The Red Hot Chili Peppers' eleventh album is their first since 1989’s Mothers’ Milk without Rick Rubin behind the boards, opting instead for Danger Mouse and Nigel Godrich.

The Getaway

Anthony Kiedis has had enough of your jokes, jeers, and general bullshit–and can you blame him? 30-odd years after his band formed, the Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman can’t catch a break. While we’re all sitting on our asses, cracking jokes about his hospitalization and his best friend’s rendition of the National Anthem, he and his pals are out there hustling—spreading love and #posivibes to stadiums worldwide, rescuing babies while doing Carpool karaoke with his bandmates, and getting inducted into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Music isn’t a game to him–neither are carefully-placed tube socks. Appropriately, then, the Peppers’ first single from their eleventh album The Getaway, “Dark Necessities,” is no cheerful comeback celebration–in fact, it’s downright confrontational. “You don’t know my mind,” he sneers on the chorus, “You don’t know my kind.” Fueled by this self-awareness (subservient to a broader desire to shush the haters), the Peppers have come to set the record straight. (Take that, Mike Patton.)
Like* 2011's I’m With You, ____The Getaway* marks a changing-of-hands in the Peppers camp: it’s their first album since 1989’s Mothers’ Milk without Rick Rubin behind the boards. While the producer's absence hasn’t stirred up the same anxiety among acolytes as John Frusciante did when he left the group at the end of the '00s, its significance can’t be understated. Sure, Frusciante's guitarist’s showy solos and funk prowess certainly played foundational roles in the Peppers' halcyon days, but as far as arrangements, engineering, sequencing, and overall sound were concerned, Rubin deserves equal credit for crafting the sonic blueprint that turned four horny goofballs from Los Angeles into kings of the global stadium circuit: crisp, crunchy, crass–and immediate.
Rubin's playbook has blessed the Peppers with a quarter-century of successful chart showings and tours, but it’s also left them sock-deep in a creative quagmire for the past several LPs, dragged down by blaring, untextured mixes and a fatal lack of boundaries in matters of alpha-male kabuki. Good thing they picked the right duo to help them clamber out of the pit on The Getaway: pop-smith extraordinaire Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton produced the record and co-wrote five of its tracks, with longtime Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich handling the mixing. If Rubin's uniform racket is engineered to tickle the reptile brain, then Burton’s approach to rock production–best illustrated by his recurring collaborations with the Black Keys–seeks to unite a divided audience through commonalities, developing frisson through the simultaneous overlaps and juxtapositions between genres, textures, and patches of negative space.
Unsurprisingly, The Getaway easily stands as the Peppers’ lushest album to date, a welcome reprieve from 25 years of cramped, inert, (and in the case of Californication, occasionally unlistenable) mixes. While their sonic tropes haven’t changed–what would a Red Hot Chili Peppers album be without Flea’s slappy solos, Kiedis’ staccato raps, or full-band funk breakdowns?–Burton's foggy, psychedelic palette marks a drastic shift in the presentation of those motifs, widening the gulf between the band's funk-metal past and their hang-loose, jam-band present. The producer’s usual cinematic flourishes (fervent strings, accentuated flange, melancholy keys) reveal his influence immediately, and occasionally excessively; The inert trip-hop arrangements showcased on “Feasting on the Flowers” and “The Hunter” (both co-written by Burton) could have come from the cutting-room floor after one of his Broken Bells sessions, while closing track “Dreams of a Samurai” suffers from a severe case of atmospheric bloat.
The Getaway proves far more successful when Burton steps back and lets the band funk around (with a little extra supervision, of course). Employing an organic approach similar to his winning strategy on Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool, Godrich staggers the tracks so the band's grooves can breathe–and more importantly, so their instrumental prowess can be put to use for a change: especially the talents of guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, who joined the band after Frusciante’s departure. Whereas I’m With You delegated the axeman to a textural supporting role, The Getaway casts the newest Pepper as a proper successor to Frusciante, ramping up his duties as a soloist and backup vocalist. Klinghoffer's yet to surpass his mentor's technical skill and overall gravitas, but between Kiedis’ puff-chested posturing and Flea and Smith's explosive percussive dynamics, the guitarist's restraint provides a much-needed anchor.
By now, Peppers fans know better than to expect Pulitzer-worthy poetry from a goofy bard like Kiedis: his rapping continues to function primarily as a vocal extension of his bandmates' rhythm section, rather than a thematic vehicle (unless there’s some hidden metaphorical genius embedded in couplets like “Up to my ass in alligators/Let’s get it on with the alligator haters”; I’m certainly amenable to enlightenment). Considering how the Peppers’ hopes of escaping their comfort zone led them to Burton and Godrich in the first place, the album’s lyrical stasis scans as disappointing, if unsurprising. Less than two minutes into the album, Kiedis gives his first shoutout to Call-ee-phon-ya; from there, the perfunctory Golden State worship quickly plummets into The Californians territory. "Driving down Calexico highway,” he croons on “Encore,” “and now I know the signs for sure.” Stuart, is that you? At least he delves into some other topics, including sex with robots (from the silvery highlight “Go Robot:” “You’ve got to choose it to use it so let me plug it in/Robots are my next of kin”) and Brazilians ("I met a girl with long black hair and she opened up so wide,” he boasts on “This Ticonderoga”), Iggy Pop & J Dilla (on a song called–what else?–“Detroit”), and worst of all, a dance Kiedis calls “The Avocado.” He even proffers up a few life lessons, including the following nugget of wisdom: "We are all just soldiers in this battlefield of life.”
Were it not for these  issues and the B-Side's proliferation of yawn-inducing, stoned slow jams, The Getaway could have potentially bested By The Way as the Peppers’ best work post-Californication. By tapping into what made the Peppers Rock Hall-worthy–their instrumental potency, their extensive knowledge of funk, their willingness to laugh at themselves (to a point)–Burton and Godrich have gracefully, gently steered the band back on the right track. At the very least, this surprisingly complex album lends credence to Kiedis’ accusations. Maybe we don't know his mind, or his kind–or at least not quite like we thought.


Jim O’Rourke doesn’t much care for ambient music, so it makes sense that his first ambient album picks apart the genre and scrutinizes its attempts to produce truly structureless music.

Sleep Like It’s Winter

Jim O’Rourke inhabits genres as different as Americana, pop, and guitar rock in order to poke holes in them from inside. His last proper solo album, 2015’s Simple Songs, tackled ’70s singer-songwriter fare with seamless orchestration and wry lyrics. On Sleep Like It’s Winter, O’Rourke changes direction again, adopting the tropes of ambient music to disseminate both criticism and nostalgia over the course of a single, stunning 45-minute track. The result is an ambient album about ambient albums—a study as effective as Eureka’s and Insignificance’s respective examinations of orchestral pop and rock, even though O’Rourke never opens his mouth to voice a jokey critique.
He doesn’t much care for ambient, as it turns out. (His first love, stretching back to early albums like 1991’s Tamper, was tape music; Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond was a foundational high school read.) O’Rourke’s quarrel is with the genre’s purported absence of structure, a formlessness he sees expressed only through a narrow range of harmonies and sounds. It’s an understandable perspective for a musician whose first love was the avant-garde world of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, where every assumption about composing, instrumentation, and performing could be challenged.
So he’s made an ambient record, but in a way, all his own. Recorded for the recently launched Japanese ambient label Newhere, Sleep Like It’s Winter purposefully picks apart the genre and scrutinizes its optimistic attempts to produce truly structureless music. On its surface, the album resembles some of O’Rourke’s more spontaneous Steamroom releases (this spring’s Steamroom 40 was all live improvisation). In fact, he spent over two years making it, and the meticulousness of his craftsmanship seems designed to examine the very idea of structure.
Sleep opens with delicately stretched horns, which give way to a methodical piano line that wanders in and out of gradually sharpening drones with enough drama to discourage background listening. Put this on while you’re cleaning the house, and it will unsettle your subconscious; a focused listen, however, reveals subtle tension mounting throughout the piece. A conspicuous crescendo suggests that, even when working with such a vast canvas, O’Rourke never loses sight of its structural frames. Around the 16-minute mark, these sounds give way to silence, save for some buzzing cicadas and a few calling birds. For several minutes (though not quite 4:33), the environment surrounding O’Rourke becomes the only instrument, a solo of sorts that serves the structural purpose of bridging the record’s two halves.
If albums like Eureka, Insignificance, and Simple Songs feel connected by O’Rourke embrace of pop forms, Sleep finds its own musical touchstones in more abstract corners of his discography. The combination of horn drones and piano achieves the same anxious swell as “Our Exquisite Replica of Eternity,” the ornate opener to his ’90s duo Gastr Del Sol’s Upgrade & Afterlife (minus the staticky Kevin Drumm guitar solo. Later, he employs a bath of synths as euphoric as his computer-music classic I’m Happy & I’m Singing & A 1,2,3,4, as the composition gently dissolves over its starry second side. These moments suggest that much of Sleep’s “ambient music” comprises sounds that have always been important to O’Rourke—but, as is always the case on his albums, what matters is how and why he uses them. Even when occupying this new musical form, his creative ear for melody and harmony never feels limited by it.
The minimalist composer Morton Feldman once asked, “Do we have anything in music that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?” His compositions—built from impossibly quiet clusters of sparsely played notes and sometimes running as long as six hours—are often cited as predecessors of ambient. But Feldman doesn’t seem to think there really is anything that “wipes everything out”; his pieces are some of the most meticulously structured and intricately notated in 20th-century music. O’Rourke, a perfectionist if there ever was one, offers a similar rejoinder to ambient rhetoric within Sleep Like It’s Winter’s expertly carved frames. The tropes of ambient music may be well worn, 18 years into the 21st century, but he navigates and challenges them enough to make the genre his own.


For all its slacker-rock credentials, the Connecticut band could rarely be described as loose. Its third album is a short, hooky celebration of friendship and fuzz pedals.

Buds

Steve Hartlett isn’t known to get ahead of himself. Since 2009, the Ovlov main man has crafted blown-out indie rock with the present moment squarely in mind, while the group keeled between cult reverence, multiple breakups, and the promise of wider success. On the eve of the Connecticut band’s third album, Buds, the singer-guitarist (who also leads garage quartet Stove) signalled he might finally be reckoning with the future. “I’m right in the middle of trying to figure out what I actually want to do with music,” he said recently. Buds tells its own tale—one that looks close to home to find a way forward.
Hartlett’s preoccupation with the present likely stems from knowing just how quickly things can come apart. While Ovlov’s 2013 debut am hit like a stoned paean to times past and places changed, 2018’s Tru bore the weight of addiction and the death of Hartlett’s best friend two years earlier. In the space of 25 minutes, Buds continues to navigate loss while sounding largely at peace with the world. With brothers Jon and Theo Hartlett on bass and drums and childhood friend Morgan Luzzi on guitar, Hartlett crafts Ovlov’s breeziest record yet. It’s still wooly and doused in fuzz, but the band sounds more lucid than ever before.
Ovlov’s knack for threading even the most amp-blown passage with an earworm sets them apart. “Cheer Up, Chihiro!” a make-believe letter to the Spirited Away protagonist, started life as a demo for the band’s debut. It was judged “too poppy” for earlier albums, but it finds a home here flipping between spidery arpeggios, punishing low-end, and vocal counterpoint by Ringo Deathstarr’s Alex Gehring. Evoking early Crumb, it’s a masterclass in how to offset heft, in part thanks to a ripping sax solo by the Hartlett brothers’ dad, Ted.
Gratitude—for life, for familiar faces, for one’s history—defines Buds. On the album’s breakneck opener, “Baby Shea,” Hartlett recalls the band’s early years at the now-shuttered Brooklyn DIY venue Shea Stadium. There, we’re told, he “felt more through” his friends. “Land of Steve-O” stretches the sentiment even further: Written and demoed before Tru, it’s an instant Ovlov classic about an “extremely important” sixth-grade friend with whom he shared a mutual love of Papa Roach. “We’ll talk about the way we try to spend our days,” Hartlett sings, his refrain cloaked in a plume of scuzz. Here, and on the likes of “Moron Pt. 2,” he finds comfort in good company. The hooky directness is hard to resist.
For all their slacker-rock credentials, Ovlov could rarely be described as loose. On Buds, dynamics are tauter than ever. Muscular but never overpowering, Jon and Theo Hartlett’s interplay on “Eat More” opens space for their brother’s sorcerous solo. Conjuring My Bloody Valentine fed through Dinosaur Jr.’s wah-soaked “Little Fury Things,” it sounds like a tear in the fabric of the universe. “Feel the Pain,” meanwhile, isn’t just an in-joke about a band to which Ovlov are often compared: The first line is Hartlett’s direct reproach of J Mascis. “You could not feel the pain,” Hartlett gently intones, defending a friend, Dino Jr. drummer Murph, against Mascis’ reportedly poor treatment. For Hartlett, conscience and personal relationships trump lingering hero worship.
As “Feel the Pain” crests in a surge of tremolo chords and double bass drums, there’s a sense that Ovlov know they haven’t got it all figured out. But accepting the unknown can provide its own solace. Buds feels like a cause for gratitude in itself: Following a “final” show in July 2019, Ovlov had planned to take an extended hiatus, only for Hartlett to glean new insight about his priorities mid-pandemic. When you’re truly thankful for life, even 25 minutes feels like a gift.

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On his second album with producer Palmistry, the elusive London vocalist delivers a surreal blend of singing, rapping, and voiceover narration.

Triad

In the seven years since the release of his debut mixtape NXB, the London-based vocalist Triad God has hardly been seen or heard. While NXB developed something of a cult following and eventually received a proper rollout from now-defunct label Hippos in Tanks, its creator remained cloaked in mystery. Triad God may have made perfect sense alongside a roster that included Dean Blunt, James Ferraro, and Yung Lean, but he's avoided those artists’ paths to wider recognition.
Second album Triad, released on Lorenzo Senni's Presto!? label, is the first sign of life from Triad God in almost four years. We know about as much about him in 2019 as we did in 2012. There are no in-depth interviews with Triad God, and no video except a FACT Magazine freestyle filmed in London’s Chinatown and some brief camcorder footage posted to his official YouTube channel. We know, from a fleeting conversation with Dazed, that his given name is Vinh Ngan, that he’s from New Cross, London, that he’s of Chinese and Vietnamese heritage, and that he enjoys “Chinese love songs” and Tupac.
Though NXB was loosely described as “rap,” Triad God's vocals, delivered in both Cantonese and English, are a surreal blend of singing, rapping, and voiceover narration. He mutters, mumbles, coos, croaks, whispers; if he’s rapping, it’s less of a flow and more of a trickle. Whatever you call it, it’s a deeply intimate and confessional mode of delivery, somewhere between the monologue in a Terrence Malick movie and Lil B’s spoken-word album Rain in England.
The songs here are sketches that crumble at a touch. “I Luv U Freestyle” isn’t the improvised rap its title implies, but a recording of a lightly sung melody couched in room tone. Two different tracks, “BDG” and “Babe Don’t Go,” are built around repetition of the phrase “baby, don’t go,” as if each loop could intensify the melancholy. On "Gway Lo," Triad God chants, "Rapping is a lifestyle/Do you know what the fuck I'm saying?," a lyric that could have been lifted from any number of American rap songs. He repeats it again and again until the words are ground into dust. When musicians rhetorically ask if we know what they’re saying, the answer is usually a resounding amen. Here, the response is more uncertain.
The foundation over which these words unfold is assembled by producer Palmistry, who previously collaborated with Triad God on NXB. Palmistry carves his instrumentals out of ghostly chants, ethereal vocal samples, and other sonic shards that elude easy identification. The final product is a little like listening to a melodramatic Cantopop ballad muffled by a wall. The beats on NXB, which often sounded something like those of label-mates Nguzunguzu, were more expansive than the sparse designs here, but Triad God’s own voice is richer than on his previous album. The vocals on NXB were akin to voice memos; here they are more present and fully shaped, though still swaddled in echo and reverb.
As the weird music at the fringes of the internet—particularly the kind of innovative esoterica in which Hippos in Tanks specialized—comes under threat of extinction, Triad feels like the last transmission from a dying planet. For listeners with limited knowledge of Cantonese, Triad God’s music is a blindfolded voyage into a particle collider where disparate cultures smash together at the speed of light. Every word Triad God spits and every sample Palmistry flips sounds like it’s disappearing before it can be heard. Listen now, before the next MySpace presses delete.


San Franciso funk outsider Doug Hream Blunt has been championed by the likes of Ariel Pink and former Hype Williams member Dean Blunt, who took his name. David Byrne’s Luaka Bop imprint makes the once obscure Blunt readily acccessible with the My Name Is compilation.

My Name Is

Even with assistance from the Internet, some cult records still have to travel off beaten paths, their pleasures imparted by friends in the know. Just how I came to know about a singer from San Francisco named Doug Hream Blunt four years ago, I am not exactly certain, though I suspect it was on a tip from either a member of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti or else Park Blvd. Records co-owner Jason Darrah. But the moment that pneumatic, rinky-dink keyboard figure that opens "Fly Guy" wheezed and wormed into my ears, I was charmed and confounded. The sleeve art was nothing but a generic white sleeve with a gold sticker advertising the 'hit' "Gentle Persuasion" and it was hard to tell if it was a put-on or else proof that outsider music could remain relevant and vital in an age when any musician could upload his music to MySpace and be discovered, when most clues could be tracked down with a simple Google search. I’m not the only one besotted by Hream Blunt, as Ariel Pink is a champion, while former Hype Williams member Dean Blunt posits himself as the progeny of the man.
Once hovering in obscurity and mystery, My Name Is makes Doug Hream Blunt readily accessible thanks to David Byrne’s Luaka Bop imprint, no stranger to tracking down itchy, quirky folks like William Onyeabor and Tom Zé. Even as the comp clarifies some of the Frisco fog that enshrouded that self-released CD and its bootlegged 12", there remains a slippery, eel-like quality to these 10 songs. We learn in the liner notes that in the mid '80s as a 35-year-old prone to taking odd jobs, Blunt answered a flyer for a workshop called 'How to Form a Band.' Nevermind it was intended for Bay Area teens, Blunt approached the classes with a similar sense of the naïf, imparting that spirit onto the other adult students, four of them women who comprise his band.
There's the spirit of the Troggs, the Shaggs, and Half Japanese to the grooves, something stupid yet undeniable, unlearned yet impossible to replicate. The whinnying, cyclical keyboard figure that Jeannie Killmer repeats ad nauseam on "Fly Guy" brings to mind '90s Ethiopian pop as well as what you might come up with at Guitar Center on a synth using the flute patch and your thumb. Even more charming and baffling are the lyrics, where Blunt makes a streetwise observation about capitalism: "The rich use paper then they charge you more," talks about teaching the youth and then adds: "Girl, I just wanna chill."
A similarly simple yet inveigling melody and needling guitar sidewinds through the wobbly boogie of said hit, "Gentle Persuasion". For all the speculation as to what it means "to do the ninety-nine", the notes just equivocate it to the mystery dance itself. Still, it takes a certain kind of Romeo to make a panty-dropping non sequitur of "like ice, your butt is like dice now, daaaamn."
Charming as those two tracks are, they both run past six minutes and verge on exhausting. But as "Big Top", "Caribbean Queen", and "Break Free" reveal, Blunt sets about recycling both melodies onto other songs to where their appeal becomes threadbare. Perhaps in keeping with the Haight-Ashbury spirit of his home, each song also contains extended, aimless guitar soloing. And while he might have a two-track mind musically, it's solely one track when it comes to his primary theme. Outside of the last song (an instrumental version of "Fly Guy"), the other nine share a similar beat and subject, the word "girl" uttered in every song. So even as My Name Is pulls back the curtain on Doug Hream Blunt’s mystery music, it also makes clear that the opposite sex will always remain one to him.


Spiritual singer/producer refocuses for a deeper, more rooted release.

Kings Ballad

Georgia Anne Muldrow's latest album, Kings Ballad, was supposedly crafted against the backdrop of Barack Obama's early days in office. And just as Obama is, for better or worse, an inspiring figure whose influence isn't quite in sync with his accomplishments, Muldrow can sometimes come across as an amazing artist in theory: She hasn't totally delivered on the promise hinted at by her debut album, Olesi: Fragments of an Earth. It's not her inspirations or intentions that are in doubt. But hope is a campaign, not a governing strategy; similarly, dropping spiritual signifiers and referencing legends Nina Simone and Alice Coltrane doesn't necessarily make great music.
But Kings Ballad stands on its own, a vessel for Muldrow's lyrics and beliefs. It sounds more concentrated, cohesive, and restrained than previous albums, especially her binge of releases last year. Soulful where she was occasionally brash, her voice pivots and floats but sounds more grounded and assured, like on "Doobie Down", where she calmly vamps over her own coos and chorus ("No apologies, I'll be as black as I want to be"). It flows well, outside of a final stretch of songs seemingly tacked on for variety, including vaguely Latin "Morena Del Ray", vocoded sci-fi riff "Industrial Bap", and the senseless pop-punk outlier "Room Punk!".
Throbbing low end plays well with jazzy piano throughout the album, like the riff on "Indeed" and the elegiac, descending line on "R.I.P.", an ode to Michael Jackson that achieves a certain tension by ending on a snapped beat. The instrumental passages, including the liquid funk-lite of "Chocolate Reign" and chugging "R.I.P.", are decent. Her beats aren't the most adventurous take on splashy, one-two rhythms, but they work here. Kings Ballad still doesn't meet all the expectations Muldrow may have initially inspired, but it's a positive, measured sign that there's more to come.


Nils Frahm collaborates with fellow composer Woodkid on a ruminative score for a documentary about Ellis Island, narrated by Robert DeNiro.

Ellis

Ellis Island was in operation from January 1st of 1892 to November 12 of 1954. That’s 62 years, 10 months, and 11 days. Over the course of that time, over twelve million immigrants passed through the island. According to the records, 3,500 people died from illness or injury. Only 2% of incoming immigrants, surprisingly, were turned away in 62 years. That’s a little over 240,000 people. Understanding the perspective of those 3,500 dead and 240,000 turned away is a key part of Ellis, a film by the French artist JR. Known to some as the “French Banksy” (take that however you will), a street artist and photographer famous for pasting enormous black-and-white images of tragic images on city streets, he was invited in 2014 to make work for a show at Ellis Island called “Unframed.” He pasted life-size images of Ellis Island workers and immigrants on several walls of the south side of the island complex. And then a year later he invited Robert De Niro to narrate a short film (14 minutes total) about Ellis Island’s immigrants, inspired by the project.
Accompanying the film, giving it texture outside of the visual is a score composed by Woodkid, better known as Yoann Lemoine, an award-winning music video director known for his work with Katy Perry (“Teenage Dream”), Taylor Swift (“Back to December”), and Lana Del Rey (“Born to Die”). His solo music work tends towards orchestral ambient with melodramatic flourishes that have overtones of Michael Bay. The score’s co-writer is the Berlin composer, Nils Frahm, who also performed the entire piece. This is just Woodkid’s second score for film, but Frahm has been busy in the last year with scores, making one for Victoria, a one-shot club heist escapade.
The film is  composed mainly of a very slow, cleverly edited, one-shot tour of the abandoned Ellis island facilities. Viewers are given glimpses of De Niro passing through rooms. He narrates everything from the perspective of a long-deceased immigrant abandoned by both parents. The narrator dies on Ellis Island, never entering the country. The script that DeNiro reads from in Ellis was written by the Oscar winner Eric Roth (Forrest Gump), and the writing for the film shares the same, strange, didactic historical view of Forrest Gump, as well as its fondness for melodrama and bathos.
There are two tracks total for the score to Ellis, “Winter Morning 1” and “Winter Morning II” (which features De Niro’s full monologue). The score is built from a single piano and the accretion of ambient noises (rain, breathing, shuffling, etc). It slowly builds up towards a dramatic armada of strings. The most interesting part of the score is probably Frahm’s use of the piano, which is supposed to mimic the sounds of a dilapidated piano they found on the ruins of the island. According to Nils and Woodkid, the natural imperfection of the piano sound made it so that the recording caught the instrument breathing, working, and heaving through the process. “Winter Morning 2” is essentially the film made into an audiobook with a slightly different sonic backdrop. The pianos are replaced with a sustained warbles and bass noises that mimic the dank and dark compositions of Colin Stetson.
But somehow that fails to make any of the music all that interesting. Perhaps like the film, it wants too badly to teach you something specific, and the unsubtle way it works can hamper the beauty of what you’re listening to. It isn’t totally Woodkid’s and Frahm’s fault of course: Their score was one of the best parts of the film, hands down. But it carries baggage that makes listening feel tiresome. Overall, they succeeded in making a graceful piece of music that can contradictorily feel bland or even less powerful with the weight of the film’s message attached to it.


The New York band breathes life into the poppier side of ’90s indie rock, and their debut is both wry and sincere in its expression of the endless crap conveyor belt that is life and love as a girl.

Guppy

Charly Bliss make no secret they’re a throwback. They hone in on an era from about 20 years ago, when seemingly every other band came blissed out, drenched in sun, and outfitted for a spot on the 10 Things I Hate About You or Jawbreaker soundtrack next to Veruca Salt. Back then, for every Breeders there were at least two Letters to Cleos or Stretch Princesses, and their legacy is now constrained doubly: condemned the first time around by a rockist critical establishment for being too poppy, then when everyone started being OK with pop again, dismissed with the same received condemnation. Thing is, this style never went away, it’s just tended to age down.
In the mid-’00s it retreated to teen pop—one of Charly Bliss frontwoman Eva Hendricks’ admitted biggest influences is the Adam Schlesinger/Kay Hanley power-pop vehicle that was Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack—and Warped Tour-adjacent pop-punk like Paramore and Fall Out Boy. It bubbles up periodically in the poppier singles from acts like Honeyblood and Swearin’, but the most mainstream outlet is, of all places, children’s shows. Which is all well and glossy for the kids, but it’s refreshing to hear a revival led by Charly Bliss made for adults.
Charly Bliss took three years from 2014’s EP Soft Serve to full-length debut Guppy, largely due to grappling with this context. The original incarnation of Guppy was a garage-rock set produced by Justin Pizzoferrato (Parquet Courts, Speedy Ortiz), but the whole thing got scrapped on grounds of grunge. “We’ve learned a lot from looking to bands that are more poppy,” Hendricks told The Fader, and the new record pulls no punches and sacrifices no hooks. Half the tracks run about three minutes or less. “Percolator” is a fake-out: the first couple seconds of Strokes guitars give way to an ebullient, literally cheering single. In case the hook of “Black Hole” weren’t enough, we get it again with a key change, and “Westermarck” and “Glitter” take to their choruses like flowers to the sun.
This all sounds simple, but it’s not. Executed poorly, an entire album of this might induce sugar shock. Or, like too many modern acts indebted to ’90s indie-pop, it might emulate the style rather than the substance, using nostalgia like a flashy suit to compensate for a lack of anything to say. But these hooks are delivery mechanisms for often acerbic, often exhausted lyrics about the endless crap conveyor belt that is life and love as a girl.
Charly Bliss gets this; there’s a bluntness to Hendricks’ lyrics reminiscent of The Pink Album-era Tuscadero or, at their bitterest, the quick-cut unease of early Throwing Muses. It’d be easy for a track called “DQ” to stop at its titular reference—it’s ice cream! So kitschy! Instead, it kills off a puppy in the first line—“I laughed when your dog died/It is cruel but it’s true/...Does he love me most now that his dog is toast?”—and when Dairy Queen finally shows up, it’s not quirky but rather the final dead end in Charly Bliss’ teenage wasteland. “Westermarck” (per its title, referencing the Westermarck effect) tosses in kissing cousins by the second line. It’s not all shock value, though. “Ruby” is an earnest, lyrically stark thank-you note to a therapist, the languid “Julia” a mash note to a friend (or more; it’s ambiguous). The glossiest part of “Glitter” is, crucially, the bleakest: “Am I the best? Or just the first person to say yes?” It’s an old songwriting trick, but it always works.
Then on the standout “Percolator,” Hendricks takes all the shit she’s given (“Eva, you’re being too nice, everyone is going to think you’re flirting with them,” she said in an interview with Bandcamp) as well as all the cudgels critics took to female-fronted bands and prods at them with exhausted sarcasm: “Swimming in your pool, I am pregnant with meaning/Could I be more appealing? Writing slurs on the ceiling?” It’s like a deeply mocking recap of a mid-’90s music video, but it’s simultaneously the most earnest track. “I cry all the time/I think that it’s cool/I’m in touch with my feelings” is ironic, but it’s the kidding-not-kidding irony that increasingly defines the decade. It works on multiple levels: as tossed-off sarcasm, as a statement of pride, and, crucially, as an undeniable pop song. It’s a deceptively hard balance to strike, but Charly Bliss does it effortlessly.


The New York party monsters change course, embracing the sounds of the ’90s and getting in touch with their feelings.

Wallop

In Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011, Nic Offer, who’s spent the 21st century hosting party monsters !!! across eight albums and many more singles, talks about looking back. “Each decade pays for the sins of the last,” he says. He’s talking about the way the grunge and rave of the 1990s sought to counter the stadium rock and dance pop of the 1980s with what he called “a new sort of slickness,” a kind of trashy authenticity.
Over the years !!! have countered the po-faced myopia of the early 2000s with their own trashy authenticity. They slapped a dad-joke patch on mom-jeans funk to critique the police state with “Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story).” They’ve again and again ordered up the ugliest sleeves that their label, hero-to-all-your-designer-friends Warp, has ever approved. They turned one of the Magnetic Fields’ best songs, a conflicted invocation of MDMA as a psychic and physiological bulwark against homophobic violence, into affable coffee-shop disco, then turned Stereolab’s Marxist-feminist French disko into Brooklyn boys’ noise with a live cover band, Stereolad.
They’ve done it all with an accomplished, if ironic, panache. But Wallop begins with a great whooshing sound, like a sort of time travel, and indeed this solid collection is a change of course: a serious embrace of the sounds of the ’90s, an attempt to come to grips with that “new sort of slickness.” Opener “Let It Change U” is a cocky hulk that could’ve waddled onto an early Chemical Brothers or mid-career Beastie Boys album; the titular it is, of course, rhythm. The next track, “Couldn’t Have Known,” cuts acoustic guitars and stuttering breaks into a nod to Akufen’s 2002 barnstormer “Deck the House,” one of the first tracks of the new millennium that, with its kaleidoscopic cut-up of country licks, R&B runs, and a million other bits of cultural detritus, really sounded like the future.
Bookends in place, the rest of Wallop fills in the ’90s timeline. “Off the Grid” gathers Liars’ Angus Andrew and longtime !!! co-vocalist Meah Pace for a roiling bit of nihilism. “Get up, it’s here/You’ve got to start to assume/The end is near/And not a moment too soon,” they chant. It’s like Primal Scream covering “1999” in 1999. Like a few other tracks, it dissolves into a dubbed coda (“In the Grid”) that’s just long enough to make you wonder what a No Protection or Echo Dek-style version might achieve, yet not long enough to demonstrate it. But then in crashes “Serbia Drums,” built off a riff drummer Chris Egan recorded while on tour; with its crunchy guitars and DX-7 style bell melodies, it sounds about as dangerous as the dominatrix number in Showgirls. It doesn’t suck.
None of Wallop sucks, really, although “Rhythm of the Gravity” duckwalks up to cock-rock with an ostentatious guitar solo and breakbeats that are probably fun live but flatfooted on record. “$50 Million” and “My Fault” are selfies of a funky schmuck who doesn’t deserve these limber party jams but earns them like a salary anyway; the latter boasts a particularly lovely, fluttering synth sound with the exact timbre of empathy. “UR Paranoid” is hyper-tense until detonation and even tenser afterward, as effects drip down the walls of a good house beat and gaggles of vocals chase each other, crying out, “I’m not the one who’s paranoid!”
But of course the ’90s were a decade very much in its feelings, and the best parts of Wallop are its most emotional. “Domino” is among the prettiest and most intelligent songs !!! have ever recorded; its delicate investigation of urban planning avoids “Me & Giuliani”’s smugness, building a multi-level argument mirrored by a multilayered sound in debt to IDM. “Slow Motion” has an undertow of a drum loop and a chorus of Offers ruminating on regret while Uzor talks herself into trouble. “Everyone’s a total fucking idiot sometimes, right? Right?” she asks, while icy-hot melodies rise and fall. “When I look back on this moment/Think about hindsight/What am I going to say I was a total fucking idiot about then?” The loop just loops until it loses its will to rise out of a bed of indiscernible chatter.
Nostalgia is a killer, but luckily penultimate track “This Is the Door” is one inflatable bootie balloon short of a Lizzo anthem, and a hell of a showcase for Meah Pace. “Maybe you think that I don’t notice/But I do/So I thought I should show this to you,” she sings, her voice casual as if escorting you around her gracious living room while tasteful (and, yes, slick) adult-contemporary pop plays on the stereo. “This is the door.” And you’re out. Horns arrive to celebrate, Pace repeats her breakup line with increasing force to make sure you heard it, and in a few minutes the track has burned better than sage in clearing out the sins of the past. Onward.

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The Nigerian singer-songwriter follows up her dynamic hit “Try Me” with a stark and voluble EP that blends the warmth of R&B with contemporary Afrobeats.

For Broken Ears EP

After barely surviving secondary school in Lagos, Nigeria, Temilade Openiyi did everything she could to avoid going to college, purposely missing enrollment deadlines for the schools her mother would submit applications to. With few friends, a stubborn depression, and an impeccable singing voice—one thick and smooth like cold butter—music felt like her only calling. Her mother, however, wasn’t having it, and sent Temilade to a university in South Africa that offered her late registration.
While studying economics there in 2016, she began working on a song called “Try Me.” Freestyling at first, she sang painstakingly of a destructive love, and crafted the song’s skeleton of organs, pads, and synths after teaching herself how to produce music on YouTube. Back in Lagos, Tems tested the song at a few events, but felt pressured to put music on hold once more and take an office job. It crushed her, as office jobs are wont to do. Finally, in early 2018, she decided she would sing, even if it meant she would starve. Her first single as Tems, the moody “Mr Rebel,” earned her a small but captivated fan base that she fed a second single (“Looku Looku”) to six months later. Then, in 2019, with co-production from Nigerian artist Remy Baggins, she finally released “Try Me.” Her most successful single to date, it’s earned around 12 million plays across multiple streaming platforms, with nearly 7 million between YouTube and Spotify alone.
Now, a year after “Try Me,” she injects the dynamism of the hit into her debut EP, For Broken Ears. Crafting songs that feel wholly new and deeply satisfying as the EP’s only songwriter and lead producer, she maintains the passion of her early singles but abandons the melancholy that defines them. Throughout the record, Tems contemplates her access to people, freedom, and ease, ultimately settling into her place and power in the new vanguard of Afropop.  In the weeds of her lyrics, her ideas are patchy, as if all born from freestyles, but they never feel disjointed. Her stark voice melds them together, pulling them across subtle rhythmic backdrops that feel minimal compared to her striking singing.
Similarly to the output of her contemporaries in this new Afropop vanguard like Cruel Santino, Amaarae, and Odunsi (The Engine), Tems’ music expands the genre with a melange of American, African and Caribbean influences. The echo and organ on album opener “Interference” sound like Tems is singing gospel in a candlelit chapel, but her fervent flow-switching on “Ice T” and “Higher” is more rap cypher than church. Predominantly, For Broken Ears is an R&B record, with swirly synths and airy harmonies, and Tems could be mistaken for an American or British artist if not for her colorful drops of pidgin and her African intonation. At one point, Tems was uninspired by standard Afrobeats production, but here, she finds a way to incorporate it without losing her unique edge. Lead single “Damages” is an Afro-dancehall ballad. “The Key” sounds like Afrobeats meets quiet storm.
Tems’ avoidance of traditional Afrobeats makes sense considering the upbeat, uptempo nature of the genre. The singer seems in touch with the darkness that shrouded her adolescence—the stress, the heartbreak, the feeling that she does not belong. She sings of these things more than the jovial pursuit of lust and love that characterizes popular Afrobeats. She starts the album with an assertion of her state of mind: “If you thought I was disturbed before, baby boy, I’m gon’ disturb you now.” Yet, in the EP’s powerful opening, she’s not crazed or vengeful, she’s conciliatory; it’s her newfound sense of serenity that may irk her adversaries. “Give me shame—I give you peace” she adds, sounding tranquil.
In less than twenty minutes of music, Tems dips in and out of autonomy and captivity seamlessly. On “Free Mind,” the EP’s most compelling track, she’s pining for the very peace she finds in “Interference.” She’s steeped in a life of 5 a.m. alarms and pretending to be okay, as if written in the throes of her office job. “Set me free...Farther than eyes can handle, freer than ocean,” she bellows, her voice rich with longing. As she ends the record with “The Key,” where she proclaims, “their chains, they cannot hold me,” you believe her.

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Heems and Kool A.D. deliver two of three promised mixtapes from the Das Racist camp. While both lack the accessibility that marked the first two Das Racist tapes, they allow the rappers to indulge their most far-out ideas.

Heems / Kool A.D.: Nehru Jackets / The Palm Wine Drinkard

Nehru Jackets / The Palm Wine Drinkard

Last November, Das Racist-- the quick-witted rap trio responsible for two of recent memory's most irreverent and engaging mixtapes and one divisive full-length-- made their national TV debut on "Conan", performing lead single "Michael Jackson" from their 2011 album proper, Relax. The scene was set for all the makings of great agit-prop theater: two stone-faced women smacking the living shit out of crash cymbals, crazed instrument swapping, and not to mention an actual Michael Jackson impersonator showing up to bust some time-honored moves during the noisy coda. It was like Andy Kaufman had he been raised on Illmatic and cable TV: Das Racist's secret strength is that you're never quite sure whether they're laughing with you or at you, but when they are at their best, their wise-ass approach also feels inclusive. The "Conan" appearance, however, was anything but welcoming. Heems (Himanshu Suri) and Kool A.D. (Victor Vasquez) mumbled through their verses, leaving the sloppy music to do the heavy lifting. Which made some sense, considering the record they were promoting was built to polarize. The paranoid Relax felt like a warning shot, a suggestion that maybe we'd all gotten a bit too close.
And now we have two of three promised mixtapes from the DR camp, Heems' Nehru Jackets and Kool A.D.'s The Palm Wine Drinkard (hype-man extraordinaire Dapwell's bid is up next.) While both lack the accessibility that marked the first two Das Racist tapes, they allow the rappers to indulge their most far-out ideas. Heems and Kool A.D. sound like they don't care what anyone thinks, and the accompanying freedom brings back some of that early charm. Though the approaches are notably different-- with Nehru Jackets sticking closer to the Das Racist script and Palm Wine Drinkard spending most of its time in the deep end-- the tapes are filled with unexpected payoffs.
If there was any question as to whether Kool A.D. was the true freak of the group, the first few minuts of The Palm Wine Drinkard lay it to rest. The opening track-- featuring the full seven minutes of Outkast's "Spottieottiedopaliscious" instrumental, junked up with what sounds like the din of a busy high school woodshop laid over top-- is annoying and offputting, but things get better. It could have skated by on the easy charms of stuff like "Lagrimas Blancas" (a funky chest-beater that finds A.D. cooling out by the pool in Barcelona, with an appropriate new mantra to match: "Bitch, I'm James Murphy"), or the ass-shakingly friendly remixes of DR's "You Can Sell Anything" and "Booty in the Air". But when A.D. really stretches himself, some of the most bizarre ideas turn into something interesting. Most notable are the three post-Drake R&B tracks, presented free of smugness or irony: The cottony, seductive "Ganglion of Lightnings"-- a 2008 track from A.D.'s Wesleyan group Boy Crisis, repurposed here-- is both sincere and intimate, conjuring a fluid dreaminess that feels sincere. Even when it fails, The Palm Wine Drinkard still entertains.
Heems' Nehru Jackets is a nice counterpoint Palm Wine's experimentation. It's a no-fuss, traditional mixtape full of solid features (Danny Brown, Action Bronson, and Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire) and some terrific production, all credited to Heems' childhood friend Mike Finito. "We definitely listened to a lot of Company Flow and Def Jux stuff in high school," Heems told MTV Hive this month of the pair's affinity for the currently defunct New York indie rap label. It shows-- Finito's production is both enigmatic and hard-edged (plus, there's his dead-on El-P imitation on "Mike Finito Raps Too"), full of junky drums, idiosyncratic sampling, and plenty of Punjabi influences.
Followers of Das Racist (or Heems' Twitter feed, for that matter) know that racial and socio-economic topics are always close at hand, but Nehru Jackets is not an overtly political record. Of the tape's 25 tracks, only a few dig into the specifics of any given issue. "NYC Cops", which first showed up on a Stereogum's Strokes cover tribute compilation, is borderline harrowing, a vitriol-spitting rundown of the NYPD's checkered past, with the too-short, self-explanatory "Juveniles Detained at Guantanamo Bay" striking a similar chord.
But Nehru Jackets as a whole is pretty loose, filled with free-associative raps that find Heems in various states of alertness, sobriety, and engagement. It's also way too long. As he explained in the same Hive interview, putting Mike Finito on was one of the primary goals here: "I figured the only way for people to hear [his talent] is if I hop on these joints and give my man some shine." Finito's work is one of the tape's strengths, but it also leaves Heems with a lot of ground to cover, and much of the material ends up feeling unfocused. In this setting, Heems is at his best when surrounded by better rappers, when he's able to mirror their enthusiasm and energy. If these two mixtapes prove anything, it's that these guys need each other.


The Stranger Things actor’s move into music is refreshingly thoughtful and understated, with emotionally incisive songwriting and a featherlight voice wrapped up in Laurel Canyon arrangements.

Blush

Every once in a blue moon there emerges from the crowded field of car-crashing celebrity children a legitimate talent. A Carrie Fisher, say, or a Ronan Farrow: some rare, shining light who burns through our deep-seated aversion to nepotism by working hard and doing good. With her debut LP, Blush, which arrives on the heels of her star turn in last summer’s season of Stranger Things, Maya Hawke—actor, model, and daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke—makes a convincing case for her own place on this rarefied list. She is not the first Hollywood heiress to gun for indie cred—for the longest time, I thought Frankie Cosmos was a broke kid from Brooklyn—but her move into music has been refreshingly thoughtful and understated.
There is no entitlement or ostentation in Blush. Hawke wrote the lyrics for each track herself, proving herself a gifted explorer of the many forms love can take. Stunning standout “Hold the Sun” is the sort of song parents sing to rock their babies to sleep, and “Goodbye Rocketship” is a lullaby in reverse, sung from child to parent. Here, Hawke forgives a parent who did their best: “You didn’t know how to raise me any more than I knew how to grow up.” There is a striking emotional maturity in Hawke’s move toward reconciliation, which continues on “River Like You.” The song seems, at first, to condemn a friend who “rushed into my belly and clouded over my eyes.” But Hawke is not laying the blame at this person’s feet. “I’m a river, too,” she sings, and she’s “tamed the moss upon the rocks, and molded the red clay.” The song becomes a hand extended from one dysfunctional person to another, in an effort to heal together.
Other songs are especially poignant, given the context of their release in a pandemic. The record was finished late last year, but Hawke seems to have predicted the phenomenon of loving and caring from afar. She relies, in the lyrics of “Coverage,” on dreams and wishes, tells us that she’s not “really here.” Lead single “By Myself” is both an anthem for the present moment and for anyone who has, perhaps, been a little unsettled by how easily they adjusted to said moment. “I’m playing with myself,” she sings on the first chorus, and alters the verb on each repetition: “talking to myself,” “dreaming of myself,” “beating up myself.” This narrator is used to loneliness; prefers it, even. “I prefer my dreams of you,” she sings, “to anything you’d ever do.”
Hawke’s voice is beautiful. It is soulful, featherlight, a natural fit for the careful Laurel Canyon arrangements that make up most of the record. Producer Jesse Harris takes care not to smooth out her natural rasp, and often records her as though she’s practicing ASMR. At its best, on a seductive kiss-off like “So Long” or the yearning closer “Mirth,” this technique lets you feel like you’re in the room with her. That said, her voice isn’t built for the Joplin swagger of “Animal Enough.” It is not enhanced by the backing of a chorus of children on multiple tracks. The kids are charming, if a little grating, on the whimsical “Cricket,” but they are wildly out of place in the dark, brooding dreamscape of “Menace.”
Even these missteps, though, are evident of a compelling urge to experiment. Blush is a record of impressive variety, both in sentiment and sound. Some of the riskier arrows fall far off the mark, but more often than not, Hawke hits her targets with verve and style.

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Henry Laufer, the Los Angeles producer who records and performs electronic music as Shlohmo, has always been a fan of distortion, but on his second full-length he’s beating his synths to hell.

Dark Red

Last year was a hard one for Henry Laufer. The Los Angeles native, who records and performs as Shlohmo, saw a collaborative EP with Jeremih delayed for months by mismanagement at Def Jam. In July, the two artists gave up and released the record for free, only to receive lukewarm reviews. Laufer also suffered through some personal losses, ones that he’s done his best to keep private. He’s spoken of hospital visits and funerals, of partying too hard and feeling like shit whenever he took the time to make music.
His second full-length, Dark Red, channels that heavy energy. The album is jarringly different from Laufer’s past work and a difficult, oft-deafening listen. The emotional anguish contained in many of these tracks was hinted at on his 2013 solo EP, Laid Out, but some internal dial has spun from "ennui" to "cold rage." The album’s third track, "Buried", is most representative, a near seven-minute piece of what could be called abyss-core. Its engine is a yearning sample, distorted into fragments and underscored with menacing guitar progressions. Shlohmo has always been a fan of distortion, but on Dark Red he’s beating his synths to hell, from the opening chords of "Meet Ur Maker", which contains a recognizable Shlohmo melody ripped to shreds, to the steel-drum-like plinks of  "Remains".
Shlohmo has testified many times recently that he is looking to avoid the trappings of his more pop-leaning projects. Once, he made an avant-garde R&B that resembled the production of mainstream foils like Drake and the Weeknd. Now he’s dabbling in ambient noise and prog with dashes of drum’n’bass and allusions to footwork. Vocals are gone, samples chopped and buried. Collaborations have largely been nixed: "I just want to do my own fucking thing," Laufer said in a recent profile.
Fans of the producer’s older work may blanche at the aggression of the first three tracks here, which function as an aural "Beware of Dog" sign, warning the faint of heart away. Yet after repeated listens, the front trio reveals some of the best moments on the album, demanding attention but also meriting it. Those who want the old Shlohmo will have to wait for the final two tracks, "Fading" and "Beams", which concede to fans, and constitute a kind of middle ground between the producer’s past work and the new album.
If Dark Red were another EP, all that fury boiled down to a manageable five or six tracks might make an impressive statement. At an hour run-time, Shlohmo’s change in tenor loses its shock value and becomes a slog. The four tracks that make up the album’s mid-section are unmemorable, a fact that their names—"Apathy", "Relentless", "Ditch", "Remains"—seem to acknowledge explicitly. When the album’s rhythm finally picks up again on the drum and bass influenced "Fading", it comes as a major relief.
Los Angeles’s Low End Theory club was an early site of the alchemical process that has melded hip-hop kids and beatheads together into a formidable coalition. Laufer was a frequent attendee and in response he formed the Wedidit collective, a group of producers including RL Grime, Groundislava, Salva, and Ryan Hemsworth. All of these artists were early in working with modern electronic dance genres that share the musical vocabulary and dynamism of hip-hop.
But the rest of the world has caught up with this style of music-making, so on Dark Red, Laufer is scrawling furiously outside the lines. Early in his career, before he dropped out of art school, he talked about music as a diversion, something that was less serious and less restrictive than learning how to paint the right way. His experiences with the mainstream and the colonization of his own genre seem to have had a similar effect. With Dark Red, he’s taken another turn, slipping out of the pop-shadowing path he was on in exchange for something darker and bolder, but compromised by its own disorder.


A remarkable new set of 1967 recordings captures the Beach Boys as they grew into a more democratic band. They sound at once chaotic and relaxed, naive and sophisticated, pop-oriented and intimate.

The Beach Boys: 1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow

1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow

From early 1966 to early ’67, the Beach Boys matured from a platform for Brian Wilson’s songwriting and production into a fully democratic band. As Wilson and Los Angeles session musicians were laboring over Pet Sounds and the infamously scrapped Smile, a live quartet—led by Brian’s brother Carl—toured the world, with Bruce Johnston replacing the stage-shy Brian. But during the Summer of Love, as Wilson’s Smile lost focus, these two visions of the Beach Boys merged and created something new—as documented on the remarkable 2xCD set 1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow. These recordings make it possible to hear the Beach Boys simultaneously as the moody pop geniuses of Pet Sounds and the fresh-faced surf-rockin’ teens from Hawthorne, Calif.—and, for that matter, the unabashed nostalgia-mongers of their later years.
Sunshine Tomorrow assembles the bulk of the Beach Boys’ post-Smile 1967 work. There are outtakes and demos from two albums, titled Smiley Smiley and Wild Honey, as well as pieces of a scrapped live record, a live studio session, and concert versions. The compilation is anchored up top by the first stereo mix of Wild Honey—a homemade, detuned, piano-based affair, where the band found a new voice for their ebullient early ’60s bounce. Clocking in at just over 20 minutes, Wild Honey is pure fun from the theremin burst opening of the title track to off-kilter folk-pop miniatures like “I’d Love Just Once to See You.”
Though most of the tracks are credited to the songwriting team of Brian Wilson and Mike Love, Wild Honey’s key is “How She Boogalooed It,” an original R&B tune credited to every Beach Boy except Brian. The other four members, along with Brian’s tour replacement Johnston, were beginning to contribute to the Beach Boys in unprecedented ways. That was especially true of Carl, who was beginning to take over the producer’s role. For those already familiar with the sweet charms of Wild Honey, this new mix reveals details throughout, like the DIY Pet Sounds-style busyness of “Aren’t You Glad” and the bass-led “Let the Wind Blow.” But the set’s value comes in the outtakes, rehearsals, live recordings, and even fake live recordings, revealing a band that retained far more ambition than their two modest 1967 LPs suggested. Though often framed as the band’s discovery of R&B, Sunshine Tomorrow reveals Wild Honey to contain almost as many connections to brother Brian’s sad-boy masterpieces and psych-pop as it does to the surf-rockers of yore.
Smiley Smile was recorded in June and July that year, when Beach Boys sessions moved predominantly from proper studios into Brian Wilson’s Bel Air home. Accordingly, Smiley Smile is the quirkier of the band’s two 1967 LPs, carrying forward the cosmic playfulness of Smile with the Boys’ earnestness swapped for Van Dyke Parks’ puzzle-box lyrics. In the studio, the band had been mostly subservient to Brian-the-Genius, and Smiley Smile reveals a finally-shifting dynamic. Working together on the exotica-tinged “Little Pad,” the Boys take up parts that would’ve once been played by the sessions musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, and it marks a beginning of their own individual creative developments.
But Smiley Smile’s lead single, “Gettin’ Hungry”—included as a live take on Sunshine Tomorrow—was the first Beach Boys release not to chart since a 1962 7” issued under the name Kenny & the Cadets. And Smiley Smile itself didn’t do much better. “It just didn’t have anything to do with what was going on [in 1967]—and that was the idea,” Mike Love is quoted saying in Howie Edelson’s perceptive liner notes. Wild Honey, released in December, was only a slight improvement in sales. Heard now, it’s clearly a breakthrough.
After the mega-success of “Good Vibrations,” the rock press had breathlessly covered the ongoing developments of Smile, elevating Wilson to intelligensia status—so much so that he’d been included on the planning committee for the June 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, with the Beach Boys scheduled for a headlining slot. But when the band pulled out of their performance, the ascendant underground effectively wrote the Beach Boys—one of the biggest American hitmakers of the decade—out of the ’60s rock narrative that followed. For that matter, the years following Smile are often written out of the Beach Boys’ own history. (In the 2014 Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy, Wilson follows up Smile by waking up in the 1980s as John Cusack.) But while Wilson drew inward and gradually stop participating in the late ’60s, he remained a vital member of the Beach Boys for several more years and albums. Sunshine Tomorrow documents one of the all-time paradoxes of rock history: the sound of a band taking a major creative turn at the exact moment pop culture dooms them to obsolescence.
Sunshine Tomorrow also captures the final live performances of the original Beach Boys quintet with Brian (and without additional musicians) in Hawaii in August 1967. Intended as a live album and ultimately tossed aside, only 12 minutes make the cut here, including two rehearsal takes. Wilson’s vision of a smaller Beach Boys sound most definitely would not have passed the Monterey acid test against the likes of the Who and Jimi Hendrix, especially the muted surf toodles of the “Hawthorne Boulevard” set opener. But it’s a joy to hear the original Beach Boys do “Heroes and Villains” in all its barbershop weirdness, drummer Dennis Wilson translating Hal Blaine's cinematic thwack to an old-fashioned surfer's stomp. With the Hawaii concert tapes deemed unusable within days of the recording, the band reconvened a few weeks later at a Hollywood studio with auxiliary member Johnston to rerecord the songs, planning to add in crowd noise and release it as a “live” album. It, too, would disappear into the Beach Boys’ accumulating vault of unreleased music.
While Sunshine Tomorrow omits Mike Love’s oft-cited anti-“Heroes and Villains” tirade from the Hollywood session, in which he refers to the single as a “nuclear disaster,” the band is powerful but subdued throughout. Brian sings “The Letter,” a brand new hit for Alex Chilton and the Box Tops just then climbing the charts. Johnston serves as a passable Ringo on "With a Little Help From My Friends" (itself only four months old) while the dreamy Wilson harmonies make it glow. The real joy of the session is hearing some of the band’s studio-aided hits performed by the band itself. If “Sloop John B,” “California Girls,” “God Only Knows,” and “Good Vibrations” sound less immortal than their original incarnations, it is also the sound of the genuine Beach Boys, human and wonderful. One can easily imagine them playing (if perhaps not writing) the same arrangements in the family garage a half-decade earlier.
Behind the scenes, the Beach Boys were in chaos, having discarded three albums in one year. So it’s something of a surprise that Wild Honey is as relaxed-sounding an album as the band ever made. Given its short length and sometimes fragmentary tracks, it’s a shock that several of the outtakes included on Sunshine Tomorrow didn't make the official LP; it’s as good or better than much of the material that did. On the mysterious “Lonely Days”—“unknown” listed as author on the official release—Carl, Al, and Bruce pick up Pet Sounds’ melancholy while channeling it through a more innocent surf-ballad brightness. Brian’s “Time to Get Alone” achieves lost-masterpiece status with its denser string and horn mix, more like the baroque machinery of Pet Sounds and Smile than the syrupy vibes of the official 1969 version.
But the magic of Sunshine Tomorrow is that the Beach Boys are all of these at once: chaotic and relaxed, naive and sophisticated, pop-oriented and intimate. Brian is both present and slipping away. The tendrils of Smile wend below the surface, a specter that continued to haunt their works, like the dreamy harmony explorations like “Cool, Cool Water” (eventually on 1970’s Sunflower), the stacked backing vocals on their cover of Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her,” and—most significantly—in another lost masterpiece Wild Honey outtake, “Can’t Wait Too Long.” There, Brian keeps working with an alluring section of “Wind Chimes” developed during Smile but jettisoned from its simpler Wild Honey version.
Wondrously, there’s also a previously unheard solo piano version of Wilson and Van Dyke Parks’ Smile masterpiece “Surf’s Up.” “You know something, I better do the whole song,” Brian says after running through a few fragments, and thankfully he does, soaring into the perfect angelic high vocals. While brother Carl would finish the arrangement, sing lead, and make it the title (and closing) track of 1971’s Surf's Up, the November 1967 take is most likely the last time Brian played the song for decades, undocumented even in Keith Badman’s definitive day-by-day history. It’s a breathtaking performance. Like so much Beach Boys music, it is filled with dark undercurrents, a never-ceasing family turmoil that still acts as a counterpoint to the Endless Harmony brand the group so actively promoted.
The Beach Boys never fully resolved the tension between pop maturity and summer fun, either musically or personally. They came closest with Wild Honey and the albums that followed over the next half-decade, perhaps mostly clearly on Brian’s “‘Til I Die,” before the best-selling 1974 greatest hits compilation Endless Summer sucked them onto the oldies circuit for good. But 1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow finds them firing in all creative directions at once for a brief, beautiful moment just as their wave started to recede. The box’s closing is reserved for an a capella mix of “Surfer Girl” from the band’s fake Hollywood live album, and there they are one last time, the fabulous Beach Boys, singing the sun into the surf.


New York poet and singer's proto-punk classic is reissued with a live track-by-track recital of the LP, recorded this past June, tacked on as a bonus.

Patti Smith: Horses [30th Anniversary Legacy Edition]

Patti Smith sounded both young and old on her 1975 debut, Horses: young because only a young punk can slink into the spotlight and sell an opening line like, "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine"; old, because she was dead serious and sophisticated, an ur-punk but also a poet and a singer who knew to stop this close to overindulgence. Like her hero Jim Morrison she wrote absurd verses more fit for a diary than a rock 'n' roll record, but could also follow them with lines that genuinely terrified.
Smith is the fountainhead for the punks, grrrls, rockers, and artists that have worn the shit out of this record in their most raw, needy hours, and who study and mimic everything she does with that voice-- which is all rends, tears, and bite marks, and no clean cuts. So it feels cheap not to put this fully on a pedestal, even if "Land"'s meandering free verse makes a poor bookend for the enraged lust of "Gloria", and "Elegie" is a turgid closer. The flaws don't matter: Horses is an album of its time-- not because it's dated, but because it precariously captures a phase in Smith's life, and when all the raw elements fall in place, it feels miraculous.
Take "Birdland". Just like in a jazz ballad, you can practically hear the band breathing in sync, and the slightest misjudgment would screw up the flow of Smith's surreal-- but straightforwardly powerful-- poem. But Lenny Kaye's guitar stretches effortlessly from post-funeral ballad to ecstatic, crazy fury, and Smith's performance is fierce and horribly unbeautiful. "It was as if someone had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars/ 'Cause when he looked up they started to slip." Holy God is she a poet, and she hurls those words so accurately you want to scream and give up too.
That was 30 years ago. Today, Smith is unavoidably grown up, stuck in the canon, and well defined, and that's the artist we hear on the bonus disc in this package, a live track-by-track recital of Horses from the Meltdown Festival in London, this past June. She took the stage with old friends Tom Verlaine and Lenny Kaye on guitar and Jay Dee Daugherty on drums. They knocked the roof off-- but they don't match the original. "Birdland" is fitful and noisy, the segue from "Lands" back to a "Gloria" reprise seems like a cop-out, and Smith's wild poet thing has settled into something a little more, hey, settled, like when she complains about how much time we spend on email and Blackberrys. "Elegie" takes far more meaning now that she has a list of loved ones to commemorate, like Robert Mapplethorpe, or her own husband. But play it back to back with the debut, and instead of a transformative force, you hear an old familiar voice cranking about George Bush.
Here's the thing about growing up: You don't know when it happens until later, but if you could catch it, it would be an amazingly quick moment-- like the point where you toss a ball in the air and it comes to a complete halt before it starts to fall to the ground. When we talk about youth and rock and roll, we're looking for that moment, of not being one thing or the other but of straddling both, of making mistakes that are above and beneath us, of a crest of energy as the ball gets ready to stop. We're talking about Smith changing from the twentysomething poet who decided to add guitar to her readings, and about an artist who can ape the last generation even as she spawns the next one. Or a performance like her old take of "My Generation", where she and John Cale knock the shit out of the by-then-ancient Who classic and Smith wraps with the wail, "I'm so young, I'm so goddamn young"-- and she's still, barely, right.


The Icelandic composer's score for Bill Morrison's film about coal mining in northern England will not make a stellar accompaniment to your next barbecue.

The Miners' Hymns

Jóhann Jóhannsson's The Miners' Hymns is the instrumental soundtrack to Bill Morrison's dolefully spare documentary about the history of coal mining in northern England. As such, it will not make a stellar accompaniment to your next barbecue. Composed for brass ensemble, organ, and a light scrim of electronics, the album takes you places that are woefully ill-suited to early summer; it feels perfect for a grim, drizzly late autumn, when wet leaves are choking gutters and the air carries the threat of pneumonia. This might not be the most inviting sound world to contemplate, but Jóhannsson's confident touch with it is powerful, and The Miners' Hymns creeps into your consciousness like a musty attic draft.
Jóhannsson builds the album's six pieces out of a series of low tones echoing faintly across a distance, like ships through fog. Extended periods of charged silence separate each burst. The structure is firmly "EVENT-pause-EVENT"-- a meek cluster of sound, an evaporation of echoes, a blank band of dead space. The effect is like slipping pebbles in a pond, watching the ripples distort your reflection, and then waiting for the surface to clear. Jóhannsson's pacing with this material is patient unto funereal, and occasionally the music appears to be just hanging there. But train your focus on it, and you will sense the slowly darkening atmosphere. The lonely horn figure of "Freedom From Want and Fear", for example, gathers weight with each repetition, so that when it blares, halfway through the track, the contrast registers like a flash of heat lightning.
The album was recorded in a Durham cathedral, and Jóhannsson has given the music a distinctly liturgical feel-- the descending bassline in "There Is No Safe Side But the Side of Truth" mimics the groaning sway of Renaissance sacred music. And when two sourly whining quarter tones give way to a gorgeously warm brass chorale in "The Cause of Labour Is the Hope of the World", the album's final track, it feels like an epiphany, a generous flooding of light that casts a backward glow on all the gloom and pallor that preceded it. Suddenly, the album's mood retroactively shifts. It's not a bleak autumn record; it's a halcyon autumn record, bathed in inviting half-light. I am reminded of playing basketball at dusk, and that imperceptible moment when you just can't see anymore and everyone reluctantly heads inside. It's a quietly exhilarating "hallelujah" that depends entirely on the previous 45 minutes of buildup for its weight, a nice reminder that some things are worth sticking it out for.


Sub Pop celebrates the seminal early Mudhoney recordings with a 2xCD set that features singles, compilation tracks, and demos, plus two fine live sets from winter 1988. Meanwhile, no envelopes are pushed on the quartet's latest, The Lucky Ones, but there's an increase in firepower that makes it their best effort in a while.

Mudhoney: Superfuzz Bigmuff Deluxe Edition / The Lucky Ones

A strange thing happened on grunge's way to the mainstream: the best band got left behind. Maybe that's not so strange, since the best in any scene is rarely the biggest. What's odd is, before grunge's breakthrough, Mudhoney were pretty huge. Their brain-shaking 1988 single "Touch Me I'm Sick" was a definite indie rock hit-- at that year's CMJ Conference, so many people asked me if I had heard it that I nearly got a complex. A follow-up six-song EP, Superfuzz Bigmuff, was almost as popular, and certainly as good. At the time, it seemed a foregone conclusion that Mudhoney would make grunge big.
Why Nirvana did so instead is no mystery, but the indelible mark left on indie rock by Mudhoney's first few records shouldn't be obscured. While the impact was partially due to buzz and circumstance, it came mostly because the music killed. Rising from the ashes of sludge-masters Green River, Mudhoney blurted a Technicolor yawn of 60s garage, Stooges-style howl, Jimi Hendrix fuzz, post-Black Flag steam, and proto-slacker slop. And they wrapped it in a blissfully primal package-- as animalistic as Iggy, with even less pretense. In 1988, Mudhoney were cool, especially because it didn't sound like they wanted to be.
"Touch Me I'm Sick" and Superfuzz Bigmuff are still powerful two decades later: Steve Turner's guitar bleeding over "Twenty Four", Mark Arm's screams pumping the veins of "No One Has", Dan Peters filling every open drum space in "Burn It Clean"-- none of it has been diminished by time. That's evidenced by Sub Pop's deluxe 2xCD set, which adds singles, compilation tracks, and demos, plus two fine live sets from winter 1988. Three versions of "Touch Me I'm Sick" all slay, but it was with follow-up single "You Got It (Keep It Outta My Face)" that Mudhoney peaked. The tune's lopsided sway is both urgent and half-awake, like a muttering drunk who blows your mind with off-handed profundity. An all-together-now "Fuck you!" at the end is Mudhoney in a nutshell-- they're laughing cause they really mean it, and vice versa.
While the smoke from these records was still clearing, Mudhoney released a pair of excellent, underappreciated full-lengths, 1989's Mudhoney and 1991's Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. Both offered gems approaching the best of Superfuzz Bigmuff. But they also exuded a modest, workman-like feel, indicating the band was headed towards a solid career unlikely to diverge from its quickly-beaten path. Five more albums over the next 14 years kept the flag flying, suffering only from a lack of surprise. Mudhoney got perhaps too good at being Mudhoney, able to churn out solid songs so effortlessly they've rarely felt the need to stretch their boundaries.
No envelopes are pushed on the quartet's latest, The Lucky Ones. But there's an increase in firepower that makes it their best effort in a while. That's especially true of the first three songs, a head-spinning block that nearly matches the snap of Mudhoney's prime. The chugging "I'm Now" tears the air, while "Inside Out Over You" marries Billy Childish stomp to Dinosaur Jr. slouch, and "The Lucky Ones" rides Turner's high-rev fuzz. Lyrically, Arm seems acutely aware of time. "The past made no sense/ The future looks tense" he snarls in "I'm Now", and later he envies those spared time's march: "The lucky ones have already gone down/ The lucky ones are lucky they're not around."
The album sags a bit in the middle, offering competent but not particularly memorable tunes. But Mudhoney rips through the last few tracks as convincingly as they did the opening three. On closer "New Meaning", over another searing Turner guitar line, a happily-hoarse Arm defends the band's continued relevance: "I've got new meaning, baby/ Don't you take it away." That new meaning may be same as the old meaning, but the fact that this hard-working band still means something is impressive-- and, based on The Lucky Ones, difficult to deny.


These two new albums from the longstanding Japanese instrumental outfit Mono feel like a double-LP split in half and given two names. The Last Dawn continues along the orchestral arc that 2012's For My Parents followed, while Rays of Darkness strips things down to the rock-quartet bone.

The Last Dawn/Rays of Darkness

Mono’s debut album, 2001’s Under the Pipal Tree, featured a few flourishes of cello amid its melodramatic, guitar-driven post-rock. Since then, the Japanese instrumental outfit has incrementally raised the presence of chamber sounds on their records, to the point where their last two full-lengths—the 2010 live album Holy Ground and the 2012 studio album For My Parents—were swamped with symphonic fluff. It’s pretty enough, but it also undercut one of the band’s initial strengths: tension. Crescendos and cannonades became as quaint as clockwork, and the band’s magnificence was made mundane. The best that could be said of Mono is that they were impeccable self-editors.
That hasn’t changed on The Last Dawn and Rays of Darkness, two new studio albums being released concurrently. Spread between two discs, the 10 songs feel more like an average Mono double-LP split in half and given two names. But there’s something at least nominally interesting about the way they’re divided: The Last Dawn continues along the orchestral arc that For My Parents followed, while Rays of Darkness strips things down to the rock-quartet bone—and adds a couple of tiny surprises that don’t make up for an overall lack of spark.
The Last Dawn is a dreary exercise in being as obvious as possible. With violin and cello as its crutches, “The Land Between Tides/Glory” squanders a fantastic intro—Zeppelin-esque in tone, shoegazing in execution—with percussive clichés and a corny piano coda. The candlelit keys on “Kanata” are even worse; there are 70s soap-opera theme songs with more emotive potency. Mono’s debt to Mogwai and Sigur Rós has never been hidden, but the waltzing schmaltz of “Cyclone” could be the product of any Explosions in the Sky knockoff of the past 10 years. Make no mistake, The Last Dawn is both sweeping and elegant, full of grand melodic gestures and updrafts of euphoric distortion. You can hear the big punches coming from a light year away, and that’s part of their power: They tug at the nervous system like circadian rhythms. But when the title track sleepwalks out of the orchestra pit and into the realm of noise-pop lullaby, it might as well be the scratch of a pencil on a checklist.
And, Rays of Darkness is just inexplicably dull. On it, Mono pulls off an impressive feat: smashing gargantuan swells of drama and volume into two-dimensional smudges, as if they were bugs to be afraid of. The removal of a string section might seem like a brave move on their part, especially after relying on its ostensible grandeur for so long—but they don’t substitute anything in its place except a higher setting on the fuzz pedal. “Recoil, Ignite” isn’t bad by any means, although its whale-song-through-a-Marshall-stack sound just sits in the midrange, inert and suspenseless. Making background music this loud is an accomplishment itself, even though “The Last Rays” confuses beige static with edgy experimentalism.
A couple of guest artists help liven up two of the album’s four tracks: Calexico’s Jacob Valenzuela lends his trumpet to “Surrender,” and Envy’s Tetsu Fukagawa sings on “The Hand That Holds the Truth”. The former track is another case of missed opportunities; Valenzuela’s tone is dusty and ghostlike, but all he does is follow the guitar for a few bars. Nothing will make you wish harder for Rob Mazurek’s punchy, twisty trumpet on Tortoise’s “TNT”. Fukagawa’s vocals on “The Hand That Holds the Truth” are far more successful. True to form, he howls a hole through the flimsy, post-rock-patterned tissue of the song. If only the song pushed back—against him or anything.
Post-rock works best when it embraces, or at least acknowledges, the subatomic friction within the conventional rock lineup. The same goes for cinematic music, another genre that Mono have a leg in; without counterpoint and textural contrast, it can slump into a pretty blob. These two new releases may be at attempt to point out some diametric dialogue at play within Mono’s music, but the range is so constricted it doesn’t allow for much beyond meek agreement. There’s a lack of texture and energy to these two albums, and also a lack of ideas; almost every song feels like a practice-space warm-up jammed and discarded by a far better band. At times in the past, Mono have been that band, and echoes of that exquisite urgency still surface here and there. It’s not enough. Mono have clearly evolved over the 13 years since Under the Pipal Tree—but if The Last Dawn and Rays of Darkness are any indication, that evolution is going around in circles.


The debut album by Matt Walker, aka Julio Bashmore, revives and tweaks the sounds of vintage house. Walker's a nonspecific revivalist who draws inspiration from every point on the genre's timeline, and Knockin' Boots could actually be the best LP-length statement to come out of the reawakening of vintage house music.

Knockin' Boots

A lot of grown-up club kids have felt gratified—vindicated, even—watching vintage house music finding large crossover audiences thanks to the efforts of Disclosure, Jamie xx, and a small army of lesser-known producers doing their best to channel the sounds and energy of the Warehouse and Paradise Garage. While this wave of revivalists has been good about citing their sources and highlighting the original artists in their DJ sets, their actual music occasionally suffers from an overabundance of respect. House music was born out of a hacker mindset, and treating it with kid gloves, instead of finding a way to innovate on the old sounds, robs the music of one of its most vital elements.
Producer Matt Walker (aka Julio Bashmore) got his start in Bristol's dubstep scene, but he claims that his first exposure to dance music came through his older brother's vintage house records, and house seems to be his true calling. His breakout 2011 single "Battle for Middle You" combined classic house revivalism with a quintessentially Bristolian combination of sub bass frequencies and icy synths. The resulting track had all the feel of a long-lost Chicago treasure being rediscovered.
Since then, Walker's lost some of the Bristol chill, but kept his focus on house, to impressive results. His debut album, Knockin' Boots, could actually be the best LP-length statement to come out of house's reawakening. Walker's a nonspecific revivalist who draws inspiration from every point on the genre's timeline—"Rhythm of Auld" emulates the kind of hard-edged disco funk that house was built on (including a spookily dead-on vocal part by J'Danna, who sings on three of the album's tracks), while "She Ain't" sounds like the funkily robotic stuff Cajmere was doing 20 years later with a dash of ghetto house raunch sprinkled on top.
He's not bound to any sort of outsized sense of responsibility to authenticity, though, and he freely adds his own personalized flourishes to the recipes he's working from. "She Ain't" ends in a glitchy breakdown that would've been very out of place in the mid-'90s. On some tracks he goes even further—a gently percolating bump combined with BIXBY's aching vocals peg "Let Me Be Your Weakness" as a stab at circa-1988 soulful house, but the rest of the arrangement is a fascinating mutant mashup of '80s freestyle and turn-of-the-millennium UK garage.
After "Battle for Middle You", Walker started collaborating with Jessie Ware, and some of her pop ambition seems to have rubbed off. It doesn't have anything as world-crushingly catchy as Disclosure's "Latch", but Knockin' Boots has enough pop hooks to interest people who don't normally listen to dance music outside the club. Much of the credit should go to the cast of vocal talent, which includes J'Danna, BIXBY, space-funk auteur Seven Davis Jr., star songwriter Sam Dew, and South African rapper Okmalumkoolkat (who helps to pull hip-house into pop's globally connected present on "Umuntu"), but Walker also has a talent for making tracks that can jack your body but also get stuck in your head.
Walker's already carved out a spot for himself on the worldwide pop scene with the Dew-fronted "Holding On", which has been on heavy rotation on Apple Music's Beats 1 Radio. House's danceability and deep utopian streak have helped it take root around the globe, spinning off more variations than even the most ambitiously imaginative house music fan could have pictured back in the days when Ron Hardy was spinning the smooth soul chopped up over thumping beats that "Holding On" tries—very successfully—to emulate. Now that house has conquered the world, it's feels right that a younger generation is bringing back the sounds of its earliest days for a victory lap, but it feels even better to know that there are artists like Walker involved who can keep pushing them into the future.


The UK singer refines her sound into something moody and aquatic, trading a narrowly escaped adult-contemporary fate for narcotic electronic pop with ASMR undertones.

Through Water

Låpsley’s debut, Long Way Home, slipped into enough corners of the music world that it might as well have been three albums, not one. The drifty adult-contemporary track “Hurt Me” anchored her to British radio; DJ Koze’s disco remix of “Operator”—which the German producer called a “unique and perfect” song—took her to the clubs. And Billie Eilish fashioned her breakout single, “Ocean Eyes,” after Låpsley’s “Station.” That’s a lot of possible directions to take; given that “Hurt Me” was her biggest hit, it would have been incredibly easy for the UK singer to start down the dismal path to becoming another Adele (a fellow XL signee) or Ed Sheeran.
Fortunately, Låpsley is more interesting than that, and Through Water refines her sound: heavy piano chords; wistful, solipsistic duets with her own pitched-down voice; high, ethereal backing vocals; and low, mournful synth pads like artfully arranged clouds. The title track drifts and swirls around a recording of Låpsley reading a speech by her father, a sustainable-development and water engineer, chopped up and echoed. The effect is a little James Blake, a little Enigma, and more than a little evocative. Out of its original context, the speech’s science jargon is rather abstract—all “impacts,” “mitigation,” “adaptation”—and Låpsley’s own meditations on extreme weather events come couched in distance as well. It’s an unusual take on climate change, which artists more often make cyberpunk or grotesque. Låpsley’s version isn’t an apocalypse but a slow dissolution, which is more often how these things go; the accidental yet unavoidable subtext is that the planet is in its own crisis now, of the shut-in and quiet kind. Against this claustrophobia, the narcotic ASMR spell of Through Water is a comfort.
Such aesthetic clarity is vital for an album that, judging from its credits, should be all over the place. Låpsley wrote and produced most of the record, but her collaborators include adult-contemporary linchpin Eg White (Adele, Florence and the Machine); while making the album, she says, she listened to “lots of WizKid, Drake, Robyn, [and] Ryuichi Sakamoto.” This isn’t a coherent sound so much as four playlists merged and shuffled, and it’s remarkable how Låpsley turns them into one. When Låpsley mentioned Robyn, she was talking about her own “My Love Was Like the Rain”: “I never really write at such a fast tempo, and I just remember shoving loads of, like, Robyn tracks on, and thinking, ‘I want to make a song that has this kind of energy!’” she told Apple Music. But what emerged was no Body Talk banger, nor (thank goodness) landfill alt-pop, but something more like a discotheque returned to the overgrowth. Sedate organs and synth pads flood it like water, and backing vocals and synth wind around it like vines; only the hollowed-out, crackling skeleton of a beat hints at what it once was.
Elsewhere, the lush pastoralia of “Our Love Is a Garden” is Låpsley’s homage to 4AD in the days of Ivo Watts-Russell and This Mortal Coil. She follows it up with the stunning instrumental “Leeds Liverpool Canal,” fogged over by minor chords and underpinned by sounds of running water (Through Water at its most ASMR) that a delicate piano line hits like sunlight. The effect is haunting, almost post-apocalyptic, like morning after a disaster. The alchemy doesn’t work every time. The Afrobeats-inspired “First” is like hearing Drake and WizKid through stagnant water, less “One Dance” than one lilt. Her less inventive arrangements lapse into mundane ballads—“Speaking of the End,” or the first half of “Bonfire,” which fortunately does go places—and half-hearted dance, like “Womxn”; perhaps this one just needs its own disco mix.
Låpsley’s songwriting, though formalist—full of tidy extended metaphors and twists on cliches—can be deceptively spiky. “My Love Was Like the Rain” turns an old Shakespearean conceit into an ex-partner’s litany of negs (“Remember when you said my love was like a rose/Not the sweet bloom, but the pain as it scratches your hand”). But the partner’s an afterthought, and their half-insults something to embrace: “I embody these elements; I wear them like a fragrance.” There’s a concealed bitterness to her voice on that chorus, but the rest of the track is shimmering and warm and alive. An aquatic rose-and-lily fragrance, after all, would be rather pleasant, actually, and soothing. And an album that embodies black skies, pulverizing rain, and cerebral, arctic chill can be quite compelling: winter, but the kind you can burrow into forever.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On their eighth album, the trio again pivot to the present, using current affairs, pop culture tropes, and contemporary electronics to aim for Spotify omnipotence.

Simulation Theory

Coming to theaters in November, the most diabolical plot yet for world domination from a familiar trio of cybernetic mercenaries. After acquiring Netflix, HBO Go, and Amazon Prime accounts, they achieve technological singularity halfway through a “Stranger Things” binge, having consumed enough popular media to pass now as humans. If that sounds like the typical plot of any Muse album, it essentially becomes their autobiography on their eighth, Simulation Theory. Muse’s most approachable and most ruthlessly broad record yet, it is an attempt to replicate Scorpion’s Spotify omnipresence, so on the nose the first track is called “Algorithm.” Even singer Matt Bellamy has taken off the shutter shades to take a good look in the mirror and admit that, despite Muse’s operatic ambitions, they have always been a pop band.
The instrumental pyrotechnics. Production from Rich Costey, Shellback, Mike Elizondo, and even Timbaland. Bellamy’s megawatt vocals and vague platitudes about breaking free and overcoming something or another: There is little functional difference between Muse and “Fight Song,” especially since most people encounter them in four-minute chunks on corporate radio, anyway. They’ve produced two solid decades of singles that are enjoyable enough when divorced from the insufferable political significance or higher intelligence they use as filler for their full-lengths. Like Coldplay but without the advantage of rapper cosigns, they’ve moved from “Radiohead if they still played alt-rock” to “Radiohead if they got into EDM.”
Simulation Theory is another deliberate pivot into the present. “Something Human” requires using Muse and trop house in the same sentence, at least until the acoustic guitars arrive. The song then becomes an uncanny homage to George Michael. The airy backing track of “Get Up and Fight” could pass for Balearic pop or a Sweetener outtake, while those whoa-ohs during state-of-the-art guitarless rocker “Thought Contagion” should be of great interest to both satellite radio providers and Imagine Dragons’ copyright lawyers. Leave it to Muse to discover Fleetwood Mac in 2018 and go straight for Tusk. They get the lesser-known of Los Angeles’ major college marching bands to play on the alternate version of “Pressure”—that it’s a highlight for UCLA says more about their current football team than the song itself.
And what’s more in line with this decade’s prevailing commercial trends than rebooting the least-obscure IP as something more shiny and self-aware? People will enjoy Simulation Theory because it’s essentially Ready Player One on wax, its techno-dystopian plot merely a piñata for pop culture nuggets that spill out on slightest contact. Because they are Muse, they can get “Stranger Things”’ Kyle Lambert to design the cover and throw in some blatant visual cues to Drive and Tron. The fluorescent howler “The Dark Side” could’ve easily been called “The Upside Down,” so credit Muse for showing some restraint. What once were string-tapping solos or tripled-tracked riffs are now sequencers, because it’s not enough for Muse to share festival stages with S U R V I V E or M83. If need be, Muse can simply replace them. That notion of swapped parts applies to the politics of Simulation Theory, too. “Propaganda” conflates a seductive woman with a totalitarian surveillance state; otherwise, these are the trite warnings of paranoid androids who have already made albums called Drones and The Resistance.
This is a band that has given up on trying to look cool to most anyone, so Muse do here what they have always done and likely will always do—throw money at their latest fancy with the indiscriminate, earnest taste of a teenage boy. The sequencers on “Algorithm” are on loan from any number of post-Chromatics opportunists, but none of them would actually add a real string section like Muse. “Propaganda” and “Break it to Me” veer frighteningly close to the monogenre pop that has crowded out guitar music on rock playlists, except Bellamy still believes in solos. A damn dobro even rises from the digital belches and fingersnaps of the former, with Bellamy doing his best Tom Morello impression before he overdubs a theremin.
If there’s anything Muse truly nail here, it’s at last embracing just the right amount of camp—not an easy skill for earnest bands to pick up on the fly, as U2 and the Arcade Fire have proven. In the past, that never stopped Muse’s name from gracing Grammy trophies, arena marquees, or the top of Billboard charts. Even if Simulation Theory is harder to laugh at than Muse’s previous records, and its appeal makes their longevity easier to understand, does that make it good pop, or are they simply less fun to kick around now? The lingering discrepancy between Muse’s popular and critical reputations comes from the fact that they have never before expressed humor in their own superhero cosplay, which by Drones entailed shiny suits and a stage made of magnets. They used to think they were Christian Bale’s Batman, and are starting to accept that it’s OK to be Adam West.