After years of being a a critical darling Charli XCX assisted Iggy Azalea on the song of the summer and landed her own "Boom Clap" on the soundtrack for The Fault in Our Stars. Sucker is her second studio album, and it's a record that seeks to bend the mainstream to its will rather than conform to its reigning trends.

Sucker

Looking back on the year she's had, it's hard to believe that the phrase "Charli XCX, mainstream pop force" was nothing but daydream fodder for the pop cognoscenti little more than a year ago. Forged in the late-'00s crucible of the MySpace music scene and signed to a label when most people are trying to get through high school, Charlotte Aitchison was a critical darling long before she was a chart presence: after leaving a scrappy self-recorded debut in the dust, early singles like "Stay Away" and "Nuclear Seasons" picked up plaudits but failed to dent the conversation of casual pop fans. It took the surprise explosion of "I Love It"—a demo she tossed to Swedish party gremlins Icona Pop on a whim, and helped to sing—into an international hit to generate the momentum required for her first full-length, True Romance. An amalgamation of her best singles to date and some sterling new material, the album sated critics again but came and went without leaving any sort of commercial impression.
After peppy advance single "SuperLove" landed with a thud at the end of 2013, Charli found herself in a familiar position: beloved by pop Twitterati and devoted fans, but lacking the sort of chart firepower many felt her talent warranted. By the summer of 2014, the script had flipped: with assists from rapping Australian supernova Iggy Azalea and a soundtrack spot on teen drama The Fault in Our Stars, she had credits on the defacto Song of the Summer (the former's "Fancy") and her own solo top 10 hit, the swooning "Boom Clap". Sucker is her second studio album, and perhaps the years of hard work and compositional refinement it took to reach the top helped to shape the record's uncompromising sensibility; this is an album that seeks to bend the mainstream to its will rather than conform to its reigning trends. And in a bold display of self-confidence and strength of personality, it operates under the premise that Charli is a viable star even though the record will ultimately constitute a referendum on the validity of that assumption.
There's a great deal of volatility to Charli's writing and artistic growth, and it shows in both her evolution leading up to Sucker and the sound of the album itself. Her great early singles were glittering and booming and a little desperate, wrapped up in love in all of its life-or-death glory; on cuts like "So Far Away", she sunk into swooning, gaseous dreamscapes. By the end of the period covered by True Romance, she had moved on to brash anthems for cool cheerleaders like "I Love It" and "SuperLove"; disillusioned with the music industry in the time leading up to Sucker, she decamped to Sweden with producer pal Patrik Berger (whose credits are all over the finished product) and put together an unreleased roaring punk record that's already entered into the annals of pop myth. Imagine a world where the boisterous onomatopoeic chant that kicks off "Boom Clap" is sped up and made the whole song, and it's an even bigger hit somehow; that's the world of Sucker.
Broadly speaking, it's a collection of colorful power-pop that occasionally veers outside the lines into punk and new wave; there are a few sentimental songs, but they're a lot more compact than the breathy, grand highlights of True Romance. And though Charli keeps the pace brisk and focuses more on speed and attitude than detail, there's a real sense of craft that seeps through cracks in the record's sneering facade. Rampaging highlights like the hilarious "London Queen" are still stained with harmony and impressive vocal layering. With its sharp riffs, tight structure, and confident, bratty snarl—tricks cribbed from the Strokes and Weezer, Kesha and Gwen Stefani, and M.I.A.—Sucker distances itself from the work of many other female pop stars that have ruled 2014: the Gothic precociousness of Lorde, the tidy lines and weaponized hooks of Taylor Swift, the focus group LCD pandering of Meghan Trainor. Its closest cousin might be One Direction's Four, a record that finds the hunky urchins steering into classic rock and gleaming Phoenix-like riffs; Sucker is a little harder to pin down, a little less formulaic.
Charli also seeks to differentiate herself from her peers through her attitude; she defines herself through her opposition to the machinery of the pop music industry, and through a sneering independent streak that's strong enough to be distinct but complementary rather than disruptive. Where other pop stars are reliant, even dependent, on the cultivation of relatability, she embraces and lampoons wealth and power and independence, often to humorous effect. On "London Queen", she conquers America, drives on the wrong side of the road to feel like JFK, and refuses to return to Britain until she's won enough to fill a wall with plaques. She builds a fortress out of money on the blown out "Gold Coins" and relaxes with a cigarette inside. She has a gift for line delivery that grants her put-downs a spiteful glow, and when she opens the raucous "Breaking Up" with, "You had an ugly tattoo, and fucking cheap perfume!" it's all the characterization the listener needs. Sucker is also a record that's largely detached from romance—any saccharine stuff, like girl group tribute "Need Ur Luv", is delivered with tongue firmly in cheek—and Charli is content to revel in hanging with friends and in her individual sexuality, like on salacious pro-masturbation romp "Body of My Own".
If you think this sounds like a lot to swallow, you're absolutely right; Sucker is a crowded and surprisingly dense record, given that the majority of its songs are concerned with the various fruits of stardom. It can be an exhausting listen if you're not fully prepared for its willfully destructive energy. The credits are stuffed with a wide breadth of writers and producers plucked from every corner of the contemporary pop world: industry superstars like Benny Blanco and Greg Kurstin, rising producers like Cashmere Cat, indie darlings (Ariel Rechtshaid, Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij, gonzo doofus Ariel Pink), and none other than Weezer godhead Rivers Cuomo (on the "Beverly Hills" rip "Hanging Around"). That the album has any sort of coherence and consistency is a credit to Charli's personality and presence, her lust for life and palpable joy. And that may not be enough for some listeners. With its carefully chosen samples (Todd Rundgren!) and swirling, love-drunk arrangements, True Romance oozed craft and measured cool; Sucker opens with a chorus built around the gleeful chant of "Fuck you! Sucker!"
With that said, there's something undeniably exciting to me about a scenario in which a young fan, fresh out of falling in love with "Boom Clap" or "Fancy", comes to this record and discovers an uncompromising, ferocious talent, self-assured and empowered and incredibly versatile. Sucker isn't an endpoint for Charli—she's already talking about her next record, inspired by J-pop and "intensely weird and childlike"—and it's not her finest work, but it's plenty good enough to rope a cohort of new fans into what's promising to be one hell of a creative ride.


The London songwriter’s mesmerizing second album turns towards porous, avant-garde love songs that celebrate kinship, change, and the wonder of quotidian experience.

Colourgrade

Manicured, glossy, easily digestible music takes up so much space in pop culture that when an artist like Tirzah finds some success, you have to wonder: How? The London-based singer-songwriter’s 2018 debut, Devotion, was filled with offbeat R&B melodies and soft vocals that offered a quiet escape. It was pop music stripped of all its bells and whistles—introspective, DIY, off-kilter—instantly rising to cult status. On Colourgrade, Tirzah’s follow-up, the formula changes, but the effect doesn’t. Written alongside close collaborators Mica Levi and Coby Sey, Colourgrade trades those pop-adjacent structures for darker, more guttural elements and alien embellishments, creating a stunning collection of porous, avant-garde love songs and Tirzah’s most enigmatic project yet.
Lying directly beneath Colourgrade’s glassy production and wavering vocals is a document about creating life and honoring kinship. Colourgrade was written while Tirzah was touring behind Devotion, and recorded and produced in 2019, the year after the birth of her first child. “Going through pregnancy and birth and motherhood, the anatomy found its way into all of the songs,” she told Stereogum. Centerpiece “Beating” reads like a handwritten love poem to her partner (and sometime producer) Kwake Bass, with a layer of noise that adds intimacy to the recording. When she exclaims, “We made life/It’s beating,” it’s one of the album’s most personal lines. “Sleeping” opens with a startling guitar noise that evokes a baby’s cry, then transitions into Tirzah’s soft lullaby: “So close/I hold you/Hold you tight.” Even as she’s actively working through these monumental changes, she’s unafraid to invite us into the process.
Part of this process means making space for corporeality. On the sensual “Tectonic,” Tirzah whispers, “Pursued as the rhythm magnetized our hips/Techno to tectonic plates,” binding the power of the Earth with the energy of human bodies. The accompanying video follows suit as the camera abstractly traces two people lying naked beside each other. Similarly, the video for “Sink In” zooms in on the sudden movements between two men, who passionately dance in a puddle of water. Colourgrade marvels at the body, a more artful kind of navel-gazing, evoking images that are regenerative and mesmerizing.
Though Tirzah continues to work closely with Mica and Sey (who sang on Devotion’s title track), her approach to song-making has changed drastically. Devotion was compiled from 10 years’ worth of material, with the intention of allowing each song to stand alone. Here, she aimed to leave things unpolished: “The roughness, the accurate recording, the time it takes to get places, it’s a bit of a statement on how things feel live,” she’s said. In this way, Colourgrade has a certain organismal quality: the mid-sentence throat clearing on “Beating,” or the sirening synths that illuminate Tirzah and Sey on “Hive Mind.” Bookended by a pair of tracks emulating conception and death, the album’s sequencing is reminiscent of life itself. The titular opener is Tirzah at her most unfamiliar: abstract lyricism, Auto-Tuned vocals, and uncanny, bird-like synth whistles signal a new beginning. On the other hand, saccharine closer “Hips” zaps all over the place, like a sudden rush to settle all your accounts: “Cold grips my mind/Cold hits my chest.”
But Tirzah leaves the middle tracks tantalizingly open-ended, as rootless as driftwood. She meditates on the existential, everyday life of a parent, bringing us into her new and ever-changing world. On “Recipe,” granular synths drenched in reverb seep through her voice, as if to wash away her anxieties. Or take “Crepuscular Rays,” a long, meandering song in the album’s second half that, according to Tirzah, is foundational to its structure. Moving through droning vocal manipulations and skeletal instrumentation, it unites the unearthly production with the fleshiness of the vocals. In nature, crepuscular rays are the angled beams of sunlight that appear near dusk or dawn. It’s no coincidence that Tirzah named one of Colourgrade’s defining tracks after a phenomenon of change.
We tend to measure life by the dots on the timeline, but Colourgrade studies all the distance in between, absorbing each moment and making space for it to settle. The songs move between rumination and enchantment, simulating the multiplicities of being alive. And while it’s a feat to watch these experimental songs come together, Tirzah isn’t trying to be anything beyond her music; the wonder is in the process. While she remains a very private individual, her music is generous even through its haziness. As Colourgrade highlights, love, family, intimacy are central to her everyday. Luckily, she allows us to partake in these familial affairs, and the outcome is spellbinding.

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Common’s latest is a loungy meditation on love and its many forms. It is at turns hopeful and naive.

Let Love

Let Love is clean, edifying rap that is as trusting as it is noble. The album, which Common has dubbed a companion to his new memoir, Let Love Have the Last Word, released earlier this year, is a meditation on love and its many forms—familial, romantic, five-pillars love (aka a love of hip-hop), self-love, the love of God, and an unconditional love he’d like to foster among all humans. Common would like to use his platform to change the world, but he’d settle for giving pep talks to anyone listening. “I’m in a phase, all I see is victory/You on that wave, then come and get with me,” the Chi-town guru raps on opener “Good Morning Love,” and while it’s unclear where exactly he’d like to lead us, his hope can be galvanizing.
Produced with a trio of jazz specialists—percussionist Karriem Riggins (who last collaborated with Common alongside Robert Glasper on 2018’s August Greene), composer and pianist Samora Pinderhughes, and upright bassist Burniss Earl Travis II—Common’s Let Love often sounds more like lounge music than rap music. It suits him. The live instrumentation, mostly warm keyboard chords and soft pattering drums, build mellow, subtle grooves that support both his vibe and demeanor. From the jam-heavy energy of “Leaders (Crib Love)” to the more muted “Show Me That You Love Me” with Jill Scott, these songs feel understated, constant, and tender, often in service of firsthand revelations. Where the album falters is when it stops illustrating how love can be applicable in our everyday lives and starts looking at the entire world through rose-colored glasses. It isn’t that he’s too optimistic; it’s that his optimism isn’t pragmatic. It’s the sort of naivety that overlooks how loving A.I. could easily lead to Skynet.
Common transcended conscious rap and evolved into virtuous rap in the wake of his hollow Oscar-winning Selma collaboration with John Legend, “Glory,” becoming a living, breathing social justice hashtag in the process. The fury and force that fueled 2016’s Black America Again have dissipated. If August Greene was a call-to-arms for unity, Let Love is simply a plea for compassion. Occasionally, Common loses the plot and gets so theoretical that real love isn’t at the center of his verses anymore. After a bit of word salad on “Hercules,” he raps, “Slow down, we can hold down/The fort of profound, thoughts that go ’round/The world is your town, it’s my town/It’s the new wave, we on high ground.” The concepts can become so abstract that they lose all meaning entirely. Across the album, his raps sometimes sound as if they were generated by an algorithm from an inspirational quote word cloud. Take this one: “Read me truth, lead me truth/The birth of freedom can’t be induced.” He wants so badly to make love a doctrine here, but love is a feeling, not an idea.
Common finds the most success exhibiting the ways love has played a role in his own life. On “Memories of Home,” he reflects on the interactions that shaped him, bravely opening up about being molested as a child and how love helped him heal. “What’s a kid supposed to do?/When they goin’ through, what I was goin’ through,” he asks before having an epiphany: “Emotions meltin’, I began to release it/Things you can’t change, you could come to peace with.” Dilla cut “HER Love,” a spiritual sequel to his seminal Resurrection cut “I Used to Love H.E.R.,” finds Common falling for rap once again. It’s as if he’s renewing his vows. He raps to hip-hop as if it were a woman, exuding true love. There’s a wholeheartedness to its cornball enthusiasm that only he could pull off.
Common is still an impressive rapper, though a bit more simplistic now than in the past. As he’s become more positive, his raps play it a bit safer. He leans into his signature flows like a crutch but he remains graceful. He can still puzzle out wordplay (“Tryna feed your fam, get Fed time”) and stack phonetic sounds with the best of them. He can still unravel an intricate thought with a string of words so elegant that listening demands empathy. Then there are the times where he’ll compare himself to a metaphorical cake just to preserve the structural integrity of his internal rhyme schemes. Sometimes it really does seem like he’s rapping to instill love, sometimes he’s rapping for rap’s sake, and those lines get smudged at times, but more often than not he’s methodical. It is in the moments where his precision underscores his affection that Let Love truly conquers.

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The New York duo's debut full-length is a wildly fun noise-pop thrill-ride, delivering on the promise of last year's widely circulated demos.

Treats

Once in a while a record comes along that makes you re-think loud: King of Rock; The Land of Rape and Honey; Nation of Millions; Super Ae; I Get Wet; Kesto. Setting aside the quality of the material-- there are classics here, along with albums I never listen to anymore-- these albums are notable for me because the first time I heard them, music just seemed bigger than it had before, like it took up more space and hit with more force and went further than once seemed possible. When I was getting into these records, I'd get a specific kind of kick just from putting them on. They felt like rides at an amusement park, and I'd get a feeling in my stomach when the first notes kicked in: Here we go. I'm adding another record to my list.
Demos of songs from Sleigh Bells' Treats first started making their way around the Internet last fall, and they immediately served as conversation starters. The distortion in early track "Crown on the Ground" was so intense that every other second the song seemed on the verge of shutting down. But while Derek Miller's overdriven guitar and bass were distressed in the extreme, vocalist Alexis Krauss remained calm as chaos raged around her. Her cadence, somewhere at the intersection of singing, speaking, and chanting, conveyed an easy confidence, like she belonged in the middle of this maelstrom and knew she didn't need to shout to be heard. The contrast between her relaxed bearing-- where she seemed to rule over it all-- and the dangerous splatter of the music was striking to say the least. It was as easy to be taken in as it was to understand why someone else might be repelled. I felt some of both feelings, to be honest, but I also wanted to hear more.
Treats delivers completely on the promise of those demos. Sleigh Bells haven't stopped living in the red, but the improved recording quality makes songs including "Crown on the Ground" that much heavier, and the duo have managed to extend their uncomplicated formula across 11 tracks without it wearing thin. The combination of the music's essentials-- jackhammer riffs clipped from punk and metal, mid-tempo beats from hip-hop and electro, and supremely catchy sing-song melodies-- is striking on its own, sounding remarkably fresh and unlike anything else right now. But an even greater source of the record's appeal is how it doesn't sound especially referential.
When so much music seems designed to evoke the mood and vibe of a specific era, either through direct imitation or playing with the memories of the music's context, Sleigh Bells deftly avoid any single pigeonhole. There are references, but it never feels like the music is merely pointing. Genre here is something to be twisted around and pulled and braided with something else, a mangled container struggling to hold the energy and ecstasy of the music. They gather up bits from all over and use them to create music that puts you squarely in the present moment.
The music hits so hard, and in such a satisfying way, and it seems designed to bring you back to the totality of the sound. It's hard to say what the songs are about, since so many words are so difficult to make out, but they work. The lyrics of "A/B Machines" consist only of, "Got my A machines on the table/ Got my B machines in the drawer," repeated over and over, and who am I to question Krauss on this point? We're talking about "a-wop bop a-loo bop a-lop bam boom" and "Da Doo Ron Ron" here, which is just right for what the music tries for.
So my ear on "A/B Machines" goes to the searing guitar lead, which screeches out a few penetrating notes, and then pauses on the clanging low-end and the interludes and Western-sounding guitar rumble. And on the opening "Tell 'Em", the focus goes to the call-and-response drum machine pummel, soaring riff, and finger snaps compressed into sharp little diamonds, as Krauss chirps a short, repetitive melody with the insistence of a pep rally cheer. "Rill Rill" takes the immortal acoustic guitar bit from Funkadelic's "Can You Get to That", blows it up to Hollywood blockbuster size, and loops it along with clicking percussion as Krauss sings what may prove to be the pop earworm of the year, the kind of tune you'd swear you were singing over and over to yourself years ago. "Straight A's" has some of the electro-punk rage of Crystal Castles, the less frantic tracks like "Rachel" have a bit of shoegaze, and the pacing of the album is just so, taking you right to edge in one song and then pulling you back a few inches in the next.
Though both Krauss and Miller have been making music for a while-- he in the hardcore band Poison the Well, she in some kind of manufactured teen-pop group that never got off the ground-- it's easy to see them as a connected band with the right gimmick at the right time. They live in New York, they've played hip shows for important people, and from the beginning the online chatter has been almost as deafening as the guitar tones. But what works in their favor is that they've taken advantage of these breaks and marshaled their talent to make something that oozes joy. There's spirit to this music, and the sonic assault is celebratory, asking only that you come along with it and join in. All of which, for me, anyway, makes the hype melt away. And if it's true that records this intense and exhilarating don't always sustain themselves over the long haul, that's not a worry either. The visceral thrill of Treats may not last forever, but neither does life; right now, this feels like living it.


Will Oldham's latest is a fittingly titled, string-band live LP released digitally and on vinyl with little fanfare during the final bleak days of 2009.

Bonny Billy and the Picket Line: Funtown Comedown

Funtown Comedown

Is Will Oldham having a good laugh at our expense? Does he cackle to himself when critics note every name change or parse every reference to darkness and light? For someone who maintains a steady stream of releases, Oldham remains elusive, impossible to pin down. Take his latest, a live album titled Funtown Comedown, released digitally and on vinyl with little fanfare during the final days of 2009. As the story goes, he recorded it in the "metaphysical community" of Funtown, which lies just outside the Louisville of the mind. One presumes the hamlet appears in the mist annually and exists solely to host Oldham's shows.
If Oldham didn't make good music, we might laugh right back at him. But for nearly 20 years, he has proved not only prolific but indefatigable, always ready with a quick hook and a dark thought on mortality and music. Funtown Comedown pulls from every corner of his rich catalog, spanning his first EP (opener "Ohio River Boat Song") through his recent peaks ("The Glory Goes", from 2008's Lie Down in the Light). This being an Oldham release, these aren't simply run-throughs of familiar songs. He studiously avoids redundancy by constantly reinterpreting and reinventing his songs. Here, he resets them in a string-band context, courtesy of the Picket Line.
Louisville's the Picket Line accompany him with a ramshackle sound and a hootenanny dynamic that fit his ramblin' songs nicely. The spry performances make some of the studio versions sound dour by comparison, as the musicians punctuate the songs with shouts and hollers. They actually howl like junkyard curs on "Wolf Among Wolves", and whoop it up on the clap-along closer "Idle Hands Are the Devil's Playthings". Cheyenne Mize plays Loretta Lynn to Oldham's Conway Twitty, harmonizing sweetly on "We All Us Three Will Ride" and "You Want That Picture". Oldham has duetted with so many female singers over the years, from Scout Niblett to former Frente! frontwoman Angie Hart, but Mize makes a dashing foil for him, with a wry, crystalline tone to counter his grainier, hangdog voice. (They released an under-everybody's-radar EP last year on Karate Body Records.)
The Picket Line kick up the dust on the first set, delivering a stormy take on Ralph Stanley's "Hemlocks and Primroses" complete with raucous call and response, but they quiet down a bit on the second set. Cleetus Redundementia's bass makes a comfy bed for Oldham and Mize's vocals on the soft, subtly sinister "Lay and Love", and Pork Chop's "outta-tune banjo" snakes through the ruminative "Rider" (these are the names listed on their MySpace, so don't blame me). As with most of the current crop of string bands, there's a strong Appalachian feel to these new interpretations, as if the musicians have modeled themselves after the Carter Family. But they shoot these songs full of classic Nashville country flourishes and Kentucky bluegrass filigrees, and their Bakersfield licks light up their cover of Merle Haggard's "Rambling Fever" and "May It Always Be" like fireworks. This is Oldham's flip-side America, where regional distinctions and variations compress into one sound. His idiosyncratic brand of traditional music, wherever he makes it and under whichever guise, has always sounded both otherworldly and earthy, and Funtown Comedown demonstrates how that contradiction energizes his music and enlivens a genre that too often gets bogged down in reverence and gravity.


Phil Elverum resurrects his beloved Microphones alias for a 45-minute song about art-making, self-mythologizing, and the endless search for meaning.

Microphones in 2020

Before he borrowed the name of the mountain that looms over his hometown of Anacortes, Washington, Phil Elverum wrote and performed songs as the Microphones, named in tribute to his recording equipment, which seemed to breathe and swell with a life of its own. In the summer of 2019, 16 years after the project’s last proper release, Elverum exhumed this moniker for a show filled with old friends. As he writes now, the performance—and the internet’s subsequent elation—raised some existential quandaries about past identities and “self-commemoration.” Over the course of a year, Elverum coalesced these thoughts into Microphones in 2020, a 45-minute song about many things, including artmaking, self-mythologizing, and what it means to bear witness to one’s own existence and transformations.
Elverum’s art has always tackled complex trains of thought. The Microphones’ music tended to do so on a cosmic scale, gazing out at the natural world for meaning. Elverum veered away from these wide-eyed tendencies following the death of his wife, the multi-disciplinary artist Geneviève Castrée, in 2016. “Conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about/Back before I knew my way around these hospitals” he sang on the album recorded very soon after. Since then, his solo work under the Mount Eerie moniker has been rooted in plainspoken specificity. But as Elverum has made clear over the years, the titles that separate his projects are irrelevant because the questions he pursues have remained the same. “...Every song I’ve ever sung is about the same thing: standing on the ground looking around, basically,” he sings here. “If there have to be words, they could just be/‘now only’ and ‘there’s no end.’”
Though Microphones in 2020 looks back at a specific moment when Elverum was finding his footing as a young musician, it carries the weight of every experience he’s had since. The skeletal two-chord melody that carries the song evokes his stark compositions of recent years but is punctuated by bursts of analog noise, calling back to earlier experimentations. (The strumming itself echoes the opening of 2000’s It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water.) He channels the wonder of his youth as if no time has passed, exalting the sublimity of waterfalls, rainstorms, and crashing waves. “We’d go up on the roof at night and actually contemplate the moon,” he murmurs, in quiet awe at the purity of these practices. “My friends and I trying to blow each others’ minds just lying there gazing, young and ridiculous and we meant it, our eyes watering.” His voice is steady, his gaze unflinching. He is kind to this version of himself, the soft kid who saw meaning and metaphor in everything.
Elverum imbues these memories of constant experimentation with undeniable romance. “When you’re younger every single thing vibrates with significance,” he sings. “Gazing at the details in the artwork of a 7", devouring every word in a zine, there was barely internet/Meaning gets attributed wherever appetite bestows a thing with resonating glowing ringing out through a life.” (To that end, a significant and delightful chunk of the song is dedicated to a revelatory screening of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at a dollar theater in Aberdeen.) But even as he sprinkles references to the work that would blossom from these rushes of inspiration, Elverum never falls prey to the wistfulness that so often accompanies nostalgia. “The beast of uninvited change,” as he calls it, always makes itself known no matter how much we will it away.
The line Elverum traces through his life is not a linear one. His thoughts skip around in time and space, from the big picture to minute detail, tethered only by the hypnotic guitar melody, but sometimes that, too, slips away. New textures arise, occasionally drowning everything else out: distorted basslines, cavernous drums, amp hiss, harmonious overdubs, and glimmers of fuzzy tape deck ghosts. At one point, after Elverum dives down into the center of a lake, everything dissolves into a dazzling, mysterious shimmer fully embodying the beauty of an earlier line: “Extravagant solitude invigorates.” Then, the double-tracked chords return and the song rumbles back to life: nothing stays the same.
Near the end of Microphones in 2020, Elverum recalls running into the touring outfit of Bonnie “Prince” Billy in a parking lot in Italy. The band, he casually notes, was wearing matching tracksuits, “a kind of Italian tour costume.” It’s a delightful, mundane image, the sort of observation that other songwriters might find superfluous, but one that—like noting the exact date of that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon showing—does the heavy lifting of making an already detailed world even more vivid.
The memory of this encounter kicks off a line of inquiry that doubles as the song’s coda: What is the root of this lifelong pursuit of creativity? Why is Elverum driven to make “wild swipes at meaning”? His tendency to play with words and poke around for significance started in childhood, Elverum explains here. But was it nature or nurture that has led him to “blur the boundary between myself and the actual churning dirt of this place, that it feels normal to me to speak with the voice of weather”? He touches on the bizarre power and privilege of being an artist, especially one with a platform.
“When I took my shirt off in the yard I meant it, and it’s still off,” Elverum declares in the song’s closing minutes. Elverum devotees will recognize this as a direct allusion to the title track of the Microphones’ most beloved record, 2001’s The Glow Pt. 2. But it’s what comes next that transcends any familiarity with Elverum’s catalog: “I’m still standing in the weather looking for meaning in the giant meaningless days of love and loss repeatedly waterfalling down and the sun relentlessly rises still.” “Meaning” and “meaningless”: these words appear again and again across Microphones in 2020 and Elverum’s discography at large. There are no easy answers in life; some questions will always remain unresolved. But there is a great and terrible beauty in this universal, timeless uncertainty.

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The former Lone Justice singer’s history is the stuff of great rock memoirs, but on her first album in 13 years she looks ahead, celebrating her new life as an out queer woman.

La Vita Nuova

In the 13 years since her last album, major changes altered Maria McKee’s approach to making music, along with her sense of self. Biggest among them was coming out as queer. She has become an advocate for queer and trans rights, and she has had to reassess and redefine many relationships, in particular her marriage to filmmaker Jim Akin. There were smaller changes, too: She began splitting her time between Los Angeles and London. She renewed her obsession with the Romantic poets, especially Keats and Swinburne, whose work had inspired her as a teenager. She read a lot of Dante, studied the occult and Western esotericism, and listened to a lot of English folk music.
Taking its title from Dante’s 13th century meditation on unrequited love, La Vita Nuova depicts the profound upheaval as McKee embraces her new life and ponders what to do with the old one. Her past is the stuff of great rock memoirs. The daughter of California evangelists, she went to high school in Beverly Hills and mingled with future actors and rock stars. She started a band with her older brother Bryan MacLean, whose tenure with the ’60s band Love endeared his sister to aging hippies and record execs. In the mid ’80s, her band Lone Justice, labeled “cowpunk” at the time, scored a hit with “Ways to Be Wicked,” a song written by Tom Petty and Mike Campbell that cast her in an overly sexualized light. As a solo artist she notched a No. 1 hit in the UK with “Show Me Heaven” and stepped into a new role as an alt-country heroine in the early ’90s.
But she exploded that persona on 1996’s Life Is Sweet, a pivotal record that traded twang for glam guitars, towering vocals, and more artfully oblique songwriting. It ought to have redefined McKee as an art-rock auteur, but her label did little to promote it, more willing to let it flop than try to market her outside the country-rock market. Soured by such treatment, she was not nearly as prolific in the 21st century, recording only a handful of albums and acting in two of Akin’s films. But 2005’s Peddlin’ Dreams and 2007’s Late December sound weirdly distant and unengaged, as though she made them out of obligation rather than inspiration.
Instead of a memoir, McKee has written an epic Romantic poem, although La Vita Nuova is less concerned with such professional travails and more interested in the person who endured them. Using Dante as her own Dylan, Blake as her Bowie, McKee adjusts her songwriting and singing to reflect these more recent changes, favoring a florid lyrical style and a dramatic vocal delivery that often verges on the operatic. This is her most commanding performance since Life Is Sweet, not to mention her most resourceful. On “Page of Cups,” which imports her older brother’s folk-rock philosophizing to the British countryside, she rattles off lines that on the page might appear anachronistic: “And I wonder, is it kind?” she chimes, her voice like a bell. “And will it understand that its provision as a practicality gave mechanism to a stunning bit of alchemy?” It’s bracing, even thrilling, to hear her fit all those syllables into such short melodic lines, rushing her phrasing and savoring the jamb of consonants in words like “practicality” and “mechanism.”
Her lyrics as well as her performance may strike some listeners as overly literary, but there is method in these mannerisms. That unwieldiness becomes one of the album’s most appealing traits, especially considering that unwieldy desire is one of the primary themes of La Vita Nuova. “Courage,” the album’s seven-minute centerpiece, conjures a woman whom McKee calls Beatrice, after Dante’s beloved, and describes her as “so winsomely arranged” and “rooted to the earth in such an arresting way.” If the verses evoke the rush of sexual thrall, the chorus is all aching uncertainty: “And I will never have the courage to tell her.” McKee doesn’t belt that confession, although we know that she can. Instead, she turns it into a forceful sigh, which gives more power to her next line: “I must love suffering!” The physical sensation of unrequited desire can be just as powerful as its consummation.
There is excitement over new possibilities in these songs, but there is also something like grief for those left behind. La Vita Nuova is an album full of goodbyes: to her brother on “I Just Want to Know That You’re Okay,” the song most rooted in the bright, generous melodies he brought to Love, and ostensibly to her husband (who co-produced the album with her) on the conflicted closer “However Worn.” But the biggest, if not the fondest, farewell is to her old self, to those parts of herself that weren’t compatible with what she calls her new “fanaticism of a daring kind.” McKee’s vita nuova is sweet, but contains just as many puzzles as her old life.

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With low-stakes dance-pop that simmers just beneath the surface, the artist formerly known as Kitty Pryde attempts to transcend her internet bubble.

Rose Gold

Kitty (fka Kitty Pryde) seemed to enter the digital world at a sort of attention apex. Were it released today, her mumble-rap hit “okay cupid” might briefly trend on Twitter or feature on a few TikToks before being swept into post-viral oblivion. But in 2012, the track’s woozy beat and Kitty’s bubbly, tossed-off delivery launched a modest career; she released EPs, played DIY shows, and moved to New York. For Kitty, though, rap was limiting, a box constructed by the hype machine. Following 2017’s Miami Garden Club, a synth-pop departure that met a tepid response, the self-produced Rose Gold is Kitty’s attempt to transcend her internet bubble.
Kitty has spent the past two years touring with her husband, Sam Ray, as one-half of the Pom Poms and a member of his band American Pleasure Club. In Rose Gold’s strongest moments, Kitty softens those groups’ rough edges—the shallow production of the Pom Poms’ day-glo EDM, the desperation of American Pleasure Club’s breathless lyricism—into low-stakes dance-pop that simmers just beneath the surface. Opener “Counting All the Starfish” has a bass drop, sure, but it’s blown out and fuzzy, like it’s being played underwater. Paired with a sparse drum beat and warbly synthesizer, it sounds like an eerie cross between The Twilight Zone and Boards of Canada. The production is thin, like a college kid experimenting with Ableton presets, but the style fits Kitty’s whispered, anxious vocals.
“The Window,” the only track featuring live instrumentation by American Pleasure Club, uses the winding post-rock affectations of latter-day emo to set up a wistful love song. As a rapper, Kitty had a lazy, sloping flow, blending one line into another as though she were simply too bored to enunciate. Here, as on the echoing dance track “Medicine,” that cadance works to her advantage, a hazy, breathy texture that seems to swim amid the instrumentation. In these moments, Rose Gold feels like a long-lost cousin to the brooding electronica of Arbutus Records, the Montreal label that fostered pop-forward avant-garde acts like Blue Hawaii, Majical Cloudz, and Grimes.
But Rose Gold also can feel like a bad résumé, showcasing too many skills and honing too few. The Miami Bass intro on “Look Demure” lasts less than 30 seconds before it’s replaced with a sparse and springy interlude, which is again usurped by a bubbly synthesizer. Each element jumps in before the last could make more than a momentary impression, overpowering the potential for danceable electro-pop. “Strange Magic” has the opposite problem, with an awkward synthline reminiscent of a trombone and a slow, halting pace.
Since releasing Miami Garden Club, Kitty has moonlighted as a video game soundtrack composer, a talent that shines through on the instrumental “Kitty’s Farm,” with its warm electric piano and shuffling beat, and “Don’t Panic Interlude,” which pairs guided meditations (“Breathe in, two, three, four/Breathe out, two, three, four”) with a mellow synth line. These songs sound almost like another internet phenomenon, “Lofi Hip Hop Radio - Beats to Relax/Study To,” the innocuous background music, popular among the gaming community, with just enough dynamism to keep the listener focused on the activity at hand.
In its prettiest moments, Kitty’s production is reminiscent of Mark Mothersbaugh’s charmingly understated score for Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. But almost at every turn, it’s overshadowed by painfully straightforward lyricism. “B.O.M.B. (Peter)” finds Kitty doing her best cabaret impression, a schmaltzy, juvenile boast about her power over a client as a professional financial dominatrix: “That’s right I’m back on my bullshit/You’ll wear my footprints on your back/Call me a cab to the nearest bank.” “Mami” aims for a similar kind of sexual empowerment, but it’s hard to shake the Oedipal connotations as Kitty scolds a clingy lover: “Mommy got things to do/Mommy don’t like your tone.”
The playfully poignant closing track “Florida,” originally recorded in 2013, highlights the lyrical inadequacies of newer work. Kitty’s seamless flow and easy rhymes about escaping small-town life in her home state feel second nature: “I don't think I'll make it hanging here another day/I wanna get spirited away.” In these moments, Kitty again feels like a friend in a distant bedroom, conjuring a mix of aloofness and intimacy that resonates long after her viral stardom has faded.


Damon McMahon’s work as Amen Dunes has been a process of expansion, and
Love is an even grander step forward, both in the roster of musicians McMahon employs—including members of Iceage andGodspeed You! Black Emperor—and the more accessible, classic-leaning songs he’s written.

Love

Damon McMahon’s work as Amen Dunes has been a process of expansion. The confined, loner vibe of his 2009 debut DIA sounded like it was made in a cabin in the woods—which it was—but it also hinted at wider vistas McMahon might someday explore. That promise was realized on 2011’s Through Donkey Jaw, as he extended his sonic palette while retaining his introspective bent. *Love *is an even grander step forward, both in the roster of musicians McMahon employs—including members of Iceage and Godspeed You! Black Emperor—and the more accessible, classic-leaning songs he’s written.
This also means that Love, in line with its broad title, is less unique than previous Amen Dunes efforts. There are more obvious reference points here—the solitary creep of Syd Barrett, the slow croak of Will Oldham, the bittersweet swing of David Kilgour, and the patient twang of Wooden Wand. But the decreased individuality actually makes the music stronger. McMahon is so open to (and adept at) simple melodies and turns of phrase that he’s bound to evoke lots of other good music along the way, as if he’s tapping into something more elemental.
Besides, as long as McMahon is singing, Amen Dunes will never sound quite like anyone else—and on *Love, *he sings better and more ambitiously than ever. Each song rises and falls with the elastic stretch of his voice, which makes shapes the way a glass blower inflates raw material into art. His voice does echo some other spirit-conjuring singers, particularly the warbled croon of Devendra Banhart. But where Banhart’s mannerisms can come off as affected, McMahon sounds like he’s trying to channel something bigger than himself—a goal at which he succeeds quite often.
That searching approach is reflected in McMahon’s wondering lyrics, which step toward a horizon that keeps receding. Though McMahon’s musings are often in the first person, he’s filled with uncertainty, fascinated and confused by the self and what he can know about it. He darts around the subject and skirts obvious meaning, recalling the way Oldham bent tangents on the latest Bonnie “Prince” Billy album. Even when McMahon hits on some answers, as in the bluntly-titled “I Know Myself”, he still questions and doubles back, over meditative acoustic strums that suggest his journey won’t end, and shouldn’t.
Still, when all of McMahon’s seeking comes together, the results can feel like the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Two examples stand out: the loping “Lonely Richard” marches forward with one tempo and little chord variation, yet McMahon makes it sound like he's scaling a mountain, to the point where a chorus as objectively banal as “have yourself a good time” becomes bracingly profound. That’s topped only by “Lilac in Hand”, whose stoned lilt should by all rights sound lackadaiscal, even lazy. But again McMahon sees simplicity as a chance to explore and discover (an effect captured nicely by the tune’s blurry, black & white video). Building an expanding universe with just a few tools: it might not be a new trick, but it’s one McMahon continues to perfect with Amen Dunes.


On their second album, Ebony Hoorn and WU LYF’s Ellery Roberts sell a mix of motivation and despair with sheer bombast.

Lost Under Heaven: Love Hates What You Become

Love Hates What You Become

The Manchester duo Lost Under Heaven, or LUH, have never been keen on subtlety. Super-sized in every dimension, the music of former WU LYF leader Ellery Roberts and visual artist Ebony Hoorn sought grand answers about love and mortality by way of drastic melodies on their 2016 debut, Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing. They haven’t downsized for Love Hates What You Become, a 10-track set that finds Roberts and Hoorn blowing out every sentiment, string sample, and crescendo while investigating larger-than-life characters and existential dilemmas. This vigor can offer a welcome jolt out of apathy, but the pair’s lack of restraint sometimes moves into alienating melodrama, too, like an epic film that’s moving to the point of being maudlin.
At its best, Love Hates What You Become rattles with perfect intensity. Roberts’ sawtooth snarl is commanding, while John Congleton’s production is hyper-attentive to shifting moods, pulling back to sparse piano or pushing into total distortion as needed. Opener “Come” exemplifies the pair’s electro prowess: Roberts’ brash voice works through a cacophony of digitized percussion that spits and sputters, like steam escaping a pressure cooker. Bass and blast beats swirl at the periphery, as though some colossal machine is being ripped apart from the inside out. Roberts’ rasp finds equilibrium in the dissonance. “For the Wild” and “Bunny’s Blues,” meanwhile, cloak their arena-rock DNA in scaly exoskeletons. In these tracks, the lyrics are largely unintelligible—a good thing, since the trifecta of overpowering arrangements, grave subject matter, and Roberts’ vocal yearning is too rich a meal for a single song.
On “Post Millennial Tension,” it actually becomes too much. Tides of reverb and celestial string samples magnify Roberts’ severe growl to the point of cartoonish tragicomedy, and his broad-brushed pronouncements of youthful rebellion don’t help. “Everybody singing, ‘Fuck the world’/Close our eyes, we will be all right/All the lovers sing, ‘This our world,’” he implores. “Do we stand, take up the fight?” The chest-beaten battle cry is unintentionally laughable, with any sense of what Roberts is fighting for lost to bombast. His caustic howl pushes the title track to the point of absurdity, too, especially in its juxtaposition with Hoorn’s laid-back drawl. Hoorn’s voice is often the antidote to Roberts’ venom, but it just makes Roberts sound like he’s trying too hard here.
The crown jewel of Love is, somewhat ironically, its least-produced number. “Savage Messiah” swaggers to saloon piano and lashing guitar. The sauntering arrangement is lively and raw, owing to its improvised origins. Recorded hours after the band landed in Los Angeles, the song conjures jetlag haze, punctuated by Thor Harris’ driving percussion and paved with Hoorn’s smoky murmurs. LUH keep close to the ground, rolling along like a tumbleweed tangled with dust, barbed wire, and bits of bone. “Savage Messiah” makes a strong case for moderation and spontaneity, rare assets across Love Hates What You Become.


One of indie rock’s more consistent guitar bands charts its evolution with a career-spanning collection of non-album singles, B-sides, and cover songs.

Singles Too

With a discography ranging from good (All at Once) to great (the Steve Albini-produced Ugly) to secretly influential (“Jonah,” from 2006’s Baby Teeth, predated Courtney Barnett by six years), Screaming Females are among the more consistent guitar bands of Bandcamp-era indie rock. That’s the story told by Singles Too, a 17-track compilation that charts the New Brunswick, New Jersey trio’s 15-plus year career not through its hits—did this band ever have any actual hits?—but through its non-album singles, B-sides, and covers. Some of these songs appeared on 2010’s Singles, but it’s nice to have everything in one place. Luckily, there are enough moments to justify its existence.
The first two tracks, 2006’s “Arm Over Arm” and “Zoo of Death,” capture the essence of most Screaming Females songs: fuzzy riffs, singalong chorus, one verse or chorus too many. By 2008’s “No Being Disgusting,” the songs get tighter, and you can hear the band learning to play with dynamics. It’s also the first time we hear singer and guitarist Marissa Paternoster’s signature howl, which often acts as a fourth band member; it sounds like a Greek god yelling into a paper towel tube.
Around 2013’s “Ancient Civilization,” Screaming Females start to sound better, though better studios don’t always mean better songs. But because of the comp’s low stakes, it’s not such a big deal that the riffs on “Let Me In” don’t quite add up to a song, or that “Skeleton” would sound better in a pit than on a playlist, or that the melody of “Take It Back” doesn’t stick. The peak of the compilation’s original music, “Pretty Okay” (which also appears on 2014’s Live at The Hideout) and “I Do,” are the songs  that sound most likely to appear on an album. Other highlights include an acoustic demo for Rose Mountain’s “Hopeless” and a remix of All At Once’s “End of My Bloodline” by Sammus and Moor Mother.
The bonus CD of cover songs is the real revelation. Screaming Females’ takes on Neil Young, Sheryl Crow, Patti Smith, Guided By Voices, Taylor Swift, and Eurythmics are loose, jammy, and, most importantly, fun—perfect for people who like the idea of karaoke but don’t want to watch their co-workers botch “If It Makes You Happy,” which the band absolutely crushes. There and on “Shake It Off,” bassist “King” Mike Abbate and drummer Jarrett Dougherty prove to be the perfect anchors to Paternoster’s furious guitar playing. Annie Lennox’s otherworldly performance on “No More ‘I Love You’s’” becomes an unexpected showcase for Paternoster’s gentler upper register. It makes you wish there were another Screaming Females song like it.
Singles Too doesn’t challenge or complicate Screaming Females’ strengths and shortcomings, and it doesn’t try to. Instead, it focuses on the band’s evolution. This is less “greatest hits” and more “here’s what you might have missed.” It’s as good an introduction as any to a trio that still sounds more similar to its 2005 self than different. More often than not, this is a compliment.

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Kacey Musgraves’ chronicle of marriage and divorce looks to the stars but takes pains to stay grounded. Writing in the plain language of someone desperate to be understood, she sounds alternately vulnerable and triumphant.

star-crossed

There is no great betrayal on star-crossed; no bloodletting; no revenge. While Kacey Musgraves’ fourth album intends to guide you from the early stages of a marriage through the aftermath of a divorce, the East Texas songwriter barely mentions the other person at the heart of her story, and her narrator doesn’t seem all that surprised when things start heading south. The 15-track record is billed as a “tragedy in three parts”—inspired by Shakespeare and a pivotal experience on psychedelic mushrooms, paired with an expensive-looking film and the most elaborate production of her career—but Musgraves takes great pains to ground the songs in reality, where things happen subtly, quietly, and without poetry. “If this was a movie, love would be enough,” she sings. “But it’s not a movie.”
Like so much of her best work—the clever, tragic turns of phrase in “Space Cowboy,” the double portrait of a proud outcast and her tight-knit community on 2013’s Same Trailer Different Park—Musgraves’ latest album offers something of a bait and switch. In country music, breakups are discussed with the severity of mass extinction events: When life goes on after love, it is haunted, tortured, joyless. And when it doesn’t, dirty laundry is aired in public, bodies torched and disappeared. Musgraves, who filed for divorce in the summer of 2020, is aware of the gravity of her subject matter: “I wasn’t going to be a real country artist without at least one divorce under my belt,” she joked, and star-crossed arrives to both the highest expectations of her career and a storied lineage in the genre.
Matters are complicated further by Musgraves’ previous album, 2018’s radiant, Grammy-winning Golden Hour, a pop breakthrough inspired by the glow of a happy relationship. The best thing that new love offered Musgraves in those songs was perspective—a vantage from which she could muse with newfound wisdom on her family, her future, and her past. Take “High Horse,” where the joyful momentum of a disco beat led her to realize that even her worst ex wasn’t just something awful that happened to her—he was a type of person, an experience she was never alone in enduring. “Everyone knows someone who kills the buzz every time they open up their mouth,” she sang with bravado, speaking for multitudes.
On star-crossed, Musgraves stands by herself, taking no comfort in this type of insight. This album’s “Breadwinner” feels like a dark counterpart to “High Horse,” with a muted dance beat that plays like steady rain from a gray sky. “I wish somebody would have told me the truth/Say he’s never gonna know what to do/With a woman like you,” she sings in the chorus, isolated and full of doubt. If being in love made Musgraves feel connected to the world, these songs find her burrowing inward, questioning everything. Accordingly, the tragedy unfolding on the album is not that of a good relationship turning bad; it is of a once-confident person losing touch with the things that made her feel complete, worried that life might never be so simple again.
To communicate this anxious frame of mind, Musgraves sings plainly using stark, simple language—the way you speak when you’re desperate to be understood, seeking immediate answers. The songwriter who, on her breakthrough single, spun a million little puns out of the phrase “merry-go-round” now leans toward choruses that could be stitched onto throw pillows: “God help me be a good wife,” she sings through a fog of Auto-Tune. Sequenced early in the album, the song is meant to represent the humble beginnings of a marriage, but its lyrics suggest that, even back then, she felt forced into a role she wasn’t particularly suited for, bracing herself for failure.
Albums like Golden Hour seem to flow unburdened and inspired: little worlds that invite you inside to explore. To both its benefit and detriment, star-crossed is not one of those albums. Its seams show at every moment, in ways that feel artful—spoken interludes, thematic callbacks, a disorienting cover of Violeta Parra’s eternal “Gracias a la Vida” that shifts between settings like the grand finale of an Oscar-bait drama—and others that feel forced. “I’ve been to hell and back/Golden hour faded black,” Musgraves sings in “What Doesn’t Kill Me,” an attempted fight song that feels slightly redundant between the softer revelations of “Keep Lookin’ Up” and the more euphoric ones in “There Is a Light.”
“Healing doesn’t happen in a straight line,” Musgraves observes in “Justified,” and the album falters when you sense her searching for a clean narrative, struggling to place her thoughts in order. The film accompaniment, directed by Bardia Zeinali, hits a similar roadblock, setting itself up to address societal concerns—see Musgraves and friends armed with medieval weaponry, assaulting a bridal shop and declaring themselves “anti-matrimonials”—but finding its most effective visualization with Musgraves alone in her car, singing along to the music. Ballads like “Angel” and “Camera Roll” mirror these tender moments of introspection, returning to the folksy atmosphere of her previous work as she finds her footing in the more complicated present.
Sometimes, the facts of Musgraves’ public life lend themselves to a breakup album that only she could have written. In “Easier Said,” which seems to be about a songwriter witnessing the anticlimactic end to the relationship that inspired her most popular material, Musgraves searches for a punchline in her trajectory. It is her favorite type of subject—happy and sad at the same time—as a reverb-heavy swirl of banjo, pedal steel, and synth offers its own perspective on her evolution. The film captures this surreal, self-referential tone by occasionally following actors back to their trailers on set, where they watch the final scene of Romeo and Juliet (“That’s a shame,” actress Diane Venora reacts, pouting) and help Musgraves through her many costume changes.
These winks at the camera are reminders that Musgraves has always seen herself as an outsider, using her fierce independence to shine through a corrupt, heartbreaking world. This quality, as she remembers in the album’s brightest moments, is the spark that has sustained her unlikely ascent to pop stardom. There is a particular irony in Musgraves’ saddest, messiest album being the one she delivers to her largest audience yet, working with a wide team of collaborators to amplify its obsessive self-reflection into something befitting mainstream reception. This tension provides star-crossed with alternating tones of vulnerability and triumph, as she pieces together a story whose ending we already see coming. “And the truth is,” Musgraves admits early in the record, “I could probably make it on my own.” She can, and she will.

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On his latest album, Kieran Hebden forgoes the lullaby instrumentation and straightforward rhythms of its predecessor, Rounds, for a darker, more intricate sound-- one rooted more in chaotic free jazz than skewed folk.

Everything Ecstatic

Kieran Hebden will not be your cuddly electro-organic playdate. He will not acknowledge the term "folktronica" in casual conversation. And he will most certainly not prattle on about Bruce Springsteen using his song "Slow Jam" (humorously mislabeled as "Slow Burn" on the Boss' official site) as walk-out music for the Devils & Dust Tour. After the minor success of his third solo full-length, 2003's Rounds, it seems like a good old-fashioned bout of rebellion is in order.
With *Rounds, Hebden created a blissful blend of his small-time, insular sound-swirls and bold-face beats. Accordingly, Radiohead, Beth Orton, and Super Furry Animals commissioned remixes, and even some non-nerds started to pay attention. But apparently Hebden isn't totally comfortable with his music filling the "chill" role at a progressive frat house's latest hackey-sack soiree. * Everything Ecstatic sees the sunken-eyed Brit forgoing the lullaby instrumentation and straightforward rhythms of its predecessor for a darker, more intricate sound-- one rooted more in chaotic free jazz than skewed folk. While this stylistic move is admirable, though, it sometimes sacrifices Hebden's more accessible melodic gifts in its quest for fresh ideas.
Whereas the amplified thump of a human heart gave Rounds an instant corporeal quality, Ecstatic opens on the back of a harsh, scraping bass loop. The low growl remains constant throughout "A Joy" as an army of programmed snares nimbly cross over each other before the organized noise dissolves into a computerized Jim O'Rourke-style cacophony of screeching bells, other-worldly whistles, and an overarching sense of many computers crashing at the exact same time. The tattered beginning is an adequate primer to Ecstatic's scruffier palette.
The slow-building "Sun Drums and Soil" is the album's strongest example of Hebden's Ornette-Coleman-meets-Sun-Ra direction. Near tribal drums build an underworld base for the song to snake out from. Keyboard lines wrap around each other as radio static muddies the mid-song breakdown. What sound like distant, effected vocals conjure another set of crushing drums and, eventually, a wonderfully wailing saxophone bleats, furthering the fury. Haunting, challenging and ultimately rewarding, the raucous track sees Hebden letting his freakout-flag fly, but not everything on Ecstatic is so dense.
The languid "And Then Patters" harkens back to Rounds' lush simplicity, while the jubilant "Smile Around the Face" may be the closest Hebden's ever come to an in-the-flesh pop song. The rinky-dink hi-hats keep it playful as Hebden puts his phaser effect to use, employing washes of synths that cut in and out across the speakers. But the track's unique, irresistible calling card is a sped-up vocal sample lifted straight out of Kanye West's Louis Vuitton backpack. The happy-chipmunk loop sticks and Hebden justly milks it, adorning the track with a multitude of additional sonic drips and fluffy atmospherics. Undeniably catchy and unabashedly cheerful, "Smile Around the Face" attests to Hebden's appealingly child-like anything-goes quality.
On the flipside of that fresh-breeze highlight is "Turtle Turtle Up", a two-minute jumble of vintage video game blips and pummeling drums that comes off as an in-process demo. The lackluster tune is followed-up by the BPM-bumping dancefloor clear-out "Sleep, Eat Food, Have Visions", near the end of the album. The eight-minute epic sees Hebden recreating the beat-busting portion of his live show where he gradually turns the speed knob all the way up until just a sheet of sound remains, which he toys with accordingly. The trick works in concert thanks to his improvisational tact and resourcefulness, but when nailed down on record, the technique becomes laborious.
Taking into account his recent impressive Madvillain remixes and the forthcoming album he's producing for Beth Orton, it seems like Hebden may be using his Four Tet albums to further his stylistic reach so he can apply his sound to more typically song-based collaborations. And more power to him. Everything Ecstatic marks his first slight step backward as a solo artist but it's hardly a failure. Like a natural jazz improviser flailing about in search of the precise moment to let loose a flurry of inspired notes, Hebden consistently sticks his neck out every which way here, knowing full well it may be chopped off at any moment.


Stones Throw expands and reissues Madlib's 2000 solo bow.

The Unseen

When The Unseen was released in 2000 as the solo debut from Lootpack MC/producer Madlib, no one could have known that it would be just the first album in an arm's-length discography that would cover everything from live jazz to Doom and Dilla collaborations, mostly to gushing critical acclaim. At the time, it was simply a quirky leftfield hip-hop record by a guy who burned grass like a wildfire and lived in Peanut Butter Wolf's basement-- like literally lived in the basement studio known as the Bomb Shelter. No one knew that Madlib preferred the solitude of the studio to pretty much anything else and that records flowed from his mind and sampler at a dizzying pace. Now, thanks to endless profiles and album reviews, we know, and it makes The Unseen even more interesting.
What once seemed a crafty producer's gimmick now sounds more like the imaginary friend of a shy dude who needed someone to talk to in the studio while he chain-smoked blunts. Reefer Madness? Probably, but wildly entertaining, as well, imagining Madlib sitting in a basement making songs all day everyday and getting so bored with himself that he finds a way to put a pig-nosed yellow hippo on record. And most of what he says under that persona is crazy shit, outlandish, hilarious fiction. Exactly what everyone stands around thinking about when he's got a helium balloon pinched in his fingers is what comes out of Lord Quas' mouth. We all know profanity is crass, violence a nuisance, and misogyny quite boring, but dude, his voice sounds funny when he says it. Whether it's the grandiose self-shout-outs, ludicrous threats, or adolescent come-ons, Quas is Webster with pimp juice while Madlib leans on the wall, mumbling affirmations and encouragement, and if you want to justify the content to your stuffy friends just tell them the pitch-shifted vocals are Madlib's commentary on the mental immaturity and irresponsibility of typical hip-hop subject matter.
Of course, the main attraction of any Madlib record is his production, and The Unseen holds up particularly well because Madlib hasn't changed this particular strain of his beatmaking all that much. Instead of tinkering with his style, he creates a new one. When he wanted to do some live jazz, he did Yesterday's New Quintet. Street bangers went to the Jaylib album. Pop remixes, reggae mixtapes, instrumental 12"s, nothing stays on paper with Madlib. So anyone who slobbered over Madvillainy or The Further Adventures of Lord Quas won't be disappointed by the now five-year-old production, nor should they skip Lootpack's Soundpieces or MED's Push Comes to Shove. If anything, The Unseen is a better "album" than Further Adventures because the compositions are more fleshed-out, more cohesive and, well, more. Madlib has a short attention span, but he kept most of the songs to almost three minutes here without much junk. The jazz and soul samples are as obscure and well-selected as ever, with Madlib's particular style of chopping a drum sample keeping the beat from becoming a bore. The skits and interludes play to the mood, and the seamless transitions, which usually include a bonus beat or two, echo the give 'em more of DJ Premier of Gang Starr.
I can't say for sure why The Unseen is being re-released, other than Madlib didn't a have another record ready this month. It's a nice treat for the Serato kids to have the full instrumentals on one CD, which is included. And if there's anything to be learned from George Lucas, it's that trusting the public to remember how awesome you are is a fool's paradise. Legacies are constructed, and with the new Quasimoto album still on the New Release wall, it doesn't hurt Madlib or Stones Throw to jog some memories. I'm sure Quas would say, "Buy my shit, or I'll cut your head off and smoke green out your socketholes," or something to that effect.


A new reissue collects the entirety of the 1973 television score for the first time; it’s a lithe, funky counterpart to the wintry, wistful moods of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Vince Guaraldi: A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (50th Anniversary Edition)

Vince Guaraldi rarely sang, but when he crooned over an East Bay funk beat on “Little Birdie,” he made a song so irresistible that it eventually inspired someone to turn it into a one-hour loop. The apex of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, “Little Birdie” chronicles Snoopy and Woodstock as they attempt to set up a table for Thanksgiving dinner (and get in a fight with a beach chair). Guaraldi responds to their antics, wondering why Woodstock flies upside down and his friend “can’t do nothin’ right” while a muted trumpet interjects laid-back riffs. It’s a carefree and fantastical song that captures the quintessential swing, playfulness, and panache of Guaraldi’s Peanuts scores.
Like “Little Birdie,” A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving trades the moody piano of Guaraldi’s most celebrated score, A Charlie Brown Christmas, for exuberant brass and buoyant Clavinet, drawing on the growing funk movement of Northern California in the early 1970s. The soundtrack represents the pinnacle of Guaraldi’s jazz-funk output, but it has never been released in full outside the television special—it could only be found scattered across compilations. A new 50th-anniversary edition presents the entire score for the first time, with remastered tracks and an array of outtakes that highlight the pure joy of Guaraldi’s most boisterous music.
To realize these upbeat songs, Guaraldi assembled a brass- and rhythm-heavy ensemble who brought heavy chops and a flair for experimentation. Drummer Mike Clark is a pioneering funk musician who worked with Herbie Hancock; his broken rhythms give the music its sprightliness and sense of cool. Trumpeter and arranger Tom Harrell and trombonist Chuck Bennett make the brass section sound as big as a marching band. Guaraldi stretches his own limits, picking up the guitar—not his primary instrument, by a long shot—and using Clavinet and Fender Rhodes to add quick-stepping flair.
Together, the quintet managed a lot with very little. On “Thanksgiving Interlude,” for example, 30 seconds are enough to capture a whole world of mischievous, elastic groove. Guaraldi would often revisit and tweak themes in his Peanuts scores, and with Thanksgiving, he and the quintet take low-key cues and transform them into uproarious reworks. That penchant for reinvention is most prominent on “Linus and Lucy,” the quintessential Peanuts song, which is sped up and filled out with a full brass section, wandering improvisations, and an ecstatic trumpet riff; here, it sounds loud and bright, fit for a holiday bash.
This complete version of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving also provides a revealing glimpse into Guaraldi’s methods. The back half of the record is full of alternate takes, bonus mixes, and reprises that show how the musicians put the building blocks together. Across the seven versions of “Thanksgiving Interlude,” for example, the same beat makes up the backbone, but it’s a little slower here, or with a little more cymbal there. In one take of “Thanksgiving Theme,” Guaraldi gets upset that he “keeps blowing” it and bangs out the melody on piano like a Beethoven étude. Guaraldi’s Peanuts scores are beloved in part for their unflappable cool; the clip offers an endearing behind-the-scenes glimpse at the composer breaking character (and channeling Schroeder while he does).
And while Guaraldi’s Peanuts music might be remembered for its wintry melancholy—“Linus and Lucy” aside, of course—A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving reminds us of the full breadth of his scores. Much of Peanuts’ lasting impact boils down to the expansiveness of Charles M. Schulz’s vision for his characters. Neither the comic strips nor the TV specials ever stuck to just one mood: They jumped from madcap moments to pensive ones, offering an unusually grown-up take on the contradictory, mercurial rush of feelings that defines childhood. The genius of Guaraldi’s scores was the way he mapped the many emotions that erupted in a Peanuts comic strip, and on Thanksgiving, he shows them all.


The English songwriter Lianne La Havas' voice marries youthful lightness with a gravitas most often ascribed to artists well beyond her 25 years. Her complex, layered second album is dynamic and poignantly self-assured.

Blood

The English songwriter Lianne La Havas may be young, but her voice marries youthful lightness with a gravitas most often ascribed to artists well beyond her 25 years. Blood, her second album, builds on the immutable grace of Is Your Love Big Enough?, her 2012 debut. Whereas Is Your Love Big Enough? looks outward for validation, Blood is dynamic and poignantly self-assured in its introspection.
Blood's first single, "Unstoppable" is a breezy summer jam that pairs lighthearted bass and groove with a whimsical video to match. In it, La Havas twirls through an empty house singing of the unique invincibility that comes post-healing: "Our polarity shifted around/ There was nothing else left holding us down/ But it's just gravitational/ We are unstoppable!" Warm and affirming, the track eases listeners into a complex, layered album with La Havas' earthy notes complementing meditations on love.
La Havas, whose soulful tunes place her most often in conversation with artists like Alice Smith, Laura Mvula, and Corinne Bailey Rae, handles her six-string acoustic with elegance and precision. Where she is less graceful, and at times even awkward, is the integration of more electric sounds. "Never Get Enough" alternates between her trademark lullaby and brash chords to almost jarring effect. The tonal shift matches the urgency of the cat-and-mouse lyrical arc, but the abrupt jumps add discordant conflict to an otherwise harmonious track sequencing. The song feels erratic, ill-suited to the pleasant lilt of La Havas' smooth voice. "Grow" alternates between acoustics and strong percussion, but its melodic shifts build gradually, matched by La Havas' rising vocals.
Though La Havas is best known for her dreamy love songs, she shines naturally when exploring her own internal world. "Green & Gold" traces her coming of age through motifs from both her Jamaican and Greek backgrounds: "I'm looking at life unfold, dreaming of the green and gold/ Just like the ancient stone, every sunrise I know/ Those eyes you gave to me, they let me see where I come from." The nods to her mixed race heritage are childlike in their innocent inquiry, but the track still retains its maturity; its strong percussive notes deviate from her tendency toward ballads, evoking the same island influence depicted in the track's lyrics.
The album's strongest ballad, the stunningly simple "Wonderful" showcases her at her finest: sultry, nostalgic, and sweet. The track is a gorgeous ode to love lost, its chorus enchanting: "But wasn't it kinda wonderful?/ Wasn't it kinda wonderful, baby?" With slow snaps punctuating La Havas' voice, "Wonderful" seduces as it soothes. It is the soundtrack to slow motion surprise encounters with an ex. La Havas weaves contentment with a charged reflection on past romance to tantalizing effect: "You can trip, flick a switch negative/ Break the circuit between us/ But electricity lingers/ In our fingers."
Melodic interruption of "Never Get Enough" notwithstanding, Blood is an almost seamless album. Tracks flow into one another with the fluidity and serenity of rain into a freshwater pond—light, refreshing, natural. But there is substance moving here, weight in the currents. La Havas' even, powerful vocals ride syrupy strings with grace and latch onto sharper rhythms with authority. She is deft and adaptive, at once inspiring dancing and melancholy reflection: La Havas is always in motion.


Puff Daddy's luxurious 1997 debut plays as both a cautionary tale and an affront to mortality. We examine its history on the 20th anniversary of the death of Christopher Wallace.

No Way Out

As folk singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin shuffled out of the wings to collect her Grammy for Song of the Year in 1998, chaos was already brewing. Wu-Tang Clan’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard made a beeline for the stage, beating Colvin to the mark. He appeared suddenly in front of millions in a brand new maroon suit, delaying her acceptance speech to protest Puff Daddy’s earlier Best Rap Album win for his debut, No Way Out, which defeated the Clan’s Wu-Tang Forever and The Notorious B.I.G.’s posthumous Life After Death. Bad Boy had dominated the rap Grammys that evening with wins in two of the three categories, landing nominations in each one, and scoring seven nominations total. Puffy, Faith Evans, and 112 were all winners. Biggie and Mase were both nominees. ODB had enough. “I don’t know how y’all see it, but Wu-Tang is for the children,” he said. “Puffy is good, but Wu-Tang is the best.”
The scene is among the most memorable images in Grammy history, despite the fact that the rap Grammys themselves were not televised that year. As if getting the last laugh, two new Bad Boy collaborations were in the Hot 100 Top 20 when the charts went live three days later: Puffy’s “Been Around the World” with Mase and Biggie and Mase’s collaboration with fellow Bad Boy signee Total, “What You Want.” The week underscored a key point about the label then: despite its opponents and skeptics, Bad Boy Records was a machine, and all it did was win.
Bad Boy's near-sweep at the Grammys capped a year of successes for the hit factory and for Puffy, who dominated the charts, the clubs, and the award ceremonies. But those fleeting highs were sullied by a far greater loss: the murder of Christopher Wallace. The specter of death hangs eerily over No Way Out, through near prescient verses delivered by Biggie from beyond the grave (“Niggas wanna hit me, if they get me, dress my body in linen by Armani”) and reflective odes bared by those living in the aftermath of his slaying. Puff explores paranoia, grief, and self-awareness in the wake of losing a dear friend, an icon at the peak of his powers. It's an album as much about celebrating and surviving as it is mourning, but more than anything, it’s a label compilation that bound its participants together, one marked by a refusal to stop winning—even when under the gun.
When Biggie was shot and killed in a drive-by weeks before the release of his sophomore album, it instantly made the Bad Boy modus operandi obsolete. They were a posse built around a transcendent star. Everything revolved around Biggie. He appeared in several Bad Boy videos. He appeared on singles and notable tracks for Craig Mack, Total, and 112. He was their face. He was the brand. In the long term, his death would create a power vacuum in rap Mecca—starting a turf war between would-be kings like Nas and Jay Z—but the immediate aftershock was felt more subtly within his camp, which was searching for a way to sustain without one of the most heavily felt presences in all of popular music. “After Big died, we were searching to see who was gonna carry the torch,” Mase remembered in GQ’s oral history of the Bad Boy run. “Everybody would’ve had the right to get out of contracts because of the violence. Instead, we rolled together. If I had a verse or beat that was better for you, I’d just give it up.” Mase’s verses for No Way Out were written in his Harlem bedroom long before he was signed. “I gave them to Puff, because he was the one with the hot hand.” Starting with Biggie’s Mase-featuring smash “Mo Money Mo Problems,” Puff’s hot hand would continue to deal hits at an unprecedented rate.
By ’97, Sean “Puffy” Combs had already established himself as one of the finest producers and talent scouts in the country. After cornering the rap market with Big and Craig Mack (with Mase and the LOX waiting in the wings), he diversified into R&B, signing new acts like 112, Total, Mario Winans, and Carl Thomas. He executive-produced Mary J. Blige’s My Life and co-produced Usher’s self-titled debut, and he scored credits on TLC’s CrazySexyCool. Along with his in-house production team, the Hitmen, he cut records for everyone from Jodeci to Mariah Carey to Aretha Franklin. Not long before his death, Biggie convinced Combs to try his hand at rap, and with his team surrounding him production began on Puffy’s debut. Taking the name Puff Daddy, he would adopt an uber glamorous image, helping to coin the term “ghetto fabulous.” Combs wasn’t a naturally gifted rapper by trade, but he had remarkable taste and a clear vision. His Bad Boy bio, shared in a ‘98 Vibe story, exposed his solo rap career as merely a means to further his roles as a premier impresario and tastemaker in true Puffy fashion: “I’m not an MC,” it read. “I’m a vibe giver.”
In January ’96, Puff Daddy set the tone for No Way Out with the Mase-featuring single “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down,” a body-roll-friendly jam that heavily sampled “The Message.” The video was a crash course in “new money” extravagance—silk pajamas, pristine white jumpsuits, action movie pyrotechnics, Eddie Griffin, driving through the desert in a drop top Rolls Royce, rapping about rocking Versace and Hawaiian getaways. The album was originally headed in a fun, glitzy direction, in the vein of “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” and the forthcoming single “Been Around the World.” But Biggie’s sudden death caused Puffy to redo half the album, creating a party record spotted with bouts of depression and sorrow; coupling words from the deceased with remembrances of his life and the impact of his passing. “[The album’s] more serious now than when I first got into it,” Puffy told SPIN that September. “There are still days where I just wake up and feel like I don’t want to do this anymore. But it’s become a situation in which I have no choice. This is what I do. I have no way out.”
No Way Out is a living document of the most tumultuous period in Bad Boy’s run. It embodies the complex mix of emotions felt while persevering through great trauma amid triumph. It's a record that splits itself in two trying to capture a gaudy lifestyle and the devastation of loss all at once, equal parts funeral pyre, signal fire, and beach luau. One minute they’re jet-setting around the globe with Big in tow, the next Puff is alone peeking over his shoulder for armed assailants, contemplating his final hour. Samples of Marvin Gaye’s “If I Should Die Tonight” and New Edition’s “Is This the End?” become vehicles for distress and alarm, as he prepares his last will and testament. But a song like “I Got the Power” reestablishes control: “I be that nigga that yo niggas can’t fuck wit,” he raps. “That nigga that'll die for his main man/That nigga with the gettin' money gameplan.” For its somewhat whiplashing nature, everything the album does is packaged neatly, spotlighting Puff as its star while exalting a slain legend and comrade and reassuring Bad Boy culture stockholders that the remaining roster was ready to carry the mantle. This is the all-conquering rap debut of a production and marketing guru.
With production from the Hitmen aces—Puffy, Stevie J, D-Dot, and Amen-Ra, in particular—and a host of talented role players, namely Big’s widow Faith Evans, his mistress Lil Kim, the star-to-be Mase, The Lox, and more, No Way Out crafted a near perfect Bad Boy time capsule, capturing the label’s highs and lows of ‘97. From the agony of “Pain” to the celebrity-critiquing “Do You Know?,” it chronicles every natural reaction to Big’s shooting dutifully and without fully compromising Puffy’s Bad Boy mission statement: make feel-good music that tops the charts.
Puff Daddy proves himself to be a more than capable leading man, talking his shit with supreme confidence one minute and humbling himself at the altar of his fallen friend the next. He’s among the most believable boasters in rap history—“You ain’t gotta like me, you just mad/‘Cause I tell it how it is, and you tell it how it might be,” he raps on “Victory”—and he’s his own best hype man who’s equally enthusiastic stumping for others. But for the most part, No Way Out pivots on its exceptional Biggie cameos. His aura lingers. There’s a slickness to his bars that’s unparalleled, that fills up all the surrounding space with brio. He makes a seam-splitting Jay Z verse seem pedestrian (“Young G’s”) and brings half the fun to “Been Around the World” with his goofy rendition of Lisa Stansfield's “All Around the World.” On the slow-building “Victory,” he trades verses with Puff, backing his play. (The song’s final verse, the last Big ever recorded, is believed to be a reference track for Puffy.) The remix to “All About the Benjamins,” a chief among posse cuts once deemed by XXL the second best rap song of the ’90s, is among the last truly great artifacts of the Bad Boy era: the perfect blend of varying personalities and top notch performances all winding around the same axis: Biggie and the mutual appreciation of stunting.
“Statistically, this was one of the best years of my life,” Puffy told Rolling Stone in December ’97, “but personally, it was one of the worst. I would rather not have this. I would do anything—I would turn the hits into negative hits if I could just be with Biggie again.” Biggie was gone, though, and the hits kept coming. Puff Daddy’s first two singles topped the charts and his next two peaked at No. 2. No Way Out set the stage for Mase’s hugely successful debut Harlem World later that year, and the next year it was the LOX’s turn. As the run continued and the accolades kept mounting, Puffy became rap’s unexpected celebrity executive, notching more No. 1’s than any rapper in history to that point. But there’s something singular about No Way Out, which somehow feels like both a cautionary tale and an affront to mortality: The Notorious B.I.G. had been assassinated by his enemies, but his legacy was eternal. The album remembers him, not as man but as myth.
There’s something fascinating about following a song as mournful and self-serving as “I’ll Be Missing You”—which turns “Adagio for Strings” and the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” into a rousing eulogy with Puff and Big at its center—with a song as triumphant as “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down.” The transition seemed to build the strength necessary to overcome tragedy. With or without Biggie, their superstar and genius, the Bad Boy machine would continue to roll. Nobody—not even the ghost of an all-time great—could hold Sean Combs down. When the dust settled and No Way Out was on its way to going septuple platinum, SPIN ran a January ‘98 feature titled “The Mourning After,” taking stock of the post-Biggie Bad Boy climate and wondering at what point public grieving became shameless promo. “Marketable mourning,” as Sia Michel called it, contributed at least in part to the ongoing sales spike. Martyrdom is misery porn for some. But No Way Out is more than just the commissioning of lifeless tributes or some flagrant attempt to merchandise tragedy; it’s an attempt to do the most difficult thing in adversity’s wake: keep going.


The rising 24-year-old Florida rapper surfs affably on TikTok trends and sounds exactly like a label executive’s idea of the future.

Dominic Fike: What Could Possibly Go Wrong

What Could Possibly Go Wrong

If you haven’t had a substantial conversation with anyone under the age of 25 or been on TikTok over the last six months —if you are, say, a label executive with money to burn and a fuzzy, Post Malone-shaped image of what Kids These Days are into —Dominic Fike might sound like the future. The 24-year-old Florida singer won a multi-million dollar record deal shortly after he got out of jail for violating house arrest tied to an alleged battery of a police officer; he didn’t have any actual finished music to instigate the bidding war, just a few demos kicking around the Internet. But for trend-chasers, that was enough; he moans when he sings, his face is smothered in tattoos, and the beats change with the grace of an accidentally opened browser window—how do you do, fellow kids!? On his debut album, though, Fike proves to be no pioneer—he’s just the latest shrugging embodiment of streaming trends.
Fike, or whoever runs his marketing campaign, bills himself as “genre-less” or genre-bending, which is an accurate, but not revolutionary, statement. Billie Eilish zigzags through Soundcloud rap and piano pop ballads. Taylor Swift makes "indie" music now. Drake continues to wriggle through so many styles it barely registers when he adopts a new one. The songs engineered to go viral on TikTok contort through genres and textures, so that a 15-second snippet that whirls around the app can sound completely different from the rest of the song.
Over What Could Possibly Go Wrong's 34 minutes, Fike swerves from crooning over swelling strings to Brockhampton-esque treated vocals to raspy raps over chaotic guitar licks, sometimes all in the same song. "Joe Blazey" halts its muffled vocals midway through for an audio of what seems to be Fike confessing to a panic attack; when the music starts again, the song shifts into sinister bass, as he hisses about "going dark mode" in a hotel bar. On “Why,” he shows off a palatable boy-band croon. The blithe, catchy “Chicken Tenders" starts with whiny, pitched-up vocals clearly cribbed from Frank Ocean. By the time the song's two and a half minutes are up, the track has mutated into a call-and-response pop tune with a twitchy electronic drum pattern while Fike proclaims “The best part of my day is/When I get to see you naked.”
These are claustrophobic songs, and even aside from some of the more grating production choices (the extraneous outro on “Wurli” that morphs from elegiac strings into a siren-like blare, the sound effect of a baby crying in “Florida”), the lyrics prove equally suffocating. The album focuses on fame, which often seems like a confusing choice (Fike has 492,000 followers on Instagram; Doug the Pug has 4 million). “What’s it like being famous?” he asks himself on “Good Game.” “Hollywood doesn’t need a reason to make you think you look bigger than you are,” he wails on the self-serious “Politics & Violence.” “I hope they cancel me,” he chants on “Cancel Me,” a trollish track that's currently coursing through TikTok and seems desperate to provoke. “I hope I get Me-Too’d,” he says on the final verse;  it’s yet another upsetting  statement designed to provoke on an album in which he also says, “I done took an L on every corner like a swastika."
For the majority of the album, though, Fike strives to be aggressively palatable, another aspect of the sound that makes these tracks seem like TikTok bait. For all their incessant beat switches and transformations, these songs end up largely breezy and buoyant, opting to create a vibe rather than to telegraph any actual emotion. He may get credit for what happens next, but ultimately, the future of popular music is on the same course it's been on for the last year: regardless of, and maybe despite, this album, there was always going to be an upcoming slew of artists that sound just like Dominic Fike, slouching towards virality.

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For the first time in years, the trap music co-architect sounds less like a copyright lawyer and more like a contributor to a culture he loves, even if he gets a little overzealous.

Dime Trap

For the past year, T.I., Gucci Mane, and spectators have been embroiled in a debate about who invented trap music. Trap has become such a force—in hip-hop, in music, in style—that its creators can credibly say they have helped shape modern culture. T.I. staked his claim to the genre’s origins on his 2003 album, Trap Muzik, arguing the proof was there in the title. But last month, announcing a new pop-up museum dedicated to trap, T.I. dropped the language of invention and proposed the genre was a group effort. “Trap Muzik wouldn’t be shit without ALL OF US,” he wrote. “I made it [an] album… but WE MADE IT A GENRE!!!!” This pivot from ownership to participation animates Dime Trap. For the first time in years, he sounds less like a copyright lawyer and more like a contributor to a culture he loves.
Back in 2015, T.I. envisioned Dime Trap as the second installment of a trilogy that began with 2014’s pop-leaning Paperwork. He’d recently received a Grammy nomination for “Blurred Lines,” was Iggy Azalea’s mentor and defender, and was the patriarch of a reality-show family. In a sense, the T.I. vs T.I.P. duel—that is, the clash between the CEO and the streetside hustler—had been settled. But he wanted Dime Trap to reset the balance and provide “unadulterated trap music” with “young, hungry, talented producers.” This return to the trap was so straightforward that, at one point, Dime Trap was simply called Trap Music.
But the Dime Trap of 2018 focuses on legacy instead of legend. T.I. still likes to flex, and balling remains a priority. But throughout this record, there’s an emphasis on consequences. Narrated by Dave Chappelle, another black artist who’s publicly wrestled with questions of legacy, Dime Trap finds T.I. in repose, mapping the choices he’s made and teasing out their effects. On “Seasons,” he quotes his marriage counselor, who tells him to focus on the pain his decisions have caused. When he dismisses the advice and sets his sights on hip-hop moguldom, instead, you can feel the weight of that choice. “What Can I Say” transforms T.I.’s unlikely ascent into a cautionary tale. “In the trap with a trap door,” he raps, insisting that a successful hustle only begets more hustles.
The past serves as muse and burden. “Laugh at Em” melds T.I.’s memories of his days in the trap with observations from this ongoing era of hyper-visible police brutality. “Swear to God I coulda been Freddie Gray/Or Mike Brown, getting shot down/With a pistol on me and half a brick of yay,” he reflects. That single sequence is more potent than T.I.’s entire last album. He seems to have rediscovered the power of fluidity, zipping through his thoughts until larger ideas settle into place.
A murderers’ row of both new and seasoned producers match his breezy rapping with zesty beats. For “Jefe,” Bangladesh blends mariachi horns and marching-band percussion into a spirited thump, landing between Nola bounce and Latin trap. Shawty Redd and Pyro da God’s “Big Ol Drip” beat is a slow, bluesy burner with bold drops and ragtime riffs. Scott Storch’s sparse arrangement on “Wraith” steadily expands and contracts, creating strange little pockets of dead air that T.I. punctures with his newly husky pitch. T.I has dabbled in a range of sounds since his debut, but that range resonates as renewal here.
The record falters when T.I. gets maudlin. The weepy keys and morose verses of “Pray For Me” are monochromatic, as if YFN Lucci and T.I. were dramatically reenacting a self-help book. The frosty lechery of the Young Thug collab “The Weekend” is undercut by an outro where T.I. explains that trap music isn’t “one-dimensional” and describes Dime Trap as “TED Talk for hustlers.” Hasn’t his career made that clear?
T.I. ends “Be There” by framing trap as a form of revenge against the carceral state and white supremacy. “I’m sure the people who put crack cocaine in our communities, infested us with all this hate, all these guns, all this violence, all this rage, you see, they never counted on us takin’ those very experiences, packaging them as philosophical presentations set to music,” he says. Like Jesse McCarthy’s essay “Notes on Trap,” the moment limits trap to its function and its impact. Trap has reached unexpected heights, but the genre’s soul exists in elusiveness—the way it shifts the moment it’s pinned down, the way its architects endlessly toil toward unpredictable ends, the way its originators don’t just invent but evolve. It doesn’t matter what “they” counted on. We made it.