The Brazilian guitarist and L.A. saxophonist’s collaboration is charming and intimate. The pair coils themselves around these songs, prioritizing rhythmic complexity and sheer prettiness over far-out exploration.

Fabiano do Nascimento / Sam Gendel: The Room

The Room

Like Billy Corgan with a Big Muff or Jimi Hendrix with a Crybaby, L.A. saxophonist Sam Gendel long ago figured out how to turn a commercial piece of hardware into something personal and immediate. In his case, it’s a battery of reverb, synth emulators, and effects pedals that, when he’s at his most dialed-in, can make his horn sound like both Rahsaan Roland Kirk on “The Inflated Tear” and Tom Morello on “Killing in the Name.” It’s a discombobulating sound that’s become ubiquitous in the L.A. jazz and experimental scenes over the past decade. Listen to a handful of songs he’s been on and you’ll know it instantly: Like backmasked speech, it feels both inside-out and strangely familiar.
It’s simply strange, then, to hear a Sam Gendel record in which the saxophone sounds familiar. There are no effects on The Room, his new duo album with seven-string guitarist Fabiano do Nascimento. There’s no percussion, either—save for a bit of breath-scatting Gendel puffs through his horn in the lovely “Astral Flowers”—or any of the bleary production effects that can make Gendel’s records sound like they were recorded by the light of an old desktop monitor. Nascimento’s recent albums—2023’s Das Nuvens and Mundo Solo—is dotted with drum machines and bushy synths, but he’s long taken his cues from the crisp and tidy jazz of ECM and the close-mic’d sambas of João Gilberto. This can make his music feel a touch formal at times, almost uncannily precise, but just as it does on 2017’s Tempo dos Mestres, that production style gives The Room a clarity that allows the listener to focus on how deftly both musicians move across the album. Like a World Cup telecast, even the slowest moments of these performances deserve to be seen in the highest possible definition.
Nascimento and Gendel’s rapport was obvious on the five Tempo dos Mestres songs they recorded together, and they bonded further over a shared love of Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell and the 1964 Stan Getz and João Gilberto smash Getz/Gilberto. While that album also brought together an American saxophonist and a Brazilian guitarist, it’s Gendel whose playing more closely recalls that of Gilberto. In a reedy tone that sounds nearly as much like a flute as it does a sax, he flies close to the ground, sometimes barely blowing above a whisper; when the end of “Foi Boto” calls for greater intensity, he gets it by playing quieter. Gendel can write a gorgeous, aching melody—that’s him at the tender core of Sam Wilkes’ “Run,” for one—but hearing him play it straight across an entire album is a very welcome reminder of the depth and delicacy that’s sometimes obscured by his effects.
Gendel’s sax tends to take center stage on these songs, but the intricacy of Nascimento’s writing and the sturdy confidence with which the guitarist plays makes listening to The Room feel a bit like seeing a solo performance at the Palais Garnier; losing yourself in the architecture is half the point. Like Baden Powell, Nascimento can turn the blank spots and heavy shadows of minimalism into florid, nearly Baroque curlicues with little more than a shift of emphasis. On “Kewere,” he pins a couple of bends to the end of his lines and fills in negative space with ringing harmonics in a way that recalls John Abercrombie, while the plucking and tapping of “Astral Flowers” could have been taken from a Meredith Monk score. For Nascimento to show this much range without being showy is a testament to how well The Room coheres.
In keeping with their tendencies as soloists, both players coil themselves around these songs, prioritizing rhythmic complexity and sheer prettiness over far-out exploration. It makes the music feel compact and concentrated, ripe with potential energy they both expend with great patience and never without the other nearby. At times, one will round a corner in their playing and start doubling the other’s line; at others, they work like partnered abstract painters, intuiting where to place their brush without having to look at the other’s work. In the gorgeous “Poeira,” they gather the melody up, then follow their own courses, their lines drifting apart and back together as they slowly descend like two feathers dropped from the same height. The sense of connection between Gendel and Nascimento is obvious, but it’s at moments like this, when they fall away from one another and still feel inseparable, that give The Room its intimate charm.


Known for its restless ambition and DIY spirit, the post-punk group evolves with unnerving ambience, spoken-word recitations, and industrial noise.

Fault Lines

Prior to the pandemic, Deliluh were a post-punky quartet based in downtown Toronto; today, they exist as a transient avant-ambient duo flashing their Eurail passes between Berlin and Marseille. That dramatic shift aligns them with a grand tradition of iconoclastic North American artists—from Iggy Pop to Liars to the Brian Jonestown Massacre—who’ve headed to the old continent to chase new musical horizons, but in Deliluh’s case, they’re breaking free of both their established sound and their essential identity. Through the late 2010s, Deliluh were more than just familiar faces in Toronto’s DIY underground; they were, in many ways, its ideological center, constantly seeking performance spaces that lay outside the traditional bar circuit. They were the kind of band that hosted shows in their living room, transformed a local veterans hall into a freak-scene clubhouse, and even got the city’s permission to stage an event in the famously abandoned Lower Bay subway station. In Colin Medley and Maria Todorov-Topouzov’s short documentary on the group, guitarist/synth player Julius Pedersen summed up Deliluh’s thrill-seeking philosophy like so: “It became this [game of] like, ‘how can we beat the last one?’”
Sometime in 2019, however, that question became less about unlocking hidden spaces in their community and more about harnessing the band’s own surging ambitions. On their first two records, 2017’s Day Catcher and 2019’s Beneath the Floors, Deliluh staked out the sweet spot between post-punk grime and post-rock grace, and they continued to stretch the aesthetic parameters of the four-piece rock band on “Amulet,” a stalking seven-minute epic that they first recorded in 2019 in Pedersen’s native Copenhagen on the eve of a European tour. “Amulet” reappears as the centerpiece of Deliluh’s third album, Fault Lines. But since its initial conception, bassist Erik Jude and drummer/violinist Erika Wharton-Shukster stepped away from the group and returned to Toronto while Pedersen and lead vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Kyle Knapp laid down roots in Europe, where they could take advantage of a more concentrated touring network. As such, the “Amulet” we hear on Fault Lines reflects both the downsized lineup and the extra tinkering-time afforded by subsequent pandemic lockdowns. The two versions share the same sinister synth pulse and Knapp’s spoken-word narrative about an unrepentant jewel thief preying on the wealthy. But what once resembled the string-spiked, jump-scare soundtrack to a creepy cat-and-mouse thriller is now more conducive to an apocalyptic sci-fi horror flick, as the duo layer techno hi-hats and eerie frost-covered drones into a cyclonic swirl that’s equally glorious and grotesque.
Both recordings of “Amulet” were released together last year as a single to commemorate the previous incarnation of Deliluh and introduce the new one. On Fault Lines, that skin-shedding process kicks into high gear. But while tracks like “Credence (Ash in the Winds of Reason)” and “Syndicate II” fit snugly into the band’s previous guitar-driven repertoire (not to mention this current era of peak post-punk), Deliluh are the rare band that can summon the menacing propulsion and imagistic density of the Fall without resorting to Mark E. Smith pantomime-uh. In lieu of hectored invectives, Knapp uses his unnervingly calm voice to worm his way into the tormented psyches of his protagonists, like when he catalogs the abuses of the church on “Credence” through the eyes of a possibly complicit priest nervously awaiting judgment day.
But where “Credence” and “Syndicate II” yield the kinds of incremental sonic evolutions (spine-tingling piano embellishments on the former, a theatrical gang-vocal breakdown on the latter) that would’ve counted as major breakthroughs in the band’s pre-2020 iteration, on Fault Lines, these songs function more as last-gasp purges that free up Deliluh to abandon rock music altogether. The album begins with “Memorial,” a serene yet restless ambient piece over which Knapp delivers a solemn funeral prayer (“When the light of the land has perished/Deliver me out to sea”) that could also double as last rites for the band Deliluh once were. It’s immediately answered by the calamitous “Body and Soul,” where Knapp and Pedersen showcase their new methods of bringing the noise, through a beatless industrial hellscape of incessant alarm-bell clamor, anvil-crushing chords, and squealing saxophone that sounds like a wounded animal begging to be put out of its misery.
By the time we reach the closing “Mirror of Hope,” Deliluh have become an apparition of their former selves. Reciting a poem about a train conductor lost in her own thoughts, possibly at the precise moment of an impending crash, Knapp intones: “She is not gliding toward her destination/This is her destiny, this is her chariot, this is her kingdom.” And for the next six minutes, Deliluh lay claim to a promised land of their own through an exquisite free-floating synthphony streaked with windswept woodwinds and tear-jerking strings. Back when they were still holding shows in their living room, Knapp and Pedersen christened their ad-hoc venue Somewhere Else, to denote a safe space liberated from the business demands, programming limitations, and hot-headed bouncers of a typical bar operation. Several years and 4,000 miles removed from those DIY halcyon days, that name still functions as a mission statement—geographically, musically, and spiritually.


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 the ambitious and masterful 1995 album from the legendary country singer, one that came at a pivotal moment in her restless life.

Wrecking Ball

By the time she was 48 years old, Emmylou Harris had lived a life or two. She’d issued 16 solo records, toured the world a few times over, and fronted a swinging country-rock ensemble called the Hot Band. She’d been a leading presence in a wave of counterculture-adjacent singer-songwriters who had spawned multiple generations of creative disciples, with Gillian Welch, the Chicks, Sheryl Crow, Conor Oberst, and Margo Price among those in her direct lineage. She’d raised two daughters and gone through three divorces; she’d experienced the death of a parent and the shocking loss of her mentor and creative soulmate. Everybody who worked with her seemed to love her, and it showed in the extensive roster of credits she’d earned as a collaborator across her multi-decade career.
But for all her high esteem, Harris was in need of a new challenge—and so, here came Wrecking Ball. Released in late September of 1995, Wrecking Ball is a staggering work that defied expectations for what a middle-aged woman should be doing with her time. The record drew Harris away from the gaudier side of Nashville and the cynical side of adulthood, pulling inspiration from the life Harris had lived with contributions from a handful of those she’d met along the way. To some listeners, it was a betrayal by their reedy Queen of the Silver Dollar, who’d once happily offered heaps of twangy, mild-mannered songs; for others, it was a refreshing start to a new chapter, proof that a woman’s artistry had no expiration date. For Harris, Wrecking Ball became a place to be a version of herself that she’d never put to tape before.
With her light, flexible voice, Harris is one of the definitive team players of American music—she’s everywhere, if you know where to look. Hear her with Bob Dylan and Neil Young, with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt; with Mark Knopfler, George Jones, Willie Nelson, or even in the low harmony of the riverbed siren song on screen in O Brother, Where Art Thou? That’s her, joining the Band for “Evangeline” in The Last Waltz, and bouncing with Bonnie Raitt and Little Feat on The Midnight Special. Outside of her many guest appearances, Harris kept up a steady career of her own, issuing sublime folk-leaning records in the ’70s and chasing them with more squarely country material over the next decade. But, by the mid-1990s, Harris was starting to hit dead ends with country radio, a platform that has a particularly ferocious hold over the genre’s metrics for success.
Harris’ 1993 album, Cowgirl’s Prayer, kept pace with trends with a couple of rock-tinged numbers and crystal-clear production, but it had no Top 40 singles, and peaked at No. 34 on the Billboard charts. Though she wasn’t in a full-on flop mode, Harris sensed that she needed to recalibrate. “It was obvious after all [the label’s] effort that country radio was not interested in me—I was too old, or whatever,” Harris once said.
Her label, Elektra, encouraged her to consider working with a producer who could reroute her for her next album. “They basically came back to me and said, ‘We’re going to back you no matter what you do. Do you have any ideas?’” she recalled to the Los Angeles Times in 2014. Rather than enlisting a Nashville sharpshooter, Harris turned to Daniel Lanois, a Canadian technician who had moved from producing Raffi records onto some of the biggest rock albums of the 1980s, including blockbusters by U2, Peter Gabriel, and Bob Dylan.
At his Kingsway Studios in New Orleans’ French Quarter, Lanois impressed and flabbergasted artists with an unconventional setup that involved unfixed gear in a weird old house, and a recording engineer named Trina Shoemaker who took no bullshit behind the board. Whatever Lanois was doing, his production work often earned a charge of being atmospheric, as though he were capable of summoning pressure systems through his manipulation of knobs and faders. Pushing reverb and swirling backdrops, he created vast soundscapes where artists and listeners could both lose themselves.
More than his impressive production credits on U2’s The Joshua Tree or Peter Gabriel’s So, it was Lanois’ 1989 solo album Acadie, with its combination of relaxed French-Canadian folk music and moody electronic ambiance, that intrigued Harris. She approached the recording process with an inherent sense of trust in her producer, and in turn, Lanois seemed to sense the careful guiding hand that Harris’ work needed: not more of the same genre material that had become restrictive, nor a pivot into the world of stadium-filling stardom. He could create an auditory depth of field that reflected Harris’ own eclecticism, matching her wide-ranging narrative appetite with subtle arrangements that freed her from the narrow constraints of country music.
Harris’ voice is rich and smoky across Wrecking Ball, wrapped in Lanois’ loose and spacious arrangements. She smolders in her natural register, keeping light without pressing herself into awkward highs. A sparkle of guitar and tumble of drums opens the album in the Lanois-penned “Where Will I Be.” As Harris floats over her lines, wondering about her cosmic fate, the song hints at the gospel hymns that had worked their way into the folk and country canons through the Carter Family and Bill Monroe. Lanois brought on U2 drummer Larry Mullen Jr. to back Harris, and the tasteful touches he brings to Wrecking Ball frame Harris’ voice without overshadowing her presence.
If the album gives a whole snapshot of Harris making a statement for herself, the individual tracks tell their own little stories about Harris and the prevailing emotional forces in her life. Old friends appear throughout, occasionally doubling up. Steve Earle, who wrote “Goodbye,” pops up on “Every Grain of Sand” and “Sweet Old World.” Sisters Anna and Kate McGarrigle, longtime Harris favorites, harmonize on closing number “Waltz Across Texas Tonight,” which Harris co-wrote with frequent collaborator Rodney Crowell. Harris picked up “Sweet Old World” from Lucinda Williams, who showed up to play guitar on the Wrecking Ball recording.
After Harris had joined singer-songwriter Julie Miller to duet on Miller’s “All My Tears” in 1993, she re-cut the song herself for Wrecking Ball. Lanois’ touch is apparent in the muted synthetic churn that carries the song, which Harris foils with airy vocalizations at its close. In “Goin’ Back to Harlan,” written by Anna McGarrigle, Harris rubs elbows with familiar characters, recalling her own position as a sort of folkloric totem. The tune summons folksong figures that populated Harris’ teenage days listening to Pete Seeger and Joan Baez albums: Fair Ellen, cuckoo birds, Barbara Allen, the bells of Rhymney. Harris lightly lifts her voice in the chorus, as if she knows that the relief of returning to a familiar place is worth whatever devils await her there. Any claims that Harris had strayed from her roots of honoring traditional artistry, which she’d done with so many ballads in her previous work, dissolve in McGarrigle’s homage.
Though Harris was an established light among the singer-songwriter set by the time she made Wrecking Ball, she’d nonetheless maintained her voracious appetite for songs by new artists, borrowing “Orphan Girl” from a Nashville up-and-comer in her late twenties named Gillian Welch. Harris’ father, whose career in the Marine Corps informed her itinerant childhood, had died in 1993, and that particular grief peeks through the dulcimer and tambourine that give the song a woodsy, shambolic feel. (The following year, Welch would offer her clear, unembellished take as the opener of her debut album Revival.)
On the title track, Harris found a coded statement of purpose from Neil Young, who harmonized with her on the recording in addition to adding backing vocals and harmonica to “Sweet Old World.” Like Dylan, Young had also had a rough go of the Reagan years, and like Dylan, had a turnaround in 1989. Bookended with acoustic and electric versions of “Rockin’ in the Free World,” Freedom liberated Young from his overstuffed era. Young’s “Wrecking Ball” sounds like something the bartender turns on with the lights, and a look that says it’s time to move along. But Harris transformed the song into a transcendental invocation, opening it with a gauzy haze of guitar that feels like a lifting mist. “My life’s an open book/You read it on the radio,” the song begins, with Harris sounding like a mystical presence as she promises to wear something pretty in white.
Like Young, Harris had lived her own version of strangers absorbing her life’s story through the airwaves, though hers involved a particularly unwieldy presence: the specter of Gram Parsons, a figurehead of “cosmic American music” who died in September of 1973 as the embodiment of burning out rather than fading away. Parsons sometimes wore a bedazzled suit designed by famed rodeo tailor Nudie Cohn, who bedecked him with embroidered icons of his favorite vices and vexations: cannabis, naked women, a Fender Telecaster, ascendant flames, assorted pills, a couple of crosses, poppies as shorthand for morphine and heroin. For better and for worse, Harris’ life wouldn’t have been the same without that rowdy Roman candle of a man, who wisely recruited her to sing with him after a tip from his Byrds bandmate Chris Hillman. She joined him on his debut solo album, 1973’s GP, and on the road in his Fallen Angels band. Parsons had cheated death more than once by the time he’d encountered Harris, but their time together was short.
Parsons died at 26, topping off years of substance misuse with a final flush of tequila and morphine. Harris was left behind, and though Parsons had not quite been a reliable presence, he was still her main tether to the music that illuminated her life. She later credited Linda Ronstadt with being the first person who sought to comfort her at the time, which ultimately sealed their lifelong friendship. Harris and Parsons had become such an inimitable pair that their separation became a defining event in Harris’ life.
Harris fulfilled Parsons’ wish for fleshing out duets that recalled the iconic power of George Jones and Tammy Wynette. The pair seemed unstoppable, their voices matched for one another. Gossip abounded about their preternatural closeness as singing partners—purportedly sparking discontent from Gretchen Parsons, Gram’s wife, who had plenty of other grievances with her badly behaved spouse—but the official record is that they kept it professional and platonic. “We were not romantically involved...but I do believe that if he had lived beyond the ripe old age of almost 27 that, possibly, we would have become involved," Harris conceded in 2000. Parsons may have been the irreverent flamethrower, but Harris was a leveling force, meeting his outrageous affection for overindulgence with a beatifically even keel. He wouldn’t have been the same without her, either.
Though Harris found her passion for music through the folk revival of the early 1960s, she admitted that she’d perceived country music of the same era to be rougher and less refined, more politically conservative than her taste. She credited Parsons with helping her see the beautiful, raw heart of country music, which he’d accomplished through the boundary-busting country-rock records he’d made with the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers. Harris seemed to turn her newfound X-ray vision into a superpower over the subsequent years, divining new sentiments from songs by Chuck Berry, Bruce Springsteen, the Louvin Brothers, Shel Silverstein, and scores more.
She exercises that gaze as she draws out the emotional undercurrents of the songs on Wrecking Ball, especially in the flexing tension of “Deeper Well.” Harris channels both the eerie rounds of pre-war Appalachian ballads and flashes of modernity for a reverberating cut that conveys an unquenchable thirst laced with a little sense of sin. The song resurrects a line from “Where Will I Be” about “addiction stayed on tight like a glove.” Here, the image bears the weight of a looming threat. Though the simile is credited to Lanois, it’s difficult not to hear a sort of resonance in the secondhand impact that addiction had on Harris’ life. A flare of electric guitar scorches the space between verses, a flame licking upward in suggestion of even darker depths.
Grief and loss appear in “Goodbye” and “Sweet Old World,” both of which feel hitched to a more general sense of parting sadness. The softly restless “Goodbye” stands out on its own merit with its regretful refrain, but Harris was, in some sense, doing a favor to the down-and-out Steve Earle. He’d written that song and the rest of 1995’s Train a Comin’ while completing a court-ordered rehab program, and the LP was the first he’d made after kicking heroin (Harris sang on two songs from the album). Lucinda Williams’ “Sweet Old World,” meanwhile, was another heartfelt addition that Williams had recorded as the title track to her fourth LP in 1992. Working together in the studio, Lanois encouraged Harris to allow Williams to lead the song at a slower pace. With that direction, the song became an even softer tune than Williams’ barroom-friendly original—which was already a feat by Williams, considering that the song is about a suicide. As Harris enumerates some of the lovely things about life on Earth, it almost sounds like a lullaby.
Wrecking Ball hits a high that unfurls as a psychedelic storm in Jimi Hendrix’s “May This Be Love,” where Lanois’ atmospheric qualifier finally roars forward. His electric guitar solos are bolts of lightning branching outward against the backdrop of percussion and distorted electric guitar gnarls. As she drifts over lines about troubles evaporating, Harris sounds as though she’s basking in the ambient warmth of loving relationships that can only reveal itself with time—the kinds of long-view perspectives that Hendrix, Parsons, and several of their peers never got to see.
Upon its release, Wrecking Ball found more favor among critics and careful listeners than the CD-purchasing public. It was never even on the country charts, and dropped from the Billboard 200 after less than two months, having peaked at No. 94. It never moved a million copies. Narrowly making the Grammy eligibility window, Wrecking Ball did earn Harris a Best Contemporary Folk Album trophy for her trouble, adding to her half-dozen-strong collection. But the industry metrics were beside the point.
Harris, being a woman in the music industry and the world at large, was well aware of the way that numbers could be used against her to assign value: her age, her body measurements, the sizes of checks she earned, how many men she’d loved, the number of records she’d sold. But because of the circumstances of her gender, the warmth of her lasting friendships, and the thoroughly proven quality of her work, Harris also knew that those numbers ultimately amount to nothing. What sits at the heart of Wrecking Ball is the accomplished thrill of running up that hill, no matter who’s watching.
Wrecking Ball wasn’t a betrayal or a denial of any other version of Emmylou Harris, neither a reinvention nor a revision of her history. Harris didn’t set out to change her story or set a new standard for the next century’s singer-songwriters. She was breaking through to something else entirely: herself.


Armed with a bag full of vintage mixtapes that he discovered in the trunk of a used car, the Toronto producer and U.S. Girls affiliate whips up a lo-fi tribute to ’80s house, techno, and electro.

Mark VI

In 2020, the Toronto-based U.S. Girls affiliate Tony Price bought a used car and found a bunch of old cassettes from the owner, a former radio DJ and archivist, in the trunk. They turned out to contain hours of house and techno mix shows from the late 1980s—sounds that Price pilfered to create his sixth album, Mark VI, which he named in honor of the car in question. A filter-heavy instrumental dance record made almost entirely from synths, drum machines, and samples, it’s a loving pastiche of the era in question whose hissy loops and gurgling basslines are sometimes all but indistinguishable from the original.
Price’s firm command over his materials shows exciting growth. He’s only attempted dance music once before: the 2019 album 86’d, which was sometimes so slapdash it was hard to groove along to the beats despite their clear intent to rock your body. Outside that LP, his dance-music CV has been minimal. His co-production credits lie mostly with non-electronic artists—Young Guv, Michael Rault, U.S. Girls—while under his birth name, Anthony Nemet, he fronted the garage rock band Actual Water. His last album, 2020’s Interview / Discount, was a two-song free-jazz affair; 2018’s experimental Celica Absolu collaged together distorted beats with blues guitar, industrial noise, and dub sirens. Despite the new album’s relatively sleek machine beats, the throughline between his previous projects and Mark VI turns out to be his abiding interest in gritty, lo-fi textures. The difference this time is that he’s using them to make music you can actually dance to.
The album sounds best when Price combines fast-paced, 808-dashed percussion with alarm-like synths. The electronics on “Aerosol” recall the Ghostbusters theme; they open a portal to the ’80s and inject adrenaline into Price’s hand-clapped shuffle. Mark VI’s title track fuses bleating synths and 808s into a body-rocking acid suite with a beat so engrossing that the transition directly into “Prime” is completely seamless. There, harsh synths evoking Galaga alien ships duke it out with phaser-drenched blasts and an accelerating barrage of drum machines. On centerpiece “Valentino,” funk and house smash into an invigorating blend while glitchy electronic chirps raise the already high stakes of the rapid kicks and synthetic slap bass. It’s all pretty advanced, given the haze that lingered over even the most frenetic moments of 86’d. There, he sounded like he was still figuring it out. Here, when he goes high-BPM, he clearly knows what he’s doing.
On the A-side of Mark VI, the tempos are faster, and Price sounds most comfortable in this uptempo zone. The album’s somewhat syrupier, more dialed-back B-side, which eventually decomposes into ambient jazz, isn’t as enticing. “Phreak” boasts the same elements as the A-side’s best moments—serrated synths, a percussive undercurrent—but its slower pace feels comparatively static, like Price left the grooviest parts on the mixing-room floor.
Mark VI’s A-side opens with “Night Time Mind,” a collage of vintage radio ads and broadcast chatter, and side B closes with that track’s presumable companion, “House of Information.” Amid its slowly groaning saxes and purgatory-like, formless synth bubbles—it’s the only track that fully recalls Interview / Discount—an ad for New York’s most expensive escort service stands out. On “Night Time Mind,” the roulette of ad fragments hints at the freewheeling musical approach and fun times ahead; on “House of Information,” they fully pull Mark VI away from electronics and act as a surreal sort of comedown. They almost take on the role of the MC who introduces and closes out Boiler Room sets. But if their lysergic moods indicate avant-garde intentions, the bulk of Mark VI suggests a much simpler purpose to Price’s archaeological experiment in vintage audio: to have a good time.


Zomby returns with a series of two four-track EPs, his first work for stalwart independent XL Recordings. Here he abandons his signature sound for something that amounts to a walking tour of early rave conventions.

Let's Jam 1 EP / Let's Jam 2 EP

In the two-plus years since 2013's With Love, Zomby has experimented with a new mode: silence. Or, at least, relative silence, as the irascible producer has been dormant after keeping a near constant release schedule since debuting in 2007. It's been for the best, really, as London's grime underground, including upstarts like Visionist and Logos, took the genre to new, exciting places just as Zomby's twinkling arpeggios started to feel too familiar. Now Zomby returns, first with a one-off single this summer with grime godfather Wiley and now with Let's Jam!!, a series of two four-track EPs, his first work for stalwart independent XL Recordings.
Anyone hoping for fireworks upon Zomby's return is likely to be disappointed, as Let's Jam!! is slight both by XL's standards and the strictures of dance music 12"s. Zomby has referred to at least one of the tracks here ("Acid Surf") as a "DJ tool"—a simple, repetitive piece meant to aid DJ mixing—and much of Let's Jam 1 proceeds in this manner, offering up slight variations on simple riffs. DJ tools are a common, simple convention, but they usually aren't packaged with promotional airhorns (nor do they tend to come out on XL Recordings, or at least not since the early '90s), so it's fair to assume that Zomby sees these as somewhat more substantial than that term implies.
Locating that substance proves difficult. On Let's Jam 1 Zomby (finally!) abandons his signature sound for something that amounts to a walking tour of early rave conventions—of the early history of XL, coincidentally or not—adding little to the equation. Opener "Surf I" is essentially a harmless electro sendup, featuring a low voice grunting the track's title while short melodic lines phase in and out. The problem is that, even for a low-stakes genre exercise, "Surf I" is badly lacking in dynamism, deploying that same curt vocal sample on the first downbeat of every other measure of the track while a short bassline repeats. It is noticeably repetitive in a realm in which repetition is basically the entire point.
No, if you're looking for the type of subtle shifts and melodic changeups that are part and parcel to the very concept of dance music you'll have to wait for "Surf II", a similar concept but with just enough rhythmic interplay and moving pieces to register as improvement. If for some reason you should want to bridge these Zomby offers aforementioned tool "Acid Surf", which sounds like a parody of Zomby doing an acid track: a zippy 303 bassline, a sample of someone sternly declaring "acid", and lots of airhorn. "Slime", a coarse interpretation of the hoover bass sound, is a far better fit for Zomby's eerie sense of melody.
There's less to say about Let's Jam 2, which returns Zomby to his default style—sparkling synths, fizzy square wave bass, pools of reverb—with diminishing returns. The best of the four tracks, "Bloom", wouldn't sound out of place on Local Action or Keysound Recordings or any of the other London labels releasing lush, forward-thinking bass explorations, but nor would it stand out. (More troublingly, you could say the same about its placement on Zomby's past two albums.) Grime has gotten vaster and braver in Zomby's absence; long reverb tails and gunshot percussion don't quite cut it anymore.
Let's Jam!! does unload some of With Love's portentous conceptualism. It's nice to see Zomby return to the short, understated format under which he's released some of his most potent material; With Love suggested that his gilded, buzzy sound is difficult to scale. No points just for showing up, though, and Let's Jam!! finds Zomby far too conservative working through two distinct periods of UK dance history.


The young Swedish house producer DJ Seinfeld applies an opaque dose of irreverence atop every surface of his project. He makes effective club tracks, but his acts of appropriation are dubious.

Sunrise EP

Veteran L.A. beat producer Daedelus recently remarked on Twitter, “Young producers. Someday your alias won’t sound ridiculous. Keep going.” A comforting gesture, but I don’t think Daedelus had DJ Seinfeld’s name in mind. Since last year, the young Swedish house producer—who also goes by Rimbaudian, referencing the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud—has been caught in the crossfire of an ongoing debate on the topic of authenticity in house music.
Along with such producers as DJ Boring and Ross From Friends, DJ Seinfeld has helped usher in a new era of house music that prioritizes pleasure over precision; feeling over substance. With that—love it or hate it—“lo-fi” dominated the scene in 2016. Satisfaction is their M.O., and the internet is their oyster. In only a few months, DJ Boring’s “Winona” and Ross From Friends’ “Talk to Me You’ll Understand” both garnered over a million hits on YouTube—astonishing achievements for unknown bedroom producers. DJ Seinfeld’s own track “U” has accrued over 300,000 plays on the same platform since October.
The music DJ Seinfeld makes isn’t all that divisive on its own. His debut Season 1 EP, released last year, presented a freewheeling collection of five jacking beats dipping between vaporwave funk, scorched-earth acid, and tribal house. It’s emotive party music with a youthful, no-fucks-given approach. Aside from the cover art’s portrayal of Jerry and George in a decidedly Macintosh Plus aesthetic and a track entitled “Jerry,” DJ Seinfeld’s namesake is nowhere to be found in the tunes themselves.
The “Seinfeld” graphics have vanished for the three-track Sunrise EP, replaced with appropriative imagery of another kind—a cheeky smiley face recalling the ubiquitous symbol of acid house and a dog happily sniffing its own ass, like an ouroboros (the ancient symbol of a serpent eating its tail). The acid house reference is undeniable, and on “Chat Shit Get Luved,” DJ Seinfeld draws up a gnarly 303 bassline from subterranean depths as the claps reverberate through a cavernous space. It’s an effective club track, but it reaches top velocity fairly quickly, and stays there for five minutes of clenched-fist tension. It forgoes the archetypal EDM “build” and offers little variation other than a few predictably satisfying bass drops.
DJ Seinfeld evokes the cyclical nature of the ouroboros on “Beginning of an End,” where he transports us to a shimmering synthscape with a 4/4 pulse less ferocious than the rest of the EP. Meanwhile, a voice recites the 1932 poem “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” by Mary Elizabeth Frye. As Frye’s voice is swallowed up by DJ Seinfeld’s gently lapping waves, her words—“Do not stand at my grave and cry/I am not there; I did not die”—emphasize morbid introspection.
The highlight here is “Flyin’ Thru Sunrise,” a stomping slice of nouveau-deep-house. Again, DJ Seinfeld doesn’t hide anything, as he recasts a snippet from the matriarch of the deep house vocal, Sade Adu. The sample comes from her 1992 Love Deluxe slow-burner “Pearls.” Her words aren’t “Flyin’ thru sunrise,” as the title suggests, but rather “dying to survive.” It’s effective inasmuch as it plays up the moody ecstasy of Moodymann or Larry Heard, but “Flyin’ Thru Sunrise”’s blatant emotion is also its greatest weakness. Sade’s “Pearls” is an elegy to a woman in Somalia barely scraping by; it’s a heartbreaking track about struggle and survival, literally “dying to survive.” For DJ Seinfeld, it’s fodder for a bleary-eyed banger.
Reinterpretation and re-contextualization are cornerstones of house music, and DJ Seinfeld hasn't really done anything wrong here. But the blatant acts of appropriation in his choice of name, visual aesthetic, and samples make one wonder what exactly Seinfeld is getting at. While electronic music can offer the allure of anonymity or an alter-ego, DJ Seinfeld lacquers an opaque, kitschy dose of irreverence on top every surface of his project. He’s not hiding from view—he wants your attention.


This LP/DVD set is culled from a pair of SBTRKT's typically sensory-overload live shows recorded at the London venue Shepherds Bush Empire last October. It's not quite bootleg cameraphone quality, but from the outset it's clear something's up.

Live

SBTRKT's 2011 self-titled debut was a welcome breakthrough. In a year when bass music was getting further acquainted with the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, SBTRKT found a way to streamline producer Aaron Jerome's clean, rhythmically intricate yet suitably catchy style into a sound that felt distinctly aboveground. And while guest spots from singers like Jessie Ware and Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano took SBTRKT's compatibility with R&B and indie pop to its logical conclusion, it was the yearning, gentle murmuring of regular collaborator Sampha that proved to be the most characteristic and distinct voice on the record.
In the following year, SBTRKT took his show on the road, and a real sense of showmanship-- elaborate masks, quick shifts from programmed to live percussion, Sampha's presence as a singer and multi-instrumentalist-- made those concerts a sensory-overload experience. That energy's visually borne out in the two videos that come with the LP/DVD version of Live, an album culled from a pair of shows recorded at London venue Shepherds Bush Empire last October. But unfortunately those video excerpts are the closest this set comes to doing justice to what seems like it could've been an exciting series of shows. Because if there's one thing that threatens to ruin the atmosphere of a really tight performance like this, it's a foggy recording, mixing, or mastering job that fails to capture the dynamic pop of SBTRKT's drums, whether programmed or behind the kit.
It's not quite bootleg cameraphone-recording quality, but from the outset of "Surely" it's clear something's up-- what should be crisp, resonant snares sound like cardboard, kicks feel mushy, and hi-hats have the weak timbre of rattling chain link fences. It's a shame, because this version takes what was a fairly forgettable bonus 7" from the LP version of SBTRKT and ups its tempo, using it as a good base to rhythmically improvise some glitchy freeform beats and turning an afterthought into an anthem. Sampha's voice suffers, too-- its strength is in his subtlety, and while he sounds powerful over minimal accompaniment, a lot of nuance is lost when he sings over heavy instrumentation. What should be the most emotional moments on "Never Never" and "Trials of the Past" give the unfair illusion that he's short of breath and trying to catch up.
Everything else about Live seems almost secondary to the cruddy sound quality, but it'd be a shame to detract from what SBTRKT was going for here. The addition of London's Heritage Orchestra on tracks like "Trials of the Past" and "Go Bang" isn't your typical class-up-the-joint schmaltz move; the strings really do wring out some additional emotional highs. The version of "Wildfire" is deliriously inspired, as SBTRKT takes Nagano's voice and chops it up into a stammering percussive riff, extending one of his signature singles into a high-energy sprawl. And one previously unheard track, the surprisingly techno-indebted "Migration" (a segue out of SBTRKT highlight "Hold On"), definitely gives followup-hungry fans something more to look forward to for the next release. This concert album's heart is in the right place. It's too bad that the mics weren't.


The Philadelphia death metal trio Horrendous were dubbed vintage revivalists just three years ago, with their 2012 debut The Chills. On A**nareta, a record captured during one obsessive, month-long session spent sequestered in bandleader Damian Herring's home studio, Horrendous' playbook feels truly open.

Anareta

The Philadelphia death metal trio Horrendous were dubbed vintage revivalists just three years ago, with their 2012 debut The Chills. But their sound opened up drastically for Ecdysis, the album's glimpses of outside influences earning the band increased attention. On A**nareta, a record captured during one obsessive, month-long session spent sequestered in bandleader Damian Herring's home studio, Horrendous' playbook feels truly open. It's as if, bona fides well established, the band set out to form a link between the past they once embraced and a future they imagine.
This shift is as clear during opener "The Nihilist", where seething whispers curl around a complex math-metal figure, as it is during closer "The Solipsist", where a kaleidoscopic melody spins like a spotlight inside a thrash metal bulwark. There are references to antecedents throughout*:* "Stillborn Gods" invokes Slayer, while moments of "Ozymandias" sound like a Big Four mixtape. The legacy of Swedish death metal looms large, too. But these are the foundations from which Horrendous now sprawl—with bright solos that whip in the wind, with rubber-band basslines that run counterclockwise to the leads, with whiplash rhythms that suggest a short-circuiting carnival ride.
Through all of these twists and churns, the band never seems to be showing off its dexterity, or attempting transitions for their own sake. Horrendous have become masters of pacing and dynamics, instinctively knowing when to let the album and audience breathe. "Polaris" progresses from doom metal to black metal to death metal and back to doom seamlessly, as though a DJ had spent hours perfecting the cuts between it all. On the first five minutes of "Acolytes", they plow through a grindcore sprint and settle into a dense and demanding death-metal section, with a squealing little riff tucked carefully into a rhythm section that refuses to sit still. These additions lend the momentum of mystery to these songs, which surprise every time you hear them.
One of the most glorious moments on the album, and in metal this year, arrives as a revelation at the end of "Acolytes". Unexpectedly, the guitar stalls, locking into one glowing note as the drums retreat into a low-tempo tap. Then, a new arching riff radiates outward, as though the guitar has suddenly emerged from a mountain's shadow and into the midday sun. The drums double and triple their pace, while Herring musters one final, fade-away scream, like a hero taking his leave of a scene. It's a beautiful passage, as redemptive as anything on Deafheaven's Sunbather and as cathartic as the closing moments of a symphony.
Though they sound quite different, Anareta has a lot in common with my other favorite metal album of the year, Tribulation's The Children of the Night. On their earliest albums, both bands wrestled with the past, rendering death metal anew as competent revivalists. But in 2015, they have both stretched those traditions, filling accepted frameworks with unlikely elements. The influences are still recognizable, but the results are no longer obvious. This quest even comes written into Anareta's wonderfully narrative lyrics, where the aim for mortal meaning serves as the cri de cœur. "Forging a new reality/ Embrace the burning dawn in me," goes the end of "Acolytes". Indeed, metal can value faithful, enthusiastic recreations more than heretical ingenuity, and vice versa. But like Tribulation, Horrendous show the value of compromise within a record that creates its own middle ground—and stands right there for eight tracks, stunning.


The masked UK duo crafts electronic pop that draws on hip-hop, R&B, chillwave, and psych-funk, but their immersive soundscapes leave little impression.

Melt Away

From spiritual jazz legend Sun Ra to self-styled rap villain MF DOOM to the chrome-helmeted robots of Daft Punk, musicians seeking to cultivate mystery and intrigue have donned masks. Jadu Heart—the London duo of Alex Headford and Diva Jeffery—place themselves in this lineage, and they’re rarely seen without their masks, which resemble a more whimsical Donnie Darko bunny.
The costuming is part of an elaborate backstory, equal parts “Legend of Zelda,” Indiana Jones, and the fever dream of a J Dilla disciple. As Jadu Heart tell it, their alter-egos Dina and Faro were cursed after they unwittingly touched a magic MPC in an abandoned temple. Their early EPs recalled the otherworldly beat music of Brainfeeder producer Teebs, incorporating aqueous warbles and clicks into glittering electronic pop. On their debut album Melt Away, the duo attempt to meet their self-mythology with immersive soundscapes that leave little impression.
In the tradition of Gorillaz or Jai Paul, Jadu Heart’s borderless electronica eagerly welcomes hip-hop, R&B, chillwave, and psych-funk into the fold. Ukulele twangs, handclaps, and found-sound samples turn “The Cure” into a Maggie Rogers-esque blend of folk and dance, except with African drumming and a hip-hop breakdown. Producer Mura Masa (the duo’s label head) joins for the jazzy “U Never Call Me,” where elements like kalimba and a clave drum pattern point towards Afro-Cuban inspiration. Then there’s “Heroin Song,” which sounds like Oasis gone shoegaze. But just because Jadu Heart pull from multiple genres doesn’t mean their tracks are innovative. Most of their choices serve to create a wash of sound that all blends together.
Jadu Heart have an ear for an intricate melody, but their vague lyrics never get a chance to be memorable. On “Forgotten Ghosts,” a disaffected Headford emotes sadness in melodramatic metaphors like, “We’ll go and feel the rain/Falling like an angel in the sea.” “Harry Brompton’s Ice Tea” refers to a brand of fruity beverage, though the song might also double as a metaphor for a psychedelic trip. “I’m drifting now, down through the river that’s made/Can you feel it,” the two sing over a smooth funk beat. But there are no clear narratives, no concrete imagery, no sense of the universe they’re attempting to reveal.
After nearly an hour of reverbed guitar and synth, Melt Away ends with a breath of fresh air: a faithful cover of Vashti Bunyan’s 1970 song “Diamond Day,” sparingly accentuated by the flutter of violin strings and the childlike lilt of a recorder. But Jadu Heart’s remake betrays their weaknesses. As Headford and Jeffery reproduce Bunyan’s elegant quatrains, their own songs appear amateurish by comparison. Granted, there are a lot more instruments and production effects in a Jadu Heart song. But Bunyan found a timeless magic in the mundane that no amount of cosmic sound-design conjuring can match.

Buy: Rough Trade
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A pair of new EPs splits the German producer’s work down the middle: ISS005 is reserved strictly for big, bruising club tracks, while ISS006 trades the drums for pure, beatless ambient.

ISS005 / ISS006

Skee Mask’s music thrives on the friction between opposing impulses. The German producer fuels storming club rhythms with jungle breaks, distorted kicks, and whip-cracking electro syncopations, then swathes them in wispy atmospheric tones, soft as baby’s breath. The end product is a dramatic pairing of force and aura, like an earthmover haloed in dust clouds and rays of sunlight, or an iceberg cleaving in slow motion, throwing off huge plumes of frozen debris.
The balance of those two impulses may shift from track to track—Skee Mask’s EPs lean harder on muscular club cuts, while his albums allow him to stretch out and explore more ethereal zones—but rarely does the needle tip all the way to one extreme or the other; the dichotomy remains fundamental to almost everything he does. With a pair of new EPs, however, Skee Mask (aka Munich’s Bryan Müller) splits his work down the middle. ISS005 is reserved strictly for big, bruising club tracks, while ISS006 trades the drums for pure, beatless ambient. (ISS is short for “Ilian Skee Series,” Müller’s own imprint under his hometown’s Ilian Tape label; as is frequently the case with his EPs, the titles are the same as the catalog numbers.) The drily functionalist tags make the contents appear to be mere DJ tools; the outsized sounds inside protest mightily at such a condescending description. Spinning off club tackle and sofa stuffing into two separate divisions might seem like an unremarkable strategy, but in Skee Mask’s case, it’s productive: Taken together, the two EPs suggest an artist uninterested in lingering in his comfort zone.
ISS005’s five tracks showcase rugged club rhythms that go for the jugular. Like “RZZ” on last October’s ISS004, the opening “IT Danza” casts a glance back at decade-old dubstep: Insistent congas tumble forward at 140 BPM, while dub sirens and murky deejay chat suggest a fever dream of dancehall reggae. Just over hallway through, Müller lets rip a sample of jazz saxophone that he flips into careening runs reminiscent of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee”—if, say, the Russian composer had been plagued by murder hornets. The next two tracks take up ISS004’s grime investigations, collectively marking a new frontier in sheer ugliness for the German producer. “Meal” thrashes like a poisoned beast, with garbled bass throbbing unsteadily beneath shrieking cuica and the occasional spray of bullets. Even more disorienting, “Reefer Madness” is just drums and snarling bass, but the beat feels inside out. The pulse doesn’t land on the downbeat, leaving you perpetually off balance; it’s like standing on the windy edge of a precipice. The EP finishes off with an attention-deficit drum tool and some razor-sharp electro. The nuts-and-bolts cuts are still a hoot: all killer, no filigree.
In the past, Müller’s softer instincts often tended toward sentimentality, but there’s nothing pretty about the six ambient tracks that constitute ISS006. “Dolby” opens the EP with chugging dub-delay feedback, before a bright tone rises like a rocket through smog, illuminating a vast expanse of featureless ground below: faint synth pads, rumbling bass, the ghost of a chord change. It sounds like William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops run through a battered rave soundsystem on a ruined planet—an elegy that has outlasted its mourners. “Frogsplash (Reshape),” on the other hand, marks the record’s emotional apex: Faint chords with an almost guitar-like feel cycle back and forth, like the memory of a love song turning to dust at the bottom of a dry well.
The next three tracks turn more indistinct. Their movements are slow and unpredictable, with muted synths or string-like textures that twist aimlessly. The blissfully numb “Henk (Version Whatever)” is particularly lovely; its deep, subdued drones would make the perfect accompaniment to a documentary on the ocean’s cold, dark abyssal zone, where dead organic matter falls like ghostly snow and the bioluminescent lures of anglerfish bob in the blackness. But if this stretch is abstract to the point of emotionlessness, “Mbass123 Excerpt” is deeply expressive, with forlorn synths tracing sad, graceful curlicues against an inky backdrop. It amounts to a powerful highlight of the whole diptych. Skee Mask has always expertly sequenced his albums, using pacing and contrasts not just to set a mood but to tell stories, tales full of twists and turns, climaxes and denouements. With ISS005 and ISS006, he arrives at a fork in the road, and the plot thickens.

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The Cornwallian drum'n'bass producer Luke Vibert has been deploying many of the same tricks for years, under his Plug alias among others: infectious drum programming, off-center synth melodies, and vocal snippets from old records or VHS movies. His latest, Bizarster, is fun enough, but there's little to suggest it might not have been put to DAT in the late-'90s and dusted off nearly 20 years on.

Bizarster

Thanks in part to a Trent Reznor co-sign, American electronica listeners were introduced to the peculiar talents of producer Luke Vibert in 1997 by Drum 'n' Bass for Papa. Released under his Plug alias, it wasn't his first album, but Vibert's caffeinated take on the still-underground dance form was given Interscope distribution. This meant that many stateside listeners were introduced to drum'n'bass via Vibert's goofy and furious rollercoaster tracks set to offbeat samples, like John Goodman's howling admonishment from Barton Fink: "I'LL. SHOW. YOU. THE. LIFE. OF. THE. MIND."
Since then, Vibert has spun off aliases to match his productions, each one slotted to fit a particular genre. Wagon Christ signified the trippiest trip-hop, Amen Andrews made dizzying jungle, Kerrier District did filter disco. Albums under Vibert's proper name spread even further: Big Soup spanned breakbeat and downtempo, YosepH dipped into acid, while a compilation, Nuggets, found Vibert digging deep into library music.
The lone constant throughout has been Vibert's corny humor, which comes up often on Bizarster, his first album for his peer Mike Paradinas' Planet Mu label in six years. "Knockout" flashes the tricky, skittering footwork of Paradinas and Aphex Twin, with left-field harp runs, analog synth bloops, and the requisite cheeky vocal sample (this one from Mike Tyson's Nintendo game "Punch Out!!"). "L Tronic" uses the neon nightcrawler squiggle from Stone's "Girl I Like the Way That You Move", some more 8-bit bubbles, and an old hip-hop freestyle atop it.
It's a formula that Vibert has done to death no matter the moniker: infectious drum programming, off-center synth melodies, and/or arcade game FX as the next layer, all topped off by vocal snippets from old records or old VHS movies. There's a soul sample, a railing preacher, and a howl to go with the crisp hi-hats and handclaps of "Officer's Club", a boast about "[makin'] like the ghetto [to] blast ya" sped up so as to move from menacing to cartoonish. Vocal lolz reach peak Vibert on "I Can Phil It", built from—as the punny title soon bears out—Phil Collins asking "can you feel it?" soon joined by the MC shout from the live version of Mr. Fingers' "Can You Feel It?", and all manner of "feels", piled up on a track that ultimately doesn't feel like much.
In 2012, Vibert unearthed more of his Plug material, releasing it as Back on Time. Much like Bizarster, it's fun enough, but there's little to suggest it might not have been put to DAT in the late-'90s and dusted off nearly 20 years on, even though those jokey samples no longer land quite right. Strip the clever vocal snippets away from Vibert's productions and you're left with those choice drums and goofy melodies, but there's little beyond that to mind.


Japanese rock artist Shintaro Sakamoto's latest album finds him immersing himself in Hawaiian steel guitar, Brazilian cuica, and banjo,  assembling the resulting sounds into a whole that suggests the heady late 1990s as much as they do the go-go '60s.

Let's Dance Raw

There’s a particular kind of freedom many Japanese rock musicians enjoy, a weird side-benefit of inheriting Elvis from post-WWII American GI radio and never much worrying about fealty to blues or folk traditions. It’s a freedom from the burdens of authenticity, in other words, that makes an artist like Shintaro Sakamoto possible. The raunchy psych-rock Sakamoto played with his band Yura Yura Teikoku was, through its origins in San Francisco and London and Detroit, a authentic product of psychedelic and narcotic influence. Yet as Julian Cope explains in his study of Japanese psychedelia Japrocksampler, the Japanese heads who built upon and translated the post-Nuggets era into their own language, laying the groundwork for Sakamoto himself, most often eschewed drugs completely, opting for other avenues through which to get to the same dizzying musical highs.
As a solo artist, Sakamoto is so unconcerned with authenticity to a musical tradition that on record, he quite nearly disappears completely. On the 2012 LP How to Live With a Phantom, he mastered an ersatz lounge-pop that skewed as much portmortem as postmodern. The lightest, oft-cheesiest products of Western '50s and '60s pop—from the Free Design to French yé-yé and Martin Denny’s “exotica” soundscapes—have long appealed to Japanese record nerds for whom “soul” is often a very foreign concept, and Sakamoto is no exception. On his second solo album Let’s Dance Raw, he doubles down on his love for such sounds, assembling them into a whole that suggests as much the heady late '90s as the go-go '60s.
A slight shift from Phantom’s chippy disco guitar licks and smoky organs, Raw finds Sakamoto immersing himself in Hawaiian steel guitar, Brazilian cuica, and banjo—an instrument which, he suggests on “You Can Be a Robot, Too”, can be plucked and looped in a way that sounds like thousands of tiny gears operating in perfect concert. If there's any recognizable Western spirit animals for Raw (other than “Sleep Walk”), it's Beck—the heavy-lidded proto-serious iteration, that is, from 1998’s Mutations—and indie-pop gadabout and arranger-for-hire Sean O’Hagan with the High Llamas, whose '90s LPs Santa Barbara and Hawaii absorbed the Americana ambitions of Van Dyke Parks and ironed out the quirks, creating a heavily-stamped, pristine musical passport. Like Beck’s “Tropicalia”, Raw is a perfectly executed version of what Westerners might call global kitsch: a series of evocative tourist postcards showing sunny scenes from Rio and Honolulu.
What makes Sakamoto unique, though, is not simply his knack for turning the exotic West into a glimmering watercolor, or his capacity to craft a simple groove redolent of Steely Dan’s gaudy disco swan song Gaucho—though “Like an Obligation” more than qualifies—but doing so with the kind of fashionable indifference mastered by predecessors like Beck, Grace Jones, and the dazed, obsessive Yokohama teenagers wandering through Memphis in Mystery Train. Yes, Sakamoto digs into countercultural sociology on “Obligation” and “Birth of the Super Cult”, two blunted treatises against the staid social structures that still dog much of Japanese society. But before we call him a prophet, let’s keep in mind his alternative: sliding “a small chip between your eyebrows” and becoming a robot. Sakamoto has an odd way of working, sure, but it's also liberating: when you disregard authenticity as your compass, it’s amazing how far you can travel.


Flying the banner of punk, Titus Andronicus' third album sounds like something knocked out immediately by five guys in a room and captured on tape without the need for narration, a brass section, or multiple tempo changes.

Local Business

Patrick Stickles announced Titus Andronicus' upcoming North American tour by proclaiming "PUNK IS BACK." I suppose it's only fair to point out this is a guy whose last record ended with a 15-minute epic based on a Civil War naval battle. (It also had a bagpipe solo.) But while "The Battle of Hampton Roads" and many other Titus Andronicus songs lack the structural qualities of punk rock proper, they more than compensate with a spirit of all-in commitment. This was music made without any sort of Plan B.
It's understandable that Stickles would be flying the banner of punk for Local Business since Titus Andronicus couldn't possibly top The Monitor by going bigger. But while Local Business is no less ambitious than its predecessors, it's ambitious in a way that's more meaningful for the band as a working unit. This is the first time the lineup touring the record is the same one that made it, and you get the feeling their intent was to make a one-take road dog album. At that they've succeeded. But Local Business also marks the first time the band seems like it's holding something back-- like there is a Plan B.
At the outset, you get an idea of how it might've been drawn up. The first three songs on Local Business are by far the strongest and perhaps coincidentally the most familiar-- a medley of opening duo "Ecce Homo" and "Still Life With Hot Deuce on Silver Platter" has been a staple of their live sets for some time, while "Upon Viewing Oregon's Landscape With the Flood of Detritus" was premiered as part of an anticipatory mixtape. Together, they align with the mission of Local Business by sounding more plug-in-and-play than even the rawest parts of The Airing of Grievances, something that could be knocked out immediately by five guys in a room and captured on tape without the need for narration, a brass section, or multiple tempo changes.
These opening tracks still bear many of the characteristics of classic Titus Andronicus songs, with rhythms to beat out on your steering wheel, triumphant classic rock guitars, and Stickles showing off his underrated sense of tunefulness. Once he grabs a hold of a melody, he crams it with in-jokes and self-reference: "Feeling like we live on a Diarrhea Planet" is a classic Stickles-ism if you don't know he's namedropping his friend's band. In a rare event, Stickles actually repeats lines, and you can easily hear those key phrases being echoed by a room full of true believers. That sense of populism is crucial as the band juggles nihilism, existentialism, and misanthropy.
The opening section is a promising glimpse of a more aerodynamic and blue-collar Titus Andronicus, but by "My Eating Disorder", their new attitude has begun to clash with old habits. As is his style, Stickles has been candid about his struggles with Selective Eating Disorder, and as a confessional, "My Eating Disorder" is admirable, enlightening, and incredibly brave. But as a piece of music, it doesn't pack nearly enough ideas to support its grand framework.
"My Eating Disorder" isn't really part of a narrative arc, but as the literal and figurative center of Local Business, it opens a fissure and everything else crumbles around it. The one-minute instrumental "Food Fight!" and the one-line rant of "Titus Andronicus vs. the Absurd Universe (3rd Round KO)" are the type of songs that carried weight in the context of Titus' prior concepts, but here they add nothing. "(I Am the) Electric Man" was a lark when it was released online following Stickles' bizarre electrocution accident, and outfitted with glitzy showtune vocals, it's a welcome respite in between the autopilot angst of "In a Small Body" and "Tried to Quit Smoking"'s agonizing blooze crawl.
Most important, for a record whose title and purpose is to celebrate punk, DIY, and local scenes, there's little sense of their previous fun or community uplift. During "In a Big City", Stickles screams "Now I'm a drop in deluge of hipsters," connecting with a sentiment on "Still Life": "It's just me, lonely me/ and the other relevant dudes/ arrogant enough to believe this is developing news." These are representative of Local Business' pervasive attitude, rife with the sort of sarcasm, gossip, and double meaning that dominates discourse in indie rock and its Twitter parallel universe.
Cynicism is both healthy and necessary in this realm, and Stickles' bullshit detector is off the charts throughout much of Local Business. But as he wonders about his complicity or how this kind of social schematic has benefited him, the album becomes stifling rather than illuminating. Even he's not sure how much he has to add to the conversation, as so much of Local Business struggles with coming up with something new to say: "Don't tell me that I was born free/ that joke's been old since high school," "By now I think we've established/ that everything is inherently worthless," "Yes, it's 'us against them' again." As such, a record meant to solidify Titus Andronicus after the past six years of personnel churn ultimately sounds transitional. This could possibly work in favor of Local Business in the long run, and after two stone-cold knockouts in The Airing of Grievances and The Monitor, it's not unexpected for them to stumble a bit. But are they on the right track? The battle lines of "us against them" aren't as clearly drawn this time, and for once, Titus Andronicus sound unsure of where they stand.


The charismatic rapper's second album captures absolutely none of his real-life persona. It is among the most insipid, vacuous statements in recent pop history.

Jack Harlow: Come Home the Kids Miss You

Come Home the Kids Miss You

Jack Harlow is a charming, tall, and increasingly chiseled 24-year-old man who sports a mop of curly hair, impossibly tamed and complemented by a youthful beard, sharp blue eyes, a coy smile, and a honking diamond earring in each lobe. Like any good heartthrob, he loves antics—he’s eager to flirt with women he’s just met and say, I love you, or simply act like a goober in public. His second album, Come Home the Kids Miss You, reveals that the showmanship is merely a distraction from some insipid, vacuous music. Harlow’s charisma does not translate onto the record, and, instead, we’re left with a one-trick pony without a discernible trick, a competent rapper who does not flow intricately or write impressively, a pop star who struggles to carry a song on his own.
Harlow’s origin story is repeated often: At age 12, he decided he wanted to be a rapper and got to work, practicing, recording, and selling CDs at school. By 19, he made “Dark Knight,” the song that launched a major-label bidding war for his talents and, ultimately, landed him a deal with the once-promising Atlantic imprint Generation Now. Just about two years later, he made his first good song and true hit, “Whats Poppin”; then, after releasing his debut studio album, the Harlow hype machine went into hyperdrive with “Industry Baby,” the Lil Nas X single where Harlow dutifully performed the role of the straight man in the proudly gay music video. Next to Lil Nas X, Harlow delivered one of the best verses of his career, too, his down-the-middle approach an appropriate complement to his co-star’s more fluid delivery.
Stripped of an appropriate foil, however, Harlow’s swagger is muted. Despite an air of pomp, lead single “Nail Tech” is limp, largely due to its chintzy beat and Harlow’s reluctant vocals. He is too casual on the song, as if he’s afraid to veer away from his tried and true flow for something more expressive. In the music video, for example, he stands tall in a tank top holding three dogs, like he’s DMX, and he raps, “You ain’t one of my dogs, why do you hound us?” He winks, sneers, and mockingly snaps his hand as he mouths, “hound,” but any implied aggression or magnetism is lost on the recorded track.
Harlow’s ability to rap well somehow acts as a hindrance to his ability to make good songs. He does not have a definable trait or tick that could be parodied, preferring to keep things tidy and also make terrible allusions. (The worst might be “Can’t lie, I’m on Angus Cloud nine” because “You know I like to dictate things, Kim Jong” is so obviously stupid that it must be a joke.) His straightforward approach is similar to those of fellow Southerners Megan Thee Stallion and DaBaby, the sort of bars-first-but-also-make-it-pop throwback rappers who maybe would not have stood out in the commercial landscape of the 2000s, but are anomalies in the day and age of vibes. Unlike them, however, Harlow does not make bright songs on Come Home the Kids Miss You. The album, for the most part, consists of a monochromatic palette of generic “smooth” beats, one just bleeding into the next. Musically, it’s unfulfilling, lacking standout melodies or exciting rhythms. The sound of Come Home the Kids Miss You, in turn, is about as sophisticated and interesting as a Daniel Arsham sculpture, neat at a glance but vapid upon any extended interrogation.
These songs have topics, for sure—women, his upbringing, how he drinks pineapple juice to make his semen taste good—but Harlow does not craft vivid scenes, proffer compelling thoughts, or wring out emotion, sounding like someone forced into an introductory therapy session, for instance, when he raps, “Terrified to see my parents pass,” on “Parent Trap.” The most intriguing thing here is the desperate commodification of his own music and ideas, seen on the suite of “First Class” and “Dua Lipa.” The former, which egregiously samples Fergie’s mid-2000s hit “Glamorous,” is massively popular, having been a TikTok hit before debuting atop the Billboard Hot 100. Harlow’s hook is basically Fergie’s, making it less of a chorus and more of a signal of cultural awareness, a nod to an era that his generation has fetishized. The nod is what matters.
With “Dua Lipa,” previewed just days before the album’s release, Harlow simply incorporates the global star’s name into a refrain. The song’s got nothing to do with Dua Lipa; again, it’s the sort of knowing wink that makes for good tabloid fodder but not necessarily good music. Were it not called “Dua Lipa,” there would be nothing of note about the song, which has a flat beat and equally flat bars. Harlow has gone for the celebrity song title in the past with “Tyler Herro,” but with that single he at least parlayed the conceit into an acknowledgment of his position as a white figure in a predominantly Black space. “Dua Lipa” is just being vaguely horny on main, as he might say. With little substance or musical intrigue, “First Class” and “Dua Lipa” are anodyne pieces of content designed to make somebody say, “Did you hear that Jack Harlow song that samples Fergie, or the one called ‘Dua Lipa’?” There’s no better answer than a dead-eyed “Yeah.” He did the same thing with a short album trailer starring Danielle Fishel, better known as Topanga from Boy Meets World. Was there much of a point? Not really, but people took notice, so that’s cool.
Still, in some ways, Come Home the Kids Miss You is the perfect album for someone like Jack Harlow. There are ways that Harlow could position it as a real album, able to point to specific points of growth on tracks like “Side Piece” and “Lil Secret,” which are meant to be adult and sexy, or the closing “State Fair,” which finds him reflecting about how he’s famous but still the same guy. And there’s his song with Drake, “Churchill Downs,” which is more or less a copy of an up-late Drake confessional and has Harlow spitting the album’s defining defensive line: “I’m hip-hop, do you fully understand?”
A big mistake, however, was actually getting Drake on the song, as the veteran artist sounds like he has something worth saying. Meanwhile Harlow, despite the growing fame and unending fascination, is still finding his footing. He is funny online and in interviews and knows how to grab people’s attention. Without much to grasp with his music, it’s easiest just to stare.


As the relentlessly positive artist ascends to pop culture ubiquity, her hook-filled and saccharine music feels increasingly boxed in by the Lizzo brand.

Special

Not long ago, Lizzo distilled her songwriting process into just three short sentences. On an episode of David Letterman’s Netflix series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, the singer and rapper coached the former late-night host through recording a song at her Los Angeles home studio. In what felt like an obvious set-up, Letterman grumbled a few self-deprecating bars at the mic— “I’m ugly, I sweat, I’m old”—before Lizzo interjected. “To make it a Lizzo song, you gotta be positive,” she said. “You can’t say, ‘I’m ugly.’ If you do say, ‘I’m ugly,’ you gotta say, ‘I’m ugly, but I like it.’”
That simple formula may be part of why Lizzo was able to write, in her estimate, “175 to 200” songs for Special, the follow-up to her Grammy-winning major label debut Cuz I Love You. The other half of the equation is undoubtedly her tireless work ethic: Since releasing Cuz I Love You in 2019, she’s launched a size-inclusive shapewear line, invested in the at-home fitness startup Hydrow, and signed a TV production deal with Amazon, which premiered her first project, the reality dance competition Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls, earlier this year. All the while, she’s been active on every social platform imaginable, correcting people on her own TikTok dance challenges and posting weekly glam shoots to Instagram. Her mission to promote empowerment and positivity, to ensure that her fans never feel alone, has manifested itself in making sure they never go a day without forgetting she exists.
The 12 tracks that made it onto Special certainly support that idea. Like Lizzo’s breakout hit “Truth Hurts” before it, lead single “About Damn Time” has achieved a cultural ubiquity that few artists could hope to reach. Perhaps the Max Martin-produced “2 Be Loved (Am I Ready),” with its groove indebted to Hall & Oates and ecstatic call-and-response chorus, is heading towards the same milestone. That touch of familiarity is key to the album: On the Mark Ronson collaboration “Break Up Twice,” Lizzo interpolates Lauryn Hill over a soulful horn section in order to get real with a back-and-forth lover. Combining voice-cracking vulnerability with some meme du jour pull-quotes (“Who gon’ put up with your Gemini shit like I do?”) is the Lizzo specialty, and hearing her in her element is a great reminder of why so many have turned to her music for catharsis, joy, and understanding.
That appeal becomes more difficult to parse out whenever Special is watered down by clunky writing and, more often than not, the kind of saccharine pop production designed chiefly for playlist adds. A good chunk of the album reads like a checklist of streaming-friendly social events such as birthday parties (“Birthday Girl”), bachelorette parties (“Grrrls”), and Pride afterparties (the very vibey “Everybody’s Gay”). In its effort to reach the masses, Special has the unfortunate fault of both trying too hard to hit the zeitgeist—like the nonsensical Tesla metaphor on opener “The Sign”—and striving for pure blahtitude. The latter is most apparent on the album’s title track, where the gap between Lizzo’s detailed verses about her pre-fame life in Houston and the all-caps “LOVE YOURSELF” chorus couldn’t be wider.
In fact, when it comes to happiness, some of the most satisfying songs on Special—the ones that come closest to finding inner peace—are also the most subdued. As made clear by the title, “Naked” is a sultry stripped-down track where Lizzo urges a paramour to “come make this body feel sacred” with no hint of shame or remorse. On album closer “Coldplay,” over a chiptuned sample of Chris Martin, she wistfully recalls the early days of a love affair, where simply hanging out and shooting the shit with another person can realign your entire view of yourself, for better or worse. “Do you say this shit to other people?/I don't think that I could,” she coos, over and over. It’s the most genuine, and the most blissful, that she’s ever sounded.
Somewhere in the wake of Daft Punk’s retro-futuristic Random Access Memories and Ronson’s “Uptown Funk,” a kind of buoyant, disco-influenced pop sound began to take over the charts. Out of all its practitioners—Dua Lipa, BTS, Doja Cat—Lizzo is perhaps the one who best captures the rapturous, sequined appeal of the genre, both in her ability to craft life-affirming hooks and in her overall self-image. Look no further than her Rolling Stone cover spread, or to her former mentor Prince, whose Minneapolis funk is draped all over Lizzo’s music. The only component that she’s missing, really, is that unique Studio 54 blend of sleaze and transcendence that artists like Jessie Ware and the Weeknd have been able to better replicate. (The provocative single “Rumors,” where Lizzo traded saucy zingers with Cardi B, is sadly nowhere to be found on Special.)
But that’s not really what she’s about. At a time when the relationship between artist and fan is in flux with each social media platform update, Lizzo has made it a point to listen and learn, for the most part. She switched out ableist lyrics in her song when asked to do so; she regularly hosts Instagram Lives, where she cracks jokes and tells candid stories. On “Birthday Girl,” she devotes the entire bridge to the voices of other women, sharing their birthdays and astrological signs. To her most devoted fans, and even to some casual listeners, these gestures towards inclusivity can mean the world. The music is just icing on the cake.


On their debut EP, the production duo of Lunice Fermin Pierre II (Lunice) and Ross Birchard (Hudson Mohawke) put together 16 minutes of the most brazen, positively huge beats this year.

TNGHT EP

Lunice and Hudson Mowhawke of TNGHT emerged this year with a glass-shattering SXSW set and a few brash, colorful bangers on Rustie's scene-defining BBC Essential Mix. While their contemporaries experiment with footwork loops, yacht rock, and 1970s prog, TNGHT zero in on rap's fixation on the loud and chaotic. Hip-hop production has always had time for bass and bombast but a growing number of producers-- notably Lex Luger, the often copied but rarely equalled soundbomber behind Waka's influential Flockaveli-- have an almost nihilistic embrace of sonic overkill.
TNGHT may not come from the American rap scene (Lunice is in Montreal, while HudMo's Ross Birchard is based in Glasgow), but their connection to it is clear. Lunice and Birchard have great ears for what's what and who's making it: their engaging and well-curated hour-long mix for Diplo's BBC show ranged from the mush-mouthed grit of Florida's Spaceghostpurrp to Chicago's recent wave of teenage antagonism (Chief Keef, Sasha Go Hard) without showing any signs of dilettantism.
Their self-titled debut EP for Warp and LuckyMe spans 16 minutes of some of the year's most brazen, positively huge hip-hop sounds. Birchard recently copped to Pitchfork that inspiration usually hits him when he's on the couch, but this is no DIY laptop affair: HudMo and Lunice took to a high-end London studio to bang out these five cuts, and the results sound properly expensive.
Ironically, they arrived at this point by process of subtraction. Where something like Gunplay's "Jump Out" crams well over a hundred SFX triggers into its short runtime, creating the kind of sonic swarm that threatens to swallow itself, TNGHT's take on post-Luger smash-and-bash drama is clean and precise. The simplicity is deceptive next to the record's volume, and its minimalist approach, rounding off every seismic charge with a futuristic crispness that recalls Timbaland's game-changing creative peak.
Another revelation dropped in that TNGHT interview is that there are yet-to-be-named MCs locked to spit over every single track on this EP some time in the future. It's a promising development, considering that their remix of Waka's recent single "Rooster in My Rari", which pulls off the four-leaf-clover achievement of actually making a Flocka single louder-- proves that Lunice and HudMo's wordless bombs retain their effectiveness with rappers on them.
On their own, though, a keen sense of structure lifts TNGHT's productions above purely functional beat-tape grooves. The breadth of carnage on the EP's centerpiece, "Higher Ground", starts with looped handclaps and vocal samples and quickly ascends to martial-law status as a synthesized tuba pops in and out to steamroll buildings just for laughs. And "Goooo"'s tight tonal coils sound like hot knives slashing through metal by its high-anxiety conclusion.
"[They] rarely work out," Birchard told us last month, regarding teaming up with others in the production world. "I've done loads of collaborations and I'm never totally happy with the outcome because it feels like you're compromising something of yourself in it." What's most impressive about TNGHT's sound, then, is how effortlessly cohesive and them it sounds. Those whose ears have been close to the ground over the past three years know that both HudMo and Lunice's solo work shares more than a LuckyMe affiliation-- specifically, heavy-thudded bass rhythms, splashes of synth color, and a fun-first approach to melodic phrasing indebted to dance and R&B alike. Separately, they compliment each other, but together, they finish each other's sentences with exclamation points in bold, underlined, 72-point type. Since the EP's completion, HudMo and Lunice have been at work on individual solo albums, but their partnership has already yielded results so impressive and of-the-moment that it's likely we haven't heard the last of it.


The Toronto singer-songwriter channels cosmic country on her debut album. Recorded live in the studio, it’s a promising showcase of both her nimble voice and her band’s dynamic playing.

All Blue

Julianna Riolino’s All Blue feels wonderfully out of time: The Toronto alt-country musician’s solo debut sounds like Dolly Parton hanging out in Laurel Canyon in 1972—or perhaps 2032. Like Parton, Riolino layers and harmonizes her voice—the most fine-tuned instrument on All Blue—until it sounds as big as your feelings for a long-lost love. Both are performers who play the sentimentalist smiling through the sadness, the most fitting form of melancholy for country music. But Riolino’s flavor of country is more cosmic; like fellow troubadours Tobacco City and Daniel Romano—Riolino was a member of his band the Outfit—she also invokes a starry-eyed ’60s folk sensibility without appearing overtly nostalgic. You’ve heard these sounds before, but their familiarity is a strength, even when All Blue plays it a little safe.
Riolino made the wise decision to record most of All Blue live. Producer Aaron Goldstein, a gifted pedal-steel player who has been associated with Cowboy Junkies and Ducks Ltd., understands that these 11 songs are best heard while swaying in place; the playing is as compelling as the songwriting. This is a testament to the performance of Riolino and her bandmates, especially Thomas Hammerton on keyboards and Anthony Ronaldi doing a few light Exile on Main St.-era Bobby Keys impressions on baritone saxophone. All Blue is at its best when it leans into this more rockin’ flavor of honky tonk, as on “Lone Ranger” (“Lend me your kisses, and dismiss me when you fear,” she sings like a dare), or in the T. Rex stomp and wails on “Why Do I Miss You.” At the other end of the spectrum, Riolino adopts an Aimee Mann-like delivery on “Hark!,” singing about a celestial dream as if it was just some passing sign on the highway.
When the album lags, it’s usually from an aggressive case of sameness or overreliance on an unchanging midtempo gait. This can plague even the best of the alt-country elite (see Wilco’s Cruel Country from this year). By the end of “Long Feeling,” the fatigue of one verse too many feels just grating enough to elicit a sigh. But the song that immediately follows, “You,” is the album’s highlight, by far the most fun and realized Riolino performance on the record. It’s straight-up power pop in which she sneaks surprising lines (“Everyone is fine until they are drowning in someone”) into wordless ’60s girl-group choruses. The drummer is finally awake, and the entrance of the 12-string recalls the twinkling 12-strings that elevate Phoebe Bridgers’ “Motion Sickness,” except Riolino and her bandmates are driving way past the speed limit.
“You” is the one great moment on a promising debut album with many good ones. And though there may only be a handful of truly memorable songs, the atmosphere of Riolino’s carefully crafted cosmic country lingers in the mind.


An improvisatory companion to 2022’s Inside Problems, Andrew Bird’s newest instrumental album channels the warmth of its Ojai, California setting.

Outside Problems

Violinist and singer-songwriter Andrew Bird delved into his interior psyche with uncharacteristic candor on 2022’s Inside Problems, balancing introspection with a subdued yet lively combo of collaborators. Though it arrives a year later, his new album Outside Problems is essentially the rough draft of its predecessor: exploratory recordings where he’s improvising textures and imagining melodies. A close listen reveals refrains and motifs—or as one track has it, “Mo Teef”—that were built out on various songs on Inside Problems. Detecting the echoes requires concentration, though, not to mention intimate familiarity with the previous record. There are no lyrics, no singing apart from some incidental vocalizing, just Bird’s violin and guitar supported by Alan Hampton’s bass.
Despite its spare instrumentation, Outside Problems never feels skeletal or small. As he telegraphs in the title, Bird is looking beyond himself, literally stepping outside to record the bulk of the music in the mountains and orange groves of Ojai, a small California town located east of Santa Barbara, not too far from his home in Los Angeles. The open vistas are like an uncredited third musician, sanding off rough edges and lending warmth to the string instruments as they pluck and strum. Inviting nature into the recording sends the unmistakable message that Bird is ready to re-emerge into the world.
In a sense Outside Problems can seem as if Bird is closing a chapter, tying a bow on his pandemic experience. Simultaneously a footnote and its own beast, Outside Problems picks up a thread left hanging from Echolocations, a multi-part site-specific series where Bird recorded music inspired by a distinct environment at the point of inspiration. He completed two out of a planned five installments—the inaugural Echolocations: Canyon and 2017’s Echolocations: River—before putting the concept on the back burner, timing that roughly coincided with the onset of the pandemic and the introspective turn of Inside Problems. As on the Echolocations albums, the physical space of Outdoor Problems is palpable within the recording but Bird’s improvisations aren’t intended to be ambient and atmospheric: They hit the heart, not the head.
Album opener “Mancey” aims directly at the gut with its slithery blues. As Bird’s lead violin dances around Hampton’s swinging 12-bar groove, he sounds joyful and alive, a spirit that flows throughout the record. The circular refrain of “Festivus” recasts a maypole jig as a secular celebration of grievances, gaining momentum from Bird’s slightly distorted violin. A similarly understated humor drives the spritely “Mormon House Party,” where the joke lies in how the percolating rhythm still sounds polite and friendly. The high spirits aren’t limited to numbers with upbeat tempos. There’s a sense of freedom to the lithe melodies and extended improvisations on “Epilogue,” where Bird’s lovely, lyrical playing has a sense of ascendent grace; it’s music that feels untethered to the weight of the world.
“Tik Tok” concludes the album on a contemplative note that doesn’t quite jibe with the track’s knowing nod toward the social media app. Yet this dissonance suits the album: Lacking the considered construction of Inside Problems, Outside Problems is definitionally a footnote, a collection of sketches and explorations that will fascinate listeners who have followed Bird for years. That audience will recognize that Outside Problems is in its own way as emotionally unguarded as its predecessor: Andrew Bird freeing himself from confines of his own design.


The 71-year-old guitarist has long been known as a peerless interpreter of American musical forms, but on these 13 diaristic originals, he reveals more of himself than ever before.

Four

Avant-garde jazz isn’t known for its gentleness, but Bill Frisell’s compositions are a fine-spun exception. Once a member of raucous early-’90s outfit Naked City, Frisell has spent decades at the crossroads of Americana and jazz, where he flirts with virtuosic, nostalgic pastiche yet never commits to any particular bit. The 71-year-old guitarist has delved into country, dabbled in surf, reworked classic movie scores, and even released an entire album of luxuriously orchestrated John Lennon covers. His fans admire the quiet sweep of his thoughtful arrangements and twangy, often vibrato-assisted tone, yet he’s accumulated his share of skeptics who paint him as a traditionalist. Many of his releases verge on beautiful formal exercises—they rarely touch on personal blues or divulge his beliefs about the country that spawned his source material.
Yet the Trump years and the pandemic marked a change. Frisell’s last couple of bandleader records revealed more of Bill, their conceptual underpinnings less prescriptive, more open to personal conviction—and as always, his collaborators were well suited to the task at hand. Americana, from 2020, was a panoramic joint effort with co-composers Grégoire Maret and Romain Collin, both immigrants who wove their complex outlooks on the titular genre into the record’s tapestry. Released later that year, Valentine expanded on its predecessor, drawing out the wounded innards of Burt Bacharch’s too-often trivialized “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” before Frisell bared his own politics on a treatment of “We Shall Overcome.” His latest, Four, harnesses a similar attitude: Having learned lessons from America’s musical history, Frisell spins them into a sense of doleful resilience in the face of the present.
He sketched out nine of the record’s 13 tracks, all of which are originals, during quarantine. (A few of the other songs appeared in more subdued form on his 1999 masterstroke Good Dog, Happy Man, another on 1988’s pathfinding Lookout for Hope.) Accompanying Frisell is a brand new, nimble combo: Gerald Clayton on piano, Gregory Tardy on sax and clarinet, and Johnathan Blake on drums. Without a bassist, the group prances through airy melodies like acrobats on a wire. Yet sorrow always follows playfulness on Four, which dips and soars like the emotions of a single day. The result is one of the most structured, deliberate releases of Frisell’s career, a diaristic set that no one will ever mistake for a genre study.
The record is smattered with requiems for dead friends, dulcet pieces reliant on subtly shifting ostinatos. Opener “Dear Old Friend (For Alan Woodard)” starts with a duet between clarinet and piano that builds into the album’s stirring version of an overture. “Claude Utley,” about the Seattle artist, who died in 2021, transposes a piano refrain into a call-and-response—Tardy’s clarinet practically weeps, before Clayton and Frisell offer a two-chord riposte. Staggered melodies give “Waltz for Hal Willner,” about the famous producer and Frisell collaborator, who died of COVID in 2020, the swirling effect of sacred choral music. Yet the album’s middle mulls too long over moody straight-ahead and cool jazz, and on the dolorous “Wise Woman,” the band leans overmuch on repetition.
Still, such slow moments pay off. At the start of the LP’s fourth, final side, the musicians spring to attention with a lighthearted rendition of “Good Dog, Happy Man,” a callback to the record’s bright-eyed opening figure. Taken together, the two compositions act like beacons of hope illuminating Four’s rueful center. This sequencing strikes at the rhythms of real life, its surprising peaks and unavoidable valleys arriving in quick succession.
Over the course of Four, Frisell and co. build up a sense of forbearance, a painstakingly formed emotional callus. Bluesy closer “Dog on a Roof” numbers among his late-career finest. Starting with several minutes of guitar harmonics, ghostly piano, sax runs, and cymbal scraping, the players settle into a down-and-dirty groove more rugged and propulsive than anything that preceded it. Before the song ends, it dissipates into unnerving, whimpering free jazz, but the promise of that thrilling central section endures, spotlighting their long-sought middle road between grief and joy.


With her own strain of batida music, the Portuguese-born, Bordeaux-bred producer Nídia offers a debut album of mind-bending complexity.

Nídia é Má, Nídia é Fudida

Batida is, at its heart, a music of exchange. Born out of Angolan styles like semba, kizomba, and kuduro, and encompassing a growing constellation of contemporary variants (tarraxo, tarraxinha, fodencia) along with global sounds like house and Afrobeats, it’s a little like a game of telephone. Rhythms bounce between Portugal, Angola, São Tomé e Príncipe, Cape Verde, and other points in the Afro-Lusophone diaspora, changing shape all the way; they ricochet back and forth across Lisbon’s suburbs, with crews on opposite sides of the Tagus river coming up with different takes on the ever-mutating form.
Nídia represents a widening of its global footprint. She grew up in Vale da Amoreira, a working-class Lisbon suburb, but  she moved to Bordeaux, France, in 2011, when she was 14 years old. In Vale da Amoreira, she had danced to batida with a group of friends who dubbed themselves Kaninas Squad. In France, armed with FL Studio and some YouTube tutorials, she set up her own bedroom studio, Estúdio da Mana (“Sister’s Studio”), and set about developing her own take on the sound. For a time, she went under the alias Nídia Minaj, a tribute to one of her idols. But she loses the borrowed surname on Nídia é Má, Nídia é Fudida, her debut album. The record is both a contribution to the style and a fierce declaration of independence.
Its title translates loosely as “Nídia is bad, Nídia is dope.” (That’s “bad,” of course, in the “not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good” sense of the term.) The opening track is all swagger: Insistent horn fanfare, rattling percussion, the defiant cry of “Mulher Profissional!” (“Professional woman!”)—as defiant as a fighter’s ring-walk anthem, it’s a triumphant way for the 20-year-old musician to declare that she is all business. What follows this brassy intro is a succession of short, devastatingly kinetic tracks. Most of them are well under three minutes long, full of brittle percussion samples, mind-bendingly complex syncopations, and rapid-fire synth bursts, as though someone had tossed a brick of firecrackers onto a Korg factory assembly line. To listeners familiar with DJ Marfox, Nigga Fox, Firmeza, and other Príncipe musicians, Nídia’s music won’t sound completely alien. But much of the album is imbued with a tough, almost confrontational tone, a not-to-be-fucked-with vibe that is hers alone.
Her rhythms are unusually intricate. “Biotheke” rides a complicated drum groove that feels perpetually on the verge of collapse as it traces its tornado-like path through a mess of metal and wood. In “É da Banda,” the clattering drum sounds seem almost random at first; it’s only when the kick asserts its gravitational pull that all the elements fall into place. Stripped of everything but snapping drums and a high-pitched, hiccupping refrain, it makes for a dazzling display of her rhythmic skills. What’s most striking about her music, though, is her use of dissonance. A handful of sharp, key-clashing sounds lent 2015’s Danger EP an extra hint of menace, but here they definitively become her signature. The eerie, haunted-carousel melody of “Biotheke” sets into stark relief the tune’s clanging percussion and deadweight bass riffs. “Mulher Profissional” is a riot of tinny frequencies and stabbing motions; “Arme” bristles with needling tones, vocal shots pitched a half-tone apart, and a piercing melody that sounds like a tape being fast-forwarded.
The slow, grinding “Puro Tarraxo” is a good example of the mind-bending complexity of her approach. Over an almost dembow like groove, the sounds pile up: high-pitched, staccato vocal samples; video-game bleeps; a harsh, buzzing sound that splits the stereo field wide open. In between these hard, bright tones, a weird, modal melody dances in circles, all but invisible amid a collection of elements so shrill they could set your teeth on edge. It sometimes seems like the main organizing principle of her music is the lattice of crisscrossing lasers found in Hollywood bank vaults: Getting inside is tricky business, indeed.
But there’s also a softer side to her music. In one of the album’s finest tracks, “Underground,” her fondness for dissonance yields fluttering, guitar-like chords jumbled up with jagged synths, a balance of soft tone clusters and sharp angles as tactile as a fistful of dandelion tufts and broken glass. And on “I Miss My Ghetto,” brooding piano chords apply the brakes to runaway drums and breakneck syncopations—the rare moment of introspection from a young artist who clearly seems more interested in moving forward than looking back. It’s also a suggestion that, no matter how far batida travels, it’s not likely to forget its roots.