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 third album from the radical rap-rock band, their sharpest revolutionary screed dropped into the dead zone of 1999.

Rage Against the Machine: The Battle of Los Angeles

The Battle of Los Angeles

Golden hour took over Los Angeles as Rage Against the Machine marched onto a small stage in a sanctioned protest zone across from the Staples Center, where President Clinton was about to deliver the keynote address at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. Thousands of young Angelenos packed into the area to scream along to the quartet’s final live performance before a seven-year hiatus. From the stage, guitarist Tom Morello could see a big screen outside the coliseum showing Hillary and Bill giving their speeches while their guests sipped champagne and dunked shrimp into ramekins of cocktail sauce. In his strident call to action, Zack de la Rocha introduced the concert from the stage: “Brothers and sisters, our democracy has been hijacked!”
Not only did the ad-hoc concert fit neatly into Rage’s political animus, but it was also a microcosm for American activism writ large in the 1990s: a multiracial group of pro-revolutionary leftists vs. the white figurehead of elite neoliberalism. The two sides flexed and preened for their respective crowds, separated by a tall barbed-wire fence and a phalanx of riot police armed with rubber bullets and tear gas canisters. For concerned parents asking their teenagers exactly whom this band was raging against—Know what enemy? Fuck who I won’t do what who tells me?—on this afternoon in August, the answer was right there, standing at a podium, speaking to his delegates, with silver hair and an Arkansas drawl.
Backstage, Morello gave an interview about why this ostensibly liberal band had shown up to protest the coronation of the ostensibly liberal Democratic nominee, Al Gore. “He’s practically indistinguishable from a President George Bush,” Morello said with unequivocal bravado. “They’re both pro-death penalty, both pro-NAFTA, both pro-big business...I don’t feel represented by either one.” When the band kicked into “Guerilla Radio,” the lead single from their third album, 1999’s The Battle of Los Angeles, de la Rocha said as much—including a line about the Republican nominee, branding Bush as the offspring of the corrupt former head of the CIA: “More for Gore or the son of a drug lord/None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord!” A film crew’s birds-eye camera view revealed five mosh pits going off simultaneously.
On The Battle of Los Angeles, Rage made clear the aim and origin of their anger, especially for those who didn’t surf to ratm.com in the ’90s to learn the word “praxis” from an animated gif. Here they cast their gaze back through history to reel in half a millennia of theft, enslavement, and slaughter at the hands of the colonial state in the Americas. The gravity of hip-hop and the thick brow of metal met the sincere gaze of radical politics, creating an album that upended the prevailing critical idea of what good rock music should be doing. It was obvious, didactic, heavy-handed, bluntly delivered to the thick of the nation, because you don’t overthrow a racist police state with weepy songs about feeling alienated by technology. What better place than here, what better time than now to empty the missile silos at the so-called New Democrats and crypto-fascist Republicans, to give the opposition contour and dimension, to even embody it themselves, to show the world what an autonomous, dignified life could possibly look like.
“There was this interesting thing that was happening during the Clinton administration,” de la Rocha would later tell the Los Angeles Times. “People were looking inward and not outward, and not addressing what was going on.” The malaise of the ’90s—a tone set by the self-defeatist laconism of Gen X—settled in during eight years of relative peace and economic prosperity under Clinton. While the bull market lined the pockets of the growing professional class, Clinton’s legislative victories broke from traditional liberal values and ballooned inequality in America. His disastrous welfare reform gutted the core tenet of the New Deal; his administration deregulated banking, allowing the most powerful financial institutions to amass unseen amounts of capital until they were “too big to fail” in the crash of 2008; they passed the abhorrent 1994 crime bill, the most sweeping in American history, a steroid injection to the carceral state that put thousands of disproportionately Black men into newly constructed prisons and increased the number of federal death penalty cases from three to 60.
Most egregiously, and perhaps most important to Rage lore, was the North American Free Trade Agreement. The treaty sought to accelerate the economy by opening borders between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. In doing so, it moved profit away from workers and their communities toward business owners and shareholders, all while crippling unions and the American labor force, who could now be replaced by unconscionably cheap labor. For Mexico, free trade was seen as—and has proven to be—economically devastating: Some two million Mexican farmers have lost their land in the age of NAFTA. Indigenous workers, like those in the southernmost state of Chiapas who faced the importation of corporate American agribusiness, predicted correctly that “free trade” would decimate their heritage and livelihood.
And so on January 1st, 1994—the day NAFTA went into effect—hundreds of men, women, and children emerged from the Lacandon jungle and the canyons of Chiapas as a guerilla army and demanded autonomy from the Mexican government. Marking 500 years of genocide against indigenous peoples by colonial rule, the workers wanted control of their Mayan land and their food; they wanted democracy, peace, and justice on their own terms. They called themselves the Zapatistas (the armed faction is known as the Zapatista National Liberation Army, or EZLN) and carried a flag bearing a single red star centered against a black background—the same insignia that peppers Rage iconography and stage shows. The Zapatistas’ bandoliers and rifles (some real, many fake) were a theatrical show of military might, but their real power lay in their philosophy, called Zapatismo, and the writings and speeches of the group’s de facto leader, Subcomandante Marcos.
Quixotic, pseudonymous, and filmed wearing a balaclava smoking a pipe, Marcos spoke in winding allegory and professorial verse about the revolution of the Zapatistas. The Zapatista revolution was not for them, but for the greater world. “Para todos todo, para nosotros nada,” goes the most famous Zapatismo maxim, “For everyone everything, for us nothing.” As Alex Khasnabish, a professor and researcher of radical collectives, explained in one of Rage’s unauthorized biographies, Know Your Enemy, the cornerstone of Zapatismo is this: “Rather than insisting that you support [the Zapatistas], they want you to struggle in your own way, in your own place, with your own commitment to dignity in a revolution that makes sense to you and the people around you.” The grandiloquent ideas of the Zapatistas and Subcomandante Marcos took on the hue of surrealism and romance, a way of sounding a revolution through the tones and rhythms of language.
At heart, the music of Rage Against the Machine is a direct extension of Zapatismo: paradoxical, militaristic, generous, a conduit for power, not a concentration of it. De la Rocha visited Chiapas four times between 1995 and 1996, working closely with the Zapatistas and strengthening his connection to his Mexican heritage (his Sinaloan grandfather fought in the Mexican Revolution). These trips helped shape the idea of revolutionary bridge-building, of connecting the struggle of one to the many. “I think every revolutionary act is an act of love,” de la Rocha told Rolling Stone in 1999. “Every song that I’ve written, it is because of my desire to use music as a way to empower and re-humanize people who are living in a dehumanizing setting.”
On its surface, it was easy to classify Rage as music for teenagers staging a leafy suburban rebellion against their parents or doing curls in the squat rack. But by The Battle of Los Angeles, Rage had ascended to something far more personal, spiritual, and bohemian. If 1996’s Evil Empire came with a leftist library starter pack, Battle came with a politics of emotion, music that was nimble and serious. In her book Hope in the Dark, the writer and activist Rebecca Solnit describes the words of Subcomandante Marcos as “the language of the vast, nameless, current movement that globalization has drawn together, a movement...driven by imaginations as supple as art rather than as stiff as dogma.” It is from this delicate branch of politics that Zack de la Rocha’s words were formed.
In 1999, however, the context in which most people engaged with The Battle of Los Angeles was not through the insurrectionary poetry of Subcomandante Marcos or a readily accessible anti-globalization platform. The album was released in the last gasp of the monoculture, dropped into the scum pond of rock’s commercial nadir. Korn led the nu-metal charge on radio, while Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock were rap-rocking without cause on TRL. There were only a few American anti-war protests against Clinton bombing a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan or the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (in the press throughout the late-’90s, Morello would often parry a journalist’s question about, say, the violence at Woodstock ’99 with an indictment of Clinton’s warmongering, like his “Tomahawk missile [that] destroyed the children’s hospital outside Belgrade”). There were no wars predicated on a lie about weapons of mass destruction, no social media to disseminate revolutionary tweets to the masses, just pockets of left-wing activism fighting against the WTO in Seattle and the IMF in D.C. as Creed’s Human Clay sat atop the charts.
The benefit of Rage reentering the mainstream during this odd musical and socio-political dead zone was that they sounded both nostalgic and of the moment. They had cleared the way for nu-metal and rap-rock with their first two albums, 1992’s groundbreaking self-titled debut and 1996’s angsty and downtrodden Evil Empire, both of which eventually went triple platinum. When they swung back in with The Battle of Los Angeles, it was like a reminder of the prophecy they foretold at the beginning of the decade. Once iconoclastic rap-rock alchemists, Rage now sounded pretty much like what was on the radio. Moreover, they sounded like the same band they always were but more lethal, more agile, able to fully disarm with a verse and a hook. “What I did a lot on [Evil Empire] was, ‘This is what I think. This is my comment,’” de la Rocha told Rolling Stone. “I’ve had to change. I want people to see reflections of themselves in the songs.” His personal accountability fit squarely with the Zapatista ethos of wanting people to create a revolution in their own way, now bolstered with songs that moved quicker, had bigger hooks, and carried more weight than anything Rage had ever written.
It took nearly a year for de la Rocha to complete all the vocals on Battle, during which he gravitated to another plane of rapping. He is exacting and dynamic, the generalissimo’s preacher. On “Calm Like a Bomb,” he loops himself around the band in long ribbons of verse: “I be walkin’ God like a dog/My narrative fearless/My word war returns to burn like Baldwin home from Paris.” Then on the pre-chorus, as the band lurches into their signature mosh-rock cadence, de la Rocha hugs the turn on two wheels to deliver this slinky triplet: “What ya say, what ya say, what ya say, what!” When the chorus hits, it does exactly what he says: “Ignite!” The chameleonic ease with which de la Rocha slides between rap, funk, and rock on “Calm Like a Bomb” is indicative of the band’s full symbiosis of all those genres on Battle; a chemical compound perfected, a longshot theory finally proved.
With Brad Wilk on the drums and Tim Commerford on the bass, Rage cut deep into the groove. The verse of “Sleep Now in the Fire” is the rhythm section at its best: the feel has that crab-creep shuffle with Wilk and Commerford laying down an “Amen break” while Morello makes his guitar sound like a British dial tone. The formula of Rage’s rhythm section can be largely predictable—hushed intro, blues riffs, experimental sound-bed under the verse, more blues riffs, wacky guitar solo, breakdown with blues riffs—but there’s just enough variety and mobility to let de la Rocha be the star. He’ll blow a word out of his mouth in a huff with big pockets of air in his cheeks, or he’ll wrap his throat around a word like a snake, sucking the air out of it. The space he leaves between the names of Columbus’ ships, the trilled “r” on “Maria,” the oddly swung rhythm of a line dripping with sarcasm—“So raise your fist and march around just don’t take what you need”—sometimes there are more ideas in the rhythm of his raps than the raps themselves.
When the band was on tour with Gang Starr, DJ Premier told Spin that he’d try to get a remix of a new Rage song onto rap radio, but that it might not be as easy as it was with Fred Durst. “Zack is trying to penetrate the whole soul… he’s speaking the real, and that takes longer to sink in.” One of the band’s longest-running causes célèbres was the fight for the freedom of Black Panther and radio journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal—who, it is widely believed, was unfairly convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer in 1981. “Long as the rope is tight around Mumia’s neck/Let there be no rich white life we bound to respect,” de la Rocha stage-whispers on “Voice of the Voiceless,” a short ode to Mumia’s struggle. While the phrase “Free Mumia” became something of an activist meme in the ’90s, Rage never took his sham trial or his then-impending death sentence for granted (Mumia’s execution case was dropped in 2011 and he is now serving life without parole). In January 1999, Rage threw an infamous benefit concert in New Jersey that raised $80,000 for Mumia and sparked a media war between a right-wing cop union and the band. And in April of the same year, de la Rocha flew to Geneva, Switzerland to speak on Mumia’s behalf at the International Commission of Human Rights.
Each song on Battle comes from an outgrowth of personal political conviction. Rage weren’t fretting from afar and hoping for change like Live Aid; de la Rocha was writing about the abject horror of immigrant sweatshop labor on “Maria” after Morello was arrested demonstrating against sweatshops in Santa Monica in 1997. De la Rocha wrote of the wealth inequality he saw in his hometown of L.A. (“Born as Ghosts”) and a final salvo about the Zapatistas’ struggle on “War Within a Breath,” the last in a series of songs about the Zapatistas stretching back to Evil Empire. Hidden in that track is a brief line that could be the album’s subheadline: “It’s a war from the depth of time.”
Perhaps most striking is “Born of a Broken Man,” a slow dirge cut from the cloth of Black Sabbath about de la Rocha’s father, the artist and muralist Beto de la Rocha. Beto was a member of the landmark Chicano painting collective Los Four; in 1974, he was one of the first Chicano artists to be exhibited at the L.A. County Museum of Art. After suffering a nervous breakdown in 1981, Beto fell into a destructive spiral of religious fanaticism. He would fast for weekends, sometimes making a young Zack fast beside him. One night, in a fit of anger and guilt, Beto destroyed over half of his paintings in front of his son. “Born of a broken man, but not a broken man,” Zack screams of complicated pride on the hook.
The anomaly of “Born of a Broken Man,” the only Rage song that ever pulled directly from de la Rocha’s personal life, lends emotional credence to the political screeds around it—“harangue’n’roll” as Rolling Stone once derisively tagged the band. Few bands have been given more purity tests than Rage Against the Machine over the years, but the question inevitably arises with any group that stakes their identity on revolutionary thought and leftist causes: Do you buy it? You know these avowed socialists are signed to Epic, a multinational major label, right? They made millions of dollars from record sales, and Battle debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, just as Evil Empire did in 1996. Are they redistributing their wealth? When de la Rocha left the band in October of 2000, he hinted at his own discomfort, saying that the group’s decision-making process had “undermined our artistic and political ideal.” How do you square the band’s leftist ideology with the defanged arena rock of Audioslave in the ensuing years?
Perhaps the biggest hurdle for buying into Rage Against the Machine is simply their name. All these years later, it has curdled into something sophomoric, trite, somehow too specific and too vague at the same time. If it is an albatross around the band’s neck, it’s created a tautology that has forced them to stay true to themselves: The immutable law of a Rage Against the Machine album is that it must, by nature, rage against the machine. And so inherent in their silly band name lies the uncynical, righteous, and repetitious work of activism and fighting for justice, the search for the will to continue even when it seems like the battle is lost.
“I’m not buying this bullshit line that says the situation in Chiapas or with Mumia or with the garment workers somehow has nothing to do with middle-class white kids at our shows,” de la Rocha told Spin in 2000. “All this alienation has roots; it’s not just TV or boredom or bad parents.” This was the great ambition of The Battle of Los Angeles, and perhaps Rage itself: to draw a line between their millions of Gen X and Millennial fans and the causes they fought for, from conquistadors to Clinton, from the Intifada to the Zapatistas, from Francis Fukuyama’s claim that the end of the Cold War was the “end of history” to the spark of the anti-globalization movement around the world. Battle revealed the extent—chronologically and geographically—to which none of us live with dignity. They showed us this is a war we can’t win but it’s a war we don’t deserve to lose.
Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing a New York police officer in 1981.

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Holed up in his DIY inventor’s laboratory,  VanGaalen delivers his most abrasive, unstable collection in years. Even this notorious Canadian recluse can't stop a little apocalyptic dread from creeping in.

Chad VanGaalen: World’s Most Stressed Out Gardener

World’s Most Stressed Out Gardener

Chad VanGaalen's creative habits seem conveniently pandemic-proof. The Calgary songwriter, animator, and all-purpose eccentric has been hunkered down, making records by himself in his home studio and creative den, Yoko Eno, since long before he had a public health reason to do so. The place is a bit of an inventor’s laboratory where you’re liable to find anything from an ancient Korg monosynth to a homemade instrument known as a “Barnswallow,” and it’s where VanGaalen has been building fragmented noise-pop songs that burrow deep into his colorful subconscious since 2011’s excellent Diaper Island.
But on World's Most Stressed Out Gardener—his eighth studio album, if you count last year’s Bandcamp-only Lost Harmonies, and sixth for Sub Pop—even a homebody like VanGaalen can’t stop a bit of apocalyptic dread from the outside world creeping in. On “Nothing Is Strange,” a gorgeous, rickety ballad on par with Diaper Island’s “Sara” or Soft Airplane’s similarly themed “Rabid Bits of Time,” VanGaalen spins a Beetlejuice-like tale of wondering if he’s already died. “Turn up the radio/I think we’re dead,” he sings, his voice garbled and decaying. Then there’s “Nightwaves,” a clattering rocker in which VanGaalen reckons with the intoxicating hum of endless doom-scrolling: “Everybody’s getting high on the same pain,” he scowls. “I can’t feel a thing.”
Named for the musician’s fondness for growing vegetables in his backyard and gobbling them raw, like a grazing animal, World's Most Stressed Out Gardener is an odd, abrasive record, even by VanGaalen’s standards. It’s also the first to draw significant influence from his side hustle creating instrumental scores for Adult Swim shows. The record opens with “Spider Milk,” a curdled psych-folk fantasy that short-circuits into a screeching rock climax worthy of those VanGaalen-produced Women records, before going medieval with “Flute Peace,” a 46-second overture apparently rescued from VanGaalen’s aborted plans for a minimalist flute album. If that sounds punishing, the album’s other two instrumental offerings—“Earth From a Distance” and “Plant Music”—are thankfully much better: soft-focus mood pieces fit for a 1980s sci-fi movie score.
VanGaalen unleashes a more aggressive alien energy on “Starlight” and “Inner Fire,” dark krautrock workouts in which the singer sounds less like a DIY dude than a wild-eyed cult leader. He also retains his flair for oddball instrumentation: “Starlight” squeezes creepy sounds from what sounds like a babbling autoharp, while “Samurai Sword” features the clanging accompaniment of copper plumbing pipes being played as a xylophone. It’s occasionally scattershot, but the songwriter's refusal to streamline his weirdness is a gift.
The throughline, as ever, is VanGaalen’s knack for crafting emotionally resonant songs out of absurd premises—be it a vision of a magical pear (“Golden Pear”) or a search for a misplaced samurai sword ("Samurai Sword")—as well as his feverishly active subconscious. For years, he’s borrowed from his own dreams for prime material; there was 2004’s “Blood Machine,” about a bunch of people’s hearts plugged into a machine for circulating blood, and 2014’s “Weird Love,” in which he described a dream about plants talking. When Chad VanGaalen runs out of bizarre dreams to write songs about, that’s when he’ll know it’s time to pack it in.

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The latest from the Canadian band finds them having fun and adding more danceable beats to the equation. It’s a more extroverted record that touches on the artisanal indie genres one has come to expect from this band.

No One Is Lost

Stars would likely be flattered if you called them “pop” and honored if you called them “sophisticated.” You shouldn’t have to choose between the two; as their previous collaborator/remixer Owen Pallett will be more than happy to tell you, a lot of science goes into bubblegum. But since their 2004 breakthrough Set Yourself on Fire, Stars made those terms seem mutually exclusive, as their charms were obscured by haughty thematic concepts (In Our Bedroom After the War), doughy orchestration (The Five Ghosts) or astonishing self-regard (the abominable remix LP Do You Trust Your Friends?). Fortunately, by 2012’s The North, Stars decided to have fun again (or for the first time) and No One Is Lost finds them chasing base thrills with more even more gusto. But in micromanaging every celebratory aspect, it raises the question of whether a party is still a party if Stars run through it.
As opposed to its nostalgic predecessor, No One Is Lost concerns itself with forward momentum, beginning with its serendipitous recording atop the Royal Phoenix, a now-shuttered Montreal gay disco. While the Phoenix was still in business, the bass would make its way up to Stars' studio and they were motivated to “out-throb the throb.” And some of No One Is Lost qualifies as danceable, if not exactly “dance music.” It’s simply a more extroverted look at the artisanal indie genres that one has come to expect from this band—melodramatic, Smiths-derived jangle, sophistipop, blue-eyed Motown—though they strew triplet bass drum across the straight soul-clap of “A Stranger” like they might’ve heard DJ Rashad at some point.
More to the point, the narrators of No One Is Lost abide by a fatalism that’s the closest thing we’ll probably get to actual optimism on a Stars record: something along the lines of, you’ll probably have to spend most of your days in a shit job or a boring relationship, so make the night count. That’s the message of six-minute mission statement “From the Night”, and as far as Canadian indie collectives paying homage to the transformative powers of sundown by fusing arena rock and Gloria Estefan, well...it’s at least in the top two from the past year. But even if Stars can never truly cut loose, they can offer the crowd an honest hands-up chorus and lack the earnestness that made Arcade Fire’s costume parties sound stiff.
But as the album progresses, that becomes a liability. If not earnestness, you wish Stars could demonstrate the same kind of black-and-white, life-or-death stakes in their music as their Montreal neighbors. If you’re gonna espouse a “live fast, die young” philosophy, you have to sound like you believe it too. This is less of a problem when Stars engage in their usual, theatrical songwriting constructs and set pieces. The he-said, she-said between Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan is too comfy to generate much friction at this point, although the possible songwriting-as-lovemaking metaphor of “You Keep Coming Up” ("You gotta give it away/ So you can get it for free") does at least provide wincing awkwardness.
But when No One Is Lost tries to blend in with the youth, Stars sound like professors rather than participants. The schoolyard shouts of “Turn It Up” sound out of character in all aspects, though at least the title refers to the radio and not the 2013 colloquialism. And while “Trap Door” contains the most elegant choral melody, Campbell’s critiques of hedonism’s inherent hollowness come off as smug, sounding like someone who’s writing about the idea of it rather than the experience—“the kids in VIP are all looking for a family/ Their teeth are made of gold but their wallets are empty.” Gold teeth? Does Campbell still think people party like it's 1999?
That's a more egregious example of how Stars' lyrics are pithy, but facile, lacking any kind of edge. The most problematic one comes when Stars deliver what should be the mic-drop, valedictory address during the title track: “Put your hands up because everybody dies.” It reminds you that irony pervades this album from its title on down and that Campbell feels the best way to cope with the pervasive disorientation of being alive is, “To get arseholed and listen to Dionne Warwick,” another arch quote demonstrating how “fuck it” is so carefully curated here. Is No One Is Lost even an album meant to be listened to in the very situations it writes about? While a fine enough record in its own right, it’s more suited to fostering a discussion about the theoretical implications of our collective, impending doom than celebrating it.


The Seattle electro-pop duo Crater populate their debut album with distant couples who hide behind glowing screens, barely speaking, and veiling their limited exchanges in so many layers of irony that they can hardly decode each other when they speak.

Talk to Me So I Can Fall Asleep

Most of us have experienced the annoyance of dining with someone who won’t put down their phone, even as we’d rather be on our phones ourselves, but few musicians have captured that feeling of hypocritical frustration as acutely as Crater’s Ceci Gomez and Kessiah Gordon. The Seattle electro-pop duo populate their debut album Talk to Me So I Can Fall Asleep with distant couples who hide behind glowing screens, barely speaking, and veiling their limited exchanges in so many layers of irony that they can hardly decode each other when they speak.
On opener "Crater Head," the duo single out a culprit behind this lonely existence: "I blame the Internet," they sing. At first the line reads like a joke, a dig at the Internet using the quippy language of the Internet, but with each repeated listen it sounds more like a genuine thesis statement. Talk to Me is filled with lyrics like this, little asides that seem cheeky or aloof until suddenly they don't anymore.
Gomez and Gordon cast their stones knowing full well they live in a glass house. The Internet has fostered a generation of jaded, apathetic cynics, and they're just as driftless and disaffected as anybody else. Gomez spends "Habits Die Slow" drawing on a sleeping lover's face because she's bored, then getting stoned and blowing off what few weekend responsibilities she had. Mostly she just sits around, watching her relationship rot but doing nothing to stop it, like her life is a TV show and Netflix keeps auto-playing the next episode without her so much as pressing a button.
Crater’s music has been labeled as industrial, but that term suggests a level of aggression even the group's most beat-heavy tracks never quite muster. For the most part, Talk to Me is too dreamy and congenial, too good-humored, to be industrial. The album's early highlight "Ain't Right" is a straight pop song, so personable and deliriously catchy it could be a Tegan and Sara single, right down to the perky new-wave guitars and merrily self-loathing chorus.
That song delivers such a dopamine rush you spend the rest of the album hoping there might be another just like it. There isn't, but what follows is pretty good in its own right. "Lucky Lucy" rocks a heavy "Safety Dance" keyboard lick, while "Summer Skin" and "Hardly at All" both boil over with feverish trip-hop beats. "Holy Ground" and "Sick Sad World," meanwhile, each rotate around frigid basslines caked in the frost of an early Cure album. The record thrives on these sorts of hot and cold extremes. Some passages swell with emotion; others are dispassionately robotic. Most songs find room for both.
The last record to cycle through electronic, post-punk, dub, and R&B textures with this kind of assured dream logic was Warpaint's self-titled album. Warpaint is nominally a rock band and Crater is nominally an electronic act, but both share a gift for creating intrigue that makes even their patchier songs fascinating to hear unfold. Both acts also cultivate cooler-than-thou personas seemingly for the sake of deflating them, letting their guard down during unexpected moments of vulnerability. One of Talk to Me's most poignant ones comes on the hard-thumping closer "Brew," when Gomez cuts through the bullshit and finally spells out her relationship desires: "Won't you take good care of me and we can dance for each other?" And while we don't learn if her request is answered, the sheer act of making it feels like a step in the right direction: no mind games, no Internet speak—just an open plea for a meaningful connection. There's no guarantee of reciprocity, but it's a start.


The unlikely collaboration between the vaporwave producer and the 311 frontman feels as natural as a wedge of lime and a bottle of Corona—equal parts basic and deeply satisfying.

George Clanton  / Nick Hexum: George Clanton & Nick Hexum

George Clanton & Nick Hexum

George Clanton knows how this looks, and he doesn’t particularly care. The Virginia-born musician has never hidden his love for 311 or the band’s co-frontman, Nick Hexum, despite how much it might confuse his fans, onlookers, and anyone else wondering how someone involved with the evolution of a niche form of electronic music (vaporwave, in Clanton’s case) ended up making a record with the dude who sang “Amber.” “They say, ‘I think it’s so funny that you make fun of 311!,’” he once told an interviewer, before clarifying, “I’m not making fun of 311. I love this stuff.”
That much is obvious. George Clanton & Nick Hexum was custom-built to showcase the things that Hexum has always done well—his gorgeous vocal harmonies, catholic taste, and, perhaps more than anything, his ability to articulate his desire to be your best bud; it could only be the product of someone who has spent meaningful time with 311’s lengthy discography. Freed from the pressures of his band’s legacy and the expectations of their still-significant fanbase, or else just more willing to get really stoned before recording than he usually is, Hexum sounds more comfortable in his skin than he has since he first jumped out of it on 1993’s “Hydroponic.” As a result, this pairing feels as natural as a wedge of lime and a bottle of Corona, equal parts basic and deeply satisfying on a hot day.
While Clanton’s music has long been haunted by the digital saudade that is a hallmark of the genre, his maximalist “vaporwave opera” Slide was built up to an at-times-staggering scale, bringing to mind My Bloody Valentine nearly as often as Macintosh Plus. With Hexum, he dials back the scope of the production without losing any of the emotional charge. At heart, Hexum is a songwriter in the classic mold, the kind of guy to put out a soul-jazz record with the regrettable title My Shadow Pages, and the formality of his writing keeps Clanton’s productions from sprawling. The concision of these songs reflects the “heavy positivity”that he’s worked hard for over the years, and which he’s made into 311’s ideological centerpiece.
But that discipline doesn’t stop these two from playing around. Clanton runs a dragnet through the post-“Loser” stream of mid-’90s alt-rock, gathering together the kinds of choppy breakbeats and disorienting samples that made temporary stars of artists like Primitive Radio Gods, Soul Coughing, Eels, The Verve, Luscious Jackson, Butthole Surfers, and any number of other (unfairly or not) cast-off artists whose combined aesthetic did as much to define the era as any of Seattle’s best. He refashions these discarded ideas into his most accessible—and fun—music to date, turning a questionable pan-pipe chime into a new-age jam for the standout “Crash Pad,” which Hexum happily spangles with a lip-smacking auto-wah guitar line. It’s as if Enigma rewrote “Return to Innocence” for a Zac Efron beach caper.
Though he’s made it clear that his partner did the lion’s share of the work here, Hexum is clearly the star, albeit an unlikely one. While the last few years have seen artists like Korn, Sublime, and the Dave Matthews Band reassessed and accepted as key influences on a younger generation of artists, Hexum and 311 are harder to pin down. The SoCal-via-Omaha quintet have never quite fit into any milieu: They were too happy for the alt-rock boom, too sincere for third-wave ska, and they’re just a little too smart for the reggae-rock kooks—from Dirty Heads to Pepper to Magic!—getting barreled in their wake. Appropriately for a band so closely associated with being on vacation, they come across as perpetual tourists to the casual listener, which makes them difficult to take seriously. Point to their graceful melodies, pop instincts, dubby experiments, and bodacious grooves all you want, you’ll still sound like someone insisting you gotta try the coconut shrimp at Sandals Montego Bay.
It’s worth wondering, then, whether Hexum is an unwitting cog in a complex machine built to exploit the subversive joy of liking something you’re not supposed to; “maybe I represent it a little bit harder because I like to get a rise out of people,” Clanton admits in that same interview. Hexum had never even heard of vaporwave until meeting Clanton backstage a couple of years ago, and part of the pleasure of this album does come from the very specific frisson of hearing a somewhat-forgotten icon of the ’90s sing over beats seemingly made from old 7-Up commercials and X-Games soundtracks.
But Hexum is an eager and present collaborator, and he neatly sidesteps his own novelty by indulging in nostalgia of his own. He sings gamely about a past spent sleeping on the floor of a run-down Hollywood apartment and driving a “rattling Corolla rusted out behind the tires” on “Out of the Blue,” and fizzes about the rush of young love on “Under Your Window” over a giddy little beat that’s part “Steal My Sunshine” and part “Baby Baby.” He’s spent the last 30 years vocally sparring with 311’s S.A. Martinez, and he treats Clanton’s beats the same way, ducking around the gaps in the production and finding the swing where it doesn’t seem like it should exist. Even when Clanton takes him through a series of nightlife scenes in “Driving in My Car,” he shows up ready to roll, skanking through with a guitar line that manages to sound like Lynval Golding, Nile Rodgers, and King Krule as the context shifts.
Precisely because these two sound so at ease as a team, the album fails when they begin to drift back to their innate tendencies. Both penultimate track “Time of Wandering” and closer “Shouldnta Done That” feature Hexum as balladeer, as if he couldn’t quite make it to the end of the album without reverting to statement mode; with its vocal stacks and starswept melody, the former comes off like Fleet Foxes covering The Greatest Showman over a 2 Skinnee J’s beat, while Clanton turns in a half-baked Slide retread for the latter. It’s disappointing to hear them both return to type, particularly given how contagious their joy is when they’re splashing around in the shallows together. Hexum has spoken compellingly about the pains of being pegged as a vapid songwriter on the basis of being positive and upbeat, but when you’re making an album as immediate and easy to digest as this, you’ve got to trust your instincts.
Despite their chemistry, it’s not immediately clear what these two artists have in common. But 311’s particular brand of radio reggae has always been tinted by Hexum’s love of the Smiths and the Cure—on their island, the sun is usually setting. As he and Clanton sing together in “Aurora Summer,” he wants you to know just how he feels this summer, because if he can say it clearly, then maybe, for just a second, he can keep the encroaching darkness at bay a little while longer. This is how he’s always operated in 311, and this unspoken self-awareness is what makes this project vibrate with fragile happiness when it’s at its best.

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Still displaying more promise than power, White Denim are thankfully able to slowly grow under the dim, fleeting spotlight of the Internet music world.

Fits

My base-level reaction to White Denim-- a trio who have seemingly never met neither a tempo they can't shift out of at a second's notice nor a branch of psychedelia they can't pluck from-- is a sense of jitteriness and slight unease, which could be what they're aiming toward. Yet once I start to gain a real feel for the band, I don't get the sense, as I do with many of their contemporaries, that they're merely reverent pastiche artists. Oh, there's plenty about their latest album Fits that pulls from the past-- the blistering fury of Love's "7 and 7 Is" is an obvious touchstone; the Doors' lusty freak-bliss pops up often. But at the same time, the band's choice of name and its aesthetic penchant for surface-level representation makes me think that, far from flipping through back issues of Creem for inspiration, they situate themselves in a nostalgia-for-the-present feedback loop.
Still, the first thing listeners will notice about White Denim is the way they switch sounds so abruptly: In opener "Radio Milk How Can You Stand It", the first two-thirds of the song is standard White Denim-- bass that sounds like it's reverberating from underground, percussion that chatters like wind-up plastic teeth, James Petralli's squawk mirrored by chippy, dirty guitars. Then after a millisecond pause, drums lock with guitar, a skronky sax appears, and Petralli's register shifts to a bluesy howl. The song, still satisfying and surprising on the 10th listen as on the first, could have been drawn from the catalog of any number of psych-based power trios, but it's executed well and makes for a great opener. More often, however, Fits features hippie paeans like "Mirrored and Reverse", bearing a wispy semi-refrain that suggests the Byrds' Fifth Dimension, without bringing much more to the table than atmosphere.
For all the moments Fits locks in and finds a groove strong enough to hang a hook on, it more often slides right past, on some sort of restless vision quest for something it's bound not to find. First single "I Start to Run" sounds like the Red Hot Chili Peppers circa Mother's Milk (there, I said it), and if they want to grind out propulsive, gonzo funk pastiche that's okay with me. It's when the group hints at something bigger and grander without manifesting something out of their ambitions, like on the album's last two songs, "Regina Holding Hands" and "Syncn", that I stop paying attention and instead start anticipating their next EP. "Regina" dispenses with any timbre resembling "honk" or "slap," substituting strummy acoustic guitar and a bluesy wail. "Syncn" ends the record on an even breezier note, Petralli's vocals holding in a creaky upper register that makes him sound like Devendra Banhart.
Incendiary live shows, sure, but White Denim are a product of the Internet, first and foremost. And their path has taken the sort of weird turns that one might expect for a band seeking to distinguish itself in a virtual market where seemingly everything's already been done. Their first EP was promising, to say the least, and since then they've released two very similar "follow-ups", Exposion and Workout Holiday, one in the U.S. and one in Europe, which folded those songs in with a bunch of others that failed to pack as much of a punch. And so Fits feels like the band's formal first LP-- lots of what makes them unique, and then those somewhat awkward "growth" points. That initial itchiness, in other words, never really goes away.


The Brooklyn duo of Rachel Brown and Nate Amos follow their whims to make experimental pop that combines the freedom of exploration with poignant introspection.

Water From Your Eyes: Somebody Else’s Song

Somebody Else’s Song

Under the tear-stained moniker Water From Your Eyes, Rachel Brown and Nate Amos make music that, like their name, pushes simple concepts towards inventive and imaginative ends. Like their peers in bands like the Cradle and Lily and Horn Horse, the Brooklyn duo makes eclectic, hard-to-define experimental pop, half digital and half not, that always takes familiar ideas to refreshingly new spaces. After several pleasant releases, their latest record, Somebody Else’s Song, combines the freedom of exploration with poignant introspection.
For all of Water From Your Eyes’ confidence in splicing different genres and feels from acoustic twee to indie-electronica, the emotional undercurrent of Somebody Else’s Song is more uncertain. The songs focus on the push and pull between the comfort of dreams and a hazy reality. This idea arrives promptly on the titular opener, when Brown admits, “I try to sing, I get the words all wrong/’Cause it’s somebody else’s song.” (Both musicians assuredly sing their own words on their respectively lovely solo projects, Brown’s thanks for coming and Amos’ This Is Lorelai.)
But the record is never bogged down by unease thanks to the pair’s impressionistic storytelling, dreamy melodies, and Brown’s bittersweet warble. On “Somebody Else’s Song,” their voice floats in a ray of sunlight over a simple guitar loop and a steadily tapping foot, evoking the wistful sing-speaking of K Records folk-poppers. But this tranquil soul-searching is shattered by “Break,” a 10-minute barrage of dizzying drum machine rhythms and creeping keys. Brown’s unvarnished vocals immediately grow cold, hardening into the stiff monotone of an automaton. Without anything resembling a concrete chorus, the track spirals confidently towards euphoric oblivion. “Break” seemingly shares little with its delicate predecessor. But the connective tissue is a yearning for connection, a theme that endures throughout the record.
Though the gear shifts are never as jarring as the transition into “Break,” across eight tracks, Somebody Else’s Song bends into new shapes as it dives into various sonic rabbit holes. The barebones title track is revisited in the back half of the album and blossoms into “Bad in the Sun,” a vocoder-soaked dose of electro bliss. Seemingly melancholic lyrics now feel full of potential, like a nightmare you can laugh off in the morning. A brief blip of harmonized vocals titled “Look” is transformed by a little bumpy guitar melody into the eerie closer “Look Again.” The song concludes with a painfully corporeal depiction of longing: a face gazing through a window at a chain-link fence in the distance, feeling the sensation of wires pressing into their skin.
The best manifestation of this internal conflict is “Adeline,” an off-kilter admission of all-consuming and possibly misplaced devotion. “Nobody else could make me leave me behind,” Brown sings, a heartbreaking, self-aware confession. While wading through Water From Your Eyes’ whims is a delight in itself, discovering the unexpected loveliness buried within is especially worthwhile.

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Sticky Fingers came at a time when—on record, at least—the Rolling Stones could do no wrong. This album could reasonably be called their peak. They were called the World's Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band for entirely too long, but if that designation ever applied, it was here.

Sticky Fingers

The story of the Baby Boomers, and their movement from adolescence to adulthood, has been documented and re-told endlessly. And few bands represent that story, and the move from the relative innocence of the mid-'60s into the hedonism and burnout of the '70s, better than the Rolling Stones. They started out as seemingly polite boys in jackets and ties and they grew and changed in front of the cameras and the microphones. Their music grew darker and more cynical, just like the times. At one of their shows, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival, held just as the '60s came to a close, a group of Hell's Angels, possibly enlisted as security, killed a man, and the event, along with the Charles Manson murders four months earlier, have long been held up as the symbolic end of the peace-and-love '60s. Seen in retrospect, the Stones were a Zelig-like band for a while there, somewhere in the mix whenever there was a cultural shift underway.
That post-Altamont moment was the setting for their 1971 album Sticky Fingers, an album reissued many times that was recently released in its most extensive re-packaging yet. From 1968's Beggars Banquet and the following year's Let It Bleed on through this album and 1972's Exile on Main St., the Rolling Stones had one of the great four-album runs in pop music history. This was a time when—on record, at least—they could do no wrong, and Sticky Fingers could reasonably be called their peak. Beggars and Let It Bleed might have had higher highs, but both also had their share of tossed-off tracks; Exile's tossed-off tracks, on the other hand, were pretty much the whole point—it's the underground music's fan's favorite, but it never had the broader cultural impact of its predecessor. Sticky Fingers is where the myth met the songwriting; Keith Richards' riffs and melodies were in full flower, Mick Jagger never sang better, their new guitarist, Mick Taylor, was upping the ante musically, and the whole thing was wrapped up in a brilliant packaging concept by Andy Warhol.
"Brown Sugar" launches the record with its quintessential blues-rock riff and lyrics that get more questionable the closer you listen (Jagger has since said it was a bit of a wind-up, "all the nasty subjects in one go"). But words were secondary for the band at this point—Sticky Fingers is about melody, and playing, and style. The Stones were always fascinated with American music, but after the death of Brian Jones in 1969 and their move away from psychedelia, their connection to blues, R&B, and country music grew even more intense. From the loping country-folk of "Wild Horses" and the tongue-in-cheek honky tonk of "Dead Flowers" to a Mississippi Fred McDowell cover ("You Gotta Move") to the swelling Otis Redding-style R&B of "I Got the Blues" to the crunchy boogie of "Bitch" to the Latin-flavored Santana jams of "Can't You Hear Me Knocking", Sticky Fingers is a love letter to these forms, the culmination of obsessions these musicians had had since childhood. But where they once sounded like English boys doing their version of the blues, now their songs felt as lived-in as their inspirations.
By this point, the Stones were so convincing playing rootsy American music it made little sense to compare them to their British peers. Musically at least, the Rolling Stones of 1971 had more in common with the Allman Brothers than they did the Who. Along with the barrelhouse piano, pedal steel, and Stax-like horns, Sticky Fingers was also only the second album to feature the guitar work of Mick Taylor, and his clean, fluid, and highly melodic leads bear a strong resemblance to Duane Allman's playing from this period.
But ultimately, this is Mick Jagger's album, the same way Exile is Keith's. Of all the iconic vocalists in '60s and '70s rock, Jagger remains the hardest to imitate, at least without sounding ridiculous. That's partly because he himself never minded sounding ridiculous, and he turned his almost cartoonish swagger into a form of performance art. Jagger's voice never sounded richer or fuller than it does here (Exile mostly buried it, to artful effect), but he's doing strange things with it, mimicking and exaggerating accents, mostly from the American South, with an almost religious fervor.
When the Stones were coming up, the line on British singers is that they sounded American because they grew up listening to those records; on Sticky Fingers, Jagger pushes that kind of mimicry to places that run just short of absurd. His twang on "Dead Flowers" is obviously played for laughs, but "You Gotta Move" is harder to get a bead on, partway between homage and parody and delivered with abandon. "I Got the Blues" is utterly sincere, with Jagger flinging every ounce of his skinny frame into it. Wherever he stands in relation to the material, Jagger is selling it, hard, and by extension selling himself as a new kind of vocalist. "Sister Morphine" and "Moonlight Mile" are the two songs that stray furthest from American music reverence, and they are highlights, showing how well the Stones could convey weariness and a weird kind of blown-out and wasted beauty.
With reissue culture in overdrive, we're seeing which classic bands kept the most in their vaults. The Stones, like Zeppelin, didn't keep much. The 2010 version of Exile on Main St. pretty much cleaned out the vault as far as music from this era, so what we have here are alternate mixes, an inferior but still interesting different take of "Brown Sugar" with Eric Clapton, the one true rarity that has long circulated but never been officially issued. There's also, depending on which version you get, a good deal of vintage live Stones, which is the main thing to get their fans excited. Selections from two 1971 gigs, both recorded well, capture the band in a peak year.
To my ears the Stones' live prowess has never quite translated to recordings. The best live records are about more: more heaviness, more jamming, more crowd noise, more energy. And their music didn't necessarily benefit from increasing any one of those things. Their songs were about a certain amount of balance between all of the elements, which is why their recordings sound so platonically perfect. With their live records, you can focus on the grooves and the riffs and the collective playing, but it's easier to notice moments of sloppiness and mistakes. Still, as far as live Stones on record, the material here is about as good as you will get.
The Stones entered the '70s still young and beautiful, but they'd have their share of problems just like everyone else; they got into disco and then in the '80s they dressed like they were on "Miami Vice" and then finally they fully understood what nostalgia for them was really worth and they discovered the power of corporate synergy. Given the weight of history behind it and its centrality to the story of both the Rolling Stones and rock music as a whole, it can be difficult to put on Sticky Fingers and try and hear it for what it was: the highly anticipated new album from one of the biggest bands in the world, a group that at the time hadn't released a new one in two years (in 1971, that was an eternity). They were called the World's Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band for entirely too long, but if that designation ever applied it was here.


Okkervil River's first release for the ATO label is a concept album about innocence and youth, showing a kid's first glimpses into the adult world. It's set in the 1980s and comes with a map of Will Sheff’s hometown of Meriden, New Hampshire, showing where each song takes place.

The Silver Gymnasium

Physical copies of Okkervil River’s eighth album-- their ATO Records debut-- include a map of frontman Will Sheff’s hometown of Meriden, New Hampshire, designed by the band’s long-time visual artist William Schaff. Points on the map correspond to songs on the tracklist to show where each is set. First single, “This Is Our Season", takes places at Plainfield Elementary School before heading west on Chellis Road; “Walking Without Frankie” wanders from Soucy’s Gas Station over to the Lake of the Strangled Crane. It’s a clever visual element, a reminder that packaging can complement an album and help shape our listening experience. Without getting into the debate over physical vs. digital, I will say that holding the paper map in your hands as you listen to these new songs is very different from looking at a .pdf on your computer screen, where it has no texture, no physicality-- and therefore no memory rhyme of the real treasure maps that most children make of their own neighborhoods. That is exactly what Sheff and evoke with this piece of ephemera: the mystery of childhood, the unbridgeable gulf between what was and what we remember.
The Silver Gymnasium is, in other words, a coming-of-age album: 11 songs that plumb the loss of innocence and youth, a young man’s first glimpses into the adult world of conflict, compromise, and confusion. It’s exactly as cohesive and novelistic as Okkervil river’s last decade’s worth of work, which explored the mythology of rock and roll. In 2005 Black Sheep Boy told a phantasmagorical tale of Tim Hardin’s doomed character (from the song of the same title) coming to pained life, while both 2007’s The Stage Names and 2008’s The Stand-Ins delved further into that world’s rock-and-roll grotesquerie, famously wrenching “Sloop John B” out of Brian Wilson’s hands and casting it as a boat-trip to hell. Rather than romanticize the experience of a life spent in tour vans and on club stages, Sheff presented it as a dark picaresque. This was a different way of writing what he knew, and his fictions were drawn from liner notes, band photos, song lyrics, and the tall tales of backstage crews in small markets.
The difference between that string of albums and The Silver Gymnasium is that on this new album Sheff is singing about his own personal mythology, mapping the terrain of his own life, and commemorating (perhaps memorializing) old friends who’ve grown too far apart. Sheff has ostensibly mined this territory before, on early tracks like “Listening to Otis Redding at Home During Christmas” (on the band’s second album Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See) or like “A Favor” (off their 2004 EP Sleep and Wake-Up Songs). But this album represents the deepest he has descended into this material as well as his most sustained examination of his own origins. While not quite as fantastical as previous albums, The Silver Gymnasium avoids the pitfalls of self-absorption and confessionalism; he’s less a participant in these stories than an observer and enabler who understands his own memory is unreliable.
Sheff evokes the milieu briskly, hinting at a 1980s childhood without resorting to cheesy period details. “Tell me about the greatest show, or the greatest movie you know,” he cajoles a friend on “Down Down the Deep River”, “or the greatest song that you taped off the radio. Play it again and again. (It cuts off at the ending, though.)” He’s literary without being pretentious (those parentheses are Sheff’s), his text-block lyrics lending themselves to slippery sentiments and corkscrew melodies. Those lines in particular, much like the Meriden map, are simultaneously personal and universal: every kid in 1988 was waiting for his or her favorite song to come on the radio, and every kid was waiting for just the right moment to press <RECORD>. Yet Sheff manages to make the experience sound new and immediate, not to mention loaded with uncomfortable meaning.
Conceptually, The Silver Gymnasium is sound; lyrically, this is incredibly fertile territory and more than enough to hang an album on. Musically, however, it may be Okkervil River’s weakest to date. On previous albums Sheff sang like a man who had already seen too much in a single lifetime, delivering his lines with a sputtering urgency that lent even the quieter songs a palpable dread. Meanwhile, the band itself sounded like they were trying to stave off his hysteria. They played like a slap to the face. On The Silver Gymnasium, however, they rarely let the cracks and strains show, and the songs suffer considerably. There’s little menace or madness here; instead the music gives the false impression of emotional orderliness.
This is Okkervil River’s first album working with producer John Agnello, who has helmed period-specific albums by Cyndi Lauper and John Mellencamp, among others. He lends these songs a careful sheen when they ought to sound taped off the radio. Synths play a prominent role on The Silver Gymnasium, even more so now than when Jonathan Meiburg was still with the band. Rather than reach back to this particular era in pop music, on “Stay Young” and “Lido Pier Suicide Car” the synths sound generically crisp, reinforcing the sense of polish and calculation. Even the sax and harmonica solos on “Stay Young” are mixed low, as though the band remains noncommittal about featuring those instruments.
It’s hard to miss that this sonic development coincides with the band’s move from Jagjaguwar (their home for more than a decade) to ATO Records (home to the Drive-By Truckers, Alabama Shakes, and the True Blood soundtrack). Ostensibly they’re making a bid for a wider audience, and why shouldn’t they? It would be amazing to hear how Sheff’s mythologies play to larger crowds in roomier venues. Okkervil River don’t have to sound right on the precipice of madness to be interesting, but unfortunately The Silver Gymnasium buffs away their eccentricities and robs the music of its impact. They aim for jittery energy on “Walking Without Frankie”, but it sounds inert. They shoot for triumphal on “On a Balcony”, but there’s no heft to those backing vocals. They reach for tattered majesty on closer “Black Nemo”, but they never hoist the flag quite high enough. Perhaps when performed live these songs will accrue the desperation and dynamism their studio versions lack, but for now The Silver Gymnasium too often makes the act of remembering sound like a consequence-free undertaking, as though certain horrors are too far in the past to do us much harm in the present. Anyone with a memory-- especially Sheff-- knows that’s not the case.


The alternately beautiful and unnerving score to Pablo Larraín’s surreal film about Princess Diana captures the elegance of a royal holiday and the horror of feeling trapped inside of it.

Jonny Greenwood: Spencer (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Pablo Larraín’s Spencer is a story of fitful disappointment, an unhappy obligation from its beginning that grows only bleaker as the tale unfolds. The protagonist, Diana, Princess of Wales (née Diana Spencer), sees that her future, if it even exists, has already been written for her. Jonny Greenwood’s music for the film, accordingly, is often unsettling, amplifying Diana’s discomfort with being held prisoner at Sandringham House with her unfaithful husband and the British royal family for Christmas traditions. Greenwood’s score, sinister and moody, marries the Baroque stylings that would likely have soundtracked royal gatherings for centuries with free jazz that represents Diana’s defiant presence as the People’s Princess. The music amplifies and elucidates Spencer’s themes, the sound of a free spirit and caged bird who becomes increasingly untethered from reality as she longs to escape. And, on its own, the Spencer soundtrack is also an impressive work of fusion, an album that is ambitious in scope and exquisitely detailed.
Emotionally, Greenwood’s Spencer is alternately melancholy and foreboding. The title theme, played on piano by Greenwood in its sparest form, is closest to the composer’s music for Phantom Thread (namely, the Paul Thomas Anderson film’s title themes and the standout “House of Woodcock”) in that it’s teasingly beautiful but never blooms into its brightest and fullest form, a lovely little melody that’s akin to a deep exhale, weary of its own simplicity and purity and nearly dejected.
Greenwood expands the “Spencer” theme on several songs, including the opening “Arrival,” modified slightly and played even more morosely by a string quartet before the free jazz ensemble, led impressively by trumpeter Byron Wallen, abandons the leitmotif and draws out the more menacing elements of the composition. Pianist Alexander Hawkins and drummer Tom Skinner (a Sons of Kemet fixture and Greenwood’s bandmate in the Smile) stand out, too, their playing growing wilder as they pull the song further away from the theme and the quartet recedes to the background.
The “Spencer” leitmotif, a musical stand-in for Princess Diana, is most traditional on “The Boys” and most foreboding when played on organ, especially the near-cacophonous “Press Call.” It also serves as a grounding force for a record that flirts with chaos, as on the Pendereckian “Calling the Whipper In,” which blends stabs of string with trumpet blasts and unhinged harpsichord. Depending on how you see it, the “Spencer” melody is either the anchor or the albatross of the album, a grounding force and reminder of the elegance at its heart or a stubborn commitment to retreat to what is safe and what is expected when improvisation and discordance are more tantalizing.
Spencer, of course, allows for both interpretations. Diana, in the film’s surrealistic portrayal of a long holiday weekend in December 1991, is forced to confront the hell in which she’s found herself, a decade into her disintegrating marriage to Prince Charles and left with all the accompanying distresses and scrutiny of royalty. However she got there, it’s still a hell, and she wants out. The soundtrack features further moments of tension, such as “Home / Lacrimosa,” burying the listener amid a cascade of organ and orchestra, glistening but overwhelming. “Invention for Harpsichord and Compression,” too, finds Greenwood hurrying his tempo and increasing his volume to make his delicate instrument play with ferocity. There is beauty throughout Greenwood’s Spencer, and it always sounds as if it’s about to collapse.

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Horse Lords songs are intricate, methodical patterns that seem to pulse and shift the longer you stare. Their tension is rooted in anticipation, the only relief the relinquishing of control.

The Common Task

Baltimore’s Horse Lords wield the familiar rock’n’roll toolkit of guitar, bass, drums, and saxophone, and they’ve cited ’70s Bo Diddley as an influence. But this is not a rock band in the traditional sense. Their lineage can be traced more directly to minimalist avant-garde experimentalists such as the Sonic Arts Union and La Monte Young; like Captain Beefheart, they gleefully corrupt the traditions of American blues and folk. Their music finds challenge and beauty in toying with the expectations that accompany familiar tools.
Often the most pleasurable way to listen to a record like Horse Lords’ fourth LP, The Common Task, is to surrender, to shed those expectations and follow the music where it takes you. If it sounds similar to the way the human brain responds to certain psychedelics, it’s no accident—the band’s perspective was shaped in no small part by formative experiences with psychotropic drugs. The record’s tension is rooted in anticipation, the only relief the relinquishing of control. Album opener “Fanfare for Effective Freedom” tests this hypothesis almost immediately, stacking staccato harmonies so tightly they make a full arrangement sound sparse. This is drone music with a narrative, full of rising action that builds to an explosive climax and ultimate resolution.
But none of the tracks on The Common Task adhere to any real pop song structure; they trace meandering paths that feel logical, even if they can’t quite be called melodic. The players strive for robotic perfection, knowing that, as humans, they are destined to fail. The beauty in a Horse Lords record lies in the results of that failure: intricate, methodical patterns that seem to pulse and shift the longer you stare at them. “After a show recently an audience member told me the music reminded her of weaving,” guitarist Owen Gardner told The Quietus in 2017. “I have never felt better understood.”
Some of the band’s most memorable motifs and compositions started as rough sketches on their mixtapes. “Outer East,” the epic opener of 2014’s Hidden Cities, draws from their first mixtape; the spaceship engine hum that appears across The Common Task was first heard on their most recent tape. As their sound has evolved over the past decade, they’ve gradually moved from live-tracking their records with a full band to multi-track recording, a technique that offers more freedom to assemble jams into cohesive statements. And since 2016’s Interventions—their first multi-tracked project—they’ve stopped segregating their modular synthesis in discrete interludes and begun integrating them into their compositions. Their field recordings have also become more sophisticated; the crunchy, resonant textures on “Integral Accident” are so well-designed that in the right context they might pass as Foley art.
Much has been made of Horse Lords’ predilection for just intonation tuning and microtonal harmonies (those notes that fall in between the keys of a piano), as well as Gardner’s Mauritanian guitar stylings, which reappear on tracks like “Against Gravity” and “People’s Park.” Their true energy, though, is derived from drummer Sam Haberman, who teeters on the precipice, veering back to the beat just before a song tumbles over the edge. The band has clearly studied percussion from across the African continent (Central Africa’s Aka and Banda music, and Tanzania’s Wagogo, in particular), and on “People’s Park,” they follow those rhythms across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, deconstructing and reimagining the reggaetón riddim far from its original context.
“People’s Park,” a reference to Chicago’s revolutionary socialist organization the Young Lords and their community-run space in Lincoln Park, offers a glimpse at Horse Lords’ radical politics. It’s difficult to make political statements in wordless instrumental music; without a visual component, titles must do the heavy lifting. And while it’s nice to know their intent, The Common Task doesn’t scan as a political message. But even apart from its real-world context, the album succeeds as an abstraction. Given even a little bit of time, space, and intention, these compositions are an uncommonly rewarding experience.

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Nearly 10 years into its career, the underrated French band has honed its sleek and increasingly effective bursts of pop to a fine point.

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

At one point in the schlocky 1975 musical comedy Lisztomania, Roger Daltrey whips out an absurdly large phallus and no less than five women simultaneously straddle it like a cannon. It's as insane as it sounds. In the movie, Daltrey plays Franz Liszt, the 19th century Hungarian pianist and composer known for his flamboyant playing style-- hysterical women fought over his handkerchiefs at concerts more than a century before the Beatles. Whereas Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's music represented all things respectable and classicist, Liszt was a Romantic hero full of flash; Amadeus won eight Oscars, Lisztomania boasts lines like, "Your big ambition was to stick your working-class cock up a piece of high-class crumpet." With their fourth album, Phoenix reference both composers and hone in on an elusive target somewhere between Mozart's formal wonders and Listz's dramatic flair. While the album's 10 songs are arranged and executed with virtuoso pop-rock precision, they chronicle nothing but angst, confusion, disappointment, and despair. It's truly universal-- everybody live, love, and die.
Much of the album's internal conflict is laid out in its first couple lines. "So sentimental; not sentimental, no!/ Romantic; not disgusting yet," sings frontman Thomas Mars on opener "Lisztomania", sounding like a madman with two tiny creatures whispering into each ear. Mars keeps this treacherous divide in mind throughout Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, and the rest of the record successfully avoids mush while keeping its beating heart intact. And the issue of thematic directness is especially important to Phoenix-- this is an established indie band writing songs about love that are armed with hooks primed for a mainstream embrace. Just listen to the invincible crescendo of Wolfgang's "Countdown"-- especially that little Coldplay-esque piano twinkle about three and a half minutes in-- and realize that these guys are a few Chris Martin-isms away from staggering ubiquity. They're a bona fide "should be bigger" band.
But, as their songs tighten into increasingly effective bursts of pop, Mars is breaking up his words and meanings into smaller and smaller fragments. His isn't a self-congratulatory, indie-nerd triumph, though, i.e., Mars isn't being cryptic to be an asshole. He's getting better and more sophisticated as his band discards anything-- an outro, a bridge, an extra hi-hat hit-- that could be deemed superfluous. Sure: YouTube tells us this album will make a generation-spanning touchstone like The Breakfast Club that much better. It'll also hit your gut if you listen hard enough. There are layers here-- maybe too many layers for the biggest rooms.
"I feel too young," went the hook on Phoenix's innocent and bittersweet 2000 debut single. Back then, the quartet was following a wave of Gallic cool led by friends Daft Punk and Air. Nearly 10 years on and this casually chic group has grown into something unique-- Wolfgang isn't a tweaked Air record or a tweaked Strokes record as much as it's a Phoenix record. Gone is the sometimes-flimsy blue-eyed soul of their first two LPs, replaced with a glossier take on the uptick guitars and sampled snare snaps of 2006's brilliant It's Never Been Like That. And they're not feeling so young anymore, either. "Do you remember when 21 years was old?" muses Mars on "Countdown". Growing up, looking back, and peeking ahead usually isn't this enjoyable.
Its unflappable sonic sheen gives Wolfgang some winsome 80s nostalgia, but smart modern touches-- a constant near-Auto-Tune vocal effect, Justice-lite keyboard stabs on "1901"-- ensure its of-the-moment-ness. Meanwhile, Mars hints at a time and space where he's everywhere-- or nowhere-- all at once. "Acres/ Visible horizon/ Right where it starts and ends/ When did we start the end?" he wonders aloud at the end of the krautrocking epic "Love Is a Sunset", just after the song has blasted into a stratosphere where a diminishing horizon line is the only clear thing in sight. "Rome" likens a collapsing relationship to a collapsed empire; "2000 years remain in a trash can." And, on "Countdown", Mars' ennui reaches its peak as he sings, "True and everlasting didn't last that long." But he's not sad-sacking along, head down, no umbrella. He's pumped. Excited. With the band going full-bore behind him, he concludes the most ebullient song about existential inevitability in recent memory with an impassioned rallying cry: "We're the lonesome! We're the lonesome!" All together now.
At another point in Lisztomania, Roger Daltrey's entire body is sucked into a devilish princess' underthings. (Seriously.) Before that happens, though, the cigar-chomping heiress quotes Oscar Wilde while explaining her unladylike smoking habit, "It's the perfect form of pleasure, it's exquisite and leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one ask?" Phoenix seem to understand this line of thinking-- and not just because they look like a group of guys who know their Gauloises. They're pleasure-pushers, filling tunes with riffs, phrases, and beats a five-year-old could love. But, on Wolfgang, those same songs are unfulfilled-- and this band wouldn't have it any other way. There's beauty in a sunset. Phoenix are wringing it out.


IDM-influenced sounds from this talented architect of instrumental hip-hop.

1983

I'd been hearing about this hot new producer, Flying Lotus-- instrumental hip-hop guy, crafter of "Adult Swim" bumper music, John Coltrane's godson's internist's third cousin or something-- and it's true; he's good. Knows his way around a sequencer, cobbles crazy sounds into beats that only crazy people could possibly rap over (so, basically just MF Doom), has a moniker that looks ill stenciled on a crate. But damn, is someone running a wildly popular Modern Instrumental Hip-Hop workshop now? Does it have a monopsonistic chokehold on a host of beleaguered factories that produce big, brightly colored slabs of BEAT® at an ever more frantic clip to stay afloat against low fees and high demand? Is Dabrye not only the company's president, but a client?
I like squelchy bass, ray-gun trills, clever drum programming, and wobbly keyboards as much as the next guy who used to be really into Anticon, and I respect the polished craft that keeps 1983 shucking along. But like an overly workshopped novel, the album is stylish, well-turned, and interchangeable with its peers. Seldom bad, seldom memorable, Flying Lotus's IDM-influenced hip-hop is paint-by-numbers. That's not necessarily negative, but I prefer music that's willing to strategically violate the terms of its genre in order to make an impression. This stuff bangs, but with a cerebral bent-- splitting that difference dilutes its impact, and a more discernible human charisma would go a long way toward distinguishing it.
At least the paint is often garish and skillfully applied enough to distract from the faint template beneath it, and the eclectic style keeps outright tedium at bay. The title track's rubbery space-funk gets whipped into an electro-pop froth on a remix by Daedelus, marking the first time that Daedelus's presence has ever made anything less boring. The moist, glassy stabs of "Bad Actors" are nicely offset by the clicky, pitch-bending corkscrews of "Orbit Brazil" and the idyllic sheen of "Untitled #7". The stuttering creeper "Pet Monster Shotglass" jerkily mutates for upwards of six-minutes, demonstrating by example what much of the album wants for-- a sense of compositional completion and deliberate evolution that's missing from more static ideas like "Hello", which humps an ice-blue synth swirl into attractive anonymity.
Those of you looking for a good genre exercise will find plenty to admire on 1983. The boom always baps right on time (which is to say, slightly off-time). The herky is extra jerky, but not to the extent of disrupting a good head-nod. Each obstinate loop eventually starts to hiccup and convulse, which is how you know it's art. The rest of you will turn off this album wondering why you can't remember any details from it, and why you suddenly feel the urge to shop for a minivan.


Hiss Golden Messenger’s bittersweet, new LP is full of fluttery soul-grooves, borrowing from various regional folk and blues traditions. It speaks to what it means to be a compassionate citizen today.

Hiss Golden Messenger: Hallelujah Anyhow

Hallelujah Anyhow

M.C. Taylor has been making music for more than 20 years, first as a member of the hardcore act Ex-Ignota and later as frontman for the California country-rock group the Court & Spark. He formed his latest incarnation, Hiss Golden Messenger, when he moved to North Carolina in the late 2000s, but only in the last five years has that band become a full-time gig for the folklorist and family man. During that relatively short time, he has not changed his approach or his subject matter: He still writes intelligently and insightfully about America as both a place to inhabit and a story to tell, about the trials of faith and the lure of doubt, about family and its incumbent responsibilities.
Taylor has not changed, but the times certainly have. Bridging two extremely different presidential administrations, Hiss Golden Messenger suddenly sounds all the more prescient in 2017 than it did even on the group’s most recent album, last year’s Heart Like a Levee. Taylor’s constant theme has been joy in the face of misery, jubilation during times of tribulation, hope despite the tide. As he sings on “Jenny of the Roses,” the first song off Hallelujah Anyhow, “I’ve never been afraid of darkness, it’s just a different kind of light.” With its burbling tempo and gospel piano, it sounds like a joyful tune, but the lyrics reveal gradations of regret and despair as Taylor celebrates the life of someone long departed. “Jenny of the Roses” is the very definition of bittersweet, as are the songs that follow.
There is something comforting in the contradictions Taylor explores on Hallelujah Anyhow, something that speaks generally to what it means to be a conscientious and compassionate citizen at a time when every day seems to introduce some new travesty. How do you find and express joy when the world is crumbling all around you? That’s been the subject of nearly every Hiss Golden Messenger album, but it’s especially pronounced on Hallelujah Anyhow, a record of fluttery soul-grooves and complicated insights. (The album title is perfect, the album cover not even close.) Taylor has said it’s not a protest album. Instead, it might be called a persist album. It doesn’t speak truth to power, but reassures and invigorates those who feel powerless.
That modest ambition supplies the music with a certain spark. Taylor recorded the album in a matter of days, bringing his road-hardened backing band into the studio to flesh out the songs quickly, as though any hesitation might lessen their urgency. Replacing longtime drummer Matt McCaughan (out on tour with Bon Iver) is Darren Jessee, best known as one-third of Ben Folds Five. He brings a staunch backbeat to these songs, moving “Lost Out in the Darkness” along at an almost martial pace and punching up the AM country groove of “John the Gun.” While there’s nothing quite so experimental as the jagged stomp of “Like a Mirror Loves a Hammer” off last year’s Heart Like a Levee, the arrangements on Hallelujah Anyhow are intricate without being showy, borrowing from various regional folk and blues traditions to imply a sense of movement across the map. Taylor has always made good use of reed instruments going back to 2012’s Poor Moon, and here Michael Lewis’ saxophone tugs at the edges of “John the Gun,” fraying the seams until the song unravels in a long, beautiful coda.
Music—and the joy we might find in our favorite songs or albums—is perhaps the dominant theme on Hallelujah Anyhow, which see Taylor referring but not deferring to his heroes. That wheezing harmonica solo on “Lost Out in the Darkness” sounds like a nod to early Dylan, just as the title of “Gulfport, You’ve Been on My Mind” echoes “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind.” There’s a strange reference on “John the Gun” to the infamous goth act Sisters of Mercy and more than a few toasts to Van Morrison, most obviously on “Domino (Time Will Tell).” That song, which shares its title and its general tempo with a song from Morrison’s 1970 album His Band and the Street Choir, might have been corny if the band didn’t convey such excitement in the tribute.
Not that you need to trace every footnote or easter egg to enjoy this album. Rather, the allusions thrum just beneath the surface of these vivid songs, as if to suggest that specific moments of music can get us through hard times or even just move us a little further down the road. Taylor does not seem to harbor the ambition to join those ranks; he’s too much of a fan himself, down here in the pits with the rest of us. “Give me a fiddle and a flattop guitar, give me the gospel of the jukebox in the Lost Horse Bar,” he begs on “Domino,” sounding weary but not beaten. “We’ll be alright tonight.”


E returns with another exercise in self-referentiality and self-indulgences.

Tomorrow Morning

One of the most bookish artists to rise from 90s alt-pop, Mark Everett (aka E or Eels) affects the seriocomic deadpan of Daniel Clowes, but really he's the Rick Moody of indie rock. Both are existential mopes who did their best and career-defining work in the 1990s, but have spent the better part of the last decade chasing self-indulgences, becoming too cerebral and too coldly distant to connect with an audience. Both regularly overthink their art to the point of strangling it of all life. Like Moody's new 700-page doorstop, The Four Fingers of Death, Eels' latest, Tomorrow Morning, is far too insular to mean much of anything outside itself. It's an exercise in self-referentiality, which might be more impressive if the music didn't sound like the folk-with-beats path Beck was smart enough to avoid.
Tomorrow Morning is perhaps most notable for how it complements its predecessor, the teasing End Times released earlier this year. That album showed E wrestling with his defense mechanisms in a way that promised to show the man behind the initial. He has never flinched from heavy issues; he wrote an album about cancer, after all. But he has always swathed any hint of confession in severe detachment, as if he could never wholly inhabit his songs for fear of the very real pain they might contain. Ostensibly grappling with a break-up with his longtime girlfriend, End Times toyed with expectations of autobiographical revelation, first laying out the situation in the barest lyrics possible and then twisting it into a concept album where a romantic rift brings forth an apocalypse. Musically and thematically, it spiraled out of E's control, but for a few brief moments, he became as human and as sympathetic as he had ever been.
Following just a few months later, Tomorrow Morning is the sequel that shows E recovering from his heartache and becoming a new man-- not a new musician, mind you, but a new man. He's found a new woman, and on "Baby Loves Me" and "Spectacular Girl" she gives him the power and perspective to overlook all the negativity in the world. "Baby loves me," he barks Tourettically, "and she's smarter than you." No one would begrudge him such happiness, but the song is a contrivance of burbling synths, plastic beats, and E's own dead-eyed growl. Later, on the gospel cringer "Looking Up", E declares himself transformed, but the song's so ridiculous it sounds more like a pisstake on the idea of salvation than salvation itself.
Even when he's trying to sound upbeat, E just sounds typically downhearted. That idea could be intriguing, but even if you ignore his tired delivery of lines like "I'm a hummingbird, beautiful and free," this album just sounds bad, clattering with rudimentary beats and chintzy keyboards that make the songs blur into each other. He still comes across as a bedroom auteur, shut away from the world like a DIY hermit, but aside from a bit of vinyl distortion around a few songs, the album sounds too slick to sell E's solitary stance. In that regard, the album just sounds way too long. End Times had the benefit of brevity-- just a few short songs that moved the plot out of the real world and into E's head. Tomorrow Morning, however, meanders aimlessly through 14 songs that sound like 28. How's that for existential crisis? Stuck in a never-ending Eels album.


The always-unpredictable singer-songwriter returns with a haunting and beautiful meditation on war that ranks with her finest records.

Let England Shake

"The West's asleep," PJ Harvey declares on the first line of her new album, Let England Shake, before spending the next 40 minutes aiming to shame, frighten, and agitate it into action. When Polly Jean Harvey burst into the public consciousness in the early 90s, her gravelly voice, outsized personality, and often disturbing lyrics gave the alt-rock world a crucial shot of excitement. That early work is still among the most raw and real guitar music to emerge from the past few decades, so no surprise, it's a version of PJ Harvey a lot of people still miss. But if you've paid attention to her in the years since, the one thing you can expect is that she won't repeat herself.
On Let England Shake, Harvey is not often upfront or forceful; her lyrics, though, are as disturbing as ever. Here, she paints vivid portraits of war, and her sharp focus on the up-close, hand-to-hand devastation of World War I-- depicting "soldiers falling like lumps of meat"-- provides a fitting setting for today's battlegrounds. From the Zombies to the Pogues, artists have often gravitated to the confused, massive loss of life of the Great War. If it doesn't resonate as much in America as it does in Europe-- and it doesn't-- that's more our fortune than our shame.
The Great War remains a rich and resonant subject for art because it briefly caused the world to step back, aghast and afraid to look at what it had done. The collective trauma of World War I did indeed shake England, specifically, out of the end of its imperialistic Victorian stupor. The rest of the world gasped as well: WWI hastened the Russian Revolution, coaxed the U.S. into isolationism and a flirtation with pacifism, and set the tone for a shunned Germany to embrace the Third Reich. Culturally, the result was modernism, dadaism, and surrealism continuing to overtake the giddiness of la belle époque; geopolitically, it redrew European borders, creating roughly a dozen new nations; diplomatically, the League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations, was meant to prevent war, at least on this scale, from ever happening again.
On "The Words That Maketh Murder", Harvey blackly and comically shakes her head at those post-WWI diplomatic hopes. After spinning tales lamenting what a soldier has seen and done, she and her cohorts-- frequent collaborators John Parish and Mick Harvey-- break into the jaunty closing refrain from "Summertime Blues": "What if I take my problems to the United Nations?" It's a hilariously depressing coda; her song's character has experienced the unimaginable and is looking to an international peacekeeping body for help.
Throughout the record, Harvey sings in her higher register, as she often did on the underrated White Chalk, granting her some detachment from her surroundings. Instead of owning the spotlight outright, as she did in the 90s, she floats above and beside it; it's a neat trick that forces listeners to crawl closer to her words, allowing them to slowly come into focus. The textural and tonal qualities of her voice are made malleable, a scalpel wielded with precision rather than a sword. On the whole, she carries distant echoes of her peers and successors-- Joanna Newsom, Björk, Kate Bush-- while remaining clearly and identifiably herself.
Harvey does this musically too, incorporating traces of English folk, early rock, reverbed dream-pop, and disparate familiar melodies (as well as "Summertime Blues," she appropriates Niney the Observer's apocalyptic "Blood and Fire" on the one directly Iraq-related song here, "Written on the Forehead", plus a close approximation of "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" that originally played a larger role on the record) as a foundation. With autoharp, zither, saxophone, and other new instruments added to her palette, Harvey crucially crafts sturdy, earwormy melodies. If you didn't listen to the words, the record would scan as beautiful, even docile or tame. Harvey forces you to locate the real world behind a pleasantly hazy foreground.
Even considering all of the horror on display, this is her most straightforward and easy to embrace album in a decade. Along with "The Words That Maketh Murder", the bouncing title track, the radio rock of "The Last Living Rose", and "Written on the Forehead" would all make excellent singles. They'll all get a chance, so to speak: Harvey commissioned war photographer Seamus Murphy to craft videos for each of the record's dozen tracks. (Three of them have already been released: "Let England Shake", "The Words That Maketh Murder", and "The Last Living Rose".) As much of a piece as this record is, its songs also work in their own contexts, and despite using a limited number of players and instruments, Harvey and co. locate a wide range of approaches to their central subject; alongside the singles, those include the rousing folk-rock of "Bitter Branches", the delicate "Hanging in the Wire", and the acoustic "England".
Even a cursory glance at the album-- its title, song titles, lyrics-- marks this as a very English record. Its pastoralism befits Harvey's West Country background and recording setting (as well as the fields in Europe in which most of WWI was fought, and where most of the dead are now laid to rest). But it's less about the experience of one nation with war, so much as one people. That those people are English is Harvey soaking her music in her own surroundings and experiences. Swap out the place names with others, though, and the message remains the same. It's universal and it's necessary-- and it's powerfully and clearly stated. That it's also a joy to hear is perhaps the most confounding juxtaposition of all, turning a record you'll respect into one you'll also love*.*


Dealer is an artistic triumph for the St. Louis band Foxing. A significant advance from The Albatross, it's even heavier, more compositionally complex, and more personally revealing than its predecessor.

Dealer

The Albatross became a self-fulfilling prophecy for Foxing. While the St. Louis band's relentless touring enabled the slow-build success of their debut, the aching opening track on Dealer recounts the effect of Conor Murphy having to repeat ugly truths about himself night after night for the better part of two years: "I am caught up in the guilt/ Making a living off of drowning." Though Dealer is an artistic triumph and a significant advance from The Albatross, it's even heavier, more compositionally complex, and more personally revealing than its predecessor. And that's why, from its very first second, Murphy sounds drained over the prospect of doing it all over again—Dealer is not an easy listen. It sounds like it was very difficult to make, and reliving it is going to be even harder.
It's in Foxing's nature to welcome a challenge. Of all the leading figures in the Fest-centered post-emo world, they made the most demanding, unique and self-assured debut. It certainly earned the genre tag—silvery guitar figures streaked and twinkled like tiny Explosions in the Sky, while Murphy's keening vocals delivered confrontational and caustic lyrics with spasmodic, burst-and-bloom dynamics. To paraphrase the slow-motion self-evisceration of "Rory" (think the Wrens' "This Is Not What You Had Planned" stretched to four minutes), he ripped his heart out while it was still beating and shoved it directly in your face. But Foxing are more interested in a renaissance than a "revival", and they mirror the adaptive and forward-thinking qualities of their scene, creating a new voice for familiar sentiments: There was certainly hints of Cap'n Jazz on Albatross, but also actual jazz, as well as Sufjan Stevens' baroque Americana and touches of avant-garde R&B.
The Albatross darted fitfully and stretched out in all directions, while Dealer pulls all of Foxing's influences inward. Inverting his typical role of making burly post-rock bands sound delicate, producer Matt Bayles (Isis, Caspian) boosts Foxing's fragility—Dealer is constructed like an expensive timepiece where you can see every exacting movement behind a thick, glossy lacquer. Murphy's much-improved vocals negotiate the curvature of "Weave"'s mournful melody and the band's syncopated sway—imagine what the Chicago late-'90s post-rock scene could've accomplished if they hooked up with the guys downstate in Urbana-Champaign. While there were short instrumental interludes on The Albatross, "Winding Cloth" is a full-on string orchestration, offering four minutes to absorb the shellshocked war reportage of "Indica" before segueing into the heavy-hearted poetry of "Redwoods".
Foxing are willing to delay gratification or even deny it entirely if the song requires it, and on Dealer, it often does. When Murphy and bassist/co-songwriter Josh Coll take on universal topics like sex, religion and war, they're framed through discomforting personal experiences: "The Magdalene" is the most dour song about losing one's virginity since "Sic Transit Gloria…Glory Fades", drawing on strict Catholic upbringings that instilled what Coll described as "the internal fear that spirits are in the room witnessing 'sin' in action": "Mother of God on the rosary/ Is she here with us?/ Does she want what she sees?" The guilt carries on to the present day as Murphy becomes choked by the supposedly no-strings hook-ups in "Night Channels" and "Glass Coughs". Both build up from spare, plaintive introductions to restrained screams and contained, brassy cacophony—Murphy allows you to feel every pang and writhe of guilt, but catharsis is scant.
There's none whatsoever on "Indica", which recounts Coll's time as a soldier in Afghanistan. Few, if any, indie rock bands have access to this kind of firsthand experience, but that alone isn't enough to ensure it avoids "Rooster" or "Support our Troops OH!" overstatement on either end. Aside from a brief clatter of field snares, there's little but a single, clean guitar and Murphy's voice catatonic from both PTSD and self-medication: "Could I give back the sounds of their children's screams?/ Let go of what I've seen?" Dealer isn't a narrative, but both his civilian and Coll's soldier could share the exhaustion of closer "Three on a Match"—"For what we did, my love, I'm sorry...the Lord won't let me in/ I'm survived by the weight of my own sins." The devil and God aren't raging inside of Murphy and Coll anymore—Dealer is the arduous post-war reconstruction.


The piano-and-percussion quartet performs a series of pieces by the Los Angeles composer that wrestle with the aftermath of 2020’s wildfires; McIntosh’s own field recordings flesh out a sense of place.

Yarn/Wire / Andrew McIntosh: Andrew McIntosh: Little Jimmy

Andrew McIntosh: Little Jimmy

Nature is no stranger to notated music. Olivier Messiaen’s transcriptions brought birdsong to the page; John Luther Adams writes music about climate change. In Andrew McIntosh’s compositions, nature appears again, but more as an impression than a direct translation. The textures of mountains, wind, and trees often color the Los Angeles composer’s gossamer phrases, creating a feeling that’s sprawling yet interior, built from contemplative, slow-moving sound. McIntosh’s new album Little Jimmy, recorded by New York piano-percussion quartet Yarn/Wire, builds on this style through three quiet meditations, two of which draw from the California wilderness and McIntosh’s experiences in it.
This album is another entry in McIntosh and Yarn/Wire’s long partnership—in 2014, they presented the similarly pensive Hyenas in the Temple of Pleasure. But unlike the strictly instrumental Hyenas, two of the works on Little Jimmy use field recordings to tell their story, letting in sounds from the outdoors. The album’s title track grows out of recordings taken in April 2020 at the Little Jimmy trail camp, in the Angeles National Forest. That was before much of Little Jimmy burned during the Bobcat Fire, altering its landscape. Sparse and ruminative, McIntosh’s music is an ode to the place and the memory of the calmness he felt there.
McIntosh grew up in Nevada’s desert and currently lives in Los Angeles, regularly making trips into the city’s surrounding wilderness, where he finds inspiration in bristling California pines and the gales of wind that swirl around the mountains. To approximate these sounds, he uses extended techniques and unusual instruments. On “Little Jimmy,” a bowed piano technique, in which the player strokes the piano’s strings using a fishing line instead of striking its keys, creates a hollow, resonant tone much like the wind as it rustles through the trees. At other points in the piece, fluttering, high-pitched melodies ring out like agitated bird chirps.
This music conjures the feeling of gradually soaking in your surroundings, yet it never feels placid. It’s unsettled and constantly in motion while keeping a leisurely pace, which is a welcome difference from works that focus solely on Earth’s serenity. “Little Jimmy at the End of Winter” opens with distant bird calls and wind gusts and unfolds into dissonant piano and rolling vibraphone, balancing stillness with desolation. There’s a sense of lamentation in these eerie moments, a yearning for a time that no longer exists.
While much of Little Jimmy explores a sense of nostalgia and uncertainty, McIntosh does gradually turn to a gentler atmosphere by the end. The music’s final moments feel nearly suspended in motion as wind billows around tapping piano and bowed cymbals, emulating the feeling of wandering around the forest alone, bathing in its tranquility. As a meditation on a place that McIntosh loves, Little Jimmy is a quiet love letter to the ever-evolving reality of life on Earth.