Aluna Francis and George Reid's sophomore album globe-trots through bass and sass-heavy dance tunes that occasionally stall out at their peaks.

I Remember

Few pop bands mix altitudes with the ease of AlunaGeorge. Down in the soil are producer George Reid’s basslines—sluffing, roiling creatures of many legs and the ceaseless forward motion of the animal brain. And up in the ether is singer Aluna Francis’ filmy, nasal falsetto, gathering frost as it drifts along. Off the strength of their first, excellently slippery electro-R&B singles, “You Know You Like It” and “Your Drums, Your Love,” they were shortlisted for the BBC’s Sound of 2013 poll, eventually coming in second (to Haim). Their consolation prize wasn’t bad, though: “White Noise,” a hit collab with Disclosure, scaled the UK Singles Chart to No. 2.
While the duo’s absorbing first album, Body Music, followed faithfully in the vein of their debut singles—chirping, sinuous club tracks, owing as much to Aaliyah as SBTRKT or Quadron—their follow-up, I Remember, kicks up dust in some unlikely new area codes. It cribs largely from dancehall, but stops short of adopting any of that form’s humidity; these diaphanous tracks are a long stream of cool appraisal. Francis thrives again in moments of sass, but she also muses on more overtly dense topics like consent and modern sexuality. They punctuate long spools of interconnected synth beats that perfectly bleed together for a dance floor of noncommittal swaying.
On “I’m in Control,” which features the Jamaican dancehall vocalist Popcaan, she shrugs off a lacking suitor by trilling, “You gotta go deeper than deep to get me off,” at once playful and damning. Its punchy house-lite beat is a distorted reflection of “Mean What I Mean,” another track hewing to themes of sexual consent, ultimately impassive due to Francis’ parceled-out delivery (“I mean what I mean when I say so/Not trying to be mean when I say no/So don’t play the fool and twist my rules”). In one of the bolder dance moments, “Not Above Love,” dark bass lines cave into another listless chorus: “You keep robbin’ my heart like a bank/No thank you.” It’s a curious quirk throughout that AlunaGeorge come in heavy in the verses—stuffing bass into every crevice—and then wind down or duck out by the choruses, stalling the motor.
The title track feels like the lone emotional counterpoint and borrows the well-timed stutters and slow-seeping synths of its coproducer, Flume. “I Remember” is a song so sorely nostalgic and bittersweet, it’s hard to hear on repeat, unless you’re the type to enjoy tilling the soot of past love affairs. Francis flutters around an old beau, remembering the heady and harsh times alike, finally alighting back in his arms. Reid’s slyly crushing, nipping and futuristic beat helps carry the emotion. “I remember, I remember, I remember the fights/Burning deep into the night,” she sings with soft, heartrending hope. “I remember, I remember, I remember your scent/When I just woke up and I’m on your chest.” Remembering the earliest promise is half the fun, after all—because next time, they could still surprise you.


The shoegaze legends return with their first album in 22 years, a precise and altogether gorgeous showcase of their peerless ability at production, mood, and songcraft.

Slowdive

Nature metaphors come so readily to mind when listening to shoegaze—clouds, stars, skies, storms, oceans, whirlwinds, maelstroms—that it’s easy to believe that, like the weather it evokes, it just sort of happens. Invest in the right guitar pedals, put the right breathy spin on your vocals, and bam—instant Loveless, or close enough to fool a stoned and heartsick teenager. It’s as easy as walking out your front door and letting the spring air greet you.
For some bands that may well be all there is to it. But song by song, moment by moment, sometimes even note by note, Slowdive do it better. There’s nothing elaborate in the bassline for “Slomo,” the opening track of their first album in 22 years, given the thick bed of guitars it bounces on. Just seven notes, the sixth of which leaps unexpectedly up an octave instead of continuing the bassline’s descent. Or at the end of “Slomo,” when Rachel Goswell’s voice pulls off a similar trick, first when she takes over lead vocals from Neil Halstead, then when she starts singing them at the very top of her register. At the end of “Go Get It,” Halstead sings two different lyrics laid on top of one another simultaneously, like his conversation with Goswell is over and now he's talking to himself.
In a genre beloved for its comfortable reliability, all it takes are these small but striking detours to remind us that this glorious noise is the work of human hands and the skill that move them. If there’s a story to Slowdive—the band’s return to active recording together after decades of slowly mounting critical and audience acclaim—beyond the human-interest angle of the return itself, the swerves in the songcraft tell it: This is an album as thoughtful as it is beautiful.
You can hear the attention to detail even in the album’s most conventionally pop songs. Knockout single “Sugar for the Pill” and “No Longer Making Time” share a similar structure, matching a loping alt-rock bassline with high arpeggiated guitar. But the differences that emerge within that framework are fascinating. “Sugar” avoids the go-for-the-throat, quiet-loud-quiet format which “No Longer” embraces, opting instead for a subdued sophistipop chorus that matches the resignation of its central lyric: “You know it’s just the way things are.” The latter song may lack the former’s restraint, but it makes up for it with the tightest, loveliest vocal harmonies on the album from singer-guitarists Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell, plus a fake-out finale that reintroduces the opening riff so deftly you’ll wonder if you hit repeat by accident.
Drummer Simon Scott, returning to the fold for the first time on record since 1993’s shoegaze opus Souvlaki, emerges as a key element not just for the songs’ drive, but of their texture. On “Slomo,” “No Longer Making Time,” and “Go Get It,” he provides not so much a backbeat as a frontbeat, a sound to be reckoned with, not taken for granted. Scott also helped create the vocal and piano loops that comprise “Falling Ashes,” the album’s closer; the repetition transforms Halstead and Goswell’s refrain of “Thinkin’ about love” from soggy sentiment into something that actually forces you to think about love as you listen. Even when Scott plays a more traditional role, as with the martial tempo he provides for the opening minute of “Don’t Know Why,” he’s apt to shift the rhythm beneath the Halstead/Goswell/Christian Savill guitars in unpredictable ways.
Slowdive offers maximum-volume shoegaze too, better than the band ever has before. Lead single “Star Roving” lives up to its interstellar title with easily the largest, most high-velocity guitar attack in the group’s discography. “Go Get It” is even better: a wet hot summer groove with a savagely flashy riff to match Halstead and Goswell’s back-and-forth chorus of “I wanna see it/I wanna feel it.” The words evoke Iggy and the Stooges’ “Gimme Danger” in how they can be interpreted as a quest for spiritual, psychological, or sexual transcendence, depending on your mood. An album this consistently shifty and surprising will likely hit three buttons at some point or other.
About a quarter-century removed from the “The Scene That Celebrates Itself” and the music press that made it infamous, Slowdive reveals what a Slowdive free of that pressure can do. The result isn’t the youthful explosion of their first full-length Just for a Day, nor the polished shot at success of Souvlaki, nor the thrillingly reactionary minimalism of Pygmalion. It’s the work of a band that reformed and recorded by choice, at their own pace, bringing the accrued experience of their entire adult lives to bear on music made outside the crucible for the very first time; no wonder the album, like their debut EP, is self-titled. So forget the weather imagery. Slowdive doesn’t make it look easy. It makes it look hard. Creating music this great almost always is.


Mark Kozelek’s latest 90-minute dispatch frames his unedited ramblings as a kind of... free jazz?

Sun Kil Moon: I Also Want to Die in New Orleans

I Also Want to Die in New Orleans

There’s a special kind of panic that sets in when you’re trapped in a one-sided conversation, the powerlessness of realizing that no amount of fidgeting will make the story you never volunteered to hear end any sooner and that, no matter how much your eyes dart across the room, nobody else at the party will come to rescue you. No songwriter has induced that feeling as uncannily over the last half-decade as Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek. Since 2014’s wide-ranging and discursive Benji, he’s doubled down on talk for talk’s sake, sharing ever-longer monologues increasingly devoid of irony, comic coincidence, payoffs, or takeaways, all delivered at the slumberous pace of those first 15 minutes of Marc Maron’s podcast that everybody skips.
Building on the audacious banality of last year’s This Is My Dinner, Kozelek’s latest 90-minute dispatch of unedited thoughts I Also Want To Die in New Orleans goes a step further by framing his ramblings as a kind of free jazz. Recorded with Dirty Three drummer Jim White and Donny McCaslin, the saxophonist who helped drive David Bowie’s Blackstar to transcendence, the record has a limber, late-night session vibe that sets it apart from its predecessors, but anybody coming for the tasteful playing of those accompanists is seriously overestimating Kozelek’s restraint. Hardly a second goes by that isn’t usurped by the drone of his indiscriminate, run-on narration.
Each of these seven songs feels like a Jim’s Journal comic stretched to the length of a Tolstoy novel. The 15-minute “Day in America” opens with news of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, but that grave backdrop gives way to a pedestrian account of a show: Some musicians sit in with Kozelek’s trio, one of them plays a Bill Evans song that Kozelek thinks is brilliant, but he’s furious when he learns it’s a cover, imagining the fallout if he’d unknowingly released it as his own (“Someone would have called me out and said, ‘You ripped off Bill Evans!’”). This goes on for minutes. And then, for no other reason than Bill Evans sounds like Bob Evans, Kozelek details a bad night he had at that chain restaurant when he was 18, which also goes on for minutes. The song ends with a dream sequence.
And amazingly that’s the most eventful song on New Orleans. On the 23-minute “Bay of Kotor” he pets some sickly kittens, and imitates various animal cries and barks. “Cows” considers his relationship with meat: “To give up cow flesh entirely, completely, at this stage in my life, I’m afraid would be very hard for me/For half a century I’ve enjoyed the tasty flavor of cow meat/It tastes so good in my mom’s chop suey.” One of the few songs with a pulse, “Couch Potato” squanders a fluttery, jazzed-out Modest Mouse groove on Kozelek’s ornery political musings and #UnpopularOpinions. Sure, Trump is terrible, he maintains, but Obama separated immigrant children from their parents, too. Never mind that fact checkers beg to differ; fact-checking a song that also includes a dicey aside about Obama’s light skin is wasted energy.
Despite their periodic flirtations with lofty subjects, these songs are deliberately inconsequential, flimsy excuses for Kozelek’s assault of superfluous details, circuitous dialogue, and dead-end asides. The individual parts rarely mean anything, and the whole means even less. Benji’s great trick was its songs only seemed meandering—its winding tales gave way to emotional revelations that were all the more moving because Kozelek sounded like he was processing them in real time. But the songwriting style that seemed so brave on that album feels more than ever like a cowardly cheat on I Also Want To Die in New Orleans, a preemptive attempt by an artist running short on ideas to shield himself from criticism by feigning indifference. After all, you can’t fail if you were never really trying, and from the blurry photo of a cat on its cover to its afterthought of a title, lifted from a poster he saw for last year’s $uicideboy$ album, and the miserable slog of the songs themselves, Kozelek never stops telegraphing how little he cares.


Certain records are just made for close listening on headphones. Some albums cannot be fully experienced\n\ save a complete ...

Feel Good Lost

Certain records are just made for close listening on headphones. Some albums cannot be fully experienced save a complete discontinuation of the outside world. The inner retreat of headphone listening sheds light on a group's true colors; the makeup rubs off, and leaves us to discover all the flaws and inconsistencies in the music's resplendent left/right asymmetry. What on speakers sounds like an extension of a refrigerator's hum may upon closer inspection be revealed as a delicate, pulsating harmony that draws together an otherwise lifeless song. Ambient noises, effects and other tricks are also often lost by stereo speakers' capricious playback tendencies. For such intricate and subtle records, only headphones paint a just portrait, and while they limit themselves to a narrow environment, their payoff can be duly satisfying.
You Forgot It in People, the album that brought Broken Social Scene due prestige last spring, wasn't one of those albums. Though it sounded just as great in the isolation of Prestige Series Grados, the record was a bona fide speaker blaster, full of craggy, overdriven guitar lines and unabashed vocals. It pulled few punches and refused to drown its populism in reverb or overblown production. Part of its appeal was its vulnerability: the diversity of musical styles and songwriting voices, the unashamedly tuneless vocals on songs like "Looks Just Like the Sun". Yet somehow, all its elements came together perfectly to create a work of accidental genius. So it may come as a shock for fans of that record to discover that Broken Social Scene premiered as just another of Canada's many instrumental post-rock bands. Their debut album, Feel Good Lost, features only two separate instances of distorted guitars or impassioned vocals (the raspy strumming on "Love and Mathematics" and the sober murmuring on "Passport Radio", respectively)-- which seems like a great disappointment until you get up close and personal with the record, and realize just how greatly it informed its successor.
Feel Good Lost is the sort of album that does lend itself to intimate listening, and while not nearly as inventive or as well-rounded a statement as You Forgot It in People, it owns its fair share of dazzling moments. The similarity between the two records has more to do with their spirit than with their sound: Feel Good Lost isn't a rock album, but the band affects the same cogitating melancholia that made You Forgot It in People so intimate-- in fact, that record's bittersweet warmth is even more prominent here.
A sense of historical influence permeates the recording, creating a pleasant sense of familiarity. The tangled, chorused guitars of "Guilty Cubicles" evoke Durutti Column at their ethereal best, while a track like "Stomach Song" possesses a blasé cheerfulness that stretches back to Nico-era Velvet Underground. "Stomach Song", in particular, feels affable, featuring a mumbled, repetitive soliloquy, delivered by a breathy female voice over a loop of jumbled talking that at times sounds like an unlikely precursor to The Books' patented crowd-sampling. Some newer influences have also wrestled their way into the mix: "Passport Radio", with its quavering strings and heart-pulse bassdrum, conjures Sigur Rós circa Agaetis Byrjun.
Unfortunately, Broken Social Scene's few attempts to step outside the narrow coordinates of Feel Good Lost's overarching vibe don't always yield successful results-- which is surprising, given how skillfully You Forgot It in People navigated the pop strata. Part of the problem is that the band seems too attached to the things it does well. The record maintains a laser-like focus that runs through all twelve songs. Any and all detours are taken with noticeable wariness, such as "Prison Province", a spare, two-minute porno-esque guitar track that left me slightly bemused, as did the percussion on "Last Place", which wouldn't sound out of place in a Lexus commercial. The song is the album's longest, and at over eight minutes of thin, repetitive drones, it's by far the least engaging track in Broken Social Scene's catalog.
Feel Good Lost is balanced nicely, however, by various embellishments which help break the occasional monotony, and even hint at the more confident band that produced last year's paramount orch-pop opus: A harmonica breathes life into the feeble "Blues for Uncle Gibb"; rustic strings add a fragile touch of broke-down sadness to "Mossbreaker"; diced drum loops drive the otherwise subdued "Love and Mathematics". Feel Good Lost may inhabit a much smaller plot of land than its successor, but the ground on which it rests has been just as thoroughly reared and cultivated.


Sleeper's title can be seen as a comment on Ty Segall's own prolificacy but it also has a deeper resonance. It's a largely acoustic album that meditates on death and loss, a record that owes a debt to Tyrannosaurus Rex-era Marc Bolan or early Bert Jansch.

Sleeper

As a recent promotional tour video pointed out, Sleeper's title can be seen as a comment on Ty Segall's own prolificacy. But it also has a deeper resonance. Last December, the singer and guitarist's adopted father died after a long battle with cancer, and shortly after, Segall stopped speaking to his mother. (He doesn't go into detail in interviews, saying only "she did some bad stuff.") Speaking to NPR, he called this period of his life a "weird, intense time," and Sleeper is a document of what came out of him in that moment. "It was kind of a purge, to be honest," he said.
Gone is the brazen, screaming Segall behind Slaughterhouse, Melted, and Twins. Even the relatively sedate Goodbye Bread, with its exploding heads and angry California commercials, featured a more intense Segall than the one who made Sleeper. "When I was making [Sleeper], I couldn't have written a loud, heavy song if somebody had paid me to," he said. Instead, he picked up his acoustic guitar and made something that owes less to Sabbath and more to Tyrannosaurus Rex-era Marc Bolan or early Bert Jansch. The title track opens quietly with a whistle, and slowly, he strums a minor chord progression louder and louder. "Oh sleeper/ My dreamer/ I dream a dream for you," he sings. It's a gentle track that Segall said was initially written for his slumbering girlfriend, but Sleeper's much weightier symbolic connotations of sleeping and dreaming hang heavy over the album.
While the album's tone and pacing seem to reflect its initial inspiration, the lyrics are rarely confessional in the most explicit sense-- any references to Segall's personal life are cloaked in more broadly relatable terms. Occasionally specific details pop out ("He packed his bags this morning/ He bought his ticket today/ Don't you go away/ Not today," he sings on "She Don't Care"), and he gets slightly more blunt with "Crazy", which is sung to a "little one," offering comfort because "He's here/ He's still here/ Though she is crazy." Segall said that "Crazy" was written spontaneously the moment he recorded it-- something he's never done before-- about his mother. "It’s kind of that thing where a person crosses a line and you just snap," he said. "You hit a point where you don’t care how it affects that person because you just have to say it so you can move on." The way he talks about the song, it's easy to imagine a diatribe, but it's a catchy, sweet, two-and-a-half minute song with a lyrical twist. For all its personal significance, "Crazy" is as open-ended as Segall's best songs.
So after all his shrieking, shredding, and psychedelic freakouts last year, Sleeper offers a welcome sonic respite. It's easily his most stripped down effort to date, full of elegantly simple, catchy, well-crafted songs. And although everything's acoustic, aside from one well-placed electric solo near the end of "The Man Man", the album's packed with subtle diversity. While "6th Street" recalls the more psychedelic-leaning folk he made with Tim Presley on Hair, "The West" could've been plucked from the rambling Carter Family songbook. Then there's "Queen Lullabye", with its distant-sounding falsetto, sludgy guitar, droning low-end, and trudging-through-molasses pace.
But even when he's switching things up on Sleeper, the album never feels as scatterbrained as his previous work. Goodbye Bread opened with a sing-songy ballad and went straight into a shout. Twins featured psychedelia and garage pop. Melted had acoustic-driven catchiness and blown-out fuzz. Those albums could pull off a scattershot of styles with well-placed transitions, but Sleeper is something else. Everything here easily lives in the same universe-- 10 tracks of similarly hued songs, all of a piece. It's his most focused album, with every song's tone easily flowing into the next, and it's also one of his best.


After elongating his brand of retro-futurism to great song lengths, the Norweigan producer crafts an achingly stylish and neatly accessible dance record.

Lindstrøm & Christabelle: Real Life Is No Cool

Real Life Is No Cool

As supportive as Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's fans have been of his random acts of creative fitfulness, one wouldn't blame them for feeling a bit tested by his most recent string of output. Between his brilliant but impractical 2008 long-player Where You Go I Go Too and his 42-minute refit of "Little Drummer Boy", two of the Norwegian producer's recent major releases have accounted for nearly 100 minutes of music across a scant four tracks. In a scene where an elongated 12-minute remix is par for the course, that's still hard going.
Real Life Is No Cool isn't just the achingly stylish and neatly accessible dance record to end all that, it also constitutes a fresh new take on the strand of retro-futurism that Lindstrøm helped create. The main difference is that whereas a lot of his output has been rooted in a genre-- disco, Balearic, new age-- Real Life Is No Cool often feels more like an attack on the very idea. It's almost as if Lindstrøm's response to years of genre exercise has been to atomise all of his influences into mist. What remains is a free-floating collection of sounds that not only still works as pastiche, but also somehow provides the basis for a remarkable dance record.
Of course, it might well be that the reason Lindstrøm finds it easier to play loose with his productions is because he's got a voice like Christabelle's to anchor them. A Norwegian with Mauritian roots, she slides effortlessly into pretty much any groove he provides, moving between slippery spoken word and breathy falsetto with equal ease. Evidently years in the making, Real Life Is No Cool functions partly as a chronicle of the pair's working relationship, spanning as far back as 2003, when she was still recording under the name Solale. While those early collaborations, including the slinky Italo of "Music (In My Mind)" and the fluttering space disco workout "Let's Practise", make repeat appearances here, they barely hold their own alongside most of the newer material.
Of the fresher tracks, the most immediate are probably "So Much Fun", a scattershot slice of end-of-the-evening disco that rivals Scissor Sisters at their friskiest; "Baby Can't Stop", an unequivocally shameless tribute to Off the Wall-era Michael Jackson that deserves airplay in even spite of Aeroplane's original-dwarfing remix; and "Lovesick", an irresistibly slinky head-nodder. Ultimately though, it's the slightly more unstructured, harder to hold tracks that make the most lasting impressions. Album opener "Looking For What" surfs along on a wobbly arpeggio, an occasional guitar chug, diffuse piano chords, and spoken-word samples; the stunning "Keep It Up" manages to transform a distinctly cheesy retro synth chime into a thing of effortless gorgeousness; and "High & Low" starts with a stodgy 1980s sitcom theme vamp before melting into something deliriously woozy.  If the man and his long songs have been off your mixtape radar for the last little while, this should see an end to that.


Two years after helping to define a genre with the Life of Leisure EP, Ernest Greene returns with a satisfying full-length expansion of his sound.

Within and Without

Despite being the butt of jokes because of its goofy but actually spot-on name, chillwave as an idea and a sound is here to stay. Synthesizers are in; guitar-based rock has taken a backseat to diffuse, rhythmic dance music; and the sound's key influences (broken, blissed-out electronica, hip-hop) have leached into most interesting music happening right now.
So, where does a significant subgenre defined by the less-than-lofty goal of manufacturing good vibes go next? The artists either do the same thing with the same synth presets to diminishing returns (Memory Tapes, Small Black, Teen Daze) or they pull a Toro Y Moi on Underneath the Pine and morph into something different altogether. The former creates music that can seem a little too comfortable, and the latter, while admirable, could come over as a bit alarmist-- a calculated response to the critics.
The first full-length from Washed Out doesn't have an on-repeat banger like "Feel It All Around" on it, and it isn't a sea change. Instead it's a sly, solid release that can fade into the background but has the ability to jump out and take hold of your ears. It sounds great on headphones and even better coming out of speakers in a car or at a party, where it can breathe a little. When Washed Out's Ernest Greene spoke to Pitchfork recently, he noted that he was working on the album in the same place that Goodie Mob were hammering out their reunion album. Quite different from the laptop on mom and dad's back porch that birthed Life of Leisure.
Ben Allen, who helped beef up Animal Collective's sound for Merriweather Post Pavilion, produced the album, and while Within and Without isn't too shiny or expensive, the more professional approach rewards multiple listens. There are delicate, lasting production flourishes like the cracking snares on "Echoes" and the impenetrable web of fashion-show synths on "Before" that give way to an agitated disco-like jerk. Drums are bold and complex, reflecting the almost Pete Rock-aping found on Washed Out's tour-only Untitled EP, and live instruments are used for atmosphere the way samples were before. One of the most chilling, affecting moments of Within and Without happens when cello swings through "Far Away".
The album's also very sensual and not just because of the American Apparel-lite album cover. Its beats slink along like those Public Enemy drums creeping through Madonna's "Justify My Love", and there's a lush, snowy warmth to the production (one of the songs is even called "Soft"). No longer a stand-alone Adult Swim-released single, "You And I", featuring Chairlift's Caroline Polachek, is the soundtrack to a tender, Sunday morning make-out session, and well, just listen to that throbbing bassline. "Sade but a bit more shy," or "Trip-hop intended for making love rather than fucking" kinda describes what's going on here. "A Dedication", the album ender, eschews airy ornate production for fragile piano and Greene's least mumbly, most direct vocal performance. It's a purposeful period at the end of the album; the point where the record stops worrying about dancing and seems intent to curl up and get cozy.
Within and Without is a declaration to snarky ironists that there is nothing to be ashamed of with this sound. "Feel It All Around", Neon Indian's "Should Have Taken Acid With You", and Toro Y Moi's "Blessa" entered this rarefied, awesome space between indie pop catchiness and fragile, narcotic groove, and here's a whole album of tracks on that level. That it comes at a time when others have abandoned the genre or quickly jumped on and then off to raise the stakes and get respectable, is even more impressive. Greene has made an elegant, subtle album in a genre that primarily values the single mp3 and, every once in a while, a 12" or cassette tape. Within and Without is an excellent demonstration of what happens when, even after the buzz-band cycle has faded, you continue to investigate a sound on your own hushed, ambitious terms.


Blink-182's seventh album wants to be a pop-punk eminence album, evidence humbly submitted that this aging pack of skater brats is still young, selectively dumb, and full of commiserating angst.

California

Much like a malcontent teen at a strip mall, killing a weekend's hours while nursing the pulpy dregs of a Jamba Juice, the internet has once again met the challenge of making something from almost nothing. This time, the subject of their dedication is a 16-second track from Blink-182’s seventh album, California called “Built This Pool.” Covers have been uploaded. Annotations have been cribbed. The band themselves knotted it in a narcotizing 10-hour loop that seems to contain all the world’s traumas and solutions. All for a cavernously stupid pop-punk blip in which frontman Mark Hoppus yelps, in entirety, “Woo woo/I wanna see some naked dudes/That’s why I built this pooo-oooo-oool.”
These endeavors as valuable as any, to be clear; the song remains hilarious, for the virtual minutes of my life I’ve dedicated to replaying it. It’s a nice jolt back to the group’s gleeful heyday, when flapping their rude bits up and down So Cal was high art to a nation of TRL viewers, and their infectious three-chord screeds belied real, sly wisdom. (It’s also a fairly unprecedented bout of brevity; the spiritual antecedent is the Take Off Your Pants and Jacket cut “Happy Holidays You Bastard,” which clocks a robust 42 seconds.) If the entire album was stuffed similarly, with sneeze-length quips and short stabs of power chords, California would seem no less anomalous for what it’s trying to be: the pop-punk eminence album, evidence humbly submitted that an aging pack of skater brats hasn’t jumped off the hedonic treadmill just yet and is still young, selectively dumb, and full of commiserating angst.
The album is a much slicker petition, though. It opens with a bald-faced admission of nerves, a level stare that doubles as a keen bit of reverse psychology. “There’s a cynical feeling saying I should give up/You said everything you’ll ever say,” Hoppus sighs on “Cynical,” the reedy edge of his voice unchanged. “There’s a moment of panic when I hear the phone ring/Anxiety’s calling in my head.” The glum pall quickly dissipates into the sort of doubletime thrash that powers most garage punk, but it never entirely leaves the record; the earnest California takes plenty of time to sprawl out, from wound-licking power ballads (“Home Is Such a Lonely Place,” “Hey I’m Sorry”) to high-shine navel-gazings that hew closely to past hits. The solemn “Bored to Death” rides a rubbery guitar intro just one note inverted from “Adam’s Song,” a hit from their 1999 breakout Enema of the State, and boasts a chorus deep in conviction only (“Life is too short to last long”).
As the title suggests, a Red Hot Chili Peppers-level obsession with the Golden State serves an undercurrent; “Los Angeles” won’t score any Schwarzenegger tourism ads soon. An ode to “San Diego,” their hometown, rings equally fatalist as a swift chanty about idyllic, surely impossible return. But there are less skilled diplomats to deliver this: especially in the spry, up-pace moments, Hoppus remains an appealing vocalist, determined and frayed, and Travis Barker’s drums are crisp. New addition Matt Skiba, erstwhile frontman of Alkaline Trio, cops some lead vocal duties with a gruff edge that complements Hoppus, and doesn’t attempt to copy the irreverence of his predecessor Tom DeLonge (who’s now thornily fixated on chasing UFOs). The many blithe punk bands their outfits influenced–Paramore, Fall Out Boy–were birthed from this nexus long before it existed on one stage.
There’s one more quick blast of total absurdity here: “Brohemian Rhapsody,” a whole 30 seconds of driving guitars and drum fills with a tinny, sole quip as lyrics: “There’s something about you/That I can’t quite put my finger in.” These two snippets couldn’t be the first dumb little jams Blink-182 committed to tape, not by a long shot, so it speaks to a canny professionalism over the years that we’re just hearing some now. And while the conceit was funnier earlier, even 10 tracks earlier—when our pants fit better and our eyes were wider—it’s still pretty damn likable.


A collection of stuttering, stately, and studiously weird disco songs associated with producer/writer/performer August Darnell.

Kid Creole: Going Places: The August Darnell Years 1976-1983

"Like the Seminole, Navajo, Kickapoo/ Like those Indians, I'm an Indian too." These are words you will find rolling around your mind, for reasons all out of sorts, after listening to the maniacally infectious disco of August Darnell. (Prepare, too, to take stock of the Chippewa, Iroquois, Omaha, and Sioux, lest other tribes go underrepresented.) The couplet comes from "I'm an Indian Too" by Don Armando's Second Avenue Rhumba Band, one of many acts commanded by Darnell during an era when disco knew no bounds. It certainly didn't on any of the tracks compiled on Going Places: The August Darnell Years 1976-1983, a collection of stuttering, stately, and studiously weird disco songs that have to be heard to be believed. Darnell was involved in Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band before branching out as a writer/producer for other acts (many on the fabled crypto-disco label Ze Records) and then for his own group Kid Creole & the Coconuts. Common to them all are theatrical airs, irrepressible grooves, and fateful moments, however subtle or pronounced, that give rise to reactions classifiable only as WTF?!?!
The new compilation starts with Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band's "Sunshower", a spritzy song that has become ubiquitous thanks to samples by Ghostface and M.I.A., among others. From there, Going Places goes places where idiosyncrasy and ambition reign. The title track, by Kid Creole & the Coconuts, struts through a funky mix of rhythm guitar and dryly shaken cymbals before breaking for a vibraphone solo and an eerie few-note guitar refrain that plays like something out of Blue Öyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper". In "Is That All There Is?", singer Cristina broods about nightlife boredom with coy high-style jadedness before assenting to "let's keep dancing" (and this in the midst of a musique concrète interlude complete with cuckoo clock and restless crowd sounds).
Some of the songs on Going Places were made for dance-theater projects in the East Village in the 1980s, but one gets the sense that, for Darnell, a blank reel of tape was as conducive to theatricality as any commissioned stage. The parade of vocalists on display-- snappy divas, choruses of kids, uncertain guys who sound like they were just pulled away from sweeping up the studio-- makes for an uncommonly wide range of expression. And the music follows suit. The disco-vocal histrionics in Machine's "There But for the Grace of God Go I", so intense you can practically see the veins rising on the singers' foreheads, sound calm compared to a synth-streaked instrumental breakdown with sweaty funk guitars and blitzing bass runs too controlled to worry over mere concerns of the humanly realm. A similar mood plays out in slow songs like Aural Exciters' "Emile (Night Rate)", which cycles through a carnival of ideas without rising above a simmer.
The most striking aspect of Going Places is how little a sense of novelty figures into songs so outrageously playful and weird. The bizarre parts are never bizarre for no reason, and they're played (often by many, many band members) with too much spirit and skill to rate as stunts. It's hard to imagine dance music half as grand and imaginative being made today. But then, August Darnell would be hard to account for in any era.


Always defined by their eccentricities, the Decemberists offer a tangled narrative set to thick stoner-metal sludge and prog-folk arpeggios.

The Hazards of Love

Nobody got into the Decemberists for the riffs. In other ways, though, the theatrical Portland folk-rockers' noble sojourn into heavy narrative prog-folk was probably always in the stars. Ornately antiquarian diction was their Ziggy Stardust. Ginormous song suites based on world folklore were their deaf, dumb, and blind kid. Yes, they were meant for The Wall.
In an interview with Paste, singing guitarist/songwriter Colin Meloy mentioned that The Hazards of Love was "initially conceived as a musical... but I decided about halfway through my time in France that it wasn't going to work as a stage piece. But it would still work as a rock record, so that's where it ended up." Alas, for all the derring-do of the Decemberists' resolutely un-sold-out (I guess?) fifth album, its failures as a stage piece may explain some of the problems that hamper it as a rock record.
It makes sense that the Decemberists would end up here. A willingness to make their fans put in some work, whether with fancy language or sprawling song suites, has been part of their steez ever since the baroque reveries of 2002 debut Castaways and Cutouts and stagey bookishness of 2003 breakthrough Her Majesty-- both of which still kick pantaloon. After 2004's The Tain EP flashed the first signs of metalhead envy, Picaresque a year later ended the Decemberists' indie years with their most relatable and poppiest album (still my favorite of theirs). Capitol debut The Crane Wife showed no symptoms of what Meloy had termed "major-label sellout-itis".
The Hazards of Love, inspired by UK folkie Anne Briggs' 1966 EP of the same name, has thick stoner-metal sludge and peat-bogged prog-folk arpeggios. Tucker Martine, who mixed The Crane Wife, produces exactly right for the material, focusing on the songs. Multi-instrumentalist Jenny Conlee and bassist Nate Query add several string arrangements. Robyn Hitchcock adds subtle electric guitar textures on an instrumental interlude, and My Morning Jacket's Jim James and the Spinanes' Rebecca Gates are in there somewhere, too. Still, although the album's grandiose narrative about star-crossed lovers William and Margaret-- and the dastardly villains who beset them-- has some nice twists, it's not exactly Andrew Lloyd Webber. Usually here's where I'm supposed to say, "That's OK, you don't have to follow the plot, because the songs stand on their own"-- except, with a few exceptions, they don't, not quite.
It doesn't simplify things that Meloy sings the parts of multiple characters, also including "First Voice" and "The Rake". The blessedly thorough lyric sheet makes advance mp3s like dark infanticide memoir "The Rake's Song" a lot funnier, full of witty wordplay ("I was wedded and it whetted my thirst") and sly foreshadowing ("You think that I would be haunted"-- he will be), but reading isn't the same as listening. Too much work, not enough payoff. (Hmm, imagine that.)
Not that the Decemberists' latest has anywhere near the smugness that haters might wrongly expect-- they sang "California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade", calling "all bed wetters", after all. "The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid", in which Meloy's William argues against the Queen to set him free to be with his beloved, has blazing classic-rock riffs and a commanding vocal by My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden. (The reprise is less essential, unless you're still following the plot.) Worden returns on the "The Queen's Rebuke/The Crossing", which has blistering dynamic shifts, an organ solo, and plenty of lurching Black Mountain heaviness. Surprisingly, it all sounds like the Decemberists, at least if you've been paying attention over the years.
For the love songs, then, The Hazards of Love puts on some Nashville twang. Pedal steel cries alongside swaying accordion on "Isn't it a Lovely Night?", with a precious post-orgasm (post-Pete & the Pirates?) pun. As the pregnant Margaret, Lavender Diamond's Becky Stark is a welcome pairing for Meloy, smiling with Princess Bride-like serenity through her worries on "Won't Want for Love (Margaret in the Taiga)"; Meloy's voice is at its vulnerable best on the trembling meadow-makeout ballad "The Hazards of Love 2 (Wager All)". I can take the undead children chanting on "The Hazards of Love 3 (Revenge!)", but not the watery wedding vows on the drunken finale-- what can I say, I really, really didn't like Titanic.
Enough happens musically on The Hazards of Love that I can still see it being fun for fans in a live setting, especially if you know the lyrics. On disc, though, it's largely missing the catchy choruses and verisimilar emotions that previously served as ballast for the Decemberists' gaudy eccentricities. As a turn toward metal, The Tain EP's smaller portion was more satisfying-- although, as mid-career change-ups go, this is still a fair piece more enjoyable than something like MMJ's Evil Urges.
"Doing The Hazards of Love took a lot out of me," Meloy confides in the press bio. "And I'm definitely curious what will come out now that I've got this out of my system." The Decemberists already released three non-album singles last year, compiled as the Always the Bridesmaid EP; "Sleepless", a lovely orchestral lullaby from the recent Dark Was the Night charity compilation, suggests the Decemberists still have plenty more nautical epics to perform. "I've got nothing to hold onto," Meloy sings. A friend of Bobby McGee's once called that feeling freedom, and it only took a four-and-a-half-minute song.


Techno artist and White Material label cofounder Young Male branches off from floor fillers on his latest. This is dank, ominous, beat-free music that suggests a certain weary fatalism.

How to Disappear in America

In the beginning, New York’s White Material label prized an ethos of function over form, packaging gruff, no-frills techno in plain white sleeves. Their logo depicted a hard-hatted technician strapped to a telephone pole: “Working man’s techno,” read a phrase stamped on the label's first release. (There is an element of fantasy at work here; a few of the label's artists are RISD grads, and at least one works by day as a graphic designer.) None of the crew’s members stripped his records more mercilessly to the bone than co-founder Young Male, aka Quinn Taylor, who came up with the label’s slogan during a stint working in a hand tool factory.
As recently as September, when he released Hot for Destiny and the Street, his second full EP for the label, Young Male was still applying himself primarily to stern, basement-quaking floor-fillers. His peers, meanwhile, had developed distinct musical identities: Galcher Lustwerk became known for his barbiturate house beats and hypnotic baritone; DJ Richard’s debut album, for Dial, put a chilly ambient spin on techno. Both producers’ music is unmistakable for the work of anyone else, but Young Male’s minor-key throb felt ego-free, a kind of ur-techno that was less about authorial genius than collective release: DJ tools meant to keep dancefloors running smoothly.
Now, though, with his debut album, Taylor makes his own pivot toward auteur status. How to Disappear in America sounds unlike anything he’s done before. This is not a dance record. The tracks are short and sketch-like. The tempos are slow, the lighting crepuscular. A few tracks feature no beats at all, and when percussion does appear, it’s a rickety pitter-pat pulse that sounds as cutting-edge as the home organ in your great-aunt’s living room, and as hard-hitting as the tapping fingernails of an ASMR video.
John Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s influence looms large over the record’s pensive pulses and gravelly pedal tones. How to Disappear in America resembles a soundtrack in other ways, too. Its titles read like film cues (“Franklin’s Theme,” “Into the Night,” “Fade”) and its pursuit of atmosphere is all-consuming. It is resolutely minor-key, and his analog synths have a bitter tinge to them.
Occasionally, a pinprick of light punctuates the murk. “Muzak” makes surprising use of fretless bass and oily tenor saxophone, evoking the glass bricks and neon lights of a decades-old softcore video found in a discarded box of VHS tapes. And while “Carrier” is little more than a gloomy bass pulse buffeted by a cold, unforgiving wind, there’s a hint of the Durutti Column in the silvery guitar line that sprouts from it like a sturdy desert cactus.
Mostly, though, bleakness predominates. “Into the Night” channels the drone of bomber jets into a short, sinister ambient sketch, and “Franklin’s Theme” wraps its hi-hat rhythms with a coppery and noxious monotone. “Reveal (Pacific Coast Highway 1 Version)” is strikingly reminiscent of the Cure’s “Carnage Visors,” the soundtrack to a film the band opened their concerts with on 1981’s Picture tour.
That song, reissued on the expanded edition of Faith, stretched a single riff into a 28-minute dirge, and Young Male’s short, funereal album—itself just 28 minutes long—functions in similar ways. Almost claustrophobic in its cohesion, it sounds like it was made using only a handful of obsolete machines, and the manner in which it worries away at the same few sounds and themes suggests a certain weary fatalism, a sense of running out of options. In Young Male’s America, all roads are dead ends.


The Australian rapper returns with her first album in five years, sounding not just unrepentant but also tediously uninterested in growing or challenging herself.

In My Defense

Iggy Azalea wants you to know she’s not sorry. She mentions this on every track of her new album, braiding it into brags about her money and her body until they snarl together in a petty wreath. It’s an odd package for a record with high stakes: This is her first album in five years, after her planned 2016 release Digital Distortion was shelved, and the first she’s released on her independent label. In those years, she has cemented a reputation built on appropriation and controversy. Name a major artist—Halsey, Snoop Dogg, the cartoon character Peppa Pig—and Iggy has entangled herself in some sort of feud with them. On an album with the unsubtle title In My Defense, she attempts to cast herself as a victim while further distorting and dismissing the cultures she takes from. Less than three minutes into the album, she raps, “Because I talk like this and my ass fat/They be saying Iggy tryna act black.” A few tracks later, she drops the record’s thesis: “I started to say sorry, but fuck that shit.”
Didn’t we cancel Iggy Azalea? Maybe because of the nature of the internet, or because of the privilege that Iggy both willfully ignores and has worn as a shield throughout her career, she’s somewhat positioned for a comeback; media outlets have been hinting at her potential victorious return for years. This album could have been an opportunity to show an ounce of contrition, to own up to her mistakes and demonstrate that she has learned. Iggy is talented: a four-time Grammy nominee with the vocal toolkit and dancefloor command that allowed her to jump on and invigorate hits. (On “Fancy,” she handily eclipsed Charli XCX, a feat that few of Charli’s collaborators have managed.) But talent isn’t an excuse, and on this album, it’s almost irrelevant.
“I just knew I wanted to go to America and be a rapper and have a ponytail and a leopard-skin jacket that went down to my feet, and like, 20 white, fluffy dogs on one leash,” she told Dazed and Confused in 2012. The album is stacked with cartoonish approximations of what she thinks a rap song should sound like: shivers of bass, the occasional “skrrrt,” Mad Libs of designer brands and bodily fluids. Many sound like direct imitations of the rappers she admires. “Sally Walker,” the best song on the album, features sparkling piano chords similar to Cardi B’s “Money” (J. White produced both songs). The exhausting, Juicy J-featuring “Freak of the Week” sounds like a rejected track by Megan Thee Stallion, whose debut album features her own song with the Memphis rapper. She hisses “lil’ bitch” in a way that sounds like Rico Nasty.
It’s possible Iggy sees herself as a pioneer who paved the way for female rappers. Her album starts with “Thanks I Get,” a paltry diatribe about the “little mes” she claims to see. Women have been rapping as well as men for as long as rap has existed, but it’s only now, years after Iggy came on the scene, that they seem to be inching towards getting equal attention. Iggy Azalea is not the only current rapper who fills songs with dreary, monotonous references to sex and money, but many find creative, amusing, and even raw ways to write and spit about both. Instead, Iggy crams her songs with one-liners that sound like branded Instagram captions: “I waste my wine before I ever waste my time”; “Catch flights not feelings.” Even worse are the banal repetitions: “I just wanna nut,” she whispers over a bastardized “Push It” sample, subjecting us to the word “nut” 15 times in under three minutes. Mixed metaphors wilt over predictable beats. I found myself bobbing along automatically to the slumped synths and handclaps, then wanting to hit “next” after 30 seconds of each song.
For an album so concerned about “haters,” the worst we see comes from Iggy herself. “They call me racist/Only thing I like is green and blue faces,” she sneers, managing to corrode and embarrass herself in one line. Rather than penitence, she offers only a garish caricature. Her only defense is to further offend.


The country star’s sixth album is an endlessly pretty back-to-basics record focused on growing and bettering oneself. It’s a balm, even if her sharp songwriting has dulled a bit.

Deeper Well

You only have to listen to the last few weeks in pop music to understand that, yes, Saturn has very much returned. There are its icy rings barging into Ariana Grande’s eternal sunshine in “Saturn Returns Interlude,” a brief explainer about the astrological notion that after the 29 years or so it takes for Saturn to orbit the sun, major life transitions may ensue. SZA begged its ammonia-yellow light to shine on her in Lana teaser “Saturn.” And now here is Kacey Musgraves, welcoming back the gassy giant to remind her that some people are givers and some are takers and she’s well shot of the latter on “Deeper Well,” the title track of her sixth studio album.
The pro forma language of astrology, tarot, and therapy is all over the charts lately. These are great boons to the famous: ways for them to venture relatability without disclosure, and to make the listener feel centered in the music, too. While you, a civilian, may never know what it’s like to feel dogged by deuxmoi, I’m a Leo and so are you! On the endlessly pretty Deeper Well, Musgraves encounters energy vampires, boundaries, moon bathing, the mycelium network, the power of jade stone, and breaking patterns that no longer serve her; the song “Dinner With Friends” is a torn-out gratitude journal page. The wistful folksy vibe is very much “pottering around your local wellness shop picking up crystals and sniffing the hand-rolled palo santo incense.” Sageing my cynicism momentarily, these things seem to have genuinely helped Musgraves as a person, and all power to her. But as songwriting concerns, they wash out the erstwhile country radical’s incisiveness, her winks, her delightfully subverted cliches, and turn a beloved outsider into a solipsist. Once she’s sweetly bid “goodbye to the people that I feel are real good at wasting my time” on the second song, the world outside is all but gone.
Deeper Well is Musgraves’ back-to-basics record after 2021’s conflicted star-crossed. Written after her divorce from fellow country singer Ruston Kelly, the lyrics were fragile and vulnerable but came in sleek pop packaging with Lemonade-sized ambitions. It didn’t connect in the same way as her 2018 psychedelic opus Golden Hour. You might imagine her next step to be another corrective, whether commercial or creative, but Deeper Well beats a further retreat. “I don’t care for money or fame,” Musgraves sings on an album that exudes disregard in its rainy-day strums and glazed vocal refrains. There are teases of more compelling directions not taken: Those lyrics are from highlight “Heaven Is,” which, like “Jade Green,” has the mournful formality of traditional British folk in its spindles. The influence of Nick Drake and Linda Thompson collides with Musgraves’ Texan roots on the yearning opener “Cardinal,” which unavoidably evokes “California Dreamin’”—but also the impeccable The Trials of Van Occupanther by her fellow Lone Star druids Midlake. It makes the idea of Musgraves striking out on a folk-rock quest over the existential plains sound extremely appealing.
Instead, the understated music on Deeper Well fits its theme: Comfort and care are life’s biggest prizes and the fear of upending that careful balance is what keeps you up at night. (“I think about you often/Worrying that I might drive/The nail into the coffin,” from “Nothing to Be Scared Of,” might be the album’s best lyric.) When there are details, they are delicate: “Giver/Taker,” one of several songs about how all one really needs is love, is sparsely wreathed with banjo and cello and has an intricate beauty. “The Architect,” the lone song with Musgraves’ old core co-writer, Shane McAnally, sticks out for its nesting Russian doll structure, mirroring Musgraves’ worried spiral about whether there’s logic to the universe.
Awareness of death hovers over some of these songs—“Cardinal” remembers a lost friend and wonders if a bird is bringing “a message from the other side” and the self-possessed “Dinner With Friends” loses some of its saccharine quality when Musgraves reveals that she’s imagining what she “would miss from the other side”—yet there’s rarely more than a shadow to the arrangements. From someone who flipped off the country establishment and vaulted beyond it two albums back, it’s perversely captivating to witness her sounding so cautious. The palliative “Sway” is about Musgraves’ desire to “let go” so that “maybe one day/I’ll learn how to sway.” The sunflower-bright wooziness suggests she’s got that licked.
For an album predicated on having cast off the superficial shit, Deeper Well is frustratingly short on what happens when you really wiggle your toes in the dirt. On the title track, Musgraves remembers her curiosity as a small-town Texan kid: Her family had what they needed, “but the world was as flat as a plate/And that’s OK/The things I was taught/Only took me so far/Had to figure the rest out myself,” smartly acknowledging her pride in her roots and her instinct that the picture was bigger than she had been told. As a young woman she developed an expansive and discerning worldview that brought her this far, which gets a cursory nod in “Dinner With Friends” when she memorializes “my home state of Texas/The sky there, the horses and dogs/But none of their laws.” Her inquiring eye, once so sharp on hypocrisy and sanctimony, is now a bit rheumy. The midnight campfire strum of “Heart of the Woods” takes the fungal web that lets plants communicate as a toothless metaphor for how it’s human nature “to look out for each other … when there is danger.” It sounds like a dream because it is one. Similarly, the tastefully twilit (and unusually hooky) “Lonely Millionaire” finds a pop star reminding her listeners that money and diamonds “can’t buy you true happiness.”
Deeper Well is the latest addition to a canon of refusenik pop records from young women burned by the spotlight: Lorde’s Solar Power, Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever, Ariana Grande’s post-2018 output, Hayley Williams’ Petals for Armor, Clairo’s Sling, even perhaps Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Evermore. They are curious artifacts. It is entirely positive that we have started to reckon with the toll that business demands and grossly unfair scrutiny take on these archetypal figures. These records are often products and expressions of the therapy necessitated by that toll, embodying the revelations about quietude and self-worth that therapy so often suggests. Yet they still exist in a pop infrastructure and function, as pop unavoidably does in this moment, as celebrity texts. This creates some tension between why they’re made and who they best serve. Deeper Well is sympathetically fame-agnostic and focused on steadying Musgraves’ axis, but its emollient balms also aren’t particularly satisfying when you know what she’s capable of.
I almost feel guilty for saying the poppiest song is the standout: “Anime Eyes” is as gorgeously weird as the best of Golden Hour, a paean to a lover who makes stars and hearts burst from Musgraves’ lashes as if they were besotted cartoon teenagers. It spirals skyward on a rapturous rush of memories that stumbles adorably, backed by Daft Punk-robotic vocal effects. For the length of the middle-eight, you understand exactly how it feels to be transformed by cosmic forces beyond your control.


For as many people who saw their idealized selves in Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane, Lodger was the first time David Bowie really seemed accessible—a character with flaws and frailties, petty thoughts and grocery lists; someone who doesn't just dabble in reality but lives in it.

Lodger

[Ed. Note: In light of David Bowie's passing, Pitchfork commissioned reviews of several of his classic albums.]
The thing to know about David Bowie's 1979 album Lodger is that there really isn't anything special to know: No creation myth, no alter ego, no 10-minute-long song-suites or spooky instrumentals or pretentious backstories about George Orwell and "the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of Muzak rock." Actually, Lodger might be the first David Bowie album marketed as nothing more than an album of recorded music by David Bowie. "I would like to do something rivetingly new and, uh, earth shattering," he said in a radio interview a few days before the album's release. "Every Saturday I want to do that!" Then, self-mockery: "Let's do something earth shattering. No, let's put the telly on*.*" A few minutes later, his digression on the metaphorical impacts of science fiction on personal identity is interrupted by a dog. Like, a canine, whimpering aloud while Bowie unburdens himself about inner space. "I know it's a bore, darling," he says to the dog, and everyone, including David Bowie, laughs.
The dog had a point: Seriousness really can be boring after awhile, which might've occurred to Bowie after the cold white peaks of 1977's Low. Sensing that high art might be losing its flavor, he went on a long, generous tour called Isolar II during which he revived the entirety of 1972's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, a gesture that in the context of his restlessly radical early-'70s career would've been like staging a Vegas revue. "He's remembering that bone shot in 2001," Bowie says of the dog during the radio interview. "What a waste of a bone!" A showman by birth and narcissist by trade, Bowie could've easily been talking about himself.
Lodger has 10 songs, all of which are three to four minutes long. One is a great Talking Heads impression called "D.J." and another is basically a Brian Eno song with vocals by David Bowie instead of Brian Eno ("Red Sails"). The music is punky and dramatic and a little odd, with detours into reggae and near-Eastern tonalities ("Yassassin") and nebulously exotic "world" sounds ("African Night Flight"), all filtered through the ears of a British guy with plenty of money and the imperial leeway to appropriate whatever he felt like. To this day, no musician has better mastered the hermetic intensity of cocaine, a drug that makes you want to have long conversations with everyone you've ever met without leaving your room.
Prior to Lodger, Bowie's alien status was existential, metaphorical, general—a one-size-fits-all garment for anyone convinced they'd been born in the wrong time or with the wrong body. But for as many people who saw their idealized selves in Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane, Lodger was the first time Bowie really seemed accessible—a character with flaws and frailties, petty thoughts and grocery lists; someone who doesn't just dabble in reality but lives in it. "Look Back in Anger" opens with a wild panorama of guitar before devolving into a story about an angel with a cough; "D.J." is childish and bitchy; "Boys Keep Swinging," which Bowie apparently wrote after listening to the Village People, actually does sound a little like the Village People but less secure in its sexuality. When David Bowie sings the word "depression" on "Fantastic Voyage," it's like listening to Zeus complain about sorting lights and darks.
The title alone reduces his myth to something banal and transactional: No longer the Lonely Starchild gracing us with his unusual point of view, we instead meet Safari Bowie, half-drunk tourist working out his masculinity issues by haggling with street vendors, Bowie the houseguest who can't stop talking about getting "authentic" tacos. The first half of Lodger especially, with its cartoon jungles and mysterious Bedouins and Englishmen too dumb to stay out of trouble but too powerful to ever really be in it, belongs more to the colonial satire of Evelyn Waugh than late-'70s art rock. (Bowie said that "African Night Flight" in particular was inspired by a trip to Kenya where he met a bunch of old German pilots who seemed to spend most of their time getting drunk and the rest doing profitable crime in the bush.) Lodgers aren't heavenly beings; they're people with enough money to rent a room.
All this didn't just humanize Bowie, it made him whole. By the time he'd released Lodger, he was 32, halfway divorced and trying to keep his drug thing in check, rich and famous and still staring down the long rest of his life. "Radical genius" would be nice, but so would making it to 1985 and having people still remember your name. In that sense, Lodger is an anxious, humble album, the sound of an artist ceding the wheel to a younger generation he'd be a fool to pretend he was part of. To let the culture take him out and chauffer him for a little while.
Of course, he still had plenty to offer and spent the next 30 years offering it: The music videos, the generous celebrity, room-unifying songs like "Modern Love" and movies like Labyrinth, which introduced hundreds of thousands of '80s babies to Bowie the mischievous goblin king, prancing around in his tights. Stars might look pretty while they fall but all they leave when they hit earth is a big empty hole. Lodger is the moment when Bowie took a deep breath and started to fill it.


The South Florida rapper puts on for his city and delivers the best, most dynamic, and altogether hardest album of his career.

ZUU

Three years ago, Denzel Curry was working out how to represent Carol City, the Miami Gardens neighborhood he grew up in. The music he was making didn’t scream South Florida, the way, say, Kodak Black’s does, but he was a South Florida boy through and through, and he wanted to make that known. He’d rapped about how his city shaped him on songs like “Chief Forever,” but he could never quite channel and embody that love. It wasn’t until now, on his new album, ZUU, that he figured out how to show appreciation for and celebrate one of rap’s most underrated regions.
Of course, Curry’s music has always been deeply indebted to the culture of his hometown. His initial mandate was to simply prove that Miami was more than Scarface, Art Basel, and spring breakers. “Most people come down here expecting that South Beach shit,” he said in 2014. “It’s not just that. We got hoods too.” ZUU dives even deeper. There is a familiarity that feels like watching a secret handshake. It doesn’t shy away from the nastier aspects of learning to love a violent place; on “P.A.T.” he raps, “I grew up in a city where most people have no goals/Just cold-blooded niggas in a place that never snow.”
Deeply referential, ZUU scans Carol City, Dade County, the Greater Miami Area, and the wider South Florida milieu. From the Miami Bass of the ’80s to Port of Miami-esque coke-rap epics and the chants of Trick Daddy and Trina, through Raider Klan phonk and the bass-boosted rioters Curry helped pioneer with Ronny J, the album maps the sounds of Florida and his path through them. These are all touchpoints along a journey of self-discovery placing Curry’s music in the lineage of his great Miami forebears. It samples MC Cool Rock & MC Chaszy Chess, has a Bushy B interlude, references Blackland Radio 66.6., dusts off Ice Billion Berg, and pays homage to Plies. (The only person missing is fellow Carol City High alum Flo Rida.) There’s drug money, and speedboats, and ass shaking, and the U swagger. You can hear and come to appreciate his love for this place and its music. The album is so rich with the subtext of Florida, and local rap history, it feels lived in.
He does this with Australian production duo Finatik N Zac, or FnZ, backing him. With credits on every Denzel Curry project since 2016’s Imperial, they have been as instrumental to his success as Ronny J. Here, they help realize his vision of a Miami rap mood board. They produce or co-produce eight of the 10 songs (excluding the two skits), stitching together something both nostalgic and forward-thinking. Their distinctive and vibrant octave-shifting synth lines help bond disparate templates, including the kingpin excesses of the Rick Ross-assisted “Birdz,” the twerker energy of “Shake 88,” and the trunk-rattling lows of “Carol Mart.” But the binding agent is Curry, who puts himself at the heart of the city.
Inside the swirling, expansive tribute to his hometown, Denzel constructs his origin story. The album is at once personal and communal, splicing throughlines of individual identity and civic pride. “This what you made me, Carol City raised me/Trick said ‘I’m a Thug,’ that’s the hate you gave me,” he raps on the title track, connecting a local psalm to cross-generational hip-hop scripture. There are lessons from parents, memories from a since-demolished Miami Gardens flea market, quiet eulogies for XXXtentacion, who he recently described as his brother, the way Poseidon and Hades were brothers, and his actual brother Treon “Tree” Johnson, who died in 2014. Even more impressive than his mastery of the local musical language is how he puts his own music and story at the center of it all. He is the bridge connecting all these things.
Since 2013’s Nostalgic 64, Curry has been a proven polymath. His raps can be blunt or sharp-edged. He’s as comfortable barring out over Wu-Tang beats as he is covering Rage Against the Machine. ZUU mines all of it to construct his most complete and thrilling music yet. It can be dark, it can be funny, it can irreverent, it can be urgent, but it’s never tonally unbalanced. He runs the full gamut from singsongy shapeshifter (“Wish”) to nuanced, panoramic storyteller (“RICKY”) to aggro black metal terrorist (“P.A.T.”). He has been all of these things before but he’s never put it all together like this. He took up freestyling while recording TA13OO last year and continued to do so in these sessions, and there’s a looseness to his verses that lends itself to the process of recall. Memories come flooding back with immediacy. He performs as if it’s all just coming to him in flashbacks, as if that history is in him. Being “raised off of Trina, Trick, Rick, and Plies” is his pedigree. There are few forces more powerful than the feeling of belonging. In creating his stunning Miami rap opus, Denzel Curry taps into that, demonstrating that he belongs among its most distinguished representatives in the process.


Danny Brown’s go-to producer abandons his sampledelic style for an album of original beats and inspired guest vocals that reveal who he really is as a solo artist.

Rejuvenate

Electronic musician Jon Hopkins explained in a recent interview that although his compositions are often ambient and airy, his aim is to capture the attention of the preoccupied listener. He loves to hear fans say things like, “I went to do some cooking and put it on, and ended up sitting down and listening to the whole thing.” But not all instrumental musicians so openly covet listeners’ attention. London-based producer Paul White, best known for his work with Danny Brown, seems indifferent to the spotlight. Over the course of more than a dozen releases marked by carnivalesque hip-hop beats and samples sourced from a wide array of traditions and cultures, his own identity has largely faded into the background. Each of White’s beats can sound like the gateway to an entire world, but few of them reveal much about their maker.
In light of that history, White’s new album, Rejuvenate, is unusual. Its cover is a sketched headshot of the artist (which, if you buy the vinyl version, you can color in yourself). And it’s the first record he’s made on which the music isn’t constructed from samples. Instead, it finds White making music that others might deem worth sampling, not by echoing his primary sources but by blending chillwave, R&B, ambient music, soul, and various British dance traditions. The result is a subtly extraordinary record that is likely to boost White’s profile whether he likes it or not.
Until now, White’s sensibility was most apparent on the 2011 cult favorite Rapping With Paul White, a mix of instrumentals and hip-hop tracks featuring collaborators like Brown (for whom he went on to produce the majority of Atrocity Exhibition), Guilty Simpson, and Marv Won. The sampledelic album was modest but arrestingly strange. On “A Weird Day,” Homeboy Sandman recounts his trip to London to record “A Weird Day” with White. The song is so odd and so distinct that, years after encountering the track, hearing the phrase “weird day” can trigger a memory of Sand kicking off his verse: “Peace to my people/Next thing you know I’m in Heathrow.”
At first listen, it might strike you that Rejuvenate could have been called Singing With Paul White. Heavy on R&B, the record features the Zimbabwean poet and singer Shungudzo, the British-Jamaican singer Denai Moore, and White’s sister Sarah Williams White, each lending her voice to a pair of songs. But its key moment is the wordless “Returning,” a peaceful, string-plucking composition that makes use of White’s expertise with loops, the rhythm coiling into place as voices echo in the background, to quietly beguiling effect.
“Returning” is a revelation following the tracks featuring Moore, which are solidly composed but a little soulless. Despite her strong voice, her performance is too listless to build two consecutive songs around. White keeps things interesting by tinkering with the beat throughout, but like many producers, he seems relatively uninterested in evocative lyricism.
Sarah Williams White feels more present on her songs. “Laugh With Me,” which includes a sample of a child and an adult talking about laughter, is a buoyant, beautiful track, reminiscent of the best of the movement once pejoratively known as chillwave. Her hushed vocal makes the song sound as if it’s meant for children, a pleasant and genuinely moving lullaby without any saccharine aftertaste. The joyous “All Around” closes the record with Williams’ voice approximating Whitney Houston coaching Natasha Bedingfield through a breakdown.
But it’s the tracks featuring Shungudzo, which come in the middle of the record, that play most to White’s talents. Shun resembles Santigold when she was still Santogold, livening up “Spare Gold” with her drawling, rhythmic vocal. White’s trilling synths elevate lyrics about the everyday struggle (“I can’t escape this paper chase”). As the song circles in on itself, the beat achieves a supernatural glow.
This turns out to be White’s signature skill: With his incandescent, polyrhythmic beats, he brings a sense of mysticism to the ordinary. His production is full of fresh ideas, but his songs wouldn’t necessarily stop you in your tracks while you were cooking. Like so many other beautiful things, it’s only once you turn your full attention to it that White’s music begins to reveal itself.


The Special Interest synth player’s latest solo project is an emotional tour of the bathhouse: a celebration of defiantly queer spaces in the form of heady, hazy techno and ambient.

A Night at the Baths

Raytheon Technologies wants to wish you a Happy Pride. The defense conglomerate and military contractor is on a mission to “celebrate and uplift [its] LGBTQ+ employees.” So is Axon, a taser and body cam manufacturer. So is Uber—did you know it has transgender and asexual “driver-partners”? Each June, another hawkish corporation debuts a rainbow-hued logo in hopes of capturing that elusive pink dollar, rapidly absorbing a once-radical identity bloc into the economy of girlboss drone pilots and Pete Buttigieg. In a recent interview, Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of the cultural history Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, bemoaned the way the mainstreaming of pride has erased deviance in favor of respectability: “Some forms of sexuality are pervy. And I think that there’s been a kind of erasure of the pervert,” he said. “There’s a kind of essentialism, then, about how you are valid because your sexuality isn’t dirty, and then there isn’t a place for dirtiness and finding playmates in perversion, you know?”
A Night at the Baths, the new album by Special Interest synth player Ruth Mascelli, is, like Gay Bar, a fond evocation of queer spaces that are sordid, deviant, and defiantly anti-mainstream—the bathhouses and club basements that are integral to queer history but rarely historicized in the traditional sense. Described by Mascelli as “an audio diary of adventures had at various bathhouses, dark rooms, and gay clubs,” A Night at the Baths is a heady and hazy record of techno and ambient music that, intentionally or not, acts as a piquant tonic to the ultra-safe, proud-but-poreless pride content often found on themed Spotify playlists. Mascelli once joked that they and Special Interest frontperson Alli Logout wanted to go on a bathhouse tour; until that day comes, A Night at the Baths is presented like an emotional tour of a bathhouse, an immersive suite that attempts to capture the tension and frisson of the sauna.
Mascelli used to make electronic music under the moniker Psychic Hotline, but their eponymous work presents far more than a name change. Where Psychic Hotline’s music was lo-fi, vocal-led minimal wave not unlike Throbbing Gristle, A Night at the Baths is instrumental and cinematic. The muffled thump of opener “Sauna” is preceded by a taut, syncopated synth sting that pans from left to right—an ostentatious welcome to Mascelli’s potent, rakish world. Throughout the album, they use the tools of immersive sound design to great effect: There is wonderful dimension to a song like “One for the Voyeurs,” which utilizes echoing, breathy vocal samples, or “Libidinal Surplus,” a frantic, menacing acid techno track built around a visceral kick that sounds like it was recorded through peaking club speakers. A Night at the Baths walks a fine line between dance music and sound art designed to evoke the feeling of hearing dance music, as Mascelli has tacitly acknowledged: “The sound of a degraded pop song several rooms away getting lost amidst the chorus of heavy breathing was the starting point for this project,” they say in a statement.
But this music, so swept up in trying to convey the power of nightlife spaces, falls short of conjuring that same thrill itself. Split between a raucous A-side consisting of four heaving techno tracks and a B-side containing four pieces of spectral, pulsating ambient music, the album occasionally feels like a museum display—fragments lovingly curated to represent a greater history that never quite comes through. There are some striking moments on the album’s second half: the way a discordant buzzsaw synth cuts through the new age meditation of closer “Missing Men,” for example, is surprising and impactful, a sharp reminder of the risk inherent in so much queer nightlife. In contrast to the meta, almost discursive, approach to club music seen on recent projects like India Jordan’s For You or Doss’ 4 New Hit Songs—records about clubbing that are also perfect for clubbing—A Night at the Baths uses club music as a means to an end. It seeks to capture the specifics of an environment that, as it stands, becomes more existentially threatened by the day. That in itself is reason to be proud.

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With his intense baritone voice, Devon Welsh travels deep into the feelings of isolation and introspection with grace and beauty.

True Love

There was a strange high-wire thrill to Majical Cloudz, Devon Welsh’s project with Matthew Otto. Welsh proclaimed the simplest and most naked sentiments in a clear but untrained baritone over synthesizers so warped and wispy they felt like they existed only in your head. Their best songs arranged these few elements in space like a score to a David Lynch film, where loud sounds crashed in without warning and confounded your sense of space and time. Nothing that happened felt strictly real. It either worked spectacularly for you or it didn’t; they weren’t a middle-ground act.
Since parting from his Majical Cloudz partner, Welsh has continued as a solo artist. His voice radiates the same emotional intensity, and he sings with equal commitment. But he also reinforces what a fragile balance the Majical Cloudz project was. On his second solo record, True Love, he occasionally sounds a little denuded, his voice leaving that uncanny space and becoming the voice of just a guy sitting at the end of the bar. The arrangements scan as simple instead of sparse, and with one of these small elements slightly out of place, everything he does starts to feel a bit flat-footed; lines like “I wanna be just like my stepdad, I wanna be as cool as him/But then the only thing I can ever really find is me” on “Uniform” scrape pavement instead of taking off.
But there are also moments here where that unsteady magic kicks back in—“Dreamers” sounds like 2009-era John Maus, painting a sweet portrait of two lovers (“He liked the Beach Boys, she liked the Doors”) and offering a bashful, fist-pump chorus of chanted “yeahs.” It’s exultant but tiny, like the cells of a future teen-movie anthem gathering in a petri dish. “Songbird” marries the finger-picked guitars of Welsh’s last solo record, 2018’s Dream Songs, with the dreamy atmospherics of Majical Cloudz. He stops to admire the way “songbirds sing in the sun,” and his music operates on a similar level—instinctual, beautiful. In place of a chorus, he croons wordlessly at the top of his range. It is a lonely, haunting sound, and it communicates with your bones.
Some songs float in the unsteady middle, dipping into near-banality and then catching a draft upward. “Somebody Loves You” might be the most bathetic song Welsh has ever written, on paper—“Heaven is a place I do hope you find,” he sings, enunciating each word as if talking to a small child—but the near-human cries of the synthesizers defamiliarize his words. “Don’t get carried away/Sometimes there’s nothing to say,” he intones on the title track. He sounds like he might be reading them, puzzled, off a milk carton. “This won’t mean a thing unless we try,” he pleads on “Faces,” allowing the word “try” to occupy six syllables.
Welsh made this album almost entirely alone, a process that seems to suit him. His introspection is the sort that usually precludes human interaction, and Welsh’s narrator always seems to be reentering the world, raw and shaky, after some defining devastation. “I will turn away from the shivering world/Though I am a child of that old and rotten place,” he vows on “Grace.” But there is no spirit of turning away here, only an embrace from someone who seems ready to break and rebuild himself, again and again, for you.


The Bay Area producer’s debut project draws upon Armenian mythology to create an ambient-house-dabke hybrid in five shape-shifting tracks.

DISRUPTION EP

To fully appreciate Lara Sarkissian’s mesmerizing Disruption, you’d have to know a little about Armenian mythology. A filmmaker and electronic musician of Iranian-Armenian descent, Sarkissian works to bring Armenian stories into the fore. Growing up in San Francisco in a community of immigrants, Armenian music was both everywhere (taught at school, sung in church, blasted through speakers at neighborhood gatherings) and nowhere, all but absent from Western pop. In 2015, she and Esra Canoğulları (aka 8ULENTINA) began throwing parties in Oakland in an attempt to fill the cultural void, booking local, queer, and non-white DJs from transnational diasporas and encouraging them to tell their stories. Those shows eventually birthed Club Chai, now one of the biggest underground collectives in the Bay Area.
As DJs, Sarkissian (who spins as FOOZOOL) and 8ULENTINA are known for ultra-eclectic sets that reach back in time, sampling traditional instruments and vintage records (like funk, disco, and psychedelic rock from 1970’s Turkey and Iran), and adapting Middle Eastern sounds for modern dance floors. Recently, the pair have expanded into their own experimental productions. 8ULENTINA’s Eucalyptus is a patchwork of distorted synths, arcade-game loops, and vigorous drum ‘n’ bass. Disruption, Sarkissian’s first release under her own name, is murkier and more melodic, an ambient-house-dabke hybrid in five shape-shifting tracks.
The EP is billed as the soundtrack to a fictional film inspired by stories from Armenian mythology. We don’t know which stories, aside from clues in a couple song titles. It’s also, Sarkissian said, about her own experiences “communicating with passed family members” and the disruptive conversations and visions that ensued.
These concepts both clarify and confuse the work. While they help to contextualize the music’s folk elements and non-Western roots, they’re also a bit of rabbit hole, with references so far-out to some that they feel empty and disorienting. Do we need to know the story of the ancient god to enjoy the song “Greeted by Tir (Տիր)”? Of course not. But if the goal is to build bridges through cultural storytelling, narrower themes and more specifics would be easier to grasp.
Unlike Sarkissian’s DJ sets, which are club-minded and upbeat, Disruption is designed for more intimate spaces, the kind where you can close your eyes and shuffle around without feeling self-conscious. The vibe is intensely spiritual, a blend of fast, frenetic rhythms from classical Persian percussion, samples of the duduk and zurna (woodwind instruments from the Armenian Highlands), and lo-fi electronic atmospheres sparked with dance-floor energy. At times, it borders on delirious. There are ambient moments in “Tir” that feel utterly out-of-body.
But this is not a chill-out tape. Most of the songs on Disruption are rooted in pummeling house and techno breaks that occur intermittently and somewhat unpredictably, skittering alongside flurries of drum whip-cracks, acid swirls, and cascading synth arpeggios. These dizzying combinations are both thrilling and mildly stressful, like sitting shotgun in a getaway car. You’ve just got to trust that she’s got it under control. On “A Ceremony (for Arax),” the project’s most muscular and structured track, she roars past fits of turbulent drums and whistles like they’re elegant scenery.
Other songs, like “Gnum Գնում (Going) (ft. Margenrot),” unfold like an elaborate obstacle course. Snare drums, cymbals, and quivering howls pile on top of each other in polyrhythmic frames until suddenly, you’re acutely aware of all the layers. It feels like zooming in on a city from a distance; the further in you get with the lens, the more alive it looks.
These dramatic shifts in perspective are Disruption’s real pleasure. Rather than linger in one place, Sarkissian weaves between moods and levels, entire regions and eras. It could be a reflection of those living in the diaspora, wedged between two worlds and searching for connections. Or maybe she’s just piecing together her own identity: old world samples, new school edits, shaped into something entirely new.


On his seventh album, the conscious hip-hop fallback poses a revisionist fantasy about underwater slaves sinking other slave ships—a premise he quickly abandons during these 24 tracks.

Drogas Wave

Conscious hip-hop exists in a state of perpetual existential irony. Known for its power-to-the-people catalog, Rawkus Records is actually a product of the moneyed elite. The subgenre’s most popular modern figure promotes himself while wearing MAGA gear. Other icons, like the artist formerly known as Mos Def, simply quit. But hip-hop heads in glasses have maintained a fallback in Lupe Fiasco, still dedicated to multi-entendres and high-concept verses.
But Fiasco’s surface-level sophistication doesn’t mask just how low-stakes his career has been since 2011. That year’s Lasers, the ugly result of his hostage situation with Atlantic, effectively ruined his chances of meeting his potential as a mainstream star and bar-for-bar traditionalist, the intersection Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole now control. Though he’s largely remained consistent since that disaster, arguably peaking with 2015’s Tetsuo & Youth, Fiasco has fallen from Late Registration feature to amicable niche. He has become overly ambitious with his smaller audience, too, so that listening to Fiasco can now feel like encountering someone’s unedited passion project. This is especially true of Drogas Wave, a wildly unrealized 24-track, 98-minute concept album with a surreal premise: What if African slaves thrown overboard during their transatlantic passage had managed to survive underwater and dedicate their existence to sinking other slave ships? This is only a slight left turn for someone who made a song about an undead drug dealer, but still.
This is emotionally rich fictitious content. Still, you can’t help but wonder if Fiasco cares to engage with its dramatic weight; this is someone, remember, who praised Ab-Soul’s barely listenable Do What Thou Wilt. by throwing around ideas about morphology and hermeneutics. Fiasco’s love of dense verses, though, often overshadows the empathy that runs through the finest moments of his career. During “WAV Files,” an early Drogas Wave highlight, Fiasco’s voice reflects a genuine mournfulness. It helps him sell his revisionist fantasy, whether incorporating a sympathetic Poseidon into the narrative or stumbling upon a new backronym: “Walking on water/WOW WOW.”
Fiasco doesn’t only construct an alternate historical narrative for Drogas Wave; he explores why we need such myths in the first place. Fiasco realizes that there’s temporary liberation available in reimagining a space where black people are empowered by—not destroyed for—their identities, a concept central to Black Panther’s significance. This isn’t a new concept for him—“Kick, Push” follows a boy wishing for something as small as a place to skateboard—but here it’s his explicit obsession. During “Manilla,” he reaches to use the tired materialism-as-slavery metaphor to set up Wave’s concept. But his powerful mantra “You can survive anything if you can survive blackness” adds gravity to this world.
This is a place, after all, populated by pain, so he offers an alternative. In “Jonylah Forever” and “Alan Forever,” Fiasco imagines a reality where Jonylah Watkins, a Chicago infant killed in a feud over a video-game system, and Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned while his family attempted to flee to Greece, survive into adulthood. In Fiasco’s vision, Jonylah grows up to open a free medical clinic. Alan’s story connects through mundane but compelling details: “I love smiling, I got talents/I can do flips,” Fiasco raps, reminding us Alan could have become a regular boy.
There’s promise here, even payoff, but Drogas Wave suffers the same problems as most Fiasco albums. The production—which is filled with aquatic textures, natch—is some of the most likable of his career, but he remains as committed to his ideology as he is to a lack of focus. Despite this being his seventh album, he’s somehow grown more inept at structuring the things. Drogas Wave stops explicitly referring to its fictional concept by the end of its first third, with little sense of plot development. It’s as if underwater slaves were a passing thought Fiasco wanted to add to an album of references to his history as an Atlantic refugee (“Imagine”) and his nephews (“King Nas”).
Drogas Wave makes little effort to hide how superfluous so much of this material is. The clunker “Sharks is my niggas/The dolphins is with us” proves we jumped the shark only seven tracks in. Fiasco spends most of one very long verse just naming slave ships. And “XO” is merely the moody counterfeit of his old “The Instrumental.” Lupe Fiasco’s career is a string of near-misses. What makes Drogas Wave especially frustrating is the way you can squint and see the shape of his possible masterpiece inside.


The final of four box sets exhaustively chronicling the seminal post-punk band Unwound's career features 1998's Challenge for a Civilized Society, which alienated fans at the time with its studio experimentation, and 2001’s Leaves Turn Inside You, a hauntingly beautiful double album that upended every preconceived notion about the group.

Empire

By the late '90s, Unwound were asking themselves whether the band was worth fighting for. The trio had invested more time and money into their 1998 album Challenge for a Civilized Society than they had any other, and they’d never been more disappointed by the returns. Trading the unrelenting roar of its predecessors for hit-or-miss studio experimentation, the album alienated longtime fans and halted any career momentum the group had gained from their 1996 near-breakthrough Repetition. "I remember playing Challenge for a couple of friends in Olympia after we finished it, and them just kinda starting at the ground," drummer Sara Lund recounts in the liner notes for Empire, the final of four box sets exhaustively chronicling the band’s career. "It’s my least favorite of our records," says bassist Vern Rumsey.
If Unwound had split up after Challenge—and they came close—the band would have ended on an off note, but their legacy would have been secure. The trio had so perfectly refined their chaotic noise rock over their first five albums that they’d forever be remembered; while they’d never be celebrated as widely as Nirvana or Fugazi, their DNA would live on for generations as young punk bands discovered and learned from them. Instead of disbanding, though, they pushed on a little longer, holding out against mounting personal troubles and growing geographic and emotional separation long enough to muster a magnificent final statement, 2001’s Leaves Turn Inside You, a hauntingly beautiful double album that upended every preconceived notion about the band.
Leaves Turn Inside You, out of print on vinyl for over a decade, is Empire’s main event, the career high this entire box set series has been leading up to. But despite its low standing in the band’s discography, Challenge for a Civilized Society is worth revisiting, too. It’s Unwound’s End Hits, a transitional work from a band chaining themselves to the studio in hopes of forcing inspiration, and occasionally succeeding. Even though they don’t cohere, the songs reveal a range the band’s previous albums had never hinted at. The opening throes of the nine-minute "Side Effects of Being Tired" are scribbled with gnarly free-jazz saxophone. The techno diss "NO TECH!" pillages the wiry rhythms of post-punk acts like Swell Maps and the Pop Group, while the boozy, blustery guitar licks of "Meet the Plastics" imagine what an Unwound Jon Spencer Blues Explosion covers album might have sounded like.
On an album of curiosities, one stands out as a clear success: "Lifetime Achievement Award", a ghostly dirge composed over a found recording of "Happy Birthday" played backward. Hypnotically paced and chillingly sad, it’s the one moment on Challenge where everything comes together: the performance, the songwriting, the phantasmal production, the overall feel; everything about it feels piped in from a different record. Three years later, they’d actually release that record. Leaves Turn Inside You took all the right lessons away from its predecessor’s hits and misses. This time the band wasn’t tossing spaghetti at the wall. They had focus.
Though Challenge’s sales were lackluster, a publishing deal with BMG afforded the band enough money to get started on a project they’d long dismissed as a pipe dream: building their own studio. They assembled it piece by piece in the basement of an old farmhouse, borrowing equipment they couldn’t afford from Calvin Johnson and teaching themselves how to use it. The band had never self-produced an album before, but the challenge invigorated Rumsey and singer/guitarist Justin Trosper, who spent weeks obsessing over technical details, figuring out the best ways to capture interesting sounds and texture. Traditionally the band has worked fast and shrugged off mistakes. Now they were discovering the luxury of time.
Midway through their sessions, the band’s old producer Steve Fisk visited their farmhouse to check their progress. “I thought, ‘God, what a terrible, depressing, sad place to be putting a record together,’” he recalls in Empire’s liner notes. That house casts a long shadow over Leaves. On "Below the Salt", a fractured, 11-minute lament paced like a séance, you can almost hear the foundation settling between notes. The similarly sprawling "Terminus" begins as a statement of defiance before succumbing mid-song to an orchestra of despair, led by a spectral cello that seems to sweep in and out of the studio walls. The whole record exists in a permanent November, condemned to those waning days of fall when all the color has been drained from the skyline, and all that’s left are barren trees and an isolating chill.
Yet for all its melancholy, Leaves is also an album of uncanny splendor. Opener "We Invent You" follows a full two minutes of cautionary drone—the band’s way, perhaps, of weeding out old-guard fans unwilling to take the album on its own terms—with an outpouring of mammoth, multi-tracked psychedelia. Trosper had recently discovered Led Zeppelin III; this was his homage. Friend of the band Janet Weiss, a few years away from letting her own classic-rock flag fly on Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods, lent backing vocals to the closest thing Leaves offered to a pop song, "Demons Sing Love Songs", a gorgeous respite from the album’s prevailing unease.
Leaves Turn Inside You didn’t happen in a vacuum. Around the turn of the century, indie acts as varied as Radiohead, the Flaming Lips, Wilco, and Modest Mouse were also embracing the studio, pouring considerable time into risky albums that ultimately proved high watermarks. But where those bands carried on with those victories under the belts, Unwound didn’t stick around to bask in their achievement.
There’s a generous way of contextualizing the group’s breakup: They put everything they had into one last, great album and called it a day. But the reality isn’t quite so romantic. Instead, the band resumed their slow process of breaking down. A tense tour behind Leaves had been cut short during its key stretch by September 11, and Rumsey’s worsening alcoholism had made it impossible to carry on like nothing was wrong. They announced their split 10 months after the album’s release, with an unceremonious post on the Kill Rock Stars website. Fourteen years later, Leaves Turn Inside You has lost none of its wonder, but it feels like a broken promise. Though the members of Unwound have bounced around between new bands, nothing they’ve recorded since has approached that album’s creativity or ambition. They teased a world of new directions, but never followed up on them.
In Empire’s liner notes, Trosper comments that in hindsight he realized some of his free-association lyrics on Leaves were about the troubled state of the band. The group hadn’t been on solid footing for a while; the writing had probably been on the wall even before they started recording the album. Perhaps that’s part of why it’s such a powerful work. It’s a last gasp, an album about ghosts by a band that on some level understood they were becoming one.