On their first new album since 2010, the veteran art-punks sound surprisingly mature, even sentimental. Fortunately they still know how to rage.

OUI, LSF

It’s always ironic hearing Tim Harrington sing pleas for human connection after a career spent exemplifying the very qualities most likely to drive others away. The megaphone-voiced frontman of Les Savy Fav quills the band’s art-punk with brash volume and hectoring sarcasm. At the band’s legendarily rambunctious live shows, he sacrifices safety and dignity alike for the sake of an unforgettable spectacle. He’s as naturally gifted a showman as punk singers come, and one of the last guys you’d assume is all that concerned with whether or not he’s dating material.

Nonetheless, as Les Savy Fav have aged into an institution, Harrington has increasingly exposed his softer side, writing often about the difficulty of maintaining close personal relationships. It can be odd, hearing the same wildman famed for stripping down to a Speedo on stage and scaling the tallest object within sight earnestly sing lines like, “It’s hard to let love in when we’re so scared of getting hurt” on the group’s sixth album OUI, LSF (on a song titled “Somebody Needs a Hug,” at that).

Released after a 14-year recording hiatus during which the group occasionally toured but mostly focused on their day jobs, including bassist Syd Butler and guitarist Seth Jabour’s gigs anchoring the unlikely house band for Late Night with Seth Meyers, OUI, LSF continues the sentimental streak that ran through its predecessor, Root for Ruin. On the tender “Dawn Patrol,” Harrington finds solace in the reassuring touch of his partner’s hand. In its somber counterpart “Don’t Mind Me,” he croons about love that’s faded into mere tolerance over time. It’s the most naked, openly weepy ballad he’s ever attempted.

One could argue that Harrington’s growing sincerity has made Les Savy Fav a better-rounded band. It’s certainly given them a wider range of moods. Yet as with Root for Ruin, OUI, LSF can’t completely shake the sense that its comedown songs are taking up space that could have been filled by bangers. Thankfully, this band can still rage convincingly when it counts: The album opens with an absolute pressure cooker, “Guzzle Blood,” which funnels their heated art-rock through the Prodigy’s five-alarm noise factory, all bleating squall and blaring horns. “Void Moon” and “Oi! Division” are both economical pit-starters, showcases for searing riffs and Harrington’s frontman-as-Russian-roulette volatility.

At times, the maturity flatters. One of Harrington’s periodic forays into Penthouse Forum territory, “Limo Scene,” calls back to the lurid sex of “The Equestrian,” but this time amid all the touching and pheromones, the detail he lingers on is a simple gesture of consent and affirmation, a whispered “I’m into this.” The album’s stabs at youthful irreverence are less graceful. With its hokey appropriations of old LL Cool J and Usher lyrics, “Legendary Tippers” pushes the band into stale dad-joke territory. It’s a nod to an earlier, sillier era of the band, a past they can’t fully let go of even though they’ve outgrown it.

Like their peer Marnie Stern, who returned from a similarly long studio hiatus last year with an album that picked up exactly where the last one left off, Les Savy Fav aren’t humoring any notions of reinvention. When you’ve got a sound this singular, this established, this irreplicable, there’s no shame in letting it ride. Still, given how time has always intrigued Les Savy Fav—their essential 2004 compilation Inches flaunted their evolution by collecting seven years of singles in reverse chronological order —it’s a little disappointing that the latest album doesn’t have more to show for the passage of so much of it. Twice the span that Inches documented has elapsed since Root for Ruin, yet OUI, LSF plays more like a continuation than a new chapter.


On their third LP, the Montreal indie rock trio attempt to take unsparing inventory, offer sincere amends, and confront the responsibilities of adulthood.

The End of That

No matter where Plants and Animals went on their first two LPs, they always came bearing good vibes: If Arcade Fire had set out to make Barbecue instead of Funeral, it might've sounded like the trio's 2008 debut, Parc Avenue, perhaps the last hurrah of shambling, collectivist Canadian indie rock as we came to know it last decade. And while follow-up La La Land traded the requisite Montreal orchestration for Hollywood namedrops ("Tom Cruz", "American Idol", "Kon Tiki"), there was a still a Lebowski-like insouciance to it, a projection from a place where beards and beer flowed equally free. Point being I never thought that whether Plants and Animals were good dudes was up for debate, but while The End of That doesn't go too far beyond the La La Land DMZ between indie folk and jam-band, they've got some dark and heavy shit on their minds this time out-- they attempt to take unsparing inventory, offer sincere amends, and confront the responsibilities of adulthood. But the unyielding geniality of the music and slackjawed lyrics show a band either unwilling or unable to commit to its own emotional ballast or offer a sense of real stakes, the result of which is The End of That confusing a bummy hangover with a full-blown existential crisis.
In a vacuum, it's admirable that Plants and Animals are finding inspiration in a life pivot that doesn't get much play in rock music: The characters in these songs are still partying and waking up on friends' couches, only now they come to while their buddy's wife is making breakfast for the kids. That's essentially the lyrical thread running through the title track, "Crisis!", and "No Idea", the three songs here which most explicitly delineate the titular catch-all of "that." On "The End of That", Warren Spicer admits, "I tried the cocaine just to know what it could do/ I had to try it again just to give it a second chance," and the mundanity of it is actually rather bold for a topic that often results in exploitative oversharing or impenetrable metaphor. But as soon as you want to pull up to Spicer's barstool, he loses the plot, referring to an object of affection as a "fucked-up bumblebee/ Headed for the potpourri," and continuing to spit game from there: "You turn me on so with your bee-sting lips/ And your pepper-grinder hips/ Like a thread in the needle/ We're just typical people/ We're hoping to be friends and do cool stuff and be equal." It's frankly pretty impressive how many different linguistic devices are used for the same cringeworthy effect.
And that's generally how most of The End of That goes, getting in a totally sincere and totally awkward sentiment before Spicer's lyrics perilously tailspin over endless Stones-y vamps. While the tone of the lyrics and music are jarringly discordant, the compositional methods for both align all too perfectly. "Crisis!" serves as the literal and figurative centerpiece of The End of That, a sloppy lanyard of guitar and vocal threads that barely tries for melodic structure and lyrics that similarly favor first-take immediacy. "Well holy matrimony!/ Everyone is gettin' married or breaking up/ And the stroller situation on the sidewalk is way out of control," Spicer sings, and like so much of the record, it initially sounds plainspoken and charming until you realize absolutely nobody talks like that. Preceded by a false count-off and some friendly studio chatter, everything is arranged so that you have no reason whatsoever to think "Crisis!" wasn't actually made up completely on the spot. And as these things usually turn out, it's the longest song on The End of That, even more forbidding back to back with the equally aimless six minutes of "2010".
Occasionally, as on solemn opener "Before" and the driving, minor-key "Control Me", there's enough drawn shades obscuring the sunlight so that intent and execution can properly parallel, and with Spicer's voice bearing a similar grain to Nash Kato, they hint at Urge Overkill's genuinely despairing Exit the Dragon. But for a record that sounds like memories of better times, there's a disheartening shortage of hooks or melodies that aren't hitched to lyrics you'd rather forget: "Lightshow" has a spunky riff but never advances past it, while Spicer barges into a McCartney-styled piano progression on "No Idea", asking, "Do you fear loneliness?/ Do you fear getting left behind?/ All your friends are getting married/ They're having... a time." Look, kudos to Plants and Animals for intervening on themselves without the help of the local authorities or concerned family members, but whether it's the trailer preview-friendly bop of the music, the utter lack of palpable conflict, or the stilted dialogue and shoulder-shrugging catchphrases, I can't shake the feeling that The End of That is ultimately a Matthew McConaughey character come to life.


Last year, Neil Young and Crazy Horse played a VIP private party for one of Canada’s richest men. Now you’re invited to hear their cantankerous takes on almost every song from 1990’s Ragged Glory.

Fu##in’ Up

The significance of the Rivoli to Toronto music lore cannot be overstated. Upon opening in 1982, the Queen Street West venue became an epicenter of local bohemia, with a streetfront restaurant serving up pad thai to art students on first dates, a second-floor pool hall where you could wager away the last of your beer money, and most crucially, an intimate, 200-capacity brick-walled performance room where the city’s freaks had free rein. Through the ’80s, it was the space where queercore pioneers Fifth Column turned their gigs into Super 8 film happenings, the Cowboy Junkies perfected their brand of codeined country, and a pre-TV Kids in the Hall pushed sketch comedy to anarchic extremes. In the late ’90s, it was the place where a young Leslie Feist workshopped songs and tended bar. And a decade after that, you might’ve caught a teenage Aubrey Graham trying his hand at improv. Even now, long after the Queen West neighborhood’s cachet has diminished, the Rivoli is still a place where music history is made: Last November, it hosted arguably the strangest Neil Young and Crazy Horse gig ever.
There’s nothing that shocking about an artist of Neil Young’s stature playing a room as tiny as the Riv—the surprise small-venue underplay is a fairly common move for arena-level acts promoting a new album or warming up for a big tour. But the circumstances surrounding the Rivoli show—a private 50th-birthday party for billionaire Canada Goose parka poobah Dani Reiss—raised a few eyebrows, given that Neil’s spent a good chunk of his career putting corporations in his crosshairs. (Maybe, after spending his formative years in Winnipeg, Neil just really appreciates a warm winter coat.) What’s even more unfathomable is that Neil Young and Crazy Horse were actually the opening act—in keeping with the party’s theme of “age before beauty,” their set was followed by an appearance from Canadian rock-radio mainstays the Arkells. But the live-album document of the gig, titled Fu##in’ Up, is more than just a glorified souvenir from the sort of birthday party that presumably required its guests to sign NDAs.
At the Rivoli, Neil and the Horse performed a track-by-track (minus one) run-through of 1990’s Ragged Glory, and in a nod to the gig’s secretive logistics, all of the songs—save for the cover of the ’60s garage-band standard “Farmer John”—have been rebranded for Fu##in’ Up with new titles pulled from their respective lyrics. If 1989’s course-correcting Freedom offered an encouraging sign that Neil hadn’t completely lost the plot during his infamous ’80s wilderness years, Ragged Glory affirmed his elder-statesman status for a new generation of flannel-clad feedback addicts, prompting tours with Sonic Youth and a million “godfather of grunge” plaudits. The album topped the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop critics’ poll and was widely hailed as an electrifying display of vitality from a veteran band entering their third decade together—and that was 34 years ago. Now that Neil and his bandmates are pushing 80 (if not already there) Ragged Glory’s spirit of camaraderie, perseverance, and bittersweet nostalgia feels all the more trenchant. If a line like “There’s very few of us left, my friend, from the days that used to be” carried a whiff of melancholy in 1991, imagine what it feels like to sing it now.
But where Ragged Glory captured Crazy Horse rocking out with the volume and vigor of a band half its age, Fu##in’ Up highlights both the corroding effects and uncanny advantages of aging. For decades now, we’ve watched our classic-rock heroes grapple with getting old: The Stones would have you believe they’re still horny 20-year-olds; the tinnitus-plagued surviving members of the Who traded smashed guitars for orchestral embellishment; Paul McCartney is the hip grandad. But on Fu##in’ Up, Neil Young and Crazy Horse embody what it really means to age. They move a bit slower but sound a lot crankier. They’re blithely unconcerned with formalities—like hitting the chorus of “City Life (Country Home)” at the right moment—because they don’t really give a shit about impressing anybody anymore. And they rumble into Fu##in’ Up’s agitated titled track (aka “Heart of Steel”) with all the subtlety of an uncontrolled bowel movement.
The Crazy Horse heard here isn’t exactly the same one that cut the original Ragged Glory: Early ’70s-era member Nils Lofgren returns to the right-hand-man slot occupied by Frank Sampedro for several decades, while the perennial quartet appears as a quintet with the recruitment of Promise of the Real guitarist/pianist Micah Nelson (who’ll be taking over Lofgren’s position on the Horse’s 2024 dates). The piano actually adds some surprising grace notes to all the grimy guitarnage: “Feels Like a Railroad (River of Pride) [White Line]” acquires some saloon-door swing, while the ivory-boosted bounce of “Walkin’ in My Place (Road of Tears) [Mansion on the Hill]” more clearly identifies the song as a direct descendent of the After the Gold Rush rager “Southern Man.” Ultimately, Fu##in’ Up is less a snapshot of a specific event than a proudly moldy monument to Crazy Horse’s long-may-you-runitude. There’s no stage banter, and the between-song applause is edited out of the mix as it was on Rust Never Sleeps. The lack of contextual detail puts the focus squarely on Crazy Horse’s incandescent noise and slack yet unfailingly steady momentum.
As a result, Fu##in’ Up makes a convincing case for Ragged Glory as the definitive Crazy Horse album, showcasing the group in their purest, crudest state, without any of the counter-balancing pop singles or acoustic reprieves that colored more hallowed classics like Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Zuma. And with the Fu##in’ Up versions, the traditional divide between Neil’s melodic accessibility and avant-grunge odysseys is completely blurred, while the long songs get to grind on even longer. Whether it’s a withering anthem like “Broken Circle (Over and Over)” or a tension-wracked 15-minute workout like “A Chance on Love (Love and Only Love),” Crazy Horse approach each song as an extended late-night drive on a lost highway, with Neil’s needling solos serving as the high-beam guiding light, and each verse/chorus passage appearing like a fleeting sign of civilization before we slip back into the desert. On the cover of Ragged Glory, we see a photo of Crazy Horse jamming away at Neil’s Broken Arrow Ranch in Northern California, transforming the vaulted, wood-lined space into their own private cathedral of sound. It’s a hermetic scene that couldn’t be further removed from a posh VIP-only party for one of Canada’s wealthiest men held at a popular downtown Toronto bar. But the beauty of Fu##in’ Up is that Neil Young and Crazy Horse play as though they’re still locked in the barn.


PiL's second album, Metal Box, is a near-perfect record that reinvents and renews rock in a manner that fulfilled post-punk’s promise(s) to a degree rivaled only by Joy Division on Closer.

Metal Box

Out of all the fascinating alternate takes, B-sides, rare compilation-only tracks and never-before-released sketches that comprise this expanded reissue of Public Image Ltd’s post-punk landmark, it’s a live version of “Public Image”  that is the real revelation. Part of an impromptu June 1979 concert in Manchester, the song keeps collapsing and restarting. “Shut up!” snaps John Lydon, responding  to audience jeers. “I told you it’s a fucking rehearsal.” Another PiL member explains that the drummer, Richard Dudanski, only joined three days ago. PiL relaunch the song only for Lydon to halt it with “Miles too fast!” The jeers erupt again and the singer offers a sort of defiant apology: if the crowd really wanted to “see mega light displays and all that shit,” they should go watch properly professional bands who put on a slick show. “But we ain’t like that... We’re extremely honest: sorry about that... We admit our mistakes.”
This performance—an inadvertent deconstruction of performance itself—takes us to the heart of the PiL project as well as the post-punk movement for which the group served as figureheads. At its core was a belief in radical honesty: faith in the expressive power of words, singing and sound as vehicles for urgent communication. After the Sex Pistols’ implosion, Lydon was trying to find a way to be a public figure again without masks, barriers, routines, or constraining expectations. So it’s especially apt that “Public Image”—PiL’s debut single, Lydon’s post-Pistols mission-statement—is the song that  fell apart at Manchester’s Factory Club. “Public Image” is about the way a stage persona can become a lie that a performer is forced to live out in perpetuity. Lydon sings about “Johnny Rotten” as a theatrical role that trapped him and which he’s now casting off. Starting all over with his given name and a new set of musical accomplices, Lydon was determined to stay true to himself. The group’s name came from Muriel Sparks’ novel The Public Image, about a movie actress whose career is ruined but who, the ending hints, is freed to embark on an authentic post-fame existence. Lydon added the “limited” to signify both the idea of the rock group as a corporation (in the business of image-construction) and the idea of keeping egos on a tight leash.
A comparison for Lydon’s search for a new true music—and a truly new music—that would leave behind rock’s calcified conventions is Berlin-era Bowie’s quest for a “new music night and day” (the working title of Low). Indeed it was Virgin Records’ belief that Lydon was the most significant British rock artist since Bowie that caused them to extend PiL such extraordinary license and largesse when it came to recording in expensive studios. That indulgence enabled the recording of three of the most out-there albums ever released by a major label: First Issue, Metal Box*, Flowers of Romance. But it’s the middle panel of the triptych that is the colossal achievement:  a near-perfect record that reinvents and renews rock in a manner that fulfilled post-punk’s promise(s) to a degree rivaled only by Joy Division on Closer.
The key word, though, is reinvention. Lydon talked grandly of abandoning rock altogether,  arguing that killing off the genre had been the true point of punk. But unlike the absolutely experimental (and as with many such experiments, largely unsuccessful) Flowers of Romance, Metal Box doesn’t go beyond rock so much as stretch it to its furthest extent, in the manner of the Stooges’ Fun House or Can’s Tago Mago. It’s a forbidding listen, for sure, but only because of its intensity, not because it’s abstract or structurally convoluted. The format is classic: guitar-bass-drums-voice (augmented intermittently by keyboards and electronics). The rhythm section (Jah Wobble and a succession of drummers) is hypnotically steady and physically potent. The guitarist (Keith Levene) is a veritable axe-hero, as schooled and as spectacular as any of the pre-punk greats. And the singer, while unorthodox and edging off-key, pours it all out in a searing catharsis that recalls nothing so much as solo John Lennon and the intersection he found between the deeply personal and the politically universal. There are even a few tunes here!
But yes, it’s a bracing listen, Metal Box, and nowhere more so than on the opening dirge “Albatross.” 11 minutes-long, leaden in tempo, the song is clearly designed as a test for the listener just like the protracted assault of “Theme” that launched First Issue had been. Absolutely pitiless music—Levene hacking at his axe like an abattoir worker, Wobble rolling out a looped tremor of a bassline—is matched with utterly piteous singing: Lydon intones accusations about an oppressive figure from his past, perhaps the master-manipulator McLaren, possibly his dead friend Vicious, conceivably “Johnny Rotten” himself as a burden he can’t shake.
“Memories,” the single that preceded Metal Box’s November ’79 release, is more sprightly. Like “Albatross,” though, the song is an embittered exorcism: Lydon could almost be commenting on his own nagging vocal and fixated lyrics with the line “dragging on and on and on and on and on and on and ON,” then spits out “This person’s had enough of useless memories” over a breath-taking disco-style breakdown.
With “Swan Lake,” a retitled remix of the single “Death Disco,” Lydon is possessed by an unbearable memory that he doesn’t want to forget: the sight of his mother dying in slow agony from cancer.  If the wretched grief of the lyrics—“Silence in her eyes,” “Final in a fade,” “Choking on a bed/Flowers rotting dead”—recalls Lennon’s “Mother,” the retching anguish of Lydon’s vocal resembles Yoko Ono at her most abrasively unleashed. On the original vinyl, the song locks into an endless loop on the phrase “words cannot express.” But “Swan Lake”—named after the Tchaikovsky melody that Levene intermittently mutilates—is nothing if not a 20th Century expressionist masterpiece: the missing link between Munch’s “The Scream” and Black Flag’s “Damaged I.”
Just as placing “death” in front of “disco” was an attempt to subvert the idea of dancefloor escapism, the title “Poptones” drips with acrid irony. A real-life news story of abduction, rape and escape inspired the lyric, with one detail in particular triggering Lydon’s imagination: the victim’s memory of the bouncy music streaming out of the car’s cassette player. This juxtaposition of  manufactured happiness and absolute horror is a typically post-punk move, exposing pop as a prettified lie that masks reality’s raw awfulness: for some post-punk groups,  an existential condition (dread, doubt) and for others, a political matter (exploitation, control). On “Poptones” this truth-telling impulse produces one of Lydon’s most vivid lyrics (“I don’t like hiding in this foliage and peat/It’s wet and I’m losing my body heat”), supported and surrounded by music that’s surprisingly pretty, in an eerie, insidious sort of way. Wobble’s sinuously winding bass weaves through Levene’s cascading sparks as well as the cymbal-smash spray he also supplies (PiL being temporarily drummerless during this stage of the album’s spasmodic recording).
With PiL still between drummers, on “Careering” it’s Wobble who doubles up roles, pummeling your ribcage with his bass and bashing the kit like a metalworker pounding flat a sheet of steel. Levene swaps guitar for smears of synth, while Lydon’s helicopter vision scans the border zone between Ulster and the Irish Republic: a terrorscape of “blown into breeze” bomb victims and paramilitary paranoia. “Careering” sounds like nothing else in rock and nothing else in PiL’s work—as with several other songs on Metal Box, it could have spawned a whole identity, an entire career, for any other band.
“No Birds Do Sing,” unbelievably, surpasses the preceding five songs. Levene cloaks the murderous Wobble-Dudanksi groove with a toxic cloud of guitar texture. Lydon surveys an English suburban scene whose placidity could not be further from troubled Northern Ireland, noting in sardonic approval its “bland planned idle luxury” and “well-intentioned rules” (rolling the ‘r’ there in a delicious throwback to classic Rotten-style singing). For “a layered mass of subtle props” and “a caviar of silent dignity” alone, Lydon ought to have the 2026 Nobel locked down.
After the greatest six-song run in all of post-punk, Metal Box’s remainder is merely (and mostly) excellent, moving from the juddery instrumental “Graveyard” (oddly redolent of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ early British rock‘n’roll classic “Shakin’ All Over”) through the rubbery bassline waddle of “The Suit” to the stampeding threat of “Chant,” a savage snapshot of 1979’s tribal street violence. The album winds down with the unexpected respite and repose of “Radio Four,” a tranquil instrumental entirely played by Levene: just a tremulously poignant and agile bass line overlaid with reedy keyboards that swell and subside. The title comes from the U.K.’s national public radio station, a civilized and calming source of news, views, drama and light comedy beamed out to the British middle classes. As with “Poptones,” the irony is astringent.
Listening to (and reviewing) *Metal Box *in a linear sequence goes against PiL’s original intent, of course. As the flatly descriptive, deliberately demystified title indicates, Metal Box initially came in the form of a circular canister containing three 45 r.p.m  12-inches—for better sound, but also to encourage listeners to play the record in any order they chose,  ideally listening to it in short bursts rather than in a single sitting.  But what once seemed radically anti-rockist (“deconstruct the Album!”) is now a historical footnote, because anyone listening to a CD or other digital format can rearrange the contents however they wish.
And if you do doggedly listen to Metal Box in accordance with its given running order, what comes across strongly now is its sheer accumulative power as an album. That in turn accentuates the feeling that this is a record that can be understood fairly easily by a fan of, say, Led Zeppelin. It works on the same terms as Zoso:  a thematically coherent suite of physically imposing rhythm, virtuoso guitar violence, and impassioned singing. Lydon would soon enough ‘fess up to his latent rockism on 1986’s hard-riffing *Album *(also reissued as a deluxe box set at this time) on which he collaborated with Old Wave musos like ex-Cream drummer Ginger Baker. That incarnation of PiL even performed Zep’s “Kashmir” in concert.
Listening to Metal Box today, the studio processing—informed by PiL’s love of disco and dub—that felt so striking at the time seems subtle and relatively bare-bones compared to today. As the Manchester concert and some wonderfully vivid live-in-the-studio versions from the BBC rock program “The Old Grey Whistle Test” prove, PiL could recreate this music onstage (despite that fumbled “Public Image”).  Levene, especially, was surprisingly exact when it came to reproducing the guitar parts and textures captured in the studio. Even the band’s debts to reggae and funk can be seen now as a continuation of the passion for black music that underpinned the British rock achievement of the ’60s and first-half of the ’70s—that perennial impulse to embrace the formal advances made by R&B and complicate them further while adding Brit-bohemian concerns as subject matter. If PiL’s immediate neighbors are the Pop Group and the Slits, you could also slot them alongside the Police: great drummer(s), roots-feel bass, inventively textured guitar, a secret prog element (Levene loved Yes, Lydon adored Peter Hammill) and an emotional basis in reggae’s yearnings and spiritual aches.
Metal Box is a landmark, for sure. But like Devils Tower, the mountain in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it’s an oddly isolated one. In marked contrast to Joy Division, PiL’s spawn was neither legion nor particularly impressive (apart from San Francisco’s wonderful Flipper). Nor would PiL’s core three ever come close to matching the album’s heights in their subsequent careering (Wobble being the most productive, in both copiousness and quality). I was apprehensive about listening to this album again, fearing that it had faded or dated. But this music still sounds new and still sounds true to me: as adventurous and as harrowingly heart-bare as it did when I danced in the dark to it, an unhappy 16-year-old. Metal Box stands up. It stands for all time.


Ahead of his October LP, Sufjan Stevens issues an hour-plus "EP" that seems to accommodate a grab bag of disparate ideas and familiar sounds.

All Delighted People EP

Over five years ago, Sufjan Stevens' Illinois finally arrived in stores, with Superman stripped off the cover. But since then, he's played Clark Kent, mild-mannered, hiding in plain sight. A brief rundown of how he's stayed on our radar by doing everything except releasing a proper follow-up to Illinois: there was a collection of B-sides and alternate takes from Illinois that was damn near as long (The Avalanche), a boxed set containing five EPs of holiday music (Songs For Christmas), a multimedia celebration of a Brooklyn thoroughfare (The BQE), a 10-minute recording for Dark Was the Night, appearances on the last two National records among other one-offs and guest spots.
So while it wasn't surprising for him to drop the All Delighted People EP out of nowhere, the more people initially learned about it, the more it gained a worrisome quality. Stevens had gone on record bemoaning the strictures of the traditional album cycle, and a guy as unconventially prolific as he could certainly be expected to make his latest work available on Bandcamp the very day the public heard of its existence. But, the "EP" qualifier: It's over an hour long. About 95% of bands will never make an album longer than 50 minutes. It was easy to jump to the conclusion that all of this low-impact, hedge-betting was meant to lower the expectations for the "long-awaited follow-up to Illinois" by presenting it as an idea dump. A lot of people felt understandably let down: Why was the guy who won us over with his staggering ambition seemingly now afraid of failure?
Of course, we all know now that what Stevens considers his new album, The Age of Adz, awaits us in October, which oddly supports the notion that this EP is a clearinghouse of older ideas. Weighty and stuffed full of them, the record doesn't reveal all of its charms immediately, yet unlike his previous work it doesn't ask for total immersion. All Delighted People allows you to choose your own adventure: the sheer length of Illinois or Michigan could tempt you to shear off some of the instrumentals for a more streamlined listen, but that would sort of be missing the point. In contrast, if you think the "classic rock version" of "All Delighted People" is totally redundant (and you probably will), on this grab bag of a record it does nothing to upset its surroundings.
That approach does favors to the original version of "All Delighted People" and "Djohariah", self-contained song islands that would have been nearly impossible to include on Sufjan's cohesive albums. "All Delighted People" is a definitive Sufjan song, encompassing all his guises over the span of 11 deceptively brisk minutes: joyous overseer of big-top orchestration and intimate balladeer, preacher and confessor. "All Delighted People" feels capable of peaking at any given moment, which makes it a consistently gripping listen up to its pulled-taut outro of tremolo strings. Oddly, the much shorter re-edit is the one that feels like a chore to get through, largely because the second half enables Stevens' weakness for prickly and aimless short-circuited guitar soloing.
Though it employs the same choir cooing and brass fanfare typical of his past work, the supine "Djohariah" still comes off as a work borne of artistic freedom for Stevens, its simmering build, improvisatory soloing, and enormous runtime suggesting that he got a copy of Hot Buttered Soul and liked what he heard. Does it really need every single second to get its point across? Maybe not, but though "Djohariah" is allowed to expand to an impossibly billowy 17 minutes, it's still classic Sufjan at its core, an endearing love letter to his sister (named in the title), as she suffers through the indignity of an abusive relationship.
Between those massive bookends are the sort of humble short stories that represent what listeners have been missing in the midst of his prodigious post-Illinois experimentation. "Heirloom" and "Arnika" in particular have a comforting, early Sunday feel to them, not just in topicality, but in how you can practically hear the morning dew on the acoustics and delicate vocals. Throughout, Stevens is concerned about how you can connect with another individual without imposing yourself on them. "Arnika" is the most straightforward expression of this confusion, Stevens sighing, "I'm tired of life/ I'm tired of waiting for someone/ I'm tired of prices/ I'm tired of waiting for something," quiet and devastating desperation seeping out like from a deflating balloon. But framing them as a "return to form" sells them short; as affecting as his prior work in this range may have been, there was a certain compositional similarity to them, just four chords and a mellifluous melody. Here, you get Stevens taking more chances with structure and cadence, whether the stripped-down bluesy phrasing of "Enchanting Ghost" or the synth-spiked "From the Mouth of Gabriel" taking "Seven Swans" one step further by portraying God and possibly himself as a possessive, vengeful lover instead of just a devoted caretaker.
It isn't the mere existence of Age of Adz that puts this EP in perspective, though-- the electronic sonics of first taste "I Walked" are a blatant sign that we may ultimately have to retire the idea of Sufjan Stevens as a banjo-toting cartographer of the heart and the continental United States going forward. The scrapbook-like cover of All Delighted People makes sense then, as its contents serve as a humble and friendly keepsake, songs that deserve to be heard, but belonging to a chapter in Stevens' artistic livelihood that he needed to close to maintain his vitality.


On their latest LP, produced by Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto, Downtown Boys present their thundering political punk with a richer sound. Singer Victoria Ruiz presses deep into the poetics of confrontation.

Cost of Living

“We are the surge,” sang Downtown Boys on “Wave of History,” the opening song on their 2015 album Full Communism. The record, the group’s breakout, was a punk-rock juggernaut of doubled-barreled sax blasts and bilingual call-and-response choruses that tackled themes like white hegemony, predatory capitalism, and police violence from a proudly Latinx, feminist, and working-class perspective. “Wave of History” made for the perfect summary of the Providence, R.I., punk band’s vision: furious and defiant, yet optimistic.
A lot can change in two years. These days, the waves are rolling in from the right, not the left, and they’re looking a lot more ominous. “The vibrations are very different right now,” acknowledged Victoria Ruiz in a recent interview with The Cut. “While all the lyrics were written before the current regime was inaugurated, we were writing about the feeling of being the target of white fragility, white supremacy, the police state, the homophobic state.” But what may have changed most for Downtown Boys might be their fortunes. Since releasing Full Communism, the group has played SXSW and Coachella and, crucially, signed to Sub Pop—putting them in a position similar to Fucked Up when they signed to Matador or Pissed Jeans when they joined Sub Pop. These are all big and, yes, risky steps for a crew with roots in labor activism (and links to Providence’s anarchist marching band, the What Cheer? Brigade) that built its reputation on confrontation and a refusal to compromise.
They’ve met those challenges with characteristic spark: Downtown Boys used their SXSW booking as a platform to call for the removal of a deportation clause included in performers’ contracts; as self-identified “workers for Coachella,” they assailed AEG founder Philip Anschutz for donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to anti-LGBTQ organizations. But on their new album, they also sound like a changed band in certain respects. The record was produced by Guy Picciotto, of Fugazi (an ironic choice, if only because guitarist Joey La Neve DeFrancesco once told Wondering Sound, “We love Fugazi and Minor Threat, but they definitely propagated this punk lifestyle individualism that we’re grappling with now”), and while Full Communism boasted the unfocused din and no-fucks-given sound quality of a basement show, Cost of Living revels in the gleaming, multi-tracked expanse of a professional recording studio. It’s a richer, fuller sound; the stereo imaging is wider and the saxophone (they’ve stripped down to just one, now played by Joe DeGeorge, who also handles keyboards) has more presence in the mix.
The bigger, brighter sound often serves them well. “Somos Chulas (No Somos Pendejas)” begins with a thundering drum groove and a lean, serrated guitar riff, but horizons quickly open up as a second guitar line peels off from the first; it’s dissonant and searching in a way that seems to call into question the very premise of the song’s straight-ahead drive. That kind of melodic tension runs through the album. Locked into pummeling, no-nonsense grooves, drummer Norlan Olivo and bassist Mary Regalado make for a powerhouse rhythm section, while DeFrancesco’s guitar flashes like sheet lightning. And while their songwriting isn’t as complex as, say, Fugazi’s, it’s a step beyond hardcore’s conventional verse/chorus format, with most songs stretching out like long, rickety branches—intuitive yet unpredictable in their twists and turns. (Not everything bears such markedly hi-fi sound quality: The raging “Because You” and “Tonta” sound as gritty as ever, and classic minor-key hardcore changes and full-throated sax skronk actually come as something of a relief.)
At the center of the storm is Ruiz, whose voice carries like a megaphone on the front lines. Her lyrics remain one of the band’s greatest strengths. They’ve always been most effective when they’ve been least didactic and here, she presses deep into the poetics of confrontation. It’s easy to assume that “A Wall” is about Trump’s proposed border wall, but her line of attack stays wily, dodging and feinting like a guerilla fighter until she zeroes in on the song’s stark closing lines: “And when you see her there/I hope you see yourself/I hope you see yourself/And when you see him there/I hope you look/I hope you look.” Whatever she’s getting at—I hear in it a searing update of Embrace’s “As long as there are others held captive/Do not consider yourself free”—it feels like a way of humanizing the struggle, of implicating all parties in a conflict some would prefer to ignore.
Her best lines are full of this oblique, agile style of critique. “It ran so easily/Undone undone with mud and blood/Yes, I mind/Yes that’s ours,” she shouts in “I’m Enough (I Want More),” flashing a glint of the blade. “What about the table/Last I checked I built the table” she sings in “Violent Complicity,” a song about labor, exploitation, and, just maybe, their determination to be more than just another check-cashing indie band. Sometimes her lyrics go to the heart of how exhausting it can feel to perennially be drawing the arc of the moral universe down toward justice (“So when we're out there running all day who wins?/And when we’re inside crying all day who wins?,” from “Lips That Bite”).
Her lyrics aren’t always so successful. “Tonta” veers too far toward opacity, as if unwilling to lay all its cards out on the table. But such lapses are the exception, and on “Promissory Note,” a bouncy tune that filters X-Ray Spex’s dance-party punk through Fugazi’s knotty harmonics, she brings all her lyrical talents to bear on the feeling like you’ve been tasked with fixing all the world’s ills:

I won’t light myself on fire to keep you warm
I won’t carry you up that hill
I won’t carry you up that hill
I won’t light myself on fire
I won’t smile
I don’t care if you cry
Before you say hello,
Can’t fix you, fuck you too.
Before you say hello,
I don’t tread water to sip tea
And so I steal the watch
And so I steal the ring

In cleaning up their sound, have Downtown Boys lost some of their urgency? It’s a fair question to ask. But they have always put pleasure right up there alongside their anger—early on, they tagged themselves a “bi bilingual political dance sax punk party,” with an implicit emphasis on “dance,” “sax,” and “party”—and it’s worth remembering that in underground music, noise (harshness, ugliness, discord) often functions as a method of gatekeeping. You could certainly make the case that, right now, with brown people and working class people and queer people under concerted attack, what’s necessary is making music that invites a broad swath of potential fans and allies in from the cold. As DeFrancesco once said, “Love and rage together are greater than the sum of their parts.” Cost of Living is Downtown Boys’ way of proving that equation.


The San Jose band’s second album is a collection of gnarly emo epics that spotlight the underbelly of being a touring musician.

awakebutstillinbed: chaos takes the wheel and i am a passenger

Life on the road may seem like an escape, but for awakebutstillinbed’s Shannon Taylor, in between sweaty gigs is ceaseless asphalt upon which to project one’s own disillusionment. “All the things I used to love before/How come they don’t feel like anything anymore?,” Taylor wonders on the San Jose emo band’s second album, chaos takes the wheel and i am a passenger, spending yet another night sleeping on the floor in a strange city. After years of failed starts in various bands around the Bay Area punk scene, Taylor found herself living what was once her dream with the success of awakebutstillinbed’s debut album, 2018’s what people call low self-esteem is really just seeing yourself the way that other people see you, but discovered the complicated truth that achieving her goals could only stave off depression for so long. The emo epics on chaos aim a floodlight at Taylor’s inner demons, channeling diaristic despair over riffs that zoom by like yellow highway lines under passing headlights.
As Taylor journeys ahead, numbed by her neverending itinerary, she meets shadowy characters who magnify her sense of estrangement. On “airport,” she recounts her life story to a stranger on an airplane, feeling an uncanny detachment from the drunken adolescent she used to be: “I couldn’t connect to the person I was describing/As if I, long ago, wasn’t me.” When she plays a show, the people she encounters are a balm, until they’re just another person to lose: “clearview” opens during a tour date in Missouri, where Taylor meets a fan who soon after passes away. She mourns by taking this tragedy with her as she performs: “Every chord I strum/You'll always be there.”
The band’s raw, expository lyrics are accompanied by a gnarlier sound. On last year’s split EP with Ohio screamo band For Your Health, Taylor opened with a screeching cry, and her voice only got harsher from there. On chaos awakebutstillinbed push even further into the red, carving scorched-earth melodies through Taylor’s battered bleats. The band’s original lineup—save for bassist Ally Garcia, who gets a quick shoutout on opener “bloodline”—worked with producer Joe Reinhardt (Hop Along, Algernon Cadwallader) and engineer Jack Shirley (Deafheaven, Joyce Manor) to build towering catharsis around Taylor’s words. The sprightly, chiming guitar tones of their debut are largely gone, replaced by dense walls of distortion and clear-eyed finger-picked guitar. Taylor too leans into the darkness; her clean vocals always threaten to crack open into a piercing howl.
The band’s amplified sound comes to a head on the eight-minute “road,” the album’s closest thing to a mission statement. Over some of Taylor’s most visually evocative lyrics—“The pavement bathed in the winter’s light/ Betrays an unobstructed line of sight”—the band builds to a feverish peak, guitar refrains lapsing into silence then returning with twice the ferocity. But the song’s secret weapon is its percussion, picking up speed almost imperceptibly until the song takes flight. When the instrumentation slows to a near-stop halfway through, the song changes its tenor from anguish to something like hard-earned hope: “This is what I want,” Taylor says over and over, convincing herself of her desire to continue with her career as much as her audience.
It might be helpful to reframe Taylor’s pain as creative destruction. “bloodline” echoes her last album’s self-effacing title—“Do the people I care about care about me/Or do they see what I see?”—and by the end, it transforms into a life-affirming march forward: “Open your eyes/This is your life,” she sings, backed by a chorus of friends and bandmates. It’s an empowering cry, one that beckons towards inner reflection. awakebutstillinbed learned the hard way that wherever you go, you take yourself; Taylor seems finally ready to step away from the stage and meet that person head-on.


The box set collects the pure pleasures of Fleet Foxes’ early years including a smattering of B-sides and rarities that reveal the band’s long-running beatific spirit.

Fleet Foxes: First Collection 2006 – 2009

First Collection 2006 – 2009

Fleet Foxes’ entrée to the greater world—2008’s Sun Giant EP and the self-titled debut from that same year—had an immediate impact on both indie and overground music at large. Critics adored Seattle singer-songwriter Robin Pecknold’s folk-pop project at a time when most of big-ticket indie’s more rocky and rustic fare was coming from the confines of Brooklyn; a considerable fanbase amassed seemingly out of thin air, coffee-shop playlists took to his breezy melodic grandeur like a barista to oat milk, and a “real-music” revival on the Billboard charts roiled on for several years after, with acts ranging from Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers to “American Idol” winner Phillip Phillips reaching for the folk-pop brass ring.
The instant success of these records was apparent to nearly everyone—except Pecknold himself. “Those are failures,” Pecknold told Pitchfork about Fleet Foxes’ first two Sub Pop releases, just five months after the release of Fleet Foxes. “I can hear every little thing that I would change.” Speaking alongside then-Fleet Foxes member Josh Tillman—who split from the band soon after the release of the 2011 follow-up Helplessness Blues—he professed admiration for the singularity of future tour mate Joanna Newsom while stating his belief that his band isn’t “anywhere close to where it should be musically...The sooner we can get started on another album the better. I don’t want to take three years off.”
As it turned out, he’d take three anyway; and Helplessness Blues indeed represented a massive leap forward when it came to Pecknold’s talent for musical arrangement and personal, image-rich songwriting. That record and last year’s dark and quixotic Crack-Up are so far removed from the pure pleasures of Fleet Foxes’ earlier outings that they practically sound like the work of a different band. So it makes sense that Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes have been packaged as part of First Collection 2006-2009, which also includes Fleet Foxes’ little-heard debut EP from 2006, a smattering of B-sides and rarities, and an array of photographs capturing the band’s early years.
In fleshing out the project’s late-2000s era, First Collection also serves as a clear delineation between Fleet Foxes’ auspicious beginnings and the fascinating, complicated-sounding music they’ve become known for today. It’s newly rewarding to revisit Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes 10 years after their initial release. Granted, both records have been so perpetually in-the-air that coming into fresh contact with them might seem as simple of an act as intaking oxygen, a qualifier that only further highlights the easy pleasures contained within.
Recorded with clarity and precision by Pacific Northwest production vet Phil Ek, it’s still remarkable how fully-formed the songs on Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes are. The sound of both releases—harmony-drenched and folk-indebted indie, equally capable of sounding sunlit or stormy—are similar enough to consider them a singular document, and together they represent some of the most strikingly tuneful indie of the previous decade. There’s little hint of what was to come in the band’s discography, save for flashes of mercurial moodiness (the multi-suite darkness of “Mykonos,” “Your Protector”’s foreboding woodwinds and wordless outro) that represent Pecknold’s affinity for on-a-dime tonal shifts.
Ek also handled the production of The Fleet Foxes, the ultra-limited-press (only 50 copies, sold locally) 2006 debut EP featuring a pre-Sun Giant lineup of Bryn Lumsden on bass and Nicholas Peterson handling drums/percussion. In a 2008 Rolling Stone profile of the band, Ek told Austin Scaggs that “It was obvious [Pecknold] had talent coming out of his ass” after first hearing the band’s music; although The Fleet Foxes undoubtedly stands in the shadow of its immediate predecessors, it’s easy to hear what caught Ek’s ear in its six songs, more explicitly rock-y while still possessing loads of full-throated charm. Pecknold’s seemingly effortless ability of writing mood-shifting transitions stands out most here; “She Got Dressed” moves from whispered vocals and fingerpicked guitar to full-band swagger, while “In the Hot Hot Rays” bookends a cascading, forceful midsection with gentle drum fills and airy guitar lines.
The B-Sides and Rarities pulls together odds and ends surrounding the band’s inaugural Sub Pop releases, along with a few early demos and sketches. If you’re the type to dig through UK-only B-sides and one-offs, it’s likely you’ve heard some of these songs before: “Isles” and a cover of the traditional British folk song “False Knight on the Road” were B-sides on the respective 7” single releases of “White Winter Hymnal,” and “Mykonos” while the unfinished “White Lace Regretfully” was included on the accompanying 10” to his sister and manager Aja Pecknold’s limited-run The Unified Field literary journal. Also included is Pecknold’s take on American folk traditional “Silver Dagger,” which made the rounds under his since-dormant White Antelope project.
But the raw-material demos that close out B-Sides and Rarities count as the collection’s greatest revelations, affording a work-in-progress intimacy to the creative gestation behind songs that already feel as familiar as the back of one’s hand. The “transition basement sketch” version of Fleet Foxes’ “Ragged Wood” zeroes in on the song’s soaring back half, isolating a few unadorned acoustic guitars and a stripped-down vocal take from Pecknold accompanied by some endearingly wobbly harmonizing; closing sketch “Hot Air” is the briefest track included here—clocking in around three-quarters of a minute—but nonetheless offers an alluring fog of unexplored ambiance.
The “basement demos” of Fleet Foxes’ “He Doesn’t Know Why” and Sun Giant’s “English House” center around rambling placeholder vocals, the former taking on a previously unheard melodic shape and possessing a shaggy looseness that stands opposite to the original’s controlled bursts of melodic steam. It’s practically a new song crafted out of the skeleton of a clear standout from this era, highlighting the inherent value of First Collection 2006-2009 beyond fan service: catching Fleet Foxes’ beatific spirit in a new light can feel just like hearing them for the first time.


The Toronto musician produces like a DJ: blending genres, playing fast and loose with BPM, and bringing club music’s promise of endless possibility to life.

INFINITY CLUB

On her debut EP, INFINITY CLUB, Toronto producer BAMBII bends time and space to her will. “Sydanie’s Interlude” opens as a nocturnal palate cleanser, the kind of after-dark R&B track that signals it’s almost closing time. But midway through, the tempo gradually slows, a supermassive black hole swallowing the beat. Within seconds, a jungle break bobs to the surface, and everything succumbs to its hard-charging drive. This is a kind of temporal insurgency: No expectation to conform to the demands of a particular BPM, no requirement to yield to the limits of genre at all. These are the moments when Bambii brings the promise of club music’s infinite iterations to life.
As BAMBII, Kirsten Azan has spent the last decade playing club music the way she wants: free of gatekeeping, pretension, or stylistic constraints. Her biannual rave Jerk, which she organized to disrupt the predominantly white electronic scene in Toronto, has become a staple for Black and brown club kids in the Canadian metropolis. You can sense her role as an agitator across INFINITY CLUB too, where 2-step garage loops meet Jamaican Patois vocals, or tenebrous synth stabs keep the tempo under adamantine R&B melodies. On the deliciously bratty “Wicked Gyal,” BAMBII contorts grimy synths and blaring airhorns over North London rapper and singer Lady Lykez’s playfully blunt verses. The lyrics are a warning to fuckboys and all clubgoers generally, with Lykez cautioning listeners that when she gets twisted, “anything goes.” But her laugh-out-loud admonition to her date is what makes the track a showpiece: “Thank the fool fi di wine and steak/Then belch in his face,” she sings over Azan’s warped synths, unleashing a booming, earth-shaking burp. These collages of dancehall, jungle, breakcore, industrial, and other sounds are a product of Azan’s Jamaican roots and of the famously multicultural milieu of her hometown. But they are not just a natural outgrowth of a scene’s specific cultural context; they double as an avowal of club music’s endless possibilities and an insistent reminder that Caribbean genres and electronic styles are far from distant, irreconcilable categories.
Azan produces like a DJ, which is to say that not a second is wasted on slowing down or catching your breath. Lead single “One Touch” is a rabid scramble of jungle and dancehall, a distorted voice warbling under the surface. Less than 45 seconds in, Azan is already pitch-shifting and chopping up vocals, which flash by like strobe lights. More layers of hard breaks crash into the production, and Azan adds a wobbly garage bassline to the delirium. Elsewhere, “Hooked,” featuring Aluna, begins as a slow-whining dancefloor tryst, but in the last 20 seconds, BAMBII introduces dapples of piano keys and the midnight march of a dembow riddim. You can feel Azan’s instincts as a DJ in these moments; the transitions across INFINITY CLUB are precise but fluid, like a seasoned selector fine-tuning the perfect blend.
In July, Azan told Crack Magazine that her ideal club experience is participatory. “I want chanting; I want dance-offs,” she declared. Even a passive listener will feel like a part of the party in BAMBII’s universe: There are frisky come-ons, gruff dancefloor commands, and all kinds of invitations to movement. On “One Touch,” someone exclaims, “I saw you with her!” while “Sydanie’s Interlude” closes with an anonymous declaration: “I’m living life right now bitch!” Then, on the title track, a glitchy voice asks the DJ to give them “something nice.” These details are small but potent, generating a sense of conviviality you can only find at the club: It’s as if you’re overhearing ambient chatter while you squeeze by people on the dancefloor on your way to the bar—or as if someone is yelling into their phone in front of you in the line for the bathroom.
It is easy to imagine these songs blasting at a certain kind of gritty underground rave in any cosmopolitan city. Sometimes, that universality is to the EP’s detriment; there are moments when INFINITY CLUB struggles to stand out from the sounds currently reigning over certain corners of the Internet (see “Body,” which invokes rap’s obsession with Jersey club). And in other moments, as on “Slip Slide,” it feels like the EP is retreading ground first paved by underground labels and producers of the mid 2010s—renegades who dared to dismantle hegemonic, monolithic ideas of what electronic music should sound like.
Even so, for BAMBII, these elastic club constructions are organic. When a chorus of overlapping, multilingual voices welcomes us into her world in the intro (“You are now entering the infinity club”), it doesn’t feel forced or spurious. Rather, it’s a notice of the globally minded vision that follows, and an affirmation that club music can be as mutable and boundless as the African diaspora that helped inspire it in the first place.


Kari Faux returns to her Southern roots on a raucous, eclectic rap album that pays tribute to the ancestors, loved ones, and inspirations that showed her the way.

Real B*tches Don’t Die!

Arkansas, 1957. Elizabeth Eckford walks to school. In her black shades, she emanates coolness. Upon arrival, a vicious crowd barricades the entrance, a moment now immortalized in U.S. history. White mothers, fathers, students, military men contort their faces. Some spit. Most hurl vile threats. All of them bank on this 15-year-old student not returning the next day. But she did, day after day. Four decades later, Kari Faux would attend Little Rock Central High School, too. Her new album REAL B*TCHES DON’T DIE! channels the resilience of Black Southern women. Its motto: “Y’all niggas ain’t stoppin’ shit!”
While it was on, you couldn’t watch a season of Insecure without hearing one of Faux’s liberated, self-affirming tracks. Lead single “Me First” would slot right into a scene of Molly and Issa hyping each other up on the way to the club after one of them sabotages yet another relationship. Over holographic pianos, Faux is unabashedly selfish. She fiercely guards her comfort against the vampires who would dull her shine. Her incredulous disgust is hilarious: “I ain’t fucking for no purse!” Bullied as a kid, Faux learned to disarm people with jokes. “The earth controls the moon, the moon controls the tide,” she muses before landing the punchline: “But I can’t control when you niggas go and tell a lie.”
Her 2019 EP, Cry 4 Help, planted a seed of emo-confessionalism that comes into bloom on B*TCHES DON’T DIE!. “My mama seen me cry, she wiped my eyes,” she opens the album in an almost childlike sing-song. Her good friend, rapper Chynna Rogers, passed away in 2020, a day after the release of Kari’s album Lowkey Superstar, and Kari also lost her cousin a year later. In a recent interview with i_D, she opened up about the way grief changes from day to day: “There are moments where you’re like, ‘I’m outside, I’m lit, I’m turnt up with my friends,’ and then the next day, you can be like, ‘Damn, I really miss so-and-so,’” she said. On this record, she memorializes her loved ones with uptempo, confidence-inspiring anthems, wielding the title slogan to reinforce her power. “Our ancestors made four ways out of no ways,” she says on “White Caprice,” reminding herself of the women in her bloodline who demanded the world for themselves and their kin—and still made time to party.
From chopped and screwed (“H-Town”) to funk (“Drunk Words, Sober Thoughts”), REAL B*TCHES DON’T DIE! showcases the richness of historically Black music. In her element in Southern rap, Faux is noticeably revitalized. Her country twang wasn’t as audible on previous projects, but here—in the way she pronounces “marijuana” on “White Caprice” or “blessing” on “H-Town”—it’s commanding. Her unique diction makes familiar phrases her own: “Young! Black! And gifted-ed!” Some moments she invokes the brash raunchiness of Crime Mob’s Diamond and Princess, particularly in the ad-libs. Other times, her voice embodies the husky androgyny of La Chat and Gangsta Boo. “Peace to the Black babies born below the Mason-Dixon,” she introduces “White Caprice.”
Producer Phoelix, a go-to for eclectic rappers like Smino, Saba, and Noname, contributes a masterclass in homage. Instead of copying successful Southern songs from the ’90s, he adds tinges of the indie psychedelia that are integral to Faux’s sound. Her hard raps over lo-fi horns and thumping basslines harken to OutKast’s Aquemini, while a melismatic, Arabian flute-esque sound in the middle of “Gemini+” builds upon Parliament-Funkadelic’s experimentalism. The effect is a hazy, humid atmosphere. “Drunk Words, Sober Thoughts,” “Past Life,” and “Borrowed Time” all stun with an immersive funk sound that Faux has never fully committed to in the past. Cringy singing is a rite of passage for plenty of up-and-coming rappers, but you can tell she’s been working on her voice. From the owl-like “who-who”s on the chorus of “Turnin’ Heads” to the way she emulates the soulful rasp of Macy Gray on “White Caprice,” she’s in full control.
Faux’s South is defined by raucous family reunions, subwoofers blasting on summer days, and classic Chevrolets that have both ferried families to church and supported women gleefully twerking on their hoods. Like many young creatives, she was taught to believe that Los Angeles was the mecca of music. The faux-artsy individualism thing lost its appeal quick. Her Southern roots, rich in maternal wisdom, hospitality, and familial comfort, proved bountiful. On the Gangsta Boo-assisted “White Caprice,” two generations of Southern rap cruise through Doberman-filled neighborhoods, taking in the scents of barbeque and mary jane. The late rapper’s presence ties perfectly to the reverential theme of the album. Real bitches transcend mortality.


Moving away from footwork conventions and playing with a wider range of tempos, the Yokohama producer focuses his attention on a scintillating of tiny, tactile, and childlike sounds.

Aru Otoko No Densetsu

When the Yokohama producer Takahide Higuchi, aka Foodman, first began reaching Western listeners, it was thanks to his 2016 release Ez Minzoku and his peculiar mutation of footwork. “I get the same sort of sensation from footwork as I do from dub or punk,” he told one interviewer. “It’s about an expression, a way of approaching sound that transcends multiple genres.” Across an array of cassettes and SoundCloud uploads since then, Foodman has pushed at the constraints of the form, with glints of house, dub techno, pop ambient, and even Christmas music all getting minced in his 160-BPM mix.
After a string of tracks cropping up on Diplo’s Mad Decent, it may seem odd that Foodman now blips on Sun Araw’s Sun Ark label. But his restless, exploratory spirit jibes well with Sun Araw’s, and Aru Otoko No Densetsu finds Higuchi adrift in strange new sonic spaces. A steady hullabaloo of sound remains intact, but for the most part, the relentless speed of his previous work has been jettisoned. As the sputtering dub effects in the negative space of “Kakon” make clear, there’s an audible sense of patience here. Even as the track’s tocking starts to speed up midway through, it seems less suited for dancefloors than contemplation.
Toying with empty space, reveling in toy-like sounds, and inverting electronic music’s tropes remain some of Foodman’s deftest tricks, and Aru Otoko No Densetsu is his deepest exploration of the minutiae of such twinkling sounds, creating weird wiggling miniatures that defy expectations. In “Body,” a wailing diva shouting “Everybody” gets paired with furious bass for an instant, but its DJ-friendly qualities are undercut by anxious woodwinds and a chopped-up choir that turn it topsy-turvy. Same goes for the almost anthemic piano stabs of “Sauna,” which are continually sideswiped by woodblocks and gentle synths.
“Percussion” features handclaps and pinging drums along with its chimes, but rather than coalesce into a surefooted beat, it instead slides away. Its most telling sound is that of a cold, frosty one being poured, all foamy head and bubbling effervescence. “Clock” could have all the makings of a simmering Sade ballad, albeit one featuring Mario and Luigi. Foodman revels in such tiny, tactile sounds, and the effect is not unlike experiencing Charles LeDray’s small sculptures. Sounds blip up with all the connective tissue left out, so that descending keyboard jags, bass throbs, spiraling xylophones, and drum hits seem wholly disconnected—and discombobulating. Foodman’s approach now is as much about quickly wiping away sounds as fast as he can trigger them, as if he was making a soundtrack for a video-game version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Along with the children’s toys, wind-up monkeys, miniature xylophones, and video-game effects, the album’s artwork and attendant booklet of drawings and doodles underscore the kinship that Foodman shares with fellow countryman EYE, of the Boredoms: Both musicians’ work is largely about reconnecting with childlike wonder. Disjointed, spare, and nonsensical as Aru Otoko No Densetsu can be, it bears a thrilling sense of play.


With subtle electronic production tugging at the edges of her fingerpicked folk, the California singer-songwriter peers at the dark side of motherhood.

STONECHILD

In Anwen Crawford’s 33 1/3 book on Live Through This, one fan, Nicole Solomon, credits Courtney Love for introducing the concept of motherhood to a rock genre dominated by men. “Courtney made motherhood the most fucking intense, crazy, rock’n’roll thing you could be writing about,” said Solomon. “I was… so struck by what a necessary corrective that was in the history of rock music.”
In folk music, motherhood has always been a central theme; many a folk song was improvised by mothers to soothe crying children, and in turn, inherited by those children when they bore children of their own. Elided in this long tradition of lullabies is the darkness of motherhood—all the notions that might spur nightmares rather than abate them. With Stonechild, Jesca Hoop complicates centuries of feminized folk music by singing about the ugly, violent aspects of motherhood. Stillbirth, spousal abuse, sexism inherited from mother to daughter—all claim vignettes on this record of electro-folk, seeking, much like Love did, to render motherhood in fucking intense terms.
The album’s thesis statement arrives early, in the opening of “Old Fear of Father,” when Hoop sings, “I love my boys more than I love my girl/She knows like I knew.” What follows is a regretful portrait of a woman so limited by her own possibilities that she can only imagine the same small, dim future for her daughter: “I’ll shape and mold you so you can get the ring while you’re still pretty.” Like Lucy Dacus on her recent Mother’s Day single, “My Mother & I,” Hoop imagines a mother as both inheritor and progenitor of misogyny. Her songs about this vicious circle reach centuries into the past, deploying subtle historical imagery and traditional melodies to awaken something atavistic. “Shoulder Charge” is especially masterful on this count, walking the tightrope between modernity and ancestry. A line like “These leathers shield my sadness so nobody sees” could refer to a woman in a bar, wrapped in a motorcycle jacket, downing whiskey, or they could call to mind Boudicca on the battlefield, decked out in Celtic armor to avenge her daughters. At the song’s end, the numb alienation of waiting on a subway platform, “shoulder to shoulder to shoulder,” is transformed by a single cry—“Charge!”—into an ancient call to arms.
“Outside of Eden,” a duet with Kate Stables of This Is the Kit and, lately, of the National, is the record’s most overt melding of old and new worlds as they apply to women’s lives. Hoop and Stables pose as digital sirens, singing to the incels of the world: “Come, shut-in boys, for the girlfriend experience/Enter the code and I’ll taste real.” The Garden of Eden is the song’s central, ambiguous metaphor: Do these men seek virtual-reality porn because they feel unworthy of real love, or is their digital Eden a soothing fantasy that shields them from the mortifying ordeal of being known? There’s empathy in Hoop’s lyrics for isolated, alienated men who seek intimacy in digital space, and a heavy dose of contempt for those who regard violent misogyny as a balm for their wounds.
The record’s production, by PJ Harvey and Aldous Harding collaborator John Parish, complements Hoop’s lyrical tension between past and present through the careful, restrained use of electronic elements, many so subtle they pass without notice on first listen. On “Foot Fall to the Path,” a sudden surge of electric guitar ruptures Hoop’s careful fingerpicking, making narrator’s desperation—“Why love if loving never lasts? I’ll never have what other lovers have”—all the more vivid. The murky filter of Parish’s production lends a grim heft to Hoop’s lyrics, sending would-be nursery rhymes like “Death Row” into witchy territory.
The album’s title, Stonechild, refers to a gruesome—and mercifully, exceedingly rare—biological phenomenon called lithopedia: a dead fetus, too large to be reabsorbed by the parent’s body, grows a calcified shell to shield the mother’s body from infected fetal tissue. A parent can carry a stone child for decades without knowing, and carry on having successful, uncomplicated pregnancies all the while. Stone babies have been a grim constant for centuries, documented as early as the 10th century and diagnosed as recently as 2015. The word is eerily apt for Hoop’s work, which lays bare the visceral terror lurking behind the traditional, tender lore of motherhood.

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Post Malone is a rap charlatan for the digital age, and his debut mixtape, August 26th, is like falling down an acoustic rap cover k-hole.

August 26th

In a post–Rick Ross rap universe, the repercussions for being outed as phony are lower than they’ve ever been. For artists on the come up, social media can be a digital journal of embarrassing missteps—think web sleuths unearthing Travis Scott’s disparaging tweets about his label boss T.I.—but in a time where catfishing can get you on a TV show, these mostly make for momentary hiccups, not career destroyers. These are ideal conditions for someone like metal-and-folk enthusiast-turned-singsong-rapper Austin Post, now known as Post Malone, to flourish. He is a rap charlatan for the digital age, and his debut mixtape, August 26th, is like falling down an acoustic rap cover k-hole.
It’s worth a quick glance back at the twisty road that led to Post Malone’s career. He found ubiquity on SoundCloud last fall with the novelty single “White Iverson,” an homage to the iconic NBA guard. A year and some change earlier, though, he was Leon Dechino, an over-the-top character with a Tim & Eric–style surrealist comedy music video called “Why Don’t You Love Me.” The song was created with help from his friends at TeamCrafted, a collective of gamers dedicated to playing and making tutorials for the sandbox game Minecraft. (In one of their videos, Post seems to denounce the song, saying “That’s it. That’s the one song. I’m done making music.”) Before that, he was playing Bob Dylan covers as Austin Richard. As a teen, he was in a hardcore band, a move spurred on by his love of the game Guitar Hero. It isn’t impossible for him to be all of these things at once—hardcore punk, satirist musician, folk singer, diehard gamer, and flex rapper—but there’s something a little disingenuous about going from prodigal son of the Dallas Cowboys corporate infrastructure to a cornrow-wearing, grill-bearing poster boy for appropriation. When asked about his place in the rap world in an interview with The Fader, he all but admitted this, saying, “At 40 years old, I’m gonna be a country singer. That’s down the line.”
Even if you were to overlook his questionable origins entirely, it’s difficult to excuse his shortcomings as a songwriter. Every song is a rap-cliche house of cards, built on some some basic variation on “balling”: how he’s doing it, who he’s doing it like, how you aren't doing it. On “Monte,” the spiritual sequel to “White Iverson,” named for Indiana Pacers guard Monta Ellis, he gets outrapped by Lil Yachty, of all people. He has no legible personality outside the confines of “marginally famous person excited to trade fame for sex”: On “Get Wit U,” he raps, “Wanna fuck? I’m almost famous”; on “Never Understand,” he raps, “Said they see me at the show, they was in the front row/ They wanna fuck, I told them bitches come and jump on my bus.”
The moments where Post Malone finds the most success on August 26th are when he highlights his schizoid background instead of trying to hide it. His cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” takes liberties with the melodies and structure before melting down into a backbone for the haunting thumper “Come Down.” The closer, “Oh God,” sounds like it could soundtrack a modern spaghetti western with chords that crunch under his distorted croons. Additionally, the 2 Chainz–featuring “Money Made Me Do It” is a nice tribute to slain Atlanta rapper Bankroll Fresh with floating harmonies that settle just below the surface of steel drum synths. Malone’s redeeming trick is his way with melody, and some of them are enchanting, particularly on the Jeremih duet “Fuck,” which vague alludes to the Chicago singer’s “Fuck U All The Time.”
The bulk of the production comes from the Atlanta duo FKi, the team behind songs like Travis Porter’s “Make It Rain,” Travis Scott’s “Sloppy Toppy,” the Rich Homie Quan and Young Thug duet “Get TF Out My Face,” and, more recently, 2 Chainz’s “Watch Out.” A lot of the beats do fun things with hollowed-out synths and dribbling hi-hat patterns, but there isn’t nearly enough firepower to overcome Post’s verses, which are a series of dead-end signs. It’s hard to know what Malone should be doing to strengthen his work; he doesn't really have an identity or a true north in his music, a more interesting direction to point towards. This is ultimately his biggest problem: Complete reinvention can be a fine and sometimes even necessary thing, but if you’re going to be someone else, at least be creative about it.


The Bristol-based electronic duo Emptyset are in a class by themselves when it comes to excavating brutality out of silence.

Borders

By its own description, the Bristol-based electronic duo Emptyset makes music as a meta-study of the relationship between sound, surface, space, gear, and process. Given how freely Emptyset’s Paul Purgas and James Ginzburg expound on those relationships in academic terms, you might expect the pair's work to drip with intellectualism. Between them, Purgas and Ginzburg actually do have academic backgrounds—in art, design, and music. So it’s no surprise that they’ve turned to spaces such as London’s Ambika P3 testing bunker for commissioned installation projects, and that such spaces have served as one of Emptyset’s primary habitats over the project’s 12-year history.
Taken on its own, however, Emptyset’s music can be surprisingly single-minded. Borders, the band’s fifth studio full-length (its first for Thrill Jockey following a string of releases for electronic labels like Subtext and Raster-Noton) can be boiled-down to three words: throbbing, bassy, sinister. More aggressive and pulse-driven than Emptyset’s last studio album, 2013’s Recur, Borders hits your senses with a brute force that belies Ginzburg and Purgas’ conceptual approach to making sounds. The album opens with a flickering, short-lived wash of static that gets swallowed by a low-end thrum, a sound that pretty much persists from that point onwards until the final track concludes.
These repetitive bursts of bass-frequency shrapnel go through significant changes—the timbre, layering, tempos, and intervals all morph from track to track—but the central pattern and rhythmic attack remain constant as the pulses come one after another after another. And once the pattern shifts from album opener “Body” to a similar pattern on “Border,” Purgas and Ginzburg establish relentless repetition as one of the album’s primary features. It doesn’t take long before Borders induces a meditative effect not unlike when you stare at ocean waves for long periods.
Likewise, the music on Borders suggests a comparable sense of catching finite slivers within a greater pool of endlessness. With a bandname derived from the mathematical term for “a set of elements containing nothing,” it’s no surprise that Emptyset aim to bring a sense of physicality to empty space—or, as Ginzburg once put it, to identify the “thingness” at the heart of an empty void. When it comes excavating brutality out of silence, Emptyset sit in a class by themselves.
The album even comes close to tunefulness on “Dissolve,” where an unidentifiable sound source takes on the character of delicate guitar strumming.  And though you'd never mistake Emptyset for dance music, theirs is still body music, in a way. One can only imagine that listening to Borders with a heavy-duty subwoofer would be a punishing affair. Similarly, even without one iota of percussion—Borders contains nothing by way of a traditional “beat”—the groove is undeniable. And the new material, perhaps more than ever, harbors ample evidence for why Emptyset continue to identify as a techno act, albeit one whose style hews much closer to Berlin than Detroit. Given their Bristol background, it makes sense that Purgas and Ginzburg see their work as an extension of sound system/DJ culture.
In truth, Emptyset haven’t evolved all that much since they began working in the full-length format in 2009. A microcosm of their overall progression, Borders essentially hovers in one mood, requires effort to recognize its contours, and ends on an anti-climactic note as the music simply ceases, without any sense of completion or finality. And whether it loses or gains flavor over multiple listens depends on the listener’s patience threshold for repetition. But by turning up the volume and menace this time, Emptyset manage to put new spins on dubstep and industrial—genres they don’t explicitly reference—as well. As such, Borders functions as a gateway between traditionalist dance forms and the artier end of the electronic-production universe. It also offers new ways of understanding both by reflecting each against the other.


Robert Forster's first release since the death of Grant McLennan, his late partner in the Go-Betweens, is also his best solo album.

The Evangelist

The Go-Betweens' initial break-up followed a fruitful span of six classic records, so when principals Robert Forster and Grant McLennan went their separate ways in 1989, there was at least a sense of mission accomplished. At the time, with solo careers embarked upon and new collaborators recruited, few expected the pair to reconvene as the Go-Betweens, which they eventually did roughly 10 years later. With the untimely 2006 death of McLennan came a sickening feeling of permanence, however; the excellent Oceans Apart would serve as the Go-Betweens' true swan song. Making the loss of McLennan all the more painful was Forster's reminiscence in Australia's The Monthly (for whom Forster has become a cultural critic), that "we were on the cusp of something," and that "album number 10 was going to be something special."
It's impossible to listen to Forster's The Evangelist without thinking of McLennan, but to his credit Forster has designed it that way. Three songs were in fact co-written with McLennan, bequeathed to Forster to reveal to the world and break our hearts all over again. "Demon Days" in particular works eerily like a self-penned eulogy, something that Forster was quite aware of: "I played it a couple of days after he died," recalled Forster in a recent interview in The Age, "and it was an extraordinary moment because I was the only other person who knew this song existed and I've got this thing, this masterpiece, which is so fragile, because if I'd died three days after him, the song wouldn't exist." It's a tough listen made all the more touching with the brief appearance of a muted chorus and a swooning string arrangement courtesy of Audrey Riley (who handled the same duties on Liberty Belle & the Black Diamond Express). It's also another indiciation, if another were needed, of the brilliance of the Forster/McLennan team.
It's similarly easy to imagine McLennan, not Forster, leading "Let Your Light In, Babe" and "It Ain't Easy", two more songs salvaged from the songwriter's works in progress notebook, and it's no surprise that his shadow spreads across much of the rest of The Evangelist as well. Forster, even though he occasionally collaborated directly with McLennan, is nonetheless a very different singer and songwriter, and his solo albums never hit the highs of McLennan's. Even here, after every great song like "If It Rains", "Pandanus", or the elegiac album-closing tearjerker "From Ghost Town", your mind is primed for McLennan's counterpart response. Aside from the aforementioned songs, they never come, of course, which partly explains why The Evangelist feels a little incomplete. It's not fair to Forster, of course, who rose to the occasion with his warmest and most welcoming solo album. But even beyond the imherant emotional baggage, songs such as "Did She Overtake You" or the slightly bombastic "Don't Touch Anything" still sound like they could have used a pass through someone else's filter.
Yet if anything the album's slight flaws work as sideways tribute to Forster's late friend and partner. "Something's not right, something's gone wrong," sings Forster, channeling McLennan, in "Demon Days". If anything's wrong with The Evangelist, it's not a problem that can be fixed. It's wrong like an empty chair at a banquet, unopened presents at a birthday party, a pile of uncollected mail on the front steps, or an unfinished novel that trails off into who knows where. It's wrong like even our fondest memories, cursed to fade with time.


Fusing elements of free jazz, breakbeat, acid house, dub, ambient, and more, the Tokyo producer’s second full-length album is simultaneously comforting and destabilizing.

Pulse of Defiance

Like so many forces of electronic music—see Warp co-founders Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell, or Kelly Lee Owens—Japanese producer Yoshinori Hayashi spent formative years working in a record store. Hayashi’s time at Tokyo’s Face Records comes through in his genre-melding music, which overflows with the encyclopedic passion of an enthusiastic cratedigger. Yet his sounds extend far beyond fandom or homage. His new album, Pulse of Defiance, takes styles forged by others—free jazz, breakbeat, acid house, dub, and other unclassifiable strands of electronic sound—and fills them out into complete worlds of his own.
Ambivalence, Hayashi’s 2018 Smalltown Supersound debut, made a clear insinuation about the artist’s relationship with any single genre or form. His first full-length dabbled in abstract, eerie multi-instrumentalism that only occasionally solidified into something dancefloor-friendly, suggesting a jazzy experimental composer as much as a DJ. But Hayashi is just as formidable a selector as he is a painter, and Pulse of Defiance gives both tendencies room to breathe.
Album opener “Callapse” begins with pensive, spacey piano that’s soon engulfed by scattered drums. Hayashi’s polymathic abilities are on clearest display when it comes to percussion; at slower tempos, his pounding loops have a trip-hop quality, while at higher BPMs, they metamorphosize into full-fledged breakbeat. The drumming on “Make Up One’s Mind” is fast and free, sounding unpredictable and open-ended while still controlled and precise.
The album’s first three cuts offer space to settle in; when the beat really drops on “Touch,” the rave begins. At its opening, the track’s four-on-the-floor pulse has an overpowering intensity, but it’s balanced out by the ethereal, almost vocal quality of the synthesizers, which sound more suited to an open-air dance party than a dark club—Hayashi’s dance tracks more often recall the technic optimism of British rave pioneers like Orbital, Underworld, or 808 State rather than contemporary minimalism. Though its energy is active and kinetic, Pulse of Defiance feels informed by the experiential nature of ambient music—as “Touch” stretches past eight minutes, you eventually forget about the underlying beat and lose yourself in its layers of crackling sound.
Though Hayashi’s work often suggests a restorative comfort, he’s not afraid to throw it off balance: “Twilight” oozes hyperactive hi-hats and cymbals, chopped-up voices, and a disorienting piano line. As the album progresses, Hayashi embarks on a restless journey through dance music history. “Flow” teeters between 808 cowbell-driven electro and acid-drenched bleep techno, with hues of LFO or Joey Beltram, and though less electro in its timbre, “Go With Us” recalls classics of the forward-thinking subgenre like the Jonzun Crew’s “Pack Jam” in its resonant kicks.
With the record’s final three tracks, Hayashi fully releases the breakbeats and turns towards classic rave. This is no nostalgia trip, though; his take on ’90s dance music is still thoroughly destabilizing. On “Shut Up,” a hazy vocal sample stretches to infinite dimensions and fractures into pieces as drums scatter and scramble. “Gallop” gleefully embraces ragga texture and jangly piano lines, while “I Believe in You” flips a dub intro into unrestrained jungle, its frenetic drum and bass infused with healing ambient waves and even a clean guitar line. In his synthesis of varied styles, Hayashi’s compositions feel less genre-defying and more genre-unifying.

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This long-running Nashville duo captures the essence of their name with a low-slung, low-stakes sway, tracing a line between languid indie rock and experimental atmospheres.

Universalis

Band names are often brain blurts that someone thought sounded cool, funny, or sexy in the moment, so it’s best not to make too much of them. But the nebulous nature of instrumental music—especially ambient—is an exception. We’re built to make meaning from abstraction and find concepts within chaos; when we encounter an artifact consisting of inkblot drones and a minimalist painting, a single word can become an interpretive skeleton key, however inadvertent. By any other name, a Phoenix song would sound as sweet, but would you hear GAS the same way if it were called SOLID? What if the Orb were the Cube?
And then, there’s Hammock. The enduring Nashville duo has a decidedly breeze-blown, down-to-earth take on Stars of the Lid’s cold ambience and Explosions in the Sky’s bright post-rock. The humble moniker fits their low-slung, low-stakes sway, but it also emphasizes their generic qualities. Still, after 15 years of recording together, Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson are fully in command of a narrow, placid lane that is in some ways self-made; they live outside of a major experimental hub and have self-released almost a dozen albums. On Universalis, they slowly unbraid loopy guitar arpeggios into spectral calls and currents, all swirled with pop-classical keys and strings. It’s the sort of album that has a credit line for “angelic vocals,” and there’s bound to be an EBow somewhere. It’s nothing you haven’t heard before, nothing you mind hearing again.
After some brief constellation-spotting in the tradition of Eno and Fripp, Universalis arrives at its highlight, “Scattering Light.” Its weary crescendo, woven with threadbare drumming, will take old heads right back to the heyday of ramshackle post-rock bands like Dirty Three. In the dusky stormfront of drum splashes and tidy guitar intervals during “We Are More Than We Are,” there’s the slowcore trace of classic Low. Hammock gives such vintage indie a neoclassical tilt with songs like “Cliffside,” a melancholy guitar rumination that morphs into a dark scherzo.
But the closer that Universalis gets to pure ambient or chamber music, the less distinctive it becomes. The title track, with a string theme sitting still at the center of a web of misty pitches, is pretty but dull. “Clothed With Sky” is an obligatory piano-and-strings bagatelle. By the time “We Watched You Disappear” rolls around late in the album, it is the background soundtrack of an ordinary life.
Another key filter for interpreting abstract music is provenance. The same kind of microtonal sculptures might evoke Scandinavian ice, Berlin architecture, or Mojave flora, depending on the origin. On that score, Hammock give us something much more compelling. Because they hail from the American South, which is not exactly synonymous with ambient music, their sonic landscapes suggest green meadows, trembling oak leaves, and cool streams, dutifully established in a field recording at the start of “Tether of Yearning.” Those impressions lend a whiff of something fresh to an album that teaches you its repertoire of gestures early and then never surprises you, working out beauty like a math problem instead of harnessing the wild thing it is.


Aesop Rock's sixth album, his first without any Blockhead beats or guest rappers, evokes the self-doubt, sleepless nights, and isolated focus required to finish something great. This is rap as Rorschach blot.

Skelethon

"I am so completely off the goddamn grid/ It's not a question of addressing me, it's 'What do these symbols under the dresser mean?'" -Aesop Rock, "Crows 1"
Hack faith healers, stained glass Saint Peter's, black rainbows, ruby tides, jarred brains, magpies, hoarders, and allied forces licking zigzags while being dragged by horses. Antiquated gentlemen outlaws reduced to a Ferris wheel of vitriol. Miniature Raquel Welches, ghost crabs, butchers in bloody aprons, splintering motordrome walls of death, homemade mummies, bats, crypts, and Chuck Taylors with "Zulu" bombed on them in Buckle Font. Dope stone lions and maple donuts. There's no Rosetta to decrypt the Nighthawk Book of the Dead doubling as the mind of Aesop Rock.
Pick over Skelethon at your own peril. The portmanteau breaks down to the marathon of skeletons. 360 chambers of death, kid. Probably the most logical left turn for the Long Island-hatched rapper who warned "Abandon All Hope" on his first video: body splayed into a crucified scarecrow, blood and tar on the vocals, words loaned from the inscription above the Inferno.
By 23, he'd died 1,000 Deaths and vowed to die a thousand more. But time makes the melodramatic seem merely morbid and Aesop Rock is now 36-- old enough to have two eyes on the odometer and a psyche swamp-drained by the disintegration of labels, loves, and all carbon life around him. Skelethon is his sixth album, a retreat into the rabbit hole, the apartment as womb and tomb. Like he says on "Leisureforce": "don four walls like a wooden coat."
There is no clear autopsy for first single, "Zero Dark Thirty", where a "thousand virtues, kick the same bucket like Chinatown turtles." This is rap as Rorschach blot. I see it as one-part gentle eulogy for the early 00s underground scene that Rock once ruled, one-part requiem for the naïve certitude that cloaks all teen dreamers.
"Roving packs of elusive young, become choke-lore writers over boosted drums, in the terrifying face of a future tongue... Down from a huntable surplus to one."
Few eat off rap infinitely. Def Jux is dead and 93% of the Fat Beats generation scrounges rent money from increasingly rare spot dates, overseas collectors, and rich kids with money to blow on cameo fees. There were even rumors that Vordul Mega of Cannibal Ox was panhandling uptown. Then there are those making dishonest moves to seem current, dudes who once penned purist "manifestos" and now collaborate with Ace Hood. Rock phrases it more tactfully: "folk being backed into what they most lampoon."
Nine years ago, Aesop Rock swore he'd never write another "Daylight". That's the closest thing he's had to a hit-- the three ring-hook that's closed out almost every one of his solo shows since 2001's Labor Days: "All I ever wanted to pick apart the day, put the pieces back together my way." Had he the desire to simplify his style and stay making off-kilter inspirational anthems for the artistically inclined, he could have been caking off independent coffeehouse baristas for decades. Instead, he created a surly alter ego named Bazooka Tooth and rapped about train bombers and acid trip adolescence. The Todd Solondz-grim cover of that album didn't help much. Picture a prep school Conan O' Brien Frankenstein in headgear being taunted by grotesque peers. Good times.
From jump, Rock said that he'd sanitize nothing for the sake of contemporary tastes and he's arguably more of a one-man solar system than ever before. Skelethon is his first real album without Blockhead beats. It's also his first without any guest rappers. In fact, the only real cameo is Kimya Dawson, who chants a necromantic hook on "Crows 1". Even then, she seems selected squarely because she was the best option to summon the spirits of the witches from Macbeth had they been into anti-folk. If anything, the semiotics have gotten subtler but more vivid. And he wasn't exactly churning out summer jams to start.
So there are no sequels. But "Zero Dark Thirty" may be the closest Rock is ever going to get to "Daylight" (save for maybe "Nightlight"). It offers a corollary: what happens when you get to arrange the pieces your way but the puzzle still doesn't fit. He sees "brown grass [on] both sides." The moral compass is "spinning batshit." He wonders if fans are "supporting the artist or enabling the addict." Both songs ultimately reject nihilism for the temporary salve of art. It updates the hero's plight to the present-day: resolved to evolve while retaining his claws. After all, claiming you've "failed all basic training, but have spent a couple Groundhogs Days with a Changeling" is really just a clever way to say "On to the Next One."
Other songs on Skelethon have spiritual ancestors. "Fryerstarter" merges the I Spy-the-LES approach of Float's "6B Panorama" with the toxic animism of "Basic Cable". The perspective revolves around Bob's Donuts on Nob Hill in San Francisco, Rock's home city for the last half-dozen years. The song's theme is faith via fried dough ("you can chew the eucharist in cruller form"), surrounded by an all-night zombie parade of insomniac sugar addicts, police, and thieves. While the self-assault of finale "Gopher Guts" is the most emotionally raw and confessional that he's been since "One of Four", the crack-up that haunted the end of the Daylight EP.
"Leisureforce" could pass for a less allegorical fraternal twin to Labor Days' "No Regrets"-- the cradle-to-the-grave story of Lucy, an artist who only wanted peace to paint her masterpieces. But rather than celebrate the joys of creation, "Leisureforce" catalogues its casual hair-pulling horrors. Yet Skelethon triumphs over those torments. It's the best-written rap album since Danny Brown's XXX, which it resembles in its ability to evoke the self-doubt, sleepless nights, and isolated focus required to finish something great. No surprise considering Brown said that he wrote out the short story raps of Rock's last solo album, 2007's None Shall Pass, to decipher their meaning.
It's always forced when people compare rappers to poets, but fuck it. Skelethon's imagistic processions of the damned remind me most of Ezra Pound's early Cantos and Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish", their own spiritual brine of burial rites, myths, pop culture, and personal anecdote. While the reaper-stalked motorcycle run of "Cycles to Gehenna" achieves the wind-blurred Bay Zen of "the edge" in Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels. If his claims are true and Rock rarely reads, then the influence is smuggled in second-hand via Tom Waits, his closest analogue and one of few admitted influences.
Should the misfits match, consider this Aesop Rock's Swordfishtrombones, a brilliant baleful experiment conducted by an ox-blade throated barker in his mid-30s, with a slant towards occult characters, and off beat percussion. Both share coffee-black humor and a gift for exploring the gopher holes of the underground. The man of Mule Variations would also appreciate the eccentric ghost of Camu Tao, remembered through Rock on "Racing Stripes". The ode to odd haircuts describes Tao's contingency plan to pay the rent: shaving his head George Jefferson-style to force himself inside long enough to make beats to acquire the bread to appease the landlord.
All weird scenes stress a recurring theme. "Grace" reveals the genesis of a stubborn disposition via the 11-year old Ian Bavitz enraging his dad by refusing to eat his vegetables. It also might be the funniest song Rock's written and a decade-late unintentional response to "Be Healthy". "Ruby '81" flashes back to a Fourth of July at five, when a toddler nearly drowned in a swimming pool while everyone was distracted by fireworks. "ZZZ Top" initially seems to only satisfy Ghostface's Killah’s basic requirement of tangled slang rap: get some official beats and say some fly shit over it. But upon repeat, you realize it’s the education of the young rebel, carving "Zoso" into his desk, "Zulu" on his Chuck's, and the Zeroes onto a bathroom stall. It grapples with the moment when childhood dies and permanent angst begins. Yet Rock gracefully dodges preciousness and melon-soft over-sentimentality.
Like Waits, Rock's lyrical gifts and cult-leader singularity often overshadows his musical prowess. Look at this review: 1,300 words on symbols and a paragraph to production. But Skelethon reveals how far Rock's come since the Bazooka Tooth-era, when his beats largely lacked swing and he hadn't yet fully synthesized El-P's industrial influence. His productions now switch between samples and live instrumentation, psychedelic guitars and fright night keyboards, 1980s 808s and beastly drum thrashes. Garage rock riffs married to phosphorescent synths exhumed from the same UFO graveyard as El-P and Black Moth Super Rainbow.
No one would've complained if Rock selected a few Blockhead beats for variety. But he compensates with the natural benefits of being a rapper/producer: these beats are bespoke. The rapping has never been better either, with the music tailored to wring maximum tension out of each bar. Drum slaps dive-bomb then disappear. Piano codas accentuate the disembodied poetics. Rock may claim to be manifestly unfit for the menacing grip of the day, but Skelethon is indelible, pagan torah to his period of exile and emotional maim. Everything dies. Everyone knows. Don't sweat the hieroglyphics, embalm what you can while you're still alive.