There are 11 songs on Sun Kil Moon’s astonishing sixth LP Benji, and in nearly all of them, somebody dies. Mark Kozelek wants us to know that they all lived, loved, fought, fucked up, and often did the best they could. While Benji is consumed with death, sadness, and tragedy, there's gratitude within this melancholy, and it’s Kozelek’s most life-affirming record.

Benji

There are 11 songs on Sun Kil Moon’s astonishing sixth LP Benji, and in nearly all of them, somebody dies. And that’s not including the ones where someone’s on the verge of death or seriously headed towards it. Toddlers die, teenagers die, adults die, and the elderly die. They die of natural causes and in freak accidents. People die alone and people die by the dozens—handicapped children, single parents, grandmothers, serial killers. They die out of mercy and die long before they’re due. Rednecks die as respected men and white collar kids die in disgrace. But more importantly, Mark Kozelek wants us to know that they all lived, loved, fought, fucked up, and often did the best they could, before he sets out to “find some poetry to make some sense of this and give some deeper meaning” to their tragedies. Turns out he doesn’t have to dig very far. Here, Kozelek does away with the metaphor and verbal obfuscation often used to distract an audience from their own joy, sadness, crippling failures, and small triumphs. If listeners find themselves unable to make it through Benji in one piece, it’s because Kozelek all but forces us to recognize how the most emotionally moving art can be mapped directly on to our own lives.
This is a culmination of the jarring shift in Kozelek's work that started with 2012’s Among the Leaves, an erratic, occasionally embarrassing, and fascinating tell-all about a life in music. Whereas early songwriting in Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon resulted in elegant, poetic lyrics that demanded a hardbound, 256-page compilation, all of a sudden he was giving us songs about justifying a case of VD to his girlfriend, picking up water from 7-Eleven, and battling his own boredom with songwriting, all wrapped in songs with titles like “The Moderately Talented Yet Attractive Young Woman vs. the Exceptionally Talented Yet Not So Attractive Middle Aged Man". It wasn’t a midlife crisis, exactly; it was more like watching your parents negotiate Facebook for the first time, equally excited and overwhelmed that they can share their daily minutiae but unaware of what to keep to themselves.
Benji steps away from the focus on process in favor of songs that elevate exceedingly personal stories into universal displays of humanity. Presenting himself as no wiser, empathetic, or understanding than any of its subjects or his audience, Kozelek has crafted an album that anyone can feel but also one that, paradoxically, is filled with songs that wouldn't make sense if covered by anybody else. The opening “Carissa” is a portal towards the world Kozelek inhabits throughout Benji, all of it painfully real and subject to nature’s laws even as time seems frozen within it. The first line of Benji lays out the record's confrontational realism: “Carissa, when I first saw you, you were a lovely child/ And the last time I saw you, you were 15 and pregnant and running wild.” We learn a few things about her: she’s Mark Kozelek’s second cousin, and in the 20 years since Kozelek’s seen her, she’s had two kids, settled into a nursing job in a nondescript Ohio town and, in general, gotten her shit together—a rarity in a Mark Kozelek song. And we also know that she dies in a fire after an aerosol can explodes in the trash.
That alone doesn’t make “Carissa” stand out, not in the catalog of one of our most prolific miserablists. But unlike Caroline or Elaine or Katy, Carissa has an effect on Kozelek that feels biological, that she’s a part of Kozelek’s flesh and blood and not just a muse, and he renders her story with detail that would be stunning for a novelist, let alone a songwriter. The chorus is sweetly sung and absolutely crushing: “Carissa was 35/ You don’t just raise two kids and take out your trash and die.” He’s right, that shouldn’t happen. Except the same exact thing happened to his uncle, which is detailed two songs later on “Truck Driver”.
Which leads to an important critical consideration: Do these songs resonate because we understand them to be true stories? We have little reason to doubt Kozelek’s authenticity, as Benji is full of proper nouns and historical facts that check out: Google some of the specificities mentioned during his eviscerating sexual inventory of “Dogs” and you find that there is indeed a Tangier and Red Lobster near the Erie Canal in Akron. When he calls his mom in "Micheline" and learns of his friend Brett’s death in 1999, he mentions booking a movie role—as the bassist from Stillwater in Almost Famous. At one point, he sings that “the Sopranos guy died at 51/ That’s the same age as the guy who’s coming to play drums,” and wouldn’t you know, former Sonic Youth stickman Steve Shelley, who played on the record, turns 52 in June. Kozelek’s reaction to both aerosol can-related deaths in his family are basically, “you can’t make this shit up.” But what if he did make this shit up? If so, Benji arguably becomes an even more impressive record—the debilitating emotional response created by “Carissa” and “Truck Driver” are undeniably real, and if the stories are fiction, the guy did his homework.
Regardless of the real names and real events used throughout, nothing feels exploitative, unnecessary, or cruel the way some of the songs on Among the Leaves could. Nor is Benji subject to the navel-gazing self-importance that usually accompanies an aging musician making their “mortality” album. Despite most of it taking place in rural Ohio, people like Carissa and his uncle (“redneck that he was”) are never used as a stand-in for some salt-of-the-earth Middle American archetype or a cheap way to make some dippy point about us all being interconnected and carpe diem.
Instead, Benji trusts in the complexity and power ingrained in anyone’s life story rather than using them for some grand statement that glorifies Kozelek’s own perspective. Most importantly, his storytelling has sharpened considerably. Befitting someone who watches an absurd amount of boxing, Kozelek’s prose has taken on pugilistic bent, where he can go five minutes or more dancing around, softening the listener with sharp jabs before landing a catastrophic body blow. This is best exhibited on the song “Micheline”, which has three acts linked by nothing but their end result, and the one where his grandmother dies is the least tragic.
This is obviously brutal stuff, its pacing, themes, and structure having more in common with cinema or literature than pop music. But Benji is still a piece of entertainment and it's a pleasure to listen to on that level. For one thing, it's the most musically diverse and sonically direct album he’s made since disbanding Red House Painters. He’ll never return to the turbulent sound of the 1990s, though you get raw, gutbucket blues (“Dogs”, “Richard Ramirez Died Today of Natural Causes”), swanky, horn-laced yacht-pop (“Ben’s My Friend”), and a tender duet with Will Oldham (“I Can’t Live Without My Mother’s Love”), to name a few. And with its chipper harmonies and a fake Nels Cline solo (not Kozelek’s first joke at his expense), “I Love My Dad” feels like a ribbing at latter-day Wilco, a dad-rock song about his dad.
So Benji can be funny as hell, too: The effervescent narrative “Ben’s My Friend” snaps us back into the present day after the happy ending of “Micheline” and follows Kozelek as he suffers through writer’s block, a distracted lunch in a restaurant filled with “sports bar shit,” and a Postal Service concert where all the drunk kids with their cells appear to be “20 years younger.” He claims he’s too tired for the “backstage hi/bye” with pal Ben Gibbard and he heads back to his hot tub in Tahoe, before revealing the real cause for his meltdown: “I’m content, but there’s a tinge of competitiveness.” “I Love My Dad” finds Kozelek possibly outing himself as a recovering alcoholic (“I’ll have an O’Doul’s and my friend here will have a Guinness”) and a victim of child abuse, but it's otherwise quotably hilarious, detailing a relationship with his father where valuable life lessons are imparted through both Iron Mike-style beatdowns and Edgar Winter records.
Benji sounds more like Kozelek relating events instead of crafting them, which makes the continuity and reflexivity of the record feel both uncanny and the work of protracted genius. “Richard Ramirez Died Today of Natural Causes” was released months before it ended up as a thematic skeleton key on Benji, and it mentions a flight to Cleveland where he’ll be mourning a relative, which eventually became the inspiration for “Carissa”. “Ben’s My Friend” mentions a visit to Santa Fe that earlier served as the turning point of “I Watched the Film ‘The Song Remains the Same’”. On “I Love My Dad”, his father forces him to watch wrestling matches with a handicapped friend as a means of teaching him patience and the ability to shoot the shit and show respect for those in need. These lessons serves as the entire basis for “Jim Wise”. During that visit, they bring Jim food from Panera Bread and later you find out that Kozelek’s father likes to flirt with the girls there. As standalone pieces, “I Can’t Live Without My Mother’s Love” and “I Love My Dad” are  touching, heartfelt odes to his elderly parents and it’s interesting to notice the vast disparity in the tone of each: the latter is an elbow-poking, uncouth tribute to his father raising him to be the man that he is, while the former is a desperate plea for the parent that keeps him alive.
None of these things reveal themselves on the first listen but even after dozens, you never feel like you've exhausted Benji's secrets. The songs are stories, yes, but the kind that are told rather than read, ones you never hear the same way twice. I’ve heard the record compared to Winesburg, Ohio, a life-changing meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, the open-heart emotional surgery of Majical Cloudz’ Impersonator, and Kendrick Lamar’s character-driven opus good kid, m.A.A.d. City, which is indicative of the artistic merits of Benji, but also its ability to reach beyond the hardcore fanbase that has Kozelek has made no secret of his feelings towards as of late. Though Benji has few of the "Behind the Music" set pieces that marked Perils from the Sea, Admiral Fell Promises, and Among the Leaves, and it lacks his stage banter's airing of grievances, this record slowly reveals itself as both a universal meditation on death and, very subtly, a recount of the life events that determined Mark Kozelek’s own artistic journey.
“Dogs” takes its title from a track on Pink Floyd’s Animals. Kozelek’s has consistently acknowledged how the classic rock of his youth has stuck with him, from AC/DC, Yes, Judas Priest to Led Zeppelin, who inspire Benji’s jaw-dropping centerpiece “I Watched the Film ‘The Song Remains the Same’”. Anyone who's seen Led Zeppelin's profoundly dumbfounding medley of concert footage and Hammer of the Gods propaganda knows that the personal circumstances surrounding your viewing of the film is far more important than any of Zep's myth-making. Kozelek admits, "I don't know what happened or what anyone did," and notes how the more pastoral, meditative "The Rain Song", "Bron Yr Aur", and "No Quarter" spoke to him more than the thunder of John Bonham's drumming or Jimmy Page's mahogany double-necked Gibson SG, leading him to conclude, "from my earliest memories, I was a very melancholy kid."
Three decades later, Kozelek cannot shake melancholy, will probably "carry it to hell", and in the meantime, uses "I Watched the Film"'s deeply moving fingerpicking patterns (similar to “Bron Yr Aur”) to understand sadness' pervasive grip on his life. The song ends with Kozelek promising a trip to Santa Fe to find the guy who gave him his first record deal—and yes, 4AD’s Ivo Watts-Russell really does live in Santa Fe. “Between my travel and his divorce," both have experienced their share of melancholy in the past two decades and have nothing to gain from each other anymore except a genuine connection and a moment to reflect.
That kind of sentiment represents the most profound shift that has occurred since Among the Leaves, when his interviews found him grousing about how his fans are “guys in tennis shoes” and reviews compare him to young, bearded troubadour-types like Jose Gonzalez and Bon Iver. He goes to Santa Fe for no other reason than to tell Watts, thank you. Fine then, someone does get used as a stand-in on Benji, because the record as a whole feels like him thanking not just his fans and supporters, but everyone who he’s come across in his life, by making good on his promise to give their lives poetry and deeper meaning. So while Benji is consumed with death, sadness, mourning, and tragedy, there's gratitude within all this melancholy and it’s actually Kozelek’s least depressing and most life-affirming record: when faced with an album that exposes so much of the beauty, truth, ugliness, humor, and grace inherent in simply existing in this world, the only response is to go out and live.


The Kentucky songwriter surveys the past, present, and future of country music on a thoughtful new record with deep roots.

Rustin’ in the Rain

Tyler Childers knows how the house of country music can be divided against itself. Since his 2011 debut, the Kentucky songwriter has roamed beyond the conventional divisions of the genre, flirting not just with Sturgill Simpson-esque heartland rock and old-time mountain music but synthesizers and even lo-fi beats. As an outspoken progressive who has found success outside the Nashville establishment, it’s tempting to see him as a break from the genre, rather than an artist working within a clear sense of tradition. But at the 2018 Americana Awards, where he accepted an award for Emerging Artist after the host mispronounced his last name, Childers took a hardline stance on his preferred genre: “Everybody always talks about the state of country music and puts down commercial country and says ‘Something’s gotta be done’ and ‘We need to be elevating artists that are doing more traditional country,’ But then we’re not calling those artists country.”
His latest record, Rustin’ in the Rain, is impossible to mistake for anything but country music. From the jaunty opening guitar lick, its songs take the dirty stains on his shirt and the scraggly edges of his sound as a badge of honor: “Blame it on my jeans/Caked in tenant farmin’,” he quips on the title track. Childers has always approached music as hard work, both a virtue earned through sweat and something to do with idle hands, but Rustin’ in the Rain takes work itself as its defining subject matter. On “Percheron Mules,” he fantasizes about rolling around in the mud with a pack of mules, and the animal becomes a recurring motif throughout the album, whether literally on the cover or as a metaphor for the labor of relationships on the stirring ballad “In Your Love.”
The catchy country-pop rhythm of the title track, buoyed by a twangy electric guitar solo, wouldn’t have sounded out-of-place in between Clint Black and Dwight Yoakam on Country Music Television in the 1990s, but Childers frequently channels a vision of the genre that predates the video era. Despite its tale of long-distance technological heartbreak, “Phone Calls and Emails” is a mournful jukebox waltz in the lineage of Willie Nelson standards like “Hello Walls.” The wistful “Luke 2:8-10” — featuring guest vocals from Margo Price, Erin Rae, and S.G. Goodman—is an ironic twist on a Nativity narrative, but the instrumentation is sincerely traditional, as an accordion squeezes away in three-quarter time. There’s gravel in Childers’ voice but a softness too, as he cries and yelps at the moon. The tender, plain-spoken quality of his tenor is what makes it stand out; he never feels strained or affected.
The old-time feeling of Rustin’ in the Rain is most evident in the bluegrass-inflected “Percheron Mules,” a jubilant picking session with the Travelin’ McCourys, the ensemble led by the sons of living mountain music legend Del McCoury. The choice in cover songs also speak to Childers’ heritage within the genre. While his early albums featured entirely original compositions, he has increasingly woven in songs by other artists, building his own canon and using other writers’ words to tell us who he is. Here, he drapes a tender rendition of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” in gentle piano and pedal steel, and it expresses an older model for the kind of outspoken outlaw Childers has become. On the closing track, Childers interprets a more modern selection, “Space and Time” by fellow Kentucky native S.G. Goodman, turning her searing ballad into a sock-hop slow-dance.
While Childers built his audience without support of mainstream country radio, his process for the album wasn’t all that different from the Nashville standard. In a recent interview with The New York Times, he explained that he imagined himself as an old-school songwriter, pitching songs to Elvis Presley. In true Nashville fashion, this album marks the first time that Childers has opened himself to co-writers; he worked with Geno Seale on “In Your Love,” while the song’s video was scripted by the queer Southern poet Silas House. He may often speak up for country music, but Childers acknowledges he does not speak for all of country music.
Released as the album’s first single, “In Your Love” suggested a significant departure, both in its Hornsby-esque sound and its queer themes, made explicit in the music video’s tale of the forbidden longing between two male coal miners. Over a glistening piano and a warm bed of synthesizers, Childers sings not just of love, but self-defense, as the emotional bond between two people helps them endure persecution: “It’s a long hard war/But I can grin and bear it.” By grounding such a radical statement in songs that are still tinged in the patina of tradition, Childers makes clear that this isn’t a break with country music: It is a light cast on its history, a recognition of what it has been and can become.


Katie Stelmanis’ fourth album swings for big, embodied pop moments without shying from the strangeness and discordance that’s animated the project since the beginning.

HiRUDiN

Katie Stelmanis has a voice like a beacon, a sound that can shear through any accompaniment, no matter how drab. She shares this power with ANOHNI and Zola Jesus, singers who enchant their surroundings with the depth and richness of their timbres, who are instantly recognizable in any setting. Her voice comprises the central pillar of her synthpop project Austra, the feature around which her music crystallizes. The Canadian artist’s previous album, 2017’s Future Politics, shifted deeper into the icy trappings of club music, laminating Stelmanis’ voice inside the production styles of deep house and trance. On HiRUDiN, Austra’s fourth LP, the project breaks from that rut, swinging for big, embodied pop moments that let the warmth of Stelmanis’ voice shine through.
The most dynamic of Austra’s albums, HiRUDiN cultivates the raw pleasure of pop hooks without shying from the strangeness and discordance that has lit up the project since its 2011 debut. Live drums bolster songs like “How Did You Know?” and “Messiah” to the heights of Celine Dion’s late ’90s radio hits, a level of urgency that Stelmanis’ voice is readily equipped to handle. But even as she navigates sweeping and sugary choruses, dissonant figures prickle in the background—a stray looping whistle, the glassy shards of a synth arpeggio, the reverb on a piano chord bleeding into abrasive feedback. These bitter notes bring the sweetness of the vocal melodies into focus, making them all the easier to relish.
Stelmanis brought co-producers Rodaidh McDonald and Joseph Shabason into the mix for the first time on HiRUDiN, and worked alongside Cecile Believe—the singer and writer whose presence enlivened SOPHIE’s debut album in 2018—on two of the album’s most striking tracks, the advance singles “Anywayz” and “Mountain Baby.” The latter introduces a children’s choir to the world of Austra, a move that contrasts with Believe’s trip-hoppy guest vocals but whose uncanniness ultimately locks into place. (Who better to sing about the blank innocence of new love than literal children?) These additional players open up the album until it sounds enormous and full, busily populated without losing particulate detail. Mountains serve as a recurring lyrical image, and the scope of the production matches the landscape—HiRUDiN towers, engulfing the listener.
Plenty of pop music about the end of a relationship tends to project personal disaster outward: A couple breaks apart, and so does the whole world. Here, Austra takes a different tack. “Anywayz” dwarfs Stelmanis’ heartbreak, situating it within a planetary scale. “We’ll figure it out/But what if we don’t?/And the world keeps turning anyways,” she sings, her voice lifting into an upbeat hook. There is comfort—even euphoria, release—in the suggestion that her individual tragedy does not matter one bit to the world at large, that it falls away alongside so many other small sufferings as the earth keeps churning itself into the future. Flowers grow no matter how sad you are. For some, that’s an insult, a slight in the face of all-consuming, all-important sadness. For Stelmanis and her new cohorts, it’s a strange relief.

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Tilting his gaze toward the heavens once again, the Detroit electronic icon delivers an ambient-techno concept album exploring the moon’s pull on the human imagination.

Moon: The Area of Influence

Jeff Mills likes outer space. Over the past three decades, the Detroit native and techno legend has amassed an expansive catalog, with many of his releases taking direct inspiration from the cosmos, including records devoted to Alpha Centauri, Proxima Centauri, Orion, and a myriad of (often fantastical) intergalactic journeys. He has even collaborated with NASA.
On his latest LP, Mills is once again looking beyond our atmosphere, albeit toward an object that’s a little closer to home: the moon. It’s not his first time tackling that particular celestial body; back in 2015, he put together a soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s pioneering 1929 silent film Woman in the Moon, and followed that up with a soundtrack for another silent sci-fi classic, George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, from 1902.
While those efforts drew from others’ work (not to mention a completely different era when space travel was pure science fiction), Moon: The Area of Influence is purely the product of his own, modern-day imagination. Its arrival coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, an event that captured his imagination (along with the rest of the world’s) when he was just a young boy.
Moon doesn’t really conjure images of rocket ships and astronauts. Although LP opener “Control, Sattva and Rama” does begin with a recording from the NASA control room, the album’s main focus is how the moon affects things right here on Earth. (It’s telling that the moon doesn’t actually appear on the record’s cover, which instead depicts moonlight reflecting off a large body of water.) Mills’ interest in the moon’s influence on terrestrial matters extends from the tides to circadian rhythms (“Sleep-Wake Cycles”) and even people’s moods (“Erratic Human Behavior”).
This being an instrumental electronic album, it’s hard to glean any of these things from the music itself. In fact, Moon doesn’t sound all that different from a bevvy of Mills’ other releases. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; the production is precise and minimal, its grooves subtly undulating beneath crystalline melodies. Fans of the insistent techno that usually populates Mills’ DJ sets will likely gravitate toward the hypnotic pulse of “Theia,” the static-laced rhythms of “Erratic Human Behavior,” and the sharp gallop of “180-Degree Repositioning Phase.” “Lunar Power” also sports a steady kick drum, but it’s the track’s analog chirps and swelling strings that stand out.
But Moon offers more meditative moments than club bangers. “Sleep-Wake Cycles” is an eight-minute trek through billowing, almost glassy melodies, while the vivid “Decoding the Lunar Sunrise” wondrously combines trundling basslines, dancing synths, and soaring strings. “The Tides” inspires a similar sense of awe, its gorgeous marriage of plaintive piano and shuffling percussion conjuring a bit of Larry Heard’s gentle magic.
Moon probably isn’t a particularly essential addition to Mills’ discography. While the production is impeccable and the music is undeniably tasteful, it also sounds like, well, just another Jeff Mills record. As such, the ideas behind the record are more intriguing than the music itself, and with this kind of instrumental techno and ambient, there’s only so much conceptual digging to be done.
Mills’ place in the larger electronic sphere is a little like the moon and its relationship to Earth. Much like the heavenly body, he’s a constant presence whose influence is practically immeasurable; it’s no wonder that his work and legacy has given rise to the same sort of wide-eyed devotion that humans throughout history have often felt when they’ve cast their gaze toward the night sky. At the same time, Mills quietly just keeps doing his thing, which makes his outsized influence easy to take for granted. After all, it’s easy to forget just how incredible the moon is if you don’t bother to look up.


The unpredictable Drool Sucker kicks off a series of EPs from the transcontinental band No Joy in which they attempt to shake off the “shoegaze revival” tag once and for all.

Drool Sucker

Distance doesn’t always heart grow fonder, but you can count on it to summon the muse. Just ask No Joy: before they signed with Mexican Summer or shared stages with Best Coast and Deafheaven, Jasamine White-Gluz, and Laura Lloyd were just two friends on opposite sides of the country (Los Angeles and Montreal, respectively), swapping musical ideas over email. The long-distance musical partnership became official in 2009, when White-Gluz reunited with Lloyd in L.A. Despite closing the geographical distance between them, their sound remained unsettled and unpredictable–honeyed hooks bookended by whooshing static, gauzy fretwork that quickly deteriorates into a Sonic Youth-like roar, even the occasional foray into demented dream-pop.
From a sonic standpoint, White-Gluz and Lloyd have made their desire to escape genre tags—“shoegaze revival,” “noise-pop,” or “indie rock”—from the jump. Regardless of a band’s intentions, most listeners (and critics) are wont to regard full-length albums as aesthetic lines drawn in in the sand. Perhaps that’s why No Joy’s skipping the album cycle brouhaha all together for their latest project: Drool Sucker, the first entry in a trilogy of stylistically distinct EPs ostensibly intended (at least partially) as a refutation of these imposed boundaries.
Like the LP that precedes it, Drool Sucker sees White-Gluz and Lloyd raking their silvery melodies over jagged coals of distortion with purpose and restraint, melting down the 4/4 tempos into a feedback-driven delirium. But where More Faithful swaddles listeners in the din, Drool Sucker represents an effort to suffocate them; on the punishing opener “A Thorn in Garland’s Side,” a stampeding drum fill gives way to caterwauling punk verses which threaten to buckle under the guitars’ leaden heft. “XO (Adam’s Getting Married)” develops their tightly-packed harmonies as a dynamic focal point soon overtaken by the lumbering, doom-y coda.
Viewed in terms of My Bloody Valentine, whose balancing act between ethereal and acrid informs most of No Joy’s output up to this point, the EP stands as the Isn’t Anything to the previous album’s Loveless**: a woozy, raucous effort that tempers their pop with caustic flourishes. Appropriately for their self-defining (or rather, self-redefining) aims, the duo end with a “Theme Song”—and while its swooning grunge doesn’t sound drastically different from what listeners have come to expect, the track belies No Joy’s confidence, as well as their broader determination to transcend genre pigeon-holing as their heroes did. They’re off to a good start.


The Glasgow duo’s second record is polished and understated, seeking to offer reassurance in the face of stasis and uncertainty.

Secret Measure

The twin duo of Rachael and Paul Swinton makes lonely, unassuming music as Cloth. Another word to describe their sound is “muted”—as in “quiet,” but also palm-muted guitar riffs,  deadened drums, and whispered vocals about struggling with connection. Muted, but not outright dull; a close listen to their 2019 debut record revealed odd, jittery syncopation and nods to the xx-style electro-pop.  It turns out a lot of important figures were tuning in: influential British radio presenters, prestige TV music supervisors, and Mogwai’s label Rock Action Records, who signed Cloth and released the more dramatic, post-rock inspired EP Low Sun in 2022. On the band’s second record, Secret Measure, they work with producer Ali Chant and subtly swerve yet again, streamlining their meandering indie rock into something like the slowcore version of a polished pop crossover.
With Chant at the helm, every choice feels intentional, the embrace of negative space particularly deliberate. The songs sound fragile enough to tip over with a small breeze, but with Chant’s production and Matt Brown’s drums, there’s a sturdy foundation. It’s still intimate, but the patient arrangements make the music feel vast in a way their more lo-fi recordings could not. Songs like “Never Know” and “Lido” pace about until suddenly blossoming midway though with arrangement changes, most notably Jemima Coulter’s trumpet on the latter. The increased focus allows them to filter familiar ideas through their own lens. “Drips” takes a well-worn chord progression and feeds it through a thworping arpeggiator, while “Ladder” is one more nocturnal “I’m on Fire” homage that nonetheless distinguishes itself with a chiming guitar riff. "Money Plant" is the one song that veers too close to 1980s sophisti-pop, complete with electronic percussion straight out of a Roxy Music ballad; it works on its own, but the bass stabs take away from the captivating atmosphere elsewhere.
If the band finds comfort in solitude, Paul Swinton’s lyrics are increasingly restless, seeking reassurance while facing the unknown. A spoken word section on “Secret Measure” describes someone staring off into the distance, unable to speak. “Never Know” pushes through writer’s block, asking, “Why don’t you just spit it out/Pick a note and sing it out?” “Lido” applies the uncertainty to an obsessive interest, just slightly too paranoid to be romantic: “Can I get lost with you/With nothing around?/We’re the same, we’re the same soul.” The recurring themes means the record is in conversation with itself, even responding to itself: The existential concerns in “Ladder” are softened in “Money Plant” (“I’m always looking out, when I know you’re thinking all wrong”).
With a more cohesive sound, some of the rhythmic quirks and time signature hops from their past output are smoothed out. On occasion, the music is so pristine that it’s easy to miss the evocative lyrics buried in the tightly wound grooves. Rachael Swinton rarely raises her voice above a whisper, and on the lusher songs, particularly “Drips,” she threatens to become just one more texture in the mix. That’s a fair enough tradeoff for a record this aesthetically airtight, but by the time they get to the closing “Blue Space,” the duo forecasts a shift ahead: “Everybody’s slowing down/You used to say so/But I don’t know/I’m feeling faster.” They sound ready to evolve again.


Billed as his final album, this 2016 live set by the late songwriter is a thoughtful and intimate survey of his vast catalog.

At Royal Albert Hall

Even before Gordon Lightfoot performed at London’s Royal Albert Hall on May 21, 2016, the legendary songwriter admitted to feeling like he was singing “on borrowed time.” Mortality loomed over much of his work throughout the decade. In 2012, he issued All Live, an album that he candidly admitted was intended as a posthumous release. The subject of age, and the wisdom it brings, suffuses Martha Kehoe and Joan Tosoni’s 2019 documentary If You Could Read My Mind. In the film, an aged Lightfoot reflects on his hard-living, hard-drinking early days, the darkness and anger that dogged him and hurt those closest to him, and the way his immersion in nature in the early 1970s via canoe trips into the Canadian wilderness helped to right his spiritual and creative compass. (Plus, you get his off-the-cuff accolades for his nearby neighbor, Drake.)
On At Royal Albert Hall, a live set that the Lightfoot estate has dubbed the late songwriter’s final album, Lightfoot sounds nothing but unburdened. The 26-song album is presented with no overdubs or fixes, only some audience fades. His discography has always made space for thoughtful interplay, and on these recordings, the band delivers. A sympathetic quartet of longtime collaborators round out his signature 12-string acoustic with Mike Heffernan’s soft rock synth pads, Carter Lancaster’s jazzy passages of electric guitar, and commanding rhythms from bassist Rick Haynes and drummer Barry Keane. Small and unexpected touches dot the set, from the flamenco dashes of “Christian Island” to the spiraling synths of “Shadows.”
Lightfoot’s miles-wide voice plays no small role in his classic material, but settled into a light, agreeable lilt, the focus shifts more to the songs: their emotional tone and stark lyricism. Though he’s often thought of in terms of pillowy soft rock, his pared down range reveals the darkness nestled among even his most pastoral narratives and gentle rockers, to say nothing of the outright menacing ballads, like 1974’s Cathy Smith-inspired “Sundown.” This vocal approach reveals more of the humor and sly wordplay, too: Performed here, that song slides along on a more agreeable current. Like his contemporaries Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, who gathered at Lightfoot’s house in 1975, where Mitchell performed a draw-dropping rendition of “Coyote,” Lightfoot’s voice sometimes cracks and falters, adding a ghostly, sly tone to his visions of about sailor’s dreams and the murky distance between winning and losing.
Outside of a few quick asides to the audience—“Here she comes!” or “That was another way of shortening a song,” after an abrupt stop—Lightfoot lets the songs do the talking. The stories they tell are layered. He opens with one of his finest, “The Watchman’s Gone.” Backed by a steady thump that echoes the Band on a stately march, he sings about the forces that kick would-be dreamers out of existence. “I’ve been on the town/Washing the bullshit down,” he sings with uncharacteristic profanity. These sorts of authority figures don’t show up all that often in his songs, and even when Lightfoot presents himself as one, it’s with a gentle shrug: “If you want to know my secret don’t come running after me/For I am just a painter passing through in history,” he sings on the balmy “A Painter Passing Through,” the title track of his 1998 album. Even when he does play the omniscient narrator, like on “Rainy Day People,” which receives a righteous clap of recognition, Lightfoot seems as baffled as anyone: “Rainy day people all know how it hangs on a piece of mind.”
The natural world plays a central theme in many of these songs, from the sunny travelogue of “Christian Island” to the gale force winds of “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” one of the most affecting performances of this set. “Every time I hear a song of his, it’s like I wish it would last forever,” Dylan once said of Lightfoot. “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” goes on for just under seven minutes in this rendition, but it carries an eternal feeling, like it’s always being sung somewhere, by someone. The very best Lightfoot songs have this quality, like he carved them out of solid wood, the sort of object that’s going to stick around long after its creator is gone.


Jace Clayton, aka DJ/rupture, returns with another outstanding mix.

Uproot

Jace Clayton (aka DJ/rupture) inspires a special tenor of admiration from music critics because, in addition to crafting literate, reference-rich, and conversational music, he often writes about it just as adeptly. It's not a stretch, if we're honest, to say that he writes about music more skillfully and illuminatingly than the majority of us who have ever done it full-time. He is, to put it bluntly, one of those people who gets it right far more often and in more different ways than your ordinary person really should. Uproot is another one of those instances.
In the broadest, most literal sense, Rupture came to rise as a mashup artist, and there are certainly elements of Uproot-- a mix following on the turrets of 2002's Gold Teeth Thief and Minesweeper Suite and 2005's Low Income Tomorrowland-- that find him flexing those muscles. To give him that tag, though, would be a bit misleading; Rupture uses the form to different ends. Folks like Girl Talk, Diplo, and A-Trak use mashups to make superficial connections, or to make people dance, or to be clever, or, sometimes, to be clever-clever. Rupture, as the name implies, creates fissures. He's less likely to rip four bars or a hooky lyric from something as he is to extract its mood in total; he's less interested in creating fleeting moments than he is in creating large, interweaving tapestries. Because his source material is generally pulled from dubstep, ragga, outré hip-hop, found sounds, and other indigenous musics, those tapestries can often sound political. Clayton has such a global, democratic ear and such a knack for soupy unease that it's difficult not to hear his mixes, at least partly, as commentary pieces. Even when, as is the case with Uproot, his mixes veer on the neatly manicured side, they still ultimately feel combustible out of the box.
While Uproot feels every bit as purposeful as those earlier mixes, it achieves that goal though different means. Musically, it's far more subdued and spacious; the lacerating swathes of digital noise have been subbed out for tracks that favor lonely, clattering rhythms, yawning sub-basslines, and displaced vocals. Like a lot of his contemporaries, Rupture has clearly gravitated towards dubstep over the past few years, and Uproot shows his selection skills in that space are as impeccable as they are elsewhere. From the cavernous glissandos in Frescoe's "Afghanistan" to the twerky, demodulated keys in Filastine's "Hungry Ghost (Instrumental)" to the haunted illbient fog of Moving Ninja's "Uranium", Clayton's selections are generous and far-reaching, and build a pretty compelling case for dubstep as the most creatively robust genre in electronic music right now.
Perhaps surprisingly, Uproot also features moments of genuine, unfettered softness and beauty. Atki2's "Winter Buds" is a dubstep rhythm that rests on an expected rush of warm piano chords, while Dead Leaf's "Save From the Flames All That Yet Remains" chases the looping, pulsing ambient of Professor Shehab + Lloop's "Drunken Monkey (Ambient Remix)" with a gentle swell of strings and pianos. Most notable, though, is the 1-2 punch that provides the mix's stirring midway point; a bittersweet interlude from cellist and Clayton collaborator Jenny Jones provides the segue into a few minutes from the second of Ekkehard Ehlers' terrific two-part ode to filmmaker John Cassavetes, from his 2002 album Plays. Although roundly earmarked as special by the relative few who heard it upon its release, history has arguably done "Plays John Cassavetes" a disservice. Clayton's resurrection of it here, in turn, speaks to another key reason his mixes are special; he's in the rare category of DJs who gives the impression that he is not just wading through music, but correcting it by building his own canon, and constructing an alternate history. It's a place you would want to live.


On a bonus album originally hidden inside gatefold copies of his opus Heaven and Earth, the saxophonist explores his mellower side without breaking any significantly new ground.

The Choice

Deep in a 2016 New York Times Magazine profile of Kamasi Washington, the saxophonist is at brunch with his girlfriend when some smooth jazz from Najee oozes out of the speakers. But Washington is unperturbed, noting that despite the beige, wallpaper tone, Najee nevertheless has roots in gospel. For a man who’s often billed as jazz’s next big star, it’s a telling moment: For Washington, no musical genre is devoid of value. To which his girlfriend quips: “Kamasi is totally nonjudgmental, in all areas. It makes life a lot less stressful.”
Such openness is a defining characteristic of Washington’s sound and worldview. It makes him an ideal sideman for Chaka Khan and Snoop, the perfect foil for Pulitzer Kenny; He’s even chill with playing the Sexy Sax Man role at the BET Awards. For his recent opus Heaven and Earth, it’s that sense of broadness that gives him the latitude to draw on everything from an early Freddie Hubbard composition to the theme music from Bruce Lee’s 1972 kung-fu joint Fists of Fury, finding Latin flavor in the former and a Blaxploitation strut in the latter. But if you were hoping to glimpse a bit more adventurousness from the saxophonist on the bonus album The Choice (which comes hidden inside the record sleeve and, once it’s cut free, brings the runtime of the entire album past the three-hour mark), the five secret songs here instead show that Washington can also do smooth jazz with the best of them.
Washington’s latest finds the tenor saxophonist, composer, and bandleader wholly in his own lane. But the sprawl of the massive new album doesn’t lead him outside the parameters he’s already established for his sound; instead, it doubles down on them. So it’s a little disappointing that an additional 40 minutes of music doesn’t reveal any new wrinkles, twists, or paths not taken in the sessions; some curious covers and mild originals merely show that the album could have been an even mellower affair. Pianist Cameron Graves’ gentle chording and Brandon Coleman’s fluttering organ give “The Secret of Jinsinson” a soft edge, and a choir fluffs out the composition’s cloudlike shape. But there’s not enough to differentiate it from Heaven and Earth’s more epic material; it feels more like a leftover.
“Agents of the Multiverse” builds with rattles and struck percussion, Washington’s horn and the rolling tympanum suggesting an oceanic vista for its opening minute. It’s the closest Washington has come to an artist like Pharoah Sanders, with whom he’s frequently compared, but that looseness soon tightens up thanks to the percolating backbeats of guest drummer Chris “Daddy” Dave. His interplay with Washington (whose rhythmic sense on the horn might be his greatest asset) makes for the EP’s highlight, even if the song ultimately just fades away.
The Choice’s most curious moments come in the form of two covers. The first is a nine-minute extrapolation of the Shirelles’ “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” As noted in Pitchfork’s recent survey of girl groups, this Goffin-King-penned song, a plaint of teenage sexual longing wrapped in lush orchestration, was the first girl-group song to hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Dilating the piece to three times its length should open it up to vast new emotional terrains, yet Washington and band do little to keep it from slipping into a supper-club standard. This approach leaves the always-dependable vocalist Patrice Quinn, who normally imbues Washington’s vocal songs with inner strength, to verge on the maudlin.
More intriguing is the band’s read on the Five Stairsteps’ 1970 soul masterpiece, “O-o-h Child.” Here, they couch the original’s comfort in the face of adversity in an eerie, psychedelic swampiness, to disorienting effect. For most of its nine minutes, Washington and band immerse themselves in the inherent darkness and unrest that are the flipside of the song’s promise that “Things’ll get brighter.” When Steven Wayne and Matachi Nwosu’s voices harmonize and reach upwards at the chorus, the band embraces that sense of liberation, soaring to new heights right at song’s end. It’s a small musical moment that speaks even louder than many of the album’s big statements.


On his latest album for Warp, the legendary sonic architect teams with poet Rick Holland for an inconsistent but occasionally brilliant set.

Brian Eno / Rick Holland: Drums Between the Bells

Drums Between the Bells

Who's your Brian Eno? The art-pop savant of Here Come the Warm Jets? The ambient theorist of Discreet Music? The prog-jazz dabbler of Nerve Net? Or the film music composer of Small Craft on a Milk Sea? Maybe you think of him mainly as a virtuoso technician, an innovative pop producer, a prodigious collaborator, or a visionary mixed-media artist. His broad range of talents and activities makes getting your head around his catalogue about as plausible as giving him a haircut, and it's natural for us to establish our own versions of what his baseline aesthetic is. Whoever the "real" Eno is to you, he's bound to show up at least once on his second LP for Warp Records, a mercilessly erratic collaboration with the poet Rick Holland.
You could say with only slight hyperbole that Eno's signing to Warp last year was like the Beatles joining Elephant 6. The British label's eclectic roster-- Broadcast's cerebral electronic pop, Autechre's ascetic IDM, Boards of Canada's synthetic naturalism, Aphex Twin's ambient techno-- could reasonably be called the Eno Diaspora. Small Craft, a collaboration with Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins, was oriented around music composed for (and rejected from) Peter Jackson's film The Lovely Bones, but with its jungle breakbeats, ambient drones, and computer glitches, it sounded like Eno refracting Warp's own history. In other words: Eno making music influenced by Eno.
Drums Between the Bells retains many qualities of Small Craft, including propeller-like live percussion and mildly dated whiffs of trip-hop and downtempo. The big difference is that the music is built around Holland's words, read by a number of different speakers. As it doesn't rely on the ironic voice and language games of modern fashion, Holland's richly imagistic poetry is well-suited to the project. The music around it is scattershot, but not random: Each song is designed to complement the poem at its center. Still, the record has a rather unnerving pace, overpowering and retiring in quick alternation. "Bless this Space" opens things inauspiciously with an electronic jazz fusion setting, which is about the most unsympathetic environment for a poet imaginable. "Glitch" is musically livelier, with a mightily abrasive climax, but the HAL-like vocal treatment flattens Holland's poem into numbingly literal sci-fi boilerplate.
Then, abruptly, a suite of meltingly lovely tracks arrives and does real service to Holland's poetry. The arctic pianos that encircle a crisp female voice on "Dreambirds" recall Eno's prior work with Harold Budd, just as the liquid guitar of "Pour It Out" recalls the lighter side of the Fripp collaborations. Despite its dystopian tendencies, Holland's writing has a plain-hearted tenderness that female voices seem to draw out more subtly than male ones. On these two tracks, as well as "Seedpods" and "The Real", Eno reacts to the female voice with great sensitivity. The result is like a gentler companion to Laurie Anderson's Homeland: no ironclad beats hammering down on the words, but a gossamer web cradling them with all due reverence. The oracular hush fits Holland much better than stentorian force.
Even when Drums dips into sketchy territory-- the reggae-styled "Dow", for example-- it's hard not to be intrigued by Eno's command of sonic texture, weight, and spatial dimensions. Nothing feels vaguely formed. With the ability to realize microscopically precise details and effects, he makes the reconciliation of extremes feel inevitable: A river of industrial slag might flow into saucy jazz horns; funk riffs might level out into a thick krautrock haze. We can count on these kinds of pleasures even from a so-so Eno record, and Drums is better than so-so. The problem with it, beyond a handful of unflattering genre excursions, is a slight but persistent thinness of imagination. The concrete music of "Fierce Aisles of Light" conjures the feel of being on a train with impeccable accuracy, but it's a pat setting for lyrics where trains feature prominently. When a minute of silence, called "Silence", appears near the end of the record, it's hard not to feel as though you're in the presence of an incredible talent casting about for the next big idea, casually producing minor wonders in the meantime.


For the last decade, T. Hardy Morris has explored the parallels between grunge and Southern rock with his band Dead Confederate. His first solo effort, 2013’s Audition Tapes, was a relatively sedate singer-songwriter affair. On Drownin on a Mountaintop the twang remains, but this time grunge and punk are the driving impulses.

T. Hardy Morris: Hardy & the Hardknocks: Drownin on a Mountaintop

Though grunge will always be linked to Seattle, the genre’s image never squared with the suave skyscrapers and cosmopolitan mindset of one of the country’s most cash-flushed cities. Instead, it owed more to the flannelled, blue-collar sensibilities of the small factory towns outside of the city, like Kurt Cobain’s native Aberdeen, which helps account for why it resonated not only with tastemakers but also ordinary, meat-and-potato rock fans. T. Hardy Morris has long been fascinated by grunge's backwoods roots. "It was rural music," the singer/guitarist contended in a recent profile, likening it to the sounds he grew up with in Georgia. "It’s kind of like Southern rock."
For the last decade, Morris has explored the parallels between grunge and Southern rock with his band Dead Confederate, though both styles sometimes took a backseat to that group’s stoner-rock tendencies. Recently, Morris has also been dabbling in side projects a good deal less gloomy than his primary band, recording a couple of LPs with Deer Tick’s Robbie Crowell and Black Lips’ Ian Saint Pé as Diamond Rugs, in addition to a pair of solo albums that play like mirror images of each other. Where Morris’s inaugural solo effort, 2013’s Audition Tapes, was a relatively sedated singer-songwriter affair, seeped in the weeping pedal steels and confessional spirit of so many Nashville records, Drownin on a Mountaintop is its temperamental opposite—wild, prickly, and unsentimental. The twang remains, but this time grunge and punk are the driving impulses.
As Morris tells it, fatherhood inspired Mountaintop’s rowdier sound. He rushed to finish the record before the birth of his first daughter, and it beats with the urgency of a man trying to purge some final youthful bad decisions from his system before it’s wholly irresponsible to do so. On song after song, Morris casts himself as a fuck up at best and a menace at worst—a trope he borrows from outlaw country, though unlike a true rebel, Morris can’t stop his thoughts from cycling back to the toll of his actions and the example he’s setting. He presents the album’s booziest, blusteriest song "Likes of Me" as a cautionary tale for his imagined children. "Maybe I can scare you silly not to do the things I’ve done," he seethes maniacally, matching the song’s In Utero-sized stop/start riff with Cobain’s curdled yowl. On Dead Confederate’s first records, Morris was sometimes overeager to play up the echoes of Cobain in his voice, but over time his has developed its own character. Where Cobain’s croak was deliberate and authoritative, Morris’s is rangy and conniving. Even when he’s being earnest, he sounds like a grifter making a hard sell.
Unimpeded by the austere, psychedelic stretches that weigh down Dead Confederate’s albums, Mountaintop gives Morris’s voice ample space to roam, and it’s a thrill to hear him cut loose. That unbridled spirit comes at a cost, though, since Mountaintop’s loosest songs are so lackadaisically written they fall apart. With Audition Tapes, Morris penned considered tributes to the childhood friends he’d left behind, but there’s little of that depth here. Too many lyrics read like they were scribbled during between-take cigarette breaks. On "Starting Gun", he sets up the album’s shittiest pun: "See that clock up on the wall? I wound it up, and it ticked me off." A couple tracks later on "Littleworth" he grabs at the nearest adage, musing "It may sound lazy but the truth hurts," and, as cautioned, it does sound lazy. The thrashing title track offers an even blunter commentary on how thinly written it is. "What the hell is going on," Morris marvels after the chorus, "How can you call this a song?"
There are two types of clumsy lyrics: Ones that pass with limited damage, and ones so invasive they bring entire songs to a halt. It’s those latter ones that Morris steers into again and again, which is unfortunate, since otherwise his crash fusion of grunge and country has never sounded better than it does on Mountaintop. He’s got the attitude down pat, but he doesn’t always have the songs to back it up.


This live album, which boasts a new song in the form of the title track, draws from all of Antony's studio albums. The renditions of that back catalog are rendered so powerfully by the Danish National Chamber Orchestra that the originals seem almost incomplete by comparison.

Cut the World

The second track on Antony's new live album, Cut the World, is a monologue called "Future Feminism." It runs nearly eight minutes. "I've been thinking all day about the moon," Antony begins. "Like, is it an accident that women menstruate once a month and that the moon comes once a month? ...And then what about the fact that we're made of 70% water?" It goes on like this, referencing "patriarchal monotheism," the matter-of-fact revelation that he's a witch who "de-baptized" himself," and ruminations on "the feminization of deities." Behold: Antony stage banter.
Antony's exquisitely earnest "Antony-ness," though, is the rare gift he brings to the world, and in whatever form he chooses to dispense it, it's a joy to soak it in. Running through Antony's gently daft speech are all the elemental themes of his music-- oceans, dying leaves, blood from wombs-- and he delivers it in such a chatty, affectionate, teasing tone that by the end, you are not only disarmed, but lit by a small glow of wonder. And then, of course, he resumes playing and singing.
For a sizable contingent of music listeners, Antony's music is like emotional tincture; powerful, necessary, sometimes a bit too intense taken undiluted. And certainly not for daily consumption. I am one of those listeners: Some innate measuring stick that calculated my desired intake of abject suffering balked at the need for another Antony record after his crossover album, I Am a Bird Now. That record still sits at the center of my listening life, but to add to it, for me, seemed only to chip away from its power, with the result that I found myself appreciating Antony from a distance, and feeling generally grateful for his existence, more than engaging with his music.
If you are one of these listeners, perhaps you will appreciate Cut the World like I did. As a compact reminder of the overwhelming force carried by Antony's best music. The song selection here draws smartly from all of his studio albums, touching on his self-titled and culling the most potent material from of The Crying Light and Swanlights. Antony is accompanied by the Danish National Chamber Orchestra, performing arrangements by Nico Muhly, Rob Moose, and Antony himself.
If ever an artist's catalogue has demanded orchestral accompaniment, it is Antony's. The emotional surge in his music all but demands the blooming of a string section. His voice dismantles defenses, pours over boundaries, and this quality is mirrored so powerfully in the arrangements that the originals seem incomplete in retrospect. He has performed in front of a full orchestra often over the years, but Cut the World is the first sustained glimpse those of us outside the hall have gotten of the results. "You Are My Sister"'s opening piano figure carries twice the drama brought into pungent, mournful woodwinds. "Cripple and the Starfish" swells magnificently to twice its size in this setting: It feels Mahlerian, overwhelming. The DNCO plays with a simple radiance, as if they've always been a part of this music.
The only song that feels diminished is "Another World"; a low drone tugs at track's harmonic center, muddying its elemental, prayer-like surface. But otherwise, this is a revelatory way to experience Antony's music. The inward-curling pain dissolves, leaving only the aching generosity. The title track, the lone new song, starts with a soft rustle of harmonics akin to those of Arvo Pärt. When the full orchestra enters on the chorus, the bloom of warmth is physically gratifying. Antony's music is like that-- restorative, good to be near. Like the sun, it's something we all need in our lives, even if it feels good to get out of it once in a while.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the folk-rock duo's darkly holistic 1974 debut, a quixotic blend of the old and the new.

Richard and Linda Thompson: I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight

I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight

Four decades after Richard and Linda Thompson released 1974’s I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, their beautiful and terrifying first album as a duo—after their music failed to attract significant commercial interest; after the conversion to Sufism, the three kids, the arduous years spent living on a religious commune; after he left her for another woman just as mainstream success seemed within their reach; after she clocked him with a Coke bottle and sped off in a stolen car during their disastrous final tour—after everything, Linda was working on a new song about the foolishness of love. It was a lot like the songs Richard used to write for them in the old days: Despairing, but not hopeless, with a melody that seemed to float forward from some forgotten era, and a narrator who can’t see past the walls of his own fatalism. “Whenever I write something like that I think, ‘Oh, who could play the guitar on that?’” she recalled later. “And then I think, ‘Only Richard, really.’”
Can you blame her? Though both Thompsons have made fine albums since the collapse of their romantic and musical relationships in the early 1980s, there is something singular in the blend of her gracefully understated singing and his fiercely expressive playing, a heaven-bound quality that redeems even their heaviest subject matter, which neither can quite reach on their own. As lovers, they could be violently incompatible, but as musicians, they were soul mates. The existence of latter-day collaborations like Linda’s 2013 song “Love’s for Babies and Fools,” one of a handful of recordings they’ve made together since the 2000s, proves the lasting power of a partnership that seemed doomed from the start.
The Thompsons met in 1969, while Richard was working on Liege & Lief, the fourth album by Fairport Convention, the pioneering British band he’d co-founded when he was 18. With his bandmates, he envisioned a new form of English folk music, combining scholarly devotion to centuries-old song forms with the electrified instruments and exploratory spirit of late-’60s rock. The misty and elegiac Liege & Lief was their masterpiece, but it had come at a price. Months earlier, Fairport’s van driver fell asleep at the wheel on a late-night drive home from a gig, and the ensuing crash killed Martin Lamble, their drummer, and Jeannie Franklyn, Thompson’s girlfriend at the time. According to Thompson, the decision to press on and record Liege & Lief was driven in part by a desire to “distract ourselves from grief and numb the pain of our loss.”
The folk-rock musicians who orbited Fairport in London comprised a hard-drinking scene, where money was usually tight, and revelry and song took precedence over talk about feelings. “They didn’t send you to therapy in those days…we didn’t grieve properly,” Richard Thompson told a podcast interviewer this year. The losses would keep coming. Nick Drake, an ex-boyfriend of Linda’s and occasional collaborator of Richard’s, who struggled to find an audience during his short life, was sliding toward oblivion by the early 1970s. And Sandy Denny, the radiant and mercurial former singer of Fairport, as well as a close friend of both Thompsons, was not far behind him. The fading spirits of fellow travelers like these haunt I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight. Its songs treat drink, festivity, and even love as fleeting escapes from life’s difficulties, staring through the good times to the black holes that often lie behind them.
Richard lasted for one more album with Fairport, then left the band with hopes of making it as a solo artist. Legend has it that Henry the Human Fly, his 1972 debut, was the worst-selling album in the history of Warner Brothers at the time. He was working steadily as a session and touring musician, but at the ripe old age of 23, he couldn’t help feeling a little washed up. Linda’s career as a folk singer, despite the arresting clarity of her voice, had been only moderately successful, and she was entertaining thoughts of cashing in, going pop. She was only a “weekend hippie,” she has said. And though he was still a few years away from embracing Muslim mysticism, he was already something of a monastic: declining to cash checks for his session work, and following a devotion to modernizing English folk that was so intense it led him to turn down invitations to join several high-profile bands because their styles were too American. Despite their differences in approach to life and career, something clicked. She moved into his Hampstead apartment, and they married in 1972.
Their reason for starting a musical duo was practical, but also sweetly romantic: They wanted to spend more time together. They began touring the UK’s circuit of folk clubs, humble institutions that mixed socialist idealism with commercial enterprise, often operating in the back rooms of local pubs, where Richard and Linda would share stage time with whatever barflies wanted to belt out “Scarborough Fair” or “John Barleycorn” on any given night. Audiences were receptive, but it was a rugged and unglamorous way to make a career, even compared to the modest success Richard had seen with Fairport Convention. After about a year on the circuit, they were ready to graduate to bigger stages, and to make an album.
They recorded I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight quickly and cheaply, working from a cache of songs Richard had been assembling since Henry the Human Fly. The backing band they recruited combined a rock rhythm section with mustier instruments like hammered dulcimer, accordion, and crumhorn, a Renaissance-era woodwind whose nasal buzz makes bagpipes sound mellow. I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight approaches its instrumentation with eerie holism, sounding neither like a reverent attempt to resurrect bygone traditions, nor a contemporary singer-songwriter album with period flourishes, but something strange and glowing in between.
It all comes together spectacularly on “When I Get to the Border,” whose lyrics also synthesize the modern with the ancient. The protagonist, voiced by Richard, spends the verses drinking wine by the barrel and fleeing oppressors down a dusty road to a paradise that may not exist. If the allusions to contemporary workaday drudgery and our futile attempts to outrun it were lost on any listeners, the chorus makes them explicit: “Monday morning, Monday morning, closing in on me.” Richard did not always stretch out as a lead guitarist on Fairport Convention albums, and “When I Get to the Border” plays like a coming-out party for the world-class player he had become. He accompanies each verse with delicate spindles, reserving his full might for a series of slash-and-burn licks traded with a rotating procession of traditional instruments in the thrilling coda. Even the crumhorns fucking rock.
Many of Linda’s signature songs are candlelit ballads, but she swaggers through the cascading brass lines of the album’s title track like a sailor on shore leave. On the surface, the song’s message is simple: work’s over, time to party. But in Richard’s writing and Linda’s performance, the urge to go out, get hammered, and press up tight against a stranger is nearly feral in its potency. The nihilism and the pleasure of drunkenness and transactional coupling are inseparable. “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight” neither moralizes about its subject matter nor attempts to enshrine it, capturing the charge of a messy night out in all its explosive ambiguity. Musically, it has the feeling of a celebration, one that could have been a massive hit had the Thompsons been willing to sacrifice their quixotic musical aspirations for slicker and more streamlined production.
I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight can be bleak, but it never patronizes the destitute characters who populate its songs, framing their anti-social and self-destructive impulses as reasonable responses to an unforgiving world. On “The Little Beggar Girl,” whose old-world melody may present a challenge for listeners unaccustomed to British folk, Linda affects a cockney accent and sneers at the well-meaning condescension of men on the street: “I travel far and wide for the work that I do/’Cause I love taking money off a snob like you.” The narrator, who seems vaguely like a sex worker, isn’t presented as a once-pure, now-fallen angel; she’s a smart, tough person doing what she needs to to get by. “Down Where the Drunkards Roll” is soft and solemn, refusing to judge its cast of misfits for finding solace at the bar. “Withered and Died” might come across as maudlin with less sympathetic performers, but Linda’s delivery lends quiet nobility to its tale of an abandoned woman at the end of her rope. Richard’s guitar solo arrives like pale sunlight through a tall window, offering a ray of hope out somewhere beyond the desolation of the lyrics.
These people are mostly doomed in ordinary ways: cruel bosses, nasty hangovers, empty pockets, absent lovers. But the Thompsons also had an interest in esotericism and spirituality, seeking deeper truths behind the doldrums of life. That attunement, together with their masterful fusion of new and old musical idioms, gives a spectral cast to their tales of everyday strife. It emerges most clearly on “The Calvary Cross,” whose stately three-chord cycle feels like the album’s centerpiece despite being only the second track. After a breathtaking raga-like guitar introduction from Richard, the song unspools as a series of bad omens from a mysterious “pale-faced lady”: a black cat crossing your path, a train that never leaves its station. “The Calvary Cross” is like a shadow that hangs over the rest of the music, suggesting that the characters’ fates are ordained not only by circumstance, but also by forces whose true nature they may never apprehend. The chorus, delivered in the voice of the pale-faced lady, contains the album’s most chilling lines: “Everything you do, you do for me.”
If Richard and Linda Thompson were unusually sympathetic to the hapless, perhaps it’s because they were singing about their own people. “I’m glad I spent a year or two playing in other people’s bands and being for hire on records, because when I became a bandleader I knew the feeling of being employed, and never put myself above those I was employing,” Richard wrote in his recent memoir Beeswing. The feeling of being employed. Maybe that’s what it comes down to for the drunks and outcasts of Bright Lights: the humiliation of lowering yourself for a buck, and how to get out from under it. Maybe the pale-faced lady with her curses and the boss with his orders are one and the same. Everything you do, you do for me.
For a guitarist and singer piecing together a living on the folk circuit, music was a holy vocation, but also a grinding job. I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight promoted them from folk clubs to proper venues, but the feeling of success was short-lived. Within a couple of years, according to Richard, “Folk rock was losing ground—not that it had much ground to begin with...we were now playing to an aging audience that consumed less and went out to concerts less.” (It bears repeating that he was in his mid-20s at the time.) Island dropped the Thompsons after Pour Down Like Silver, their third album. They retreated from the music industry and moved into a Sufi commune in London, and then another in rural Norfolk, after having fallen in with a group of worshippers not long after making Bright Lights.
Richard devoted himself to Sufism, and quickly quit drinking, hoping to “fill the void in the pit of my stomach, and not with numbness, but with nourishment.” According to Linda, he donated much of their money to fellow members of the London sect. She had her own interest in Sufism, but her experience on the communes—led by “an Englishman who styled himself a sheik,” as a 1985 Rolling Stone profile put it—was more like an intensification of worldly oppression than an escape from it. She gave birth to the Thompsons’ second child there, which she described as “fucking awful: No doctors, no hot water, nothing.” In her telling, the atmosphere was sexist and repressive, with women made to perform domestic tasks like cooking and cleaning, and to avert their eyes when talking to men.
In the late ’70s, they left the commune, released two albums to little fanfare, and got dropped by another label. Then came 1982’s Shoot Out the Lights, their biggest critical and commercial success by a wide margin, which happened to be filled with blistering accounts of dissolving relationships. Richard announced he was in love with another woman soon after its release, but Linda decided to accompany him on tour anyway. You know the rest: Coke bottle, stolen car, divorce.
Were they doomed from the start? Isn’t everyone? That’s the underlying theme of I Want to See the Bright Lights. “The End of the Rainbow,” the album’s almost comically morose penultimate song, takes the form of a warning to a newborn: “Life seems so rosy in the cradle/But I’ll be a friend, I’ll tell you what’s in store/There’s nothing at the end of rainbow/There’s nothing to grow up for anymore.” In the 1985 Rolling Stone piece, Linda reflected on their honeymoon in Corsica, taken not long before they started work on Bright Lights. “It rained the whole time,” she said. “I should have known then.”
But there is a happy ending, for the Thompsons at least, who eventually reconciled as friends, began sporadically collaborating again, even recorded an album together with their children. Judging by their public remarks, they get on pretty well these days. We’re all doomed to hurt each other, and to be hurt in return. The least we can do is forgive.

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Interpolating field recordings and birdsong, the Cuban-born jazz pianist's fourth album explores the sounds of his home country with warmth and fervor.

Fabian Almazan: This Land Abounds With Life

This Land Abounds With Life

The Cuban-born jazz pianist Fabian Almazan has always been interested in roots. On his 2011 debut Personalities he paid homage to his homeland with renditions of Antonio María Romeu’s danzón “Tres Lindas Cubanas” and Carlos Varela’s “Bola De Nieve,” one of the first songs Almazan says he remembers hearing. On Rhizome, his second album, Almazan explored the idea of interconnectedness, inspired by the underground root system from which the record took its name.
Almazan draws on a similarly naturalist metaphor with his fourth album, This Land Abounds With Life. It is his most fully realized to date. In some ways, the album is a tribute to Cuba’s natural splendor: Almazan, now 35, was just nine when his family left Cuba and settled in Miami by way of Mexico. He returned to his birthplace three years ago and brought back some vivid recordings of bird song, along with the improvised poetry of a local raconteur.
The field recordings, which are featured on “Uncle Tío,” “Songs of the Forgotten” and “The Poets,” cast a spell, especially when juxtaposed against Almazan’s atmospheric piano playing. Almazan’s project here has something in common with that of David Virelles, another young Cuban-born jazz pianist who, for nearly the past decade, has been making a deep and thoughtful study of the disappearing folk traditions of his native country. But Almazan’s new album is both more personal and perhaps more universal in scope.
For the most part, This Land Abounds With Life makes the case for Almazan—who also plays in the trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s band the E-Collective—as a soloist. His previous albums were more form-focused and classically oriented, with heavy string accompaniment. But on this record there is only one track with strings, a reprise—from Personalities—of “Bola De Nieve,” which in Spanish means “snowball,” the nickname of the great Cuban singer and pianist Ignacio Jacinto Villa Fernández.
On this record, Almazan gives himself the chance to stretch out, accompanied by his longtime trio mates, drummer Henry Cole and bassist Linda May Han Oh, who play on all of his previous albums. Cole’s funk beats are like water; he creates rhythms that expand and contract. Oh’s bass work, meanwhile, is thick like molasses, keeping everything in place, even when she takes a solo.
Almazan navigates each track with a dexterous touch. On the first tune, “Benjamin,” so named for the donkey in George Orwell’s Animal Farm—one of a few overtly political compositions—Almazan begins with an impressively fleet-fingered introduction. “Jaula,” on the other hand, dedicated to Nelson Mandela, is a solo number, slow and contemplative.
If the album itself has a narrative, it exists first and foremost as a catalog of Almazan’s own diverse and ecumenical interests as a musician. And that makes sense, given that, at root, Almazan’s long-term project, going back at least to Rhizome, seems to be focused on music’s binding power, whether it comes via bird song, poetry or piano. It’s a lovely thought when filtered through his hands, because it is implied rather than stated. The record’s unofficial anthem appears to arrive, quaintly, at its end—a sweet solo rendition of Willie “the Lion” Smith’s understated stride composition “Music on My Mind.” There is, his own playing suggests, no higher pursuit.


Alicia Bognanno’s snarling alt-rock and sledgehammer choruses are blunted by the muddy production on her fourth album.

Lucky for You

Even before reinventing her band as a solo operation in 2020, Alicia Bognanno wrote, composed, produced, and mixed every Bully record herself. That’s on top of singing and shredding. In control behind the microphone and at the boards, Bognanno cultivated a raw alt-rock revivalism. Her stunning, capacious Nashville rasp—the main event—screamed and soared above her crisp, clean instrumentals. Early press for Bully touted her apprenticeship to Steve Albini, suggesting, credibly, that she might be his heir apparent as a producer.
So why, on Lucky for You, Bully’s fourth studio album, does Bognanno cede so much control to Nashville producer JT Daly? Though Bognanno recorded some of her own guitars and vocals for this album, and was involved in its production and mixing, Daly is credited as the album’s sole producer and co-mixer. He’s Grammy-nominated for engineering, but acquits himself poorly here. Tinny drums, flatulent bass, an indistinct slurry of guitars—not one of the instrumentals on this album is up to Bognanno’s peerless snuff. Muddy mixing can’t entirely sink her compositions—lead single “Days Move Slow” is among the best rock songs of the year—but several other tracks take on water. It’s heart-wrenching to imagine how much better these songs would be, how much more worthy of showcasing Bognanno’s maturation as an artist, had she presided solely over production.
Lucky for You shifts Bully’s sound into the territory of radio-friendly Y2K pop-rock pastiche lately made wildly popular by artists like Olivia Rodrigo and beabadoobee. It’s not Bognanno’s traditional milieu—which could account for her choice to pass the reins to another producer—but her performances stun nonetheless. The snarling “Hard to Love” is a highlight, recalling the Breeders and featuring an absolute sledgehammer drop of a chorus. “How Will I Know” is a grunge-lite flip of the question made famous by Whitney Houston, focusing, instead of infatuation, on the nearness of death. “If you go before I go, send me a sign,” Bognanno sings, before wondering if she’ll even be capable of receiving it: “How will I know, how will I know, how will I know?”
Bognanno wrote the best track on the album, “Days Move Slow,” while grieving her beloved dog, Mezzi. From the anhedonia of grief, she pulls something kinetic and insistent. She draws out each word of the title—daaaaays move slooooooow—as though pulling on a rubber band, only to let go and sting the listener with the realization that she’s singing about death, with direct references to the afterlife, to belief in God, to bouquets on graves. It may be the best mismatch of tone and content since “Dancing on My Own,” and it marks a new pinnacle for Bognanno.
Not every moment on Lucky for You is this successful. Some, like the pat “Change Your Mind,” dwell too much in cliché: “All I wanted was to feel wanted.” Others, like the bold and novel “A Love Profound,” experiment with vocal stylings new for Bognanno, but are undermined by swampy mixing. “Lose You,” a collaboration with Soccer Mommy, borrows lyrical motifs from Color Theory—“the shades of blue that remind me of you”—and winds up feeling like an outtake from that album.
The final two songs, “Ms. America” and “All This Noise,” make for a fascinating couplet. Both meditate on the state of the union, and each locks into a single emotional register: “Ms. America” is a downbeat grief spiral; “All This Noise” is a screaming punk rager in which Bognanno name-checks polar bears and AR-15s before bellowing “My body is not your choice!” Ultimately, though, “Ms. America” is more convincing, and heartbreaking. Bognanno considers whether or not to have children, and finally, quietly, decides, “I don’t want to teach a kid to fight.” It feels like an honest corrective to blistering protest diatribes, one that grieves for the fallen rather than charging into the next battle.
It’s this kind of lyrical introspection and emotional complexity that drew listeners to Bully’s debut, Feels Like, eight years ago. Bognanno preserves much of what made her earlier records great on Lucky for You, and pushes herself with some novel experimentation. Still, no one can produce her better than she can produce herself.


On his third and final album as SONOIO, Alessandro Cortini of Nine Inch Nails combines the brooding intensity of Trent Reznor’s band with arena-rock melodies in the vein of U2 and Depeche Mode.

Fine

For Alessandro Cortini, naming a solo project SONOIO feels like a conspiratorial wink. “Sonoio” means “it’s me” in his native tongue, Italian, and SONOIO is where he grants free reign to his personality, synthesizing everything that has come before it in his musical career. The tireless Cortini is a veteran of industrial pop giants Nine Inch Nails and New Order-ish emotionalists Modwheelmood, while under his own name he makes opulent ambient records that worship at the altar of the Buchla synthesizer.
Elements of all of these projects appear on Fine, his third and final SONOIO record. But, as might be expected of someone who spends his nights strapped to the NIN touring machine, their influence dominates. The album combines the brooding intensity and coiled aggression of Trent Reznor’s band with grandstanding arena-rock melodies that owe more to U2’s “big music” and Depeche Mode’s stadium-sized angst than to Skinny Puppy’s deviant thrash. By and large, these are the kind of solidly written, satisfyingly thick pop songs that would have Albuquerque row ZZ singing along; it’s easy to imagine Reznor bellowing out “Thanks for Calling” or “Bad Habit” on his latest Enormo-Dome trek.
Cortini, however, possesses neither Reznor’s aggressive authority nor Bono’s buffed-up emotional sincerity. His voice more closely resembles that of Sparks’ Russell Mael or Wild Beasts’ Hayden Thorpe, all quivering intensity and twitchy falsetto. When it works—as on the sunstroke ballad “What’s Before” and the electronic shoegaze track “Left”—this unlikely fusion of music and vocals creates a wonderfully dramatic hybrid that’s somewhat akin to the synth-pop foppery of John Maus’ recent album Screen Memories. At other times, though, the theatrical sheen undermines the songs’ emotional heft. A line like, “Thanks for calling/Thanks for letting me go,” from “Thanks For Calling,” might be a barbarous kiss-off when delivered by Trent Reznor. But Cortini sounds petulant, like a teen whining at parents who wouldn’t let him go to a party.
That the vocals sometimes grate is a shame, considering that the best moments on this album have the instrumental grace of Cortini’s eponymous synth work. “I Don’t Know (Coda)” rests on a subtly burbling TB-303 line—a surprisingly delicate use of an instrument too often employed for its shrieking impact—that trails off into a duet between machine and glockenspiel. “Bad Habit” has a nebulous synth sound that wobbles around like a tired toddler, in a throwback to the dreamy world of Sonno, a 2014 solo album that grew out of lullabies Cortini composed while on tour. This is Fine at its best, though even it could have done without the vocals.
“I Don’t Know (Coda)” provides a fitting end to SONOIO’s charming but underdeveloped run. Whereas NIN regularly leave stages slick with sweat and littered with broken keyboard parts, this agreeably noodling closer suggests that Cortini would return to sweep up any mess he’d made after the house lights came back on. SONOIO turns out to be the Nine Inch Nails you can take home to meet the parents: a pleasant diversion that may leave you craving more illicit excitement.


Claire Boucher's cassette-only debut of "post-Internet" DIY bedroom recordings gets an old-fashioned CD/LP release. Following a wave of hype, the re-release is a wisely timed holdover for the months before her next album comes out, but the immersive, enchanting collection is more than a quaint indicator of how far Grimes has come in the past year and a half.

Geidi Primes

In a recent interview with the New York Times Magazine blog (tagged: "culture;" previous post: "The Novelty Knit"), 23-year-old Claire Boucher proudly described the music she makes under the name Grimes as "post-Internet." "The music of my childhood was really diverse because I had access to everything," she said, and this omnivorousness is apparent in her eccentric, dreamy sound, which draws upon everything from dubstep to disco, Eastern music to 1990s R&B.
Even before that interview, it was clear Grimes knew her way around a web browser. She first attracted an audience outside Montreal's DIY art and music scene when she put her earliest recordings online for free, and since then she's cultivated an online presence that makes equal room for her music and haunting visual art. She's even issued preemptive strikes against critics' misguided games of Spot the Influence ("I don't listen to Kate Bush, nor have I ever," she tweeted a few weeks ago-- a delightful bit of sacrilege from an artist who's probably never read an article about herself that didn't contain the word "weirdo"). Whatever she’s doing, it's working: at the beginning of last year she was uploading to her MySpace the DIY bedroom recordings that would comprise her debut album, and now she and her art school haircut are posing in couture for Times online subscribers. (Just ask Salem-- shit doesn't get more post-Internet than that.)
Now that debut album, Geidi Primes, is getting a good old fashioned CD/LP rerelease on the UK-based label No Pain in Pop. (Previously its only physical release was a limited-run cassette on Montreal’s flourishing experimental pop imprint Arbutus.) Coming on the heels of her terrific material on the tantalizingly brief Darkbloom split EP, the Geidi Primes' re-release is a wisely timed holdover for the months before her next LP comes out early next year. But Geidi Primes is much more than a quaint indicator of how far Grimes has come in the past year and a half. Despite its modest production values and relative simplicity, it's a cohesive, enchanting, and surprisingly assured debut.
Even though it clocks in at a slight 30 minutes, Geidi Primes is a wholly immersive listen. The melodies are hooky and sweet, but each track has a throbbing undercurrent of menace that pulls you in like a riptide. It's hard to pinpoint exactly from where this pervading element of darkness springs-- especially since, on paper, most of the lyrics read like valentines. (Pretty much every discernable chorus revolves around the word "heart.") The hypnotic standout "Feyd Rautha Dark Heart" begins with a simple Casio-style beat and an ostensibly sugary hook-- "I won't break your heart in the dark"-- but the track builds into something decidedly eerie: chilly synth hits, zombified vocals, and percussion that sounds like rattling bones. By the end, even the sweet refrain sounds less like an expression of devotion and more like a chant meant to put you under some kind of spell. Which, you come to realize, is Geidi Primes' main objective.
Perhaps Geidi Primes' greatest virtue is its resourcefulness: It excels at crafting evocative moods from deceivingly simple sonic materials and song structures. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the simple, looping bassline of "Rosa", the brightest and most unabashedly straightforward song on the record, and also the one most likely to stay lodged in your head for days. Then there’s the brief, wordless "Gambang" making utter gorgeousness from nothing more than a slightly warped sample and breathy falsetto curlicues.
As a vocalist, Grimes knows how to work her range. Though she's become known for her impressive falsetto (which she pushes to rapturous, Donna Summer-like heights on the Darkbloom single "Vanessa") and she can occasionally pull of a spooky low tone that's faintly reminiscent of Karin Dreijer Andersson, she spends much of Geidi Primes in mid-range, tuneful deadpan, which lends wry humor to the lines she coos to a lover on "Zoal, Face Dancer": "Everybody thinks that I'm boring/ Many people think I've got no clue." Just because she's spacey-- yes, nerds, those are Dune references scattered throughout the track listing-- doesn't mean she's without earthly wit. It takes a pretty good sense of humor to write an utterly gorgeous closer and call it "Beast Infection".
Given her restlessly prolific creativity (she followed up Geidi Primes with another solid 2010 release, Halfaxa) and the bounding artistic strides she's displayed with her recent singles, Grimes could very well be poised for a meteoric rise with the release of her next full length. But Geidi Primes shows that even her earliest recordings displayed a distinct point of view and an oddly mesmerizing quality. There’s something refreshingly "post-Internet" about that too-- a dreamy soundscape that invites an escape from the glitchy universe, a brief provocation to let go and just bliss out.


After a string of EPs and some offbeat hits, rapper/singer D.R.A.M. arrives with his first full-length, a record filled with funny asides and sharp details and its fair share of memorable hooks.

Big Baby D.R.A.M.

Roughly forty percent of the Hampton, Va., singer and rapper D.R.A.M.’s appeal is that he seems like just a really happy guy. His happiness is palpable, indestructible, communicable. His breakout hit was about the cha-cha, for god’s sake, a dance so winningly goofy in name and act that even 6-year-olds know to giggle at it. The chorus was about how he liked to cha-cha, and it was clear from the way he sang it that he meant it, goddamn it.
After Beyoncé Instagrammed herself dancing to it, “Cha Cha” became the viral novelty hit that remained a hit after both the “viral” and the “novelty” wore off. D.R.A.M. quickly proved that he was going to stick around, pumping out a steady stream of joyful, heartfelt, and ever-so-slightly silly songs that treat rap and R&B like a big bubblebath. He has the broad, inspirational corniness of a star camp counselor, the kind of relentless motivational charmer who could coerce a roomful of older kids who should know better to get up and dance the chicken.
Rap in 2016 is having a dizzy moment, in stark contrast with (or perhaps relief to) the sobering and dark times. Gentle positivity is suddenly a virtue, or an armor, and you can see it in music from new kids like Lil Yachty, who floats and gurgles amongst pink puffy clouds of beats like Kirby in his Dream Land, to Fetty Wap belting drunk-uncle love songs on Hot 97, to Chance, counting his blessings and bringing a lifetime’s worth of church services into the booth with him.
D.R.A.M. doesn’t really have new ideas to pitch into this ball pit, but on his full-length debut Big Baby D.R.A.M., he reminds us that new ideas aren’t the whole game. The key to D.R.A.M. is his generosity, evident in his personality and his voice, a huge barrel-chested warble that lands somewhere in between iLoveMakonnen and Biz Markie. There is something sly in that voice, a sense that he is purposefully singing with just a little less certainty than he needs to, just to keep things relatable and allow you to belt along.
Consider the first chorus of the first song: “I had to tell myself to go and get it myself,” he sings in a burly tone, and his vibrato wobbles a bit, like someone losing control of bike handlebars and steering towards a ditch. But then he comes in behind himself, stacking rich, flawless, three-part harmony, the top line a laser-cut falsetto, and you are gently reminded: He is actually a powerhouse.
His best songs often hinge on concepts that could easily work as lame Lonely Planet-style parodies. Like the silk-sheets, window-steaming, bedroom-ready quiet storm ballad “WiFi,” for example, in which the male suitor gently croons “Do you got wifi? Cause I really wanna show you somethin’/But my phone is fuckin’ up” and the woman responds “Do you like my feng shui in my living room?”
Yes, the song is funny, but it hits all sorts of other notes, too—“Put your phone down, please don't check it” pleads the woman, who just so happens to be Erykah Badu, an artist who made an entire whimsical and philosophical riff out of a mixtape full of songs about phones just last year. The tremble in her voice is not joking, and neither is the music, which is yearning and erotic and frank. D.R.A.M. has indicated that Hot Buttered Soul was a guiding light for him while recording, and Big Baby D.R.A.M. is full of evidence that he has learned real lessons from this study.
He manages the same balancing act on “Cute,” a song that could be insufferably cloying if someone else were pushing it too hard—the chorus is, after all, “I think you’re cute/Oh yes, I do” repeated in a pinched falsetto, and it also features the line “I choose you like a Pokémon.” But specificity rescues it: He admits “one thing ‘bout me, I am a foodie,” and describes the exact moment and location he first saw her Instagram.  The song isn’t funny—it’s giddy, and few human emotions are worth treating as seriously.
Great comedians slip the dead-serious stuff into the middle of their routines, and D.R.A.M. sneaks in some confessions amidst all of this crowd-pleasing. He even kinda/maybe/sorta takes a shot at Drake, who jacked the beat of “Cha Cha” and attached it to his world-conquering “Hotline Bling.” “I was hemorrhaging in the red and I could not afford it/N*ggas tried to appropriate me, I could not go for it/I’m taking mine, I’m claiming mine, bitch I go Narco for it,” he bellows on the Young Thug-featuring “Misunderstood,” one of the only minor-key songs on the album. Even on his surprise Top–40 charting hit  “Broccoli,” D.R.A.M. makes sure to note that he’s “at the restaurant with that ‘why you gotta stare?’ face,” implying that he’s aware you might have a reason to stare at him, and that he might not like the reason. It’s a barest hint of vulnerability, but it deepens the surrounding joy.
Some of the interludes on Big Baby D.R.A.M. sound like they originated in some distracted shower-singing moment and didn’t evolve from that point—“In a Minute/In House” gently wastes nearly six minutes of your time as he coos in your ear, and “Change My #” is similarly directionless. As an end-to-end album, it can grow tiring; as delightful as, say, “Cash Machine”’s flip of Ray Charles’ “Hallelujah I Love Her So” is, sometimes you just need a breather.
But D.R.A.M., one eye forever on the shot clock on his 15 minutes, leaves hints that he has yet another act planned; the sultry and low-key “Monticello Ave” retools some classic ’90s R&B grooves while he sits back, rapping in the pocket about the peculiarities and frustrations of his not-quite-star life and pining for someone. “I’m still mad at you for the shit you did, but not that mad, so just come to where I’m is,” he pleads. It’s poignant and small-scale and intimate, and about a million miles away from “Cha Cha.” Maybe one day we will no longer even remember that is where he started.


The concept behind Golden Tickets, a concept album from Yoni Wolf's WHY?,  is generous and sweet. However, these songs represent the nadir of the project.

Golden Tickets

The concept behind Golden Tickets is generous and sweet. As Yoni Wolf explained on the Joyful Noise label's website, the EP is a collection of songs for and about specific WHY? fans. "We would write a theme song for one customer who came to the [WHY?] web store and bought something every month... We'd read all about them on Facebook and Twitter, and sometimes even go so far as to contact their significant other to ask them questions. Then I would write the song on piano, and my brother would take the skeleton of lyrics & piano and turn it into a fully realized arrangement."
Those seven songs are collected here, on the Golden Tickets EP, and if I was any of these hardcore fans, I would be struggling with the uncomfortable question of whether my favorite band was personally mocking or belittling me. Part of the issue with these fan-specific valentines is unfair to Wolf but hard to ignore; Wolf's acrid delivery turns everything a little smarmy, which suits him well when he's addressing his favorite subject-- himself and his many faults-- but skews a little queasy when he's paying tribute to people who've done him the favor of repeatedly buying his music.
If I were the fan who Wolf pays tribute to on "Banana Mae", for instance, I would have some serious questions.  Wolf opens with the room-clearing line "Follow me, @banana_mae/ If you wanna see what I have to say/ now I'm only less than twenty-tre/ But I'll Twit a tweet to make your hair turn grey" before offering an unflattering imitation of a stereotypical vapid, prattling teenage girl. Banana Mae gets the last laugh, though; the second verse is cobbled together from her own tweets, which ironically contain the only characteristically Yoni Wolfian insights to be found on Golden Tickets: "I'm very impatient for science to figure out/ how I can clone myself and make the clone interact with my friends and family, it's tiring." Or: "I think the reason I don’t have any friends is ‘cause the people that I click with the best/ Also hate to leave their beds." You can hear what she might like in Wolf's best writing.
Speaking of which: For WHY? fans who are not the seven people selected as this EP's subject matter, these songs represent the nadir of the WHY? project. Every song begins with the character baldly introducing themselves: "My name is Hunter Van Brocklin." "Well it's me, Dropjaw." Or "Peta E. Godfrey, I'm a bonafide Aussie." The characterizations are less sketches of human people and more little sock-puppet retellings of the sort of basic biographical info you can glean from scanning a person's Facebook and Twitter: "I was born to teach/ I do humanities/ Strictly public school, I think that should be the rule," he sings on "Peta Godfrey". Wolf's lyrics are bewilderingly lazy throughout: Hunter Van Brocklin is "just a small-town boy in this big city" and a "a simple Southern man trying to find my fate." Van Brocklin has "fingers like a poem when they press the keys." Fingers like a poem?
Wolf has long been a shrewd, incisive writer, and his words have often borne testament to the virtues of mental sweat and finger-cramping rewriting. You could practically see the ghosted revisions hovering over a perfect line like "God put a song on my palm that you can't read/ I'll be embalmed with it long before, you'll see." "I want that sharpened steel of truth in every word," he insisted on "This Blackest Purse." It's been awhile since we've seen that guy. On Golden Tickets, it sounds as if he's simply given up trying. There is one remaining golden ticket, by the way: "The lucky person who receives this golden ticket will have a WHY? song written about him or her," the album page says. "No foolin." In context, it sounds like a threat.