bands went on to play hopscotch with pedigreed indie labels on both sides of the Atlantic—Merge, Matador, Rough Trade, 4AD—but they finally differentiated themselves. As Murdoch veered toward writing showtunes for imaginary musicals, Campbell, amid some country-and-western and orch-pop dalliances, tuned her band’s purring motor to run a golden-age rock ‘n’ soul chassis. Camera Obscura ceased to resemble Belle and Sebastian. Their new touchstones were old: doo-wop and shag music, Phil Spector and Motown, AM radio and Time-Life oldies. Their pert, glittering, 20th-century citations centered on a singer whose dulcet tone and willful naivete had filled in with something wiser and steelier over the years, and who had developed a surer compass than Murdoch as a songwriter.
All this history comes flooding back with the self-titled debut of Campbell’s new project, Tracyanne & Danny. It’s not just that the names-and-an-ampersand thing calls to mind Camera Obscura’s former doppelgangers. With Campbell once again overshadowing a male singer who valiantly hangs in there, it’s like Underachievers Please Try Harder but with better production, sharper musicians, and time-tempered tastes—an older musician answering her own youthful edict: “I did.” Campbell still sings about insecurity, but it’s been a long time since the music sounded insecure. If this is full circle, it ends somewhere higher than where it began, like a spiral staircase—one that passed through tragedy as it rose.
It’s easy to imagine why Campbell, to get back to music, might need to return to the start. Camera Obscura went out on a high note for listeners and a low one for the band. As 2013’s excellent Desire Lines was being recorded, Carey Lander, their keyboardist and Campbell’s best friend, had cancer. She finished the album and died in 2015. Tracyanne & Danny represent Campbell’s relatively low-key comeback. The Danny in question is Bristol’s Danny Coughlan, who creates fastidious pastiches of music from dusty 45s as Crybaby. He and Campbell became friends around the time of Desire Lines, and friendship and music seem inextricable to her. “Our friendship is not a replacement, but Carey left a space as big as it possibly could be, and now I have a best pal again,” she told The Daily Record. “I think she would have been so glad I got off my arse and didn’t mope about. I think she would have loved the music.”
If Tracyanne & Danny harks back to Campbell’s past in one way, it seems to leap into the future in another. There’s an alternate universe where Camera Obscura continued uninterrupted and made an album like this 10 years after Desire Lines instead of five, as if grief accelerated a certain kind of maturation. There’s no turbocharged rush like “French Navy” that really stands out from the mannered material. The tempos are slower, the arrangements broader, the indie-rock pep recessed. “Home & Dry” sets the pace, its trotting melody conveying us through trim passages of tickling guitar reverb: a little mariachi here, a little soft jazz there, the orchestration fluid and mild. The album is discreetly crammed with producer Edwyn Collins’ vintage gear, with glockenspiel and woodblocks, piano and horns, strings and winds blowing across the songs like weather. The pedal Collins used on “A Girl Like You” is supposedly lurking around. Eventually, someone breaks out a clavioline. It’s all very tasteful and well-turned, a little remote.
Coughlan sounds like Morrissey crossed with Roy Orbison, with twinges of both Elvises and a smidge of French lech. Strong and clear but with a narrow expressive range, he’s the kind of singer who stubbornly wins you over, rubbing elbows with one who effortlessly bowls you over. Campbell’s voice is perfectly hers—a strip of emerald-green ribbon, matte on one side, iridescent on the other, slowly tossing on a breeze. On “Home & Dry,” she starts husky and then slowly swings upward in her particular way, like something stumbling learning to fly. I’m not certain she gets the most mic time, but it feels that way. Still, on “It Can’t Be Love Unless It Hurts,” Coughlan ably holds down the brisk, romantic melody so Campbell can explore melisma more than she usually does alone, and he strikes on a sweet, inviting style on “Deep in the Night,” much more appealing than his Jacques Brel bray on “Jacqueline.”
Tracyanne & Danny peaks with “2006,” whose space-folk setting offers the album’s most inspired music and clasps the most quintessentially Tracyanne self-references: “I can’t believe this life was me/Now my passion is gone/I put my life in a song/I sing the words, they are true/I was as mean as you.” The album peters out in the home stretch, where more aggressive period mannerisms don’t entirely paper over the wispiness of the songs. But mostly it cruises in a sturdy vintage mode, down to the video for sugary country-rocker “Alabama,” which is shot like a 1970s buddy comedy, with Tracyanne & Danny driving around a crossfading map of the U.S. This timeless snapshot blur characterizes the record, too; its loveliness is a bit more tentative, more cautious, more formulaic than Campbell’s music with Camera Obscura had become. One understands. This project has time to grow. For now, we’re just so glad she’s back.


Toronto musician and U.S. Girls associate Carlyn Bezic’s disco meditations and euphoric, mechanical dreamscapes hint at the mysteries of linear time and perception.

Faster Than I Can Take

It’s a familiar story for working musicians: In March 2020, the world shut down, forcing artists to cancel tours, push back album releases, and wonder how they’d ever make up the losses. For Toronto-based indie rocker Carlyn Bezic, who had played only a few shows as a touring member of U.S. Girls before COVID hit, the shutdown offered an opportunity to shift priorities to a long-gestating solo project. Cobbled together from unreleased demos she’d written as a part of the pop-punk duo Ice Cream and rock quintet Darlene Shrugg, Bezic’s 2021 debut as Jane Inc., Number One, was an eclectic whirlwind of funky rock and electro-disco that critiqued capitalist structures and tried to reckon with living through digital personas.
Her second album, Faster Than I Can Take, comes a little over a year after the first and has a clearer thematic throughline. Over nine tracks, she crafts disco meditations and euphoric dreamscapes that blur together past, present, and future. “The laws of time have changed,” Bezic sings on glossy opener “Contortionists,” and each song shudders with a cosmic realization. From Bezic’s vantage point, time is porous and shimmering, a fluid entity that’s hard to parse yet easy to embrace. “Oh, I can feel it changing/Oh, the sky is rearranging/Faster than I can take,” she sings on the breezy title track. “Human Being” is a pointed exploration of how others’ perceptions affect our own self-image. “Building a face/Pretend I’m in a public place/Surrounded by strangers/And no one knows my name,” she muses over bouncing synths and a tugging bassline; a vocoder effect makes her voice sound like an actual group of strangers.
Bezic has described her musical persona as “a machine or an entity,” a distinct headspace punctuated by the “Inc.” in her stage name. Likewise, Faster Than I Can Take occasionally conjures the sound of factory automation: Each drumbeat falls into place with precision, and Bezic’s dry vocals sometimes evoke an industrial robot seeking human consciousness. On the abrasive, clattering “2120,” she imagines an invisible force shoving her through time itself: “The days rush past like a dollar bill/That you try to grab but it flies right past you.” Over a resonant cowbell rhythm that rings like an alarm, she chants about a reckoning, desiring to “forge a new infinite fuel/made of anger, and hope, and refusal.”
At other moments, the regimen of the factory fades away. In the sweet bossa nova groove of “Picture of the Future,” a simple acoustic arrangement slowly builds into a heavenly synthscape. Bezic is joined by backing vocalist and arranger Dorothea Paas (also a U.S. Girls touring member), who lifts the track to an ethereal plane. Paas’ vocals appear all over the album with a bright, almost metallic sheen, and her arrangements provide a pillow of moral support for Bezic to rest her frenetic anxieties.
The highlight of Faster Than I Can Take is also seemingly the most stuck in linear time: “Dancing With You” is a seven-minute ’80s-pop opus about Zoom dance parties, a reference that might be annoying if it wasn’t such a bizarrely fun listen—around minute four, a distorted, robotic voice briefly visits the club to deliver a guided meditation. Leaning into the absurdity of those early pandemic moments, Bezic plays the part of a glamorous, Madonna-esque guide. “Use the power of your mind/To bring you to the time of your life,” she sings as synths whizz off to alternate dimensions. It’s the album’s silliest lyric, but it’s strangely compelling in its sincerity. In Bezic’s view, we’re already dancing on a suspended temporal fracture—might as well confront the chaos head on.


The UK singer refines her muscular take on lovers rock. She’s at her best when she’s veering from tradition.

Happy Hour

The beating heart of Steve McQueen’s mighty historical film series Small Axe was the music of Black England during the mid-to-late 20th century, and its best episode was Lovers Rock. A celebration of the titular reggae subgenre, the hour-long film pivoted on a London house party dancefloor scene gloriously soundtracked by Janet Kay’s 1979 courtship referendum “Silly Games.” For some it was a reminder, for others a revelation, of a style that, in its heyday, got little traction beyond the UK and Jamaica—a Philly soul sibling less concerned with politics or Rasta theology than with battlefields of the heart. While men certainly distinguished themselves in lovers rock, it was a less male-dominated space than roots reggae, especially in the UK, where lovers rock fully bloomed and where women shone brightly, even if they were often denied agency. English artists beyond the genre felt its sweet and sultry pull: Sade reflected its influence on an album named after it, as did the Clash on a highlight of London Calling.
Hollie Cook, a London-raised singer in her mid-30s, missed the music’s golden era, but over the past decade she’s become its most notable booster, expanding its possibilities the way Sharon Jones revitalized 1970s soul. Her fourth LP (fifth if you count the Prince Fatty-remixed Hollie Cook in Dub), Happy Hour refines her muscular sound, which echoes tough British roots acts like Aswad as much as the silk sheet approach of Janet Kay and Caroll Thompson. The daughter of Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook and Culture Club backing vocalist Jeni Cook (Boy George is Hollie’s godfather) started her career as a latter-day member of the Slits—all of which might explain her taste for rough edges. The tension between soft and hard animates her sound. Happy Hour’s title track bolts on Ben Mckone’s hot-stepping drums and cymbals, which bushwhack through clouds of reverb, conjuring the wooziness of being two or three drinks in, as the singer laments how margaritas can’t cure her jilted ache. In “Moving On,” she pledges to ditch a toxic mate while a tart string quartet telegraphs a queasy, echoing uncertainty.
Weed paeans are reggae tradition, like whiskey ballads in country, and “Kush Kween” advocates the psychic benefits of home gardening, as well as consuming the harvest, with a guest appearance from Jamaican singer Jah9. But the best moments veer from tradition. On “Gold Girl,” Cook side-eyes a femme fatale with old-school vocal drama, unfurled over strings and mixing-desk antics like a triangulation of British touchstones Shirley Bassey, the Slits, and Soul II Soul. “Move My Way” updates the mix with a touch of ’90s UK garage, suggesting a new direction Cook’s sound could take, situating lovers rock in a continuum of Black British musical invention like the outstanding recent Soul Jazz compilation Life Between Islands.
Cook co-produced Happy Hour with Mckone and keyboardist Luke Allwood, taking the reins from Youth, the bassist and post-punk dub master who produced Cook’s 2018 Vessel of Love, though he returns to help out on the mix here. But the most notable guest spot is the most subtle. Dennis “Blackbeard” Bovell, known for his landmark work with Linton Kwesi Johnson, is an architect of UK dub and lovers rock who wrote “Silly Games” and even had a cameo in McQueen’s film. On “Praying,” the legendary producer joins Cook’s backing vocalists to express collective resilience in the face of heartbreak, wondering “what now?” and ruing “the mistaken hope that we were blessed.” With Cook insisting that “somehow we’ll make it through,” the song hints at the stealth cultural politics of lovers rock, while nodding to a creative forbear. But here, it’s Cook calling the shots, and carrying the torch with style.


As Com Truise, the producer Seth Haley works within an especially constrained 1980s aesthetic. But he pushes himself towards a higher level of sophistication on his new LP.

Iteration

If you’re looking for music that recreates the synthesizer ambience that was so emblematic of the 1980s, there’s no shortage of current artists to turn to. But electronic producer Seth Haley’s work under his most well-known pseudonym, Com Truise, is arguably the closest you can come to a TRON-like experience of total immersion. Like his previous two full-lengths and four EPs, Haley’s latest Com Truise album Iteration immediately brings to mind the feel of low-budget exercise-video soundtracks and VHS tapes whose pitch would warp when your VCR’s tracking control would kick in and it sounded like the tape was getting chewed up in the player.
Of course, these are sounds that immediately evoke their accompanying visuals. If Com Truise’s source of inspiration wasn’t obvious enough, though, his first two albums, 2011’s Galactic Melt and 2012’s In Decay spelled it out for you with album covers featuring the vintage fonts, crude computer design, and murky color saturation that once proliferated across film, TV, music, and advertising. Where artists like Boards of Canada, Tobacco, and Julian Casablancas have used ’80s aesthetics as one of several tools in their creative arsenal, Haley’s palette has been especially constrained.
Whether this is intentional rather than unimaginative, you can’t get around Com Truise’s limited range. Haley does stretch out somewhat on Iteration, though, in contrast to previous releases, and he’s learning to emphasize composition over sounds alone. Opener “...Of Your Fake Dimension” begins with a stately keyboard figure that could have worked as a hook on acoustic piano or guitar. Likewise, the electronic drum pattern, bass-register synth line, and the extra keyboard fills that pepper the song all point to an increased awareness of band dynamics, as if Truise had live players in mind.
There are numerous other examples like this, and Iteration certainly gives the impression that Haley has started to care about arrangements as much as he does about mood and tone. “Dryswch” starts out, as so much of Com Truise’s music does, with a keyboard haze that feels like looking out onto a thick blanket of fog, where you can’t clearly discern the boundary between the fog and anything else. A coiling sound effect that recalls the early days of Atari pogos across the stereo field—nothing new so far. But then the track quickly flowers as an actual song.
Had “Dryswch” contained vocals, you could easily imagine it as a pop single; in fact, you almost can’t listen without hearing a vocal hook atop it. Still, Haley manages to invest the tune with a tension. At several points, the music pauses to hover, creating still pockets to reflect. “Dryswch” shows what Haley is capable of when he doesn’t lay things on quite so thick. It wouldn’t quite be fair to say that “Dryswch” rivals ’80s music as complex and cerebral as Seeds of Love-era Tears for Fears, but it’s certainly encouraging to see Haley pushing himself towards a higher level of sophistication with its sliding, interlocking parts. The album also features key moments—“Isostasy,” “Vacuume,” “Ternary”—where Haley goes for the gold with hooks so big and melodic they cause a kind of auditory sugar rush. The fact that he’s able to do so without a single vocal in sight shows what a skilled craftsperson he’s become.
Of course, there are times throughout Iteration when Haley sounds trapped in the same old rut. Overall, though, the album balances between bombast and gestures that are a little harder to read. That contrast gives Iteration a texture that’s missing from previous Com Truise releases. In the past, Haley has steered the experience in one direction with such a singularity of focus that it felt like being engulfed in synthetic kitsch. Even if you weren’t averse to its overwhelming ’80s flavor, it didn’t take long for the music to get flat or even queasy. This time, Haley works around his limitations just enough to stave off one-trick irrelevance. Good on him, as it’s only a matter of time before ’80s retrofuturism becomes a thing of the distant past.


The brief odds and sods charity EP from Ty Segall brings both the eternal comfort of his garage rock and the joy of something new and mellow.

Fried Shallots EP

It seems Ty Segall only looks ahead. He cares about cranking out the hooks, not the critical reception of them. He cares about always performing with vigor, not the size of the mosh pit. Above all else, he cares about creative improvement, this muted confidence that’s beginning to define his career. It’s the type of confidence that brought Segall here, standing before his miraculous Jenga tower of songs, a precarious wonder of a catalog that shows no signs of collapse.
Fried Shallots, Ty Segall’s latest EP, consists of six tracks from “different times and places over the past few years” and all profits from its sales will be donated to the American Civil Liberties Union. It’s an organization he’s clearly fond of, and he offers up a comfortably familiar set of songs to guarantee some traction. “Dust” sounds like Goodbye Bread filler that’s vaguely unmemorable but saved by a blissful, classic rock guitar solo. Opener “Big Man” stomps through ‘60s fuzz with hushed “oohs” to balance the warped electronic synth that punctuates it. Even the lo-fi, scuzzy vocals on “Is It Real” feel right at home. Fried Shallots isn’t Segall’s best work, but it stays on par with the rest of his garage rock catalog.
It’s the genre-traipsing songs like “Talkin’” that contribute to Segall’s evolution, one ripe with power-pop melodies and McCartney-styled basslines. Before that, he gets caught in a quintessential Ty Segall chord progression on “Another Hustle,” where the acoustic guitar tangles itself in a bass line, climbing up a blues scale with an R&B swing. If Segall's self-titled full-length from earlier this year was new material disguised as a sampler of what he's been up to for the last half-decade, Fried Shallots is old material disguised as a sampler of what he could be up to in the future. After all, full-throated folk is a side of Segall worth welcoming, especially if it brandishes banjo the way “When the Gulls Turn To Ravens” does.
It’s these moments where the EP hits a notable stride. With over a dozen releases to his name since he started back in 2008—not including his work in Fuzz, GØGGS, and a handful of other groups—Segall re-earns the “prolific” badge each year. His talent isn't built on rehashing garage tropes, as it may seem, but rather his evolution. He freaks out morning news programs. He masquerades as an animated squirrel. He hosts an art exhibit of his paintings. Segall is at a point in his career where a random collection of outlier tracks and potential B-sides still sound fresh, and, once again, the way he stacks them makes for a marvelous listen.


Released with little fanfare, the new album from Olympia punks Milk Music is full of pure kinetic joy. It’s fueled by a tension between nihilistic fun and heady expansiveness.

Mystic 100's

After releasing their debut full-length Cruise Your Illusion with help from Fat Possum in 2013, Olympia punks Milk Music dropped their new Mystic 100’s LP with no fanfare, on appropriately mysterious label Dom America. And as with Cruise, it’s full of pure kinetic joy. Take its second track, “Twists & Turns & Headtrips,” a quintessential driving song. It starts on a keyed-up four-to-the-floor drum beat and careens through waves of scuzzy guitar, which all makes a line like “take the crazy paisley lizard/on the freeway for a spin” feel right at home. It’s meant for a West Coast open road: an old car, long hair blowing through the hot wind.
This is the oldest trope in the American road-cowboy book, but one that holds a deep power over everyone that steps into it, and one that frontperson Alex Coxen holds in great esteem. It’s not just the lizard king—Milk Music makes no secret of worshipping the old gods, from hat tips to Neil Young and Meat Puppets to a disaffected golden-age nostalgia that once drove the band to hide out in Joshua Tree, take acid, and “shoot a gun at the moon.” America’s most revered rock’n’roll came from the same “no rules, man” libertarian ethos: the premise that radical counterculture can come from isolation rather than organizing. It’s a legacy of escapism that sent white people to the desert in droves in the ’60s to drop out and make art in canyons while civil rights movements struggled against state violence that turned cities into war zones. The conditions that enable this—along with whatever ethos compels white men to uncritically invoke Eastern spirituality motifs—are due for a long line of critical inquiry that requires more column room than is possible here. In the meanwhile, the aesthetic of freedom rock is still potent.
The high-octane “Dare to Exist” is the other major scorcher. It carries a vibrant, swinging ’70s blues riff, the kind your local rock dad would swear harkens back to Zeppelin or Stevie Ray Vaughan, thrown into an ornery garage track. Like “Out of My World,” from debut EP Beyond Living, or any major track from Illusion, it’s what Milk Music does best, with Coxen’s voice now even more front and center, sneering about the audacity of existence.
Mystic 100’s references Beyond Living more directly by using the same closing song. “The Burning Light” was left as an instrumental track on Living, but on Mystic 100’s, there are newly added lyrics that make it anthemic. Milk Music want to give birth to burning light, Milk Music hate the shadows (“I don’t want to be a punk, it’s so sad, you know?”). Like their soul siblings Merchandise’s iconic “Become What You Are,” “The Burning Light” is simultaneously world-weary and desirous of pure life.
Scuzzy California sun-rock has come back into prominence in the last decade or so (Ty Segall, King Tuff), but the core of this album lies in the kind of deep psychedelia that sets in around the Northwest and Northeast alike (Gun Outfit, MV & EE). “Dramatic Exit” is a gorgeous freaked-out psych odyssey: the pleasurable ooze of Pure X intertwined with the heaviness of Sun City Girls’ “Blue Mamba.” It’s a desert mirage complete with paroxysms of searing, agonized saxophone. Then, clocking in at almost nine minutes, “Crying Wand” fully unwinds into a headscape of searching guitar passages and elegant progressions. It rides waves of exuberance and longing before crashing into abrupt, fuck-it catharsis: a tension between nihilistic fun and heady expansiveness that fuels the heart of Mystic 100’s.


The double album from the Bronx rapper is a bloated, grab-bag of singles made for Hornblower cruises and thirty-second timeouts at Madison Square Garden.

MONTANA

There’s an only-in-America charm to French Montana, the Casablanca-born Bronx rapper who—through persistence and the imprimatur of whichever label is behind him—has failed steadily upward into a world of fast cars, Kardashian trysts, and tigers on leashes. As New York’s Bloomberg-era mixtape circuit imploded, he curried favor with tastemakers from Atlanta and points south before emerging as a curator of blockbuster singles in the tradition of his indefatigable neighborhood elder Fat Joe. If his full-length collaborations with Fetty Wap, Max B, and Waka Flocka feel like ancient history, it’s because French is, improbably, the last man standing.
It’s possible that no one was exactly clamoring for a French Montana double album in 2019, even if, at 67 minutes, MONTANA’s two-disc packaging is simply a stylistic choice. Montana’s longtime producer Harry Fraud, an acolyte of melodramatic ’80s rock and contemporary foreign pop, helms Disc One. Whatever the joke is, Fraud’s always in on it, and his expansive productions comprise a self-referential universe reminiscent of a Tarantino flick. The title track’s smoky chords and weeping guitar build to one of his signature second-verse beat switches, but lacking a bright narrator like fellow Fraud clients Curren$y and Action Bronson, the unwaveringly lethargic tempo makes a slog of MONTANA’s front nine. “That Way,” a reimagining of Das EFX’s “Looseys,” neither reinterprets nor builds upon the 1992 original, and French stumbles over Cool & Dre’s stuttering beat on the listless “What It Look Like.”
Although Montana has a habit of sounding like a guest on his own tracks (you’ll be forgiven for failing to notice that he even clocks in between Kevin Gates and Kodak Black on “Lifestyle”), his better mixtapes feature moments in which opulence is less a taunt than an honest tribute to peers who never got to enjoy it. This can hardly be said of MONTANA, in which wealth’s depiction is surface-deep and kneecapped by French’s autopilot punchlines. The eponymous opener finds him “masturbatin’ on a scale for a hundred million, asking God how we made it”; he’s “militant like the Middle East” and “Big like the kid from Bed-Stuy.” There’s a lot of empty space in his bars.
Disc 2 is the big-tent attraction, picking up where 2017’s Jungle Rules, a trap-lite affair headlined by various Migos and Sremmurds, left off. It’s star-studded, dancefloor-ready, vaguely Caribbean. “Writing on the Wall,” a delectable serving of Hot 97 kibble, stands tall among Montana’s considerable singles catalog, with a Cardi B verse that ends with her “Rollin’ down the freeway, talkin’ ‘bout a three-way/Started workin’ out but he gon’ eat me on his cheat day.” The Swae Lee-featuring “Out of Your Mind” aims to recapture the magic of “Unforgettable” and gets most of the way there, whereas “Wiggle It” conscripts City Girls for a tried-and-true barnburner.
Despite the second disc’s upbeat highlights, it’s clear the well runs dry before the album’s over. “No Shopping” and “Lockjaw,” both singles from 2016’s MC4, reappear on MONTANA, as does the Drake duet “No Stylist” from mid-2018. “Hoop” sounds like a Quavo throwaway, and the Blueface and Lil Tjay feature “Slide” only perks up when the beat is briefly switched out for the “Serial Killa” instrumental halfway through.
French can be enigmatic, in that his strengths and shortcomings tend to blur together: He’s a citizen-of-the-world dabbler at best, at worst an uninspired cover artist. As a grab-bag of singles made for Hornblower cruises and thirty-second timeouts at Madison Square Garden, MONTANA is effectively too big to fail. But it’s perplexing that a project this market-tested came out so flimsy.


Across two albums that function as one stunning piece of music, the Big Thief singer approaches familiar themes of loss, solitude, memory, and regret in some of the most vivid songwriting of her career.

songs / instrumentals

When Big Thief pick up their instruments, they like to face inward, standing in a circle. That is how they rehearse, and how they have recorded all of their albums: eye to eye and practically elbow to elbow. Even when they perform, they face each other as much as possible. Much has been said of Big Thief as a family, an organism, a self-sustaining ecosystem. But what happens when the circle narrows to a single point? On the two-part songs and instrumentals—billed as a pair of standalone albums but really two inextricable parts of a whole—Adrianne Lenker, the group’s singer and emotional fulcrum, stands alone, a solitary figure learning to shoulder a burden of fresh absence. Here, inside a “circle of pine and red oak/Circle of moss and fire smoke,” she strips her music down to just an acoustic guitar and voice with minimal overdubs, all recorded straight to tape. She wrote nine of the first half’s 11 songs right there on the spot. The second half is purely instrumental; the final side is mostly windchimes.
Lenker made the record in a one-room cabin in the woods of Western Massachusetts where she holed up in spring, waiting out the early days of the pandemic and reeling from a broken heart. The simple pinewood planks of the shack’s interior reminded her, she said, of “the inside of an acoustic guitar,” which is to say it felt like home. Her friend Philip Weinrobe, a recording engineer, was summoned with a truckload of gear: half-inch tape machines, XLR cables, a binaural mic. They spent a couple weeks setting up and another three weeks recording, and the sense of presence they captured—in two cases, recording directly to Weinrobe’s Walkman—is almost overwhelming. The guitar sounds so close that you can hear the ridges of Lenker’s fingertips rubbing against coiled steel. Occasionally, her chair creaks or her foot brushes against the floor. Some songs wear a halo of birdsong or rainfall. Fragments from the sessions—orphaned chords strummed in the silence before a take begins, the thunk of what might be fingers pressing down on the keys of the tape machine—litter the final mixdown like leaves strewn across the cabin floor.
Given its modest origins, this album could have been just a detour. (“I really admire Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen—how they have such a breadth of material throughout the years, into old age,” Lenker told The Ringer last year. “They seemed to follow their own thread of curiosity and creativity, even through some weird phases when people were like, ‘I don’t know what they’re doing.’”) Instead, it sounds like the essence of her music distilled, steeped in grief. In addition to the pain of Lenker’s own breakup, Weinrobe’s grandmother was dying; he was saying his farewells to her over Zoom. Big Thief’s tour had been cut short by the pandemic. And no matter how far you went into the woods, there was no ignoring the ambient ache in the nation’s bones, all that death and neglect and malevolence. Colored by all these overlapping shades of pain, songs and instrumentals are about leave-taking, solitude, and self-reliance; about memory, longing, and regret; about the “mystery of lack.” None of these are new themes for Lenker, but she has never explored them quite like this.
Where Two Hands looked outward, songs tends to dwell in the space between Lenker and her absent lover. She begins the album with a plea: “Lay me down so to let you leave/Tell me lies/Wanna see your eyes/Is it a crime to say I still need you?” This naked second-person form of address is all over these songs, like “I’m not afraid of you now” and “You are changing me/You are changing.” They sound like private thoughts tested on the tongue, the sorts of solitary ruminations shared with the four walls of an empty space—the room tone of loss. It is an invitation to move through pain, to disappear into sound alongside her.
Some of these songs are as lovely as any Lenker has ever written: lush and verdant, chords fanning out like ferns, their major-key tonalities at odds with the heartbreak at the album’s core. On “anything,” she trades the cosmic sweep of U.F.O.F. for the microscopic detail of a moment of stillness: “I wanna listen to the sound of you blinking.” The wounds of her breakup are still raw, peppered with the buckshot of memory. She sketches the arc of a doomed affair in a series of disconnected images: wet skin and dripping mango, a Christmas Eve argument, dog’s teeth biting through flesh, “unchecked calls and messages.” But the chorus is sweet and unburdened, and toward the song’s end, Lenker lets out a soft little “Whoo!” as though carried away by the music. It’s a remarkable moment: In the midst of an unshakable sadness, the beauty of this thing she has created elicits a whoop of joy, a tiny fist pump of affirmation. Solace arrives in the form of a momentary adrenaline rush.
Lenker’s writing has never been as vivid as it is here. In “ingydar,” she sings of a horse lying naked in the barn while flies “draw sugar from its head,” her voice tumbling over itself in a rush of sticky-sweet detail. It is an image of decrepitude so richly rendered that, rather than suggesting decay, the impression is one of extraordinary fullness, like a meadow exploding into bloom:

His eyes are blueberries, video screens,
Minneapolis schemes and the dried flowers
From books half-read
The juice of dark cherries cover his chin
The dog walks in and the crow lies in his
Jaw like lead
Everything eats and is eaten
Time is fed

Throughout songs, life and death are locked in an embrace, as opposites collide and subsume one another. Violence is never far from the life force. Several times she sings, ambiguously, of motherhood. Her partner’s “dearest fantasy/Is to grow a baby in me.” Yet in “ingydar,” as she picks her way carefully over the bright-red carcass of memory, she pauses and sighs, “Six years in, no baby.”
In the almost unbearably beautiful “not a lot, just forever,” she sings, “I want to be your wife/So I hold you to my knife,” her voice growing thin like the air leaving a body. Her voice becomes even more diaphanous in “half return,” which seems to be a story about revisiting her childhood home. Images drift across the listener’s vision, unmoored from their origins, until she arrives at the chorus: “Standing in the yard/Dressed like a kid/The house is white and/The lawn is dead the lawn is dead the lawn is dead.” The sing-song melody and repeated words sound almost like a playground chant; the way she sings, “The lawn is dead”—her voice multiplied on the tape, harmonies rippling like cirrus clouds above the broad, flat Midwestern landscape—it sounds almost ecstatic.
Unlike the A-side, the B-side is devoid of overdubs, giving the songs a more intimate, stripped-down character. The crux of the record, “zombie girl,” begins as she awakens from a dream about her absent lover, but it turns into a conversation with absence itself. “Oh emptiness/Tell me ’bout your nature/Maybe I’ve been getting you wrong.” Her guitar sounds almost like a music box, and the recording is wreathed in chirps and chiming metal. “What’s on your mind?” she asks, repeatedly, and you can hear her gasp for air between the lines; the longer she holds each note, it is as though she were emptying out, becoming emptiness. As her voice trails off, a buzzing fly enters the frame, and the ambient sound swells to fill what is left. It is a song about emptiness but also fullness, about the way the self can disappear into what surrounds it.
Lenker began and ended each day’s session with an extended improvisation on her guitar. A collage of these recordings comprises instrumentals’ two songs, “music for indigo” and “mostly chimes,” which together run more than 37 minutes. They are not showy pieces, but the depth of her relationship with her instrument is clear. Channeling folk and bluegrass, she mulls over series of notes, sounding out melodic ideas, nudging forward and then doubling back; it feels less like composing than dowsing, like she is responding to the smallest variations of the weight of the wood in her hands. “She gives a lot of significance to that moment where she’s holding her guitar,” Big Thief’s Max Oleartchik told the New Yorker. “I never really think of her, like, fucking around and playing riffs or something. It’s always this instrument of witchcraft. It’s always holy.” That glimmer of something sacred shines through here: Set against the sounds of nature, her playing has a devotional quality. Toward the end of “music for indigo”—composed, she says, as something for her ex-girlfriend to fall asleep to—she murmurs, “I’m starting over,” and it is unclear whether she is talking about the song, or her life.
If “music for indigo” is spacious, “mostly chimes” is mostly just space. It begins with tentative playing, but after four minutes, her guitar gets quieter and quieter, and then drops off to silence. What is left is just the swirl of chimes and birdsong, 11 minutes of pure dreamspeak. That might seem inadvisably precious or indulgent, but Lenker’s atmospheric coda has a purpose: It completes the process of disappearing that has taken place across the course of the record. On side A, there may be as many as three guitar parts, plus overdubbed vocals, in play at any moment. Side B loses the overdubs but retains the vocals. Side C is just guitar and chimes. Side D, on the other hand, is just a suggestion of what will be left when Lenker packs up and leaves. It is the wind in the trees, the sun through the branches, the robin’s egg lying cracked and hollow on the ground, a half-moon of sky blue nestled against black loam. The barely-there conclusion of this remarkable pair of records is a memory frozen in tone, absence given form. “Oh, emptiness/Tell me ’bout your nature,” Lenker asks in “zombie girl.” Taken together, songs and instrumentals provide an answer.

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After a quiet few years following her 2016 debut, the Chicago rapper returns sounding self-assured, wrapping her sharp flow in lush yet punchy beats.

Big Dreez

It’s been a quiet few years for Dreezy since she released her appealing 2016 studio debut, No Hard Feelings. She’s released four non-album singles since, but none of them really stuck. She was anointed the Princess of Chicago rap upon her arrival as a fresh-faced 20-year-old in 2014, but other artists moving into the same sonic spaces she’s occupied—Cardi B, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, Tierra Whack—have covered more ground in less time, commercially and creatively. But those paying closer attention know Dreezy’s potential, and how it’s still paying out returns. She was recently invited to J. Cole’s rap summit for his Revenge of the Dreamers III uber-compilation, a nod from her peers to her obvious talent in what otherwise felt like a boys’ club; she played Rolling Loud, a festival notorious for underbooking women, two years in a row. Now 24, the Chicago rapper and singer has reemerged with Big Dreez, her second studio album on Interscope Records. “Made a name but ain’t chase the fame/Bitches trade respect for a paid gimmick,” she raps on opener “Chicken Noodle Soup,” as if to explain her current position. The album is a lesson in earning respect. Within these songs, Dreezy seems not just self-assured but gratified.
Tightly cut into scenes from an unraveling love triangle, No Hard Feelings was a more ambitious storytelling exercise; it was also more discerning about segueing from combative bars to sumptuous R&B songs. Big Dreez is a bit aimless by comparison, but it also feels like an evolution in Dreezy’s songcraft. The writing is tighter, the verses tauter, the hooks snappier. Edited down to 10 songs and 31 minutes, the album is a distillation of her abilities and an first-rate exhibition of her skill set.
Big Dreez has its flex anthems and its songs about trysts on the verge (of either collapse or combustion), most of which neatly fit into their respective categories. The Jeremih-assisted “Ecstasy” is like a sequel to their platinum hit “Body”; “RIP Aretha” channels the perpetual “Chiraq” freestyle burning within her. Dreezy is effective in both spaces, but she is still working toward finding a middle ground to connect these disparate elements of her sound. She’s getting closer: Three years ago, she couldn’t have made songs like “Cash App” or “Where Them $ @,” tracks that perfectly fuse her natural sing-songy tendencies with her silver-tongued technique. There isn’t much flow in the sequencing, but she delivers with consistency.
Dreezy can go rapid-fire with the best of them, hurtling into cadences with reckless abandon but sashaying in and out of them with an unwitting finesse. This is still her default setting, and when all else fails, she feeds off that aggression to relentlessly taunt the challengers in her rearview. “Niggas askin’ me stupid shit like who my competition. Ain’t no fuckin’ competition. Y’all in 2018, we in 2020,” she says in the album’s opening seconds, and her raps abide by this principle. Her design for pointing out her own progress is to treat her competitors as benchmarks she’s already passed; she’ll rap something like, “I ain’t goin’ back to what I used to do/Bitches hatin’ on me in an Uber Pool,” or “Just spent a light 30/I got enough bread to feed you lil birdies,” where the proof of her success lies in just how far ahead of rivals she is.
This tactic is aided by the album’s lush yet punchy soundbeds from trap mainstays Southside and London on da Track, along with producers of the moment like Take a Daytrip (Sheck Wes’ “Mo Bamba,” Juice WRLD’s “Legends”) and OG Parker (Migos’ “Walk It Like I Talk It,” Tory Lanez’s “B.I.D.”). The beats sound pricey and in your face without being obtrusive or compromising her carefully timed show-offs and put-downs, all performed with a sneer or a scoff. In the Pi’erre Bourne-produced “Chanel Slides,” an obvious standout, Dreezy and stunt mate Kash Doll put their degrees from “the U of Finesse” to good use as handbells crash all around them. It seems unlikely Dreezy will ever scale rap’s greatest heights, but it’s in these moments, on another impressive album, that she proves success doesn’t look the same on everyone.


What starts as an homage to John Cage, soon shifts into an increasingly honest and heartfelt album of solo piano by the young composer.

Partners

As a love letter to John Cage, multi-instrumentalist and composer Peter Broderick based most of his seventh solo album Partners on Cage’s concept of chance-based composition. Before writing any of the album’s original material, Broderick learned to play Cage’s solo piano piece “In a Landscape” by listening to various recorded versions and breaking them down note for note. That process inspired him to look beyond Cage’s musical ideas and deeper into the venerated composer’s philosophical leanings and overall approach to living. In a contemplative message that Broderick sent to his label Erased Tapes upon handing in the finished record, he explained that he was particularly drawn to the way Cage stripped his music of a composer’s presence. In like-minded fashion, Broderick set out to remove himself from Partners. That he fails to do so ends up being one of this album’s greatest triumphs.
In Broderick’s own bio, he declares his love for all living things “from donkeys to dandelions” and then switches in an instant from a goofy romanticism to the sublime. Over a discography that ranges from piano, to minimalist drone scores for film, to singer-songwriter folk (along with a heap of accompanist/session credits), Broderick wears his heart on his sleeve, even in his instrumental work. Had he succeeded to remove himself from these pieces, *Partners *would no doubt have ended up as a more remote, perhaps impenetrable work of solo piano. But unlike Cage’s more radical subversions of conventional definitions of music, his “In a Landscape” disarms you with its simplicity and warmth. Those qualities provide the perfect space for Broderick’s sensitivity to shine through in his playing.
The first real piece on the program is Broderick’s own rendition of “In a Landscape.” Faithful to Cage’s original instructions, Broderick keeps his foot on the sustain pedal the whole time, while a cloud of natural reverb creates the acoustic ambiance of a conservatory music hall. One can nitpick this rendition against Stephen Drury’s quintessential recording , but that would defeat the purpose. Broderick nails the lyricism and flow at the piece’s spiritual center and brings a sense of pathos that casts “In a Landscape” as more than the Satie-influenced backdrop Cage envisioned it as.
Broderick may sound like a lovestruck stoner fresh out of Asian philosophy class in his spoken-word album intro, but what follows resounds with genuine adult heartache. He works through four original compositions, breaking up the solo-piano format with his own singing, chanting, and discreet touches of post-production, while still keeping the piano center stage throughout. He even riffs on Cage’s “Landscape” motif several pieces later on “Up Niek Mountain.” By then, you’re in a rather different terrain from where the music started, yet you may not notice because Broderick has shown such mastery of temperance and consistency. When he gets to the final tune, a cover of Irish folk singer Brigid Mae Power’s “Sometimes,” Broderick lets his hair down and breaks the mood after such a long spell of controlled stillness.
First, in a nod to the floppy-eared exterior of the title track, Broderick stops himself after a false start and says, “Dang, it! I’m gettin’ nitpicky.” Then, over a stately, bittersweet piano melody, he performs the album’s only bona-fide lead vocal: “Sometimes,” he sings, “I just want to collapse into you/But I don’t know if you want me to.” His voice croaks, clearly privileging emotion over perfection. In just about anyone else's hands, such naked earnestness would verge on embarrassing. In Broderick’s, it’s a knockout punch to an already gripping body of music and a fitting last word that cements this album not just as a heartfelt expression of love for John Cage, but for love itself.


The duo continue their drift from lo-fi throwbacks to crisp modern pop, while maintaining the preoccupation with marital love that has animated their records since the beginning.

Swimmer

Tennis have never shied from kitsch. The duo founded their sound on a mix of nostalgic ’60s pop and schlocky soft-rock, and packaged it with album covers styled like art from a ’70s hair salon. Even their backstory was like a relic from a bygone era: Lovers Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley spent seven months sailing the Atlantic, and documented their leisure voyage on their 2011 debut album Cape Dory. That Seinfeld quip about nobody liking a kid with a pony applies doubly to adults with sailboats: In another world, the perfectly prim and preppy couple could’ve been antagonists from an ’80s summer camp movie. In their telling, they were the stars of their own paperback romance.
It’s better to be a divisive band than a forgettable one, though. And exempting Vampire Weekend, no 2010s indie act weaponized their own privilege quite so provocatively. Tennis have outlasted most acts from the mp3 blog era in part because they were more audacious than most of them, but also because they’ve had the songwriting craft to back up all the shtick. Each record since Cape Dory has introduced new ripples to their fundamentally breezy sound, with producers like Richard Swift, Spoon’s Jim Eno and Black Keys’ Patrick Carney challenging the duo just enough to keep things interesting without upsetting their escapist appeal.
Swimmer, Tennis’ fifth album, is self-produced, but even more voluptuous than anything they’ve recorded with a name producer, continuing their drift from reverby lo-fi throwbacks toward crisp R&B-laced pop. It’s not exactly a scarce sound—from Grimes to Tei Shi to Haim, plenty of DIY acts have channeled their humble inner Mariah Carey over the last decade or so—but Tennis’ take has moxie, and Moore’s deceptively pliable voice stands up to Swimmer’s production-driven aesthetic. The snappy “How to Forgive” is pure bubblegum, dreamy and limber, while “Need Your Love,” with its halting stop/starts and vampy pianos, is the catchiest track the duo has ever recorded, the showstopper that even Cape Dory didn’t deliver.
Where 2017’s Yours Conditionally teased fissures in Moore and Riley’s once-faultless romance, Swimmer’s conflicts stem from external forces: toxic presences, aging parents, failing bodies. “Once I was young, those days are long gone, suddenly I’m 33 and on a gurney,” Moore sings on the album’s centerpiece “Echoes,” recounting the hospitalization that nearly derailed the group’s 2018 tour. The song is bright and peppy, with a tropical lilt—the good-humored response to the situation that Moore was apparently unable to muster in the moment. As her panicked husband rushes her to the hospital, she tries to lighten the mood with a quip and realizes she can’t. “It looks like I won’t be going down stoically,” she concedes.
Tennis’ privileged worldview periodically bleeds through in offputting ways (Moore scoffs at “all the tourists as they flock to the sea” on the title track), but Swimmer is mostly sweet and personable. Any listener who’s followed Moore and Riley for five albums running is probably somewhat invested in their relationship, and once again, they’ve rewarded that interest. “I only have certainty when you hold my hand,” Moore sings tenderly on the closer “Matrimony II.” Domestic bliss may not be the flashiest muse, but Tennis commit to documenting it lovingly.

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The latest album from the Vietnamese pop artist is an empowering statement of purpose, at its best when pairing evocative storytelling with theatrical, large-scale production.

Link

Hoàng Thùy Linh has spent the better part of her adulthood reclaiming her narrative. The Vietnamese actress and V-pop artist was a teenager in 2007 when her sex tape leaked online, causing nationwide uproar. The television show she starred in, Vàng Anh’s Diary, was immediately canceled and the resulting farewell program caused further outrage. People said her crying was an act, that her attitude wasn’t sufficiently repentant; many assumed her career was over. She began making glitzy electropop a few years later and would increasingly weave her life story into her art, crafting some of the most satisfyingly conceptual records in V-pop history. In 2018 she wrote a tell-all autobiography that detailed the incident and its aftermath. It was called Vàng Anh & Phượng Hoàng (“Oriole & Phoenix”); in publicly revealing her old story, she was ready to begin telling a new one.
Her 2019 album, Hoàng, cemented the transformation; “Duyên Âm” in particular was an arresting showcase of her ability to merge traditional Vietnamese culture with contemporary pop production. Its video made various allusions to her life but ends with her in royal garb, representing the phoenix’s second meaning in local mythology: an empress. Three years later, her fourth album, Link, is another empowering statement of purpose. A riff on her first name, the title also points to the invaluable relationships that have sustained her all these years. (Notably, it was released on the day of the Vu Lan festival, a ceremony honoring parents.) “Today I’m sitting here, fully healed,” she said in February. “I’m genuinely starting to feel love, to crave a connection with other souls.”
At 34, Hoàng writes songs replete with messages about finding joy in every moment. On “Lúc Thấy Lúc Không” she fawns over a guy who was once affectionate but is now nowhere to be found. Its lively synth pulses capture the incomparable high of pursuing a crush, but its underlying message is a celebration of how early flings can help you become wiser in love. “Life will have sad times, happy times, in-between times, or times of unnamed feelings,” she said in a press conference about Link. “Just treat yourself and indulge, because every choice will make you more complete.” Hoàng summarizes this sentiment on “Hạ Phỏm,” where racing synth melodies and trap drums bolster a message about treating life’s challenges not as something to win or lose, but as opportunities to grow. Her slick maneuvering between rapping and singing sells her assurance.
Link’s most convincing moments arrive when sonic experimentation matches lyrical conceit. The theatrical epic “Trưởng Nữ Chạy Trốn” begins with a warped rendition of the “Wedding March” before transforming into a runaway bride story that’s part Cardi B, part BLACKPINK. In her autobiography, Hoàng confessed she was plagued with self-blame in the year following the leak, and that things didn’t change when she found her next partner. He was 20 years her senior, disparaged her profession, and saw other women on the side; still, she stayed for four years filled with self-hatred, convinced nobody else could love her. It’s a delight, then, to hear such gleeful sneering across “Trưởng Nữ Chạy Trốn.” She mocks this former lover and his empty words by chanting “blah blah blah,” while pounding drums and dramatic strings assert her dominance. The rattling percussion and pogoing electronics that close the song are taunts pouring salt in the wound.
Large-scale production and evocative storytelling return in “Đánh Đố.” Produced by Triple D, who specializes in jaw-dropping EDM spectacles, it incorporates grandiose instrumentation to depict self-discovery as an unwieldy, tumultuous process. Hoàng’s voice is nearly overwhelmed by operatic performances by vocalists Tùng Dương and Thanh Lam, both of whom sing with so much vigor that listening to “Đánh Đố” borders on anxiety-inducing. Much easier to swallow is the buoyant jubilance of “Gieo Quẻ.” Released on New Year’s Day, the single is Hoàng’s attempt at creating an “escape route” from the grim realities brought on by the pandemic. The chorus’ cheerful drop and flute melody feel like a moment to pause, reflect, and look to the future.
As Hoàng has become more confident, her music has become more distinctive while encompassing inspiration from a wide range of cultures. Take “See Tình” (“See Love”), whose title is a play on “si tình,” which means “lovesick.” Its breezy disco-funk channels Funk Wav Bounces, its chorus recalls K-pop’s love for onomatopoeic hooks, and the sped-up remix that blew up on TikTok (accompanied by one of the most famous K-pop choreographies) is closer to nightcore than Vietnam’s own vinahouse. Still, listen closely and you will hear variations on the word “tình” meant to resemble the filler words—the “la la la”s of Vietnamese—used throughout traditional folk songs. Her playful navigation of Vietnam past and present, something central to her art, exists even here. On Link, Hoàng’s music evolves thanks to this deepening web of influences and the strong community of friends and collaborators around her.


With classic rock ambition and full-hearted sincerity, the 27-year-old British songwriter hits his stride when looking inward but fumbles when casting his gaze toward society at large.

Seventeen Going Under

In “Seventeen Going Under,” the title track of Sam Fender’s second album, the 27-year-old British songwriter meditates on anger, fistfights, an ailing family member, and the rising debt accrued from a pitiless Department of Work and Pensions. Paired with a jangly electric guitar part and an unrelenting backbeat, his words conjure both angst and beauty, holding your attention from start to finish. It is his best song yet. As a child, Fender idolized Bruce Springsteen; now his work attempts to outrun his long shadow. But while Seventeen Going Under excels when Fender looks inward, the intimacy is disrupted by scattered political musings.
In the album’s most successful moments, Fender reexamines his teenage years. He confronts his father on the moody heartland rocker “Spit of You,” which features dazzling interplay between guitars, saxophone, and mandolin. Witnessing his father’s vulnerability after the death of a grandparent, Fender embraces a new perspective on their strained relationship: “You kissed her forehead and it ran like a tap,” he sings. “And I’d never seen you like that.” On the title track, he returns to a pivotal memory—“The boy who kicked Tom’s head in/Still bugs me now”—and reflects on his own growth: “I was far too scared to hit him/But I would hit him in a heartbeat now.”
Fender’s lyrics shine when putting his adolescence under a microscope, but they flounder when aiming binoculars at the world. On “Paradigms,” Fender tackles oligarchs, pedophiles, and “marketing masterminds.” In the style of “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” “Aye” jumps from Jesus’ crucifixion to the atom bomb, from Boudica to Jeffrey Epstein, but it never sticks the landing, with Fender saying everything and nothing at once. Perhaps it’s a symptom of being a rock star in the age of Instagram infographics: He often defines himself by what he isn’t rather than what he is. (“I’m not a fucking singer anymore,” goes one lyric. “I’m not a fucking liberal anymore.”)
Sometimes Fender’s big ideas are better achieved through his arrangements, as in the slow-building tension of “Get You Down,” which erupts in a guitar-saxophone duel and climaxes with a swarm of strings. There’s no hiding the influence of Springsteen’s lyrical prowess and the E Street Band’s orchestral grandeur on Fender’s work, as well as the Boss’ 21st-century acolytes like the War on Drugs and the Killers. As clearly as he follows in the legacy of these influences, however, Fender’s full-hearted sincerity feels refreshing and entirely his own.
Fender’s singing ranges from a Glastonbury yawp to a thick-accented sprechgesang, and he accompanies himself on a wide range of instruments including bass, piano, mandolin, glockenspiel, and harmonica. But while Seventeen Going Under attempts to conjure a full spectrum of memories and emotion, the sterile production sometimes limits its effect. The record closes on its rawest song, and also one of its most affecting, “The Dying Light.” It opens like a late-night confessional, played on a dusty piano after everyone else has left the pub, but it quickly transforms into a cathartic singalong. It plays like an encapsulation of Fender’s entire life to this point, gaining speed and confidence as it proceeds.

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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Elliott Smith’s big 1998 album, both a transformational landmark and a logical next step for the restless composer.

XO

When Elliott Smith sat down to lunch with Lenny Waronker, he hardly spoke a word for 40 minutes. The fact that he’d even been coaxed into a meeting with the co-CEO of DreamWorks—the glittery new entertainment venture founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, David Geffen, and Steven Spielberg—was a testament both to Smith’s own quietly undeniable ambition and his codependent relationship with his then-manager, Margaret Mittleman, who had coaxed and cajoled him into place. Smith was the kind of guy who had to be ordered sternly to go back out in front of a crowd of 50 when his stage fright overwhelmed him. Now he was at a white-tablecloth power lunch with the guy who signed Randy Newman, and things were going poorly.
Waronker had handled some difficult singer-songwriter types in his day, but with the painfully shy Smith, he found himself at a loss. Finally, he pointed to the orchestration primer he noticed Smith clutching to his chest like a child’s security blanket and asked him about it. The tension finally broke; Smith began regaling Waronker with his grand visions for what would become XO. For his next record, Smith confided, he wanted to use an orchestra.
Up until then, Smith was known for playing music so quiet it almost died away before it reached your ears. He made most of his first three albums in friends and loved ones’ bedrooms, and it was his 1993 debut Roman Candle, which he recorded in then-girlfriend JJ Gonson’s basement by pressing his guitar strings against a low-quality microphone, that transfixed Luke Wood, DreamWorks’ A&R. The thought of Smith singing over a full orchestra might’ve seemed as unlikely in that moment as collaborating with Metallica.
But Elliott Smith had already lived several musical lives before he became “Elliott Smith.” Starting as a freshman at Hampshire College, he co-fronted the distortion-soaked alternative rock band Heatmiser, striking lip-biting guitar-god poses and riling up beery crowds at punk clubs. As a high schooler in Portland, he’d written and recorded multiple album-length art-rock opuses with his music-nerd friends, testifying to his childhood love of Rush and Yes. It was only when he set out to make his solo debut that he tested out a whisper—maybe to see how it felt, maybe because he sensed that was his truest register, or maybe because he’d already spent years trying to snarl like Elvis Costello. This was the sound that had started winning him converts—fanatical ones—but he had other, bigger sounds in his head. Now that he’d just become labelmates with George Michael and John Williams, it was time to try them out.
XO captures Smith on the cusp of his biggest transformation. He became famous during its recording, not after—a strange state of affairs owing to the fact that he’d given a few of his songs to the indie filmmaker Gus Van Sant, who used them in a movie called Good Will Hunting. That movie went on to gross $138 million, making stars of everyone involved, and then “Miss Misery” was nominated for an Oscar. Suddenly, Elliott Smith was fielding phone calls from People Magazine reporters in between sessions where he was laying down drum, bass, piano, and guitar tracks. He was scheduling back-to-back interview blocks in the studio lounge as he tracked vocals. His compositional ambitions were flowering. His career was exploding. He was at the center of it. Somehow, it didn’t crush him.
The most remarkable thing about Smith’s career is the degree to which pressure—even the overwhelming kind, which might be expected to break a soul as sensitive as his—never once stopped the flow of his songwriting. “Songs would just come up,” marveled Rob Schnapf, the producer he worked with on both Either/Or and XO, of Smith’s writing process. “Maybe they weren’t necessarily written in the studio, but they’d be written while we’re making the record.” The songs that went on to comprise XO seemed to pour in from every corner imaginable, and no matter what else was happening in his life—suicidal ideation, addiction, paranoia, finding himself backstage at the Oscars being comforted by Celine Dion—he never once seemed to struggle with writer’s block. In an interview with The New Yorker, Neil Gust, his bandmate in Heatmiser, struggled to understand his friend’s prodigious genius: “He got to a place where it just lined up. He just couldn’t not nail it.” Luke Wood remembers how Smith would write “four or five different sets of lyrics” for each song, and Smith’s rarities are littered with examples. Perhaps he’d spent so long cultivating that channel that it stayed open, or perhaps because he wouldn’t know how to shut it off if he tried, songs flowed through him from the first moment he tried writing one in middle school to the end of his life.
Most people look back at XO, his DreamWorks debut, as his big break, but really, it was just his next logical step. Before XO, he’d suppressed his instincts towards grander gestures, maybe to strike a contrast with his Heatmiser music or from some allegiance to punk rock purity. Maybe he associated those gestures with his youthful prog-rock misadventures, which embarrassed him. He’d allowed a few bigger sounds to seep in at the edges on 1997’s Either/Or, like the crashing rock guitars on “Cupid’s Trick,” and they hadn’t spoiled the mood. “We could have blown it up more, but he wasn’t ready to do it just yet,” producer Rob Schnapf remembered. Now, armed with his orchestration book and Waronker’s blessing, Smith stepped into the studio where both Exile on Main Street and Led Zeppelin IV had been recorded and went for broke.
The songs were still recognizably his—you could strip them back to just acoustic guitar, as he often did live, and they fit neatly alongside his earlier material. But glorious new sounds welled up everywhere: the Mellotron that turned the chorus of “Bottle Up and Explode!” sunset-pink; the bass saxophone honking its way through on “A Question Mark”; the George Harrison-style acoustic slide guitar on “Oh Well, OK” or the “Getting Better” guitar chimes of “Baby Britain.” On album opener “Sweet Adeline,” he even indulged in some Dorothy-enters-Oz playfulness—for a full minute and a half, the song resembles a slightly cleaner, crisper, take on the hyper-intimate folk of his previous records. But then, just as the lyrics land on the title phrase, Smith’s voice reaches for a new, louder register, and then—what’s this?—a full band crashes in, complete with huge, pounding “When the Levee Breaks”-style John Bonham drum hits and multi-tracked vocal harmonies, all of them recognizably Smith. His songs had been a lot of things—lucid, tender, angry, brilliantly constructed—but they had never before been showy.
Smith moved from instrument to instrument in the studio with the laser focus of someone possessed, testing songs out songs in different registers, keys, and arrangements. On day one of recording, he demoed and finalized a sickly, twirling lullaby in 3/4 time that he just called “Waltz #1.” He’d written it after listening to Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” on mushrooms for 18 straight hours. Foggy, staggering, and fragile, the song never breaks from its simple rhythm but seems to exist in a world outside meter. There might be no more naked moment in his catalog than the tipsy stagger up the Db-major scale to his pleading line, “What was I supposed to say?”
The other, more famous song on XO with the word “Waltz” in its title also explored childlike feelings of fear and helplessness. Something about 3/4 time seemed to stir primal feelings in Smith, and he returned to the time signature whenever he found himself staring into the dark pool that waited in his subconscious memories of childhood in Cedar Hill, Texas. Maybe it was a method of self-soothing, a sort of musical EMDR that allowed him to revisit the childhood ghosts that never entirely left him. But “Waltz #2,” Smith’s lead single, deals rather conspicuously with the troubled dynamic that Smith observed between his stepfather, Charlie Welch, and his mother, Bunny.
The song is set in a karaoke bar, the characters a man and wife taking turns on the stage. The woman selects “Cathy’s Clown” (”Don’tcha think it’s kinda sad/That you’re treating me so bad?”), while the man returns the message, with a vengeance, choosing “You’re No Good.” “Waltz #2” is a song about people singing subtext-loaded songs to each other. It is also, itself, loaded with subtext. Smith wasn’t typically eager to encourage biographical readings of his songs, but in live performances he seemed to have no compunction about making this subtext clear, subbing the sign-off lyric “XO mom” with the plainly sung “I love you, mom.” For this song, at least, there was no alternate reading.
Smith’s relationship with his stepfather was always fraught with uncertainties. Welch wrote Smith more than one pained letter of apology after Smith left Texas for his father’s home in Portland halfway through his freshman year in high school. Later, Smith wrote a sort of acknowledgment and apologia of his own, another waltz-timed number called “Flowers for Charlie” that borrowed the melody from John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (The War Is Over).” Whatever else Smith’s childhood meant, XO was a moment for him to dredge up bits of his past, holding them up to the light of Sunset Studios to see what they might yield.
It was by way of this method that he came to revisit one of those old songs from his high-school band days, those formerly mortifying years of extended whammy-bar solos and mullets. “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands” began life as a tough, snarling rocker called “Catholic,” when Smith and his friends were recording under the name Harum Scarum. Now, it was “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands,” and again, the target of the song was unusually direct: Smith wrote it as a rebuke of the friends who had staged his 1997 intervention and insisted he go to rehab. The song climaxes with that string orchestra arrangement Smith had dreamed of. Smith arranged it himself on a MIDI keyboard as a reference to hand to the professional arrangers, Shelly Berg and Tom Halm, only to revert to his original when he didn’t like the results. As the strings surge into the foreground, the song enters a phantasmagorical space, one where new instruments seem to be sprouting off the song’s walls like vines. Smith had grown up idolizing the Beatles; now, he was orchestrating his very own “A Day in the Life” within a song written with one group of close friends, rewritten to chastise another.
Dreams and grievances, biography and metaphor, truth and fiction—it all swirled together in Smith’s music until every throwaway line seemed like a secret. Smith fans were spooked into lifelong identification because of the purity of that voice, its unmistakable sadness, its seeming simplicity. But the deeper you peered into Smith’s music the more elusive and diaphanous the portrait of “Elliott Smith” became. Behind “Elliott” was, always and forever, Steven Paul Smith, the guy behind the guy behind the guy who had been working out his childhood songwriting visions for a lifetime and arrived at a point in which his ambitions and his talent synced up in one tall, clean line. The “Elliott Smith” of Smith’s solo records was not a person; it was a project. And XO was a testament to how far that project could go.
The breadth and depth of XO astonished even his benefactors. “The clarity and continuity of [his] thought is amazing,” said Wood. “He can take a metaphor…and sing about it for three minutes and never leave.” Waronker himself said that Smith was “as good as it gets when you’re talking about layers within lyrics.” On the stunning closing chorale, “I Didn’t Understand,” Smith sighs the line: “My feelings never change a bit, I always feel like shit/I don’t know why, I guess that I just do.” It sounds like a pure depiction of depression, in all its weariness and ingrained fatalism. It sounds, as it always does, like confession, like the truth that remained after exhaustion had burned away all artifice.
And yet behind even this song, you can find ghosts of previous versions, with implications of different meanings, dancing behind it. Early versions—on piano, rather than poised against Smith’s stacked vocal harmonies—reveal alternate lyrics: “My feelings never changed a bit/I’m waiting to get over it, but I know what it is I have to do.” The shifting tense of “changed” to “change”; the gap between “I know what it is I have to do” and “I don’t know why, I guess that I just do”—somewhere in the elongating shadow space between them, Elliott Smith the draftsman, the songwriter, the notoriously shy performer who never brought his eyes up from a spot a few feet away on the floor, seems to flick his gaze up to meet you head-on. There were no confessions on Elliott Smith records, but there were moments, like this, where he put every single nerve and sinew of his being on display.


The Catalan folk duo makes music full of unnameable longing and buzzing with portent. The remixes included, from John Talabot and Mans O, cannot compete with the simple sound of their voices.

Pack Pro Nobis

Time and distance collapse in the music of the Catalan folk duo Tarta Relena. With little more than their two voices, Helena Ros and Marta Torrella connect the far corners of the Mediterranean, drawing on traditions stretching back more than a thousand years. Pack Pro Nobis, an expanded edition of two EPs released in 2019 and 2020, gathers songs from Crete, Corsica, Mallorca, Menorca, and Andalucía; the two women sing in Spanish, Catalan, Greek, Latin, English, and even the Judeo-Spanish language of Ladino, also known as Sefardí.
Tarta Relena’s spellbinding harmonies root their singing in the deep past: This is music of primal essence and unnameable longing, full of frequencies that seem to tap an ancient ache in one’s bones. But the occasional smidgen of artificial reverb, synthesizer, or digital editing snaps us back to the present. Their vision of folk is no museum piece; it is contemporary, alive, and buzzing with portent.
The opening “Ma ezevgarósan,” a Cretan song the duo learned on a visit to the island, plants us in humble, quotidian terrain. Singing in Greek, their voices circle each other in a round, mimicking the courtship of birds, their wide-open harmonies evoking the loneliness at the song’s core: “The birds mated/The wild ones are paired/But my destiny has no bird/Nor the wilderness of the mountain.” From the echoing room tone, it sounds like they recorded the song in a courtyard, perhaps a quarry; the incidental clanking of construction noise punctuates the background, along with the occasional passing car. While these sounds lend an overwhelming sense of place, subtle backmasking unsettles, as though the axis of the song’s world had come unbalanced.
Tarta Relena draw upon both liturgical and secular sources. The luminous “Tota pulchra” is a Corsican polyphonic treatment of a fourth-century Catholic prayer; “Morenika” is a melancholy Sephardic love song; the flamenco standard “Tres morillas” dates back to the 15th century songbook Cancionero de Palacio, though Tarta Relena flesh out the villancico’s rhymes and palmas with drum machine and bass synthesizer. Regardless of provenance, many of these songs are shot through with profound mourning, and not just for the subject matter, which is full of dying brides, heartbroken widows, and weeping mothers. Ros and Torrella have a stark purity of tone which, combined with their electronic treatments, sets their music apart from other interpreters of the same material.
Not everything here is old. The airy “Desigs,” which falls halfway between Arca’s operatic vocal work and the ECM New Series, is based on a Catalan translation of the contemporary Greek poet Kavafis, and “D’ençà” interpolates elements of songs by the Catalan guitarist Toti Soler and the rising duo María Arnal and Marcel Bagés, who interpret Catalan folk music through a contemporary prism. These nods to their peers situate Tarta Relena as part of a broader reappreciation of folk traditions across Spain, placing them alongside the Catalan singer-songwriter Sílvia Pérez Cruz, flamenco iconoclast El Niño de Elche, and even Rosalía, whose debut album drew heavily upon the flamenco canon. An additional disc locates Tarta Relena even more explicitly in the present, gathering remixes that range from Mans O’s glitchy, North African-inspired beats to John Talabot’s acid dub. Despite their strengths, they pale in comparison with the simple power of the duo’s own singing. The best of the bunch is the Barcelona experimental musician Ex Continent’s chilling “Morenika (Rework),” which harnesses the same spooky energy as Beatriz Ferreyra’s 1978 composition “Echoes,” pulverizing the singers’ voices until the stereo field swims with ghosts.
One of the album’s most fascinating songs seems at first to break with the Mediterranean theme. The lyrics of “Infans qui nascitur,” written in Latin, are by Tarta Relena’s own hand, but the melody, paired with a darkly shimmering drone, comes from the traditional Georgian lullaby “Chela.” The Caucasian nation of Georgia lies nowhere near the Mediterranean, of course; it is separated from the region by Turkey, Syria, and the Black Sea. But some believe that prehistoric ties link Georgia, once known as the kingdom of Iberia, and Spain, which occupies Europe’s Iberian Peninsula. Whatever the truth of these speculations, the melancholy splendor of Georgian polyphony makes for a striking counterpoint to the duo’s mix of influences. Beyond the song’s uncanny beauty, its slippery contours and intricate modal shifts feel symbolic of music’s fundamental refusal to be fixed in place. Like everything Ros and Torrella do, their adaptation of “Chela” is a celebration of musical exchange. At a time of rising nationalisms across Europe, Tarta Relena’s songs are a testament both to the porousness of borders and the ideas that unite disparate cultures, running beneath the centuries like a pedal tone.

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On his new album, the Awful Records founder trades his groggy rapping for smooth crooning.

Father: Come Outside, We Not Gone Jump You

Come Outside, We Not Gone Jump You

Father’s early music was defined by sharp contrast. Over minimal, bass-heavy beats, he spearheaded Awful Records’ raunchy, misanthropic take on Atlanta’s nightlife and sounds, constantly juxtaposing the turn up with the flame out. Key to his style was his groggy voice, which sounded permanently hungover yet clear. He honed that style on 2018’s polished Awful Swim, which showcased his cheeky writing. On subsequent EPs Hu$band and Tha Thingz I Do 4 Money, Father started trading his syncopated rapping for a syrupy singing voice that turns syllables into slurry. Come outside moves further in that direction, every song awash in melody.
The turn is conscious. “Back in the day it was just like, “let me say some wild shit, put some bass over it, and let that shit blow the fuck up,” he’s said of his old approach to songwriting. “Now I wanna make chill, contemporary, calming-ass records.” His reference points for that shift are what he calls “old R&B” and Drake, influences audible in the production. On “Backbreaker,” produced by trio Bankroll Got It, he croons over crisp finger snaps and a dreamy Spanish guitar loop reminiscent of mid-’00 beats by producers like The-Dream, T-Pain, and Bryan-Michael Cox. And the dulled drums and lithe, slow-moving chords on the title track and “Spell Book” recall T-Minus and Noah “40” Shebib’s atmospheric work on Take Care. These production choices work well with Father’s singing, smoothing his coarse bangers into catchy, almost cutesy lullabies.
Father is no less brash and outrageous over these calmer backdrops. “Came through front door so slick/Niggas thought I was the locksmith/Fuck blue lives, fuck them coppers/Them boys can’t stop this,” he says on “Brighton Beach Flow,” floating over a spare drill beat. “Bought baby mama that brand new Rihanna/Her makeup don’t run when I’m dickin her down,” he sings on the anime-referencing “Fist of the North Star,” his Auto-Tune-slathered voice somehow generating a slant rhyme between “Rihanna” and “dickin her down.” Like Lil Wayne (who, coincidentally, Father interpolates on “Fist of the North Star”), Father uses melody more to mutate sounds and flows than to emote, an approach that produces verses that feel loose and stream-of-conscious despite being tightly metered. He’s always been a dexterous rapper; his embrace of melody highlights his precision.
The downside to Father’s singing is that it sometimes feels too reserved. As outlandish and detailed as his writing continues to be, his performances are often controlled, avoiding schmaltz or passion. The exceptions are “Backbreaker,” where he goes full heartthrob and laces his verse with squeaks and purrs, and album closer “Uncut,” where he completely lets loose. On the latter, swinging betweens coos, mumbles, and whines, he issues brazen threats, an earnest marriage proposal, and horny come-ons. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that in these more unhinged moments, his writing turns more personal, referencing parenthood (he became an actual father in 2020) and relationships alongside debauchery.
It’s overly even keel aside, Come outside, we not gon jump you is a breakthrough for Father, bringing out the color in his writing and forging a new direction for his music. In internet years and in rap years, there’s enough distance between now and Awful Record’s emergence for Father to coast on legacy and influence or pivot to empire-building, but he continues to prioritize fun and adventure. Though his new music is more suited to slow-dancing than moshing, the party continues.

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Andrew Savage and Jason Kelly's second album as Fergus and Geronimo continues the pair's preoccupation with lampooning hipster indie, proving to Williamsburg what Zappa was to San Francisco-- though with a slightly more conservative pallette.

Fergus & Geronimo: Funky Was the State of Affairs

Funky Was the State of Affairs

Andrew Savage and Jason Kelly have recorded several singles and, with the arrival of Funky Was the State of Affairs, two albums as Fergus & Geronimo. They've drawn inspiration from the Mothers of Invention, 1950s doo-wop, Motown soul, 60s British Invasion pop, and garage rock. Their musical vision is expansive, but their perspective is narrow and specific: Savage and Kelly live to take the piss out of indie rock. What Frank Zappa was to San Francisco, these snarky Texans are to Williamsburg; they're outsiders pointing and laughing at the self-serious shenanigans perpetrated on the other side of the window. With Funky, Fergus & Geronimo have created a concept record of Big Ideas-- something about alien invaders and cultural paranoia-- that plays like a gag on indie pretentiousness. Whatever else can be said about Fergus & Geronimo, Funky is a worthy record for this moment in time, even when its weaknesses get in the way.
Speaking of weaknesses, Funky isn't as enjoyable as Fergus & Geronimo's full-length 2011 debut, Unlearn, even if it is more musically focused and muscular. Unlearn had better jokes, which were aimed with deadly accuracy at the trust-fund babies and trend-chasing yuppies currently populating the hippest realms of rock music. Beyond the quips, Unlearn made its most persuasive argument against the current state of indie with its very form: Misshapen, tossed-off, and unprofessional sounding, Unlearn seemed like a statement against the slick-ification of underground music. Savage and Kelly were clearly conversant with various musical styles, slipping in and out of genre guises with ease, but it was the ease (rather than the skill) that was emphasized. It recalled a time when self-identifying indie rockers made records on a lark, not to make a career.
It's tempting to compare Fergus & Geronimo to Ween, especially since we now desperately need a new group that can be funny while also being musically credible. Like Ween, Fergus & Geronimo have rooted their latest record in a specific time and place in music history. Funky is Savage and Kelly's "late 70s art-punk" record, and the reference points are as obvious as they are keenly observed. The chugging "No Parties" is a perfect melding of the first B-52's record with the first Devo record. "Roman Tick" barks nonchalantly in a rapid-fire 90 seconds like Pink Flag-era Wire. "Spies" sends the mid-60s Kinks through a Paul Weller filter. Toward the end of Funky, the album finally lives up to its title by pumping up the African polyrhythms of "Marky Move" in a nod to Talking Heads.
If Unlearn seemed like two smartasses laughing into a tape recorder for 30 minutes, Funky suggests that Savage and Kelly are in the midst of turning Fergus & Geronimo into an actual band. And, again, the Ween comparison looms; perhaps on the next record, Fergus & Geronimo will finally display some serious Eddie Hazel-level instrumental chops.
But here's how Fergus & Geronimo are not like Ween: Savage and Kelly don't go far enough. Where Ween were sick and dark and genuinely off-putting, fearlessly bounding down avenues of bad taste and full-on sociopathic rage, Fergus & Geronimo are only slightly less polite than the groups they're mocking. Funky Was the State of Affairs is a nice record with some quality laughs and catchy songs, but it doesn't cut as deep as it could. Fergus & Geronimo's goofiness belies its musical vision; it should leave a mark, rather than be easily brushed off.


The Super Furry Animals frontman’s latest is a concept album about an ancient volcano on the China-North Korea border that ranks among his most imaginative solo records.

Seeking New Gods

Gruff Rhys could have been a schoolteacher—one of those unconventional educators who regale students with skits about historical oddities and scoff at standardized testing. The Super Furry Animals singer’s academic interests are as eclectic as the freewheeling Welsh band he spent most of his adulthood fronting. That’s been particularly clear since 2008, when Rhys began digging his way out of a songwriting rut with biographical albums about historical figures. First came a concept album by Rhys side project Neon Neon, about the bizarre life of car designer John DeLorean. Then, after SFA drifted into a lengthy hiatus, Rhys discovered he was a descendant of an 18th-century Welsh explorer named John Evans and proceeded to write a solo album, documentary, and book about the little-known saga. He’s the sort of songwriter who could read a newspaper article at 9 o’clock and have the outline for an album by noon.
You could characterize Seeking New Gods, a record drawn from the same well of madcap curiosity, as a loose follow-up to that 2014 record, American Interior. But Rhys’ seventh and latest solo album is not as aggressive in its genre-hopping, nor is it about an explorer. It’s not even about a human. It’s a concept album about a volcano—Mount Paektu, a desolate stratovolcano on the North Korea-China border that’s thought to hold mythical properties, and with which Rhys became obsessed after reading about it in a book. Coated in Rhys’ signature candy-sweet psychedelia and rippling with the immediacy of his touring band’s performances, Seeking New Gods ranks among his best and most imaginative solo albums, powered by the fervent drive of one determined to make an esoteric obsession legible to others.
The concept, to its credit, never feels tedious. It would be a fool’s errand to strive for scientific rigor, or a thorough accounting of Mount Paektu’s qualities. (That was Rhys’ first strategy, and the songs were, by his account, “pretty bad.”) Instead of bending his music to fit Mount Paektu’s story, Rhys shamelessly anthropomorphizes the volcano to suit his songwriting. He’s at his whimsical best crooning about the imagined emotional life of an ancient peak; on “Loan Your Loneliness,” he turns a song about the isolation of mountains that outlast entire human civilizations into a honeyed rumination on loneliness. A thumping piano shuffle makes the song a lively standout, and the pleasant buzz of a vintage Solina synth hovers over the mix like a high-altitude fog. (Rhys deliberately applied the instrument to every track, envisioning the synth pads “as weather systems wrapping around the mountain.”)
Musically, Seeking New Gods slots neatly between the orchestral grandeur of Rhys’ excellent Babelsberg and the lush, laidback psychedelia of Phantom Power- or Love Kraft-era Furries. Recorded in live sessions with the group Rhys assembled for the Babelsberg tour, the album feels like a solo record in name only. It pops with the collaborative energy of Rhys’ supporting cast: “Can’t Carry On” coaxes celestial beauty from the swooning vocal harmonies of Mirain Haf Roberts and Lisa Jên, while even the prettiest moments are offset by the energetic drumming of longtime Rhys collaborator (and former Flaming Lips drummer) Kliph Scurlock. “Hiking in Lightning,” an obligatory nod to stormy weather on Mount Paektu, evokes the raucousness of early SFA; it’s a rare miss, never quite committing to its punkish abandon. Still, the crisp, live sound of Seeking New Gods is a welcome change from the pitter-patter beats of 2019’s Pang!
As a songwriter, Rhys has a knack for locating the emotional center of surrealist subjects, whether it be a love story about Albert Einstein’s parents or an optimistic vision of Earth after human extinction. With Seeking New Gods, he’s found a particularly malleable target. He writes in the liner notes that he hopes the songs sound “like they come from a very personal place,” despite having been inspired by “events relating to Mount Paektu, from 2333 BC to present day.” The paradox thrives on “Mausoleum of My Former Self,” an ambling psych-folk meditation on how volcanoes inevitably linger long after they’ve erupted. Is Rhys envisioning himself as a volcano reflecting on past glories, or an aging songwriter pondering past lives through the prism of his old records (“As the mausoleum of my former self/My songs displayed upon the shelves”)? Naturally, it’s both. Centuries from now, when eccentric musicians stumble upon the long-lost figure of Gruff Rhys, they could pick a worse place to start.

Buy: Rough Trade
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