Metal band blends elements of folk and goth to create a dark, haunting album that's as gorgeous as it is ugly.

Wolves in the Throne Room: Diadem of 12 Stars

Diadem of 12 Stars

As the home of labels such as Kill Rock Stars and K Records, Olympia, Washington has blessed us with a wide variety of off-kilter music. Unwound, Bikini Kill, and Microphones/Mount Eerie were birthed in the city, while Nirvana and the Melvins used it as a hub, connecting with a population of fans not available in their own smaller hometowns. Something about the bustling college town seems to breed a restlessness that can't be cured with mainstream music. In that sense, Wolves in the Throne Room fit perfectly with their geographical peers. Musically, however, the band is a wholly different monster, combining intense, desolate black metal with dark folk and goth.
Wolves claim inspiration from the "mystical witch ideology" of the Olympian forests (a Googling only revealed news stories about a woman robbing banks dressed as a witch, but I don't doubt the mythology exists), and the imagery on the disc adheres to that. The cover is a misty forest waterfall scene, and the sparse booklet shows the three flannel-and-jeans-clad band members ritualistically jamming out in the woods, complete with a naked woman and enough candles to make Smokey the Bear bristle. Oddly, the picture shows two members playing acoustic guitars while a third blows on some sort of woodwind. These instruments don't really reflect the music on Diadem of 12 Stars, but they do give a hint that there's more here than your typical muddy barrage of black metal muck.
The four songs, shrouded in a just-slightly-cleaner version of black metal's usual lo-fi production, range from 13 to 20 minutes. For many of those minutes, the band sticks to the genre's typical facets. An impenetrable wall of wailing instruments is set to a rhythm that alternates from blindingly fast to a slow crawl, and the vocals, mixed low, are desperate rasps peppered with bestial growls. But it's the inclusion of folk and goth that separates Wolves in the Throne Room from the pack, breaking up the madness with moments of poetic clarity. Opener "Queen of the Borrowed Light" is a relentless assault for the first five minutes. But seemingly out of nowhere, the distortion gives way to quiet, clean picking and atmospheric keyboards, ushering in the song's second act. "Face in the Mirror (Part 1)" introduces witch-inspired, gothic female vocals provided by Hammer of Misfortune's Jamie Myers. But after another brief acoustic folk interlude, the band erupts again into familiar territory with dizzying speed and demonic howls.
Those who aren't familiar with this style of music might find it hard to see the beauty that is here, and the songs' epic lengths certainly don't invite new listeners. Admittedly, listening to the record is daunting. The songs are complex, with layers of melodies that at times seem to be working completely against each other. Even with the breaks and quiet interludes throughout the songs, it will take multiple listens for songs to differentiate themselves (but really, that's probably not the band's intention anyway). But art doesn't have to be pleasant to be pretty, nor easy to be enjoyable, and Diadem of 12 Stars is a dark, haunting piece that's as gorgeous as it is ugly.


In pursuit of sweaty deliverance, the acrobatic singer takes worries about police brutality, relationship woes, and embracing differences to the dance floor.

A Million and One

A Million and One, the fifth full-length from Shara Nova’s My Brightest Diamond, is nocturnal and optimistic, like the dark winter trek toward the lights of the dance floor. “Sometimes I will go to a club and don’t want to be distracted by everyone else’s energy,” Nova says, “but I want to dance hard, so I face the wall, playing with what shadows I can create.” Nova is directed and moody during these 10 tracks, making the sort of sulky party music that is the specialty of Troye Sivan or Robyn. They don’t want to escape their tender aches but, instead, bring their little heartbreaks along in the search for sweaty deliverance. Nova understands the value of pleasure in a painful time.
On 2014’s This Is My Hand, Nova’s pop landscape was weird and dextrous, full of swaying horns and electronics. Her opera-trained voice aces incredible whirligigs and whiplashes here, too, but there is little sense that this is a show. It’s on the ground like a fighter, her voice weaponized by jagged quavers and barbed high notes. Even within a single preposition, like “for” during opener “It’s Me on the Dance Floor,” she can flip from full-bodied boom to imposing growl. She often layers her voice with itself so that songs like “White Noise” and “Supernova” reveal their eerie underbellies over time. Her voice is intense, the kind that suggests the mouth and throat as a series of interconnected caves; you want to follow it down.
Over the past decade, Nova has collaborated with artists who share her sense of narrative drama: Laurie Anderson, Sufjan Stevens, the Decemberists, David Byrne. Her most potent songs often describe the type of loneliness that is particular to the oddball—like “Another Chance,” where lovely howls over twinkling bells and stuttering drums communicate relationship regrets. When she sings “You won’t believe what you cannot see” during “A Million Pearls,” it suggests being resigned to someone else’s inability to see her shimmer.
Even though Nova asks you to dance often—the snapping funk interlude of “It’s Me on the Dance Floor” practically commands it—she favors slightly aloof, entirely glacial dramatics. Her tone is glistening, large-scale. The songs here have the backbone of a club track, but their sparseness allows the elements to echo, for you to understand each phrase. Earl Harvin’s sensational drumming holds itself closely to Nova’s charged voice; on “Sway,” his moves sound like trailing footsteps.
A Million and One, Nova says, is indebted to Detroit, a city just east of her Ypsilanti hometown. References to Detroit are oblique, and the geography comes across as a biographical fact rather than an explicit feeling. During “You Wanna See My Teeth,” she actually heads for Florida, documenting the scene of Trayvon Martin’s murder. Somewhat uncomfortably, Nova embodies Martin by stepping into his clothes, as when she flatly sings “My hood is up” over jolting guitars. Sirens flashing in the distance are theatrical props, enhancing the showtune quality of her jarring phrases. “Hey kid, where ya going, going?” she asks with the bullish, upbeat tone of a musical. The final perspective switch—to the person who gets away with murder, who “nothing can touch”—leaves a haunting residue.
Most of the songs on A Million and One burrow between ecstasy and threat, Nova’s voice playing at the edges of those feelings. During “It’s Me on the Dance Floor,” she sings: “I been going out/I been going out on a limb.” She tells us how to read the album, that she’s going to upend even the songs that seem ready for the floor. The pursuit of pleasure can be risky, and that’s the rush.


A Tribe Called Quest’s sixth (and final) album was a rumor for 18 years. It’s here, and against many odds, it reinvigorates the group’s discography without resting on nostalgia.

A Tribe Called Quest: We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service

Since their 1990 debut, People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, A Tribe Called Quest have been forward-thinking, presenting their albums as full-length meditations on sound and society. They didn’t break new ground as much as they dug deeper into the lands beneath their feet, turning stones and cultivating fertile soil, unearthing the past and tending the roots, with album-length suites centered around loose conceits—the light diary of Instinctive Travels, the aural dive into drums, bass, and downbeats of 1991’s The Low End Theory, the pan-African flight of 1993’s Midnight Marauders, the dysfunction of hip-hop’s materialism on 1996’s Beats, Rhymes and Life, and the yearning sadness of 1998’s The Love Movement. The latter strived to serve as a healing elixir and balm for what was, up until recently, the swan song for one of the greatest acts that hip-hop has ever produced.
Alluded to constantly via rumors and unfounded hopes, a forthcoming Tribe album seemed like wishful thinking for years. Despite the assurances of legendary music executives, fans could not be blamed for being cynical. The group had splintered fabulously, as documented in Michael Rapaport’s unflinching 2011 documentary Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest. Moreover, the death of member Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor earlier this year, seemed to ensure that any future efforts would be full of excavated throwaways and repurposed vocals from other projects made fresh via studio magic. Yet, We got it from Here exists, their sixth (and final) album, and it’s full of unblemished offerings that were recorded at Q-Tip’s home studio following their performance on Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show one year ago. And, against many odds, it’s an album that reinvigorates the group’s enviable discography without resting on the nostalgia of past accomplishment.
The album’s first number, “The Space Program,” is quintessential Tribe—it has that sooty bottom heavy warmness, the uncluttered arrangements and bright instrumentation, and it sounds like a piece of 2016 instead of a fragment of 1994. For the first time in their career, the entire group appears to be at their peak, exuding a well-earned effortlessness. Even if Ali Shaheed Muhammad is listed nowhere on the credits, the act’s three MC’s—the abstract Q-Tip, the ruffneck Phife, and the often M.I.A. Jarobi—are on point all the time, picking up each other's couplets and passing microphones like hot potatoes. On “The Space Program,” Jarobi rhymes “We takin’ off to Mars, got the space vessels overflowin’/What, you think they want us there? All us niggas not goin’,” before Q-Tip nimbly takes over with “Reputation ain’t glowin’, reparations ain’t flowin’/If you find yourself stuck in a creek, you better start rowin’.” The song plays with a sci-fi framing—“There ain't no space program for niggas/Yo, you stuck here, nigga”—yet it’s not about an imaginary future, but right now. “Imagine if this shit was really talkin’ about space, dude,” Q-Tip raps, unveiling the entire song as a metaphor for gentrification, perhaps even forecasting the showdown over the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock. And just that quickly, you realize that Tribe—poetical, allegorical, direct, and forever pushing forward from the present—are back as if they never left.
The timeliness of this album can’t be understated, nor could it have been predicted. On “We the People…,” Q-Tip breaks out into a mini-song as hook: “All you Black folks, you must go/All you Mexicans, you must go/And all you poor folks, you must go/Muslims and gays, boy we hate your ways/So all you bad folk, you must go.” It follows in the pathways of Jamila Woods’ HEAVN and Solange Knowles’ A Seat at the Table as an album that expresses the deeply painful and deep-seated racist attitudes of current America without rancor. That the hook echoes President-elect Donald Trump’s most famous and reductionist campaign views works in ways that it would not had Hillary Clinton garnered enough electoral college votes to win the election. (For comparison, the video for Ty Dolla $ign and Future’s “Campaign,” released the day before the election, seemed to bank on a Clinton victory in its jubilation, but now feels tone deaf.) Ironically, Tribe may have also been seeing a Clinton victory; Q-Tip references a female president on “The Space Program.”
A decade and a half ago, while working on his (erroneously shelved, then belatedly released) sophomore album Kamaal the Abstract, Q-Tip was asked about grown men making hip-hop music—he had, after all, just entered his thirties and was still playing at what is largely a young person’s game. He countered that hip-hop was not solely a youth genre; that the media and commercial forces had made it so; that the top MC of the moment—Jay Z—was in his thirties; that the best art comes not from the exuberance of youth, but the mastery of form. We got it from Here proves that he was right.
Q-Tip has long been quietly regarded as one of hip-hop’s most thoughtful and inventive producers, and this album is full of accomplished flourishes. On the lascivious “Enough!!,” the vocals of Ms Jck (of undersung alt-R&B progenitors J*Davey) are treated like source material, woven into the musical bed. There are layered, echoing, melodic sonic manipulations and restrained uses of Jack White and Elton John on “Solid Wall of Sound.” On the introspective and confessional “Ego,” White (again) is used sparingly and smartly for subdued electric guitar touches. *We got it from Here *is not the music of a producer showing off, but of one knowing what to do and when to do it. There is a bevy of guests on this record, but they all serve the project like instruments that come in and out without attempting to take over with solo turns.
When “Dis Generation” uses a sample of Musical Youth’s “Pass the Dutchie,” one can see a labyrinth of in-jokes and conceptual easter eggs that extends to the rhymes: Phife prefers cabs to Uber; Jarobi is wizened, smoking on “impeccable grass” and waiting for New York to approve medical marijuana; and Busta Rhymes—who appears multiple times and sounds more at home with his Native Tongues brethren than he ever has with the extended Cash Money bling set or even on his The Abstract and the Dragon mixtape with Q-Tip—is “Bruce Lee-in’ niggas while you niggas UFC.” For his part, Q-Tip shouts out Joey Bada$$, Earl Sweatshirt, Kendrick Lamar, and J. Cole as “gatekeepers of flow/They are extensions of instinctual soul.” It’s what ATCQ has always been—self-referential without being self-serving, part of the pack but moving at their own pace, and able to lightly and relatedly convey observations that would be heavy and pedantic from just about anyone else.
It can’t be said enough how simply good this record sounds and feels. Everyone here shows themselves to be a better rapper than they have ever been before, but that still doesn’t capture the ease and exuberance of it all, how Q-Tip curls flows and words on “The Donald,” how Jarobi surprises with packed strings of rhyme at each turn, how Phife and Busta Rhymes dip effortlessly in and out of Caribbean patois and Black American slanguage. (And that’s not even taking into account Consequence’s inventive word marriages on “Mobius” and “Whateva Will Be,” Kendrick Lamar’s energetic angst on “Conrad Tokyo,” or André 3000’s and Tip’s playful tag team on “Kids…”) The music is decidedly analog, a refutation of polished sheen and maximal perfection; it’s an extension and culmination of ATCQ’s jazz-influenced low-end theory. But that doesn’t capture the bounces, grooves, sexual moans, random bleeps, stuttering drums that float throughout—like every classic Tribe album, it defies simple descriptions.
Many of the songs here hearken back to off-kilter and underexposed gems of days past (see: Tribe’s “One Two Shit” with Busta Rhymes and De La Soul’s ATCQ-featuring “Sh.Fe. MC’s” from days past for musical antecedents) without feeling like retreads, the free-wheeling whimsy and experimentation of the past having been replaced a grounded irony and proficiency. So much has stayed the same and yet so much has changed.
There’s no overriding story that easily presents itself—no vocal guide a la Midnight Marauders, no driving ethos served on platter like the Low End Theory; the title itself, which lends to an interpretation of this as a project of hubris demanding homage, is never explicitly explained. Even Phife’s death is given due reverence, but isn’t treated as a central theme. We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service is all just beats, rhymes, and life. Nothing about this feels like a legacy cash-in; it feels like a legit A Tribe Called Quest album. We should be the ones thanking them.


Lust For Youth have spent the last six years refining lo-fi darkwave into club-ready synth-pop. Compassion is the end product of that evolution, a once rough stone polished into a lustrous crystal.

Compassion

Go back to Hannes Norrvide’s earliest solo recordings as Lust For Youth and listen closely. Trapped underneath the droning synths, morose vocals and grainy production, you’ll find some big melodies fighting to reach the surface. Over the course of a string of full-lengths, singles and cassettes, he’s worked steadily to clean up and refine his sound. 2014’s International marked a turning point: Working now as a three-piece, the band’s vision suddenly snapped into focus, tightly-wound new wave anthems emerging from the shadows.
Compassion goes further yet, pushing Lust For Youth’s sound to its natural conclusion: glimmering, maximalist dance-pop. If these songs were photographs, they’d have the brightness cranked up all the way. The synths here are crisp, the vocals high in the mix, the production echoey but slick. Musically, they’ve stripped away the last vestiges of post-punk tension, giving these songs over fully to driving, four-on-the-floor beats. Put another way, Compassion presents a band that could easily have slotted into any lineup at the Haçienda in the late ‘80s without arousing a whiff of suspicion.
Things start off slowly with "Stardom," a new wave aubade whose synths pierce through the track like light through blinds. Norrvide’s previous claims of writing love songs always felt a bit disingenuous but there's no mistaking his straightforward couplets here (“I’m complete, I’m content/In your bed but I’m floating"). While his vocals have become far more expressive over time, there's still a pronounced austerity in his delivery--think Bernard Sumner with a head cold.
The rest of the album continues in this vein, gleefully mining the sounds of the Thatcher era: See the Smiths-esque balladry of "Display", or "Sudden Ambitions," which reads like a lost Depeche Mode B-side. “Better Looking Brother” is the album’s clear centerpiece, a seven-and-a-half-minute cut that sounds like it was ripped straight from New Order's singles catalog, chiming guitar arpeggios, dated club beat and all. It's a gorgeous song, a joyous merry-go-round that keeps spinning until just past the four-minute mark, when the track dissolves into a shuddering mass of atmospheric noise and then comes roaring back. Unfortunately, that genuinely thrilling moment is one of only few that attempt to reconcile the band's past and present.
Certainly, Lust For Youth’s rapid stylistic evolution has been impressive. Just a few years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine Norrvide’s lo-fi darkwave beating a path to something this polished. That said, the last decade has hardly wanted for this sort of '80s nostalgia, and whereas acts like Cut Copy and the Junior Boys introduced new textures to this well-worn template, too few of the songs on Compassion add up to more than the sum of their influences. What’s more, while Lust For Youth’s earlier work wasn’t nearly as refined, it had plenty of personality; many of the songs here sound not just derivative but generic. Compassion still feels like the album that Lust For Youth have been working toward this whole time—it just turns out that the journey may have been more rewarding than the destination.


Twenty years on from its original release, Yo La Tengo’s finest album still sparkles with wit and charm, an album so cozy you forget about its musical eclecticism.

Yo La Tengo: I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One

I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One

An easy way to break the ice when meeting a new couple is to ask them how they met. Sometimes there’s no story; more often these days, they met through an online dating website. But now and then the answer is revelatory. Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley were formally introduced on America’s Independence Day weekend. It was 1980, and the Feelies, New Jersey’s own nervy new wavers, were playing at Maxwell’s, a bar that had opened a couple of years earlier in Hoboken. The curly-haired rock critic from New York City’s northern suburbs and the art-schooled daughter of an Oscar-winning animation duo on Manhattan’s Upper West Side shared a passion for music. Within months, they were in a close relationship, and they started playing together, Ira on guitar, Georgia on drums. By 1984, they’d formed Yo La Tengo, putting out several respectable albums of Flying Nun- and Velvet Underground-minded college rock with a rotating array of bassists. But it wasn’t until they brought on a former Virginia college radio DJ named James McNew that these Hoboken-anchored Maxwell’s regulars moved from channeling their record collection to advancing on it.
The 1993 album Painful was Yo La Tengo’s first breakthrough, a whispery feedback-streak opus that stood as a worthy riposte to British shoegaze; Electr-O-Pura, two years later, sounded more spartan but boasted career-highlight songs like “Blue Line Swinger.” While those two records solidified Yo La Tengo as one of the best bands in a competitive indie rock landscape, 1997’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One was their first true masterpiece. More than a dozen years into get-in-the-van touring life, here was a band not only expanding the boundaries of American garage rock, but exploding them. But for all its stylistic eclecticism, the record also sensitively traces the outlines of intimacy, both musical and romantic, hinting at a new way to imagine a life in music, one that still resonates 20 years on.
Yo La Tengo had always had the covers repertoire of a jukebox, and here they channeled that into their own songwriting. The love-buzzed guitar swirl Painful still had its power, as evidenced by the perfect squall of a track like “Deeper Into Movies.” But their wry bossa nova on romantic duet “Center of Gravity,” the alt-country lilt on pedal-steel weeper “One PM Again,” and aching jazz-pop balladry with the Hubley-led “Shadows” were just as masterful. Steel-guitar instrumental “Green Arrow” wrought cinematic expanses out of cricket chirps and off-kilter percussion. And a band that a decade ago cut a harmonica-tinged jangler called “3 Blocks From Groove St.” happily found that rhythmic destination in the Stereolab-locked psych loops of “Moby Octopad,” which also managed to sample an obscure Burt Bacharach track.
Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield has written that Kaplan and Hubley “[do] for marriage what the Velvet Underground did for heroin,” and there’s something to the love-is-the-drug comparison. “When the smack begins to flow/I really don’t care anymore,” Lou Reed sang on the Velvets track, one where he infamously called the opiate both his life and his wife. Yo La Tengo also seek escape, talking of love as their place to hide from the outside world. “Locked in a kiss, outside eyes cease to exist,” they sing in the first words we hear on I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. The feedback-stained “Damage” could be a shuffling tone poem reminiscent of Laughing Stock-era Talk Talk, except for Kaplan’s soft speak-singing: “I used to think about you all the time/I would think about you all the time/Now it just feels weird that there you are,” he murmurs. What was once routine can be made privately uncanny through time shared together. It’s something outside eyes can’t see. They don’t even exist.
That same inscrutable intimacy is all over the album’s most groove-driven—and most seductive—track, the indie-mixtape classic “Autumn Sweater.” When Kaplan gently describes a knock at the door, and how “We could slip away/Wouldn’t that be better,” as an organ peals over hiccuping polyrhythms, he might be portraying a bashful pair going on a date. But the critic Jon Dolan, writing about I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One in 1997, heard a lover contemplating an affair, his partner’s steady beat reminding him that “it’s a waste of time.” Or it might be a drearily autobiographical tune about Kaplan and Hubley having to go to some boring function after Labor Day, and we’re all reimagining it as somehow sensual and profound. Whatever the specific reference, the song itself is quintessentially cozy, capturing the feeling where the days are growing shorter and it’s time to move inside.
The album’s title also describes a group of musicians working closely in sync. Throughout, under the Nashville tutelage of longtime producer Roger Moutenot, the band seems to have established its own innate communication. They’ve been doing it enough to make it look easy. Their cover-band roots return on “Little Honda,” which gets under the hood of the Brian Wilson original and corrodes it with chugging distortion; it wasn’t necessarily supposed to be on the album, McNew has said, but “it just sort of turned out pretty good.” And McNew, who has also long made endearingly shambling indie-pop under the goofy misnomer Dump, he had his first Yo La Tengo lead vocal on “Stockholm Syndrome,” and earns it with high and lonesome folk-skronk that’s like a missing evolutionary link between Neil Young and Whitney. The penultimate track, “We’re an American Band,” is not a cover; its six-odd minutes of whispery harmonies and smoldering shrillness offer a very different idea than Grand Funk Railroad’s of what that title phrase means. It’s a bittersweet elegy for a life on the road, of Monday matinees and playing in Southern college towns where Cracked Rear View is the pre-show house music. It’s an idea that was already turning into a throwback in its own time, as the major labels’ slash-and-burn approach to the U.S. indie underground left a denuded cultural landscape. But in the elegant sprawl of Yo La Tengo’s rendering, it all sounds like a dream nonetheless.
In the story of I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, the other key relationship, beyond Kaplan-Hubley, and beyond Kaplan-Hubley-McNew, is between the musicians and their fans. The winking title of melodious instrumental opener “Return to Hot Chicken” is an inside joke not only for the band, but also for those who follow them (“hot chicken” had been referenced in earlier song titles). Along with “Autumn Sweater,” the record’s other unassailable landmark is “Sugarcube,” a fuzzed-out singalong that’s some of the finest American noise-pop of its era. The song’s video, Yo La Tengo’s last for more than a decade, features “Mr. Show’”s David Cross and Bob Odenkirk and a pre-Jack Black school of rock. The band’s members are cast as down-to-earth underdogs who’ll bow a guitar if you ask them to but don’t really see the point of stadium-rock theatricality. If they had “cred,” it was because they were credible—because they, as fans first too, knew their own capacity to suspend disbelief about industry pomp. They knew how fragile their idealistic outlook could be, too: “I crumble like a sugarcube for you,” Kaplan insisted.
Yo La Tengo may not have bought into their own hype, but by this point in their career, it was considerable. SPIN, CMJ, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly all bestowed I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One with rave reviews. It cracked No. 5 on the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop critics’ poll, still the band’s highest placement, and has ranked high on 1990s best-albums lists, Pitchfork’s among them. I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One is not, in other words, an album that obviously screams out for a critical reassessment. But beyond its music, which has lost none of its luster, the album also captures a moment in time, and points to creative ideals that still matter.
Over the past 20 years, Yo La Tengo have kept releasing good-to-great albums, from their more nakedly love-themed And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out in 2000 to 2015’s  Stuff Like That There, a covers-based callback to the band’s pre-Matador album Fakebook. They’ve scored films, they’ve backed Yoko Ono. They’ve even performed Grand Funk’s “We’re an American Band”—after all, Yo La Tengo were born on the Fourth of July, remember? In short, by trying just about everything but never forgetting who their fans are they’ve pursued the insular yet alluring worldview that I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One epitomized. When Yo La Tengo are cited as an influence these days, it often seems to be by bands that are directly channeling the ’90s, but their human-scale approach to being in love and being in a band while making their way through the music industry machinery. Yo La Tengo never really were about mainstream success. What they were about may be summed up in the album’s finale, yet another cover, this time of a mid-century MOR staple.
Once recorded by singer Anita Bryant (later known more for her ugly anti-gay activism), “My Little Corner of the World” now belongs to Yo La Tengo so indelibly that “Gilmore Girls,” when misguidedly denied permission to use the band’s version, closely replicated it for a song in the pilot episode (Yo La Tengo later performed on the show—McNew was a fan). In the knowingly naive mold of Moe Tucker on VU’s “After Hours,” it’s an invitation from Hubley to a lover, to a band, to a specific audience: “I always knew that I’d find someone like you,” she asserts. Their little corner of the world may have since acquired a dust bunny or two, a couple of chips in the paint. But this couple, this band, seems to understand, with Leonard Cohen, that there’s a crack in everything, because that’s where the light gets in. How some people met may be a good conversation-starter. How their hearts began to beat in time is between them. And where they want to go from there, Yo La Tengo remind us, is a back-and-forth that can fill a life.


MGMT follow the surprise hit Oracular Spectacular by teaming with Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom for a leftfield psych-pop LP bereft of obvious singles.

Congratulations

If you’re coming to the second MGMT album because you loved “Time to Pretend,” “Kids,” and “Electric Feel,” there’s the door. No such moments exist on Congratulations. Hell, there aren’t even failed attempts at replicating those songs here. This time out, MGMT aren’t crafting pop; they’re Creating Art. The problem is that many of the half-million or so people who bought their debut, Oracular Spectacular, just want a couple catchy-as-fuck, ear-candy singles to blast in their cars or put on with their friends.
One possible response to Congratulations is that MGMT are having a real “time to pretend” moment—that they’re willfully being weird, and either shrinking from the challenge of repeating their crossover success or clumsily aiming to prove their underground cred. But the simplest answer seems most realistic: MGMT are being themselves. Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden wrote and released “Time to Pretend” and “Kids” way back in 2005. With a major-label contract in hand, they’ve never again written anything so radio-friendly. Instead, they penned the headier and exploratory (and weaker) parts of their debut album with help from go-to bells-and-whistles guy Dave Fridmann. This led to songs called “4th Dimensional Transition” and “Of Moons, Birds & Monsters.” Pastoral English pop, flighty mysticism, and studio-rat arrangements aren't the exception with this band, they're the rule.
Now they’ve returned with an album full of that stuff, and the result is audacious, ambitious, and a little fried. Working with Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom, MGMT have crafted a grandiose but not always clear-eyed record. Instead of the commercial climbers they’re lumped alongside (the Killers, Kings of Leon, Muse), MGMT follow the lead of the Flaming Lips and Beck and prove to be kindred spirits with Of Montreal, Yeasayer, and Klaxons. They’re in love with 1970s art-rock, and they’ve immersed themselves in uncool subgenres like pop-psych and prog. And despite the lack of marquee songs, they’ve made, top to bottom, a more interesting and even better record this time out.
If their success granted them the opportunity to do whatever they wanted, MGMT took advantage of it, layering songs with a surplus of ideas when a few good ones would have done. Every track here has successful passages, but frustratingly, they too often turn out to be detours or trap doors. In general, the less cluttered and more focused their tracks are, the better they turn out. The most satisfying songs are the ballads—the title track in particular, but also “I Found a Whistle”—or the ones like “It’s Working” and “Someone’s Missing” that walk a fairly linear path. The most arduous is the 12-minute “Siberian Breaks,” which has some intriguing elements but little discernible reason to be so densely constructed.
Few bands this year will release a record under more difficult circumstances than MGMT, and following a shock commercial success with a zig when your fans want you to zag has always been dangerous. MGMT aren’t hitting the self-destruct button here, but the best-case scenario is that a cult, happy to shed the carpetbagger fans of OS, are willing to follow these guys around from idea to idea. Some may even use them as an introduction to the bands they’ve namechecked—Spacemen 3, Brian Eno, Television Personalities—and the sounds from which they’ve drawn inspiration. The more likely, short-term result is that MGMT are reined in a bit, not given so much rope to hang themselves. But that they didn’t hang themselves here, given the circumstances, suggests a certain amount of talent. Whether they write club-friendly songs like “Kids” or tracks like “Congratulations” or “Flash Delirium” or “It’s Working,” they can write songs. Hopefully, next time they won’t try to jam two dozen of them onto a nine-track album.


The Danish singer-songwriter’s powerhouse voice can wring genuine catharsis out of even the gaudiest pop, but on her third album, the muted, anonymous production too often holds her back.

Motordrome

A motordrome is an electrifying image to attach to a pop album. Evocative of thundering sound, burnt rubber, and engines speeding by in a blur, the specialty racetrack is the guiding metaphor behind Danish synth-pop singer MØ’s third LP, which uses it as a loose stand-in for the relentless spiral of anxiety. It’s a perilous loop the singer is eager to escape; her own anxiety manifested in frequent panic attacks following a lengthy, stressful tour behind her sophomore album, 2018’s Forever Neverland. Motordrome is crafted as a way to see through those struggles, approached with a sense of restraint. She reaches for new heights, but the album’s muted, anonymous production largely pushes MØ’s performances into the background.

MØ’s best songs are fueled by her brash, raspy voice, which is capable of turning even the gaudiest pop concoction into a concentrated surge of catharsis. Motordrome instead drowns her out in bland settings, relying on forgettable, reverb-soaked guitar melodies and rolling drum beats. “Wheelspin” and “Brad Pitt” both plod along over sluggish beats and slackened synths, her usually punchy voice delivering merely a glancing blow. Even some of the more propulsive songs, like “Cool to Cry,” settle into sterile, stomping pop-rock, an unfortunate byproduct of a mix of producers (Ariel Rechtshaid, S.G. Lewis, Linus Wikland) whose styles struggle to cohere together.
Motordrome’s highlights arrive when MØ’s performance and songwriting overcome the staid backdrops. On “Live to Survive,” she assumes a staccato rhythm over uptempo, splashy synths that glitz up the struggle of learning from your mistakes. “New Moon,” meanwhile, is one of her best straightforward dance songs in years, bolstered by charging synth lines that lend heft to the song’s headstrong verses about a manipulative relationship: “I’m not that somebody you used to bully,” she vows, just before the song opens up into a dazzling chorus that proves the point.
In those instances, MØ’s music hits with emotive, compelling power. On the album’s fan-dedicated opener “Kindness,” she finds a similar sweet spot as her voice dances along with sharp string jabs and a pattering drumbeat. “Let me in, shake me out of my shell,” she trills, “I wanna feel like myself again.” In her raw, rollicking delivery, MØ does sound comfortable in her skin again, giving the lyric a genuinely openhearted turn. Motordrome occasionally passes through such exhilarating moments, but faceless production too often spins its wheels, making it seem as though MØ is still in search of a sound to match the bravado.


The “vaporwave opera” tag is a red herring: The electronic musician formerly known as Mirror Kisses has grown into his most fully realized vision of pop yet.

Slide

George Clanton is exactly the kind of artist chillwave could have used a decade ago. The Virginia-born artist’s faded synth pop hits all the right 1980s-indebted notes, but as a singer Clanton is anything but chill. Starting under the moniker Mirror Kisses in the late 2000s and continuing on 100% Electronica, his 2015 debut under his own name, Clanton has let anxiety, joy, lust, insecurity, and a sharp sense of humor run wild through his music. While many chillwave artists struggled to bring lasting personalities to match their early internet fame, and while vaporwave champions anonymity, he couldn’t do either if he tried. Like Ariel Pink before him, Clanton throws himself into his music without any self-conscious concern for cool—and throws himself about in breathtakingly physical live shows that bring to mind a young John Maus.
Though Clanton’s pop sensibilities are undeniable, he’s proven just as adept at navigating the surreal world of vaporwave with his project ESPRIT 空想. The moniker, an outlet for his more experimental production work, has captured a woozy magic all its own. Like much early vaporwave, ESPRIT 空想 chopped up Muzak and other seemingly tasteless samples into foggy soundscapes, a sort of exotica for the digital world. That project culminated in last fall’s companion album 200% Electronica, a psychedelic treasure trove built on stretched-out samples of his own pop songs. Clanton makes an even greater leap on Slide, a self-described “vaporwave opera” and his first album under his own name in three years. By channeling his most dynamic production ideas through his best set of pop songs yet, Slide aligns all of Clanton’s strengths at once.
That expanded range is immediately apparent. Opener “Livin’ Loose” begins as pure vaporwave as a chintzy synth chime intertwines with hypnotically stretched-out sax samples, unsteadily warping in and out of tune. Clanton’s voice rises up and everything locks into place under a lively beat as the melting atmosphere solidifies into a driving dance track. These are sounds Clanton has nailed in the past in different projects, but he blends them here with an effortlessness that’s new. It’s a feeling that only grows over the album even as individual songs fire off in unique directions.
The enormous “Make It Forever” is one of Clanton’s first songs to capture the relentless energy of his live shows, where he’ll scream and thrash in front of a self-made wall of LED lights. The crashing drums and shimmering synth make for one of the biggest hooks on the album, but even that feels small next to his heart-on-sleeve shout, “When you come back again/We can convene/Make it forever.” Other songs, like “Monster” and the title track, find emotional resonance in softer moments, revealing a more vulnerable side as Clanton’s voice explores a higher register. It comes full circle beautifully on “You Lost Me There,” which offers a somber reprisal of “Forever”’s big chorus, elevating both songs in the process.
In a recent interview, Clanton describes his decision to return to his own name as a spontaneous one. He had intended 100% Electronica to be a Mirror Kisses record before he decided to drop the alias altogether. On the other hand, “Slide is the first album that I’ve written from the jump as myself,” he says, and the distinction feels crucial: Stepping out from behind the alter ego has clearly changed his music in palpable and exciting ways. Whether you’ve followed his sprawling discography over the years or are only discovering him now, Slide feels like the true introduction to George Clanton.


On the Manchester art-rock band's second album, the flat-out ridiculousness of their debut is replaced with a mixture of concise, moving, often funny pop singles, mid-paced laments, and roiling tirades.

Arc

The first single to be released from Everything Everything's second album, Arc, kicks off with a finger-wag at the deadening effect of extreme consumerism: "Sold your liver, but you still feel in the red/ Sold my feelings now I'm hanging by a thread." The sentiment might seem a bit rich coming from a band whose debut album, Man Alive, ricocheted between advertising hoarding-style proclamations like a rubberized pinball bouncing off Flubberized bumpers: If song titles like "MY KZ, YR BF", "Qwerty Finger", and "Photoshop Handsome" weren't a strong enough allusion to brief attention spans, then the agitated, yelpy hairpin nature of the material implied that, true to their name, Everything Everything were not men of singular focus.
Probably as many people hated them for it as became slavishly, delightedly addicted. If you could look past Jonathan Higgs' extreme garrulousness, Man Alive's equally distracted and distracting exterior contained much scathing humor (and heartbreak) about the absurdity of modern media overload, and our disrespect for the planet. "Chest pumped elegantly elephantine/ southern hemisphere by Calvin Klein," Higgs sang with weary wit on "Photoshop Handsome". But laughing at society forever is a hiding to becoming a low-tier Vice stringer, and lyrically, Arc realizes that, beneath those low-fat muffins that promise to change your life for five minutes, there's hell in that hand-basket.
The album name inadvertently nods to a biblical story about salvation; there's anything but on Arc, where Higgs repeatedly envisages apocalyptic situations both as payback for human irresponsibility, and out of a surprisingly binary desire to stand at the end of time and weigh up whether we did more bad than good. The beasts that populate his Bosch-like landscape are privileged guilt, apathy, generational despair, the inability to communicate, foiled aspiration, and broken homes, though they're rendered with less crash, bang, and wallop than you might expect-- touring with Muse recently didn't make EE go full conspiratorial prog lizard king, thank god.
The flat-out ridiculousness of Man Alive's most exhilarating material is gone, and in its place a mixture of perfectly concise, moving, visceral, often funny pop singles, perhaps one too many mid-paced laments, and a couple of rounds of roiling tirades. Some welcome breathing space unites the strands; songs stick within a genre at a time, and Higgs' lyrics no longer need Infinite Jest-style footnotes to decode them. If the subject matter sounds like Thom Yorke's dinner table patter, at least it's tempered by plenty of musical larks: the percussive glottal stops and exclamations of "Cough Cough" are a funny, theatrical jibe at half-assed activism, "Armourland" is testament to anyone who's ever claimed Max Tundra's mashed vocal glitch is ripe for pop transformation, coupled with the most gorgeous, warm rush of a chorus EE have ever written: "I wanna take you home/ And find some new joy in this autopilot life." And Higgs' sense of cadence and consonance is strong as ever, backed up by the band's campy, musical theater backing vocals: "So fast, hence take an arrow from your quiver or we're/ Past tense-- what's a trilobite to anyone?" he sings on the stuttering "Kemosabe", underpinned by Jeremy Pritchard's rude funk bass.
Everything Everything's reputation for abject maximalism overlooks their unexpected ability to craft relatively tender, sad songs; the handful on Man Alive were as delicate but dark as the coiled rainbow on oil's surface. There are similarly unconventional, small-scale ballads on Arc, the best of which is "Torso of the Week", whose nervous, mournful verses about the literal and figurative grind of the treadmill eventually burst into a Roman candle of a chorus. "The House is Dust" is an atmospheric tale of divorce made ominous by Michael Spearman's cavernous drums; centerpiece "Arc" is seemingly a structural homage to OK Computer's "Fitter Happier", and the best employ of the luscious, Hans Zimmer-y strings that showboat throughout the record. But violins will play sad for any old chump, and beyond the silliness and spark present on Arc, there's a braveness more profound than sticking Beyoncé, Arvo Part, and Mr. Bungle on your influences list and calling it mammy.
It doesn't take an analyst to deduce that the former knottiness of Higgs' lyrics might have been a smokescreen for some ineffable feeling-- for all the words, he didn't often admit to much. Throughout Arc, he's repeatedly crueler to himself than any critic could have been about Man Alive, and sinks beneath the dulled specter of male depression. The juddering, Dustin Wong-like shimmer of "Choice Mountain" veils him pondering reincarnation rather than submit to hopelessness; the fraught "Feet for Hands" (which opens with the only truly unpleasant sound on the record, a misplaced mandolin intro) asks, "When you think of me, don't remember this/ Not a slow wane of a blinded man," and the sublime "Radiant" counters guitarist Alex Robertshaw's piercing, heart-pounding release with the mournful admission, "I could make a difference, but I don't."
Their general sense of drama and vulnerability couched within a pretty masculine idiom-- guitar rock, to be reductive-- brings to mind the way Queen duped a nation into pounding a masculine chest with a feminine fist. The way that Everything Everything play against the macho, aggressive posturing of contemporaries who could care less about caring should be their strongest calling card. "Don't try to hide it! ... 'Cos it'll have you in the end," Higgs sings in a strong head voice on the final song, the itchy, choral anthem, "Don't Try". He should know; Arc is a brilliant lesson in not letting your neuroses become you.


New Orleans MC and self-proclaimed "best rapper alive" squares his ambition with his delivery and creates what could wind up being the year's most vital mixtape.

Dedication 2

The cover of Dedication 2 shows Lil Wayne, eyes closed, the words "Fear God" inked on his lids. Take it as a particularly gruesome example of the repentant gangster cliché, or, considering Wayne christens himself "The God" just minutes into this mixtape, a blasphemous warning. Self-deification is nothing new in hip-hop, but-- whether Rakim Allah's humble expression or Jayhova's hyperbolic swagger-- it tends to be a New York thing. So New Orleans' Lil' Wayne not only proclaiming god status but "best rapper alive"-- instead of merely "King of the South"-- is significant both for his rebuke of the prevalent trapper-before-rapper conceit of his Southern peers and his direct challenge to the NYC lyrical throne. Just a few years ago, Wayne making these claims would have been laughable, but with each significant release, he's proving himself to be the most imminent eminence post Jay-Z.
In his praise of Wayne's performance on "The Tonight Show" **earlier this year, Pitchfork's Nick Sylvester wrote, "it's one of those black-and-white-to-technicolor moments after which, if you still don't believe in Wayne, you're just lying to yourself"; Dedication 2 is the aural equivalent. More than anything Wayne's done, it's evidence of his virtuosity as a rapper and MC, showman and lyricist. Tha Carter II was one of last year's best hip-hop albums, but its clean lines hemmed Wayne. He crafted too much, measured his movements instead of letting fly, as he does here.
The track that will convert most naysayers, "Georgia Bush", borrows the instrumental from Disturbing Tha Peace's state-repping anthem; Wayne adds one word to the hook and transforms the hoedown into a stinging protest. But, never one to eschew form for function, he mocks the styles of the original song's participants, Ludacris and Field Mob. It is, at once, a vicious uppercut at the U.S. president, the media, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, racism, neglect, an embrace of his city and its populace, and a fearsome display of skill and intelligence. "So what happened to the levees/ Why wasn't they steady?/ Why wasn't they able to control this?/ I know some folk that live by the levee that keep on tellin' me they heard some explosions/ Same shit happened back with Hurricane Betsy 1965/ I ain't too young to know this/ That was President Johnson/ This is President [Georgia] Bush," Wayne raps in breathless double-time, folding history, conspiracy, anger, and confusion over each other with style and venom.
Does this one song, at the end of a mixtape, justify the sex, drugs, and violence of nearly every other? It doesn't mean to. It only makes the thoughts, emotions, and motivations behind his more objectionable lyrics more explicit and literal, but it's not as if the same conclusions cannot be drawn from his other material. Wayne is no fool; he's built a mountainous persona of myth and some truth and coerces the listener to burrow into it through the tiny holes he's left in the façade. Whether you choose to dig is up to you, but Wayne is just beginning his ascent. He is 23 years old, 11 years in, and working on a level most need more time to reach. His confidence and charisma overwhelms, and on this mixtape he's doing more than wresting beats from contemporaries-- he's invading their songs and conquering their styles and cadences. Rick Ross, Dem Franchize Boyz, Three 6 Mafia: Wayne's merciless, claiming Southern anthems for himself and spitting Northern verses over them.
For his part, DJ Drama provides another example of why he's killing the mixtape game right now. Whether he's putting Pharrell over Wu-Tang or Little Brother over Pharrell, Drama is a magician. What might look like a dullard's handful from the top 10 is actually a platform for Wayne and a notable departure from the first Dedication's East Coast larceny and Tha Carter II's ambiguous production. "Poppin' My Collar", "What You Know", "Kryptonite," "Hustlin'", and "I Think They Like Me" all get the royal treatment, and it's exhilarating to hear Wayne bring his best to these regional-gone-national hits.
Much has been made of Lil' Wayne's growth from album to mixtape to album and so forth, and Dedication 2 is no exception. He seems more ambitious, and more capable of fulfilling ambitions with every release. Wayne clearly believes he's the "best rapper alive." What remains to be seen is whether he can convince the rest of us.


The live album from one of the UK’s largest rock bands serves as a broad, if flawed, introduction to the still-growing band, their enormous potential, and the swaggeringly neurotic frontman Matt Healy.

DH00278 (Live From the O2, London, 12/16/2016)

If pop’s notable figures of the present time-warped themselves to, say, 1987, the UK band the 1975 would probably occupy a place similar to INXS, or Duran Duran. They craft super-catchy songs that ping-pong through pop-adjacent genres and aren’t afraid to throw in some sax skronks or vibed-out textural experiments. It’s a heady mix, and their second album, last year’s I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it, made it even more so. It front-loaded its vibed-out moments (its title track is a six-minute dreamscape, its strident bass serving as the only tether to reality) but balanced them out with exquisitely constructed pop songs that got meta-fantastic about 21st-century culture like the sumptuous “Change of Heart.” I like it when you sleep… documented a band with creative energy to spare, able to wink sardonically at selfie culture’s halls of mirrors while also being very much a part of it.
With a new album reportedly coming out sometime in 2018, the band close the book on the Sleep era with DH00278, an audio-only capture of the 1975’s December 16, 2016, show at London’s O2 Arena, one of two they played at the UK’s biggest indoor venue. (It was initially released as a concert film on Christmas 2016.) While it doesn’t entirely echo the thrill of being in the same EnormoDome as Matt Healy and his bandmates, at about two hours long and with 24 tracks, DH00278 serves as a broad, if flawed, introduction to the still-growing band and their potential. When it succeeds, it does so because of the electrified bond between the band and its audience, which gets a jolt from the casually audacious way the group brings together glam, shoegaze, synth-pop, and any other sound that might tickle its fancy—even when the 1975 fall short, their sheer nerve is worth applauding.
Live albums are now more of an oddity. Are they necessary in the age of Setlist.FM and YouTube and shortened festival sets, and don’t they mostly benefit rock acts, who seem to be out of fashion in America right now? Sure they are, if only because they provide a historical record of those bands who can keep a crowd’s attention for more than your festival-standard 45 minutes. A document of a single, two-hour show in one place, from the opening cheers through the big singles and into the long stretches of mood music—a recollection that isn’t done until the sounds of the crowd exiting as “Jungle Boogie” wafts in the background fade out—might be passé, but it does at least reveal which acts have built up stamina and magnetism.
On paper, the 1975 operate in the rock band mold—they have a guitar-vox-bass-drums core, are fronted by a larger-than-life persona in Healy, and are more than willing to super-size their sound with brass or even a choir. DH00278 shows how they’ve blown up that ideal and refashioned it for the 2010s, whether by bringing in a choir for the impish “The Sound” (sample lyric: “You’re so conceited, I said ‘I love you’/What does it matter if I lie to you?”) or hyper-charging an open-road anthem with overdriven guitars and bashed-out beats (the glorious “Milk”). It also reveals the bond the 1975 have developed with their audience, who are fervent and steadfast, tracking Healy’s cryptic social-media posts and poring over the musical and lyrical details of the band’s songs. The cheers for tracks like the hip-wriggling anti-fame broadside “Love Me” and the bad-kid-jitters anthem “Chocolate” are lusty and loud; Healy gets nearly drowned out by fans singing along multiple times. In the context of a show, ambient interludes like the swirling “Please Be Naked” is a chance for crowd and artist to bathe in feedback and glory, marveling at being in the same room together. But on DH00278, some of that electricity is lost, as the nuances offered by those tracks’ studio versions get dampened.
Not to mention those interludes are all without Healy, the swaggeringly neurotic frontman who can follow up a passionate screed against in-concert phone use (“The memory, the visceral memory of the next three and a half minutes will be better than a video on your iPhone,” he pleads before the glittery smolder “Fallingforyou”) with a request for a bit more wine, and who can passionately advocate for human rights, and who can pull off multiple welcomes to a crowd over the course of a show with brio. His charisma radiates from the speakers on a recording heard a year and change after the actual event it’s chronicling. Even if the songs weren’t as good as they are, DH00278 would still be a chance to capture the enigmatic Healy as both showmanship-minded frontman and frazzled neurotic—two sides that aren’t as different as one might think.


The Washington, D.C.-based rapper GoldLink broke through with an upbeat fusion of house music and hip-hop on his mixtape The God Complex, snagging the attention of Rick Rubin. His debut album concerns a relationship and subsequent breakup he had when he was 16, and the details are often kept elusive.

GoldLink: And After That, We Didn’t Talk

And After That, We Didn’t Talk

On GoldLink's 2014 debut mixtape The God Complex, the then-20-year-old rapper nailed a difficult balance: soft sounds, hard rhymes. The music—an uptempo mixture of house music and hip-hop signifiers (GoldLink coined the term "future bounce" for it)—offset lyrics full of hypermasculine, purposefully exaggerated sexual boasts and street-savvy narratives. There was something indescribable about hearing the high-voiced rapper spit something like "Dick to the face, might choke" 0ver bubbly champagne synths, and the tape caught on, along with its signature hit "Ay Ay". The Washington, D.C. rapper toured alongside Mac Miller, as well as electronic producers like SBTRKT and Kaytranada. He even caught the attention of Def Jam founder/music visionary Rick Rubin, who has served as a mentor for his debut album, And After That, We Didn't Talk.
And After That, We Didn't Talk is not a significant sonic departure from Link's previous work, but it carries more thematic weight. The album concerns a relationship and subsequent breakup he had when he was 16, but telling a six-year-old story also leaves the door open for very selective memory. The woman in question remains nameless throughout the album, and though he freely talks about a "Que" (with whom she was cheating on Link), an "Allan" (a likely previous boyfriend), and sprinkles other biographical notes, the bigger picture of why this moment and this person matter so much to Link that he dedicated his first studio album to her is often missing.
Instead, And After That communicates GoldLink's state of mind. He is reflective on the opening track, "After You Left", hopeful on "Zipporah", with its gospel chant bridge, "Lord, Lord, I need your help, Lord." The following three songs ("Dark Skin Women", "Spectrum", and "Dance on Me") best encapsulate his hip-hop/dance hybrid sound, and find Link returning to the sexual braggadocio of The God Complex, which is often where he finds the most joy as a writer (listen to his very vivid description of cunnilingus on "Dance on Me").
Toward the album's end, Link ventures into R&B and, at times, completely abandons rapping. He sings about his obsessive love on "Palm Trees", and while it's still unclear why he's obsessed, his pained vocals make you believe. The same emotion comes through on "Polarized" when he sings, "Go down South to Atlanta with your sister and/ I'll fly you myself, if I have to." In that song, all we learn about the subject is that she's a 5'7" model, but Link is convincing enough as a communicator to make up for the lyrical gaps.
And After That, We Didn't Talk is not quite as immediately exciting as its predecessor, which was a burst of aphrodisiac energy. GoldLink feels tugged down occasionally by the story he is trying to tell. As he said in an interview with Pitchfork, "I feel like 99% of niggas lie in they raps; I don't." The literal truths, however, distract from how he expresses them. GoldLink is a total-package artist, someone who does not have to rely entirely on facts to succeed as a rapper. His music works when every element blends together, and And After That, We Didn't Talk is most interesting when he shares only the most vital details from a moment. It's then that he can wring his experiences for their emotions and convey feelings with more than just words.


On their latest LP, Ava Luna are, as always, toying with a collection of ideas that should not work together in theory. The album has a loose, playful energy, and always seems to be ready to pounce on you.

Infinite House

On their third full-length, the Brooklyn quintet Ava Luna is, as always, toying with a collection of ideas that should not work together in theory. There are traces of genres they’ve already spent some time exploring: British post-punk, '70s soul and funk, late '60s krautrock. The band recorded Infinite House in wildly different environments—Benton, Mississippi and Brooklyn—which serve as central and opposing life forces for the album. One minute murmuring, echoed vocals imitate spirits in a Southern forest, and the next frontman Carlos Hernandez is texting a lover and bemoaning the cost of living. It’s a scatterbrained trip, one that invites you to nestle into its grooves and get comfy before it rudely catapults you out again.
Take, for example, opener "Company". A muted bass line thumps through the first minute, joined by some leisurely strumming and a faint hi-hat. Drummer Julian Fader abruptly cues the rest of the band in for an outburst of noise and distortion as Hernandez hollers in sheer desperation, "Do you appreciate my company?" This is a group that basks in these kinds of bipolar switches, slinking away to a new mood just as they’d gotten grips on the one preceding it.
Nonsense is intrinsic to Ava Luna, and either of its two backup singers (Felicia Douglass and Becca Kauffman) is prone to breaking out into gibberish at any given moment. But they take this tendency to a new level on "Tenderize" when Kauffman breathily scats between Hernandez’s anxious yelps like a jazz club singer. Douglass’ shadowy harmonies counteracts them both, closing in the gaps at exactly the right points. When the group builds on each other this way, the result is eerily mystical. This layering works similarly on "Coat of Shellac", blending the slickness of R&B with the harshness of post-punk and unpredictability of no wave.
The album has a loose, playful energy, and always seems to be ready to pounce on you. Skittish guitar improvisations tangle with neo-soul percussion on "Steve Polyester", while Kauffman alternates between speaking and sliding into song sporadically, as if by accident. "Black Dog" starts off with Hernandez telling a seductive, drowsy tale over a few simple guitar chords, allowing for a much-needed moment of respite. Of course, that too gives way to the dissonance, accompanied by haunting, gospel choir gang vocals. He often riffs on freewheeling blues-rock in the style of Captain Beefheart, most prominently during the serrated rhythms of "Best Hexagon".
The most bizarre track—if forced to pick one—is "Victoria". Primal utterances dance circles around distorted, intergalactic synth beats. Kauffman takes a beguiling taunt ("You’re no good, baby!"), deconstructs it, then pieces it back together repeatedly. It’s a disorienting thrill that draws out the band’s innate ingenuity. There are plenty of other high points on the album—the aching chorus of "Billz" is arguably Hernandez’s most addictive yet—but listening to Ava Luna play off of each others’ quirks here is intoxicating. Minimalism has never been their strong suit, and they wrestle with controlling their lawless tendencies, yet Infinite House doesn’t compromise the group’s hyperactive curiosity. Keeping up with it requires careful attention, though unpacking it hardly feels laborious. Just don’t expect Ava Luna to do any hand-holding for you throughout the process.


Tim Hecker's new album is more focused on performance than process, as most of it was recorded with a small group of orchestral musicians affiliated with the label Bedroom Community. Rather than having the music conjure a space, the space now shapes the music, and while Hecker’s music has always been eerie, it's never been this forceful.

Virgins

Tim Hecker’s first album under his own name was called Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again. This was 2001: Ambient and electronic music was still ruled by the penetrating austerity of labels like Mille Plateaux and Raster-Noton—labels whose artists strove to make their music sound as digital as possible. Markus Popp's Oval, which inspired a lot of supposedly funny comments about whether or not its CDs were skipping, is still probably the best example of this—and in an era where CDs are starting to go the way of the public pay phone, probably the most quaint, too.
From its title down, Haunt Me presented a model of electronic music that was spectral, imperfect, and capable of erosion. The most applicable metaphors for it weren’t technological, but natural: Parts of the album sounded like the slow tearing of paper, other parts like wind blowing across infinities of sand. Hecker didn’t just imbue his computers with “warmth”—a lazy term that has long needed to be put down—but with mortality. (Remember that that this was 2001, a year after the Y2K scare made supposedly infallible stores of digital information look vulnerable in a very human way.) At the time, Haunt Me’s most obvious companion was Fennesz’s Endless Summer, a grainy, blissful album that resembles easy-listening music coming through on the broken broadcast of a distant star.
Hecker has more or less followed course for the past 12 years, releasing high-quality albums with the low-key consistency of someone apparently unconcerned with trend. His approach to sound and texture can be traced to mid-2000s Radiohead, the ominous holding patterns of Godspeed You! Black Emperor (fellow Canadians with which Hecker has toured), William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, and basically any music that sounds like it has been abandoned by its maker to rot. His peaks are arguable: My favorites are 2006’s Harmony in Ultraviolet (his most conventionally beautiful) and 2011’s Ravedeath, 1972, which was built out of a single session of live organ, piano and guitar, recorded in an Icelandic church, and later worked over in the studio.
Virgins is the first Tim Hecker album more focused on performance than process. Most of it was recorded with a small group of orchestral musicians affiliated with Bedroom Community, the collective that also includes composers Nico Muhly, Ben Frost, Valgeir Sigurðsson and Paul Corley. (Frost helped record Ravedeath; Paul Corley engineered both Ravedeath and Virgins, and co-produced Oneohtrix Point Never’s R Plus Seven at Bedroom Community’s Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavik; Oneohtrix Point Never’s Dan Lopatin collaborated with Hecker on 2011’s Instrumental Tourist: The world of forward-thinking electro-acoustic music is a small and fraternal one.)
The live-room conceit is an interesting turn for an artist who for a long time worked in a primarily digital realm: Rather than having the music conjure a space, the space now shapes the music—a return to idea of sound as something that exists in the air before on hard drives, and of albums as specific records of specific people in specific places. Even the electronics—and there are still plenty of electronics—sound like they’re refracting and ricocheting off of wood and metal, scraping a ceiling, trying to find a way out.
Hecker’s music has always been eerie, but never this forceful. Some sections of Virgins feel like soundtracks for horror-movie climaxes when the camera fixes on a sickening image and refuses to turn away, fascinated and trapped at the same time. Even the album’s quieter moments are more tense than they might’ve been on Hecker’s earlier albums—a function, maybe, of a live-room environment where every creak and whisper seems to be happening a few feet from the speakers instead of at some artificially cavernous distance.
This is music that benefits from being heard loud and/or on headphones in the same way couches are best experienced by actually sitting down in them instead of just brushing your fingers against the upholstery as you leave the room. Like a lot of Ben Frost’s albums (or something like Swans’ The Seer), Virgins feels possessed by the idea that no advancements in society or technology will ever shake our primal reactions to fear, wonder, awe and what in a more naïve era used to be called the sublime. And while it’s a fallacy to think that hyperseriousness is the only way to strike people at their core, it’s still inspiring to hear an artist—especially one who started out as mellow as Hecker—double down and make a statement so confrontational. Once haunted, now he’s the one who haunts.


With dancefloors gone dark, the Northern Irish DJs tailor their second album to homebound listeners, but their indoor voices don’t command the same attention as their main-stage belters.

Isles

The idea of a home-listening record from Bicep feels suspiciously oxymoronic. Like Orbital and Avicii before them, the Belfast-born duo of Matt McBriar and Andy Ferguson are one of those electronic acts designed for the sweeping euphoria of big summer stages. Isles, their second album, should be blowing the cobwebs off the Southern Hemisphere’s festival circuit as you read this. Instead, the pandemic intervened, so Bicep are rolling out a domesticated version of their music, promising a “much, much harder” version of the same material to be delivered in person once it’s safe to tread the boards. No wonder Bicep sounded so miserable on comeback single “Atlas,” a song whose Ofra Haza sample and synth squiggles suggest an (inverted) cross between Richie Hawtin’s F.U.S.E. project and the Sisters of Mercy: the live shutdown has left them like heirs to a knife factory in the age of big soup.
In the best-case scenario, Bicep might have proven themselves to be house music’s own Taylor Swifts, taking their epic bluster down several notches to locate a homely charm that is equally sympathetic to their gifts. In reality, though, you’d be pressed to find significant difference between Isles and Bicep’s eponymous debut album. The new release may push the boat out a little further in search of sample sources, with Malawian polyrhythms and snatches of the Bulgarian State Radio & Television Choir connecting on “Apricots,” but the group’s bread and butter remains cavernous electronica, progressive house, and a scraping of UK garage, underpinned by a strong melodic current. This might sound like a convoluted mix, but Bicep keep their productions simple, linear, and uncluttered. They’re like the anti-100 gecs. Not all that much happens in a Bicep song, and what does is orderly and well signposted.
For many people, this is part of the duo’s charm. Bicep resonate with large audiences precisely because their music is so digestible, like the well-ordered moral structures of a blockbuster film. But this means Bicep walk a perilous line between brilliant and banal. When they get it right and the melodies connect, as on Isles’ epically wistful “X,” they are hugely enjoyable. When they don’t, as on the disappointingly vague “Cazenove,” there’s almost nothing to get your teeth into; their music drifts by in a haze of turbo-charged powder puff.
Isles is at its best when the gloom sinks in. “Atlas” has a wonderfully hangdog feel; “Apricots” is Dead Can Dance deep house; and the liturgical feel of “Lido” suggests monk-friendly German electronica act Enigma. “Saku (feat. Clara La San),” meanwhile, is almost an excellent song: Its vocal melody has a bitter sting of melancholy, like tears drying in a cold winter wind, but the production is too polite, a house-cat version of UK garage that has been neutered and declawed. There’s no rage, little passion and—rather ironically—no muscle.
“Saku”’s frustratingly not-quite-there production is emblematic of the way Isles teeters on the brink of success. There is something confoundingly almost about Bicep: they are almost a great act, almost capable of unleashing vast emotion, and almost on the verge of letting go. But the release never quite arrives. Isles has sparkling moments but it’s all a bit constrained, like a potted plant on a window sill that craves the natural wildness of a garden.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The once-mighty Pixies debase their legacy with this mercifully brief new EP.

EP-1

The sad spoils of a job in music criticism: I am finally given the chance to review a new release by the Pixies, and it's this. There is a bitter personal irony in the moment, a momentary affirmation of a fear that anyone chasing the culture industry contends with occasionally: I got here too late. Anything worth covering has already happened.
I don’t really feel that way, of course, but this quickie EP, dropped into the world two days ago, prompts bleak thoughts, at least while it’s on. It’s mercifully brief-- four songs, one, “Indie Cindy”, repeated in a “clean” version-- but considering it is the first new release bearing the Pixies name since 1991’s Trompe Le Monde, it leaves deep marks. Nothing in these four faceless, fatuous alt-rock songs distinguishes them as the music of the Pixies. Nothing, in fact, distinguishes them at all. Kim Deal is absent, having left the band, but no one else-- not Santiago or Lovering or even Frank Black-- seem to have shown up either.
From the moment Black’s bleating vocal take begins on “Andro Queen”, it’s painfully clear: There is no Pixies in this Pixies. No tension between preschool giddiness and grad-school sophistication, between finger-painting pop and Bunuel-quoting lyrics; no seesaw between playfulness and menace;  no intimations of terror. There is no alien shimmer to the guitars or the vocal melodies. The cheerily plodding power chords and excruciating rhyme scheme of “Another Toe in the Ocean” recall Green Album-era Weezer, or Lit. The turgid crunch of “What Goes Boom” summons uncomfortable memories of Papa Roach covering “Gouge Away”. This music wasn’t just written or recorded without any regard to the quality of the Pixies legacy, it was done so without regard to songwriting quality at all. If one of these songs had started playing over the credits of an American Pie knockoff that never reached theaters, you would not blink.
For anyone with even a mild investment in the music the Pixies made in the 1980s-- which, considering how far their influence spread after Kurt Cobain leaked them into the world’s mainstream water supply, is a fair amount of people-- the utterly anonymous sound of EP-1 is shocking. On “Indie Cindy”, Black rants and mutters lines like “You put the cock in cocktail, man/ I put the tail in wait, watch me walk." It's terrible, but it's possibly the most memorable turn of phrase he manages. The rest streams by like multiplex air-conditioning.
It's hard not to take the EP's failure personally. If not for the once-faraway promise of the Pixies, and bands like the Pixies, I would almost certainly never have wandered down the foolish siren-song path to music-critic employment in the first place. When I saw them play after they reunited, nine years ago, I distinctly remember the thrill, shared by the other twentysomethings around me, as we all sang along to “Hey”. This moment, maybe, wasn’t supposed to be. I was cheating death, or time, and like any good monkey’s-paw cautionary tale, it would certainly backfire in some way. And so it has. Very soon, no one will remember much about this EP, or that it even exists. But it’s a minor tragedy that it was released, and it’s almost enough to make me wish the reunion and even that magical show I saw never happened.


After parting ways with Uncle Tupelo partner Jay Farrar, Jeff Tweedy's first step was an unsteady one-- Wilco's *A.M.*, like a nervous houseguest fidgeting to get comfortable on the couch, never found its vibe. Farrar, on the other hand, with Son Volt, confidently assumed his position as Americana's standard bearer. Things soon changed, however, as 1996's sprawling and ambitious *Being There* saw Wilco reimagining themselves as rock'n'roll revivalists with a drunken swagger, and winning the hearts of Uncle Tupelo fans and critics the world over-- Son Volt, meanwhile, stagnated on 1997's *Straightaways*, which, while not a bad record by any

Summerteeth

After parting ways with Uncle Tupelo partner Jay Farrar, Jeff Tweedy's first step was an unsteady one-- Wilco's A.M., like a nervous houseguest fidgeting to get comfortable on the couch, never found its vibe. Farrar, on the other hand, with Son Volt, confidently assumed his position as Americana's standard bearer. Things soon changed, however, as 1996's sprawling and ambitious Being There saw Wilco reimagining themselves as rock'n'roll revivalists with a drunken swagger, and winning the hearts of Uncle Tupelo fans and critics the world over-- Son Volt, meanwhile, stagnated on 1997's Straightaways, which, while not a bad record by any stretch, failed to innovate quite like Wilco had. The tide had turned, and Wilco found themselves unexpectedly on top.
In 1998, Wilco teamed with British folkie Billy Bragg for Mermaid Avenue, a collection of Woody Guthrie lyrics paired with original music by the collaborating artists. Wilco lent a suitable Midwestern sensibility to the project, but with Guthrie putting the words in his mouth, Tweedy had yet to beat the biggest knock against him. By now, it was obvious that he had a knack for crafting instantly memorable melodies; the question was: what did he have to say?
Just as the Velvets' swan song, Loaded, was packed with hit songs for critics who claimed Lou Reed was incapable of writing them, so too is Summerteeth Jeff Tweedy's statement of purpose. The album, a loose song cycle considering the intermingling of perception, communication, and reality, and its affect on our relationships, witnesses the band dismissing its country-rock sound for a studio sheen that would make Brian Wilson proud. Drawing on the pop music of their late-60s and early-70s youths, the band members have crafted a collection of immediately infectious and consistently stunning melodies with complex, layered arrangements. With the band having jettisoned Max Johnston and his dobro, fiddle, and mandolin, Summerteeth's songs are driven not by rustic guitar licks, but rather by Jay Bennett's grand organ fills and ever-present harmonies, which paint the album in Technicolor.
Undermining this sticky-sweet pop party in a delicious irony, and ultimately supplying Summerteeth with its depth and success, is Tweedy's dark contemplation. The intrigue begins quickly on the album's opener, "Can't Stand It", which finds our narrator lamenting the end of a relationship over a pop-soul ditty punctuated by bells. As the source of the narrator's frustration crystallizes on his own fickle emotions, Tweedy plants the seeds of mistrust, warning of "speakers speaking in code."
As the album racks up false realizations, startling confessions, and outright lies, listeners find themselves exchanging suspicious glances with their guides. Where "Pieholden Suite" dupes a sleeping lover, the frail "We're Just Friends" finds Tweedy lying only to himself. Similarly, the singer's resolve on the jubilant would-be self-help anthem "Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway(again)" is plastered like a forced smile, and cracks like, "I'm a bomb, regardless," scar the façade. In fact, during the album's first half, only the overtly sarcastic "How to Fight Loneliness" is what it seems.
The album's confusion climaxes during its keystone, the majestic "Via Chicago", and its counterpart "ELT". On the former, a scorned lover stews, "I dreamed about killing you again last night/ And it felt alright with me." Then, a couplet of unsettling stream-of-consciousness lyrics give way to Tweedy as he tears into a disturbingly deliberate, off-key guitar riff that might very well be the musical moment of 1999. Interestingly, the celebratory "ELT" finds our sad psychopath repented and healed: "Oh, what have I been missing/ Wishing, wishing that you were dead." Taken on its merits, the song is almost unimaginatively sincere, but in context, it becomes enigmatic. As the narrator shuffles his story for our approval, which spin are we to believe? Brilliantly, the album leaves such questions unanswered.
As Tweedy removes his trickster mask for "My Darling", a spare lullaby to his young son, the mood of the album emerges, but Summerteeth's transformation is most apparent in its two recitals of "A Shot in the Arm". Amidst the incertitude of the album's twilight opening, its chorus, "Maybe all I need is a shot in the arm/ Something in my veins/ Bloodier than blood," seems a ghoulish reference to drug addiction. However, its reprise, on the heels of the Elvis Costello-by-way-of-Phil Spector romp, "Candyfloss", seems to call on an inner strength and the fortitude for self-improvement.
From its opener, in which "our prayers will never be answered again," to "In a Future Age", where Tweedy challenges us to "turn our prayers to outrageous dares," Summerteeth drags us through our interpersonal garbage, only to politely ask us to pick up after ourselves. Once drawn in by the album's addictive pop hooks, the band ensnares us with clever ironies and rich musical treatments that never let go. As the album admits its intricacies, it's clear that the band is growing exponentially. Having confidently abandoned their alt-country ghosts, Wilco has become a band from which we can expect everything and nothing at all. With Summerteeth, they've delivered on both counts, crafting an album as wonderfully ambiguous and beautifully uncertain as life itself.


The folk singer enlists an elite, dynamic group of players for an album deconstructed from a master jam session, naturally creating his most jazz-forward release to date.

The Following Mountain

You can rely on Sam Amidon’s albums for heavily reworked American traditionals and a bit of Irish folk, mixed with a heartfelt pop cover or two—and always that beseeching voice, with its dusky bronze hue, elongating syllables like whale song. But only the last is present on The Following Mountain, his first record of mostly original material, save for a few stray citations: the lyrics of “Blackbird,” a Kentucky fiddle tune, and some lines from a 17th-century poem. It is also, as foreshadowed by the presence of the electric jazz guitarist Bill Frisell on his last record, Amidon’s most jazz-forward release to date.
Amidon inspires deep personal identification in his fans, but his sixth album sometimes courts admiration more than cathexis, at least compared to its most crushable predecessors. He usually spins old-time music into jazzy flights and neoclassical compositions, stitching rustic motifs and lyrics into postmodern Appalachian pastiches. Here, he’s done the opposite, extracting folk songs from his own improvisations. Free-jazz finale “April” is the album’s keystone, the final twelve minutes of an epic sesh with some prodigious players along for the jam including percussionist luminary Milford Graves. The spiritual saxophonist Sam Gendel, the eclectic instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, and other younger musicians also add fine playing throughout
Amidon and producer Leo Abrahams reverse engineered songs from individual moments of the master jam, and drew out a unifying, gently driving rhythm across the album. The resultant music rolls and shimmers, with hard little fillips of guitar glinting in waves of woodwinds and violins, organs and electric basses. The bright purity of beloved songs like “Saro” are absent. Instead, imagine if Amidon’s best record, I See the Sign, had been all “Kedron” and “How Come That Blood”—all understated dynamics and trotting rhythm—and no “Johanna The Row-di” or “Pretty Fair Damsel.”
It’s not a bad look, but the record has a rocky start. “Fortune” is simply underdeveloped, a sketch. “Ghosts,” though, is a real stumbling block. Amidon drags ear-splitting squalls across his violin and howls almost tunelessly, as if the music were a thicket he’s trying to claw out of. But things quickly settle down, and familiar dreamlike pastorals reign, with an effect like looking at an Andrew Wyeth painting while—not tripping, exactly, but gently hallucinating as from sleep deprivation.
*The Following Mountain *is more a musician’s record than an art object. “Another Story Told” emphasizes, however archly, the gestures of live-in-a-room playing (“Fiddles,” announces a carefully tracked-in voice); other song titles also shout out their players (Sultan’s elegant congas propel the entrancing “Juma Mountain” and Gendel leads the mythic “Gendel in 5” with force and clarity). The cold-burning blues of “Warren,” blending an old shape-note song and a Chinese poem, matches these highlights in sultry, solemn grit.
But what to do with “April”? It’s a juicier voyage through extended techniques than “Ghosts,” but it’s also an undeniably jarring ending for a placid record, and I’m not sure one can even appreciate the end of a long improv out of context. It’s interesting that it is the master document for the other songs, but that doesn’t make listening to them side by side feel intelligible. It’s no knock on the great drummer Graves, who once gigged with Albert Ayler and Sonny Sharrock, to wonder who would ever put on a Sam Amidon record when they were in the mood for some rowdy jazz. But, a few odd decisions aside, there’s enough between the unforgiving slopes to make this essential for Amidon’s present devotees, if not the perfect mountain for prospective new ones to climb.


The work of London-born, Sudanese artist Ahmed Gallab, aka Sinkane, blends styles including sub-Saharan pop, shoegaze, and afro-rock. More than ever, his new album has the feel of a democratic band.

Life & Livin’ It

If any artist deserves to swerve around a borderless Earth with a real World Passport, it’s the London-born, Sudanese artist Ahmed Gallab. Listen to his catalog under the Sinkane moniker and you’ll hear fragments of sub-Saharan pop, shoegaze, afro-rock, electronica, krautrock, and everything in between—all melded into his own funky blend. Jumping into Sinkane’s discography is like a weekend immersed in your local record store’s world music rack.
On Life & Livin’ It, Sinkane’s sound is, more than ever, that of a democratic band. Supporting its predecessor, Mean Love, Gallab and his musicians toured 166 shows in 20 countries, and this new album retains the immediacy of a live set. The highlife bluster and catchy hooks of Life & Livin’ It are sweet as taffy, like a bright sunburst of positivity that could melt ice.
With production spotless from front-to-back, no instrument trips another’s heels. The orchestration remains refreshingly breezy, from the simple-but-infectious keyboard riffs of “Favorite Song,” to the gentle sax lines on “U’Huh,” to the afrobeat bluster of members of Brooklyn band Antibalas’ rich horn sections on “Telephone.” (If anything, the mix could be a little too clean.) Gallab—eternally infused with the spirits of his Sudanese pop forefathers—shines on top of the rhythms with zero struggles. A bit of an outlier, opener “Deadweight” features the kind of digital blips that have underpinned some of Gallab’s previous work: The chipped guitar chords, twinkling keys, and rapped bongos rev up slowly, culminating with wailing guitars.
The singer’s gentle vocal tones perfectly suit the lyrics, which are sunny, upbeat, and sometimes a little goofy. There’s an endearing simplicity to “Favorite Song,” inspired by Gallab’s one-time side job as a DJ: “Won’t you play my favorite song?” he repeats over and over. Elsewhere, “U’Huh” sees Gallab asserting, “Everything is fine/We’re all gonna be alright” and “Kulu shi tamaam,” an Arabic phrase meaning “everything is great.” It’s either an admirable shot of optimism or skittish fingers-crossing given these times we find ourselves in.
On closer “The Way,” the guitars get nasty. The horns come down hard, and chants of “I know, I know, I know” summon the spirit of Bill Withers. It’s psychedelic-era Temptations cut with Blaxploitation grooves. *Life & Livin’ It *signs off with a stiff jab to the nose, hinting at what could be if Sinkane’s next journey takes them deeper into the mud.


Indie rock’s preeminent classical composer offers a selection of piano pieces from minimal, to rousing, to a heroic concerto for two pianos backed by a full orchestra.

El Chan

Bryce Dessner’s “Concerto for Two Pianos” opens with a rolling boom of sound, rich and super-saturated. The two piano soloists, Katia and Marielle Labèque, gallop up and down the keyboard and the orchestra shudders and blurts. It is the kind of curtain-drawing moment that concertos used to be made of, and as this introduction clears out, a rising four-note piano theme emerges. It’s a simple, searching figure that could serve an Indiana Jones-style swashbuckler score as well as a chamber opera, and Dessner proves that to us by blowing the theme up and shrinking it. We hear it ripple through the woodwinds, the strings; under the hands of the Labèque sisters, it sounds like cool jazz.
Dessner, of course, is a member of the National, one of the longest-running success stories of 21st-century indie rock. Part of their durability might have something to do with just how busy its members keep between album cycles: By now, Dessner is almost as integral to the contemporary classical programming cycles of American orchestras as his band is to summer festivals. Deutsche Grammophon releases his works and every few years, he premieres a new, substantive commission. In 2018, he was named a creative partner to the San Francisco Symphony, under the direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen. For a contemporary composer, there are few loftier positions. It is an unusual lane for a working rock musician to occupy.
Dessner’s music feels heavily influenced by early 20th-century composers like Bartók and Debussy—composers working within the range of conventional tonality but pushing its outermost limits, composers who did then-unprecedented things with orchestral color. The opening flourish to the “Concerto For Two Pianos” nods towards Olivier Messiaen’s massive “Turangalîla-Symphonie,” which opens with a similar burst. Dessner keeps a low profile in his band, and his classical works don’t have the showy faux-intellectual edge of, say, Frank Zappa’s concert works, but he is unafraid of bombast, and seems to understand and even relish the ways that orchestras are uniquely positioned to create it.
His new concerto is filled with long, heroic piano runs set against the orchestra, the kind of writing that evokes the hoary old hero’s-journey dynamic that once defined all concertos. The piece is short and punchy, all three movements clocking in under a total of 25 minutes. At times it veers towards the empty-calories sensations of composers like Michael Daugherty, whose works fill your ears and dissipate as fast as fireworks. But it’s a meaty and sometimes haunting work, a genre exercise that fulfills its own goals, kind of like a good cop show or western.
“Haven,” a pristine little eight-minute piece for piano and guitar, is less memorable. It is so wildly and distractingly redolent of Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint” that it verges on a student exercise. If you synced up, say, the 2:12 mark of first movement of “Electric Counterpoint” with the opening of “Haven," you would have your own little Reich work. Dessner doesn’t usually go for such open mimicry. The piece is lively but has a hard time arguing for its independent existence.
The title work, “El Chan,” features a whisper of pianos that begins to sound a bit like John Adams’ “Hallelujah Junction” and then opens into a stillness closer to Erik Satie. But Dessner’s music has too much surging harmonic motion to fit neatly into the smooth churn of modern minimalism. The work is a dedication the filmmaker Alejandro Iñárritu, and there is some of his frenetic spirit in the music: “Coyote” is two minutes of leaping, pounding dissonances, a mixture of playfulness and rising panic. It makes him a refreshingly old-fashioned kind of composer. His pieces do the sorts of things that compositions students were taught to watch for: first theme, second theme, development, recapitulate.
Old-fashioned never needs to mean “sleepy,” though, and these pieces are more sedate and less distinguished than some of his others. The dulcet murmur of the concert hall seems to be overtaking him as his classical career grows in stature: I deeply missed the gnashed teeth and bad-caffeine jolt of his Kronos Quartet piece “Aheym,” or the soured-milk little dissonances of “Raphael,” which he recorded with the Copenhagen Philharmonic in 2014. As his rock-band gig got a little more predictable, his classical pieces used to be the secret places you could hear him indulge some wild-hair energy; it’s disheartening to see that spirit fade as his resume grows.


While this seven-song EP sounds like it was birthed from the same creative wavelength as the London producer's recent LP Dedication, here the album's glum funereality gets an almost dance-friendly makeover.

Nothing EP

Don't let the title or post-album late-year timing fool you-- there are plenty of good things happening on Nothing.  While it sounds like it was taken from the same creative burst that birthed London producer Zomby's recent LP Dedication, here that album's glum funereality gets an almost dance-friendly makeover. With its classic-sounding jungle breaks and ragga vocal samples, opener "Labyrinth" immediately recalls Zomby's vaguely conceptual throwback debut Where Were U in '92?, though drenched in noir melancholy. The breaks stutter and sputter, the perfunctory chord progression is oddly defeatist, and the characteristic airhorns are mockingly empty and peripheral: Breakbeat 'ardkore never sounded this tormented.
That's not to say Nothing isn't ever upbeat or danceable-- it's tinged with Dedication's air of quiet, nocturnal introspection but not shackled by its thematic bent or album-oriented sequencing. Thus we get seven shades of Zomby, and even if they're basically different shades of gray, it's exciting to hear him branch out. He tries something new on the unusually dissolute "Trapdoor", where grainy synths billow over scattershot percussion that has more to do with footwork than Zomby's usual hardcore continuum. "Digital Fractal" and "Equinox" take the pseudo-garage bounce of older tracks like "Tarantula" and turn it somber in two different ways: "Fractal" plays with dulcet, mournful tones and shrouds its cycling arpeggios in reverb so they sound like they're off in the distance, lost in a fog, while the shimmering "Equinox" sucks that echo chamber dry, all crisply slicing snares and tactile hand percussion. It's a brilliant realism often missing from an artist whose work is expressed through glassy, artificial textures or borrowed tropes from extinct genres.
Those extinct genres make a determined comeback on Nothing, however, and Zomby's take on them is stronger than ever. "Sens" toys gently with its breaks, carefully placing them in the white space of a melody caught between jerky and jilted, and "Ecstasy Versions" transitions from a hesitant breakbeat crawler into full-on jungle. Even here, again Zomby's morose melodicism takes center stage, a track more about its sadly cooing vocals-- a common sample source sullied and sullen-- and bleepy melody than the flashy, distracting breaks that should be the center of attention. It's like he's proving once and for all that Where Were U in '92? wasn't just a transparent exercise, blending his hardcore copycat tracks with his more personal, idiosyncratic tendencies.
The Nothing EP was originally included as an appendage to the Japanese edition of Dedication, so it seems almost certain that these were leftovers from the album. But it says a lot about the strength of these tracks-- and Zomby's preternatural propensity for prolific greatness-- that the seven odds and sods on Nothing make for such a strong whole. It's not quite the sound of Zomby having fun-- this music is still too dark for that-- but it's Zomby being his usual tangential self again, after bearing the constraints of a second cohesive album. He recently tweeted: "jungle is going to come back hard, mark my words, it might be five years from now but we will witness a new great age of jungle in England." This sounds like the excitable mouthing-off of a delusional purist, but really, with visionary artists like Zomby behind a potential new wave of the stuff, it's hard not to wonder if he could be right.