Big Trouble Little Jupiter

Atlanta artist (by way of Chicago) Kodie Shane is a young jack-of-all-trades, the Swiss army knife of Lil Yachty’s Sailing Team. She’s already mastered a few of them: rapper-singer alchemist, hook-making savant, bittersweet ballad scribe, intergenerational R&B translator, and (much like Yachty himself) effortless transmitter of communicable joy. She’s at her best when she fills rap cadences with R&B melodies and when her verses blend into her hooks, sometimes because the verses themselves are hooks, too. After releasing her breakout EP, Zero Gravity, in December, which showcased all of her skills in a sampler, she has quickly delivered a new 10-track mixtape called Big Trouble Little Jupiter. The tape ventures even further beyond genre limits—moving erratically from belligerent pop trap to vintage new jack swing. What it lacks in flow and consistency, it makes up for with big transitions and sheer ambition.
Big Trouble Little Jupiter, billed to be “starring” Kodie Shane, is at least loosely related to the 1986 Kurt Russell film Big Trouble in Little China. Thematically, the tape is mostly about rescuing a lover from a boring boyfriend only to lure her into a short-term, noncommittal relationship while-jet setting across the globe. (Not exactly the plot of the film, but close.) Much of Kodie Shane’s strength lies in her ability to generate earworms out of thin air, and that’s still in play on Big Trouble Little Jupiter, especially on cuts like “Be With or Without.” But some song drag, or never get going: Woozy opener “2 Minute” is subdued and nearly sedated. The boxy confines of the slow-trotting, En Vogue-featuring “Your Side” minimizes open space, forcing Shane to maneuver through pockets with more traditional flows. The trap screecher “Like a Rockstar” forces her to over-exert her voice. When she presses too hard, the difference is palpable.
The best songs on Big Trouble Little Jupiter are as soothing and infectious as her strongest work. Songs pivot dramatically from stunt anthems to emotional pleas to personal profiles. On “Twins,” she declares herself a hustler and a pimp in the lineage of Jeezy, Jay Z, and Meek Mill. Over bunched synth strings on “Na Na Naa,” she reassesses her surroundings: “These niggas is my sons, but I ain’t raise ‘em like this/And these hoes they not the one, but they swear that they is.” Her writing is as sharp as ever, producing subtle double entendres like “They all want my swag but they just can’t grasp it” along with scathing reads: “So keep it real with me/And you don’t have me now cause you can’t deal me/I know your man don’t know you here, you know I know you babe.” It’s in these moments, where she examines those around her, that she invites listeners to know her.
Production-wise, she continues to build a rapport with longtime collaborators Matty P and D.Clax here. They have credits on every song on Big Trouble Little Jupiter, and while the songs sometimes seem to come from different decades, Shane almost always pairs them with the appropriate melody and rhythm, finding a precise balance, ripping through some and drifting through others. As they continue to work together, they’re getting a feel for what works through trial and error, scanning the entire hip-hop/R&B spectrum in the process. Though not her best work, Big Trouble Little Jupiter showcases why Kodie Shane is one of rap’s most promising prospects: she’s resourceful and she’s fearless.


Sinatra’s  influence can be heard everywhere from Angel Olsen to Lana Del Rey. This new compilation offers one of the only overarching retrospectives of a singular career.

Start Walkin’ 1965-1976

Nancy Sinatra was both blessed and burdened with that last name. When she launched a pop career in the early 1960s, the Sinatra name immediately distinguished her from so many other promising young singers, and it meant she had a trusted adviser who could provide wise counsel (such as always own your masters). On the other hand, she was always Frank’s daughter in the public eye, always Nancy with the laughing face. She covered his songs, signed with his label (Reprise Records), and even made movies for his production company. It was her father who set up a meeting between her and Lee Hazlewood, who until then was best known for working with guitarist Duane Eddy in the 1950s. Both men have long been viewed as motivating figures in her career, barely behind the scenes, and it appears to be an ongoing struggle: “I can’t seem to get out of this trap,” she told The Believer in 2014. “I’m either Frank’s daughter or the person who sang with Lee Hazlewood. That’s OK; I don’t begrudge the men in my life. They helped me tremendously.”
In many ways, her career and legacy have been defined by getting out of the shadows of these famous men and fighting to get her proper due as an artist. Sinatra has enjoyed few major reissues. There have been many greatest-hits collections, but few that do more than scratch the surface or offer any kind of broad overarching vision. In fact, the most substantial retrospective, 2011’s Cherry Smiles: The Rare Singles, was released on her own Boots label. That paucity of compilations makes Start Walkin’ a necessary addition to her catalog and immediately the best place for a newcomer to jump into her catalog. While most compilations cover a relatively brief period in the late 1960s when she was enjoying a steady stream of hits and even filming television specials, this one extends that range well into the 1970s, concluding with her retirement in 1976. These 23 tracks cover a lot of ground musically and critically, tracing her massive hits in the mid 1960s and following her as she weathers professional upheavals and changing pop trends.
Start Walkin’ does not, however, include Sinatra’s very first singles, when she was a teenager trying to find her voice. She calls it her “Nancy Nice Lady” period, when she worked with Annette Funicello’s producer and presented a squeaky-clean image. Even Sinatra doesn’t think very highly of those songs, and Start Walkin’ locates her first sessions with Hazlewood in 1965 as the true start of her career. But that older material provides an interesting point against which to measure her transformation: She dyed her hair blonde, performed on TV in go-go boots and miniskirts straight from Mary Quant’s store in London. Always aware of the importance of visuals (her 1961 single “Cufflinks and a Tie Clip” was one of the first seven-inch singles packaged in a full-color sleeve), she projected power and sophistication from the stage and from the TV screen, along with a sexual confidence and emotional maturity that made her a stand-in for an entirely new generation of American women in the mid-’60s. Those boots suggested a whole army behind her.
Those qualities extended to the music and then some. Hazlewood goaded her in a more sexual direction, often describing what he wanted in vulgar terms (in a 1968 interview with Cosmopolitan, Sinatra says he asked her to sing “like a 13- or 14-year-old girl who goes out with 40-year-old men”). But Sinatra’s songs never sound vulgar. Like the first generation of rock’n’rollers a decade earlier, Sinatra has a blast with innuendo rather than stating her desires outright. She teases the possibilities in her infamous cover of Cher’s “Bang Bang,” as though she knows that you know what she’s really singing about. That song was neither a single nor a hit at the time, but half a century later, it’s one of Sinatra’s most popular and enduring tunes largely because there are so many different layers in her performance: She foregrounds the poignancy in the lyrics—the sting of betrayal, the weight of regret—to match Billy Strange’s noir guitar licks. Similarly, she revels in the breezy ambiguity of “Sugar Town,” which may or may not be about turning on and tuning out. “I’m gonna lay right down here in the grass, and pretty soon all my troubles will pass,” she sings, her voice skipping along to the melody, but the song is less about the wink and more about the calm she finds looking up at the sky.
As Start Walkin’ progresses through her career, the songs grow more florid and more idiosyncratic, incorporating folk rock, country, chamber pop, and a kind of theatrical pastoral psychedelia. Until he abruptly moved to Sweden (allegedly without telling Sinatra) and later after he’d returned to the States, Hazlewood served as her primary songwriter, and this compilation suggests that it was her versatility that allowed him to embrace his own mannerisms as a lyricist, producer, and pop conceptualist. The jump cuts on “Some Velvet Morning” are fairly well-known, but can still knock a listener off balance, while “Arkansas Coal (Suite)” is more cinematic and certainly more ambitious, as Sinatra sings in the voice of a woman whose life is made and then broken by the coal mines. More generally, her voice seems to invite oddball arrangement ideas, such as the backwards guitar solo on “Sand” or the solo kickdrum on “Lightning’s Girl,” which rumbles like an idling motorcycle. It’s fun listening to her navigate these unexpected flourishes, as though she is responding to the music and the music to her.
One of the best moments on Start Walkin’—and certainly one I’ve returned to repeatedly—is a small, tossed-off line on “Friday’s Child.” The song, a hit in 1967, is about an individual abandoned by society, an outcast born with no blessings, only burdens. It seems to suggest some allegory, but Hazlewood’s lyrics can be vague. Still, Sinatra invests the song with the weight of experience and empathy, culminating in the line, “Friday’s child… whom they’ll forget to bury!” She spits the line, almost choking on her disgust. It’s the rare moment when Sinatra’s composure threatens to crack. But it never does, at least not on Start Walkin’, not even when she bursts into sobs at the end of her melodramatic reading of Dolly Parton’s “Down from Dover.”
It’s unfortunate that this retrospective concludes with “(L’été Indien) Indian Summer,” from 1976. Hazlewood takes lead, reciting in his stentorian baritone verses about an old lover and a beach and the moon, and Sinatra is reduced to singing wordlessly in the background—window dressing for his reminiscence. True, this was her final single before she retired to raise her daughters, but Start Walkin’ plays loose enough with the tracklist chronology. It has the perhaps unintended effect of leaving her career open-ended, as though she still hasn’t escaped the shadow of the men in her life. Everything up to that point proves otherwise.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Australian producer's latest project creates a sense of spaciousness, tracing the almost forgotten flutters and rushes of a good night out.

Logic1000: You've Got the Whole Night to Go EP

You've Got the Whole Night to Go EP

Logic1000 debuted in 2018 with an undoubtedly excellent self-titled EP, packed with tracks that tip between techno, IDM, and garage. The record put her firmly on the map as a producer to watch, and dance heavyweights—most notably Four Tet—championed Logic1000 consistently. But while the EP was a strong introduction to Logic1000 as an artist, she herself has admitted that the production was scattered.
Recently, Logic1000 has been curating her own musical identity through remixes; her work for Låpsley, Christine and the Queens, and Caribou has allowed her to find a throughline in her own sound through the additions of her signature clean garage beats and hook-bolstering harmonies. These act as a strong introduction to her latest EP You’ve Got the Whole Night to Go and give a taste of Logic1000 as a producer with a keen ear for melding the underground with pop-worthy hooks. Though just four songs, it shows Logic1000 flexing her stamina and spinning ideas more consistently across the EP.
Central to the feel of You’ve Got the Whole Night to Go is a sense of expansiveness throughout, from the wafting trance drones and the vocal samples fed back and forth through a tape machine on “Like My Way” to the airy, echoing melody and bouncing bassline of “Medium” that sound as though they’re reverberating around an empty dance floor. This spaciousness unites each track in spite of the EP’s varying genre aspirations—“I Won’t Forget” gives lighthearted house; and “Medium” is eclectic and glitchy, whereas “Her” ends the EP on a downright dirty, sweaty, techno note. It all grants Logic1000’s productions a touch of something bigger that stretches outward and upward, hinting at her ability to reach beyond the underground to break into a wider consciousness.
You’ve Got the Whole Night to Go also works as a concept album, tracing the almost forgotten flutters and rushes of a good night out. “Like My Way” functions as a pregame track, the light trance paired with sharp hi-hats and a cheeky ascending bassline echoing the heady mixture of vague excitement and nerves. The way the muffled melody of “I Won’t Forget” gradually becomes clearer is reminiscent of the sudden clarity of music that hits when the club doors fling open. A strained vocal sample cuts through with “I won’t forget,” but the rest of the sentence is lost in the first muffled voice, as though the remembering is more important than the thing remembered. The immersive hard techno of closing track “Her” recalls that exact moment halfway through the night when you feel you could continue full-throttle forever. It seems cruel that a release that speaks so potently to the club experience probably won’t be played in its proper setting for a while, but for the moment, it’s a necessary simulation of it.

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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit an overlooked 1995 record from the experimental New Zealand guitarist, a psychedelic invocation of drone, noise, and the spiritual beyond.

Temple IV

It’s a common misconception that the cult New Zealand indie label Flying Nun launched with the Clean’s 1981 single “Tally Ho!.” The Dunedin band’s debut would make sense as a shot across the bow: a jaunty, bratty organ choogle declaring “yesterday’s another day” to shake off the gray drudgery of the nation’s ’70s—of rugby, racing, and pubs teeming with cover bands. In fact, FN001 was that year’s “Ambivalence” by Christchurch trio the Pin Group, a flinty post-punk rumble about two would-be lovers each baffled by the other’s inscrutability.
Unlike the Clean, the Pin Group would have made terrible ambassadors for Flying Nun, their attitude fairly summed up by the title of that first single. They refused to be photographed and struggled to convey their sound in the recording studio, even going so far as attempting to prevent copies of “Ambivalence” from getting to local reviewers, and apologizing for their sonic limitations in the sleeve to the follow-up single. By the time they released their third and final 7", “Go to Town,” their mercurial frontman and guitarist Roy Montgomery had left to go traveling. He didn’t hear the finished product until Flying Nun sent a copy to England, where Montgomery, then in his early 20s, had sent himself on an “anti-sabbatical” to see in the flesh the acts he had only previously read about in expensively imported copies of NME.
Today, we’re in the midst of a gentle Roy-naissance: Grouper has long led the charge, citing him as a key influence and releasing splits and reissues on her label. Dry Cleaning guitarist Tom Dowse cited his playing as an inspiration on the London band’s second album, and they invited him to open for them in New Zealand. He appears on harpist Mary Lattimore’s new album and is working on a collaboration with London songwriter Martha Skye Murphy. In March, his masterpiece, 1996’s Temple IV, is getting its first vinyl pressing. It was one of two solo albums recorded simultaneously and released in quick succession that would establish the wordless, pummeling thicket of sound that would become the Montgomery trademark.
Back in the early ’80s, Montgomery was still trying to work out his “relationship with the ‘rock’ medium,” as he would later tell the Wire. His disaffected baritone had earned him sufficient comparisons to Ian Curtis that someone graffitied the words “ROY DIVISION” on the front of the EMI record shop where he worked, a jibe he found both funny (it lives on as his Instagram handle) and fair comment. On that trip to the UK in 1982, he became comrades with the Cure (even witnessing the recording sessions for Pornography), Echo and the Bunnymen, and the Fall, who he described as “very hospitable, even when I told [Mark E. Smith] that his favorite brew tasted like used sump oil from a Morris Minor.”
From his year in England, Montgomery concluded that no one other than the Cure was making ends meet as a musician: “Any faint notions of a viable rock’n’roll lifestyle were quickly extinguished.” He returned to New Zealand and released just one single under the name the Shallows in 1985, “Suzanne Said,” which showed a dronier side to his playing inspired by his burgeoning interest in film soundtracks. He took up a degree in Russian language and literature and got involved in the avant-garde theater scene as a practitioner, soundtracker, and critic. One might discern something about Montgomery’s outlook at the time from his droll review of a 1989 production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit: “Existentialism can be fun!”
In the early ’90s, he was cajoled into adding his gauzy guitar textures to the experimental band Dadamah, who released one great album and played live just three times or so before breaking up—perhaps owing to Montgomery’s dislike of live sound; perhaps too because his partner, Jo, died that year. He set off on the road again. “I felt I owed it to her to travel and deal with what had happened,” he later told The Guardian. He went to the Guatemalan rainforest and broke into the ancient Mesoamerican pyramid Tikal Temple IV to stay overnight and undertake a focused personal trial. “I wasn’t in advance convinced that I had to go there to make an album…it was more about getting there and sitting still for a little while,” he said. “And if that’s all it was, a moment, pure spirit, that would have been enough.”
But Montgomery made the moment last, turning his long night at the temple into a towering record of what it is to live and commune with grief. At the turn of 1995, in an empty apartment at 324 East 13th St in New York, equipped with a four-track recorder, some effects boxes, and an old department-store guitar, he recorded those defining first two solo albums: Scenes From the South Island looked back towards home, while Temple IV was his attempt to reinhabit his relationship with Jo. Like its monumental namesake, the latter remains grounded in the material world while reaching for a realm beyond it as Montgomery tills this unmapped kingdom of loss in steady, melancholy strums. At times, he plays as if he were feverishly trying to reach someone, or create the spark that might resuscitate a memory into a presence. Storms and static strafe his scenes, but the deep furrow plowed by his guiding hand remains consistent. The music demands the intimate focus and willing adjustment of witnessing Rothko’s “Black on Maroon” works in low light.
Temple IV’s experimental nature was not driven by wilful boundary-pushing, à la avant-guitar forebears like Glenn Branca or Rhys Chatham, but by circumstance. The four-track enforced a minimalist approach, and Montgomery used a cheap Teisco guitar with four pick-ups: ostensibly a feature, but in practice a bug, creating an excess of electrical interference. The Japanese knock-off was a workhorse for blues musicians who couldn’t afford fancier guitars, whose ability to wring beauty from such simple means was an inspiration to Montgomery. (He overdubbed some Moog synthesizer later.) He also professed his own limitations as a musician who could neither read music nor play especially complicated chords or melodies, who claimed no awareness of any world musics, like Indian raga, whose influence one might discern in his undulating hum: “I could play barre chords and, sometimes, leaving a string open by mistake created a droning aspect I liked,” he said. “I fumbled my way to that sound.”
Yet the results are pristine in their way, the four tracks of guitar often so distinct that each can seem to take on the character of a different element. The contemplative opener “She Waits on Temple IV” is a 12-minute burble of tributaries braiding into a single seam, fizzes of static and feedback glinting like silver in the silt. One guitar line is recorded close and bright; others bleed to fill the frame and then recede; the most distant seems to evanesce at the limit of the horizon, lending this patient composition a sense of infinite hope—only for the clenched static of “Departing the Body” to quickly annihilate that peace. The dramatic arc of Temple IV suggests both the conflicting stages of grief and the Mayan belief that death parts the soul from its physical form, with song titles that reference the religion’s symbols and ideas. It’s a work of fraught transmutation: body into spirit, loss into some manner of acceptance, pain into self-expression.
Miraculously, on Temple IV, both body and spirit prevail. The music is as intensely physical as it is seemingly divine, as thrilling in its viscera as it is sensitive to the disembodying feeling of grief and the unexpected flashes of reanimation in its wake. “Departing the Body” attempts to depict the separation of flesh from spirit as heavenly, its initial billowing drone washed in a benevolent glow as peaceful as any depicted in children’s images of the afterlife. But then violence sets in, with static that whirrs like a tornado tail scarring the ground and coils of feedback piercing the squall. The comparatively brief, anxious jangle of “The Soul Quietens” suggests the soul does anything but. “The Passage of Forms” approaches a formless high, Montgomery’s insistent strum melting into the ether. Rather than Montgomery’s avowed “fumbling,” these tactile evocations suggest a direct line from his gut to his guitar.
In grief, we look for signs and symbols, and often find them in nature. For Montgomery, the Mayan deities of jaguars and snakes connected to this music in a way “that I hoped wouldn’t be seen as just tourism,” he said. In Mayan culture, the jaguar was able to cross between the two worlds of day and night, but given its ease in the latter was regarded as a member of the underworld. The snake carried celestial bodies across the heavens, and with the shedding of its skin became a symbol of rebirth and renewal. Montgomery has these beings embody the bereaved’s conflict between hope and defeat in Temple IV’s most fearsome moment. “Jaguar Meets Snake” is eight minutes of white-knuckle feedback that seems to shear flesh from bone. Something about its gnashing intensity evokes the crunch point of irreconcilable pain, where nails dug furiously in palms offer a poor substitute for absolution. But the closer you listen, the more tenderness emerges: The wooly thrum below the noise suggests a safety net, one that allows the feedback to begin to jump and lurch with zip-wire glee, finding playfulness and freedom. In its most piercing blasts, there is the euphoria of being able to feel again after a long dull spell.
Even after that rebirth, Montgomery is not done with epics: The near 15-minute “Above the Canopy” is the longest but simplest song, a dense, insistent strum that seems to ring with good news, quietly triumphal and undisturbed by more than a whisper of static. The shortest, closer “Jaguar Unseen,” is almost groovy in its looseness, slipping from the scene in a swift fade-out: no grand climax or evolution. The wispy, mellowed guitars are as in sync as they were on “She Waits on Temple IV,” suggesting a cycle: another inevitable ascent up the mountain to come, and a calm readiness with which to approach it.
Decades later—after sporadic flurries of music in between completing a Ph.D., lecturing, and working as a volunteer firefighter after the 2011 New Zealand earthquakes—Montgomery would say that it was often intense life experiences, and particularly grief, that brought him back to music after long periods of inactivity. “Critical mass is reached when I’m thinking about doing a piece that acknowledges someone’s life,” he said. The Shallows’ “Suzanne Said” had memorialized Suzanne Irvine, a key figure from the Christchurch scene. In 2016, four decades after the Pin Group’s “Ambivalence,” Montgomery released four albums, collected under the title R M H Q: Headquarters, which hymned the likes of Sam Shepard and Popol Vuh’s Florian Fricke, evoked the death and destruction wrought by those earthquakes, and acknowledged the cancer that his partner and mother to their two children Kerry McCarthy had been diagnosed with in 2014. She died in 2021. The couple had been together 20 years, and Montgomery made 2022’s Camera Melancholia in the immediate aftermath: “I needed to respond while things were still raw rather than wait years, which is what happened when my partner Jo died in 1992,” he said.
In a recent post on Instagram, Montgomery shared a cocksure image of himself staring down the lens from early 1995, having just finished recording Scenes From the South Island and Temple IV in New York. “I may look self-satisfied but the Olympus OM-1 is on self-timer and they were hard, lonely yards,” he captioned it. He paid tribute to the people who pulled him through, among them the Clean’s Hamish Kilgour, who died in late 2022. “I am not done remembering you Hamish,” he wrote. The ornery young Montgomery may have made a terrible ambassador for any sound or scene. But in 1995, the sublime incantations of Temple IV set out his emotional and formal acuity for memorialization, and established a monolith to which listeners might make their own pilgrimage on long dark nights of the soul.


As Blessed Initiative, experimental producer and sound artist Yair Elazar Glotman explores some deeply uncomfortable and unsettling spaces. But there is a strange and beautiful majesty to his work.

Blessed Initiative

Experimental producer and sound artist Yair Elazar Glotman has an unparalleled knack for wresting gold from uncomfortable sounds. With the album he released under the moniker KETEV in 2014, Glotman gutted the basic operating principles of techno. KETEV’s music is rife with vaporous rhythmic apparitions that resemble dance beats, even if you can't touch them physically. Likewise, on his 2015 album Études, released under his own name, Glotman basically threw his classical acoustic bass training out the window in favor of hacking the strings with the bow to make solemn dark ambient drones. And yet Études has a certain grace of form that even an untrained ear can readily trace back to classical music.
With the debut of his new project Blessed Initiative, he ventures into even more forbidding territory. This time, Glotman, who works in sound installations and film scores, drew mainly from foley recordings. Blessed Initiative begins with a sound that resembles a huffing car muffler, digitally chopped up to create the sensation of air being sucked out of the listening space. On an instinctual level, the listener can't help but feel a sense of suffocation—an effect that Glotman plays up by introducing gurgling and splashing sounds. And when a human voice suddenly appears and gets choked away, it’s as if we’re listening to a person drown. It's gripping, astonishing, and nearly unbearable.
“Jazz as commodity,” the album’s cleverly titled second track, deposits us in a similarly unsettling place. At first, the piece is completely devoid of rhythm or melody. We hear only a perforating sound—something like a door opening and echoing across the expanse of a parking garage. Glotman builds a beat out of multiple layers so that eventually it takes on the character of a heavy-footed creature dragging chains. “Xanax interlude (relax!)” features a stereo panorama of crunching sounds that might make Matmos shiver, bringing to mind the magnified acoustics of insects moving through soil, while “Delirium juice & taste of jewelry,” reprises the air-sucking and bubbling effects of the album's opening.
The sensations induced by these works can be profoundly unsettling. Yet, as usual, Glotman’s brand of discomfort never loses its flow and, on repeated listens, even acquires a certain majesty. The history of experimental music is littered with records that give bragging rights to anyone with the stamina to endure them. Blessed Initiative doesn’t fit that mold. Much to Glotman’s credit, there are moments where he is utterly convincing at bringing the sound-installation experience to you. His skillful placement of natural (or at least natural-seeming) reverberation casts the composer as an architect, someone who could have spent hours drawing blueprints for these tracks as much as he spent working on the KYMA software system he used to generate and manipulate some of the sounds.
Blessed Initiative would be intriguing enough based only on its visceral sense of physical space. But there’s more dimension to Glotman’s process than that. You glimpse his vision most clearly in second half of “Delirium juice & taste of jewelry”; as dozens of wind chimes clatter, Glotman frames them as if they’re doing so in an indoor space, i.e: without wind. You end up with the distinct sense of having stumbled upon something magical, an unseen force bringing these inanimate objects to life. As with the rest of the album, Glotman scoops the music of any traces of human presence, which makes you feel as if there’s no one else around to witness this strange and beautiful event. Describing it is impossible, and no one will believe you, but you know you were lucky to experience something special—much like this album as a whole.


On their debut album, the UK duo nudges classic British bedroom indie toward a fuller, richer sound, while singer Nancy Andersen discovers the potential of her understated voice.

Home for Now

Babeheaven first made their name with dreamy bedroom indie pop; their early songs were like teenage confessions whispered into their pillows. After the double whammy of their Suspended Animation mixtape and Circles EP last year, vocalist Nancy Andersen and producer-instrumentalist Jamie Travis are stepping into their grown-up selves, bidding the band’s adolescence goodbye with a gentle kiss on the forehead and readying themselves for a new chapter. On Home for Now they show a more evolved sound, still interior in its focus, but far more self-assured.
They’ve included a few of their older songs, nodding to the crowd favorites that have brought them this far. “Friday Sky” is the most notable of these, with reverberant guitar chords that instantly evoke memories of a very specific brand of British bedroom indie—bubblegum, hopeful, head in the clouds. (Travis is the son of Rough Trade founder Geoff Travis; british bedroom indie is, in a sense, in the duo’s blood.) The wistful “November” strikes a balance between Andersen’s tentative vocals and a forceful drum pattern; “Jalisco” melds a kicked-back trip-hop beat with layered, echoing vocals that keep it feeling airy.
In their new songs, Babeheaven continue to play with genre, rolling it around in their hands and molding it to fit their own strain of dream pop. “Human Nature” opens on a bassy throb that signals the group’s trip-hop influences, expanding on what they started with “Jalisco”; the wobbly guitars on “Cassette Beat” sound as though they’ve been run through a tape recorder several times over, an example of Travis’ increasingly adventurous studio techniques. “Craziest Thing” is the most out-and-out indie song on the album, but touchingly so. The peppy twang of echoing guitar strings is imbued with a naive hope, in stark contrast to Andersen’s anxious lyrics (“I lie in bed, try not to think/But my head’s on the ceiling”). Sometimes mournful, sometimes pleading, Babeheaven favor a primarily minor-key palette to give voice to vulnerability in a way that’s endearing yet empowering.
Throughout Home for Now, Andersen’s voice flows with understated confidence and quiet power. She has spoken of her discomfort on stage; when she finally took singing lessons, just before the UK went into lockdown, her teacher advised her to remember to breathe. Home for Now sounds like Andersen allowing herself one long exhale and settling into her talents as a vocalist. On “In My Arms,” she indulges in subtle R&B trills and pushes so that the chorus hits with a greater intensity. The close harmonies of the all-too-brief interlude “6 Times Round” buoy the woozy drum beat. On the closing “Through the Night,” Andersen takes things at exactly her own pace, singing just off-beat enough to pull the rest of the instrumentation in line with her own rhythm, her rich voice cushioned by soft layers of synths.
Home for Now isn’t necessarily groundbreaking; there are plenty of bands working with similar fusions of indie, pop, and electronic music, but the album shows them clearly moving forward in their abilities and ambitions. What’s most exciting is hearing Andersen discovering her potential as a singer. If she was unsure of herself before, Home for Now sounds like her proof to herself that she’s doing exactly what she needs to do.

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After a relatively quiet 2015, the Bay Area legend returns to his firehose production methods, dropping another slab of new material. But there's an increasing sense that he's repeating himself.

The D-Boy Diary Books 1 & 2

E-40 only released one project in 2015—unusual by the prolific rapper's standards. After dropping nothing but double and triple albums on an annual basis since 2010, a 7-song EP felt might’ve felt scant in comparison to the tomes to which we had grown accustomed to receiving; instead, the succinctness of Poverty and Prosperity felt like fresh air rushing into a cellar that hadn’t been opened in decades. But a fundamental shift in the Bay Area legend’s approach to disseminating his music the EP was not. With The D-Boy Diary: Books 1 and 2, E-40 returns to the firehose method that over the past six years has become his default mode. Except this time around there’s an increasing sense that he’s beginning to repeat himself.
The most obvious example: “Uh Huh” is a shameless retread of E-40’s own “Choices (Yup),” the now gold-certified track from 2014’s Sharp on All 4 Corners. It uses the same call-and-response format, except it swaps out “Yup” and “Nope” for the nearly synonymous “Uh huh” and “Mm mm.” Even its beat is a simulacrum of its predecessor’s eerie slink, only less eerie and less slinky. Of course, being as inventive a rapper as he is, E-40 still manages to cram “Uh Huh” with novel swaths of wordplay: “Your paper shorter than a fake smile (Mm mm!)/My paper longer than a murder trial (Uh huh!).” It’s not the only instance of déjà vu—many of the double album’s 44 tracks feature production that recalls earlier E-40 material in broad strokes if not exact configurations: squelchy synths, block-shaped percussion, and an endless buoyancy.
Which isn’t to say that any of these beats are bad; there’s nary a dud in the entire batch, but they do feel slightly less imaginative than they have in the past. The sheer amount of music on most E-40 projects can amplify this issue—when the beats are as homogeneous as they are here, even the slightest dip in quality will produce uneventful stretches. For every “Hunedz,” whose hydraulic bounce comes courtesy of hyphy pioneer Rick Rock, there’s a “Bag on Me,” which hits all the required marks but not particularly enthusiastically, or boilerplate hyphy like “The Grit Don’t Quit.” All of E-40’s usual in-house collaborators are here: from his son Droop-E—whose three contributions are all highlights, the inside-out lurch of “Goon Music” standing tallest—to fellow Californian DecadeZ, all the producers enlisted deliver beats that range from guaranteed function-starters to merely functional.
As with most of the E-40’s gargantuan projects, the moments that fall furthest from the mean stylistically tend to be found towards the tail-end of each volume. Book 1’s “Check” is a collaboration with Zaytoven, and the Atlanta producer known best for his work with the likes of Gucci Mane and Future serves up one of his iciest tracks in recent memory, full of slow-rolling menace and verging-on-EDM wubs. “2 Seater,” from Book 2, is the most conspicuously anomalous beat on the whole project. Nard N B bring a pop sensibility to the Kid Ink-featuring love song, and E-40 brags about how for a special night out with his girl he “booked this room on Hotels.com.” The track’s low-friction glide sets it apart from the rest of the album’s bottom-heavy focus, but it suits E-40, a rapper who has always had a strong ear for beats.
It helps that even though the production sometimes leans run-of-the-mill, E-40 remains as enamored as ever with the physical act of rapping. Nowhere does he sound more energized than on “I Had It in a Drought,” a joyous back-in-the-day reminiscence that naturally doubles as a brag session. The main character of the song, however, is not E-40 himself but rather the Bay Area itself: “On Solano Avenue, I bought a clothing store/In Vallejo, California: entrepreneur/Next to Davenport, Elite Check Cashing store/Across the street from Church's Chicken, it was on/A couple of doors down, Studio Ton.” His lyrics are so hyper-specific that you can find the actual street view using Google Maps. And on an album where his rubber-ball cadence belies his age (49!), it’s no surprise that he sounds most youthful rapping about his second favorite topic (after E-40): his hometown.
Straight thoughts delivered with zig-zagging technique: this has always been E-40’s formula. It sounds simple; in reality, it’s anything but. His rapping style—all over the beat without being bucked off, simultaneously pushing and pulling in all directions—is one that few if any try to approximate at all, let alone lift wholesale. It’s so inextricably linked with him that it would sound alien coming from anyone else. And the rub is he makes it sound as natural as breathing. “I’m a master of reality/Rap about good times and casualties” he raps on “Blessed By the Game.” There’s always been an underlying current of civic duty in his music, an unquenchable need to document the events around him for the benefit of future generations—and this one, too. The D-Boy Diary is just further proof that as long as he’s alive, E-40 won’t stop.


Despite her new-age leanings, the Milan musician refuses to let her music fade into the wallpaper. With a playful, enveloping touch, she makes the most of the genre’s whimsical possibilities.

Eurybia

About 15 seconds into track two of Francesca Heart’s new album, the Milan artist’s veil of dizzying synths is pierced by what sounds like a dolphin’s chirp. Before you can process what’s happening, a noise appears like magic cartoon bubbles rising and bursting in midair, casting off their translucent spray in the process. It’s a glittering jumble of sounds as absurd as it is delightful. This moment feels like a microcosm of Eurybia: Where recent new-age music has often trended toward tones so soft and airy that they barely rise above the hum of background listening, Heart refuses to let her work fade into the wallpaper. Instead, she conjures vivid vistas with her sparkling palette, diving headfirst into the more whimsical side of new age with a playful, enveloping touch.
Compared to the current wave of ambient artists channeling the delicate environmental music of Japanese composers like Hiroshi Yoshimura and Takashi Kokubo, Heart’s music pulls from the quirkier end of the pool. Like older weirdo relics such as Andreas Vollenweider’s Down to the Moon and more recent left-field classics like Spencer Clark’s The Spectacle of Light Abductions, Eurybia isn’t made for taking candle-lit baths so much as it is for experiencing dazzling, hallucinogenic visions. Synths flicker like fireflies waltzing in the dark, while Heart’s voice refracts against itself in hard-panning echoes, at once inviting and disorienting. The sounds may be silky smooth, but in Heart’s hands they’re also exhilarating—a constantly unfurling tide of melodies spilling out in all directions at once while feeling eternally, peacefully still.
Eurybia takes its name from the Greek goddess of the sea, and in keeping with the theme, the album creates a lush world with the radiant colors of a coral reef. On the title track, Heart and fellow Italian hypnagogic guru Polonius gently layer swaying marimba lines until an iridescent drone streams through, like sunlight glistening beneath the waves. “L’Inno delle Oceanine alla Bellezza e alla Fortuna” is even more stripped down, revolving entirely around a bewildering mallet arpeggio whose spiraling notes contract and expand at will, dancing as nimbly as krill caught in an underwater whirlpool. Tracks like these might seem simple if they weren’t so texturally rich with ear-tickling detail; “A’Marina” verges on musical ASMR, with Heart coating the song in resplendent water droplets that shimmer psychedelically.
Heart’s greatest strength is her ability to imbue this ostensibly relaxing music with a rejuvenating jolt of energy; her more sedate tracks are less impactful. “Stella Rugiada” is calming, but at seven and a half minutes, it fails to go places that weren’t covered long ago by the likes of Michael Stearns. Likewise, the closing “Argentosfere” rests too heavily on its basic three-note synth arpeggio for the entirety of its runtime, turning up no new depths as it progresses. But outside of these moments, Eurybia is frequently bewitching, a reminder of how wondrous new-age music can be when powered by both curiosity and complexity. Rather than simply trodding down the path taken by seers before her, the composer charts her own way, playing with the tropes of classic new age to unlock ornate, heavenly new dimensions. In honing her craft, Heart earns her crystals.


Pete Kember follows up his first album under the Sonic Boom moniker in 30 years with a remixed version that stands as its own discrete work, as impassioned and cohesive as the original.

Sonic Boom: Almost Nothing Is Nearly Enough

Almost Nothing Is Nearly Enough

Hackneyed as it may sound, you can learn a lot by taking the right drugs at the right time. You can also learn a lot by quitting drugs, but the emotional and physical lessons of substance experimentation aren’t to be sneered at. Few musicians have been as outspoken on this topic as Peter Kember, who calls taking DMT a “sacrament” and whose first band, Spacemen 3, were unparalleled in their desire to mimetically reproduce the experience of tripping on record. Their Möbius strip of a motto, “Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to,” rendered both activities equal, cause and effect crossfading into an endless bender. And while their output, aside from the single “Big City (Everyone I Know Can Be Found Here),” was hardly danceable, they embodied a late ’80s shift in their native England when rock music became gentler and less aggressive thanks in part to the rise of rave culture and ecstasy. The fans mellowed out, as well.“They were hugging, not fighting,” Kember said on the C86 podcast earlier this year, laughing, “and it was a big improvement. People stopped chasing me.”
Always a raver by association alone, Kember changed his tune in 2020 with All Things Being Equal, the first album in 30 years he released under his Sonic Boom moniker. Electronic and undulating, if not exactly booty-shaking, All Things suggested Suicide if they moved to Ibiza and sang about love and environmentalism. Sonic Boom’s new album-length remix of its predecessor, Almost Nothing Is Nearly Enough, locates him more firmly in Britain’s so-called Second Summer of Love. Surprisingly, Almost Nothing isn’t an afterthought, but rather a companion vision, as cohesive and impassioned as its source material.
Kember has a fraught relationship with remixes. He doesn’t enlist other producers to rework his tracks, and dislikes the cross-genre treatments that have become ubiquitous in the past couple of decades. Yet he approaches his own work like a remixer: he winnowed down an excellent mix of Spacemen 3’s masterpiece The Perfect Prescription simply because he and his bandmates determined that the songs were too difficult to play live. Reflecting this same logic—that records can be simplified without losing the qualities that make them great—Almost Nothing is Nearly Enough scoops out its precursor’s blissful core and presents it to us as a discrete artwork.
The scenery here is sunnier, the beats more propulsive. The introspective spoken word pieces are gone, and even on the title track, lyrics about “floods” and “fire” are elevated by sky-bound synths. The ceaseless optimism of Kember’s drones and the delightful languor of his vocals evoke his friend and frequent collaborator Panda Bear, which only adds to the tone of positivity. Cutting his last album down to its throbbing pulse, Kember captures the spirit of the rave—if not its sound.
He does employ some time-tested moves. Songs that were originally shorter, like “Just Imagine,” stretch out past the 11-minute mark. ”Tawkin Techno” lives up to its name with more four-on-the-floor pummel, and throughout the album, Kember loops stems, filters drums, and begins songs with nearly a capella vocals. The project is nonetheless suffused with his auteurist sensibility, its 51 minutes chock full of signature Kember mantras. “Take me somewhere a lil’ bit deeper /Take me somewhere a lil’ bit sweeter,” he sings on one track, and later, “Make it about, the way that you live /Make it about, the love that you give.” His new motto, it seems, is “Making music to become a better person to make music to become a better person.” The key is change, whether of your consciousness, mixes, life, or all three: Past and present selves can coexist as easily as records on a shelf.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The co-founder of seminal kosmische bands Cluster and Harmonia, Roedelius has two of his records reissued just as their sound is enjoying a comeback.

Roedelius: Selbstportrait / Selbstportrait II

Selbstportrait / Selbstportrait II

Digital technology provides modern electronic producers with superhuman control over countless hyper-real sounds. In the analog 1970s, Hans-Joachim Roedelius made do with the merely real, coaxing miles of variation from his Farfisa's limited selection of timbres, which all tended to be shrill and watery. He recorded the material that would be released in a long series of Selbstportraits whenever he wasn't busy helping to define Krautrock and ambient music as a co-founder of seminal kosmische bands Cluster and Harmonia. His augustly hyphenated name makes him sound like a severe German classical composer, but he brought a playfully jazzy sensibility to these solitary miniatures, improvisations, and moods. Amid Brian Eno's stillness and Kraftwerk's speed and light, Roedelius found a middle way between the void and the Autobahn. His Selbstportraits are dreamy, introspective cruises, rising and falling as if over looping country lanes.
Recorded over old tape at low speed, in mono, on a Revox reel-to-reel, these albums sound really dated. That's why this happens to be an ideal moment to re-release the first two, as their datedness-- they were originally issued on Sky Records in 1979 and 1980-- feels quite contemporary, thanks to the modern resurgence of Roedelius' style of gently propulsive, floridly minimalist keyboard music. You hear it everywhere in recent years, from Oneohtrix Point Never and Arp to Ducktails and Nite Jewel, burbling in woolly analog atmospheres. It seems that when modern musicians aspire to something back-to-basics with electronic music, it's Roedelius' durable easy-listening/new-age aesthetic they're after. Selbstportrait I and II are similar in style and quality, and casual fans may need only one in their lives. II has a couple of the best individual tracks, and contains added material. I is stronger overall, or at least feels that way because it came first, introducing the palette and ideas Roedelius continues to explore on II.
The formula is deceptively simple. There are usually two or three distinct voices, one of which will be an ostinato-- the coursing piano of "In Liebe Dein", or the thrumming bass clusters of "Fabelwein"-- while the others modulate thematic material around it in windy, twisting lines. Sometimes, the ostinato is left out in favor of sheer thematic exploration, as on "Inselmoos", where Roedelius manipulates a sticky harpsichord-like motif through major, minor, and hints of chromatic modes. The music is usually solidly tonal, eschewing dissonance to create a sense of everlasting flow. Roedelius preferred gambits of harmony and counterpoint-- one of his favorites is to let a clump of established intervals suddenly unclench and go wheeling across an octave or more. It's not that the music isn't brainy: The carefully patterned pitches, timbres, and durations of "Girlande", for instance, suggest a lot of forethought. But it doesn't make a big deal about its braininess. Each track is intent on clearly illuminating a musical notion. The groovy low-frequency bagatelle "Signal" seems to preemptively summarize Boards of Canada in less than 12 seconds.
The Selbstportraits can be monotonous; monotony is part of their charm. Roedelius' versatility with limited resources imbues the music with what can only be described as a deep humanity-- a mandatory thoughtfulness. "Prinzregent" has a remotely Asian cast, while "Herold" gestures at funk. "Halmharfe" has a Nordic dolefulness, and "Arcona" has a breezy Latin feel. "Aufbruch", a standout track from II, introduces the pointillistic arpeggios of techno into the matrix. But it's all so blended into Roedelius' almost-subliminal style that a cursory listen makes the albums sound monolithic, like one undifferentiated electronic pulse. You have to slow down and attune to both the pace and the narrow palette of Roedelius' world, and then the little differences seem huge. That, all in all, is the magic of this music-- it inspires the familiar nostalgia of having more appreciation for fewer options.


For Pet Shop Boys' first decade, they were impostors so studious and inspired that they were better than the real thing. Now they've settled into being elder statesmen of pop at a time when pop has little use for elder statesmen, and they're off-puttingly bitter about it.

Elysium

When the Pet Shop Boys made their appearance at the closing ceremonies for this year's Olympics, they were as marvelous as they've ever been, in their spectacle-that-punctures-the-spectacle way: a reliable part of the English firmament, like a more tuneful Gilbert & George in better outfits. They were trotting out a truncated bit of "West End Girls", now 28 years old, whilst on the cusp of releasing their eleventh studio album, Elysium. The videos for new songs "Invisible" and "Winner", are elegantly conceived and executed, and so is the packaging associated with the record and its singles. They have all the design sensibility anyone could want in a pop act. If only they'd put the same vigor and power into their new songs, they might be on to something.
As always, the Pet Shop Boys' latest studio LP has a resonant single-word title. "Elysium" is a reference to Elysian Park, near where they recorded the album in Los Angeles, but it's also a high-class sort of word for paradise, in the specific sense of the afterworld of the blessed. The implication is that, somewhere in there, Pet Shop Boys slipped into the great beyond, and Neil Tennant is now singing to us from the other side. But Tennant and Chris Lowe's relationship to pop and its audience has changed over time, and not in a loss-and-beatification way. For Pet Shop Boys' first decade or so, they were impostors so studious and inspired that they were better than the real thing. Now they've settled into being elder statesmen of pop at a time when pop has little use for elder statesmen, and they're off-puttingly bitter about it.
Their self-consciousness is overtly the subject of Elysium's two worst songs: "Your Early Stuff", whose title gives away its only good joke, and "Ego Music", a slapdown of fake-humble stars ("There's a real purity to my work, a childish innocence...") that's a diluted variation on the theme of 1993's "Shameless". And it keeps coming up in Tennant's lyrics, one way or another. "It's queer how gradually I've become invisible," he croons: That's most obviously a commentary on being a gay man in his 50s, but it's hard to miss the suggestion that he's talking about his position on the charts.
Lowe has suggested that he'd have preferred there to be "no fast songs at all" on this record, and the quietest songs on Elysium are generally the best, especially the heart-on-sleeve "Memory of the Future". (There's one full-on dance track here, "A Face Like That", whose fake-orchestral stabs and strobing single-note synth bass make it sound like an outtake from the Actually era, but its melody is instantly forgettable.) Tennant's mature gift as a lyricist is for sentimentality tempered by slyness, and he pulls that off a few times: "Ossie's last collection/ Biba's closing sale/ A little more rouge on powdered cheeks/ But the base is pale," he sings in "Requiem in Denim and Leopardskin", an elegant tribute to the late makeup artist Lynne Easton that's also a tender remembrance of the London of Pet Shop Boys' prehistory. (It's no "Being Boring", but one can only write "Being Boring" once.)
Too much of Elysium, though, misplaces its subtlety. There's no suggestion that "Hold On"--adapted from a piece by George Frideric Handel-- is anything more than a vaguely inspirational lighter-waver, for instance, and the arrangement's alternating male and female choirs are corn syrup poured on cotton candy. Is there some covert archness to it, some enormous conical hat peeking out from behind its bromides and bombast? Or does Tennant and Lowe's vision of paradise really consist of unpunctured spectacle?


On her first full-length release since her viral breakout, the rapper-singer and songwriter proves that her real gift is her versatility.

Hot Pink

Doja Cat can’t be boxed in. A little over a year after her kooky viral hit “Mooo!,” the 24-year-old rapper-singer and songwriter is still full of personality and endless wordplay. On Hot Pink, her second album and her first full-length since achieving viral fame, Doja cements her voice as the most crucial part of her sound. Depending on the track, her tone can be ultra-soft and chill or peppy, almost frantic as she fires off verses. But it’s her sarcasm and cheek that cut a more dynamic figure in pop music. “PLEASE DO NOT BUY MY ALBUM IF YOU BUY MY ALBUM I WILL PEE IN YOUR LAP,” she wrote alongside a video of her dancing to celebrate the release. She’s in her bag, giving us her kinky, soulful, pop queen, and not-to-be-fucked with sides all at once.
Hot Pink runs the gamut of a sound that’s still taking shape. Doja’s equally capable as a rapper and a singer, but it’s her understanding of melody that makes the project flow. On “Like That,” featuring Gucci Mane, Doja weaves easily from rap mode into a whispery chorus with an upbeat R&B groove reminiscent of early-2000s Janet Jackson. It’s the perfect soundtrack for a backyard party. “Rules” captures a more serious—though hardly humorless—mood, pairing eerie old-western bass with Doja’s memorable command: “Play with my pussy, but don’t play with my emotions.” (Both songs were co-written with Dr. Luke; Doja Cat is signed to his imprint Kemosabe.)
Other songs, like bubbly opener “Cyber Sex” and the Blink-182-sampling “Bottom Bitch,” explore Doja’s potential as a pop star. Their imaginative videos cast her as a playfully raunchy android or a rebellious, milkshake-throwing skate punk, attention-grabbing themes designed to illustrate distinct musical aesthetics. To some, tracks like these could seem ultra-commercial, but Doja’s earned the right to flex her duality. Her pop songs complement her more intimate music without diluting it.
Throughout the rest of the LP, Doja leans into her softness. The dreamy soprano she introduced on 2014’s Purrr! EP cradles the ear like a fluffy pink pillow. It’s when Doja slows down or lightens her bars with her silky rasp that she sounds the clearest. “Shine” dazzles with spurts of tasteful Auto-Tune as she brags about her jewels and her pearly whites in an enchanting blend of rap and breathy lullaby: “What’s that drippin’? No, baby, I’m not cryin’/Baby, that’s my diamonds, everything so vibrant.” It’s not hard to picture her recording a ballad like “Streets” from within an all-pink lair. She’s even more serene on the penultimate “Better Than Me”: Surrounded by slinky, psychedelic guitar, her voice is soothing and slightly coy as she sings to a man who needs a reminder that there’s no one above her. “The best pussy/Comes from wifey,” she coos, elongating every word so he’s sure to hang on. It’s a Doja love song: a tinge of heartache and vulnerability with more than enough confidence to drown out the sadness.
Doja’s versatility is a gift, but as varied as the album is, Hot Pink doesn’t feel scattered or semi-rushed like her debut Amala. And though there are moments where a new tone or inflection runs the risk that Doja might be mistaken for someone else, the album’s anchor in her R&B and soul background creates a tender space for her to stack and reveal her layers. Hot Pink doesn’t demand that Doja figure out the totality of her sound right now. It’s a continuous process and her recipe for success is to honor it.


On his first release in five years and his major-label debut, Pat Grossi offers his cinematic anthems as a sort of spiritual balm.

In Another Life

On In Another Life, Active Child’s Pat Grossi offers cinematic strings, surging choral harmonies, and his dazzling harp as a kind of spiritual balm, a respite from the harsh outside world. Frequently, his new album sounds like church music (which comes as no surprise, given his roots as a choir boy). On the anthemic album closer, he urges us to “Hold your head up/Even though it’s a cruel world.” But Grossi never fully introduces the conflict or cruelty of that world into the realm of his compositions—there is no ugliness here, only affirmation, and sounds as pristine as the upholstering on the album cover.
This is the Pasadena-based musician’s first release in five years, and his major-label debut for Sony. In a note shared to Twitter, he alluded to the fact that this release had been “with me for too long really”; he also mentions that he began composing it after the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015. These attacks were perhaps the impetus for the soothing, sympathetic offerings on In Another Life like “Cruel World,” and “Brighter Day,” though Grossi also cites death and the birth of his daughter as songwriting inspirations. The loosely circling themes feel almost irrelevant; the textures are what’s most striking.
Grossi has largely ditched the soft-rock sheen of his 2015 album Mercy, returning to full-bodied strings and choral chamber-pop dotted with electronic flourishes. When he’s in this mode, Active Child sounds glorious. But perhaps even more impactful than the grandiose moments are the lower, more somber offerings. “Spirit Buoy” is a showcase for his delicate double-tracked vocal and harp, while he delivers a horror movie-worthy distorted vocal in his trembling higher register on “Color Me,” the record’s only thrillingly discordant moment. On lead single “Weightless,” the percussive hand claps resound viscerally in your eardrums and the dam-bursting strings lead to a dramatic payoff that feels earned.
Elsewhere, Grossi creates moments of bombast that fall flat because of the platitudes at their center. “Weightless” is followed by “Brighter Day,” a dusky track that urges its listeners to “Love one another/Help your brother/Lean on each other.” These cliches are met with no tension; as with the sunny “keep your head up” hook on “Cruel World,” they shimmer earnestly over a bed of powerful drums and Hollywood strings, offering nothing but uplift for uplift’s sake.
Grossi often hints at shadows in his lyrics, but shies away from looking directly at the objects casting these shadows. On “In Another Life,” he sings that we’re surrounded by “something bigger”; on “Cruel World,” he dedicates himself to “something richer,” but in both instances he swerves away from specificity. There’s a hollowness to this worship, though Grossi plugs the gap with distractingly beautiful arrangements. It is an unmistakably lovely record, which is occasionally stifled by its own loveliness.


Leonard Cohen's 14th studio album feels like a pristine, piously crafted last testament, the informed conclusion of a lifetime of inquiry.

You Want It Darker

Leonard Cohen has been bidding his farewell for decades, since before we ever met him. In 1966, he opened Beautiful Losers—his mystical, lysergic, gleefully obscene second novel—with the sunset plea, “Can I love you in my own way? I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.” He was just 32 then, rakish without ravaging, not yet celebrated for pairing wry, elegant sacrilege to folk melodies—a year before courting “Suzanne,” 18 from raising his “Hallelujah.” But even then, he was conscious and deferential to the light waning around him.
Which is a placidity his followers don’t always share; what other 82-year-old artist could possibly acknowledge his impending mortality and alarm his fans enough to recant? After The New Yorker’s remarkable recent profile quoted him as “ready to die”—depicting a mentally dexterous, physically frail ascetic “confined to barracks” in Los Angeles, solemnly tidying his affairs—Cohen took pains to console his fans, with familiar drollness: “I’ve always been into self-dramatization. I intend to live forever.” But even as he demurs, it’s hard not to play his 14th studio album, You Want It Darker, and hear a pristine, piously crafted last testament—a courtly act of finality that extends to the title. (Notice it’s not a question; it’s a prescription.)
Cohen has always kicked up his heels in the ambiguities of love and spirituality—casting prayers to the carnal, getting off on enlightenment. And so this new darkness he offers has dimensions instead of declaratives—it feels, in turn, to lyrically reference the encroaching blackness of death, the insularity of plumbing the soul ever-deeper, a fresh fatalism toward the spinning world. “I’m leaving the table/I’m out of the game/I don’t know the people/In your picture frame,” he laments, achingly, on “Leaving the Table,” over a warm and minimal waltz. Later, he intones, “I’m traveling light/It’s au revoir/My once so bright/My fallen star” (“Traveling Light”). It’s delivered with a wink, and no more dramatically brooding than his past work, but it is inescapably morbid; every track is vivid yet still enigmatic as it conjures loss and lamentation of some variety.
This darkness also apparent in the newly fathomless boom of his baritone, which already stripped the floorboards on recent albums Old Ideas and Popular Problems. Whereas the rough edges of his younger, nasal reediness suggested chic bohemian nonchalance, now his low caroling is edged in defiance, and Darker’s production is singularly complementary to it. When he imagines, not so subtly, the stars above him losing light (“If I Didn’t Have Your Love”), his intoning dips below cherubic organs, hinting at what these enamored lyrics soon reveal—that this bright devotional is of the spiritual sort, hewing closer to his past career as a monk than as an Olympic-level ladies’ man. (The most jarring thing about Darker is how utterly devoid of lust it is.) The gracious, spare production adds to the spell—contributed by his son, Adam Cohen, who almost wholly replaces his father’s proclivities for tinny keyboards and stately, gospel-esque female harmonies in favor of violins, warm acoustic guitar, and a cantor male choir. The elder Cohen’s familiar scaffolding of flamenco-influenced guitar remains, a bridge to history.
Cohen is not a songwriter who panders; he speaks above us, sometimes quite literally to higher forms, but also to universality instead of common denominator. Topicality, to him, remains somewhere around the Romantic era. But Cohen is also keen to experiment here. He embraces spry, rootsy bluegrass strings on “Steer Your Way,” which nods back in a few directions—to his college stint in a country band, to 1971’s Songs of Love and Hate (which featured Charlie Daniels on fiddle), to brighter moments on Popular Problems. The album’s final track, for the first time, is a string reprise; it bows out “String Reprise/Treaty,” Cohen’s difficult conversation with his higher power (“I wish there was a treaty we could sign/It’s over now, the water and the wine/We were broken then, but now we’re borderline”) with delicate, mournful dignity.
The album’s heart is exposed early, and plainly, in the title track. Its religious tones veer toward disdainful (“If you are the dealer/I’m out of the game/If you are the healer/I’m broken and lame”) but his oaky growl quickly becomes rapturous. Three times, as the choir drops out, he chants, “Hineni Hineni”—a Hebrew cry of devotion, the reply of a ready worshipper who hears their calling from God and is ready to act in service. Often, it’s the service in the afterlife. His is not a yelp of fervor, or excitable in any shade; the moment is his most quaking, sunken baritone delivery on the album—so deep, it would sound sinister without such compassion imbuing it. It’s the informed conclusion of a lifetime of inquiry. Hopefully, it is one holy dialogue of more still to come. But in this moment, he sounds satisfied; he has loved us in his own way, and he is ready for what awaits him next. But that doesn’t mean we are.


In the latest installment of his anthology, Glen Boothe continues dipping rap verses in warm, nostalgic loops.

WT_PRT15.

Rappers loved bootlegging Glen Boothe’s beats, so he started bootlegging their raps. That’s the lore behind the Wraptaypes anthology, which Boothe (aka Knxwledge) started back in 2011 and of which he has dropped multiple installments every subsequent year. (It’s hard to tell how many, as he likes to put decimals points in the edition number, like last summer’s part 14.8). Each one combines lo-fi a capellas of songs and freestyles ripped from dollar-bin record finds and YouTube with burly sampled loops, sometimes barely altered beyond a degradation in fidelity or a few drum clicks.
WT_PRT15., his newest, is no different, dipping vocals from Jay-Z, UGK, and Young Thug into a gluey mixture of vintage horn riffs and soul croons. Some may view the formula as tired, but there are always moments of brilliance to catch you off-guard. Just as his beats start to lull, an entrancing melody, or a punchline that’s tee’d up dazzlingly off a sample, hits you square in the heart.
That moment comes fairly early on in PRT15. Wedged in between a pair of minute-long sketches sits “UGK[TAPE],” a repurposing of UGK and OutKast’s 2007 classic “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You).” The southern MCs are parachuted in over a bed of strings, a sample that sounds like it was plucked from the score of some 1940s MGM classic. Accentuating the strings, you can still sort-of hear the soaring vocals from the a capella’s original sample, Willie Hutch’s “I Choose You.” The track is over four minutes long, doesn’t include any changes in its song structure—just like all the other beats on the tape, the loop keeps looping—and yet remains mesmerizing.
Another high point comes on “freeallmynihgas,” a sprawling freestyle from an unnamed MC that sounds captured from a cell phone. Boothe takes this verse, a roll call of loved ones locked away, and sets it to a sprightly keyboard melody, giving it a near-musical theater quality. He pulls a similar move on the opener “shotgunvision,” pinning a gritty verse referencing ski-mask robberies and trapping from the sofa against a bright synth. In these moments, Boothe is reimagining not just  songs, but moments in time, a method he’s been pursuing since his childhood in church, where he would record sermons on small cassette tapes and then chop them up on his Roland SP-303.
But not all the tracks on PRT15. justify their run times. A handful start to lose steam past the first few minutes, when the initial rush wears off. On “team [SRF],” for example, which reworks Young Thug’s So Much Fun highlight “Surf,” the bare-bones instrumental of guitar plucks and doo-wop hums is simply too sparse to keep things interesting, a bridge section stretched too far. Meanwhile, Boothe’s ghostly revision of Reasonable Doubt classic “Dead Presidents” is thrilling in its first moments, with its muffled carol choruses and croaking bass notes, but is too gooey to go four minutes without any sort of beat change or break.
This is par for the course when it comes to Wraptaypes, a series that finds Boothe hardly extending himself beyond his first strike of inspiration. It could explain why he can produce at such a prolific clip, cranking out numerous installments of other anthologies simultaneously, including an R&B vocals-based tape series and a Meek Mill-centered one. If an a capella and instrumental sound right on first alignment, he lets them take on a life of their own, leaving the door open for both imperfection and symmetry.


Rising Canadian hip-hop artist offers underground-leaning lyrics over gargantuan synth riffs and decidedly non-boom bappy beats.

Breaking Kayfabe

Ask most United Statesians what they know about Canadian hip-hop, and they'll answer with a wistful remembrance of Tom Green. Occasionally, some wiseacre will blather about his collection of Kardinal Offishal mp3s or, god forbid, his love and respect for Swollen Members, and you wish you'd never said anything in the first place. As deeply as we love Canadian indie boys and girls, rappers trying to cross the border still find it surprisingly difficult. We like our rap stars either angry, self-educated, and packing or benignly solipsistic and fashionable; the politely unarmed of Canada don't offer much beyond, for all intents and purposes, the edited version of American commercial hip-hop, and nobody wants that. This was enough to make Rollie Pemberton neglect his blog long enough to issue a grimy clarion call to Edmonton and beyond as Cadence Weapon.
It makes sense that Rollie's first proper album would be a rousing alarm. His father, Teddy Pemberton, having emigrated from Brooklyn to Edmonton, almost single-handedly introduced hip-hop to the province in 1980 through his college radio show "The Black Experience in Sound". In a 2000 interview with See Magazine-- which, like Pitchfork, later employed Rollie as music journo-- Teddy Pemberton remarked of his arrival in Edmonton, "I would see the kids walking around, and they didn't even have a clue. I decided right then and there: 'I've got to change this.'" Breaking Kayfabe is infused with the same sense of obligation, an idealist's thrust against perceived indifference. Call it Rollie's Künstlerroman, his struggle against the insouciance of a scene that his father helped birth. Sounds heavy, but Rollie pushes forward with a slap on the back, like the friend who gives you a new shirt "Not because yours looks bad." It does. Your shirt looks horrible.
Breaking Kayfabe revels in clashing the two worlds of hip-hop together, the self-awareness of Rollie's underground-leaning lyrics spilling over gargantuan synth riffs and decidedly non-boom bappy beats. Imagine a less-irritating Slug if produced by a Three 6 Mafia inspired by Sparks instead of cough syrup, and you're somewhere near Cadence Weapon's aesthetic. Rollie's electro clatters and clangs, but not at the cost of rhythm, as many of the underground's boundary testers would have you believe is necessary. Anti-Pop Consortium hinted at this kind of accessible experimentation, but then ate themselves. Cadence Weapon sees the idea through on songs like "Vicariously", a tumbler of bleeps and drones borrowed from Nintendo backed by a grinding, metallic break. "Julie Will Jump The Broom" does Books-like, but struts where they stumble. "Diamond Cutter" talks noir and treats a Rick Rubin-esque break with caustic techno-disrespect.
Throughout, Rollie makes choices that surprise: flipping a sample from video game Silent Hill into a Wild West shootout with the Canadian rap establishment; subtle references to his father's passing; admitting his contradictions and not expecting credit for doing so (ahem, Kanye). These are things most rappers don't like to bother themselves with, and much of that can probably be attributed to Rollie's background. Raised in a library of music and having already dissected his influences, Rollie takes confident first steps as Cadence Weapon. Breaking Kayfabe may not be his masterpiece, but it hints that he may be capable of one, and now you can finally get his music without having to write a check to his landlord.


Bishop Nehru debuted as DOOM's protege and signed and split with Nas' label all before age 19. Now, he stakes out his own territory on a mostly self-produced effort that blasts off for other galaxies.

Magic 19

Accepting DOOM as your mentor is a gift and a curse. There’s barely a young rapper in the world who wouldn’t want the super villain playing the Palpatine to their Darth Vader, but he hasn’t crafted one of rap’s deepest mythologies by being easy to predict. The 2014 joint album with teen protege Bishop Nehru, NehruvianDOOM, was a break for the young New Yorker, but the final product suffered from a lack of care. The regurgitated Special Herbs* *beats, slight running time and limited on-mic appearances from DOOM himself reflected his patchy interest in the project, and he’s since retreated to his hidden underground lair, plotting the next move in his malevolent masterplan. Meanwhile, Bishop, still just 19 years old, has been left exposed to the rising levels of hype surrounding him.
The union with DOOM had looked good on paper. Bishop deploys the same complex rhyme patterns as his hero, while early mixtapes saw him jack beats from DJ Premier and J Dilla, solidifying his status as a new-age guardian of the old school. After signing and splitting from Nas’ Mass Appeal label, the stakes have been raised to seemingly suffocating levels. “I hate expectations, they ruin every single thing that I think of doing,” he rapped on last year’s single “User$.” With his debut album perpetually delayed, maybe it’s all come too early for a kid not yet old enough to know what it is to step in front of a liquor store counter without sweating under the collar.
Magic 19 sees Bishop abandon the block to blast off into another galaxy. Mostly self-produced, the 11 tracks move towards a more disorienting sound, full of ethereal synths, skittering drums and lots of dead space. Bishop sounds like he’s rapping in an outer orbit, alone on board a starship made up of aluminum walls and alien technology. “Sacred Visions” is as graceful as a gravity-free float around the cosmos, while the gritty “He the Man,” built around a two-note piano riff and sledgehammer drum beat, bears down with claustrophobic intensity. Stripped back to the bare elements, the atmospheric orchestration hypnotizes.
Elsewhere, though, too many of the beats feel overcooked. Sounds rattle around each track, bumping into each other pointlessly. “Cake Up,” an out-of-place look back at Bishop’s childhood, is hampered by a grating key riff that tugs the thing earthward. The abrasive, totally unmusical collage “I Know (Angel Of My Dreams)” sounds like the young producer trying to test the outer walls of his new style.
Cut through the failed experimentation and Bishop still has skills in the booth. The nimble dexterity of his thickening voice is more impressive than ever as he relentlessly crams his bars with syllables without losing rhythm. Here he adds a creeping paranoia to his style that reflects the schizophrenic beats. Opening two tracks “Did I Find It” and “It’s Whateva” sees him brush more dirt off his shoulder than a 19-year-old ought to have. He spits venom in all directions, calling out haters, phoney rappers and tastemakers who’ve missed him “off their list like I ain’t been lyrical for half a decade.” Talk of forces actively invested in his demise sound fearful and suspicious.
While NehruvianDOOM suffered from a lack of interest from its overseer, Magic 19 could do with an experienced hand on Bishop’s shoulder to help harness his gifts. The beats are sloppy, the rapper’s voice struggles to carry a memorable hook, and too many of the song concepts, like the thin ode to his girl “You Should Know,” fail to make an impact. Bishop’s strengths are all on show, but it’s going to take a little extra to funnel them into a great project.


The alt-rock icon returns with tasteful, timeless rock arrangements on a record about friendship, sobriety, and the love she’d like to receive.

Soberish

Soberish is Liz Phair’s first album in 11 years. There is a lot riding on this one. Her 1993 debut Exile in Guyville is an enduring alt-rock touchstone. Her mid-2000s foray into radio-friendly pop? Not so much. Unlike certain other artists for whom this is true—say, Weezer—Phair largely took the 2010s off. She reissued Guyville, with an excellent box set of early bedroom recordings, and toured on it. She worked, for a while, on a song-by-song response to the Beatles’ White Album. After several women accused the record’s would-be producer of sexual abuse, Phair scrapped it. And thank God for that: Soberish is far more honest, forthright, and heartfelt than any concept album. It is a solid, sharply written record of sturdy, enjoyable songs that gradually unfold to reveal new depths of feeling.
It doesn’t sound like Guyville, not even with Guyville producer Brad Wood at the helm. It doesn’t sound like the glossy “Why Can’t I,” which is really not such a bad song. It doesn’t, mercifully, sound anything like the frenzied rap stylings of “Bollywood.” Instead, Phair opts for tasteful, timeless rock arrangements. She hones in on a few key themes: falling in love at 54, falling out of it; falling into bars, hauling herself out of them. She is refreshingly frank about her struggles with sobriety, firm and empathetic when she refers her friends to recovery. It’s like Brandy Jensen’s beloved Ask a Fuck-Up column; you trust Phair’s advice because you know she’s seen the bottom of the barrel.
The obvious highlight here is “Hey Lou.” It’s an intervention set to song, built on crisp couplets: “No one knows what to think when you’re acting like an asshole/Spilling all the drinks, talking shit about Warhol.” It barrels along at top tongue-wagging speed, Phair sounding every inch the weary mom-friend—“I’m not running a zoo here!”—until, abruptly, she lets the song fall apart. The punchy guitars and drums drop, and her voice repeats the same line, washing over itself in dense layers: “How did that work out for you? How did that work out for you?” It’s tough in the way “Divorce Song” is tough; there is tenderness and fragility in every word she sings.
Elsewhere, she’s concerned less with friendship and more with love—losing it, gaining it, looking back on it with the perspective that only 50 years of life can bring. She’s been burned, but she’s also burned others. Her priority now, it seems, is simply to move forward. She makes amends (“Good Side”), avoids old date-night haunts (“Spanish Doors”), and imagines the kind of love she’d like to receive. In the stunning, stripped-down “Lonely Street,” she sings to herself, pretending the words are her lover’s: “I’ve gotta run/I’ve been missing you, girl, like the sun.” There are no “Flower” or “Hot White Cum”-level come-ons here, but she’s still unapologetic about her sexual appetites. “We’re gonna go on up to my hotel room, make each other late,” she sings, on the sweet, gentle “Ba Ba Ba.” Her next rhyme is “I don’t have the guts to tell you that I feel great/I feel safe.”
There is much to love on this record, and only a little to skip past. The use of programmed drums and synths occasionally distracts from the substance of Phair’s lyrics, and from her unvarnished guitar. Poor mixing keeps the chorus of “Spanish Doors” from fully blasting off; the Haim-lite backing vocals come to the fore, and Phair’s leading melody is nearly inaudible. “Dosage” is a tad too shiny for its dark subject material, and “Soul Sucker” collapses under the weight of its experimental concept. I caught myself cringing, too, at the overtly sexual opening of “Bad Kitty,” before Phair herself chastised me in the chorus: “I don’t live in a world that appreciates me.”
In her 2020 Netflix documentary, Taylor Swift fretted about the prospect of turning 30. “Women in entertainment are discarded in an elephant graveyard by the time they’re 35,” she said. “As I’m reaching 30, I’m like, I want to work really hard while society is still tolerating me being successful.” Swift may well have learned this fear by watching the arc of Phair’s career. The girl who made Guyville is preserved in amber; the woman who made Liz Phair became a punchline. Soberish succeeds largely because Phair is no longer asking for tolerance. She is simply, fully, being herself.

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Erika M. Anderson’s third solo album is a surreal and powerful story about political alienation. Her character-driven songs of noise, folk, and pop music thrum with rage and fear.

Exile in the Outer Ring

Red State, the first and only album by Erika M. Anderson’s late-2000s noise-folk trio, Gowns, opens with a bleak but hopeful spoken-word tableau. Over morbid drones, Anderson describes a soldier’s bedroom in Fargo, N.D., “with an American flag draped over a basement window.” She listlessly names the various drugs consumed one summer in that subterranean chamber. Titled “Fargo,” the brief track ends with an image of secular transcendence. Echoed by what sounds like a heavenly chorus of junkies, Anderson recalls that “the light shining in through the window was golden/And the days stretched out as far as the horizon/And you could see the dust flow like sparkles in the air.”
A decade later, Red-state rhetoric feels more suffocating than ever, Anderson is now the solo artist EMA, and her new album, Exile in the Outer Ring, ends with a similar scene. Her voice emerges from a mist of feedback as she recounts an escape attempt: “I ran away/To the darkest place that I could find:/A basement in the Outer Ring/It was an interior that was familiar to me/ The smoke, the blinds/Sometimes sunlight coming in/And sometimes street lamps/Brighter now than they used to be/Casting lines on beige carpeting.” This time, there’s no redemption to be found. Darkness pervades the squalid room, even with the lights on. “It seems to be closing in from around the edges,” Anderson whispers, “but it’s possible that it’s coming from inside you.”
Contrast these two views of American alienation: If the former is a vérité-style documentary on life in Anderson’s native Dakotas during George W. Bush’s hawkish, theocratic presidency, then the latter is a horror movie that captures the darkly surreal mood of the Trump era. Fargo is an actual city. The Outer Ring is an imagined territory that may substantially overlap with certain segments of the U.S. electorate, where broken dreams and desperation metastasize into a B-movie monster of uncontrollable rage.
Anderson has said that she finished writing Exile before the end of last year’s presidential primaries. Coming from an artist whose prescience about societal preoccupations yielded an entire album, 2014’s The Future’s Void, suffused with the same kind of technology anxiety that is fueling the current “fake news” panic, that’s entirely believable. And Exile’s timing might’ve made it a more complex work than it would have been if it had been composed after Trump’s victory. In the past few years, EMA has released a series of overtly political songs, from “Active Shooter” to her cover of Sinead O’Connor’s “Black Boys on Mopeds.” Accompanied by a lyric video in which phrases like “no hate” and “no xenophobia” appear over images of rural decay, Exile’s deceptively catchy first single, “Aryan Nation,” seemed to promise more of the same.
But the album turns out to be an atmospheric, character-driven narrative more than a polemic, and that makes it a more graceful political statement than the singles that preceded it. EMA doesn’t distance herself from the angry, poor, white, largely male milieu she understands intimately, having grown up in South Dakota. Instead, she channels her own leftist, female rage through the abject rhetoric of Middle America. She has described her persona on Exile as “a woman who swallowed a scumbag teen boy whole,” and the fusion of those two points of view is astonishingly seamless. At the chorus of “Aryan Nation,” Anderson’s voice goes from sweet to strained as she sings, “Tell me stories of famous men/I can’t see myself in them/We could steal, we could steal, we could steal/But we’re stealing from them.” A tornado of noise gathers before Anderson’s torrential vocals kick in and propel us through “33 Nihilistic and Female,” whose title is self-explanatory.
The Outer Ring has an aesthetic. It is the creeping dread of “Breathalyzer,” whose six minutes of jittery synths, echoing drum beats, and narcotized vocals paint a blurry picture of an intoxicated suburban couple in a landscape of big-box stores and parking lots. The music video follows a white woman with a nose ring, a bondage collar, and a baggy FUBU parka who rides with a male companion (gold chain, black baseball cap, red-tinted glasses) through a desolate suburban landscape. Anderson appears as a drug dealer, selling a glow-in-the-dark paste that the woman spreads under her long nails. This is a reminder that the Outer Ring isn’t exactly the real world, but rather an uncanny, impressionistic rendering of life on America’s fringes—dirtbag cyberpunk.
Anderson’s ideas and lyrics tend to be so compelling, they drown out any discussion of her songwriting. But it’s a mistake to consider her words or sounds in isolation, especially on Exile. The album is a bridge from EMA’s past to the present, fusing Red State’s drones and fuzz and political-made-personal portraiture with the dystopian sci-fi of The Future’s Void. From her excellent solo debut, 2011’s Past Life Martyred Saints, it takes pop vocal melodies and the sparse, explosive percussion of “California.”
What’s unique to Exile is the unreal world of the Outer Ring, which is as well developed in the music as it is in the lyrics and videos. To a base of noise, folk, and pop, Anderson adds industrial coldness, in the pounding and clanging of “Fire Water Air LSD” and the buzzsaw synths of “Breathalyzer.” These sounds will force many of us who are 33, nihilistic and female (especially if we’re white and grew up outside of any major urban center) to recall blasting Nine Inch Nails in grimy, ’90s bedrooms with disaffected white boys who might have grown up to be neo-Nazis. There is empathy in EMA’s insistence on revisiting that place and making us remember the anger it incubates, but don’t mistake Exile in the Outer Ring for some “understanding Trump’s America” thinkpiece. It’s a horror movie. It does not have a happy ending.


An album’s worth of dub versions of last year’s Con Todo El Mundo offer playful, if inessential, tweaks to the Houston band’s psych-funk sound.

Hasta El Cielo

Khruangbin are a conundrum. The Houston band with a Thai name has skillfully showcased a crate digger’s approach to global sounds, setting heads nodding by homing in on southeast Asian funk (2015 debut The Universe Smiles Upon You) before widening out into styles from Iran and the French Antilles (last year’s Con Todo El Mundo). At the same time, despite Khruangbin’s globe-trotting narrative, their more obvious sonic touchstones are among American music’s most heavily sampled, whether the Isley Brothers’ “Footsteps in the Dark” or the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache.” Melded together, the group’s low-slung psych-funk threatens to turn into a Spotify chill-playlist slurry: Notice how, although Khruangbin’s music actually has occasional subdued vocals, many publications, including Pitchfork, have described them as “instrumental.” More and more people are listening to Khruangbin, but how many are really listening?
Hasta El Cielo, a dub version of Con Todo El Mundo, seems unlikely to settle many debates. Traces of the Jamaican dub reggae tradition are already evident on the original album in Khruangbin bassist Laura Lee’s deep rumbles and drummer Donald Johnson’s cavernous breakbeats, filled out by guitarist Mark Speer’s balmy spaghetti-western brambles and, yes, sometimes Lee’s and Speer’s ghostly vocals. In fact, Khruangbin have released a handful of dub remixes as B-sides going back a few years now, and Lee even purportedly learned the bass listening to Scientist’s dub touchstone Scientist Wins the World Cup. There’s also a decent precedent for non-Jamaican artists issuing dub versions of their albums, from Massive Attack to Bill Callahan and Franz Ferdinand. Khruangbin’s effort succeeds in subtly making a mellow record even more mellow. But it also feels like an album-length equivalent of a B-side.
The strongest cuts on Con Todo El Mundo are also the standouts on Hasta El Cielo, where they’re run through the usual dub effects: echo, flange, drop-outs, and more. The “Apache”-based “Maria También” still sounds urgent when it’s warped and hollowed into “Mary Always.” The disco-tinged “Evan Finds the Third Room” basks warmly in a world of echo as the dub version “A La Sala,” with a detached vocal cry of “yes” now more starkly positioned in the foreground, ambiguous as a Mona Lisa smile. Attentive listeners may enjoy flipping between the two albums to notice such little, nuanced differences. For dub devotees, the record ends with two additional tracks processed by Scientist himself, lathering extra atmosphere onto “Rules” and “Cómo Te Quiero.” But the sequencing does him no favors, as other, slightly varying dub versions of the same two tracks appear earlier on the album, as “Order of Operations” and “How I Love,” respectively. A better idea for an album might have been to let Scientist just do the whole thing.
As it is, little of Hasta El Cielo sticks. The wobbly instrumental interplay and dub-standard FX of “Sunny’s Vision” (“Shades of Man” on Con Todo El Mundo) or “Four of Five” (née “August 10”) are never less than pleasant in the background. But Khruangbin seem capable of more. Maybe, for a band that recently covered Warren G and ODB at Coachella—and, full disclosure, will be playing at this month’s Pitchfork Music Festival—that “more” is merely a future as a crowd-pleasing live act. But late last year, Khruangbin released a dreamy cover of Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time Is Here.” Conceptually inspired and sublimely executed, this worldly trio’s take on a homely holiday chestnut was a stunning indication that for all Khruangbin’s savvy as curators, they might have it in them to someday create something of their own with comparable staying power. By comparison, Hasta El Cielo is so laid-back that it’s almost inert. Inevitably, Khruangbin’s “Christmas Time Is Here” single also included a dub version—as a B-side.

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The Weeknd’s new six-song EP finds him in limbo between the bleary-eyed vibe of his early mixtapes and the bulletproof pop stylings of his last two albums.

My Dear Melancholy, EP

Over the last five years, Abel Tesfaye has publicly executed a sort of artistic evolution-in-reverse, inching away from the oily R&B aesthetic that propelled his initial ascent as the Weeknd in order to seek pure pop omnipresence. And who can blame him? The early releases collected on 2012’s triple-disc blowout Trilogy cast a long shadow of influence over modern pop, for better and worse. The mood those mixtapes captured—horny, druggy, and downright miserable, like a never-ending bender—was overbearing in a way that could suffocate creative growth, and eventually it did: 2013’s Kiss Land doubled down on Trilogy’s aesthetic received a tepid response critically and commercially. Just a few years into his career, it seemed like Tesfaye had already hit a creative dead-end.
What followed was, even in this transparently careerist era of pop music, a fascinatingly direct dilution of the Weeknd’s brand. Big-deal pop wizards like Max Martin and Diplo started sharing production credits alongside O.G. Weeknd collaborators Illangelo and Doc McKinney. And Tesfaye, who was once content to exploit anonymity as a marketing tool, could now be seen shamelessly mugging in a tux in a promotional tie-in for one of the most successful erotic dramas of all time.
Increasingly, the Weeknd’s musical output resembled a Seussian randomness: You could hear him over a trop-house beat, choral hair-metal, starry-eyed new wave, and lilting filter-disco. 2015’s Beauty Behind the Madness was a bombastic Event Record streaked with aspirations of Grammy gold; the following year’s Starboy pushed his newfound eclecticism into the red, a try-anything-once album that doubled as the Weeknd’s longest LP to date. Dreams of Michael Jackson abounded on both records, to a sometimes comical extreme: Watch Tesfaye literally bursting into flames in the video for “Can’t Feel My Face,” and try not to think of when MJ’s hair caught on fire while filming a Pepsi commercial in 1984.
The knowingly crass gambit—Tesfaye losing his sense of self in the service of increased image awareness—worked. As of this writing, Beauty Behind the Madness is triple-platinum, with Starboy certified double. Following all this eclecticism, the Weeknd’s latest project, My Dear Melancholy, turns Tesfaye’s gaze back to the project’s earlier, more morose material.
Many have speculated that the album’s six tracks of downcast, bleary-eyed electronic pop are direct responses to Tesfaye’s recent split with pop star Selena Gomez, and there’s certainly enough for celeb-gawkers to chew on in that respect. But the record’s title and contents could also be interpreted as Tesfaye’s sign of affection for the moody music that he made his name on—a love letter to the aesthetic past he left behind.
If old habits die hard, though, then so do new routines, and My Dear Melancholy, finds Tesfaye trapped in a middle ground between where he came from and where he is right now. As it was with his last two records, the production list is moneyed and well-respected: Skrillex, Nicolas Jaar, Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Cristo, and Mike WiLL Made-It are among the collaborators here, adding new wrinkles to Tesfaye’s ever-expanding sonic palette.
Skrillex continues pursuing his recent 2-step fascination with “Wasted Times,” featuring a breakdown that seems tailor-made for a capable UK Garage flip; the pained nihilism of “Privilege” takes on a subtle bloom in the hands of Frank Dukes (Lorde, Camila Cabello), with a pleasingly wordless chorus that emerges in the song’s final third. Arguably, the production has always been the most interesting element of the Weeknd as a project, and these highlights showcase Tesfaye’s still-sharp ear for cool, contemporary sounds.
When My Dear Melancholy, does recall Tesfaye’s creative past, it serves to illuminate the project’s weaknesses. It’s impossible not to hear the pronounced “Call Out My Name” as a redux of Beauty Behind the Madness’ “Earned It.” On “Hurt You,” Homem-Cristo and fellow Frenchman Gesaffelstein draw from the same well that produced Starboy’s title track and “I Feel It Coming,” but fail to match the radiance of either.
Simply put, it’s too early in this stage of Tesfaye’s career to so obviously attempt to replicate past glories. While My Dear Melancholy, makes for a slight curio in the Weeknd’s discography, it also feels like an unnecessary step backwards following the down-for-whatever approach of his recent work. There’s nothing wrong with reflecting on the past, but sometimes it’s better to just leave it there.
Correction: An original version of this review mislabeled the album as an EP.