These live sets between the saxophonist and pianist capture a dialogue between two highly skilled and empathetic collaborators whose reverence for space matches their regard for the music itself.

Archie Shepp / Jason Moran: Let My People Go

Let My People Go

Archie Shepp doesn’t play the saxophone so much as he sings through it. His phrasing is expressive and free, on par with the great jazz and blues vocalists, and six decades of making music has not dulled his abilities. Each note on Let My People Go, his new record with pianist Jason Moran, is fresh, like the start of some fascinating conversation you’re lucky enough to overhear. At 83, Shepp has found a worthy partner in this particular exchange. Moran is 37 years Shepp’s junior, but has worked with greats like Wayne Shorter, Cassandra Wilson, and Charles Lloyd. His presence on Let My People Go is elegant and highly sensitive to Shepp’s spirited wanderings. Recorded live in 2017 and 2018, Let My People Go captures a dialogue between two highly skilled and empathetic collaborators, whose reverence for space matches their regard for the music itself.
Let My People Go collects Shepp and Moran’s performances from two sets: a gig at Paris’ annual Jazz à la Villette festival in 2017 and live recordings from 2018’s Enjoy Jazz Festival in Mannheim, Germany. For their first time recording together, having met just a few years prior, it’s remarkable how at ease both men sound in each other’s presence. Shepp has said that he tries not to use written music during his performances in an attempt to “make it as much like old New Orleans as possible: that is, completely improvised and nonacademic.” Let My People Go epitomizes that spirit; it deals in pure feeling.
Shepp is lyrical and emotive with his instrument. He is capable of communicating great pain, but does not clog every measure with shrieks. Moran is equally tasteful and expressive, but if Shepp is a painter, Moran is more like an expert boxer, shuffling in only when there is space to do so, dancing away gracefully when there is not. Standards like “Round Midnight,” “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” and “Isfahan” are all prime examples of this gorgeous exchange, and each one takes on new life in Shepp and Moran’s hands. Shepp and Moran explore the darker corners of “Isfahan,” a Duke Ellington tune from his band’s 1967 album Far East Suite. Shepp’s measures are full of longing, and they occasionally seep out in queasy blurts; Moran tiptoes in between them, striking clusters of notes that sparkle and growl. The effect is intimate and forlorn, as if Ellington’s orchestra turned in for the night and Shepp and Moran stayed onstage to concoct their own after-hours sonata.
The chemistry between Shepp and Moran is so heady, it could easily be disturbed by singing. But when Shepp’s voice comes in the final third of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” it’s more of a comfort than a surprise. His range has settled into a velvety timbre that creates the deepest tone on the album. His repetition of the title phrase is pained, as if crushed under the weight of the song’s history as a traditional spiritual. On “Go Down Moses” Shepp sings the album’s titular line with a similar gravity: “Let my people go.” It is a sobering demand, following some of Moran’s most stunning, dynamic piano work.
Shepp has always felt that the music made by Black artists functions as a political act in and of itself. But throughout the decades, he has always gone further than just making music. Shepp was actively involved with the Civil Rights movement, wrote politically charged theater pieces, and recorded an album in response to the tragic outcome of the Attica prison uprising. Today, Shepp is still pushing forward, inviting the new guard to recontextualize jazz standards, and actively collaborating with them. Let My People Go is at its core a conversation between a jazz elder and a modern virtuoso, one that draws on a rich history of ideas, but offers space to further the discussion.

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2xCD reissue of the crucial 1982 LP adds live tracks, Peel sessions, and a B-side.

Hex Enduction Hour

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Fall starts and ends with Hex Enduction Hour. It sure as hell doesn't start with the 458489 B-sides collection, like I once thought. "Hey, it's cheap, and it has lots of songs, and it's two discs!" = bad move. If you're new to the scene, and you want to know what the big deal is about this Fall group, proceed to Hex Enduction Hour post haste. But don't just take the word of some bitter no-talent sweater-wearing Pitchfork Media jerk. Renowned musicologist Courtney Love swears by the album's ramshackle opulence and vituperative charm. Even street thugs like Hex Enduction Hour! Why, one went so far as to play catch with my driver's side backseat window using a piece of concrete, just to get a hold of a copy.
Castle has kindly reissued the album, and added a bonus disc. The recent Peel Sessions collection makes the inclusion of two session tracks somewhat superfluous, but that valuation assumes you're fanatical enough that the decision to drop upwards of $50 for a 6xCD set of radio sessions is no biggie. If you're not so disposed, enjoy this interpretation of "Deer Park" (the third on this collection) and a rinky-dinked "Who Makes The Nazis?" that replaces the introductory ping-ponging bass line with some banjo-sounding plunking. In addition, there's a B-side-- "I'm Into C.B.", which sounds like a Fall B-side-- and some live tracks. Most notable from the live stuff is the inappropriately titled "Jazzed Up Punk Shit", unless their idea of jazz came from traveling into the future to watch This Is Spinal Tap. It's more like down-tempo Fall shit, the band puttering along on E (the fuel gague reading, not the recreational aid) as Mark E. mulches "shit" into "shirt." All of this is good, by the way.
No write-up concerning the Fall is complete without mentioning and/or quoting their gone-but-not-forgotten patron saint John Peel, so here you go: "Always different, always the same." And that's Hex in a nutshell. You've got two-drummer, four-on-the-floor rave-ups like "The Classical", you've got pensive seethers like "Hip Priest", and you have a kazoo on "Nazis?"-- all different, but all the same. It's Mark E. Smith's scatological charisma that makes, breaks, and remakes the Fall. As has been said before and will be said many times, the Fall are pre-, post-, and beyond punk, taking the same old tools and building timeless machines. Atavistic in approach, futuristic in scope. And catchy as all hell, too-- phrases like "hey there, fuckface" and "he is not appreciated" are hard to escape, either while listening to this record or doing anything else. The most quotable tidbits, however, are the ones that can't be neatly discerned through Smith's interpretive elocution. In regards to a pseudo-intellectual magazine editor: "Has a beard which was weird/ Some time ago heard Ramones in '81/ Has a Spanish guitar." In regards to who makes the Nazis: "Motels like three split-level mirages...Buffalo lips on toast, smiling."
But what does it sound like, you may ask? Well, it sounds like the Fall. It sounds like a group of five talented musicians trying to play as brilliantly stupid as possible, while a sixth fellow from the docks hops on stage, grabs the mike, and fights his way through the morass scorched-earth style. It sounds like the primordial ooze that birthed touchstones like the Stooges and the Velvet Underground come to life, nursing a bitch of a hangover and a vendetta. It's something you're born with, not something you learn. And, as on most Fall records, but especially this one, it's something to behold.


The Los Angeles band nods to various corners of psychedelic music while transcending its influences on this blissful and spacious debut album.

Mandatory Enjoyment

Dummy has all the makings of a modern cult band. Formed in late 2018, the Los Angeles group have evolved noticeably in a short span of time, leaving behind the shivering avant-folk of their first EP and lo-fi video game music of EP2, recorded on an iPhone. Their debut full-length, Mandatory Enjoyment, is just as voracious, merging the band’s key influences from 1990s noise-pop and early electronic psychedelia with ambient interludes that add welcome dynamics between bursts of frenzied instrumentation. You could call it “record collection rock,” but it’s also one of this year’s most consistent debuts.
Emma Maatman’s droning organ is a hallmark of Dummy’s music, filtering through almost every song on Mandatory Enjoyment. When combined with her sundazed, deadpan vocals and drummer Alex Ewell’s endlessly cycling rhythms, they sound like they’ve intently studied the Stereolab catalog. However, the band of self-professed music nerds are just as likely to name-drop bossa nova post-punks Antena, new age godfather Laraaji, or the original LA jangle-pop group, The Byrds. Dummy’s brand of drone-pop is intended to be blissful and spacious rather than dour and  claustrophobic: “We love the idea that you can make layered, complex, chaotic music but not in the pursuit of it being difficult or abstract,” they have said.
Dummy’s dual guitarists Joe Trainor and Nathan O’Dell (both former members of Baltimore band Wildhoney) inject the album’s noisiest songs with jolts of distortion. “Punk Product #4” is the first time we hear them let it rip, before the brief, scrambled solo at the conclusion of “Daffodils” that sounds like Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan kept on a short leash. The latter song leaps out of the tracklisting, bookended by the field sample interlude “Unremarkable Wilderness” and thumping, Silver Apples-styled motorik of “X-Static Blanket.” This clever sequencing makes Mandatory Enjoyment’s louder passages pop and the quiet ones feel deeply hypnotic.
Outside of Dummy, the band’s members have spent time in unexpected corners of music, including Maatman’s role in the doom metal group Taarkus and her work as an art director for Southern Lord Records. With these years of experience, it makes sense that their lyrics would include elements of meta-commentary. Midway through “Punk Product #4,” Maatman defines the dilemma of any DIY artist wearing influences on their sleeve: “Years spent mining the obscure/What are they worth?/A couple hundred bucks a week/Scattered infinitesimally.” One song later, on the buoyant “Cloud Pleaser,” O’Dell lays out his complaints about the current state of rock music: “Everything homogenized/Easy to digest/Guitars crystalline/Sounds so pointless.” The two singers’ voices come together to trade calls and responses on the standout “Daffodils,” as the choruses provide a sarcastic suggestion to bury your head in the sand: “Never mind the changing times/Just ignore the signs.”
In his latest book, Muse-Sick, author and producer Ian Brennan writes that Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon remained on the charts for 957 weeks in part due to its vast dynamic range: “Those classics take a journey and allow the ear to rest—to listen to the noises within the ‘quiet,’” he writes. Dummy have understood this lesson since the extended ambient closer of their first EP, and both sides of Mandatory Enjoyment end with a similarly sprawling multi-part suite. Showcasing their attention to detail, a clopping woodblock rhythm appears halfway through “H.V.A.C.”  before fading into clattering percussion and kosmische synth tones. “Atonal Poem” drifts through metallophone-like electronic bleeps reminiscent of Hiroshi Yoshimura, then returns with a reprise of the band’s chiming art-rock. In less capable hands, music so meticulously researched and constructed could sound like pure mimicry. Instead, Dummy have transcended their influences and crafted their own record collector gem.

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With her second album, Willow Smith opts for a more organic and raw sound. It’s a huge leap in the right direction, as she uses her guitar to channel alternative singer-songwriters of the 1990s.

The 1st

Willow Smith has spent the entirety of her career in the limelight. It’s been eclectic and interesting, if not always stellar. Willow is clearly not interested in being a Top 40 popstar, though her stabs at higher consciousness through futuristic R&B have lacked the nuance of her more acclaimed peers. With her second album, the 17-year-old Willow faces the daunting task of avoiding a sophomore slump while having already reinvented herself twice before even graduating high school.
At this point, anything remotely musically challenging would be a relative win. But in a welcome turn of events, The 1st sees her leave the humdrum Soundcloud electrobeats well behind, opting instead for something more organic, substantial, and raw. These are all qualities that actually enhance her millennial-new-age persona instead of tempering it.
Upon first glance, the album still suffers from the same thematic editing issues that have always hampered the songs she writes. Opener “Boy” begins with the bluntly adolescent lyricism that gave her last album, Ardipithecus, its amateurish air: “Hey mom, I met a boy/He plays guitar/He likes Quentin Tarantino/And really sad songs.” It aims for “Leader of the Pack,” but sounds more like a saccharine diary entry.
But Willow displays a clear desire to grow as an artist and see her creative potential realized. As the album unfurls, each track digs deeper into this new down-to-earth, acoustic sound that seems tailor-made for her personal and reflective songwriting. “Boy” announces this tonal shift with plucked violins and lush strings, its pacing languid and relaxed. Willow’s voice settles into a throaty contralto, recalling Fiona Apple’s jazz-flecked vocals on Tidal.
In fact, for an album made by someone who wasn’t even born during the decade, The 1st is a surprisingly adept compendium of alternative female singer-songwriters of the 1990s. “And Contentment,” which features Willow on guitar, respectfully culls from Tracy Chapman’s introspective folk. The light grunge, crunchy guitar riffs, and strident vocals of “Human Leech” recall Alanis Morissette’s razor-sharp pop angst. An easy highlight, “Warm Honey” takes the indie rock breakbeats of Luscious Jackson and infuses them with Erykah Badu’s early mix of lilting R&B and esoteric imagery (“The universe is too bright/Light beams in the sky speaking to my third eye”).
Willow knows she’s talented and she knows that, due to her status, she has to prove that talent twice as much as anyone else. That The 1st is able to somewhat shed its lyrical blemishes within the first few tracks—evolving into a measured, intelligent, laid back soul-rock record—speaks to the tenacity with which Willow pursues her artistic goals. On much of The 1st, it sounds like Willow is still figuring out her own creative persona—the guitar playing on “Romance” feels simplistic, and tracks like the repetitive “Oh No!!!” bog down what would otherwise be a fresh sound. That said, Willow is clearly biding her time, searching for the optimal self. The 1st represents a huge leap in the right direction.


The fifth full-length from the experimental Berlin-based musician offers a meditation on negativity that’s dreary and enervating in equal turns.

Air Lows

The first words spoken on Air Lows are a firm suggestion: “Lay back.” Silvia Kastel’s tone is that of a knowledgeable overseer at a DIY hallucinogen ceremony. Her advice pans back and forth across the track while the cosmic instrumental suggests a funny person jumping around on the moon, alone with their thoughts. It’s an oddly whimsical introduction to a genuinely grave experimental electronic album full of anhedonic synths and moody sound effects. Her fifth full-length Air Lows feels like a goth psychedelic ritual intended to plumb the depths of the listener’s unconscious; while the record doesn’t always hit its mark, the moments that do sustain momentum radiate a delectably gnostic hum.
Much of Kastel’s previous output, both solo and as a founding member of the Italian duo Control Unit, has been influenced by ’70s and ’80s sounds of no wave and industrial music. Along these lines, her work often deals with themes of existential angst and depressive catharsis. She returns to this approach on Air Lows, but opens up her sound by incorporating motifs from club music for the first time—a move possibly influenced by her current home in Berlin. Kastel nurtures a more electrifying kind of machine energy by lacing her tracks with spectral techno beats stretched out in slow-mo. It becomes full-on body music when she discharges slabs of murky sub-bass that drag like an anvil across concrete. The effect is intensely visceral and immediately evocative of strains of sonic dread developed within jungle and UK dubstep.
Spindly, high-pitched synth gestures connect Kastel’s jumpy drum patterns and her gut-shifting low-end. They have an almost alchemical influence on the inner ear, their timbres alight with pleasantly grating resonance. It’s these passages, in combination with Kastel’s eerie vocal murmurations, that give the record its occult, para-spiritual feel. On the first half of Air Lows, these elements are implemented in a “song”-like format that feels a little too overdetermined by formal constraints. It’s on the album’s second half, which is more like a loosely defined four-part movement, that they really sync up with one another. The sonic palette forms its own ecology of sound, mutating and germinating in combusting feedback loops. “Heart 2 Tape” etches out a creepy form of dreamy decadence, while on “Spiderwebs” and “Concrete Void” Kastel pairs unwavering emotional intensity with dispassionate remove.
Much contemporary music that draws upon the canon of industrial and dark ambient ends up sounding like unimaginative Tumblr mood-boarding, or a flimsy attempt at LARPing bygone scenes. Kastel mostly avoids these pitfalls, though, and it’s clear that Air Lows is something a little more singular. Deciphering the lyrical content of her alternately sung and spoken passages can be hard, but one audible turn of phrase in “Spiderwebs” is a good index for the record’s ethos: “It’s the poetry of nothing/Concrete void.” Kastel’s previous solo release was called The Gap, and her fascination with hardcore negativity pervades the general spirit of Air Lows. Exactly what this negativity is supposed to do is left ambiguous—it’s positioned more like an abstract emotional compass than anything remotely resembling a coherent ideological stance.
The record’s central feeling tends to diffuse—in the moments when you’re not paying attention—through small adjustments in ambiance and mood. Gloom is stylized in many ways on Air Lows, and Kastel renders it luxuriously on the unsettling final track, “The Closer The Stranger.” Mainlining bursts of what the artist might figure as “concrete void,” it immerses the listener in smudged bliss. Kastel’s work here suggests that negativity can be bountiful, overflowing: something we ought to “lay back” into, as she urged in the beginning.


Devendra Banhart's fourth album corrals the combined talents of the loose-knit freak-folk community; the result is one of the scene's most accessible and engaging records.

Cripple Crow

As "freak-folk" began to hit a stride last summer, Devendra Banhart's Golden Apples of the Sun compilation suggested a cogent introduction to the genre. A year later, Cripple Crow provides, in a sense, the loose-knit scene's strongest group effort to date. Banhart's fourth album isn't a compilation, nor is it billed as a group project, but he's assembled such a rich cast of cohorts here, it feels more like the fruit of community interaction than the product of a lone singer/songwriter.
The communal vibe is hinted at by the album's artwork: Rather than adorning the cover with his usual calligraphic scribbles, Banhart offers a composite photo of "The Family" (a term he often ascribes to his musical friends), gathered beneath a large knotty tree and accompanied by the disembodied heads of smiling spirits. Sgt. Pepper is the obvious point of departure, though unlike the Beatles' classic, there are no numbered silhouettes in the liner notes to decode the relative anonymity of the photo subjects. Fittingly, the only immediately recognizable figure is Banhart himself, crouching front and center, wings spread wide.
The artwork conjures Native America, an attribute Banhart seemingly alluded to in a recent email exchange, admitting that he's "a little terrified at how white most of the people are," but reassuring me that "68% of the people on the cover have Native American blood." Indeed, Banhart strives for ethnic diversity on Cripple Crow, boasting the highest concentration of Spanish-sung tracks of any of his albums (he was raised in Venezuela where Spanish was his mother tongue), and finding him moving further beyond "freak" territory and into a worldly blend of various exotic approaches. Banhart has always experimented with method and sound, but he's never before approached Cripple Crow's expertise and variety. In all its obvious details, the album not only finds Banhart coming into his own as a songwriter and performer, but suggests future directions for the 24-year-old as well.
Having started out on primitive recorders and four-track machines, Banhart only recently graduated to proper studios, and Cripple Crow further increases fidelity, possessing a warmer, more pristine quality. His vocals, too, often draped in slight reverb, are especially assured and less flaky than on previous outings. And as mentioned above, an ensemble cast showed up to back him: There's best chum Andy Cabic (aka Vetiver), Noah Georgeson (of Joanna Newsom's old rock band the Pleased, and producer of The Milk-Eyed Mender), and Thom Monohan (Pernice Brother and production whiz). The cast also includes members of Currituck Co., Espers, Yume Bitsu, The Blow, Feathers, CocoRosie, and others. Basically, it's a traveling band of hippies excited about Donovan who aren't afraid to rock.
On Oh Me Oh My's "Roots", Banhart sang, "I don't play rock 'n' roll." All that's changed. Cripple Crow features an explosion of psychedelic R&R stuffs. "Long Haired Child" maneuvers a three-pronged guitar attack-- Adam Forkner's distorted noodling, Banhart's wah-wah, and acoustic coupling-- backed with Otto Hauser's drums and Jona Bechtolt's percussion. "Lazy Butterfly" is memorable for Cabic's closely mic'd backing vocals and a tambora sheen along with hand drums and guitars. And "Little Boys", which Banhart alleges is sung from the perspective of a schizophrenic Hermaphrodite, is divided in half by a mid-song bass change-up which shifts the song up from a sorta boring Oldham prom-dance lament to its sinister, surfy refrain: "I see so many little boys I wanna marry/ I see plenty little kids I've yet to had."
Juxtaposed against a number of upbeat rock tracks, Banhart's quieter, more introspective material often makes a stronger impact. "Dragonflies", a whispered duet between Banhart and Matteah Baim of Metallic Falcons, flutters by in less than a minute with a cryptically tender lyricism. Likewise, album opener "Now That I Know" is one of his most beautiful and controlled tracks yet. It finds him backed only by cello and his own guitar, in confessional: "12 years old/ In [my] mama's clothes/ Shut the blinds and lock up every door/ And if you hear someone's coming near/ Just close your eyes it'll make 'em disappear."
Elsewhere, on "Heard Somebody Say", there's a sense of protest, with Feathers' lovely vocals adding witch-hunt background layers. Banhart gently lays down the thesis-- "Heard somebody say the war ended today/ But everybody knows it's going still"-- before winding around to the chill-inducing punchline, the easiest anti-war slogan ever: "It's simple, we don't want to kill." Later, he tries out Dylan rhyme schemes on "I Feel Just Like a Child", while "Some People Ride the Wave" is Louis Armstrong with New Orleans toy jazz ("some people write the songs that stay inside our souls"); "The Beatles" lets it be known that "Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are the only Beatles in the world" before shifting gears into Spanish; Pangea and various fertility myths are given new legs in "Chinese Children"; and endless love song "Korean Dogwood" tells as thorough an elliptical story as Banhart's tackled.
Banhart's ambition is apparent throughout, but at 22 tracks and almost 75 minutes, the album does stretch its legs too long. Though it feels like an attempt to document as thoroughly as possible his late winter retreat to Woodstock, any more experienced mystics will tell you that blanks, dissolves, gaps, and other ingredients for mystery could've made it even richer. Still, Cripple Crow is undoubtedly impressive, vastly singular but entirely accessible, and an inspired listening experience where Banhart again proves himself one of the more talented and charismatic forces in modern music.


The Puerto Rican trio’s debut album is a sleek collage of reggaetón, indie rock, and R&B, heralding a vivid new era of Caribbean syncretism.

La Rareza

Much like the motley dialects, foodways, and spiritual practices that define the region, Caribbean musicians have never been shy about colliding genres in the spirit of innovation. It’s a deeply rooted cultural approach that has carved the path for the region’s most commercially successful artists of the last few decades—just consider the history of salsa, reggaetón, and dembow, to name a few. Now a whole new generation is poised to do the same with contemporary sounds, and Los Rarxs are at the forefront. Their debut album sharpens their revelrous R&B, but it also offers a snapshot of Latinx popular music’s current zeitgeist, especially in the Caribbean.
Los Rarxs have been searching for their voice over the course of their last four EPs, turning their disparate styles and musical inspirations into the funk and spark that now defines them. Singer Vento Alejandro forged his sleek vocal style fronting rock bands on Puerto Rico’s beachy west coast, where competing with raucous instruments prepared him to share the booth with two exuberant wordsmiths. Meanwhile, rappers Erre and FOKINFROID’s delivery is lively and quick-witted, allowing them to complement each other instead of swerving into redundancy. Orteez, their longtime beatmaker and unofficial fourth member, is the lead producer of the album (his recent credits include fast-rising names such as popetón purveyor Rauw Alejandro and emotón darling Álvaro Díaz). The introduction of new collaborators MELLOWAVES and UNOUNO (aka Muela Inmunda) might account for the doors the band opens here, though they don’t stray too far from the sound that garnered them a following in the first place: a chimerical blend of indie rock, quiet storm R&B, East Coast hip-hop, and sticky reggaetón that is both cohesive and spirited. Think of them as a more debaucherous the Internet, or Free Nationals with slightly more verve, and some essential Boricua swag as the secret ingredient.
La Rareza’s first single, “No Tire Foto,” fuses house music with other genres, taking a page from a trend that has permeated música urbana for the past two years. The band follows the same direction in “Búscame,” a track that stitches an energetic drum’n’bass break with lyrics about seeking the ultimate party. It’s tailor-made to be played at rude volumes during a pregame, and infusing the song’s fun and flirty aura with a dose of EDM is a seamless combination.
With its electric guitar licks, slow-jam drums, and Vento’s frisky chorus, opener “Tú Nunca Has Sentido” signals to old fans that the boys are trying something new and vying for more commercial appeal. The album takes off on the next song; “Guitarra” maximizes the trio’s talents into a danceable track chock full of sexy double entendres and a perreo beat designed for grinding with your partner of choice. FROID in particular shines here, with a clever verse that name drops Fender and B.B. King, staying true to the theme without losing its provocative edge. “Enetepé” is also a standout; it’s a mishmash of snares, hi-hats, and warbles that embraces whimsy, but doesn’t succumb to mere cacophony.
Vento cedes “Nomes13” to his shooters Erre and FROID, and the two team up for a riotous diss track. Here, Erre’s flow resembles street storytelling with an edge, his cadence sometimes recalling Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s Wish Bone, while FROID’s bars reflect a cheekier, more mischievous, and prurient demeanor. “Arrogantel,” meanwhile, is another opportunity for Vento to flaunt his smooth tenor and pop-rock and R&B sensibilities. Whether they’re being romantic or rambunctious, Los Rarxs always wear their emotions on their sleeves.
Reggaetón and its offshoots have dominated Puerto Rico for more than a decade, and more recently, Latinx trap and drill have encroached upon (and sometimes transcended) their predecessors. But now, pockets of a new sound—or sounds—have emerged on the island. Los Rarxs is one of numerous examples of up-and-coming artists creating a new aural oasis in Borikén, one that gleefully refuses easy definition. Alongside other performers like RaiNao (who Bad Bunny recently highlighted as one of his favorite discoveries of the summer and who is herself a fan of La Rareza) they instead exist in a musical smorgasbord that owes as much to rock en español icon Draco Rosa as reggaetón legend Don Omar.
Early in their career, Los Rarxs had unbridled zeal; today they’re more disciplined, but still thrilling. When even the most subdued tracks tempt a repeat listen, and the strongest ones promise to be in rotation for the rest of the year, it’s clear Los Rarxs are heralding a vivid new era of Caribbean syncretism.


This Australian garage-rock band's vocalist is several shades more complex and adaptable than your typical throat-shredding truth-teller: His warm, soulful voice pilots his group's promising 26-minute self-titled debut.

Royal Headache

"When he sings, it just comes out." That was Chris "Shortty" Short, drummer of soulful Sydney garage-punkers Royal Headache, expressing his own awe at the vocal stylings of his bandmate Shogun to Pitchfork's Evan Minsker. A half century past its born-on date, in the midst of yet another uptick in interest in the scuzzy stuff, and even the best of garage rock's new breed's not exactly long on surprises; the cream of this particular crop, as our Jayson Greene rightly noted a week back, "plays upon beloved memories while confusing them," but the worst of it simply seems to content itself with rehashing of somebody else's past glories. Get 20 seconds into "Never Again", opening chugger of Royal Headache's 2011 self-titled debut (just reissued in the States), and you may find yourself wondering whether you're in for another rotely rollicking, backward-facing fuzz assault. Seconds later, Shogun opens his mouth and, well, you won't be wondering that much longer.
Soul's a tough one to quantify, one of music's true know-it-when-you-hear-it propositions. But this Shogun character's got soul, no doubt about it. His voice-- warm, urgent, overloaded with feeling-- comes on like a house on fire, harkening back to the grit and grain of Faces-era Rod Stewart and Sam Cooke at the Harlem Square Club, several shades more complex and adaptable than your typical throat-shredding three-chorded truth-teller. It's a wonderfully lived-in, schtick-free, era-defying thing; along with Rod and Sam, young Roger Daltrey, Argybargy-era Glenn Tilbrook, and even Bob Pollard edge their way into the frame, but what Shogun's doing is hardly some studious reading of all these greats. As Shortty rightly claims, it just seems to come out that way, the kind of thing you just can't fake. Sure, Shogun sings the hell out of these songs, but every line's imbued with real emotion, and even when he's jamming stanzas with a couple-three too many words, his meaning's never less than crystal-clear. That, too, is soul.
Shogun's assuredly the centerpiece here, but sub him out for somebody else, and Royal Headache's songs would still stand fairly tall. For every economy-ridden post-Ramones thrasher like "Back and Forth", there's a shambolically stately, wordless breath-catcher like "Wilson Street" or a misty-eyed yearner like "Distant and Vague", which sounds for all the world like the kind of song the Beatles would've covered in their Hamburg days. These performances-- lo-fi without sloppiness, reined-in without losing their rollicking edge-- provide a rock-solid counterpoint for Shogun's hollers and croons. The whole record's got a bristling, live-in-a-room feel, and vocally, there's almost nothing in the way of harmonizing. Shogun, front-and-center on every track but the instrumental, has it covered all by himself.
Royal Headache's 26 minutes go by quickly, and while it's not all run-and-gun pacing, another ballad (or another "Wilson Street") might have helped a bit with the balance. And, as with any innovation-averse music like this, there's a rousing game of spot the influence to be played if you think you can keep up. But the inclusive, ebullient Royal Headache's simply having too much fun in the present to ever let the past get in their way. "Honey Joy"-- the highest of Royal Headache's many highs-- finds an exuberant Shogun shouting, "honey joy, honey joy, honey joy, boys," a line that, typed out, doesn't look like much of anything. But Shogun, like Brenton Wood in "The Oogum Boogum Song" or Otis Redding in "Happy Song (Dum-Dum)", manages to turn that little sliver of nonsense into a pint-hoisting, mates-toasting embrace. "It just comes out," you say? By all means, keep it coming.


The result of a 10-day recording session in Salvador De Bahia in Brazil, Calidostopia! features material from Oval's post-2010 output transformed into pop-structured songs featuring vocals from seven South American artists.

Calidostópia!

Back in the mid-90s, Berlin's Markus Popp became known for trailblazing the iconic Clicks & Cuts style, working with the glitchy audio from skipping CDs. Back then, his band Oval was a trio, but Popp subsequently went solo and pursued an increasingly abstruse aesthetic with a series of albums for Thrill Jockey. Popp has often said that his work from this era was concerned with deconstructing and commenting on "music" in the traditional sense of the term, rather than participating directly in that culture. Oval's "Aero Deck", from 1994's Systemisch, was sampled on "Unison" from Björk's Vespertine, which takes a similarly deconstructionist approach.
In 2010, after almost a decade of silence from the Oval project, Popp started afresh with the name. He described O, released as Oval, as feeling like a "debut album". Sampled sonic minutiae were replaced with real instruments, "loops" replaced with "riffs," and careful studio arrangements supplemented with live improvisation. The results, by Oval's standards, were unprecedentedly warm and inviting. This pioneer of the abstract was, he claimed, finally making "music."
Take a closer look at Oval's discography, though, and this narrative starts to feel simplistic. For all his emphasis on procedure over music and his use of self-imposed compositional restraints, Popp has always had something of a populist sensibility. Half of Oval's oft-overlooked 1993 debut LP, Wohnton, featured charmingly unschooled vocals and breakbeat-led percussion, inviting comparisons with contemporaries Seefeel. A decade later, Popp collaborated with singer Eriko Toyoda as So, for an eponymous LP where twilit vocal-guitar ballads lurked under the clouds of digital filigree.
Calidostopia!, recently released as a free download, isn't so much a bolt from the blue as a return to a long-held preoccupation. This record was the result of a 10-day recording session in Salvador De Bahia in Brazil, funded by the Goethe Institute and the Cultural Foundation of the State of Bahia. Popp brought along tracks taken from O, its preceding EP Oh, and offcuts compilation OvalDNA, as well as some unreleased sketches. Seven vocalists from across South America transformed them, in Popp's words, from "material" into "songs." As such, this record treats vocals in a manner more direct than Popp has attempted since Wohnton, and foregrounds the song-like forms latent in Popp's recent compositions.
Given that many of these tracks have been previously released, the palette of this album will be familiar: gorgeous resonant tones, somewhere between guitar and plucked piano strings, that sputter sharply or lap like waves; splashy drums dancing nimbly around a groove; miniaturised squalls of electronic noise. In fact, as with O, Popp's choice of sounds is almost too uniform, leaving it up to the vocalists to ward off potential monotony. Here they have mixed success. At points the marriage of vocal and backing is entirely adequate but doesn't really amount to more than the sum of its parts. Maité Gadea fails to take command in "Glossy", and her contribution feels slightly extraneous as a result; Aiace's melodies on "Alpen" and "Credit Roll" unfold in a measured, staid manner that seems to stifle the organic nature of their backings.
But a handful of exquisite moments make the whole thing worthwhile. Agustín Albrieu is the most reliable in this regard, his wonderfully clear, open tone lending a starry-eyed quality to opener "Featurette" and closer "Savvy Aeropuerto". Elsewhere, Hana Kobayashi transforms "Koral" into a beautiful hushed lullaby, undeniably the record's highlight. Calidostopia! certainly feels like a hothoused project rather than a painstakingly constructed album-- the vocals are a little lacking in finesse at points, and the wholesale use of pre-existing tracks can lend the thing a feeling of inflexibility. But at its best it's a captivating listen, and an admirable move from a producer who continues to challenge himself after two decades in the game. "This might be only the beginning," says Popp of this project. Fingers crossed.


Hardcore is a genre that revels in certain clichés—the ultimate of which is making a record that renounces your ties to hardcore. The former powerviolence group Ceremony's new album, their second for Matador, finds them wanting to sound like Joy Division, and it’s interesting in the way that any true debacle is interesting.

The L-Shaped Man

Hardcore is a genre that revels in certain clichés—the ultimate of which is making a record that renounces your ties to hardcore. Despite its commonality, it’s still a risky maneuver: perhaps playing in such a stylistic straitjacket has made a band incapable of doing anything else. Even if it’s an artistically successful record, it can alienate old fans without attracting new ones. Most relevant to Ceremony, it’s a card you only get to play once. Six years after they could be accurately described as "powerviolence," the Bay Area group released their John Goodmanson-produced Matador debut *Zoo—*a slog through boggy, primordial punk, interesting for the sole fact that it was made by a former powerviolence band. Ceremony undergoes another drastic change on The L-Shaped Man, but it cannot be leniently judged relative to Violence Violence. They’re now just one of the thousands of indie rock bands that really want to sound like Joy Division, and sounding no more engaged with their source material than the average dude plucking an Unknown Pleasures graphic T off the rack at Hot Topic.
Mind you, Ceremony are on their fifth record and are named after a Joy Division song. But at the very least, the veritable return to their roots makes sense within the context of The L-Shaped Man. Ceremony are also one of the thousands of indie rock bands making a conceptual breakup record; and in these situations, such a breakup is assumed to be so catastrophic that it totally dismantles one’s self-construct and leaves nothing but foundation. Joy Division lyrics, advice from your father, bumper stickers that read "all things pass"—everything you’ve been led to think is trite once you’re out of your teens might actually reveal themselves to be the truth.
There’s no way to judge the authenticity of Ross Farrar’s emotions on The L-Shaped Man. But how can he can be exempt on an album where everything feels like facade? In particular, the facade inherent in Ceremony’s own name, as they grab at the most obvious signifiers of their idols and pass them off as their own. For one thing, Farrar’s vocals are now unrecognizable, or only recognizable as Ian Curtis karaoke. To be fair, Curtis is a natural touchstone for a punk rock carny barker, as his enduring qualities—the militaristic cadences, the claustrophobic melodies—can be approximated without much technical ability.
But you can’t fake his command or intensity or sonorousness, though Farrar tries. Or maybe he doesn’t try hard enough. The lyrics are delivered with honesty and presumed urgency. They are also proof that those qualities can be less important than thinking before you talk. The dishwater-gray ambience of "Exit Fears" implies sleepless nights filled with lingering regret, while Farrar moans, "The pain will leave in the night/ Memories return in the light"—which seems to express the exact opposite of what he means. "The root of the world is in the red heart," "you saw yourself walking with no one else and it scared you"—they all aspire to be aphorisms and fade upon impact like a tweet never to be favorited. The album title itself is indicative of Farrar making observations without any insight—men are generally L-shaped, but...so?
The lack of resonance is even more obvious in Farrar’s newfound tone, a monster mash of alternating cartoonish bellow and honk which doesn’t sound like Curtis or Paul Banks so much as the dude from Editors drunkenly imitating Paul Banks trying to sing like Ian Curtis. Of all Farrar’s means of cheating towards cogency—repetition of lyrics that just can’t bear the attempts at establishing portent, lending numerous song titles a definitive article to import significance—the most absurd is his Jay McInerney-like tendency to speak almost entirely in the second person. Call it Turn on the Bright Lights, Big City.
As a working unit, Ceremony still play with customary, clumsy enthusiasm. The terse drumrolls, plangent guitar fills, and basslines that are all thumbs—it’s all here and played with the expected looseness of a former hardcore band that moved onto garage rock and is now learning post-punk on the fly. It occasionally coalesces into a surf-goth hybrid that at least justifies John Reis being roped into this. Who knows what Ceremony expected of the former Hot Snakes/Rocket From the Crypt frontman, but his production might be more overmatched than mismatched: the confused melodies Farrar strews over the piano plunking of "Hibernation" and the wayward guitar leads in "Root of the World" can generously be heard as an experiment in avant-garde atonality. Ceremony would’ve been better off phoning a different guy from Drive Like Jehu—put Mark Trombino behind the drums or the boards and he could provide a high-velocity, low-viscosity sleekness that would make relatively hooky outliers like "The Separation" and "Bleeder" go incognito on satellite radio as enjoyably derivative post-pop-punk.
The L-Shaped Man does have an advantage over Zoo, in that it’s interesting in the way any true debacle is, where a band’s conviction is either impervious to any kind of outside intervention or just not subject to it. Just look at the album cover: almost immediately after Ceremony revealed The L-Shaped Man, fans noticed its too-hilarious-to-be-intentional similarity to a gag from the "A Millhouse Divided" episode of "The Simpsons." This is better known as the "Can I Borrow a Feeling" episode, an unfortunate coincidence seeing as how we’re talking about a record whose entire aesthetic is on loan. It’s even more serendipitous in light of the exact scene with the offending Pictionary attempt—there we have Kirk Van Houten, on the verge of a calamitous divorce, yelling at a dinner party crowd who reacts to his inept visual rendering of "dignity" with embarrassed silence. Maybe it's good for a laugh, but only as a defense mechanism against the cringe-inducing experience of watching artistic expression abandon a heartbroken man at his lowest moment.


The Hot Chip founding member’s first official solo full-length is a collection of charming odes to the history of dance music.

Electric Lines

As a founding member of Hot Chip, Joe Goddard has been producing on an international stage since his band’s dance pop became popular in the mid-2000s. Over the past decade, he’s also released high-energy disco and house as one half of the 2 Bears, co-founded Greco-Roman Records, and produced countless remixes (he was even nominated for a Grammy last year for his edit of the Chemical Brothers’ “Wide Open”). But many of those efforts seemed secondary to Hot Chip. More than any of his previous solo endeavors, Goddard’s latest solo album, Electric Lines, holds steadily on its own.
For Electric Lines, Goddard has adapted the tried and true DJ/producer album format—multiple vocal features, obscure samples, pop structures—to his particular sensibilities. But instead of stringing cookie-cutter dancefloor hits, Electric Lines is an electronic pop LP funneled through the intellectual lens Goddard honed during his many years in Hot Chip’s ranks. One of the best examples of this is the album’s opening track, “Ordinary Madness,” which sounds like a meditation on the Zara Larsson-style tropical house that has been tediously inescapable for the past five years or so. Amid warm, tinkling synths and breezy electric guitars, British singer Slo sweetly croons a catchy melody—if she sounded any more laid-back, she’d have had to record her takes on a chaise lounge. Instead of merely copying radio-friendly summertime songs, Goddard tries to deconstruct them, injecting an arsenal of tricks into tired production tropes, making something both familiar and instantly listenable.
Lead single “Home” is the album’s crown jewel, both an homage to the deep Detroit house of the ’80s and the UK big beat chart-toppers of the ’90s. Built around a jubilant sample of “We’re on Our Way Home” by 1970s Detroit funk group Brainstorm, “Home” couples that band’s star-reaching, soulful vocals with those of 26-year-old Daniel Wilson, an American singer and producer who has been one of this genre’s best kept secrets for the past few years. With its low R&B tones and splashy snares, “Home” is a perfect middle ground between an understated comedown and an all-out peaking-on-the-dancefloor banger. It illustrates the feeling of reluctantly leaving a party only because the sun has decided to come up.
Goddard’s odes to the history of dance music are charming, and Electric Lines convincingly showcases the sheer breadth of his encyclopedic knowledge of production. It’s also a little too reliant on it. Though solidly enjoyable, Electric Lines could have benefitted from some more concretely original ideas to propel it forward.
But when Goddard taps into his love for house, disco, and techno, his enthusiasm radiates through the speakers. Where the sample on “Home” is used in contrast to the song’s more low-key moments, “Lose Your Love” repurposes the Emotions’ “I Don’t Wanna Lose Your Love” in a more traditional way, carving through a climbing piano loop punctuated with blasts of horns. Goddard gives us a taste of the familiar with the title track, featuring vocals by Hot Chip’s lead singer Alexis Taylor. It’s the quietest and most reflective song on the record, a slow-building web of handclaps, electropop keys, and Taylor’s unmistakably pensive voice. It’s difficult not to pit it against other Hot Chip songs, and realistically, it could fit on any one of their albums. Here, it’s a touching look at what Goddard has accomplished and a new place to stand.


2 Chainz's Trap-A-Velli Tre arrives as the rapper is fighting to remain relevant in a crowded field. Perhaps because of this, he raps with real purpose for the first time in a long time, and the tape contains several serious reminders that 2 Chainz still has real hit-making potential.

Trap-A-Velli Tre

When rapper 2 Chainz released Trap-A-Velli in 2009 he was still Tity Boi, the more prominent member of middling Atlanta duo Playaz Circle. That seems like a lifetime ago. Back then, as a signee of Ludacris' label, Disturbing Tha Peace, with one hit single to his credit (which was heavily indebted to its Lil Wayne feature), his boasts were discernibly smaller. Still, it was easy to hear his talent working. Even then he was an expert at making basic rap colorful and comical (on "Stunt": "The feet on the whip, big like Jurassic Park/ The car tall, to get in you need a running start"). By the time 2010's Trap-A-Velli 2 arrived, the rapper was a free agent, and it felt like he was campaigning to be a star, swaggering a bit bigger on record while carefully floating around an alternate moniker. The following year brought the name change and with it came the breakthrough, completing one of the more successful rebrands in rap history. Shortly thereafter, he landed the rap trifecta: a big feature run, a signature mixtape, and a #1 debut.
The third installment in the series, Trap-A-Velli Tre, comes at a very different time for 2 Chainz. After becoming a chart mainstay for much of the '10s, he's fighting to remain relevant in a crowded field. His 2013 sophomore album, B.O.A.T.S. II: Me Time, was shut out by urban radio: Not only did it sell significantly less than its predecessor, it also failed to chart a single in either the Billboard Top 40 or the Rap Top 10. (Four of his previous five singles hit both of those marks.) For a rapper that relies on visibility as much as 2 Chainz does, that's a pretty sizable blow. Last year, his solid FreeBase EP came and went without so much as a whimper, despite the stellar, single-ready "Crib in My Closet" with big name guests Rick Ross and A$AP Rocky. He's at the point in his career where stagnation could render him a footnote.
Perhaps 2 Chainz is aware of this, because on Trap-A-Velli Tre, for the first time in a very long time, he raps with real purpose. These aren't the phoned-in raps from failed crossovers like Jessie J's "Burnin' Up" and TeeFLii's "24 Hours". 2 Chainz has always been naturally charismatic, and it's an integral part of his shtick, but his true talent is measuring the weight of a goofy punchline. When he raps "Get so much pussy I go to sleep with a condom on" on "A Milli Billi Trilli", it comes after a string of considerably less ridiculous jokes  and it lands right before the hook, boosting its effectiveness.
Good comedy sometimes requires a sharp eye for commentary, and on the tape's centerpiece, "GOAT", which features The-Dream, he mixes in keen observations ("Mama's only child, the crackhouse was my daycare") with goofy humor ("Aiming for the stars, so I fucked her on the balcony"). Trap-A-Velli Tre often struggles to find that balance elsewhere. On a pair of Zaytoven-produced tracks, "BFF" and "Starter Kit", cringeworthy bars stick out like sore thumbs. His daughters pop up on "Halo (Letter to My Unborn Son)", a weird record written from the perspective of the fetus. There's a random bar about having enough land to find Sasquatch. Sixteen tracks means there is far too much room for filler. 2 Chainz isn't built to embellish.
Despite the overabundance of one-liners, it isn't all laughs on Trap-A-Velli Tre. There are several serious reminders that 2 Chainz still has real hit-making potential. The TM88-produced "Big Meech Era" staggers back in time through otherworldly synths and feedbacking 808s. "Watch Out" reinterprets the minimalism of OG Maco's "U Guessed It" and turns it into a full-on jam that can sustain itself for longer that six seconds. On "Lapdance in the Trap House", produced by Honorable C Note, he shouts some of his most graphic boasts ("Put a half a milli in an MCM bag/ Had that muthafucka looking pregnant!") over deflating synth chords. If he can again harness his charm, he may just stick around awhile longer.


While only four tracks and under 20 minutes of music, the Swedish duo Thunder Tillman’s debut EP spans continents.

Jaguar Mirror

There’s not much info to be gleaned on the Swedish duo Thunder Tillman, and you have to dig deep just to find out that number of members and country of origin. Perhaps most elucidating is a recent mix for The Lot radio, wherein the group (or was it just one member plus their life coach?) labeled the set “a magic carpet ride with no dead weight” and then proceeded to drift through tripped-out edits of Lizzy Mercier Descloux and PiL as well as world-music warpers like Hector Zazou and Aksak Maboul. All these smartly chosen regional jams, mixing into a psychedelic Pangaeam points to their own sound, as their own productions seamlessly slid right into the mix without marking an obvious crossing of borders.
While only four tracks and under 20 minutes of music, Thunder Tillman’s debut EP for ESP Institute spans continents. In that manner, it both mirrors the aesthetic of the LA-based imprint while also marking a new direction for it. Since 2009, ESP Institute has specialized in left-field dance tracks from producers around the world; it’s where Norwegian Prins Thomas remixes Japanese weirdos Cos/Mes, dark circuitry gets bent by Serbian 33-10-3402 and Aussie Tornado Wallace gets washed out by Cali beachheads Pharaohs. But like most dance imprints, the label usually focuses on producers working by their lonesome, while Tillman sounds like a duo just jamming things out, not quite sure where their ultimate destination might be.
Take opener “Exact Location of the Soul” which begins at a low murmur of strummed guitar and droning organ. Just as it passes the minute mark and you suspect it has reached a chill cruising altitude, it suddenly picks up velocity. Drums crash in and give the song a classic motorik beat and the song blooms into Technicolor with flute twirls and swirling keys. The melody climbs higher, and while it brings to mind the likes of La Düsseldorf as well as bands like Stereolab and Spiritualized who emulated that sublime rock drone, “Soul” drifts along at its own pace.
The other tracks eschew the dancefloor entirely, but are sublime in their own right. “Snake Charmers Union” moves slowly, propelled by little more than a shaker and floor toms as the melody glints behind the percussion, wheezing and whirring at a relaxed pace, slowly dovetailing into the dizzying keyboard arpeggios of early Terry Riley on closer “Alignments.” The title track suggests the most promise: A bass and church organ figure lurch together, beehive drones and wordless vocals swell all around while a rattle invokes cumbia at its most psychedelic. It all suggests a methodical climb up Teotihuacan, and nearly four minutes in, it all strips back to just organ and voice, suggestive of a Morricone soundtrack, building tension with only a few elements. And like most magic carpet rides or pyramid climbs, you wonder just how you got up to this rarefied space and how you'll get back down.


The Puerto Rican quartet blends streamlined psych pop, atmospheric chillout, and yacht-rock disco on a concept album about lovelorn dream states.

Cromo Rx

With their 2018 debut album, Modo, Puerto Rico’s Epilogio staked out a thoroughly contemporary position within a lineage of Latin psych rock and disco. Founded a few years before, the quartet worked its way from smaller venues to touring Mexico at a time when rock was being eclipsed by Latin trap, standing out in their Geordi La Forge-esque visors and all-white tracksuits. Tracks like “Sonido Infinito,” “Submarina Club,” and “Otro Nivel” channeled inspirations from ’70s Argentine rockers Almendra and Pescado Rabioso alongside dream pop and acid jazz into sleek, subdued funk.
Five years later, the group applies its retro fixations to more ambitious ends with Cromo Rx, a concept album about a special pill that lulls those who take it into a deep slumber filled with fantastical dreams. They lean into the setup with aplomb, using it to alchemize sounds and genres: bolero interludes sandwiched between surf-rock riffs; glam-metal guitar hooks and echoes of ’80s new wave that segue into somber emo.
Following the expository “La Pastilla de Tus Sueños, Pt. 1” (“The Pill of Your Dreams, Pt. 1”), the horn fanfare of “Pirámide” kicks off the sojourn with a fusion of indie rock and electric sitar, courtesy of Peré Oudav. Peppered with references to heat, mirages, and pyramids, the song evokes a trippy desert landscape, an idea underlined by the René Laloux-inspired visuals of its music video. From that setting they shift to the pastoral ’60s harmonies of “Hangar,” whose folksy twangs make it easy to picture Epilogio performing from a quaint fairgrounds gazebo. “12AM,” in contrast, harnesses arena-rock energy with crisp drums and bluesy guitar licks before morphing into a sleek, Tame Impala-esque shuffle that underlines guitarist Marco Torres’ breezy croon.
Epilogio have been releasing the bulk of Cromo Rx’s tracks as singles for a year now, and fittingly, the album feels like a collection of A-sides. “Circuito por Milán” and “Platicar” are tailor-made to kill live, so much so that they re-recorded the latter to include an extended jam they’d been tacking on at the end in concert. The ethereal "Molecular" marries funky wah-wah with chillout, while the solemn “Los Cuervos”—with guest vocals from Chango Menas, of the now-disbanded group Índigo—pulls back the sheet and confirms what’s really gnawing at Epilogio’s melancholy: heartbreak, of course, as ever. It’s all fun and games until you remember what you’re trying to run away from. Beneath fanciful lyrics sketching out the album’s dream world—filled with explorers, race car drivers, secret agents, and spacemen—lurks an underlying angst: These are adventures meant for two.
Concept albums can be a risky proposition, but Epilogio make good use of Cromo Rx’s expanded imaginative bandwidth. As they travel from dream to dream, the band revels in exhilarating moods while grappling with the lovelorn feelings that loom over the fits of joy. Whereas Modo was an “instruction manual” to overcoming heartbreak, here they bring a more outlandish approach to similar subject matter. The sound of the record is so lively and varied that the album’s conceptual Macguffin might not even have been necessary. But Epilogio’s creative swing helps show off the breadth of their musicality and their increasingly sharp lyrics. As rock en español oscillates between indulging in saccharine pop and retreating to harder-edged corners of alternative and metal, Epilogio show that there’s another path to be found in tapping the nostalgic sounds of decades past and reshaping them into a narrative that hits all its emotional beats.


The L.A. duo's debut album is very much in sync with the R&B slow jams made popular in recent months. But inc. doesn't aim to duplicate the vocal abilities or striking personalities of contemporaries Frank Ocean or Jessie Ware, opting instead for distinct, velveteen scene-setting.

no world

no world is Andrew and Daniel Aged's second release as inc. (formerly Teen Inc.), and it refines and improves on 2011's 3 EP. On that brief release, the two L.A. producers were still trying to extract their strengths as songwriters and producers from their fixation on 1980s R&B. Two years later, they've found a much more appealing comfort zone. The Ageds are producers and session players first-- they've produced and played with a handful of big names in R&B, soul, and pop music as well as lo-fi artist Nite Jewel-- and this approach manifests itself clearly on no world, which feels like the work of studio hermits successfully dialing in on a sound. The atmospheres, textures, and melodies here feel drawn from a parallel universe where smooth Quiet Storm standards like "All This Love" or "Secret Lovers" were made in the ProTools era of infinite layering.
Whether by plan, luck, or a combination of both, no world finds itself in good company. Over the past 12 months, sultry, slow jam R&B has made an incredible comeback: Miguel's "Adorn" borrowed from "Sexual Healing" and Gregory Abbott's "Shake You Down", and the sound found its cachet heightened with Frank Ocean's "Thinkin' Bout You", Usher's "Climax," Jessie Ware's Devotion, and the Voodoo reissue. inc. doesn't aim to duplicate the vocal abilities or striking personalities of their most skilled contemporaries, instead opting for distinct scene-setting. Opening cuts "The Place" and "Black Wings" are enveloping soundscapes cloaked in velvet, cut with a self-conscious air of mystery. When Andrew sings, "I feel like you've been here before," it's the perfect piece of bedroom soul scene-setting: It's all about you, not him, wait... doesn't he know you from somewhere?
Though the album is obsessed with the sound of the early 1980s, the Ageds incorporate nods toward R&B's internet-fueled 21st century mutations; "The Place" and "5 Days" pull the flat, skittering drum patter from Atlanta's trap-rap production playbook. The last few years' indie/R&B crossover resonates throughout the album, as well, with good reason. Legendary British independent 4AD is releasing no world, and the grey, slowly billowing guitars on "black wings" and the cavernous atmospherics of "Angel" feel like the Aged brothers' nod toward label godheads the Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil. Andrew's muted vocals throughout the record, mixed to blend in with the production, have more in common with Toro y Moi's willowy retro soul than anything currently climbing the R&B charts.
Being perfectly of its time obviously doesn't mean that no world competes on the same level as their most successful contemporaries: the xx, Rhye's viral-era, gender-twisting Sade fixation, even How to Dress Well's full-on smooth-soul deconstruction. There's the sense that the duo with the purposefully generic corporate moniker, the timid fixation on lower case letters, and the penchant for composing songs out of genres are comfortable with their whispery anonymity, which is fortunate: inc. is both faithful to its source material and clever enough to twist it into new shapes, but at least for the time being, no world is unlikely to bring the Ageds out of the shadows.


This punk band from Vancouver has learned a thing or two about sludge and volume from the year punk broke, but Nü Sensae also have the finesse to break the mold. At its best, the record is a thrilling example of the power of righteous anger.

Sundowning

Rage at its most pointed can offer a footing, a way to define yourself through protest and negation. But it's more potent when left open to interpretation. Delivered in abstract terms, rage can elevate a punk band. Furious questions, not answers, leave a lasting impression. What does this band detest? Nü Sensae, the Vancouver trio of bassist and vocalist Andrea Lukic, drummer Daniel Pitout, and newly added guitarist Brody McKnight, explore the latter territory on their heaviest and finest noise punk record yet, Sundowning.
Nü Sensae's approach feels like a cut-and-paste message-in-a-bottle from the early 1990s: the hysteric vocal ferocity of Babes in Toyland's Kat Bjelland; the unpredictable artistry of early Sonic Youth; the violent corners of post-hardcore noise à la Unsane. This band has learned a thing or two about sludge and volume from the year punk broke; in 2010, inspired by Bikini Kill zines, they began monthly fan-mailings to hundreds of followers around the globe. But Nü Sensae also have the finesse to break the mold: guitars that hint at mystic psychedelia, dirging death marches, wildly tense drum builds. Some verses border on floating, spoken word, as in the record's dread-laced final moment: "I'm in my own world. Life is a nice girl," Lukic deadpans on the massive "Eat Your Mind". "Sweet and secret subtle mess. My 45 is loaded. My head is exploding."
Everything on Sundowning is heavier and more pronounced than the band's 2010 full-length TV, Death, and the Devil. The menacing lead single, "Swim", is a dynamic punk song about doing something new-- "I hit it for the first time/ You wouldn't even try"-- that packs more variation into three minutes than some punk groups manage on an entire record. It opens with sharp, ringing chords and pummeling drums that foreshadow Lukic's clenched, harrowing attack: shrill, full-throated roars that are improbably visceral. Here, and throughout, Lukic flips between coarse, grating shrieks and a hovering, emotionless style that channels Kim Gordon. It sounds both schizophrenic and seamless, anchoring the band's studied loud-quiet shifts. Sundowning's contrasted vocals create a friction that increases the album's velocity, even when thematically deluded, like on the maniacal "Dust": "Speak backwards/ Talk faster/ The walls become a monster/ You've realized/ Your nightmares/ Are thoughts and nothing matters."
Melody is not a priority. The band seems more concerned with dismantling drum kits. Pitout's percussive assaults function like an additional voice of their own-- opening songs unexpectedly with crescendoing rolls, or working with negative space to create something tense and uneasy. The distant "Tea Swamp Park" and "Say What You Are" use skittish, barely-there instrumentation with peculiar, far-off harmonies. The album's introductory instrumental "First Born" conjures a slow, haunted sense of isolation, like peaking through the door to a musty old house, suspecting it's empty but imagining the potential horrors inside. "Tyjna", meanwhile, is a grim, anxious, and ultimately thrilling track sung in Lukic's native Serbian, centered on a jailed person hit with a supernatural fear of our internalized secrets. "What do I do now without my thoughts?" Lukic shouts. Its sentiment feels timely, with a delivery easily comparable to Pussy Riot.
In a 2011 radio interview, a broadcaster asked Pitout about a t-shirt he wore in a picture online: "GIRLS INVENTED PUNK ROCK, NOT ENGLAND," the popular Kim Gordon shirt. The reporter inquired as to what Pitout thought women and non-straight men bring to punk. "Personally, I'm a gay male, and I really relate to female punk musicians," he said. "There's something inherently angry and punk about growing up a girl, or gay, or feeling like you don't fit into the top seat in society." Nü Sensae, despite their loud and endearingly torturous qualities, don't communicate so transparently on record. But Sundowning is an empowering listen, and Lukic's roars force you to reckon with what's raw inside yourself.
Last weekend, I went running with this album. I happened upon a young man clad in a very different sort of shirt: "Cool story babe. Now make me a sandwich." Dumbfounded, I paused, and started towards him; took a photo, told him squarely to fuck himself, and moved away. Which is to say, bands like Nü Sensae can offer valid lessons for living; stay mad, make something of it. And they also offer reminders that so long as pricks like that guy exist, and better dressed versions of him are entrusted as lawmakers, our world will always have room for vital, liberative punk.


Michael Jackson was a perfectionist about his music, and he recorded many more songs than he ever released. That means that there's a lot of unreleased material in his archives; Michael appeared in 2010, and now we've got this strange, underfed, vaguely horrid eight-song record.

Xscape

Michael Jackson has released more new music in the five years since his death than in the 12 years before it. Jackson was a perfectionist about his music, and he recorded many more songs than he ever released. That means that there's a lot of unreleased material in his archives; Michael appeared in 2010, and now we've got this strange, underfed, vaguely horrid eight-song record, inexplicably named after the group that had a hit with "Just Kickin' It". It's a set of outtakes and misfires that Jackson recorded in the 20th century, freshly "re-produced" by L.A. Reid, Timbaland, and others to sound as if he'd just shown up to make a new record in a contemporary style.
That, it should be noted, is a trick that's been tried before with Jackson's music. When Motown overdubbed and remixed some of his decade-old factory seconds in 1984, it yielded the Farewell My Summer Love album, whose packaging briefly fooled a few people into thinking it was the follow-up to Thriller. It's true that the new versions sound more modern and souped-up than the originals (which you also get if you buy the "deluxe edition" of Xscape), but their producers don't have enough distance from Jackson's presence to reframe his voice the way that, say, Junkie XL's remix of "A Little Less Conversation" reframed Elvis Presley's.
It doesn't help that the outtakes they're dealing with are several tiers below the stuff that ended up on Jackson's later albums—maybe the estate is trying to parcel out the best material over time, maybe it doesn't get any better than this. "A Place with No Name" is Jackson's rewrite of America's two-chord wonder "A Horse with No Name", which is a bad enough idea on its own; Stargate, who produced the new version, replace the signature guitar riff with a sugary electroswing arrangement, but it doesn't help. Most of these tracks are Jackson hiccuping and eee-hee-ing on autopilot through underdeveloped semi-tunes; both Grace Jones and MC Lyte beat him to the title "Slave to the Rhythm" with much better songs. (The version here is not the one with Justin Bieber that leaked a while back.)
Jackson liked to present himself as pop's eternally youthful Peter Pan. In truth, he was more its Rabbit Angstrom, forever re-enacting his moment of moonwalking glory from a position of ever-increasing bitterness. Defensive, brittle songs like Xscape's title track ("don't you try to tell me what is right for me!") don't look good on anyone. The most embarrassing song here, though, is "Do You Know Where Your Children Are", a Dangerous outtake that apparently never got finished. (If Jackson knew what the bridge's lyrics were going to be, he wasn't letting on in the recording studio.) It's a finger-jabbing harangue about a 12-year-old runaway who's "tired of stepdaddy using her/ Saying that he'll buy her things while sexually abusing her" and ends up hooking on Sunset Boulevard. As courageously stand-taking as it was for Jackson to indicate that he opposed child abuse, it might not have been wise for his estate to release a song in which he's getting all sanctimonious about that particular topic. (The shred-by-numbers guitar solo that ends the new version doesn't do the song any favors either.)
The one keeper on Xscape is its opener, "Love Never Felt So Good", which is also its oldest song—it dates from 1983 or so—and the one that's been in circulation the longest: written by Jackson and Paul Anka, it initially surfaced on a 1984 Johnny Mathis album. It's got the best Jackson vocal here, too. The original take, which is mostly just his voice, fingersnaps and a piano, showcases the kind of  gravity-defying singing-for-pleasure that we barely heard from him in the post-Thriller era. The deluxe version of Xscape appends a Timbaland-produced remix of "Love Never Felt So Good" on which Justin Timberlake sings along with the old tape, featuring disco flourishes borrowed from Jackson's "Working Day and Night". It sounds pleasantly like an echo of good Michael Jackson, but the fact that sampling an even earlier Jackson song makes it sound more contemporary says something about how wrongheaded this entire project is.


The Philadelphia band return with a glorious sheen on their pro-worker, pro-barroom rock’n’roll.

A Distant Call

At this point in Sheer Mag’s five-year career, the Philadelphia four-piece has delivered more power-pop and heavy metal riffs than a Thin Lizzy cover band expo. Their face-slapping, fist-pumping anthems have sounded countless working-class and socialist rallying cries. By now, are we hoping for more of the same? Or are we ready for growth, their “weird” album, the kind that would shuttle the group from one vintage era to another, maybe a record with some ’80s-influenced keytar and 808s, alongside a ’90s grungy self-seriousness?
When a band is so deeply rooted in and influenced by an era long since past, progress can be hard to track. If you were to get no further than the first couple songs on their second full-length album, A Distant Call, you wouldn’t be blamed for believing that Sheer Mag was ready to give us more of that old school rock‘n’roll, rather than something riskier. “Steel Sharpens Steel” opens with lead vocalist Tina Halladay’s signature manic howl, kicking off a stomp-and-chant anthem about fighting the system that comes down like a sledgehammer. “Blood From A Stone” covers the injustice of living check to check in the land of milk and honey. They are perfectly serviceable and easily accessible follow-ups to 2017’s Need to Feel Your Love and Compilation LP (a collection of Sheer Mag’s first three EPs). Eleven or 12 songs like this would be good enough—after all, we could always use more thrashing workers’ rights anthems.
But A Distant Call is a slow, slow burn. It’s not until halfway through “Unfound Manifest”—an open-hearted reflection on the guilt and shame of feeling depressed while so many others have it worse off than you—that the band unleashes new depths. “I’m in my head and I’m feeling false,” Halladay sings over a bridge of warbly, undistorted guitar. That vulnerability, combined with the unfamiliar, looser, almost jazzier sound—more Fleetwood Mac or the Eagles rather than, say, Kiss—signals that something new has broken through. These songs are equally as ripe with earworm melodies as their others, but with components that are less obvious or easy to reach for. Sheer Mag has infused their typically punchy hooks with texture.
On “Silver Line,” a 12-string acoustic is complemented by a lap steel guitar and keyboard (a sentence I never thought I’d use to describe a Sheer Mag song) but it’s capped off with a monster electric guitar solo from Kyle Seely that shoots off into space. This is what progress sounds like. It doesn’t have to mean abandoning what defines you as a band. It’s the buffing of a rough diamond until it shines. Less lo-fi fuzz and more layered, compelling instrumentation underlay lyrics co-written by Halladay and Matt Palmer that touch on more personal themes like domestic abuse and depression. “The Right Stuff” is Halladay’s righteous message to anyone who might have critiques about her body size: “I don’t care what they see/I think of beauty differently/If you’re worried about my health/Shut your mouth and keep it to yourself.” A Distant Call is an album with depth of production, more deliberate songwriting, and a commitment to style.
The most notable change comes in Halladay’s raspy growl. This record was written after she was laid off from her job, out of a relationship, and mourning the death of a father with whom she had a complicated relationship. On previous albums, Halladay screeched as if her life depended on it, nearly cracking when hitting the high notes. Here, she is no less restrained, but the true tone in her singing voice comes through (helping matters, she recorded her vocals in a studio with producer Arthur Rizk rather than on her usual 8-track recorder). This change doesn’t weaken the band’s  DIY spirit—they still self-release all their records and rail about communist uprisings and our corrupt government—but this upgrade to Halladay’s vocals allows those lyrics to shine brighter. On “The Killer,” she sings repeatedly, straight into an epic key change, “The Cold War never ends/It starts all over again/He’s got you right between the eyes/Waving the flag for human rights.” The better we can hear her, the more potent the message becomes.
If the scrappy early single “Fan the Flames” was the song to metaphorically grab the major label’s attention, A Distant Call sounds like the result of one of those lucrative multi-album record deals with unlimited studio time by comparison. Even the design of the Sheer Mag logo on this go-round has slightly morphed. On previous albums, the text was flat and black, in the style of any classic power-pop band of the hair-metal era. On this record, that logo has been given 3D depth and is finished in shiny chrome, with a twinkle glinting off the surface. Same band, same logo, same spirit—polished.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Katie Crutchfield revisits six tracks originally recorded in 2012, waving away the lo-fi haze that blanketed much of her early work to reveal her celebrated skills as a storyteller and singer.

Great Thunder EP

Katie Crutchfield’s back catalog is ripe for rediscovery. Since embarking on her first musical venture—The Ackleys, co-fronted with her twin sister Allison, who now leads Swearin’—at age 15, Crutchfield has bounced between collaborative recording projects, released four studio albums under her solo alias Waxahatchee, and experienced no apparent dips in productivity. Now 29, Crutchfield is heralded for the dexterity and directness of her songwriting, but the sheer size of her oeuvre means that some of her songs remain unknown even to steadfast fans.
She took her first step toward remedying this with 2016’s Early Recordings, a reissue of her little-heard first EP as Waxahatchee. Now, Crutchfield has excavated another EP’s worth of songs, this one from a short-lived group she formed with Swearin’ bassist Keith Spencer in 2012. Great Thunder, which shares that band’s name, reintroduces six of its tracks. While the new recordings vary in their faithfulness to the originals, all are minimally arranged, foregoing showy production to highlight Crutchfield’s skills as a storyteller and singer. Time has brought these treasures into sharper focus, waving away the lo-fi haze that blanketed much of her early work and retelling old tales with new clarity and conviction.
Recorded at April Base, Justin Vernon’s secluded Wisconsin studio, Great Thunder has the expected cabin-in-the-woods vibes, both in the sparse acoustic instrumentation that shapes each song and in the pangs of isolation that course through its emotional core. On “You’re Welcome,” Crutchfield turns to make-believe to bridge the space between herself and another: “You can pretend you don’t hold back anymore.” The haunting lead single “Chapel of Pines” is built around the question, “Will you go?,” posed as a relationship falls into crisis (the lyric has changed from the original, hypothetical “Would you go?”). “You Left Me With an Ocean” gives the query its tragic answer: “You can’t say goodbye/You rip out its lungs and you let it die,” Crutchfield laments.
These stories of separation and distance are intensified by the way Crutchfield tells them. Her voice has always been striking; both airy and gritty, it floats delicately through her melodies but sometimes gets caught on a note or two. Here, it gains additional texture from the sickness that befell Crutchfield just before she began recording. She strains more than usual: In the sustained notes of closer “Take So Much,” this audible pain makes the narrative—in this case, centered on her earnest desire to take the blame for a partner’s shortcomings—all the more potent. Here, and often throughout the EP, Crutchfield’s only accompaniment comes from unfussy block chords plunked out on a piano. Tasked with holding the listener’s attention, her voice delivers.
If you feel the slightest bit of whiplash listening to these tracks on the heels of Crutchfield’s latest album, last year’s remarkable Out in the Storm, you aren’t alone. That release made a case for her skill as a rock bandleader; it found her crashing through the end of a relationship with live-wire energy and a herd of brash electric guitars. She has acknowledged the disconnect between her two most recent releases, calling Great Thunder “a complete 180” from Out in the Storm. Presumably, this paring down is not a permanent stylistic shift so much as a creative exercise —a chance for Crutchfield to revisit the simple roots of her songwriting practice. In its completion, she has demonstrated just how few colors she needs to paint vividly.


Regina Spektor is, without a doubt, the most talented representative of New York's antifolk scene, although\n\ calling her ...

Soviet Kitsch

Regina Spektor is, without a doubt, the most talented representative of New York's antifolk scene, although calling her that is like calling the current outbreak of bird flu Asia's least deadly epidemic. I'm an unapologetic relativist when it comes to music, so Spektor's alliance with the repulsive likes of The Moldy Peaches does color my perception of her. Antifolk's modus operandi is to masquerade drooling insolence as outsider art, but the unholy progeny of Tiny Tim and Beat Happening have a pretty good thing going, because it's absolutely impossible to approach them with any objective criterion of quality.
Regina Spektor doesn't need that coat of post-modern protection. Her songs are clever and touching in any context, and her technical prowess is considerable: A girl from a good Russian-Jewish family (her father comes to her shows), she's put her inevitable piano lessons to good use. Spektor does, however, constantly employ a trick I consider dirty: She reaches her audience's ears and heartstrings through feigned naivete. The I'm-just-a-wee-lass stance is apparent throughout *Soviet Kitsch, as well as her live performances, where she's been known to pout and giggle and murmur and feed the crowd chocolates; what the Russians call * manernost' is her only liability, but it's badly holding her back.
Take the best song on the record, "Ghost of Corporate Future"; this exquisitely structured number steadily spirals up from a plinky opening to a majestic finish, from a street sketch to a Big Statement on life and how to live it. "Everything is plastic/ And everyone's sarcastic/ And all your food is frozen/ And it needs to be defrosted," sings Spektor in an inimitable mix of horror and wonderment. But watch the whimsy go to work: "Maybe you should cut your own hair/ 'Cause that would be so funny/ It doesn't cost any money/ And it always grows back." Spektor delivers "funny" in a kindergarten squeak that would only be accessible to the rest of us through regression therapy; this kind of stuff only works live, and then in measures. In the studio, it's murder: Even if Regina's mannerisms are totally spontaneous, guess what? They won't be by your third listen.
Other songs suffer a similar fate. There's a wealth of great material here-- "Carbon Monoxide", the expansive "Chemo Limo", "Your Honor" with its sudden outbursts of punk thrash-- all diminished, to various degrees, by genre affectations. When Regina's not belting Billie, she's cooing Tori, or vamping up elastic Bronx vowels; although there's no Russian accent to speak of, Spektor's occasional Björk-isms compound the cuteness.
Soviet Kitsch, which was deliberately intended as a minor release, is currently enjoying a wider audience than it appears to have been made for. Some of it has to do with Julian Casablancas' dabbling in arts patronage: Spektor opened for The Strokes on their European tour dates and duets on the inconsequential "Reptilia" B-side "Modern Girls and Old-Fashioned Men". I'm reminded of the way David Bowie parades around his admiration for Daniel Johnston: Spektor is becoming a unit of freak-cred currency. Except in this case, the ball is still in her court; she can still walk out of the corner into which the circumstance and alliances are painting her, with wits and talent intact.


On their first album in 38 years, George Clinton and his impressive band channel the Parliament of old for something decidedly modern. It’s delightfully raunchy but also surprisingly tenderhearted.

Medicaid Fraud Dogg

P-Funk bandleader George Clinton was raised at the center of the world’s pharmaceutical industry. His family moved to Plainfield, New Jersey only a few years after the Warner-Lambert pharmaceutical company settled in nearby Morris Plains, and in the decades since, 14 of the 20 largest pharmaceutical companies on Earth have called the state home. Naturally, Clinton has some choice words for the industry he’s watched drug the American public, characterizing Big Pharma as an untamable, parasitic beast, and everyone with a prescription regimen as members of a dazed zombie horde: “It’s one nation under sedation, everybody is getting high on something.”
Parliament’s first album in 38 years, the deliciously zany Medicaid Fraud Dogg, is an indictment of what Clinton has called “bullshit medicine” and the system that produces it, suggesting, almost off-handedly, that you choose funk as your sedation alternative. “It’s about the real Medicaid fraud, which is the big pharmaceutical companies,” he told Offbeat magazine. It’s unclear if the album is meant as “Dr. Funkenstein” meets Doggystyle, but it frequently finds the seam where P-Funk and G-Funk meet. A revamped Parliament horn section—featuring band lifers Greg Thomas, Bennie Cowan, Fred Wesley, and another notable James Brown band member Pee Wee Ellis—along with an entirely new cast of players channel the Parliament of old for something decidedly modern. Clinton leads them marching into a new war on drugs with horndog funk jams less concerned about health care than general wellness. As always, Clinton and company’s antidote is clear: lewdness, absurdist humor, and opalescent funk refracting several decades of black music. It’s delightfully raunchy but also surprisingly tenderhearted.
Medicaid Fraud Dogg is over 100 minutes long, seemingly exploring every idea Clinton and his crew have had for the Parliament project since 1980’s Trombipulation. Written primarily by Clinton and longtime P-Funk member Tracey Lewis, the album honors Flying Lotus, Kendrick Lamar, and “all that shit coming out of Atlanta” while staying truest to the soul at the Parliament core. New characters are introduced into the P-Funk mythology, like Loodie Poo Da Pimp, Oil Jones, and the eponymous Fraud Dogg. It is more grounded than his space funk of the ‘70s, but no less alien. The album doesn’t always hit the sweet spot, at times veering too far into the absurd or doing too much, but it’s never shy about trying. Sometimes, just as a song is kicking into gear, the bizarro lyrics will snap you out of the groove, as on “Kool Aid” (”Hump until you hiccup/Pump until the pussy poop”), evoking his role as a doctor in FlyLos’ gross mutant horror flick Kuso. (Clinton fittingly compared being in Kuso to being on drugs again.) If the objective of this excursion is simply to make a funky, spirited, low-stakes caricature of a dangerous, indomitable industry, though, then the album was worth the wait, the bloat, and the occasional cringe.
Clinton’s genuine concern for the medical system translates in both the messaging and the often soothing soul sound, which branches out in all directions. “The bigger the pill, the harder to swallow/She turns into something else with half a water bottle,” Tra’Zae sings on “Medicated Creep,” flipping a coined Parliament phrase into a commentary on pill addiction. The intoxicating title track gradually grows from golden horn riffs—played by Ellis, Wesley, and Whitney Russell—into a medley of electric piano, synths, and hip-hop drum programming. In keeping with the Parliament mandate, there is a concerted effort to provide music as a substitute through which to survive what ails you, especially on songs like “Psychotropic” and “Pain Management.” “Learn to deal with it!” Clinton implores on the latter, handing out a prescription for weed and funk.
The wildest and most wonderful songs on Medicaid Fraud Dogg understand P-Funk’s relationship to rap and embrace it. The Scarface-featuring lead single, “I’m Gon’ Make U Sick O’Me,” slaps P-Funk horns on a synth bass blaster fit for a low-rider, the song’s suspension springing forth as if on hydraulics. “I’m Gon’ Make U Sick O’Me,” which pledges to both make you sick and provide the remedy, is a satire of malicious pharma practices designed to keep people medicated and dependent. On “Set Trip,” Lewis and Clinton pose as gangsta rappers atop a Chuck Brown-conjuring go-go blend. The raps on “Insurance Man” echo Tupac’s flow on “Keep Ya Head Up” to directly address the country’s current healthcare crisis, standing with Obamacare and rebuking Trump’s opposition to programs like Planned Parenthood. “Mama Told Me” is like a vintage Jeezy trap epic if performed by the marching band at an HBCU homecoming.
These diversions only work because Parliament, despite all its new players and moving parts, is still in touch with what made the band so great in the first place. It allows the members to make something curious like the warped “Antisocial Media,” in which Clinton sings, “Bloggers are bitching, so I tweet/And my Twitter thing is twitching/Still scratching at the itch out of reach.” The seven-minute funk-rock odyssey “No Mos” and the infectiously horny “69” are two sides of the same coin, varying shades of the classic P-Funk experience updated. On the album, Clinton not only traces his band’s impact through the generations of music it influenced but suggests it still has the power to influence people today. At its best, most enthusiastic, and most optimistic, Medicaid Fraud Dogg proposes that funk is the panacea.


Janelle Monáe’s fourth album exchanges science fiction for lusty romance, creating a rapturous Afrofuturistic sound collage for sunny days and sticky nights.

The Age of Pleasure

During a routine memory-erasing operation, the New Order—the oppressive regime at the center of Dirty Computer’s “emotion picture”—comes across information about an underground resistance army. Sporting a kufi crown, Janelle Monáe’s alter ego Jane 57821 leads the rebels. They collude in the shadows, preparing for a coup d’état. Tragedy strikes when state officials seize Jane for neutralization. When all seems lost, her lover Zen breaks her out of the lab. The Age of Pleasure occurs in a world where these femme dissidents won the battle against totalitarianism. For many marginalized individuals, it’s difficult to dream of better worlds while mired in chaos and destitution. Janelle Monáe takes us to the promised land.
Opener “Float” is the victory speech to “Django Jane”’s battle cry. Monáe is no longer in survival mode. “No, I’m not the same, nigga,” they announce over celestial horns. They’ve come out as a “free-ass motherfucker” and they refuse to dignify bigotry with any engagement. The Age of Pleasure revels in an ecclesiastic enjoyment of indulgence. Some might argue that good Christians must deprive themselves of earthly pleasure, but the Good Book said, “Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.” Shaking their Baptist tits on a yacht in an all-white ensemble, Monáe keeps the liquor and celebratory mood flowing with those who value them in all their complexity.
Monáe flourishes in a Pan-African utopia. Wondaland co-producer Nate Wonder melds diasporic influences into an Afrofuturistic soundscape. “Champagne Shit” pairs an electric piano sound found in Ethiopian electronic dance music with a sinuous synth that mimics the ancient Egyptian ney flute. Evoking the historical memory of these fruitful civilizations, Monáe aligns themself with their regality. Amapiano grooves meet android ball culture on the humid “Phenomenal.” Throughout the album, Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 supply reverberating brass; Wonder adds breezy woodwinds characteristic of Afrobeats. No diasporic record is complete without reggae tunes and Caribbean riddims, and the presence of Jamaican dancehall legend Sister Nancy on “The French 75” interlude encapsulates the sense of laid-back communion. Each influence ebbs and flows through the record like neighbors stopping by for some rum and gossip.
The blues have always served as an outlet for Black queer people to explore their sexuality and gender expression. Subverting the ogling gazes of those who wish to covet and control their body, Monáe worships their own flesh and desire, which after all are molded in God’s image: “If I could fuck me right here right now, I would do that.” They take the guilty out of guilty pleasure. “Lipstick Lover” envisions the kind of sapphic orgy where you show up looking for an anonymous thrill but leave with three new best friends. If the record is a steamy tropical romance novel, then Monáe plays both the broad-shouldered hunk and the yearning damsel. “Leave a sticky hickey in a place I won’t forget,” they plead.
A roster of eclectic collaborators balances The Age of Pleasure’s masculine and feminine energies. Grace Jones lends her husky French to the seductive interlude “Ooh La La.” Doechii channels Good Girl Gone Bad-era Rihanna in a raspy, haughty verse on “Phenomenal.” The hypnotic spoken-word opening to “The Rush” is voiced by Black cinema bombshell Nia Long. Of all the features, Ghanaian-American singer Amaarae best matches Monáe’s apocalyptically horny energy: “Fucking you like it’s my destiny.” Even blinded by lust, no one denigrates women as conquests. Tender aftercare arrives in the polyamory ode “Only Have Eyes 42” and the acoustic remembrance “A Dry Red.”
Like their original alter ego Cindi Mayweather, Monáe is a time traveler, archiving information and bearing witness for future generations. As an actor, they’ve worked on several films that centered on Black freedom struggles: Hidden Figures, Antebellum, Harriet, and Moonlight. For over a decade, in concept albums and short stories, they’ve crafted allegorical worlds to warn against the dangers of ahistorical thought. The protagonists in The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer, a collection of Monáe’s dystopian fiction, liberate themselves through an intergenerational collective consciousness. Jane convinces Zen to escape by triggering shared memories of their relationship. The Age of Pleasure isn’t as intricate as their sci-fi novellas or as electrifyingly innovative as The ArchAndroid. It’s a bacchanal in the haven Monáe constructed for themself, cobblestone by cobblestone, tree by tree. Even the Lord rested.


The soul singer Kadjha Bonet offers a twisting, rich mix of psychedelia and soul on her plush debut album.

The Visitor

For an artist whose bio reads that she was “born in 1784 in the backseat of a sea-foam green space pinto,” L.A.-based soul singer Kadjha Bonet’s debut LP The Visitor sounds a bit closer to home than that. Her sound is retro-fitted, but you only have to travel to, say, the experimental jazz-meets-soul-meets-singer-songwriter traditions of 1974 to find her home planet. Her voice twists Roberta Flack’s velvet tone around the archness of Shirley Bassey over creamery-rich strings, producing a sound as familiar as it is haunting.
“Honeycomb” is the album’s lead single, and alongside mid-album tracks “Nobody Other” and “Portrait of Tracy” it sets forth the best case for Bonet. Both are couched in a majestic sort of of blaxploitation soul, a mix of half-remembered Bond themes and the string section from Curtis Mayfield’s 1972 epic Superfly. Bonet's voice is the twist in the fabric, the element that sends the song down a Lewis Carroll rabbit hole; her falsetto on “Nobody Other” creates a vortex where the Isley Brothers’ and Aaliyah’s version of “At Your Best” meet. It also features a rolling Hammond organ, another classic crate-dust sound.
Bonet employs the intentional oxymoron “fickle majesty” in “Honeycomb’”s lyrics, and the phrase is also an apt description for the album. The Visitor is an amazing virtuoso performance, both for Bonet’s voice and for the many instruments she plays on it. However, the songwriting loops and twirls around styles and concepts that traditionally have straight-line meanings, and it creates a bit of ear fatigue, especially when so much of the album sits in a luxurious mid-tempo. On “Fairweather Friend,” Bonet discovers the limits of a friend’s loyalty and mourns it with a cool, laconic vocal that drains all the sorrow of the song. The trilling harplike ripples behind her are lovely, but the song is a little inert.
Bonet can’t be faulted for ambition; the plush arrangements bring to mind Janelle Monáe’s The ArchAndroid in their scope and scale. “Francisco” swirls together late-’60s Beatles psychedelia and “Walk On By” woodwinds into something that might be called “Sgt. Pepper soul.” On the title track she delivers the impressionistic lines “Skin the color copper/She comes without a call” in an overwhelmed rush. Immediately thereafter, “The Visitor” spills into a well-composed orchestral mini-suite and closes with a vocal run that displays the stunning full breadth of her voice.
But The Visitor doesn't quite equal the sum total of its impressive pieces. Like a lot of talented artists working underneath their potential, Bonet offers a collection of familiar references, immaculately recreated, without telling us something about herself that we might hold onto. She is a master at her craft, but she hasn’t quite figured out what she wants to say just yet.