The final album in Royal Trux's deal with Virgin Records, a record Virgin didn't put out, is the most openly celebratory yet perversely strange entry in the dirtbag-rock duo's canon. Accelerator sounds every bit as absurd, chaotic, and exhilarating as it did 14 years ago.

Accelerator

In the early 90s, indie rock was essentially synonymous with lo-fi, as upstart artists embraced four-track recording for its cost-effectiveness, DIY egalitarianism, and aesthetic remove from the increasingly commercialized nature of alternative rock. But by decade's end, many of the movement's most visible proponents-- Guided by Voices, Pavement, Sebadoh-- had traded up to bigger labels, bigger recording budgets, and proper producers, effectively defining the idea of lo-fi as a formative phase that bands inevitably outgrow.
Royal Trux seemed destined to follow the same trajectory. While the duo of Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema first earned underground renown with 1990's still-inscrutable sci-fi skronk masterwork Twin Infinitives, by 1995, the band was signing a three-album deal with Virgin Records and hiring Neil Young's long-time right-hand man, David Briggs, to oversee their southern-rockin' major-label debut, Thank You. And despite its infamously retch-worthy cover art, the 1997 follow-up, Sweet Sixteen, was even more sophisticated in execution, swaddling the band's grimy boogie in layers of cinematic strings and gleaming guitar solos. But Royal Trux's increasingly high-concept take on dirtbag-rock didn't exactly light up SoundScan registers: Rather than release the band's third Virgin submission, Accelerator, the label opted to pay Royal Trux to just go away. (Hagerty all but anticipates Royal Trux's exile from Virgin when, on the Dylan-esque "Yellow Kid", he moans, "I don't like this arrangement/ Wild schemes and nothing but bad dreams.")
You can't blame the Virgin execs for running scared-- in sharp contrast to its two refined predecessors, Accelerator pulls an abrupt 180 back to the lo-fi obfuscation of Royal Trux's earliest releases. Accelerator found more sympathetic benefactors at the band's original homebase of Drag City Records, but while sonically of a piece with the hazy, strung-out blooze of 1992's untitled release and 1993's Cats and Dogs, the album continues with the more accessible songcraft the band introduced on the two Virgin releases, making this both the most openly celebratory yet eternally warped entry in the Royal Trux canon. In the hands of, say, Guided by Voices, lo-fi recording could approximate the tinny din of the golden oldies broadcast on your local AM station; Accelerator, however, doesn't so much evoke the sound of a classic-rock band blaring out of a cheap transistor radio as one trapped inside of it, strangled by circuitry and choking on static.
Royal Trux had conceived their three-album Virgin run as a triptych exploring a different decade in recent American pop-cultural history: Thank You was their comment on the 1960s, Sweet Sixteen their take on the 1970s, and Accelerator their interpretation of the 1980s. Not that you could necessarily tell without the advance notice: Accelerator bears none of the MTV-ready sleekness we tend to associate with popular music from the era and, if anything, its acid-damaged riffage, wiggy Wurlitzer vamps, and copious cowbell more closely relate to turn-of-the-70s post-hippie jam-rock. (The latest release from Herrema's post-Trux outfit, Black Bananas, Rad Times Express IV, actually boasts a more explicitly 80s ethos.) But then, for all of the glamor and futurism attached to the 80s, the decade was equally defined by its retro-gazing-- the first wave of aging-rocker reunion tours, "The Wonder Years", and every second film at your local cinema being about the Vietnam War. Accelerator thus captures the experience of 80s kids who grew up thinking the most transformative moments in history had already passed them by, its distorted, disorienting production underscoring the impossibility of recapturing something that's long gone. Closer in spirit to Ariel Pink's phantasmagoric pop than its 90s lo-fi contemporaries, Accelerator is like an Instagram-filtered take on rock's golden age-- an attempt to recapture something authentic through knowingly artificial, premeditated means.
Like the previous entries in Drag City's Royal Trux reissue campaign, this no-frills re-release of Accelerator exists simply to put this essential album back into print rather than try to deconstruct its mystique through outtakes and demos. And besides, bonus materials are ultimately unnecessary, because this album sounds every bit as absurd, chaotic, and exhilarating as it did 14 years ago. The passage of time has brought us no more closer to figuring out the logic of the uproarious roadhouse riot "The Banana Question" or the absolutely demented, street-jive nursery rhyme "Juicy, Juicy, Juice", but their insidious earworm hooks perpetually lure you back into the clamor for further investigation.
Most of these tracks are simply structured, and even repeat the same lyrics throughout, but Royal Trux deviously tweak the sonics so that you barely recognize your surroundings by song's end-- over the course of five identical verse/chorus cycles, "New Bones" approximates the sound of walking through the eye of a hurricane, with Herrema's dead-cool drawl and the song's steady strut perilously on the brink of being washed out Hagerty's alien guitar frequencies and shortwave vocals. But Accelerator's bizarro sound-world is not so overwhelming as to completely obscure Royal Trux's bad-ass essence (see the wah-wah-drenched knockout "Follow the Winner"), nor their penchant for surprisingly lucid, affecting lyricism: in the chorus of "Liar"-- "I've got a taste in my mouth/ just like a burning tire"-- you've got a slogan for your worst Sunday-morning hangover. And in a late-game surprise, Accelerator drops its fuzz-covered facade to deliver Royal Trux's most unabashedly tender moment ever in "Stevie", a suave, string-swept soul ballad that could practically pass for early Steely Dan. Where the song's poignancy was once undermined somewhat by the fact that it was reputedly written in honour of Steven Seagal, today, the tribute feels that much more appropriate: after all, if a B-level 80s action star can go on to play a real cop on TV, then surely Accelerator can now stand alongside the hallowed classic rock it so brilliantly subverts.


On his vivid and eccentric new album, the Roman-born electronic producer smooths down some of his edges and sinks deeper into an air of wide-eyed rapture.

Acrobatic Thoughts

Working backward through Raffaele Martirani’s catalog as Panoram, you might get the impression that he’s an incorrigible trickster. The Roman-born, Brooklyn-based musician’s most recent release was a 7" of hazy electro-funk and wistful ambient featuring an actual cannabis leaf pressed inside the clear vinyl disc. The promotional text hinted that the label responsible, a new outfit called Arpabong, might have been dipping into its own stash: “Life forms and attached information merge in a sonic mash-up re-linking to the inexorable pluralism of florae, order, listening statics and scientific protocols evolve into a bio-acoustic morphology.” It came out on April 20, of course.
The record before that, however, was a more serious affair. Pianosequenza Vol.1 gathered Martirani’s experiments on the Yamaha DC7X, a MIDI-controlled acoustic grand piano capable of both breathtaking complexity and profound delicacy. Aphex Twin is believed to have utilized a similar instrument on “Avril 14th”; Martirani used it to achieve a black MIDI-like blur of runs that no human could play, as well as elegantly detuned tones suggesting light lensing around black holes.
The truth of Martirani’s musical character probably lies somewhere between those two poles: Conlon Nancarrow in the streets, Jeff Spicoli in the sheets. Since 2014 he has developed an idiosyncratic signature by cobbling together various styles—IDM, library music, classical minimalism—into a loose, low-key vibe where kitsch mingles with the sublime and whimsy tickles awe’s funny bone. It’s an unpredictable sound, lysergic and squirrelly. In Panoram’s world, just a few neurons separate a chuckle from a swoon. But Acrobatic Thoughts marks a subtle shift in emphasis, smoothing down some of Martirani’s gonzo edges and sinking deeper than ever into an air of wide-eyed rapture.
The album takes its tonal cues from classic chill-out sounds. It’s awash in lush synthesizers slathered on in creamy harmonies, while telltale vocal textures—whether choral synthesizer pads or monosyllabic samples played up and down the scale—lend human warmth. A century’s worth of ambient tropes swirl together in “Pseudolove,” where Satie-like piano chords commingle with pitch-bent strings reminiscent of the steel guitar of the KLF’s Chill Out. In “Wandering Frames,” a stumbling, slowed-down sample of new-wave drums anchors synths that billow like hot-air balloons, and an indistinct loop of a child speaking recalls Boards of Canada’s cheerful emotional blackmail. The space-age lounge jazz of “Z Miles” evokes ’90s electronica’s fascination with the ’60s; the song’s reverbed drums, dubbed-out vibraphone, and abstract splashes of sax wouldn’t sound out of place on Mo Wax’s canonical Headz compilations.
But Acrobatic Thoughts never settles for mere trip-hop pastiche. In “Storme,” burbling synth patterns mimic the moire-like layers of Steve Reich, but there’s also a touch of My Bloody Valentine in the way the chords seem to smear together; spilling over the rhythmic grid, the song’s erratic pulse feels neither played nor programmed, but possibly generative, as though triggered by natural processes—dripping icicles recorded in time lapse, perhaps, or the chemical communications of a mycelium network. “Monocielo” is even more intense, with violin-like arpeggios spiraling frantically atop the sounds of rolling waves. In “Fiction of a Sea,” Martirani puts a mellower spin on the aquatic scene, using jazzy chords to depict the translucent curl of a wave and bursts of digital distortion to simulate the foam of the break. A layer of squeaks and squawks even colors in the seagulls at the edge of the frame. Playing off the faintly campy air of vintage porn soundtracks and nature documentaries, Martirani paints a vivid picture in sound.
He’s at his most boisterous on the giddy “Beautiful Engines,” a Boards of Canada-inspired reverie that explodes into tumultuous prog-rock drum fills. It’s a tricky balancing act, juggling such opposing modes, but Martirani pulls it off; the drums never quite tip over into full-on ridiculousness. On the contrary, this willingness to go a little nuts is what makes Acrobatic Thoughts so refreshing: In defiance of mood-music piety, Martirani taps into the eccentricity that fueled the best Balearic music of the ’80s and ’90s. And despite the big, gushing chords, sloppy as a golden retriever’s kiss, there’s frequently a hint of something feral that lurks beneath. Album highlight “Seabrain” is a case in point: The song’s airy, major-key pads and crisply pinging percussion, dead ringers for Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92, are suffused in all the optimism of golden-age rave music. Listen deeper, though, and dissonant metallic shards cut crosswise against that beatific mood. The mix of emotions is pure Panoram: The sunset is so rosy, you almost don’t notice the blade glinting in the middle distance.

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More science than fiction, Detroit techno maven Erika Sherman’s lean and icy new album plugs into the subtle environmental flux of an alien planet.

Anevite Void

Without wishing to spoil one of the best science fiction movies of the 1970s—you’ve had long enough to watch it, surely—there’s a crushing scene in Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running that envisions a biome floating through deep space, its greenery sustained in perpetuity by a loyal robot. This off-world equilibrium can run and run, is the idea, at least until the next civilization chances upon it. The closed-system techno of Detroit authority Erika operates on the same principle.
Anevite Void is Erika Sherman’s second full album, though she’s been active in her local scene for nearly three decades. Now known as both a DJ and live act, Sherman was drafted into electro duo Ectomorph in the late ’90s to replace Drexciya’s Gerald Donald. She’s among the core personnel of Interdimensional Transmissions, the Detroit record label founded in 1994 by academic-turned-DJ Brendan M. Gillen (aka BMG) on the nagging instruction of “ancient voices” who repeatedly urged him to dump his girlfriend and start making techno.
There’s a definite wigginess to the I.T. worldview, which prescribes 14-hour raves and audiophile sound quality in search of an escape from the mainframe. Some artists on the label have taken their music in especially idiosyncratic directions: Alpha 606’s cranked-up take on electro’s Cuban roots; the crusty cassette house of I.B.M. (an alias of Hieroglyphic Being); I-F’s schlocky and formative “Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass.” Erika’s music is more like the label’s neutral atomic core, an experiment in technoid equilibrium built from a space station’s worth of gear. (The Anevite Void liner notes include a thank you to “my closest friends and family”: 27 bits of kit from Roland, genoQs, Moog, et al.) With all that technology at her disposal you might expect the results to feel dense and overworked, but Anevite Void is rather sparsely populated. There’s a concept, of course: the “irregular life cycles” of a strange planet—half rock desert, half deep forest—orbited by three suns, with each track describing what she calls the “acts of survival of the biomes.” Perhaps a drone robot is lurking with a battered watering can, but certainly there’s no humanoid life.
If Sherman’s I.T. labelmates dream of ancient aliens and space invaders, Erika’s imagination is more science than fiction. Sometimes her systems are barely breathing, all rhythm reduced to the ticking of vital signs, like a bank of hospital monitors hooked up to a meditating monk. After the obligatory ambient opening track, “Opal Haze” enters on a ripple of hi-tech jazz in the Detroit fashion: tight blank kicks, a squelch of bass notes, fizzling hats. “Desert Red” rolls forth on a bottled-up bassline as a billion synapses blink on and off. On “Anion,” the gaseous remains of ’90s IDM evaporate on contact.
Sherman’s music can come across as purist to the point of austerity, but her own tastes are omnivorous, thanks in part to a past life as a programmer on student station WCBN-FM. (Many Detroiters will credit the city’s history of adventurous freeform radio for their eclectic listening habits.) While the I.T. crew’s No Way Back parties—the stuff of legend for scene outsiders—have burnished her reputation as a master selector of the dark and hypnotic, in her studio the dancefloor feels eons away. Gillen has compared her tracks to “[Charles] Darwin’s field drawings, very free and organic.” Interviewed in 2015, Sherman explained that she usually listens to the sounds around her at home—“echoing car stereos, the weather, a toilet flushing, heels on tile”—and sometimes blocks them out with drum machines and synthesizers.
At moments, especially when the analog gear is most present, like the wobbly synths of “Tomorrow’s Fires,” you could almost imagine no time had passed since this type of ultra-cool, ultra-clean techno first appeared on Detroit labels like Planet E. But take a small leap and imagine electro not so much as a genre, built from this type of kick or that type of snare, but as a dimension, an endless plane of contemplation. If you want it, it’s always there, this platonic zone of endlessly pulsating forms, drifting on a distant lifeworld, waiting for someone to pick up the signal.


On what the band has said is its final album, Frog Eyes sound galvanized by the prospect of bowing out, resulting in their strongest record in years.

Violet Psalms

Frog Eyes are a great band fated to be underrated: acclaimed but not canonized, productive but not prolific, established but not famous. They have never enjoyed the crossover success of indie-rock stars Spencer Krug (a former member) or Dan Bejar (a frequent collaborator), though they aren’t exactly languishing in obscurity, either. They are the kind of reliable stalwarts who release an album every two or three years to mild but certain praise—just consistent enough to take them for granted. If, as the band insists, Violet Psalms is to be their final record, “underappreciated” seems bound to be their legacy. We will miss Frog Eyes when they’re gone.
We nearly lost them once before—permanently, and for more harrowing reasons. In the fall of 2013, two days after completing Carey’s Cold Spring, lead singer, guitarist, and frontman Carey Mercer was diagnosed with throat cancer, a revelation that would keep the band off the road for years and cast the album unavoidably in the light of grim circumstance. Mercer has since recovered; their follow-up, 2015’s Pickpocket’s Locket, was recorded in part while Mercer underwent radiation treatment, and the resulting music had a surprisingly sprightly, playful exuberance, given his condition. It is a cruel irony that Frog Eyes are poised to disband so soon after evading tragedy—especially given that Mercer re-emerged as, in his own words, “a stronger singer now than I ever was.”
As an ending, Violet Psalms is the last testament of a band that even after 17 tenacious years remains relevant and indispensable. That it is also the strongest Frog Eyes album since 2007’s sprawling rock epic Tears of the Valedictorian is a happy concurrence. Or perhaps Mercer and his talented bandmates—drummer Melanie Campbell, bassist Terri Upton, and keyboardist Shyla Seller—were galvanized by the prospect of bowing out and invigorated every stroke of this record with dying-breath intensity and care. Either way, Violet Psalms feels concentrated and energized, more aggressively frenetic than the band has sounded in years. As endings go, it is more raging than going gentle.
Mercer has described the recording of Violet Psalms as an effort to return to the beginning. “We were trying to pretend it was our first record,” he has said, aspiring to the freedom felt “when there’s no expectation that anyone will actually listen.” It was recorded in the basement of the house Mercer shares with Campbell in Victoria, British Columbia, and is absent some of the more extravagant guest contributions notable on previous releases, such as the florid string arrangements Krug provided on Pickpocket’s Locket. Yet this is not the back-to-basics album suggested by that account of its making. These songs feel distinctly robust. The production is rich and detail-heavy; the instrumentation is elaborate and diverse. Even the reverb sounds strangely ornate.
Opener “A Strand of Blue Stars” begins with much the same distorted sprawl as “A Flower in a Glove,” the nine-minute introduction to Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph, and Frog Eyes aficionados will feel on familiar ground as Mercer exhorts the listener to “Be the fire/Be the ruler/Be the squire,” with cryptic verve. But “A Strand of Blue Stars” never wends its way into the curlicues of noodling one expects of a Frog Eyes barn-burner; in fact it doesn’t digress at all, and comes to a close after a sensible four and a half minutes, with renewed and surprising focus. Mercer’s songs are often complex to the point of being elusive, at times meandering into chaos. Here his efforts feel distilled and lucid. The songs throughout are more legible and coherent than ever without sacrificing any of their ferocity or manic, vibrant energy.
“Idea Man” has the brisk zeal of a pop song, its eponymous hook crashing against the waves of Campbell’s crisp snare as ethereal backing vocals wave hello to “daughters in the sand.” “Don’t Sleep Under Stars,” meanwhile, brings out more of the propulsive rock’n’roll enthusiasm that has occasionally earned Mercer comparisons to Bruce Springsteen: His cries of “Don’t rock under the sun!” put him unmistakably in Boss territory, which you can hear him fairly delighting in. And the yearning, angst-ridden childhood battle cry “Itch of Summer Knees” (a quintessential Frog Eyes title) careens ahead with a sugar rush of synthesizer and guitar, as Mercer imagines himself a 13-year-old going crazy in a suffocating place. “I abhor this town!” he wails, the sad lament swallowed up in a whirl of reverb and distortion.
Through it all, that wail remains the centerpiece: the irreplicable signature touch that defines the Frog Eyes sound. Mercer’s singular voice, nightmare-bent and horror-pained, has put him in league with such eccentric vocalists as Tom Waits and Frank Black, and he shares with them the status of the truly inimitable. That his voice survived throat cancer undiminished is all the more extraordinary. It’s what gives Violet Psalms its otherworldly power—especially on its two final songs, “Unconscious Missive” and “Pay for Fire,” heartening demonstrations of Mercer’s expressiveness and range. His falsetto yawp on the last song, which finishes with a maelstrom of electric guitar and Mercer’s mysterious, moving declaration that “hell is the sun,” concludes as a showcase of Frog Eyes’ strengths. It’s a poignant end for a band never accorded their proper due—until, perhaps, after they are gone.


Composer Peter Broderick manages to make simple, beautiful post-classical music with a distinctive personality. His new EP collects five tracks taken from a single day’s live recording in Berlin.

Grunewald

Composer Peter Broderick has spent the past ten years crafting consistently strong post-classical music, but on last August’s piano-only Partners he seemed to uncover a new gravitas and substance in his limpid, clear language. The inherent challenge with producing minimalistic music is figuring out how to infuse humanity and new ideas into work with only a handful of notes, and to avoid a reliance on vacant “prettiness.” On Partners, Broderick’s music remained stirring and evocative, but there was something new in it: a deeper injection of his personality, and a larger sense of how that plays into his relationship with his own compositions. Now, just a few months later, he returns with follow-up EP Grunewald, but rather than continue to expand on Partners’ developments, it sees him returning to the less vital, more ephemeral work of his past.
To be clear, Grunewald is less of a regression for Broderick than an amiable walk down memory lane. This graceful-but-slight release collects five tracks previously issued across two discs (one Japanese, one Taiwanese) that were taken from a single day’s live recording in Berlin. Grunewald takes its name from a beloved local church which functioned as a hub for other Berlin-based experimentalists from the Erased Tapes label constellation like Nils Frahm, seeming to provide inspiration for all those who passed its door, including Broderick here. As a result, Grunewald is Broderick’s way of marking the importance of both the place and time in the lives of him and the other musicians who’ve been impacted by it.
Like Partners, Grunewald is an entirely solo effort, featuring Broderick unaccompanied on piano, violin, and—on the opener “Goodnight”—a bit of vocals. Broderick’s use of his voice on Partners provided one of that album’s highlights, an arresting cover of Irish folk singer Brigid Mae Power’s “Sometimes.” On “Goodnight,” one of four piano-only numbers, he doesn’t quite sing as much as moan and coo on top of slow, plaintively struck chords. Broderick’s instincts for when to use vocals to enrich his minimalist performances are strong—sometimes he will even drop in a snippet of conversational speech, such as on Partners’ “Sometimes.” But the instrumentation of “Goodnight” is so bare and simple as to make it a trivial confection, more ambience than song. “Violin Solo, No. 1,” positioned as the middle of five tracks, provides another nice textural break amidst the four piano tracks, but is no more than advertised—a nice and brief minor key solo on violin.
The dark-night journey “Low Light” and the reflective “Eyes Closed and Traveling” offer entrancing melodies and more depth than “Goodnight,” but Grunewald’s clear highlight is “It’s a Storm When I Sleep.” Buoyed by Broderick’s thundering take on Alberti-style bass, he produces a cacophonous-yet-soothing drone that carries on for nearly eight minutes. A shorter version would have been interesting on its own, but stretched out here, it becomes formidable, challenging, and meditative. Though marooned amidst the lighter pieces here, it is suggestive of some of the new directions Broderick would take in making the leap from “pretty” to “profound.”


The trio’s debut is an exercise in post-punk and no-wave galvanism crafted from throbbing bass, tight-zipped drumbeats, and buzzing synths.

Signal

If Los Angeles trio Automatic had been around in 1978, they’d probably play at the same clubs as their hometown heroes the Go-Go’s—they’re named after the band’s ominous 1982 single. On “Automatic,” Belinda Carlisle hovers over every word like Victor Frankenstein awaiting his monster’s first breath. “No thought, automatic,” her voice clicks. The sentiment is still menacing today, with our necks craned over our phones. With every hypnotic bassline and quotidian criticism on their debut album Signal, Izzy Glaudini, Lola Dompé, and Halle Saxon carry the torch of post-punk precision.
The band also has a personal connection to this era of foreboding stares and doomy lyricism: Their percussive engine Lola Dompé is the daughter of Bauhaus drummer Kevin Haskins. Automatic prefer brighter colors, but Signal has a fair amount of darkness and even spookiness to it. The band’s first collection of songs since forming in 2017 is an exercise in post-punk and no-wave galvanism, setting chilly motorik rhythms against contemplations of zombie robots and death.
Automatic are minimalists crafting songs with mostly throbbing bass, tight-zipped drumbeats, and synths that evoke the buzz of neon lighting. Album standout “Highway,” which recalls New Order’s “Blue Monday,” has only one lyric (“I drive all night”) but the music captures the restless desire to escape. The drumbeat has the crunchy propulsion of tires running over gravel; shallow bleeps emerge and recede like stripes of road paint. Though most of the production is sparse and controlled, Signal is rich with late-’70s genre influence: “Humanoid” references the psychedelic goth-rock of Bauhaus or Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop,” while the eerie vocals and post-punk morbidity of “Suicide in Texas” are reminiscent of Joy Division.
A fog of apathy plagues Signal. It’s in the repetitive nights out on “Strange Conversations,” the stubborn romantic proclamation of “I Love You, Fine,” and one particularly depressing assertion from lead single “Calling It”: “Emotion is always out of reach.” Glaudini’s deadpan lead vocal suggests the trio has given up hope, or that their hearts have been taken over by a tangle of wires and chrome. “Oh look at me/Machinery of modern life,” goes the anxious title track. We’re all another cog in the machine. “It’s not enough to be alive,” Glaudini chirps. She’s looking “through satellites or lonely nights unsatisfied” for a guiding mechanical transmission. By song’s end, she’s drawn “to wash away the man” in her. Does she seek to scrub away the stains of masculinity, or of humanity?
Automatic would be at home in the late ’70s, but their nostalgic, mechanical sound paired with ruminations on cyborgism eventually feel tired and directionless. When Glaudini recounts a jarring transformation on “Humanoid,” her hopelessness is just casual, without stakes. “Signal” and “Electrocution,” the latter inspired by a real-life near-death experience, are gloomy romps with a purposeful sense of dread. But by album’s end, the mesmerizing buzz becomes a numbing sedative. Automatic wrestle with preserving humanity, but at times it seems they’re barely fighting for theirs.

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Fifty-two tracks deep, this archival compendium might seem like a catch-all. In fact, it’s a chance to peek under the hood of the multi-instrumentalist’s creative process.

Fresh Bread

Sam Gendel plays both guitar and saxophone with a sneaky virtuosity. His saxophone is often heavily modulated and his guitar attack is more like a tiptoe. Even his singing is hushed and mumbling. And while it might sometimes sound like he’s filtering ideas through an old Casio keyboard, Gendel has a sincere fascination with melody and rhythm—you might hear him suddenly break into an earnest beatbox that’s more like a jazz drummer recording a scratch track. In just a few years he’s built a reputation out of creatively hungry experiments and collaborations. Across his last two albums alone, he’s revamped songbook standards, covered “Old Town Road” on a German synthesizer, and produced some gorgeously glitchy beats. Throw a dart at Gendel’s discography and you might land on something that sounds like way-out free jazz or steamy R&B.
Gendel’s latest album, Fresh Bread, is a catch-all collection of songs he recorded between 2012 and 2020. It’s not just a lot of music, it’s a haphazard jumble. Some of the 52 tracks contained here are public performances and some are home recordings; there’s free improv and fuzzy cloud rap, solo performances and ensemble collaborations. In its full version, Fresh Bread feels more like a personal archive than an album, but Gendel has also pared the tracklist down to just under 20 songs for a vinyl edition. It’s tempting to wonder if he would have been better off editing down the digital version, too, but all of these recordings really do deserve the light of day.
Where to start? “Roomba” reminded me of an Ocarina of Time song, the type of video-game moment where the chiptune production undersells its emotional gravity. In Gendel’s case, a simple loop of saxophone, guitar, and drums turns meditative and trance-like until a solo soars near the end. The production might sound a little cheap at first, but it lays bare the beauty of the melody. Other tracks are less tinny and more spiritually open: Over the free-jazz groove of “Sometimes I Feel So Good,” Gendel euphorically sing-shouts the track’s title. Where some of his ideas require some coaxing out, this is immediate and cathartic.
There are slow swells of ambient (“Wwaasshh”), solo sax experiments (“Transparent Background”), and songs that feel like outtakes from other Gendel albums: The guitar-driven “Fractl,” would have been right at home on his full-length debut, 4444. Not all of these ideas quite stand on their own merit; the ambient noodling of “Birds of Paradise” (track number 40) and “Tape Tiger” (track number 21) feels untethered and nonessential. More than three hours into the album Gendel’s confident and fluid rapping on “Champs Élysées” might sneak up on you, but his vocal performance is almost buried in the mix to the point of obscuring all the lyrics.
This much music can understandably trigger an I’ll-just-sift-through-it defense mechanism. To Gendel’s credit, Fresh Bread both resists and rewards that approach. The music might run the gamut, but the tracks are often loosely bunched together—you still get some jarring transitions, but not at every turn. More importantly, as disconnected as they may be, for the most part these aren’t half-baked or unfinished drafts, they’re thorough explorations of singular ideas. What might appear at first like a hard-drive dump turns out to be more like an exhibition in an art gallery. How you navigate the space is up to you.

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Jonathan Meiburg and co.'s latest album finds Shearwater dropping the arcane conceptual gambits of their recent "trilogy" and speaking in layman's terms emotionally and sonically.

Animal Joy

Shearwater are often considered "underappreciated," but they're just properly appreciated by an understandably modest, devoted fanbase. Though their handsomely recorded albums and Jonathan Meiburg's former membership in Okkervil River put them in the context of NPR darlings and amphitheater headliners, they're still a tough sell: Often compared to Talk Talk at their most commercially forbidding, they're not populist like Okkervil or the National, their theatricality doesn't appeal to a specific brand of geekdom like the Decemberists or Andrew Bird, and their artiness is too pretty and studied to be edgy. Even when trying to describe what makes something like Rook's "The Snow Leopard" a staggering listen, you're left with chin-stroking explanations, like how a trumpet's fanfare finally breaks the tension of John Congleton's immaculate production, but it lasts three seconds and takes four minutes to get there.
On Animal Joy too many changes are afoot to think Meiburg isn't chafed by the situation: They've peripherally moved from one indie titan (Matador) to another (Sub Pop) and from one revered indie producer (John Congleton) to another (Danny Reisch). But more notably, take a look at the unusually plainspoken title: Animal Joy proves they are still a naturalistically minded band, but in dropping the more arcane conceptual gambits of their self-described "trilogy" of Palo Santo, Rook, and The Golden Archipelago and speaking in layman's terms both emotionally and sonically, they're taking their best shot at meeting new listeners halfway.
They come racing out of the gate to do so on "Animal Life"-- Meiburg's amped-up choirboy vocals have always been suited for grand, sweeping gestures and yet he's never delivered something so overtly pop. To put it in his preferred orinthological terms, it's a peacock moment for sure, pure 1980s corporate rock because it somehow sounds expensive, striving to honor ambition itself as intrinsically good-- it could be a Florence and the Machine song, NBC could use it to soundtrack their commercials for the Summer Olympics, but they throw in enough fussy chord changes and dissonant fringe to keep things from getting too cozy.  There's a similar release-the-hounds rush to "You As You Were", a sonic and poetic ramble culminating in Meiburg's desire to "Go back to the East/ Where it's all so civilized/ Where I was born to the life/ But I am leaving the life." Whether it's meant as a candid admission from a touring musician or a nod to the desk jockey that longs to mount a wild steed, it feels like a mission statement; Animal Joy doesn't so much stand for carnality but for the thrill in upsetting the equilibrium between domesticated repression and desire for primitive abandon.
While Animal Joy doesn't totally do away with Shearwater's exploratory tendencies, Ek's production is radio-friendly in the sense that there's a constant presence to this music-- even the comparatively quieter moments make themselves heard fairly easily. In the past, Shearwater songs occasionally got loud, but lead single "Breaking the Yearlings" is loud throughout, big churning guitars and busy, inventive percussion from the truly underappreciated Thor Harris. That said, it's still a Shearwater song in that you'll get more out of it if you happen to know that yearlings are essentially pubescent horses, energetic and unpredictable. Indeed, though considerably dialed-back, Meiburg hasn't lost his preference for poetic devices-- whether equine or otherwise-- to keep any attempts to present Shearwater as a red-blooded, blue-collar rock band short lived. Amidst the trudging orchestral strains of "Insolence", he announces rapture as a time "when my thoughts become undisciplined... it is effortless," a wish-fulfillment fantasy for a band whose power is often the result of fairly obvious effort. And though Shearwater typically allow themselves one song per album to rock out of character, "Century Eyes" or "Corridors" wouldn't prepare you for how "Immaculate" gets all Eddie & the Cruisers with it, complete with tweaked 12-bar blues riffs, and a reckless loner named Johnny as a narrative device.
Yet while being Shearwater's most accessible record by some margin, it isn't quite the best, and toward the record's back half, it begins to become clear why. Meiburg's inimitable vocals aside, this is the first batch of Shearwater songs that could conceivably be the work of another band, confirming what made Rook unique while hinting at their shortcomings previously unexpressed. While the streamlined "Open Your Houses" and "Dread Sovereign" ably replicate the rhythmically stoic but emotionally jittery mien of fellow Austinites Spoon, Meiburg's imperious vocals cut against a musical backdrop that calls for more strut or swagger. Likewise, the startlingly ordinary iPhone-waver "Star of the Age" closes Animal Joy by bringing Shearwater perilously towards to the sort of adult-contemporary indie wallpaper they've never been.
These are minor quibbles, as even Meiburg admits that Animal Joy is something transitional for the band. And it's a welcome move-- The Golden Archipelago fell victim to the sort of indulgence and inscrutability that's to be expected from a concept album titled The Golden Archipelago, and the worry then was that Shearwater would be content to drift even further into their rococo fantasies without realizing they'd left the rest of us behind. Even if Animal Joy brings them closer to the mainland of pop and rock, it'll still take a lot to place these guys in the middle of the road, and after all, what's a more basic animal joy than to be appreciated?


Like James Ferraro or Dean Blunt, the Turin-based artist uses unsettling percussive loops and field recordings to create a mood as if lost in a strange urban landscape.

Serpent Music

Yves Tumor is an associate of Mykki Blanco and was a key player on last year’s C-ORE compilation. He’s also blipped up on comps from buzzworthy labels like NON and UNO and had Hippos in Tanks’ founder Barron Machat not passed away, Tumor would have been a ready-fit for that groundbreaking label, too. As it stands, Yves Tumor shares many sonic traits with the likes of HiT artists like James Ferraro and Dean Blunt. The latter is most apparent in that Tumor favors mysterious loops, soul music as rendered by the recently concussed and noise-as-loofah.
The early parts of Serpent Music seem equally noncommittal in choosing which side of himself to present. Early highlight “The Feeling When You Walk Away” needs little to cast its spell: winding itself around a looping sting of R&B guitar and allowing Tumor’s gossamer voice to serve as narcotic. “Cherish” attempts something similar with another hiccuping loop, but to little effect.
Minimal as those tracks are, something like “Dajjal” allows its rolling piano line to get cluttered with out-of-sync drum machine sputters and spurts of white noise, his voice lost underneath it all. For “Broke In,” Tumor again juggles a creepy close-mic whisper with footwork-fast beats and ambulance sirens, but it never quite congeals. “Role in Creation” begins promisingly enough, a strange hiccup of ethnic percussion and drum patter, only to have it do little more for the next two minutes.
“Serpent I” and “II” do more with ritualistic percussion, razing it with noise and field recordings of an undetermined nature, veering into eerie spoken word, crashing cymbals, rubbed drum heads and the sound of children playing in the distance. Lo-fi noise gets coupled to a tinny drum machine and mumbled vocals on “Seed,” but over the course of its seven minutes, the feedback squalls don’t quite attain the invigorating abrasiveness of the tracks Tumor makes as Bekelé Berhanu.
While it doesn’t always work, it’s Yves Tumor’s use of field recordings that gives Serpent Music an ambulatory quality. “Spirit in Prison” gets its pulse from the chatter of crows overhead, but just when it might give the track a sense of paranoia, the introduction of a female voice and harp plucks midway evokes the likes of Björk. Closer “Perdition” replicates what it’s like to walk along the docks in total darkness, with only the lapping of the waves (and a slow sine wave of bass) to console you. At times, such a sense of wandering makes the tracks feel unresolved or interrupted, but at other times it gives the sensation of being lost in a strange urban landscape, alternating between endless gray blocks and brief glints of beauty. Though given the legless nature of that titular creature, maybe Tumor revels in slithering through such sounds on his belly.


Esco Terrestrial is technically DJ Esco’s project, but the weight of it is carried by Future, who appears on all but two songs. Despite strong moments, Future sounds a little exhausted.

Future / DJ Esco: Project E.T. Esco Terrestrial

Project E.T. Esco Terrestrial

It’s tempting for buzzing rappers to keep producing new work, to continue striking while the iron is hot. The model for this is 2Pac, whose legend is due in part to the fact that he was always in the studio, recording enough to ensure his discography outlasted him. It's a lovely idea, but it’s a double-edged sword. Not only is the sheer process exhausting, but the expectation to live up to a past standard grows heavier with each release. The love given to any artist is fleeting—dependent every time on whether or not the newest project lives up to the last.
This sort of relentless clip was a major factor in Future’s comeback in 2015. He dominated the year with three mixtapes (the first, Monster, technically came out in late 2014) in addition to the album DS2**, and a joint project with Drake. It  seemed like whatever he released couldn't miss. The takeaway, in Future’s mind at least, was to keep doing the same thing. This a new mixtape, Project E.T.: Esco Terrestrial, could be considered his third project of the year, following both Purple Reign and *EVOL**; *good projects in their own right, but neither bringing anything like an evolution to what came before.
While Esco Terrestrial is technically DJ Esco’s project, the weight of it is carried by Future, as he appears on all but two songs on the tape. Despite a few strong records, this is a much less inspired Future than the one we’ve seen over the past year. This is unfortunate: as the third record to come before we’ve even reached the halfway point of 2016, it’s starting to feel like Future is dropping music just to stay relevant rather than showing the hunger, originality and insight into his mental state that put him in this position in the first place.
After the laid back, chilly intro that uses audio samples of news reports on UFOs and aliens, the tape tries to charge up and hit hard with “Check On Me” but it falls flat. Future transparently tries to follow his own formula for making a turn-up song, and he comes off like one of his imitators. Future is on autopilot: giving us what he thinks people like about his music (loud songs about drugs and hedonism) and nothing else. Despite the number of noteworthy guest appearances, lack of effort weighs the project down. Regardless of how you feel about any of the individuals involved, a song with Future, Drake, and 2 Chainz should be an easy hit record. But maybe it’s so easy that they can give us the lazy “100it Racks” with the assumption it’ll be a hit no matter what. Except for 2 Chainz rapping: “Put codeine in a Snapple/Put codeine on a salad/Guess I'm on a codeine diet”; there’s really nothing particularly memorable about a song featuring three popular exciting rappers.
Even album highlight “Juice,” an OJ Simpson-inspired subtweet at any guy trying to sleep with the mothers of his kids, doesn’t pack a punch; it’s just a fun-yet-predictable turn-up song. It does kick off the one run of good-to-great songs: The Zaytoven-assisted “Too Much Sauce” has the gorgeousness of a piano ballad that worked better for Lil Uzi Vert than for Future; “Who” brings Future and Young Thug back together and they bounce off each other so well that you wish they would keep making songs together, and “Married to the Game” is reminiscent of “The Percocet and Stripper Joint” with its smooth, melodic production. It also feels honest in a way that's missing from the rest of this tape. When Future raps, “I’m seeing the animosity, the riots is on CNN/I got some homies that just got out, some ones that just went in/The deeper the ocean, the deeper the pain/ Blow out their brains, switch through lanes/Ain’t gotta call out no names/They know I’m married to the game” it’s a sobering splash of water to the face not necessarily because of its subject matter but because it’s not trying to be a crowd-pleaser record in way everything else is.
The songs without Future are even worse. The Casey Veggies and Nef the Pharaoh collaboration “Stupidly Crazy” is the kind of pandering to radio hit that should be beneath everyone involved. Certainly a dope young artist like Nef the Pharaoh deserves better than this, and the Stuey Rock-featured “Deal Wit It” is just boring. As a showcase for DJ Esco, this tape lacks much of anything to make you think of him as the all-star DJ who rose to prominence DJing at Magic City. The end result is something that feels like a last-minute favor Future did for his friend more than anything else, and given the feelings of overexposure creeping into the Future reception, ultimately this ends up as a tougher hit for him than anyone else.


More direct and consistent than his last two scattershot LPs, Beck's latest-- produced by Danger Mouse-- finds the disillusioned L.A. hippie struggling to balance his deathly 21st century outlook with his more crowd-pleasing inclinations.

Modern Guilt

On his tour behind 2006's The Information, Beck and his band were accompanied by a troupe of marionette doppelgängers. Projected onto a big screen, the dot-eyed puppets mimicked the group with uncanny accuracy; if Beck triumphantly raised his hand during "Devil's Haircut", his counterpart quickly followed. As the distance between concert DVDs and concerts themselves continues to dwindle, the puppet scheme was a winning example of spontaneous, analog cleverness. It was also a crafty bit of outsourcing. The cute figurines provided much of the night's visual entertainment while offering a distraction from Beck's increasingly uninvolved performances. Since the famed stops on his Odelay tour more than a decade ago, he's become a static shell of his former break-dancing, bed-humping self. Similarly, while Beck has gotten darker and more apocalyptic, he's tried to temper his direness with upbeat, counter-punch production from the Dust Brothers, Nigel Godrich, and now, Danger Mouse. Though Modern Guilt is more direct and consistent than his last two scattershot LPs, it also finds the disillusioned L.A. hippie struggling to balance his deathly outlook with his more crowd-pleasing inclinations.
It wasn't always like this. At his creative peak Beck tackled everything from R&B to hip-hop to folk, and more often than not, his songs' sentiments matched their styles. On a base level, Sea Change was full of downtrodden couplets matched with picturesque melancholia; the falsetto zaniness of Midnite Vultures corresponded with its equally bizarre and hilarious imagery. And while there were plenty of serious specters like ghosts and devils all over Odelay, they were used to symbolize the invincibility of youth while the album's pastiche funk kept the post-modern party alive. But starting with Guero, the disconnect between the singer's frisky beat-based pop and his suffocating anxieties became more apparent ("Earthquake Weather", for instance, was filled with musings like, "The days go slow into a void we filled with death"). And now, after the overlong space jam The Information warned of modern society's ills while pumping futuristic dance-folk, we get Modern Guilt, probably Beck's most harrowing collection of songs yet.
As usual, you probably wouldn't pick up on the record's gravity by putting it on at a cookout. Danger Mouse does a decent job of injecting the record with the same 1960s sounds found on Gnarls Barkley's LPs: Scratchy snares, surf-rock rhythms, and piano vamps pop up and disappear in no-nonsense, three-minute bursts (at just over a half hour, the disc is half as long as The Information). Beck's first new producing partner in eons, Danger Mouse mostly plays into the star's love of vintage aesthetics while working in snippets of his signature style. The wobbly rocker "Orphans" could be a Mutations outtake, drum 'n' bass lullaby "Replica" would sound at home anywhere on The Information, and the lush "Volcano" would have made an excellent Sea Change bonus cut-- it's also one of very few songs on the album that couples its tenuous ennui with an appropriate backdrop. Interestingly, the record's best psych-rock showing-- the tripped-out "Chemtrails", featuring a wicked drum exhibition courtesy of longtime Beck collaborator Joey Waronker-- is also the only track that doesn't include any of Danger Mouse's beats or loops.
Elsewhere, Beck pushes his happy/sad dichotomy to its breaking point. "Gamma Ray" combines a beach-party beat with ecological updates ("If I could hold hold out for now/ With these icecaps melting down") and a call for nuclear annihilation. The title track comes on with plenty of Spoon-esque strut and swagger only to dwell on collective insecurities: "Don't know what I've done but I feel ashamed." These are nice tricks, but after two albums of similar bait-and-switches, they grow tired; with the world legitimately bent on a one-way trip to hell, Beck fails to ease the tension with the unadulterated fun he built his name on. (Tellingly, the 38-year-old recently admitted he's "not proud of" several songs from his wildest LP, Midnite Vultures, all signs of which have been erased from his live show.)
"I'm tired of people who only want to be pleased/ But I still want to please you," sings Beck on closer "Volcano". It's the most personal song on the album, where the alt-rock journeyman stunningly conflates his own troubles with those of the world at large. In his heyday, Beck seemed to please everyone by pleasing himself-- each new genre excursion was met with new fans and a fresh appreciation for his limitless talent. Now things don't come so easy. "It's harder and harder to write songs these days," he told The New York Times last week. "I'm always slashing and burning, going, 'Is this too on the sleeve?' But if you're not up front like that then you're hiding behind something, so it's a real maneuvering." With its off-the-cuff cover, brevity, and ramshackle feel, Modern Guilt comes off like Beck's attempt to outrun those songwriting complications. But the reluctance to break with his own conventions is still evident. The album ends with a look ahead: "I don't know where I've been, but I know where I'm going/ To that volcano/ I don't want to fall in, though/ Just want to warm my bones on that fire a while." It's a cautious prophesy-- maybe too cautious.


Four new reissues explore the acclaimed Japanese producer’s work c. 1984-1985, as he set aside techno-pop in favor of spacious, imaginative ambient music.

Haruomi Hosono: S·F·X / The Endless Talking / Paradise View / Mercuric Dance

After the dissolution of Japanese techno-pop pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra following 1983’s Service (their final album until the one-off reunion Technodon a decade later), each of its members were eager to go their own way. Reluctant to call it a breakup, they opted for the softer term “fan out,” though creative differences had created such friction between the trio that it was difficult for them to keep working together. Beleaguered from staring into the spotlight of pop stardom, Haruomi Hosono let out a sigh of relief. “Our music happened to hit the chart and I had an awful time. I was too famous to walk around,” he told the Red Bull Music Academy in 2014. “As the dust settled, I was liberated at last. I love to be free.”
Wasting no time, Hosono teamed up with Japanese major label Teichiku in 1984 to create two new imprints that would allow him to explore his newfound freedom—Non-Standard, a haven for Hosono’s friends, collaborators, and protégés, and Monad, an outlet for his more experimental solo outings. No longer beholden to the demands of YMO’s label Alfa or the desires of his bandmates, Hosono receded from the limelight and immersed himself in his own musical interests. The years 1984 and 1985 would be some of his most productive as he “fanned out” in several directions, bearing truth to the euphemism used to describe YMO’s collapse. Four new reissues, courtesy of Teichiku, survey this critical period—painting, with broad strokes, a picture of Hosono’s wildly creative post-YMO output.
In its brief few years of original releases, Non-Standard would become a petri dish of innovation. Hosono was the first to give a home to Pizzicato Five, a group whose fusion of Japanese pop, soul, jazz, and western kitsch was instrumental to the popularization of Shibuya-kei, the pluralistic pop sound of Tokyo’s most fashionable district. He offered the first sighting of World Standard, multi-instrumentalist Sohichiro Suzuki’s globe-trotting love letter to exotica and Americana. Non-Standard was also the launching point for Hosono’s group Friends of Earth, a revolving cast of musicians that has included vocalist Miharu Koshi, Senegalese session percussionist Aïyb Dieng, and, strangely, James Brown and his star saxophonist Maceo Parker.
For Hosono’s first solo project on his newly minted label, he brought along Friends of Earth to back him up. S·F·X is a stylistic grab bag, throwing in everything but the kitchen sink in only half an hour. That eclecticism is on full display in “Strange Love,” a triumphant pop opus that feels like the logical step forward from YMO, and also like it arrived from another planet. A funky melody and Hosnono’s smooth baritone underpin alien-sounding synth, owed perhaps to an unlikely inspiration—video games. Hosono had released Video Game Music earlier the same year on Yen (a label he co-curated with YMO bandmate Yukihiro Takahashi) as an experiment in replicating arcade game music with synthesizer; the arpeggiated blips of Video Game Music’s “Phozon” would feel right at home here. We get a glimpse of his future on the piano ballad “Dark Side of the Star,” which draws a curtain on the album with a melody repurposed from a piece composed for the retail chain Muji, transforming it into a deep melancholy that feels like a eulogy for the Hosono of the past.
The following year, Hosono would narrow his focus with a trio of albums on Monad. Each is a collaborative effort, representing more facets of his fascinations. The Endless Talking, the least consequential, was composed for an Italian art exhibit titled “Japan, Avant Garde of the Future.” Hosono improvised its 13 sketches while looking at photographs of sculptures created for the show, resulting in short pieces intended to play on loop. The tracks are designed to talk endlessly, but not to each other as a cohesive body of work. “The Endless Talking” is the standout, a twinkling metronome of hypnotic melody—but it, too, is a reworked Muji composition.
Hosono takes a trip to Okinawa for Paradise View—the score for a film by the same name—exploring the musical traditions of the island prefecture while weaving in elements of gamelan and otherworldly chants. “The Paradise View” ties it all together into a compelling proof of concept, with Hosono plinking out a distinctly Okinawan melody as a sound reminiscent of Balinese gongs washes over it. Reaching across cultures and through time, Hosono crystallizes disparate influences into an image of a place that you wish really existed so that you could see it for yourself.
Mercuric Dance—the companion piece to a contemporary ballet by Arai Tadayoshi—stands as the most fully realized of the trilogy. It was based on Hosono’s time in scenic Amakawa Village, and the environmental themes run strong. Nara Prefecture (where Amakawa is located) is home to the highest concentration of protected cultural sites in Japan, and nearly a fifth of its area is national parkland. Hosono pays respect to the land with a series of compositions—each inspired by a celestial body—that shift slowly into one another, like a leisurely trip around the sun. With traditional Japanese percussion, soaring synth, and interspersed field recordings, Mercuric Dance unfolds like a time-lapse photo of a place slowly weathered by the passage of time.
Haruomi Hosono’s freewheeling spirit is what makes each phase of his endless reinvention so fascinating. After the dissolution of YMO, he made S·F·X, a pop album no one expected; then he didn’t make another for a long time, opting instead to set himself “adrift in the sea of ambient music,” as he later described it. In recent years, Hosono’s ambient work has attracted fresh interest—particularly the music he created for Muji around this time, which he’d since forgotten about. As they’ve been rediscovered by new listeners, the Muji compositions have lately gone somewhat viral, but the Teichiku albums, which iterate upon those ideas in bold and surprising ways, have yet to see their day. These reissues, though only a two-year snapshot of a long and winding career, contain a lot more music worth remembering.

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Much more than one man's solo recordings or an Okkervil River side project, Jonathan Meiburg's Shearwater follow last year's partially re-recorded and re-released Palo Santo with their first LP of new tunes for Matador.

Rook

Since last year's partially re-recorded and re-released Palo Santo, Shearwater have gone out of their way to assert themselves as more than just an Okkervil River side project or one man's solo recordings, but a living, breathing full band. Rook, however, is their first album-length test, one that reaches deeper into their influences and flexes muscles no one knew they had. Singer and principal songwriter Jonathan Meiburg's voice is just one instrument among many that color these ten tracks, which, in one way, is disappointing, as Meiburg is a stunningly expressive singer who could easily carry a record by himself (see: either edition of Palo Santo). Regardless, they're blessed with engineers who sweat and toil over every incidental noise, guests on everything from clarinet to harp, and a drummer named fucking Thor-- all of whom assert themselves on Rook. This is good news for any listener, but perhaps especially for those who favor the more sensitive and baroque strains of indie rock, yet are tired of hearing it soundtrack every stray minute of public radio or primetime TV: Shearwater give "pretty" indie a good name.
From its hushed start to the crunch and swing of its chorus, "On the Death of the Waters" is a dramatic opener that announces how much clatter Shearwater 2.0 can make. First single "Rooks" is far more ordered and composed, but the attention paid to its craft is discernible, from Meiburg's more controlled vocal performance to the nimble guitar plucking and insistent half-note throb of bass.
"Leviathan, Bound" is the first hint at how far the band has stretched its palette, incorporating plenty of strings, glockenspiel, and glassy, mysterious percussion, with Meiburg finally letting out a more immediate howl as the song's simple melody gathers steam. Thor Harris' contributions to the record on percussion are more subtle than his name would imply, but his performances always elevate the song, whether it's the buttoned-up accompaniment of "Rooks" to the determined gallop of "Home Life", saving its seven woodwind-and-string-laden minutes from sagging. While he serves at the anchor to some tracks, he adds the most vivid touch to the already dramatic bridge of "Lost Boys" with a formal military march during its bridge.
A necessary jolt on a well-paced album, Shearwater's attempt to let their collective hair down on the guitar-driven "Century Eyes" comes off as forced next to all these cautious and mannered arrangements. They've lost no momentum, however, when they reach the steady rumble of "The Snow Leopard", which comes later on the record. It begins with conspicuous unaccompanied piano chords before slow, elemental drums and low single notes of guitar trudge forward, driving the song with the same woozy melodic force of previous Shearwater highlights like "White Waves".
The influence of Talk Talk's later records is even more apparent here than on their earlier work, notably in Meiburg's voice as he leans more on his falsetto and exercises restraint. It's also in the instrumentation, which tends towards the drifting and heavily atmospheric. Meiburg's more than capable of hanging with Mark Hollis vocally, and this approach drives the band to considerably expand its sound. Shearwater have not only broken new ground for themselves, but added a welcome sense of variety from track to track on Rook, all in a concise 35 minutes that feels more like a double album in scope.
Hollis acolytes or not, these are hardly song-sketches; all of them are careful compositions adding new instruments, moods, and sounds around the anchor of Meiburg's voice. The edges of these otherwise lulling, hypnotic songs hint at danger and chaos, but only the brief feedback excursion of "South Col" pokes a hole in the album's fabric and hints at what more avant-garde threads the band might be capable of following. As impressive and uniformly gorgeous a record as Rook is, the band's best work is likely still to come.


Released exclusively on a device called the Stem Player, the first version of Kanye’s 11th album is lackluster and undercooked. It does not bode well for any future updates or revamps.

Donda 2

For all the theatrics, mythmaking, and assholery that come along with a Kanye West album, at the center of it all used to be the music. I challenge anyone to watch the first two episodes of jeen-yuhs, the new three-part documentary about West’s early years, and not come away feeling a little bit nostalgic for a bygone era. Times when the hunger in Kanye’s raps could consume you like they did Mos Def, who looked on in awe as Ye rapped an a capella version of “Two Words.” Or when his irrational confidence and drive had this innocent charm to it, like the scenes of him going door to door in the Roc-a-Fella offices trying to get anyone he could to listen to “All Falls Down.”
The documentary began shooting years before the release of his debut album, 2004’s The College Dropout, a project Kanye and the directors approach as not just another batch of songs, but a soul-wrenching outpouring. An album nurtured and stressed over. An album that bum-rushed through industry politics, skeptics, and even a near-death experience. An album Kanye believed in so wholeheartedly that even before it lifted him from the shadows to the limelight, he spoke about it as if the world would stop spinning without it.
Somewhere along the way—I might point to the era around The Life of Pablo and I’m sure some would say earlier—that ego was no longer a piece of the art, but the art itself. The music became an afterthought, a mere bullet point in a Kanye machine more concerned with clothing lines, Forbes list rankings, and a pivot to “free thinking,” an excuse to pretend his dumb tweets and political stances were actually genius.
True to this direction, Donda 2, the sequel to last year’s Donda, is not chiefly concerned with the music. It hasn’t even been officially labeled Donda 2 yet—instead, it’s designated “V2.22.22 Miami” (the date and location of the most recent Donda 2 listening party) like it’s an iOS update. That seems to be what Kanye wants anyway. The album was released exclusively on the Stem Player, a $200 gadget that he believes is revolutionary new technology but is really a glorified iPod Shuffle. (You would think the device that is going to change the game would be able to hold more than 8GB.) The tennis ball-sized contraption allows you to isolate a specific element of a song, an idea that is fine for about five minutes until you realize listening to a song is way more fun without having to choose your own adventure through it. The 16 tracks uploaded on the device so far are hardly even finished. The idea of the Stem Player is that Kanye will update and revamp the album as he sees fit, which some may laud as innovative or iconoclastic, but it comes off as an excuse to put out lackluster, undercooked music and label it as a fluid, ever-changing art piece that may never be complete. Does this inherently make Donda 2 somewhat critic-proof?
It does not. This crudely unfinished dump of songs is hiding behind a spectacle. But unlike the G.O.O.D Friday buildup to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy or the Madison Square Garden fashion show before The Life of Pablo, this spectacle is not designed to draw attention to the music but to distract from how Kanye’s passion has shifted: from making some of the most culture-defining albums of the last two decades to dreaming of being spoken about in the same breath as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.
There’s no larger indictment of Kanye than him misfiring on arguably his greatest skill of them all: curation. For all the messiness of later Kanye records, his ability to bring any rapper into the fold and handpick the right bits and pieces of their style to let them shine was unmatched. I mean c’mon, Desiigner sounds pretty good on Pablo, and on the original Donda, Fivio Foreign was briefly the hottest rapper in New York. The only guest who sounds like they have a pulse on Donda 2 is Vory, whose sweet bellowing over one of those quintessential orchestral Kanye and Co. beats on “Lord Lift Me Up” is hypnotic. Future also sounds impassioned on “Keep It Burning”—but Kanye’s verse is muffled and unfinished.
The rest of the album’s collaborators suggest that Kanye is either scraping the bottom of the barrel or calling any rapper on the Billboard charts to see who will show up. Soulja Boy, sued multiple times last year for alleged sex crimes, phones in a shoddily mixed verse. The XXXTentacion hooks on “Selfish” and “True Love” feel minor and unmemorable, like they’re just there to fill space. Unlucky for everyone, Jack Harlow arrives doing a hacky tough-guy Drake impression.
The Harlow-assisted “Louie Bags” is probably the most disappointing track on the album. Not because it’s the worst but because, had it been treated with the attention to detail that Kanye used to be known for, it could have been great. Over a thumping beat, Kanye mourns the passing of Virgil Abloh in the most Kanye way possible: “I stopped buying Louis bags after Virgil passed,” he raps repeatedly on the chorus, sounding downbeat. Kanye’s verses don’t build off that. In fact, it’s more mumbled nonsense that would be tolerable if this was a leaked demo and not an official release.
This is a recurring motif on Donda 2: Songs have a cool moment or two, but do not hold any shape. “Security” has a hilariously great opening line (“No you can’t be on my mama album”) but no other bar has any weight to it, as if it was freestyled to be replaced later. “Get Lost” has serious 808s and Heartbreak vibes, with his voice submerged in so much Auto-Tune he sounds nearly robotic, yet as a straight a capella it bores me. The production on “Sci-Fi” is rich, though tacking on an SNL monologue from Kim Kardashian—where she boasts about Ye by calling him “the best rapper of all time” and “the richest Black man in America”—feels like the weird equivalent of a movie character cutting out photos of their crush and pasting them on the wall. Kanye is allowed to handle his breakup like a human, but why not put some of those feelings in the lyrics?
There’s no Silicon Valley-speak that can explain why Kanye should have released any music in this shape. It’s not ready or complete and one can only speculate that he was racing to meet some kind of external deadline, like the Netflix documentary or the new Yeezy Gap and Balenciaga collaboration. If so, that would align with the direction Kanye has been headed for a minute now: Music as a way to boost visibility for ventures that make him way more money. Like many, I have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that Kanye West, the rapper who made The College Dropout and Late Registration and so many more labors of passion and love and emotion, would reach the point of releasing anything as hollow as Donda 2 (V2.22.22 Miami). Every now and then, he can still crank out his signature sweeping production or drop a line that stops you in your tracks. But no minor edit or revamped version of Donda 2 can conceal the album’s inherent flaw: It is presented as a revolutionary work but it is decidedly a non-event.


Chris Stewart continues his decade-long quest to rewrite ’80s synth-pop on his latest record, an enjoyable homage that struggles to reach the heights of its influences.

Fast Idol

For Chris Stewart, the synthesizer wizard behind Black Marble, influence is more than a guidepost, it’s his whole act. On his latest record, Fast Idol, he continues his decade-long project of essentially rewriting ’80s synthwave classics. It’s a pastiche that sounds more New Order than New Order, so close to OMD that it makes you wonder if you were perhaps living inside of Pretty in Pink. It’s an enjoyable, sexy record that is little more than a composite of its influences.
Fast Idol is a record of makeout jams; the kind of druggy, pupil expanding synth-pop that you leave on so you can tune out. There’s nothing wrong with making mood music, but these songs often feel indistinguishable from each other; it’s a flat record without highs or lows, lacking momentum or lift. “Royal Walls” gives off the vibe of walking out of a club and into rainy city streets. It melts seamlessly into the grayscale “Try,” which is made up of the same slouchy drum machines and aqueous synths. Both songs feature crisp production, and Stewart plays his synthesizers with the dedication of a professor reading late into the night. They just don’t go anywhere.
Stewart is not one to change his sound though, and throughout his career he’s released record after record of extremely competent synth music; this one is no different. It sounds exactly like something that would be played in a club or on the radio in 1980s London, and the results are often really lovely, if not slightly repetitive. Opener “Somewhere” is the record’s longest and best track. It feels almost euphoric, with synths that reverberate like whispers in a cave. It’s six minutes long, but it’s so breezy that it’s over before you know it. Though the song could’ve been on any of Stewart’s records, it is nonetheless undeniably pretty. If there’s anything new about what Stewart’s doing here, it’s that he’s playing with slightly different textures from the past. There’s little flickers of dub here and there on songs like “The Garden” and “Streetlight,” breaking up the record like a short walk in the middle of a run.
At his best, Stewart is an archivist of past sounds. And for the most part, that’s what Fast Idol is: a collage of old synth tones that are cool to the touch. It can feel like discovering an old roll of film in a vintage camera, or like going to a dive bar and messing around with the jukebox. While it aspires to be the heart on your sleeve synth pop of the past, it’s most successful as mood music to soundtrack the present.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Even on this brief EP, the London producer’s music is becoming more confident and idiosyncratic, moving beyond familiar club contexts in search of points unknown.

flashes in time

In early 2017, not long after she had begun DJing in earnest, London’s FAUZIA uploaded her inaugural DJ mix to SoundCloud. “first ever mix,” she noted in the track description. She quickly landed a monthly residency on NTS Radio and worked her way up to gigs at clubs like Frankfurt’s Robert Johnson and Berlin’s Griessmuehle; early last year, she joined the renowned Discwoman agency, stepping up alongside artists like Juliana Huxtable, Object Blue, and SHYBOI. But as swift as her rise as a DJ has been, she has taken her time in establishing herself as a producer. Her scant discography so far has felt like a collection of works in progress—stepping stones, perhaps, to a more official debut, ETA unknown.
FAUZIA only began putting out her own music last year: first a couple of compilation tracks, then a collection of original productions she showcased in her Discwoman mix, followed by more loosies and a proper EP. Her music could be fierce, sensitive, and striking. But many tracks also had the unfinished character of a sketch or DJ tool, right down to functional titles like “generic bass track,” “Percussive Track,” and “138 PERCS!” Her new EP flashes in time, which she bills as “a collection of demos/ideas/emotions,” shares the unvarnished presentation of her previous work. But despite the brevity of the release, which breezes through seven tracks in under 13 minutes, it marks an important shift. FAUZIA’s music is getting more confident and idiosyncratic; it’s moving beyond familiar club contexts in search of points unknown.
Until now, FAUZIA’s tracks have hovered mostly in a kind of interzone, drawing variously from UK bass, Detroit techno, electro, breakbeats, and IDM. On flashes in time, she abandons many of those clubby touchstones in favor of ambient vocal overdubs, lo-fi guitar, and long stretches where she lets reverb do most of the work for her. When there are drums, they sound like they’ve been carved out of bursts of white noise. Her voice is what tends to hold the songs together, like wispy connective tissue.
“Stormy Days” opens the EP on a low-key note, contentedly mulling over the kind of lilting melody someone might absent-mindedly sing to themselves in the contented daze of a new infatuation. “No more stormy days/Now I get to play/In the sunshine with you,” she sings, unaccompanied but for her own overdubbed vocal harmonies, which she alters as she repeats the refrain, subtly expanding the song’s dimensions. Then, about halfway through, her singing stops, the reverb tail on her voice whipping into a gust of echo. What follows is almost a minute of ambient sound, like bird calls ricocheting through a canyon.
The rest of the EP’s songs don’t get much heftier than this diaphanous opening. Moody and cinematic, the bookending “recollection” pairs mournful vocals with a scratchy drum machine and creaky streaks of dissonance, conjuring a symphony of rusty screen doors. “swirl,” the record’s most upbeat cut, makes do with little more than an electric guitar, post-punk bass, and tinny snare, her voice bobbing like flotsam over the dubby mix; it’s an inspired cross between the Slits and Two Lone Swordsmen. “rewind” is just 71 seconds of granular synth, as though she’d dipped a kaleidoscope in a glass of bubble tea.
It’s hard to put your finger on what it is, exactly, that makes these songs so rewarding, much less so coherent. FAUZIA’s rhythmic techniques are unusual but not radical; her melodies are mostly loop-based, her words often indistinct. You wouldn’t think that the Matthew Herbert-like IDM of “low!” would make sense in such close proximity with the lo-fi ambient folk of “one day.” Somehow, though, she conjures something distinctive, no matter how diffuse. More than merely a mood, it feels like the glimpse of a unique perspective. It’s unclear whether flashes in time’s “collection of demos/ideas/emotions” is meant as a clearinghouse before she embarks upon a more intentional project. For now, anyway, FAUZIA is finding new ways to express herself within the confines of the humble work in progress.

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The late songwriter recorded the unreleased Eight Gates in the ’00s. The posthumous version sounds by turns haunting and unfinished.

Eight Gates

Jason Molina’s songs are like unfinished houses. Wander the hallways late at night and you might open a doorway that leads nowhere, or look to the ceiling and find the moon staring back. Though the late Ohioan songwriter could write a rousing melody, he rarely offered them fully formed. Instead, he drew your ear toward the cracks in the edifice: placing an expanse of near-silence where a chorus might go, or emphasizing the empty space between someone’s high harmony vocal and his own distinctively damaged tenor. On Molina’s best albums, this vacancy is a virtue, imbuing the music with a sense of magic and mystery to match his lyrical preoccupation with the phantasms of memory and regret. The holes in the wall are invitations for spirits to come in.
Molina wrote and recorded Eight Gates while living in London in the late 2000s, where—according to press materials from his longtime label Secretly Canadian—he claimed he was recovering from a bite from a rare spider, writing in a letter about doctor appointments and drug prescriptions for which no medical records exist. Whether Molina was suffering a delusion or engaging in artistic myth-making is unclear, but he was on the cusp of real and dire challenges to his physical health either way. Ten months after the January 2009 recording sessions that produced this material, he cancelled a planned tour, blaming unnamed health issues. He never recorded or performed publicly again after that. In 2013, he died, at age 39, from complications related to alcoholism. Secretly Canadian presents Eight Gates, unheard until this posthumous release, as something like his final statement.
Like Molina’s classic albums, Eight Gates documents songs that are still in the process of becoming, a snapshot of their neverending journey toward a nonexistent final form. But given the nature of the release, it’s unclear what is an artistic effect and what is a more literal case of unfinished work. The album’s nine songs pass in 25 minutes, with several barely crossing the two-minute line—practically unheard-of for an artist who regularly sprawled out to six or seven. Some songs are plainly not done, like “She Says,” which fades out after a bit of studio banter and a single acoustic-strummed verse. Others sound more or less complete, like “Shadow Answers the Wall,” built on pensive organ chords and an uncharacteristically lithe drum pattern, coming off like Molina’s take on the rhythm-forward music Radiohead was making around the same time.
The songs of Eight Gates are often beautiful, but they can feel a bit like cues in a film score without an accompanying visual, hanging around for long enough to establish a mood but disappearing before they have a chance to progress. The palette is drastically limited—guitar, organ, cello, a bit of bass, hardly any percussion—and deployed with painterly aversion to excess, allowing subtle changes to instrumental inflection to serve as major events. These sounds are miles from the rangy rock of Magnolia Electric Co., the amorphous band Molina fronted for much of the 2000s. They have more in common with the pitch-black folk of Ghost Tropic and The Lioness, albums Molina released under his Songs: Ohia alias at the beginning of the decade.
The most confounding and moving material is the most difficult to assess in terms of completeness. “Whisper Away,” the opener, and “Thistle Blue,” the penultimate song, are like a room and its reflection in a broken mirror. Their arrangements, and introductions, are nearly identical: drones of organ and strings, with sharp, delicate electric guitar chords occasionally slashing through. Both move slowly, even by Molina’s standards, building tension without release. The latter contains the album’s most evocative lines: “Black bird and thistle blue/Whose wilderness has my heartbreak wandered through?/Whose questions have I left to go unanswered?” The former addresses a similar transience, one of Molina’s great themes. It could also be read as a premonition of death, or a comment on the ephemeral character of the music itself: “Whisper away the howling universe/Pale against something, pale against what/Hiss and the fading, the dying radio.” Their haunting arrangements are rich and deliberate, but as compositions they are not wholly realized; neither song feels complete without the other, and even then the image is fragmented. Is their uncanny duality a result of Molina's mastery over his art, or was he simply still working through this material when he went into the studio that day? For a listener approaching Eight Gates a decade later, how much does it matter?
Secretly Canadian muddles the issue slightly by giving Eight Gates the veneer of an album, rather than presenting it as a collection of archival material, holding it to a standard it shouldn’t have to meet. Molina released albums prolifically before his withdrawal from public life, sometimes at a rate of two per year. He was not shy about putting out material he’d recorded quickly, or that which showed its rough edges clearly. He once released a collection of album outtakes that was four times longer than the album itself. In spite of this open-book approach, the Eight Gates material sat on the shelf for four years of his life. It’s not unreasonable to wonder whether he considered it a whole and successful body of work, or whether he wanted people to hear it at all. Still, regardless of his or his label’s intentions, it’s possible to hear Eight Gates as a fitting tribute. In its blank spaces, it reflects the spectral quality of his greatest music, albeit sometimes for different reasons.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Trite where it should be subtle and mellow where it should be exciting, the Jamaican star’s new album fails to consistently capture his magic.

Great Is He

Popcaan’s music is slathered in sweetness. Andrae Sutherland has a gift for shiny, elastic flows, making him a singjay—a reggae or dancehall artist with an ultra-melodic style—in the purest form. His indelible 2014 anthem “Everything Nice” felt like sipping on an icy rum and Red Bull in the Kingston daylight, the sun’s rays a warm balm for the punishing turns of everyday life. But on his fifth studio album, Great Is He, that brightness isn’t pleasant; it’s overpowering. The production often feels languid and homogenous, yielding a plodding, monotonous slurry. Far from the pop thrills and rap escapades of 2020’s FIXTAPE, Great Is He is a too-mellow record bogged down by repetitive beats, familiar themes, and forced sentimentality.
The few prize moments on Great Is He arrive when Popcaan relies on classic dancehall flourishes or effective collaborations. “Set It” feels like the explosive peak of a bashment megamix from the ’90s, complete with speaker-frying bass punches and sweaty come-ons: “Waistline likkle, mama, you so curvy.” “Aboboyaa,” Popcaan’s second collaboration with Burna Boy, spotlights his knack for seamless collaborations, linking the shared Afro-diasporic musical genealogies of Nigeria, Ghana, and Jamaica. Its title references the Ghanaian term for a tricycle used to transport goods, but Popcaan flips it into a metaphor for a woman riding him in bed. It’s summery and playful, and a chorus of horns trumpets under the Afrobeats production, as if they were blaring out of a car radio on the streets of Accra. “New Benz” and “Freshness” are sybaritic odes to luxury cars and clean Gucci fits, familiar flexes made electric by the percussive echoes of a fever-pitch riddim and the ringing of a steel drum.
Yet it’s easy to forget about these flashes of delight in the face of the record’s trite rags-to-riches tales. There’s nothing wrong with a come-up anthem, but on Great Is He, the execution is too superficial. The opening song, “Defeat the Struggle,” lands as an obligatory motivational intro rather than a genuine victory. “St. Thomas Native,” “Appreciation,” and “Past Life” are so formulaic, you almost wonder if they were designed using a type beat tutorial on YouTube; there are maudlin string crescendos, sappy guitar strums, and heart-tugging piano lines lifted straight out of a trailer for a Hallmark Channel drama. The penultimate track, “Memories,” an ode to Popcaan’s late loved ones, is stained with flimsy lyrics and a hackneyed bridge; “Believe me it’s gonna be, gonna be fine” is a far cry from Popcaan’s typically subtle, grounded approach to questions of radical hope and spirituality. And when Sutherland sings “Life a nuh joke like Kung Fu Panda,” you might involuntarily screw your face up in disappointment.
It’s been nearly a decade since his breakout album Where We Come From established Popcaan as an artist able to swim back and forth between the waters of pop and dancehall, flaunting his sense of narrative and verve within the sunny templates of the Jamaican genre. He’s been a lifeline for Drake when the Canadian rapper has exhausted his own creative energies, first siphoning some of Popcaan’s magic for an unreleased version of “Controlla” and via a sample on “Too Good.” That impact is muted on Great Is He; the collaboration that appears here, “We Caa Done,” feels like the pair is retreading old ground just for nostalgia’s sake. Dancehall is a singles-driven genre, but Popcaan often shines in the album format, so it’s regrettable that many of these 17 songs feel so lackluster. For a genre rooted in joy and conviviality, the letdown is hard to ignore.


Dumb Flesh is the second LP from Benjamin John Power, one-half of Fuck Buttons. Where the debut featured glacial build-ups and monotonous loops, Dumb Flesh is filled with handclaps, 808s and is-that-human-or-what? vocal samples. As the album title and cover art suggest, it's concerned with the fragility of the human body, using sonic degeneration as a metaphor for the biological kind.

Dumb Flesh

Since 2008's Street Horrrsing, Fuck Buttons has served to sublimate the noise genre into something that fans with lower tolerances for extreme music might enjoy. From the band's unlikely (but fittingly epic) use in the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony, to its status as festival mainstays, Fuck Buttons have brought music of the most punishing variety to an unusual level of popularity. If "pop" is what's popular, then Fuck Buttons fit the bill by definition, but no other act of their level can claim to scorch audiences with Fisher-Price-processed screams, only to rocket into a stratosphere of major-key bliss. For every club-leaning detour ("Prince's Prize") or humanist anthem ("Olympians"), there's a relentless "Brainfreeze" to remind us that the band is as unruly as ever.
The same can be said for the duo's solo ventures. Though Dumb Flesh is the second full-length LP from Blanck Mass, the stage name used by Benjamin John Power, it's been four years since his self-titled debut and three since his "White Math / Polymorph" single. In that time Fuck Buttons also released Slow Focus, their biggest-sounding record to date, and Andrew Hung, who records under his given name, dropped the retro-bizarro weirdness that was the Rave Cave EP. (Sure, Beck plays a Game Boy on stage, but who can say they made an entire album on one?) Dumb Flesh is an often-fascinating document of Power's evolving tastes over that time period, as well as a departure from his murky first album. While Blanck Mass often featured glacial build-ups and monotonous loops, Dumb Flesh is filled with handclaps, 808s and is-that-human-or-what? vocal samples. But for a record whose cover art is pinkish folds of human biomass, much of Dumb Flesh is actually pretty darn accessible. It also serves as occasional proof that Power is amenable to the idea that people might actually want to, like, dance to his music.
As the title and cover art suggest, Dumb Flesh is an album about the fragility of the human body, one that uses sonic degeneration as a metaphor for the biological kind. Opener "Loam" is a sound-collage of groaning vocals enmeshed with reversed tape hiss, while a mid-tempo chillout cut with squelching synths and a head-bobbing beat is called "Atrophies". Across the record, Power uses sounds that meld into each other fluidly, an ouroboros of cyclical synths where you don't know where one loop begins and another ends.
Fuck Buttons solo projects often give the chance to spot individual seams in what usually appears as a singular, monolithic endeavor, but Dumb Flesh could be mistaken for the latest Fuck Buttons album, albeit one looser and less cohesive than usual. The themes may be dark, but the songs often contain the ecstatic blissfulness of the band's best and most transcendental beauty. "Cruel Sport", a name that echoes Fuck Buttons' enormous-sounding second album, for instance, starts with a driving beat similar to "Olympians", but just before the five-minute mark the synths clatter and collapse into a squiggling pile—a breakdown in the literal and metaphorical sense. The shift plays like a commentary on Power's past; rather than achieving total liftoff, Power proves he can still take us all the way there and then deliberately doesn't. While "Cruel Sport" works, sometimes the less intense tracks don't quite land; "Lung" is a low-key track that sounds like you're waiting for a particularly avant-garde conference call—pleasant, but it's just not what Power does best.
Largely, however, Dumb Flesh is a pleasure. Album closer and highlight "Detritus" has multiple movements and features Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe of 90 Day Men on vocals. It's here that all of Power's strengths come out at once: dark noise gives way to a pounding rhythm which, in turn, melts into a tapestry of airy synths. If Dumb Flesh is about the prison of the body, "Detritus" is an entire life-cycle in eight minutes. Over his career, both in Fuck Buttons and as a solo artist, Power's music has been an exercise in the sweeping emotional and physical power of sound itself. Fuck Buttons may be unlikely stars, but their music's pure momentum almost guaranteed its audience by force alone. Like Power's best work, Dumb Flesh moves you when it literally moves you.


The New York quartet Stern is the vehicle of Chuck Stern, a singer who spent a decade leading the aggressively esoteric Time of Orchids. He formed an elite band including Toby Driver, the mastermind of art-metal savants Kayo Dot. Bone Turquoise is a promising start for the meeting of two captivating and contrasting bandleaders, reveling in the unexpected.

Bone Turquoise

Listening to Bone Turquoise, the proper debut album from the New York quartet Stern, you spend the better part of an hour waiting for the band to get loud, to go unhinged and generally to deliver the volume-heavy vexation its roster promises. Stern is the vehicle of Chuck Stern, a singer who spent a decade leading the aggressively esoteric Time of Orchids. That band tellingly hopscotched between metal labels like Relapse and imprints that embrace the avant-garde, including Cuneiform and Tzadik. Since the end of Orchids, though, he's recorded and released loose-limbed solo work under his last name.
For Bone Turquoise, he at last built an elite band (and even scheduled a handful of shows) that includes Toby Driver, the mastermind of art-metal savants Kayo Dot, and two of Driver's collaborators in that outfit. But the album's only real outburst—a plangent passage of sustained feedback, roiling drums, and ringing church bells—arrives just before the end of "Birds of Passage", the long record's serpentine closer. Instead, for much of these nine tracks, the quartet twists meticulously, almost seductively through pop-rock songs refracted at disorienting angles. At some points, what Stern terms his "alien pop" band even feels wistful—surprising given the group's pedigree, sure, but certainly not without reward.
Much of Stern's surprising restraint stems from the quartet's deliberate choices about dynamics and modulation. Rather than simply pivot between quiet and loud or fast and slow, this subtle group often does both at once, moving incrementally rather than aggressively. That's the most striking feature of opener "Reliquary", for instance, which goes from languid passages into tense interruptions and then back again. And "Ousted" deploys near-amoeboid motion, where every element, from the tempo to the tone, seems fluid enough to shift at any moment. No peak in volume or pace ever lasts too long. That approach allows for touches of post-rock and pop, math rock and metal inside songs where no one look overrides the others.
Stern himself is a provocative lyricist and an oddly endearing singer. His words are impressionistic and evocative—"Silt/ Precious memories/ A grave matter"—and his voice, like Scott Walker's, can quickly curve from a croon to a caterwaul. His songs and his sound deserve the full-rock-band treatment. Stern, however, seems to be readjusting to the role of proper bandleader a decade since Time of Orchids split, or of turning over his songs to collaborators who tamper with them. Across the eerie drift of "Common Carrier", piano notes echo against arid spaghetti western guitars, and the drums circle idly through low clouds of noise and hum. It's a wonderful arrangement, but Stern chooses to sit at its rear, merging his voice with the haze instead of pushing past it.
Much the same goes for "Storm Guide". It's a simple quatrain—"You are my storm guide/ You make it right…"—but the band's luxurious patter communicates the mood more than his near-diffident singing. And during "The Plot" and "Trappings", songs where the band zigs and zags through time signatures and textural approaches, his singing often seems to be chasing the playing, as if his songs have become so complex he's now just trying to keep up with them.
Still, Stern's tunes provide ballast and borders for Toby Driver and part of his Kayo Dot crew, something that band's albums have needed badly in recent years. Bone Turquoise is a promising start for the meeting of two captivating and contrasting bandleaders. Like the best of Kayo Dot and Time of Orchids, it revels in the unexpected—to the extent that it struggles with letting accessible songs stand, every once in a while, on their own.


Guitarist Marisa Anderson's latest album soundtracks a theoretical sci-fi Western of her own invention, where it’s up to the listener to fill in the cinematic details.

Into the Light

On 2013’s Traditional & Public Domain Songs, guitarist Marisa Anderson took tunes from the American songbook—“The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “Pretty Polly”—and warped them to her own liking. The results dropped relics from the past into sometimes harsh, but always interesting, new environments. On her new album Into the Light, she bends American guitar traditions for a completely different, but no less captivating, conceit: They soundtrack a theoretical sci-fi Western of Anderson’s own invention, where it’s up to the listener to fill in the cinematic details.
Anderson's sensitive touch brushes Into the Light with a far-reaching haze that firmly evokes the open, wild West. Her songs often make you feel as though you’re squinting toward the horizon, straining to make out the edges of a mirage. Her faint picking encourages you to lean in and listen closer  to soak in the details: She experiments with a more classical Spanish-style guitar on “He Is Without His Guns” and then immediately reprises these beguiling impressionistic strokes on the appropriately airy “Chimes.”
Anderson’s playing throughout the record is understated and exquisite—but then, she’s never veered toward shreddy, explosive showboating. Her guitar grumbles and murmurs, with low-end notes providing subtle muscle behind reverberating riffs and halos of twang. She achieves all of this right off the bat with the album’s opening title track, where she lifts a low, plodding roll with light, inquisitive curls. It’s easy to imagine the song behind the opening scene where we meet the tough and gritty hero/heroine, weary from desert wandering.
The only moments that feel dissonant arrive in “Resurrection” as a few unwieldy notes poke through, sounding like faraway car horns. But these off-kilter moments act as foils to Anderson’s fluid playing, again highlighting the baritone notes that anchor the song. Most often, Into the Light is breathtakingly beautiful: Anderson's licks ripple upward on “The Golden West,” sounding like a sinking stone in reverse. Its patient thrumming is soothing, and Anderson slides Into the Light toward a cinematic-sounding close as she drifts “The Golden West” into the sleepy, soft “End of the Night.”
Into the Light is the kind of record that requires rapt attention, best enjoyed in still solitude. But even as Anderson’s instrument simmers, it still reaches for the great beyond, and she makes you ache to reach along with it.