The South African jazz ensemble’s improvised soundtrack to a 2017 documentary about the 1976 Soweto Uprising captures a mixture of outrage, injustice, and hope that resonates powerfully today.

UPRIZE!

“I ran away from the scene,” photographer Sam Nzima recalled to Time magazine. Then, after recovering himself, he doubled back to capture one of the most powerful photographs of the 20th century. It was June 16, 1976, and several thousand Soweto students had begun protesting the imposition of mandatory Afrikaans-language instruction in township schools. When a student protest turned violent, Nzima captured the still-shocking image of 13-year-old student Hector Pieterson, gunned down by police. South African apartheid wasn’t well known outside of the country up until that point, but its brutality was undeniable after that.
Director Sifiso Khanyile’s 2017 documentary UPRIZE! focused on these student protests and foregrounded their struggle against the Bantu Education Act, a repressive policy aimed at disenfranchising Black South Africans. Enacted in 1953, the law set up mandatory government-run schools where Black children were trained for lives of manual labor and menial work, creating an uneducated, unskilled underclass, and indoctrinated to believe that they were subservient to the country’s white minority. “They were putting our minds in a box,” playwright Fatima Dike says in the film. Accompanying the film is an improvised soundtrack by the South African group SPAZA, created as they watched a rough cut of the film projected on a living-room wall in 2016.
On last year’s heady debut album, which captured a one-off live performance from 2015, the group—an open-ended collective with rotating members—created a decidedly loose and spacey iteration of South African jazz, favoring slowly unspooling improvisations and woozy electronics. Stripped back to a quartet (only bassist Ariel Zamonsky and percussionist Gontse Makhene are held over), the smaller ensemble tightens up its sound while keeping that expansive sense of space. Zamonsky, who also serves as bassist for Shabaka and the Ancestors, provides a scraping, growling figure at the start that suggests deep unease and serves as a recurring theme throughout. “Bantu Education,” named for the repressive law, joins Zamonsky’s visceral low end with the echoing ululations of newcomer Nonku Phiri to create eerie, hackle-raising atmospheres. Folded into the spacious music are voices from the film describing apartheid’s attempts to divorce children from their heritage. “The South African history would get thinner and thinner and thinner,” says one woman. “And all you were taught was that your ancestors sold their land to the white people for a mirror or a knife.”
Spontaneous though the album’s compositions may be, several tracks stun with a spare, disarming beauty. On “Sizwile,” led by pattering hand drums and the gently spaced piano chords of Malcolm Jiyane (whose style brings to mind Bill Evans and South African jazz legend Abdullah Ibrahim ), Phiri’s aching vocals take center stage, by turns mournful and soaring, electronically doubled at key junctures to create a weightless atmosphere. Unhurried and disarming across its eight gossamer minutes, it serves as the spiritual kin to another piece of hushed, reverent South African jazz from earlier this year, Asher Gamedze’s “siyabulela.” Built on a one-note pulse from Zamonsky, “Banna Ba Batsumi” is another highlight, moving ever so slowly from turmoil to transformative release.
But through most of the album, the dread and unease of the apartheid era infuse the music. Fear and darkness encroach on pieces like “Mangaliso Sobukwe” and “The Black Consciousness Movement.” On the latter, Phiri’s vocals are processed in such a way that they resemble a spirit roaming the earth, unable to rest. Restraint and reserve inform most of the music up to that point, as if conveying resilience in the face of oppression and injustice. Only on “Bayasiphazamisa” do SPAZA finally let their sound boil over. Agitated keys and shrieks emulate the tipping point of the film, wherein the student demonstrations begin to spread into widespread workers’ protests and strikes across South Africa.
On the closing “We Got a Lot of Work to Do,” the recurring bass motif returns, now in a higher register. The title is potent, suggesting that such protests are not the end, but the beginning of a much longer struggle. The Soweto student uprising and dissemination of Nzima’s photograph were but the first step; it would be another 14 years before Nelson Mandela, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, was released. It’s erroneous to say that SPAZA’s performance captures the energy of our present moment, given that they recorded four years before the current upheavals. Yet they expertly distill in sound a sense of outrage, injustice, and hope similar to the one felt throughout the world now. As singer/actor Abigail Kubeka says in the film, “The only way we could find of dealing with the trauma was to perform.”
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Stars of the Lid's Adam Wiltzie and pianist/composer Dustin O'Halloran find a halfway point between their projects, creating music that moves more than drone and feels thicker than minimalism.

A Winged Victory for the Sullen: A Winged Victory for the Sullen

A Winged Victory for the Sullen

When I heard Adam Wiltzie, known for his ambient work with Stars of the Lid, and Dustin O'Halloran, a Berlin-based pianist/composer and member of the dream pop band Devics, were teaming up for a new project, I knew what to expect. Which isn't a bad thing. Wiltzie makes sonorous and droning music with static harmonies in Stars of the Lid (and has played in Windsor for the Derby); O'Halloran writes melancholy piano music built around the repetition of chords and phrases. A Winged Victory for the Sullen, it turns out, is an exact halfway point between the two.
What's interesting about the sound they've hit on isn't so much what the two musicians bring to each other's styles, as it is what each sacrifices from his own. In Stars of the Lid, Wiltzie and Brian McBride have a particular way of massing instruments into a big, pulmonary drone-- the individual timbres of the instruments rarely rise out of the overall shape. You can hear him do some of this on A Winged Victory for the Sullen, making new sounds out of many sub-sounds, but he also lets certain individual tones take over. It creates small, noticeable details in otherwise large, fairly monolithic compositions.
O'Halloran is a synesthete, and I wonder what this music looks like to him. Certainly, it has different colors from his own work, though his usual palette is present. He's used to the repetitive harmonic structures favored by Wiltzie, but in his own music there is typically more movement. When his music includes more than piano, he's usually chosen those instruments for their unique timbres. Here, he's giving a bit of that away to Wiltzie. The strings-- and even to some extent the piano-- move in and out of focus. The duo did some of the principle recording at Berlin's Grunewald Church and overdubbed some of the strings in East Germany's old state radio studios, so some of this blurring and refocusing can be attributed to acoustic spaces in which the recordings were made-- like Wiltzie's other duo, A Winged Victory creates all these otherworldly sounds using only traditional instruments.
The band was named in reference to a Greek statue in the Louvre called "Winged Victory of Samothrace," a long-beheaded depiction of Nike, the winged goddess of victory, found on the Greek island of Samothrace. It portrays the striding, triumphant figure, an image of arrested motion that ties nicely to this record: A Winged Victory's music, more active than drone and thicker than minimalism, captures movement and freezes it.


The Belgium-based composer—best known as a member of Stars of the Lid and A Winged Victory for the Sullen—steps out with a solo debut that plays like an ambient-drone crowd-pleaser.

Adam Wiltzie: Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal

Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal

There’s something distinctly Texan about Adam Wiltzie’s music. With the late Brian McBride, the drone titan co-founded Stars of the Lid in 1993, releasing seven albums of ambient music as wispy and ethereal as a desert mirage. Though he’s lived in Belgium for nearly 25 years, he continues to produce music that suggests both the nearly incomprehensible vastness of the American West and the dread secrets it seems to contain. His new album Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal sounds somewhere between a Western soundtrack and an emanation from an underground gas-mining operation, with tails of reverb from electric guitars bleeding into miasmas of strings and horns. Perhaps it’s time to think of Wiltzie in the tradition of European artists—the Wim Wenders of Paris, Texas, the Daft Punk of Electroma—fascinated with America’s enormity in contrast to the compact continent across the pond.
Remarkable though it might seem, given his lengthy string of collaborations and duo projects, this is Wiltzie’s first full-length under his own name. (It also contains only nine fugues for sodium pentothal—the co-author of “December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface” retains his streak of mischief.) Wiltzie spends a lot of the album’s runtime in his orchestral-drone comfort zone, but whenever the terrain threatens to sound too well trod, he pulls out something like “Dim Hopes,” with its twinkling constellation of vibraphones, or “Stock Horror,” which seems in the process of being ground up and devoured by the earth. “Tissue of Lies” is one of the catchiest things he’s written, with a friendly two-chord guitar motif that’s all the more mysterious for sounding so familiar: maybe a cousin of Slowdive’s “Trellisaze,” or a ghost of classic rock.
Wiltzie has made plenty of music like this in the past, but it’s easy to forget that he hasn’t made much like it recently. His primary project for the last decade-plus has been A Winged Victory for the Sullen, his duo with Dustin O’Halloran, which feels a little more high-budget and magisterial than the almost self-deprecatingly quiet music he made in the first decade or so of his career: the self-titled Aix Em Klemm and Dead Texan albums, the sad and spectral emanations on the 2001 masterpiece The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid. (The Dead Texan, a collaboration with Christina Vantzou, particularly seems like a precedent for this record.) Is it a stretch to call an ambient drone album a crowd-pleaser? Wiltzie does everything you hope he will on Pentothal, and then some.
The opening track is titled “Buried at Westwood Memorial Park, in an Unmarked Grave, to the Left of Walter Matthau.” Fans will surely speculate that it’s a reference to the resting place of Brian McBride, but Wiltzie has confirmed it’s not; ambient albums have a nasty habit of getting contextually tangled up with tragedies that happened once the music was already recorded. Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal is the latest in a long string of albums concerned with ephemerality, and its emotional weight comes from the sense of a glacial time scale that renders human concerns profoundly irrelevant. The most important thing here is this feeling of impermanence, the illusion that the sources of these sounds dissipated into the Texas heat before the soundwaves reached your ears.


The follow-up to King-- one of 2006's best rap albums-- works on the thin and dubious concept that T.I. the businessman and T.I.P. the unreformed hustler are two completely different entities, and that the strain of balancing the two personas is enough to tear Clifford Joseph Harris Jr. apart.

T.I. vs. T.I.P.

On last year's King, T.I.'s scrappy street-kid swagger seemed indivisible from his pop instincts, and that's partly why it was one of the year's best rap albums. On older records like 2003's Trap Muzik, T.I. built an image of himself as a haunted, remorseful drug-dealer, balancing triumphant anthems like "Rubberband Man" with sad, introspective laments like "Be Better Than Me". By the time he released King, though, the emotional resonance was all but gone from his music, replaced by a world-conquering confidence unmatched in rap. Titanic bangers like "What You Know" and "Top Back" didn't work in spite of T.I.'s guttural sneer; they used that harshness as fuel. But T.I.'s new album, T.I. vs. T.I.P. operates on the thin and dubious concept that T.I. the businessman and T.I.P. the unreformed hustler are two completely different entities, and that the strain of balancing the two personas is enough to tear Clifford Joseph Harris Jr. apart. Apparently, those two sides aren't as indivisible as they once seemed.
T.I. first explored this dichotomy on Trap Muzik's "T.I. vs. T.I.P.", crafting an argument that movingly dramatized his internal struggle. That struggle also serves as the concept for the new album: T.I.P. gets the first seven tracks, T.I. the next seven, and the two sides spend the last four songs hashing out their differences. It's an interesting conceit, but it doesn't really work as a hook for an entire album, and the record's exhaustingly long running time pushes the conceit far past the breaking point. For one thing, it's a pacing disaster; by lining up all his sugary for-the-ladies tracks in a row, T.I. leaves a long dead-streak in the second half of the album. For another, it plays against his strengths. His music works best when both sides of his personality are allowed to co-exist in the same track. When they're separated, they both sound emaciated and half-formed. And he never quite commits to the concept. If T.I. represents the rapper's pop half, why do the album's first two singles come from the T.I.P. section? If the album's final stretch is meant to unite both sides, why do they confront each other in song only once, on the second verse of "Respect My Hustle"?
Unsurprisingly, the strongest stretch of the album comes from T.I.P. On songs like the underwhelming first single "Big Shit Poppin'" and the clichéd drug-dealer instruction-manual "Da Dopeman", the rapper seems to be on autopilot, but a few of the T.I.P. tracks would've been highlights even on King. On "You Know What It Is", he rides Wyclef Jean's sublimely summery rubber bassline, intuitively sinking into the beat and savoring the sound of his voice. "Watch What You Say" boasts a bluesy organic thump and the most authoritative Jay-Z guest-verse in a couple of years, and T.I.'s throaty snarl conveys menace infectiously. On "Hurt", he keeps pace with Danja's royal horns and riotous drums and the fiery guest-verses from Alfamega and (surprisingly) Busta Rhymes.
The T.I. suite doesn't fare so well, partly because its mere existence positions it as a compromise. T.I.'s cruise-ship money-talk never feels as urgent as his grimy side, and bored and lazy guest-verses from Eminem and Nelly-- both of whom sound like shadows of their former selves-- don't help anything. The best that can be said about the T.I. section is that it mostly doesn't sound all that different from the T.I.P. section; beats from Just Blaze and the Runners are as convincingly hard as anything elsewhere, and T.I. uses the same cadence and delivery whether he's talking about spending money or killing you. If the final act works more consistently than the previous two, it's more because of its two slyly synthetic Danja beats than because of any trenchant insights the rapper comes up with.
Even if the concept falls flat, though, T.I. vs. T.I.P. still warrants a listen, if only because T.I. seems constitutionally incapable of releasing an album full of uncompelling music. As a rapper, he's still a dominant voice; his slurry, guttural drawl is a great instrument, and always keeps it deep in the track's pocket, occasionally whipping out tricky double-time patterns or murmuring singsong melodies. The album is perhaps best heard in chunks; only a few of these songs wouldn't sound great on shuffle. Heard as a piece, though, the album's momentum sputters and dies more than once; after a few consecutive listens, T.I. sounds dour and joyless, like he's just punching the clock.
Shortly after the release of King, T.I.'s friend Philant Johnson was shot dead after a nightclub brawl between T.I.'s entourage and some Cincinnati thugs. After Johnson's death, T.I. mentioned that the business of rapping no longer felt good and admitted that he was seriously considering quitting music altogether. On T.I. vs. T.I.P., he repeatedly makes reference to Johnson, and indeed he rarely displays the spark and verve that gave King much of its power. T.I. vs. T.I.P. may be self-obsessed and self-indulgent, but maybe T.I. needed to make this album to keep himself interested. Let's hope he's gotten it out of his system.


Silversun Pickups, who generated more Smashing Pumpkins comparisons than any band this side of Zwan with their 2006 debut Carnavas, return for Album #2.

Swoon

Silversun Pickups generated more Smashing Pumpkins comparisons than any band this side of Zwan with their 2006 debut Carnavas, and whether or not it was justifiable, it was certainly understandable. But in the manner in which these things usually work out, such hyperbolic comparisons helped the Silver Lake band way more than it hurt them-- if they haven't quite reached the national profile of the Pumpkins, when I suggested that Los Angeles lacked a band that was locally connected, critically respected, and popularly accepted, I got a bunch of e-mails claiming my exclusion of Silversun Pickups had to be unintentional.
Despite a handful of expected Second Album Upgrades (cue the strings!), Corgan influences continue to manifest themselves on Swoon-- Brian Aubert's treble-gutted riffs, the tendency to honk boyishly miserable lyrics through his nasal passage, and requirement that a bassist must be a looker that can harmonize. But while the Great Pumpkin would balance "Siva" and "Quiet" with a "Disarm" or "Window Paine", the Pickups just polish-to-shine loud modern rock songs that feel like they evolved out of jam sessions based on "Drown" and go on at least a minute longer than they should. The shortest track on Swoon clocks in at about 4:30 and the longest at 5:55, but these roomy structures don't house stand-alone riffs, mean displays of chops or interesting dynamic diversions.
More often, it's tougher to tell when the Pickups should've cut. Though Swoon never becomes unpleasant, Aubert's lyrics and melodies are so wishy-washy that you'd think they were going out of their way to be ignored. Hardly any melodic turns stick among these slippery and repetitive textures-- the Pickups are so mesmeric at times that if they had more groove, they could pass for a Krautrock band.
Most of the blame for Swoon's featureless vista goes towards its identikit modern rock production. You wouldn't think these guys would be better off listening to Siamese Dream more, but, you know-- listen to Siamese Dream, particularly "Soma" or "Today" or "Geek U.S.A." and you recognize the dynamics are actually dynamic. Here, the Edge-wise tapping that of "Getting Old Is Getting Old" and "Draining" register at pretty much the same volume as the martial intensity of album highlight "Panic Switch". When the chorus of "Secrets" is supposed to blast off, there's no room in its obnoxiously compressed confines.
Upon the announcement of Swoon's impending release, Pitchfork's Tom Breihan's backhanded compliment that Carnavas had two really great songs whereas most other albums had none was pretty much on-point-- no matter how you choose to interpret that. Swoon ultimately delivers the exact same results as its predecessor mostly because it's written in nearly the exact same way. The problem all along for the Silversun Pickups isn't that they sound too much like the Smashing Pumpkins. They just sound way too much like themselves.


Expectations are a bitch. Ask J.D. Salinger. Or George Lucas. Or Kevin Shields. After Broken Social Scene stumbled out ...

Broken Social Scene: Broken Social Scene

Broken Social Scene

Expectations are a bitch. Ask J.D. Salinger. Or George Lucas. Or Kevin Shields. After Broken Social Scene stumbled out of the incestuous Toronto alt-rock scene with Feel Good Lost-- a postrumental refrigerator-hum stiff of a debut-- few would have guessed this group of scruffed-up bohos had a veritable classic lurking in their collective consciousness. Then, ignited by a rabid internet reception, You Forgot It in People gracefully went boom, and lots of people remembered why they loved indie rock-- the shambling ecstasy, the pitch-perfect experimentation, the unabashed heart-on-sleeveness of it all.
Now, with file-sharers queuing up like mad and pre-orders bumping them to Amazon Top 50 status, the collective reacts to the furor by expanding and magnifying; another six members join the brood for its self-titled third full-length, and the band's once-refined studio sound is blown up into a pixilated blur of blood-gush guitars and squall-of-sound production that's somehow meticulously unhinged. This exercise in excess makes the ambitious You Forgot It in People seem positively understated by comparison.
De facto band leader Kevin Drew recently told Pitchfork that Broken Social Scene producer (and NYPD punching bag) David Newfeld "got addicted to the idea of trying to top YFIIP." He added: "His massage therapist says he might die in 10 years unless he changes his lifestyle." It's Newfeld's risky mixing and uncanny knack for coalescing myriad instruments and voices into a propulsive whole that defines this new album. Whereas You Forgot It in People was exacting and refined-- each cymbal crash snipped to perfection, each underlying string melody was spare and to-the-point-- Broken Social Scene is wily and flowing. Just consider each disc's mood-setting introduction: YFIIP's "Capture the Flag" is muted and tasteful; BSS's "Our Faces Split the Coast in Half" gets out of bed, trips, falls down, does a sloppy summersault, and gets back up no worse for the wear. The contrasting titles alone-- one direct, one Dali-esque-- speak volumes. But, however symbolic, "Faces" is only a casual stretch, with follower "Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Half)" serving as the album's first true workout.
"Ibi" breaks in with a woozy, five-alarm guitar-- a warning call for the track's off-key surrealism and pile-on distortion. Like the shaky ascent of a homemade rocketship, the song constantly teeters on cataclysmic oblivion; shards of chords slip away and grind against each other as the track embarks. Buried between the static and the void, mumbled vocals are folded in before the brass enters and elevates the endeavor to fist-pumping, room-on-fire glory.
That track's garbled vocals and lyrical ambiguity are filtered throughout this record. With no accompanying lyric sheet, most of the album's highly interpretable words not only provide fans with a time-wasting message-board guessing game but add another layer of atmospheric haze to the group's already out-there takes on sex, politics, and that whole indies-vs.-majors thing. On the wispy, faux-idyllic "Major Label Debut", the chorus could be "I'm all hooked up" or "I'm all fucked up," but either meaning snidely puts down the rockstar clichés Broken Social Scene are determined to avoid.
Anyone's who's been to a Broken Social Scene show over the past few years probably knows "Major Label Debut" as a rollicking, open hi-hat dust storm. But here, that version is relegated to an accompanying EP (otherwise filled with mostly expendable outtakes and instrumentals) while the album version is slowed down and fogged up-- and decidedly less single-worthy. Another live favorite and possible crossover contender, "Superconnected", is still catchy on record, but Newfeld's all-at-once, in-between-vox production subverts any chance at overt smashdom.
Such insular stubbornness leads to Broken Social Scene's few overly self-indulgent moments, when their lack of inhibitions turns from charming to faintly annoying. Their tendency to jam out-- not entirely surprising given bassist Brendan Canning's striking Trey Anastasio-meets-Elmo look-- turn the seven-minute "Bandwitch" into an aimless jumble. Along with the similarly too-free-spirited "Windsurfing Nation" and "Handjobs for the Holidays", such unchecked exorbitance damages the album's hard-won continuity.
But a few regrettable overreachings are somewhat inevitable when a band tries to top a record as strong as YFIIP. Looser and slightly kinkier, Broken Social Scene indulges in the pop eccentricities and keen melodic ears of more than a dozen Canadians who take willful pride in their ability to lock together into one solid unit and make good on the sum of their unique individual talents. With its doomsday provocation of a title, the epic Springsteenian endcap "It's All Gonna Break" bursts forth with enough ideas to keep a lesser band productive for years. The song ecstatically encapsulates Broken Social Scene's heightened ambitions and flawed Icarus journeys, conflating into a bold, brash love-in infatuated with its own bumps and bruises.


Annie Clark’s self-produced seventh album goes for a hard reset on the St. Vincent project. She retains her sharp edge as a songwriter while making the music sound exalting, inspiring, and thoroughly romantic.

All Born Screaming

Annie Clark says that a performer’s job is to “shock and console.” For years, she was doing much more of the former than the latter. Her first four records—an impeccable run from 2007’s Marry Me through to 2014’s St. Vincent—played on a common trope of the horror genre, the idea that behind every pristine façade lies a world of ugliness, violence, and malcontent. Horror franchises, of course, tend to get stale pretty fast: Once you know the general mode and motive of a killer, they aren’t all that scary. The aesthetic of Clark’s music has stayed relatively consistent but as she’s added more elements in—synths, latex, wigs, outlandish album concepts that don’t necessarily align with the increasingly personal music contained within—it’s begun to feel less potent.
All Born Screaming, Clark’s self-produced seventh album, goes for a hard reset on the St. Vincent project, not by going back to the harsh, alien textures of, say, 2011’s Strange Mercy, but by flicking the dial from “shock” to “console.” Musically, it feels like the first St. Vincent album since Marry Me presented without a unifying aesthetic: at various points, Clark incorporates Bond theme melodrama, Steely Dan-style prog, bouncy art pop and lechy industrial rock, making for what is arguably her loosest record, an exhale after years of fitting her songs into increasingly tight restraints.
It’s a freedom that carries through to the album’s emotional content. Clark’s records often display warmth and vulnerability in flashes, but All Born Screaming feels thoroughly romantic and highlights bits of beauty amid Clark’s usual lexicon of chaotic, violent imagery. On the dazed dream-pop ballad “The Power’s Out,” she sings about New York as a kind of hell created by its inhabitants; far from a horror story or an indictment, it sounds like a love song.
St. Vincent has occasionally let her mask of irony fall on past albums—“Candy Darling” on Daddy’s Home, “Champagne Year” on Strange Mercy, “Happy Birthday, Johnny” on Masseduction—but this feels like an album full of those songs. Even the harsh tracks are born out of empathy; the quivering, volatile “Reckless” is about spiraling out after someone you love dies; “Flea” might be kinda gross, casting love and desire as a form of infestation, but there’s something romantic about that idea, too. Over a beat that recalls the overdriven chug of Nine Inch Nails, Clark sings lyrics that walk a line between devoted and creepy: “Drip you in diamonds/Pour you in cream/You will be mine for eternity.”
“Flea” was one of All Born Screaming’s lead singles, along with the sleazy, hammed-up classic rock pastiche “Broken Man.” Their brazen sexuality and thundering riffs hardly represent the album proper, which on the whole is sensitive and introspective. On the surging pop track “Sweetest Fruit,” Clark pays tribute to SOPHIE and other artists who know that “the sweetest fruit is on the limb”; on “So Many Planets,” a glammed-up take on two-tone, she sings of having “to visit so many planets before I find my own” with equal parts exhaustion and wonderment. Clark has long used her music to memorialize individual queer friends and heroes, but this album takes a more general tack; it feels as if she’s looking to both exalt and inspire, a relatively new mode for Clark, but a welcome one.
Or maybe that’s a total misread: After the straightforward lyricism of Masseduction and Daddy’s Home—both produced by Jack Antonoff, who is known for asking his collaborators, “What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” as a songwriting prompt—Clark has returned to the relatively oblique, enjoyably puzzling turns of phrase of her early records. Some of these are fairly legible—“I have climbed into open arms that turned into a straight jacket,” she sings on the fidgety new wave track “All Born Screaming,” which borrows a lyrical conceit from the Strange Mercy classic “Cheerleader”—and others confounding (“Hemorrhaging heartthrob with a six-pack of beer/Leaning outside her burned-out window”.) For the most part, though, All Born Screaming feels sanguine. It ends on a repetition of its title phrase, which could, in one light, be an expression of pessimism; on Clark’s most hopeful record to date, it feels like a marker of communal experience—a sweet kind of consolation.


For many EDM acts, once they go pop, they stay pop, but Eric Prydz’s career has represented a kind of balancing act between overground notoriety and underground cred. Opus is a 19-song album collecting new material, fan favorites from Prydz’s own DJ sets, and even a few singles dating back as far as 2012.

Opus

Eric Prydz got his pop crossover out of the way early. The Swedish DJ and producer broke through in 2004 with "Call on Me," a fizzy filter-house anthem that sampled Steve Winwood’s "Valerie" and came complete with a video aimed at horny boys. For many EDM acts, once they go pop, they stay pop, but Prydz’s career since then has represented a kind of balancing act between overground notoriety and underground cred. At Ultra Music Festival in 2013, he performed on the same stage as Calvin Harris, Avicii, Tiësto, and David Guetta, but that same week he also played Scuba’s Hotflush party at Miami’s 300-capacity Electric Pickle club. And while Prydz’s catalog over the years has been peppered with programmatic, over-the-top heartstring-pullers like "Every Day," last year’s proggy epic "Opus" found an unlikely fan in Four Tet, who publicly asked to remix the song (and eventually got his wish). Fellow big-tent Swedes like Steve Angello, Axwell, and Sebastian Ingrosso may pay lip service to the underground, but they can only dream of getting that kind of co-sign.
Opus, a 19-song album collecting new material, heretofore unreleased fan favorites from Prydz’ own DJ sets, and even a few singles dating back as far as 2012, is Prydz’s second album, and it confirms him as both a master craftsman and a masterful manipulator of emotions. He’s got a real way with neat four-bar chord progressions and elegant counterpoints that spin as naturally as mobiles, and his mixes are as uncluttered as his drums are crisp and loud. He favors big, bold melodies pitched somewhere between yearning and euphoria; his melodic sensibility is a lot like that of M83, whose "Midnight City" Prydz remixed in typically grand fashion in 2011.
Even with the showiness, Prydz is probably the subtlest DJ ever to headline Madison Square Garden. One of his favorite tricks is to hypnotize listeners with a reassuring chord progression and then, after three or four minutes of eight-bar cycles, to suddenly pivot into a new variation, breaking the imaginary space of the track wide open. He wisely avoids the over-the-top pyrotechnics of main-stage EDM in favor of hypnotic arpeggios and long, teasing filter sweeps; instead of his peers’ Pavlovian sucker-punches, he prefers to seductively blur the line between tension and release. And where big-room DJs deploy rushing snare rolls and vertiginous glissandi to create tension at the close of a 32-bar segment, Prydz uses a single, reverberant snare drum, a sound so imitated that it has come to be called the "Pryda snare," after one of Prydz’s alter egos. (In theory, each of his aliases has its own sound—Pryda leans toward pure progressive house, Cirez D is reserved for techno, and Prydz’ bigger crossover tracks come out under his own name. In practice, however, the lines between them are often blurry.)
Opus oscillates between two poles. On the one side are entrancing progressive house numbers like the bookending "Liam" and "Opus," in which lessons learned from decades’ worth of electro-pop are sculpted into lean, elegant shapes that arc effortlessly toward the horizon. "Black Dyce," one of the album’s highlights, fashions its bassline after Giorgio Moroder’s octave-jumping throb and its synth lead after Kraftwerk’s naïve melodies; there’s a little bit of Depeche Mode in there, too. "Floj" proceeds along similar lines, with an Italo-inspired bassline eventually evolving into a spine-tingling breakdown reminiscent of fellow Swede Tomas Andersson’s 2005 electro-house anthem, "Washing Up."
At the other end of the spectrum are songs informed by Prydz’s pop instincts, and these can be more of a mixed bag. The slow, snaky "Breathe" boasts an excellent synth lead reminiscent of Boards of Canada, but the vocals from Knife Party’s Rob Swire take the song deep into generic, post-grunge stadium rock territory; they’re as faceless as Prydz’s own style is distinct. And "Every Day," a cover of a 2002 song by Mood II Swing’s John Ciafone, sounds more like an electro-house rendition of Van Halen’s "Jump," and the over-the-top emoting of the vocals do the song no favors.
But sometimes he gets it just right: On "Moody Mondays," a singer named the Cut does his best Phil Oakey impersonation, striking a balance between effortless cool and faintly ridiculous—a balance that’s even more effectively managed on the '80s-tinged "Generate," where singer Tom Cane’s falsetto evokes Yes’ Jon Anderson. Yes, there’s something faintly corny about those songs, and also "Liberate," a shimmering vocal anthem meant to elicit closed eyes and raised cell phones. But corniness—the willingness to let go, to be not cool, to escape judgement—is deeply woven into the fabric of EDM. And it’s to Prydz’s credit that he makes even these moments of excess sound far classier than any of his peers.


Rilo Kiley co-leader Jenny Lewis takes another solo bow with this immediately pleasurable genre record, one brimming over with hooks and songwriting techniques that announce themselves with openness and surety. Elvis Costello guests.

Acid Tongue

Plenty of the most celebrated writers of the past century, from William Faulkner and Graham Greene to Michael Chabon and John Banville, have found cause or need to periodically interrupt their more individualized pursuits and produce work that strictly adhered to a certain niche such as horror, mystery, or sci-fi. For such authors, genre-bound detours often function as tie-loosening fodder-- playful, low-stakes, persona-dodging fare. As one of indie rock's preeminent lyricists and a fascinating personality in her own right, Jenny Lewis has similarly been trying her hand at already regimented styles, particularly over the course of her two most recent albums, the 2007 release Under the Blacklight from her band, Rilo Kiley, as well as her newest solo effort, Acid Tongue. Lewis made her name with highly conversational indie pop that played up her keen lyrical and vocal facilities for conveying humor, sexiness, and humanity, yet these latest recordings have found the former child actress retreating into classic soul, pop, and rock roles that inevitably mute her most appealing idiosyncracies and predilections. What separates Lewis from the aforementioned novelists is the fear that these moves represent a significant shift in artistic direction as opposed to a momentary diversion.
As with Under the Blacklight, Acid Tongue is immediately pleasurable, brimming over with hooks and songwriting techniques that announce themselves with openness and surety. The problem then is one of staying power-- Lewis does such a good job of nailing choice sounds and styles from pop's past that you can't help getting reeled in right away; only upon later reflection do you realize that much of her success lies in evoking something else great rather than achieving a greatness more uniquely her own. The spacious echo of "Black Sand", the crackling tension of "Pretty Bird", and the blues-rock hysterics of "Jack Killed Mom" are enjoyable mostly insofar as they reenact the prior accomplishments of Jeff Lynne, Neil Young, and the White Stripes, respectively. Meanwhile, "Bad Man's World" and "Trying My Best to Love You" resume Blacklight's fetish for girl-group and early soul (with the former, to its credit, boasting a delectable bassline).
Perhaps it sounds like I'm being too hard on Lewis, and it's true that in most other hands such simulacrums would likely be more forgivable. The difference with Lewis is that she's already displayed a distinct, undeniably compelling artistry that's mostly been given short shrift here. Her solo debut, 2006's Rabbit Fur Coat, was a rambling, intensely personal document of sexual and spiritual confusion that frequently conflated and commingled the twin urges in fascinating ways. Constant soul-baring isn't necessarily a healthy tactic for any songwriter, yet aside from the self-excoriating title track (the record's clear highlight, swiping the indie-gospel vibe that helped make RFC so indelible) and the early-Rilo-evoking "Godspeed", the majority of Acid Tongue lacks Lewis' singularly bracing, unabashed stamp. That's not to say she doesn't cut loose with aplomb on the blistering, eight-minute country-rock medley, "The Next Messiah" or raise a few goosebumps with the gently lilting "Sing a Song for Them". The first minute or so of the shit-kicking "Carpetbaggers" is pretty thrilling, too, at least until Elvis Costello shows up to wheeze all over everything.
The point isn't that Lewis needs to stick to dirty jokes and jaunty twang (though country seems her natural milieu). There's more than enough likeable, listenable material on Acid Tongue, yet the effect is nonetheless equivalent to Tiger Woods trying to conquer the mini-golf circuit. In these straitjacketed settings, Lewis' considerable strengths as a lyricist and performer just aren't given sufficient room to fully emerge.


Coming on the heels of two stellar 2020 albums, one of the best new voices in underground hip-hop sounds a little looser and lighter, but still keeps his raps bracingly personal.

Navy’s Reprise

Before sharing a pair of soul-bearing 2020 albums that established him as a new scion of cerebral, lo-fi hip-hop, Navy Blue released a lot of music that very few people heard. Most of it was tucked away on an anonymous SoundCloud account, or on projects that played like demos and beat tapes, rough drafts fishing for completed thoughts. Two years after revealing his identity, some listeners are still surprised to learn that the man behind those projects is Sage Elsesser, an accomplished skateboarder and a model for skatewear brands like Supreme (although Elsesser’s proximity to Odd Future and his credits on Frank Ocean’s Blonde might have been giveaways that he had musical ambitions).
Perhaps Elsesser was just waiting until he honed his craft to go public. If his early tapes were solid, 2020’s Àdá Irin and Song of Sage: Post Panic! were frequently brilliant, fine-tuned with a poet’s precision and an arthouse director’s control of mood. Yet if he’s looking to capitalize on the acclaim those projects earned him with his third album, Navy’s Reprise, he sure isn’t showing it. Surprise released with a bare minimum of promotion on his social channels, the album is, for the time being, available only as a digital download on his website for $20—hardly an egregious sum, and a good $10-$20 cheaper than some Roc Marciano digital albums will run you, yet still an uncommon barrier to entry for music in today’s economy.
What most separated Navy Blue’s 2020 albums from his SoundCloud loosies—as well as his many peers making similarly underground hip-hop—was Elsesser’s intensely autobiographical focus. Those same themes of trauma, resilience, and recovery carry through Navy’s Reprise. “This is personal” he repeats over the sampled fanfare of the opener “Light.” Elsesser is most moving when he testifies to the power of familial bonds and ancestral ties, and he slips those sentiments everywhere. Most of these songs include tributes to his mom, dad, and sisters, as well as the literal and figurative brothers who shaped him. On “Timberwolves” he’s recharged by a visit to his grandma, who tells him he has his grandfather’s eyes.
Elsesser is seldom showy—like most lyricists in the loops-and-rhymes lane of rap, he works from a spartan palette of cadences—yet his voice can reveal meaningful tells. When he looks back at his childhood on “Peach Cobbler,” his flow is hued with an almost Mac Miller-esque boyishness. When he recalls an ambiguous family tragedy on “HGTV,” it aches, like he’s physically reliving the experience. “My laugh sermon/My past murdered/My back hurtin’,” he raps.
Navy’s Reprise is a touch more down the middle than its predecessors, the pain still present but less front and center, the production less askew. Here, his producers fillet their shag-carpet soul samples down to just the choice cuts, with fewer of the off-kilter crops that lent a nervy edge to Àdá Irin and Song of Sage. Yet if Navy’s Reprise lacks some of the heft and invention of those albums—if it feels less like a statement and more like, in the words of his collaborator and former roommate Earl Sweatshirt, some rap songs—it isn’t to the music’s detriment. The lighter mood frees Elsesser for shit-kicking bars like, “They can’t even swim around the moat, toss ’em in Dawson’s Creek/All these white teens suck, I don't know defeat, I know growth,” along with copious jovial references to food and athletes. Àdá Irin and Song of Sage stood out for their loftiness, but the world needs projects like this, too, well-rounded rap albums that acknowledge trauma without being defined by it.

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The Berlin-based duo of Errorsmith and Fiedel push toward the extreme lower limits of danceability on a debut LP that’s stranger, woozier, and slower than anything they’ve made before.

On the Edge

For a quarter century, Berlin’s MMM have crafted rave anthems of unusually potent caliber. The duo of Errorsmith and Berghain resident Fiedel, MMM aren’t terribly prolific. Since their debut, in 1996, they’ve released just seven 12"s, all on their eponymous label, along with one half of an unusual split LP with German noise-rockers Surrogat and a handful of remixes. But their scant output is the fruit of dogged focus; each of their records feels carefully designed to make dancefloors go absolutely apeshit, using as few elements as possible.
Early on, MMM developed a knack for songs that not only move your body but practically pierce your skull. The 1997 anthem “Donna” and 2010’s “Nous Sommes MMM” brandish frequencies that whir like trepanning drills, steadily increasing in pressure over whip-cracking electro drums. In recent years, their music has grown even more unhinged, pushing energy levels into the red or stripping lysergic minimalism down to splintered bone. But On the Edge, their debut LP, represents a radical reversal. Gone are the seasick pitch-shifting, the blistering distortion, the bruising kick drum. In place of MMM’s usual white-knuckled intensity, the duo explores a vibe that’s stranger, woozier, and slower, shifting their attention from far-out psychedelia to the extreme lower limits of danceability.
The album begins in relatively upbeat territory: “Where to Go” is its most energetic track, coursing along upwards of 130 BPM. Yet it also displays a lightness of touch—a level of rhythmic and textural refinement—that feels new to their work. Though nominally four-to-the-floor, the kick drum falls only on the first and third beats of each bar, giving the rhythm a springy, moon-walking cadence; soft, syncopated chords suggest a reggae band covering Raymond Scott’s Soothing Sounds for Baby, while squirrelly little drum-machine fills add to the lighthearted air.
If you’re not paying attention, you might not even realize that what follows, “Everything Falls Into Place,” is a new song. It’s essentially a dub version of the opening track made with little more than glancing echoes of its glowing chords, the anti-matter to its matter. An overwhelming emptiness also defines the third track, “On the Edge,” which colors in the faintest percussive outline—skipping hi-hat, steady kick drum, occasional clap—with the dubbed-out ghost of a single chord. The equally vacuumed-out fourth track, “No Thought,” underscores the nothingness at the heart of the album.
The remaining tracks proceed like a balloon that’s steadily leaking air: Each one is a little bit slower and more enervated than the one before. “The Interview” deploys scraping cello—shades of Mica Levi—over staggering kick drum and clattering spring reverb. (“Everybody gets, you know, chills,” intones an unidentified woman, neatly summing up the effect. “When I don’t get those chills, I am very disappointed, and I just want to cry.”) “Farsta Dream” twists a mournful vocal melody over wraithlike chords; “When Does Ghosting End” collapses into a languid groove reminiscent of Andy Stott at his most soporific. By the end, with “So Nigh,” there’s nothing left but an eerily processed voice over lethargic kick drums, all of it soaked in the clammy reverb of a freeway underpass.
But for all the murk, these final tracks are never actually gloomy. Even with their boots stuck deep in the mud, MMM remain fundamentally playful, and even at its darkest, their music is distinguished by its lightness of spirit. When MMM played Krakow’s Unsound Festival last month, their set skewed heavily toward On the Edge, but even way down in the double-digit BPMs, they kept the peak-time crowd engaged. The low end was voluminous and enveloping; their trademark hi-hats were sharp as scalpels. It was a good reminder of the risks that dance music can take. MMM have proven time and again that they’re masters of the full-on; with On the Edge, they show that emptied out can be just as satisfying.

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With a focus on guitar-centric pop-rock, Posty’s latest record is a passion project that feels overstuffed and undercooked.

AUSTIN

AUSTIN has to be Post Malone’s guitar album, if only because, as he proudly noted, he plays guitar on every track. He’s no stranger to the instrument of course, and he has dialed down the trap-pop dial and replaced it with various speeds of six-string pop-rock. He’s still drinking too much, still smoking like an oil fire. But the most interesting thing about Post Malone’s fifth album is how his vices have changed from rote signifiers to features of his mental landscape. His chauffeur’s doing tequila shots, so Post takes a cab home. He pukes in someone’s bathroom, then pauses to admire the tiling. His relationships are co-dependent, but at least he’s got company. Propulsive lead single “Chemical” tints its bad romance with a yearning three-note bass figure. “Outside of the party, smokin’ in the car with you/‘Seven Nation Army,’ fightin’ at the bar with you,” he sings, cherishing every tainted memory. “Sign Me Up” is the same situation with a New Romantic spin. “If your love is a cult/Then I’m in it,” Post shrugs, skipping past all the red flags until he comes upon his one true dealbreaker: when she tries to take his liquor away.
While his guitar album is decidedly not a country album, the tenderness with which he regards whatever bottle’s at hand is certainly the most country thing about it. “2 a.m. they ran out of lemonade,” he croons on “Enough Is Enough,” splitting the difference between Morgan Wallen and Warren Zevon, “So I shot that vodka straight anyway.” The combination of electric piano and acoustic strum conjures the illusion of a banjo. But when the drums come in it’s pure Antonoff homage. On the boom-clap ballad “Landmine,” Post swings from the heels like fun.’s Nate Ruess. In the lyrics, Post’s self-conscious about ripping cigs while his friends are taking supplements; he ostentatiously breaks out a pack to see if it catches anyone’s interest. The track has some poignant bits for any partier approaching (or careening through) their thirties. But more importantly: It has a bridge.
For some reason—fear of boring his fans, obedience to the preferences of the streaming services, a career focused on club bangers—Malone won’t let these songs breathe. The result is an album that’s overstuffed and undercooked, no matter what he and co-producers Louis Bell and Andrew Watt try. The balearic boogie of “Speedometer” is lovely, but too brief to enter a dream state. The chamber-folk “Green Thumb” may be the most creatively ambitious thing Malone’s attempted, just him and a guitar and a whole chorus conversing with an ex’s dying plant. He’s clearly proud of it: In his Zane Lowe interview, he talked at length—Martin acoustic at hand—about the challenge of writing and performing the song. Yet it’s built like it’s something to quickly usher offstage. It’s over faster than you can return from the beer line.
But when he does dip into pop-rap, the results are as richly weird as Post at his best. He chases the Nirvana Unplugged vibes of opener “Don’t Understand” with “Something Real,” a doomy, choir-backed lurch through luxury. He stomps from foreign island to foreign island, popping mushrooms and strapping skeleton watches on like armor. In the album’s most audacious moment, he croons, “I could play that pussy like it’s Für Elise,” twisting the melody until it becomes Beethoven’s. He’s firmly in his bagatelle. This is Post at his strongest: audaciously raiding the entire pop toolkit. Even after forsaking Los Angeles for Utah, his life remains a movie: loaded with state-of-the-industry pyrotechnics, bristling with guns, and littered with synergistic product tie-ins. It makes AUSTIN, in directorial terms, a one-for-me situation: a passion project secured with almost a decade at the summit of pop-rap as collateral.


Benny Hester is considered one of the pioneers of the Contemporary Christian Music movement, and he has written many of the genre's standards. But in the early '60s and '70s, he made a lovely, strange, and sincere baroque psych-pop record with Elvis' backing band, which has just been reissued.

Benny...

It might be hard to imagine now, but there was a time when "Christian rock" was an oxymoron. It wasn’t until the advent of the Haight-Asbury-friendly "Jesus movement" in the late '60s that CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) became a staple in worship services. Before there were charts and public access programs full of it, the genre’s seeds were being planted by individual voices like Benny Hester’s, young singer/songwriters strumming guitars outside of makeshift chapels—Hester recalls first attending a "gigantic tent revival on [a] vacant lot." He and his peers remained enamored with both the psychedelic sounds of post-Beatles rock and the therapeutic possibilities of Christ.
Today, Hester is regarded as one of the CCM movement’s pioneers. He wrote many of the genre’s standards, and would go on to release the longest-running #1 on the Christian music charts in 1985. But a full decade earlier—when Hester got his first break as a solo artist—he was poised for a more uncertain career path, and on a potentially larger scale. Hester spent the late ‘60s and early ‘70s bumming around Las Vegas. He hawked jingles and helped out at soul recording sessions before an opportunity to record his songs arose. Miraculously, the most in-demand mercenary musicians in town were part of the deal. The result of Hester’s sessions with the "Taking Care (of) Business" band—famous for backing Elvis during this time—was Benny..., a modest collection of well-scrubbed baroque pop. At this time, Hester was forming his identity: The record is not fully secular, not explicitly the Word. It’s musical schematics are about as idiomatic for the time period as one can imagine: Opener "Give Your Love Forever" makes this immediately clear, mirroring the melody of Neil Young’s "Old Man," from that February’s Harvest. Later, the likenesses pile up more and more, from the precocious neo-classic pop of the Left Banke to pre-Rumours Lindsey Buckingham ("What’s Happened to My Friends”) to Chipmunk-ed Tumbleweed Connection-era Elton John ("The Painter").
Perhaps the album could have gotten some modest traction, if only in nu-Christian circles. But just after a literal handful of promos were sent out, the home of his label burned down, and Benny…’s masters along with it. Hester would make a proper debut in 1978, but he’s called the loss of his first, non-CCM record "the greatest disappointment that I’d ever had in my life." One wonders if the reason for the decades-long delay in the record’s release—remastered from errant vinyl copies—was more personal than practical. Now, 44 years later, Benny… sounds too odd in its delivery to imagine as anything other than a collector-championed footnote.
Its eccentric character comes from the tension between the naivete of Hester’s agile, high-tenor vocal—mired in his pronounced Southern drawl—and the TCB Band’s adept, chamber orchestra-enhanced arrangements. One can imagine what inchoate, less convincing solo acoustic demos might have sounded like, but guitarist James Burton and his cohort improve every song’s chances. One of the record’s most cloying compositions, "Love Never Dies," organizes around the Donovan-esque refrain of "Have you seen the people there/ They are speaking words of love/ From their souls." However, the song gains lustre from phantasmal string cushioning and a cascading, George Harrison-esque guitar solo.
Most of Benny…’s tracks are made more appealing by their sophisticated arrangements, though electric-piano-driven clodhopper "Malcombe," with its fidgety, Ren Faire aspect, is unsalvageable. A few songs feel like a musical triumph on every level, demonstrating Hester’s sensitive and detail-oriented ability with a melody. On tracks like highlight "No the End Is Not Near," beautifully voiced electric guitar and a lilting bassline highlight and complicate Hester’s simple strummed acoustic backdrop. The words are crammed awkwardly, avoiding rhymes that could have been pulled off with the help of a wilier co-lyricist.  But without these kinks, Benny… would certainly lose some of its character.
There is a sadness listening back to Benny… knowing that it would be a false start rather than a fortuitous beginning. The singer/songwriter’s most famous work would merge deathly smooth, Kenny Loggins-esque funk with the sensibility of tragic-anthemic rock opera, articulating more somber Christian messages and narratives. Much of this music demonstrates a sharp pop prowess, but the sunnier, more pantheistic Benny… stands in contrast to it both lyrically and compositionally. It’s the charmingly transparent work of a fledgling singer-songwriter realizing his first group of songs, which offers as utopian a vision of its decade as "I’d like to buy the world a Coke." A slight, necessary edge is provided by allusions toward a slightly unsettled sense of faith ("The Bridge"). "I believe I’m about to change…Please let this be so," he sings late in the album, with saucer-eyed earnesty. Hester was indeed on the cusp of a change and a new becoming, but it was to be much more hard-won than he imagined.


Luke Temple's new project finds him letting his psychedelic impulses take over, as he adds hazy electronic textures, loops, and extended bits of ambience and noise.

Here We Go Magic

Luke Temple's first foray into pseudonymical songwriting territory feels as current as did Snowbeast and Hold a Match for a Gasoline World , his prior two records released under his given name. But where those albums-- banjo-centric and cast with Temple's delicately high-pitched voice-- situated him firmly in the realm of borderline-precious indie folkies like Sufjan Stevens and Danielson, Here We Go Magic works with a different form of alchemy. Four-tracked and supposedly cut in "a two-month period of stream-of-consciousness recording," the album filters Temple's psychedelic muse through a much more muted palette: hazy electronic textures, endlessly-spiraling lyrical loops, occasional forays into extended sections of ambience and noise. The title itself indicates that Here We Go Magic might just be a spur-of-the-moment lark between more polished works, but its best points suggest we should only encourage Temple to mess around more in his off-time.
The old-timey waltz "Everything's Big" closes Magic as both a reminder of the first two records and a neat index of the prevailing themes of the current effort: winsome, romantic philosophizing distilled to its very essence, with Temple agape, staring down the immensity of his existence. Opener "Only Pieces" has Temple singing a mantra about mortality awareness ("What's the use in dyin', dyin', if I don't know when?") in a lo-fi wash of xylophone, clip-clopping percussion, and acoustic guitar. If it sounds like a field recording of a ca. 1971 Paul Simon acid trip, it's as much kismet as intent: Temple's vocals throughout the album are cast with a sense of boyish wonder that suggests Simon, but that's only because it's how a lot of young guys sound when they're confronting the enormity of the Big Questions.
The gentle abruptness of "Only Pieces"' conclusion-- it just quietly fades away-- is indicative of Magic on the whole: we don't get proper endings, but brief interruptions in what seem like transmissions straight from Temple's unconscious. The best bits of Magic are, like "Pieces", wispy and repetitive, emerging fully formed, drifting about for a bit, then disappearing. On "I Just Want to See You Underwater", Temple blanches his voice to Perry Farrell territory, and cycles through that phrase alone, mantra-like, as if it matters not to him that anyone actually hears it. All of "Tunnelvision"s woozy vigor is also contained in Temple's undulating vocals, which glide effortlessly between notes over a backing of hiccupping guitars and the comforting sound of drumsticks on a guitar case. The result is a bedroom-folk "Knives Out", which is a good thing. "Fangela", the best and most fully realized track, is where clip-clopping percussion and handclaps share space with glimmering synth flecks, over which Temple's voice offers sympathetic counsel. Only swatches of the lyrics are intelligible ("Look at me," "Feast your eyes," "All is yours") but that's part of the enchantment of magic: A fleeting glimpse of something that might have been transcendent, leaving our minds to fill in what we didn't quite see.
By definition, interior monologues are self-indulgent, and entrancing as it can be at its peaks, 11 minutes of Magic's brief 38 are taken with that trendiest of current indie tropes, the ambient/noise interstitial. Deerhunter, No Age, and Women have all found different ways to let the hiss take over, but Temple doesn't seem to have the same innate knack for this stuff (maybe I'm being too idealistic, but Temple seems too good-natured to simply broadcast white noise), and those moments combine to drag the album down a bit. More specifically, those bits suffer in comparison to those other 27 minutes of Magic: a sculpted version of that same disarming din, with a compassionate interpreter telling us what we're seeing.


Layering spoken interviews about the experience of disability with pulsing minimalist fugues, Perspective is a powerful work of love and empathy that underscores the poison of ableism in American culture.

Perspective

Five decades after Judith Heumann sued the New York Board of Education to become the state’s first teacher to use a wheelchair, the esteemed disability rights advocate asked Molly Joyce why she referred to her left arm as “weak.” Joyce, a 30-year-old composer and teacher, has always made disability a central subject of her work, drawing on her own experience with a childhood car accident that left severe, permanent nerve damage. With the Magnus chord organ, a toy produced in the 1960s and ’70s, Joyce found an instrument naturally suited to her body, allowing her to use both hands freely without any further adaptations.
Prompted by Heumann to reconsider strength, weakness, and other supposed dichotomies, Joyce began interviewing others about their inner lives and experiences with disability. She assembled them into Perspective, a multimedia program that Joyce has presented as a dance collaboration, a music performance, and an audiovisual installation. Now in album form, Perspective is a powerful work of love and empathy that underscores the poison of ableism in American culture.
Joyce probed questions about her body and belonging on 2020’s Breaking and Entering, but in expanding her focus, she exposes realities that simply never register to many able-bodied people. Joyce sorts Perspective’s dozen pieces by subject, beginning with a spoken question: “What is access for you?” Layered amid rich, buoyant chords and pulsing arpeggios, Joyce’s interviewees do not identify themselves or their disabilities; her interlocutors are free-floating entities whose primary accounts are edifying and vulnerable. Joyce favors a pluralistic approach, collecting insights from a varied array of experiences, among them musician JJJJJerome Ellis, accessibility AR entrepreneur David Furakawa, and activist Alice Wong, who founded the Disability Visibility Project. From “Access,” Joyce moves into interrogations of weakness, interdependence, agency, and autonomy. She balances a high two-note oscillation against airy vocals in “Care,” where speakers reflect on their needs and how to meet them.
Perspective highlights the marginalization that those with disabilities experience while also gesturing toward the financial and logistical impediments that impose a brutally low ceiling on the “independence” they can achieve. (In the United States, for example, most people who receive disability payments may not keep more than $2,000 in personal cash savings.) Against that end, “Control” is a tense ride driven by a fast but surly synth line, a derisive laugh relaying dark humor early on. The tone and candor of Joyce’s respondents bring extra color to their testimony: Their voices tighten in frustration and loosen in dismay. The album’s closing triad—“Isolation,” “Connection,” and “Darkness”—impresses a somber seal as interviewees discuss their feelings on loneliness, solitude, and community.
Against the restrictive ideals of an exclusionary dominant culture, Perspective refuses to treat disability as deficiency—just as it refuses to treat minimalism as a purely formal or aesthetic exercise. “Maybe it isn’t you who is a failure,” Joyce suggests on “Resilience,” where others push back against patronizing assumptions. “Cure” further rejects prescriptive solutions, examining how a hardline focus on medical responses still equates disability with brokenness. Able-bodied understandings of disability are frequently fixated on themes of “overcoming” and “inspiration”—a condescending mix of myopic optimism, pity, and even fear. But just as Joyce found a newly unfettered self through the controls of her keyboard, she uses her compositions to aid others in finding relief from the maladaptive mainstream’s unrelenting demands. She points her listeners toward a radically simple, if not entirely foregone conclusion: the idea that each person, regardless of their bodily differences, deserves to build their own comfortable and dignified life.


The third volume of Light in the Attic’s ongoing survey of this largely notional movement puts a new twist on the idea of combining two seemingly incompatible genres in one unruly sound.

Various Artists: Country Funk Volume III (1975-1982)

Country Funk Volume III (1975-1982)

One of the unsung qualities of Country Funk Vol. I and Country Funk Vol. II was their casual disregard for history. Documenting a scene that wasn’t really a scene and not even much of a movement, they traced a mere idea—hey, let’s combine country twang with funk rhythms!—across a couple dozen tracks from the late 1960s through the mid 1970s. Neither bothered to put the songs in chronological order; in fact, the two volumes themselves weren’t in order, with Vol. II covering a slightly earlier time frame (1967-1974) than Vol. I (1969-1975). Those spans didn’t even represent particularly salient mile markers; they were just the dates of the songs the producers wanted us to hear. They were more like mixtapes than reissues, which fit the gritty, sometimes funny, occasionally sexy, often bizarre music perfectly well.
Almost by necessity, this long-awaited third volume is a bit more aware of the past. It picks up roughly where the other two left off and follows that idea into the early 1980s. Still scrambling the timeline in its sequencing, the collection can’t help but track the changes that both country and funk but especially country-funk endured as one decade ended and the next began. Vol. III covers 1975 through 1982, a period that saw the end of outlaw country and Southern rock, the beginnings of yacht rock, the rise and fall of disco, the start of the Reagan era, and the arrival of new sounds and technologies in pop music, all of which affected the music collected on this new compilation.
So set aside your disappointment that Jess Rotter didn’t return to draw the cover; this set succeeds because it puts a twist on the whole idea of combining these two genres into one unruly sound. The yacht-country strains of Eddie Rabbitt’s “One and Only One,” with its breezy vocals, percolating rhythm section, and genius rhyme scheme (“Baby, you’ll always be my special… lady”), would have sounded jarring on the first two volumes, but it fits nicely within this wider array of sounds. Jerry Reed projects boundless hick charm on “Rhythm and Blues,” and Delbert McClinton goes cowboy noir on “Shot From the Saddle,” which gets its boogie from, of all things, an alto saxophone. The funkiest thing about Dolly Parton’s disco-adjacent “Sure Thing” is the way she sings that title, hoarsely drawing out the ur in sure with a wink and a nudge.
Some of these country artists, including Parton, used funk sounds as a springboard to cross over into the pop market, while others struggled to adapt. Tony Joe White was caught between the mainstream hitmaker he’d been in the late ’60s and the cult artist he’d eventually become, and “Alone at Last” (released here for the first time) shows why he was flailing commercially: That low voice still sounds compelling and weird in its phrasing and intonation, but it’s paired with a chintzy keyboard that is the very opposite of funky. (Side note: Is he actually singing, “The first time your ass touched mine, I knew we’d get together somehow”?) Ronnie Milsap, on the other hand, was on the cusp of crossing over to a pop audience when he cut “Get It Up” in 1979, sounding like a man so unhinged by lust that he mistakes the discotheque for a honkytonk.
Sex remains one of country funk’s favorite topics, and Vol. III tracks some changing attitudes about getting it on. There’s nothing here that’ll make you blush as scarlet as Bobbie Gentry’s “He Made a Woman Out of Me” did on Vol. I, but Rob Galbraith’s “I Got the Fever” comes awfully close, specifically the way he delivers the line, “You got me feeling so illegal.” And Terri Gibbs delivers a rags-to-riches story worthy of Joan Collins: On “Rich Man,” she plays a woman who uses her wiles to snare a wealthy husband and has fun doing it. Best of all, Gary & Sandy combine sex and sci-fi on “Gonna Let You Have It,” which is Gary, Sandy, a tight rhythm section, and a phalanx of laser blasters. Over a galloping melody, the duo equates shootouts with hookups, with Sandy turning even the most cliched lines into come-ons: “Gonna open fire… with sweet desire.”
It may be obvious by now that the best moments here are the most outrageous, the ones that lead country music way out into some deeply weird pastures. And none get weirder than Billy Swan’s 1977 not-a-hit “Oliver Swan,” which opens as a character sketch about a town drunk who “smelled like a dead skunk.” Despite that supremely infectious organ lick and shuffling drumbeat, it plays like one of those somber Southern slice-of-life songs, similar to Mac Davis’ “Lucas Was a Redneck,” from Vol. I. Then it takes a truly strange turn: “Then one night a saucer flew down from the sky, full of another world’s women saying, ‘We need us a guy!’” They abduct him, hold intergalactic orgies, and repopulate their planet, and Billy Swan wraps it up by describing a “bunch of little green Oliver Swans.” There’s a mischievous edge to his delivery, as though he can barely suppress a laugh. It’s the beautifully ridiculous centerpiece of this collection.
Even at its most absurd, there’s a tinge of sadness to Vol. III, as though the artists and the compilers understand that something is coming to an end. The ’80s weren’t necessarily kind to country funk, as many of these artists aged out of the mainstream and were replaced first by Nashville neo-traditionalists who viewed innovation with suspicion and later by hat acts more interested in rock than funk. A theoretical Vol. IV could dive deep underground, although half the fun of these weird compilations is knowing that these artists and sounds had infiltrated the mainstream to some degree. Or it could simply backtrack and see what was happening from 1974 through 1981. Until then, Dennis Linde’s frantically upbeat “Down to the Station” serves as a fitting send-off to this unlikely marriage of two seemingly incompatible styles. “Feeling fine at the station, I ain’t even gonna look back,” sings the man who wrote both “Burning Love” and “Goodbye Earl.” “I ain’t worried about tomorrow, it ain’t here and I ain’t there.”

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Stas offers a sharp solo debut doused heartbreak, identity, and the familiar production touches of her former futurist rap and R&B duo THEEsatisfaction.

S’WOMEN

Stas THEE Boss, best known as one-half of the futurist rap and R&B duo THEESatisfaction, bops through a string of breakups on her self-released solo album S’WOMEN. Pronounced “swimming,” and billed as “an aquatic explanation of failed female companionships,” the 11-track project is a meditation on Stas’ knack for falling out of love that follows her 2014 Stas For Hire instrumental EP.  S’WOMEN is buoyed by nostalgic sample selection, Stas’ post-Digable flow, and a collection of innuendos that deliver bravado and honesty with ease. The project’s narrative, however, is disrupted by frequent returns to the well where she pulls from the deep black aesthetic that defined THEESatisfaction, whose 2012 debut awE naturalE and 2015 follow-up EarthEE positioned the duo as the feminist star children of Missy Elliott, Erykah Badu, and Audre Lorde. Though infrequent, the places where S’WOMEN falters ultimately become a testament to Stas THEE Boss’ growth, which remains imminent but incomplete.
S’WOMEN is the fruit of three failed relationships in as many years. At points cold and cocky, at points vulnerable and introspective, the project is a meditation on getting it wrong. Stas doesn’t consult the “please baby, please” handbook of R&B to secure a do-over, she gets things off of her chest like they’re extended riffs on angsty text message threads. Though Stas obviously grapples with disappointment, she is also resigned to diplomacy—the odd ways that it can fill the divide between estranged lovers.
Vocal distortion, playful harmonies, and rich basslines mingle with cheeky samples that show her love for bogle-ready basement party anthems. Stas speaks with impressive fluency through the music that has spoken to her through her life, like an encyclopedic recall of the jams of her youth. She checks another girl for being an opportunist over a mesmerizing sample of Nina Simone’s “Don’t Smoke In Bed” on “Solo.” Echoing Simone’s sentiments, she fashions curses into salty pleasantries on the clear star of the album. “Bummer” sports a flip of Wreckx-N-Effects’ “Rump Shaker.” “Before Anyone Else” and “Melt” are derived from Missy Elliott’s Supa Dupa Fly standout “Beep Me 911,” and Erykah Badu’s “Other Side of the Game,” respectively. The latter is propelled by Stas’ search for a suitable partner, which comes with a warning that her bite is much worse than her bars; “You been waiting from the get go/[...]Scary at my best so you should never let your fret go.”
Deviating from her infatuation with the otherworldly, S’WOMEN eventually brings Stas back down to earth to navigate her feelings. But the way she crowds the production makes it difficult for the heart of these songs to be made plain. She plunges into familiar territory with references to the black cool and ancestral memory that girded THEESatisfaction’s catalog. “Melt,” “Gon Phishing,” and “Diamond Doris”—a cool nod to notorious jewel thief Doris Payne—suffer when Stas acts upon the urge to reiterate, despite her dating woes, how authentically black she is. Like her talent, her identity is never in question. Her measurable growth, however, is. While Stas is consistent across S’WOMEN, it is not clear that she makes a sustained effort to ditch her comfort zone. Transformation was not the stated purpose of the project, but a bit of sonic bravery and tighter storytelling would have made the final mix that much more refreshing.


Barcelona’s John Talabot and Stockholm’s Axel Boman work in tandem to bring house music off the floor and into the air with an invigorating and meditative mix of compositions.

The Night Land

Making electronic music is often a solitary endeavor, and sometimes, after enough lonely all-nighters in the studio, its practitioners find themselves craving company. The annals of electronica are peppered with what we might call “superduos,” pairings where both members first made their names as solo artists. Sometimes these are one-offs, like Mike & Rich (the early-’90s collaboration between µ-Ziq and Aphex Twin) and Supermayer (Superpitcher and Michael Mayer). Sometimes, the new projects become so influential that they threaten to eclipse their members’ solo careers, as briefly happened with TNGHT (Hudson Mohawke and Lunice). Sometimes, these outings give their members an opportunity to veer outside their usual lanes, like househeads Motor City Drum Ensemble and Marcus Worgull dabbling in kosmische music as Vermont. More often, they find their participants doubling down on shared traits, like Mumdance and Logos collectively engineering an ultra-reduced, hyper-abstracted form of grime, or Marcel Dettmann and Ben Klock cutting all the meat off techno’s bones.
Talaboman are Barcelona’s John Talabot and Stockholm’s Axel Boman, and the goofy portmanteau is strangely fitting. The crosshatched part of the Venn diagram connecting the two artists is actually relatively slim. Both musicians make a kind of house music, both are disco fans, and both are given to bright-eyed reveries (compare Talabot’s “Destiny” or “So Will Be Now…” with Boman’s “1979” or “In the Dust of This Planet”). But that’s about it. If the tattooed Boman sometimes comes across as the wily class clown, Talabot is the sensitive kid in the corner, distracted by his colors and his books. Together, though, something interesting happens. Their collective output doesn’t sound much like either’s work; it doesn’t even necessarily reflect the thin, convex sliver where their interests overlap. Instead, they’ve hit upon something new.
The album’s long, slowly evolving tracks tend to be more mood pieces than club jams, defined less by their beats than by the rounded contours of their synthesizer patches. Album opener “Midnattssol” (Swedish for “Midnight Sun”) is a scrap of Balearic cosmic disco replete with rain sticks and birdcalls, and it sets a tone midway between ritual and celebration, private contemplation and collective abandon. Half the set hovers around that languid pace. “Safe Changes,” an emotional highlight, toys with a Kraftwerkian melody and bubbling dub delay over a measured andante drumbeat; “Six Million Ways,” a hair faster, teases a slinky arpeggio out of a murky, slow-motion house groove. The album’s other highlight is “Brutal Chugga-Chugga.” As a pitter-pat CR-78 rhythm percolates beneath the keys, their synths gradually stiffen and sharpen; the Knife’s Silent Shout briefly comes to mind, and the sound of thunder occasionally peals across the background.
The musicians have said that embarking upon the project gave them license to buy scads of hardware; fortunately, unlike most kids with new toys, a remarkable air of restraint prevails. All that extra room paves the way for some wild acousmatic effects: Listening through decent headphones, the steady backbeat thump of “Dins El Llit” (Catalan for “In Bed”) sounds for all the world like it’s situated somewhere in the physical world, just outside the room you’re sitting in. It’s disorienting and damn near magical.
The other half of the album kicks along closer to house music’s usual pulse. “Samsa” is the album’s clubbiest selection, and—perhaps not coincidentally—its least compelling, flogging dubby organ chords and bass squelch over tambourine backbeats for nearly 11 minutes. Along the way, they flirt with a tremolo synth lead that's strikingly reminiscent of Carl Craig’s classic “Falling Up” remix, and while the extended climax might help explain why they stretch out the way they do, they could have managed just as much drama in half the time. “The Ghosts Hood” is more successful, wrapping a cowbell-heavy groove in burbling electronics and periodically unleashing quiet but expressive bursts of reverb. It's small tweaks like these, which subtly but decisively move the energy forward, that reveal the deftness of their touch. On “Loser’s Hymn” and the closing “Dins El Llit,” they keep the pace brisk but downplay the drums, and the results, a kind of dance music with its head in the clouds, are both invigorating and meditative—like the album itself.


Members of Orthrelm and Behold...The Arctopus come together for a project that combines the hyper-technical "calculator metal" of their other projects with dreamy textural meditations.

Krallice

"I'd love to be a nature band, but unfortunately we live in New York." So said guitarist/vocalist Mick Barr in Pitchfork's interview with Krallice, his black metal band with Colin Marston and Lev Weinstein. He was referring to black metal's typical obsession with nature, given its origins in Scandinavia's rugged landscape. But Krallice is a nature band. It's just that New York's "nature" is concrete, glass, numbers, and dollars. Barr's and Marston's main gigs are Orthrelm and Behold...The Arctopus, respectively, two bands that showcase mind-boggling technicality. Their "calculator metal" aspect colors Krallice, which is precise, neurotic, yet powerful-- just like mathematician Maximillian Cohen, protagonist of Pi, Darren Aronofsky's Kabbalah/math thriller set in New York. "For fuck's sake, how does a Jew end up listening to Burzum?" Weinstein rhetorically asked. Easy: Cohen would have jammed hard on Krallice.
From their first note, it's obvious how unlike most other black metal they are. Barr's agonized yell isn't the usual witchy screech. The guitar tone nods to black metal's trebly buzz, but it also has rich midrange. Instead of paper-thin walls of cymbals, these drums have heft, blessed by a naturalistic analog recording. No Satanism, Odinism, or nationalism here-- a few mysterious phrases replace printed lyrics: "Solar winds breed laceration"; "The lesser gods have taken their withered placement back from man." Most saliently, the guitar work isn't the typical minor chord that's moved up and down. These are complex, abstract lines, often spinning away from each other in counterpoint. In "Cnestorial", guitars cross at skewed angles, cutting the tonality loose in an indeterminate key. Eventually, dreamy sheets of Rothko-esque chords envelop the tune. "Timehusk" flutters with free jazz skronk, then resolves into straight-ahead thrash. "Forgiveness in Rot" weaves lines picked at light speed with curtain-like chords that billow open and shut. It's ambient music at 200 bpm.
The tremolo picking and blastbeats are unmistakably black metal, but this record otherwise relocates the Norwegian art form to Mars. Two American precedents do exist for Krallice: Weakling and Wolves in the Throne Room. Weakling were more emotional, and Wolves in the Throne Room are more lush, but both have stretched what essentially began as Satanic punk rock into 10-minute textural meditations. Krallice have now added math to the equation. The results are hard to grasp, but strangely addictive. Krallice would have made a marvelous soundtrack to Pi.


Born in 1931, the Russian composer Mikael Tariverdiev scored more than 130 Russian films in his lifetime. The box set Film Music is his first introduction to the West, and it is all the more compelling for arriving with its mystery intact.

Film Music

Film Music arrives in the West with little in the way of context. Without any context, actually, beyond the basic information provided on the sticker that adorns the front of the set. Born in 1931, Mikael Tariverdiev became hugely popular in his home country of Russia. In addition to ballets, suites, concertos, and even operas, he scored more than 130 Russian films from the 1950s until his death in 1996, most of them directed by Mikhail Kalik. Goodbye, Boys!, from 1964, is arguably their most famous collaboration, but none of the films represented on Film Music are available in the United States at this time.
Gathering mostly instrumental excerpts and miniature suites on 3 LPs, Film Music is his first comprehensive release in the West, essentially introducing him to half the world, which makes it a major collection, albeit a puzzling one. Soundtracks are a curious musical format, by nature secondary to the visuals they’re meant to accompany; in execution the music ought to work subliminally, becoming part of the fabric of the film itself, not unlike set design, wardrobe, or blocking.
Listening to Film Music without having seen the films, in other words, can be an odd, unsettled experience. You have no idea what Tariverdiev might be reacting to, what he might be trying to achieve, how he might be using musical cues to complement visuals. Nor do you have any of his previous works to provide a clearer portrait of the composer. So we are left with music that is presented in a setting for which it perhaps was never intended. And yet, it is to Tariverdiev’s immense credit that the music sounds so evocative, so immediate, so transporting even without its visual anchor. Rather than forbidding, Film Music is immersive: a box set to get lost in.
These excerpts sound simultaneously simple and complex, austere and lush, straightforward and elusive, adventurous and modest. Typically Tariverdiev spotlights only one or two instruments at a time, usually with minimal backing: A piano daydreams at a sidewalk café on "Prelude for Ket," the spare percussion suggesting the clink of silverware and the chatter of passersby. A robust and red-faced saxophone bursts into "The Last Romantic" to deliver a pining solo that sounds like a eulogy. The tracklist has an easy, unforced range that covers humble piano suites, knockabout American jazz, pliant folk, rambunctious klezmer, erotic chanson. This is specific, even programmatic music, allowing you to infer character, setting, and even story.
Tariverdiev’s eclecticism allows these songs to exist apart from the films that inspired them and to speak to Western audiences. In fact, Film Music gives you a strong, yet fleeting impression of Russian cinema during the latter half of the 20th century. You would imagine any film accompanying this music would balance whimsy and melancholy, humor and tragedy, naturalism and fantasy, hope regarding the future and nostalgia for the past. For Tariverdiev, the thing itself—whether a musical instrument, an artistic tradition, or a political idea—is much less important than how it interacts with other things. That may be the guiding theme of Film Music, which is all the more evocative for arriving with so much of its compelling mystery intact.


Law & Order-- the solo debut from Foxygen's Jonathan Rado-- suggests Rado is fully prepared to make Foxygen records on his own. The collection sketches out a homemade grab-bag of jams and rough-cut gems devoted to monolithic 60s rock sounds.

Law and Order

Foxygen’s devotion to 60s rock knows no bounds. Along with adopting all of those paisley clothes and groovy organ sounds, the polarizing psych-pop duo even conforms to the era’s compressed sense of time. Similar to how the Beatles and the Rolling Stones released new albums every six months, and went through full-scale musical transformations pretty much every other year, Foxygen has already endured a career’s worth of ups and downs since the release of 2012’s Take the Kids Off Broadway EP. There was the acclaimed full-length debut We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, a series of tumultuous tours, rumors of intra-band strife, a wacky appearance at the Pitchfork Music Festival, and now Law & Order, the solo debut from the “quiet” half of the band, Jonathan Rado. As if that wasn’t enough activity, Rado is already working on his second solo LP, even as Foxygen’s handlers insist that the group isn’t falling apart. It might be a good idea to keep eyes peeled on L.A.-area rooftops for an impromptu farewell concert, just in case.
No matter what lies ahead in Foxygen’s future, Law & Order suggests that Rado is fully prepared to make Foxygen records on his own. As a singer, he’s not as dynamic as Sam France, whose ability to ape various 60s icons-- Jagger, Lennon, and Barrett are his main touchstones-- adds extra authenticity to the group’s studious genre exercises. Rado’s vocals, meanwhile, are serviceable though not exactly essential, which might explain why he often buries them in effects (like on the demented late-night soul ballad “Looking 4a Girl Like U”) and abrasive guitar fuzz (on the clanking garage-rocker “I Wood”), or removes them completely (on the swinging Booker T. and the MGs homage “Dance Away Your Ego”).
Rado didn’t set out to make a record as pristine as We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors; Law & Order is a homemade grab-bag of jams and rough-cut gems that sounds like it was hashed out in a matter of days. It’s basically Rado's version of McCartney, which is one among approximately 83 classic-rock references on Law & Order smothered in the requisite air quotes.
Rado might be derivative, but at least there’s an admirable consistency to his prodigious output. Studying the masters has taught him how to put together catchy songs seemingly at will. The best tracks on Law & Order are frontloaded: The album-opening “Seven Horses” blobs along on a trippy groove that’s surprisingly funky, and “Hand in Mine” is an enjoyable callback to the sexy camp of those old Lee Hazelwood/Nancy Sinatra duets. Things get weirder in the album’s second half-- “I Wanna Feel It Now!!!” recalls the thrilling cacophony of Broadway-- but the glitchy closer “Pot of Gold” is Rado’s most focused pop song yet. He even indulges in a slick yacht-rock guitar solo-- is this a sign that he’s moving on to the 70s, as all 60s heroes must eventually do? Knowing Rado, the wait won’t be long to find out.


The Austin band’s first album in 18 years puts an ever-so-slightly sharper edge on their familiar, slow-burning indie rock.

For Forever

“Punk as Fuck” is American Analog Set’s definitive song and not just because it’s their most popular. The opener of 2001’s Know by Heart doesn’t hit all that different than “A Good Friend is Always Around,” “Come Home Baby Julie, Come Home,” “Dim Stars (The Boy in My Arms),” or any other song with a title that more accurately reflects the Austin band’s music. Their bashful take on slowpoke indie rock was initially seen as an extension of Yo La Tengo and Stereolab, and it was a formative influence on Ben Gibbard, who appeared on an AmAnSet track named “The Postman” two years before Give Up. Throughout their initial run straddling the turn of the 21st century, the Austinites stuck to one sound, and they had a sense of humor about the reputation it earned them.
The nice thing about having such a defined aesthetic is that any incremental adjustment can have a profound impact, like a cruise ship sailing half a degree off course. For Forever, the first American Analog Set album in 18 years, doesn’t really rock, but it’s not afraid to get in your face. The instruments are stripped of the cottony production of their Emperor Jones era, the synths completely devoid of retro kitsch. You’d figure that a song that shares its name with a Judas Priest classic would be For Forever’s “Punk as Fuck,” an ironic allusion to everything this band is not. But “Screaming for Vengeance” really is the most metal thing American Analog Set have ever made, if only because the mix is completely dominated by a bass riff that judders like a close-mic’d trampoline spring.
It’s all relative, but “the hardest American Analog Set album” still applies. As with many of his peers in the early aughts, Andrew Kenny’s lyrics had a mean streak masked by a librarian whisper. But as every sound on For Forever becomes more rigid and aggressive, Kenny takes on a snarl that highlights the nastier tone. While “Over the Jeans” and “By the Bridle” could be interpreted as obituaries for the indie rom-com era that American Analog Set helped soundtrack, “Screaming for Vengeance” has little room for interpretation. “It’s young love/You get fucked/You’re gonna bleed a lot,” he hisses.
Still, none of this comes off as urgent or bracing. For Forever is not the result of a pandemic-induced reckoning or an opportunity to capitalize on an unexpected flourishing of influence; a Numero Group reissue of the band’s first three albums isn’t set to arrive until 2024. Rather, it’s been described as the result of guys slowly remembering they liked hanging out together and years of surreptitious jamming awaiting a proper outlet.
And so For Forever moves at the same leisurely pace as classic American Analog Set, setting aside a sizable amount of time for songs with no particular sense of where they need to be. The lengthier “Camp Don’t Count” and “Long Limbs” recall times when this band was described as “krautrock,” because what else are you gonna call a song that repeats the same riff for six or seven minutes? Then again, even as the 12-and-a-half-minute title track makes good on its name, it doesn’t aspire for a state of mesmerism or try to pack in as many ideas as possible. Once they hit on a mantra of “back and forth and forever dear,” they just knew they were going to stretch things out. Familiarity is still the primary appeal of For Forever: the melodies soothe rather than rouse, most songs start and end at the same volume, and the clever double entendres satisfy even if the meaning remains somewhat elusive. It aligns with the real, if somewhat reductive, nostalgia not just for American Analog Set, but for a time when indie rock bands were beloved for not seeming so eager to be noticed.


Featuring a standout vocal performance from Panda Bear, the French house veterans’ new EP could almost be mistaken for a lost classic of the Y2K era.

Step by Step EP

In a quarter century of four-to-the-floor beats and spine-tingling filter sweeps, Alan Braxe and DJ Falcon never collaborated until now—but for fans of the silky style popularized by Daft Punk, their union represents the second coming of the French touch. Both men’s trajectories trace back to Roulé, the label that Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter ran between 1995 and 2003. Roulé released only a dozen records in those eight years, but it cast a long shadow: Together with his partner Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s Crydamoure imprint, Bangalter’s label masterminded the playful sample flips, driving drum machines, and insouciant squelch that came to define late-’90s French house.
As two of the few members of the Roulé roster not named Bangalter, Braxe (aka Alain Quême) and Falcon (aka Stéphane Quême, Braxe’s cousin) are central to the story of the French touch. Braxe had a hand in the 1998 Stardust one-off “Music Sounds Better With You,” a single that is to French house as the croissant is to French pastry; Falcon partnered with Bangalter on a pair of singles that stretched the crew’s template to especially ecstatic proportions. Falcon subsequently dropped out of view; Braxe continued to refine his sumptuous sound across numerous productions and remixes, including a celebrated stint alongside fellow Frenchman Fred Falke in the early ’00s. Braxe + Falcon’s new Step by Step EP sounds more meticulously crafted than any of the early Roulé 12"s, which were banged out on rudimentary samplers, but—improved fidelity aside—the record shares the same spirit of simplicity; it could almost be mistaken for a lost classic of the Y2K era. Now that Daft Punk have hung up their helmets, it’s a welcome return to the golden age of French house.
Roulé’s signature was always exceptionally tactile: The label’s dogged loops, disco vamps, and overstuffed chords suggested a surfeit of emotion that the era’s electronic tools could barely contain. The EP’s clubbiest tracks revive that full-to-bursting energy with chord changes that just keep spiraling giddily upward. On “Love Me,” a rock-steady house beat fleshed out with laser zaps and boomy drum fills lays the foundation for a slow-motion whirlwind of a chord progression, synths and pianos cycling in such a way that they seem always on the verge of arriving at a climax. The keys have a naggingly familiar quality that makes you wonder where you’ve heard them before—the turnaround in a Billy Joel song? The bridge of some Joe Jackson B-side? The slower, swervier “Creative Source” manages a similar trick with a chunky loop of lush, orchestral disco sampled from ’70s R&B group Creative Source’s “I’d Find You Anywhere”; listen closely around the song’s 31-second mark, and you’ll hear the snippet that Braxe + Falcon flip into their warbly hook, sped up until it sounds like a Jackson Five song you can’t quite place. Both songs capture the kind of winking déjà vu that French house has always excelled at—a guileless, open-armed embrace of pure pleasure.
In the post-Roulé era, Braxe has become known for particularly starry-eyed takes on ’80s pop—like the Fred Falke collaboration “Rubicon,” a serotonin-fueled descendant of Jan Hammer’s Miami Vice theme, or “One More Chance,” a synth-driven power ballad in the tradition of “Take My Breath Away” and “One More Night”—and “Elevation” plays with similar sounds. It’s the weakest track here; within the context of the song’s mid-tempo funk, L.A. singer Sunni Colón’s velvety falsetto inevitably evokes Pharrell’s turns on “Happy” and “Get Lucky,” and the chords lack the unpredictable frisson of Braxe’s best work. Even the production, while sparkling and satisfyingly spacious, fails to surprise; this time, the déjà vu feels a little too on the nose.
The standout is “Step by Step,” a song so good that the rest of the EP pales in comparison. It’s a languid yacht-rock-disco number that features a chord progression for the ages; the sun-kissed vibe recalls Chicago, Godley & Crème, and Christopher Cross, while the high-end frequencies fan out like the jets of a lawn sprinkler. Clever filtering was always one of the principal hallmarks of French house, and the two producers make great use of it here. In the song’s intro, there’s nothing but tinny midrange frequencies that sound like a battered transistor radio playing your grandparents’ favorite soft-rock station. But then an invisible knob twists and a whole world of color and frequency comes surging to life.
What really makes the song is Noah Lennox, aka Animal Collective’s Panda Bear, who delivers one of his most stirring performances. His multi-tracked harmonies rise upward in gravity-defying layers, like glass-sheathed architectural marvels, and when he hits the high notes, it’s a searchlight streaking across the skyline. Though the lyrics are a hair’s breadth from an inspirational quote—it is, after all, a steadfast ode to taking things step by step—Lennox’s idiosyncrasies have a winning relatability that’s uncommon in platinum-dipped dance music; there’s a conversational familiarity to his drawl, and a loveable, almost goofy quality to some of his couplets (“As I try to find a new way forward/An empty space that I am goin’ for”). Few singers handle the balance of elation and dejection better than Panda Bear, and when he’s in underdog mode, as he is here, it’s impossible not to root for him.
Step by Step doesn’t entirely hang together as an EP. Leading with the best song is understandable, but it would have been better saved for last; listening sequentially, the shift from “Step by Step” to “Love Me” is jarring. But the producers sweeten the pot with “Step by Step - Bonus Beat,” a dub mix that strips out Panda Bear’s lead vocals and leaves only his multi-tracked backing harmonies. Faster than the original, it’s no longer a middle-school slow dance, but an end-credits drive into the sunset. Panda Bear’s voice is unrecognizable; filters teasing him in and out of the background, he’s rendered shapeless and weightless, a chorus of angels. There’s a reason they call this stuff the French touch: It’s tactile, corporeal, a full-frequency embrace that can feel like a divine caress.