I'm Gay was Lil B's highest profile release to date, and he's kept up his free mixtape pace since. I Forgive You was dire, but this recent pair-- especially BasedGod Velli-- have plenty of inspired moments.

Lil B: BasedGod Velli / Silent President

BasedGod Velli / Silent President

"I changed the rap game, and a lot of people know that-- a lot of rappers know that," says Lil B at the end of BasedGod Velli. The boast comes shortly after he's thrown out a revealing, eyebrow-raising jab: "I'm the reason you got your deal, bitch, A$AP." The line, and the fact that it's clearly true, says a lot about Lil B's unique perch in rap: Without ever abandoning the fringe, he's changed the mainstream conversation enough that rappers like A$AP Rocky can score six-figure signings in part by copping B's producers and calling themselves "pretty" like he does. But Lil B isn't your standard neglected innovator, grousing in interviews about more successful rappers stealing his style: He's more popular than ever, still constantly retweeting requests from young girls begging him to "fuck my bitches." For a cult rapper with no record deal, the extent of his influence is astonishing.
BasedGod Velli and The Silent President, both released in the past month, will scan to most onlookers like Just More Lil B Mixtapes. It's an impression he doesn't always exactly work overtime to dismiss: After he ignited an Internet firestorm last summer with his lovely, dazed I'm Gay, he followed it up with I Forgive You, a dare-you-to-get-through-it teeth-gritter that worked like bug spray to anyone who'd just climbed on board. But while they lack the unifying-moment ring of I'm Gay, BasedGod Velli and Silent President are both strong entries into the massive, bewildering Lil B canon. If you sit somewhere in the middle of the Lil B-obsessive spectrum, here's the shorthand: You probably need one or both of these.
BasedGod Velli gets the edge over President, for focus and quality of production. The cover, which splits his face with Pac's, Face/Off-style, might get a half-hearted rise out of some rap traditionalists somewhere, but it's difficult by now to imagine many of those types still being undecided about Lil B. He opens the tape up addressing this crowd: "Niggas talk about 'Lil B done killed rap'/ Stupid bitch, man, I brought the rap game back." After that, he doesn't waste time defending himself against anyone. The rest of the tape is high-quality #based music, nothing more, nothing less.
Lil B is in open-hearted truth-teller mode on Velli: there are no gangsta-rap or pimp-rap exercises. At his best, Lil B uses his positivity like a blunt-force object, clearing out his lane in front of him with the heat of his convictions. Witness this remarkable tirade, also from the title track: "It ain't hard to smoke weed and go tote gats/ It ain't hard to pimp hos, man you lame for that/ It ain't hard to rob a nigga at close range/ Much harder to go outside and use your brain/ Much harder to go to college and go get grades/ Much harder to get a job to go feed your seed/ Real easy to give up and go complain."
This passage bears all the scuff marks of Lil B's without-a-net style-- it's artless, it's fumbling, the lines barely connect with a rhyming syllable at the end-- but it's a remarkable outpouring nonetheless. "King Cotton", which borrows the instrumental from Raekwon and Ghostface's "Heaven & Hell", is another highlight, a touching lament framed in the simplest and most direct possible of terms: "How the fuck can I forget about the people hangin' off a tree/ For the simple fact they look like me?" Those who write off B's style as mindless rambling could spend a chastening few hours watching other rappers' attempts at "based" freestyle: B's gift for turning up startling language inside himself with little to no preparation is uncanny.
Silent President is less rewarding and more scattershot than BasedGod Velli. The beat selection and production are lower in quality, and B's real-time fumbling for words occasionally grows outright distracting. But there are some welcome moments: "Great China Sea" repurposes the only bit of Watch the Throne's "Lift Off" beat worth keeping-- the smooth coda-- and turns it into a parade of softly glowing Christmas lights for B to rap over. On "The Based One", he warbles over DJ Khaled/Drake/Rick Ross/Lil Wayne's "I'm on One". "Cap Pillah" and "BasedGod 50" are highly entertaining examples of ignorant Lil B, with gun threats and non-sequiturs thrown out over linoleum-curling beats.
As usual, both tapes have moments of sheer irredeemable silliness: On President's "Beat the Cancer", he raps over a sped-up loop of Metallica's "Fade to Black" and dedicates it to a terminally ill YouTube follower who requested it of him. It's a nice personal gesture but a profoundly ridiculous song (the chorus is "beat the cancer, cancer.") Ditto for BasedGod Velli's "I Got AIDS", which doubles down on Lil B's personal spit-take title sweepstakes and offers a message song so bluntly literal it inspires mostly disbelieving laughs ("on top of that, she gave me herpes when she gave me AIDS!"). What makes them work, though, is their place within the larger Lil B world: His pratfalls are offered up with the same fearless generosity as his triumphs. Without them, we wouldn't feel the audacity of his creative high-wire act. They're the price of entry into Based World, which is still a pretty transformative place to spend some time.


The Israeli singer and the Radiohead guitarist team up with artists from across the Middle East to tackle a range of Arabic love songs, in an act of concerted musical bridge-building.

Dudu Tassa / Jonny Greenwood: Jarak Qaribak

Jarak Qaribak

Saleh and Daoud Al-Kuwaity were giants in Iraq. The brothers played violin and oud in the courts of kings and composed new standards for the greatest singers of the Arab world, reshaping Iraqi classical music for the 20th century. But when they emigrated to Israel in the early 1950s, their stature and earning power plummeted; they sank from concert halls to private parties. “My father sold eggs,” Daoud’s daughter remembered in the documentary Iraq N’ Roll. After all, they were Arabs. Still, they retained their fame in Iraq—for a time, until Saddam Hussein had their works redesignated as anonymous folk songs. After all, they were Jews.
Born in Kuwait, with Iranian and Iraqi ancestry, Saleh and Daoud were part of the Middle Eastern and North African Jewish diaspora that came to be called Mizrahi after the State of Israel was formed. As the great Iraqi Jewish musician Yair Dalal put it in the documentary, “It was an identity with a question mark,” and it did not align with the cultural establishment’s European biases. “Their entire journey was blotted out” in both their ancestral and chosen homelands, Iraq N’ Roll director Gili Gaon told Haaretz. Because of this, Saleh and Daoud forbade their children to pursue music. “But it returned in the grandchildren,” Dalal said, moved to tears by the playing and singing of a younger musician named Dudu Tassa.
Tassa is the grandson of Daoud and the grand-nephew of Saleh. His music, sung in Hebrew and Arabic, is big in Israel but less known in the States, and to a foreign newcomer, he seems like a slightly scruffier Chris Martin: a polished, generous rock-and-ballad performer of evident popular appeal. Since 2011, Tassa has been reviving Saleh and Daoud’s music and prestige with his rock band the Kuwaitis, which Radiohead once took on a U.S. tour. Their guitarist, England’s Jonny Greenwood—who is married to Israeli artist Sharona Katan—also played on the Tassa-penned 2009 song “Eize Yom.” Thus the conditions were set for Jarak Qaribak, an altogether extraordinary album that seems to create new pieces for the geopolitical puzzle of its backstory, as if doing so might be the solution to eventually completing it.
The title means something like “Your neighbor is your friend,” and the singers come from all over the Middle East. In a quietly ingenious touch for a study of imbricate identity, all of them sing songs from countries they aren’t from. The album consists almost entirely of Arabic love songs, an ancient, refined tradition admired the world over, and one that contains far more than eloquent longing. Take the spark and highlight of the project, a Lebanese song called “Taq ou-Dub,” rendered as a palpitating dance track where sweet flutes reel with tangy plucks. Palestinian singer Nour Freteikh softly bends the title’s three percussive syllables into an adhesive hook. It’s even zestier if you know it means “take a hike,” and the whole thing is basically a Swiftian excoriation of an ex.
While this song was recorded live, most of the vocalists recorded in their home countries. Greenwood and Tassa traveled between Oxford and Tel Aviv to make the music with players of brass, strings, keyboards, and Middle Eastern instruments. Ariel Qassis plays the silky Arabian zither called the qanun, while Mustafa Amal plays the rebab, a spike lute found throughout Islamic culture. There are bamboo pipes and, of course, the intricate intervals and supple slides of the fretless oud. Tassa and Greenwood blend in standard rock kit; the former sings on an electro-cinematic version of the Moroccan song “Lhla Yzid Ikhtar,” while the latter has described the production vision as Kraftwerk in 1970s Cairo. The use of drum machines instead of computers helps to give the piecemeal recording its warm, live feeling.
It would be miserly to call these songs simple covers: The range of interpretation between the microtonal scales and interwound melodies of Eastern music and the harmonizing octaves of the West is too wide for that. Yet the album’s arrangement closes the distance with skill and sensitivity, flowing easily from electronic music to torch songs to classical bricolage. But the difficulty of this musical bridge-building pales next to what it took for this project to exist at all. Tassa has hinted at what one would imagine to be considerable bureaucratic and diplomatic efforts behind getting some of these artists to work with him or one another. Thus the record is organically, even experimentally, political—not narrowly or expressly.
On the other hand, it never would have come about without Greenwood and Tassa choosing to use their clout to do something hard and rewarding. There’s no other circumstance in which the Egyptian singer Ahmed Doma would give a suave account of the Algerian Ahmed Wahby’s “Djit Nishrab,” and Iraq’s Karrar Alsaadi would travel to Tel Aviv to commandingly sing a Yemeni song, and Dubai’s Safae Essafi would fashion a sleeper hit from an Israeli song, “Ahibak,” with its ’60s spy-jazz groove, like fingers running over a beaded curtain. And there’s a tune by Tassa’s great-uncle Saleh, at last restored to his proper place in this story, in a haunting yet poppy rendition by two Tunisian singers. Jarak Qaribak is a rich, fascinating case of music both carrying history and shaping the future, redrawing the limits of the possible in specific, limited, yet meaningful ways.


Katie and Allison Crutchfield would go on to bigger things in the bands Waxahatchee and Swearin’, but their early band P.S. Eliot made some fantastic music of its own.

2007-2011

Katie and Allison Crutchfield, the 27-year-old twin sisters now known for fronting the bands Waxahatchee and Swearin’, respectively, began playing music in their early teens, Katie picking up guitar, Allison, drums. They would come home from school in their hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, grab a snack, and head down to the basement to practice until their family told them it was too late. By the age of 15, the Crutchfields had formed their first band, the Ackleys, a twangy rock four-piece that gained a small local following. In a 2006 documentary-style short about the band, the Ackleys discuss the future of their two-year-old project, which was soon to be challenged by the departure of one member for college. “I see it going on forever, of course,” says a 17-year-old Allison, optimism radiating through her thick Southern accent. But though the factors that break up many friends after high school graduation would indeed extinguish the Ackleys, the Crutchfields were clearly meant for greater opportunities. P.S. Eliot, the band they formed together after the dissolution of their first group, has been lovingly documented with 2007-2011, a 2xCD set that gathers the group’s two albums and an EP, along with assorted demos and home recordings.
P.S. Eliot was directly informed by the Crutchfields’ desire to experience life outside of Birmingham. Then 18 years old, the twins found that they had very little in common with their hometown scene, which, according to an oral history by Pitchfork contributor Liz Pelly included in the box, was largely composed of hardcore bros moshing to music made by men without any awareness of the space they were occupying. Thanks to the Ackleys’ limited but informative tour experience, Allison and Katie discovered that musical spaces don’t have to be hyper-masculine or oppressive. P.S. Eliot was an opportunity to work against sexist social structures from within through the simple strategy of offering an empowering alternative.
Early on, Katie and Allison cited stalwarts like Guided by Voices, Fugazi, and the Velvet Underground as influences. Robert Pollard’s prolificacy inspired Katie, leading her to think that she too had to write many songs, good and bad, in order to find the gems. Though in sound they were more pop-punk than riot grrrl, P.S. Eliot was indebted to the sensibilities of acts like Bikini Kill or Sleater-Kinney, whose words offered anthems for those expected to sit on the sidelines, who paved a path simply by existing, who created music as a means to survive.
P.S. Eliot’s first recording, the 2008 Bike Wreck demo, sounds decidedly harsh and lo-fi, being recorded in the Crutchfield family garage on a digital 8-track and Macbook, but there’s obvious potential in the five-song experiment, even if it is buried beneath some serious static fuzz. It wasn’t until 2009, with two small P.S. Eliot tours down and after the Crutchfield twins had settled in nearby Tuscaloosa, that they hit their stride. Recorded over two days in their living room, Introverted Romance in Our Troubled Minds sounds considerably cleaner than the Bike Wreck demo, and for the first time, P.S. Eliot sound like a fully-formed project, existing somewhere between scrappily precise and gracefully shambolic. Now joined by Will Granger on guitar and (briefly) Michael McClellan of the Ackleys on bass, the Crutchfields could focus on a sort of controlled chaos.
Unlike the carefully constructed expression of vulnerability she currently owns as Waxahatchee, Katie’s songwriting with P.S. Eliot exploded in a wild rush. She stacks adjectives with abandon, as words tumble over each other in a race to stay afloat above the churning riffs (see “Augustus”’s 20 seconds outpouring “the subsequent or the demise/to praise or to antagonize, it all sounds the same/the arrogant teenage prestige/seems like such a distinctive breed/disheveled fame taking steady aim/on cerebral wealth, or my own personal hell”). While her stream-of-consciousness style could seem like an attempt at obfuscation, Katie’s lyrics are so deeply rooted in the personal that their excess manages to convey a sincere (and perhaps naive) hunger to experience the highs and lows of life.
The slow-burning “Tennessee,” for example, is about being tugged in different directions by desires: “I’ve got a racing mind and enough gas to get to Tennessee/Baby, let’s push our limits/I got a West Coast heart and an East Coast mentality.” She explores emotional division through anecdotes about a three-year romantic cycle with a partner. On “Incoherent Love Songs,” this takes the form of an unhealthy mutual dependency that is later elaborated as a blind reliance on “memories of content” in “Tangible Romance.” P.S. Eliot’s self-critical admission of uncertainty, bad habits, and the inability to escape recalls the early work of Rilo Kiley, whose singer Jenny Lewis offered assurance that it is okay to feel.
By the time *Introverted Romance in Our Troubled Minds *was released by Detroit label Salinas in 2009, P.S. Eliot were regularly touring north to Brooklyn and had a growing and devoted fanbase. Their next release, 2010’s five-song Living in Squalor EP shows remarkable growth from the Bike Wreck demo. While both share a similar unrestrained energy, Squalor is cohesive. A telling example is an updated version of Bike Wreck’s “Broken Record”; what was once an (ironically) indecipherable song about the struggle to communicate now came through loud and clear.
Sadie, P.S. Eliot’s final album, was recorded in Birmingham in late 2010. If Introverted found P.S. Eliot processing the world around them, Sadie was an epiphany, a discovery after a whole lot of digging. The emotional ties that bound Katie’s lyrics were dissolving and there is a distinct sense of freedom and confidence. But rather than displaying a pop-punk need to spit everything out immediately, P.S. Eliot instead turns towards slowly, patiently, painting a clear picture. Sadie is more of a moodboard than a list of concerns and complexes like Introverted. Even though P.S. Eliot had not played many of the songs on Sadie as a full band before, they come off as tight and prepared thanks to the production work of New Jersey’s Mark Bronzino. A song like the five-minute “Diana” is a world away from Introverted. It finds a melancholic Katie singing barely above a whisper, but a majority of the track is just a guitar. By their end, P.S. Eliot had reached a state of cohesion many bands never do. Yet by September 2011, the band decided to quit while they were ahead.
Creatively, Katie and Allison were both ready to pursue new projects; there was a distinct feeling that P.S. Eliot had fulfilled its intentions. Shortly after recording Sadie, Katie wrote the first Waxahatchee release, American Weekend, on the same 8-track used to record the Bike Wreck demo. Katie and Allison started a band called Bad Banana, which lasted from 2010-2011. Allison would later go on to start Swearin’ along with a solo act and Katie would commit to Waxahatchee full-time. P.S. Eliot were, for better or worse, a true DIY band, starting and ending equally suddenly. On the plus side, they existed on their own terms, refused on compromise, and developed their own personal politics. On the negative side, they would cancel shows on a whim and fight amongst themselves to the point of once abandoning first bassist Reena Upadhyay in Grand Rapids.
As DIY artists, the Crutchfields possessed agency that has helped determine how they now carry themselves as solo artists. P.S. Eliot wasn’t created to please anyone. It didn’t satisfy Ackleys fans who were just confused by the scuzzy and distinctly feminist project. Its publicity was minimal at best. P.S. Eliot existed for its members. “I feel like the things I wanted were so pure,” reflects Allison in the oral history of the band that accompanies the release. “To just write music, and for people to hear it, and to go on tour, and to hang out with our friends.” Today, in 2016, knowing what would come after the end of P.S. Eliot, it is particularly funny to think about one lyric Katie sings on Introverted’s “Tennessee”: “Because we’ll go to sleep when we’re dead/And I’ll quit when I’m 25.” They had no idea what the future held.


Compiling several years’ worth of material and spanning nearly two hours, the Munich producer’s first full-length since 2018 feels cohesive, virtuosic, and thrillingly physical.

Pool

This time last year, Skee Mask put out a pair of EPs that felt like dueling reactions to lockdown blues, then stretching into month five in much of Europe and North America. In the sudden and prolonged absence of nightlife, ISS05’s unruly club cuts seemed to kick against the strictures of enforced downtime. On ISS06, on the other hand, a succession of beatless ambient tracks succumbed to numbing torpor. While some frustrated DJs distracted themselves by baking bread, the Munich producer just kept cutting up breakbeats. Mere weeks after the release of those records, Skee Mask, aka Bryan Müller, tweeted that he had yet another album in the can. At long last, Pool, released without advance warning in May, is the promised fruit of that harvest.
Particularly in the case of dance music, a style predicated upon sweaty bodies swapping aerosols in close quarters, it’s hard not to read any given new release as a response to the pandemic year. But despite the timing of its completion, Pool isn't a report on the doldrums of 2020. Its 18 tracks, totaling an hour and 45 minutes, are drawn from the past four or five years of his daily studio regimen. Combined with its surprise release on Bandcamp, the record’s length and semi-archival nature—some of these songs predate the release of 2018’s Compro—might suggest that Pool is a clearinghouse of orphaned tracks meant to bide time before the next proper album. But Müller calls it “a fully conceived project,” the intended successor to Compro. (For now, there are no plans to make the album available beyond Bandcamp: “I just don’t get positive energy from [streaming] companies, and I wanted to send a message to other artists that they didn’t have to put their music on these platforms,” Müller recently said in an interview with Pitchfork contributor Shawn Reynaldo’s First Floor newsletter.)
Where Skee Mask’s last EPs split his output between rhythm and atmosphere, Pool brings those elements back together. Müller continues to work with the types of sounds that have animated his work from the beginning: scabrous breaks and clean-lined 808s, seismic subs and airy pads, smoldering overdrive and dub delay. In the past, Skee Mask’s genre experiments have sometimes felt like he was checking various styles off a list, but Pool shows his work becoming more holistic, moving toward a kind of ur-dance music—as though the disparate continents of drum’n’bass, footwork, techno, electro, and downbeat were all merging back together into a spongy musical Pangaea. Twisting acid sequences give otherwise gentle ambient tracks a steely edge; funk basslines wriggle worm-like through drum’n’bass grooves; rugged jungle breaks and ambient dub flicker like two sides of a lenticular image.
As on Shred and Compro, the sequencing is everything here. Both of Skee Mask’s previous albums followed a distinct arc, moving from gaseous intros through mellow warm-up territory before plunging into beefier fare, then coming full circle with languid, contemplative finales. Pool does something similar, but it covers more ground and entertains more switchbacks along the way. (For a while, the album felt scattered to me, more like a hard-drive dump than a cohesive full-length; then I realized I’d inadvertently been listening to the songs in alphabetical order. Once I corrected my error, the whole record snapped into focus.)
An opening trio of pulsing, quasi-ambient cuts builds to an early highlight with “CZ3000 Dub,” a fast, opalescent techno track whose bassline channels the spirit of Kevin Saunderson’s 1997 classic “World of Deep.” On “Collapse Casual,” a feint into ’70s funk (via what I could swear is a sample of Scooby Doo’s bark) flips into a bruising drum’n’bass roller, sounding like vintage Photek being ground beneath a rusty stylus. After extending the peak-time energy with another unrelenting breakbeat track, Müller eases off into a passage of sentimental, supremely chilled-out tunes, including “Ozone,” among the most unabashedly beautiful things he’s ever recorded. He keeps zig-zagging all the way to the end, sometimes within the space of a single track: “Testo BC Mashup,” another career highlight, starts out sounding like a sat-phone intercept of an old-school gabber rave, morphs into Aphex Twin-grade drill’n’bass, teases a winsome breakdown, and finishes—after an honest-to-goodness key change—by sinking into inky murk, like a corpse beneath a stone slab.
There’s a thrilling physicality to Pool. Skee Mask’s 808s run as hot as a laptop laid across your thighs; omnipresent dub delay gives the feeling of pushing through viscous liquid, actually swimming through the music. But even in its heaviest moments, what distinguishes Pool is not so much power as finesse. Müller says that many of these tracks have origins in live hardware jams, and that energy comes through. Though many songs are largely based on 16-bar loops, their elements are constantly morphing. Drum patterns never play quite the same way twice; shifting synth lines twist and turn with uncanny naturalism, less like programmed sequences than living things. Whether in the wanton G-funk portamento of “60681z,” the faux guitar solos of “Harrison Ford,” or the shape-shifting textures of “Pepper Boys,” you can feel Müller’s fingers on the knobs at every turn. It’s a virtuoso display of control made all the more remarkable for its seeming lack of calculation. Skee Mask gives the impression that his music is a flowing current, and he’s just the channel.

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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a slice of hyperactive, politicized nu-metal from 2001.

Toxicity

Toxicity came out one week before September 11th, 2001. Its lead single, “Chop Suey!,” famously landed on a Clear Channel blacklist of songs to avoid broadcasting in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center. “Chop Suey!” contained the word “suicide,” so it joined Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me” and Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” on a roster of tracks that might conceivably remind listeners of the recent national trauma.
“Chop Suey!” became a hit all the same, a nu-metal chimera that crashed unintelligible babbling into the chorus’s gorgeous vocal melody. One minute Serj Tankian’s shucking syllables like pistachio shells, saying nothing; the next he’s appealing to the Lord God Himself in a rich, reverent baritone, singing the words Jesus spoke to his father on the cross: “Why have you forsaken me?” The bait-and-switch between abrasion and allure makes the song irresistible, a songwriting tactic that would elevate System of a Down from the glut of hard rock that occupied a sizable portion of pop radio through the turn of the millennium.
Raised in Los Angeles’s Armenian-American community, all four members of System of a Down were primed to see through the myth of American exceptionalism that would justify the coming warmongering of George W. Bush’s presidency. Their families had survived the Armenian genocide under the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century; they grew up in the United States with ancestral scars from a massacre still officially denied by its perpetrators, which lent them keen eyes for political suppression and internal propaganda. It’s as if their position as ethnic outsiders in one of the largest cities in the U.S. contributed to the atypical configuration of their sound.
System of a Down released their debut self-titled album toward the end of Rage Against the Machine’s tenure as rock radio’s crowning political agitators. Like RATM, SOAD interpolated West Coast hip-hop’s quick vocal clip into a guitar-driven metal milieu. But SOAD’s compositions disoriented as much as they elucidated. Tankian’s wild, flexible delivery spun out of control. Guitarist Daron Malakian didn’t drive home the beat of their songs so much as he threw it into disarray. Malakian and Tankian forged a close chemistry on the band’s 1998 self-titled debut, whose cover image of an open hand referred to a World War II anti-fascist poster designed by a member of the Communist Party of Germany.
Tankien, Malakian, bassist Shavo Odadjian, and drummer John Dolmayan played with the weight of metal, but the quick pivots of their compositions also aligned them with L.A.’s hardcore punk heritage. Political without dipping into preachiness, they accumulated fans who could either tap into the radical messages of their music or easily ignore them. Come to it with political anguish and you’ll find an outlet for that pain. Come to it with more specific personal angst and you’ll leave just as satisfied.
Their second album, Toxicity, succeeded, improbably, in a radio environment that favored simplistic formulas. Max Martin had stamped popular music with his surefire songwriting brand, ushering in a cross-genre rush of structurally identical singles from the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and Britney Spears. System of a Down competed with the bros of Nickelback, Creed, and Staind on the alternative charts, bands that dressed up the Martin school of pop with power chords and ham-throated vocals. Most of their songs took the form of the confessional: Men apologized to women and to God for their sins, which tended to include substance abuse, emotional neglect, and general chauvinism. Post-grunge incubated a strain of sincerity so obsequious that no amount of nostalgia has yet to rehabilitate it. It lives on as a punchline that itself has grown passé.
Even when System of a Down quoted the literal Bible, they managed to sidestep the blunt impact of grunge’s sickly dregs. Their lyrics tended toward the surreal, the humorous, and the abstract, and the hairpin turns of their compositions kept them from marinating too long in a single mood. Toxicity is heavy, making abundant use of the juiciest guitar distortion in its class thanks to the density of Rick Rubin’s production. But more importantly, the album is restless, bounding from one idea to another before the first can sink in. With such a nimble hand, System of a Down could smuggle radical politics into the headphones of bored kids drawn in by Tankian’s carnival-barker screams.
The album begins with a song that lucidly highlights the evil of the American for-profit prison system. “Minor drug offenders fill your prisons/You don’t even flinch/All our taxes paying for your wars/Against the new non-rich,” Tankian pronounces in a rapid sing-song cadence. He’s not joking but it sounds like a joke, which helps him ease into his more literal policy suggestions: “All research and successful drug policy shows that treatment should be increased/And law enforcement decreased while abolishing mandatory minimum sentences,” he shouts repeatedly at the bridge to “Prison Song,” biting out every syllable of the last three words. Malakian screeches behind Tankian, punctuating his lines and lubricating their blank seriousness; radical abolitionist viewpoints go down easier when accompanied by visceral nu-metal grunts.
The tension between the state and its subjects plays out more dramatically on “Deer Dance,” where riot police shove their guns into the ribs of peaceful anti-capitalist protesters. “Pushing little children/With their fully automatics/They like to push the weak around,” Tankian chants at the chorus, calling to mind any number of images from the past 15 years: mass shootings at high schools or concerts, demonstrations turned violent at the hands of the cops. There’s a light, playful quality to his voice throughout the verse. He trills the “R” in the word “brutality” and swoops in and out of the melody. Then, at the chorus, Tankian snaps into a scream and Malakian grinds between two chords, squeezing all the space out of the arrangement. The verse is like watching a riot on TV, with commercials breaking up the violent footage. The chorus breaks the glass and transports you into the claustrophobic mayhem of the crowd.
System of a Down practice their politics knowing full well its material limitations. They’ve almost certainly directed a few inquiring minds to Howard Zinn and perhaps they’ve reframed the concepts of prison and policing for more than a handful of millennials. Redirecting attention and softening preconceptions are both forms of political work that music can do, but it can’t pass laws or free prisoners. It can only galvanize, and its effects are almost always invisible, subconscious, and slow. The awareness of music’s inherent failure as a political tool saturates Toxicity. It’s why Tankian twists his voice into a sneer when he sing-speaks, “We can’t afford to be neutral on a moving train.” He’s not a theorist, only playing at being one. It’s why, between “Prison Song” and “Deer Dance,” he breaks out a song whose chorus urges, “Pull the tapeworm out of your ass!”
These comic deflations balance the weight of Toxicity’s politics, though some of their humor pitches into the oppression they purport to resist. “Psycho,” sandwiched between the mournful title track and “Aerials,” cuts the mood with a sequence of complaints about, of all people, groupies. He skips the ritual fun and goes straight to rejecting the groupie for being “cocaine crazy,” an elision without improvement. That women only appear on Toxicity to play disposable nuisances (or, on “Bounce,” orgy fodder) makes “Psycho” a skippable extra at best, and at worst a perfect example of the left’s longstanding deficiency in gender politics. The patriarchy and the police state are one in the same, but System of a Down only strike at one face of the enemy while ostensibly shielding the other.
Though “Psycho” mars Toxicity’s tightly wound wit, it only emphasizes just how magnificent the album gets when it’s not distracting itself with petty sexism. The three singles from Toxicity—“Chop Suey!,” the title track, and “Aerials”—represent a break from its two predominant modes of deadly serious politicizing and patently absurd joke-cracking. These songs are weighty and helpless. In them lies the dead air that rises when all the problems have been named, and the naming brings you no closer to a solution. The picture is clear but the path forward remains obscured.
Tankian’s language breaks down on “Aerials.” He gestures toward a spiritual unity among humans: “We’re one in the river/And one again after the fall,” he sings, rendering all of life as the few seconds between the top and bottom of a waterfall. At the chorus, he stresses every syllable and lapses into barely legible syntax. “When you lose small mind/You free your life,” he urges, a sentence that hints at psychedelic enlightenment, escaping predispositions through biochemical intervention—free your mind, man. Except it’s not the mind that gets free: The mind falls away and the person who’s lost it rises away from needing it at all. This isn’t mind-expansion. It’s mind-sloughing. No wonder the grammar’s bad.
The weight of the instrumentation on “Aerials” captures a sense of exhaustion that spills over into Tankian’s delivery. Having wrestled through his share of abolitionist praxis and scatological humor, he falls, drained, to the reminder that the world still exists even after it’s been defined. These songs, where System of a Down shift away from agitprop and plunge into numbing despair, comprise Toxicity’s gleaming emotional core. It’s that rare artifact among commercially heavy music: a nu-metal band that gets tired, and funnels its fatigue into its most compelling performances. System of a Down let their motor run out. After firing everybody up, they offer solace for the spent.
The lyrics to the title track call to mind the serene, lonely image of a barren highway on a midwinter night. Tankian sings of “Flashlight reveries/Caught in the headlights of a truck” and “Looking at life through the eyes of a tire hub,” as in spinning, exhausted, disoriented. There’s a city in the chorus, and the mock Hollywood sign on the album’s cover suggests the song takes place in Los Angeles, a strange, dry place choked with smog and congested with traffic. Trees grow there, but they’re palm trees, which look the same in emoji or Lego as they do in real life. The song houses a world sick with technology, cars, and apartments and the scourge of software updates, and still, the speaker is “eating seeds as a pastime activity,” like a paleo-vegan cruising the shoreline in a Tesla. Toxicity came out the same year as David Lynch’s surrealist nightmare Mulholland Drive, and both works feel prescient 17 years later, as if both Lynch and System of a Down could see California (and the rest of the country) about to fall into disarray.
“Toxicity” ends on a new idea. It doesn’t trail off into the cold. Malakian plays a lunk-headed riff and Tankian repeats a new lyric: “When I became the sun/I shone life into the man’s hearts.” There’s the potential for a whole song packed into those quick measures—earlier in the track, he sings the word “disorder” for longer than he takes to sing that entire couplet. It’s a big idea rendered in fragments: man becomes sun, sun enlightens man. Why end there? “Toxicity” snaps off, leaving silence. Tankian speaks in the past tense, like he’s already illuminated humanity, as if his work were done. He points to that distant, abstract image of life without suffering, and then he falls back into disorder.


These are some of the biggest, strongest songs that Baroness has written; it's rock music that folds in their more metal leanings, along with something more delicate and spare. The hooks and melodies are their best.

Purple

It's been almost four years since Baroness’ last record, 2012’s Yellow & Green. That 18-song, 75-minute double album found the onetime sludge group making calmer, more melodic rock music, and seemed to presage a crossover. There was energy around the band, a palpable sense of momentum. But a month or so after the release of the record, Baroness got into a bus crash while on tour in England. It was a serious accident, a slide off the road, that stalled the Yellow & Green roll-out and almost ended the band. It was jarring enough that drummer Allen Blickle and bassist Matt Maggioni, who both suffered fractured vertebrae, ended up leaving the group.
There was emotional and psychological healing, as well as bones that had to be reset: A photo of the banged-up band surfaced and frontman and visual artist (and the group's poet and beating heart) John Baizley said he was close to having his arm amputated. But he healed, as did longtime guitarist Peter Adams. After the accident, Baizley wrote an amazing letter reaffirming his commitment to Baroness and music and art in general before he and Adams went on tour with new members, bassist/keyboardist Nick Jost and drummer Sebastian Thomson. Their shows after the accident were powerful—even the calmer Yellow & Green songs had a magnetic, life-affirming force.
Shortly before Y&G's release, before the accident, I interviewed Baizley. He told me he wanted Yellow & Green’s cover art, like the songs themselves, to reflect the feeling of the moment before or after a disaster. It’s eerie rereading his words now: "A lot of what I tackled lyrically or conceptually with [Y&G] is present on first glance but has... this implication of horror, or 'this is the moment before a car crash,' or the moment after a car crash. It seemed a little bit more engaging and interesting to me to consider those moments before, those moments after, rather than the ease and bluntness that comes with graphic violence or obvious, terrifying things." In a very real-life way, Purple, their first studio album since the accident, has ended up doing this, too.
Purple is the color of fresh bruises. It's also the combination of Red and Blue, which makes sense musically for those familiar with the group's albums of those names. These are some of the biggest, strongest songs Baroness have written; it's rock music that folds in their more metal leanings, along with something more delicate and spare. The hooks and melodies are their best. It also marks a number of firsts for the band. They're releasing it themselves on their new Abraxan Hymns imprint, and instead of recording with John Congleton, who produced the last couple of albums, they worked with Dave Fridmann, best known for his longtime collaboration with Flaming Lips (and you'll notice a larger presence of psychedelic keyboards throughout). It's also the first album to feature the new lineup, the same group as that first tour after the accident, and at this point they play together like longtime vets.
It’s shorter and more precise than Yellow & Green, with 10 songs in 43 minutes. The opener "Morningstar" rips into the thoughtful synths of "Shock Me", before that song, too, starts to burn. "Shock Me"'s an elegant song about being shocked into a new reality, about bad dreams coming true, about going into battle without proper preparation. On one level it feels like a song about the struggle and battle of day-to-day living, but this isn't dour or sad music: In fact, Baizley sounds thankful for the clearer, sharper vision personal tragedy's afforded him.
Songs like "Kerosene" and "Desperation Burns" nod to heat or flames, as do many of the lyrics. There are also lyrics about breathing and disappearing, doctors and spines and pills and death. The excellent, epic first single "Chlorine & Wine", features a harmonizing breakdown after a gentler piano bridge that seems to signal survival. In it, the entire band sings (or, shouts really): "Please don't lay me down/ Under the rocks where I found/ My place in the ground/ A home for the fathers and sons." These feel like war stories, or more aptly, stories from some people who feel ecstatic to be alive.
Baizley likes to tell stories through his cover art as well. On the sleeve of Purple, four women huddle together in what looks like the cold, with calm dogs and falcons by their sides. There are some mice (food for the birds) and nails (tools for building). There's a full moon, too, as well as blooming flowers and bees and berries and honey (the promise of Spring). The picture, which seems to be referenced in the lyrics to "Morningstar", communicates the hardiness of spirit it takes to live through tougher times and emerge hopeful. It's easy enough to see the four band members reflected in these four women. Here they are, alive and astonished, and here is this record.


The New Jersey rapper and singer’s full-length debut is wide-ranging and unfocused—but it never lacks for energy.

Trendsetter

It took Coi Leray a decade to figure out who she wanted to be. At 14, she released her first two songs, “Bow Down” and “Rock Back,” on a YouTube page belonging to her father, former rap media mogul Benzino. Both songs aped the rigid pop-rap aesthetics of hits like Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow” and Flo Rida’s “Right Round,” and when Leray returned with 2018’s “G.A.N,” it was a stark rebrand: Her voice, high-pitched and athletic, leaned heavily on melody—in the vein of a then-rising generation of SoundCloud stars—and kiss-offs to trifling men. It wasn’t exactly unique, but as she began dropping singles and EPs and became a fixture on social media, her plucky energy became harder to deny.
Leray’s biggest looks yet came last year when her singles “No More Parties” (with Lil Durk) and “Big Purr” (with Pooh Shiesty) exploded online. Their success felt like vindication after years of growing pains, industry skepticism, and Leray’s increasingly rocky relationship with her father. On “Hollywood Dreams,” the opening song of her full-length debut, Trendsetter, she addresses her haters directly: “It’s funny how they sit back behind they computers/And be so quick.” The song is a moment of reflection, a balance of drinking the pain away and summoning the courage to face her insecurities. Paranoia and anxiety are relatively new feelings in Coi Leray’s music, and they frequently clash with her otherwise boisterous and unfazed personality. Leray isn’t exactly subtle—song titles include “Paranoia” and “Anxiety”—and her bluntness is both a blessing and a curse, depending on what type of song she’s aiming to make.
Across 20 tracks, Leray tries out several trendy sounds: Sad Guitar Rap (“Heart in a Coffin,” “Mustard’s Interlude”); the Moody New York Anthem (“Mountains”); the Plucky Pop Hit (“TWINNEM”); the obligatory stab at an Afrobeats Crossover (“Aye Yai Ya”). She never lacks for energy, but her double act of brash bruiser raps and melodic honesty fits better against some sounds than others. Her staccato croons don’t gel on the G Herbo-assisted “Thief in the Night,” but her straightforward raps fare better over the Chicago drill of solo cut “Box & Papers.” Sometimes, like on “Heartbreak Kid” and the first half of “Anxiety,” she channels Death Race for Love-era Juice WRLD. It can feel like an auditory dressing room, unworthy styles hitting the floor or the return rack.
There are a handful of moments where Leray lands on a style that fits. Out of all the album’s guests, she works best with the ones who came up during the SoundCloud era, whose smooth cadences she’s clearly studied. On “Clingy,” a scorned-lover ballad featuring the Canadian rapper Nav, Leray switches between singing and rapping with ease over a minimal jingle and crisp 808. Her sing-song fits neatly over the colorful synths of “Mission Impossible” and the silky piano of “No More Parties,” mixing well with vocals from Lils Tecca and Durk, respectively. She doesn’t sound like an opportunist searching for her next hit: The appeal is natural.
One of the album’s most impressive feats comes on the second verse of “Anxiety,” after the sprightly hook, when Leray kicks herself into triple-time to keep pace with the hectic beat: “Yeah, you tried to break me/I could never let it faze me/I gotta learn to embrace it/Won’t let it change me, even when life get crazy.” Her flow sounds inherent, unforced, and confident. As a whole, Trendsetter is too wide-ranging and unfocused to scan as the proper debut she aspires for it to be. But when she does lock in, her mission couldn’t be clearer.


After its surprising, quietly effective debut, If Children, Merge band returns with a new set of gorgeous songs.

The Knot

Wye Oak's debut, If Children, was a small, surprising record. Surprising because it was the sound of two kids, barely 21, playing earnest, noisy folk-rock that ignored nearly every trend in indie music; surprising because it came out of Baltimore, a city whose indie scene-- lead by Dan Deacon and bands like Ponytail-- is publicized for its spasm and flash. Surprising because of the sympathy in Jenn Wasner's lyrics. Most of the songs on the album were about age and domesticity, and most of the time it was impossible to gauge how old or domestic the band was. The character of Wasner's voice flickered between baby bunny and bitter wife, and swelling, muscular moments in the music were as confidently handled as the quiet ones.
If it's not obvious that I sincerely love the band Wye Oak (and not for sentimental reasons), let me clarify that I do-- and so it's with bit lip and heavy heart that I report on The Knot. The record doesn't feel as varied or agile as If Children did-- which is too bad only because If Children proved they could make a varied, agile record. Songs rarely pick up from a crawl. Sustained guitar chords fan out and crush whatever momentum the band gets going. The bursts of distortion that colored If Children are almost pornographically expanded.
It's also about as close to objectively gorgeous music as I can imagine. Drummer Andy Stack's arrangements are integral and imaginative: The big string-section harmonies on "I Want For Nothing" practically pry the song open; the unrepentantly rock climax of "For Prayer" washes away on the mercurial sound of slide guitars. But dirges like "Mary Is Mary" and "Slight, Flight" end up serving as measuring sticks for how much pretty is too much pretty-- for me, it's about five minutes. If not five, definitely seven and a half.
Wasner's voice has become more expressive, something I'd noticed during live performances of songs from If Children. There's probably more than one good way to sing the lines, "Do you never ask because you know I'll say/ You're the only one?"-- "but you're not the only one," but damn if they don't feel like anvils when she drops them.
I mention all their achievements because I feel like Wye Oak is still a young band, still growing, still singular. When I met Jenn and Andy last April, we talked briefly about the reviews for If Children-- one of which I wrote for this site. Jenn said that the numbers didn't matter to them at the moment, and surprisingly, it looked like she meant it. "The way I see it," she said, "we're going to be doing this for a long time." Here's hoping.


Reprise revisits the Bay Area punk band’s pre-Dookie, get-in-the-van days with reissues of its two Lookout! albums.

Green Day: 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours/Kerplunk

Like most reissues from former get-in-the-van types who went on to interplanetary success, it’s weird hearing these records cursed with the knowledge of Billie Joe Armstrong’s future-present as America’s anti-Republican youth ambassador for colorfast eyeliner. But each Green Day album has found the trio slowly growing up, even if until American Idiot all that meant was accordion and ripping off the Kinks. We can chalk up the half-assed politicking and the downer vibe of stinkers like “Holiday” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” to the depressing madness of the 2004 election. (We Americans all went a little nutty that year.) But a character-driven concept album was probably your typical aging rock star inevitability.
So what makes these moldy oldies either charming or frustrating (or both) is your opinion on where Green Day has wound up. When they hit the mainstream in 1994, the band’s too-slothful-to-wank ’tude initially landed them in detention with the rest of the era’s slack motherfuckers. But until the full horror of the coming wave of obnoxiously peppy Goldfingers and Suicide Machines and fourth-wave ska crashed down on us, Green Day were a godsend. And if you were 16 and a budding music nerd, you looked back in the wake of their success and discovered that throughout the 1980s California pop-punk had been speaking your secret language all along, rough and tumble and hooky enough to offset the fact that not every indie rock band kept things as speedy as Superchunk.
1989’s 1,000 Hours EP was recorded when the band was a baby-fattened 16 years of age, and Green Day debuted its three platonic songs: fast and punky, wistful and mid-tempo, and throwaway jokey. Their songs were almost entirely about girls—mostly about how hard they are to get or keep—an honorable pop-punk tradition. But compared to the locker-room explicit sex chat of mod pop-punkers like Say Anything—whose singer Max Bemis can somehow drain all the fun out of phone-sexing your significant other—the lyrics are never gross or grossly sexist, the quality that rightfully makes so many haters screw up their noses in 2007. (What can you do? You can say “balls” on TV now, apparently.) People beefed that BJ’s vocals were biting the Brits, which is debatable. They also continue to gripe that his puppy yelps spawned a million adenoidal pop-emo bands, and sadly that’s a lot harder to argue with.
1,000 Hours, 1990’s Slappy EP, and 1991’s 39/Smooth LP were bundled together on CD as (duh) 1991’s 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours. It’s raw stuff, but even at this point Green Day’s records were at least halfway decently recorded, unlike most of their peers’ tin-can-and-twine set-ups. And songs like “At the Library” were downright hummable, always important when you’re trying to make pop music—especially out of only a few chords in a formally restrictive setting. Of course, on a label that at the time included household names Plaid Retina and Sewer Trout, early Green Day were bound to shine, but if they had broken up after 1,039, they’d be remembered—if at all—as perhaps the slightly less emo cousin to early Jawbreaker, or maybe the musically less accomplished Crimpshrine.
Every post-facto review of 1992’s Kerplunk mentions that it’s what got the band eventually signed to a major, and it’s not hard to hear why: Producer Rob Cavallo breaking out the compressors may have helped Dookie become a hit, but the songwriting was pretty much already there. As with many of the best punk records, the bass is often pushed up higher in the mix than the guitar, and here Mike Dirnt has begun to perfect those pop-punk walking b-lines that, slowed down on “Longview,” would become the band’s great hook-machine. The group also realized that, if you slow down on the bridge and strip things back to just Dirnt and new drummer Tré Cool, it makes the push of the final chorus that much more exciting. There are fewer jokey throwaways, like barely-a-gag teenage S&M country-swing of “Dominated Love Slave,” and tunes like “Christie Road” slow things down without spilling over into the band’s later, occasionally mawkish ballad territory. All in all, it’s a magnitude better than its predecessor and only a hair behind the follow up.
It’s weird to think that, in the immediate aftermath of Dookie, Green Day’s success was perceived as some kind of a threat. Former compatriots took swipes in songs and I remember many a zine rant by friends in bands that sounded quite a bit like Green Day. Hard to imagine such ire now that Billie Joe hobnobs with humanitarian aid folks in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and keeps major label execs from losing their jobs while Jermaine Dupri gets shit-canned ’cause Janet Jackson no longer goes platinum. If these records aren’t quite as listenable as the band’s major label-era greatest hits collection, the scrappy tunes and fresh-faced songwriting naïveté—which by accident or design lack that arched brow and knowing wink that sink so many modern pop-punk bands—at least help you forget that these formerly lazy goofs have turned messianic on us.


Though Joan Shelley is a folk traditionalist, she's spent her career playing with its form. On Over and Even, her third and best album, she returns to something closer to her origins to make as compelling a record as that genre has seen.

Over and Even

During the final verse of "Over and Even", Joan Shelley discovers the ceiling of her evocative voice and dares to test it. The title track of the Kentucky singer-songwriter’s beguiling third album, "Over and Even" is a gentle canter. Cymbals splash idly against a steady electric guitar, and a banjo babbles in the distance, as though it soon hopes to join Shelley’s fireside chat. The song itself, though, is an anxious number, where images of domestic bliss disintegrate into feelings of longing. At first, Shelley offers scenes of nesting bliss in her warm contralto—smoldering embers and full cups of coffee, handwritten letters and thoughts of friends. But during every other verse, her voice becomes a thin and nervous soprano, as if she’s barely able to utter her own words. With the song's last words, she admits to an abiding loneliness: "I miss your scent and sight," she sings, her voice about to break. "How can I write this?"
Shelley weaves that feeling of vulnerability throughout the dozen songs of Over and Even, an album that is alternately more confessional and prismatic than her previous output—and better for it. Shelley comes from an American folk background, with a history singing songs endemic to her rural region. She records, for instance, with Maiden Radio, a trio that works through standards with traditional instruments and commingled country voices. While her earliest solo records spoke to that pedigree, last year’s Electric Ursa took bona fide compositional risks. "Something Small", for instance, grew like a post-rock phoenix, while "Remedios" suggested a lullaby bound forever in hypnagogia. She embraced elliptical songwriting, too, webbing together evocative phrases to suggest a story more than share it. If Electric Ursa began with a folk core, it ended with folk in fragments.
On Over and Even, however, Shelley returns to her roots without fully retreating beneath them. Accompanied by fingerstyle guitarist and musical archivist Nathan Salsburg, she favors a refined simplicity. "My Only Trouble" is a duet for strummed-and-picked acoustic guitars and her leaping-and-diving voice, while "Easy Now" is a big-chord ballad, where reassuring piano lines offer support behind lithe, bluegrass-like runs. Even the more fully produced numbers, like the organ-lined and electric "Ariadne’s Gone" or the Will Oldham-backed beauty "Stay on My Shore", seem only to dress up simple structures, to cast them in a full studio glow.
The lyrics follow suit, too, with Shelley letting listeners in as she previously didn’t—hence, the hint of unease that ends "Over and Even". "My Only Trouble", for instance, is sensual but bothered, with confessions of intimacy chased by admissions of worry. Likewise, "Stay on My Shore" betrays a human neediness that Shelley might have once clouded or cloaked. As Oldham chases her through the verses, their musical push-and-pull reinforces the give-and-take of any good relationship or, as they sing with their last shared breath, "the pages of our story." That clear lifetime theme returns during the gentle "Not Over by Half". Meant both as a mournful dirge and an anthem of expectations, the song positions a death as a reminder that everyone else still has the chance to live. "Here on the mountain I’m thinking of you," Shelley sings in one of her most vivid bits of writing yet. "The birds are all singing, screaming of youth." She keeps the listener almost as close as the subject.
This tension between plain old songs and structures and an interest in omitting details and accessorizing sounds enlivens Over and Even from start to finish. Shelley started with folk and then pushed away from it, to Electric Ursa’s spectral and soft version of roots-rock. But now in the middle, where the songs are direct but bent just so, she’s more compelling than she’s ever been.


I couldn't have given a shit about the Lemonheads in 1992, when I was a freshman in college and all the upperclass women were swooning over Evan Dando. For me, his pin-up status de-authenticated his music, which seemed mopey and unsubstantial. He sounded detached, like a stoner at a funeral, and the songs on the Lemonheads' break-out album, *It's a Shame About Ray*, were so short (several under two minutes) and the hooks so nonchalant they sounded accidental, all of which suggested a paucity of ideas and a short attention span reinforced by song titles like "Rudderless" and "My Drug

The Lemonheads: It's a Shame About Ray [Collector's Edition]

I couldn't have given a shit about the Lemonheads in 1992, when I was a freshman in college and all the upperclass women were swooning over Evan Dando. For me, his pin-up status de-authenticated his music, which seemed mopey and unsubstantial. He sounded detached, like a stoner at a funeral, and the songs on the Lemonheads' break-out album, It's a Shame About Ray, were so short (several under two minutes) and the hooks so nonchalant they sounded accidental, all of which suggested a paucity of ideas and a short attention span reinforced by song titles like "Rudderless" and "My Drug Buddy".
So, when Rhino's new reissue arrived in the mail a few weeks ago, I put it in my early 90s boombox out of pure nostalgia, mildly curious to hear how or if it had aged. Since then, I've kept playing it for very different reasons, which are more difficult to pinpoint and hopefully say as much about the music as they do about me. Almost 16 years after its initial release, Dando's slacker pop sounds almost Zen. Those short songs now seem concise and even disciplined. What was once mopey now plays as something much more complex and contradictory: exuberant pop melancholy.
Some background: The Lemonheads formed in Boston during the mid-1980s and released three albums of fuzzy punk-pop on local label Taang! Records before signing to Atlantic in 1989. Their 1990 major-label debut, Lovey, wasn't a huge return on the investment, but in the two-year interval between that album and Ray, Nirvana and the ensuing alternative boom proved that smaller bands and unlikely signings could have enormous commercial prospects. The Lemonheads both benefited and suffered from this new pop cultural climate: Just as Ray found a more open-minded audience, it was also disregarded by so many kids like me, who were suddenly very serious about music, man, and saw only Dando's model looks, not his songcraft. Never mind that Ray is as much a junkie album as Nevermind, written and partly recorded during a particularly narcotic-heavy trip to Australia. No wonder Dando was a pin-up: He was handsome but damaged, a fixer-upper. If he was the Jordan Catalano before Jared Leto, then the do-they-or-don't-they controversy between him and roommate/bassist/kissing partner/self-professed virgin Juliana Hatfield made them the Ross and Rachel of the "120 Minutes" set.
Now that all of that hubbub has died down and Dando is just another alt-act trying to make a comeback, Ray sounds nearly revelatory in its restlessness, mixing college pop with country flair and relocating Gus Van Sant's Portland atmosphere to New England. The most beguiling aspect of the title track, one of Dando's best compositions, is its impenetrability: It could be about anyone or pertain to almost any bad situation, and that ambiguity suggests some tragedy that can't be named or faced. "The Turnpike Down" descends on a tripping hook that sounds altogether too bubbly for the material, while "Alison's Starting to Happen", inspired by a friend's ecstasy trip, sounds genuinely excited, especially when Dando starts rushing his words towards the end. "Kitchen", with its handclaps and effervescent jangle, rubs elbows with the tense chords and casually manic repetitions of "Rudderless", where the acoustic guitar sounds spikier than the electric. And the bow on the package is the not-necessarily-ironic cover of "Frank Mills", a song from the musical Hair that Dando sings with a charmingly goofy bliss.
This is, of course, a reissue of a reissue: Less than a year after its initial release, Ray was re-released with that cover of "Mrs. Robinson" as a bonus track. It was more of a marketing than a musical decision, some suit's confounding idea to commemorate the 25th anniversary of The Graduate. So, take a red fine-point Sharpie and write "(bonus track)" next to that song title, and pretend it's a curious rarity rather than the lame album closer it became. The song is more endearing as a lead-in to Rhino's unearthed bonus tracks, which sound like they've still got dust on them. Aside from the B-side "Shaky Ground", which doesn't need the full-band treatment to convey its slept-on melody, there are nine rough demo versions featuring mainly Dando accompanying himself on guitar. That's three-quarters of the album, which isn't bad.
There's also a DVD of videos and live performances from the Lemonheads' Australian tour, showcasing the circle of friends who inspired the album as well as a dated title-track clip starring Johnny Depp. But the real attraction here is that set of demos: Dando's songs stand up exceptionally well stripped to their barest essentials, especially "My Drug Buddy" and "Bit Part", which loses Peggy Noonan's shouted intro but features tender backing vocals from Hatfield. Ultimately, these demos prove how much craft and care went into the album's unique blend of levity and gravity, which sounds so unaffected it could easily be missed.


On her latest album, Copenhagen noise artist Frederike Hoffmeier has abandoned the universally bummed out aesthetic that's marked all of her efforts so far. Persona offers disaffection, sexuality, and outright ferocity in addition to the desolation she's offered to date.

Persona

Take a brief listen to any of the dusky tunes that Frederikke Hoffmeier has released as Puce Mary, and a startlingly bleak picture begins to form. Grating percussive scraping and nail-on-chalkboard vocalizations dominate her creeping compositions, even as her instrumental work runs the gamut from deafening drones to clattering industrial drum beats. It's a bitter and icy collection of short form pieces and collaborations when taken as a single entity, but her first LP Success didn't provide a compelling full-length exploration of that tenebrosity. With Persona, her new record for Posh Isolation, she's finally figured out how to present her strain of nauseating noise as a totemic, engaging whole.
Just as friends and fellow members of Copenhagen's underground music scene like Lust for Youth, Lower, and Iceage continue to flirt with slicker production and pop structures on recent releases, Hoffmeier too has abandoned the universally bummed out aesthetic that's marked all of her efforts so far.  But rather than abandon the project's characteristic abstraction and abrasiveness, Hoffmeier uses Persona to diversify the moods that Puce Mary covers, offering disaffection, sexuality, and outright ferocity in addition to the desolation she's offered to date.
"Courses" relies on a blown out kick drum and the shrill trill of Hoffmeier's distorted vocals to offer a ferocious red herring to kick off the record. The outright terror and lurching subversions of industrial genre tropes rank it among the best in the mode that she's worked in most frequently. But where other noise records would offer little variations on that track's unhinged theme, Hoffmeier chooses to stagger in completely different directions for the rest of the record's six tracks, offering stark ambient pieces ("The Viewer"), squalling, sprawling noise jams ("Persona"), and the slow drone of the codeine-slurred "Gesture".
It's a daring move to expand the project's thematic focus so drastically, and though it sticks the landing on the tracks that retain ties to the all-encompassing darkness Hoffmeier knows so well, Persona offers a handful of missteps too. Two of the album's longer pieces, "The Viewer" and "Impure Fantasy", rely a bit too heavily on vocal melodrama to underscore their sweeping instrumentals. In the former, Hoffmeier unleashes a string of phlegm-y coughs to punctuate a gradual synthesizer swell; the latter features distant sounds of spitting and rattling chains underpinning what would otherwise be a compelling spoken-word exploration of empowered sexuality. In each of these cases, a flair for theatricality undercuts tracks that were already unsettling enough on their own. But in taking the risks that spawned those blunders, Hoffmeier has managed to create a varied and rewarding record that's uniform in its gloominess.


Miami underground-metal trio follow-up 2008's excellent Meanderthal with this stopgap eight-song release that has an intense focus on brevity.

Songs for Singles

There should be more bands like Torche. The Miami trio sits near the top of the underground-metal heap, but they're also the rare underground-metal band happy to come off as regular dudes rather than medieval warriors or swamp monsters. They churn out fuzz-rock bangers with mechanistic precision, never betraying any signs of pretension or mystique. Since the departure of guitarist Juan Montoya, they're an entirely short-haired band, and frontman Steve Brooks sings in a beer-belly bellow, not an elemental rasp. The band take as many cues from ragged 1990s indie as they do from bongwater-dripping 70s crunch-rock, and you can hear echos of Guided By Voices and Superchunk reverberating around in there. They never sacrifice melody for volume, or vice versa-- and somehow, that quality makes them exceptional.
Two years ago, the band came out hard with Meanderthal, which the metal mag Decibel called their album of the year while admitting that it sometimes sounds like the Foo Fighters. On Songs for Singles, their new eight-song EP, there's nothing that leaves as deep an impression as some of the best Meanderthal moments. Instead there's an intense focus on brevity, as the first six songs stick as tightly as possible to a very basic formula, sort of like the Ramones did. These songs never get far beyond the two-minute mark. The band plays with heads down, never taking time for solos or anything that registers as a chorus. If you're not paying much attention, the tracks bleed into one another and feel like one long rush of effects-pedal rumble and chunky riffage.
Nothing during these first few songs is all that memorable, but it's always impressive that they're able to work up such furious grooves in such confined spaces, hardly even altering the tempos. This is fun, assured heavy rock, and it gets the job done. But the last two tracks-- the ones where Torche give themselves room to stretch out-- are where Songs for Singles really takes off. "Face the Wall" and "Out Again" are still very much wheelhouse songs for this band, but they slow down their attack noticeably, letting space and dynamics creep [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| into the guitar-storm. "Out Again" is six minutes of relentless pounding, and the band spends its back half abandoning the song-form stuff completely and just vamping hard. It sounds awesome.
With that title, Songs for Singles practically announces itself as a stopgap release, a breather after the breakthrough. If it doesn't shake the earth the way Meanderthal did, it's not really supposed to. But the EP does show that this band remains in fine working condition, and another full-on album from these guys would be a welcome thing indeed. Until then, this will do just fine.


On his second album for Barcelona’s Lapsus Records, the Tbilisi producer brings a rhapsodic melodic sensibility to rhythms that pay tribute to the golden era of IDM.

Obscure Languages

If you can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep, then Georgian producer Gacha Bakradze is conflicted indeed. Since debuting in 2012 on Apollo Records, the ambient subdivision of electronic giant R&S, he has recorded for Fort Romeau’s club-oriented Cin Cin and Barcelona experimental label Lapsus but also Anjunadeep, an imprint run by progressive trance overlords Above & Beyond—a slightly scattered state of affairs that has placed his work in Jody Wisternoff’s progressive dance mixes and Cafe Del Mar’s opulent chill-out compendiums along with compilations from John Talabot’s Hivern label.
What doubtlessly attracts both sides of the electronic spectrum is Bakradze’s clean sense of melody. The nine songs on Obscure Languages, his second album for Lapsus, sparkle with pristine refrains, their cobalt-wash surfaces capable of withstanding great repurposing; stylistically speaking, they’re at home in all sorts of contexts. “Indivisible” opens the album with a gorgeously dreamy melody, reminiscent of a gentle summer breeze, that provides the through line as the song accelerates from beatless indolence into a chattering electro rhythm. “Frame” uses vast synth washes to break up IDM beats and acidic machine babble, like early-’90s Autechre arriving at the pearly gates. Obscure Languages is so utterly untroubled by dirt, in fact, that when a jungle-ish breakbeat turns up on “Thank You for This Upload” it sounds box fresh and possibly a little sterile, however clever its subtleties of tone.
While Bakradze’s previous album for Lapsus, 2018’s Word Color, experimented with micro samples in a way that suggested the future was more than just a date on the calendar, Obscure Languages is unashamedly retro, calling back to the glory days of the early ’90s, when Warp codified the idea of “electronic listening music” on the way to IDM. Obscure Languages is to Black Dog Productions’ Bytes—the third album in Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series—what Oasis’ Definitely Maybe is to the Beatles’ Revolver: an enjoyable throwback that benefits from three decades of advances in musical technology to loom over its predecessor like a muscleman before a nerd at a 1960s beach party. The sub-bass alone on “Endless Tone” is a resounding tribute to hi-def audio processing, a sound so deliciously corporeal you want to wrap yourself in its arms as the nights get colder.
This is the essential trade-off on Obscure Languages. The sound design and immaculate tones that attract progressive trancers and chill-out czars are more notable here than radical ideas or stylistic novelty. Then again, electronic music has long had a nostalgic streak, and Obscure Languages does the retro-IDM shuffle with style, finesse, and an ear for melody that speaks to Bakradze’s long history with the guitar. Album closer “Slow Heart,” for example, has strong Durutti Column vibes in its ornate guitar figures. Bakradze’s music is frequently called cinematic for its epic scope and attention to sound design. In that sense, Obscure Languages is a new Star Wars film to Autechre’s recent art-house opuses: a familiar pleasure that brings comfort if not enlightenment.

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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the Cure’s commercial peak in 1992, a pivotal, fantastic, and often overlooked album in the band’s catalog.

Wish

Wish is what happens when a daring, visionary rock band starts slowing down; when the album-a-year pace and artistic reinventions pause to let the world catch up; when they reach a peak in popularity but start losing steam as a creative unit in the studio. While touring the album in 1992, the Cure played sold-out stadiums around the world, sounding stronger than ever, and most of the band quit afterward. They found an enduring hit with “Friday I’m in Love,” and a good portion of their fanbase felt slightly queasy about it. They were selling records and charting like never before, and critics began turning their attention to hipper, younger acts.
Granted, plenty of those bands were citing the Cure as an inspiration. From shoegaze to Britpop, alt-rock to post-rock, many of the prominent strains of music in the ’90s pulled from some corner of the Cure’s vast catalog, whether it was the tightly crafted post-punk of 1979’s Three Imaginary Boys or the ghostly sketches of 1981’s Faith, the devilish art-pop of 1985’s The Head on the Door or the immersive world-building of 1989’s Disintegration. Any one song from these records has enough character, vision, and atmosphere to spawn the careers of five entirely new bands.
On Wish, the Cure were beginning to assume the role of a legacy band—more important for what they had done than what they were currently doing—but they still had plenty of peers. Like R.E.M. on Monster, they cranked up the guitars to fit in with the current crop of radio rock; like Depeche Mode on Songs of Faith and Devotion, they ditched some of their signature synths in pursuit of a raw, live-band sound, complete with feedback and amplifier noise; like U2 on Achtung Baby, they took pleasure in challenging expectations, which meant balancing their totems of depression with gestures toward unfettered joy. In “Doing the Unstuck,” Robert Smith closes each verse with an uncharacteristic instruction: “Let’s get happy!”
Unlike those records, Wish is not remembered as a left turn or experiment, neither the start of a bold new phase nor an unsung dark-horse favorite. Instead, Wish is a solid record that sometimes gets overlooked due to the remarkable records preceding it and the largely disappointing work that followed. This humble reputation was aided by the music’s organic, communal genesis: It arrived in a rare moment of peace. Compared to previous career highs, the sessions were smooth and productive, even idyllic. With longtime producer David M. Allen, the quintet recorded in the stately Manor Studio in the English countryside, where they lived together and plastered the walls with cartoons and poetry.
As the sessions proceeded, there were no rumors that this would be the Cure’s final album, no dangerous drug use or health scares, no interpersonal conflicts to seep into the lyrics. Smith, who had gotten married to his high school sweetheart Mary Poole just a few years earlier, turned 33 on the day Wish was released, April 21, 1992. In the preceding months, the most scandalous news story to emerge in the UK tabloids was that Smith—whose severe employment of backcombing and Aqua Net had recently inspired the film Edward Scissorhands—had actually gotten a haircut.
If there is a quality that distinguishes Wish from the rest of their catalog, it’s the dense, buzzing sound—the work of five people in a studio, as opposed to one person’s vision brought painfully to life. An immediate side effect was a creative process that tended to drift all over the place. First, it was going to be a pair of albums: one titled Higher and an atmospheric companion called Music for Dreams. Then it was going to be called Swell. On the cover, you will find a prominent drawing meant to depict a song called “The Big Hand,” an early favorite during the sessions that was cut from the tracklist. These might seem like minor footnotes, but for a band whose leader conceived his work with a monomaniacal focus, they represented a proud embrace of directionlessness.
While it scattered the vision for the record, the full-band approach led to some fantastic performances. Bassist Simon Gallup is irreplaceable, adding latent hooks to even the most abstract moments, a melodic undercurrent that connects singles like “High” to gothy throwbacks like “Trust.” Drummer Boris Williams performs with arena energy, making their ongoing ascent feel inevitable. Weaving between the rhythm section, you can hear guitarists Pearl Thompson—whose electric, mythical leads would soon result in a gig accompanying Jimmy Page and Robert Plant—and Perry Bamonte, a one-time roadie who added a burst of levity to their dynamic. There are records by the Cure that feel like full-body experiences—music that asks you to step inside in order to fully enjoy—but Wish glides, floats, goes with the flow.
It’s not like Smith lost his edge—and to prove it, he paraphrases Sylvia Plath in the very first song. But listen closely, and note what is bringing him down. “Open” seems to be narrated by the saddest attendee of some industry party, the kind of grim, obligatory event that requires massive amounts of alcohol to get through the night: “The hands all on my shoulders don’t have names/And they won’t go away,” Smith sings to Williams’ pounding drums, antagonized by dull conversations and fake smiles. These are not the laments of a hopeless young romantic, grasping for love and meaning in a loveless, meaningless world, but rather the private anxieties of someone who lived long enough to see his dreams come true—and realized they didn’t solve anything.
Smith finds a contrasting setting in the closing “End,” which seems to address the conflicted thoughts of a beloved artist performing to his audience: “I think I’ve reached that point/Where giving up and going on/Are both the same dead end to me/Are both the same old song.” To make matters even clearer, the chorus goes as follows, repeated over and over again like a tantrum: “Please stop loving me/I am none of these things.” In interviews, he described these words—the first he wrote for the record—as a message to himself, a reminder not to fall into the trappings of ego and delusion: “It might seem like it’s quite late in the day for it to all go to my head, since we’ve been going so long,” he explained with typical self-deprecation, “but the success has reached the kind of magnitude where it’s insistent and insidious.”
I imagine most people who play dark, artsy music for long enough will notice a particular show when the audience seems different—a little bigger, maybe a little more distant, maybe no longer wearing entirely black. Smith always took pleasure in writing pop songs as a kind of gateway—“That was always our intention,” he said, “to draw people in and then smother them”—and often, his romantic songs like “Just Like Heaven” and “Lovesong” helped set the stakes for the gloomier material around them. In the lyrics of “Friday I’m in Love,” the Cure’s giddiest single, he condenses this idea to an existential quandary: Can just one day of bliss justify all the surrounding pain and monotony? The chorus offers an answer, and the classic, chiming chord progression does not contradict.
Like a lot of great bands, the Cure have followed a parabolic journey, starting as a cult act, then peaking in the mainstream before settling back with their core audience. For many of those hardcore fans, Wish is a strong album whose deficiencies are diagnosable and treatable. If you’ve got a Cure head in your life, casually mention Wish to them and count the seconds until they bring up the outtakes. From the six excellent B-sides on 2004’s Join the Dots box set to the four instrumentals on 1993’s cassette-only Lost Wishes EP, these shadowy obscurities are enough to fuel decades of conversation regarding alternate tracklists for the true follow-up to Disintegration. (And not to mention, heightened expectations for the delayed installment in Smith’s meticulous, enlightening reissue series, where Wish has been the next item on the checklist for years.)
For new listeners, Wish may be an unrepresentative starting point but it does go down easy—even the filler tracks have a lightness that feels uniquely humanizing. “Wendy Time,” while not the Cure’s most memorable funk-rock excursion, still offers a whimsical adrenaline hit, as Smith’s opening meow snuffs out the fiery momentum of “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea.” This is the precise type of tone shift the band would have difficulty replicating as the years wore on and their records took the form of jarring hodgepodges (1996’s Wild Mood Swings) and overcorrected moodpieces meant to reclaim the brooding melancholy of their signature sound (2000’s Bloodflowers).
Back when they settled on that sound in the early ’80s, the Cure could conjure vast feelings through sheer suggestion. Records like Seventeen Seconds and Faith have a sinister magic akin to those early, low-budget horror movies, full of distant murmurs and ominous shadows, jump-cut climaxes rendered in grayscale. Instead of showing you the monster, Smith realized our subconscious could fill in the blanks with something far scarier. With their increased notoriety, the Cure upped the ante on Disintegration and Wish to color in those details, swapping our primal fear of the dark for elaborate settings and scenery, real characters and dialogue. It’s why “A Letter to Elise,” with its strumming acoustic guitars and keys that sound like a broken xylophone, seems to embody an entire narrative arc in the music alone.
It could veer toward melodrama if the sadness didn’t seem so real, so inhabitable. On Disintegration, the Cure prolonged and accessorized the emotion, embellishing each instrument—the drums with heavy reverb, the bass soaked in chorus, the lead guitar solidifying while it played, like liquid into ice—until everything sounded how we feel at our lowest. It was a creative breakthrough and an emotional one: “The crux of this album is the horror of losing the ability to feel things really deeply as you get older,” Smith told OOR Magazine’s Martin Aston, pinpointing the driving tension of his songwriting. “It worries me and everyone that I know of my age.” There is a reason why so many of his lyrics turn to Christmastime and kittens and first loves—formative symbols that carry past adolescence, never losing their sentimental appeal.
In a sense, the Cure’s entire body of work can be heard as an inquiry into how childlike emotion fares against the crushing tedium of adulthood. “For me, the idea of growing up is this idiot idea, because I was more grown up when I was 13 than I am now,” Smith said in 2004. “To me, grownups [were] people that kind of sighed a lot and had worry lines and looked forward to the weekend. I don’t look forward to the weekend at all.” It’s a funny distinction, but it speaks to the particular escape that his best work provides: The Cure posit that any emotion—sadness, fear, nostalgia, unrequited longing, ill-fated optimism—is preferable to numbness
This is why, in the loudest and most desperate moment of Wish, Smith lashes out using these words: “You don’t feel anymore/You don’t care anymore.” Compared to Disintegration, these songs keep a foot in the adult world, where we are encouraged to appear a little more balanced. “The vulnerable, lost little boy side of my image is gradually disappearing, if it hasn’t gone already. But the emotional side of the group will never disappear,” Smith promised at the time, noticing his use of the word “man” in a lyric where he might have previously written “boy.” Eventually, on Bloodflowers, he would find a way to verbalize this dissonance: “She dreams him as a boy/And he loves her as a girl,” he sang on “The Loudest Sound,” a bleak song about an older couple vowing to live entirely through each other’s fading memories. It’s not exactly a happy ending, but then again, what did you expect?
The years that followed Wish brought some hard lessons: Thompson and Gallup quit temporarily. Williams left for good. Smith endured a long and brutal legal battle with his former bandmate, Lol Tolhurst, a co-founding member who had been fired at the end of the previous decade due to issues stemming from alcoholism. Wish’s distracted and labored follow-up, Wild Mood Swings, landed with a thud four years later, effectively ending the Cure’s tenure in the mainstream. In retrospect, Smith claims he saw the writing on the wall, and the commercial failure forced him to develop a more personal relationship to his art, blocking out the masses to please only himself and his devoted fanbase. You can hear him beginning to embrace this path on Wish, letting go of some perfectionism, accepting the inevitable. Everything ends; life goes on. It doesn’t make growing up sound particularly fun, or any more avoidable. But it assures us we don’t have to do it alone.


Magic

There’s an unwittingly poignant sequence at the end of Magic, Nas’s fifteenth studio album. The final track, “Dedicated,” is pure middle-aged ennui couched in wistful pop-culture references, the sort of preoccupied nostalgia trip Jay-Z perfected on 4:44. Nas name-drops Mike Tyson, Kimora Lee, and Carlito’s Way, alluding to some compelling ideas without really exploring them; it’s breezy enough that you can almost forgive the kids-these-days grumbling. But the chorus—“I dedicated my life, my life,” a simple repetition of an evasive half-statement—is tantalizing in its elision. At 48, the Queens native continues to enjoy the institutional acclaim afforded one of rap’s most prodigious talents. A survey of his latter-day catalog yields a melange of short-lived crossovers and self-indulgent concept records, the cynical musings of the bitterly divorced. To what did you dedicate your life, Nas?
Magic points to hard-earned craftsmanship, the humble cultivation of a blue-collar métier. It asks that you overlook his mid-career miscues and late-career misanthropy, which is just as well—his listeners have long clamored for a return to ’90s pragmatism, and Magic is the most meat-and-potatoes Nas record in years. “Speechless” casts back to the It Was Written aesthetic, with a spoken intro and pealing mandolin instrumental. A flashy performance with a modest purview, it relays a judicious street code (“I’m tellin’ it like it is, you gotta deal with the consequence/When you run in a n***a’s crib, n***a, you better be ready to sit”) with knowing winks at the fourth wall (“Only thing undefeated is time/The second is the internet, number three is this rhyme”). If it’s fan service, it’s the best Nas song in a decade.
The album maintains a sprightly 95 bpm clip, opportune for its focus on verbal acrobatics over Nas’s usual sermonizing. Anything faster is liable to trip him up; anything slower and he’s practically comatose. Unsurprisingly, these songs are far more habitable than the haranguing fare of 2018’s Nasir and 2020’s King’s Disease. Similar to 2004’s “Good Morning,” “Ugly” flips an atmospheric premise (“It’s ugly outside, it’s muggy, it’s money outside/One hundred and five Fahrenheit, thunderous skies”) into a metaphor for societal rot, a tactile slice of life relative to his familiar, narrative-driven methods. “The Truth” packs battle rhymes with bright imagery: “Galactica glaciers, eighty-eight karats, immaculate paystubs/Them n****s do a crime, I drop a rhyme, it’s the same rush.” Nas is a pointillist, better at writing couplets than albums, and Magic proves he’s still a transcendent rapper when he allows himself to be.
But he’s never content with low-stakes grandeur: on “Ugly,” he promises yet another King’s Disease installment for 2022. Although Magic steers clear of Nas’ Achilles heel—his notoriously poor judgment of his own strengths—it’s compromised by the presence of Hit-Boy, a thoroughly B-list producer who’s helmed the last three Nas records. Hit-Boy’s depthless beats are stately at a distance but chintzy up close, like music played through a mangled iPhone speaker. The saccharine melodies of “Hollywood Gangsta” and “Wu for the Children” each sound a half-chord off-key, and when he tries to conjure golden-era ambiance with digitized synths, it lends the air of a Vegas revue. Not to play fantasy sports, but DJ Premier is literally right there doing the turntable cuts on “Wave Gods.” Did no one think to ask him for some loops?
You could knock Magic for being backward-facing, but then again, all of Nas’s music is backward-facing. It’s charming when he revisits his own gospels, but the nostalgia act would be easier to swallow if it weren’t so resentful—the King’s Disease records are joyless Grammy bait, demanding that award committees ignore the elephant in the room. (Needless to say, they’ve complied.) The specter of his ex-wife turns up as a scapegoat on “Ugly” (“It’s grown men jealous outside/It’s grown-ass women that’ll have you set up to die”) and “Wu for the Children” (“One girl for the rest of your life, is that realistic?/Some had told me they like when you call ’em all types of bitches”). These are the grievances of a Bitcoin millionaire, music defined less by what it is than by what it’s not: druggy, minimalist, or improvisational.
But this is what Nas does: If Illmatic and It Was Written have an expository flaw, it’s that their inmates, capos, and Queensbridge Park winos are welded to their fates. His characters rarely exhibit agency of their own, which becomes a convenient narrative device when your wife walks out and the audience’s gaze drifts from New York to Atlanta. Nas needn’t be a tragic figure, and his endless cataloging of things taken from him—record deals, a happy family, a seat at the throne of hip-hop—is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. All that’s left is to go through the motions.

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DJ Seinfeld’s entry to the long-running mix series is a competent mix of electro, breakbeats, and deep house for the fledgling selector.

DJ-Kicks

It was only after one of Armand Jakobsson’s early singles took off on YouTube that he learned to DJ at all. In an interview with Germany’s Groove magazine last October, roughly a year into his sudden ascent, the Swedish house producer recalled boning up on video tutorials on beatmatching while he sat in the departure lounge en route to one of his early gigs.
The milieu with which Jakobsson is most closely associated—a style and scene termed “lo-fi house,” though no one, artists included, ever seemed to want to have much of anything to do with the term—was always predicated on a certain kind of outsider attitude: autodidactic, anti-virtuoso, cheekily can-do. But if the name DJ Seinfeld, along with the aliases of peers like Ross From Friends and DJ Boring, scanned as almost insufferably ironic, Jakobsson’s music was more sentimental than smirking, and far more grounded than his fledgling audacity might have suggested. (If “Seinfeld” was famously a show about nothing, then lo-fi house might be a genre without a sound—a name without a reference, an instance where there is no “there” there.)
So the big surprise about DJ Seinfeld’s contribution to DJ-Kicks—a 23-year-old series that has hosted mixes from storied selectors like Carl Craig, Moodymann, Four Tet, and Nina Kraviz—is not just that it exists at all; it’s how competent the set turns out to be, mixed with both skill and, at least for the first half, personality. It covers 72 minutes’ worth of wistful deep house, chunky breakbeats, and syncopated electro, classic in spirit without being expressly retro, and with 16 of its 21 tracks exclusive to the mix. (Weirdly, the tracklisting is particularly heavy on Melbourne producers—at least eight of the artists featured in the set are either based there or affiliated with a Melbourne label—meaning that, despite whatever it may say on Jakobsson’s passport, the set doubles as a timely snapshot of the contemporary Australian house scene.)
The first third of the mix is particularly strong. After an exclusive that sounds a little bit like DJ Seinfeld’s take on Burial—misty-eyed and hiss-infused, an evocative mood-setter—he dives straight into house music’s deep end. The mixing is unfussy and direct, but he’s got a keen sense for complementing tone colors: The blend between a pair of ruminative cuts by András Fox and Fantastic Man brings to mind the woozy, watery style that Michael Mayer showcased in mixes like Neuhouse and Fabric 13. As he builds, he maintains a nice balance of weights and textures, with hefty breakbeats and rough-hewn drum sounds underpinning floaty chords and ethereal synth leads. That mixture is particularly convincing on Rimbaudian’s “Simple Call,” another new cut from Jakobsson himself, where synths pinwheel above a slowed-down “Think” break like fireworks over a funfair.
Unfortunately, he can’t quite sustain that effortless mood. Things hit a pothole somewhere around the 20-minute mark, with trancey arpeggios giving way to a featureless breaks tune that sucks all the air out of the room. He wastes little time in picking himself up and getting back to his sun-kissed sweet spot; the “Think” break reappears with Pépe’s mood-brightening “Victory Level,” and Project Pablo’s “Who’s It For” marks the set’s emotional high point exactly midway through. But the back half feels directionless, tugged this way and that across a succession of nervous techno and electro cuts; a shift back toward more atmospheric climes, a few tracks from the end, doesn’t quite gel. The mix closes with six minutes of wide-eyed ambient synths, but the closing drama doesn’t feel quite earned. There’s a nagging sense across the second half of the set that we’re losing sight of who DJ Seinfeld actually is—as though, in trying to meet the requirements of what he thinks a dancefloor set is supposed to be, Jakobsson had lost sight of what makes his own music unique.