On his first release for the iconic British label XL, the Swedish deep house trickster leans into his pop proclivities and heavy-lidded Lothario persona.

Showtime EP

Like a number of Swedish electronic musicians in his orbit—Axel Boman, whose Studio Barnhus label he has recorded for; Yung Lean, for whom he’s made beats—Baba Stiltz is a trickster at heart. An early EP, Our Girls, was simply the same song at progressively slower tempos, devolving from a jovial skip to a woozy, tape-warped crawl. But the 24-year-old producer is a joker with a heart of gold: One of his first singles, 2013’s “Sometimes,” interpolated a snippet of Etta James’ “Something’s Got a Hold on Me”—the same song his famous countryman Avicii had popularized for mainstream EDM fans the year before—without a trace of sarcasm. Stiltz’s twinkly deep house boasts the bright colors and rounded contours of a plastic toy, and when he sings a characteristically love-besotted plea (“I’m selfish, can’t help it, I love you so much”) he really sells it, his croon gooey with a surfeit of pure feeling.
Chalk it up to his youth as a ballet dancer: Stiltz soars gracefully over thorny barriers of taste that would trip up a more heavy-handed artist. He can play it straight when he wants to, and he never beats listeners over the head with his eccentricity. But in recent years, he has increasingly let his quirks come to the fore—or near the fore. Draping his sometimes goofy, clearly untrained voice in a silky scrim of Auto-Tune, he dances around the question that invariably comes to mind: Is this guy for real?
Showtime is his debut release for the iconic British independent label XL. It’s not hard to imagine that the title alludes to the step into the spotlight that signing to such a storied imprint might entail. And while the music doesn’t make a significant break from Stiltz’s previous work, it’s clear that he’s leaning into his pop proclivities. All four tracks showcase his voice, and only the two B-side cuts—the diaphanous “Serve” and the punchier “Maze,” which drizzles syrupy Auto-Tune over a crisp, synth-heavy groove—are keyed to the sound and energy levels of contemporary leftfield house. On the A-side’s two showcase tracks, the emphasis falls squarely on the producer’s heavy-lidded Lothario persona.
It’s a good look. “Showtime” is particularly fun: Between his boomy register and his boastful sweet talk, Stiltz comes across a little like Johnny Cash singing Drake lyrics. Over lowing R&B horns and snippets of doo-wop vocals, he unspools a stream-of-consciousness tale of “a DJ with a good soul,” flitting from wry hedonism (“They say the drugs don’t work no more/They seem to work just fine”) to boilerplate braggadocio (of the “bags full of money” variety) whose naivety is worth its weight in imaginary gold. The beat is druggy and playful: Organs and guitars stretch and contort willy-nilly, and odd, extra beats cheerfully wrongfoot the groove when you least expect. Stiltz sums up his whole philosophy with a cheerful dis directed at no one in particular (“LOL on your whole life”), followed by a burst of sheeplike sampled laughter and a shrugged confession: “Grown man with a whole lotta downtime.”
“Situation” strikes a similar balance between stoner soul and unrepentant silliness. The sampled groove sounds like it’s trapped in a waterlogged cardboard box; his come-ons (“‘Cause sexy situations call for sexy measures/Sexy situations like you and I tonight”) are about as suave as someone whispering sweet nothings with a half-dissolved gobstopper in his mouth. Stiltz is basically a big, wet dog bounding out of the water and shaking his fur, gleefully oblivious to any discomfort he may cause; that he sounds weirdly like Odelay-era Beck here may or may not contribute to that discomfort.
The song is fun and fresh, if admittedly a little low-stakes—like the EP itself. It would be nice if more of the production had the sizzle of his best work. With just four tracks totaling less than 12 minutes of music, Showtime feels like a teaser; what Baba Stiltz does next remains to be seen. But if the Swedish heartthrob with the sly grin and a whole lotta downtime figures out the right balance of shtick and sincerity, we could have a pretty scintillating situation on our hands.


The producer and DJ’s guest-packed “Brexit album” conjures a great sprawl of humor and tragedy that makes for Herbert’s richest album in years.

The Matthew Herbert Big Band: The State Between Us

The State Between Us

Matthew Herbert was once a people-pleasing house DJ, but over the past decade he has become known primarily as an eccentric. His high-concept themes and unorthodox methods—manipulating samples from aerial warfare, a pig’s life, and other artifacts of consumerism—tend to overshadow the producer and composer’s core mission: an earnest campaign to make us consider not just sounds but also their sources, and to experience both as equals.
The project has a forbiddingly post-modern ring to it, so it’s worth stressing that the best entry point to The State Between Us, his sprawling and guest-packed Brexit album, is also the easiest: Go in blind, and let his collage of jazz, house, blues and politically loaded field recordings lead your curiosity. Take “The Tower”: The album track opens with a gentle shuffle and a staticky sound that eventually resolves into footsteps and wind. A shrill piano chord chimes from the periphery, the kind you might hear at a nuclear power station after pressing the wrong button. It rings out several times and settles only when a jazz beat skulks in, coaxing out a full-blown big band number. For the next few minutes, brass rises and falls in waves of rapture and panic. Then footsteps resume as a police siren sounds in the distance. After the song finishes, the curious can read a gut-wrenching footnote: Herbert made the field recording in London last May, on a silent march for the victims of the Grenfell Tower blaze.
Like Brexit, the deadly fire that “The Tower” commemorates has prompted allegations of state racism while entrenching divisions between British people and an indifferent elite. In a tone of inquiry and elegy, Herbert has found a way to eulogize these modern tragedies even as he pillories the political farce enabling them. Herbert has always obsessed over the big picture, which makes Britain’s departure from the European Union a convenient problem: Now that cultural regression is headline news, he can make these bold proclamations without being branded a kook.
In 2017, Herbert revived the big band project he launched in 2003 and enlisted multinational guest singers and big bands to record his new songs. He wanted the reboot to advance a Brexit counter-narrative, and the record even had the same deadline as Brexit—March 29—but, unlike the British government, he’s sticking to it. He enlisted local big bands around Europe for short-notice tour dates and recorded in their dressing rooms. He deployed proxies across the continent on bizarre missions. The recordings they gathered include Gibraltarian monkeys, a trumpet being deep-fried, a swimmer crossing the English Channel, and someone dismantling a Ford Fiesta. Two minutes into opener “A Devotion Upon Emergent Occasions,” a medieval chant gets ambushed by a roaring motor and mighty crash: the sound of a 180-year-old German pine tree being felled with a chainsaw during Brexit. (He’s also recorded a companion album documenting every second of the tree’s final week, reasoning, “I'd rather listen to a tree than [Brexit ringleader] Boris Johnson.”) Together these contextual flourishes conjure a great sprawl of humor and tragedy that makes for Herbert’s richest album in years.
That’s not to say it goes down easily. A hostile environment of dread and paranoia lasts through the opening songs and well into track three, when keys roll in and a spotlight falls on guest vocalist Rahel Debebe-Dessalegne. She sighs the song’s title, “You’re Welcome Here,” and the album softens: From then on, The State Between Us provides a balm to the dispossessed. To submit to the dreamlike record is to wend through cities and centuries, big-band ballads and avant-classical curveballs. Interpolating text from a Caryl Churchill play, “The Special Relationship” unfurls like contemporary opera, with Arto Lindsay yelling “Catastrophe!” and “Cunt!” in character as the British and American governments. More than an hour in, “Where’s Home?” busts out the first dance beat: a carnivalesque house squall.
“Fish and Chips,” with its cantankerous rhythms and triumphal brass, is similarly euphoric, though once you consider the title, which evokes a British innocence that now feels vaguely ironic, it begins to sound less like a carnival than a wake. In this spirit of national reckoning, Herbert rummages deep in the British psyche and pulls out an unlikely cover of Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade.” This wartime classic has a Proustian significance to many Brits that is rivaled only by the Coronation Street theme and the smell of Battenberg. Yet Herbert, with his usual sledgehammer symbolism, conscripts a German big band to perform it. He aims for your gut, where so much of the avant-garde can’t reach, and rarely misses.
At two hours long, The State Between Us ought to waver in focus or intensity, but Herbert has never sounded more at home. Safe in the knowledge that most British people, for better or worse, can’t help but engage with the subject, he taps into a small, honest hope that would be inexplicable as a thinkpiece. On “You’re Welcome Here,” for instance, Debebe-Dessalegne sings, “We can stay here in the music,” while an angelic choir serves as propaganda for the redeeming qualities of community. Like a sardonic opera, Herbert’s grand vision could easily live on as a post-colonial, anti-nationalist allegory. Yet it’s just as reassuring to imagine that, one day, Brexit’s toxic memory will fade, his field recordings will lose all poignancy, and the trees will again sound just like trees, nothing more and nothing less.


A$AP Mob's first group album and the crew's first major release since A$AP Rocky's debut uses the framework of producers like Clams Casino, AraabMuzik, and the Mob's own A$AP Ty Beats to trace out a new brand of cold, nihilistic New York rap.

Lords Never Worry

A$AP Rocky is no longer just an underground star. His crew, though, has largely stayed in the background as he's ascended into the mainstream. Much of the magnetism of Rocky's early visuals came from the idea that the viewer was getting a look at a movement of culture already in progress, and though Rocky is highly central to that, there's a strength in numbers when it comes to those sorts of moments. This has been the power of Rocky and his A$AP Mob, much like it was the power of Tyler, the Creator and the once nascent Odd Future. But the A$AP Mob is just now getting itself off the ground musically. Its members are highly visible backing up Rocky onstage or in certain corners of the Tumblrsphere, but there is no trove of mixtapes. You will not, in other words, find any A$AP Mob trading cards.
That is all beginning to change with Lord$ Never Worry, A$AP Mob's first group album and the crew's first major release since Rocky's debut album. Rocky's presence looms (he appears on six of 18 songs), but this is the coming-out party for the guys who have spent the last year-plus in his orbit. The results, though, are extremely mixed-- the Mob's image emerged fully-formed, but its music is still, at best, rough and unpolished. It is a work of a group of kids who are well-versed in the aesthetics of certain strands of rap, and who have good and nuanced ideas of what they want their own music to sound like. Unfortunately, much of the crew has yet to develop a voice strong enough to prop up these general notions-- Lord$ Never Worry is an attempt to build a house from the top down.
Where the album fails is precisely where A$AP Rocky succeeds, and the unintended side effect of Lord$ Never Worry may be a greater appreciation for what Rocky is able to pull off, even taking his own lackluster contributions into account. Rocky's music is a triumph of taste over skill, but there is a songcraft on LIVELOVEA$AP that just isn't present here. What's left is an album that is long, dark, and ugly, with little to none of the pop crossover or tactful stewing of regional sounds that colored Rocky's debut. Lord$ Never Worry instead uses the framework of producers like Clams Casino, AraabMuzik, and the Mob's own A$AP Ty Beats to trace out a new brand of cold, nihilistic New York rap.
It is, though, an idea better in theory than execution. The main issue is that guys like A$AP Nast, Da$h and A$AP Twelvyy-- who all appear across the tape-- are gruff shit-talkers who are competent on a basic level but largely indistinguished. In a different context, that style can provide an effective counterpoint to Rocky's jiggyness-- take, for instance, this Funk Flex freestyle. But when pushed to the forefront on songs like "Full Metal Jacket" or any of their various solo tracks here, straight-forwardness quickly becomes dullness, and "workmanlike" begins to take on negative connotations. There is little on Lord$ Never Worry that is illuminating lyrically or stylistically, or doesn't make you wish that the central figures were better or more experienced.
But there is A$AP Ferg, whose three solo tracks go a long way toward invalidating the previous three paragraphs. Ferg's style is similar to Rocky's-- his flow is hyper-musical, largely owing itself to the lithe sing-song rapping of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. It is a flow that is stilted and off-kilter, but delightfully so. His songs are jagged paths of space and tangled words, furious rapping and soulful singing. It is rap music that keeps you on your toes, that dips and swerves around you. He chooses beats that are outlines, then traverses outside the lines or barely colors anything at all-- he skips and skates all over the mournful, melting strings of "Persian Wine" then barks in short jabs throughout the spare, Luger-ish rattle of "Work". Ferg's voice is undoubtedly unique, and there's something thrilling in that he seemingly doesn't yet have a firm grip on it. Maybe he doesn't even need one-- he is, quite possibly, figuring out how not to figure it out.
Ferg, though, is the exception. The individual members of A$AP Mob have stepped out of the shadows and shown that they have a long way to go before establishing themselves as compelling figures on their own. The A$AP formula is a tricky one-- the amalgamation of revered and trendy sounds and styles invites each member to walk a very thin tightrope on the way to standing out. Rocky is maybe even better at it than people thought.


The producer and songwriter’s second solo album is a romantic exploration of uncertainty, a rush of momentum softened by his trademark sounds.

Changephobia

The ecstatic peak of Changephobia arrives in “4Runner,” an instant addition to the canon of jangly, smeared-pastel pop songs about cars: It feels wrong to listen at any speed under 50 mph. “Take off a shift for me/I’m waiting down the street,” Rostam Batmanglij sings in a conversational tone, the kind of writing and delivery that invokes the magic of the everyday. “Take all the time you want to come, come, come.” It’s a good example of what works about Changephobia, which often wrestles with expression and finding the right words. Even the album title is pitched as a winking take on a “Coexist” bumper sticker: earnest but self-aware, an awkward name for an awkward feeling.
Prior to his 2016 solo debut Half-Light, Rostam introduced himself as a founding member and in-house producer for Vampire Weekend. (He left prior to the release of 2019’s Father of the Bride). He’s now an in-demand producer and songwriter, working on a 2016 joint album with the Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser and earning writing credits for the likes of Clairo and Haim. Some of his production borrows the baroque energy of his old band, but much of his recent work has felt curiously warped, funneling Rostam’s own influences and those of his collaborators down to approachably human scale. “I always felt like the music I made was mine, whether it was part of a collaboration with people,” Rostam told Spin in 2017. “I think the reason is because I care so much, when I work with other artists… I give all of myself to it.”
On Changephobia, that sense of continuity often recalls Rostam’s work on last year’s Haim album, Women in Music Pt. III. Danielle Haim plays drums on “These Kids We Knew,” the sort of porous, guitar-forward jam that the group built their name on. Another Haim collaborator, baritone saxophonist Henry Solomon, returns for the frenetic “Kinney.” Over a drum pattern straight out of a Teklife song, Rostam rushes out the lyrics before arriving at a bittersweet release: “This shouldn’t work, but it does/Didn’t expect to spend the night/But I’m in your arms.” Despite the temporary contentment in his lyrics, Rostam’s trademark blown-out production veers toward clutter, dulling the sensation rather than heightening it.
“Kinney” is a song in constant motion, but Changephobia often evokes the opposite sensation. The album lives somewhere smoggy and sun-baked, finding small respites in moments of overwhelming uncertainty. “Staying at your place/Underneath the bridge/Laying down to sleep/Don’t know what time it is,” Rostam sings in “Unfold You.” Guided by twinkling piano, the words spill out like a sigh of relief. “From the Back of a Cab” tackles a similar subject, tracing an hour-long ride to the airport with a lover. Even as their separation looms, the connection feels sweet and secure.
Breakthroughs like these amount to some of the strongest entries in Rostam’s catalog—songs that locate their intoxicating highs in the restless spontaneity he writes about so frequently. “I want to slow it down,” he sings in the lilting closer “Starlight,” “but I can’t.” Yet even on an album so concerned with fluidity and risk-taking, Rostam mostly stays in his comfort zone. At its best, Changephobia frames the experience of giving in to doubt and ambiguity as a kind of empowerment. Other times, it just feels like giving in.

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The Blue Jean Committee is a fictitious soft-rock '70s soft-rock band fronted by SNL alumni Bill Hader and Fred Armisen. It began as a knowing Eagles parody but has expanded into a proper EP, on which they try to hit as many '70s songwriting themes as they can in as little time as possible.

The Blue Jean Committee: Catalina Breeze

Catalina Breeze

This summer, Jenny Hval sang of "soft dick rock" on her incredible and unsettling Apocalypse, girl. She explained to Pitchfork that part of this idea—an inverse of hyper-masculine cock rock—stemmed from her watching the two-part, three-hour History of the Eagles documentary.
Like Hval, "Saturday Night Live" alumni Bill Hader and Fred Armisen found something to ponder with History of the Eagles. On a two-episode chunk of their new parody series "Documentary Now!", they paid tribute to the same expansive documentary that inspired Hval. But instead of the Eagles, Armisen and Hader focused on the fictitious Blue Jean Committee. What started out as fake has become fact with the Blue Jean Committee’s new EP, Catalina Breeze. The duo don't just lend their faces to the band: they wrote and recorded all these songs themselves, too—Armisen has a long history as a drummer, and is currently the bandleader on "The Late Show with Seth Myers", his "Documentary Now!" co-creator and "SNL" cohort.
Catalina Breeze barely passes the 10-minute mark through seven songs, but even in its brevity, Hader and Armisen manage to hit every hallmark of the California band they sought to be in "Documentary Now!". The opening title track offers the most complete portrait of the Blue Jean Committee: keys mix with bongos and a swishy percussion section, while the repeating chorus of "Catalina breeze, Catalina" is just as breezy as you’d hope. It feels so comfortable and familiar that, for a minute, it feels like it’s not just funny business after all. Later, "Gentle and Soft" arrives as a harmony-heavy acoustic ballad adorned with an occasional twinkling chime.
Elsewhere on Catalina Breeze, it feels like the Blue Jean Committee is trying to hit as many '70s songwriting themes as they can in as little time as possible. "Going Out to Hollywood" follows the trope of a narrative of a small-town diner waitress who’s got bigger dreams than her home can accommodate, while "Mr. Fix It" directly recalls ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky" in its jumpy, earnest appeal to a powerful cosmic figure. The band throws the slightest bit of funk into the mix with "Mama You’re a Dancer", and "Walking Shoes" mimics the not-so-Southern rock peddled by the likes of the Doobie Brothers with a banjo hiding under peppy guitar licks.
All of this is enjoyable for music nerds, who get to pick out the embedded inspirations and influences. But ultimately Catalina Breeze is an impressive, if perhaps not entirely necessary, follow-through on a joke. It wasn’t enough for these songs to exist on TV; they had to get cut to vinyl and put out through Drag City, as well. Catalina Breeze makes for a fun exercise, but as a standalone release, it’s a little, well, soft.


On her debut, the French-American musician offers a broken heart, a jaded eye, oceans of surf-rock reverb, and a Van Dyke Parks cameo.

Waves

During a breakup, you fantasize about dramatic reinvention. Maybe you'll move across the ocean, change your hair, pick up a new hobby. For Amélie Rousseaux, the French-American musician who performs as Sofia Bolt, post-breakup reinvention entailed swapping Paris for L.A., getting into surfing—and oh, writing a slightly clumsy, mostly lovely debut album called Waves.
The first thing you notice about Waves is the atmosphere. On opener “London 2009,” Rousseaux recalls the initial spark of attraction over snippets of party chatter, clinked glasses, and pouty-lipped surf-rock guitars. “I was so drawn to you/Artistic, timid, cute,” she sings. Her lyrics are often messy, with endearingly clunky rhyme schemes and the occasional cliché, but she’s aided by talented session musicians and oceans of reverb.
Sometimes, Rousseaux plays it a little too cool for her own good. On “Ojai,” she casts her disaffected eye across a room full of “wannabe hippies,” sounding not so much above it all as detached. After pontificating about hot springs and horizons, she switches to French and allows a beach-rock guitar solo to see her out. The arrangements are distinctive, but Rousseaux’s own voice gets a little lost.
The title track, which comes in two versions, offers the biggest surprise. The first version sounds like every other song on the record: moody, chic, simmering. The second, appearing at the very end, is arranged by the legendary Van Dyke Parks. The master L.A. weirdo’s trademark orchestral flourishes move through the flimsy song like a summer storm spinning a weather vane; it’s a trip to hear Parks’ work punctuating lines as facile as “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and “hella easy.” But ultimately, Waves is a debut. It’s an asymmetrical listen, and that’s fine; there’s more than enough promise here. Amélie Rousseaux moved halfway across the world to heal, and it is a pleasure to hear her processing.


Wavves' fifth album was inspired by a breakup, as well as a period of what Nathan Williams calls "just drinking, straight drinking." Accordingly, V sounds like a hangover. The best songs here will make for a welcome injection into his set list, reminding you of his keen ability for penning appealing "woe-is-me" anthems that won’t bruise you too badly in the pit.

V

In July, Nathan Williams became the latest musician to show you can take the boy out of indie but you can’t take the indie out of the boy: He got in a fight with his major label. Williams uploaded "Way Too Much", a single from his then-untitled new album, to SoundCloud, only to see Warner Bros. take it down. Without disclosing Warner’s motivation behind the takedown, he implied the label was threatening to sue him, and wrote, "Its so obnoxious to work tirelessly on something and then have a bunch of ppl who just see me as a money sign go and fuck it all up."
On this, Warner was right: V is definitely not a record that’s going to make them a lot of money. That would require Williams writing the pop-punk crossover LP of his career—a little more Paramore, a little less Psychedelic Horseshit. Instead, what we have is an angry collection of songs more indebted to his recent collaboration with Cloud Nothings and the brute-force approach of his earlier releases, where punk catharsis was achieved by saying the same lyric over and over. (Say "I’m so bored" five times fast and you, in fact, will feel bored.)
V was inspired by a breakup, as well as the band’s hellaciously bad habits: 100 beers and two bottles of Jameson a night for the four-piece group, a period of "just drinking, straight drinking,” as Williams says in the album’s press materials. Accordingly, V sounds like a hangover. Every song starts somewhere dismal, and ends up somewhere that’s only a little hopeful—a process akin to the recovery from a hangover, when by the end you're mostly happy not to be drooling and vomiting on yourself. Multiple tracks refer to headaches both physical and spiritual. Williams’ budget has outsized the lo-fi recordings he made his name with, but he hasn't deviated much from the core formula. Though there’s room for easy-breezy surf rock ("Heavy Metal Detox"), insistent riffage ("Flamezesz", "Pony"), and shuddering sounds ripped from a horror movie ("Redlead"), the predominant aesthetic is dirty and discordant backed by big harmonies—the sweet spot from which all memorable Wavves songs emerge.
It’s a faster record, too: V abandons Williams’ previous attempts at balladry, with all slow moments preceding the eventual assault. At times, the pace works to his advantage. Williams writes a killer hook, and it’s easy to hear crowds slamming along to the feel-bad vibes of "Heavy Metal Detox",  "All the Same", "Way Too Much", and "My Head Hurts". A line like "I lost my job today, but it’s all the same" ("All the Same") is delivered much more happily than "It gets better" ("Pony"), a reminder that he’s better reveling in angst than trying to convince us it doesn’t matter.
When he leans into his ennui, V achieves momentarily thrilling peaks. Williams is a child of singers like Billie Joe Armstrong and Tom DeLonge, pop-punk brats great at sounding snotty next to a massive chorus. The best songs remind you of his keen ability for penning sonically fractured, melodically appealing "woe-is-me" anthems that won’t bruise you too badly in the pit. (The best songs were written with the other members of the band, too, suggesting a necessary camaraderie.)
Still, V is a slight regression from the subtle growth he showed on 2013’s Afraid of Heights. Songs like "Demon to Lean On" and "Cop" weren’t just excellent songs—they showed the crystallization of the Wavves project into something mature, a word that’s rarely been used to describe Williams or his music. V will make you think he’s lapsed back to his #worstbehavior. Take a characteristic line like "Everything sucks if you don’t get your way" from "Tarantula"—it’s like he fell through a portal from 2009, and is back to playing the perpetual brat. V is a perfectly capable record, one that showcases what we’ve come to expect—and in many cases, enjoy—from Williams and his band. Even so, you wonder where else they might have gone.


Chief Keef's latest mixtape feels like an emergence from the rapper's wilderness period. Over tracks from his Glo Gang Productions affiliates, he raps, for bars and bars at a time, in a way that he hasn’t seemed interested in for awhile.

Sorry 4 the Weight

In November 2013, a TMZ cameraman greeted Chief Keef as he wandered, blinking, into LAX baggage claim. Keef was being sentenced to rehab, and the TMZ drone flung questions at him in his employer’s house style (lightly mocking, difficult to ignore), about his drug use, his fast driving, his habit of carrying too much cash around. Was he planning to change? Flashing a smile that seems charitable to spare for a paparazzo, Keef responded simply (and unforgettably): "I growed up. I glowed up."
He repeats this ear-sticking phrase, "glowed up", on the first track of his latest mixtape, Sorry 4 the Weight. Dropped last week with a title punning on Lil Wayne’s recent release, the tape feels like an emergence, in a way, from Keef’s wilderness period. After Interscope released Finally Rich, the Chicago rapper underwent serious, uh, glowing pains, during which his already-dark music took a surreal, infernal turn. He uploaded songs to his SoundCloud, like "Wait",  that felt too weird to include on any official releases. He taught himself to produce. On Back From the Dead 2 and Nobody, he drowned his voice in processing like someone bent on murdering their personality through technology. It was a fascinating reinvention, forged away from the glare of major labels, in the soup of YouTube and Audiomack plays. It was occasionally indistinguishable from flailing. On Sorry 4 the Weight, he emerges as something new: A calm, poised, self-sufficient auteur, a production machine of Keef Music.
The tracks on Sorry 4 the Weight are credited to simply GGP, or Glo Gang Productions. Individual names are subsumed into the collective, but members include Hurtboy AG, 12 Hunna, DP Beats, and Keef himself. The vagueness of authorship may be intentional, a way of retaining ownership over a house sound. And that sound has settled into something that feels both formally fixed and malleable, a sort of sonic Silly Putty that can be stretched and stamped in any direction. The basic stuff of the sound comes from tinny MIDI patches arguing with each other in squiggly bursts, while drums boom and rattle. The sounds all line up along the same plane, so it all reaches your ear in a trebly tangle of mid-frequencies. It’s both busy and dinky, a hard chunk of sound that separates into a writhing pile of earworms when poked.
Congas and bongos, clattering busily around the edges of the music, are the most noticeable new addition on Sorry 4 the Weight. On "What Up", produced by Keef himself, circular bongos pulse against a snare roll, and Keef weaves a third pattern in between them, so that there are at least six different permutations of rhythms to nod your head to. This is where the sneaky complexity of Keef’s music comes in: He’s a formal innovator, one who finds lots of ways for his muttering vocals to mesh with the contrary moving lines of his music. His cadences have strange emphases everywhere, and the effect is similar to hearing someone clumping around a floor above you wearing a full leg cast. He breaks words up over bars, so that words like "money" get rendered as two molten lumps, "mah" and "nah", strewn across different beats.
These sorts of decisions are often what keep skeptical rap fans at an arm’s length from Keef, but Sorry 4 the Weight is the least abstracted thing he’s released in a long while. His voice is mixed higher and clearer; there is less AutoTune applied to his voice, fewer glottal non-verbal performances. He raps, for bars and bars at a time, in a way that he hasn’t seemed interested in for awhile, and in a way that rap fans who feel reflexively derisive about him probably aren't used to. He has a gift for writing hooks that contain enough jokes, thoughts, and phrases in them that they feel like they could be the whole song, a talent that you can trace back directly to Gucci Mane, and indirectly to 50 Cent before that, who Keef idolizes and namechecks again on an interlude on Sorry.
There are still fleeting moments of the nightmarish, sinking-tarpit sound of his wildest work: On "W.W.Y.D.", over clotted-up synths, Keef’s voice moves like headlights in fog, and his words break down into outbreaks of "Skoot-doo-do". It’s still thrilling to hear, and it makes one wish that wasn’t such a clean partition set between Keef’s verses and his flirtations with the digital void. The loneliness and poetry of "Nobody", say, in which Keef’s wandering, bluesy vocal take may as well be a wah-wah guitar solo for all you can make out of it, is missing. Sorry 4 the Weight is more settled-sounding,  a "grown" record from an artist who seems grimly determined to move forward at all costs. "If I'm in my mansion, every day all day, best believe I'm working on something...That's all I need to be happy. Work, work, work myself," he says on the intro to "Ten Toes Down". Maybe once he feels safe in his mansion again, he can invite the chaos back into his studio.


If everything Chad VanGaalen touches seems to have a repellant, piss-pungent weirdness about it, that's kind of a ruse—his records of jangly junkyard-pop are warm, inviting, and surprisingly easy to love. His latest, Shrink Dust, is possibly his best, and certainly his most confident; it's the closest we've come yet to getting inside his head.

Shrink Dust

Calgary songwriter Chad VanGaalen has a complicated relationship with beauty. In 2011, he made what I thought was one of the loveliest indie-rock records of the year, but I had a lot of trouble convincing other people of that fact, because he decided to call the damn thing Diaper Island. (Its most tender ballad? Well that would be "Shave My Pussy", of course.) As a visual artist, VanGaalen dabbles in various mediums; he's made animated videos, fantastical figurines and a conceptual piece that was, according to a press release, "a literal piece of shit in a hot dog bun." Recently, he began posting on his Instagram whimsical drawings he had etched into snow: Here is a cute dinosaur, a tugboat, and what appears to be a self-portrait. It was only after I'd admired a couple of them that I realized they were made out of pee.
But if everything VanGaalen touches seems to have a repellant, piss-pungent weirdness about it, that's kind of a ruse—his records of jangly junkyard-pop are warm, inviting, and surprisingly easy to love. His latest, Shrink Dust, is possibly his best, and certainly his most confident. These songs are gentle, sad, and just bizarre enough. (There's a streak of Cronenberg-ian body horror throughout, and it begins playfully unsettling image: "Cut off both my hands and threw them in the sand/ Watch them swim away from me like a pair of bloody crabs".) VanGaalen's called Shrink Dust his country record because it's his first where he makes use of a recently acquired pedal steel, but some of the quieter songs also feature the lonely-cricket chirps of a mouth bow that remind me of Leonard Cohen's Songs from a Room. Like that record, Shrink Dust has a slow, steady trot—like an eccentric stranger rolling into town on horseback, bemused but also made lonely by the vivid visions in his head.
VanGaalen records by himself at home, in a space that's equal parts garage studio and wacky inventor's laboratory. He creates a lot of his own instruments from scratch: a two-person thumb piano; a narrow, portable harp; an analog drum machine that is dotted with Legos and looks more like a middle school science fair project than a rock instrument. Triggered by foot pedals or whirring by themselves with built-in motors, most of these jerry-rigged contraptions are designed to help VanGaalen act in the studio as a one-man band, but they also give his songs a homemade feel. Like all of his records (including the two he produced for the great, defunct Calgary art-rockers Women), Shrink Dust is full of varied, ramshackle textures. Spacey lead-off single "Where Are You?" rumbles like rickety spaceship, its hollered title lyric echoing and warping through an unfamiliar atmosphere on its way back to earth. A gorgeous and languid love song in the vein of Diaper Island's "Sara", "Lila" sounds like a crooner's ballad dissolving in a murky pond, with all the scummy creatures popping up to harmonize with VanGaalen on the surprisingly stirring chorus.
"I started out just experimenting with more… sound-scapey, ambient sort of experimental music," VanGaalen said in an interview a few years ago. "The songs weren't really what I was concentrating on." Since his 2004 debut Infiniheart, though, VanGaalen has moved towards uniting those "song" and "soundscape" tendencies with increasing seamlessness. For all its cosmic-cowboy vibes, Shrink Dust contains some of the catchiest and most assured hooks he's written yet—many of which are just a single word or phrase ("Evil", "Monster", "Lila") that's been taffy-pulled into a graceful and memorable melody. Occasionally, as on the rather aimless "Weird Love", things get a little too plainspoken and laid back, but the psych-pop tune "Leaning on Bells" wakes up the back half of the record with a satisfying jolt of electricity.
In the middle of Shrink Dust, there's an upbeat folk-pop song called "Monster", which describes in vivid detail a Gregor Samsa/Teen Wolf-esque metamorphosis of man into beast: The singer suddenly sprouts quills, his skin turns "scaly and yellowish brown", his fingers wither away only to be replaced by claws. It's one of the creepiest-ever conceits for a jangly pop song, but there's also something cool—and quintessentially Chad VanGaalen—about it. It's like watching one of his surreal claymation creatures, odd drawings, or Frankenstein-esque instruments come together in real time. Chad VanGaalen's world is weird, but never just for weird's sake—his creations spring from deep inside the singular, twisted mind of their creator, and Shrink Dust is the closest we've come yet to getting inside his head.


Pulse Demon / Animal Magnetism

OH CHRIST! SHOOT ME IN THE HEAD! THIS IS THE MOST EXCRUCIATINGLY TREMENDOUSLY CLANGROUS DISASTER PSYCHO-INFERNO SINCE THE GULF WAR AND A YOUNG NIC CAGE! This is what a Merzbow review circa the early 90s would have looked like. I remember briskly walking down the streets in the crisp air, seeing the idle Merzbow-listeners in the cafes. There was an ineffable apprehension in the air. New Merzbow reviews go like this: "We heard this all a hundred times back in the 90s. It's tedious boringcore, alternating between trivial and insufferable." I saw a show where Merzbow played between Madlib and Sleater-Kinney sets, and kids were sitting on the floor chatting, patiently waiting, painting their nails. I sympathize with the position, but I can't adopt it.
Trey Parker once said the end of reality TV would only come when they started airing baby-fucking shows. Once that show starts production, it will be viewers' fault, not the baby-fucker's. Merzbow is the aural baby-fucker. Wherever your ideology lies on the experimental scale, and whatever your religious affiliation, music cannot get much more extreme than this. Maybe John Cage's 4'33", and that's so far to the limit, it's probably cheating. This is the edge of music, of sound in general.
And now, here we are, confronted by the junction of a new album and the re-release of an incomparable classic. It's a moment for reflection and memorialization, and respect for the battleaxes that have been ensconced in our brains. In a lot of circles, 1996's Pulse Demon was one of the verifiable foundations of noise, the final proof that the pythonic wall of sound was scalable. This is a gross overstatement, of course, as journals from the Sixth Century also indicate the presence of noise, but it's not an entirely deceitful one. It came after a string of near-apocalyptic releases that were far more severe and atrophic, but also entertaining, heterogeneous, energizing, malleable.
Pulse Demon is simply pure sound, viciously unadulterated static. The earlier releases stimulated the imagination; Pulse Demon decimates it. It also has a bit of a beat that would be further dismantled in the succeeding years. Pulse Demon is Meet the Beatles, where you start to understand Masami Akita's appeal before the relentless experimentalism period. And, in this sense, the record is probably one of the most archetypal Merzbow albums, the one most resolutely and incorrigibly reluctant to dilute itself with free jazz, industrial, world, or musique concrete.
"Woodpecker No.1" is a static abscess that at first overtakes some pathetic techno, and rises to a steaming squalor that subsumes the rest of the track. "Spiral Blast" performs exactly what the title promises, although the "blast" part seems to be the focus, instigating one of the most demented howls on record, like the squeal from the JBs' "The Grunt" maximized to its most trembling, terrifying, cumbersome capacity. The second half is even better. The last half of the half-hour-long "Worms Plastic Earthbound" is a brutally drunken subterranean gunfight. All in all, seventy minutes that feel like driving an 18-wheeler made out of concrete into a remedial course on nuclear winter. And there aren't even overdubs! Essential. Unimpeachable. And the packaging by itself is already more valuable than some people's lives.
In these leadenly gray days, everything from Black Dice to Fennesz is being played on the campus radio and it's easy to lose sight of what was truly revolutionary. And yet, even compared to the most recent Merzbow releases, Pulse Demon will still slaughter innocent orphans in a fraction of a second. Case in point: Animal Magnetism, one of the more approachable recent Merzbow releases. I can easily imagine someone enjoying this album who doesn't even feign to enjoy masochism. On the titular track, the mix is muddled, there are tinny beats in the surroundings, and the slow rise of a pseudo-melody. There are still static, androids, and bondage, of course, but this is definitely a step closer to getting signed to Astralwerks.
"Quiet Men" is a light, vivacious cartoon, making the sound Warner Bros. animals make when they spin around. The first half of the album feels rather fluid. Whereas startling jaggedness is to be expected on a Merzbow album, on Animal Magnetism, there's a continuity that observes evolution and decay. Unfortunately, it's also less distinctive. "Super Sheep" tries to get some propulsion going, but the bassline is so immediately familiar to the causal Alec Empire fan, it makes the distortion feel like a deleterious contrivance Akita felt compelled to include at the last minute.
"A Ptarmigan" is the most interesting track, if not particularly exemplary. In twenty minutes, it's a parade in one section, a turgid dirge in the next. "Pier 39" is an ambient, scraping anomaly that wouldn't be too out of place on a Boards of Canada album. While it's perhaps the best recent Merzbow CD for newcomers, it's not a keystone in his canon. Still, it's not nearly worthy of the horrendous dullness ascribed to it in the media in its first days of release. And, even if it's not his best, it'll still be hilarious when all our dads get it thinking it's that old album by The Scorpions. Maybe then Merzbow will finally be able to piss someone off.


The band’s imposing, precarious new album cements them in a history of North Carolina bands making thrilling indie rock.

Running From the Chase

For all that’s changed over the past 30 years, you can still take comfort in certain recurring phenomena, like Martin Scorsese movies that require booking an afternoon off work and North Carolina acts raising the bar for unkempt yet emotionally stirring indie rock. When charting the genre’s trajectory this year, all roads lead to the greater Asheville area, which has yielded pace-setting albums like Wednesday’s raggedly glorious Rat Saw God and Indigo de Souza’s charmingly eclectic All of This Will End. Now, their Raleigh compatriots Truth Club complete the 2023 Triangle triangle: Frequent showmates with the former and occasional collaborators with the latter, the band also shares custody of Asheville studio ace Alex Farrar. But if Wednesday are like the Superchunk-esque rallying point of the current NC scene, then Truth Club are like the more enigmatic and forbidding Polvo, deploying more oblique strategies to similarly arresting ends.
Running From the Chase is technically Truth Club’s second album, but it captures a moment of spiritual rebirth for the band. While recording 2019’s wily and wiry Not an Exit, the founding trio of singer and guitarist Travis Harrington, bassist Kameron Vann, and drummer Elise Jaffe tapped Yvonne Chazal for additional songwriting support. Chazal officially joined upon Not an Exit’s release, and her addition effectively reformulated the band’s DNA, encouraging a more open collaborative process and increasingly unconventional strategies. Their debut presented a band teetering between classic ‘90s slack-rock and second-wave emo; Running From the Chase both builds upon that foundation while redrafting the architecture, integrating DIY sound experiments—from the floor-scraping sounds of a musical-chairs competition to cymbals being driven over by cars—into songs as imposing and precarious as Jenga towers.
This isn’t simple fucking-around for the sake of it—Truth Club’s alternately lurching and liberating dynamics reflect hard-fought struggles with mental health. Several songs on Running From the Chase begin abruptly, thrusting you directly into Harrington’s turbulent headspace. But after these sudden entries, it can take a moment to acclimate to the band’s slow-stalking movements and shapeshifting songcraft, where wandering, half-spoken vocal lines gradually swell into fulsome melodies and stray guitar patterns intertwine into delicately latticed tapestries. They approach these songs as if their very survival was dependent on conserving their strength: “Suffer Debt” is like a 4-7-8 breathing exercise in musical form, receding and surging at increasingly dramatic intervals. Harrington paints a vivid portrait of trying to keep your shit together when your mind won’t let you rest while also interrogating the very process of turning personal trauma into public entertainment: Three minutes in, the band suddenly shifts gear into a raucously grungy denouement where he abandons the poetic similes to speak more bluntly. “Sometimes it feels so bad I can’t even express myself/I don’t even know where to start,” he declares.
Running From the Chase is rife with similarly scabrous sentiments that go down like broken glass. As the title track makes clear, the reward for drumming up the courage to leave the house is getting your soul crushed by your day job (“Work until he’s dead/ work until we’re dead/Is there any other plan?”). “Is This Working?” transforms that existential quandary into riot-stoking unrest: “Each day: wake, worry, watch,” Harrington seethes. “Is this working?/Are you working hard?/Is it working for you?” But Truth Club never seem fully paralyzed by their pessimism: Running From the Chase also offers up adrenalized, fuzzbox-kicking rave-ups (“Blue Eternal”) that function as necessary pressure-release valves, and slow-burning moments like “Exit Cycle,” where Truth Club push back against the darkness. “Hopelessness asserts itself/Not the last time,” Harrington cautions, though he sounds less defeated than prepared for battle, while de Souza joins him on the frontline. Running From the Chase is an often agitated response to a world intent on draining you of your energy, but it’s also a reminder of the beauty in a community.


The debut from the English bandleader and producer is a fascinating blend of spiritual jazz and brass band that can sound full-on psychedelic while staying grounded in its clever arrangements.

Yellow

In a world of musical utility, it is incredibly satisfying to come across an album as supremely impractical as Yellow, the full-length debut from English bandleader and producer Emma-Jean Thackray. It’s so deliciously circuitous that it develops its own gravitational pull. The album takes inspiration from a number of modish sources, including Flying Lotus’ wonky beat sorcery, the mystic jazz of Alice Coltrane, Roy Ayers’ sunshine-soaked funk, and Sun Ra’s cosmic overload. At times, the result is not that far from Kendrick’s towering To Pimp a Butterfly or the jazzier shade of Tyler, the Creator, as witnessed on Flower Boy.
But Yellow splits off into its own lane thanks in part to Thackray’s overarching lysergic bliss. She says she approached the record “by trying to simulate a life-changing psychedelic experience,” which explains a lot: Yellow is fascinating and profoundly befuddling, a voyage deep into nowhere in particular. Just when you think you’ve got your bearings—when you’ve got “Sun” pegged as a kind of disco number, for example—Thackray throws in an impetuous chord progression or rhythmical stutter to pull the ground from under your feet.
The album’s other distinguishing characteristic comes in its use of low-end brass and, in particular, the liberal employment of the sousaphone. Its sonorous parp comes across like a trad jazz send-up of modern producers’ obsession with electronic sub-bass. As a teenager in Yorkshire, Thackray was the principal trumpeter in her local brass band, a musical tradition often associated with the North of England. The use of brass here, with the sousaphone joined by the trombone, trumpet, and saxophone, seems to call back to that era, giving her cosmic jazz a fascinating Northern English (and New Orleans) tint. Thackray has previously wondered whether “some Yorkshire white girl” should participate in the Black American musical tradition of jazz. This, perhaps, is her answer, with the tremble of brass making Yellow something more than a straight copy of someone else’s musical innovation.
Thackray clearly has a devilish skill in composition and arrangement. Fabulous vocal melodies anchor this album, from the lilting command to “stick out your tongue” on “Say Something” to “Golden Green”’s languorous ode to weed. It is a measure of Thackray’s skill as an arranger and bandleader that a song like “Third Eye” manages to sound both epic and concise, with a soaring string arrangement, jubilant vocal choir, and a melody that leaps around like a licked frog—all dispatched in three exhilarating minutes, an abundance of ideas used very nimbly. It’s a testament to the vision that Thackary puts into every moment of her debut: Few people would dream up an album as endearingly obtuse and gleefully dysfunctional as Yellow, let alone have the skill to realize it.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Rebecca Taylor and Charles Watson, the Sheffield duo who record as Slow Club, have a knack for patient, confident evolution. The band's new record continues their developmental trend: Taylor and Watson have taken a large, proud step into the world of soul.

Complete Surrender

Rebecca Taylor and Charles Watson, the Sheffield duo who record as Slow Club, have a knack for patient, confident evolution. Their debut, 2009's Yeah So, was a collection of peppy, straightforward folk-pop that earned the band comparisons to pairs from the White Stripes to the Fiery Furnaces; by 2011, they had moved on to a richer, more tonally diverse sound, one captured by their strong sophomore effort Paradise. The band's new record, Complete Surrender, continues their developmental trend: Taylor and Watson have taken a large, proud step into the world of soul.
The transformation is comprehensive: arrangements move and swing, newfound emphasis is placed on rhythm, blooming horn sections hold court, and Taylor taps into a reservation of emotion and sheer vocal power that was kept hidden on the band's earlier records. But even as Slow Club moves from sound to sound with each new full-length, the core of their appeal—their unique relationship and vocal interplay—remains uncompromised. Taylor and Watson spend a lot of time singing about love and how it's won and lost, but they shy away from playing a couple or suggesting some unresolved romantic drama. Instead, they usually end up sounding like two old friends who share a powerful, purely platonic love, and have spent years singing together and for each other. That interpretation of their dynamic is complemented by their vocal strategy: they frequently sing in unison, eschewing harmony save for situations where special emphasis is required.
Complete Surrender preserves this core strength and doubles down on a few others, giving Slow Club a solid base from which they play with genre and density. The album was produced by veteran Colin Elliot, who has a good ear for space dynamics whether the arrangements are jam-packed (on rompers like "Suffering You, Suffering Me" and "The Queen's Nose") or sparse (the stunning piano-led ballad "Number One"). Elliot understands that Taylor and Watson's voices are the keys to unlocking the band's songs, and he highlights them accordingly, making sure they remain at the forefront no matter how much action is taking place in the background.
Taylor, continuing a pattern of improvement that began with Paradise, is an absolute titan of a lead vocalist. Her voice is big, bright, and open, with a complete lack of pretension. She's an expert at conveying a wide range of emotion, which renders her an instantly familiar presence; when she cuts loose on a dusty, grand ballad like "The Queen's Nose," it's like having your face unexpectedly melted by a neighbor or co-worker at a local open mic. Given that she spends much of Complete Surrender singing about complex relationships and different strains of heartbreak, it's a valuable quality, as she has no trouble connecting with the listener. Watson is a good singer in his own right, too—he carries the aforementioned "Number One" with surprising tenderness—but he's best when serving as Taylor's backup or enthusiastic foil.
An important contributor to Complete Surrender's success is the reverence and respect with which Taylor and Watson approach the material. They're not the first group to evoke the spirit of Northern soul, but they understand that the genre deserves more than a few bleating horns. Their strong sense of identity helps, too: it's clear that the duo have a good handle on their strengths, and even their less successful experiments or compositions can fall back on a base level of chemistry and comfort. Listening to Complete Surrender, you get the sense that Taylor and Watson would be just as happy making music for, and with, each other in their spare time, revelling in their companionship.


The Singaporean band’s new album showcases a punchier indie rock sound and reinvigorated perspective on the environment.

All Around You

On their third album, Nature of Things, the Singaporean quintet Subsonic Eye pivoted from their usual wide-eyed dream pop to a raw, earthier sound. Nature was frenetic yet loose, mixing the shaggy indie rock of Life Without Buildings and Pavement with snappy vocal melodies, frisky math-rock rhythms, and buzzy emo riffs. But while the band may have sounded vibrant, their outlook seemed downcast. Witnessing the destructive effects of urbanization had left them feeling cynical, even as they were making a conscious effort to explore the environment. They ended the album with a defeated sigh, the natural world slipping from their grasp.
Subsonic Eye’s latest album, All Around You, takes on a reinvigorated, more welcoming perspective. It’s set in the crowded cityscape, the hustle and bustle of urban sprawl reflected in the band’s rip-roaring guitars and whirlwind drumming. Their production is tighter and heftier; their hooks are sharper. Vocalist Nur Wahidah doesn’t sound overwhelmed, but hopeful as she surveys her surroundings and glimpses greenery. On “Everything,” she notices wildflowers growing out of car parks and waxes poetic about the sunrise: “Watching the gold bathe the birds/Bringing song into cities/Bringing luxury in our souls.”
Across the album, she’s self-assured and playful. She responds with cool-headed sass to the demands of a nine-to-five, like on the gleeful, hooky “J-O-B” or the scuzzy “Machine,” where her mocking observations on being a corporate cog get swallowed by an exhilarating guitar solo. Bandmates Daniel Borces and Jared Lim act as strong complements to her lead. On the skittish opener “Performative,” Borces lights her flippant narration of political activism—“Signing petitions, charging laptops, separating causes from ourselves”—up with a sublime riff, shaking off the song’s creeping malaise. Elsewhere, the pair’s textured performances lend warmth to Subsonic Eye’s boisterous noise pop: Their bright guitar tones have an electrifying glint, while the reverb-heavy, shoegaze fuzz conjures the prickling sensation of sunlight on skin.
Subsonic Eye are at their most urgent and heartfelt on “Yearning,” the explosive climax of All Around You. With thrashing guitars and hammered drums, the song explores the heat of desire. As the guitars cool to a rolling swell, Wahidah finds comfort in an affectionate embrace: “You woke me from my slumber, I fall down on my knees/Basking in your warm light, it’s how I came to be,” she sings, still searching for the natural even in the arms of another. She nudges forward, driven by her hunger for contact, but it's the surge of the band that pushes her through. Even when her optimism falters, they’re a supportive backing. All Around You proves that connection—to nature, to a lover—can be a profoundly potent force.


Music is a wounded, corrupted, vile, halfbreed mutt that begs for attention as it scratches at your door. You let ...

I See a Darkness

Music is a wounded, corrupted, vile, halfbreed mutt that begs for attention as it scratches at your door. You let it in and give in a warm place to reside. It licks its paws and whimpers for store-bought snacks. You tolerate the fact that it shits all over your lovely Persian rugs because it seems so cute and vulnerable. It becomes your center for a while. Time passes, and it learns no new tricks. You begin to grow apart. It shuffles about in the background while you microwave your popcorn, and while you're vaguely aware of it, it seems less important to you.
I'm firmly convinced that Bonnie "Prince" Billy's new record, I See a Darkness is not music. It doesn't register in the familiar ways of a pop record (although conceptually speaking, it is one). You can't dance to it, and... it makes you feel small. A friend of mine said this: "I was listening to it the other day and someone called. I had to turn my stereo off. I couldn't just have it on in the background. It felt wrong."
Bonnie "Prince" Billy is the current moniker of Will Oldham, also known as Will Oldham. Throughout his musical life, Oldham has been churning out dark, literary dirges with help from a veritable who's-who of Important Rock and Rollers (members of Slint, the High Llamas, and Gastr del Sol). If, previous to I See a Darkness, Oldham had simply quit, he would have carved out his share of the American Gothic with his tales of death, religious reckoning, incest, and wayward horses in the cold stone of history. Even his substandard records have always had their glory moments.
But here he is again, with a new name, and his consummate offering. The familiar touches are all here-- dense, ominous words and subtle flourishes of guitar, drums, bass, organs, and piano. And best of all, Oldham is perhaps the greatest of human singers, in that he sounds like a real person. There's no studio gimmickry to hide the quiver in his mostly bang-on tone.
I See a Darkness is warmer than the title would have you think, and darker than the warmth of the stellar musical backdrop-- the songs feel both familiar and eerily strange. Virtually every note feels like a universe. It's the type of record that demands solitary reverence. No, this isn't music. It can't be. It's something else.


Though Teen Daze is intent on calling himself a producer, it's helpful to view the British Columbia artist's debut LP within the frame of rock music.

All of Us, Together

"Hey, have you heard of this guy Teen Daze?" This is how a friend began an iChat conversation with me late last year and, short answer, "no." A longer answer would've been one that was likely shared by just about anyone keeping up with prevailing internet trends ca. November 2011: "No, I haven't. But do I really need to actually hear Teen Daze to know exactly what it sounds like?” The answer to that question was likely "no" as well, since if you go to the young British Columbian's watercolor-splashed Bandcamp page, you could find EPs with titles such as *My Bedroom Floor, Four More Years *and, I shit you not, Beach Dreams. His description of Four More Years includes the following phrases: "chillwave," "glo-fi," "falling asleep on the beach," "reverb-drenched," "summer vibes." Fast forward to Teen Daze's debut LP, All of Us, Together, arriving on the same label that brought you Psychic Chasms and The Year of Hibernation, and it's clear that his fervor has not waned: Note songs with titles like "Brooklyn Sunburn", "The New Balearic", and "Cold Sand". It's like Fraser Valley's cable providers allowed Teen Daze's Jamison to view the past three years of internet discourse with a snark-eliminating firewall.
Add it all up, and although Teen Daze is clearly the kind of guy who might say Memory Cassette changed his life with a straight face, his sincerity could disarm a nuclear warhead.  Can you really accuse someone of opportunism when he's knowingly dressed to the nines for a party that ended at least a year ago? Look, I remember hearing this stuff start to bubble up and thinking, "*finally…*someone's doing that," and there have been plenty of great records to come from this subgenre. And can you knock a dude who for all intents and purposes comes off like chillwave's answer to the Darkness? You simply can't have that much enthusiasm about a specific artistic aesthetic and be cynical at the same time.
Though Jamison is intent on claiming to be a dance producer, it's actually helpful to view All of Us, Together within the frame of rock music. Typically, when electronic artists are likened to rock bands, it's something like Justice or Skrillex, acts that incorporate the hard, fast, and loud corndogging aspects of guitar music. But Jamison's compositional method is more along the lines of Real Estate, forthrightly melodic, unfussy, and wholly uncomplicated. These are basslines that could easily be tapped by a beginner familiarizing himself with root-note patterns. The steady 4/4 beats inch close to disco, and it doesn't sound like he went too far into his presets to select the drum sounds. The arpeggios could likely be slowed down to half speed and unpacked as open chords and ringing Strat leads. He even prefers flange and phaser effects above all else.
Jamison's intent is that All of Us, Together will inspire real life enactment of its title, but music that packs dance floors has an emotional or sonic ambition that alludes to social interaction inherently being a risky thing-- the music of Teen Daze is not, and it's hardly a total slight to say this is music meant for more meditative pursuits. It's too agile, perky, and sober to really be likened to chillwave and whether it's rangier numbers like six-minute opener "Treten" or more condensed near-pop like "The Future", everything amicably ambles along in the most agreeable way possible-- I've found it to be a good companion while walking to pick up a specific item or two at Trader Joe's, knowing exactly what I'm getting and knowing that the price never changes.
Which ultimately brings us back to where we started: odds are, you absolutely know what to expect from All of Us, Together and frankly, the actual quality of the record is less of a factor than your interest in what it brings to the table. But towards the end of All of Us, Together, you get the impression that Jamison's still learning on the job and might want to consider a name change. At times, it sounds far less like his beloved Boys of Summer 2009 so much as a simplified homage to Kompakt's more populist acts, electronic's version of a neophyte performing solo acoustic versions of Zeppelin or Radiohead at a college bar. The reverb trailing off the rigid snare hits imply the patiently-building "For Body and Kenzie" and "The Future" were created in the image of Gui Boratto's "Beautiful Life" and "Erbstück" pretty much never happens if the Field doesn't. Granted, he doesn't sound like he has nearly enough finesse as a producer to pull any of that stuff off right now, but it does nonetheless give All of Us, Together a distinct personality outside of being a guileless late adapter with more gusto than technique: if you ever wanted to commemorate the sound of your little brother discovering Pop Ambient for the first time, here you go.


On her first full-length album, the versatile Atlanta artist explores the alternate identities of girls and women, finding solidarity in a cast of striking friends.

Girls

As a little girl, roleplaying is an essential part of forming an identity. With your friends, maybe you choose which Powerpuff Girl you relate to the most or debate the merits of each Breakfast Club character. When you’re a girl, the possibilities of who you could be are endless; by the time you’re an adult woman, you’re supposed to have it all figured out. But on her full-length debut, Girls, the 22-year-old Atlanta singer/rapper/producer Yung Baby Tate applies the limitless imagination of childhood to a concept album about exploring different identities. The track titles sound like characters from a budget female superhero flick: “Bad Girl,” “Flower Girl,” or “Pretty Girl.” Tate flexes all her modes, too, delivering silky R&B vocals, sassy bubblegum-popping bars, and pop-punky chants. Entirely self-produced, Girls is a playful exploration of all the facets of femininity that any one girl—or woman—can possess.
The many alter-egos of Nicki Minaj were an influential blueprint for Tate’s character survey. Tate practically sounds like a Minaj clone in sections of “Bad Girl,” too, and adopts her sex-positive lewdness on the Gucci Mane-interpolating “Freaky Girl.”  Just as quickly as she flips Nicki on, though, she can pivot to a Lil Uzi Vert-esque emo rap cadence for the outro of “Cozy Girl” or a croon that ranges from syrupy like Kehlani (“Lover Girl”) to whispery like Kelela (“New Girl”).
During clear standout “That Girl,” Tate doesn’t assume any specific character. She’s just that girl—the captain of the cheerleading squad, perhaps, or the ringleader of the popular clique, like Regina George in Mean Girls. “Woke up feeling awfully cocky/Who the fuck gon’ stop me?/Baby, I’m a job, you a hobby,” she raps with glee, letting out a tiny squeal after each line. You can practically hear her flipping her hair behind the microphone. Tate is fun when she’s alluding to icons and archetypes, but she’s thrilling when she’s just being herself, as she is here.
Tate’s vision gets a little blurry when it comes to production, however. “New Girl” blends new wave and early 2000s pop without much edge, while “Hot Girl” dips into the vague zone of deep house. She is a little more successful shifting toward Charli XCX’s PC Music-produced future pop on “That Girl” or playing with Grimes-inspired electro candy. Her experimentation is ambitious, expanding far from the sonic palette of her 2018 EP Boys, but most of these references never crystallize into something more.
On the other hand, the only features on Girls are from fellow black female rappers—a pointed and welcome move, considering they are often pitted against each other. Tate spotlights fellow slick-tongued Atlanta rap queens Killumantii and Mulatto for “Pretty Girl (Remix).” With a warm voice suggesting Sampha, Atlanta’s Baby Rose contributes a stunning verse to the heart-bearing “Lover Girl.” Chattanooga’s BbyMutha practically steals the show with her dexterous bars on “Wild Girl,” while Little Rock’s Kari Faux adds a calming presence to closer “Hot Girl.” Tate’s collaborators collectively push against mainstream expectations of female rappers, making a bold statement that black girls are not some monolith. While she gets help from her friends to make that point, Tate ultimately does it for herself. When she sings a short snippet of Chaka Khan’s 1978 anthem, “I’m Every Woman” for the outro of “That Girl,” her philosophy comes into focus: She’s every woman, and you can be, too.


Featuring the earliest known renditions of several Velvet Underground classics, this archival set of acoustic demos highlights a formative period in Lou Reed and John Cale’s artistic partnership.

Words & Music, May 1965

It’s an archivist's dream: One day, dusting a back corner office, you discover more of the past, lying dormant on a shelf. After Lou Reed died in 2013, Laurie Anderson charged Don Fleming and Jason Stern with excavating the thousands of recordings, photos, letters, keepsakes, bar tabs, and credit card receipts that comprised Reed’s creative life. And there, tucked away behind some art books, lay a weathered package made out to Lewis Reed in faded blue ballpoint pen. The handwriting was Reed’s own, and the address was his parents’ house at 35 Oakfield Ave. The postmark was May 11, 1965—the date of the mythical, heretofore-unheard first recording sessions between Lou Reed and his then-new friend, John Cale.
Because real life often bedevils the neatness of archives, the spindly little demo recordings that slipped out of the package were not, in fact, made on that epochal day. Nevertheless, the songs on the long-lost reel-to-reel tape capture the early days of John Cale and Lou Reed’s artistic partnership. Included here are the earliest-known renditions of future classics like “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” and “Heroin.” Reed mailed them to himself with a notarized signature as a sort of “poor man’s copyright,” a cheap and effective way to prove the songs on the tape were, indeed, his.
In other words, Words and Music captures Reed just as he was beginning to take himself seriously as a songwriter. “Words and music by Lou Reed,” he intones at the start of each performance, his deadpan concealing the barest hint of bashful pride. As demos often are, these recordings are bare and unadorned: just Cale and Reed harmonizing over some hastily strummed acoustic and a wheezy harmonica. They sound more like a folk duo than the unholy terror of a rock band they would soon become.
On each track, you hear Cale and Reed go on fishing expeditions, seeking the dark and untamable spirits that would soon occupy their songs. They knew they were out there, but they find them only fitfully. These versions are slight and sly and simple; sometimes, they fail to even tap you on the shoulder. Nothing on Words and Music redefines or amplifies Reed’s legend. Instead, what we get is a photograph, stark and charming. For an artist known for cool and cruel observations, for cutting remarks and misdirections, these recordings show him completely free from guile. Lewis Reed, unguarded.
There is no better illustration of this than in the two versions included of “I’m Waiting for the Man.” The first version opens the set. You hear Cale and Reed harmonizing in a way they never did again—no bent notes, no howling, no sneering, Reed’s voice breaking into an honest-to-god yodel. They sound like the Weavers or the Kingsmen, and the slouch that Reed would work so hard to perfect is nowhere in sight. The second version is even further off, with a harmless clippity-clop knocked out on the guitar’s hollow body, and the harmonies even more subdued. This narrator doesn’t really sound sick and dirty, more dead than alive, and there is no menace, no threat, to the line “Hey white boy/Whatcha doing uptown?” You can see through the song’s swagger right to its fragile, birdlike bones.
The Velvet Underground’s songs were already skeletal, and when X-rayed this way, they give up new secrets. Without the grace note Reed threw on the word “on” in “linger on,” for instance, “Pale Blue Eyes” somehow transforms into a straight country ballad. The dreamy essence of the final recording lies entirely in that vocal take.  He also tries out an early version of “Heroin” with a plunky walking bassline on the low strings that sucks the liquid motion from the song, the sense of love and danger mixing as quickly and seamlessly as the blood into the dropper’s neck. Just as this set’s spartan title implies, he had the words and he had the music. He didn’t yet have the pose.
Maybe it’s for that reason the most interesting moments on the demo tape have nothing at all to do with the Velvet Underground, or with the well-known character of “Lou Reed.” “Men of Good Fortune,” for instance, bears no relation to the song from 1973’s Berlin, despite the name. It’s Reed’s take on a child ballad, a story of a woman grappling with the fear that she will die unmarried and alone. Sharing a melody with Merle Travis’ “Dark as a Dungeon,” it’s both odd and deeply out of character, and Reed sounds more committed to its performance than to anything else here.  Where the other tracks sound like what they are—demos, rough drafts, ideas put down for the sake of record—this one feels like the final version, a vision of a song Reed pulled whole from somewhere in his subconsciousness. It was a place he wouldn’t have cause to go again in his songwriting life.
The same goes for the doo-wop of “Too Late,” which is a love letter to Dion and the Belmonts. Is it a remarkable recording, either in words or music? It is not. It does not have much in the way of meat on its bones, and Cale and Reed nearly give up on it halfway through. But it has Lou Reed assaying a squeaky soul shout, it has a tempo that meanders charmingly, and it has the sound of Cale and Reed, both young and unassuming, busting up laughing at each other, still in love with what they might do.


Annie Hardy and Micah Calabrese move between snaky guitar lines and demure pop.

Hearts and Unicorns

Hearts and Unicorns kicks off with "Kevin Is Gay", which opens with some indecipherable gibberish and guitars that squawk a simple theme over layers of bent, distorted chords. It quickly drops away to just Annie Hardy's innocent voice over a simple drumbeat and sunny synthesizer bass. From this, you probably wouldn't guess that Giant Drag has just two members, singer and guitarist Hardy and drummer Micah Calabrese. Calabrese's left hand should get a third of the credit, triggering the programmed bass that somehow becomes the glue holding together "Kevin Is Gay" and later the kiss-off anthem "This Isn't it", among others.
"Kevin Is Gay" ends with Hardy singing the melody with "meow" in place of every word, and segues into multi-tracked studio banter where she demands with uncontainable glee to hear the song played back. "Cordial Invitation", reprised from the group's consistently overdriven Lemona EP, gains a fleshed-out arrangement, recast here as demure acoustic pop. "This Isn't It" is another track recycled from Lemona, as is "yflmd". "This Isn't It" is just as inviting as the earlier version, giving the spotlight to Hardy's voice and Micah's hand during the verses, until three distinct chords in the chorus deflate all the momentum, as if Hardy's stopping the car to give someone an added awkward goodbye from the driver's window. "yflmd" retains a snaky guitar line that sounds like To Bring You My Love-era PJ Harvey, with come-hither lyrics that get a little creepier with context. (The song title is an acronym for "you fuck like my dad.") What's more memorable than the psycho promiscuity the title suggests is Hardy's countermelody on guitar that takes us to the chorus ("You're just like my father.")
"High Friends in Places" treads the same ground-- man-eating promises over cantankerous swells of guitar ("One wasn't clean/ One wasn't man enough for me"). There's moments when they vary the approach, adding horns to the swaying rhythm of "Blunt Picket Fence" and creeping electronic tones to "Smashing". By and large, the two-man formula is stretched for all its worth, though the bouncy "You're Full of Shit (Check Out My Sweet Riffs)" or the strong vocals of "My Dick Sux" transcend Giant Drag's simple formula.
All these silly song titles and nearly frightening studio patter scratch the surface of something, the way the snippets on a record like Surfer Rosa add another layer of inscrutability, but monochromatic guitars overwhelm the album and mute the few moments of quirk. The two gems here are the bored kiss-off "This Isn't it" and the effortless "Slayer", which closes the album. Hardy softly murmurs the melody, sliding through a riff with a pristine guitar tone over the gentle 4/4 thump of the bass drum, adding the barest back-up harmony. Yes, Giant Drag sound good with the guitars cranked to 11, but they sound great when they're barely trying. If you make it through the maniacal bonus tracks, you might get the feeling I did: That Hardy could be a far more interesting frontperson than Hearts and Unicorns lets on.


Mac DeMarco is an unusually sensitive songwriter, capable of ferreting out what someone else might be feeling even as he’s absorbed in his own perspective. His new mini-LP, which features some of his prettiest material to date, is like a novella, or a made-for-TV movie—something to chew on while we wait for the next major project.

Another One

To get to Rockaway Beach you take the A train toward Far Rockaway, waiting as it winds through Brooklyn, past clumps of trees dotting picturesque residential neighborhoods, over narrow bridges surrounded by the sea, through an imaginary portal away from the hustle and bustle of New York City to a more serene existence. That's where Mac DeMarco lives on the water, when he's not busy gallivanting in the Brooklyn scene or touring across the world. At the end of his new mini-LP, Another One, he tells us his address, and invites us to come over for a cup of coffee, so that in the process of taking that long train ride, toward boardwalks dusted with white sand and the ocean stretched for miles and miles, we might come closer to understanding his slacker-poet point of view.
At first sight, DeMarco seems impossibly "chill," that meditative state achieved by studying Buddhism or popping a few Oxys, only it’s more complicated than that. He connects not simply because he's "chill," but because his relaxed self seems borne of extreme self-confidence. His music isn't for situations that are laidback in and of themselves. They're for the unguarded moments you might share with another person where the both of you are comfortable without reservation. Music made for the end of a rooftop barbecue, when the sun dips, the beer is nearly gone, and everyone who doesn't want to be there has already gone. Here, you can be honest, goofy, even silent; all of it is accepted without a dissenting word. This type of sincerity without precocity is rare in art, and the contrast between the content of DeMarco's music and the content of his character only highlights his singularity as someone whose contradictions build toward a vibrant self, rather than collapsing in disarray.
Which means: If you like DeMarco, you'll like Another One. It's like a novella, or a made-for-TV movie—something to chew on while we wait for the next major project. It riffs on his established formula: the same rinky-dink guitar tone, funky basslines, air-tight percussion announcing a band with enough experience to avoid fucking up the vibe. There are four slow songs and three songs that are a little less slow but still plenty relaxed, all of them filled with little details to catch your ear. The solo in "The Way You Love Her" was written with Robbie Robertson's strictured tone in mind, even as it ends up a few steps closer to the nu-reggae swing of Magic!'s "Rude". Few will sound as comely or as inviting as DeMarco does on "No Other Heart" when he sings, "Come on and give this lover boy a try/ I'll put the sparkle right back in your eyes/ What could you lose?"
The twinkling chord progression on "Without Me"—amongst his prettiest songs ever recorded—is buttressed by a cloud of washed out synthesizers, creating a lovesick feeling as he sings about accepting that a woman is better without him. "Just to Put Me Down" has a future as an extended set closer, with the refrain of the song title warping ever so slowly as he sings it over and over again, his guitar bursting into peals of expression. The wink of the album's title turns introspective on the title track, with a deeply languid DeMarco ruminating about the uncertainty of his relationship while wondering if "another one" is knocking at the door of his beloved.
DeMarco is an unusually sensitive songwriter, capable of ferreting out what someone else might be feeling even as he’s absorbed in his own perspective. He’s what sex columnist Dan Savage refers to as "GGG": good, giving, and game. When I saw him at this year's Primavera Sound Festival, his band dropped in a few minutes of Coldplay's "Yellow"—the joke, of course, being that "Yellow" is fairly close to a song that DeMarco would've written. Chris Martin says the stars shine for his lover; DeMarco says they call for him, only he'd rather stay with his woman. I know I'm special, he sings, but I want you to be a part of it, too. And so he continues to write another one and another one until we're convinced.


The prodigious London electronic producer, still only 21, crafts intricate music that's both deeply retro and futuristic.

CMYK EP

CMYK is only the third release from London electronic producer James Blake, who is only 21-- and the reason I keep saying "only" is because I get a little dumb thinking about how much ground he's covered in so few steps. His style is already recognizable: progressions of thick soul and jazz chords (a product of years of piano lessons), pitched-down and mangled vocals (often his own), and mid-tempo beats that balance synthesized sub-bass with handclaps, snaps, and other humanizing soundlets. But each of his releases-- last year's "Air & Lack Thereof" / "Sparing the Horses" single, February's The Bells Sketch EP, and now, CMYK EP-- also sounds like its own project, filled with private rules and concepts. He's writing his theme and his variations at the same time.
Blake isn't peerless, exactly. He's got collaborators and associates. (Untold and Mount Kimbie-- two artists he's done remixes for-- come to mind.) But Blake's peers are better known for the boundaries they're breaking down than the ones they're reinforcing, which is to say that Blake-- who appears to have a brain full of uncategorizable ideas-- is in a good position to do whatever tickles him. (The BBC DJ Gilles Peterson had him as a guest on his show last week, where he talked about his plans for a vocal-and-piano EP, and how he'd just had his mind pried open by seeing Joanna Newsom live. From any other contemporary electronic producer, I'd be surprised.)
CMYK is built from samples primarily from 90s R&B. Sometimes, they're incredibly obvious-- obvious like "I hope James Blake doesn't end up with legal fees" obvious. Other times, he crushes them beyond recognition. (We know from a Rising interview last month that Brandy is on there somewhere, and R. Kelly, too.)
The title track draws on both Kelis' "Caught Out There" and Aaliyah's "Are You That Somebody"-- songs that helped define the years they came out in by sounding two steps ahead of everything around them. This is canny for plenty of reasons, I think, but I'll be brief: Blake takes two R&B archetypes-- the Spurned Woman and the Secret Lover-- and imagines them in a back and forth. It's modern homage to old ideas. But if you know the songs already, it's also an exercise in warming up your cultural memory-- both tracks are over 10 years old but under 15, a kind of dead zone for nostalgia, not yet retro-ready but no longer current. He's not reminding us of something we've forgotten or telling us about something we never knew about, he's reanimating songs that are probably just at the edge of peoples' thoughts. (It's also a statement of allegiances: though Blake-- as Harmonimix-- has worked with Lil' Wayne's voice, he doesn't seem to be as interested in current American hip-hop and R&B as much as he is in picking up where Timbaland and the Neptunes left off at the end of the 1990s.)
But what makes the track isn't its samples, its the way Blake integrates them. Everything on CMYK is remarkably balanced: throwback sounds (a soul singer) next to contemporary ones (filtered synthesizer sweeps); deeply processed sounds (a vocoder) next to clean ones; moments of dissonance and digital noise next to a consonant progression of organ chords. One minute it's naked, the next it's obscure. Blake's songs-- three- and four-minute long pieces of electronic pop-- have no real space or time. They're not dance tracks. They're deeply retro and slightly futuristic-- which is to say they're contemporary. They're made on a home computer, but sound like the work of an animatronic band.
I keep thinking of the Wong Kar-wai movie 2046, ostensibly a love story with parallel narratives, one set in the 1950s, one set in 2046. The superficial surroundings of the past are different from the future, but at one point, two characters say the same exact thing: "Leave with me." The context, though, is different, and changing the context changes the meaning. And when the meaning is changed, communication breaks down. In both cases, the characters are somehow misunderstood, and the misunderstanding leads to heartbreak. James Blake plays in these gaps-- these modern gaps-- in ways that are both clever and sympathetic. "Do androids dream of electric sheep?" is an old question. Blake's trying to figure out how convincingly they sing gospel.


The Atlanta rapper sounds comfortable, uninspired, and indifferent on his latest album. It’s a missed opportunity to flaunt his talent for vocal manipulation and emotional delivery.

It’s Only Me

On his 2020 album My Turn, Lil Baby embodied a heavyweight boxer the night before his title shot. But his latest, It’s Only Me, is the championship defense against some dude they pulled off the street to lose. While his rapping was hungry then, now he’s extremely comfortable. It makes sense: As it stands, Lil Baby is one of the biggest rappers on Earth. He’s got commercials, a Budweiser World Cup theme, a major look in a new book about Atlanta rap history, and a whole ass documentary about his life at 27 years old. In that film, Untrapped: The Story of Lil Baby, which came out this summer, the story is more about his popularity than the music itself. When it was time to talk about My Turn, they might as well have had the director turn the camera on himself, shrug, and say, “Hey, it’s a Lil Baby album and people really liked it. I don’t know what else to tell you.” That way of thinking feels ingrained in It’s Only Me, as if all Lil Baby had to do was show up and rap. Nobody will care about the missing subtleties, right?
But those nuances do matter. One of Baby’s gifts is the way he can manipulate language with his voice, turning a forgettable line into words to live by, depending on how intensely, passively, or melodically he raps. This isn’t a Jack Harlow situation, where folks are more into the idea that he’s a good hang, rather than how effective the songs are. The nuts and bolts of the singsongy rhythms matter. Lil Baby is at his best when he’s using those tricks to switch between moods, but there’s just one on It’s Only Me, and it’s indifference: not in the too-cool-to-care kind of way, but in the way when words have no weight behind them. On “From Now On,” his bar about buying too many houses stands out solely because it’s a wild problem to have, but it’s not tied to any emotion. This happens a lot across the record: He gloats about dinner with Kris Jenner on the intro, or about blowing a bag on new veneers on “Everything.” He doesn’t seem to be trying all that hard, and ends up sounding as hollow as when Tracy Morgan’s 30 Rock character did a stand-up routine about how people eat their lobster in St. Barts.
It’s not that Baby’s tracks need to have tons of depth, but they should at least make you feel something. Take “Heyy,” which doesn’t need much to work, other than an extremely simple, catchy, and strangely funny hook. “Danger” has some of the most routine Baby lyrics ever, but he delivers them as if they’re life-changing, and that’s what makes them work. When he’s locked in, he can spit or croon a line that lingers long after he’s said them. Sometimes it’s because they’re chilling: On “Double Down,” he raps, “Too many dead contacts in my telephone,” his numb croon infused with grief. Other times, it’s because he can lay out a ridiculous scene and offer a detail that adds personal specificity. “It’s like sixty girls, me and gang, and no one got their phone,” he spits on “Back and Forth.” The “no one got their phone” bit is said with a hilarious sigh of relief.
These moments don’t happen enough across 23 songs to mean that much. He doesn’t even sound inspired by the trusty song templates that have long been his bread and butter. On the rags to riches intro, he just sounds bored; the mandatory collaboration with Young Thug feels like a leftover; and the track with a few straightforward minutes of introspection is missing here. “Top Priority” is close, but ultimately lands all over the place: He goes from celebrating buying his mom her own salon to a DJ Akademiks diss and crypto investing. In moments like these, flashy beats could have made a critical difference, but for the most part, the instrumentals from Murda Beatz, Tay Keith, and others are predictably safe and blank. That’s not a problem on My Turn, because the rapping does most of the leg work, but when it’s not up to snuff, he’s exposed. All it takes is one opening for the belt to be up for grabs again.

Quality Control / Wolfpack Global / Motown


A listless album about being listless, Mac DeMarco’s new collection of instrumentals summons the bleary, exhausted feeling of time spent on the road.

Five Easy Hot Dogs

Bob Rafelson’s 1970 film Five Easy Pieces ends with the hero, played by Jack Nicholson, hitching a ride on a northbound truck and disappearing into  anonymity. Mac DeMarco is too larger-than-life to ever be anonymous, but this scene is a good starting place for considering his new Five Easy Hot Dogs. Ever since he sang “What mom don’t know has taken its toll on me” on 2014’s Salad Days, he has been exploring a long post-adolescent hangover, the feeling of emerging on the other side of your young and carefree days and seeing little that looks exciting in your future. This thread came to a head on 2019’s Here Comes the Cowboy, a record whose burnt-out ballads were full of dead friends, departed lovers, and uncertain plans. Now here are 14 instrumentals made on a long and spontaneous solo road trip, where DeMarco pledged “not go home to Los Angeles until I was done with a record.” This is a listless album about being listless, and it’s a pretty accurate picture of the stretches of useless, money-burning time that come with being on the road.
Five Easy Hot Dogs isn’t DeMarco’s first instrumental release. 2015’s Some Other Ones was recorded in five days and released as a free download, and it grew naturally out of the fizzle and spark of Salad Days. Hot Dogs continues in the lugubrious vein of Here Comes the Cowboy, rarely exceeding the tempo of a resting heart rate. The familiar Mac palette is apparent as soon as “Gualala” kicks in—spidery acoustic guitar, a pleasingly round bass tone, the tap of a cheap drum machine, and a synth that sounds like a little bird commenting mockingly on the (lack of) action. But rather than building, developing, or even meandering as his songs tend to do, these pieces simply putter along for a while and end. The songs themselves seem to be twiddling their thumbs, waiting for something more exciting to happen.
As much as any Mac DeMarco release, Five Easy Hot Dogs resembles Gorillaz’ The Fall, another road diary whose half-formed songs were named for the places they were recorded. As with Hot Dogs, it was the nature of The Fall to stand slightly apart from the Gorillaz catalog, a repository for spontaneous ideas rather than a po-mo pop-prankster triumph to rank with the project’s first three albums. But in both records is the desire to make this music a little better than it needs to be, creating an atmosphere of bleariness that approximates the actual feeling of exhausting transcontinental travel. Both artists also succeed by incorporating cute little filigrees that diversify the landscape. “Victoria” gains tension from a synth melody whose notes hover in the air, casting creepy chords against the innocuous tiki-bar backing. The pan-flute sound effect on “Portland 2” is so goofy that you might not even notice the little metallic plinks in the background that contribute both a tactile feeling and their own subtle rhythm.
These moments speak to DeMarco’s gifts as an arranger and his ear for woozy textures, but even when held to the standard of his earlier instrumental work, Five Easy Hot Dogs comes up short. Some Other Ones is livelier, and the simmering lo-fi instrumentals on his Demos compilations, even ones with names like “Organ Ronald Donkey Water,” possess a mystery and depth missing from these clean-lined, minimal compositions. Though each track is named for where it was recorded, there’s not much to distinguish one stop from another, and though you could connect the locations into a journey, these tracks don’t form an arc but play as if stacked atop one another. You won’t find much of the excitement and mythology of the American road trip here—just the feeling of being stuck between destinations and not being totally sure where you’re going.


French Montana gives you all the raw material of a 2013 rap icon: fluent in regional microtrends, "New York" enough to keep local tastemakers satisfied, all while carrying an air of self-aware absurdity. However, Excuse My French does absolutely nothing to make French Montana look interesting.

Excuse My French

Here’s a guess: if you can’t promise that your blockbuster rap album will outsell the National and Darius Rucker, you don’t have a blockbuster rap album. And, as such, you do not get a blockbuster rap album budget. It’s rare when Billboard statistics can prove anything these days, but in the case of French Montana’s Excuse My French, its meek first-week numbers are an echo of an apathetic reception, the dull thud of a sunk cost. And since Excuse My French does absolutely nothing to make French Montana look interesting, it’s safe to say that the record failed in its one and only goal: to make French Montana look like a star.
This isn’t all that surprising considering that his 2012 mixtape Mac & Cheese 3 achieved the same result as loudly and expensively as its commercially available follow-up. But you can understand what people see in French Montana, as he does give you the raw material of a 2013 rap icon: fluent in regional microtrends and stylistically fluid enough to involve himself in them, "New York" enough to keep local tastemakers satisfied, all while carrying an air of self-aware absurdity. You can get all of that from his Twitter feed; his actual music just ends up putting his shortcomings in sharp relief. His flow conflates loopy rapping and off-key singing similar to Future, but Pluto somehow felt more earthbound than Excuse My French. Nobody that Montana threatens, fucks, robs, or peddles bricks to is granted any sort of humanity. Which isn’t a huge problem, since he’s often been welcome on Rick Ross’ fantasy island. But whereas Rozay has developed a character through vivid imagination and exaggeration*,* Montana doesn’t express enough individuality in his music to even be a caricature. Which itself isn’t a problem, as Montana’s emotional blankness puts him within the range of Chief Keef, but whereas the latter is fueled by nihilistic defiance, French just sounds listless and bored.
The bigger issue is that unlike any of the aforementioned, Montana has no real idea of how to put a song together. As proven by “Stay Schemin’", “I’m a Coke Boy", “Pop That", “Shot Caller” or anything else that’s willed its way into becoming a hit, when surrounded by the right team, Montana can impress himself on a track without stealing it. But left to his own devices, he raps the same way the guy in your freshman dorm played guitar, absent-mindedly moving from one unrelated riff to the next, fixating on familiar phrasings, and just basically annoying the hell out of you. Some decent one-liners are sprinkled throughout, and somehow, hearing him do his trademark “hah?” is about the only thing that never becomes tiresome. Otherwise, any French Montana verse is the sound of time being killed bar by bar.
Nearly a year old, “Pop That” is wisely and somewhat desperately included-- there’s no way Excuse My French will result in anybody’s first-time legal ownership of the song, though you figure its 37 million YouTube views will yield something. Not surprisingly, the noxious lifeblood of “Pop That” courses throughout Excuse My French. Every beat seems to be modeled after it, so whether it’s Young Chop’s domineering synths or Rico Love’s piano-laced and pathos-laden boom bap, it all pounds like Miami bass. Mixed and mastered without nuance or mercy, the relentless blare of Excuse My French becomes a paradoxically ambient experience. Think Music For Airports, except for situations if you’re engulfed in volume: sitting next to a guy on the subway whose headphones function more like a boombox, trying to have a conversation in a restaurant that allows the decibel level of a nightclub, being stuck in a cab blasting Hot 97 during rush hour traffic.
I can’t verify that Montana’s indifference infects the massive roster of Excuse My French any more than I can find concrete scientific proof that yawning is contagious. But the results make the question of correlation or causation a moot point. When the Weeknd’s sexual politics on “Gifted” are somehow less reprehensible than yours, that’s a problem. When “Trap House” finds Rick Ross so disengaged that Birdman manages a more complex rhyme pattern, that’s a problem. When an appearance from ACME-brand rapper Ace Hood feels like the first time in 20 minutes your blockbuster rap album has shown a pulse, that’s a problem. When you decide “Fuck What Happens Tonight” also needs Mavado, a clearly pre-“No Guns Allowed” Snoop, and a typically authoritative Scarface verse that could not be more out of place, that’s a problem. And when you let DJ Khaled yell at the beginning of that same song to justify his place in the credits, that’s a problem. This is the point in the review where you might expect me to say “this is everything wrong with hip-hop in 2013,” but that might’ve been the case if Excuse My French had sold a ton of copies and could be taken as a mandate for more of the same. Instead, forcing French Montana into that #1 spot and having it come off like a transplant rejection actually lets us know the genre’s in fine health.