Sharing members with Dungen, this Swedish group alternates between moody acoustic folk rumination and various permutations of stoner-friendly rock.

The Amazing

Despite sharing two members (three if you count jack-of-all-trades contributor Frederik Swahn), the Amazing and Dungen don't sound overly similar. In the quickest, dirtiest sense, the Amazing trade Dungen singer and sole songwriter Gustav Ejstes for former Granada frontman Christoffer Gunrup, and where Ejstes sings entirely in Swedish, Gunrup opts for English. The two men don't share all of the same influences (though they do share some), and that's where the groups diverge, because if there's one thing Ejstes and Gunrup have in common, it's a keen faithfulness to their particular sources of inspiration. The Amazing's reference points aren't nearly as broad as Dungen's, but each project succeeds by reproducing vintage sounds so lovingly and masterfully that a lack of originality ceases to matter.
Most people first caught wind of the Amazing late last year via the wonderfully lissome single "Dragon", the majority of which is given over to misty, moody acoustic folk rumination in the vein of Nick Drake. Almost half of the album explicitly mines this same terrain. The achingly sensitive, fingerpicked fragilities "Beach House", "Is It Likely", and "The Strangest Thing" may skirt the line that keeps out soggily simplistic pushovers like Damien Rice and David Gray, but Gunrup's alluring lyrics and the sheer loveliness of the instrumentation ensure they stay on the non-douchey side of the divide.
The element of "Dragon" that leaps out on first listen is its beautifully fluid twin-guitar refrain that evokes the easy-bake grooves of the Allman Brothers Band and the Grateful Dead. This sun-dappled style crops up again at various points on the album, and, in a more general sense, the parts of the record that don't find Gunrup conjuring up Drake's pink moons and northern skies instead see the band exploring various permutations of stoner-friendly rock. Opener "The Kirwan Song" features a sublime interpolation of Fleetwood Mac's "Sunny Side of Heaven", penned by the eponymous Danny Kirwan and recorded just as the Mac were transitioning from jam-friendly blues-rock to soft-focus pop. Fittingly, Gunrup and co. take Kirwan's original, intimate instrumental and blow it up to stadium size, complete with thunderous drum rolls from Dungen kitmaster Johan Holmegard. That's just a warm-up for the massive, molten "Code II", a roiling monolith of wicked, doomy guitar shards and more skull-rattling drumming.
The hazy, heavily treated "Dead" could pass for mid-period Flaming Lips, but it's on the penultimate "Had to Keep Walking" that the Amazing really kick into interstellar overdrive. As the song cycles through a cerebral, ruminative groove, it touches on post-rock before melting into a keyboard-laden head trip ripped straight from the Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd playbooks. As far-flung as Dungen may be, they're clearly not going to be able to exhaust every avenue of album-era revivalism all by themselves.


At seven tracks and 24 minutes, Jennifer Lee's (aka TOKiMONSTA) Fovere is a brief, rounded project that does not ask very much of its listener.

Fovere

In an era when music is primarily distributed digitally, the distinction between an EP and a mini-album can be significant. An EP could easily be a throwaway project—a place to store songs that didn't quite fit a proper full-length thematically or sonically. A mini-LP, though, connotes the same wholeness and completion as any given album, just shorter. At seven tracks and 24 minutes, Jennifer Lee's (aka TOKiMONSTA) Fovere is just that: a brief, rounded project that does not ask very much of its listener. With its quick runtime and tight structure, it is neither groundbreaking nor entirely lacking inspiration. Though prone to drift into the background, Fovere is certain, reliable, and mostly enjoyable.
A disciple of Flying Lotus (and the first woman signed to his Brainfeeder label), Lee began her career as an L.A. beatmaker, content to get lost in her own universe of kicks, samples, and smooth instrumentals. On 2013's Ultra-released Half Shadows, she largely maintained her warped ethos, but added vocalists (like Kool Keith) to the tracks. Then on 2014's mini-LP Desiderium, Lee began crafting songs with room for singers to perform. With that transition, her music gained some space, but lost the hip-hop-indebtedness of earlier work. The project was not particularly memorable, nor was it terribly distinct from that of other producers creating club-ready tracks that were still cool enough for solo listening. Not even a then-unheralded Anderson .Paak made much of a lasting impression.
Fovere finds Lee continuing her transition away from DJ and toward bona-fide producer status. Whereas Desiderium had three guest vocalists on its seven tracks, Fovere has five. (Lee samples her own "Hemisphere" with Gavin Turek on opener "I'm Waiting," too, making it more like six out of seven.) Nevertheless, their lyrics are largely ignorable. A suddenly empowered .Paak, the exception to the rule, turns in a commanding performance on "Put It Down" (which also features KRNE), but everyone else is just an agreeable element in a pop-ready electronic track.
There is hardly a daring track on Fovere. "Put It Down" is its most impressive, but neatly fits Lee's previously laid framework, simply a couple notches up on the intensity scale, complete with Skrillex-ian drops. "Penny" is a potentially strong ballad hamstrung by nonsensical songwriting. Closer "Wound Up"  cues up some house sounds, a genre in which Lee sounds more like a visitor than an innovator. Even if it's lacking highs (or lows), Fovere is strong enough to be pleasant. It doesn't ask to be grappled with nor taken at much more than face value, but it finds Jennifer Lee further cementing herself as a viable pop composer.


New York psych rocker Ryan Jewell channels the subterranean sounds of the ’70s—kosmische, prog folk, space rock—into infectious, wildly inventive songs.

T.V. Sun

Ryan Jewell is a first-call utility player in the rock underground who has long shown flashes of all-star potential. But neither his extensive list of collaborations with Ryley Walker, Neil Hagerty, Steve Gunn, Psychedelic Horseshit, et al., nor his micro-indie releases, whether solo or with his band Mosses, can totally prepare you for the eclectic excellence he flexes on T.V. Sun.
Intimations of T.V. Sun can be heard in the transcendently twangy, Sandy Bull-like “Mono Lake Improvisation,” from Mosses’ 2014 album Attic Dundee, and in the cosmic pastoralia/space-rock klang of 2015’s Ouroboros. But Jewell and main musical partner Danette Bordenkircher—who contributes piano, vocals, and flute to the new record—have polished their variegated influences into compositions that show a deep appreciation of ’70s subterranean rock and electronic music while flooding the stereo field with their own distinctive sounds. Their inspirations may not be a mystery, but Jewell and Bordenkircher’s musical taste is impeccable, and Mosses’ inventive song structures and tonal palette swiftly rebut any charges of derivativeness.
“Tall Bearded Iris Speckled” raises the curtain on a band frolicking in verdant British prog-folk fields. After an intro of disorienting cascades of guitar, keyboards, and martial paradiddles, Jewell and Bordenkircher’s vocals evoke the archness of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Six Organs of Admittance. “There’s a lightness on the dark side of light/There’s a darkness on the light side of dark,” they sing, establishing their paradoxical, nature-observing bona fides. Eve Lenker’s fuzz bass and Jewell’s churchy organ lend the song the air of a Soft Machine fantasia.
With brilliant perversity, Mosses follow with “T.V. Sun,” whose introverted, methodical funk comes riddled with scat vocals and skeletal drum machine, bolstered by chunky funk beats from Troy Kunkler that hark back to Can timekeeper Jaki Liebezeit at his early-’70s peak. Over this, Jewell’s glinting guitars speak in elliptical tongues. The song’s frequent structural morphing and textural variety epitomize Mosses’ approach—not in an ADHD manner, but rather as the product of restless, organic creativity.
Mosses may be based in Highmount, New York, but their minds often flash back to ’70s Germany—a sage decision, musically speaking. “Time in Yer Mind” boasts the frightening propulsion of Can’s “Mother Sky” while also throwing in hysterical ululations that pay homage to the main riff of Pink Floyd’s “Astronomy Domine.” For good measure, they close the song with the sort of calamitous clangor that’s made Acid Mothers Temple a household name among LSD devotees. If you ever wanted to hear a Teutonic facsimile of the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner,” “MSR” will satisfy you with its orotund motorik drums and controlled euphoria. It’s the album’s obvious single, quasi-jokey vocals and all.
On “Ahh Auspicious,” Mosses strive for the grandeur of German kosmische-volk ensembles such as Emtidi and Between, attaining blissful elevation via Arjun Kulharya’s sitar and Bordenkircher and Meg Baird’s drifting vocal harmonies. LP closer “You Can’t Fall Off a Mountain” is a tangent from all that’s preceded it, even before Robbie Lee contributes an alto-flute solo that veers into the psych-jazz territory of Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider-Esleben. Coupling the regimented arpeggios of Harald Grosskopf with the carbonated burbles of analog-synth madman Conrad Schnitzler, “Mountain” feels like T.V. Sun’s obvious highlight, without being ostentatious about it.
The radical tone shifts on this album suggest the musicians are having great fun, and that infectiousness translates to the listener. It helps that Jewell packs so many ingenious ideas into each song that he makes many of his contemporaries seem like underachievers. T.V. Sun proves that not all musical nostalgias are created equal. As highbrow and esoteric as Mosses’ reference points are, the songs that spring from them express a vitality that bridges eras.


The Cleveland band craw carved out a space where post-hardcore, technical metal, math rock, and experimental noise all flow together under a hazy smog of something that resembles jazz, but isn't always clearly definable as such. Listening to their first three albums for the first time today is like traveling to a remote, untouched location and discovering strange wildlife and fauna that have evolved in genetic isolation.

1993-1997 Box Set

Listen to enough music, and go to enough shows, and you're bound to stumble across an unknown artist that blows you away and makes you wish you had the means to put their music in front of every serious listener you know. Sure, there's a perverse thrill in digging on something that few other people know about, but it can actually be painful to harbor a lifelong love for band that's been all but erased from history.
That might sound a tad dramatic to you, but it's a safe bet that it doesn't sound that way to Hank Shteamer, the producer and driving force behind this three-album box set. (Full disclosure: Shteamer is an occasional contributor to Pitchfork). As a 16-year-old, Shteamer's mind was so thoroughly blown by the Cleveland quintet craw that no other music has affected him in quite the same way since. He currently plays drums in STATS and Aa, serves as senior music editor at rollingstone.com, and continues to chart connections between metal and jazz via his interview blog, Heavy Metal Be-Bop. With this box, listeners get an opportunity to re-trace Shteamer's steps through the band's first three albums. (craw's fourth and final LP, 2002's Bodies for Strontium 90, is still available via Hydra Head.)
If you've never heard craw's work, you'd have every reason to be skeptical about how it might hold up in a climate where even groups like the Dillinger Escape Plan and Gorguts have a hard time keeping up with the accelerated mutation they inspired in other bands with their classic output. Indeed, Lost Nation Road, craw's 1994 sophomore LP, includes a song, "Bypass," that drifts uncomfortably close to the silt-coated riverbed that Tool illustrated so memorably on 1993's landmark Undertow. "Bypass" is immediately followed by "Botulism, Cholera + Tarik," a chaotic saxophone orgy (courtesy of guest horn players Matt Dufresne and Marcus Rosinski) that recalls the expulsive spirit of Mr. Bungle splattered with a little John Zorn for good measure.
Other than those two moments, however, this set demonstrates over and over how craw found their way to their own musical island, and listening to these three albums for the first time today is like traveling to a remote, untouched location and discovering strange wildlife and fauna that have evolved in genetic isolation. If you were forced to categorize this music—or, more aptly, to describe it in terms that people will understand—craw carved out a space where post-hardcore, technical metal, math rock, and experimental noise all flow together under a hazy smog of something that resembles jazz, but isn't always clearly definable as such.
Craw specialized in shifting, nonlinear song structures where rhythms, riffs, harmonies, and atmospheres seep into one another—a stark contrast from the enduring metal/post-hardcore standard where bands flash their chops by stringing together part after part after part. Craw actually had more in common with Pony Express Record-era Shudder to Think and These Arms Are Snakes than they ever did with Botch or Converge, and an unhinged semblance of jazz permeates their material like a spectral presence. Of course, their music sounds more fitting of a psychiatric ward than the urbane lounges—or even the piss-stained lower-Manhattan sidewalks—that jazz was heavily associated with in the '90s.
As much as bands like Candiria and Shining deserve credit for transplanting horns into their respective takes on street-level hardcore and black metal, craw were clearly aiming for a creative dimension you can't arrive at by stylistic gene-splicing alone. Neil Chastain, who played drums on the first two albums, helped shape craw's warped sense of structure by applying concepts he'd discovered in the music of Neubauten and Edgard Varèse. Likewise, guitarist and self-described "math and science geek" Rockie Brockway used a numbers-based system to write riffs. But those things don't necessarily do justice to the sound that craw came up with. "We were trying," Chastain recalls, "to dig through your comfort layers and make you feel something." The realization that this band was searching for something intangible lurks at every turn, but as you grow more familiar with craw's vocabulary, that "something" remains as vague and hard to pinpoint as it must have sounded to people's ears in the mid-'90s. And it is that mystery that ultimately pulls you in.
Shteamer recalls that at the six or seven craw shows he attended, there were fewer—"sometimes far fewer"—than 20 people in the room. Unsurprisingly, he brings a missionary's fervor to documenting the band's history via an accompanying 200-page book that comes stuffed with interviews (conducted by Shteamer himself), a complete catalog's worth of lyrics, and an abundance of photos, show flier and album artwork (much of it courtesy of famed cover artist Derek Hess), handwritten notes, a complete gigging history as best as everyone can remember it, and miscellaneous ephemera including a merch order invoice. According to Shteamer, even the most diehard experi-metal aficionados have never heard of craw, but this box presents as thorough an opportunity to play catch-up as one could ever hope to get for any artist, let alone a band that makes Barkmarket and Thought Industry look like household names by comparison.
The lyric sheets and voluminous interviews included in the book give listeners plenty of perspective on frontman Joe McTighe's way with words, but suffice it to say that his images walk the fine line between demented and acutely aware—much in the same way schizophrenics can appear at once utterly detached from "reality" while speaking with intuitive precision about their surroundings. McTighe's reference to the car-bombing of real-life environmental activist Judi Bari is as captivating as it is uncomfortable to stomach—and just one of many examples that set his lyrics in a class by themselves. Likewise, even through his barking/gurgling/whispering style, McTighe's words are almost always intelligible. Some heavy bands—the majority of them, arguably—play heavy music to aggress, to go fists-up and balls-out into life. For others such as craw, heaviness represents a barrier behind which one retreats and stews in observation of the outside world.
Early on in their career, craw moved away from a riff-based approach and began writing as an ensemble. It shows, more or less, from note one of this set. Musicians in particular should find craw's approach to structure especially illuminating, even though, when taken as one entire chunk, it's sometimes difficult to tell one album apart from another. It doesn't help that Steve Albini's thoroughly unremarkable recording style fails to capture the raw immediacy of a band in the room while also forcing the band to shy away from using the studio as a means to create the atmosphere and "album feel" that its material rightfully called for. Luckily, though, there are times when the audio mix recalls the charming timbre of the cassette demos that were common during craw's years of activity.
In any case, long before you arrive at 1997's Map, Monitor, Surge it becomes obvious that craw didn't fit any of the commonly accepted storylines that media outlets like this one depend on and, essentially, manufacture. And unlike, say, Helmet or the Jesus Lizard, craw didn't benefit from a media climate that embraced their exotic other-ness and allow them to exist in multiple camps simultaneously. Who knows what other factors played into craw's career trajectory, but looking back it's easy to imagine that this band was more or less destined for obscurity.
In the best sense of the term, craw's music is an acquired taste. Immediately on hitting play, one understands that this was not a band that got to the point quickly or shied away from making long, drawn-out albums. Sometimes, though, more does end up being more. And this box provides an appropriately exhaustive vehicle for taking the time it requires to sit with and digest a body of work that's still revealing itself to a lifelong fan like Hank Shteamer so long after the fact. Listening back, you have to wonder how many other trailblazing groups have existed that you'll never know about. But as you work your way through 1993-1997, you do get the distinct impression that none of them sounded quite like this.


The dance-pop icon selects her favorites remixes from a back catalog stuffed with club reworks, but her picks offer a curiously distorted look back at her history on the dancefloor.

Finally Enough Love

Few pop superstars have borrowed as much from club music as Madonna. Her decades at the top of the charts have been bolstered by a canny ability to co-opt contemporary dance sounds without scaring off the mainstream. Finally Enough Love is supposed to represent the singer’s own favorites from her extensive remix catalog. It’s an intriguing premise, promising a candid look at what this musical magpie makes of her excursions into club culture. Sadly, the compilation’s selling point also turns out to be its Achilles’ heel, with Madonna making what can only be seen as some pretty weird selections from her remix archive. (This first edition of the album has been whittled down to 16 tracks; a bounteous 50-track companion, Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones, titled in reference to the singer’s 50 Billboard chart-toppers, follows in August.)
Toward the start of her career, Madonna worked with a small number of remixers from her inner circle, like John “Jellybean” Benitez, who was the resident DJ at the Fun House club in New York where Madonna used to dance. As demand for remixers grew, she called on an increasing number of producers from further afield, and many of them, frankly, were not particularly worthy of the honor. These lesser names are over-represented on the second half of the album, which trails off dramatically.
It’s heartening, in a way, that Madonna has thrown in a load of her Y2K-era remixes simply because she likes them. But Eddie Amador’s leaden and infuriatingly sexless “Club 5 Edit” of Hard Candy’s “Give It 2 Me” probably isn’t even Eddie Amador’s favorite late-period Madonna remix, while the jubilant and cheeky “Music” deserves so much better than Washington, D.C. duo Deep Dish’s dull-as-Deep-Dishwater “Dot Com Radio Edit.” The fact that workaday Israeli DJ and producer Offer Nissim appears twice across the album’s 16 tracks, while the Pet Shop Boys’ fantastically chiseled take on “Sorry” only turns up on 50 Number Ones, is a cultural facelift akin to Cecilia Gimenez’ scandalous attempts to clear up the Ecce Homo fresco.
At their worst, there is something rote and functional about the mid-to-late-period remixes that dominate the second half of Finally Enough Love, as if Madonna needed something to get played in the fashionable New York clubs from which she emerged, and didn’t care all that much about how she did it. The fact that Madonna ostensibly cherishes these songs enough to pick them out of the business-house bin of history isn’t enough to rescue them from ignominy.
The other baffling call on Finally Enough Love is the decision to include remix edits rather than the full remixes themselves, when often the whole point of the remakes was to create extended jams that would work for dancefloors and DJs alike. The version of “Into the Groove” included on Finally Enough Love, for example, is the “You Can Dance Remix Edit,” a truncated take on the magnificent eight-minute-plus remodel that Benitez and True Blue producer Patrick Leonard created for You Can Dance, Madonna’s 1987 remix album; the decision is akin to buying a dog that loves to swim, then locking it in the laundry room.
The “You Can Dance Remix Edit” of “Into the Groove” (which this compilation makes available digitally for the first time) is glorious even in its truncation, with instrumental effects, stuttering vocals, and occasional rhythmic flourishes offering a sparkling alternative flavor to one of Madonna’s most iconic hits. But it invites damning comparison with Madonna’s previous work. You Can Dance was an essential Madonna release for the way it showed how a huge pop act could live in parallel to the club underground; Finally Enough Love feels more like a collection of footnotes. (In the case of 50 Number Ones, a very long and tangled set of footnotes.)
Questionable curatorial choices aside, there is plenty of incredible music on Finally Enough Love. “Everybody,” “Into the Groove,” “Like a Prayer,” and “Express Yourself” may appear as rather stingy remix edits, but they are still “Everybody,” “Into the Groove,” “Like a Prayer,” and “Express Yourself”—four of the best singles of the 1980s, and near-perfect examples of how club culture can be directed toward the mainstream without sacrificing its sass or vigor. Shep Pettibone’s canny, percussion-heavy remix of “Express Yourself,” meanwhile, goes a long way to explaining why he was the remixer of choice for ’80s pop megastars, capable of teasing out a club groove with a few well-placed tweaks while maintaining the integrity of the original song.
Shuffling forward in time, David Morales’ “David’s Radio Edit” of “Deeper and Deeper” and Junior Vasquez’s “Junior’s Luscious Single Mix” of “Secret” are scintillating examples of the early-1990s New York house sound: all tough, swung beats, perky keyboard lines, and perfectly coiled tension. And Stuart Price’s raucous “SDP Extended Vocal Edit” of “Hung Up” (a song he produced in the first place) is a wonderful example of how 2000s Madonna connected with the European dance underground on her fantastic 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor.
Sadly, it’s not quite enough. Finally Enough Love is good when it should be spectacular; frustrating when it could be fantastic, a mixed bag where we deserved solid gold. You could accept the odd strange song selection, maybe, but Finally Enough Love makes the erstwhile Queen of Pop feel inexcusably boring at times—which is the one thing Madonna at her prime would never countenance.


With their third album, the Montréal band TOPS have sharpened their hooks and clarified their aesthetic. These slyly-produced soft rock tunes carry a plush atmosphere and vintage warmth.

Sugar at the Gate

When they formed in 2011, TOPS were among a crop of Montréal indie bands involved with Arbutus Records, a label that came into prominence after releasing Grimes’ early albums and co-releasing 2012 breakout Visions with 4AD. Following Grimes’ success, watchful eyes turned their sights to her peers, looking to crack the code in the city’s scene. Among their compatriots—Blue Hawaii, Sean Nicholas Savage, Braids, and Majical Cloudz—TOPS were the most aligned to conventional notions of rock and pop, a throwback AM-rock band amid a sea of indie-tronica. Their fuzzy, honey-dipped songs were straight out of the school of Fleetwood Mac and Mazzy Star: eminently listenable, easy to digest, romantic, and catchy. For their third record, Sugar at the Gate, the band relocated to Los Angeles and  recorded at a former brothel in Jewel City. Sugar at the Gate mirrors this sordid and light-filled clime—which is wholly appropriate for a band that has always been a lot sunnier than the city they hail from.
TOPS is anchored by the singer Jane Penny, whose voice embodies the deep nostalgia that the band’s music projects. Something about her style feels anachronistic—contemporary rock music always draws on previous eras, be it 1990s indie or 1980s punk, but rarely do singers have such a vintage warmth. Her soprano luxuriates in its own imperfections, and some sly production allows it to sound fuzzy and blown out, mimicking the feeling of a cassette you found at a garage sale. In fact, the whole album bears this considered lo-fi sound: like vaseline rubbed along a camera’s lens to give a photo an old-timey aesthetic, the songs on Sugar at the Gate are perfectly old feeling. Take, for example, “Petals”—with its strutting guitar riffs, sweet choruses, and rinky-dink synths, it would not have sounded out of place on drive-time soft-rock radio circa 1977. It’s the kind of rock song that would be perfect for a David Lynch film, smokey and slightly kitschy—absolutely redolent of the past.
If anything, Sugar at the Gate represents the perfection of a formula; TOPS are workmanlike in their insistent repetition. It’s hard to distinguish one song from the next, and instead they flow into each other like syrup falling from a glass bottle. This is in part due to David Carriere’s impossibly catchy guitar riffs and Riley Fleck’s understated drumming. In tandem, the two create a plush atmosphere for Penny’s singing. Carriere’s guitar lines are simple and well-executed—generous in their grooves, but filled with static, recalling Jim Reid at one moment and Lee Ranaldo the next. This especially evident on songs like “Dayglo Bimbo,” which channel Sonic Youth at their poppiest.
But Sugar at the Gate proves that TOPS are not out to reinvent the wheel. Lyrically, none of the lines Penny and Carriere write are all that memorable. Even in surreal moments (“I was hypnotized by why/We could not kill the light”), they mostly kowtow to convention (“It’s time to start again/I know I’ll never win”), writing standard-fare love songs. What sets TOPS apart is their consistency—across three records, they've sharpened their clean hooks and clarified their aesthetic—making soft rock songs that sound good on repeat. Overall, Sugar at the Gate is a compact record from a band chugging along smoothly, unspooling sweet rhythms like it is finally their job.


This thoughtful, earnest, cerebral MC might be a prototypical "rapper liberal arts kids like," but he's also ferociously on-point and prodigiously skilled.

I Heard It Today

If Kanye West came into the game as "the first with a Benz and a backpack," then Mr. Lif was surely "the first with dreadlocks and Harry Potter glasses." The thoughtful, earnest, and unapologetically cerebral Bostonian might be a prototypical "rapper that liberal arts kids like," but he's also ferociously on-point and prodigiously skilled. His last full-length, Mo'Mega, winningly mixed warnings about government conspiracies and mind control with disarming odes to his unborn children and truly unexpected feminine-hygiene advice. On new album I Heard It Today, he takes this autobiographical tack a step further, fashioning each song as a sort of unfiltered blog-entry reaction to the news as it happens. He wrote, recorded, and released to blogs the songs on the record over the course of fall 2008, as the economy plummeted, election fever set in, and Barack Obama won the Presidency. Lif's intentions-- to heat up his politics with personal immediacy-- are admirable, but the result, unfortunately, recreates a bit too successfully how it might feel to read a Mr. Lif Huffington Post column.
The successes and failures divide pretty evenly into songs that benefit from the sense they were spilled out in one long breath and ones that feel like they were written on a napkin minutes before recording. "Welcome to the World" and "What About Us?" were penned, as Lif tells us in the liner notes, as responses to the collapse of the world economy and the bailout plan, respectively, and they are sincerely aggrieved, gut-level blasts that benefit from the surging beats (by some dude named, no joke, Batsauce) that nicely recreate the sort of muscular apocalypse-rap Lif was rhyming over on the Emergency Rations EP. Other songs fall prey to the Cornel West rap-album-as-seminar problem, where Lif get so worked up he sort of forgets he's supposed to be rapping: "It hurts that even our most prestigious leaders cannot shun what these centuries of hatred have done" or "They were willing to give people with bad credit loans because they knew within a few years, we're out of our homes and they can buy up all the same properties" might be salient points, but they don't exactly make for natural-sounding lines.
Which brings us to the other problem: Lif's always had passion and verbal dexterity to burn, but his lyrics typically don't offer much that you can't gather from your first Propagandhi album or an Alan Moore graphic novel. It doesn't help that he still insists on saying things like "We should use our mind power to collapse the walls." He also remains touchingly convinced that his decision to wear dreadlocks is controversial in any way, shape, or form: "While I'm walking down the street, I see it all the time/ People looking at me like my dreads are a crime/ They signify the fact that I refuse to conform/ And I rock 'em real thick, cuz I'm allergic to the norm." His most thoughtful moment on I Heard It Today comes on "Head High", where his indignation cools a bit and and he gets reflective: "It hurts me to the marrow when I drive through the ghetto/ And see my peoples caught up in a life that won't let go/ And what's weird is/Few of them will hear this/ Melody I'm pouring from my heart so fearless." It's moments like these that make Lif so appealing: he might be touring the Seven Sisters college circuit for the rest of his career, but he embraces his turf wholeheartedly and raps with palpable zeal and conviction. Unfortunately, the ratio of thoughtful zeal to clunky screed this time around is decidedly not in his favor.


These unearthed recordings of an early solo piano performance showcase the composer’s ecstatic approach to melody and repetition.

1980

Katrina Krimsky unleashes a vibrant spectrum of colors from just a few looping melodies. The pianist’s compositions and improvisations build from small, repeated phrases, creating dreamy patterns in their interweaving. Her light, fluid music draws from her experiences performing in eclectic corners of the 20th century avant-garde—notably playing works by electronic trailblazers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luc Ferrari and minimalist pioneers Terry Riley and La Monte Young. When she turned to composition in the 1980s, her pieces naturally emerged as a hybrid of contemporary styles, finding a sublime depth within every pattern she dreamt up. 1980, an unearthed solo piano recording from a June 1980 concert in Woodstock, New York, introduces the effervescent oscillations that would become Krimsky’s signature, showcasing the artist as she began to solidify her compositional voice.
Krimsky performed the music of 1980 while visiting Woodstock’s Creative Music Studio, which at the time was a hotbed for musical exploration. The evening marked a turning point in her musical practice—it was an early performance of material she composed and improvised, rather than material composed by others that she later interpreted. It also provided a lens into the lattice-like compositions that she’s written throughout her career. Across three tracks, Krimsky presents three different ways of creating a trance from undulating melodies, making music akin to her minimalist counterpoints and Keith Jarrett alike. With each return, her motifs take on a different mood—what may have at one point felt cheery might turn ominous—displaying how a change in perspective can affect a sequence of notes, not unlike meditation. In the liner notes for the release, Krimsky describes her love of patterning as a “search,” a means to an end of finding resonance. As her ostinati inch closer together, she writes, “It makes me free, another dimension happens.”
In the opening seconds of the 42-minute “Soundscape,”  Krimsky lays out a rippling motif that loops throughout as other moody tones swirl around it. Though her gentle style often feels pastoral, here, there’s a hint of tension driven by the music’s rumbling, low notes; they chug along like a train that’s late to the station, picking up tension with every repetition and every trill. Krimsky examines her themes from every angle; gradually, a bright-hued, higher-pitched melody derived from the earlier motif emerges, presenting a new take on what we’ve already heard. And while much of her music ends up feeling ecstatic, she also touches on darker emotions, which make the bright spots feel even sunnier. She pauses, stretches notes, lets them sit awhile and ruminate. In a few moments on 1980, her oscillations even drop out, revealing dissonant, faraway clangor. It’s brief—her melodies return, stronger, brighter, within minutes—but their absence underscores how she explores each color and texture.
Documenting the start of her journey as a composer, 1980 presents Krimsky’s work at its most stripped-down and exploratory as she works through the ideas that would go on to define her voice. In some cases, the distinct pieces on 1980 would even return later in her career. “Stella Malu,” the album’s upbeat finale, returned in a more melancholy form on 1982’s Stella Malu; in this version, Krimsky slows her melodies down, transforming its peppy rhythms into pensive, meandering swaths of sound. It’s another example of the staying power of her vivid approach—though they’re just a few repeating notes, Krimsky finds new angles within them, teasing out different harmonies and moods. Every time, she shows us that there’s more left to say.


The Chilean-born, UK-raised producer continues his work to breathe life into techno and meticulously break down the division between texture and rhythm.

The Assistenz

If the grid is what gives techno its shape and its structure, then resisting the grid—warping its contours, cheating its grip, slipping through hidden cracks—is what gives techno its life. Syncopation, flux, slippage: These are all strategies for escaping the rigidity of the too-perfect beat, and all of these escape hatches have long been at the center of Cristian Vogel’s work. The Chilean-born, UK-raised producer has spent his entire career teasing out a fundamental contradiction: Repetition is both techno’s defining feature and its Achilles’ heel.
Vogel got his start in Brighton’s anarchic techno scene alongside artists like Si Begg and Subhead and in the mid-’90s on Berlin’s Tresor label, he began brokering a series of unstable truces between order and chaos. Compared to most techno, Vogel’s sounds have always been especially untamed. On landmark albums like All Music Has Come to an End and Dungeon Master, he favored squeals and squelches, a metallic scrape and glassy clank, all lending to an impression of greased ball bearings tossed on a dusty floor. It was techno that was designed to trip you up.
For the past decade, Vogel has focused his efforts on making music with Kyma, a complex software application and programming language geared toward generative processes and the real-time control of advanced sound design. Autechre are among Kyma’s best-known adopters, but its use extends far beyond experimental dance music; the WALL-E sound designer Ben Burtt used it to fashion the voices of the film’s robots, “performing” their pixelated pitch-shifting using a light pen and a tablet. In Vogel’s hands, the tools help him achieve a kind of rhythmic, loop-based music that is constantly morphing.
The Assistenz builds upon the sounds and ideas that run through 2012’s The Inertials and 2014’s Polyphonic Beings, juggling dub-techno, industrial crunch, and the queasy tones of academic computer music. A fine, grey dust seems to cover everything, and every beat kicks up tiny squalls of soot. He concentrates mostly on the tempo range between 130 and 150 beats per minute, forgoing four-to-the-floor rhythms in favor of lurching, uneven cadences. “Vessels” hurtles along like a ghost train just barely clinging to the rails, and though the force of the drums is unmistakably violent, it feels muted by the reverb that hangs over it. “Telemorphosis” has a similarly contradictory feel, with zapping electrical frequencies smothered by thick, noxious fumes. Part of his project entails breaking down the division between texture and rhythm: The deeper you listen, the more microscopic textural elements blossom into finely detailed patterns. To peer into the penumbra of these tracks is like getting lost in the inky tangle of an Albrecht Dürer woodcut. But Vogel isn’t above bashing out a spectacularly forceful groove, either. The shuddering electro of “Cubic Haze” is built around a gut-punching 808 whose every hit seems, like the bullets in The Matrix, to displace the air around it in tight, concentric rings.
The album is a pretty bleak affair. After all, it gets its name from a graveyard in Copenhagen, the city where Vogel recorded it. And if the album has a flaw, it’s that the mood is a little too uniform. Even given Vogel’s habit of changing up the flow mid-track only to drop out the beat and simply let everything breathe for a bit, the first four tracks pile up like a slow-motion car crash. Fortunately, the album’s back half is more varied. Immediately following “Cubic Haze,” the record’s rhythmic highlight, “Signal Symbol” offers a gorgeous stretch of luminous, beatless drones reminiscent of Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas material; at five-and-a-half minutes, it could easily go four times as long. Vogel brings his rhythmic interests and his ambient skills together on “Barefoot Agnete,” The Assistenz*’s* centerpiece and indisputable highlight. Throughout the album, faint murmurs can occasionally be picked out of the murk, but the haunting “Barefoot Agnete” is the only track to put the voice front and center. As a skeletal drum pattern beats out a ritualistic rhythm, a woman’s wordless voice is digitally liquefied until it burbles like a mountain spring. For eight minutes, nothing changes except the small contours of that voice as it trickles into the darkness, and it is absolutely spellbinding.


The leader of indie rock band 31Knots teams with folkie Corrina Repp for a project that's not simply the sum of their parts.

Hearts on Hold

To their credit, Tu Fawning are not simply the sum of their parts. The brainchild of Joe Haege and Corrina Repp, the band has little in common with either the sprained indie rock of his longtime group 31Knots or the muted folk excursions of her solo output. These two Portlanders have, however, lent their talents to each other's records in the past, and Tu Fawning grew out of Haege backing Repp on a European tour a few years ago before it expanded into a quartet of busy multi-instrumentalists. The most outstanding aspect of their debut full-length, Hearts on Hold, is how different this new act is from anything they've ever done. Guitar is only a walk-on; these songs are built on a foundation of droning horns, ambient sounds, and rumbling drums (mostly courtesy of percussionist Toussaint Perrault). Repp sings more forcefully and brazenly in this setting, drawing out her syllables languidly and paring down the lyrics to their barest syllables.
So, Tu Fawning is a means to indulge all the impulses that don't fit with their day-job acts-- an opportunity to start anew with a different set of rules, influences, and possibilities. Hearts on Hold certainly bears that out; its title is the only mundane thing about it. These songs are crammed with ideas and sounds, inventive and fluid as they bend and change shape. A baleful trumpet loop anchors opener "Multiply a House", forming an eerie backdrop whose simplicity reinforces its trip-hop potency. That horn will appear throughout the album, nodding alternately to Haege and Repp's love of early twentieth-century jazz and to cheesy neo-noir soundtracks (remember "The Salton Sea"?). Such associations are tempered by the percussion, which strictly regiments most of these songs. The simple time-keeping tap of "Lonely Nights" suggests the regular thrust of a pickaxe or shovel, which, along with the ominous call-and-response, evokes a field holler or prison work song.
Anchored to prominent drums and gloomy airs, Tu Fawning make a noise that might be best described as organic industrial. Yet, in this context the rigid rhythms of that genre sound stiff, convoluted, and-- perhaps most damningly-- premeditated. The musicians are so intent on creating and sustaining such dark moods that they dampen the songs rather than free them. "Just Too Much" struggles to live up to its title, to go off the rail and lead them into danger. Even as they build to a promised payoff, Tu Fawning rein everything in, creating a sense of timidity and truncation. It's a missed opportunity-- and not the only one on Hearts on Hold. The moody atmosphere is an end in itself for the band, but it would make a better starting point.


The Canadian musician’s latest album is his most ambitious yet: a lush, cryptic, and creepy suite that questions the very concept of love.

Norm

God and the devil have preoccupied Andy Shauf’s work since the beginning. Sometimes, he paints sympathetic portraits; on 2009’s “The Devil,” he describes a lovesick Satan, clutching a bottle and weeping over the souls he’s ushered to hell. On the 2012 murder ballad “Wendell Walker,” the title character hears the voice of God urging him to rescue his wife from an affair by killing her lover. For over a decade, these visitations have helped to contextualize the complex characters in the Canadian songwriter’s elaborate storylines. His eighth album, Norm, is his most meticulous and beguiling, straying from his semi-autobiographical past work to span three perspectives and tactfully downplaying its philosophical quandaries with his lushest arrangements to date.
From the social anxiety of 2016’s The Party to the wistful bar-hopping of 2020’s The Neon Skyline, Shauf’s previous concept albums explored the humdrum lives of relatable characters. This time around, the narrators are more unknowable—and, sometimes, all-knowing. On lead single and album opener “Wasted on You,” Shauf writes from the perspective of God and Jesus as two bros brainstorming an idea for their new startup: Christianity. “What happens when they die?” God asks his son in the opening line. “Maybe eternal life? But only if they find me.” As if tossing out ideas in a sitcom writers’ room, Shauf breezes through concepts that have incited doctrinal wars. “Maybe I’ll send you down, give them a clue…. Then they’ll kill you.”
This isn’t a biblical outlier amid more down-to-earth material; it’s the album’s thematic root. With “Catch Your Eye” and “Telephone,” Shauf introduces the main character, Norm, a lovelorn stoner determined to turn his meet-cute fantasies into reality as he desperately stalks his crush from the grocery store. These brief half-encounters—running into her around town, calling her and quickly hanging up—escalate into an alarming routine. Soon, he’s standing outside her window, hiding behind a tree, or trailing her to the theater.
All the while, someone else is following the action: God. When Norm hides in the bushes outside his crush’s house, the Lord watches over him, making sure the leaves cover his shoulders. As the plot thickens with the introduction of the woman’s worried acquaintance and an open-ended, possibly nefarious car ride, Shauf’s romantic inquiries grow more open-ended and existential. By the end of the record, it’s difficult to say which characters come away together or even alive. “What if God didn’t understand what love was?” is how Shauf poses the album’s motivating question. “I wanted to make love songs that were disconnected from romanticizing love,” he told Stereogum. “If there’s a reality to it, it’s that we’re always getting it wrong.”
Narrative twists and divine intervention are not the only tools Shauf uses to complicate his story. Play Norm in the background and notice its unburdened, graceful tone, the easeful glide of the instrumentation. Shauf’s needlepoint vocal delivery, at times reaching a newly unlocked high register, is a highlight. Pastel synths glint through “Telephone” and “Don’t Let It Get to You” like highway lights, while clarinets flutter alongside piano on “You Didn’t See.” The light arrangements evaporate into the air like fragrance, but, weighted with the story’s spiritual ambiguity, each note feels worthy of obsession. Even at their most obscure, Shauf’s songs are as alive and full of mystery as the stranger beside you at checkout.


The 30th-anniversary reissue of this dream-pop landmark includes a second disc of demos, capturing a celebrated band already eager to move onto new sounds.

The Comforts of Madness

In 1990, shortly after his dream-pop band Pale Saints released their acclaimed debut album The Comforts of Madness, bassist, vocalist, and bandleader Ian Masters was already feeling restless. During an interview with MTV’s 120 Minutes, he and his bandmates—drummer Chris Cooper and guitarist Graeme Naysmith—were asked if they had favorite songs from the album. Masters quickly batted the question aside. “My favorite’s always the new ones,” he told the unseen interviewer. “I get really bored of playing the same songs all the time.”
It’s exactly the kind of cheeky remark you’d expect from a young musician riding the wave of a successful album (it landed at number 40 on the UK charts). But Masters’ impatience illuminates his mercurial post-Pale Saints career as well as the capricious spirit of the songs on Madness. Newly remastered and reissued by 4AD in celebration of its 30th anniversary, the album feels volatile even at its most introspective. Throughout 11 tracks, the trio maintains a tricky balance between the sugar rush of their C86 influences and the hypnotic churn of psychedelia. Nowhere is that more obvious than on their cover of “Fell From The Sun” by the Paisley Underground group Opal. In Pale Saints’ version, the gallop of the original is rendered, by turns, as a Fairport Convention-like ramble and a speedy Wedding Present fuzzfest.
What this reissue makes clear is how much of Madness’ iridescent sound is the work of producers Gil Norton and John Fryer. The deluxe edition includes a second disc of demos recorded at Masters’ Woodhouse Studio. Those earlier recordings are much rawer and more direct, while revealing the strength of the bare-bones material. Fryer and Norton brought the band more in line with the 4AD aesthetic, coating Naysmith’s guitar in washed-out colors, adding layers of compression and some dub-style effects to Cooper’s drums, and finding ways to thread the songs together so that the vinyl sides flow seamlessly.
The band also allowed the producers to reshape some material. In demo form, “Insubstantial” splays out a bit more, with a meandering opening section. With Norton’s help, Naysmith’s shimmering lead comes to the fore, alongside a touch of hand percussion, providing a nice counterbalance to Masters’ wispy singing. Fryer pushes “Sight of You” away from pure Spacemen 3 worship toward its dream-pop pinnacle by dialing back the delay pedal and cranking its coiled bassline. Masters may have gotten bored with it eventually, but in this version of the song, he sounds invigorated.
As Masters promised, he and Pale Saints didn’t stick in this mode for long. The group added a second guitarist (Meriel Barham) and with their second album In Ribbons, steered into lusher, more measured compositions. After touring to support that record, Masters left the group, exploring more psych folk territory with Spoonfed Hybrid and ESP Summer, his project with His Name Is Alive’s Warren Defever. These days he makes what he calls “confusion jazz” as a member of the experimental duo Big Beautiful Bluebottle.
It’s a wonder anyone involved with Pale Saints could keep him still long enough to record Madness. Watching and listening as Masters has spun off in as many different directions as he has only makes this album feel even more special; a brilliant, vivid snapshot of an artist and a band at the very beginning of a fascinating and unpredictable journey.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Lockhart, Texas band moves easily between folky Americana and Renaissance-esque ditties, conjuring strange stories as if through a Ouija board.

Merlynn Belle

On Merlynn Belle, Tele Novella offer a ticket to a time-traveling ghost town tour. The Lockhart, Texas band’s second album shifts easily between style, genre, and time period, moving from folky Americana to Renaissance-esque ditties, from cabaret ballads to baroque pop and psychedelic rock, from the Old West to a previous century. Ultimately, Merlynn Belle is about grief, loss, and longing, conjuring its subjects as if through a Ouija board: We hear about a witch who dines on crystals, a beautiful girl who’s involved in a murder, and a shrine illuminated by candles where petitioners write their dreams on scraps of paper.
Merlynn Belle, Tele Novella’s first album for Kill Rock Stars, is also the first album as a duo for singer-songwriter Natalie Ribbons (formerly of Agent Ribbons) and multi-instrumentalist Jason Chronis (formerly of Voxtrot); Sarah La Puerta and Danny Reisch provide additional vocals and instrumentation. The band’s previous album, 2016’s House of Souls, explored Ribbons’ penchant for an uncanny story, but its macabre imagery was often covered in shimmery psych-rock guitars. Merlynn Belle trades House of Souls’ more polished production for the DIY feel of an eight-track cassette, setting Ribbons’ voice against a cornucopia of instruments including harmonium, autoharp, Optigon, vibraphone, and a yard tool known as the Garden Weasel. If House of Souls was one great vintage coat, Merlynn Bell holds the key to the entire costume department.
Ribbons steps immediately into her role as narrator on the album’s psychedelic country love ballad of an opener, “Words That Stay.” Her careful enunciation evokes a cabaret singer in the dust of a pink stage light, asking, “Where did you go?/Nobody knew you were gone.” Punctuated by flamenco-like guitar flourishes, she yo-yos between a raspy alto and a soft yodel that taps against her upper register. Here, and on “Paper Crown,” her vocals bring to mind Angel Olsen’s on Burn Your Fire for No Witness. Approached from a different angle, “Paper Crowns”’s eerie, lullaby-like melodies and Ribbons’ sing-song delivery suggest the unblinking smile of an animatronic figure. But for all its mystery, this song, like many of the others, ends with a charmed sense of resolve.
At times, Tele Novella push the stylistic boundaries a little too far and the album’s spell breaks. “One Little Pearl” sounds like accidentally wandering into a recital of medieval hymns; “Crystal Witch” evokes a beleaguered rock opera, with Ribbons singing, “No, no, get out, begone/No, no, you don’t belong,” as if she’s trying to remove a hex. But while it’s easy to imagine Tele Novellea’s rapid oscillation of styles leaving you carsick, Merlynn Belle is grounded by its evocative imagery and by Ribbons’ unique narrative voice. The final effect is less dizzying than it is intoxicating.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Marrying the shimmery indie-dance of Saint Etienne and the Field Mice's starry-eyed earnestness, Swedish singer/songwriter Mikael Carlsson's full-length debut is a staggering monument to gentle loners everywhere.

Here Comes the Future

Pop history is full of loners, rebels, and social misfits. As introverted adolescents, Elvis Presley and Kurt Cobain both got bullied. You could argue that rock'n'roll itself began with James Dean. No one can ever seem to agree on a better starting point, anyway-- Ike Turner's "Rocket 88" in 1951? T-Bone Walker's "Rock Awhile" in 1949? Uhh, Trixie Smith's "My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)" in 1922?-- so it might as well be a guy who lived fast, died at 24, and inspired everyone from Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles to Morrissey and Ian Curtis. If most rock long ago ceased to seem rebellious, maybe it's because the macho cock-rockers of the 1970s and 80s ignored Dean's most revolutionary (possibly apocryphal) dictum: "Only the gentle are ever really strong."
Dean shows up on Here Comes the Future, Swedish singer/songwriter Mikael Carlsson's full-length debut as the Honeydrips. So does plenty of other pop history-- Joy Division's Curtis included. Like the Knife, Jens Lekman, and Sincerely Yours label chiefs the Tough Alliance, Carlsson is based out of Gothenburg, Sweden, where he used to sing lead for Dorotea, a punk-spiked indie-pop group in the style of the Television Personalities, the Wedding Present, or the June Brides. A few years ago, Carlsson started releasing CD-Rs and a 7" single under his current moniker, moving a bit toward the shimmery indie-dance of Saint Etienne. Embracing even more the Field Mice's starry-eyed earnestness, Carlsson has now built a staggering monument to gentle loners everywhere-- and one of the best twee-pop albums of 2007.
"Please, let's not talk about the past," Carlsson sings on Here Comes the Future's title track. It's hard not to, though. For one thing, Carlsson's reverb-bathed vocals have the aching imperfections of Lawrence, from too-often-overlooked 1980s UK pop act Felt. And he's constantly invoking the past, whether lyrically or musically. Acoustic-jangling "I Wouldn't Know What to Do" imagines the intimate scene from the Smiths' classic awkward-mixtape starter, "Reel Around the Fountain" (you know, "15 minutes with you") and admits that he'd spend it in... virginal confusion. The most Field Mice-like moment, "Wait for the Grief to Come", is as "difficult" as that band in the intensity of its romanticized frailty: "I don't want to socialize, not tonight or tomorrow night," Carlsson whispers, as distant electric guitar doubles his winding acoustic guitar figures, joined by glockenspiel and, eventually, whistling. Good grief, eh?
As much as Carlsson may remember the past, he never merely revisits it. "It Was a Sunny Summer Day" sets a lockstep New Order bass riff beneath sighing, autumnal synths, beating back Mancunian misery via fair-weather melody until the whole song suddenly veers off into a Brazilian Carnivale. Then there's the obvious Joy Division nod, "(Lack of) Love Will Tear Us Apart", a wistful falling-out-of-love song with crackling Euro-house drum programming, faraway multi-tracked vocals by Hanna Göranson of Gothenburg electro-pop duo Cat 5, and a faltering rap verse (!) from Carlsson. If this one never gets played at a middle-school dance, the industry is in worse shape than we thought.
Here Comes the Future is packed with what the pros still call "perfect pop", but despite clocking in at just 34 minutes, it works as more than a collection of singles. "The Strangest Dream" starts off with a glance backward, then sets the emotional stakes dangerously high: "Last night I had the strangest dream/ I met the boy who raped you," Carlsson sings over intricate acoustic guitar, emphatic bass, tambourine, and a "Be My Baby" beat that is thankfully understated. "Trying Something New" combines more early-New Order rhythmic drive with arena-sized guitars, gusting synths, and terse lyrics about "a place where you and I can go." On "The Walk", tambourine backs a traipsing tune about a visit from ever-present Death. Amid flutes and loungey chords, finale "In Some Distant Future" goes back to to the opening "dream" theme, again on a scale that's both epic and intimate. Carlsson dreams of post-apocalyptic archaelogists, digging for clues about our civilization. They find a list of his dream girl's lovers-- and on it, our narrator's name.
Dean finally makes his appearance on "Fall From a Height", a hypnotic dance track that's based, as Saint Etienne have done before, on a couple of spoken-word samples. Appropriately, this is Here Comes the Future at its most existential and its most romantic alike. Carlsson sings about literally falling to his death, then turns sappily metaphorical: "I think I'm falling for you." Meanwhile, the kid version of Woody Allen's Annie Hall character won't do his homework because he just found out the universe is going to end someday so now he knows everything is pointless, and Dean's interjecting out of Rebel Without a Cause: "If I had one day when I didn't have to be all confused, and I didn't have to feel that I was ashamed of everything. If I felt that I belonged someplace. You know?" Please, let's not talk about the past.
As with the Field Mice, the Honeydrips will be anathema to some, especially those who conflate bravery with balls, the avant-garde with equipment-measuring, or sex with conquest. It may be in humanity's animal nature to exploit every weakness and avenge every grievance, but our species' greatest hits have always suggested we were capable of something more. (Nietzsche might call that "slave morality," but whatever, he got syphilis.) On the Honeydrips' MySpace page, Carlsson quotes a line from one of Felt's best songs: "It's better to be lost than to be found." Here comes the end of the universe.


Even if the title of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings' fifth album invokes one of the more state-of-the-art slices of 70s soul as delivered by the O'Jays, Give the People What They Want finds the group staying in their late 1960s lane. It's an album built less on advancement than resilience.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings: Give the People What They Want

Give the People What They Want

If you wanted to pick two stories that defined the kind of year Sharon Jones had in 2013, it's easy to single out the first: the pancreatic cancer that struck the singer in the initial run-up to her new album. It's an ailment that grounded one of the most vibrant stage presences in R&B, and it seemed like a cruel rebuttal to a career built on long-due good fortune and a spirit that took on and beat all comers. That she intends to tour again soon after her recent final chemo treatment is a good omen, and with luck the disease will be just a footnote to a long career. The other story of note is the cameo Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings had in Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street: there they are, the singer and her group, standing onstage in the role of a wedding band playing James Bond supervillain torch song “Goldfinger” at the reception of a Caligula-minded stockbroker. A movie where a 21st century band plays 1960s music in a scene set in the early 90s—that's the context they found themselves in, and there are few better ways to show off just how unindebted to time they are.
Placing Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings at a certain space in time seems easy aesthetically; few bands' version of 1968 have lasted as long or as effectively as theirs. With a virtuoso versatility that all parties involved have cultivated, it wouldn't be a huge shock—much less a disappointment—if they deigned to cross that Nixon-era threshold and fool around with some “Blow Your Head”/“Funky Worm” synthesizers or put a little B.T. Express-style proto-disco hustle in their backbone. But even if the title of Give the People What They Want invokes one of the more state-of-the-art slices of 70s soul as delivered by the O'Jays, Jones and company stay in their more vintage lane. They might be a bit tighter than they were on 2002's Dap-Dippin'..., and they cut a bit more cleanly through their old-school analogue recording methods, but this is an album built less on advancement than resilience.
And this is an album with plenty of the latter. It isn't a sound anyone should take for granted, since it's been well-established that the blue-flame intensity of Jones' voice and the Dap-Kings' evocative arrangements aren't exactly common stock and would legitimately bring down the house anywhere from Coachella to Wattstax. Both singer and band have gotten so versed in their mixture of classic Southern soul and occasional flourishes of Motown or Philly soul opulence—transitions they make with a masterful smoothness—that even a first listen will make a song feel lived-in, with an “always been there” familiarity that hasn't yet gone threadbare. Even the cover art is a direct nod of a throwback—a more ornate riff on the sleeve of the Chi-Lites' 1971 LP (For God's Sake) Give More Power to the People.
That lets slip another commonality of theirs with vintage R&B—the idea of soul as a vehicle for social commentary. The fun irony of Jones and the Dap-Kings playing the on-screen Jordan Belfort's wedding is that their songs' sense of grievance, justice, and populist power has rarely felt stronger. Opener “Retreat!”, with its martial-march tweak of the Holland-Dozier-Holland that gave us “I Hear a Symphony”, is a massive kiss-off to some arrogant somebody-or-other that can't help but crumble in the face of “a woman scorned”—though any lingering spite is drowned out by the sheer joy of Jones expressing the strength needed to overcome someone else's misdeeds. “People Don't Get What They Deserve” is that rare dose of idealism-deflating reality that doesn't drown in its own bitter cynicism; Jones' sprint-paced rapport with the backup singer Dapettes doesn't sound jaded and world-weary enough, and right on to that. And “We Get Along” holds the prescription to endure—help and relief might be a long time coming, but being able to keep on doing it in the face of strife is a source of inner strength in the meantime. It's implicit gospel that puts its faith in the people.
Give the People What They Want is a pretty short 10 songs, though its breezy half-hour leaves plenty that sticks and plenty more worth revisiting when it doesn't. The collection's balance of rousing barn-burners and slower, sweeter break-up/make-up ballads (like the sun-streaked bliss of “Slow Down, Love”) keeps it moving. And it's all briskly impassioned enough to make most skeptics brush off the old “have I heard this before?” questions, even if this is one of the more get-what-you-expect albums of the early year. It's like peeking into an alternate reality where an artist like Lyn Collins or Marva Whitney could have a decade-plus career without having to worry about changes in trends—and it's long since been clear by now that Jones belongs in their class. May she remain unstoppable.


James Mercer takes his most recent album through the looking glass, flipping songs’ tempos and production styles on an eccentric mission of discovery.

The Worm’s Heart

What makes a song? Is it a series of notes, or is it everything around that core—the production choices, instrumental decisions and vocal inflections that bring a melody to life? Such is the question posed by The Worm’s Heart, the Shins’ sixth studio album. A year-late twin to 2017’s Heartworms, it arrives from a parallel universe where that album has been “flipped”: Slow songs become fast, fast become slow, pop turns to rock and rock turns to disco.
Faced with such an overhaul, it’s tempting to wonder if some simmering discontentment with Heartworms has been keeping James Mercer up at night. But that would be unfair: the Shins’ leader has always been a more experimental musician than he is given credit for, and Heartworms was a strong release, with a compelling production style that jumped between modern electronics, country warmth and good old-fashioned indie pop. For fans of that record—and it is hard to see non-devotees casually investigating The Worm’s Heart—the new album may initially prove hard to swallow.
For a start, it’s all over the place. Expecting stylistic consistency from a release like this may be a fool’s errand. But The Worm’s Heart takes Mercer’s eclectic spirit to groggy new heights, jumping in the first three numbers from the kind of slackened garage rock the Velvet Underground spat up on “Foggy Notion” (on “The Fear (Flipped)”) to a song that resembles LCD Soundsystem lost in the Christmas fog (“So Now What (Flipped)”) to a disco pop belter (“Heartworms (Flipped)”). Later, The Worm’s Heart offers us a piano-led torch song and a rather excruciating dash of rocksteady, neither a sound that anyone was especially clamoring for from the Shins.
The rocksteady number, “Half a Million (Flipped),” is the album’s nadir, strangling the song’s delicate melody with jaunty guitar chords out of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” Joining it in shame is “Mildenhall (Flipped)‚” which acid-washes the original’s laid-back country charm in the kind of beery rock drawl that bar bands revert to when they start running out of songs. “Name For You (Flipped)” is pretty horrible, too, drenching the goofy sweetness of the original in gloomy synths and distorted guitar.
Against these lows are two songs that rank among the very best in the Shins’ catalogue. “Cherry Hearts (Flipped),” originally a confused synth number, is transformed into a chest-beating rock anthem thanks to a fabulously Who-esque guitar riff. “Heartworms (Flipped)” goes the other way, mutating from a soporific, guitar-led daydream into an electrifying disco number that rouses like a long-lost ’80s hit, with a throbbing synth line and drums that stomp like Prince. Elsewhere, the impact of these transformations is less extreme. “Rubber Ballz (Flipped)” is an acoustic take on the Beatles-y Heartworms number that matches the original’s understated appeal, while both “The Fear (Flipped)” and “So Now What (Flipped)” end up feeling neither better nor worse than their 2017 editions, just different.
In the end, The Worm’s Heart proves the fairly obvious point that both song and surroundings are important, and reminds us that Mercer is an occasional master of both. It’s a pleasant oddity in the Shins’ catalogue—neither a dazzling reinvention of the original release (see: Massive Attack V Mad Professor’s towering No Protection) nor a hastily-assembled insult to the band’s creative work (like TRON: Legacy Reconfigured). If nothing else, it lets you cherry-pick the radical brilliance of “Cherry Hearts (Flipped)” and “Heartworms (Flipped)” for a playlist and forget the rest.


Green is defined by the tweaks R.E.M. made to their creative process, by the restlessness that destroys many bands but somehow revitalized these four musicians. The 1988 album marked many firsts for the band-- their first major label effort, their first LP to go double platinum, the first to achieve popularity in the UK.

R.E.M.: Green: 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition

Green: 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition

Eight years into a career that had started at a reclaimed church in Athens, Georgia, and ended up at Warner Brothers with an extremely artist-friendly contract, the members of R.E.M. were getting restless. They’d been touring almost nonstop throughout the 1980s and were understandably growing tired of their assigned instruments and their assumed roles in the band. So in 1988, when they holed up in a local studio to demo new songs, drummer Bill Berry called dibs on bass for one tune, while bass player Mike Mills moved over to keyboards. Peter Buck set aside his electric guitar and strummed a mandolin. Michael Stipe sang. According to Tony Fletcher’s massive band bio Perfect Circle, now out in its sixth edition in 25 years: “The process was partly an education, forcing themselves to learn to play equipment they’d often taken for granted, and partly to explore the inherent chemistry of the group, to see whether R.E.M. remained R.E.M. even when its characters changed their roles.”
The immediate result of this intraband game of musical chairs was “You Are the Everything”, a standout on their sixth album and major-label debut, Green. Against a chorus of nighttime crickets, Buck’s mandolin almost jangles, Berry’s bassline dances in the moonlight, and the effect is a curious Southern pastoral without precedent in R.E.M.’s catalog. The song would become crucial, however, to their future output, providing a musical and logistical blueprint for much of Out of Time and Automatic for the People-- the band’s most popular albums, which exploded their traditional drums-bass-guitar-singer line-up.
This alone would have been sufficient to establish Green as pivotal in R.E.M.’s catalog. Released on November 8, 1988-- the day Vice President George H.W. Bush was elected as the 41st President of the United States of America-- the album marks many firsts for the band. It was their first effort for a major label, and so understandably represented a gigantic risk. It was their first to go double platinum, which proves the risk paid off. It was their first to gain a popular foothold in the UK-- testament to Warner Brothers’ international reach. And yet, it’s that complete rethinking of the band’s line-up that defines Green 25 years later; listening to this newly remastered anniversary edition, it’s impossible to miss that sense of renewed purpose within the band, which both expanded and solidified their sound. If nothing else here sounds quite like anything R.E.M. had done in the past, it still sounded undeniably like R.E.M.
Green is an album of experiments. Freed from their usual roles, the band members tinkered with sugary pop, martial arena punk, fluttering folk rock, country flourishes, and dramatic dirges. Especially on the second side (referred to by the band as the “metal” side, referring not to the genre but to the element), these experiments collide for a set of songs as strong and as diverse as any sequence on previous albums. Stipe’s vocals overlap eerily on “The Wrong Child” to create an unsettlingly spectral roundelay. Against the military stomp of “Orange Crush” he sings through a megaphone that lends his vocals a corroded quality appropriate to the subject matter (namely, the degenerative effects of Agent Orange on U.S. soldiers). Foretelling the glam-rock attack of Monster, “Turn You Inside-Out” is a scabrous examination of the entertainer/audience relationship, while “I Remember California” grows so darkly ominous that it threatens to sink the Golden State in the Pacific.
Whereas Document, their final release for I.R.S. Records, sounded grimly solemn, Green is often positively giddy as the band try out new tricks and as Stipe grows more confident and charismatic as a frontman. The album contains some of the jauntiest and most upbeat tunes they had ever recorded, revealing a self-deflating sense of humor as well as a sophisticated self-awareness. “Pop Song ‘89” is a pop song about pop songs, with Stipe introducing himself (“Hi! Hi! Hi!”) before wondering, “Should we talk about the weather?/... Should we talk about the government?” Both subjects had figured prominently into his lyrics on previous albums, and R.E.M. were trying to figure out what to sing about next.
The joviality of tunes like “Get Up” and especially “Stand”, which dominated the “air” (or first) side, proved divisive, alienating long-time fans while attracting new listeners. Because MTV played the hell out of “Stand” and because this pop urge would culminate in the questionable “Shiny Happy People”, it’s all too easy to dismiss the pop songs on Green. They certainly haven’t aged as well as some of the other, graver tunes, but it’s intriguing to hear R.E.M. bring to the fore a playfulness that had previously only been shunted to the margins. Plus, there’s a certain charm to their unguarded goofiness, which seemed at odds with the band’s sense of purpose and Stipe’s cultivated enigma. And it extended to the packaging as well: the spot-gloss 4s on the over, the spiraling tree trunk on the CD, and especially the untitled closing track, which made it impossible to request at live shows. "Untitled" grows out of the same pop impulse that motivates “Stand”, yet the result is wide-eyed and big-hearted as Stipe delivers some of his most direct lyrics. The music is simple, shaky, even arguably unprofessional, as Buck lays down a rudimentary drumbeat and Mills interjects an emphatic organ riff. Even on a major label, R.E.M. were still trying to shirk the trappings of their newfound celebrity, to play with their own image, to bend the language of pop music to convey their own ideas rather than fix their ideas to the mechanics of pop.
Still, R.E.M. were professionals. In the studio they might have switched things up, but on stage they hunkered down into their individual roles and did their jobs with exciting efficiency. The success of first Document and then Green meant they were playing increasingly larger venues, and the long run of dates burned them out so much that they would decide not to tour for their next two albums. So the live bonus disc on this reissue, recorded at the Greensboro Coliseum in North Carolina (friendly territory for the band, as the crowd on this recording makes clear), shows R.E.M. at the height of their abilities as a live act, with a strong batch of songs and a relentless intensity. The tempos are quick, the dynamic rowdy-- almost impatient on “The One I Love” and “Life and How to Live It”. Songs from Murmur and Lifes Rich Pageant sound rejuvenated in this context, meshing naturally with the newer material; early versions of “Belong” and “Low” point the way forward. “This song goes out to… you,” Stipe says before the band launches into “You Are the Everything”.
Green is defined by the tweaks R.E.M. made to their creative process, by the restlessness that destroys many bands but somehow revitalized these four musicians. For that reason, this reissue of Green is incomplete: it lacks those original demos R.E.M. made in Athens, when they were still figuring out that they could shuffle the deck, exchange instruments and roles, redefine the band without changing its membership. On the other hand, the concert disc provides some valuable insight into the afterlives of these songs: how the band lived with them, how they played them, mutated them. On these live tracks, you can hear the old bar band that cut its teeth covering “Stepping Stone” and “Hippy Hippy Shake” on cramped stages in tiny clubs around Athens. In other words, R.E.M. at their greenest.


This internet-enabled rap trio’s new collaborative album is a brief blast of unruly energy that bounces between 5G towers in New York, Atlanta, Milwaukee, and beyond.

Polo Perks  / FearDorian / AyooLii: A Dog’s Chance

A Dog’s Chance

Atlanta producer-rapper FearDorian first asked to join the NYC hip-hop collective Surf Gang six years ago. It didn’t work out—Dorian was then just 12 years old—but the young artist was undeterred, steadily racking up internet collaborations with everyone from digicore wunderkind d0llywood1 to skater-turned-lyricist Na-Kel Smith. Along the way, he co-produced tracks with Surf Gang triumvir Harrison and began sending beats to one of the collective’s OG members, Polo Perks.
Perks and Dorian make a sensible combination on paper, drawing equally from the 2020s SoundCloud underground and mid-2000s Warped Tour-adjacent detritus even as their music moves in different directions. Their union with Milwaukee lowend upstart AyooLii is less intuitive: The 23-year-old rapper’s songs tend to be simpler, better suited for moving asses on dancefloors than solitary listening. But like Polo Perks, AyooLii has never met a sample that scared him, and all three members of the trio work fast. Their new collaborative album is charged with this improvisatory spirit: a brief blast of unruly energy that bounces between 5G towers in New York, Atlanta, Milwaukee, and beyond.
On the freewheeling and frenetic A Dog’s Chance, familiar samples twist into endearingly bizarre shapes. Here, a warped fragment of chiptune band Anamanaguchi; there, a snippet of Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo’ole. Our intrepid protagonists barrel recklessly through these landscapes, rarely hitting a dead end. Thanks to FearDorian’s steady hand behind the boards, A Dog’s Chance manages to zig on even the zaggiest beats. The lowend drums on “BackPack” are layered over a wisp of melancholic guitar; “Skatepark” scans as straightforward sample drill for three seconds until weaving snares snap that anticipation in half. Dorian’s production here cribs heavily from Milwaukee, setting the BPM via 1-and-3 handclaps, and moderately from Surf Gang’s hazy vision of New York drill, pulling just enough from his collaborators’ home turfs to ensure they feel at ease.
Yet the defining rhythms of A Dog’s Chance come from nu-jerk, the zany, burgeoning wing of the Gen Z underground that counts Xaviersobased, YhapoJJ, and FearDorian himself among its pioneers. Nu-jerk ostensibly retrofits the drum patterns of mid-2000s California jerkin’ music to modern synth loops—albeit with glitchier snares and blown-out 808s—and Dorian crushes these drums up against unusual palettes and patterns. The lowend/jerk hybrid “They Love Ayoolii” splits open to reveal a Jersey club style break, while Current Joys collab “Rockband Tees 08 Denims” treats Nick Rattigan’s sampled vocals and Polo Perks’ verses with equal respect, a nearly unintelligible mishmash that miraculously gels.
A Dog’s Chance stumbles where it retreads ideas. The maudlin “Carissa’s Weird” aims for catharsis, but its fusion of jerk drums and rock sample pales next to the stoic “Breeshwrld.” Oklou-sampling “BackPack” sounds watered down rather than wavy, especially when the atmospheric “Alicia Keys” arrives two tracks later. These songs aren’t bad, but they drag down the trio’s batting average.
FearDorian’s idiosyncratic flair is perhaps best understood through the highly recognizable samples heard on “PaperPlanesSoulja” and “Benice2me.” On the former, Dorian twists Diplo and Switch’s flip of the Clash’s “Straight to Hell” into endless rising action, building and building without release; on the latter, Dorian and Quinn chop and screw a fragment of Bladee into a stop-start shuffle. These “cheat code” samples feel tonally distinct from Jack Harlow singing Fergie or Kanye invoking the Backstreet Boys: less concerned with triggering nostalgia than with bringing their source material into the now.
The capricious production leavens AyooLii and Polo Perks’ raps, which stray just far enough from their solo work to avoid feeling static. Perks is the more grounded, his fine-grit bark loping forward with metered precision. “Yeah that nigga broke, he get no bread/How you wanna, uh, nigga go head,” he sighs on “Answers,” before craniometrically deducing a woman has good pussy. By comparison, AyooLii’s pinched yelps zip forward like a terrier with the zoomies. “This Glock’ll paint a picture, I’m an art director! Need a bitch with a booty like Ari Fletcher!” he crows on “Pinky.”
When playing against each other, as on lead single “Ricky Eats Acid,” Perks and AyooLii find a delirious synergy; on the brief occasions FearDorian steps in front of the mic, his slightly more melodic approach splits the difference between his teammates’ salt-of-the-earth raps and more aerodynamic Auto-Tune flows. And although closer “Left Right” leaves ample room for Dorian and Perks to get in their feelings, most of the tape is sunny and chipper, as if AyooLii burst into the studio and told them to stop dwelling on Midwest emo and touch grass at the skatepark instead. The net result is a breezy celebration of all the small wins along the path of regional semi-stardom. With friends like these, there’s no need to rush.


Filled with flute and birdsong, Björk’s 10th album is deeply personal, a discovery of googly-eyed romance, a rebuke of violent men, and a generous offering of love song after love song.

Utopia

Each music video for Björk’s 2015 album Vulnicura featured the Icelandic artist on camera alone. Through her use of virtual reality, you were beside her as she crawled out of a cave and danced at dawn lakeside; you swirled inside her mouth or moved into her sherbert-neon computer-generated body. It was intimate to see and feel her isolation, her heartbreak, and ultimately her healing as she sewed up a wound in her chest and walked away. The final statement of Vulnicura’s sweeping narrative about ending a relationship with her longtime partner was that after all this, Björk was finally alone.
It’s easier to create a utopia in isolation. If only we didn’t have this misbegotten, biologic desire to welcome someone else into our world. Another person? With me right now? I’m good, thanks. Yet most of us persist in this welcoming, an act that requires so much patience, compassion, and sacrifice because we believe that by co-organizing a perfect world for two, we might come closer to knowing love. Add to this small world a child and it seems like a miracle—a small paradise immune to the horrors outside of it. “If you feel this world is not heading the right way,” Björk said recently, “you have to be DIY and make a little fortress.” It’s within this matriarchal frame that Björk and her co-producer Alejandro Ghersi (aka Arca) created the challenging album Utopia. It’s a long, skittering discovery of googly-eyed romance, a rebuke of the violence inherited by men, and a generous offering of love song after love song, rendered musically with unerring elegance and passion.
The four decades of Björk’s music can be seen, simply enough, as a long trek to detail every last tendril of spiritual energy and spark of emotion that has existed in the world. Her relationship to feeling is particularly spatial, living within environments built Björk-tough for all the screams and whispers of history: emotional landscapes, hidden places, internal nebulas, mutual coordinates. Her shift from avant-garde pop star to immersive multimedia artist is not brand-building in a career sense—rather, it’s in service of having more tools for this restless excavation of human senses, their origins and futures. If this seems high-minded, it’s because it is, but it’s also because Björk’s music now exists on ever grander musical staffs, her lingua franca is that which is rarely broached in casual conversation: How does it really feel to lose someone? How does it really feel to start loving again?
The former was the focus of Vulnicura, a breakup album of strings and electric thuds that grounded her music for many listeners. But a crater of loss is easier to describe than the feeling that might begin to fill it, and accordingly, a denser fog hovers over the music of Utopia. “How to capture all this love?” she sings on the near 10-minute epic “Body Memory.” She knows it’s not easy, “like threading an ocean through a needle.” Her first single “The Gate” is a good starting point, though, the crossroads between old heartbreak and new wonderment. The chest wound she repaired becomes the “gate” through which this new love enters. Groups of flutes and synths zoom from one side of the song to the other, unconcerned with sub-basement beat gurgling beneath, or Björk savoring every consonant from elongated s’s to trilled r’s.
Utopia is Björk’s flute album much the way the darkly intimate Vespertine leaned on the celeste or Medúlla was composed mostly of human voices, or Volta had brass and Biophilia its choirs. But Utopia is, more accurately, an album of breath and wind. After a few plucks of harp on the first two songs—the arresting banquet of “Arisen My Senses” and the gentle touch of “Blissing Me”—Utopia lives almost entirely suspended in the air. Its orchestration is carried by a small flute ensemble, the Icelandic Hamrahlid Choir, Harmonic Whirlies, and a collection of birdsongs culled both from Iceland and Arca’s homeland of Venezuela. The arrangement on the album flits and flutters everywhere, hard to grasp, much like modern classical composer Olivier Messiaen’s serialist compositions or even his ones composed to mimic birdsong. All throughout the album we hear the singing of birds called the Montezuma Oropendola—the one that sounds like a Moog synth in a microwave—and the Musician Wren, whose call is one of a few birds that sings in melodies similar to human music. We hear all this breath rushing through metal, wood, plastic, cartilage, and muscle, all in largely minor, dissonant modes. At 72 minutes, this is the longest studio album of her career. Björk doesn’t find love with three chords and the truth, she finds love through an endless interrogation of every note there is.
Accompanying this airy, grandiose mood are, thankfully, a few moments of levity. At one point she offers that she is “Googling ‘love’”—a dizzying and delightful image—and she gets legit pissed off at how beautiful nature is: “This fucking mist/These cliffs are just showing off.” If the first half of Utopia crawls through the brambles of welcoming someone new, exchanging mp3s, warming the heart “on this log fire of love,” the second half reckons with a world that can’t fully support it. The pain of Vulnicura turns white-hot on “Sue Me,” a kiss-off to her ex-partner Matthew Barney who, in 2015, did sue her for custody of their child. It relies heavily on the bodily percussion of Arca, a martial kick drum whose provenance is closer to a battering ram on a dungeon door than Pro Tools.
The traumas of Björk’s past—affairs and “fuck-ups” are plainly stated on Utopia—are not used as a weapon so much as they become symbols of an impossibly broken system. She sings that “he took it from his father/Who took it from his father/Who took it from his father.” As ever, Björk becomes a hunter for the origins of her emotions and a ward for their future. “Let’s break this curse/So it won’t fall on our daughter,” she sings, “And her daughter/And her daughter/Or let this sink into her DNA.” She places all these words in her mezzo register, pushing them out from the bottom of her lungs.
A close collaborator of Björk’s, the singer ANOHNI (along with artists Kembra Pfahler, Johanna Constantine, Bianca Casady, and Sierra Casady) once etched into marble slabs 13 tenets of “Future Feminism” as part of an exhibition of the same name. The tenets are radical commandments crucial to reconstructing a better future driven by women and their care for the earth. It’s as if, by the end of the record, Björk descends from the mount with these tablets in arms for her final three songs. Here the fog of Utopia begins to clear, flutes uncluster, modes turn major, and Arca’s threshing abates. Not since the chorus of “Jóga” has such a feeling of release and catharsis come over a Björk record.
This feeling pours into “Future Forever,” the final track, one of the finest songs of Björk’s career. She sings: “See this possible future and be in it/Hold fast for love, forever.” What glowing simplicity her words now possess. They are irreducible in their meaning, like on “Tabula Rasa” when she sings this to her daughter: “My deepest wish is that you’re immersed in grace and dignity.” There is no image or metaphor underneath, just emotional mass. Björk’s lyrics have become the anvil that forges her voice and the music around it. They may arc and bend in odd new ways, but that text is unshakable. You take her at her word.
So when Björk finally describes her utopia, it already feels etched in marble. “Future Forever” has no flutes or electronics, just a synth organ, spare and holy. After the restlessness of the album, it floats in stasis. In it is an intimate and perfect world of matriarchal domes and musical scaffolding. She summons the love she has tried to describe, that ocean through a needle. “Now you mirror at me,” Björk sings at the end, “Who I used to be/What I gave to the world, you’ve given back at me.” The greatest love songs are measured by the depth from which they surface. If these words in Utopia seem unfathomable, a bit much, a little too real, perhaps it’s because our imperfect world was not built to support it. Björk’s utopia begins with someone else, and so does ours.


The start of an extended reissues series, these two albums find the essential trio of the aggressive German guitarist fighting through darkness to find any light.

Black Axis/The Tribe

The music of Caspar Brötzmann can sound terrifying—fitting, of course, for a guitarist who famously called his early and most important band Massaker. In the late 1980s, Brötzmann, long inspired by the bohemian indulgence of his West Berlin youth, launched the power trio as a radicalized rock platform for his unwaveringly confrontational approach to the electric guitar. As a teenager, Brötzmann began to feel the possibility in the instrument, the way its comely order of wood and wire could be wrestled into feelings of unease and chaos.
And moments of the trio’s 1988 debut, The Tribe, do seem mortally frightening. There is the frantic solo at the center of “The Call,” where Brötzmann’s rabid circularity suggests someone trying to claw their way out of some mise-en-abîme marvel. And there is the trio’s theme itself, “Massaker,” a hellscape of militaristic bass, brutalist drums, strangled guitar, and distant werewolf calls. It’s the kind of music that makes you look over your shoulder, ashamed to remember you’re merely wearing headphones.
But for all the ghoulish yells, suicide-cult references, and malevolent tones, Brötzmann’s music with Massaker is the stuff of transcendence, too, the sound of three musicians fighting through darkness in search of any light. On The Tribe and its follow-up, 1989’s beautifully aggressive Black Axis, Brötzmann and his rhythm section wield the spare parts of rock’n’roll like weapons of collective liberation, lashing back against the very torment they’ve created. Written and recorded during a moment of tentative but hopeful international promise, when at least one wall was on the verge of collapse rather than construction, The Tribe and Black Axis are an unapologetic offering of new possibilities in rock—punk in spirit if not in sound, free in feeling if not in execution. Issued stateside for the first time ever as part of an extended series of Brötzmann excavations by the heavy-etcetera bastion Southern Lord, these 30th-anniversary editions have put them back into circulation at a timely moment when their unapologetic rebelliousness feels inspired and inspiring.
The linchpin of the first two Massaker albums—and, really, every record Brötzmann has made since—is the overwhelming physicality of it all. On The Tribe, Brötzmann seemingly marauds every centimeter of his guitar’s neck during “The Call” in search of the perfect screaming note while the band keeps pace. The finale, “Bonkers Dance,” is as close as Massaker has ever gotten to a standard rock song, with lurid harmonies and a gothic chorus that attempts to slip between Bauhaus and the Birthday Party with all the ease of a bodybuilder fitting into a budget airline’s middle seat. The effort is audible, with Brötzmann grating his knuckles against the strings to enhance the violin-like squeals and machine gun click-clack of his guitar. Drummer Jon Beuth lashes away so hard you worry he may tear a muscle.
Beuth was gone by the time the band again entered Berlin’s famed FMP in March 1989 to cut Black Axis, replaced by the more athletic but impressionistic Frank Neumeier. He widens Massaker’s scope, alternately adding a deep funk wallop and an outbound improvisatory zeal. Here, on their best album, they are paradoxically more centered and sprawling, building a song just to beat it into bits. “Hunter Song” begins as an incredibly tense post-punk tirade, Brötzmann’s guitar pulled tight like piercing razor wire; you could imagine an edit being an industrial anthem. But it climaxes again and again in a belligerent three-piece rumble, every instrument locked into a paroxysm to rival the biggest wall of noise or the most ecstatic Albert Ayler outburst. It is a considered sort of rock upheaval, the song a feint for something much wilder.
They exemplify this ideal during “Böhmen,” an eight-and-a-half-minute instrumental triumph. At first, the rhythm section seems only to pound ahead, the frequency and intensity shifting ever so slightly. But the pulse escalates slyly, quickening with a sort of pregnant expectation. Brötzmann responds in kind, his guitar coiling from early atonal slashes into a skywriting riff, fighting through a fog of acrid smoke. What seemed at first existential torment is a moment of pure liftoff.
Since the start of his career, Brötzmann has suffered our impulse for categorization. Whether repudiating the impact of his father, the free jazz provocateur Peter Brötzmann, on his music or shrugging off associations with fellow raucous travelers, he has repeatedly contested convenient associations. A 1995 cover story about him for The Wire (“Burning Up!” it’s called, in reference to the cigarette dangling from his lips) is a futile 3,000-word exercise in forcing him to commit to being something—an idealist, a naif, a liberal, a renegade, a heavy metal musician, a part of any scene at all. But the lifeblood of The Tribe and Black Axis is just how much Brötzmann and his band resist easy codification. They claw and scrape at the divides between rock and jazz, funk and industrial, Hendrix and Haino, songs and chaos, dark and light, a power trio with a mind for breaking binaries. Even after three decades of shifting or failing genre boundaries, the effort here feels like an earthquake.