The unparalleled Scottish band has its first two LPs reissued and expanded, with Peel Sessions and live performances added.

Arab Strap: The Week Never Starts Round Here [Deluxe Edition] / Philophobia [Deluxe Edition]

In a 2009 interview with Stereokill, Malcolm Middleton claimed that of all the albums he's recorded, his favorite is the first, Arab Strap's The Week Never Starts Round Here. "It's completely undiluted and free from any self-expectations which we later developed," was the reason he gave, and this makes sense when you're thinking about albums from the standpoint of a creator. Listening back is like finding yourself in a snapshot from when you were younger and the complications hadn't added up in your life yet. For a listener, of course, it's a bit different-- those same self-expectations that make Middleton uneasy when listening to his later work can nonetheless help a band create something greater, and I think age actually helped Arab Strap. Their final two albums, Monday At the Hug & Pint and Last Romance, are really fine records. The complications had piled up for sure, but the band's outlook changed as well, and their more nuanced way of looking at the world made for their best music.
It's still interesting, though, to go back and revisit the band's debut and follow-up, especially with the bigger picture of their subsequent career in mind. Chemikal Underground's deluxe reissues bulk up the sound a little bit (but not too much) and each add a bonus disc with a Peel Session and a live performance that offer a more complete look at the band's early career than the albums alone would have. The Week Never Starts Round Here is in fact a pretty unpretentious, honest sounding record. Middleton, who did the instrumentals, and Aidan Moffat, who handled the vocals and lyrics, were a unique, fearless band right out of the gate, and Moffat's approach to sex and the exquisite misery of sleeping around and staying drunk immediately set them apart.
You can hear what Middleton was talking about in that interview, too. The record rambles quite a bit, to the point where it feels a fair amount longer than its 45-minute running time. There are a couple tracks that end with demo-sounding recordings of Moffat singing by himself, "General Plea to a Girlfriend" is abrasively lo-fi, and a few of the songs are a bit shapeless, but the duo's basic sound is well-established, with Middleton's guitar and drum machines laying out rough, urban landscapes for Moffat to wander through. Moffat's vocals were often aggressively amelodic, a speak-sing whose shape was heavily governed by his thick Scottish accent and Scots dialect, so he gets by more on detailed storytelling than a big chorus. There are some amazing moments, though-- Middleton's guitar on "I Work in A Saloon" is delicate and light, providing an almost absurd counterpoint to Moffat's character sketch of a bartender who's stuck in a bar full of women he's slept with and split with.
And of course, there's the band's debut single, "The First Big Weekend", which epitomizes everything great about Arab Strap and points the way toward their later work with its taut dance rhythm, snapping guitar and brilliant weekend-in-the-life lyrics. Moffat and his friends drink all night and crash all day, but there's so much more to it: they sleep through the indignity of Scotland's loss to England at Euro 1996, fail to win the canteen quiz night, get misty-eyed watching "The Simpsons", invade a playground, give each other questionable advice (i.e., giving up cheese to avoid nightmares) and take the train. It builds up to the big sing-along refrain: "Went out for the weekend, it lasted for ever, high with our friends it's officially summer." The real key to why it all works, though, is that Moffat stuffs the whole range of emotions into lyrics-- it's a good time, but there's frustration and sadness in it all too. He sees women he still loves but also hates for the indignities they've visited upon him (and he on them), and he gets bruised jumping a fence. It feels real.
Philophobia opens with a hell of a couplet: "It was the biggest cock you'd ever seen/ But you've no idea where that cock has been." In some sense, this is the band responding to that self-expectation Middleton referred to later. They put the sex and disturbance right up front, almost caricaturing themselves before getting down to the business of placing all that imagery in the context of stories. They may have had self-expectations on Philophobia, but the pair had also acquired discipline and made a better album, one that works almost as a song cycle-- the consistency of Moffat's storytelling and subject matter turns the album into a full-fleshed character study with each song acting as a sort of chapter in the story of some boozing bloke's wrecked and often wretched life. Middleton grew as an arranger as well, incorporating occasional strings, more sophisticated drum programming and more keyboards, and he joins Moffat in injecting a bit of humor as well, especially on "Not Quite a Yes", where his beat is hilariously stadium-ready. The songs have more shape to them and consequently so does the album.
The albums stand well on their own, but the bonus discs are very welcome, not least because the live recordings actually offer superior versions of quite a few of these songs. The two Peel Sessions are especially lively and illuminating. On the first, the band is backed by members of Belle & Sebastian, sounding distinctly unlike their other band as they mash the distortion pedals and hammer the drums, and Moffat delivers the non-album track "I Saw You" in a straight deadpan as he talks about going to see a Belle & Sebastian show, remarking that the girl he had a crush on at the time was friends with "the girl who plays the cello." The Week Never Starts Round Here also includes a full recording of the band's first live performance, a ragged but energetic set at King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, while Philophobia gives you the band's full set at the T In The Park festival from 1998.
The live material hints at the fuller sound the band would later explore on its best albums-- certainly, there'd be no cause to complain if the rest of the band's output got a similar treatment. What's most fascinating about these two LPs, though, is hearing Moffat and Middleton sort out how to make these mumbly barstool rants and gutter stories into compelling songs. They didn't always succeed, but their best early songs were outstanding and set them apart from virtually everyone else on the Scottish and larger UK music scene.


The percussionist and composer explores the minutiae of a break-up via a robotic text-to-speech program on her quietly devastating new album.

it was always worth it

A hush overtook the room just before claire rousay performed at the small nonprofit arts space Rhizome in Washington, DC last summer. The percussionist sat quietly behind a snare and tom with two microphones placed directly above the drumheads. The beginning of her set crept out of that silence as she picked up small pieces of metal and plastic—a bowl, screws, steel wool, an unidentifiable white cylinder, an empty can of La Croix—and placed them on the taut mylar, shuffling them around, rubbing and striking them against each other and the drums. The microphones picked up  the minute sounds, the soft crinkles and sudden plinks, but also rousay’s rapid, precise movements. It was a delicate chaos that emphasized the strange resonances of everyday objects and our interactions with them, foregrounding sounds usually taken for granted and making them feel vivid, intimate, and new.
That practice of locating the revelatory in the mundane is at the core of rousay’s work, which encompasses both compositions and free improvisation. In the past year, her recordings and live-streamed performances have shifted almost exclusively to utilizing the robotic voice of a text-to-speech program, her own spoken words, and manipulated field recordings. These pieces are direct and vulnerable, taking pieces of our built environment and using them to interrogate her experiences and relationships, her guilt and anxieties. “i’m not a bad person but…” recounts moments of shame and regret, while “Tuufuhhoowaah” centers around the digital audio cues of texting on an iPhone interspersed with recorded conversations with her friends—the everyday clatter of sounds and thoughts that fill a restless mind.
it was always worth it is a devastating culmination of so many of the processes rousay has been exploring over the past year. She assembled and recorded the piece after the break-up of a six-year romantic relationship, saturating the music with grief. Each passage unfolds like one of the persistent, bleak thuds of realization that come with looking back at severed connections, putting moments of both joy and pain into the context of the relationship’s inevitable collapse. She feeds letters they wrote each other into the text-to-speech program, rendering words of affirmation flat and emotionless, and intersperses recordings captured at home during the final week with her partner. Slow swells of synthesizer augment the piece’s sense of drama and weight, as well as offering a tonal center to return to; it’s rare that rousay provides such a clear sense of harmonic development instead of reveling in the indeterminate nature of found sounds.
If that harmonic development suggests a narrative, it is a non-linear one, fractured by the fallibility of memory and the unpredictability of heartache. The lines of text rousay pulls oscillate between heartfelt declarations (“You are so loved”) to tentative reassurances of security (“I know things have been rough lately, but I want to remind you that I love you, and I’m working hard to be with you”), the blunted tone of the computer echoing the numbness of shock and a feeling of alienation from one’s own memories. Nearly halfway through the 20-minute piece, the synthesizer dampens to a low growl, growing in intensity as high- pitched pulses go in and out of phase until it abruptly collapses into a recording of rousay listening to “Innocent” by Our Lady Peace. It is a surprising turn, but in grief there are moments where normal things feel out of place and absurd. The hushed conversation that follows, barely audible, could feel banal if the intensity of the situation wasn’t already made clear.
If rousay’s work typically excavates meaning from small, everyday objects, it was always worth it locates it in the smallest moments that add up to life’s most shattering experiences. Drawing attention to the mundane elements of personal trauma grounds the experience in something tangible and relatable. We’ve all stared, numb with shock, at a message on our phone, unable to believe something so life-changing could arrive via such a blank medium. rousay’s work intensifies this feeling with her mastery of texture and detail. The computer blurts out “I will always love you” as the final piece fades, the ambiguity of the phrase hanging in the air as life resumes.

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On the second part of a planned trilogy of archival anthologies, a long-forgotten Belgian group from the early 1990s emerges as standard-bearers of globe-trotting ambient and psychedelic techno.

Bardo for Pablo

Reissue culture is a curious business. For every unnecessary major-label re-release that clogs up pressing plants around Record Store Day, there are artists who went largely unheard in their day who are worthy of reconsideration in the here and now, be it a contemplative Japanese ambient composer or a pioneering transgender soul singer. But sometimes artists just hide in plain sight, as is the case with Pablo’s Eye. A loose Belgian collective that formed in 1989 around Axel Libeert, the lone constant over the decades, the group had releases on Swim ~ (an experimental label run by Wire’s Colin Newman and Malka Spigel) and the prolific Australian electronic imprint Extreme. You can still scoop up most of their discography for a few bucks on CD.
But it’s in the way that Ostend-based record label STROOM has presented their fellow countrymen’s body of work that makes it resonate with newfound mystery nearly three decades later. STROOM has already gained notice for curious excavations, like that of the Latvian performance group Nebijušu Sajūtu Restaurēšanas Darbnīca and the Japanese chanteuse Sonoko, but a trilogy of Pablo’s Eye reissues is their biggest statement to date. The first installment, Spring Break, presented the collective as an unheralded Balearic group full of Spanish whispers, pliant bass, unobtrusive hand drums, and echoing nylon-string guitars, perfect for sundown sets on the White Island.
STROOM’s second compilation, Bardo for Pablo, now explores a side of the group that’s darker, druggier, and more transcendent—less linen-clad loungers and more like tribal-techno and breakbeat primitives. Rather than the seven credited members on Spring Break, this particular set pares down to three: Libeert, Dirk Wachtelaer, and Thierry Royo. The shift is most noticeable on the massive, 12-minute opener “Amb 8.” It comprises essentially the same elements as the beguiling, relaxing “Amb 7,” from the first set, just remixed into something psychotropic. By tweaking the settings ever so slightly, Pablo’s Eye present a parallel dimension of these once-placid sounds, allowing dread, unease, and a chemically-enhanced sense of disorientation to seep in at the edges. Propelled by a deep, throbbing tom-and-timbales pattern and a sustained, almost levitating church organ, the wide vistas of “Amb 8” imply an intoxicating void, making the set’s invocation of the concept of bardo all the more germane. Voices echo from a seemingly vast distance, so that one can’t quite pin down whether they are shouts of ecstasy, grief, or seduction. Midway through, a slowed-down “Funky Drummer” beat surfaces and the track turns into a lost ambient-techno epic, putting it in the same hypnotic and diaphanous class as other early-1990s tracks like the Orb’s “Blue Room” and fellow Belgians Mappa Mundi’s “Trance Fusion.”
The rest of the set is full of other early-’90s electronic-music tropes, particularly the chunky breakbeats that were prevalent during that era. Paranoia curls around “Cypher NY Mix” while the claustrophobic breaks and encroaching dread of “Today” could easily get mistaken for a lost Maxinquaye demo. In a better world, the incessant toms, ritualistic percussion, and queasy processing of “My Only Guide Is” would replace Future Sound of London’s “Papua New Guinea” as the tribal-techno standard. Every track here is so mesmerizing that it makes one wonder just how the collective went largely overlooked over the decades. It’s not hard to imagine these tracks being mistaken for the work of new, mischievous producers like Sex Tags Mania’s DJ Sotofett or Acting Press’ PLO Man. Compiling these drum-heavy experiments from the collective, STROOM posits Pablo’s Eye as not simply a reissue curio but something that’s completely contemporaneous.


Somewhere deep in the heart of Athens, Georgia, there lies a 10-acre cornfield. Five feet from its northwest corner stands ...

Of Montreal: Horse and Elephant Eatery (No Elephants Allowed): The Singles and Songles Collection

Somewhere deep in the heart of Athens, Georgia, there lies a 10-acre cornfield. Five feet from its northwest corner stands a single willow tree. One hazy Sunday afternoon, I set about reclining under this tree, when all of a sudden I heard a great rumbling. The earth beneath me began to crumble, and before I could move it bottomed out and I found myself plunging toward the bowels of the earth. Descending towards what I was sure would be my demise, I blacked out.
I awoke in a brightly lit environment, surrounded on three sides by endless white space. Directly in front of me stood a gargantuan green metal gate, reflecting the mysterious light so intensely that I could barely look at it. "My God!" I said to myself. "I'm... dead!"
"Not so!"
I spun around to see where the mysterious voice had come from, and found myself face-to-face with six large elephants. To my amazement, the largest began to speak:
"Greetings, visitor. We are the six keepers of the Elephant 6 Kingdom. I am Fluffy, the elephant of precious cute."
"I am Pinky, elephant of psychedelia."
"I am Zanzithoph, elephant of bizarre and archaic instruments."
"I am Fatty, elephant of dense, layered production."
"I am Friendly, elephant of perpetually rotating band members."
"I am Ringo, elephant of Beatle worship. And you have arrived just in time for the party."
Before I had an opportunity to interrogate the elephants, I was whisked through the green gates into a vast open field. The elephants led me to a massive circus tent that lay in the middle of the field. "We cannot go beyond this point," spoke Pinky. "We wish you the best of luck." And with that, the six immense pachyderms dissolved into a sweet-smelling mist.
"Hello? Hello?" No response, except the echo of my own voice through the distant hills. Timidly, I peeled back the curtain leading to the giant big top. The incoming flood of shapes and colors almost knocked me on my back. Inside, various creatures, all dressed in tie-dyed business suits were mingling, drinking bright green ambrosia from silver goblets. But before I could fully take in my surroundings, the ringmaster approached me. "Welcome," he said. "We've been expecting you. My name is Robert Schneider."
"How did I get here?"
"You got here through the door."
"Yes, yes, but how did I get here?"
"Ah, but the question is not how you got here. The question is, how did you get there?"
I looked around and, to my astonishment, I found myself standing on the opposite end of the circus at the base of a giant stage. Robert was nowhere to be found. A voice came from behind me:
"No time to dawdle! The band is about to play!"
"Robert! What?! What band?"
"Shhhh!"
I turned around to find that the stage, which only moments ago had been empty, was completely set up. Three skinny gents in silver t-shirts were standing onstage, guitars in hand, grinning at me.
"My name is Kevin Barnes," said a man with a guitar, "and this is my band, Of Montreal. We are going to play some songles for you."
"Songles?!"
The band started their set. From the moment they began playing, I could tell I was going to dig it. Of Montreal had all the tenets of a great Elephant 6 band-- the catchy melodies, the whimsical lyrics, the marching-band-on-acid aesthetic, it was all there in full form. I turned to Robert, who stood next to me, eating porridge out of a tremendous pink flower.
"Bob, these guys sound great! Let me guess... you're their producer?"
A pearl-shaped tear welled in Robert's eye. He replied, "Alas, no!"
"But Bob! They sound so..."
"So Beatles? Yes, I know! Listen to 'Scenes from My Funeral!' Tell me that guitar part isn't taken straight out of 'Getting Better!'"
"Well, they definitely sound like they like the Beatles, but I wouldn't quite compare..."
"Oh, they do. They really like the Beatles."
"I love how dense and layered the sound is-- the sound is just huge! It reminds me of..."
"The Beatles?!"
"Uh... Hey, what's he doing now?"
"Oh... you see, Kevin likes to tell stories. This song is called 'Ira's Brief Life as a Spider'. It's about a spider who gets bitten by a snake hiding in a lake in a crater on his own tongue."
"What in the fuck?! This is starting to freak me out. I love this music, but the lyrics are starting to get on my nerves a little."
"Granted, the lyrics are a bit twee. But the music is so good! Kevin can write a good melody so effortlessly and arrange it impeccably."
"Wait a second. Is this a Kinks song?"
"Yes! 'World Keeps Going Round'."
"Good tune. But couldn't Kevin have done a bit more with the arrangement? Wouldn't it have been that much better if he'd given Ray Davies a complete psychedelic makeover?"
"Perhaps. Hold on, they're finishing the set!"
And as the last few notes rung out from Kevin Barnes' guitar, the array of strange creatures that, along with me, had made up the audience, returned to their underground dwellings. This left only Robert and I.
"Say, Bob, that was a really fantastic show! I'm going to pick up one of their records as soon as I get back. Wait a second... get back?! How am I supposed to get out of here?!"
"Do not fear. One sip of this drink will return you to the place that you call home."
I grasped the silver-lined goblet from Robert's hand and took a quick sip of the iridescent liquid contained within. The second the drink touched my lips, I found myself standing back underneath the willow tree. The Elephant 6 Kingdom seemed nothing but a distant memory. Shaken, I gathered my bearings and started to head home. "Boy," I said to myself, "that was one hell of a trip. Kind of like..."
A familiar voice echoed in the distance: "Magical Mystery Tour?"


Guy Blakeslee's second album under his own name is issued by Leaving Records, an L.A. imprint that specializes in the astral and the abstruse. These six pieces are complementary, connected tributes to several strains of musical mysticism—American primitive guitar playing, New Age trance-induction, Krautrock ascendance, and ambient drift.

The Middle Sister

Guy Blakeslee, it seems, did not launch a solo career with a clear category in mind. In 2014, after a decade spent leading the occasionally entrancing psych-and-blues syndicate the Entrance Band, Blakeslee stepped from beneath a long-hanging haze to issue Ophelia Slowly, his proper solo entrée. The nine-song set suggested the musical equivalent of a clean haircut acquired for a job interview, as though Blakeslee wanted to prove he had moved beyond the chemically addled numbers of his youth and matured into proper rock songcraft. As such, moments on Ophelia Slowly aligned with the War on Drugs, Beach House, the Walkmen and, lo and behold, Kings of Leon. Sure, some wild-eyed, static-heavy clips remained, but now past the age of 30, Blakeslee seemed to have cleaned up his act and cleared up his songs.
But The Middle Sister, his second LP under his own name, is a reentrance to a psychedelic state of mind, at least on the surface. Issued by Leaving Records, a Los Angeles imprint that specializes in the astral and the abstruse, The Middle Sister is an all-instrumental, guitar-and-accessories reverie of two very different, very high minds. If Ophelia Slowly was Blakeslee’s attempt to sharpen the edges of his rock and aim for a bigger audience, The Middle Sister turns left and aims for the solitude of the stars. These six pieces are complementary, connected tributes to several strains of musical mysticism—American primitive guitar playing, New Age trance-induction, krautrock ascendance, and ambient drift. It fails, however, to get very far beyond pleasant.
The record’s first half, a two-song collection called "Halcyon Movement," offers precisely what the title implies—peaceful, feather-light acoustic guitar meditations that spiral upward toward some New Age ideals, for eight-to-10 minutes each. Not content with the sound of six strings alone, the second selection adds the sustained washes of singing bowls and the twinkling ripples of distant piano. Blakeslee plays a bit harder above them, feverishly strumming the chords toward the diptych’s end as though pushing back against the very veil of prettiness he’s created. These extended compositions reach for the majesty of James Blackshaw’s finest recorded hours, which turned six or 12 strings into graceful little symphonies. But Blakeslee’s approximations are rudimentary and shambolic, too uneven and pedestrian to provide the lift of his predecessors.
The four-movement back half, collectively dubbed "Maja (Queen of the Storm)," comes as an uninterrupted four-song suite. Blakeslee starts alone, routing rudimentary triads through a series of guitar effects, tape delays, and static shrouds. It’s a wan recreation of the Stars of the Lid’s galaxy-sized swells. A drum machine subsequently anchors this wafting chromaticism, with rays of noise dissolving into and out of a beat that is itself more identifiable than Klaus Dinger’s name. Blakeslee lets that steady thrum disappear gradually, first into a drums-and-guitar space jam and, finally, a glacial six-minute exit that splits the difference between Eno’s ambient systems and Tim Hecker’s high-volume thrall. This is a listener’s digest version of those enormous touchstones; Blakeslee has slimmed the giants he summons of necessary weight and context, repurposing their accomplishments into his own facile end.
The best of Blakeslee’s work with Entrance found him digging deep into archaic source material, challenging and churning it into tunes that, no matter how clear the inspirations, felt like personal journals. He’d wrestled with the references. But The Middle Sister feels passive and passing, like a fleeting homage from a musician just starting to explore new sources. It’s hard not to picture Blakeslee in the back of a van or at the desk of a bedroom, going down YouTube, Spotify, or MP3-blog wormholes with transfixing masters like John Fahey or Lubomyr Melnyk, Cluster or Ash Ra Tempel, only to re-emerge with the hope of making a record like that of his own. What will tickle his fancy next, you wonder?
Our instant access to almost everything produces interesting, vital recombinations of sounds and styles at an astonishing clip. But the same capability can lead, of course, to records that, like The Middle Sister, scan like the composite result of a string of Google searches. It’s a modern joy to be forever a digital dilettante, continually discovering something new with each successive point-and-click. It’s a lot less interesting to hear a restless musician turn in an album that’s little else.


The 24-year-old Providence musician’s 15th album bursts with imagination, complexity, and feeling. The abundance of ideas might seem excessive if it weren’t so carefully arranged.

Home Constellation Study

A few details to get out of the way up front. Home Constellation Study is Asher White’s 15th album, though the actual number of releases on her Bandcamp, which includes various side projects and non-album collections, is 26. The earliest of these, a ghostly collage of feedback and field recordings of Icelandic landscapes, came out when the Providence musician was 14 years old. She is now 24.
White’s prodigious early years may help to explain the accomplishment and imagination of Home Constellation Study, an album whose abundance of ideas might seem excessive if it weren’t so carefully arranged. One song sounds like Radiohead with periodic interruptions from Lightning Bolt, another like Burt Bacharach by way of Jim O’Rourke, a third like a Gamble & Huff symphonic soul epic downsized to the scale of a basement rehearsal room. A partial list of instruments that White played includes guitar, bass, drums, banjo, glockenspiel, granular synthesis, piano, and “fake mellotron”—nearly everything on the album, save for some horns and additional electronics.
White clearly loves pop and outré music from many eras. The period that Home Constellation Study most directly recalls is the one just before she started uploading her work: the mid-to-late 2000s, a time when indie rock held accessibility and experimentation in delicate balance, when a bruising noise-rock band might share a bill with a psych-folk collective that seemed sort of like a cult, when DIY scenes had just enough attention to feed bands’ ambition—but not yet so much that they crumbled under the pressure or cleaned up their acts and signed to majors. And though White wrote and recorded Home Constellation Study primarily by herself, it feels distinctly social, in an embodied, in-person, perhaps old-fashioned sort of way. So much music from young songwriters and producers now evokes the solitary overstimulation and context collapse of hours spent online. White’s feels more like hitting the road with a friend, making impromptu stops, laughing together, getting into arguments whose stakes are not hidden behind screens, then talking it out and hitting the road again.
Home Constellation Study begins in transit, with “Theme From Leaving Philadelphia,” a travelogue that a less adventurous arranger might have set to simple acoustic guitar or piano, for maximum directness and authenticity. Instead, White opts for sounds that reflect the wonder and frenzy of her departure. First, there is a fanfare of horns, voices, and maybe fake mellotron that recalls Aaron Copland’s hymns to the American spirit more than it does indie rock. Then the drums come in with a groove like a runaway train. There’s an acoustic guitar somewhere deep in the mix, strumming so hard and fast I can’t help but worry about carpal tunnel. Asa Turok’s trombone and Addy Schuetz’s sax bob and weave, sometimes offering lyrical countermelodies and sometimes terse punctuation. Cowbells clang like only cowbells can. White sings as if at a comfortable remove from the frenzy, tracing exuberant spirals of melody, unbothered by the rushing noise on the other side of the train window. The rhythms of the words neatly fit the hairpin turns of the tune; impressions of inner feeling and outer landscape begin to blur in her imagistic lyrics. One line returns persistently, nagging as it might have nagged the hungover passenger as she wrote: “I am still drunk!”
One gets the sense that White is not satisfied with a song until each of its constituent parts has been turned over and considered from all possible angles for potential adjustments that might make it somehow stranger and more familiar at once. Each time the wonky guitar hook to “Runes” repeats, it is one beat longer or shorter than the previous version, a change that doesn’t at first register on the conscious level beyond a vague sense of unsettlement. “Slow Wheel of the Year,” whose guitar-and-voice arrangement is the album’s sparest and most straightforward, has percussion breaks that sound like the lazy clicking and whirring of a bicycle’s gears as its rider coasts downhill.
These idiosyncrasies are almost always in service to the effect of a song as a whole. In the case of “Slow Wheel of the Year,” the unusual instrumentation illustrates the title and the words; in “Dream Design House,” the verse’s underlying rhythm subtly shifts to accommodate White’s vocal phrasing, using time-signature changes to make the music smoother and more natural rather than ostentatiously jagged in the manner of math rock. The printed lyrics to the gorgeous and cautiously optimistic love song “Capital Cowboy” contain a reference to Steely Dan that doesn’t actually appear in the final recording, an easter egg or version-history error that is revealing in some small but significant way: Though White’s music sounds almost nothing like the Dan on its surface, you can see how she might relate to their famous fastidiousness.
White’s preference for poetic formalism and non-narrative imagery also sets her apart from her generational peers. A line might move you not for what it reveals about Asher White as a person, or the way it makes her more relatable to you as a listener, but for the exquisite way its syllables and phonemes drape across the melody. Her interest in the musical possibilities of language can make the songs tough to parse for literal meaning, but it also makes them emotionally supple, adaptable to whatever the listener might bring. “Downstate Prairie” is apparently about city-dwellers who fetishize the idea of simple rural existence. The lines that stick with me come after most of the instruments fall away—banjo, churning drums, skronky free-jazz sax, enormous slabs of guitar distortion—leaving only White’s voice and a few bare chords: “No more borrowing the trouser and the collar and the boot/No more visiting the orchard and absconding with the fruit/Hand in hand.” You can see how they relate to the idea of urban hipsters stealing valor from country folks, but in context, for me, they sound more like a last look at love gone by, at days spent breaking rules and wearing each other’s clothes.
White writes challenging melodies for herself to sing, and pulls them off with low-key sprezzatura, never at pains to show off their difficulty. Her inflections color the words with feeling beyond whatever might be grasped on the page alone. There is a world of rich contradiction in the way she breathes the word “photograph,” in “Capital Cowboy”: on the one hand, longing for reassurance; on the other, radiating self-possession that requires no such outside validation for sustenance. Her human presence as a singer helps to hold Home Constellation Study’s divergent strains together, and to keep the album from ever coming across like an exercise in music-school intellectualism, no matter how elaborate its underpinnings. White may have had a sizeable head start on many of her peers in learning how to put a record together, but as a character in her own songs, she’s just like any other young American: high on romance and danger, restless in love and ideas, unsure of herself and the world, determined to figure it all out.


Returning to the duo format, the MacArthur grant-winning experimental percussionist teams up with an elite classical violinist for an album of wide-ranging improvisations.

Jennifer Curtis / Tyshawn Sorey: Invisible Ritual

Invisible Ritual

Devotees of the experimental scene  know that Tyshawn Sorey thinks big. He won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2017 and premiered a new song cycle with Opera Philadelphia the following year, and he has continued to revise and refine a dramatic tribute to Josephine Baker. While fans wait for some of those ambitious projects to be recorded, the composer and multi-instrumentalist has recently turned to the intimacy of duo sets.
It would be a mistake to think of these as minor offerings. Last fall brought an inspired concert recording with veteran pianist Marilyn Crispell. Now there’s another gem under that same heading. Invisible Ritual pairs Sorey off with the violinist and composer Jennifer Curtis, a player from the International Contemporary Ensemble, an elite new-classical crew. Once again, this set documents fully improvised performances. But there’s nothing tossed off about it.
Curtis’s range as a soloist is a revelation. She proves a nimble listener and co-leader as she works with Sorey to create a 76-minute program rich with narrative drama. There are no track titles (other than Roman numerals). But instrumental music as expressive as this doesn’t need any additional poetry.
The short opening movement introduces an amalgam of attributes that the pair will explore in greater depth over the duration of the album. Free-improv twangs of violin and skittering cymbals set the stage for airy textures, but before long, kick-drum blasts and strummed strings tease the influence of propulsive folk forms. Country blues and vintage rock have their place in this mix, as do the calm and the not-quite-silence of select Art Ensemble of Chicago deep cuts.
The following movements make good on these promises. Sorey tends to produce sounds all over his kit, playing even the edges (or sides) of every piece of equipment in his arsenal. And Curtis can match him texture for texture, tossing off clean-tone, song-like sounds, as well as quivering glissandi, and moving between jaunty pizzicato plucking and bowing close to the bridge—the latter effect producing thin, piping harmonics. After she plays a fragment of melody, the delicate extended techniques from her violin that follow sometimes suggest wisps of some phantom turntablist’s remix.
At two points during the set, Sorey switches to piano (a side of his multi-instrumentalism that hasn’t been all that prominent on recordings). During the third track, he shows the same feel for nuance and delicacy that can be heard in his subtler percussion work. On the fifth track, he becomes a speed demon with a light touch. Adopting an edgier tone while matching Sorey’s quickness of thought, Curtis provides a winning element of contrast.
Beautiful balladry takes center stage during the sixth movement. Feel free to skip directly to this part if you’re eager to hear how a free-improv session might channel conventional loveliness. But those who have been keeping up with Sorey’s recent work won’t be surprised. After that pinnacle of songful gorgeousness, the duo ventures back toward passages of tumult; the recording ends with an extended exploration of sparser, quieter energies.
This album may not announce itself as capital-I Important; it lacks some of the superficial, external signs of ambition that can help audiences understand how serious a work intends to be. There is no operatic libretto here; nor is there much of a promotional engine in place. (The album is released by the International Contemporary Ensemble’s own Tundra label.) But the quality of interplay to found here is always news, whenever and however it makes itself heard.


Before the Asheville guitarist found his signature blend of deadpan humor and tight hooks, he cut his teeth on the more introspective songwriting highlighted on his newly reissued 2019 solo debut.

MJ Lenderman

It’s been a banner year and a half for the unassuming MJ Lenderman. Thanks to both his solo work and his role in modern Southern rock group Wednesday, the Asheville guitarist has become a genuine indie-rock star. His recent output has included his 2022 breakthrough Boat Songs, last month’s stellar live collection And the Wind (Live and Loose!), and Wednesday’s anthemic Rat Saw God, which showcased the communal side to Lenderman’s guitar playing. Another solo album is on the way, but in the meantime, a new reissue of Lenderman’s self-titled 2019 debut—including its first-ever vinyl edition—offers a fresh look at his fuzz-rock origins.
For anyone who discovered Lenderman through bite-sized vignettes like “Someone Get the Grill Out of the Rain,” the droniness of MJ Lenderman may come as a surprise. These songs sprawl to six or eight minutes in length, filled out with molasses-slow drums from Owen Stone and circuitous guitar melodies from Lenderman and Lewis Dahm. (The band also includes frequent Lenderman collaborators Colin Miller and Xandy Chelmis on bass and lap steel, respectively, along with guest appearances from Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman, Indigo De Souza, and saxophonist Alex Brown.) Yet the album doesn’t feel plodding or dense; as the song “Space” would suggest, Lenderman gives these tracks room to breathe, letting a single strum or burst of reverb play out for a moment before the band comes back together like a long exhale.
On his earlier work, Lenderman took inspiration from Jason Molina, and anyone familiar with the Songs: Ohia/Magnolia Electric Co. oeuvre will recognize some of its hallmarks here. You can hear Molina’s bleating inflection in Lenderman’s singing on “Heartbreak Blues,” his voice scraping the rafters of his tenor register, or in the multiple references to “the darkness” that punctuate the album’s musings on loneliness. But underneath the gravitas, Lenderman’s plainspoken style offsets the heaviness with candid observations. “Southern Birds” sounds like it was inspired by nothing more than what Lenderman saw outside his window one morning, and that simplicity brings levity and warmth to the whole record.
Lenderman shines an ample spotlight on his collaborators, which also helps cut through any self-seriousness. The album’s centerpiece is “Left Your Smile,” a gorgeous song built around a guitar hook reminiscent of Drive-By Truckers in which Lenderman’s voice is completely absent from the chorus, replaced by De Souza’s low, ghostly howl. On “Grief,” Lenderman distills the feeling into its most elemental form—“There’s a part of you/I wanna hold in my hands/A part of you I want again”—while letting Alex Brown’s mournful saxophone take center stage.
On subsequent records, Lenderman has found his signature in a distinctive blend of deadpan humor, tight grooves, and heavy distortion. But the charm of MJ Lenderman lies in watching him trying things and seeing what sticks. With “Basketball #1”—which would get a sequel on his Lucky EP—Lenderman hints at the empathetic, character-driven stories that will later become his stock in trade. In the middle of reuniting with an old flame, Lenderman goes off on a drawn-out tangent, describing a kid he used to play basketball with who’s now fallen on hard times. “Anyways,” he intones, cutting himself off, “I’m glad you got out of all the bad things you’ve been in.” Through the sorrow and darkness, Lenderman shows that relief can be its own kind of euphoria.


Recovery is a 7" box set (10 singles, 20 tracks) put out by the Fractured label; the imprint asked 20 artists working in the realm of experimental music to cover a song, and the results include Matmos doing Bow Wow Wow, Jóhann Jóhannsson on OMD, Barbara Mortgenstern tackling New Order, and Fennesz covering A-Ha.

Matmos / Fennesz / Jason Forrest / Ryoji Ikeda / Barbara Morgenstern / SND / Mika Vainio: Recovery

Recovery

I'm sitting on the floor, next to the stereo, computer in my lap. I'm listening to songs like "Running Up That Hill" and "Billie Jean" and "Back in Black". I'm parked here next to the turntable because I'm playing 7" singles, which means I need to be ready to put something new on every three or four minutes. But something strange is going on: "Back in Black" consists only of a couple of sine wave tones for bass and a few blasts of white noise static for the guitar riff; "Billie Jean" is little more than a few clicks, and you can just barely make out the bassline; and I can't tell you what is going on with this crazy "Running Up That Hill".
Recovery is a 7" box set (10 singles, 20 tracks) put out by the Fractured label. It comes housed in thick box and the design of the set (by Graham Dolphin) is sharp and well put together but not too fancy. It feels a bit more like an art object more than a functional set of music, which I guess is appropriate. The people behind Recovery asked 20 artists working in the realm of experimental music-- they are drone purveyors, laptop abstractionists, extreme techno minimalists, and improvisers, but they don't have much truck with popular music-- to cover a song from the past that's been especially significant to them. So we get extreme minimalist Ryoji Ikeda doing AC/DC, UK click'n'cutters SND doing Michael Jackson, and Mika Vanio, best known for his post-industrial work in Pan Sonic, doing Kate Bush.
In the best tracks here you can hear a sense of discovery and the fresh crackle of energy that comes from two aesthetics colliding. Richard Chartier makes highly detailed microsound pieces, and Russian producer/composer CoH is too prolific to pin down, though he has a fondness the harsh and noisy. But they come together on for a version of Soft Cell's "Bleak Is My Favorite Cliché", slowing the original to half-speed, adding some mechanized hum, and whispering the lyrics. It feels like isolationism/dark ambient soundscaping mixed with proper goth, and the effect is thrilling. BJ Nilsen, best known now for his albums of field recordings, covers Joy Division's "Heart and Soul", keeping the tense, grinding groove of the original almost exactly but fleshes it out with judiciously placed distortion, and the affection he brings to the material is palpable. Thoughtful re-works these might be, but the pleasures are immediate and obvious.
Matmos' terrific choice of cover, Bow Wow Wow's "C30, C60, C90, Go!", is a sly reminder that Recovery is a defiantly physical object (vinyl-only, no mp3s), comprised of songs from a time when all music could be held in the hand. Google the lyrics of the 1980 hit and marvel at how accurately they predict present modes of music consumption (Matmos thought enough of the words to print them on the 7" label here). Matmos also deliver musically, mirroring the clattering Burundi beat of Bow Wow Wow quite closely while adding some wicky high-pitched squelches and whispered vocals for a net effect that is cartoonish and playful. (Here I note that Matmos' Drew Daniel has written for Pitchfork.) The flip of the Matmos single is Barbara Morgenstern doing New Order's "Temptation", which serves as a reminder of how hard it is to mess up a brilliant song, though her slightly awkward phrasing and modest bedroom pop production nicely play up the song's vulnerability.
Interesting but perhaps not surprising is that most of the songs chosen come from the 1980s and, depending on how broad your definition, can be loosely classified as new wave. It's a clear reminder of how much sway that era held for artists later working in the electronic field, even the bands that haven't since been canonized. Both Fennesz' version of A-Ha's "Hunting High and Low" and Jóhann Jóhannsson's take on OMD's "Souvenir" zero in on the lush romanticism of the new pop era's sonics, blowing things up to 70mm widescreen proportions. Though in the press notes for the set Jóhannsson claims that his track is "revenge" for being seduced by OMD as a kid before later discovering their superior influences, these two tracks feel like loving homages that demonstrate how almost any song's unexplored corners can be transformed into something new by a good listener. Serving as counterweights to these highs are the handful of tracks that seem like conceptual goofs, some of which are pretty fun (Ikeda on "Back in Black") some of which are boring (Vanio's track is nice enough, but its relationship to Kate Bush is vague at best) and some of which seem pointless (never really dug SND's original stuff, and this "Billie Jean" does nothing for me.)
It goes out without saying that cover comps these days are a dime a dozen. Indie artists pay tribute to heroes, smirk along to guilty pleasures, and logroll with like-minded contemporaries to keep their names in the blogs. It seems a harmless trend, if uninspiring. But the artists here aren't involved in such games. These are intellectual types, people with concepts, who think things through when taking on new projects. Recovery reflects this more cerebral and considered stance, and some of these covers seem like commentaries or venues to work through ideas more than musical tributes (or, for that matter, send-ups). Which means that Recovery is "interesting" more often than it's "fun." But there's still enough variety in the mix to make the whole project worthwhile.


The Buffalo rapper continues to build his grimy, boom-bap brand, one endearingly straightforward release at a time.

Hitler Wears Hermes 7

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently boasted that the Buffalo Bills are the only true-blue NY football team, as they’re the only one that actually plays in-state. (Both the Giants and Jets play in a stadium in New Jersey.) Buffalo rapper Westside Gunn has been trumpeting a similar claim in the realm of rap, dubbing himself the “New King of New York” despite being from a city upstate that’s more known for its snowfall than hip-hop. But while MCs from the NYC boroughs have tried to shake the dust off their sound with trap hi-hats, Gunn and his Griselda Records cohorts have proudly embraced the loops and drum breaks of the city’s “Golden Age” and revamped them. So much so that the richest rapper to ever make it out of Brooklyn recently gave them a management deal.
On Hitler Wears Hermes 7, the formula doesn’t change, with Gunn rapping ruthlessly about life on the streets of Buffalo over glistening barely touched samples. With each edition of the series, the bars seem to get a little harder, the beats a little prettier, and Gunn’s persona comes further into focus. The project opens with DJ Drama, whose Gangsta Grillz mixtapes once served as proclamations of stardom for artists like Lil Wayne and Young Jeezy, decreeing that the “Buffalo kids done did it.” It’s a sentiment Gunn circles back to often on Hermes 7 with crass lines like, “First nigga in my city with a Rolls/Fuck two bad bitches at the Lowe’s,” injecting a conventional rap boast with some of his hometown’s blue-collar attitude.
Gunn’s voice is a nasally high-pitched yap, somewhere between Brooklyn rappers AZ and Troy Ave, and is perfectly tuned for talking shit. “At the Roc Nation brunch with my tool on, don’t disrespect us,” he cooly warns on “Gondek.” Elsewhere, on “Connie’s Son,” he crows that he’s “made half at least half a mil’ ridin’ Megabuses,” a clever reference to the cheap bus service that’s been exposed more than once as a tool used by traffickers to run drugs across state lines. Griselda crew members Conway the Machine and Benny the Butcher show up to deliver equally gritty verses, as well as a surprisingly in-form Fat Joe, who harkens back to his D.I.T.C. days on “Kelly’s Korner” by lamenting how he once got his hand put in a meat grinder for stealing a Mafia don’s car.
The production, handled by a who’s who of boom-bap aficionados like Alchemist, Statik Selektah and Griselda in-house producer Daringer, is as lovely as the lyrics are ugly. The swirling keys on “Broadway Joes” sound more like something jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi laid down for A Charlie Brown Christmas than a backdrop to an ode to cooking crack. The soaring vocal sample on the frontend of “Undertaker vs. Goldberg,” meanwhile, throws Gunn’s violent “doot, doot, doot, doot” ad-libs into a warm swirl. The only moments the beats come up short are when their simplicity veers into redundancy, like a few minutes into “Undertaker,” which could have been bolstered by some drums.
This could be said for other aspects of Hermes 7 as well, a project that’s endearingly straightforward but has a firm ceiling as a result. By its midpoint, you pretty much know how each song will unfold, a one-note dish that’s tasty on first bite but starts to lose its flavor by the end. Make no mistake, this is who Westside Gunn is: He makes one kind of song and does it well. Putting out a niche product has ironically led him, along with the rest of Griselda Records, to a larger audience. But even recipes for success can be improved upon.


In 2017, the National revisited their 2007 classic Boxer at a show in Brussels, and the set has been packaged for a Record Store Day release. You had to be there...

Boxer (Live in Brussels)

Boxer: classic stuff, definitive album for one of the definitive indie rock bands of 21st century. One of the best live bands too. The National curate festivals and massively influential artist compilations, Matt Berninger’s relationship with his brother was deemed a worthy subject for a critically-acclaimed documentary, they’ve been this close to debuting at #1 on Billboard and won a Grammy in a category that actually gets televised. It’s been a very, very long time since the National actually had anything to prove, and yet they take the stage as the same Cincinnati transplants who spent years getting ignored in New York long before their infamous tour with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah show. It’s easy to imagine them spending each pre-show reading and internalizing every backhanded compliment about their erudite image and fanbase and getting back into that 2005 headspace. Oh, and the city of Brussels seems pretty awesome too. So it’s hard to rate Boxer (Live in Brussels) both as an actual experience and as a recorded document of music. I would have paid a significant amount of money to watch Boxer live in Brussels, and not a single dollar for Boxer (Live in Brussels).
At the very least, Boxer (Live in Brussels) keeps most of its promises—Boxer played in full, in order, with no encores or stage banter indicating it was indeed recorded in Brussels and not the CalCoast Credit Union Open Air Theatre or Verizon Hall or any other late-2017 tour stop. “This is a sad record,” Berninger jokes at the end of “Guest Room,” before mentioning the tendency of grammar-minded fans to hear the title of the next song as “Racing Like a Pronoun.” That’s about it. And so the utility of Live in Brussels is less about whether the National improve on any of the originals so much as offer something different than an album that has been a fixture for the entirety of its existence.
Live in Brussels inevitably capitalizes on the personal nostalgia driving any 10-year anniversary year celebration—the night you got way too drunk and sung “Fake Empire” in a cab home, the night you got way too drunk and listened to “Slow Show” while scrolling through ex’s Facebook profiles, and so forth. It also skews the global context of Boxer and shows just how much it was a product of its time. “Fake Empire” is technically the National’s biggest hit, so it at least feels weird as the opener of a live set in 2017. It sounds a little jauntier, less solemn than it did originally—it was released towards the very end of Dubya’s second term, after all, where more hopeful times were clearly in sight. Were it written for 2018, “Fake Empire” would be both way too on-the-nose and too obtuse. “Mistaken for Strangers” likewise took on a very time-specific kind of sociopolitical heft shortly after its release and feels weirdly quaint in retrospect: a portrait of “economic anxiety” when that term felt like less of a coded euphemism. The central metaphor of “Start a War” was daring, but not insensitive. Those songs still feel like people falling apart, not an entire society.
But that’s all taken care of in the first seven minutes and in all likelihood, the Brussels crowd is not here to reassess Boxer as a document of slow, steady American decline. It then falls to the individual to scavenge Live in Brussels for any new wrinkle: horn sections are a luxury for bands playing a hometown gig or a festival, and the National is big enough to mandate one at just about any show. These horns were on Boxer too, and when the coda on “Fake Empire” catches the beat differently than it does on the album, it's a papercut-subtle change that drives me nuts. “Mistaken for Strangers” runs a little breathless and ragged, Berninger occupying the space of the beleaguered desk jockey rather than an omnipotent narrator whose judgment feels comforting—this adult life is unmagnificent, it’s not just you. The studio version of “Squalor Victoria” is the shortest song on Boxer and it’s the longest one on Live in Brussels, whipping up a turbulent outro, the only time Berninger screams on something written after 2005. And if you’ve seen the National at any point in the past 10 years, this is the exact version of “Squalor Victoria” you’ve heard every single time.
As avowed Grateful Dead fans, it’s not surprising that the National would eventually leverage their live reputation into a burgeoning cottage industry—you wonder why it took them this long. But there’s nothing cynical about Boxer (Live in Brussels), and it’s being released on Record Store Day, where 98% of the available goods are clearly “collector’s only” artifacts. Sure, it’s Boxer’s time to celebrate its birthday, and yet it’s the National album that’s the least revelatory in a live setting. Alligator will forever be the National’s enduring document as underdogs and the way some people will always want to see them—there’s no way we’re ever getting back the guys who made “Mr. November” and “Abel.” The claustrophobic, dense production that made High Violet such a convincingly difficult comedown record was off-putting to some and seeing “Terrible Love” once will make you understand why it managed to replace “Mr. November” as their perennial set closer. Trouble Will Find Me is still kind of a grab bag, but loose—the most “live” National record, and even if Sleep Well Beast isn’t as energetic as their past work, it’s worthwhile to see how they get to play with their new toys.
And then there’s Boxer—the one with the tightest songs, the most exacting arrangements, a muted Side B. Yeah, “Gospel” and “Guest Room” are the kind of fan-favorite deep cuts that likely got retired from setlists once High Violet dropped and that deflated horn outro of “Mistaken for Strangers” will always take me right back to those days of eating another lonely dinner in my cubicle at 7:30 PM during a 14-hour day that hasn’t ended yet. But more than any National album, Boxer needs the things that make these guys such compelling live theatre—listening to a record, you can’t see Berninger take mighty pulls from a bottle of wine and lose himself in the din during the instrumentals, nervously pacing, head-down like so many of his narrators. There are no covers, no possibilities of “Cherry Tree” or “Cardinal Song,” no way to fully appreciate the intense physicality of the Devendorf and Dessner brothers’ instrumental compositions. None of which is to detract from the National’s live reputation, mind you. Live in Brussels does the opposite, reminding you of all the fun you’re not having.


2 Chainz made a name for himself by following his mentor Lil Wayne’s lead, but the pair’s new collaborative album finds the teacher struggling to keep up with his student.

Collegrove

2 Chainz and Lil Wayne have been running mates for almost a decade now; following their collaborative 2007 hit "Duffle Bag Boy," Wayne has appeared as a featured guest on every 2 Chainz album, and 2 Chainz has often returned the favor on mixtapes and the 2013 single "Rich as Fuck." It’s a naturally absurd pairing: At their best, both rappers’ similarly skewed perspective allows them boil down the universe into an endless supply of WTF punchlines. On Juicy J's strip club ode "Bandz a Make Her Dance," for instance, 2 Chainz and Wayne deliver sometimes-head-scratching non sequiturs about their favorite pastime, and it’s representative of their combined cheekiness. It’s also the first song that comes to mind when 2 Chainz raps, "You said, ‘You can make a million rappin’ ‘bout some pussy,’" on "Dedication," the opener to their new project, ColleGrove, recounting some wizened Wayne advice. 2 Chainz made a name for himself not only by listening to Wayne but also following his lead, so it’s a bit odd that ColleGrove has him spending so much time dragging Wayne behind him.
That isn’t by design, of course. The intention of ColleGrove is, as the hometown-referencing name suggests, to merge the rappers’ two worlds, and to also display 2 Chainz’s enviable respect for Wayne. "Dedication" is a "Big Brother"-style narration of the duo’s longstanding friendship, with 2 Chainz paying homage to Wayne’s impact on his career. (The record is billed as a 2 Chainz album likely because of Wayne’s unresolved disputes with Cash Money, making this the ultimate outpouring of gratitude.) And in a way, ColleGrove is itself a dedication, to both Lil Wayne and the era of freaky one-liners he ushered in. But Wayne is now a shell of the rapper 2 Chainz revered, and here, standing beside Atlanta’s zinger king, he struggles to get an interesting word in edgewise.
At his peak, Lil Wayne was an efficient and effective puncher, taking compact swings and landing in flurries. There are glimpses of that here, but more often than not Wayne is merely trying to keep pace. At this point, he simply has trouble matching 2 Chainz’s outlandishness bar-for-bar. For every "I’m so high the blunt feel like a dumbbell/ These niggas tiny like a spider on a Spud Webb," Wayne provides, 2 Chainz delivers five delirious winners like "I had a sitdown with Farrakhan/ Turned the White House to the Terrordome." This unbalance becomes an issue on songs like "Rolls Royce Weather Every Day" and "Bentley Truck," where Wayne sputters so much that you wish this was just a 2 Chainz album.
To be fair, some of it is. Six tracks are 2 Chainz-only, including two highlights—"MFN Right" and "Not Invited"—which originally appeared on his recent EP, Felt Like Cappin, where they benefitted from the shorter running time; without Wayne verses, they feel out of place here. It’s also odd that one of that EP’s standouts, "Back on My Bullshyt," which features of the better Lil Wayne verses in recent memory, didn’t make it to ColleGrove.
"MFN Right" and "Not Invited" also standout as the sonic outliers here, one minimalist, the other soulful. Everything else lies along a gradient of glazed synths that mushroom, percolate, or oscillate, allowing just enough room to accommodate both Wayne’s whine and 2 Chainz’s groggy drawl. The production credits are a road map of the pair’s collective journey, from one-time in-house Cash Money producer Mannie Fresh, to modern trap architects Mike WiLL Made It, Southside, and Zaytoven, to rap’s current all stars Metro Boomin, TM88, and FKi. Their collective effort doesn’t quite live up to their pedigree, but it’s still formidable.
That is, excepting the Mannie Fresh-produced "Gotta Lotta," with its unnecessarily dense layering and nursery rhyme hook. It’s symbolic of why ColleGrove stalls. There are moments where everything goes right, like on the well-paced "Bounce" or the London on da Track-produced VIP checklist "Section," and you can see how the album may have worked in theory. These rappers have an undeniable chemistry, and when they both find their best, the album is pure fun. But more often than not, ColleGrove plays out like 2 Chainz pulling his friend and mentor up by his bootstraps while ceding a bit of the spotlight in the process. It’s a generous gesture, but a costly one.


Luke Abbott’s synth/sax/drums trio illustrates the links between London’s fertile jazz scene and longstanding psychedelic traditions in six vibrant, unedited improvisations.

New Hymn to Freedom

When mountains move, entire landscapes change—not just how we perceive them, but the physical properties of their dirt, what oenologists call terroir. One such tectonic shift appears to be taking place throughout the UK’s experimental-music scene. The rising profile of London’s jazz movement is pushing the immediacy and vibrancy of group improvisation far from the jazz community itself, creating an environment at once related and separate.
To wit: It's entirely possible to hear New Hymn to Freedom, the excellent sophomore album by Szun Waves, as part of this new world. To place it in this context, one need only engage “Constellation,” the album’s grand, searching opener, wherein saxophonist Jack Wyllie, synth experimentalist Luke Abbott, and drummer Laurence Pike slowly bloom together into a noisy flower, full of yearning spirituality, knotty runs, and wonderful internal exchanges, all of it at once synthetic and organic. Texturally, Szun Waves even mirror the sax/synths/beats mix of the Comet Is Coming, one of the numerous groups featuring Shabaka Hutchings, a central figure in London jazz. (The two projects also share a label.)
The six wholly unedited improvisations of New Hymn to Freedom don’t so much open the window on another corner of London’s “scene”—only the most broad-minded interpreters of the word “jazz” would place much of this droney, psychedelic music in that tradition—as they illuminate the field on which many of UK’s experimental musicians have been playing of late. Social, sharing, dynamic interplay is hardly the exclusive provenance of London’s DIY scene, but the recovery of this model for musicians working at the intersection of electronics, rhythm, and improvisation has been instrumental in pushing individuals towards group settings.
Szun Waves is a trio of such curious veterans. Abbott’s is probably the most recognizable name, from the texturally thorny, synth-heavy electronic music he’s been creating for nearly a decade as part of James Holden’s Border Community stable; both Wyllie, whose saxophone and electronics are an integral part of the Mercury Prize-nominated jazz ensemble Portico Quartet, and the Australian Pike, a veteran of electronics-meets-jazz groups PVT and Triosk (whose 2003 album with producer Jan Jelinek, 1+3+1, is one distinguished precursor of New Hymn to Freedom), are more formally attuned to collaborative improvisation. The project began as a duo between Abbott and Wyllie, exploring a space somewhere between drone-oriented ambiance and Vangelis’ globe-trotting new age (you can hear why Wyllie’s Portico were long-time mainstays of Peter Gabriel’s ethnographically inclined Real World label), and the trio’s potential fruition came into focus on 2016’s At Sacred Walls.
By comparison, New Hymn to Freedom feels like a wonderfully rollicking coming-out party, consistently stormy and stirring in ways that the trio’s debut only hinted they could be. One of the traits it does share with the more electronic-minded London jazz participants is its desire to push people toward engaged motion. On “High Szun,” Pike moves all over his kit to rev up the rhythm alongside Abbott’s arpeggiated synth runs; Wyllie’s soprano phrases are often processed, short and repetitive, before voicing the tune’s melody with a stateliness that briefly recalls Coltrane and Pharoah cutting through the musical gale. One can envision hearing this at strategic moments in DJ sets by Four Tet or Ben UFO.
At their best, Szun Waves jams come as swells, with a power that is hard to dismiss, regardless if you can see their intentions from a click away. Even when the build-up is as long—and the name as potentially portentous—as the 12-minute closing title track, the pay-offs win. The feedback-like squall of a duet between Abbott and Wyllie at the end of “New Hymn to Freedom,” with Pike’s hi-hats pushing the space, can easily be imagined as the contemporary progeny of numerous jazz-attuned psychonautical Brits, from Robert Wyatt to Jason Pierce. It’s also a bountiful example of the local dirt’s modern harvest. Drink it in.


The New York duo’s gloomy trip rock songs are danceable, depressing, and designed for you to mosh with your shadows.

Mother Engine

New York winters are best soundtracked by brutal reverb or ice-cold synths. Model/Actriz and Nation of Language, two beloved newcomers out of the Brooklyn indie scene, have mastered this particular chill on either side of the spectrum. Somewhere in the middle lies Amiture, a duo made up of Jack Whitescarver and Coco Goupil. This latest group out of New York’s new school of rock convey an earnest isolation by way of screeching guitars and quick-paced drum machines, a desire to dance in the dark alone.
While their debut The Beach was comparatively synth-heavy, their follow-up Mother Engine feels dark as an oil slick—and just as coarse. The grooves here feel slightly askew, oscillating between the danceable and utterly depressing. Whitescarver sings with ferocity throughout, his tremulous voice soaring with rock’n’roll smolder, though at times it borders on inaudible growling. Still, cuts like fuzzed-out single “Billy’s Dream” unfortunately reduce him to a low grumble lost in a sea of drums and reverb.
But these vocal modulations have the potential to touch the heart. Over looping guitar and cold, sparse percussion, “Dirty” tells a tale of queer yearning for an old flame now masquerading as straight. “You’re just like me/You wanna be a lady/You wanna make it dirty,” Whitescarver whispers to his former beau, evoking a pain all too familiar to any horny loverqueer spurned. On “Baby,” Whitescarver’s breathy snarl glides over upbeat drums. A particularly chilling cut comes in the form of “Cocaine”: Opening the doleful final third of the record, the namesake drug serves as a metaphor for Whitescarver’s toxic lover, a relationship he compares to being “just like [his] father” in a hushed rasp. This is a trip-hop scorcher for love addicts with daddy issues.
Halfway through, Mother Engine begins to sputter. “HWL” feels like a Garbage B-side better left off the album, carried only by Whitescarver’s floaty voice. The song positions him as the latest in a long line of alt-rock frontmen whose lyrics can hardly be made out past the vocal dramatics. Near the end, the instrumental “Porte Sosie” proves that the band need not rely on the ghostly beauty of the lead singer’s pipes. Layered electric guitar riffs clash in a chaotic miasma, reviving a record that at this point feels like post-punk slosh. Moments like these are proof of this album’s crackling, compelling soul.
Leonard Cohen famously said cracks allow light to enter, but the fissures in Whitescarver and Goupil’s music allow plenty of space to mosh with your shadows. Mother Engine is a sexy gallowdance, a trip rock journey that contains echoes of early 2000s New York, when Karen O and Julian Casablancas were rubbing shoulders with Paul Banks and James Murphy. It’s a chilling dream in a leather jacket, a one-night stand taken home from Welcome to the Johnsons that disappears in a thrush of guitar, in a wisp of smoke.


Sam Beam’s earliest recordings reveal a songwriter and singer already secure in his eccentricities. Far from sounding tentative, these songs are more like a lost Iron & Wine album.

Iron & Wine: Archive Series No. 5: Tallahassee Recordings

Sam Beam just sorta stumbled into Iron & Wine. When he moved to Tallahassee to attend graduate school at Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts in the late 1990s, writing songs was merely a hobby. It was more like an extension of his filmmaking, and he didn’t think much of the music he did make, at least not until a friend lent him a four-track recorder. Setting his songs to tape and playing them back, Beam could actually hear them for the first time. He started making decisions about structure, lyrics, melodies, arrangements, and vocals. Through another friend, he landed a song on a compilation by the Portland-based Yeti magazine, then signed a record deal with Sub Pop and an immediate tour opening for Isaac Brock’s side project Ugly Casanova.
In 2015, the first volume in Iron & Wine’s Archive Series collected songs from early in his career, most dating just before the release of his 2002 debut The Creek Drank the Cradle, but the fifth volume goes even deeper into his vault, unearthing some of his very first recordings. (Volumes 2, 3, and 4 were tour-only releases.) Often an archival compilation like this one reveals a steep learning curve, using those first tentative recordings as a point against which to measure an artist’s progress toward more familiar material. It is gently disappointing that Tallahassee reveals a songwriter and singer already secure in his mannerisms and eccentricities, already in possession of the traits that would eventually endear him to fans. Aside from some rather abrupt fades and a lo-fi hum similar to the one that pervades his debut, the music sounds professional, accomplished, refined. You miss the creative epiphanies, those moments when a young musician realizes what he can do within a song. You miss the idea that an artist started off like any of us.
That’s only the mildest of complaints, especially since Tallahassee plays less like a compilation and more like a lost Iron & Wine album. As produced by E.J. Holowicki, the friend who lent Beam that four-track and plays bass, these songs cohere into something like a story or a statement, with opener “Why Hate Winter” immediately establishing all the traits that would soon define Iron & Wine: the easy intimacy, the patient melody, the arrangement that’s both austere and generous, the hints of something darker behind a romantic idyll. Similarly, he’s already developed a vocal tic, a way of hitting a note slightly flat. Rather than conveying powerful emotion, it reinforces a compelling stoicism, a form of understatement that serves Beam well especially on “This Solemn Day” and “Calm on the Valley.”
To a certain degree, much of Tallahassee sounds like it could be an extension of Beam’s filmmaking, which he’s described as “pretentious” and others have likened to Andrei Tarkovsky. Some of these songs are like short movies in themselves, or at least modest soundtracks to short scenes. The windswept melody of “Ex-Lover Lucy Jones” follows a lovelorn man building shrines to a woman, before revealing that the romance is one-sided and the man an unreliable narrator. Beam punctuates the tale with the most basic harmonica solo you could imagine—a series of long inhalations and exhalations marking the passage of time that might separate lovers from each other or from the people they once were. On this song and throughout Tallahassee, Beam demonstrates a knack for devastating succinctness, giving only enough details to insinuate a pain that never becomes overwhelming—the kind you just live with from one day to the next. Nothing about these songs sounds tentative or grasping. Already he understands how to settle into a song and simply let it breathe on its own.

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The British trio moves beyond the tropical-house Top 40 of their debut on a theatrical, diverse sophomore album that finds frontman Olly Alexander blurring the boundaries between sacred and profane.

Palo Santo

Images of spirituality and religion permeate the work of Years & Years. The title of the British trio's 2015 debut album was Communion. Those themes become even more prominent in tracks with names like “Sanctify,” “Hallelujah,” “Karma,” and “Preacher” on the sometimes bombastic, sometimes sensual follow-up, Palo Santo. (“Palo santo,” or “holy wood,” is an incense used in indigenous Inca culture to cast away evil spirits.) In most Western theologies, dancing is the devil’s work, and the thrill of shaking your blasphemous hips while invoking the Lord predates Madonna by centuries. But you can see why Years & Years, in particular, connect music with religious transcendence. For an artist like the trio’s principal songwriter, the energetic Olly Alexander, who’s gone from mild-mannered frontman to fledging queer icon in just a few years, pop isn’t a frivolous pastime—it’s a sacred experience.
Alexander’s lyrics have always dealt with the murky, complicated side of desire, a fascination that gives physical heft to Palo Santo’s spiritual imagery. “Sanctify,” the record’s lead single and opener, finds him mid-hookup with a man who professes to be heterosexual. “You don’t have to be straight with me/I see what’s underneath your mask,” Alexander chides, in an apt double entendre, as he asks the guy to “sanctify my body with pain.” The contrast between the quiet verses and wide-open pop chorus mimics the lovers’ conflicting emotions of shame and ecstasy. Alexander ladles on the drama with Timberlakian trills, his voice smooth and precise against icy synths. A welcome reinvention for Years & Years, the track departs from the tropical-house Top 40 they’re known for, moving toward a more theatrical and intense sound.
Palo Santo puts its best foot forward with “Sanctify,” and a handful of subsequent songs make for some of the most enjoyable music Years & Years have released thus far. Although it uses a somewhat predictable dancefloor-as-site-of-divine-communion metaphor, “Hallelujah” is so relentlessly upbeat that its sounds blast through the mundanity of its lyrics, reigning in the atmosphere of Ibiza beach-rave revelry just before it slides into gaudiness. With an intro lifted almost note-for-note from Lauryn Hill’s “Everything is Everything,” “Karma” differentiates itself from typical Discover Weekly pap by taking inspiration from ’90s R&B girl groups instead of the sub-EDM vocoder pop many of Years & Years’ contemporaries peddle. At his best, Alexander exudes the youthful confidence of a kid perfecting his moonwalk in the bedroom mirror.
Unfortunately, while the front half of Palo Santo is packed with catchy tunes and genuine surprises, the album struggles to sustain its sense of wonder—or even structure. Communion was a scientifically balanced record, each of its songs similar enough to the others in tone and atmosphere to sustain a consistent mood. But “Hypnotised,” a ballad with lyrics like, “Just one look at you/My heart has been hypnotised,” meanders so aimlessly that the record never recovers. Even attempts to reintroduce dancefloor fodder feel strangely out of place in its wake. “If You’re Over Me,” a peculiar choice for a second single, uses a sing-song synth line to trace a picture of redemption in the midst of a failed relationship. The songs that follow blur together like the by-the-numbers pop Years & Years so eloquently challenge on tracks like “Karma.”
Palo Santo is a promising sophomore album because it evolves past the sound of the band’s debut. But at its low points, the record lacks the bite to drive home the razor’s-edge duality of sacred and profane that Alexander seems to thrive on. Eventually, themes of salvation, damnation, and enraptured revelation become mired in electropop clichés that are beneath the band’s talent. At their best, Years & Years are capable of godlike sublimity. To take up permanent residence in the heavens, all they need to do is exorcise a few colorless spirits.


Elvis Costello & The Attractions: Armed Forces

Armed Forces

It could be said that Elvis Costello had the distinct pleasure of living out the ultimate dream of every sharp-witted, incurably bitter young bastard with hopes of achieving stardom. In only two and a half years, he was propelled from an awkward, computer-programming teenager with a Jazzmaster and ugly glasses to the prototype for chic geekdom. Virtually overnight, he established himself as among the most articulate songwriters rock music has ever seen, infusing punk with the literacy it had always strived for but rarely achieved. With superstar status and a reputation for pushing the envelope, Costello was able to crystallize the thematic threads of political and personal devastation that ran through his first two records into the concept of "emotional fascism," the original title for Armed Forces.
Though Armed Forces is in many ways the most conceptually aggressive and confrontational of Costello's first three records, it doesn't carry with it the same immediacy of his first two releases, 1977's My Aim Is True and 1978's This Year's Model, on which he came as a man with something to prove. There's something intensely subversive about My Aim Is True with its undercurrents of anger and frustration providing a foundation for his synthesis of pop melody, country twang, and punk energy. This Year's Model, meanwhile, saw Costello expanding his sound significantly, with each instrument coming through as clear and urgent as a warning siren. It was equal parts whispered confession and frantic street corner sermon, and though he never quite reached its apex again, Armed Forces comes very close.
As Costello writes in the liner notes to this expanded reissue, Armed Forces marks the first time that he was actually aware of his audience. Perhaps in an attempt to elucidate the web of veiled and convoluted social and personal references running through his first two records, the album is lyrically much more general, and remarkably self-conscious, right from the opening lyric, "Oh, I just don't know where to begin." This, of course, doesn't slow Costello down-- "Accidents Will Happen", one of the finest songs in his, or any, repertoire, matches a signature smirking double-entendre with an almost Baroque pop sensibility. Melodically and lyrically, the song is above reproach, as Costello sings of infidelity with what could either be construed as regret or smug satisfaction. It's also one of several songs on Armed Forces to benefit from the album's dense production.
Whereas both My Aim Is True and This Year's Model are sharply produced, relatively sparse affairs, Armed Forces is extravagantly layered with dense instrumentation and rich, effusive textures. Pete Thomas' maniacal drumming is much more consistent than on previous outings, and keyboardist Steve Nieve, for the first time, is as likely to be found at a piano as behind a synthesizer. On "Accidents Will Happen" and the similarly stunning "Oliver's Army", in which Costello winds catchy and elegant melodies around slightly off-kilter chord progressions, the production works to the record's advantage, filling the songs out with bombastic power-pop arrangements and giving weight to their urgency. "Big Boys" and "Green Shirt"-- two subdued products of the same mold that produced "The Beat" and "Pump It Up", and make full use of steady, insistent rhythms and the unstoppable kinetic energy of The Attractions-- are near-classics as well, but are somewhat hindered by the album's smoother production. An earlier acoustic version of "Big Boys" included as a bonus track on Rhino's reissue of This Year's Model reveals layers of anger and heartbreak that the album version buries beneath impenetrable four-part harmonies and a heavy fog of reverb.
Of course, even if the production on Armed Forces often serves to conceal, rather than reveal the nuances of Costello's songwriting and The Attractions' always impeccable playing, the songwriting can hardly be argued with. "Goon Squad" carries on the menacing tone and complex rhythms of "Watching the Detectives" and "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea" with a prodigious sense of melody; "Party Girl" is yet another example of Costello successfully executing what would, in the hands of a lesser musician, quickly strike as overwrought; "Moods for Moderns" turns disco cliché into new wave brilliance; and a fiery, acidic cover of Nick Lowe's "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding" mockingly closes an album packed with dauntless, condemnatory social commentary.
In the end, the greatest strength of Armed Forces may be the same thing that makes it less viscerally powerful than Costello's two prior records-- its songs absolutely demand to be appreciated for their craftsmanship. In many ways, Armed Forces can be seen as the point at which Costello dropped the role of angry young upstart, and became more comfortable with his personification as a songwriter. And considering that he has since remained largely true to this sound, it can be seen not only as the consummation of all he had worked toward, but a window to what he would later accomplish.


The collected solo recordings from a veteran of three of krautrock’s fundamental groups—Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Harmonia—walk the line between mesmerizing riffs and wistful, cinematic gestures.

Solo / Solo II

Before he’d turned 25, Michael Rother had played in three innovative groups—Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Harmonia. The guitarist became an avatar of what’s become known as krautrock, inspiring bands as disparate as Stereolab, Chrome, and Negativland with sounds ranging from beatific pastoralism to industrial clangor. Rother’s solo recordings from 1977 onward, which are enshrined in the Solo and Solo II boxed sets, haven’t been as world-shaking as those earlier forays into avant rock, but they reveal his ability to wring maximal emotion from minimal gestures in ways that seem quintessentially Northern European.
It’s fair to say that Rother discharged most of his best ideas with Neu! and Harmonia. In “Hallogallo,” the lead-off track from Neu!’s 1972 debut album, Rother and drummer Klaus Dinger drafted perhaps the most emulated krautrock blueprint: Dinger’s “Apache beat” chugging swiftly beneath Rother’s plaintive guitar wails and Dinger’s curt rhythm-guitar quacks, all contoured by producer Conny Plank for optimal aerodynamic glide. This was ultimate driving musik for the Autobahn of your imagination. You can hear the seeds of much of what’s collected on Solo in Neu! 75’s “Isi.” Its melody suggests grand vistas and tempered hope, its beats advancing with purposeful propulsion. But when an artist has dreamed up ideas as significant as those, falling short of them is no disgrace. On Solo’s collected recordings—Flammende Herzen, Sterntaler, Katzenmusik, Fernwärme, two previously unreleased soundtracks (Die Räuber and Houston), and a smattering of live recordings and remixes from the 21st century—Rother hones his trademark riff mesmerism, emphasizing beauty and placidity.
Flammende Herzen (1977)—featuring Can’s Jaki Liebezeit on drums and Plank on the console and Yamaha synth—reiterates Rother’s predilection for expansive song structures, cruise-control rhythms, and guitar tones that signify anguish and ecstasy. “Zyklodrom” and “Karussell” are exemplary; the latter’s melody is perhaps Rother’s most grandiose. No wonder it’s been covered by William Tyler, another master of big-sky guitarscapes. Another key track, “Feuerland,” was redone by Kompakt Records’ Justus Köhncke; you can hear the roots of ’90s German techno’s streamlined efficiency in the original’s purring sonorities and clipped 4/4 gait.
Sterntaler (1978), with Liebezeit and Plank again in tow, follows in the vein of Flammende Herzen. “Stromlinien” exemplifies Rother’s m.o. during this phase: majestic melodiousness propelled by fleet, locomotive beats. It becomes clearer on Sterntaler that Rother—as he’d shown in Harmonia, where his parts smoothly blended with Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius’ synths—may be one of the least extravagant guitar heroes in rock, favoring artfully modulated squalls and muted spangles that exude modesty, even as they’re blanketing the firmament.
A 12-song love letter to felines, 1979’s Katzenmusik purveys a more interior sound, with faintly precious melodies and less emphasis on rhythm, although Liebezeit remains. Rother introduces eBow to his repertoire, which enables him to generate infinite sustain and evoke cat-like cries. Rother’s own cats recently had given birth to more kittens than he could handle, forcing him to give them away; any downhearted moments on the album might be traced to that feeling of loss.
With Plank gone, Rother takes a slightly darker tone on 1982’s Fernwärme (the title means “warmth from a distance”). “Elfenbein,” written after the death of his uncle, detours into a mournful, gothic meditation that verges upon Bohren & der Club of Gore territory. Liebezeit’s ever steady beats undergird the guitarist’s pleasantly undulating peregrinations, the legends working with nonchalant precision. Fernwärme also contains Jim O’Rourke’s favorite Rother song, “Klangkörper,” which bears hints of the minimal, gaseous techno for which many Germans would become revered nearly two decades later.
Rother’s evocative instrumentals enabled him to make a natural transition to film scoring, as 2013’s The Robbers and 2012’s Houston prove. From the former, “Part 1” is an ideal specimen of panicky, vehicle-chase soundtracking. When not in quicksilver-propulsion mode, Robbers settles into an ice-blue orb of beautiful tentativeness, as exemplified by “Part 4.” The zenith of Houston occurs on “Part 5”; over a foundation of emotive static, Rother unleashes Doppler-effected guitar sighs, conjuring a sense of hope receding toward the vanishing point. One of the principal through lines of Solo is Rother’s ability to express overwhelming emotions with as few gestures as possible, and “Part 5” captures it beautifully, with a mesmerizing repetition of rigorously honed motifs.
Solo II collects Rother’s output from 1983’s Lust to 2020’s Dreaming, with additional bonus tracks from the ’90s. He mostly goes the one-man-band route, and the presence of his guitar gradually diminishes. This material bears only the faintest traces of Rother’s peak-’70s sound, which leads to a dilemma. On the one hand, we admire artists who avoid repeating themselves. On the other, we wish musicians wouldn’t abandon the qualities that endeared us to their work in the first place. But the main problem with Solo II? His ideas aren’t as galvanizing within this 37-year stretch.
On Lust the dominance of the Fairlight CMI synth lends the songs a candied timbre. Couple that with melodies redolent of movie-of-the-week schmaltz, and the result hews closer to OMD at their cutest than to the paradigm-shifting rock and electronic music that marked Neu! and Harmonia. “Palmengarten” epitomizes this approach with its meringue-light synth and pastel, pointillistic guitar pirouetting over pitter-pat drums. Lust’s anomalous standout is “Pulsar,” a polar meditation reminiscent of Michael Hoenig’s 1977 album Departure From the Northern Wasteland.
The pensive guitar intro to “Süssherz,” Süssherz und Tiefenschärfe’s opener, may make it hard to believe that this is the same musician who scorched earth with “Negativland.” Here, Rother is more interested in tugging your heartstrings than in blowing your mind. Thankfully, things improve with “Tiefenschärfe,” whose glittering keyboard fantasia foreshadows Spiritualized’s organ-drone symphonies, before shifting into a motorik rhythm that implies purposeful glide to an important rendezvous. Think of “Tiefenschärfe” as an update of Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn.” At 13 minutes, it’s one of the grandest works in Rother’s ’80s canon. “Blaues Licht” ends the album with a frosty tone poem of exquisite poignancy—like Brian Eno’s Apollo at the North Pole.
The title of Traumreisen translates as “dream trips”; if only these weren’t such tepid journeys. While “Reiselust” barges in with the aggressive, thunky beats of a new-wave club hit, the tune bears a tinny urgency. Rother’s guitar tone has lost its edge, dissolving into anodyne sheen and modest prettiness, with outsized demonstrations of melodrama marring several tracks. Redemption comes on “Schwarze Augen,” a percolating, Tangerine Dream-esque efflorescence of majestic synth swells, and the heroic, Neu!-like rock of “Lucky Stars.”
On 1996’s Esperanza, Rother abandons rock and lights out for various strains of middlebrow electronic music, and enlists a vocalist for the first time. He also calls on Joachim Rudolph to program ProTools and DD-1000 computer software, making this the most digital-sounding record in Rother’s discography. On “Silver Sands,” a forlorn panpipe melody and prim boom-bap lifted from the trip-hop playbook alert you to his new paradigm. At 17 tracks, Esperanza could have benefited from editing, but Rother does generate some engrossing ideas. “Weil Schnee Und Eis” (which features vocals and lyrics by Jens Harke) proffers sluggish trip-hop that could almost be mistaken for a release by WordSound artist Spectre, its low end far dirtier than typical for Rother, who’s notoriously averse to bass frequencies. The gently psychedelic “Wolkenwelt” is odd enough to segue into an ambient-dub excursion by the Orb and proves that Rother may have had an ear cocked toward the outdoor-rave circuit. Esperanza’s peak cosmic effort, “Gleitflug,” is as hypnotic as Harald Grosskopf’s best material.
If Esperanza proved that Rother could adeptly adapt to the zeitgeist, for 2004’s Remember (The Great Adventure) he relied more heavily on singers, outside producers (including Asmus Tietchens and Jake Mandell), danceable rhythms, and conventional song structures. The chant-intensive “Energy It Up (Part 1)”—featuring Herbert Grönemeyer’s vocals and easy-going beats by Mouse on Mars’ Andi Toma—resembles the Beta Band. Perhaps even more surprising are the songs that recall the Wire offshoot A.C. Marias: “Sweet Sweat,” with singer Sophie Joiner adding a frosty swirl of sensuality, and the slow-burning churner “Energy It Up (Part 2),” which is cross-hatched with strange FX. But the maudlin, widescreen ballad “Morning After (Loneliness),” the humdrum electronic brooder “Nostalgia,” and the stodgily depressing “Remember” are so ill considered, they almost negate the album’s highlights.
This year’s Dreaming continues Rother’s drift away from rock and toward song-based electronic music. Rather than boldly deviating from previous works, he instead nudges the music’s minimalist elements into slightly altered forms. So although “Bitter Tang” echoes the slow-motion disco of Lindstrøm, a first for Rother, it retains his plangent guitar tone and those trademark wistful chord progressions that suggest awe of natural beauty. Dreaming is at its worst when it slips into the saccharine sentimentality of“Fierce Wind Blowing,” “Gravitas,” and “Quiet Dancing.” More often, though, Rother seems suited for his role as an elder hero transitioning into a late-career metamorphosis. The soaring minimalist techno of “Wopp Wopp” isn’t a million kilometers from Kraftwerk’s late-period work, with its synthesized vocals blurring into a serene drone over the sproingy metallic percolations. At once majestic and dulcet, the dub funk of “Hey Hey” splits the difference between the Orb and Enya.
Recorded from 1988 to 1994, Bonustracks yields a few extraordinary cuts from Rother’s hiatus between 1987’s Traumreisen and 1996’s Esperanza, but the majority of the collection traffics in Weather Channel tapestries. Typical is “The Doppelgänger,” a pellucid, mellow guitar study with faint echoes of his pastoral Neu! magic augmented by wispy choral drones and the occasional cymbal crescendo. “Silencio,” a majestic meander of ambivalent beauty, represents Rother’s default mode of this era: a wan resignation that nonetheless contains depth and breadth. But it’s “Unterwasserwolken” that reminds us of Rother’s forte: forging aquatic ambience pregnant with pathos through long delays on his guitar, and then shifting into a smooth motorik jam with the élan of a bicyclist leaning into a downhill swerve.
These two boxed sets prove that Rother’s music has changed subtly and at his own pace, sporadically capturing the thrill of his peak feats in Neu! and Harmonia. They also reveal that Rother’s talents flourish best in group settings. Listening to Solo and Solo II, you can sense the returns diminishing, but the original source was so potent, even the decline bestows rewards.

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An unannounced album from the Japanese producer sounds as mysterious as ever, but his once chilly techno has warmed and deepened, and a communal, even celebratory spirit has come to the fore.

Heat

The price to send a package via airmail from Saitama, Japan to Manchester, England is a little over $20. Not too long ago, a CD made this 5,853-mile journey, arriving at the offices of DDS records, the label run by the electronic duo Demdike Stare. The disc contained Japanese producer Shinichi Atobe’s fourth LP, Heat. There was no other info attached: no artist statement or supplemental details, just an hour of new music from one of dance music’s most reclusive producers. Or that’s how the story goes. But whatever route the seven tracks took to arrive at DDS’ doorstep, one thing rings true: The cost of postage pays for itself. Atobe’s latest is a priceless addition to a formidable catalog, and it stands apart from anything he’s done before.
Up until four years ago, Atobe had exactly one release to his name—2001’s Ship-Scope, an EP of ambient techno so evocative it could elicit tears from a sympathetic listener. Then in 2014, Demdike Stare followed a tip from Atobe’s previous label, the Berlin dub-techno pioneers Chain Reaction, and tracked him down. Since then, Atobe has entrusted DDS to release both new and archival music from his collection, which now includes three albums of material, each building upon the dreamy logic of Ship-Scope. Cold and swirling and sad, Atobe’s recent releases have been every bit as enigmatic and alluring as their creator.
But Heat does not sound like any of this previous work—it’s a house record first and foremost. Heady and soulful and smooth in a way that harks back to Mr. Fingers, Heat is an open book compared to the black boxes of Atobe’s past albums. Its thesis is clear from the moment a humid synthesizer melody introduces the opener, “So Good So Right”: This is a record, as its title suggests, primarily interested in the warmer end of dance music. These are tracks to make you sweat. It’s a new climate for Atobe’s music, downright tropical. The plush hand drums and purring bassline on “Heat 1” swing and sway like palm fronds moving with the ocean breeze; the slippery and bubbly synths on “Heat 2” move like bodies writhing on a waterbed.
Even as Atobe paints with brighter, more vivid hues on Heat, a blueness works at the lower registers of the album. There is a rich, emotional world here, one where melancholy freely intermixes with joy: On “Heat 4,” hi-hats chirp and crawl around hissing ghostly ambient noise like crickets on a foggy night, but right beneath the creepiness is the softest, supplest low end.
Working in this hot and heavy mode, Atobe transports all the exacting rigor and creativity of his techno to the creation of house melodies whittled to dancefloor perfection. Patience is what connects the soulfuness of Heat to Atobe’s back catalog. But in the beatific piano chords and the crispy kick drums, it’s easy to hear the communal spirit of Heat: These are songs oriented towards public consumption, not private listening. That change in setting and intent might shock anyone who has been following Atobe’s records over the years. But when Heat locks into its groove, it taps into the contemplative spirit that powers all of his music. Atobe’s work has always been about the rewards that come with careful, repeated listens. The beauty of Heat is the way it allows its listeners to experience those gifts together.


Jessy Lanza’s new EP, You Never Show Your Love, features remixes from founding Teklife member DJ Rashad, whose beats were used posthumously. The contrast of up-tempo, glitchy styles and languid, floating electro-R&B is a testament to Lanza's chameleonic style.

Jessy Lanza: You Never Show Your Love EP

You Never Show Your Love EP

Since Jessy Lanza released her debut Pull My Hair Back in September of 2013, the electro-R&B landscape has become significantly more crowded. Her debut effort with Junior Boys' Jeremy Greenspan was a well-produced, confident effort that nonetheless was at times a bit too restrained, if only because Lanza's vocal power was otherwise so apparent in the few instances in which it was allowed to shine through. Those hints seemed to suggest there would be more of her in future efforts.
On Lanza’s new EP, You Never Show Your Love, on UK-based label Hyperdub, you can hear those same glimmers of promise. Lanza’s voice on the EP’s title track is light and smooth, floating over the languid beat in a way that almost brings to mind a sunnier Sade. The EP was produced by Teklife’s DJ Spinn and Taso, and the beats are pure footwork. While the title track is more of a slow jam, the beat slowly orbiting Lanza’s vocal, the rework, featuring founding Teklife member DJ Rashad’s beats used posthumously, is up-tempo and glitchy, contrasting with Lanza’s floating vocal to great effect. This chameleon-like quality is one of Lanza’s signatures—her vocals are versatile, and tend to melt into a mix rather than overpowering it. This is a commendable skill, especially in a house singer, but there are many moments when you wish the music would be more about her, and less about the beat.
While the EP is atmospheric, it does nothing to separate Lanza from the scene that has grown up around her. Her vocals skew more purely house than FKA twigs or Banks, but she lacks their same showmanship or melodrama, and it's difficult to imagine the niche she would fill. You Never Show Your Love is a small sampling of the Canadian vocalist's work, however, and her choice in producers speaks volumes to her curatorial vision. If That Voice were to assume a place in the forefront of the engaging, boundary-pushing beats she picks for herself, she could sound larger than life.