Lil Yachty consummates his unlikely relationship with Michigan rap on a mixtape pairing him with mainstays like Sada Baby and Rio da Yung OG.

Michigan Boy Boat

There has never been a bag Lil Yachty won’t shamelessly chase. Since the Atlanta rapper arrived in 2016 with his melodic mixtape Lil Boat, he has been equally known for brand shilling as his music. He hit a two-step with Carly Rae Jepsen in a Target ad. He reworked the lyrics for his grating breakout single “Minnesota” for a Sprite commercial. He devised a cursed Chef Boyardee jingle with Donny Osmond. He might have recorded the worst television theme song of all time. Currently he’s working on a movie based around the card game Uno. It’s a reflection of the current climate, where almost any rapper eligible to appear on the top three lines of a Rolling Loud bill is a brand.
It’s because of all this that I was initially skeptical of his longtime intermingling with the shit-talking characters of Michigan’s thriving street rap scene. Was he using them to make his music cool again? Or was this a genuine connection with a fast-growing movement that has long been underappreciated? Likely it was a bit of both. Songs like last year’s “Flintana” (with the animated Flint rappers RMC Mike, YN Jay, and Louie Ray) and “Not Regular” (with Detroit’s robot-dancing Sada Baby) not only revived Yachty as a rapper but also raised the profile of Michigan rap.
Yachty’s new mixtape, Michigan Boy Boat, is an earned celebration of this fruitful relationship. Though it’s important not to position Yachty as Michigan’s rap savior—the music in both Detroit and Flint is so singular that it would have ended up in Atlanta anyway—Yachty has undeniably helped speed up the process. The chemistry Yachty has built with many of the scene’s rappers is real. Yachty sounds comfortable on the posse cut “This That One,” among the patented darkly funny punchlines, grim piano melody, booming drums, and ominous church bells, but he is not the center of attention. He’s more like a host that paves the way for his compelling guests: KrispyLife Kidd beat a dude so bad he thought he got jumped, and YN Jay is selling dope to a customer who has a bald head like Bobby Lashley. Similarly on “Plastic,” Yachty takes a backseat to Eastside Detroit’s Icewear Vezzo and Flint’s Rio Da Yung OG: “My shooter got ADHD, he’ll kill you for a script of Addys/I was finna fuck my bitch mom, but I can hit the granny,” raps Rio, maybe the most unnecesarily batshit consecutive lines on a mixtape full of them.
But the mixtape struggles when the focus shifts to Yachty. He doesn’t have Mike’s commanding voice or Rio’s recklessness, the laid-back swag of Babyface Ray or the out-of-pocket insanity of YN Jay. It’s less noticeable when he’s bouncing off of them, but glaring on solo songs like “Final Form” and “Concrete Goonies,” which are tolerable only because of dynamic beats from mainstays of the scene Helluva and Enrgy. When Yachty invites Swae Lee into this world on “Never Did Coke,” it goes about as badly as when a melodic teenage rapper shows up on a radio freestyle show and they play a DJ Premier beat.
Sprinkled across the 14 tracks are moments where Yachty sounds at home: “How the hell is niggas gangsters graduatin’ from St. John’s?” he asks on “Hybrid,” and on “Dynamic Duo,” he raps “My old bitch was really old, born in ’86,” sending all the ’80s babies into an early mid-life crisis. His best performance of all is on “G.I. Joe,” which coincidentally is the only track on the tape not rooted in the Michigan style.
If you’re already familiar with the state’s street rap movement, Michigan Boy Boat doesn’t add anything new. It’ll be a real success if it leads new fans toward superior modern mixtapes like Babyface Ray’s MIA Season 2, Rio Da Yung OG’s City on My Back, Drego and Beno’s Sorry For the Get Off, Los’ G Shit Vol. 1, BandGang Lonnie Bands’ KOD, and more. But for anyone searching for an entry point, it’s a fun introduction to the fast-paced instrumentals, unpredictable flows, and demented punchlines synyonmous with Detroit and Flint.

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The L.A. skate-punk band's debut full-length is full of snotty songs about cheap beer, cheap cocaine, cheap weed, and "shitty pills." They're not reinventing the wheel, but FIDLAR have their references down.

FIDLAR

The L.A. skate-punk band FIDLAR don't make music you'll grow old with, and they won't get an "A" for originality, but that's not really the point. While there's a definite lineage and history here, the quartet's self-titled debut is about today-- being young, broke, drunk, ecstatic, and not worrying too much about what happens next.
The 14-song collection includes a song called "No Waves" that sounds a lot like Wavves (as does the descriptive "Wake Bake Skate"). There's also a song called "Max Can't Surf" about their "ginger" drummer's lack of balance, and plenty of West Coast party anthems. But you're probably right to assume that, while punning on "no wave," the "waves" in that title is also a nod to Nathan Williams' similarly snotty project. Like Odd Future, these guys established their band identity via the internet, and they're savvy about their references.
Toward the end of December, FIDLAR covered the Descendents' "Suburban Home" for Filter's Milo Turns 50: Songs of the Descendents compilation. That classic California punk quartet are obvious influences on the scatological, silly subject matter of FIDLAR; where the Descendents fixated on farts, girls, coffee, and not growing up, though, FIDLAR populate their songs with cheap beer, cheap cocaine, cheap weed, and "shitty pills." And their sound is closer to former tourmates Black Lips and, at times, their early heroes Blink-182 (see the vocal lines of "Five to Nine" and "No Waves" or their cover of "Dammit") than it is 1980s SST. But the spirit is there: While you'd never mistake FIDLAR's playful approach for that of, say, the intense snarl of Black Flag, they'd do a great job with "TV Party".
Despite their youth, you get the sense that these guys have been playing music for a long time. (It's worth noting guitarist Elvis and his brother, drummer Max, are the sons of T.S.O.L. keyboardist Greg Kuehn.) They've operated as FIDLAR since 2009, and released a couple of EPs prior to this collection. That time was spent honing a brand of hopped up, surfy garage punk that comes with more variety than you might expect. They veer from sounds that evoke the Ramones ("LDA", the opening to "Cheap Beer", and the general "Rock 'n' Roll High School" vibe) to poppier take on the Germs minus the danger and the Misfits minus the goth. They also weave in western acoustic elements in a move reminiscent of the Gun Club ("Gimme Something", "Cheap Cocaine," "Whore").
But, again, the way FIDLAR seem to function as their own clique is most reminiscent of the Descendents and their life-philosophy espousing "All-O-Gistics". Though beneath the sunny hooks, * FIDLAR* suggests a darker, more nihilstic worldview. In "Stoked and Broke" they shout: "I just wanna get really high/ Smoke weed until I die.../ There's nothing wrong with living like this/ All my friends are pieces of shit." And as they like to remind you in interviews and at their live shows, FIDLAR is an acronym for "fuck it, dog, life's a risk." That said, across these 39 minutes, they also make life sound like a lot of fun.


The Kansas City artist better known as Huerco S. continues a recent string of ambient investigations with foggy, ambivalent tracks shot through with a sense of anxiety.

Make Me Know You Sweet

As Huerco S., Brian Leeds got his start producing mottled, inward-leaning house music; several years into the project, he dropped the rhythmic imperative and released a pair of excellent—though sonically distinct—ambient releases. For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have) brought together a series of wandering melodies swaddled in dust and static; a stunning cassette for the Quiet Time label, several months later, was a half-hour-long frozen exhale conjuring an unfussy contemporary spiritualism. For Make Me Know You Sweet, the first release on his own new label, Leeds has adopted the moniker Pendant and further broadened the scope of his experiments in ambient sound.
Make Me Know You Sweet can be disconcerting, in part because it finds Leeds unlacing the sense of focus that structured his two most recent releases. Where For Those of You Who Have Never had its melodies (sometimes resembling a hold-tone sing-song put through the wash), and the Quiet Time cassette its clean, sustained tones, the seven tracks that comprise Make Me Know You Sweet are less direct. Texture and tone accumulate in layers of uneven residue, designating a headspace where ideas spill over—a greyed, dissociative kind of dreamy.
Leeds’ productions have long embraced a kind of sonic clutter, and the relative formlessness here underscores that tendency; the scattering of detail is what makes this album. “IBX-BZC” has a writhing feeling: It both rattles and drones, growing thick with dry samples that chirp in a way that’s half-machinic hum, half-field at night (is that a bird crowing in the distance?). Midway through “BBN-UWZ,” a more insistent synthesizer phrase perforates lilting melodic fog, altering the track’s course without ever overtaking it. “KVL-LWQ,” produced in Kansas with Pontiac Streator, follows a cleaner line but still wanders out from its woozy core progression with wisps of vaguely percussive static.
The mood throughout is one of relative ambivalence. When the pair of quasi-epics that close the album, “OXI-GKK” and “NMQ-HYT,” reach their respective crescendos, it’s not quite clear whether the music is is offering to envelop listeners or threatening to swallow them. That it could be both is part of what’s gently destabilizing about this release, which, for all its hazy sonic niceties, returns often to the flat, persistent tension that characterizes a generalized anxiety.
It’s tempting to talk about this album in the context of a supposed ambient revival, a balm for our world—and dancefloor-weary souls. (I’m still not over a recent Guardian article that, while alleging such a resurgence, called Huerco S. “ambient for the flat white generation.”) But this record, more than its predecessors, doesn’t fit easily within ideas of why we might want or need this kind of music right now. It’s not an escape to some other, better place; it’s not grand or conceptually driven; it’s certainly not regulating or functional,  the kind of thing that helps you focus while you read or work. There’s something blissful about that lack of functionality, and in the multiple sometimes-contradictory surfaces these tracks contain: a series of overlapping paths leading nowhere in particular, a lovely reflection of the quietly wild nature of interiority itself.


Featuring players from Spiritualized and the Necks, the hushed third album from Jack Cooper’s chamber-improv ensemble slots into a lineage of exploratory groups fusing folk, psych, and post-rock.

No Fixed Point in Space

There is music that feels like it was born out of a white-hot spark of inspiration, and there is music that feels like it has come together gradually, like accrued wisdom; the music that Jack Cooper records as Modern Nature falls into the latter category. Across three studio albums, Cooper—a musician originally from the English seaside town of Blackpool, now located somewhere in the countryside of Cambridgeshire —has invented and refined a quietly introspective, semi-improvised acoustic style that nonetheless feels richly sensual and radical in its approach.
Cooper has lived a few musical lives already. He fronted the scuzzy 2010s punk group Mazes and made sunny psych as part of Ultimate Painting before launching Modern Nature. I’m willing to bet the name of this group comes from the 1991 book by Derek Jarman, which documented the artist and filmmaker’s building of a garden amid the arid shingle of Dungeness on England’s south coast, shortly after Jarman had been diagnosed with HIV. That sounds potentially bleak, but Modern Nature was about finding new ways to live, and Cooper’s music feels born from a similar impulse: an attempt to shed the baggage of the past and create something honest and meaningful by embracing nature’s cycles of renewal and rebirth.
Like Modern Nature’s 2022 album Island of Noise, No Fixed Point in Space draws on the language of free improv, but this is a subtler and more muted record than its predecessor, and somewhat stranger in the bargain. Recorded live to tape with Cooper joined by a loose consort of players that includes Spiritualized’s Alex Ward, the Necks’ Chris Abrahams, the veteran experimental vocalist Julie Tippetts, and members of the London avant-garde group Apartment House, its gently exploratory chamber music occupies a liminal space somewhere between composition and spontaneity; its loosely notated songs are given space to wander and drift.
The title of No Fixed Point In Space comes from Albert Einstein by way of the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Cunningham used the term as a way of conceptualizing a group performance without a central focal point, and Cooper borrows it as a guiding precept here, nominating no one leader and empowering his chosen players to find their own route. Take a track like “Murmuration.” Its constituent parts—plucked electric guitar, hushed woodwind, tapped cymbal, and Cooper’s lightly dazed voice—intermingle yet never tethered to one another. The song’s title takes its name from the flocks of starlings that weave and turn as one, a natural phenomenon in line with this album’s affinity with the patterns of nature, but also a useful metaphor for the way the album’s music itself is assembled: each musician a free agent, but all acting together in a state of harmony.
The arrangements are lean and pared back, even as the lyrics erupt with florid descriptions that feel like direct entreaties to the senses. “Sweetness breaks the air in colours/Golden, orange, olive, violet/Feint relief from bent horizon/Withered bow and bramble tight,” Cooper sings on “Cascade,” his voice hushed, like a bird watcher who has caught sight of his quarry through the branches. Thrumming double-bass notes and soft puffs of clarinet hang in the air, or drift softly like pollen on the wind. Moments recall earlier jazz-influenced rock milestones—the melancholic slow burn of Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, the deconstructed psych-folk of Radiohead’s The King of Limbs. Perhaps most of all, No Fixed Point in Space reminds me of the band that Brian McMahan formed after Slint’s break-up, the For Carnation: another group that spoke softly but still created something of heavy emotional resonance.
Describing his vision for No Fixed Point in Space, Cooper writes that he wanted “the music and the words to feel like roots, branches, mycelium, the intricacies of a dawn chorus, neurons firing, the unknown.” That appeal to the realms of physics and biology indirectly highlights a distinguishing factor of Modern Nature’s songwriting: a near lack of human presence. Where we see people, they're usually passive bystanders, lost in a landscape or sheltering from the rain. Just occasionally, we get a glimpse of how these songs might have been shaped by past trauma. The pensive “Orange” reflects on the tiresome routine of passing days, with a repeated refrain—“Don’t let it break you”—that hints at a state of psychic exhaustion.
Largely, though, No Fixed Point in Space feels sealed off from the concerns of modern society, content to exist in its world of nature. The closing “Ensō” takes its name from a Zen Buddhist symbol, a hand-drawn circle representing enlightenment and quietness of mind. The topic is nightfall, the mood serene, and as gentle strummed guitar and brushed cymbal conjure up a vision of dusk, Tippetts and Cooper sing together one last time. “It’s a lot to take in/It’s impossible to see,” they chorus. And then they fall silent and everything is still.


The Philadelphia rockers sign to Third Man, try a few new tricks, and kick out the jams with some diminishing returns.

Playing Favorites

It is a blessing and curse when a band nails their sound right away. Sheer Mag brought their devotion to the sound of ’70s hard rock to a new generation with their much-hyped mid-2010s EPs, thanks to lead guitarist Kyle Seely’s gleeful and technically impressive playing and singer Tina Halladay’s anthemic sing-a-long melodies that could unite a rally or a karaoke bar. You’d have to squint to see their songwriting evolve from those EPs to their official 2017 debut, Need to Feel Your Love, and 2019’s relatively clean-cut A Distant Call, where the main differences felt like Sheer Mag were able to afford nicer studios. On Playing Favorites, the studio still sounds nice, and the riffs and howls will still get cheers from the rock clubs. There are even a few modest attempts at sonic experimentation. Ironically, Playing Favorites’ few tries at changing up the Sheer Mag formula show the limits of this band’s abilities (or willingness) to evolve from the sound many people fell in love with a decade ago.
Playing Favorites is a how-to-survive-in-this-world album, full of declarations someone might make after the strictest of pandemic lockdowns gives them time to pause and think about how they would like to be treated. In the case of the album opener and title track, Halladay’s first step into happiness is to pack up the van and ride into the sunset with her friends, “Just like the old days, playing the same old songs.” A call to friendship, but maybe Sheer Mag is also getting ahead of the critics who may accuse them of repetition: What’s wrong with playing the same old songs?
Still, “Playing Favorites” is a wonderful showcase for Matt Palmer, Sheer Mag’s rhythm guitarist and lyricist who gives the band its power-pop canvas for the other members to add their heavy rock flourishes. “Eat It and Beat It” has several dirty, prog-like mini movements that drive Halladay to kick and scream through her tough love for the phony rockers who need to learn when to quit. As usual, the feeling of her vocals is more compelling than its literal meaning.
These opening songs are strong enough. Every descriptor you could imagine to describe Sheer Mag here—shimmering guitars, heavy riffs, classic rock boogie—could also apply to every past Sheer Mag album. Most of Playing Favorites struggle to add new sounds to their vocabulary. After a brief acoustic intro, “Don’t Come Lookin’” steps back into the Sheer Mag mid-tempo safety zone of a tipsy 12-bar twang that hinges on generic lyrics about a wishing well. “Golden Hour” also reads generic and worse, sounds muddy and loud, destroying any sense of dynamics that help build up a song’s tension and release. “Tea on the Kettle” is pretty with its power ballad twinkles and some actual lyrical imagery (“The old dog cried behind the bus/You stopped the car cause you hated to see him alone”) and “Paper Time” might be power-pop’s newest peak when it comes to songs about waiting for the newspaper to arrive. However, by the time we get to these songs towards the end of the album, the fatigue of listening to familiar riffs and howls starts to set in.
Playing Favorites is at its best right in the middle. “Moonstruck” is a dreamy and lovelorn cosmic country strut first written for a scrapped disco EP and gives this album its first sense of unique sonic identity. Maybe Sheer Mag should have released that EP instead since “Moonstruck” and the following multi-part experimental jam “Mechanical Garden,” featuring a blast of a Mdou Moctar guitar solo and flourishes by album producer, engineer, and mixer Hunter Davidsohn, feel like the only moments when the band are challenging themselves.
Minor changes aside, Sheer Mag’s mission for Playing Favorites, even now as part of Third Man, remains to put huge and catchy songwriting front and center. Sheer Mag succeeded again, though the band’s issue was never its inability to write compelling and accessible rock songs. As the title track suggests, Sheer Mag are still playing just like the old days and playing the same old songs that make you feel like you’re in 1975 or 2014. It’s not a loss for the guitar rock world. Still, there’s no need to pretend that consistency always justifies a lack of new ideas.


Gabriel Birnbaum’s urban Americana project intersperses grit and gloom with alluring glimpses of deliverance in the first installment of a planned musical novel on young adult life in Brooklyn.

Zion

If New York City is your trap, Wilder Maker will not be your escape hatch. The seven songs that make up Zion—the amorphous urban Americana project’s first album since the series of 2015 EPs that helped the band establish a more cohesive identity—form the first installment of a planned musical novel concerning the exigencies and ecstasies of young adult life in Brooklyn. Artists living in squalor long to find their big break before the city’s low-wage jobs and low-stakes friendships break them. Excitable pals tolerate inconveniences like late movers and rickety stairwells when they find a new apartment, all in the eternal search for adventures and lovers. A tardy cocaine dealer gives the narrator time to ask himself a verboten question: What if this incessant toil isn’t fucking worth it?
In the microcosm built by founder and lyricist Gabriel Birnbaum, there is no definitive answer, only a peculiar mix of gloom and alluring glimpses of deliverance. The lows are debilitating and quotidian, the sort of stuff that will drive you back to the tallgrass prairie unless your ego develops callouses. During “Drunk Driver,” someone gets their heart publicly shattered amid an uncaring crowd, performing a symphony with “the sound of High Lifes popping”; the only possible exit is more booze elsewhere. “Impossible Summer” paints the city as a showcase for other people’s opulence, constantly reminding you of the things brewing coffee and mixing drinks may never buy you. At the other extreme, perfect summer weather and the pleasantness of a crowd at a New York music festival feel like salvation in “Women Dancing Immortal,” a song that springs into a refrain so ebullient it’s hard not to feel lighter.
This admixture even follows the kids out of town for “Multiplied,” in which they’re stranded at a venue with no place to sleep after playing for six people. When a stranger rescues them, they snuggle in sleeping bags, watching late-night television. Birnbaum and the great singer-songwriter Katie von Schleicher recount this experience in dovetailing harmony, their easy chemistry and lyrical specificity confirming that they share this (and all these songs, really) from experience, not imagination. This push and pull—between harsh reality and resilient hope, between skipping town and staying put—recalls Craig Finn during the early days of the Hold Steady, mapping the experiences of a wild youth with the perspective of a survivor.
The Hold Steady, however, arrived with an asset Wilder Maker have yet to develop: a consistent and compelling sound that affords their tales the room and resources to flourish. A crisp and clever band, Wilder Maker do offer razor-sharp webs of guitar and a rhythm section that leans back and rushes ahead with refreshing narrative sensitivity. And their hooks are mighty. But the songs themselves pinball among influences that seem vetted for their cultural cachet, shaping a patchwork that resembles the cool corner of a Facebook group where people share pictures of their record collection. The highlife of Ghana, the harmonies of Dirty Projectors, the zigs and zags of St. Vincent, the textural tension of Radiohead, the saxophone of the E Street Band but with the acidic edge of Peter Brötzmann: They all drift through Zion, one by one.
It’s not simply the traces of these artists that pose a problem; entire elements of recognizable songs appear here, as though Zion were some instrumental mixtape with Birnbaum’s lyrics added later. “Gonna Get My Money” pivots from the swaggering belligerence of Neil Young’s“Revolution Blues” to the poignant lift of Bobby Charles’ “Small Town Talk” without a wink. When it happens, I get lost within the song, distracted by thoughts of those masterpieces instead. The same holds for “Drunk Driver,” a tense torch song about the tragedy of casual heartbreak. Von Schleicher is hypnotic here—that is, until the music morphs into a clear riff on the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs,” with kick drum and snare strutting behind a coruscant drone.
Maybe these borrowed bits are meant as signifiers, hypertext links to songs that tell us more about Wilder Maker’s sojourn through the city. But it often feels like they’re struggling to make sounds worthy of these subjects, to write music as interesting as the times Birnbaum documents. That sensation only grows on the frequent occasions when he over-sings his own lines. It’s as if, caught up in New York’s rush of ambitions, he’s not yet comfortable letting Wilder Maker’s music stand on its own—a conundrum that someone in this map of Brooklyn is bound to face along the way.


The days of Zeitgeist-shifting Depeche Mode awesomeness may likely be behind them, but that doesn't make their new LP less worthy of the band's legacy.

Sounds of the Universe

"They're a singles band," sniffed a friend, dismissing Depeche Mode's influential career. Even if one were to agree with that blithe assessment, there's no way Depeche Mode could be dismissed as just a singles band, given their track record on the charts and in the clubs, a string of hits that have hung in there to varying degrees of ubiquity. Sure, the singles sometimes remain standouts, but the rest of the tracks-- especially on albums like Music for the Masses and Violator-- are hardly filler. For better or for worse-- and those who miss the band's more subversive early days may think it's for the worse-- Depeche Mode have gotten in the habit of crafting complete start-to-finish statements.
Yet it's still unclear where Depeche Mode fits into today's pop world. The group is currently selling out stadiums around the globe, which attests to its ongoing popularity, and unlike many other acts of its vintage still manages to attract fans that span demographics. But Depeche Mode are also a far cry from the pioneers they once were, let alone the leaders they grew to become. It's almost as if the band has stepped aside to a parallel track, content in its place; more cachet, more cool, more money-- they'll take it if they can get it, but they sure don't need it.
So, yes, the days of earth-quaking, Zeitgeist-shifting Depeche Mode awesomeness may likely be behind them, but that doesn't make Sounds of the Universe any less worthy of the band's legacy. If the album as usual seems to have little or no bearing on anything outside the group's own, um, universe, the wheels and gears are definitely still turning and churning in the Depeche Mode machine. Martin Gore can still be counted on to deliver the goods, and recent songwriting convert Dave Gahan is impatiently nipping at his heels. Gahan's singing, meanwhile, is as strong as ever, always the perfect vehicle for Gore's lyrics, and the glue that holds together even the disc's most diffuse songs.
And really, Sounds of the Universe is, at 60 minutes and 13 songs-- the group's longest player to date-- relatively loose and sprawling, as likely to drift as hit hard. While the group's brought back producer Ben Hillier, Sounds of the Universe is a very different album from its predecessor, Playing the Angel. "In Chains" begins like how one imagines it would feel to be on the receiving end of a SETI signal before stretching into an epic-- satisfyingly dramatic and dynamic despite its leisurely seven-minute gait-- and deceptively full of activity despite what feels like an intentional ear for minimalism. "Hole to Feed", a Gahan composition, is similarly busy yet spare, bounding along a sci-fi take on the Bo Diddley beat while Gahan (his troubled history public record) draws on double meanings and innuendo to project the band's trademark narcissistic portent.
The song doesn't know how to end, but that just makes the entrance of "Wrong" that much more theatrical. That song-- the single-- is short but deliciously sour, hearkening back to the band's synthier days without losing the layer of grunge it's carefully cultivated post-Violator, a strategy also reflected by "Fragile Tension" (which wouldn't have been out of place on the generally noisier Angel). "Little Soul" and "In Sympathy", however, once again echo old-school minimalist Depeche menace and pop smarts, respectively, which makes "Peace"-- sounding like Kraftwerk gone dreamy gospel-- that much more striking. It's a stirring encapsulation of all of Depeche Mode's different sides and qualities, reminiscent of all those other great album tracks lurking throughout the group's catalog.
Yet a funny thing happens next. With the strong but still oddly static Gahan composition "Come Back", the album starts to feel a little fractured, and by the time the effortlessly melodic "Perfect" comes around, followed by the casually industrial "Miles Away/The Truth Is", the synth-lounge "Jezebel", and the fuzzy closer "Corrupt", it's almost as if we've embarked on another album entirely. Either that or the band's simply left us to find our way through their space. Ending with a brief, queasy reprise tease of "Wrong", Sounds of the Universe concludes anticlimactically, an echo of its promising start.


On their fourth album, Hooded Fang slip away from their garage rock and indie-pop pasts and embrace a weirder, more wired sci-fi horror vision.

Venus on Edge

Hooded Fang emerged in 2008 like many Canadian bands of the era, crowding the stage with seven players and offering upbeat artisanal indie-pop with the then-requisite glockenspiels and trombones. But in Daniel Lee’s sly, sonorous vocals, you sensed an eccentric streak lurking, and he and bassist April Aliermo weren’t afraid to unleash it through other projects. Outside Hooded Fang, the two have betrayed a fondness for heaving hardcore (as Tonkapuma) and day-glo electro-pop (Phédre), while Lee has flexed some Krautrockin’ funk in his solo Lee Paradise project. Meanwhile, Hooded Fang shed its keyboardists and brass section, and as its line-up got leaner, its sound has become progressively meaner.
Hooded Fang’s fourth album, Venus on Edge, represents the next step in an evolutionary process. The transformation began in earnest with 2011’s Tosta Mista, which scuffed up the band’s formative indie-pop sensibility with a Modern Lovers scrappiness. That aesthetic was pushed deeper into the red with the grotty garage rock of 2013’s Gravez. But Venus on Edge is even more weird and wired, marking the moment where Hooded Fang’s fantastical name ceases to be an ironic counterpoint to the band’s playful fuzz-pop and becomes a guiding principle.
The new record also turns a page on proto-punk completely in favor of weirder turf: industrialized dissonance, sci-fi surf-punk, and tweaked-out guitar frequencies that ring out like a biohazard lab activating the meltdown siren. Lee’s cool, conversational voice melds into the artfully mutated noise swirling around him, as he breaks down his melodies into staccato communiqués.
But as Hooded Fang’s music has grown wilder, their lyrical focus has become more concrete. Venus on Edge is another springtime release from a Toronto act presenting views from the 6, though, as Hooded Fang would tell you, any view view of that city is inevitably obstructed by friggin’ condos. Where Drake invokes Toronto as a visual and thematic backdrop, Hooded Fang treat the city as a target, a place where gentrification, smartphone dependency, and pandering lifestyle marketing have run amok: “Plastic Love” depicts big-business branding as an exercise in Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style mind control, complete with a wonderfully wiggy B-52s-style breakdown; “Glass Shadows” channels the dispiriting feeling of walking among the high-density, high-rise developments that loom ominously over city’s downtown core, with Lee darting around the song’s jabbing riff as if he were trying to avoid the panes of glass that frequently rain down from Toronto’s shoddily built towers.
And while Toronto’s rich multiculturalism is an oft-advertised point of civic pride, Hooded Fang are nonetheless one of the few mixed-race bands in the city’s indie-rock scene, a circumstance that informs Venus on Edge’s most agitated tracks. Where the frantic “Impressions” spins an alien-visitation yarn to highlight the corrosive effects of xenophobia, the pin-pricked, new-waved rave-up “Shallow” sings of unchecked white privilege as a festering disease: “You’re no iconoclast/Blinded all your life by the paleness of your sight/It’s a sickness/You can’t see what’s going on.” The target of the song is unnamed, but it’s not a stretch to assume it’s directed at the band formerly known as Viet Cong, given the instrumental role Aliermo played in mobilizing the protest to get them to change their name.
Over the course of its 10 tracks, Venus on Edge’s warping effects do start to normalize somewhat, like when you stare into a funhouse mirror for an extended period and your eyes get used to the distended shapes. Even as its songs twist into new shapes, the dynamic between the band’s relentless racket and Lee’s casual tone never wavers, to the point where the transformation of the finale “Venus” from deconstructed blues dirge to high-speed sprint feels less dramatic than intended. But, on an album that’s about keeping your cool in the face of mounting frustration, perhaps that resolute stance is just a defense mechanism. With Venus on Edge, Hooded Fang are the stars of their own horror flick, playing the last surviving rational humans in a city overrun with mind-numbed, inconsiderate, glass-eyed drones. And like all good scary movies, there’s a plot twist: this one’s actually a documentary.


On his excellent and ambitious double album, the tuneful sensibility that Segall has been nurturing for years has fully blossomed, all while keeping his primordial spirit intact.

Freedom’s Goblin

Near the end of last year, Ty Segall put a bunch of new songs out online, which is a bit like saying water is wet. But even for a guy who has spent the last decade setting the pace for indie-rock prolificacy, releasing 20 albums and more than 30 singles and EPs, these tracks stood out. They sounded like strange one-off experiments, from the heaving hardcore of “Meaning” (featuring lead shrieking from Segall’s wife Denée) to a straight-up cover of Hot Chocolate’s 1978 disco warhorse “Every 1’s a Winner” (with guest percussion from Fred Armisen to boot). It turns out these songs weren't just a stream of orphaned outtakes. Rather, they were setting the far-flung aesthetic goalposts for Segall’s most freewheeling and free-ranging album to date, Freedom’s Goblin.
A year ago, you could’ve said the same thing about the Ty Segall album, which pit some of his most deranged material against his most unabashedly romantic, yielding the scatterbrained folk-punk/psych-jazz suite “Freedom”/”Warm Hands (Freedom Returned).” As the title suggests, Freedom’s Goblin sounds like that 12-minute epic’s evil offspring, spreading its lawlessness across an hour and a quarter. It’s Segall’s second double album to date, but the first one to truly embrace and exploit the possibilities of the four-sided medium. In essence, this is Segall’s White Album moment, a scrapbook of the singer’s many guises, along with a few new ones, too—check the sleazy drum-machine disco of “Despoiler of Cadaver” or the T. Rex-goes-to-E.-Street swoon of “My Lady’s on Fire.” Recorded piecemeal with various line-up configurations in five different cities, its most remarkable quality isn’t the whiplash-inducing, track-to-track variation—it’s that each song works as both a crucial unifying thread in the overall patchwork and as a stand-alone statement.
In marveling at the sheer volume of Segall’s discography, it’s easy to overlook his growth as a writer. He’s often slotted alongside peers like Thee Oh Sees and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard in the pantheon of garage-rockers with exploratory impulses and little regard for traditional promo cycles. But it’s more apt to mention him in the same breath as musicians like Robert Pollard, Ted Leo, or Elliott Smith—expert melody-makers who borrow liberally from the classic-rock canon, but reshape and demystify it in their own eccentric image. And on Freedom’s Goblin, the tuneful sensibility that Segall has been nurturing since 2011’s Goodbye Bread fully blossoms into sky-high hooks and rich, resonant lyricism, all while keeping his primordial spirit intact.
With the grandiose grunge of “Alta,” Segall delivers an ode to Mother Nature with all the valor of a superhero flick, while the opening “Fanny Dog” could be the most badass song ever dedicated to a household pet, summoning a brass section to pummel its rumbling riff into submission. But the album’s ugliest moments only enhance its prettiest: The burning fury of “Meaning” is immediately extinguished by the wistful George Harrison tribute “Cry, Cry, Cry”; the lecherous fuzz of “Shoot You Up” is chased by the cosmic, falsetto-cooed folk-rock of “You Say All the Nice Things.”
As the latter song unsubtly suggests, Freedom’s Goblin is an album made by a guy who’s clearly head-over-heels in love—Segall and Denée married just over a year ago, and through that lens, the “Every’s 1 a Winner” cover sounds less like a cheeky lark than a genuine expression of devotion. But if Freedom’s Goblin was born of a honeymoon period, it’s one where the room-service trolley becomes food-fight ammo, and TVs get tossed out into swimming pools. Even the album’s most unruly turns—like the guitar solo on the motorik metal of “She”—project an exhilarated, anarchic joy that sustains the album’s momentum until its great payoff: the penultimate “5 Ft Tall.” Here, Segall delivers the totemic power-pop knockout that he’s been working toward his entire career, the sort of hair-raising, roller-coaster rocker that you could imagine a contented Kurt Cobain writing.
Following that glorious peak, you can forgive Segall for indulging in an extended comedown. As the closing “And, Goodnight” begins its slack, Crazy-Horsed lurch, it appears we’re in for 12 minutes of improvised guitar skronk. But when Segall’s vocal comes in just before the three-minute mark, it’s revealed that this is no random jam, but an extended, electrified cover of the title track to his 2013 psych-folk opus, Sleeper. It’s a song Segall originally wrote for Denée one night as she was dozing off, but it served as the surreal, dreamlike portal into a deeply meditative album where Segall addressed the death of his adoptive father and subsequent estrangement from his mother. This new version feels even less like a romantic reverie and more like all the intervening years of pent-up sadness and frustration being unleashed through Segall’s scorching fretboard runs. It’s an intensely sobering conclusion to an otherwise intoxicating album and a reminder that Segall’s ascent from garage-punk hellraiser to consummate rock craftsman over the past 10 years hasn’t been without its trying times. But Freedom’s Goblin is ultimately a celebration of Segall’s aesthetic and emotional freedom—a definitive capstone to the first decade of a scuzzy, heartfelt songwriter nonpareil.


The Puerto Rican singer’s EP is a mix of robot soul and trap beats that sound like he’s just having fun making expensive-sounding records.

Trap Cake, Vol. 2

Rauw Alejandro’s Vice Versa, released last summer, was carefully crafted for the pop charts, punctuated by a cotton candy lead single that managed to soften his rough edges. But it also offered a glimpse of why the Puerto Rican singer can be so exciting, channeling transportive UK rave and drum’n’bass vibes to multiple dancefloor climaxes. If that record suffered from Alejandro’s splitting the difference between pop for the charts and for the club, his latest project, Trap Cake Vol. 2, a genre exercise in Caribbean trap soul, represents clarity of vision.
Maybe the stakes are lower with an EP, but there’s no pandering here. Alejandro just sounds like he’s having fun, a street kid with great taste making expensive-sounding records with his homie (El Zorro, who produced much of Vol. 2) and his girlfriend (Rosalía, who shares a writing credit on “Caprichoso”). Much of the record is a mix of robot soul and dick-swinging over trap beats, but the more narrow palette works in Alejandro’s favor, serving as gentle guard rails for experimentation. On “Red Velvet,” Rauw and Jamaican producer Rvssian craft a moodier vibe for nascent dancehall star Shenseea than we’re used to hearing from her, and the distorted guitar opening “Gracias Por Nada” transcends from radio rock to resplendent when the drumbeat melts into a pool of sub-bass on the chorus.
Even on a dedicated trap EP, Alejandro can’t stay off the dancefloor; “Wuepa” features a minimal palette but a relentless four-on-the-floor bassline, and guest vocalist Ankhal’s grit keeps the song from being too slick. His appearance is not insignificant; it was the remix of Ankhal’s “Si Pepe”—a posse cut featuring Alejandro, Arcángel, Farruko, Miky Woodz, and Jhay Cortez—that launched Alejandro’s beef with Cortez, who had no shortage of barbs aimed at both Rosalía and his music. The project’s standout is the Future/Rvssian trap master class “Fck U X2,” which bounces from Manhattan’s Latin Quarter to Atlanta’s Magic City before meeting somewhere in the middle for a codeine-coated outro. “I showed you the real me,” Future bleats as the song fades out. We believe him.
Trap Cake Vol. 2 is ostensibly a sequel to a similarly named 2019 mixtape, but at most, the two share only a general vibe. Just three years removed, Alejandro is significantly more polished. He’s a heartthrob with dancing skills, an R&B crooner with hip-hop swagger, and the platonic ideal of Chris Brown without the toxic personality. If this is merely the in-between project, it feels like Alejandro’s ceiling remains in the clouds.


After years of foregoing recorded music for other pursuits, Jim O'Rourke makes a brilliant return with a subtly complex 38-minute piece of orchestral pop.

The Visitor

Pardon the archaic suggestion, but if you've opened a physical copy of Jim O'Rourke's return to glory, The Visitor, you'll understand that it's a demanding release even before you've heard its introductory trace of acoustic guitar. Indeed, if you're legally listening to your own edition of The Visitor, then you're holding either a compact disc or an LP. Whether for reasons of sound quality, tradition, or both, O'Rourke and Drag City forewent an mp3 release of his new album. You have to, like, pick it up. And inside, on the minimal liner notes, O'Rourke makes his second demand: "Please listen on speakers, loud," he entreats, as if now recording under the name Jimm O))). In the end, these prerequisites presage The Visitor, a unified 38-minute instrumental piece that plays hide-and-go-seek with dozens of instruments, textures, and motifs before refusing to deliver the climax you might have expected. An arrogant pop record, The Visitor's intricate, long-form composition rewards repeated close listens through its own insistence on subtlety and craft.
Calling The Visitor a pop record is as much of a stretch as it is a reduction, but it's an important distinction to make here. Despite his involvement with well over 100 albums in the past two decades, The Visitor is just the fifth in a string of highly accessible if equally nuanced O'Rourke releases on Drag City. That series began in 1997 with the rustic instrumental Bad Timing and, until now, ended with 2001's rock opus, Insignificance. Along with Eureka and the EP Halfway to a Threeway, that quartet offered listeners easier inroads to O'Rourke, especially relative to his noise or improvised output, the textural radiance of Gastr del Sol or the kitchen-sink compositions of Brise-Glace. But they weren't your average pop records, either: Bad Timing twisted parochial roots music ideas into a gorgeous four-track cycle, while Halfway to a Threeway paired instrumental elegance and emotional ruefulness in four nearly clinical tunes. Throughout, O'Rourke moved just as deliberately as he'd later move on the long-form laptop record, I'm Happy and I'm Singing and a 1, 2, 3, 4, or with drone masters Tony Conrad and Faust on Outside the Dream Syndicate Alive. Bad Timing, for instance, built for nearly 40 minutes before horns and steel guitar ricocheted against each other like pinballs. And on the wry Insignificance, he'd often open a stanza with a happy sentiment just to present the blade beneath the cloth as conclusion. With O'Rourke, patience is more necessity than virtue. On The Visitor, it is an absolute.
Offering a play-by-play guide to The Visitor, an album that O'Rourke says required over 200 separate recorded parts, would be tedious at best, but a few qualities deserve notice: The Visitor feels polite and dainty, perhaps to a fault. Much of its music, all made by O'Rourke alone in Tokyo, isn't unique or overly complicated, in that one could easily find a guitarist, organist, drummer, banjo picker, and guitarist to play the bulk of this album as a band. As with most of O'Rourke's pop output, you could imagine these ideas on any stock singer-songwriter or Sunday afternoon jazz record. In that way, though, The Visitor is a perfect gestalt, where the connections between the elements and their sum are more important than any one instant. O'Rourke links the melodies across instruments, letting a piano mirror a guitar, adjusting one slightly either by changing its meter or letting it slip away from the melody and into the next variation. Such shifts pull the whole into the next phase, maintaining nothing if not constant motion. Rather than sudden payoffs, The Visitor favors careful, minute shifts that amass over its runtime. To that end, there's no big, terminal peak. Sure, the second half springs forward with a bouncy banjo lick, and the drums, pedal steel and piano dance around each other near the track's end. But, true to its name, as soon as The Visitor begins to lean too heavily toward cerebral textures or more visceral moments, it quickly pushes in the other direction. When the action rises, know that there's always something subdued one groove over.
Such a plan works because, from the acoustic guitars that mix O'Rourke's heroes Derek Bailey and John Fahey to the bright electric guitar leads that suggest Electric Light Orchestra or the Doobie Brothers, every moment here is pristinely recorded and carefully mixed. As with Joanna Newsom's Ys and Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, two masterpieces O'Rourke mixed this decade, each layer sits in its perfectly defined space. Each gesture rings clearly. But these parts are written so that they blend across those spaces, in effect creating a collage without seams. We hear every sound, but we never hear them without the benefit of their accompaniment.
Given its patient development and refusal to climax, The Visitor runs the risk of being labeled boring and bland. Given its use of common instruments and techniques (a cymbal scraped with a drumstick constitutes the album's most "out" sound), it runs a high risk of being labeled pedestrian, too, as if O'Rourke has taken all of his experimental tendencies and finally reduced them into an adult-contemporary instrumental. Ultimately, that's about as silly as it sounds: The Visitor is a defiant record in both sound and spirit. The reluctance of O'Rourke and Drag City to release The Visitor as a digital download, for instance, rebels against our need for instant gratification. You have to work a bit to hear it. Symbolically, it's a potent act for such an anticipated release, even if bit torrents, RapidShare, and the ilk mean it's little more than a symbol. And O'Rourke's request that you listen out loud, loudly, means that you give it your attention, that you let it fill the room with sound. After all, this is soft music-- and graceful and complicated and rich, too. While it might sound polite, though, it's not to be heard passively during your morning walk to work.
That's because, in the end, The Visitor is a one-man show that refuses to be selfish. It eschews spotlight moments and elides our need to be greedy, to be fed captivation. After a decade of bands exclaiming it all in five minutes (The Arcade Fire, MGMT, this list never stops) and a season of bands getting Internet famous with 40 minutes of output where the tape hiss is to my ears more interesting than the songs (Wavves, Vivian Girls, will this list stop soon?), it's redeeming to hear something deliver such development and depth. These 38 meticulously prepared minutes offer dozens of memorable moments. They just demand that you listen.


Featuring demos, outtakes, and a quietly powerful Björk cover, this EP from the Massachusetts songwriter feels like a gentle exhale.

Planet EP

Ella Williams, who records under the name Squirrel Flower, weathers the storms thrown at her. The Massachusetts singer-songwriter’s 2020 debut, I Was Born Swimming, introduced her as a folk-tinged rocker bearing witness to life’s vacillations—the passage of time, seasonal depression, and the shifts within her own heart. One year later, the apocalyptic road trip record Planet (i) elevated these reflections to seismic levels as she envisioned natural disasters like droughts, fires, and floods. Now, Williams has shared Planet EP, a self-produced collection of tracks rescued from the Planet (i) cutting room floor alongside demos and a quietly powerful Björk cover. After releasing full-length albums at a steady clip over the past two years, Planet EP feels like a long-awaited exhale.
Williams has described Planet EP as “an exercise in self trust and experimentation,” a reminder that not every recording needs to reach finality before being shared. As a result, the EP is loose and unpolished, just Williams, a guitar, piano, synthesizers, and the ambient city sounds that spilled through. Williams lingers in the hazy twilight hours with her closely miked vocals wrapping the listener in warmth. “Ruby at Dawn” transports you into this mindset with its sleep-kissed lyrics about a walk home at daybreak. Most of the song is carried by Williams’ gentle multi-tracked vocals and a minimalist organ line until a flourish of synths introduce a subtle sweetness.
“Your Love Is a Disaster” longs for intimacy from someone who seems ill-suited to deliver such care. It is a lovely gesture when Williams’ own multi-tracked harmonies offer the companionship she yearns for. “Live Wire” is more assertive as Williams lists the things she would do “to be with you,” which include cutting her hair, leaving a lover, and killing her friends. “To be with you, I’d fuck it all,” she proclaims with a sudden cruelty before softly adding, “And leave at the first sign of snow.” It’s the EP’s most challenging moment and the only one that breaks through the pensive melancholy that cloaks the release.
For the most part, Planet EP moves patiently as Williams watches time unspool, from the purgatory of traffic, or out in nature as the seasons change. “Open Wound” acknowledges that “healing’s not a straight line,” which justifies her apparent inability to convey the extent of her pain. “You think that I’m a wave/But I’m undertow,” she sings over a delicate acoustic guitar. “Long Day’s Done” begins with the chirping of birds as Williams captures a moment of tranquility as flood waters encroach. (A line off Planet (i) comes to mind: “And I’m not scared of the water/The rain is my parent and I am the daughter.”) Near the end of the song, she takes a moment to question perception: “How to define a horizon linе/Does it have to be a linе,” she wonders. “A meeting of points with no direction/A cease of movement, an intersection.” Williams’ existential searching leads her to cover Björk’s “Unravel,” a staggering meditation on love’s elasticity from 1997’s Homogenic. The reverb-drenched rendition is more lo-fi than the original, but it offers a promising vignette for the territories Squirrel Flower might plumb next.


Forty years into his career, Nick Cave emerges with one of his most powerful albums yet, an endlessly giving and complex meditation on mortality and our collective grief.

Ghosteen

On the sublime Ghosteen—the first album Nick Cave has written and recorded entirely since the death of his teenage son, Arthur, in 2015—he sorts through his grief and all the requisite stages, occasionally as though in real time. His mood drifts between domesticity and depravity. He empathizes with the true believers who wept beneath Jesus’ feet at the crucifixion. He latches onto friendship and love in any shape they take. He loses his faith, then fights desperately for any belief that can replace it. Scored by synthesizers, pianos, and electronics, the process is alternately harrowing and comforting for the first hour of the album, Cave’s waking nightmare on full display.
But then, in the album’s final verse, at the close of the dangerous “Hollywood,” he steps back from the edge of a nervous collapse to paraphrase a Buddhist parable in his fractured falsetto: “Kisa had a baby, but the baby died,” he sings. And so begins “The Mustard Seed,” a tale in which a mourning mother, Kisa Gotami, tries to save her baby by asking for seeds from houses where no one has died, as prescribed by the Buddha. Alas, someone has already died in every other house, so Kisa is left to bury her child and manage another home where the specter of death has crept across the threshold. “It’s a long way to go to find peace of mind,” Cave repeats at the end, the bassline’s tension and his wounded tone emphasizing the cold irony of the epiphany. Still, the takeaway is clear: He has not been alone in his sadness, and neither will you when the time comes.
A little more than a year had passed since Arthur’s death when Cave released Skeleton Tree, a masterful record that, like the best of his catalog, used our mortality as way of considering what matters most. Hearing it as anything other than a response to the recent tragedy seemed nearly impossible. But the accident only informed Skeleton Tree, a new solemnity settling over the songs like morning mist.
Ghosteen, however, squares up to the aftermath and to feelings of loss so overwhelming that Cave—“a man mad with grief”—questions the foundations of his sanity. There are moments where he nearly comes apart, holding himself together only by denying that death is final and believing that, maybe on the next train, his child will return. But he slowly wrestles hope from that existential abyss. Cave does not sublimate tragedy into triumph; he simply finds assurance in the knowledge that we’ve all walked through some sort of hell. That realization is the core of what may be the most poignant album of his storied career.
Though Cave has long stood at the edge of darkness and tried to document what he felt there, writing about his family’s own tragedy proved vexing. His new songs didn’t ferry adequate emotional weight, he confided in The Guardian, and the singer who had once contextualized a convict’s trip to the electric chair as a sinner’s visit to confession had tired of the disingenuous tidiness of narrative. Soon, though, he found himself “amassing a stockpile of lines and thoughts, images and ideas,” forsaking his traditional sense of song for an atmosphere of intuition and feeling.
That’s where we find him on Ghosteen, sorting through sensations of despair and persistence. Cave has cryptically said that the songs on Ghosteen’s first half are the children, while the interwoven triptych that follows are their parents. Those final three pieces are discursive and raw, pulling the broad emotional sweep of grief into a series of overstuffed settings. During “Ghosteen,” Cave counterbalances the wonder of being alive at all—broadcast over a sudden surge of strings and the record’s only cavalcade of drums—with the pedestrian cruelty of washing his dead child’s clothes or realizing almost absentmindedly that his family is now smaller. And “Hollywood” begins with seething rage, Cave looking to lash out at anything within reach, to hold even nature itself responsible for his loss while he waits for his own death. In the end, he relays the fable of Kisa, calming his nerves not with the company of others’ misery but with the wisdom that our sadness is but a point on an ancient timeline.
The eight “children” are filtered and discrete, each investigating another side of what it means to bear the unbearable. Cave slips through phases of nostalgia and fantasy, fragments of lullabies and vows of love. He realizes that his art will outlive his body during opener “Spinning Song,” a surrealist rumination on Elvis and Priscilla Presley and their downfall. Cave and his wife, model and fashion designer Susie Bick, navigate their mindsets differently during “Waiting for You.” She wants to confront the truth and stare down reality, while he seeks refuge by longing for an ecclesiastic miracle—if an entire religion can rest on a belief in resurrection and afterlife, cannot fatherhood? Both are reasonable, he concludes, crooning, “Just want to stay in the business of making you happy.” Cave returns to the shores of compromise, finding safety in companionship.
Likewise, the gorgeous “Bright Horses” opens inside a realm of imaginary terror, where horses dash through cities with their manes ablaze. He holds someone’s hand, protecting them from the fires. Even when that alternate world crumbles to reveal a swath of sociopolitical failure, he seeks some hypothetical redemption, some future brighter than his present. “Everyone has a heart, and it’s calling for something/And we’re all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are,” he deadpans in a stunning moment of functional escapism, reminding us that it’s OK to dream of the world we want, not the one we inherited. It’s impossible not to pull for him, to believe in his belief.
As listeners, we mostly hover alongside Cave, floating in a middle distance shaped by Warren Ellis’ sprawling synthesizers and gilded by elegiac piano and scrambled samples, like signals dispatched from the great beyond. The Bad Seeds have long been a mighty rock band, prowling the darkened corners of the blues and the avant-garde. But they bend completely to Cave’s will here, not receding in the background so much as framing his self-portraits. This is the most musically esoteric record they’ve ever made, suspended somewhere between the urgent but obtuse abstraction of Current 93’s Black Ships Ate the Sky and the charged soundscapes of Harmonia. Their restraint strips away all emotional armaments, placing each of Cave’s vulnerabilities at the record’s humming surface. Cave doesn’t blink.
Though secondary to the script, the production is sophisticated and subtle, often augmenting Cave’s words with shades of feeling and meaning he’s omitted from his text. There’s the chiming church bell that keeps the rhythm of “Night Raid,” a half-spoken recollection of Cave’s family gathered in a hotel room, laughing and leaning from the window to take in the streetscape below. The bell’s sound is initially warm and round, a signifier of the bustling city. But by song’s end, it arrives harder and faster, like a beeping alarm clock. It is a warning dispatched from the future, a damning promise that this happiness will end.
Or there’s the choir that echoes his aspirational words during “Galleon Ship,” a song about committing to love, although you know it’s bound to bring pain. The voices are phased between the channels, surrounding Cave so that their pronouncements arrive at different times. The effect is vertiginous and disorienting, just as setting yourself up for hurt can be. The sound is so beautiful, though, you reckon it must be worth the risk.
Ghosteen marks the 40th anniversary of Nick Cave’s recording career, a span that’s especially daunting considering that he has rarely released a clunker. For the uninitiated, it can seem intimidating to tap into new music by this kind of legacy artist, to dive into a massive body of work by someone with such a mythology. We tend to wait, frankly, until they’re dead, so we can more readily see how it all fits together. But you don’t need to be an expert in Cave’s wider cosmology to be swept inside of Ghosteen, to be devastated by its despair and lifted higher by its humanity. You only need the ability to suffer and the desire to survive.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam is a spellbinding, 16-minute, six-track sequence from Thundercat—an artist who has been in the public eye plenty this year already, thanks to prominent spots on albums by Kendrick Lamar and Kamasi Washington. The songs here are airy, while Thundercat's lyrics reliably invoke death, mourning, and vulnerability.

Thundercat: The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam

The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam

The EP format isn't where artists tend to make big statements, with the possible asterisk-style exception of Robyn (whose Body Talk series eventually resulted in a proper, long-playing release anyway). Instead, a short-form release suggests anxious label-heads putting pressure on an artist to release something, anything, as soon as possible. But that's not at all the aura projected by this spellbinding, 16-minute, six-track sequence from Thundercat—an artist who has been in the public eye plenty this year already, thanks to prominent spots on albums by Kendrick Lamar and Kamasi Washington. While riding that wave, it's hard to imagine members of Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder imprint saying "We need something from you right this second," which leaves us with an alternative explanation: namely, that the brief duration of The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam (he's calling it a "mini-album," which is the euphemism du jour for EPs) is exactly the statement the bassist-singer-composer wanted to make at this moment.
The songs here are airy, and often provisional-feeling, while Thundercat's lyrics reliably invoke death, mourning, and vulnerability. The mini-album opens with an ethereal, vocal-led invocation entitled "Hard Times", and follows this up with a track called "Song for the Dead", which labors under some muffled-sounding percussion for most of its running time before stumbling into a clearer sonic field, near its conclusion. Every composition seems relentlessly aware of its own mortality. The greatest comfort on offer tends to be the nimble power of Thundercat's virtuoso technique on his main axe. That instantly recognizable, feather-touch electric bass sound of his is potent, but also gossamer-delicate in a way that reinforces the mini-album's themes of impermanence.
Even when Thundercat comes up with with a monster, single-worthy groove, as on "Them Changes"—the interlocking bass parts of which recall the supple funk Thundercat has contributed to Erykah Badu's New Amerykah series—he does not allow himself a rousing chorus, instead reverting to the wordless vowel-mewling of the mini-album's initial, more downtrodden tracks. He even fades the track into silence just as Washington starts a saxophone solo. One images that there's an extended "Them Changes" sitting in a folder on Thundercat's computer—though if so, it's obvious how giving listeners an epic version of this song might have thoroughly disrupted the equilibrium of a release as reflective as this one. Likewise, Herbie Hancock's keyboard cameo—which comes during "Lone Wolf and Cub"—isn't the place for guest-star grandstanding. (Though he sounds good.)
In a series of Twitter messages posted shortly after this mini-album's release, Thundercat explained that he is continuing to come to terms with the "insanely brutal" deaths of some close friends, while also attempting to process the larger-scale racist injustices that still occur with disheartening regularity. In the final, almost-sunny-sounding track (over some atypically bright keyboard tones), the narrator encounters a strange but comforting entity. It sounds
like Thundercat finds the figure's presence to be a welcome one—though tellingly, still has to ask "can you tell me who you are?" For those of us also muddling through various grim realities, it's tempting to think of this mysterious and unassuming release—which appeared with little advance notice—along similar terms. As it doesn't behave like many other recordings out in the world, you're at first blush tempted to ask what it's up to, and what it wants. But then the figure puts its arms around you, and you start to feel a bit better, even without a full explanation of what's going on. That's more than plenty of full-length records achieve.


The Japanese jazz saxophonist’s debut arrived at the intersection between traditional and unfamiliar, mannerly and chaotic. A new reissue restores it to its rightful place.

First

When Kohsuke Mine led a band into the studio to record First in 1970, the Japanese jazz scene was progressing fast. A new school of artists were testing the limits of composition, arrangement, and improvisation, evolving away from hard bop and Blue Note methodology towards free jazz and a more electric boogaloo. You could say it reflected the post-Bitches Brew world, but Japanese jazz musicians only partially looked to Miles and his fellow Americans for inspiration; they were drawn toward sounds from all over the planet. There are good reasons why BBE’s J Jazz compilation series—the recently released third installment of which includes a cut from First—picks up the story of “Deep Modern Jazz From Japan” in 1969.
BBE’s restoration of Mine’s previously rare debut album ensures it takes its rightful place in the narrative. Born during the Second World War, Mine’s childhood was marked by a temporary evacuation from Tokyo to relative safety in Miyako. An early interest in mambo and cha-cha-cha—music with a bit of swing to it—as well as six years playing the clarinet filtered into a taste for jazz and alto saxophone. Mine spent the 1960s traversing the scene, rubbing shoulders with all its key figures, playing clubs and even U.S. air bases when the opportunity arose. His first recording appeared as part of the live record Jazz in Tokyo ’69, cut at Hibiya Open-Air Concert Hall and issued by Nippon Columbia. It wasn’t long before Mine was offered a chance to record his own studio album for the company.
First is the sound of breaking away from old ways in favor of a daring new future. Sure, it feels like an organic jazz LP—a layman would have no difficulty identifying the genre and its typical instruments. But the rich textures, experimental arrangements, and elongated solos predicted the inventiveness to come: Japan’s jazz was about to get bolder and more intense. First arrived at the intersection between traditional and unfamiliar, mannerly and chaotic.
Mine didn’t do it alone. He was joined by two American players, bassist Larry Ridley and drummer Lenny McBrowne, both in town to record a live album with guitarist Kenny Burrell. On electric piano was Masabumi Kikuchi, a venerated figure in the movement who wrote and recorded with artists at a phenomenal rate. (It was Kikuchi who convinced Nippon Columbia to roll the dice on a Mine album.) Each musician brought an original composition to the table—Kikuchi presented two—with a version of Thelonious Monk’s “Straight No Chaser” rounding out the set. The album cover is identical in concept to that of Let It Be, with the casual photography reflecting a shift in Japanese jazz culture from sharp suits and good manners to a more laid-back look.
The quartet recorded in Tokyo over two days in June; they’d never played together before and would never do so again. Yet First is incredibly well-tuned and measured. The music rarely swells; it grooves. The peppy opener “Morning Tide” features dueling keys and bass that nonetheless maintain smooth synchronicity, as if Kikuchi and Ridley were moving in opposite directions in matching patterns, a musical palindrome. The blustering “Love Talken” keeps up the energy, with McBrowne’s drum rolls and rapped cymbals driving the song from the corner of the room. On “Straight No Chaser,” Mine launches straight into the famous blues riff—played a little more hastily than Monk’s famous version from the album of the same title—before indulging in a zigzagging solo. Kikuci’s keys and Ridley’s bass appear in opposite speakers, battling in glorious stereo sound, as if each man were attempting to elbow the other out of the way.
First might be an illustration of uninhibited studio collaboration, but it would be wrong to minimize the input of the man whose name adorns the cover. Mine’s sax work is cast in the spirit of Coltrane’s post-Ascension freedom, soaring around the room in fluttering flight. The sleek, sly “McPhee” begins with Ridley’s fingers creeping up and down his double bass like a cat burglar on an uneven roof; Mine joins him in creating the rhythm, before cascading away without losing the song’s sense of collectedness. His performance on “Little Abbi” is a clinic in midnight-cool jazz sounds. The album ends with “Bar ‘L’ Len” and some eccentric orchestral stabs that make way for a huge drum solo. It’s like finishing the night with a shot of hard liquor before dashing out the door.
In a recent conversation about First for the reissue’s liner notes, Mine admitted that he “cannot remember that much response or assessment received around the time of release.” Nevertheless, his influence grew. Recorded just a few weeks later for the prominent Three Blind Mice label and released first, the more kinetic Mine incorporated spiritual jazz and futurist post-bop. For Mine and for Japanese jazz, it was another step towards the new-fashioned. The orchestration became more intense; artists began incorporating a wider range of global sounds. First helped set the table for all of that. It is a critical album in a crucial period for Japanese jazz—the sound of everything changing and a new order taking form.

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On their long-awaited follow-up to their breakthrough sophomore effort, the pop-punk band embraces the liberating power of anger.

Morbid Stuff

In PUP, there is only one rule: the People’s Champ can never win. The Canadian quartet's sophomore album, the loudly beloved The Dream is Over, brought them perilously close to the kind of success that would strip them of underdog status forever: They made an album about the comprehensive mental, physical, and financial toll of touring constantly for two years straight, and their reward was...getting to do the same exact thing for even longer, in larger venues. The dream wasn’t over, it just stuck around long enough to prove hollow. As a result, Morbid Stuff is the angriest PUP has ever sounded. But it’s not a cry for help. It’s a cry of freedom, the sound of a band realizing that anger is liberating when depression is intractable and incurable—we’re not broken, so why bother trying to fix it?
Many PUP songs thrash towards a record-scratch/freeze frame moment where frontman Stefan Babcock becomes far too pissed off to bother with singing anymore. On Morbid Stuff, a lot of songs just begin at this place. During the bridge of “Full Blown Meltdown,” Babcock hectors, “I’m losing interest in self-help/Equally bored of feeling sorry for myself.” It’s Morbid Stuff distilled to an emotional concentrate, and a song that sounds like nothing they’ve ever done before: As the last great band to ever appear on Warped Tour, PUP have always boasted profoundly unfashionable influences, and “Full Blown Meltdown” wraps itself in sonic JNCOS—slap bass as thick as Tim Commerford’s lat muscles, a chugging circle pit coda scented by Toxicity, the unchecked aggro lyricism of nu-metal.
Though PUP are from Toronto, they’ve always channeled the perspective of the sheltered suburban loser for whom every social interaction is a chance to stoke their inferiority complex. “I was getting high in the van in St. Catharine’s/While you were rubbing elbows in the art scene,” Babcock sneers at an unnamed frienemy on the title track. However, the greatest and most frequently suffered indignity in PUP songs is simply seeing someone getting on with a relatively normal existence. On “See You At Your Funeral,”  Babcock is in the grocery store, presumably living his best life— “buying organic foods/making healthy selections”—until he spots an ex; by the end of the song, he’s rooting for a televised apocalypse. Minutes earlier on “Free At Last”, Babcock is at Tim Hortons at 5 AM, prompting Charly Bliss’ Eva Hendricks to deliver 2019’s greatest one-line cameo: “Have you been drinking?” Babcock: “Well of course I have!”
Punk bands dedicated to the most immediate impact aren't expected to take three years between albums, but PUP justify the long hiatus after The Dream is Over with a craftsmanship that’s the only subtle thing about them. Even if guitar solos and hyperspeed drumming are welcome in this kind of punk rock, outright technical proficiency is viewed the same suspicion as a keg of Michelob Ultra. PUP balance wrath and math on Morbid Stuff’s most agitated songs—their favorite trick is faking a 4/4 riff and cutting measures a beat short, turning “Morbid Stuff” and “Blood Mary, Kate and Ashley” into highlight reels of every time a guy in a skate video faceplants after catching a curb a split second too soon. Before releasing their single “Free At Last,” they posted the song’s chord charts and lyrics, to see if any of their fans would cover it “without hearing it first.” Of the 253 bands that responded, none were boy bands, but I wish one had dared to try—on their biggest choruses, these guys are like Max Martin with gang vocals.
Still, it's somehow possible to miss the challenging message PUP are trying to get across. Their acceptance of anger as a gift is nonetheless a bold gesture at a time when the language of self-care has become fetishized and commercialized—the gang yells “just cause you’re sad again, it doesn’t make you special at all” at least a dozen times during “Free At Last,” and we can take the song’s rapturous reception as proof that it’s a message that fans wanted to hear as much as they needed to. It’s possible to work towards improvement while feeling like a total fucking loser—your shrink calls that a dialectic, and Morbid Stuff is 37 minutes of safe, sweaty space to process your worst feelings when a half-assed meltdown just won’t cut it.


Jeezy is less effective these days, as his new album attests. But he covers gaps in his writing with a few tricks and guest appearances from Kendrick, Rick Ross, YG, 2 Chainz, and others.

Pressure

For nearly a decade, Jeezy was an unwavering pusher. His guiding principles have always been candor and clarity, sharing action sequences from inside his coke-fueled world. But Mr. 17.5 has changed his tune in recent years. It isn’t the trafficking he relishes; it’s the entrepreneurialism, meeting demand with a high-quality product. “I don’t wanna be known as the World’s Greatest Trapper,” he told Billboard. “I wanna be known as the World’s Greatest Hustler.” To that end, his new album, Pressure, forgoes Jeezy the wholesaler in favor of Jeezy the tycoon and socialite, taking stock of his various ventures (rap among them) and the new life they’ve bought him. Jeezy fully embraces his role as a paragon for dealers trying to escape the game clean and profitable.
As a younger man, Jeezy was a trap extraordinaire so ruthlessly blunt and efficient that he was exhilarating. He was in the thick of it, moving weight by the trunk load and defending his turf accordingly. As a rap elder statesman, he mostly enjoys the benefit of hindsight, less concerned with the act of trapping and more concerned with his legacy. “Fuck these niggas talkin’, I’ve been ballin’ for a century/Niggas think of quarter kis and scales when they mention me,” he raps on “Spyder,” all but likening his raps to a corporate ledger. He doubles down on “This Is It”: “The champ here, yeah you niggas gon’ fall back/Funny dressin’ ass nigga, where you sold crack?/Them alternative facts, that’s just a mystery/Bought my first 8-ball, the rest was history.” Every line is meant as a grand gesture. Yes, Jeezy was an elite trapper, they seem to intimate, but then he turned that into all of this—penthouse suites, luxury cars, exotic women, a modest rap empire.
The issue isn’t so much the message as the delivery. Jeezy really is among the greatest hustlers because he keeps selling listeners something they’ve already bought—the same larger-than-life coke saga he’s always peddled—just with minor adjustments and diminishing returns. The dealing is all past tense on Pressure, as if he’s reliving his glory days, or simply marveling aloud at all he’s been able to accomplish with his credentials. Most of what he does now could be defined as adjusting to the bed of roses—picking up his car from the valet, fully bejeweled and popping bottles in VIP sections, showing up on the big screen courtside at an NBA game—activities that don’t lend themselves to his explosive dispatches. His raps continue to depreciate in value.
There can be power in directness, as Jeezy knows well—many of his best threats and boasts were emphasized by how plainly he put them, and how effortlessly they connected: think “Go Getta”’s “Risk it all you can lose your life/What else can I say? That’s a helluva price.” He’s less effective these days but there are still flashes. He covers gaps in his writing with a few tricks. Sometimes verses are shorter and more compact. On “Valet Interlude,” there’s only one. Diddy (credited as Puff Daddy) ad-libs nearly every moment on “Bottles Up.” Jeezy lets 2 Chainz, rap’s most devastating puncher, take “Floor Seats,” and he bends to fit the courtside theme. YG, who trades on the same kind of efficiency Jeezy does, totally soaks up all the space on “Pressure.” Jeezy is mostly comfortable doing the same things he’s always done and letting others take the leaps.
But times are changing and Jeezy is still clearly struggling to adapt to them. He gets outmaneuvered by newcomers Tee Grizzley and Payroll Giovanni, who are just a bit nimbler than he is. Sometimes he’s out-paced by the big, lavish D. Rich production. Jeezy used to command even the most extravagant beats, but he occasionally gets swallowed up here or is a step out of sync. His collaboration with longtime rival and one-time enemy Rick Ross, “Like Them,” is a cheap attempt at romanticism from two of the least romantic men in rap by a wide margin. “American Dream,” Jeezy’s big team-up with Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole tries to do a lot at once: reconcile capitalist ideals with a broken political system, make sense of the War on Drugs, consider trap music’s side effects. The song revisits the shallow political activism of The Recession highlights like “Crazy World” and “My President,” as if to respond to the current climate and Trump. Cole has the most to say, but the track as a whole is overstuffed and tonally imbalanced. Where “My president is black, my Lambo’s blue” was impactful, “First my president was black, now my president is wack/I ain’t never going broke, what’s American in that?” is considerably less so. Really, what’s the point of being direct when you’ve run out of things to say? For all Jeezy’s posturing as a savvy businessman, he doesn’t seem to know what he’s even selling anymore.


DJ Shadow trades in his turntables and MPC for a copy of Ableton and embarks upon a freewheeling, low-stakes journey through the contemporary sounds that inspire his practice.

The Mountain Will Fall

Josh Davis passed a milestone recently: the artist known as DJ Shadow now has a greatest hits collection to his name. This suggests, of course, that he’s had a fruitful career; it also suggests that his best work is in the rearview mirror. His enduring masterpiece, Endtroducing is now 20 years old, its cover art accurately dating the music contained therein: two men thumbing through the same dusty crates where Davis himself once sought out obscure samples. In an era where beatmaking revolved around physical hardware, vintage records and vinyl manipulation skills, Shadow stood at the vanguard. In the years since, however, he’s struggled to find his footing, even as a younger generation of producers have successfully adapted his omnivorous sampling approach to suit the current climate.
It’s been a while since we’ve heard a full-length from Shadow, but wherever he’s been for the last five years, he’s been keeping his ears open. He hinted at as much on “Ghost Town” from 2014’s Liquid Amber EP, a fizzy trap instrumental that’s more reminiscent of current trendsetters like Hudson Mohawke than the reverent classicism and breakbeats for which Shadow is known. Tellingly, “Ghost Town” appears again on The Mountain Will Fall, and serves as a sort of statement of purpose: this is a record where Shadow seeks to draw as much inspiration from contemporary artists as they have from his back catalog.
Opening number “The Mountain Will Fall” announces as much by exploring the distance between Shadow and his progeny. Given the hazy sonics and flutes, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a Clams Casino beat, until the errant record scratches that punctuate the track whirr into the frame. The song closes with the sound of a cassette being flipped—a cheeky reminder that Shadow has been in the game since before many of today’s producers were born.
Davis has had too few collaborations with rappers over the course of his career, so “Nobody Speak,” a collaboration with Run the Jewels is sure to raise eyebrows. Unlike some of his past work with emcees, however, this is a laid back affair, more boom-bap spaghetti western than furious rapping workout. Killer Mike and El-P don’t quite bring their A-game here--“I don’t work for free/I am barely giving a fuck away” is the best quotable you’re going to get this time around—through there’s an undeniable thrill to hearing these three elder statesmen in a room together, building a Run the Jewels track atop what is decidedly not an El-P beat.
Elsewhere, Shadow invites in collaborators who can pull him out of his comfort zone. “Bergschrund,” a collaboration with experimental producer Nils Frahm, is the album’s most sonically adventurous song and one of its best. In the marriage of their divergent approaches, the pair manage to find a middle ground between IDM and EDM: warped, decaying tones that ping-pong between channels, a pleasantly tactile beat and an almost dabke-like keyboard run that cuts through the song’s final section.
As contemporary as much of The Mountain Will Fall sounds, there are still a few reminders that we’re listening to a DJ Shadow record. The second half of “Three Ralphs” is the closest thing here to vintage Shadow: echo-laden minor key piano chords, sputtering synths, a morbid snippet of movie dialog. Still, the drums fire off in inhuman machine gun blasts, an immediate reminder that what we’re hearing wasn’t built on an MPC. “The Sideshow,” however is a period piece through and through, a track where Shadow shows off his scratching ability over a cache of enigmatic samples, as surface dust crackles in the foreground. While the vocal sounds like it’s pulled from hip-hop’s golden era, it’s actually an original performance from relatively unknown Sacramento rapper Ernie Fresh. The song feels like a particular kind of flex: a reminder that Shadow’s ear for and knowledge of musical history runs deeper than most of us will ever be able to fully comprehend.
Admirably, Davis takes a lot of risks on The Mountain Will Fall; unfortunately, not all of them pay off. “Depth Charge” is a bit too goofy for it’s own good—built around an ominous surf guitar line, it comes out sounding like a trap remake of the Jaws theme. “Pitter Patter” chases some easy thrills, with a breakdown that nods toward stadium EDM; worse yet is the iTunes bonus track “Swerve,” a dubstep number constructed from Pac Man chirps and cartoon sound effects. If Shadow continues to push in this direction, one imagines the offers for multi-million dollar Vegas residencies won’t be far behind.
Even these flops are revealing in a sense, though: they point to a playfulness that Davis has managed to maintain despite the heavy yoke of expectation that he’s worn ever since Endtroducing. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that Shadow is a foundational figure in hip-hop; with Endtroducing, he helped elevate both sampling and hip-hop instrumentals to the art forms they are today. And yet here he is, more than two decades in, experimenting, having fun, trying out new sounds and not being afraid to fail. Far from aiming for some grand unified statement, The Mountain Will Fall feels a lot more like a DJ set—a curated grab bag of ideas that overlap and collide, sometimes in unexpected ways. It’s as if Davis has no agenda beyond putting his own spin on the music he finds exciting—what higher calling could there be for a DJ?


The debut LP from the duo Jenny Hval and Håvard Volden is a warm-blooded exploration of the sensuality of the artistic process.

Menneskekollektivet

Drafting, more often than not, is terrifying for an artist. You can spend your whole life on a draft, ideating endlessly, never arriving at a finished product. It feels like an especially strange place for Jenny Hval, the avant-garde Norwegian artist who has been making rigorously theoretical, supremely varnished records under her own name for a decade. Hval primarily deals in feminist exegesis, in fully fleshed-out ideas about aging in a female body, or menstruating, or choosing whether or not to be a mother. Listening to her music can feel like reading Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto after drinking three espressos. Her work with Håvard Volden as Lost Girls is different; it is more freeform, improvised. The duo’s debut LP, Menneskekollektivet, lives almost exclusively in the draft stage, and the music itself seems to relish in the experience of its creation.
Menneskekollektivet is primarily a dance record, a heady cocktail of muted drum machines and hypertrophied synthesizers. The first sounds on the album are Hval’s voice and a womb-like synth. They remain in stasis for nearly three minutes, when a drum machine that moves like a dinghy on choppy water comes to disrupt things while Hval speaks about selflessness. The song, the title track, is over 12 minutes, but the length is hypnotic rather than monotonous. Hval and Volden use the passage of time to simulate processing, to capture themselves figuring out what they are trying to say as they move through soft corners and harsh lighting.
It is a joy to witness someone like Hval, normally purposeful and direct with language, to let loose, and that joy is carried over into the flickering, warm-blooded music. This is not to say her words are meaningless, just that her emphasis is more on sound than sense. On “Carried by Invisible Bodies,” Hval talks about storytelling. “Right now,” she says, her voice inquisitive, as if she were looking for her words in the air, “there are two—there’s like double fiction.” She continues, sounding more assured, as she goes on to explore the feeling of writing music—its layers, its unreality. As she probes her way through, the drum machines sail through space like a perfect tennis serve. She sounds almost like Robert Ashley on Automatic Writing, softly grasping onto particles of phrases, watching them atomize, and taking as long as she needs to arrive at a destination.
Of course, like all drafts, there are less-successful moments. Jenny Hval’s aimless musings on pork, lettuce, and cucumber over the minimalist drum machines of “Losing Something” are a bit nonsensical, and not in a particularly interesting way. This moment, however, is one of very few. More often than not, Menneskekollektivet’s inherently unfinished quality makes it feel naturalistic, deeply human. If Menneskekollektivet is about the sensuality of meandering through one’s artistic process, then “Real Life,” is the record’s most fully realized, gorgeous cut. Here, improvised guitars glow like sun rays, and the emphasis is placed on Hval’s vocal arrangements. She sings of writing a letter, of what it means for life to be real. Her voice is vibrant, blissful, bursting with bright color. Ironically, the lack of surtext makes Menneskekollektivet as conceptually rich as anything Hval has ever done. It is a statement about the beauty of slowing down, of not worrying about what you say and instead focusing on how you feel.

Buy: Rough Trade
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With a playful mood and a wide range of collaborators, the debut full-length from the outlandish pop duo subverts trends with ease.

Sexy

Coco & Clair Clair sound like someone gave a record deal to the band formed by the cool girls in your seventh grade class. They’re weird, bitchy, and a little self-obsessed, but they’re charming enough to pull it all off. Coco’s brazen rap and Clair’s hushed vocals have a childlike quality, accompanied by noisy production and whimsical lyrics about the power of friendship. Since forming in 2014, the band has risen to fame off slyly addictive singles like “Knife Play,” “Crushcrushcrush,” and the viral hit “Pretty.” The duo’s debut full length album, Sexy, continues in the vein of these tracks, melding the aloof and the outlandish.
Coco and Clair Clair coalesce and subvert trends with ease. Their music has the airy beats of cloud rap, the breathy vocals and reverb of dream pop, and the Auto-Tune and genuinely funny songwriting of hyperpop. On Sexy, the pair works with even more sounds and a wide range of collaborators, including Lagos-based rapper Deto Black and NYC indie band Porches. This experimentation is promising, but Sexy shines brightest when it builds on the duo’s strengths, creating a playful mood that seems designed to welcome new listeners into their all-star clique.
On Sexy, the pair sings over and over again about being hotter and cooler than everyone they know without managing to alienate anyone. They look flawless from all angles, they insist on “Tbtf”; on “Pop Star” they brag about being paid to show up to parties in their pajamas. Everyone wants to be them, everyone wants to get with them. It’s a cliché, but the silliness makes their pose feel original and genuine, inviting us to live vicariously through their inflated confidence. The record’s upbeat atmosphere encourages a physical response, asking fans to dance, sing along, or laugh out loud. More lackadaisical songs such as “8 Am” or “Love Me” weaken the album not because they are bad but because they feel out of place.
The duo’s cheeky self-obsession translates into a boredom around romance: They only have time for each other. Several songs address men who can’t keep up with them—they are ghosting Tinder matches and swerving exes who are still obsessed. “He wanna sync up to my period/Meanwhile he’s saved on my phone as ‘idiot,’” Coco raps on “Bad Lil Vibe.” Sexy feels like listening to the funniest, most confident people at a party making fun of everyone else in attendance because they just can’t keep up. “Realest bitches in the room always, me and Clair,” Coco quips. Despite their harshness, Coco and Clair Clair have surprisingly wholesome intentions. Sexy is an ode to two best friends against the world, finding a way to make it work when they are leagues above everyone around them.


On their seventh album, the moody trio drafts in vocal contributions from Cat Power and Sally Timms.

Cinder

Everybody likes one Dirty Three album but nobody likes all of them, and your favorite is probably the record you heard first; this fine and original band engenders an odd sort of fanship fatigue. For a while it seemed as though the records sounded too much alike, but Dirty Three found ways to change up the sound through multi-tracking and shift of focus, so that's not quite it.
The weariness has I think more to do with the inherent drama and love of dynamics in the trio's approach to their respective instruments. You think violin, guitar, and drums, and you figure there's something in there that might work as background music, but Dirty Three albums ask a lot. With their inevitable crescendos, every song eventually butts its way into whatever you're doing. You're either paying close attention or you're listening to something else.
On Cinder, Dirty Three seem ready to pare back and let the songs inhabit comparatively modest worlds. Most of these 19 tracks are relatively short mood sketches that will likely be pushed in grander direction in a live setting. There's a bit more instrumental variety, too, with Warren Ellis adding mandolin and piano to some tracks, and Mick Turner contributing bass and organ. "Doris" surprises by beginning with huge drums (turns out Jim White knows how to play a straight backbeat) and angular, almost funky guitar, before reaching a moment of jubilation with a jagged blast of bagpipes from guest Mark Saul. "The Zither Player" is an extrapolation of a theme by Hungarian fiddle player Félix Lajkó, and its jittery upbeat rhythm and Gypsy melody is unusually danceable for the D3. On the other end of the spectrum are quiet set pieces like "Ever Since" and "Amy", on which restrained playing by Ellis allows the simple beauty of trio's group interplay to gel.
Another first: Cinder has vocals. "Great Waves" has Dirty Three backing Chan Marshall to lovely effect; as with her 1998 record Moon Pix, Marshall's hushed ethereal leanings sound particularly convincing stitched up in the rhythms of Turner and White. And she remembered to bring her newly sharpened sense of melody. Sally Timms' wordless cooing on the shapeless "Feral", on the other hand, is far less satisfying, bordering on pointless. Still, on their seventh album, any expansion in approach is welcome, and even the excesses of traditional D3 builders like "She Passed Through" are easy to swallow. If much of it is merely pretty, this is easily the most diverse and wide-ranging Dirty Three record yet, absolutely the right thing for them to be doing at this time. It doesn't ask for or promise nearly as much, which is just the breather needed.