Roly Porter used to be a member of Vex'd, a duo known for its abrasive, industrial approach to dubstep. His solo music remains loud and visceral, full of seismic sub-bass and metallic shudders and black-hole reverb that swallows up everything around it.

Third Law

Roly Porter used to be a member of Vex'd, a duo known for its abrasive, industrial approach to dubstep. While it's been a number of years since Porter abandoned not only the dancefloor but beats altogether, his music remains loud and visceral, full of seismic sub-bass and metallic shudders and black-hole reverb that swallows up everything around it. It's also head music, with stark post-classical elements—a somber scrap of strings, a mangled choir—hinting at a narrative lurking beneath the abstraction. Since the beginning of his solo career, Porter has nodded toward big themes: The 10 tracks on his 2011 debut, Aftertime, each referenced a different celestial body from Frank Herbert's Dune; his 2013 album Life Cycle of a Massive Star aimed squarely at the sublime, on a truly cosmic scale.
Porter's new album, Third Law, is his headiest yet; it also punches harder than anything he's done, contrasting waves of charred, overdriven texture with high, lonesome tones drifting across inky emptiness. Force and stillness are its twin poles. Its title references Newton's third law of motion (for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction), while the cover art pictures the profile of an eyeball in extreme close-up, so close that the play of shadow across its glassy surface looks like the broad sweep of the night sky. Is it a coincidence that the image so closely resembles certain shots from Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity—both Clooney in his space helmet and the glinting curve of the earth itself? That film, with its violent chain reactions of exploding debris, was a harrowing case study in Newton's third law, and Porter's album similarly revels in both the kinetics of destruction and the ecstasy of weightlessness.
Just as he avoids repetitive beats, Porter rarely repeats musical elements as the album winds through its 52-minute run time, aside from the sub-bass rumble and elegiac strings. "Mass," a study for bouncing-ball kick drums and plucked synthesizers, plays out like a series of explosions in reverse, clouds of shrapnel snapping back into their shells over and over again. "Blind Blackening" swings the pendulum back toward the suffocating overdrive and wordless choral samples of the opener, "4001." "High Places," the album's quietest track—either headphones or a very good, very loud home stereo are recommended— shows off Porter's dynamic range while exploring the texture of scraped strings. "In Flight," the most obviously "electronic" thing here, plays with trembling pulses, while the final two cuts, "Departure Stage" and "Known Space," veer back into soundtrack territory.
To make music this abstract work, pacing is key, and Porter's proves masterful throughout—that's as true of individual tracks, which heave like massive bellows, as of the shape of the album as a whole. It seems significant that the first real melody we hear, a clarion synthesizer reminiscent of mid-'70s Tangerine Dream, appears only in the album's final five minutes—a reward, perhaps, for having made it through nearly an hour of edge-of-your-seat intensity. Third Law suggests that big-budget sci-fi directors who ignore Porter's work are seriously missing out. But he doesn’t need the silver screen to get his ideas across; this album has all the drama you could ask for on its own.


Topaz Jones is a young, positive-thinking New York-based rapper with an affinity for soul and a likable and fully formed personality, and Arcade reveals quirks and depths with repeated listens.

Arcade

At first, Topaz Jones sounds like the sort of young, positive-thinking emcee who should pay tithes to Chance the Rapper on an annual basis. But repeated listens to the 23-year-old New York rapper’s Arcade reveal the intricacy and subtleties of Jones—he’s not the earnest pup sniffing around your ankles, but a fully formed personality, an approachable everyman rapper who’s more Oddisee and Open Mike Eagle than Vic Mensa.
Jones’ persona is enriched by a deep love of old funk and soul music (his father Curtis played guitar for the influential band Slave), and he frequently uses live instrumentation. “Grass (Survivor’s Guilt)” transitions from light adult-contemporary guitar to thudding boom-bap, mashing together conflicting thoughts in the same way Jones weaves a love song into a thought about romance as a “great distraction from checking the evening news and staying up on what’s happening.”
“Tropicana” occupies the same fleet-footed space as other intoxicating, breezy singles from this year, like Joey Purp’s “Girls @” and Amine’s “Caroline.” But Jones manages to weave details and asides in the lyrics that require repeated, close listens (it also proves he’s more than capable of double-time raps and old-school flows). “He killing but you still say, ‘free my bro,’ truth be told he should do his time/but hey that’s another song,” he offers casually, hinting at a larger world than he has time to get to inside a two-and-a-half minute toe-tapper. It’s a reminder of the potency that a flighty, sub-three minute rap song can contain, and the depths rap often plunders through beats that fill floors with joyous dancing bodies.
Jones is also an excellent hook writer, transforming the fantasy of the funky “Powerball” with a gospel-hued, reality-crashing bridge of: “What’s going on/nothing but the rent, nothing but the rent, nothing but the rent.” The song's cheeky “what if I won the lottery” concept is fleshed out by his chuckling reminiscence: “I graduated all they gave me was a piece of paper/no ‘good job’/no goodbye/not even ‘see you later.’” The humanity of the moment is telling: How else could you expect to “move up” in life without the aide of the lotto, while dealing with the quotidian reality that education rarely provides a pragmatic leg-up?
The piano ballad “Untitled” showcases his soulful voice, framing the song as a declaration to his mother he’s moving out while sneaking a tender autobiography. He calls back to this “hidden track” a few songs later, trading the piano for guitar (again, no drums) and offering a few more personal details: “My prom date just got engaged, I’m happy for you Marissa/that night in June I was probably just too nervous to kiss you,” he sighs, seconds after noting the colors of his childhood home were painted as the house gets put on the market. These moments are affecting because they are the work of an empathetic writer—he gives everyone in his stories autonomy: Jones has searched himself for the story and held onto the moments he thinks matter, not merely assumed he is the story. With Arcade, he makes you a part of the story, too.


Using voice and synthesizer, the Shanghai-born, Berlin-based artist channels operatic tropes and controlled explosions of noise into visceral and cathartic forms.

Lack

Pan Daijing’s first two releases—the 2015 tape Sex & Disease and this year’s A Satin Sight EP—for the most part fell squarely into the realms of noise and techno, respectively. Meanwhile, “Zhao Hua,” her standout collaboration with HVAD from Pan’s MONO NO AWARE compilation, was a cloudy and dreamlike ambient track. Useful as these genres have been as guideposts, the Chinese-born, Berlin-based artist’s practice is more expansive than any one of them, incorporating movement, improvisation, and installation—and also taking an interest in the potential of sound beyond music. Lack, Daijing’s ambitious debut full-length, incorporates all of this as it draws from the past two years of her live performances, accommodating a deeply felt theatrics.
Though Lack collects pieces from different contexts, it follows a well-structured dramatic arc, building from eerie, ominous atmospheres into pulsating industrial fuzz. Daijing has noted that the record is her take on an opera, and this emerges literally on the piercing opener, “Phenomenon,” in which a soprano oscillates between two tones over struck strings and dissonant drones. Moving forward, she turns to a wilder sonic palette: a muted atonal chorus of synthesizers on “A Loving Tongue,” and on “Practice of Hygiene,” the claustrophobic sound of a groaning voice, either ecstatic or tortured—it’s unclear which, and maybe irrelevant.
But amid such explosive aesthetics, there remains a formality to her delivery, a sense of control and even elegance. In “Plate of Order,” for example, Daijing portions out snarls of distortion that act as blistering punctuation underneath her own sustained vocals. Not merely aggressive, her application of crashing percussion or squalls of noise develops a near-meditative quality as Lack progresses. Certain songs may at first have an anxiety-inducing effect on the listener, but this is not anxious music; rather, it transmits an intense sense of presence.
The voice is often the means by which we get to know a performer, and while Daijing’s offers some of the most arresting moments on this album, other elements of her productions are equally expressive: the melodic clanging of “Come to Sit, Come to refuse, Come to Surround,” or the frenzied, arrhythmic sawing of “A Situation of Meat.” Without adopting legibly confessional language or even, for the most part, affectively triggering sonics, Daijing places herself in daring proximity to the listener, linking the production of noise to physical embodiment. In an interview earlier this year, the artist described the sensation of using a Buchla: “I ended up getting stuff that made me feel like part of me and part of this thing I’ve been touching every day for the past two weeks had come together.”
Most distinctive about Lack is the way it moves beyond catharsis—sometimes through the intellectual distance that comes from dramatization, but sometimes simply through an openness to fear. At moments it can seem as if we’re privy to the development of Daijing’s relationship to pain—her respect for it and desire to understand it. Much sharper-edged than the sounds one would usually associate with healing, Daijing’s music still seems to cultivate a space in which one might grow.


Until now, L.A.'s Eddie Ruscha Jr.-- the progeny of the famed pop artist-- has been reticent about letting the bedroom-woven electronica he makes as Secret Circuit see the light. But the analog components, modular synths, and dusty drum machines of Tropical Psychedelics seems to hint at breakout tendencies.

Tropical Psychedelics

With a name like Secret Circuit, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that the copious amounts of music that L.A.'s Eddie Ruscha, Jr. (yes, he is the progeny of the famed pop artist) has been cranking out in his home studio has not seen that much of California's legendary daylight. Ruscha's previous alternative rock band, Medicine, had spent a decade under-appreciated before getting some due this year with a Captured Tracks-pressed box set. And Ruscha's other notable project, the Laughing Light of Plenty (made with famed UK, SF, and NYC DJ Thomas Bullock), released one of 2008's Stone Rosiest dance singles, but then released a full-length album that I defy you to find, already deemed "lost" even though it dates from 2010. Almost all of Ruscha's music remains secret.
Soon after Medicine achieved mid-level grunge-era success (even landing a cameo in The Crow), Ruscha bowed out of rock altogether to dabble bedroom-woven electronica being crafted by the likes of Aphex Twin. It's that sort of Selected Ambient Works-worthy playfulness that comes to mind in sampling Tropical Psychedelics, released on England's finely attuned Emotional Response imprint. (Their reissue arm-- Emotional Rescue-- has also had a pretty decent year.) The album also caps Secret Circuit's rather overt 2012, wherein his quirky take on homespun electronic music began to gain more exposure via singles on the Beats in Space label and on Prins Thomas' Internasjonal.
Drawing on music dating back to when Ruscha first left Medicine (a quick scan of Secret Circuit's entry on Discogs reveals over a decade of self-released CDs and cassettes), this 12-track collection finds the music hard to peg to any particular era or trend. Analog components, modular synthesizers, and dusty drum machines underpin nearly every track. Opener "White Wish" has a winsome melody flutter about as a beat ticks underneath, but then a plucked nylon-string figure appears, replaced soon after by a warm'n'fuzzy psych guitar flare-up, before returning to its simple components. The cleverly named "Afrobotics" feels both primitive and futuristic, a roiling tom-tom getting topped with multiple layers of spy theme guitar, modular synth gurgles and squalls, even a dash of wordless vocals from Ruscha, the cumulative effect of all these overdubbed tracks never feeling cluttered.
The acoustic guitar foregrounded on "Moon Life" and the swirling noise interlude of "Angel's Eyes" nod back to 1996's Cosmic Sword #1, while the piano recital-meets-Conrad Schnitzler noise of "Psouvenirs" was available on Secret Circuit's 2010 Bandcamp album of the same name (another piano sketch, "Piano Waltz", has similar components). You can just make out that clatter and voices of children in the background of the former, suggesting a sketch rendered with the same sense of play. The most taut rhythm tracks appear on "Winded Up on the Floor" and "Lagoland", the former having the earmarks of early acid tracks while the latter features a buzzing kalimba lick that could come right off of a Congotronics album. Most of the album tracks are mindful to not wear out their welcome, with only three ventures beyond the four-minute mark.
Most of the album's pacing comes at a fugue-like, breezy speed, somewhere between the Balearic sensibilities of a new generation of producers (see the International Feel label and DJ Harvey's Sarcastic Study Masters) as well as the strange sort of punch-drunk exotica evoked by Yellow Magic Orchestra's Haroumi Hosono, with the casual sway of "Foggy Twilights" and "Walkin' on Water" conjuring island sunsets. Ruscha's curious sensibilities remain intact across Tropical Psychedelics, making the album an idiosyncratic yet satisfying listen. And with a new crop of L.A. producers like Suzanne Kraft, Pacific Horizons, and SFV Acid taking cues from Ruscha's peculiar soundworld, Secret Circuit may yet become overt.


The 24-year-old Berklee College of Music graduate and former YouTube star Charlie Puth has already had three top 40 singles, all since last February: The Meghan Trainor duet "Marvin Gaye", "See You Again" featuring Wiz Khalifa, and "One Call Away," an ocean of syrup that sounds exactly like "See You Again" and is the first song on Puth's debut LP.

Nine Track Mind

There are 12 tracks on Charlie Puth’s debut album Nine Track Mind, which is either three or 12 too many. But no matter; the album is a smoothly executed pitch deck of exactly what will perform on pop radio in 2016, and Puth—pronounced "Pooth," and the slice through his right eyebrow is from a childhood canine attack, if you’re wondering—will do just fine. The 24-year-old Berklee College of Music graduate and former YouTube star of the acoustic-cover variety has already had three top 40 singles, all since last February: first, the demonic Meghan Trainor duet "Marvin Gaye," then, the Paul Walker Memorial Beanie Baby track "See You Again" (featuring Wiz Khalifa), then "One Call Away," an ocean of syrup that sounds exactly like "See You Again," and is the first song on the LP.
Charlie Puth is extremely talented, it must be said. There’s that Berklee degree, of course, and the fact that he wrote so many theme songs for famous vloggers before he signed to Atlantic. Puth co-wrote every song on Nine Track Mind and produced much of it solo, and the songwriting and the arrangements and the engineering are shockingly proficient, proficient to the point of insensation. Also, there is Puth’s voice, a beautiful tenor/falsetto soaring out of a throat that never coughs that frog out and as such must be magical. In other words, Charlie Puth is a truly excellent product, the type of artist that inspires wildly confident emails from anyone getting a cut. "Wrote the hook in 10 minutes," you can imagine his A&R tapping out on an iPhone (Puth did, he says, for "See You Again"). "Video’s going to be just Paul Walker clips and the Wiz verse, guaranteed smash, gonna do a billion on YouTube." And it did.
Like the best-selling (i.e. blandest) model home in the up-and-coming suburb, Nine Track Mind is demoralizingly well-constructed as a means to an end, and it’s because of Puth’s considerable abilities, and not in spite of them, that the album induces such despair. It doesn’t help that Nine Track Mind is all ballads except for three tracks, two of which are duets (Trainor, a sleepy Selena Gomez) that somehow still feel like ballads. Puth cannot fill this frame of sentimentality with any genuine sentiment: The album’s emotional range covers the spectrum from light longing to light infatuation, contributing to the overall sense that Nine Track Mind is aimed exclusively at hairlessness: children, prepubescents, the discomfitingly waxed.
As he showed us in "Marvin Gaye," Puth lives for retro flourishes: doo-wop rhythms, sock-hop melodies, finger snaps, arpeggiated singalong piano. The album doesn’t deviate much from this safe spot; when it does, it goes blander ("Up All Night" is completely self-effacing) or, pleasantly, Ryan Tedder-er ("My Gospel" is a nicely rumbling One Republic facsimile), or, even more pleasantly, somewhat close to Justin Timberlake territory. "Suffer" is a credibly lustful piece of pleading, and "Losing My Mind" begins with a lovely, distorted Timbaland-lite riff that rings like a bell over Puth, who gets to take a welcome break from his falsetto. The latter track sounds like the work of an award-winning college acapella group; it is the album’s strongest track.
As for the rest? "Left Right Left," a love-ish song that sounds like accidentally holding hands with a coworker, is a ballad that assumes no one will listen to it. If you did, you’d hear Charlie Puth encouraging his romantic interest—"We’re almost there, baby, one more step"—to bravely overcome the obstacle of Charlie Puth, who is dealing with a set of problems that includes "walls," "long roads," and "climbing." There is a classic track in the So Sweet The Neg Will Be Invisible genre (it’s called "Then There’s You," and the chorus goes "There’s beautiful and then there’s you"). There is also a series of increasingly unnecessary vows scattered throughout the album: Puth promises to save the day, to never sleep alone, to stay perfectly still when the world is on fire, and then, in "My Gospel," he goes nuclear. "I’d stroll into a bank and put a ski mask on and walk out with a million bucks," he blusters. "Then I’d burn it in a pile out on your front lawn, just to prove it didn’t mean that much."
That lyric couplet has the approximate relationship to joy and meaning as the rest of this album does, generally. Later in the same track, Puth promises to "carry your body to the top of the tower to kiss your lips at midnight." What a tempting offer, and a typical one, in which your best case scenario is unconsciousness. You’d have to be completely sensible to pass.


David Byrne’s first true solo album in 14 years is daring and open-hearted. The risks Byrne takes on these songs, however, too often feel clumsy or gaudy.

American Utopia

For legacy musicians in their late-career phrase, there’s a common track to follow. Maybe it’s an album that incentivizes low risk/low reward, a real back-to-basics outing, or a tasteful covers collection followed by some meditations on aging that lead to predetermined takeaways, that sort of thing. But so long as they’re willing to settle for good-enough, everybody wins: The artist keeps creating, Rolling Stone tosses them an extra star as a thank you for their service, and fans get a chance to hear the old hits on tour.
David Byrne isn’t playing along. Rather than subtly downplaying expectations for his latest project, he’s actively drummed them by billing American Utopia as his first solo album in 14 years (technically true, but he’s made plenty of collaborative albums in the interim). More dramatically, he announced it in conjunction with a huge tour behind what he’s called “the most ambitious show I’ve done since the shows that were filmed for Stop Making Sense.” He’s all but daring audiences to compare American Utopia to his Talking Heads heyday, a comparison that doesn’t flatter even his best solo albums—and American Utopia, to be clear, is not one of his best albums. Nonetheless, with his latest, Byrne does what so few of his peers will: He takes some actual risks.
It’s hard to determine how much goodwill that affords him. Beyond American Utopia’s rictus optimism—Byrne’s method of pushing back against the cynical politics of the moment—the album has plenty to commend: It’s bright, daring, and open-hearted, the work of an artist who has thrown himself into his work absolutely. Yet, almost as often, it’s clumsy or gaudy, if not outright grating. It takes less than a minute to realize you’re in store for a rough ride, when the swooning, mannerly “I Dance Like This” is upended by a robotic breakdown—a throwback to a very 1980s notion of coolness that scans as hopelessly dated today.
That’s just the first of American Utopia’s many losing gambits. Byrne has often flirted with silliness as an aesthetic, but the wonky sound effects on “It’s Not Dark Up Here” cross the line into brazen dopiness. Even less tasteful than his indiscriminate knob-twisting is his wordplay. “The brain of a chicken and the dick of a donkey,” Byrne croons on “Every Day Is a Miracle,” a potentially infectious Caribbean party-starter that’s undone by one lyrical face-plant after another. “The pope don’t mean shit to a dog,” he observes on that same song (which, amazingly, is immediately followed by another song about the cognitive limitations of a dog). Despite his reputation as one of rock’s great thinkers, Byrne has never sounded more like a stoned teenager staring at the clouds and spit-balling deep thoughts about the universe.
And yet despite its many misfires—including a truly unfortunate pun on the word “duty” in that dog song—American Utopia manages two unblemished triumphs in its final stretch. “Doing the Right Thing” builds from a twitchy tempo and suave string accompaniment to the album’s greatest thrill, a surprise blast of proggy synths that completely eviscerates the song, a musical ambush on par with Jerry Harrison’s extraterrestrial keyboard abduction on “Stay Hungry” four decades ago. Even better is “Everybody’s Coming to My House,” an absolute jam and Byrne’s sharpest satire of the suburban dream since “Once in a Lifetime.” Here, everything that might have blown up in his face elsewhere on the album pays off beautifully: the overheated post-punk guitars, feverish art-rock horns, and wily drum breaks. He even pulls off a dubby breakdown. These are the kinds of highs a master can achieve when they rediscover a moment of unknown inspiration. It’s just a shame they’re tucked away on an album that’s otherwise littered with cautionary tales.


Released mere months after the Sex Pistols’ infamous implosion, PiL's First Issue was deemed too uncommercial to release in the U.S. This Light in the Attic reissue marks the first time the band's scabrous debut album has been officially available Stateside. It features a prescient BBC interview as bonus material.

First Issue

With the Sex Pistols, Johnny “Rotten” Lydon helped define the everlasting image of punk: the spiky hair, the safety-pinned clothes, the wanton disregard for monarchy and the defaced Queen Elizabeth portraits to match. But in doing so, the Pistols also created a caricature, one that could be readily trotted out by sleazy TV talk-show hosts for cheap shock value and easily aped by sketch-comedy troupes. And for all the media outrage and label politicking that surrounded the release of Never Mind the Bollocks, it was ultimately a slickly produced, highly accessible set, its anti-establishment invectives latched onto shout-along hooks crafted by the world’s most ridiculed Beatles fan. Really, the Pistols were just a rock‘n’roll band fronted by a singer who happened to hate rock‘n’roll. And his next move was to show everyone just how much, by redefining punk not as a sound or costume, but as an idea, a liberation philosophy of pan-cultural musical cross-polination and strident non-conformism.
Formed in 1978, mere months after the Pistols’ infamous implosion in San Francisco, Public Image Ltd. were not so much post-punk as meta-punk. Though he’d detest the comparison, PiL initially served precisely the same function for Lydon as the Plastic Ono Band did for another famous John L., a vehicle through which he could exorcise and excoriate the albatross of his former band. Not only was the new group’s very moniker a pointed comment on Malcolm McLaren’s shrewd attempts to commoditize the Pistols as punk-rock puppets (and Lydon's former bandmates’ complicity in the gambit), their self-titled debut single scans as a particularly bitter break-up letter; spiked with barbs like “You never listened to a word that I said/ You only see me for the clothes that I wear,” “Public Image” is essentially a “How Do You Sleep?” you can dance to.
Musically speaking, “Public Image” presented a logical bridge between Lydon’s old and new ventures, retaining the punk-rock drive and agitated vocals, but with a greater sonic expanse highlighting Jah Wobble’s subterranean basslines and Keith Levene’s metallic (in the materiality sense) guitar grind, and hinting at the dub reggae and Krautrock influences that would inform the early PiL's sound. But the album on which it appears, First Issue, presents no convenient gateway, tucking the single onto Side 2 while greeting rubberneckers with “Theme”, a grueling nine-minute dirge-- on which Lydon repeatedly screams “I wish I could diiiieeee” with varying degrees of anguish-- that serves as a litmus test to instantly ward off Pistols fans looking for another excuse to pogo.
Sure, the Sex Pistols could be nasty, but the primordial Public Image was unrepentantly brutal-- punk stripped of its fashion and tabloid-baiting sensationalism and reduced to its noisy, nihilistic essence. Where the Pistols engaged in broad-stroke critiques of British institutions, First Issue’s strikes on the Catholic Church are more like close-range stabbings that gruesomely twist the blade; through the two-part spoken-word churn of “Religion” (a song reportedly rejected by the Pistols) and the relentlessly harrowing “Annalisa” (based on a true story of an exorcism gone horribly wrong), Lydon’s voice is transformed from a mere instrument of provocation to the pure embodiment of sheer terror. (Not surprisingly, Warner Bros. deemed First Issue too uncommercial to release in the U.S.; this Light in the Attic reissue marks the first time the album has been officially available stateside.)
A word-association game with Public Image Ltd. inevitably yields the phrase “death disco,” however, that sound (and the single that coined it) wouldn’t fully flourish until 1980’s Second Edition; rather than proffer a bastardized take on dance music, First Issue works the other way, applying disco production principles-- by boosting Wobble’s bottom end and foregrounding Levene’s tin-foiled guitar refrains-- to its deconstructionist rock attack. But what’s most striking today is the in-the-room immediacy and towering presence of the sound-- Canadian-born drummer Jim Walker may have only stuck around for this one record, but his Bonham-scaled boom leaves behind a career’s worth of craters. While future PiL records would provide easily photocopied blueprints to post-punk progeny like the Rapture, LCD Soundsystem, and Liars, First Issue’s industrial-strength stompers anticipate the scabrous art-punk of the Jesus Lizard and Slint, while Levene’s guitar curlicues on “Public Image” are the stuff Daydream Nations are made of.
Not all of First Issue casts such an imposing shadow-- after completing the album’s first side at Townhouse and Manor Studios, the band had blown its budget, and finished off the album’s closing trifecta in a more affordable, lo-fi studio that specialized in reggae tracks. But the downsized dimensions encouraged the band’s experimental tendencies. “Low Life” and “Attack” succesively follow the “Public Image” single’s tunefully dissonant template but gradually debase it into echo-drenched disorientation, and though the dub-disco doodle “Fodderstompf” essentially amounts to a one-note joke stretched to seven minutes, it’s a significant one, presenting both a test run for the grotty grooves mastered on Second Edition, while paving the way for everything from Ween’s early bong-sucking pranksterism to James Murphy’s self-reflexive irreverence.
Rather than lard up the tracklist with endless outtakes and alternate versions, the First Issue reissue offers but two bonus incentives: beserker, Bonanza-inspired B-side “The Cowboy Song” and, far more intriguingly, a complete unedited 56-minute BBC interview with Lydon (conducted before the album’s release) that is well worth the price of re-admission for those who've already worn out their original vinyl import.. While Lydon has since cultivated a media personality as the consummate crank who gleefully hangs up on journalists, here he seems less surly than cagey and defensive, still stinging from the Pistols’ break-up and the perpetual flogging that band received from the press. It initially results in some painful moments of silence between Lydon and the intensely meek interviewer, but to her credit, she gradually gets him to loosen up and sound off on everything from the Rolling Stones (“they rip off everybody else’s ideas”) and Siouxsie and the Banshees (“I find their record appalling”) to the superiority of dance music over rock‘n’roll, which he’d already declared dead 35 years prior. And just as the album it accompanies set the discordant tone for next three-plus decades of indie rock, the interview yields its own uncanny prophecies-- Lydon stops just short of outing late BBC host Jimmy Saville as a pedophile, an insinuation that wouldn’t go public until an ITV documentary brought the sexual abuse claims to light last year. He may have gotten famous screaming “no future,” but as this reissue makes clear, Lydon’s greatest gift was a known future.


The agony, desire, that none rise above
The sweet aching torture from one that you love
For some shall believe ...

Danse Macabre

The agony, desire, that none rise above
The sweet aching torture from one that you love
For some shall believe, while many find hard
There is nothing quite like, the song of Macabre!
Okay, so I ripped that off some goth chick's "webcave," but short of a tragico-absurdist interpretive dance, it's the best way to sum up the feelings I have for The Faint's new album, Danse Macabre. Indie rock (with the exception of the obscure supergroup The Hattifatteners) has never expressed much of an interest in a "ring of corpses holding hands," but if the kids really want to fight the culture industry through song, they should embrace this, as death does not care for social standing or wealth. Nor does dance!
But let's start from the beginning: long before The Faint released Danse Macabre last Tuesday, the Bubonic plague wiped out approximately one-third of Europe's population. Fear of falling victim to the plague's wrath became a part of everyday life for the people of the time, inspiring a lot of art, poetry, music, and most importantly, woodcuts, about death. The Danse Macabre usually referred to representations of skeletons dancing or playing musical instruments. Danse Macabre is also a symphony by Camille Saint-Saens, a progressive-metal band from Birmingham, and an 18+ night on Thursdays.
From what I gathered in my days studying woodcuts, the music of the Danse Macabre would cast a diabolical spell over people, drawing them towards the dance into death. And The Faint's Danse Macabre is no exception. These songs may ride on new-wave synth swells but they've got a New Order-like urgency and art-punk edge that throws off comparisons to Depeche Mode and The Human League. The album is primarily driven by keyboards, though Joel Petersen's live bass, Todd Baechle's occasional acoustic drums, and Saddle Creek cellist Gretta Cohn help the album avoid a sterile sound.
Right from the start, Danse Macabre casts a gothic light on the ordinary (as opposed, of course, to the extraordinary). A song title like "Agenda Suicide" suggests something more in the order of Heaven's Gate than career paralegaling, but instead, the song details the wasted days of mindless work in the name of an empty American dream: "Our work makes pretty little homes/ Agenda suicide, the drones work hard before they die/ And give up on pretty little homes." Meanwhile, "Let the Poison Spill from your Throat" is gossip from the crypt. Social climbing and bitter words motivated by insecurity are made physical and grotesque: "If there's dirt you've got on someone/ You let it loose without a thought/ You let the poison spill/ Spurt from your throat/ Hiss like steam."
Though The Faint's last album, Blank-Wave Arcade, was lyrically obsessed with sex, Danse Macabre seems to keep coming back to gothic paradoxes; the living die by agenda suicide, and mannequins are brought to life. Paralysis and involuntary movement or actions are common themes-- although paralysis is more likely to mean being trapped in daily routines than in coffins, and involuntary movements are caused by social pressure rather than Satanic possession. Still, these subjects seem well suited for synth-heavy anthems that lack subtlety in their thumping draw towards the dancefloor.
So, sure, it's dancy, and unquestionably new-wave, but the Danse Macabre is anything but retro. The Faint might be using Duran Duran's keyboards, but rather than mimicking the past, they play with new-wave, goth, punk rock, and some old woodcuts to make a record entirely fresh and oddly optimistic in the way that only an album which commands you to "Danse!/ Danse the Danse Macabre!" can.


The Norwegian producer Hans-Peter Lindstrøm’s latest solo full-length feels breezily noncommittal. Each experiment—including a spoken word piece by Jenny Hval—dissolves into the next.

Lindstrøm: It’s Alright Between Us as It Is

It’s Alright Between Us as It Is

The heyday of “space disco”—in its Scandinavian, endurance-length format—is a decade behind us now, but the brightest stars in that galaxy have demonstrated some serious longevity. Between his dotty collaboration with fellow disconaut Todd Terje (“Lanzarote”), 2012’s perfectly formed Smalhans, and last year’s colossal “Closing Shot,” there’s an argument that Hans-Peter Lindstrøm’s most dazzling dancefloor moments have all arrived at a rather advanced stage of his career, more than a decade after his first 12”.
It’s Alright Between Us as It Is marks the Oslo artist’s first solo full-length since 2012’s Six Cups of Rebel, a wacky, inscrutable epic which left dancers perplexed rather than perspiring. The lukewarm reaction to that record didn’t put an end to his progged-out experiments, however; next came the damn-near unclassifiable Runddans, an album collaboration with veteran rock producer Todd Rundgren. After such bold strides into new territory, it’d be reasonable to expect another high-concept showpiece. Instead, It’s Alright Between Us as It Is feels as breezily noncommittal as its title. Playing in a continuous stream, with each track dissolving into the next, the experience is like leafing through a gluey scrapbook of experiments.
The most attention-grabbing moments are provided by three vocal collaborations, while a cluster of churning, yearning space disco tracks provide the padding. Those cuts are a reminder that Lindstrøm is a master of duration and evolution, able to grab a moment of bliss and stretch it between his fingers like putty. This is the Lindstrøm we meet on the first half, after the curtain comes up with a burst of wah-wah guitar that could be a leftover from Runddans. “Spire” is a smooth, endless ascent that never quite bubbles over; “Tensions” rises higher still, bringing shimmering sunset boogie and a dazzling crescendo to turn even the most louche dancefloor participant into a 100-watt megastar. The featherlight vocals of Swedish singer Frida Sundemo uplift “Sorry,” a 1980s-style tearjerker adorned with wistful flutes and a brass-bright melody that’s one part Badalamenti, three parts Benny Andersson. It’s an homage to simpler times—the kind of impossibly tragic disco ballad that should be winning Eurovision and soundtracking long drives along winding fjords.
The bolder, messier second half begins with “Shinin,” a dizzying construction built up from itchy drum patterns and shards of bass and piano that punctuate the mix at strange junctures, as if improvised. It might have been an idea worth exploring, but the vocal—provided by Grace Hall, singer for moody R&B duo Skin Town—is an awkward fit: a powerhouse, competition-worthy performance, peppered with earnest “ooh-woah”s and “alright”s. The contrast with the dreamy instrumentation is severe, and just as the hook starts to cohere into something memorable, the arrangement takes a left turn and the mood collapses.
Faring much better is “Bungl (Like a Ghost),” where a spoken word piece by Norway’s Jenny Hval injects a welcome layer of intrigue to a pared-down house beat, showcasing her phenomenal talent for language: “I look into the camera and I feel black metal bulging behind blue eyes,” she says quietly, like a confessional. “I chose the other path, to be dead, so when I held her she would feel me like a ghost.” Again, a jazzy piano line wanders in as if from another studio session, adding an uneasy atonality; little else happens but the sustaining of a cryptic mood. It’s so unsatisfying it demands your attention.
While the vocal credits might have promised a more straightforward pop route this time around, It’s Alright Between Us… ends up being one of Lindstrøm’s most disjointed and ambiguous projects. Lifelong studio-dweller that he is, Lindstrøm is far too talented to leave us empty-bellied after 50 minutes—but when you’ve served up a buffet, don’t be surprised if your guests can’t remember what they ate.


The Detroit rapper’s fourth album of 2020 is yet another unalloyed success. It’s pure genre fare delivered by an artist with a refined, almost clinical approach to storytelling.

Boldy James / Real Bad Man: Real Bad Boldy

Real Bad Boldy

What’s remarkable about Boldy James’ bounty last year is how each of his four records succeeded as a standalone project. February’s The Price of Tea in China, an understated suite produced by prestige-rap mainstay the Alchemist, tunneled into James’ drug dealer psyche in noirish flashes. August’s The Versace Tape was comparably low-stakes, a collection of prismatic two-minute sketches with beats contributed by former Vine star Jay Versace. The wild card was July’s Manger on McNichols, an evocative synthesis of jazz and claustrophobic rhymes—the bulk of which James recorded over a decade ago. All this Rust Belt coke rap is carried by James’ extraordinary presence, instincts, and exposition. Even when trying on different sounds and styles, he never overplays his hand.
In looking at a stretch like this, it’s tempting to try to place James within an established tradition, but none quite fits. At times his affectless poise and seen-it-all tales recall a pre-retirement JAY-Z, but Boldy’s raps aren’t exactly kingpin narratives: He refrains from sweeping cause-and-effect arcs, which makes all the pavement-pounding sound exhausting. One might assign him to the canon of post-Marcberg neoclassical rap, but Roc Marciano’s obsessive detail and acquisitiveness sound practically sociopathic next to Boldy’s survival stories. James is looser than Mobb Deep, less eager-to-please than the punchline-happy Clipse; he orbits the Griselda universe, but they need him more than he needs them.
December’s Real Bad Boldy is a full-length tryst with Real Bad Man, who, per their Bandcamp, “is a crew from Los Angeles that makes clothing but also happens to have fire-ass beats.” The conceit isn’t unprecedented—Conway the Machine recorded an entire tape credited to a streetwear line in 2019—and while I can’t speak to their $60 t-shirts, Real Bad Boldy’s 10 tracks corroborate the latter claim. Paradoxically, it’s James’ most Detroit-sounding record in years, with expressive samples recalling Dilla and Waajeed’s sooty electro-soul. The melodic “Street Shit” is at once upbeat and contemplative, and the cinematic “Held Me Down” loops a mournful vocal track with choppy drums. “Failed Attempt” features a swelling Rhodes piano; James’ brisk imagery (“Parkin’ back-to-back black-on-blacks at the Coliseum/In the trap, we go rack-for-rack, this is not per diem”) feels like flipping through a stack of fuzzy Polaroids.
Structurally, Real Bad Boldy keeps to a static formula. Each track has two verses plus one durable hook, and James’ delivery and syllable placement hardly vary. His general aplomb belies his detailed vignettes, bricks of yola shipped from Pensacola, fishscale that flakes like dry skin. Some moments are positively breezy in light of Manger’s menace and Tea in China’s interrogation, but Real Bad Boldy is grounded in the same narrative authority. Even at his most violent, James maintains a neutral distance, dutifully charting cross-streets and genealogies in a way that makes the episodes feel less like capers and more like a manual that human resources would hand out on your first day. This lends an unusual omniscience to his first-person accounts: Boldy doesn’t exactly glorify a life of crime, but he’s not asking for pity either.
It’s genre fare at its most sure-handed and unadulterated, and the guests—all vivid stylists from New York State—are so devoted to selling drugs they make it sound like a vocation. Stove God Cooks, a leering Roc Marciano protégé from Syracuse, appears on “Thousand Pills,” his verse (“I had the feds tap dancin’ in my ear before Rick Rubin had a beard”) like something relayed over a burner phone. On “Good Foot,” Rochester rappers Mooch and Rigz trade reports of jewel thieves and sculptures molded from cocaine. They’re almost caricatures of ’90s rap villains—Rigz flows like Big L on cough syrup—and while James partakes in the revelry, he stays rooted to the concrete. After Eto outlines another trafficking plot on “Little Vicious,” Boldy sighingly admits, “I was happier when I was poor with my friends.”
James’ meat-and-potatoes craftsmanship doesn’t yield the shiny hooks of Jay’s epics or Marciano’s ornate tapestries, but his 2020 quartet is ideally formatted for his unhurried burrowing. Short of Manger’s audacious vision and Tea in China’s tricky corners, Real Bad Boldy is both an entry point and a crowd-pleaser that suggests an American original: No one sounds quite as comfortable in this milieu.

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On their first album together, ambient singer-songwriter Ana Roxanne and leftfield producer DJ Python find common cause in slow-motion grooves and downbeat electronic pop.

Natural Wonder Beauty Concept: Natural Wonder Beauty Concept

Natural Wonder Beauty Concept

Both Ana Roxanne and Brian Piñeyro operate with a perpetual slowness. Piñeyro’s productions as DJ Python might be more club-focused than Roxanne’s gently unfolding ambient lullabies, but he is just as patient in his approach to house and reggaeton; even his hardest tracks don’t pummel the dancefloor so much as gradually envelop it like a vaporous cloud. He’s a child of IDM at heart, building songs out of wispy drum patterns and strange synth patches that pull the listener into a deep, nocturnal trance. Roxanne, for her part, has explored rippling electronic drums on tracks like “Camille.” So it’s not completely inconceivable that the two artists might find kinship in each other’s work. In their first record together as Natural Wonder Beauty Concept, they set about exploring the shared spaces in their practices, uncovering subtle new emotional territories in the process.
Although Natural Wonder Beauty Concept isn’t expressly intended for moving bodies, club culture has left scuff marks in its ebbing rhythms (the cover art should trigger flashbacks for anybody used to catching Lyfts from a downtown warehouse at 3 a.m.). “Fallen Angel” opens the album in slow motion, with Piñeyro’s spacious bass and tinny hi-hats inching along like a caterpillar crawling up a leafy branch, while Roxanne’s softly cooing voice peeks through like sunlight overhead. Together they arrive at a crisp, chilly downtempo not quite like anything either artist has released before. But part of Natural Wonder Beauty Concept’s appeal is the way it constantly changes direction: Immediately after “The Veil I” casts us into a bleary spell of warbling piano loops, flipped pages, and tap-dancing shoes, the duo shifts gears on the lovely title track, whose racing jungle breaks and melancholy central motif mix together to create a purified drip of blissful nostalgia.
Vocals have always played a central role in Roxanne’s music, filtering her background in church choir and Hindustani chant into an otherworldly mist, and that emphasis seems to have rubbed off on Piñeyro. The trip-hoppy “III” interjects its skittering drums with Piñeyro’s own voice—marking the first time he has used them on one of his productions—as he disaffectedly asks, “Isn't it strange that nothing makes a difference at all/Isn't it strange that I kind of feel nothing at all?” His soft humming fits surprisingly seamlessly into the track’s dusky atmosphere, particularly when balanced out by Roxanne’s own glowing voice on the chorus. Roxanne treads new territory of her own on the downbeat pop of “Driving,” though unfortunately the results are less convincing; her awkward enunciation and noodly doot-doo-doot-doo refrains sound more amateurish than ethereal. Much better is the intimate “Sword,” whose tactile polyrhythms circle around Roxanne’s pitch-shifted melodies to elicit a sweet, alien tenderness.
At times the two musicians teeter so close to the edge of formlessness that they spill over into a nondescript electronic haze, particularly as the record begins to wind down. But if Roxanne brings one thing above all else to Piñeyro’s sound, it’s a sense of serenity. Though Piñeyro has shown himself capable of concocting heavenly jams of his own, his fascination with twitchy illbient has largely lent his music to dim, ravey basements compared to the tranquil meditations Roxanne conjures with her performances. Natural Wonder Beauty Concept finds a magic zone between those two worlds: sleek yet damaged, peaceful yet ghostly, a new-age record for the comedown lounge. So often supergroups end up failing to become more than the sum of their parts, or struggle to cleanly thread the needle between its band members’ distinct voices. Where Natural Wonder Beauty Concept shines is in the way it uses Roxanne and Piñeyro’s common ground to reveal deeper textures buried within each artist’s work. When they align in that sweet, blurry middle, both projects feel even more alive with possibility.


FKA twigs' first full-length is a monumental debut. On a formal level, it takes the kinds of risks that few pop artists, and few "experimental" artists, for that matter, are willing to take these days. As far as the making of the artist known as FKA twigs goes, it brings her tantalizingly into focus without shedding any of the mystique she has developed so far.

LP1

FKA twigs knows a thing or two about creating an image for herself. Every song she's released so far, even the four from her self-released debut EP from 2012, has been accompanied by its own video. What these may lack in storyboarding, set design, or anything else, really—"Hide" just features her hypnotically stroking an anthurium that adorns her nude midsection—more than make up for in their ability to draw you close, hold you rapt and keep you wondering just who, exactly, this character called twigs might be.
The British musician and performer born Tahliah Barnett got her start in the pop-industrial complex as a backup dancer in music videos, a career that led, for a spell, to a strange kind of almost-fame—you walk around and you get recognized, but not for being you, necessarily, just for being that girl from the video. And so, she has said, you learn to lie: "No, that's not me. No, I get that a lot." She addresses this situation on her debut album, LP1, with the song "Video Girl". It's actually one of the album's most straightforward songs, but its chorus is unequivocal in its equivocations: "Is she the girl that's from the video?/ You lie and you lie and you lie."  And all that artifice, in turn, is a way of making truth out of the lie. Because what is her music, what are her videos, if not an elaborate way of saying, "No, I'm not that girl from the video. This is who I am"?
She hides in plain sight on the cover of LP1, wearing an expression that's—what? Coy? Distant? What exactly is going on there, beneath those strands of just-so curlicue and that weird, plastic sheen across one slick cheek? And that splash of red, what is that supposed to be—a blush, a bruise, a birthmark? Is she a teenybopper post-popped bubblegum, a cartoon character post-exploding cigar? The image expands upon the subtle surrealism of last year's EP2 cover, where her neck was almost imperceptibly elongated, and the more aggressive post-processing of her "Water Me" video, in which her eyes are enlarged, anime-style, until they threaten to pop like a Panic Pete Squeeze Toy. These tweaks are crucial to twigs' eerie, post-humanist, Uncanny Valley-girl aesthetic.
More than anything else, the image reminds me of Björk's Alexander McQueen-designed Homogenic cover, in which the Icelandic singer hovered in the middle distance between larger-than-life pop icon and superflat fantasy gloss like a digital scan of a wax figure. Listening to LP1, it's immediately clear that twigs is aiming for similar heights—and easily capable of scaling them. Quiet as it may be, this is a huge album, a monumental debut. On a formal level, it takes the kinds of risks that few pop artists, and few "experimental" artists, for that matter, are willing to take these days. As far as the making of the artist known as FKA twigs goes, it gives us a sense of who she is without shedding any of the mystique she has developed so far.
Building on her co-produced debut EP with Tic and her Arca-produced EP2, the sound throughout is a crystalline jumble of splinters and shards, of stuttering drum machines cutting against arrhythmic clatter—metronomes winding down, car alarms bleating dully into the night. Her voice, the most awe-inspiring instrument on the album, flits between Auto-Tuned artifice and raw carnality. As an acrobat, she's a natural, but she's not afraid to lean on a little digital enhancement. One minute it's a flash-frozen sigh; the next, it's a melon-balled dollop of flesh. As futuristic as her music is, no single technology dominates. Elastic digital effects brush up against 808s, and icy synth stabs share space with acoustic bass. The common denominator is the crackling sense of dread that persists when the notes go silent and the beat drops out, which is often. The overall effect is that of R&B that has been run through some kind of matter-transporting beam and put together wrong on the other end, full of glitches and hard, jutting artifacts.
The most obvious reference points, aside from the spectrum of breathy, synth-heavy R&B that stretches from Ciara through the Weeknd and Beyoncé, are first-gen trip-hop acts like Portishead and Tricky, with their charcoal-streaked affect and sumptuous sense of texture. There are also clear links to contemporary UK artists working the margins between R&B and electronic music, like James Blake, the xx, and even Sophie, she of the deconstructed Saturday-morning rave choons. Her own vocal style, or at least her stratospheric range, evokes Kate Bush and even Tori Amos. More provocative, though, is the way she and her producers wrangle a whole host of unlikely references into the mix: "Two Weeks" features blushing chords reminiscent of late Cocteau Twins and a junkyard guitar lead straight out of Tom Waits' Rain Dogs. Even more incongruously, "Two Weeks" cribs a fleeting riff from Air Supply's "All Out of Love."
At the same time, it's a testament to the strength of her vision that the album is as cohesive as it is, despite having so many producers involved, including Arca, Devonté Hynes, Clams Casino, and Grammy-winning journeyman Emile Haynie (Eminem's Recovery, Lana Del Rey's "Born to Die" and "Blue Jeans," Kanye West's "Runaway"). Sampha helps out on the brittle "Numbers," a Portishead-gone-footwork number that serves as the album's energetic peak, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Paul Epworth (Adele, Coldplay, the Rapture) is responsible for "Pendulum," the album's literal and emotional centerpiece.
FKA twigs is not a masterful lyricist, at least not yet; some of her couplets feel clunky, like she's grasping in the dark for rhymes and coming up with the objects closest to hand ("If the flame gets blown out and you shine/ I will know that you cannot be mine"). But when she zeroes in on the essence of a thing, she hits hard. The brazen "Two Weeks" features lines as vivid as red welts: "Higher than a motherfucker", "I can fuck you better than her." (The Weeknd only wishes he could make depravity sound so soul-destroyingly desperate.) On top of that, there's a whole thing about pulling out teeth that tips the song into some kind of freaky David Cronenberg territory, making her drugged-up and tied-down fantasies all the more tantalizingly surreal.
If "Two Weeks" represents the album's sensual core, "Pendulum" is the epicenter of the record's underlying sense of heartbreak, with its glum mantra, "So lonely trying to be yours." Lyrically, the song finds twigs at her most plainspoken—it's a long way off from last year's similarly devastating, but far more cryptic, "Water Me"—so it feels significant that it's one of the album's most sonically out-there songs, with a rhythm built out of what sounds like a roulette wheel run amok and its wash of synthesizers like a sky full of fireflies in death spirals.
Early in the song, she sings, "Lately I'm not so present now," and the line goes straight to the crux of FKA twigs' whole identity. After all, this is an artist whose name itself suggests a fundamental displacement. Spelled out, it's "Formerly Known As twigs," (no) thanks to the lawyers of some other artist named Twigs. (Barnett earned her nickname from her habit of cracking her joints like dried sticks; is it any wonder her beats are so brittle?) That "FKA" is a way of masking the bigger question mark. Formerly known as, sure. But who is she now? Are you that girl from the video? "I can't recognize me," she sings at the close of "Video Girl", but for the rest of us, with LP1, she's zooming into vivid focus, and it's impossible to look away.


Few have taken house music deeper than Ron Trent and his Prescription label, and this new comp gives a moody, silvery snapshot of the label’s mid-’90s heyday.

Various Artists: Ron Trent Presents - Prescription: Word, Sound & Power

We’re five or 10 years into the latest deep house revival, 30-odd years since the style first coalesced. Yet in all that time, no one has come up with a precise definition of the style. Deep house is less a set of characteristics as it is a kind of blue, a mood recognizable primarily for its woozy, immersive pull. If house music’s steady thump is the anchor, then everything else—synths, bassline, vocals, effects—tosses to and fro like kelp in the current.
Few have taken house music deeper than Ron Trent and his Prescription label, which he co-founded with Chez Damier in 1993. Ron Trent Presents – Prescription: Word, Sound & Power is a snapshot of the label’s mid-’90s heyday, when Prescription developed an instantly recognizable sound rooted in the jacking grooves of early Chicago house, splashed with moody tone color, and crosscut with Afro-Latin polyrhythms. The compilation’s 24 tracks—nearly all by Trent, either solo or in collaboration with artists like Damier and Anthony Nicholson—highlight Prescription’s sweet spot: not too rough, not too slick, and swirled with dusky color.
Unlike Trent’s early hit “Altered States” and its larger-than-life hook, these tracks tend to conceal more than they reveal. There are few obvious melodies; instead, sounds painted on in overlapping layers create the illusion of unfathomable depth. Trent has described his style at the time as “drum-orientated Chicago rhythm tracks with a minimalistic melody,” and the key word there is tracks: Unlike songs, these tumbling perpetual-motion machines have no verses or choruses, no bridges, no reprises. They roll straight ahead in an unswerving line, climbing upward at a steady, 30-degree grade until, some imperceptible climax having been reached, they begin their descent, shedding layers as they lose elevation. But such simple additive and subtractive arrangements don’t account for the complex ways in which those moving parts interact. Three or four drum patterns—machine sequences, disco breaks, cowbells, congas—might run in parallel at any given moment, each with its own particular sense of swing and syncopation. Similarly, what might sound at first like a single set of chords reveals itself to be four or five different layers of synthesizer, organ, Rhodes, and sampled voice, all fused into one rippling wave.
Chez-N Trent’s anthemic “The Choice” is the only selection that grabs you by the lapels, but its charm lies in the details: rimshots so vivid you can practically feel the grain on the sticks; a wheezy ghost rhythm of sampled grunts and hiccups. Trent’s 13-minute “Seduction” strikes an impeccable balance between atmosphere and sheer muscle: Shakers and syncopated bassline keep pushing things forward, even as deep blue chords apply a narcotic sense of drag. At their best, Trent’s tunes throw up the faintest hint of a silvery hook, just enough to draw you deeper into their tidal flux.
The album’s very best track is its first: “Morning Factory,” which Trent and Damier made in their Detroit studio following the 10-hour drive home from New York, where they’d gone to see Junior Vasquez spin at the Sound Factory. Inspired by the clarity of the club’s sound system and the energy on the dancefloor, the tune samples Kerri Chandler’s Atmosphere EP, a 12-inch they’d picked up on their trip to the city. Even though the link is clear—those aquamarine chords are a dead giveaway—“Morning Factory” ultimately sounds nothing like its source material. Where Chandler’s tune is crisp and clearly defined, “Morning Factory” is a soft and spongy, with shakers, bells, and synths dubbed into a vaporous haze. Atmosphere was, at the time, about as deep as deep house got. But with “Morning Factory,” Trent and Damier blew the dimensions of the style wide open. Today, anyone traversing the outer limits of deep house still follows in their wake.


Two reissues and a well-selected compilation from the offbeat singer-songwriter.

Harry Nilsson: Son of Schmilsson / A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night / Everybody's Talkin': The Very Best of Harry Nilsson

He sung his balls off for you, baby. Harry Nilsson, mild-mannered banker by day before being propped up by John Lennon and Paul McCartney as the fabbest songwriter they knew, was one of those guys you read about being able to sing out of the phonebook and make it work. He had a bizarre, almost too-bountiful-for-its-own-good talent that combined sarcasm, dry wit, pure songwriting chops, and a personal buoyancy that usually offset even his most self-defeating, throwaway lines. His best stuff-- pretty much everything he released in 1970-71-- was unlike any major recording artist, juggling disparate aspects of pop music (and even pop culture in general, check his animated short/soundtrack The Point for New Age idealism crossed with acid-damaged imagery) with the whirlwind pace at which he was living.
So, Nilsson was an Icarus. He teetered over the edge both musically and physically, indulging passions for melody and liquor as if both were going out of style. When he and Lennon hooked up in the early 70s, during Lennon's famed "lost weekend," it was like an excuse for both men to give in to every addiction, bad idea (and even a few good ones), and rock'n'roll clichŽ they'd managed to avoid before. For Nilsson, it wasn't totally destructive: He scored several major hits off his Nilsson Schmilsson LP. It was a desperate record that, even if it didn't necessarily fall back on the Beatlesque songcraft he'd flashed on his earlier stuff, was overflowing with charismatic bravado and the sometimes-ragged voice of someone who'd inhaled more than his fair share of smoke.
However, if Nilsson Schmilsson was desperate, Son of Schmilsson sounded a little bored. Or drunk. Or something you'd imagine a ridiculously talented singer might come up with as an afterthought before heading out for the night. It's not that the songs are terrible: "Remember (Christmas)", hokey title aside, is a classic Nilsson ballad, perhaps taking a cue from his pal Randy Newman, but delivered with a nuance that sounds very close to sincerity. Nilsson had a knack for being able to make almost any line, any tongue-in-cheek turn of melodic phrase seem warm, even optimistic in the face of whatever foolery he was up to at the time outside the studio. "Spaceman" sounds like a single, 70s style, big chorus and syncopated band hook intact. In fact, it's one of the best "productions" on the record, right down to an orchestration that would make George Martin proud, though lines like "I wanted to be a spaceman/ Now nobody cares about me" seem almost too fitting for comfort.
However, most of the record is gags. "Take 54" (which borrows way too liberally from the bad Lennon solo records) finds Nilsson admitting he needs his girl to come back so he "can make a good track," while "Joy" details his run-in with a woman would turn him into her "joy boy" over a goofy country-rock backdrop. Funny? I guess. "You're Breakin' My Heart" lays it out: "you're breakin' my heart, so fuck you." Funnier? Arguably, though at that stage, it wasn't honesty or blunt humor that Nilsson lacked, but tunes. The jokes on Son of tend to fall flat for similar reasons as Lennon's concurrent stuff did: All attitude and not many great hooks make getting through the music a laborious, if occasionally chuckle-worthy experience.
As if retreating further into an inside joke (that Nilsson probably only ever told to himself in the first place), the singer released an album of standards and showtunes, A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night. Fans shouldn't have been surprised at his ease pulling off this kind of music, as he'd always been something of a cabaret pop performer, only now subbing out a clarinet-ridden McCartney influence for Irving Berlin. The best news is that his voice is back to its old, silky smooth self (though he'd completely ruin it the following year recording Pussy Cats with Lennon). The bad news, if you don't happen to love extra golden oldie American popular song, is that the arrangements and performances are straight-down-the-middle, by-the-fakebook croon to make Andy Williams beat the band.
"It Had to Be You" is nice (and the string quote of "Over the Rainbow" is a cute touch by veteran Hollywood bandleader Gordon Jenkins); "Makin' Whoopee" is done well, with still more vintage string arrangements, though seems a bit on the slow side to me. In fact, the whole record is geriatric with a capital Muzak: I want to think Nilsson actually loved this stuff, and was paying it homage with straightforward interpretations, but the tempos are uniformly nursing-home ready and his voice perpetually in the same modest, comfy tenor; eventually, I want to look for a trace of sarcasm just to stay awake. The bonus tracks aren't helping, as the last thing I need is more of a drowsy thing. Everybody's Talkin': The Very Best of Harry Nilsson is (another) serviceable best-of for an artist that had a habit of actually tucking his best stuff away deep in the middle of his albums. Nevertheless, if you've never heard the guy before, this has all the hits: "Coconut", "Everybody's Talkin'", "Jump Into the Fire", and his versions of "One" (made famous by Three Dog Night) and "Without You" (Nilsson's only No. 1). For my money, the best stuff here is "Me And My Arrow" (from 1971's The Point) and "The Moonbeam Song" from Nilsson Schmilsson, but I wish they'd included more from his early records (particularly Aerial Ballet or Nilsson Sings Newman).
After Son of Schmilsson, Nilsson never really came back from the edge. Pussy Cats was an improvement, though often for reasons unintended by its makers. Sometimes when I hear it, I wince-- it's tough to listen to someone self-destruct on record, even if (or especially if) he's giving it his all. Each of Nilsson's records from the mid-70s onward (ending with 1979's marginally underrated Knnillssonn) was less popular than the one before, and unlike some of his pop-genius peers, it wasn't really because he was flying too far over the heads of audience. As such, these latest reissues probably aren't the best way to discover his music, though are still an essential part of his legacy.


Ricky Eat Acid is Sam Ray, a Maryland-based musician who mixes unobtrusive electronic drifts with the basic shapes you expect from more linear types of songwriting. Three Love Songs is at once hypnotic, triumphant, and bittersweet.

Three Love Songs

Music that's "as ignorable as it is interesting," to use Brian Eno's famous phrase about the ambient genre, can pack an emotional wallop, too—what if the wallpaper reminds you of an ex? Or of a long-gone grandmother? The techno whizzes over at Germany's Kompakt label recently released their 14th annual Pop Ambient compilation, but lower-case "pop ambient" still seems like a useful phrase to describe records that mix unobtrusive electronic drifts with the basic but intense #feels you might expect from more linear types of songwriting.
The ghost of Drake hovers over the tune on Ricky Eat Acid's Three Love Songs that would be most likely to fit on one of those Pop Ambient comps. "In my dreams we're almost touching" flips the "my only wish is I die real" bit of the rapper's 2011 Take Care title track (via a cover version) and lofts it over percolating thumps and whirring synths. At once hypnotic, triumphant, and bittersweet, it's something like Kompakt star the Field gone piano-house, with dance-diva vocals reaching heavenward and then disintegrating as if you were listening to it on a tape player with a battery that's giving up the ghost. Nothing else on the album is quite like this, and certainly nothing is as immediate.
The rest of Three Love Songs is pop-ambient in more of a lower-case sense, and that works, too. Ricky Eat Acid is Sam Ray, a Maryland-based musician who has his hand in a few other projects and was booked to open a late-February New York City show by R&B aesthetes Rhye; wonderfully (and tellingly), a recent mix Ray made for The Fader consists mostly of scruffy, heart-on-sleeve indie guitar pop from bands like Go Sailor, Joanna Gruesome, and Rocketship. Though it takes this album until the eighth of 12 songs to reach its dying-real pinnacle—the LP title is a slight misnomer—how it gets there is a patient journey across nuanced, digital-meets-organic soundscapes, fraught with gnawing heartache and wistful reminiscence.
Three Love Songs is Ricky Eat Acid's first album available on vinyl, and the first vinyl release from Brooklyn's Orchid Tapes. Part of why it's so affecting comes down to an inspired and strategic use of the format. Side one is almost entirely drum-less, but each flickering vignette, heavy with found sounds, is different enough from the last that by the time a preacher starts spewing fire and brimstone on the fifth (and first substantial) track, the seven-minute "In rural virginia; watching glowing lights crawl from the dark corners of the room", it's, well—not quite a come-to-Jesus moment, but pretty close. The slightly uncanny piano loops of fuzz-caked mid-album track "Inside your house; it will swallow us too" are in their own way almost as catchy as "In my dreams we're almost touching"; piano carries over to Clams Casino-like side-A closer "It will draw me over to it like it always does", which finally adds percussion and a sung vocal sample. Not a moment too soon, or too late.
One predecessor for this type of unguardedly emotional, magpie downtempo might be late, great Swedish duo Air France's 2008 No Way Down EP. The sonic similarity is clearest on the second of Three Love Songs' two (one for each side) seven-minute opuses, the instrumental "Outside your house; the lights went out & there was nothing", with its sumptuous viola next to IDM-bustling beats and opulent keys. But there's a bigger spiritual affinity: The choir-like vocals and shrill hum of Yo La Tengo-referencing hymn "I can hear the heart breaking as one" would be out of character from the Swedes, but the "sort of like a dream, no better" quality, that heart-in-throat sense of of being suspended between planes of existence. Finale "Starting over", meanwhile, ripples like Deerhunter man Bradford Cox's more esoteric blog-only Atlas Sound tracks.
The ultimate forebear for Three Love Songs would have to be the KLF's 1990 ambient-house landmark Chill Out, with its strong sense of place, its free-flowing evocativeness, and its samples ranging from Elvis to an evangelist's sermon—the gleefully trolling UK duo had a fever, and the only prescription was more Tuvan throat singing! A Pitchfork writer once quoted another describing that album as "the sound of music having dreams about music"; again, for what it's worth, "In my dreams we're almost touching" samples a cover of a Drake (and Rihanna) song that samples a Jamie xx remix of a Gil Scott-Heron song (that was actually a cover of a pop standard). Three Love Songs might be the sound of music having a dream within a dream about music. And in those dreams, it's almost touching.


Most of the material on this 13-track, digital-only, rarities compilation was recorded prior to Seth Haley's 2011 Com Truise debut, Galactic Melt.

In Decay

Fifty minutes into Com Truise (Seth Haley)'s fifth "Komputer Cast"-- an infrequent but rewarding podcast series offered through his website-- he takes a wild left turn into Other Side's "Central". The track, an obscure, surly post-punk offering, collides harshly with the proggy computer compositions that surround it. It's like being punched in a library: You peel yourself off the floor smelling must and blood. It's an interesting moment because this impulse-- to fuck things up, to jar and puncture-- is absent from Haley's recorded work. It's still missing on In Decay, a 13-track, digital-only, rarities compilation that finds a younger Haley asking little of his listeners or himself.
Most of the material on In Decay was recorded prior to Haley's 2011 debut LP Galactic Melt. We can debate the utility of this type of release for a prolific, still-green producer, but that timeline is important because In Decay is deceptively underdeveloped. (The digital distribution, normally a great idea, chafes: Like many on the Ghostly roster, Haley has such a well-developed sense of design that his physical products are treats.) Haley so ably winds his synths into pleasing shapes that his compositions can sound complex when they're not. On In Decay, it's the drums that give him away: Respectful, grid-worshipping snares dominate almost every track, slapping against the more formed melodic ideas.
About those ideas: In Decay still leans heavily on dry-ice, low-cal funk. The tracks are baubles, pure sonic fetishes that that fail to provoke discernible imagery or mood beyond a noirish appreciation for the oscillators of Christmas past. Where Galactic Melt dipped its toes into dance music, In Decay hovers sluggishly in midtempo grooves (the engine rev of "Klymaxx" is a welcome diversion). In this mode, bass-heavy anthems like "Data Kiss" and "Smily Cyclops" offer the most to grasp.
The re-emergence of Chromatics (including Johnny Jewel side concern Symmetry) and Todd Terje's hot streak-- among others-- mean that an already crowded field of 1980s analog revivalists has, shockingly, gotten more crowded. Cut Haley whatever slack you see fit for In Decay's odds-and-sods status, but nothing here dispels the notion that his vision is more limited than that of many of his peers. He is a pure stylist, something his affinity for beautiful graphic design helps make clear, but if you're sitting behind a synthesizer in 2012 in the name of nostalgia, you'd better be able to use it to sharpen that style to a point. In Decay is too dull and passive to threaten.


Invoking the playful spirit of classic IDM, the Dutch producer’s debut full-length is an ode to reveling in the beauty of life’s tiniest details.

Zoom

Despite its title, Zoom has nothing to do with the video conferencing app that’s kept us all connected over the past few months. If anything, the debut full-length from the Dutch electronic musician upsammy (aka Thessa Torsing) is about disconnection—if not from society as a whole, then from the day-to-day hustle and bustle that often prevents us from examining the world around us. It’s an ode to taking a closer look and soaking up the beauty of life’s tiniest details. The chunk of ice melting in Torsing’s hand on the cover—also referenced in the woozy opener “Melt in My Heated Hand”—is a metaphor for the entire record. Zoom is a rumination on impermanence.
Torsing lives in Amsterdam, but she has an affinity for nature, which provides an ideal setting for the moments of thoughtful observation that inspired Zoom. Videos for “Extra Warm” and “It Drips” both feature fixed shots of pastoral tranquility. Though the music itself isn’t necessarily peaceful—Torsing’s percolating rhythms often recall the impish spirit of classic, late-’90s IDM—it is richly melodic and full of light, with sparkling synths and billowing pads that invoke the magic of the untamed wild.
It was a DJ residency at Amsterdam’s much loved De School nightclub that first put Torsing on the wider electronic music radar, and words like “adventurous” are often used to describe her sets. Straight lines aren’t really her thing, and depending on her mood, she’s as likely to hit crowds with low-key ambient bliss as she is intense blasts of off-kilter electro. Zoom takes a similar approach; while it’s not impossible for DJs to put these tracks to good use, the album clearly wasn’t designed with dancefloor functionality in mind.
Zoom is transportive, and it is best when glistening and gliding toward Torsing’s wooded hideaways. “Glowing Out of the Plastic Box” is a shot of bright bucolic wonder, the charm of its cotton-candy melodies only enhanced by the song’s crooked stomp. “Echo Boomed” is similarly buoyant, although its carefree rhythm feels more like a breezy afternoon walk through the countryside. There’s a lightness to much of Zoom, though that shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of complexity. Torsing’s production is abundantly detailed and always evolving; her music has an organic quality, an aesthetic aided by her use of field recordings and intermittent patches of fuzz. There’s something delightful about the restlessly playful drum patterns of songs like the world-weary “Twisted Like a Flame” and the more rousing “Reality Paces the Platform,” which together close out the album on a high note.
At times, Torsing’s percussion coalesces into something that resembles a danceable groove. With its dubby, halftime bounce, “Extra Warm” is Zoom’s most obvious head nodder, although it’s been overlaid with additional drums that top 170 bpm, darting to and fro with the inexhaustible energy of a hummingbird. “Subsoil” is similarly energetic, its bubbling percussion bringing to mind the frantic vibe of shangaan electro and other fleet-footed African rhythms. Much slower is the sci-fi strut of “Send-Zen,” the only track that could potentially be described as ominous.
Zoom arrives at a moment in which the world feels particularly chaotic, but the album’s irrepressible shine shouldn’t be dismissed as superficial escapism. For those who have the luxury of pausing to reflect, right now seems like an opportune time to simply be present and take stock of their surroundings, both physical and mental; upsammy’s album makes for a rewarding soundtrack to such introspection.


The Los Angeles folk musician’s third album is her best yet—a collection of hushed reveries that unspool like daydreams.

Quiet Signs

Jessica Pratt spins fantasy worlds bound to bewitch, dreamscapes that spiral towards the surreal, psychedelic spirituals that nourish. Her music’s intimacy feels so organically abstract, it is as if the songs are distilled directly from her subconscious. But as her third record, Quiet Signs, reveals, any perceived effortlessness is an illusion. While Pratt’s toolbox remains minimal—her trusty fingerpicked guitar and elastic voice alongside a sprinkling of keys and woodwinds—she weaves these means more intricately than ever, with a firm and confident hand.
After her last album, 2015’s On Your Own Love Again, transformed the meditative starkness of her 2012 self-titled debut into a lonely, ornate reverie, Pratt decided to record in a proper studio for the first time. She has said the experience initially induced anxiety, as she worried that a more polished sound would come at the expense of her otherworldly haze. But instead, Quiet Signs’ crystalline production allows even the subtlest of Pratt’s musical choices to radiate.
This depth is immediately evident on “Opening Night,” a contemplative piano instrumental played by her musical and romantic partner Matthew McDermott. Pratt named the track after indie auteur John Cassavetes’ 1977 film about an aging actress who struggles to find a truthful performance. And that same ruminative mood is felt in the song’s echoing notes, which sound as if they were played to an empty, gigantic theater. The meandering of “Opening Night” reveals an essential principle of Pratt’s work, that of trusting intuition, of letting a melody wander until it finds a natural resting place.
The nine songs here follow their own innate paths, often beginning with a simple acoustic arrangement before blossoming into vivid daydreams. On “Fare Thee Well,” Pratt’s gentle strumming and a piping organ give way to a whimsical flute solo—like a bird just freed from captivity, the sprightly woodwind soars higher and higher until it dissolves into the distance. Meanwhile, Pratt’s voice winds its own course, her varied intonations imbuing each song with its own character. Memories of “stolen city sighs” on “Here My Love” swell with the lingering euphoria of infatuation. On “Silent Song” she harmonizes tenderly with herself, imparting the idea that she is never truly alone. When she sings of existential restlessness on “As the World Turns,” her vowels are so round you can trace their full orbit.
Within these acrobatics, insight into Pratt’s poetic musings remains elusive.  She warps the typically direct, observational role of a singer-songwriter into something altogether more mystifying. She wraps her words in tightly woven melodies and gauzy reverb, often rendering them incomprehensible. Pratt’s obscuration sometimes sound like a means of emotional protection, as if she is draping her vulnerabilities behind a veil. Motifs that do emerge from Pratt’s cosmos swirl around notions of uncertainty, loss, disenchantment, and, on the bright side, budding romance. When a lyrical impression emerges, it floats to the surface just enough to announce its presence, but rarely offers clarity. Pratt’s method of abstraction is especially affecting because it embodies the ambiguities of the everyday: how words are not always enough.
The clearest moments on Quiet Signs are the centerpieces “Poly Blue” and “This Time Around.” “Poly Blue” is all Laurel Canyon sunshine, as Pratt observes a lover’s mystique. “He’s the undiscovered night,” she murmurs, as flutes flutter around her chords. “This Time Around,” on the other hand, captures a moment of hopelessness, of a profound uncertainty that faith might fail. As the song opens with spare strums, she keeps these fears close to the chest, but they soon begin to spill out. Suddenly, her voice deepens for a startlingly straightforward confession: “It makes me want to cry.” It’s a rare moment of perceptible pain, one that lingers on after the song has ended.
From there, Quiet Signs begins to fold into itself like a daylily facing the moonlight. While “Silent Song” exudes sentimentality, “Crossing” is private to the point of impenetrability, its curlicuing shape suggesting the mysteries of introspection. Both tracks largely do away with ornate embellishments, allowing Pratt’s meticulous plucking to shine. It’s as if she could needle away on her guitar for the rest of eternity, slowly unraveling the biggest questions, one by one.


Syd reshapes heartbreak into pillowy, ’80s-nodding R&B on her second album, softening her sound while maintaining vulnerability in her songwriting.

Broken Hearts Club

Over the past decade, Syd has emerged as a purposefully understated but no less commanding singer and producer in R&B. Whether making layered, party-ready grooves with her group the Internet or sultry, subterranean hip-hop and neo-soul on her 2017 solo debut Fin, the California artist’s music has an unhurried, intimate appeal to it. Syd’s hushed voice can bend into a gossamer falsetto or a no-nonsense flow depending on her mood, bringing a deft, preternaturally cool touch to sensual ballads and swaggering earworms alike.
On her second album, Broken Hearts Club, Syd reshapes heartbreak into pillowy, ’80s-nodding R&B. The album softens her sound with sunny acoustic guitar and velvety beats, but her songwriting doesn’t surrender its vulnerability and focus on queer desire that made Fin so intoxicating. Syd is a natural romantic, especially on “Fast Car,” which depicts an affair so white-hot it’s holding up traffic. “Don’t care that they beepin’ now/Hope they’re all watching,” she teases over phased electric guitar and twinkling piano, zeroing in on that sweet spot where adoration takes over common sense. Opener “CYBAH” relishes in the sound of quiet storm, as Syd teams up with New Orleans crooner Lucky Daye over pitch-shifted guitars and a slow-motion beat. Here, her insecurities start to simmer before a new flame: “If I ever make you mine, need to know if you’re the type/Do me wrong or do me right… Could you break a heart?” she murmurs, posing a question she already knows the answer to.
That push-and-pull is at the core of Broken Hearts Club, which saunters from breezy, tenderhearted songs to downcast ballads that center moments of doubt and mistrust. True to its title, Syd has said the album is about her first real heartbreak, and many songs are tinged with that bittersweet aftershock. “Hope you’re finding what you need or what you seek/’Cause now I’m free,” she shrugs on “Missing Out” alongside trilling, Casio-style keys, just before a trace of regret sets in. During “Out Loud,” a silken ballad featuring Kehlani that’s fringed with plucked acoustic guitar and layered backing vocals, Syd urges a lover to voice their true feelings, no matter the cost. There’s a bluntness to the songs on this record that was absent from Fin and makes for a more conventional album when paired with the soft-focus instrumentation, but it offers a familiarity that grows seductive in Syd’s mellow flow. That she makes a more traditional path still sound so fresh only reaffirms her considerable versatility, no matter the style of R&B.
Broken Hearts Club doesn’t stray far from that warm atmosphere, but Syd still makes time for the occasional detour. The bouncy, cartoonish synth line on “Tie the Knot” brings a welcome jolt of playfulness, while the creeping bass that courses through the Darkchild-produced standout “Control” evokes Fin’s shadowy, after-hours highlights. Those idiosyncratic moments embroider an album that proves allowing yourself space for vulnerability is the surest method of moving on from heartache. Syd finally finds closure of her own over a lone, hazy synth melody on the too-brief “Goodbye My Love”: “Maybe we’ll see it in time, my love/Just wasn’t destined to work for us,” she confesses. “We had to put ourselves first for once.” It’s a mature farewell imbued with melancholy, a temperament that Broken Hearts Club carries with artful finesse.


The rock group evokes Deerhunter while perfecting their own unpredictable way with melody, teetering on the edge of catchiness and constantly teasing and dodging the logical next note.

Pool Holograph: Love Touched Time and Time Began to Sweat

In 2015, Wyatt Grant decided to upgrade Pool Holograph from a solo bedroom project to a proper band, adding three members including the brothers Jacob and Paul Stolz, a duo who help cultivate silky, vintage hooks for the indie-pop band VARSITY. The Stolzes are a cornerstone of VARSITY’s sound, but on Pool Holograph’s three LPs and one EP as a group, few melodies, if any, should be described as “hooks.” The band seems more challenged and rewarded by teetering on the edge of catchiness, constantly teasing and dodging the logical next note.
Their latest, Love Touched Time and Time Began to Sweat, rides that line better than any before it. On their prior releases, Pool Holograph kept a dose of whirlwind aggression in their back pocket, succumbing to occasional rock-out urges as a way to break up their loping art rock. Here, they cut out the thrashing and growling in favor of  negative space. That openness draws extra attention to those melodies, which have a tendency to trip over themselves and still sound in control.
A disclaimer: Pool Holograph recall Deerhunter c. ‘07-’10 pretty clearly, to the point that any Deerhunter fan will probably notice the similarities within seconds, whether in Grant’s extremely Bradford Cox-like voice or in the band’s movements between sheets of haze and punctuated clangs. Given this, Love Touched Time doesn’t always feel fresh, exactly—its strength lies instead in its light touch. Pool Holograph have refined a natural sense of balance between pristine and peculiar, dangling nice, simple phrases, then corrupting them slightly with odd steps that pique the ear.
That’s clear in moments like the outro to “Medieval Heart,” Love Touched Time’s best song, when they squeeze in a stray high note at the very end of the repeating guitar line that’s almost an octave higher than any note before it, like an involuntary twitch that they anticipated and somehow finessed into their regular gait. It’s there when they feed a sample of ambient nature sounds into the background of the half-speed, 3 a.m. stargazer “Harbor Lights,” but faintly enough that it’s not heavy handed or distracting from the song’s plain beauty. At times, it’s there in a phrase from Grant’s choppy lyrics (“your hand in her bracelet” is a particularly alluring double-taker). Pool Holograph found their zone from a route of left turns and controlled collisions. With Love Touched Time, they give themselves some breathing room to explore it.

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Neither arch nor brittle, this is the Japanese electronic musician’s most approachable and generous collection to date: “plastic” as in “malleable,” not “artificial.”

Love of Plastic

Sustaining creativity over the decades isn’t always a question of figuring out who you are. Sometimes, the operative question is how: How much of yourself should surround your work? How do you balance a unique point of view with the utilitarian demands of the dancefloor? How do you change while remaining yourself? Across two decades and six albums, Shinichi Atobe has developed an adventurous, uncompromising, and deeply pleasurable body of work that offers a clear answer to the first question: Very little.
A handful of photos identify his physical form. His origin story is short and sweet: He somehow managed to release a single 12", 2001’s Ship-Scope on Chain Reaction, itself among the most mysterious and respected techno labels, and then went quiet until another cult label, Demdike Stare’s DDS, suddenly reactivated his career with a series of instantly sold-out albums—or are they compilations? No one can say. He’s said to live in Saitama, north of Tokyo. If he’s otherwise present in the world, there’s little trace.
Atobe’s early work floated industrial loops across seas of melodies, with rhythms like iron anchors tethered to vast rubber bands. It was odd; it was awkward; it sounded like nobody else yet fit right into the mix. Eventually, he came to sound even more singular: Tracks like 2014’s “Butterfly Effect 2,” 2018’s “Heat 2,” or 2020’s “Ocean 1” are off-the-grid endeavors that murmur in your headphones but bang on the floor, in perfect and uncanny balance.
Like his previous releases, Love of Plastic arrives by surprise. It’s peak form. Like the rest of his CV, its tracks are titled serially but sequenced out of order. They might be two minutes long or almost 10, and those lengths feel both arbitrary and inarguable. Love of Plastic embodies his POV: Phrasing should be sweet but not sappy; beats should be slippery, not sloppy. The difference here is what else he’s allowing himself to do, which is warm up. Not scorch, as parts of 2018’s Heat did, or get mushy like a moment or two of 2017’s From the Heart, It’s a Start, a Work of Art. From the directness of Atobe’s titles, one could be forgiven for expecting Love of Plastic to be arch or brittle. Instead, it’s his most approachable and generous collection to date. “Plastic” as in “malleable,” not “artificial.”
The brief “Intro” is all bubbles, something coming to the surface—and what comes is “Love of Plastic 1,” so bright and bouncy that it glistens like a bauble before revealing itself as a crown jewel in Atobe’s catalog. What the world needs now is more good old gay house music, and while I wasn’t expecting Atobe to suddenly go all Frankie Knuckles, the look suits him.
Love isn’t all poppers and pianos and synth pads. “Love of Plastic 8” leaves welts, with an itchy, acidic bassline etching lines between your ears that never quite form pathways. It’s a devilishly good bad trip, one so delirious that when the kick drum suddenly tumbles over itself, it sounds like a laugh. “Beyond the Pale” is coated in so much high-viscosity gloss that its house feels more like an apartment in a high-end magazine, desirable and out of reach. Its low end is equally enviable.
Two tracks look back to 2020’s Yes. “Ocean 2” is neither the analog-y expanse of that album’s “Ocean 7” nor the crowd-pleasing deep house of “Ocean”; instead, it’s the kind of twinkling, humid hall of mirrors DJ Sprinkles might reside deep inside. And the seductive “Loop 6” is less a reincarnation of Yes’ “Loop 1” than a take on the kind of bulbous, queer fantasias Olof Dreijer made in the Knife’s later work and, especially, in his recordings as Oni Ayhun. Yet their shape and scope are Atobe’s own.
The highlights are the “Love of Plastic” tracks, though, and they are just delightful, even Deee-Lite-ful. “Love of Plastic 5” squelches and squiggles with glee, as curtains of perfumed synth pads shimmer and percussion taps and tinkles. At one point, a handclap arrives just a beat or two behind and spends the next few minutes trying to fit in, and maybe it’s just how shit the world seems right now, but the effort is heroic. With its fabulous staccato strings and tantalizing vocal sample, “Love of Plastic 6” is almost diva house, the way Burial can almost be UK garage, but there’s a gaggle of glitchy noise panned way to the side and a situation of rattling like a purse spilling all over the floor. Closer “Severina” ups the ante, its tunneling dub techno gradually expanding into a jaw-dropping immensity of detuned bells, some kind of trumpet, spiraling chimes, and streamers of whirring bits of noise. Atobe is striking a pose and showing off his poise, perfecting gestures he’s finessed over the years. What happens next is an open question.

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On Vince Staples’ third album, the California rapper keeps it short and not so sweet.

FM!

On Vince Staples’ debut mixtape, in a calm tone that suggested he had seen some shit, he rapped, “You want some positivity go listen to some Common.” Eight years later, he continues to live up to those words. In Vince’s Long Beach, California-centered world, it’s summer year-round, and while the season usually brings bright skies and beach weather, it’s also the time of the year when people are wilding—when the temperature increases, so does violent crime. The West Coast never gets a chance to catch its breath, a feeling brought by the change in season. In Cali, the block is always hot.
Vince’s dark humor and borderline-troll personality have turned him into one of the genre’s most captivating characters, but his provocative side has been explored more often in interviews and social media than in his music. On his brisk, third studio album FM! he finally brings that personality to wax. The album begins with L.A. radio mainstay Big Boy describing the relaxing endlessness of a West Coast summer. But Vince is not with that and immediately debunks the fairytale: “Summertime in the LB wild/We gonna party ’til the sun or the guns come out.”
With all the success he’s accrued simply being himself, Vince appears to realize he doesn’t need to shape his sound to appease out-of-touch label executives for his music to weave through the West Coast air waves; with the 11-track FM!— of which he only raps on eight songs—he creates the shadow broadcast of his dreams. Vince has made an album that’s true to himself, one that represents his image of Long Beach, his love for the music of the West Coast, and that unleashes the complete personality of Vince Staples.
Vince’s tone is present on FM! in a variety of ways. Often he’s not even the one relaying it. Case in point: The project’s two interludes, presented as radio premiere snippets, don’t feature him at all. The radio has always been a home for trolling, consider, for example, Funk Flex’s frustrating and legendary “Otis” premiere on Hot 97 that teased the Kanye and JAY-Z collab for over 20 minutes. Vince uses the radio in a similar fashion, dropping in an Earl Sweatshirt knocker only to cut it off after 20 seconds. He follows that up later with the tease of a Tyga strip club anthem. The moments give Vince the chance to spotlight two artists he genuinely appreciates—but they’re also maddening. Because even though I’m aware I’m being trolled, I want more. Vince knows that and he’s rubbing it in my face.
When it comes to the album’s proper songs, Vince is often influenced by classic G-Funk records, and Vince uses the genre to signal his California authority. He even has to deal with the old school conflict of trying to capture the nonstop party sound of summer while lyrically recognizing its darkness. The production on the album, mostly from the chameleonic Kenny Beats—who can go from ATL melodic ballads to punk headbangers to now West Coast turn-up tracks—moves at a rapid pace. Kenny’s ability to pinpoint regional sounds will make some go in the streets and dance like the New Boyz, until Vince’s sorrowful lines pop in to remind everyone that shit isn’t sweet: “First months still feel like summer/Cold weather won’t stop no gun, or wrong hat, wrong day, I killed my brother.” A song like “Fun” feels like the sort of radio single that YG would perform at award shows until you realize what Vince is saying. Lyrics like “My black is beautiful, but I’ll still shoot at you” will always drag it back to the gloom of Long Beach.
When an artist decides they’re going to make an album for nobody but themselves, my first thought usually is, “Man, this is going to suck.” But Vince is at ease here, intertwining his personality into his somber celebration of Long Beach like never before. He’s rapping his ass off, and hooks are mostly an afterthought. He dips in and out of inventive flows, like on “Outside,” where he hits the pocket to make lines like, “Park gangster back then/At my Uncle Phil’s house with a mac 10” as memorable as any chorus. And on “No Bleedin” he enlists Bay Area favorite Kamaiyah’s buttery flow for a lively track about avoiding death that will melt into brains like an everyday pop song. On Vince’s station, the melancholy bars and the bounce come at the same time.