While fame and fortune may’ve eluded them, the before-their-time New York City rockers’ influence is incalculable. Two decades on, their 1996 mini-LP sounds like a hiccup in the timeline.

Jonathan Fire*Eater: Tremble Under Boom Lights

Tremble Under Boom Lights

Jonathan Fire*Eater’s Walter Martin once interrupted a meeting with Dreamworks label brass to see about capping sales of Wolf Songs for Lambs, their major label debut, at an even half-million, lest the band grew too big, too quickly. Ambitious, but perhaps a bit premature; Wolf Songs wound up selling about 10,000 copies in the early going, a few zeros shy of the Appetite for Destruction numbers Martin was gunning for. Chutzpah isn’t everything, but it’s certainly not nothing, and what DC-to-NYC before-their-timers Jonathan Fire*Eater lacked in bankable success, they more than made up with unshakable faith in their own abilities. Through their brief, tumultuous tenure, the elegantly wasted JFE looked, acted, and frequently even sounded like heirs apparent to the big crown. They never really came close.
Yet, while traditional markers of fame and fortune may’ve eluded them, Jonathan Fire*Eater’s influence on a generation of stall-hogging, scene-making New York rockers—some of whom did go on to the kind world-conquering fame JFE only grasped at—is incalculable. Flip through the first few chapters of Lizzy Goodman’s NYC scene tell-all Meet Me in the Bathroom, and you’ll see one bold-face name after another singing JFE’s praises, if not openly copping to stealing their moves. Jonathan*Fire Eater were it; and then, just as suddenly, they weren’t.
For years now, Jonathan Fire*Eater have been a band more talked about than actually listened to. That’s largely been a problem of access: For nearly 20 years, just about the only record available through the usual channels was the spiny Wolf Songs for Lambs, which served as many curious Karen O fans’ first and only taste of JFE. And Wolf Songs is a stellar record, all subterranean scrum atop squealing organs and clattering drums. Now, Third Man has brought Tremble Under Boom Lights—the band’s 1996 mini-LP, released a year before Wolf Songs—back to shelves, alongside five bonus cuts and a chapbook of Stewart Lupton’s poetry. It’s not quite Marvin Berry holding the receiver up to Marty McFly, but two decades on, Tremble Under Boom Lights does manage to sound like a hiccup in the timeline: The brash young JFE didn’t just arrive in NYC fully formed, they showed up to the party five years early.
The short version of Jonathan Fire*Eater’s turgid tale goes something like this: DC boys, prep schoolers all, forge a proto-JFE called the Ignobles. The Ignobles eventually relocate to NYC, recruit bassist Tom Frank, put Stewart Lupton behind the mic, and acquire the asterisk. From there, they hustled: Meet Me in the Bathroom finds Lupton glad-handing at every gallery opening and 4 a.m. bar he could find, shamelessly trying to get the word out. Even early on, JFE had something: They were preppy with an unlikely goth edge, “talky” without digressing into polemic, wide-ranging in their musical interests but still very much rooted in oily, scuzzy rock’n’roll. Once they’d worked through the collective throat-clearing of their self-titled debut, their sound was fully in place: big blasts of Walter Martin’s dusty organ, Matt Barrick’s galvanic drumwork, Frank’s subcutaneous bass, Paul Maroon’s alternately stately and spooky guitar, and the scrawled-past-the-margins picaresques of the late Stewart Lupton.
Lupton was possessed with the kind of preternatural confidence granted to only the heavily deluded and the genuinely dazzling, and after three seconds with Tremble Under Boom Lights, it’s pretty clear he wasn’t kidding himself. He’s a man of 1,000 voices, able to jut nimbly through a dry Iggy Pop drawl, a squawking Timmy Taylor falsetto, and the Jarvis-worthy swoon that closes out “Winston Plum: Undertaker.” Mostly, though, he’s a scene-stealer, a scenery chewer: whether prattling on about yet another estranged relative or passing out in the hotel hallway after too much free record company hooch, Lupton’s never less than compelling, stuffing scene after roundabout scene with past regrets and unsteady futures.
Rollicking highlight “Give Me Daughters” imagines Lupton, years down the road, ringing up his theoretical offspring from some dingy motel. The song is more or less a tacit admission that Lupton’s not about to settle down anytime soon, and like many of his songs, it finds him sliding further and further into a kind of perpetual transience: always on the go, always looking for a new rush, always wondering what his life might’ve been had he hewed a little closer to the straight and narrow. Lupton’s prone to abstraction and red herrings, stocking the pond with characters whose purpose remains somewhat unclear. This Dylanesque combination of cracked imagery cut with bohemian drift is the jewel in Lupton’s crown, the dividing line between JFE and so many other citified mopesters, past and present. “It’s important that you know how I want all the shadows on my street to converge every time it snows and have the conversation that they really need,” he sings on the gnashing “Make It Precious,” the kind of line—and there are plenty like it here—you could spend a lifetime turning over in your head.
The tension between the wild-eyed, increasingly unpredictable Lupton and his more temperate bandmates was JFE’s ultimate undoing, but Tremble finds the two sides sparking each other to new heights. Tom Frank—along with Lupton, JFE’s only non-Walkman—brings an almost visceral heft to the low end with his near-toneless bass. Matt Barrick’s drumwork is, as with the Walkmen, the electricity in the socket: without him, the whole thing never gets off the ground. On the organ, Walter Martin favors a piercing, otherworldly sound that’s more “96 Tears” than the grandiose Rothko techtonics he favored later. They wield this rangy, malleable sound—an ever-shifting mishmash of moddish classic rock and post-punk, speckled with Motown and new romance—with all the foolish audacity of youth. These guys just went for it, and 20 years past its sell-by date, their cocktail of inexperience and gall hasn’t lost a drop of potency.
The five songs from the initial Tremble release are joined here by five additional tunes: three from 1995’s Public Hanging of a Movie Star EP, a pants-free cover of Lee Hazlewood’s “The City Never Sleeps,” and the previously unheard “In the Head.” The spry, mercurial Tremble songs, available for the first time this century, are the real draw here, but the Public Hanging songs—JFE’s first release after their forgettable debut—are where the band sorted out the sonics, pushed the vocals to the front, and came into their own. “In the Head” is thought to be their final recording, finished not long before their 1998 split; it’s tempting to hear the first murmurs of the Walkmen in its “In the New Year” ripple, but the tune belongs, as they all do, to Lupton: Adopting a decidedly Dylanesque wheeze, he inches the ambling track heavenward. By the end, organs are churning, Lupton’s howling, and the whole thing seems to collapse in on itself. Lupton seems right at home.
Influence is a strange currency: It seems valuable enough, but the exchange rate’s lousy. Jonathan Fire*Eater were, for a moment, the hottest band in New York, which was just enough to earn them a massively lopsided deal with Dreamworks and the occasional Paul Banks namecheck. Their stormy, searching sound still looms large over the glammy inversions of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the brackish urgency of Interpol, and so many others, but for too long, that’s how most people encountered their music: indirectly. Once JFE split, Lupton disappeared for a couple years, reemerging as the Childballads and, later, the Beatin’s; Martin, Barrick, and Maroon’s Walkmen called it quits in late 2013, and Frank took a gig with Vanity Fair. Lupton passed away in 2018, a tragically early end. There’ll always be a lot of “what if?” hanging over JFE, particularly now, with no chance of a full reunion. But for all their accidents of fate, Jonathan*Fire Eater accomplished something most bands can only dream of: not many may remember, but those who do won’t soon forget.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The “experimentation” on the Baltimore band’s latest album is hesitant and unfocused. It’s a punishingly familiar collision of yesteryear's crossover rock with textbook hardcore bluster.

Time & Space

Turnstile’s fans—at least in the colorful imagination of their haters—are a legion of spin-kicking sycophants splayed akimbo in mid-air devotion, cheering the thrash-funk and rap-rock that surely no savvy hardcore fan misses. But the Baltimore-anchored five-piece deserves credit for riling these hardcore purists, who often sound like musical xenophobes when they decry outside influence. The backlash against the group also seems to stem from the presumption that the popular and resonant music of one’s adolescence—in this case, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Deftones, and 311—is categorically irredeemable as an adult. But Turnstile’s unlikely rise to a nationally adored major-label act shows hardcore’s nascent poptimism: Fans’ latent fondness for the alt-rock radio of their youth is resurfacing in their affection for Turnstile, even if they’re quick to point out, a smidge defensively, that the band cites its debts to lumpen bruisers such as Madball alongside Rage Against the Machine.
But the “experimentation” advertised on Time & Space, Turnstile’s third album and first for Warner Bros. imprint Roadrunner, is hesitant and unfocused. Instead of woven throughout the album, the flourishes are like mismatched ornamentation, out of place. To wit, Diplo’s synth squiggles on “Right to Be” are a celebrity cosign, not a touch of boldness. The 25-second R&B sketch “Bomb,” echoing the Gap Band’s hit “You Dropped a Bomb on Me,” is a derailment, not a detour. The album also includes an interlude called “Disco” and the cover sports a disco ball. Unless it’s about selling pre-order bundles, which come with a disco ball keychain, this theme is mystifying. Certainly, none of the songs themselves sound inspired by disco, and the imagery isn't imaginative enough to compensate for the record’s fundamental shortcomings. It’s not exactly the conceptual, post-hardcore verve of Fucked Up. Even relieved of these distractions, Time & Space is actually a punishingly familiar collision of yesteryear's crossover rock with textbook hardcore bluster.
Turnstile developed the sloshing hi-hats and mid-tempo strut of its early EPs into a more careening sound on 2015’s Nonstop Feeling, with vocalist Brendan Yates adopting a syncopated, Anthony Kiedis-style yawp atop blocky riffs and zigzagging solos. A perceptive troll listed Hot Action Cop’s sub-Limp Bizkit rap-rock hit “Fever for the Flava” as “Turnstile 'NONSTOP FEELING’” on YouTube; it has 12,000 views. Perhaps chastened, Yates raps less these days. Time & Space has more lift than Nonstop Feeling, with texture and contour conveyed by tuneful backup vocals, tambourine, and handclaps where they’re unexpected. “I Don’t Wanna Be Blind” is like Deftones with more low-end, while “Moon,” on which bassist Franz Lyons charismatically croons, is an outlying bit of spritely pop-punk. The tasteful overdubs, along with dynamic mixing, rescue some songs, such as “Generator,” from feeling aggressively antiseptic.
Even by the standards of hardship and adversity bromides in hardcore, Turnstile lyrics still read like ad jingles for a gym (”It’s hard / Too hard / Too hard to get it off the ground”). Yates sings about “you,” who’s typically a traitor, and himself, who overcomes challenges that remain mostly mysterious. And “Big Smile,” though its subject is vague, typifies the scorn with which he writes about women, striking a chillingly dictatorial tone as he shouts, “When I look you in the eye/Don’t need your big smile.” It fits a pattern in the catalog: “Death Grip,” from 2011, goes “Another girl to tear apart a man’s heart/Tie me down while you sleep with the world,” while Nonstop Feeling’s “Can’t Deny It” criticizes a “two-faced girl.” How easily camaraderie, the theme Turnstile shares with its hardcore peers, dovetails with gendered expectations of loyalty and reprisals for perceived betrayal. They could better vindicate the Lollapalooza headliners of yore if they didn’t evoke the rank sexism of emo.
As far as sharing stages, Turnstile’s effort to straddle different scenes is commendable. Time & Space’s record release gig is presented by Damaged City—the prominent Washington, D.C. hardcore fest—and they recently played at Nature World Night Out in Los Angeles, which featured Hatebreed alongside rappers Lil Ugly Mane and CupcakKe. Despite its formal constrictions, hardcore is amenable to stylistic exchange. But if hardcore and hip-hop have better common ground than nu-metal, they deserve a better synthesis than Turnstile. Drummer Daniel Fang once said that “rebelling against your peers is the hardest thing to do,” but nostalgia is easy, and Time & Space is conservatism in disguise.
Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified the song “I Don’t Wanna Be Blind” as “Drop.” It has been corrected.


Now I know what it's like to assume you know what Arthur Russell sounds like. Back in the day ...

Calling Out of Context

Now I know what it's like to assume you know what Arthur Russell sounds like. Back in the day, those comfortable with his modern classical accomplishments were baffled by his acetates of loopy leftfield disco. Likewise, lovers of these dance tracks were confounded by their beatless, beatific recasting on World of Echo. And then there were listeners astounded by the intimacy of his voice and cello work, stymied by both the pop songs and the classical works, all spinning in a vicious cycle of artistic assumptions.
Smug with the presumption that I could accept all of his work, here comes the first release from the label now responsible for the Herculean task of gleaning the contents of hundreds of hours' worth of unreleased music from Arthur's tape archives. Culled from an unreleased album from 1985 called Corn and another slated for release on Rough Trade but never solidified, Calling Out of Context's twelve tracks are unlike anything I've ever heard from the man.
Consider the immediately striking "The Platform on the Ocean"; gone is the personal, arm-hair rubbed dub of cello, the atom-heart palpitations of layered drum skins, the murmuring, translucent voice in the chilly discofloor of space. In its stead is the rigorous drive of programmed drums and a heavily distorted cello that fuzzes like The Jesus & Mary Chain, chopping up the surface of the song. Arthur's killer whalesong voice, often a lone entity, bobs in multi-tracked rounds like schools of jellyfish on the unplumbed depths. He sings about seeing the fish beneath him, yet he also hears the steam room churn behind him, and it makes for seven minutes of cycling pop strained between the pull of fluid motion and a more mechanistic push.
I'm so used to hearing Russell be ahead of his time (the cover even shows him anticipating hipster style with a crooked trucker's cap!), that I'm surprised to find these twelve pop songs are simply of his time. While long-time collaborator Mustafa Sidahmed provides a good deal of percussion, he bolsters the beats with drum machines that would sound more familiar on a Mantronix track or Patti LaBelle comeback. The keyboard intro to "That's Us/Wild Combination" could pass for a Mike Post theme song, but while the production is shiny at points, there's just enough of that innate, anachronistic ability of Arthur's that-- though it marred his career during his lifetime-- has guaranteed critical resurrection ever since his passing in 1992.
With all these cheesy earmarks of an era, Arthur makes it seem unfamiliar: synth-pop in an alternate reality. "I Like You!" takes simple sentiment and slices it with tin-canned handclaps, serrated cello, and ancient arcade game bleeps. "Calling All Kids" takes a digital keychain and sets it as a destabilizing sound effect throughout the song, robotically intoning that "grown-ups are crazy." Despite the factory presets that date "Arm Around You", Arthur's watery vocals convey that endearing, universal gesture of touching a lover's face yet never quite overcoming the space in-between. A poignant koan reiterates throughout the song: "All alone and right next to you/ What I'm doing in a fine, this fine stretch of time." As the title track runs on, the comforting cello and percussion rises up between the drum machine hits, and Arthur echoes through the space, conjuring both the Iowa fields of his youth and the Indian Ocean. There's that axis of intimacy and unrecoverable distance, of the tangible and ethereal, dealing with the hardware that makes music and the soft machines that do, too, inseparable no matter what song form gets explored.
The disc proves Russell to be a changeling artist whose only parallel might be Miles Davis, constantly placing his individual sound in new contexts, constantly searching. But whereas Miles' explorations-- from cool nonets and electric washes to on-the-one funk and Cyndi Lauper-- came over a forty year period, Arthur did it all at once; the genres undifferentiated in his mind and compacted into the infinity of a single decade.


For their sophomore effort, the Calgary post-punk band offer a bleak but beautiful record, full of subtly skewed melodies.

Public Strain

On their self-titled debut, Women kept their howls and hooks separate. The Calgary-based post-punk quartet dished out gritty drones and pristine pop with equal aplomb, but the album's highlights-- the spiky and dissonant "Shaking Hand" or the melancholy psych-pop nugget "Black Rice"-- stuck to one camp or the other. Two years later, Women have bridged the divide. The group's sophomore effort, Public Strain, pushes forward in both directions-- the hooks are noisier, the noise is hookier, and both are fogged over with enough reverb to make Felt records seem bone-dry by comparison. Fidelity-wise, it's a step down. But in just about every other sense, Public Strain is an improvement-- a bleak but beautiful record, full of subtly skewed melodies.
Women's debut revved up quickly-- a minute's worth of garage-rock stomp dropped straight into the throbbing art-noise of "Lawncare". Public Strain is a more subdued record. Album opener, "Can't You See", drifts gradually into form-- the bass anchoring Patrick Flegel's vocal amid a haze of bowed guitars and abstract sampler-squeals. "Narrow With the Hall" pits ghostly vocals against a sea of feedback, bound together only by a couple of wiry, tremolo-riddled chords. The atmosphere owes a distinct debt to the noisier side of 1980s underground music-- particularly Sonic Youth's darker, skuzzier early days. But the when it comes to melody, Women dial things back a few extra decades. The Flegel brother's vocals are harmony-heavy, recalling the work of ornate 60s pop acts like the Zombies and the Electric Prunes. The mixture produces a unique, gray-paisley vibe-- the sound of vintage psychedelia bleached of its color.
But by the halfway point, Public Strain shifts toward darker, more paranoid territory. "China Steps" rides the eerie, tick-tocking, interplay between the rhythm section and two de-tuned guitars. The Flegel brothers' ethereal vocals drift in and out of key, creating an unsettling call-and-response at the song's climax. For all the sonic bric-a-brac, it's these vocals that push Women off of the retro-rock grid and into territories unknown. Their songs start out familar enough, but the Flegels-- along with guitarist Chris Reimer, who also sings-- frequently dovetail into unexpected, crooked-sounding harmonies. In the first minute, "Venice Lockjaw" screams Velvet Underground knock-off. But by the time the chorus swings around, things have been screwed an octave up into choir-boy territory, giving the song an awkward but tender resolution.
Public Strain was recorded alongside producer Chad VanGaalen, who also helmed Women's self-titled record. His production is chilly and thin-- possibly a nod to the early-80s indie bands that Women hold in high regard. Or maybe it was just the weather--the sessions were conducted in Alberta, Canada during the dead of winter. At first listen, Public Strain is impenetrably cold. But deep down, beneath the blizzard of noise and hiss, something's burning.


Since leaving the Pipettes, Rose Elinor Dougal has quietly released an impressive trove of lovelorn pop music. Stellular is wry, frosty and swooning by turns, romantic but hesitant.

Stellular

The Pipettes as a group were never bound to last—a decade on, it doesn’t sound so appealing to combine the girl-group fandom of indie rock with the schtick of Meghan Trainor and the singer-retention of the Sugababes. The Pipettes as a group of artists, though, have been remarkably prolific. Two years ago, Gwenno Saunders released the year’s highest-concept album, the Welsh-language, sci-fi-enamored Y Dydd Olaf. Bandmate Rose Elinor Dougall, meanwhile has quietly released several albums and EPs’ worth of lovelorn pop music. The comparison is inevitable—both artists work in more or less the same vein of synthpop—but where Gwenno prefers futurism, Dougall prefers romanticism. On tracks like “Fallen Over” and “Hanging Around,” she sheds the self-consciousness and polka-dotted prurience of her old group for a disarmingly earnest swoon.
Stellular, produced with Oli Bayston of Boxed In (who also sings on and co-wrote “Dive”) is not a departure from her past solo work—if you’ve heard any of the EPs, you know what to expect, and even if you haven’t, you can venture a guess. Dougall is a Pipettes alum; pastiche is expected. Specifically, most of Stellular wouldn’t exist without the past several decades of post-punk (in particular, Blondie), and the rest of it wouldn’t exist without Trish Keenan and Sarah Cracknell. The lilting “Take Yourself With You” recalls ’70s folk, spacey Stereolab, and some of ABBA’s pastoral, statelier tracks. As influences, they’re ideal—they don’t lend themselves to kitsch so much as sturdy, comfortable arrangements that Dougall inhabits with love and familiarity.
Take the title track: it begins bramble-spiky, but Dougall makes it entrancing. She winds through verbosities like “Hopes and despairs in parallel live wildly side by side” effortlessly, almost distracted. It’s a love song, but a hesitant one, caught between prickly guitars and moony sentiments, warning itself off in the bridge: “You’re giving yourself away again.” The title, as precisely chosen as the rest, compares her would-be partner to a small star; full-on cosmic crushing is just not something the narrator allows herself. She does allow herself the more earthy kind on “Closer”: closing time in some arbitrary bar, gazing at someone who’d rather blather on about something so much less important than moving their hand that last crucial centimeter. Dougall’s a wry songwriter when she wants to be, and she delivers these details to match, but the way her coy chorus and frosty “I don't care about your band—it’s 3:45 a.m.” melt within seconds reveals her hopes, and the speeding-heartbeat guitar lick, her blissful impatience. The other blatant new wave cut, “All at Once,” pulls the same sleight-of-heart. There’s as much “Rapture” in it as actual rapture; the funk and whispers and “tonight”s affect cool and do it quite well, but the lyrics—“Give me apathy...sentence me to heaven”—merely aspires toward it, from a longing place.
Indeed, what elevates Stellular from just another decade’s nostalgia exercise is that longing. “Answer Me,” while the weakest track here—Dougall’s posh voice doesn't navigate soft-rock or R&B ballads well—redeems itself in its final minute, a plush pile of backing vocals; “Space to Be” is nothing but redemption. It’s a sequel to “Stellular”—the chorus melody is tucked into the synths—set in the same city with the same loneliness, but none of the hesitation. The chorus might lend itself to a girl-group arrangement, and certainly the sentiment would: “I want a love to lift me up high, to wreak havoc on this heart of mine, tear me limb from limb until I find some kind of space to be.” But where the Pipettes would give it irony or sex somewhere, and just about every other girl-group revivalist would lean into the darkness and violence, Dougall leaves it at full-throated emotion.


At the age of 36, and after two decades in hip-hop, Memphis rapper Yo Gotti has scored his biggest-ever hit with "Down in the DM." The album it comes from, The Art of Hustle, is the biggest of his career, featuring guest spots from Nicki Minaj, Future, Pusha T, and more.

The Art of Hustle

Yo Gotti has been a Memphis rap star for so long that you can hear his voice deepening over the years even as his subject matter hasn't. If you listen to his first regional hit, 2000’s "After I Fuck Your Bitch," and then his recent viral breakout, last year’s "Down in the DM," you’ll hear the same guy rapping about pretty much the same thing in slightly different registers. But at the age of 36, and after two decades in hip-hop (he first released music under the name Lil Yo when he was 14), Gotti has finally firmed up his status as a major-label rap artist. And while his latest album, The Art of Hustle, is unquestionably the biggest of Gotti’s career, it also feels like just another notch in his belt.
As a rapper, Gotti is practiced but lyrically unambitious. His bars are straight-to-the-point and matter-of-fact, and it’s his willingness to open up that endears. On "Momma," one of The Art of Hustle’s best and most personal songs, Gotti raps about being raised by six women and a man that wasn’t his father, accounting for the highs and lows of a life built on hustling and basking in the relief of going legit. For opener "My City," Gotti enlists K. Michelle to lament and pay homage to their shared hometown. But for all his pride and investment in the city—Gotti’s Collective Music Group label has signed local up-and-comers like Blac Youngsta, Snootie Wild, and Zed Zilla—The Art of Hustle reads generically Southern.
Despite an impressive head count of industry heavyweights, the album doesn't fare well as a whole. Lil Wayne shows up on "Bible" for a rote banger; Future punches in a forgettable verse on a flat trap anthem called "General"; Pusha T snarls appropriately on the middle of "Hunnid." The collaborations are evidence of Gotti’s industry footprint rather than creative matchmaking, and the only one that strikes a spark is mold-breaker "Law," which folds E-40 comfortably into a slinky beat with bells ringing in the background.
And then there’s the album’s money-maker. "Down in the DM" isn’t a fluke hit, but it’s enjoyed the type of viral success that can’t be forced. In the last week alone: Lil Mama shared a video called "Memes," Lil' Kim enlisted Kevin Gates for a Valentine's Day track called "#Mine", and Soulja Boy offered a sleazy artwork-toting single called "Snapchat." All three are lame attempts to recapture what "Down in the DM" does so naturally, revelling in the shallowness of Instagram. The addition of two full-fledged verses from Nicki Minaj improves on the original and also gives the album its best and most memorable burst of rapping.
In a recent podcast interview with Rap Radar, Gotti admitted that "Down in the DM" was "just another song." "I’m making three, four, five songs a day," he said. "To be honest with you, I’m not even dwelling into the music that long." It’s an unsurprising piece of insight that accounts for the album’s generally low-stakes vibe. Noticeably, on the same day that Gotti released this eighth album in his catalog, another Memphis rapper released his first. Young Dolph’s King of Memphis seems almost like a provocation, but that there’s a crown worth snatching at all is a testament to Gotti having molded it for himself. Unfortunately, The Art of Hustle is mostly forgettable as a major-label rap record, but it bears out a teachable truth about Gotti's career: sometimes showing up is more than half the battle.


This 16-minute EP of leftovers comes from the same sessions as Drums Between the Bells, Eno's earlier collaboration with the spoken-word artist, and once again it feels more geared toward Eno completists and poetry fans.

Brian Eno / Rick Holland: Panic of Looking

Panic of Looking

A 16-minute EP of leftovers, released in conjunction with a little mountain town's music festival-- doesn't sound very exciting, does it? But you could put Brian Eno's name on the cover of just about anything and generate intense anticipation and scrutiny. Our prime architect of interdisciplinary electronic art has so much authority that when I don't love one of his records, I feel disappointed in myself. That was the case with Drums Between the Bells, a worthy but uneven collaboration with the poet Rick Holland, where sonic miracles sat cheek-by-jowl with dated electronic styles perhaps better left in mothballs. Now, from the same sessions, comes Panic of Looking. It's very slight, and its clearest purpose is to augment Eno's recent residency at Asheville, N.C.'s Moogfest (which honors electronic music pioneer Robert Moog), where the EP received an early release. But even Eno's spare parts give us something of substance to chew over.
Panic of Looking is distinguished from its father LP by placing more emphasis on the words. This is a happy development, because poetry is delicate. It can sound strained, or even fake, when it tries to scale the visceral heights of music. Instead, music must lay back. If the glitchy sonics of Drums Between the Bells sometimes ran roughshod over the words, Panic verges on overcorrection. Eno has engineered it to feel like Holland's show-- spoken-word with accompaniment, sometimes engaged and sometimes desultory. It can be difficult to discuss the musical quotient because there's so little of it. The most developed tracks are "In the Future" and the title piece. The former draws out the tonality of speech via placid melodic counterpoint and euphoric backing vocals, recalling the joyous world-pop of Eno/Byrne collaboration Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. The latter may be the best-balanced effort the collaboration has produced, with Eno's taut textural background sensitively augmenting Holland's staccato verse. Beyond those, we get a minute-long lite-industrial curio, a pro forma instrumental, and a couple less memorable fusions of orotund speech and crepuscular atmosphere.
Poetry writing and poetry recitation are two very different talents that don't always-- or even often-- coexist. Inverting classical music's emphasis on the concert hall over the recording, modern Western poetry favors the written word over the oral performance, which has become something you do mainly in order to sell books, regardless of whether or not you're any good at it. It's a weird cultural construct: Imagine if musicians were expected to promote their work by juggling. As a result, even poetry lovers may emit a long-suffering groan at the prospect of attending yet another reading. But there are things oratory can do that text simply can't, and Holland exploits them to his advantage, especially on the title track. One of them is homophonic ambiguity: Is he saying "speed and weight" or "speed and wait?" Both concepts are compelling, especially in flickering juxtaposition. Biting off words one by one, Holland creates hard enjambments ("Men… shake… hands") that deliver doses of meaning, each altering the last, as if from a time-release capsule. If all of this sounds more geared toward Eno completists and poetry fans than the general listener, that's about right.


This 1974 performance of Femenine is a marvel of open-form minimalism, a rare recording of the undersung avant-garde composer and pianist that heralds the powerful voice of the black, queer artist.

Femenine

According to all eyewitness accounts, Julius Eastman was hard to ignore. He was lithe, he had a five-octave voice and an improviser’s intelligence at the piano. When he was healthy, Eastman was sought out by famed conductor Pierre Boulez. He played jazz in a combo that frequented clubs in Buffalo, contributed synths and vocals to an experimental disco outfit organized by Arthur Russell, and sang in early groups led by Meredith Monk. As a queer African-American member of the avant-garde, he cut a unique figure in the 1970s by necessity. Composer and trombonist George Lewis remembers that, to him, Eastman represented “a singular figure of presence” in those years, since “black artists were far less in evidence in the Downtown New York music scene than queer ones.”
While in the company of such elites, Eastman challenged the norms of etiquette with a potency that guaranteed scandal. His explicit, queer reframing of John Cage’s Song Books famously enraged Cage himself. And Eastman’s confrontational “nigger series” of compositions—including pieces like Nigger Faggot, Crazy Nigger, and Evil Nigger—were sometimes truncated on concert bills, due to pressure from well-meaning protestors and risk-averse programmers. These were moves that obscured Eastman’s stated desire to face up to “that thing which is fundamental” in American society. He contained so much art and vision as to be a scene unto himself. Then he faded from view.
After alienating lovers and collaborators alike, Eastman was evicted from his apartment in the mid-’80s. Most of his scores were bagged and carted away—eventually lost to history. Details from his homeless period are sketchy (or contested), but it’s generally agreed that he lived in Tompkins Square Park and also suffered from some form of addiction. After he died, alone in a Buffalo hospital at age 49, it took eight months for an obituary to be published.
Eastman can be almost as fascinating to read about as he is to listen to. Yet for a long time, hardly anyone pursued either activity—largely because much of his music had been scattered to the winds prior to his death in 1990. Thankfully, the last decade has seen a renaissance in Eastman appreciation. Contemporaries like Kyle Gann and Mary Jane Leach have pooled rare recordings and fragments of scores, and found new material in archives. In 2005, a three-CD set on New World Records, Unjust Malaise, brought several of Eastman’s most notorious compositions into wide circulation. Jace Clayton reinterpreted two of those works on a 2013 album. And along with Renée Levine Packer, Leach has edited an important book of essays covering every aspect of Eastman’s career. Still, the primary stumbling block to any greater revelry has been a lack of recorded evidence of Eastman’s own performances.
The release of Femenine, however, is an occasion for wide celebration. In terms of sonic fidelity, this is an occasionally scratchy live recording of a chamber orchestra performance from November 6, 1974, with Eastman at the piano. In creative terms, it’s a crystal-clear, 72-minute shot that reaffirms what all the veteran scholars and performers have been talking about for decades. Though it doesn’t offer an expansive look at his compositional growth like Unjust Malaise, it gives us a better sense of Eastman as a bandleader and performer of his own works. Better than any recording currently circulating, it’s on Femenine that listeners can get a sense of how Eastman fused jazz-informed improvisation with the rigors of early, pulse-based minimalism.
And there is also a suggestion of Eastman’s humor—an attribute sometimes overshadowed by the seriousness of his politics and the tragedy of his death. The first sound you hear on this recording is an audience casually settling down. And then there is laughter, as a performer switches on a mechanical device that shakes sleigh bells. In an era before drum programming, inhuman percussion had a jokey, improbable tinge. Artists in the Fluxus movement outfitted a violin with a rod-twirling motor that slapped away like the meekest torture device imaginable.
For Femenine, Eastman’s machine automated the shaking of sleigh bells for the entirety of the performance. It can be read as both a Fluxus-style joke on the stark rhythmic processes of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, as well as an assumption of that sound into the overall Eastman palette. That Eastman could simultaneously be a prankster and a skilled style-scout was one aspect of his genius; whereas he’d copped R&B textures for a prior composition, Stay on It, with Femenine, Eastman was scouring his avant-garde contemporaries for inspiration. He gave as much as he took, too. As Leach told the musician and writer David Menestres, Femenine offers “the fluidity of jazz and a swing that is missing from, especially, Reich.”
In the recording’s opening minutes, Eastman plays a few chords and notes as the other members of the chamber ensemble tune up. Before too long, the piece begins in earnest with a catchy vibraphone line: one that starts with fast, one-note repetition, before ascending in see-saw fashion up a narrow interval. Along with the bells’ rhythm, this vibraphone motif—both optimistic and energetic—is the backbone of the piece. Aside from that, it’s up to Eastman and the other members of his orchestra to sustain the audience’s interest over the next hour.
The length of the performance was a grid that Eastman used to guide his ensemble’s improvisations. Each member had a digital clock, as well as brief passages of scored material that corresponded to a particular minute-mark in the performance. Choices left up to individual performers might have to do with octave placement, or with the selection of a given note from a particular chord. Another direction in the score is more explicit: “pianist will interrupt.” Like other minimalists, Eastman knew how to get a lot of mileage out of means that look scant on the page.
Overall, the assembled string and wind players can hang with Eastman—an impressive feat, since this performance included some players who were much less familiar with the composer than others. There are brief fumbles in the ensemble, at some points, but nothing that can derail the performance, as it’s Eastman who holds everything together at the piano. Over time, it’s the intuitive authority of his largely improvised piano part that emerges as the major attraction of this set. He stays in the background during the initial playing, allowing that vibraphone part to really carve out a space in the listener’s consciousness. Once that hypnotic effect is achieved, Eastman starts pulling from his personal dictionary of styles and influences, all while staying relatively close to the melodic material he gave to the other players.
Femenine was an early example of Eastman’s “organic music” concept—a version of minimalism which allowed for all previously played material to be present in later stages of a performance. Years after this gig, Eastman would tell an audience that he was still trying to perfect this approach. But there are hints of his success with it here, thanks to a steady accretion of ideas that never throws Femenine off balance. Ten minutes in, there are strong hints of the blues coming from Eastman’s piano. Soon after, he steadily adds new chords to a jazzy, rollicking piano line that syncopates with the vibraphone theme.  Gradually, the harmony is built out to a point of richness that recalls Romantic-era classical composers.
After nearly half an hour, the flute player of the S.E.M. Ensemble works in tandem with Eastman on an extended, ascending progression. A quarter of an hour later, when Eastman shifts down several octaves, he creates a massively booming, bass-heavy crunch. While he manages to put the recording a little in the red, the intensity and volume of this choice can’t obliterate the essential joy of Femenine.
Remembrances of the show included in this album’s liner notes inform us that Eastman appeared in a dress for the concert. The audience was also served soup. That convivial group spirit is alive on this recording, even at its loudest or roughest edges. The piece’s semi-notated structure and expanded performance timeframe present a question of genre that is pointedly never resolved. But the force of Eastman’s performance shows his own mastery of this ambiguity. His spirit of offering isn’t merely strong enough to survive the openness of the form, it is enhanced by this radical flexibility.
Though never intended as an album as such, the first appearance of Femenine is nonetheless a major landmark in both Eastman’s posthumous narrative and the story of the American avant-garde. In the recent scholarly volume edited by Packer and Leach, there is a tantalizing list of other Eastman-led performances, currently available only at the music library of the University of Buffalo. The artistic value of this archival release—imperfect sonics and all—begs for an arrangement that will make the rest of Eastman’s genius widely accessible.


The latest from cerebral and refined UK duo Rob Brown and Sean Booth, who continue to work with complex structures but here flirt at times with metered rhythm.

Untilted

(Sitting in the dormitory room just after class on Thursday, Achilles changes into his gym clothes as his roommate Tortoise bursts through their door in a fit of happiness.)
Tortoise: Achilles, have you seen this?
Achilles: What?
Tortoise: Do you see? Yes? I'm referring to the object, though small in size, quite interesting in stature, I am holding in front of you now.
Achilles: It's a CD.
Tortoise: Brilliant! I can see I have come to the right man.
Achilles: ...
Tortoise: Never one for suspense, I'll begin the next phase of our conversation: It is a new album from one of my country's most respected groups of musicians, Autechre.
Achilles: Okay.
Tortoise: And I am holding it in my hands.
Achilles: Okay. Yeah, I heard a new one was coming out or something.
Tortoise: Or something indeed, for I think it may be their best. Better even than the fine Confield. Do you remember the one?
Achilles: Yeah, to be honest, I kinda stopped listening to them a few years back. I liked the first one, I think I liked EP7. I don't really remember much about it.
Tortoise: I would happily grant you a very big favor in return for a moment of your time as I explain to you my thoughts on this record. Might you humor me?
Achilles: Hey, hand that to me. Over here. Thanks. Yeah, whatever.
Tortoise: Thank you. For starters, it's called Untilted. Isn't that funny? "Un-til-ted." They really do have a good sense of humor, don't you think?
Achilles: Um, not really. It's kind of stupid.
Tortoise: Well, I think it's a decent title all the same. But funnier still, I will admit, is that it's comprised of eight letters.
Achilles: Oh shit, yeah, that's hilarious.
Tortoise: Which is to say, funny when I recall that their previous album's title was also comprised of exactly eight alphanumeric characters (not counting the colon, of course). As was the full length before that-- Confield. Don't you think that's strange?
Achilles: No.
Tortoise: And even stranger still, Autechre-- A-U-T-E-C-H-R-E-- has the identical number of characters. Why, when I happened upon this, I was struck by the similarity in form.
Achilles: Okay, way to go off the deep end. Are you going to tell me now that they're geniuses and I can learn trig faster by listening to them? I mean, what's funny is I might actually study to them more if I could hear a beat somewhere.
Tortoise: As it happens, I do believe they are masters of form. But then I also believe they are as instinctively driven as any other musician, if that's not a contradiction (and I don't necessarily believe it is). Take "Pro-Radii", the third track: It begins with pounding, industrial-machinery sounds, as if stomping through a foggy alley using meter-thick blocks of iron as shoe souls. Yet, it slowly mutates into something lighter, with stuttering snare and what sounds like a digital sitar drone in the background.
Achilles: You sound like a critic.
Tortoise: And I haven't even gotten to the punchline! As it changes into something even further removed from the weighty opening, as eerie overtones ring above the pinging, metallic percussion, I realize the piece has arrived at this point in segments, lengthy and subtle, but obviously delineated to be sure. This, or course, is exactly the same scheme much of the dance music-- that with a "beat"-- follows. Measure by measure, units of 8, 16, 32, 64-- it proceeds formally, yet changes its "colors" quite unpredictably.
Achilles: Hey, hand me my bag.
Tortoise: And the first piece, "Lcc"--
Achilles: haha
Tortoise: --"Lcc", with its rapid-fire artillery precision, tight snare, and clear, metered rhythm, could easily be mistaken for dance music. In fact, I'd move some limbs for you, but would hate to influence your judgment negatively.
Achilles: Next.
Tortoise: Achilles, if you'd listen, you'd hear that the beat you are looking for is here, and an especially well-put-together one at that. Autechre are rightfully accused of being influenced by hip-hop, even as I imagine a rapper laying behind the beat might find himself on the wrong side of "1" from time to time.
Achilles: So, you're saying it's got an interesting beat as long as you don't expect any kind of groove. And you know what? It's not even like I'm turning to Autechre for "grooves." Where the fuck did all the cool IDM even go? Like three years ago, you couldn't stop finding cool shit, shit that nobody'd ever heard before.
Tortoise: I'm saying that interest is found where you are sufficiently motivated to look. "Fermium" would fit perfectly in the Berlin mix you made for your nephew. A little busier, perhaps, but...
Achilles: Oh man, I forgot I was supposed to copy that for that board chick. Fuck, hey, can I use your computer? The library's closed today.
Tortoise: The point is, despite their abstraction over the last few years, Autechre aren't an altogether different beast than when they started. In fact, they're smarter, more refined.
Achilles: Look, I'll grant you they sound more complicated, but so the fuck what? I mean, I heard Draft 7:30. I liked it at first, until I realized all this form and content or whatever you're talking about is totally transparent. Dance music? Come on man, you need a more than "beat" to make dance music. If anything, I think they're out of ideas; throwing in a bunch of random shit to hide the fact that they peaked about seven years ago.
Tortoise: My point is, I am still moved by this music. Not just the form, not just the hidden beats and seemingly chaotic shifts in meter. I believe artists are those who instinctively recognize the ways of things, and translate them in ways ultimately true to their spirit. Ours is a "seemingly chaotic" world, but underneath the maze of people and opinions, there is order, truth, and beauty. And maybe, just maybe, Autechre have the rare gift of showing us just where we stand, turbulence and all.
Achilles: And my point is, if it's driven by form, it's a pretty messy, lazy form-- certainly no more structurally sound than any other software wank music. On top of that, if I'm supposed to "feel" this, to pick up on some obscure metaphysical in-joke, I'm not-- isn't it the job of a good artist to make that shit clear? Either way, it fails for me. Autechre decided to go their own way, fine, you know, just don't expect me to call them "geniuses."
Tortoise: [Sigh] Alright, Achilles, I can see we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm sorry to have wasted your time.
Achilles: Oh don't worry, dude, just wear headphones when you play that stuff.
(With all apologies to Douglas Hofstadter and Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, which I'd send you if I had an extra copy.)


A collaboration between noise icon Masami Akita—aka Merzbow—and drummer/pianist Eiko Ishibashi, Kouen Kyoudai is long on pretentious theory but short on fresh musical ideas.

Masami Akita / Eiko Ishibashi: Kouen Kyoudai

Kouen Kyoudai

Four years ago, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote an article in The New Yorker called “Merzbiebs” where he conflated the music and process of Japanese noise icon Masami Akita (aka Merzbow) with the then-nascent tabloid pop machine of Justin Bieber. Frere-Jones made a very compelling case that the two, while incommensurably disparate musically speaking, were enviably talented and more similar than we’d like to realize, ultimately deciding that they were “both worth hearing.” But that same argument could not be made in 2016. At this point, Bieber is shifting rapidly, releasing vibrant pop songs carved from strange and infectious sounds, while Akita is mired in some very old tropes.
Akita’s latest record, Kouen Kyoudai, is a collaboration with Eiko Ishibashi, a Japanese singer and multi-instrumentalist who has released two Jim O’Rourke-produced albums of languorous J-pop over the last few years. According to the artists, the two tracks that compose this album, “Slide” and “Junglegym,” can be read as “contemporary takes on the avant-garde”—an increasingly meaningless marker often used by artists who want to paint themselves as utterly tasteful outsiders. They also stress that the tension of the music comes from “the human use of the tool” which is “made explicit as these works unfold in a storm of ecstatic human/instrument/interaction.” These pretentious statements create an air of importance, suggesting the album only gains weight from its textural presentation. As for the music itself, it fails to live up to the way it’s offered.
Kouen Kyoudai’s two tracks both run more than 18 minutes, and there is very little that distinguishes them other than the main analog instrument accompanying the field of noise. For “Slide” it's a drum set; for “Junglegym” a piano. But both are generally diminished by Akita’s noodling drone sounds, which hog up too much space, making it seem like Eiko’s contributions were little more than an afterthought. In this case, the forceful drone is like the sonic equivalent of manspreading between subway seats. As the album wears on unchanged through almost 40 minutes, it sounds more like an amorphous chunk of noises than an exploration of contemporary avant-garde.
It’s a shame too. For decades, Akita’s music has been chipping away at an allusive and important thesis: That music created with his array of noise-making tools can be life-affirming and express sublimity from such raw and uncontrollable forces. But a lofty presentation can create lofty expectations from a consumer of art. As such, the entire apparatus revolving around Kouen Kyoudai did it in. The album expects to be taken seriously. It demands to be evaluated under a different aesthetic criteria by pure virtue of its gravity. These demands could be met and accepted if the music here was more than a tired retread of endless philosophical dead-ends alongside a smattering of flashy noises.


The minimal Austin duo Hovvdy stack simple riffs in idiosyncratic ways. Their debut album rarely accelerates past a snail’s pace, but its interlocking pieces are deceptively complex.

Taster

Hovvdy never really seem in a hurry to go anywhere fast. Since 2014, the Austin duo of Will Taylor and Charlie Martin has made frill-free rock music on a shoestring budget—they’ve shouted out both the convenience and happily strange compression that comes from recording songs in their iPhone voice memos—that centered on repetition and spacey simplicity. They make quiet compositions that plumb the cavernous depths of romantic and existential disillusionment with little more than some fuzzy guitar strums as accompaniment, but to hear them tell it, that started out of necessity rather than design.
Both Taylor and Martin were drummers before Hovvdy, and neither has been playing guitar all that long, which they’ve said has made their instrumentals naturally “minimal.” But after an EP and a split with the similarly minded Austin band Loafer, they’ve figured out how to make those limitations work to their advantage. Their debut album Taster—released last year on tape, but reissued in remastered form by beloved Brooklyn indie rock label Double Double Whammy—rarely accelerates past a snail’s pace, but the interlocking pieces are deceptively complex. Recalling the unpretentious efforts of bands like Bedhead, Duster, and even Yo La Tengo’s more hushed moments, they stack simple riffs in idiosyncratic ways, and in the process put together 11 songs that are far more compelling than the sum of their parts.
That’s perhaps most evident on “Can’t Wait,” one of the record’s more straightforwardly catchy moments, which weaves together at least three loosely interlocking guitar riffs over the course of its three minutes. Played by a different band, it’d feel like a rip of Weezer’s across-the-sea balladry, but Hovvdy’s take is a little more austere. A lazily drawled acoustic guitar and a barely on-beat lead make the scuzzy main riff feel a little dizzier than it would otherwise. Piling uncomplicated parts on one another until it resembles something like a pop song is a surprisingly sophisticated trick—and one they’re able to keenly repeat throughout Taster. Each song seems like it should topple over under its own weight, but it never does.
Lyrically, the record revels in the overwhelming confusion and regret bound up in interpersonal relations. “In My Head” tells a surreal tale of romantic pining, describing scenes in small jagged snippets, like a conversation that takes place “on the gulf in that screened-in room.” On “Try Hard,” they perform a clever autopsy of the failures of a past relationship (“You could not call your dad back then/Forgot his name again/I never did try hard”). It’s relatively standard stuff for this sort of downcast rock music, but the beauty is in its lack of resolution. All conflicts remain unsolved—there are only events, no answers.
Taylor and Martin have jokingly referred to their music as “pillow core” over the years, which is fitting for Taster both in its downy sonics and fragmented lyricism. As they flit through various half memories and upsetting realizations, it feels like the thoughts that spin through your head as you lie in bed late at night, waiting for sleep to overtake you. Those liminal moments can be puzzling, filled with internal conflicts that are hard to untangle. But there’s a suggestion of how to move forward embedded in Taster: start at the beginning, go slow.


"Electro" is a slippery word. When affixed to the word "clash," it's come to stand for a recent movement ...

L.I.F.E.

"Electro" is a slippery word. When affixed to the word "clash," it's come to stand for a recent movement in electronic music that draws from the icy and removed synth-pop sound of the 80s, strips the beats down, and turns the lyrical focus to the joy and loathing in decadent sex. Because "electroclash" is an unwieldy word, many have taken to shortening it to just plain "electro." I find this abbreviation confusing, because the word "electro" has such specific connotations in my mind. To me, electro is an early strain of hip-hop that used the stiff machine beats of Kraftwerk as a foundation for a new, sci-fi obsessed form of funk.
Time and meanings change, though, and I'm trying to set aside my semantic biases and get with the program. Still, hearing this record by Transllusion, one half of Drexciya, got me thinking about the original electro and how it developed as a vehicle for two expressions. On the one end, dating from 1982, Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" is without question the electro classic of the era, a party jam through and through. This sound and vibe made its way down South and played a part in what came to be called Miami Bass. "Planet Rock" is the future as a high-tech carnival.
The other branch of electro was bound for a more desolate and isolated Northern climate. On their influential 1983 track "Clear", Detroit's Cybotron saw electro as a means for projecting a cold, depressing future where technology leads to alienation. "Clear" is clearly not celebration music, and this is the branch of electro that picked up some sounds and eventually morphed into ultra-serious Detroit techno (Juan Atkins, who was half of Cybotron, was an originator of the Detroit sound).
The wintry side of the place where electro-meets-techno has been kept alive in Detroit by Drexciya, the mysterious duo comprised of the Gerald Donald and the late James Stinson (he died in September of this year). Ironically, the identities of Drexciya's members were revealed only shortly before Stinson passed away. For most of the group's life, it remained an anonymous outfit dedicated to producing paradoxically cold yet emotionally evocative music from the Detroit template. Drexciya side projects included The Other People Place and Transllusion.
As electronic music goes, there's something oddly timeless about Transllusion. Certain aspects of the production sound quite current, while other bits are allude to the 80s. The synth patterns in "Bump It", for example, are very early videogame, but the thick bottom end seems of a more recent vintage. I have to say that of the Drexciya-related material I've heard, L.I.F.E. seems especially grim and bleak, and the repetition, while central to the project's aesthetic, is wearying. It's certainly a good record that succeeds at what it sets out to do, but I expect that I won't find myself in the mood to listen too often. I hope not, anyway.
Most of the tracks follow a similar template. The midtempo drum hits are ridged as drop forge steel, never deviating even slightly for the beat, never pausing for a fill, never laying out. Moving through and around the beats are all manner of synth squiggles that give some hint of the unpredictable nature of organic life. And the thread through it all is the deep and menacing bass tones that make sure the dark cloud never goes away.
The contrast between the downright oppressive repetition of the drum machine and the looser, softer synth patches make me think of these tracks as a view of a factory floor. The steel crash of the factory machines are always there, but moving between the spaces are the people, flesh just barely visible beneath helmets and through gaps in their coveralls. There's humanity in Transllusion's music, but it takes a lot of effort and compassion to find it.


Cherry Bomb, Tyler’s fourth long-player and third official album, bears all the hallmarks of his personality, for good and for ill. Smart, annoying, obnoxious, and creative, it's a reminder that Tyler, the Creator only creates as the sum of his exhaustive, trying, kaleidoscopic self.

Cherry Bomb

In a recent appearance on "Tavis Smiley", Smiley asked the now-24-year-old Tyler, the Creator to describe himself. He replied with a candid, perhaps-practiced monologue: "I’m very bright. I’m smart. I’m annoying and obnoxious. I’m very creative and borderline genius, and I think other people are starting to see that, too."
Cherry Bomb, Tyler’s fourth long-player and third official album, complements his self-professed characteristics to a T, in ways both good and bad. His greatest strength has always been world-building, using a synth-heavy blitz of candy-colored jazz chords taken straight (sometimes blatantly so) from the Pharrell handbook. Cherry Bomb isn’t exactly a hard left turn from this lane, but it is a quick swerve.
He’s still occasionally obnoxious and shockingly adolescent for someone almost a quarter-century old (on "Smuckers" he defiantly raps, "Fuck your loud pack, and fuck your Snapchat" with the gusto of Ian MacKaye declaring his devotion to straight edge). His idea of a joke is making the lead single to his rap album a Stevie Wonder-inspired bop about an underage relationship. What makes the joke "land," of course, is that the song is really good, a warm-sounding piece of pop music complete with an appearance from the ineffable Charlie Wilson. It’s a smart, annoying, obnoxious, creative, and borderline genius tactic from someone still working on reaching his final form.
The best thing Cherry Bomb has going for it is relative brevity. Goblin and Wolf were notoriously long, which felt like a betrayal of one of Tyler’s biggest strengths—shotgun blasts of creativity and anguish as opposed to woozy, multi-part dirges that bordered on self-parody. Cherry Bomb still features three songs that are longer than six minutes, but the songs transform within themselves, like the jazz Tyler admires, so that they almost feel like three songs in one. There's still nothing "minimalist" about what Tyler does; this tweet just about sums up his approach to this album.
Opener "Deathcamp" was allegedly inspired by the Stooges, and it sounds like what would happen if you put Tyler's idea of the Stooges on top of Glassjaw on top of Trash Talk, and, it should go without saying, on top a vintage N.E.R.D. production. Your mileage may vary, but I find it thrilling—the influence of rock music, while always present in Tyler’s music, is overwhelming here, which creates a Rebirth-ian wrinkle to an album that, to its strength and detriment, mostly recycles three or four similar ideas. "Pilot" and the title track to me recall none other than Big Black—drum machine-led walls of sound that break down and start up again as Tyler struggles to be heard over the noise. He is friends with Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bundick (who makes an anonymous appearance on filler track "Run"), and "Find Your Wings" is Tyler’s gentlest song to date, an interlude that’s part quiet storm, part Toro, and completely without pretense or sarcasm.
Kanye and Wayne have verses on "Smuckers", the album’s best song. All three artists are auteurs in their own right, and with Tyler’s verses bookending and sandwiching the track and a beat switch thrown in the middle, it’s as if he’s playing hot potato with rap’s most singular voices and inserting himself in their world, a vandal placing his imprimatur on a piece in a gallery. The thrilling part is how at home Kanye and Wayne sound having fun in this playground (Kanye’s "Richer than white people with black kids/ Scarier than black people with ideas" is an instant classic, while Wayne slides into a comfortable vintage flow).
There will be a lot of talk about how unfocused or chaotic this album is, but I’ve always taken that as par for the course with any Tyler music. Tyler is still gonna do Tyler things, and it’s refreshing when an artist creates exactly the kind of art they want to create. A quick glance at the announced five alternate covers to the album was revealing—there’s a real aesthetic consistency to them. I’m reminded of the work of Marilyn Minter, an artist with a similar panache for creating intentionally ugly and tacky art, with the knowing observation, "Yes, this is ugly, but I can’t stop looking at it." That may be old hat at this point, but the idea is still such a seductive one: I know it's a mess, I put a lot of work into creating this mess, and it's your problem if you can't handle it. A funhouse mirror doesn’t make sense without knowledge of how a regular mirror works. Tyler, the Creator only creates as the sum of his exhaustive, trying, kaleidoscope self—and I keep looking at him.


The trio’s fifth album further smooths out their neo-soul sound while celebrating the voices that inspired them along the way.

Starfruit

Los Angeles–based trio Moonchild have refined their sound with every release. A decade ago, the group—composed of lead singer Amber Navran and multi-instrumentalists Andris Mattson and Max Byrk—introduced their brand of jazz-inflected soul on their soothing, groove-heavy debut, Be Free. Their next three LPs fused dreamy keys with funk-inspired songs over lush instrumentation. Set against a similar backdrop, their fifth album, Starfruit, leans further into those smooth instincts while staying true to their neo-soul roots.
The album marks the first time Moonchild have had featured artists. Navran noted in a press release that they intentionally chose primarily Black women as collaborators, with a stacked guest list including North Carolina MC Rapsody, R&B mainstay Lalah Hathaway, and indie rapper Ill Camille. Their voices add a sense of vibrancy to Starfruit, an otherwise carefree record about the rocky yet rewarding experience of falling in love.
Navran’s velvety voice is the album’s anchor. Over the synths and subtly throbbing bassline of “Takes Two,” she croons to a partner: “The greatest gift that you could give to me is to leave and stay gone.” Her soft tone sounds even more pristine when paired with artists whose vocals challenge her to test the depths of her own. On the sultry opener “Tell Him,” Lalah Hathaway’s signature low register motivates Navran to toy with the delicate contrast of her falsetto. The Tank and the Bangas–assisted single “Get By,” a playful, synth-driven track, sees Navran flirting with hushed melodies alongside Tarriona “Tank” Ball’s coy raps.
The album’s subdued beats and airy vocals almost beg for extended instrumental jam sessions. But only the closing track, “The Long Way,” aided by a sax solo from jazz musician Josh Johnson, rewards that desire. With Starfruit, Moonchild settle into their groove, further smoothing out their sound while celebrating the voices that inspired them along the way.

Buy: Rough Trade


The newly reissued six-song EP from the Maryland indie-pop band wallows in uncertainty and transition—but their songwriting makes it feel both adolescent and eternal.

Habit EP

When Lorde released Pure Heroine in 2013, critics could not get over that fact that a teenage girl could contain such galaxies. Though Lindsey Jordan is not a New Zealand pop star, her work as Snail Mail serves another reminder that the most thoughtful perspectives often come from those who are misunderstood or underestimated. Jordan began playing classical guitar as a small child and then began writing her own songs as a young teenager. While balancing guitar lessons and hockey practice, she became absorbed in the D.C./Baltimore music scene and was moved to form her own group.
Two weeks after Snail Mail’s first practice, Jordan, drummer Shawn Durham, and bassist Ryan Vieira performed with punk heroes Sheer Mag and Priests at a Maryland festival. Priests, in particular, took Snail Mail under their wing and released the trio’s first full band EP on their Sister Polygon label; guitarist G.L. Jaguar and Jason Sauvage of Priests’ sibling band Gauche served as producers. When Habit was released in July 2016, the arduous but ultimately rewarding process implied by the group’s moniker proved to be prescient: after emerging quietly, the EP built considerable buzz that led to tours with Waxahatchee and Girlpool, a vinyl reissue, and talks of a future full-length with a major label home. Oh, and most importantly, Jordan graduated high school.
But Habit portrays a time before any of this felt possible. The six songs here wallow in the spiral of uncertainty and transition that feels both adolescent and eternal. Rather than joining the “we ain’t ever getting older” crew (though she does occasionally indulge in such luxuries), Jordan is burdened with being young and feeling old. “Baby when I’m 30 I’ll laugh about how dumb it felt/Baby when I’m 30 I’ll laugh it out,” she sings on “Dirt.”
Only on “Thinning,” Habit’s upbeat opener, does ennui sound somewhat enjoyable. Even though Jordan wrote the track while ill with a double whammy of bronchitis and infatuation, sunshine radiates through the weary oozing of her voice. “I wanna spend the entire year/Just face down/...And spend the rest of it asking myself/‘Is this who you are?’/And I don’t know/It just feels gross,” she declares before launching into a slippery guitar lick.
But for the most part, Habit’s lucid reflections move at relaxed pace. It gives Jordan the space to tackle the anxieties that she can’t “run [her] hands over.” On “Static Buzz” and “Stick,” her heavy, vast voice serves as the inverse of her tight, intricate guitar work (Jordan’s guitar teacher is Mary Timony of Helium and Ex Hex). While the instruments stay measured, only Jordan’s voice breaks through the slowcore haze. “I can’t keep anything down,” she belts on the former with a hurl. “Dirt” and “Slug” are less lethargic as they touch on rising above smallness.
Regardless of what path Jordan chooses for future Snail Mail material, Habit’s six songs eloquently reflect a place in life that most find too complicated to express. There’s no grandstanding here, no attempts at hiding how truly confusing it is to be young and feel like the world is simultaneously infinite and hopeless. Perhaps that is why Snail Mail sound so alive despite much tangible optimism: there’s no person behind a curtain, the ugly resides in reality.


On his third album, the in-demand producer and solo artist ends up splitting his time between careful rock songwriting and carefree pop singing, leaving a minor impression of both in the process.

Bleachers: Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night

Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night

There’s a strain of Tasteful Pop coursing through mainstream music right now, guided by Jack Antonoff’s princely hand. Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey and Clairo and Lorde have all recruited Antonoff as co-pilot on their journey to the soft and lush grounds of Tasteful Pop, cushioned by string arrangements and acoustic guitars and first-person observational songwriting that always seems to ask what is honest right now? as opposed to what might sound interesting later? As a producer, he is more than a hired gun but never an egomaniac, just the footprints in the sand when you need him the most. Even when working on funky ’70s pastiche with St. Vincent or the pop-country of the Chicks, Antonoff remains collaborative, chameleonic, versatile, and difficult to pin down save for one word: tasteful. And there is no accounting for taste.
His third solo album as Bleachers, Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night, threatens to blow that whole idea out of the water. It’s a confused album that sounds like it wants to sit on the shelf next to do-it-all pop savants like Jeff Lynne or Todd Rundgren, yet retreats to the safety of Antonoff’s alt-pop impulses before anything spectacular really develops. Everything feels a little too sweaty and effortful, and the yelpy millennial-pop singles gobble up the scenery behind more nuanced and emotionally textured album cuts. Though it’s an album led by a bona fide hit-maker, it is perfumed with the notice-me-dad odor of a solo project. It is mostly inspired, sometimes interesting, and occasionally banal, half All Things Must Pass, half Jack Antonoff and the G League Band.
Antonoff recorded these sessions with his five-piece touring band during the pandemic, crafting an album about falling in love with the sound of the slapback echo. I’m kidding, but not really. The production effect—made famous by Elvis Presley in Sun Studios, a hallmark of ’50s and ’60s rock’n’roll, and used by many since then from Bruce Springsteen to Wolf Parade—is essentially a sixth band member, coloring the songs with a sepia, rockabilly tint. It is the first hint at Antonoff’s desire to create a real album’s album.
On 2014’s Strange Desire and 2017’s Gone Now, he celebrated his nostalgia for the ’80s, but now he seeks something even further in the past, summoning images of lyrics scrawled on foxed pages and captured with vintage microphones. This feeling begins with the lovely “91,” co-written and sung with the author Zadie Smith. The slow prelude has an expressionistic, dreamlike quality, a spectral memory play set in 1991, where there’s a war on TV and a mother waltzing around a room “like there ain’t no rip in the seam.”
Mothers, ghosts, faith, and darkness are a few of the motifs across Saturday Night, cropping up like Bruce-shaped signposts along the side of the turnpike. Antonoff even calls in Bruce—his childhood idol and chief musical and spiritual inspiration—to join him on “Chinatown,” a song that feels like a spec script for a Bruce Springsteen song, glockenspiel and all. (The first line: “Get in my backseat, honey pie, and I’ll wear your sadness like it’s mine.”) It conjures big nights and bigger tomorrows like some viral video where Bruce joins a wedding band on stage—kind of lovely and sad and small at the same time. Antonoff told Billboard that this album was “always about breaking out, knocking at the door of the next phase of your life.” Bruce wouldn’t knock, though—he’d kick it down.
In that way, the nervous and quieter parts of the record are where Antonoff separates himself from his pop career. “Big Life” sounds like a songwriter who knows the rules and is willingly destroying them with a preposterous amount of slapback echo, a surfy guitar riff, and an opening line that is funny and self-lacerating: “I flip back and forth coast to coast like an herb.” There’s a lot of odd creases like this, nerdy songwriter/producer choices that highlight Antonoff’s love of making records: The way he sings the title of the album on two separate songs; the close-mic’d vocals and how they strangely overlap each other on closer “What’d I Do With All This Faith”; the clear homage to another inspiration of his, the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle, on the acoustic heart-pumper “45.” It is the quintessential Antonoff solo song, the self-professed herb strumming a guitar and singing his heart out about music and records and love.
The bigger swings at pop-rock are when everything gets blurry and Antonoff pulls a muscle trying to make another hit. “Stop Making This Hurt” is a horn-filled, chest-beating Garden State anthem with a shout-scream chorus as welcome as a troupe of theater kids doing an impromptu number at an IHOP. The big rave-up “How Dare You Want More” fares a little better because it sounds like it was recorded all huddled around one mic, the kind of infectious live-show staple that might really cook if it didn’t stall out completely when the guitar and saxophone start miserably trading fours. It’s rare to find a moment on any record where it seems worth remarking how bad a solo sounds, but there it is.
“I talk so much because I’m scared to begin,” he sings on “Secret Life,” the best and most revealing line on the album. The anxiousness and confusion that bloom in the album’s smaller moments hide behind the bigger songs, which, for all their ’80s and ’50s worship, still sound tailormade for schlocky alt-pop radio. Antonoff remains a curious case for a solo artist, this perennial kid brother archetype with a grin stained on his face even when he’s trying to look serious. His leather jacket says rock star, but his songs are mostly without danger or angst. And even in their hangdog sadness, they are always eager to be heard, yipping at your shins as opposed to inviting you in.

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Okkervil's newest batch of songs create a roomy and natural showcase for Will Sheff's high-wire vocals.

Black Sheep Boy

Will Sheff sounds mad. Not angry mad, but the other mad-- nearly hysterical. On Okkervil River's fourth album, Black Sheep Boy, he oversings beyond the limits of taste and vocal cords, either belting the notes forcefully or overenunciating his syllables at quieter moments. You can even hear his agitated spittle hitting the microphone on "For Real". It's as if his voice is too small a vessel for the big ideas and even bigger emotions that drive the band. As Pauline Kael once wrote of Gene Wilder, Sheff "taps a private madness," as if the pain and heartbreak around him-- the runaway sons, abused daughters, lost friends, damaged lovers, and doomed relationships that comprise the world of the album-- push him to caterwauling arias, his hysteria barely bottled by the demands of his carefully constructed songs. But, like Wilder, Sheff never overplays his hand and always maintains control, which, also like Wilder, makes him at once heartbreaking and somewhat humorous-- more self-aware than Conor Oberst, more serious than Colin Meloy, more legible than Jeff Mangum.
Black Sheep Boy creates a roomy and natural showcase for Sheff's high-wire vocals, and as a result, it may be the band's best album, the crest of a wave that began with 2003's Down the River of Golden Dreams and rose through a subsequent EP and two releases by sister band Shearwater. Okkervil River's major accomplishment-- what sets Black Sheep Boy farthest apart from previous efforts-- is the sense of purpose to these songs: they sound studiously literate, melodic, and concise, which bolsters their cumulative effect. A concept album that moves thematically rather than narratively, Black Sheep Boy was inspired by the Tim Hardin song of the same name and begins with a more or less faithful cover. The following 10 songs expound on these themes of prodigality and wanderlust as the band display an unflinching devotion to the sheepish title metaphor, following it all the way through until the boy becomes a ram.
Writing in first-person, Sheff traffics not in plots, but in predicaments full of concrete details and clever wordplay. On "Black", a man despairs to counsel and comfort his lover, who was abducted and possibly abused as a child. "April 12th, with nobody else around; you were outside the house...when he put you in the car," Sheff sings, capturing the character's boiling frustration and romantic abandon. Meanwhile, the band churns a bouncy pop energy, driven by Jonathan Meiburg's keyboards and Zachary Thomas's rubber-ball bass, which pushes and prods him along, intensifying the emotions even as it seems at tonal odds with the dark material. But, as the music makes clear, "Black" is a love song, a statement of determined devotion.
The sound on Black Sheep Boy, while certainly familiar to fans, is so far removed from the purposefully lulling pace of Golden Dreams that it could belong to another band altogether. To an extent, it does: The quartet has grown into a sextet, and the expanded line-up is evident in the ambitious, intricate, yet accessible arrangements and the dramatic dynamic between the songs. "For Real", "Black", and "The Latest Toughs" are frenzied headlong rushes that nicely offset the quieter moments like "A King and a Queen" and "In a Radio Song". "A Stone" rests on a bare honky-tonk two-step shuffle, and Howard Draper's lap steel adds a flourish to "Get Big", a duet with Amy Annelle. Careening strings and crescendoing horns add catharsis to the eight-minute "So Come Back, I Am Waiting", the album's climax. "A Glow", though, is its dark denouement, a menacing coda to Okkervil River's most sustained and startling collection of songs yet, throughout which the band makes Sheff's private madness starkly public.


Welsh singer/songwriter Cate Le Bon’s understated and modest third album, Mug Museum, is in part a lament to the erosion of memories, all told with remarkable detail.

Mug Museum

Even those dumb tchotkes we own can take on a greater meaning simply by virtue of how long we’ve owned them. Sometimes it’s a small wooden cabinet filled with thimbles or spoons, or little magnets of all 50 states permanently fused onto the fridge door, or a binder full of basketball cards I can’t let go of just yet. For Cate Le Bon, it may be something as simple as collection of coffee mugs that as time wears on becomes a museum on a shelf, endowed with tiny memories of the past. The Welshwoman sings on *Mug Museum'*s title track, “I forget the detail/ but remember the warmth.”
Le Bon’s understated and modest third album is in part a lament to the erosion of memories, all told with remarkable detail. These are small, graceful songs with deceptive amounts of depth, due in no small part to the circumstances surrounding writing the album. While in Wales last winter just as Le Bon was ready to move on from her 2012 album CYRK, her maternal grandmother died. The songs on Mug Museum were written during that time of reacclimation after grief, as Le Bon struggled with her loss and how affected her maternal role in her family.
Le Bon navigates these uncertainties with both poise and a kind of performed confidence, like someone just pushed her out on to the stage from the wings. Inspiration notwithstanding, it’s the most spritely album she’s released, though the songs themselves remain room-sized and unadorned. The band behind her, featuring guitarist H. Hawkline and White Fence drummer Nick Murray, hit at some familiar folk garage signposts from her previous albums. Mostly, they're a tight, scrappy Euro beat band from the 60s held together by a dusty organ underneath, but sometimes they adopt more metro Television sound, or a carefree California psych group.
The main focus though is Le Bon, whose voice grows more and more singular and versatile with each release. The Nico comparisons still linger on perhaps only because the two are just biologically similar in their yawn-to-song delivery. But where Nico’s voice was alluring in a kind of siren way, Le Bon’s is more curious and diverse. Sometimes she sounds like the shyest member of a folksy sylvan choir and other times she rears up and belts out a high soprano note at the climax of “Duke”. These precise melodies are often performed without precision, or at least without consonants—something about her thick Welsh accent and tipsy elocution just makes her voice swirl around words rather than really land on them. When she sings, “split me like timber,” or, “beat me like egg yolks,” on “I Can’t Help You”, it’s less the emotion behind the sentiment and more the joy in hearing the words spill out.
And Le Bon revels in her language. For Le Bon, who is one of a small percentage of people in this world who can speak Welsh and frequently sings in it, her love for words rarely feels ostentatious, and her gentle delivery rarely makes her words intrusive. There’s several simple turns of phrases on Mug Museum that are just captivating: the subtle transpositions in the chorus of “I Think I Knew”, sung in a classic duet format with the well-paired Perfume Genius. There’s the tangled and desperate "Mirror Me" where she sings, "Mirror me/ Like you want me to be/ Like I want you to see me" (a knowing inversion of Nico, perhaps?). And there’s the emotional climax, “Sisters”, where Le Bon, now powerful in her lower register, proclaims, “I won’t die/ I’m a sister”, coated with denial and stuffed with subtext. We finally get a good look at her fear of mortality and sororal dread, and even then, it’s all boiling under her cool and collected voice.
The pen gets away from Le Bon a few times on the record, most notably on “Wild” where the band and Le Bon play with aggresive dissonance and purple prose, respectively. They don’t work especially well trying to fill spaces, they work better at sounding isolated in them. That’s what Le Bon does best: delicately amplify the tiniest moments that would otherwise go unnoticed. From H. Hawkline's erratic, trashy guitar on late-album psych highlight “Cuckoo Through the Walls”, to the creaking of the piano stool on the final track, Mug Museum accumulates hundreds of pieces of Le Bon's life to form an imperfect whole. By the end as Le Bon sings alone above a rusty piano, it sounds like she’s surveying the artifacts around her, her questions and worries laid out in great detail in the nine tracks that came before it. Most of Mug Museum is bare and direct, quaint and unassuming, but Le Bon makes a rather grand occasion out of it—she's a master curator and consummate immortalizer.


After being largely unknown throughout most of 2009, this Southern rapper is suddenly the next big blog-rap hope.

K.R.I.T. Wuz Here

Big K.R.I.T.'s zero-to-60 career trajectory has taken the rapper mere months-- he was unknown for much of 2009-- to become one of the more buzzed-about blog-rap phenomenons. Compare his sudden rise with that of his obvious influences, like Pimp C, whose impact was still just being recognized upon his death, or T.I., who toiled in the Atlanta underground after a major-label false start before beginning his ascendancy. K.R.I.T. is a talented artist, a rapper with dimension and ambition who has learned much at the feet of the masters. His new record, K.R.I.T. Wuz Here, is a strong release from a kid who has a lot of ideas and approaches, although he hasn't quite established himself as a distinctive star, and often falls back on a collection of well-crafted southern rap clichés. The fact that we're even talking about him today is because he stands on the shoulders of some rappers who didn't have such an easy path to critical acceptance.
It helps that K.R.I.T. seems uninterested in following the paths of major-label creative casualty B.o.B., who seemed to outgrow rap before he could even grow into it. Instead, the rapper joins a first wave of new artists (G-Side, Yelawolf, Pill) working a vein of Southern rap traditionalism, embracing the production aesthetics of UGK and Organized Noize. K.R.I.T.'s ear is his biggest strength; as a producer, tracks like "Return of Forever" and "Country Shit" find him revitalizing the staid indie rap template with the 808s and swagger of Southern rap.
As a rapper, K.R.I.T. still seems to be working his persona out, as if his talents have leapt ahead of his sense of self. Just as he deftly emulates great producers, his rap influences are the best of the best; choosing Pimp C as a stylistic forefather suggests he identifies with strong personalities, even if he's working his way through them to find his own. And T.I.'s topical breadth and lyrical flexibility serve a strong example for an artist uninterested in painting himself into a corner. Goodie Mob certainly laid a blueprint for his more socio-political verses. It's also smart of him to work with rappers like Curren$y-- the most charismatic nu-South backpack rapper. If K.R.I.T. follows this path, he could end up with a truly great career.
And while this tape is strong, it's as much about potential as it is an achievement in itself; as great as it sounds hearing K.R.I.T.'s scrappy rap style ride "Country Shit"'s energetic beat, the track is almost undercut by its topical genericism. Tracks like "Just Touched Down" and "See Me on Top" feel like steps further back; standard soul loops, archetypal exercises flawlessly executed but ultimately quite empty. The flip is tracks like "They Got Us", "Children of the World", or "Small as a Giant," where K.R.I.T.'s reflective, conscious approach shows signs of personal honesty, political frustration, and hints at the person hidden behind the music.


On their second full-length, Cotton Jones take a more wistful and weary tone; the result sounds like classic country music filtered through dream-pop haze.

Cotton Jones: Tall Hours in the Glowstream

Tall Hours in the Glowstream

Michael Nau of Cotton Jones sounds like he's aged 40 years since his tenure as the frontman of Page France. That band pushed his boyish vocals front-and-center, most notably on 2005's Hello, Dear Wind, and he sang almost-hushed heart-on-sleeve lyrics about love, loss, and devotion. If the Michael Nau of Page France was the young man immersed in wide-eyed wonder while taking in everything around him, the Cotton Jones iteration of the same person proves to be wiser-but-wearier, stricken with a sense of longing and regret even when singing lines like, "How sweet it is to roll up on your floor."
The directness that once defined Page France's music (and Paranoid Cocoon, Nau's first album under the Cotton Jones moniker) is brought into more atmospheric heights on Tall Hours in the Glowstream, while the lyrics shift from proclamations and heartwarming imagery to the uncertainty of love. On opener "Sail of the Silver Morning", Nau's dusky, southern-tinged vocals (along with those of co-vocalist Whitney McGraw) fit snugly atop the otherworldly doo-wop shuffle, complete with ethereal background humming cloaked in reverb. "If there was a path your feet could follow, where in the world would it lead?" sings Nau on "More Songs for Margaret" in a place where his own legs seem far too tired to carry him any farther. Toward the end of each verse, with the float and drift of blissed-out keyboards and distant tambourine, Nau intones, "Always the mornings keep coming onto me." Even when found in the occasional bright spot, even when realizing that his days are far from over, still Nau can't help but sound wistful and downtrodden.
This is apparent on songs like "Man Climbs Out of the Winter", where Nau's wistfulness is carried through the clouds by softly strummed acoustic guitar and the faint whine of pedal steel, evoking the country & western greats of yesteryear. The romanticism of a bygone era also permeates through songs like "Place at the End of the Street" and instrumental "Soft Mountain Shake". As a whole, Tall Hours in the Glowstream sounds like classic country music filtered through a dream-pop haze, a glittery summer night somewhere below the Mason-Dixon Line, where the sky is filled with fireflies and bright stars. The blurry sound drifts through the music and seeps its way into the lyrics, as much of the album is steeped in uncertainty, Nau's footing never steady enough to see a bold, clear image as he had in his Page France days. Closing track "No Things I Need (Like Some Time Ago)" finds Nau and McGraw at the center of a lilting duet, walking hand-in-hand and "singing sad songs backwards" as they head to the downtown of an unspecified city. Even with such an optimistic ending to a work of deep longing, it sounds like Nau is slightly remorseful to leave where he is in search for something better.


This oft-bootlegged, now greatly enhanced 29-song recording finds the Replacements on the brink of a crucial turning point—like a final college bender before entering the working world.

The Replacements: For Sale: Live at Maxwell’s 1986

For Sale: Live at Maxwell’s 1986

When you talk about the Replacements’ early years, the myths and outrageous anecdotes quickly pile up like empties around a trash bin. But for all the tales of drunkenness, “SNL” bans, and cross-dressing that define the band’s legacy, no transgression encapsulates their prankster personality better than the decision to christen their 1984 breakthrough album Let It Be. As frontman Paul Westerberg has famously quipped, the heretical act of shoplifting an album title from the Beatles was their simple way of saying “nothing is sacred.” And for the Replacements, that maxim went beyond an isolated title swipe—during their first half-decade of existence, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy that took root every time they stumbled onto a stage.
While the Let It Be buzz would yield a major-label deal with Sire Records at a time when bands like R.E.M. were burrowing a path from the underground to the mainstream, the Replacements harbored no ambitions for big-budget MTV videos, Grammy Award galas, or establishment acceptance. For them, playing rock’n’roll was seemingly no more meaningful than doing a shot of tequila: It’s invigorating and disposable in equal measure—something that’s downed quickly and messily, courses through your veins, and makes you do things you regret before you piss it out of your system. But as much as their live history houses a junkyard’s worth of booze-fueled train-wrecks, the true legend of the Replacements hinges on the fact that their messiest moments could immediately be followed by triumphant, transcendent displays of rock’n’roll valor. And on this pristinely preserved live document, the entire underdog-comeback narrative of a Rocky movie plays out and repeats itself in recurring five-minute intervals.
If the Replacements story is one of anarchic inebriation gradually giving way to more sobering introspection, then For Sale: Live at Maxwell’s 1986 is like that last college bender before entering the working world. This oft-bootlegged, now greatly enhanced 29-song recording finds the band on the brink of a crucial turning point, mere months after the release of their Sire debut Tim, and a few more before they ousted wild-card guitarist Bob Stinson. Fortuitously captured on a 24-track mobile studio set up at the venerable Hoboken venue, it’s a crisp, broadcast-ready portrait of the moment when the tug-of-war between the Replacements’ split personalities—the perma-blotto garage band vs. the refined rock craftsmen—had escalated into a bloody battle.
Even as they found themselves headlining clubs and crashing network soundstages, the Replacements approached live performance with a determined lack of ceremony. Traditional set-list rules—like making a grand introduction, establishing a natural flow, saving the best for last, etc.—got tossed out the window. From the opening rip through “Hayday” onward, the Replacements rifle through their back catalog as if randomly clicking on songs in a jukebox. Four tunes in, they’re already attempting the sort of sloppy covers most bands trot out in the encore (in this case, an aborted one-minute romp through Sweet’s “Fox on the Run”). Less than a half hour in, they’ve already dispensed with their two most emotionally wrenching songs back-to-back, “Unsatisfied” and—in embryonic form—“Can’t Hardly Wait” (with Stinson’s swirling leads subbing in for the horn section that would eventually appear on the Pleased to Meet Me version). And in lieu of rousing stage banter, Westerberg inexplicably shouts out “murder!” periodically, while the overzealous crowd shouts out requests for Big Star covers as if pelting the band with ice.
But even if you’re not nearly as soused as the Replacements obviously were at this show, listening to this set will still leave you feeling delightfully off-balance—because on a song-to-song basis, you’re never quite sure which Replacements will show up. By Tim, the ratio of juvenile rockers to savvy pop songs on a given Replacements record had tilted toward the latter. But here, the band still have one foot planted firmly in their basement-punk roots, taking raucous rave-ups like “Otto” and “Fuck School” out for some empty-parking-lot donuts. And along the way, they recast classics by T. Rex (“Baby Strange”) and the Beatles (“Nowhere Man”) in their own roughshod image.
But if the aforementioned “Fox on the Run” flub plays right into the Replacements’ drunk-punk reputation, it’s instantly answered by an absolutely heroic “Hold My Life.” And if cutting off “Left of the Dial” right before its anthemic outro seemingly reaffirms Westerberg’s nothing-is-sacred credo, then the full-band blitz on “Answering Machine” transforms Let It Be’s closing song sketch into the fist-pumping salvo we always imagined it to be. The punked-up pillaging of Kiss’ “Black Diamond,” meanwhile, shows how The Replacements could redeem cock-rock posturing with a genuinely unbridled intensity.
The latter song is also but one of countless moments here where Stinson’s frenzied fret-work squirts extra kerosene all over this fiery performance. More than just provide a rare, radiant snapshot of a legendary live band previously enshrined on an infamously crude cassette, For Sale is a long-overdue concert-album commemoration of the Replacements’ resident Ace Frehley-in-a-tutu, whose playing personified both the band’s cheeky charm and wounded soul. (Sadly, he never found his way after getting fired from the band; he died of organ failure—spurred by years of substance abuse—in 1995 at age 35.) Stinson was the band’s wobbly kneed but fleet-footed running back, sneaking his way through every open space, forever on the verge of toppling over but always managing to dance his way into the end zone. He tricks out the driving roar of “Color Me Impressed” in little six-string ringlets, casually dropping off-the-cuff solos underneath Westerberg’s verses; on the countrified ballad “If Only You Were Lonely,” he playfully punctuates each line as if drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa. He was the difference between the Replacements being merely a great rock’n’roll band and an ecstatically unpredictable, brilliantly absurd one.
The Replacements would go on to make more classic songs without him. But from this point, they would swiftly mature into the sort of steady, semi-professional rock outfit that gets invited to open Tom Petty tours and makes it through televised appearances without swapping clothes. With For Sale, we get the bastards forever young.