Formed out of slowcore legends Bedhead, the New Year return with an album that is judiciously paced and artfully arranged, recorded with fine detail over the better part of the last decade.

Snow

We’ll probably never hear it, but Bedhead made a jazz album. As a palate-cleanser before the Beheaded sessions, the Brothers Kadane hit the studio, cut Thelonius Monk’s “Misterioso” and a couple others, played it for a few tight-lipped friends, then buried it in the backyard. Bubba Kadane maintains that the record’s not actually worth hearing, but that hasn’t stopped the Kadane faithful—among the most quietly loyal fanbases in indie rock—from decades of speculation.
Though nobody’s going to mistake Transaction de Novo for Brilliant Corners, the Kadanes, like Monk, are as concerned with the notes they don’t play as the ones they do. And while most jazz records are made in a day or two, Snow, the fourth LP from Matt and Bubba Kadane’s post-Bedhead outfit the New Year, took the better part of a decade. Recorded in studios and living rooms from Chicago to Denton, Snow is—like virtually every Kadane record before it—a spare, deliberate record, judiciously paced and artfully arranged. With its wide-open vistas and vast expanses of negative space, the album lays claim to the territory the band staked out 25 years back while managing to turn over a couple new leaves.
Change does not come naturally to the Kadanes; The New Year, after all, is more or less Bedhead with a different rhythm section. The New Year’s 2008 self-titled LP tracked down a piano and turned up the optimism a half-notch or so; hardly a radical reinvention, but fairly seismic shifts in the New Year universe nonetheless. Songs don’t so much start as materialize; solos seem to gather themselves up in the air and float across the room before drifting back into the ether. The ripples of electric piano beneath the jaunty lite-psych of the Left Banke-inspired “The Last Fall” are a welcome addition, but that’s just about the only “new” thing here. The rest is textbook Kadanes: decorously expansive, decidedly unhurried indie rock, every note afforded due space, every syllable careful consideration.
Tricky as it is to draw a through-line across two-and-a-half decades, history professor Matt Kadane’s oft-undervalued lyrics have generally concerned themselves with how the forces that act upon us keep clawing at our heels. Drugs, depression, organized religion, general malaise: Kadane’s tackled them all, with a lighter touch than many of the sadder-sacks in his cohort. Where its predecessor found Kadane drawing just little more light in through the window, Snow pulls back the shades even further. Album highlight “Recent History” sees Kadane scoffing at those who think we are uniquely—as opposed to just generally—fucked; “There’s nothing wrong with the 21st century,” he points out, “that wasn’t wrong with the 20th, too.”
It’s not that Kadane is unbothered by the state of affairs, he’s just urging us to take the long view, and the wisdom he imparts in these songs is both hard-fought and well taken. There’s still plenty keeping him up at night—unraked leaves in the backyard, unchecked power operating behind closed doors—but he operates with a kind of quiet resolve; things may be rough, he seems to be saying, but we’ve all got to keep pushing. There’s a lot of life in these lyrics; if the band’s nine years away didn’t exactly upend their sound, it certainly seems to have given Kadane more to draw from.
The New Year worked and reworked Snow for years: between day jobs, across state lines, whenever they could find a spare moment. A few songs date back to the late-aughts; others have come in the years since. That Snow sounds very much of a piece with the Kadane’s back catalog is a testament to their singular and durable sound. From the sunburnt shuffle of “Myths” to the rangy push-and-shove of “Recent History,” they know just how far can stretch themselves without upsetting the balance. There’s a moment in virtually every song where a single loose strand seems to break free and float skyward and it’s there, in the languid sway, where Snow truly takes hold.


On their second album, the goth-influenced Manchester rock band MONEY shines a light on the crisis of identity that often befalls creative folk during their late twenties (or, occasionally, their thirties or forties)—Who am I? What do I really have to say? And how can I figure it out without somehow destroying myself?

Suicide Songs

"Suffer Little Children," the final track on the Smiths' eponymous 1984 record, was a kind of siren song for romantic miserablism. The song itself might have been based on the infamous Moors murders of the 1960s, but it also served to cement Morrissey's home city in the cultural imagination. "Oh, Manchester, so much to answer for" rang like a bell, forever positioning the Northern city (at least for mopey Anglophiles such as myself) as a place where creative melancholy always wins out—a city in which the industrial gray, bitter cold, and ceaseless rain helped to forever nourish great, hopeless art.
On their 2013 debut, The Shadow of Heaven, Manchester’s MONEY upheld this vision, simultaneously playing up to the city's melancholic legacy while also grandly skewering it. (The record’s release involved billboards emblazoned with the words "Manchester Is Paradise.") By turns dour and swooningly romantic, self-destructive and charmingly fey, the songs on Heaven were sprawling, guitar-driven affairs that often stretched beyond the five-minute mark and sounded as if they might have been recorded in a candle-lit cave. It was the sound of a band almost living up to the scale of its own grand ambitions.
On their second album, the intensely titled Suicide Songs, MONEY appear to have weathered what must have some harrowing sophomore anxieties. The album opens with "I Am the Lord"—a nearly seven-minute long opus involving Indian dilruba, hushed gospel singers, and gently-employed shakers that sounds more like Storm in Heaven-era Verve than the echoey WU LYF squall of their earlier efforts. "You are not the same as me/ I'm up there in the clouds," Jamie Lee sings. "I am the Lord/ He gave me his eyes to see through." It’s a suitably epic opening for an album that deals largely in seeking transcendence via self-imposed oblivion. And while another record of young Brits singing songs about despair and getting smashed at the pub isn’t exactly a novel concept, MONEY manage to make the prospect of weathering your own personal apocalypse sound not only beautiful, but transformative.
The cover art of Suicide Songs features a black-and-white photo of Lee with a knife that appears to be balancing on (or slowly burying itself into) his forehead. That image—paired with the record’s oblivion-seeking lyrics—makes for what should be a pretty heavy listen. ("I wanted the album to sound like it was ‘coming from death’ which is where these songs emerged," explains Lee in the promo materials). Still, the nine tracks on board never feel oppressive. Even "Suicide Song," the album’s centerpiece (whose chorus is literally, "This is your suicide song") is weirdly more merry than maudlin.
It’s to the band’s credit that this despondency feels exploratory—occasionally even celebratory. Lee, along with bandmates Billy Byron and Charlie Cocksedge, emerges with a record that shines light on the crisis of identity that often befalls creative folk during their late twenties (or, occasionally, their thirties or forties)—Who am I? What do I really have to say? And how can I figure it out without somehow destroying myself? It seems grimly fitting that the album ends with a song called "Cocaine Christmas and an Alcoholic’s New Year," which is just as much of a glorious drunken bummer as the title would suggest. Alternately making comparisons to both Marilyn Monroe and Jean Genet, Lee allows a sense of levity to permeate even the messiest of moments: "I've wasted all my time on cocaine at Christmas and bottles of wine," sings Lee, "And I’m as happy as a child/ Because you don't have to ask me why." Much like records by the Smiths, Suicide Songs is both consoling and encouraging, revealing itself fully only after repeated listens and paying dividends each time. Manchester should be proud.


The Canadian composer’s latest album marks a subtle but significant shift in her music-making, marking her most extensive foray to date into the hands-on, real-time realm of studio recording.

Gave in Rest

Something unexpected happens almost exactly one minute into “Auster,” the opening track on Sarah Davachi’s Gave in Rest: The song goes silent. It happens abruptly, as though someone has hit the pause button on the Canadian composer’s dial-tone drone. Then, after a few soundless seconds, the tone cluster springs back to life, except deeper and darker. Such a break is almost unheard of in Davachi’s work, in which electronic and acoustic tones—vintage analog synthesizers, Mellotron, Hammond organ, cello, viola, piano, voice—are layered as intricately as tendons and sinew. Hers is a music of continuity, where the shifts in tone and timbre happen so subtly you barely perceive them taking place. But the pauses in “Auster,” and the subsequent changes in pitch, go on like that, once every 60 seconds or so, for the duration of the eight-and-a-half-minute track, until it comes to seem almost that the music itself is breathing. As the Slits once noted, silence is a rhythm too.
Those breaks are symbolic of a larger rupture: Gave in Rest marks a subtle but significant shift in Davachi’s music-making. Despite the vastness she conjured—lines arcing toward a perpetually receding horizon; reverb suggestive of caves, cathedrals, canyons—most of her composition until now has taken place in the flat, virtual space of the computer. She has occasionally worked with collaborators, and she has done some work with acoustic instruments in actual recording studios, but for the most part these occasions have served mainly as opportunities to generate raw material to be rearranged in Logic later. She’s been as much a collage artist as a composer.
But Gave in Rest, recorded in Montreal’s Hotel2Tango studio, marks Davachi’s most extensive foray into the hands-on, real-time realm of studio recording, where the sound and even the vibe of the room are intrinsic to what gets caught on tape. Hotel2Tango is a particularly hallowed space—Arcade Fire, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Wolf Parade have all recorded there—and it’s equipped with a pretty enviable gear list; the plate reverb Davachi used is said to be the very same unit applied to Stevie Nicks’ voice when Fleetwood Mac recorded “Rhiannon.”
Davachi says that much of the writing this time took place before she went into the studio, working out harmonic relationships on the piano, then fleshing out those ideas with collaborators (Godspeed’s Thierry Amar on contrabass, Thee Silver Mt. Zion’s Jessica Moss on violin, Terri Hron on recorders, and Lisa McGee, aka Vestals, singing), as well as playing the effects as though they were instruments. In “Gloaming,” the piano is run through multiple tape-echo devices whose controls are manipulated on the fly: What starts out sounding like one of Grouper’s ruminative sketches is gradually smeared until nothing is left but an ambient blur.
In some places on Gave in Rest, Davachi’s music sounds much like it always has: “Auster” remains, despite the pauses, a minimalist study of harmony and tone color, and the gorgeous “Third Hour” is languid and drifting. But there’s also more motion here than we’ve heard in her work before. On previous releases, a track like “Third Hour” might have been a foggy snapshot of static tones; now, her elements slowly twist like tall grass in the wind, contrapuntal melodies pulling themselves up and away from the background, flashing out in stark relief before disappearing into the swirl.
“Evensong” goes even further. An ensemble piece for piano, organ, violin, bass, and voice, it marks the rare occasion when an honest-to-goodness chord progression can be detected in Davachi’s work. The title is a reference to evening services, particularly in the Anglican church, and there’s a distinctly liturgical feel to the song’s resonant textures and melancholy harmonies, with their eerie echoes of medieval music.
Davachi has said that much of the album was inspired by a summer spent touring in Europe, seeking out moments for reflection in the reverberant stone spaces of centuries-old churches. The purest expression of that experience takes shape in the album’s closing track, “Waking,” recorded in a single take on the Hammond organ. A tentative right-hand melody paces up and down the scale, pulling against the root note; pulsing overtones throb and relax as Davachi’s chords shift between tension and resolution. It is meditative, searching, but also peaceful—the sound of solitude and solace. It’s one of the simplest things Davachi has ever written, and also among the most powerful.


I sometimes wonder if musicians like Samuel Beam (aka Iron & Wine), envy contemporary "artists" such as Britney Spears or Linkin ...

The Creek Drank the Cradle

I sometimes wonder if musicians like Samuel Beam (aka Iron & Wine), envy contemporary "artists" such as Britney Spears or Linkin Park-- and not for reasons of fame or money. Spears and Linkin Park, after all, make decidedly contemporary music that, while tangentially owing debt to earlier music periods, puts little pressure on them to legitimize their backgrounds. Spears was once a teen who liked Madonna; Linkin Park were once teens who liked angst. That's about all anyone asks of them.
Not so for Sam "Jim" Beam. He makes bare-bones music that constantly nods to musical periods long since passed, perhaps the earliest being the 1920s of Blind Lemon Jefferson. In short, Beam makes roots music with southern themes, though to end there would do him a disservice. But now knowing this, you may be wondering: What are his qualifications? Is this guy authentic?
Where you come from, of course, can automatically grant you authenticity. Perhaps the best current example of this is Detroit; if The White Stripes and Eminem grew up in the most miserable city in the States, they must be for real! Beam, however, hails from the Miami area, which is not exactly backwoods Mississippi. Moreover, he teaches cinematography at a local college (an academic!) and was recently signed to Sub Pop, of all labels.
Of course, issues of authenticity plagued Bob Dylan at first. Plus, isn't Neil Young a Canadian? In other words, if you exhibit enough talent, then the critics will look past whatever your background may be, and time-- the greatest critic of all-- will erase any petty misgivings. While Beam has a long way to go before joining these visionaries, The Creek Drank the Cradle is a good enough start to make you forget anything you ever knew about the man. The music speaks for itself, and for Beam's talent.
The gentle acoustic plucking that ushers in the opener, "Lion's Mane", may not grab your attention, but Beam's delicate, hushed vocals sure will. His lyrics, meanwhile, tread familiar territory without sounding too familiar. He even tackles love through metaphor without seeming like a high school poet: "Love is a tired symphony you hum when you're awake/ Love is a crying baby mama warned you not to shake."
As with the rest of the album, slide guitar and banjo appear throughout the first track. The folksy sound sometimes recalls Nick Drake-- that is, if the British troubadour were from the bayou instead. In the lolling "Bird Stealing Bread", Beam's voice then takes on a Drake-ian resemblance, as he sings, "Did his hand in your hair feel a lot like a thing you believed in?/ Or a bit like a bird stealing bread out from under your nose?"
By the time "Faded from the Winter" arrives, the album has its hooks in you. Beam's overdubbed harmonies, delivered in a repetitive cadence, are spooky without being forbidding, bringing Low's early work to mind, if only in pace and tone. On songs like this one, Beam feels like an artist working in different hues of the same color-- blue, perhaps, or brown.
But the changes keep coming, subtle though they are. "The Rooster Moans", with its layered banjos and talk of riding a rusty train to the Devil, could sit firmly in the middle of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack and no one would blink an eye. The southern themes continue on "Upward Over the Mountain", in which the narrator kills a snake in a creekbed, but Beam's vocal harmonies are nearer to Simon and Garfunkel than Ralph Stanley. "Southern Anthem", meanwhile, brings to mind Crosby, Stills and Nash.
But any potential writhing or wincing is soon dissolved by "Weary Memory", the album's simplest and perhaps strongest track. Here, Beam's voice is all his, as he stretches out his vocal cords and displays a greater range than he had led the listener to believe he possessed. As the song peaks, all guitars but one drop out for a brief respite. "Found a photo of when we were married," Beam sings, breaking the last word into two. "Leaning back on a broken willow tree/ That's one memory I choose to carry/ Weary memory I can always see," and he takes that "see" soaring skyward.
The Creek Drank the Cradle is made of small epiphanies such as this. There are few guitar solos, if they can even be called that. Beam rarely gets adventurous with his voice, and the songs, for the most part, are of the same pace, tone, lyrical content. Written and performed to tape by Beam alone, the album could easily be lumped in with other home-recording talents such as John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. But the music here has such deeps roots in a vast swath of Americana that the bedroom image just wouldn't suit Beam.
And please don't be fooled by the label. Sub Pop may not be the foremost purveyors of roots music, but they've proven before-- in the case of former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan-- that they at least know good old-time country and blues music when they hear it. If indeed The Creek Drank the Cradle is only half of the material Beam submitted to the label, then hopefully there's some more Iron & Wine on the way. It sure beats more mud and honey.


Wedding the elemental, earthworn rock of My Morning Jacket to the atmospheric pop of the Shins or Red House Painters, this debut from Sub Pop signees Band of Horses is immediately, invitingly familiar. But if its roots are recognizable, the music is anything but commonplace.

Everything All the Time

"At every occasion, I'm ready for a funeral."
In the year between my father's diagnosis with cancer and his death, I dreaded the telephone. Whenever it rang, I jumped. Picking it up with a trepidant hand, I tried to quickly discern the caller's tone of voice, fearing the worst news. Whether intentionally or not, the line quoted above, from Band of Horses' debut album, Everything All the Time, perfectly evokes that particular anxiety. It's a sad line for any song, but Band of Horses singer Ben Bridwell's delivery isn't mopey or self-absorbed-- there are no intimate acoustic guitars or whispery male vocals accompanying these words. Instead, he belts them over soaring guitars and extroverted chords, all tempered with a stoicism that staves off histrionics. Turning despondency into indie majesty is a major talent of Band of Horses; their music is carefully balanced to evoke specific emotional responses while allowing space for personal projection.
More elemental than the lush dream-pop of Bridwell and Mat Brooke's former band Carissa's Wierd (the duo played all the instruments here before fleshing out the band with backing musicians), Band of Horses' sound will be immediately, invitingly familiar to anyone who reads this site regularly. Their guitar-heavy sound and Bridwell's echo-y vocals invite specific comparisons to labelmates the Shins as well as My Morning Jacket, and more general similarities can be noted with forebears such as Neil Young and the Ocean Blue. While apt, these comparisons seem restrictive and reductive, but their limitations can be illuminating. On quieter songs such as "St. Augustine", Bridwell recalls Jim James' reverb-heavy vocals, but he lacks the defining regional drawl; as a result, Band of Horses seem placeless. Where the Shins coil their songs tightly to spring out at the choruses, Bridwell and Brooke's tracks sprawl languorously-- more atmospheric than hooky, but nevertheless too structured and targeted to be considered jammy.
Band of Horses' alternately lucid and obscure songwriting remains life-size, even as their guitars swell beyond the everyday. Album centerpiece "The Great Salt Lake" begins with a jangly guitar that suggests early R.E.M., lying low to the ground during the verses until the chorus takes off. They also successfully work that contrast between earthbound and airborne on "The Funeral" and "Monsters", with its rickety banjo carving a rough path for a climactic finale.
Of course, if all of Everything strove for such catharsis, the repetition of builds and releases would become tedious and cheap. Wisely, Band of Horses show off a much broader dynamic, peppering the album with rangier numbers like "The First Song" and the churning, catchy "Wicked Gil". "Weed Party", the album's most upbeat track, even begins with what sounds like a spontaneous and genially goofy "yeee-haw!" Still, every element and track on Everything contributes to the album's wistful, twilit atmosphere, from its first cascading guitar chords to its final rueful strums. And instead of closing with the slow crescendo of "Monsters", they go out on a quieter note with "St. Augustine", a gently ebbing tune featuring both Horses singing together, Bridwell's higher-pitched voice anchored by Brooke's low whisper. So the album's not as grim as that introductory quotation would imply; the band's downheartedness is always offset by a sense of hope. As Bridwell sings on "Monsters", "If I am lost it's only for a little while."
Though Band of Horses aren't likely to be heralded as trailblazers, they do sound quietly innovative and genuinely refreshing over the course of these 10 sweeping, heart-on-sleeve anthems. Ultimately, the band's most winning trait is its delicate balance of elements-- between gloom and promise, quiet and loud, epic and ordinary, familiar and new, direct and elliptical, artist and listener. Each of these aspects makes the others sound stronger and more complex, making Everything All the Time an album that's easy to get lost in and even easier to love.


Recorded in a sleek L.A. studio, the Gen-Z hyperpop artist’s latest EP hides his natural talent under a layer of amorphous production.

All Dogs Go to Heaven EP

Glaive’s youth lends itself to easy characterizations, but it should really be used to place his second EP, all dogs go to heaven, into context. He’s a 16-year-old high schooler from North Carolina, and his real name is Ash Gutierrez. He’s a member of a generation that has spent their formative years perceiving the world through a screen, and he’s a natural musician.
Cypress grove, his first EP, was an impressive snapshot of modern adolescence: Emotions were suffocating and cell phones were central. Yet Glaive got away with shouting lines like “I’m so pissed, I’m angry as fuck” and titling songs “hey hi hyd” and “dnd” (shorthand for “do not disturb”) due to the force of his charisma rather than his age. All dogs go to heaven follows in a similar direction, but instead of being recorded in Glaive’s childhood bedroom, it’s told from a sleek L.A. studio with a crew of young producers and Gen-Z punk-whisperer Travis Barker. The EP is polished, near spotless, and that’s the problem.
Certain production choices buff out the knicks and fingerprints that make Glaive a magnetic talent. The shinier tracks are solid pop songs, but they’re so amorphous that they could easily accompany any TikTok. On opener “1984,” Glaive dons a Post Malonian tremble-moan that reappears throughout the rest of the EP. “Poison” could be a 2000s boy band B-side with its sultry guitar and Glaive’s drawn-out enunciation (“You’re like a poison that I just can’t esca-ee-ay-ee-ay-ee-ape.”) “I wanna slam my head against the wall” is deceptively chipper, complete with radio-friendly lyrics like “She don’t really like me/She likes alcohol” and “Sometimes I shouldn’t text you/You act just like my ex do.”
Glaive is part of a new wave of artists and listeners exposed to every kind of music across a few streaming platforms. You can listen through a survey of Midwest emo and most of Beyoncé’s discography, but you can also discover 30 songs that all sound vaguely similar, grouped under genres that Spotify more or less engineered. You can even upload your own music and pray your single gets placed into one of these categories. It’s perhaps telling that Glaive is featured on several of Spotify’s branded genre playlists: Hyperpop, Lorem, SALT, Pop Sauce, dear diary, Alternative Beats, and misfits 2.0, to name a few. Glitchy chaos, emo-pop, and future Top 40 hits are smoothed into one mushy MegaGenre, bleeding into one another as their tracklists multiply.
Glaive’s influences are consistent, like if Lil Peep was a suburban teen who listened to pop punk, 100 gecs, and the 1975. They resonate when there’s friction, the styles rattling together inside his brain. The inspiration is lost when they’re coated in gloss. He’s at his most compelling and genuine on the bumping, screeching “Synopsis” and penultimate track “Bastard.” On the latter, he masters the space between a bummed-out scoff and a desperate cry, evoking teenage ambivalence. Initially paired with the clunk of a keyboard, his exasperated whine is joined by a string arrangement as he reaches a moment of clarity. The entire EP has been building to this revelation: “Let me tell a story ’bout a boy I know/He was ’bout 15 years, stood about six-foot four/He made a couple connections and he opened some doors/And now he realized he was way better before.” It would be a nice moment of levity if it weren’t sadly true.
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On the New York rappers’ collaboration, just about every bar is sharply written, rapped, and also could’ve been plucked from any project these two have done in the 21st century.

Fabolous / Jadakiss: Friday on Elm Street

Friday on Elm Street

There probably was greater demand for a Fabolous and Jadakiss collaborative album in 2002, but far less likelihood of it actually happening. At their commercial peak, the two were inverses of each other: Jadakiss, the grimy hardhead whose overt pop concessions never gave him a bigger single than the one with the 9/11 trutherism; Fabolous, flippant and frivolous, sounding effortless over the flossiest beats of the “MTV Cribs” era.
But on the time since, they’ve remained respected veterans with mixtapes and guest verses that play to their strengths without having to address their weaknesses: beat selection, development of a multi-layered personality, artistic evolution, the sort of things that result in great albums. And so what Summerland Tour is to KROQ, Friday on Elm Street is to Hot 97, a nostalgic package deal that consolidates all of the fond memories of past radio hits at the expense of everything that kept their CDs readily available at your local Disc Go Round.
Friday on Elm Street has been in development for damn near two years, so it can’t be accused of trying to bandwagon 21 Savage and Offset’s Without Warning. But their commitment to the slasher-flick aesthetic lasts about as long as the intro, which makes a more accurate sales pitch: Fab spends several bars working towards a Harold Miner gag, while Jadakiss rhymes over the drums from Notorious B.I.G.’s “Dead Wrong,” both serving as an ID check to clear out anyone under the age of 30.
Like basically everything the duo has done in the past decade, Fabolous and Jadakiss instead spend most of their time enumerating the countless ways in which the current generation are failing to respect a street code of bygone, gullier days. Their voices have aged exceedingly well, and few rappers savor a slightly past-its-prime namedrop quite like Fabolous, though his punchlines are just as likely to land like a punch to the groin, taking all of the air out of the room. If it isn’t obvious by now how much Big Sean picked up from the guy, groaners like, “I humbly put y’all in y’all fuckin’ place, that’s my OCD” should pass for a positive DNA test. Meanwhile, Jadakiss sounded like the proverbial gangster who got chubby and moved to Miami since the get-go, so tough talk always remains convincing, even when he’s face-to-face with Donald Trump “in my man cave watching CNN.”
Not surprisingly, this is where Jadakiss and Fabolous are most committed to putting a contemporary spin on ’80s horror, if only for one track. “Talk About It” is a fairly platitudinal survey of America’s political nightmare, though Fabolous shows some rare insight as a political thinker: “Kerr got the credit, forgot about Mark Jackson,” he raps, likely referring to the latter positioning the Warriors as NBA’s wokest team by calling to boycott Clippers games as a protest against Donald Sterling. This is the track that needs a Styles P guest appearance, as he echoed Jadakiss’ attack on the Clinton’s “super predator” policies (“Will Hillary release niggas that Bill locked up?”), in one of the most passionate and cogent arguments for black voter disengagement at the end of 2016. Instead, Styles shows up later on “Ice Pick” for what’s essentially an outtake from the Lox’s muted 2016 comeback, while Fabolous’ solo track “Nightmares Ain’t as Bad” closes out Friday on Elm Street with motivational mogul talk that negates the entire point of the project.
As with most of the duo's recent commercial projects, Friday on Elm Street forgoes its obvious throwback appeal to try to exist in a middle-school netherworld. There’s a distinct post-Tunnel Banger approach on Friday on Elm Street, as the duo hone in on flows traceable to The Black Album, others from a few years prior when New Yorkers had to learn how to ride southern beats on the fly. And yeah, Swizz Beatz is all over this thing, but it’s mostly reprising his hypeman role from Kanye West’s “Famous” and his one production credit is a fairly standard Marvin Gaye flip (“Theme Music”) rather than the happy-hardcore Casio abuse that resulted in so many Ruff Ryders anthems with Jadakiss. Whether or not it’s unfair to even dream of a We Are the Streets throwback, most of the production betrays its years in developmental limbo and features the same stainless steel trap beats from not-quite name producers (i.e., Tory Lanez producer C-Sick) that could’ve been given to Dave East, Uncle Murda or any other functional “bring New York back” type. Meanwhile, the inclusion of Future and French Montana suggest some level of commercial expectations, but there needs to be a stronger term than “phoned in” to describe their zen-like lack of engagement; the hooks on “Stand Up” and “All About It” are more like getting an away message from their assistant.
The problem isn’t that these two didn’t become the 2017 Gravediggaz; once the initial novelty wears off, the solo tracks stuffed at the end serve as a reminder of how little collaboration took place on Friday on Elm Street. The best crossover franchises of this sort—Run the Jewels, Without Warning—result from contrast or unexpected chemistry, something that presents well-known entities in an unfamiliar light. Just about every bar is sharply written and rapped and also could’ve been plucked from just about any project these two have done in the 21st century. Then again, if an enterprising Canal Street bootlegger did that in 2002 with a compilation of radio freestyles and guest verses intended to settle “top five” debates, it’d be the Fabolous/Jadakiss album we truly deserve—one more like Alien vs. Predator than Friday on Elm Street, a competition rather than a collaboration.


Sorority Noise's hushed, brief EP is a four-song cycle about grief and loss, narrated from the perspectives of both the departed and those left behind.

Sorority Noise: It Kindly Stopped for Me

It Kindly Stopped for Me

Sorority Noise’s 2015 album Joy, Departed culminated in an awakening. On "Using," songwriter Cameron Boucher saves the album’s biggest, grungiest riff for an explosive declaration: "I stopped wishing I was dead!" The sentiment is played mostly for celebration, and Boucher shouts it with palpable joy. But it’s also a correction, an indictment of emo’s long history of glorifying depressive thinking, and an implied apology for his complicity in that. In interviews, Boucher explained "Using" was the first song he’d ever written with a positive takeaway. Despite his struggles with mental illness, he'd decided to make the best of things. "I started loving again," he sang.
How cruel it is, then, that just as Boucher was learning to appreciate his own life, so many of the people close to him were giving up on theirs. Since recording Joy, Departed, Boucher lost some friends to suicide—"a lot of friends," he told American Songwriter. Loss on that scale would upend anybody, but it’s especially derailing for an artist who’s had reason to fear he could meet the same fate. In all likelihood he’ll be working through his grief for albums to come, and that long process begins on the home-recorded It Kindly Stopped For Me EP, a four-song cycle narrated from the perspectives of both the departed and those left behind.
Boucher doesn’t just sound bereaved; he sounds downright shell-shocked. Singing like all the color has been drained from his face, he recites most of the EP in a sickly, half-inaudible mumble. If there are listeners who haven’t checked in on Sorority Noise since their debut LP Forgettable, released only two years ago, they won’t even recognize the band. Boucher’s purged every trace of pop-punk whimsy from his songs, trading crunchy riffs and shout-along tantrums for hushed pianos and closed-mic'ed drums tapped so lightly it’s as if they’re being gently blown on.
It Kindly Stopped is as intensely somber as its subject matter demands—maybe even more so, if that’s possible—and Boucher often seems to be processing these tragedies in real time. He captured the EP’s most disquieting track, the spoken-word interlude "Fource," while he was literally wandering through the wilderness. "I think it might be okay, I’ll be okay," Boucher mutters unconvincingly into his recorder while trying to catch his breath. "Today was an off day; I’ve had a few." If he wasn’t actually drunk when he recorded it, he’s a mighty convincing actor. And while the rest of the EP is more deliberate than that field recording, it’s nearly as lonesome.
Sonics aside, what truly distinguishes this recent iteration of Sorority Noise is Boucher's newfound sense of responsibility. In concert, he prefaces "Using" with a heartfelt introduction about mental illness and the value of life. He includes a similar plea in It Kindly Stopped For Me’s liner notes. "If you do have the opportunity to listen to this record please know that suicide is not the answer," he writes. "Please know how important you are and how much your life matters to your family, friends, and most importantly yourself." Yet despite his convictions, he never admonishes the dead in these songs. He sympathizes with them too much for that. On "Either Way," he casts life as a coin toss, drawing a parallel between a friend who saw "a chance to leave a life you couldn’t lead" and his own chance "to rid myself of my toxic ways," a chance he could have just as easily missed. That’s the lone consolation on an otherwise disheartening EP, and it’s not an insignificant one: Many of his friends are gone, but Boucher is still here and he's still thankful for that.


Natalie Mering, the brains behind indie-folk outfit Weyes Blood, has toured as a member of noise-rock outfit Jackie-O Motherfucker and alongside Nautical Almanac, though most listeners will recognize her robustly forlorn voice from Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti's Mature Themes. All those experiencess come to play on her second album, The Innocents.

The Innocents

Natalie Mering, the brains behind the indie-folk outfit Weyes Blood, has seen a great deal of the country in the past few years. She has toured as a member of noise-rock outfit Jackie-O Motherfucker and alongside Nautical Almanac, although most listeners will recognize her robustly forlorn voice from Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti’s Mature Themes. After the release of her 2011 label debut, The Outside Room, she has wandered America like a Steinbeck character (anyone who adapts her stage name from a Flannery O’Connor novel will certainly be familiar with literary references). Mering tapped maple trees for syrup in rural Kentucky and studied herbs in the New Mexico desert. After a brief layover in Baltimore, she settled into the New York music scene and signed with Mexican Summer.
All of those experiences—from harsh drone to hallucinogenic herbology—come to play on her second album, The Innocents (which is presumably a reference to the 1961 film adaptation of Henry James’ "The Turn of the Screw"). The album plays like a picaresque of the Lower 48, as Mering collects sounds and ideas along her journey and pieces them together into an album that has considerable scope yet is rooted in the personal. Drawing from Donovan and Joan Baez as well as Mark Linkous and Sonic Youth, Mering blends the idylls of folk ballads and madrigals with the sonic abrasiveness of noise rock. Most of the songs feature just guitar and Mering’s rich soprano, but on several tracks she manipulates the instruments to suggest music that is curdling, fading, transforming, evolving right before our ears. Even the simplest and loveliest tunes, such as “Requiem for Forgiveness” or closer “Bound to Earth”, sound like they might be interrupted at any moment by waves of distortion.
To indulge another literary reference, the center will not hold. Things fall apart. There is no solid ground on The Innocents. The album opens with explosions in the distance, a rhythm of destruction that portends something darkly ominous. Borrowing not just the music but also the topicality of '60s folk, “Land of Broken Dreams” conveys a sense of immense dread as Mering sings about an America in fantastical disrepair—in particular, the growing rift between what the country should be and what it actually is. “Stand by to believe in the land of the free, whatever you want it to be,” she sings, and it’s impossible to determine just how much irony is packed into that line. Are those explosions an echo of atomic testing in the 1950s, or perhaps of the bombs planted by radical activists in the 1970s?
The aftershocks of those opening explosions reverberate throughout the album. “Bad Magic” sets its delicate acoustic guitar theme against an ambient tape hiss, as though Mering were self-consciously creating a new field recording. “Some Winters” opens with a warped piano, its glissandos garbled and mutating, as though Mering found the tapes buried deep in the snow—memories of an old affair made new. “I’m as broken as a woman can be,” she sings, with a peculiar quiver in her voice. That vibrato, it becomes clear, is not part of the performance itself, but a subtle distortion of the notes in the studio. It’s applied so sparingly that it’s impossible to determine where her voice ends and the manipulation takes over, and the effect is thematically powerful and musically jarring. There’s no small thrill in hearing Mering both uphold and upend the conventions and even the pieties of folk music, which means that while The Innocents may be her second album, it plays like a debut. These finely wrought songs introduce a fascinating and confidently subversive artist and offers a glimpse of the road she’s traveling.


The Irish artist’s full-length collaboration with DJ Koze is a showcase of everything impressive about the musician sapped of the excitement that has historically made her work feel so vital.

Hit Parade

Róisín Murphy has always made a point of standing out. For nearly three decades the Irish diva has pitched herself as your friendly neighborhood pop star; a couture-clad weirdo at odds with her surroundings but at ease in the world. In the tradition of David Bowie or Grace Jones, she’s capable of bridging haute art sensibility with down-home naughtiness; a fashion week fixture, “KLF MILF,” and “JG Ballard sexpot,” who’s still an absolute scream down at the pub. Her career looks like a traditional glam blueprint, which is to say a whirlwind of references, identities, and genres, all phrased as a sexy, mischievous kind of dare: Why don’t you dress up too? Even though she presents in an outlandish way, escapism has no place in Murphy’s music. What you get instead is an artist wrestling with the problematics of being a person in the world, until through a feat of style, she’s charted her own way out and through.
After a string of releases in the 2010s that spanned Italo-pop to prog-disco, the pandemic imposed an especially dramatic set of limits that Murphy’s music seemed uniquely poised to meet. Where other artists in the incongruous disco boom of 2020 went for broke on dancefloors that would be shuttered for months, Murphy was able to tap into the genre’s cathartic undertow, foregrounding yearning and resilience even as she was high-kicking in a Balenciaga gown in her living room. A song like “Murphy’s Law,” which rages against fate while insisting on “making my own happy ending” came as a revelation, especially since everything that could go wrong, had indeed gone wrong. “Everyone had this response, like, ‘You’ve saved me,’” she expressed in an interview with Pitchfork in June, “I’ve never lived through a time where music suddenly became the most important thing in people’s lives. They poured themselves into it.”
It’s almost impossible to imagine Hit Parade being received in remotely similar terms. The cache of goodwill for the singer seemed to evaporate almost instantly upon the news that Murphy had written that young trans people are “little mixed up kids” and that “puberty blockers are fucked” in a private Facebook comment. A screenshot of her comment rippled through social media and many fans, especially those in her sizable LGBTQ fanbase, were met with bewilderment, anger, and disappointment. A few days later, she issued a statement that included an apology for “comments that have been directly hurtful” to her audience, stating they were made “out of love for all of us” and that she would no longer share her feelings about the issue publicly. You could feel all the excitement surrounding Hit Parade being sucked out of the room.
With her masks and costumes and make-up, Murphy’s act is seemingly all about the fluidity of identity and suspended reality on the cusp of a breakthrough. Despite her saying that her “true calling is music, and music will never exclude any of us,” her comments feel like a contradiction to the spirit of her best work. The truth is that Hit Parade is the best record of Murphy’s career; it also feels like the definition of a qualified triumph. It is both musically vast and hemmed in by its circumstances, a showcase of everything impressive about the musician sapped of the excitement that has historically made her work feel so vital. Like the album’s cover art by Beth Frey, Hit Parade is colorful, fun, and unwieldy, but also vaguely disfigured in spite of itself.
Where 2020’s Róisín Machine proved her mettle as a disco queen, very little on Hit Parade resembles any kind of a straightforward genre exercise. House bangers are pitched-shifted and sped up into digitized slurries, while detours into funk and disco are derailed by peels of dissonant electronics. A large part of the record’s chaotic alchemy boils down to the dialogue that played out between Murphy and executive producer, DJ Koze. Over the course of almost six years, the duo cycled through version after version, tearing down and reinventing fully completed songs before Murphy would put her foot down when they’d landed on something really good. “Two Ways,” which was initially conceived of as a country song, pits the singer’s warbling vocals against a heaving slice of corroded mutant trap, while the effervescent “The Universe” manages to stay the course while swerving from bluesy guitar-pop to demented spoken word to an interpolation of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and back again.
From Maurice Fulton to Matthew Herbert, Murphy has been blessed to collaborate with all-star dance producers throughout her career, but none have matched her for sheer off-the-walls weirdness as perfectly as DJ Koze. From their first collaboration— the dazzling astral house of “Illumination” off of Koze’s 2018 album Knock Knock— the duo have smuggled moments of absurdity into the mix that only heighten the music. The put-on American accent that Murphy affects on “The Universe” and “Crazy Ants Reprise” strikes as both a call-back to her old days in Moloko, an outgrowth of the characters she plays on TikTok, and a hybrid of Koze’s own love for babbling non-sequiturs. On “The House,” an incredibly sticky funk beat is fraught with anxiety, as Koze stutters and stops the beat for Murphy to interject with a withering “Fuck’s sake!” The tug of war between the song’s seduction and agitation is brought into creepy-camp relief when Murphy belts “this house is our swannnnn song” through a vocoder, suggesting she’s got a piece of soul-devouring horror movie real estate on her hands.
When they’re not seeding their tracks with brazen silliness, Koze and Murphy have an unrivaled sense of space and sensuality. “Can’t Replicate” is the album’s most glorious high point, a hypnotic deep house banger that makes an unbelievably sexy moment of mutual recognition last until the end of time. It’s also a showcase for how powerful Murphy can sound in moments of vulnerability, giving a performance built almost entirely from exhales that gradually transforms bruised hesitancy into bracing exhilaration. The absolutely devastating “You Knew” is just as moving. For seven minutes Koze sends Murphy’s voice through cycles of processing, repeating and stalling out on the line: “You’ve always known I had feelings for you that burned.'” The effect is of a brain broken by unrequited love gradually re-gaining sentience, and as the sheer enormity of Murphy’s wasted time and effort comes into view, a constantly disintegrating dub echoes her yearning and progressive disillusionment into darkness.
Throughout the record, Murphy wrestles with themes of loss and fate. “CooCool” is an ode to uncomplicated love, tinged from the beginning with the specter of heartache as she whispers “I’ve lost it” before Koze’s beat lifts her rapturously into the sky. The extended metaphors of “Free Will” and “Eureka'” most literally embody these ideas, as Murphy respectively weighs romance so euphoric it feels predestined and dejection so visceral it shows up as a black dot on a doctor’s scan. “Fader” is the album’s most triumphant moment and a clear sequel and call-back to the cosmic, push-and-pull struggle of “Murphy’s Law.” Flipping a sample of Sharon Jones’ “Window Shopping” from a bluesy lament into a fist-pumping high, Murphy sings of holding onto love for as long as she can, death be damned. In doing so she isolates that track’s chorus and blares it like a personal motto: “Keep on!”
Despite the record’s jagged edges, Hit Parade bears a funny symmetry to her solo debut, 2005’s Ruby Blue. A thorny collage of micro-samples, unconventional vocals, and unapologetic artsiness, that album was well-received by critics, but regarded as an inauspicious start for a wannabe pop star; too unnecessarily difficult to ever find a proper mainstream audience. After years spent striving for a breakthrough and many more course-correcting back toward a career as a successful solo auteur, Hit Parade is the kind of highly original pop assemblage that the Irish singer has seemingly always wanted to make, a record of peerless highs whose best and worst quality is how alienating it just so happens to be.


Gibbs is in full command of his weathered voice and persona, and though its runtime may be short, You Only Live 2wice is a brief showcase of the Indiana rapper at his hardest and most haunting.

You Only Live 2wice

There’s sounding like you’ve triumphed, there’s sounding like you’ve struggled, and then there’s sounding like you’ve just survived. The well-worn voice of Freddie Gibbs has typically resided in the space between the first and second category like an audio imprint on whatever path he rolls through. But as Gibbs approaches his mid-30s, he’s still reeling from the after-effects of two life-changing events: the 2014 shooting in Brooklyn that wounded two members of his entourage, and the sexual assault charge that hung over him for much of 2016. The gunmen missed and the court acquitted, but for an artist who’s never had Tupac far from his mind, Gibbs has to have used him to reflect on what could have gone wrong otherwise, and just how he managed to survive.
You Only Live 2wice doesn’t put Gibbs on a Makaveli cross, but does paint him as a Christ-like figure, resurrected and floating on the album cover’s modern-Renaissance depiction of him. Whose sins he’s ready to die for, he’s not saying; he calls himself “20 Karat Jesus” on the crystal chandelier of a leadoff cut but focuses more on the actions (“Fresh up off the highway with that higher power how you want it”) and the consequences (“Don't sleep, bags under my eyes is designer”) than the casualties. Throughout the album, he’s haunted by both the things that have and haven’t happened to him, what he has and hasn’t done, ruminating over a tight 32 minutes across eight tracks that feel haunted even at their hardest.
So is he interrogating his first life, or planning for his second? Early single “Crushed Glass” finds Gibbs pushing towards the latter. He’s in reflection mode, continuously comparing himself to days (or weeks, or years) gone past only to open each verse with the proclamation that “the future started yesterday.” It’s less an examination of what he’s done than what’s been done to him, and its hook (“If I gotta be by myself, I’m’a be all right”) hints at the only-trust-yourself defiance of a man burned too many times. He’s still got that thematic focus on frustration, toughness, and regret that keeps things on edge, feeling like he’s outgrowing all his friends on “Alexys” and pledging to abandon his crew for the sake of his infant daughter on “Homesick.” Even on “Phone Lit” and “Amnesia”—the closest he gets to true brag tracks—his blackout flow sounds like an agitated reaction to being overwhelmed by demands.
But Gibbs never brings a low-energy pity party. There’s still the sense that he can lay claim to a rap-over-anything flow that centers his voice as all the authority a track really needs. The rest of the beat can do whatever—a quality that makes him one of those ultra-rare Madlib/Gangsta Grillz crossover artists who can never make weak shit. His vocal command is still stunning, that rough-hewn flexibility in his voice putting across intensity and vulnerability at the same time. And when the beat goes melodramatic (or dramatically mellow)—the aching violin-laced Speakerbomb-produced flip of Sade’s “Fear” on “Crushed Glass,” molasses-creeping to billowy new age keyboards on “Homesick,” satiny vocal-harmony R&B on “Andrea”—each syllable feels like a knuckle busting your eyebrow open. You could look at *You Only Live 2wice *as a transitional record—and many could see it that way dismissively, given its brief borderline-EP runtime—but whatever turning point this might be in Gibbs’ career, it stands to reason that he’ll still be making diamonds out of pressure.


The Scranton indie rock band Petal records beautifully aching songs that are illuminated by singer/songwriter Kiley Lotz's clear, direct voice and poetic lyrics. The album's atmosphere is nervous and defeated at once, the frenzied search for a cigarette and the long exhale of smoke layered on top of each other.

Shame

Kiley Lotz, a musician from Scranton, Pa. who performs as Petal, writes songs that ache. Aches are ambiguous and often mosaic sensations; they’re less a product of pain or pleasure than a seductive mingling of both. Ache can flow through the body as a kind of dark, indefinite wave, summoned by a photograph, or an old email.
Shame, which came out in October last year, functions well enough as an indie rock record, but its atmosphere is nervous and defeated, both the frenzied search for a cigarette and the long exhale of smoke layered on top of each other. Lotz describes scenes, relationships, and emotions in fragments. "A bulb/ A thought/ A home you’re not,” she sings in "Feel." Her voice is clear and direct, and illuminates her songs internally, like a skeleton made of Christmas lights. Sometimes she crafts an unstable reality, the physics of which are susceptible to anxiety. "Being mocked by the crack in the ceiling at the top of the stairs," she sings in "Sooner." "Wishing it’d swallow me whole." Later in the same song she threatens to "sow a garden of backbones I never had." Her imagery is rich and often moves like poetry, knowing just when to slip out of sense into a region that feels blurred and indefinite, yet true to the lived experience of love and panic—all this atomic activity beneath an otherwise placid surface. Lotz’s lyrics are also funny; in "Chandelier Thief," she instructs someone to "be thankful for the floor/ it leads you to a new place."
Fellow Scranton band Tigers Jaw acts as Lotz’s band on Shame; their playing is precise yet also softens at its edges. Chords appear like bruises, vivid shapes with unclear borders. In "Camera Lens II," there’s a delightful, lopsided quality to the changes; they almost seem to collapse on each other. "Nature" is the opposite; it’s completely skeletal, just vocals and drums, and yet it communicates with extreme precision something as shapeless as falling in love. "It’s like you have an innate sense of me," Lotz sings. "Like you’ve lived in my head waiting patiently/ To tell me 'you’re so afraid, just breathe.'"
Lotz's finest moment is on "Photobooth," which unfolds patiently as she sings, "Kissed under the streetlight/ By your friend’s house." Then the image recedes into a cerebral space, while the song itself amplifies and expands: "I guess what I mean is that if I could/ Pick out all the parts of my brain/ I would leave the place where you made your home." This is the lingering quality of Shame: Lotz’s ability to translate the imprecision of a kiss, the quality of a streetlight, the decay of a shadow into a memory so powerful it consumes everything. Shame is an album of preserved traces, of things that were.


On his eighth solo album, Talib Kweli remains the vanguard for deep-thinking conscious rap; storytelling and uplift are in ample supply, though the risks are few and far between.

Radio Silence

Scholar. Street philosopher. Triple Nobel Peace Prize victor. First black male to pilot an aircraft. Father of the Nike Swoosh. “The man that made Kool Aid say, ‘Oh yeah!’” So said Dave Chappelle, that hip-hop tastemaker with the 90-percent free-throw percentage, on the first track of Talib Kweli’s first album, Quality. Yeah, it was hyperbole worthy of ushering Xerxes the Great into court, but it reflected the rising Brooklyn star’s bottomless ambitions. While hip-hop has continued to stylistically mutate, Kweli has spent the decade and a half since as the vanguard for deep-thinking conscious rap. You can’t solve all the world’s curses—not even over seven solo records. But at least he’s given it a shot.
Album number eight, Radio Silence, is another solid Kweli release to add to the pile. He’s still bending the knee to the same soul-infused beats that contemporaries like Kanye West and Lupe Fiasco mostly abandoned sometime during George W. Bush’s second term. Kweli is still stacking cultural references on top of cultural references: The opening 90 seconds of Radio Silence alone see him citing, among other things, Back to the Future and Carlito’s Way, and rhyming “Sonny Carson” with “Johnnie Cochran.” And he’s still sometimes guilty of being a better thinker than music maker. Kweli’s flow can feel rushed and sticky, as though he can’t articulate his thoughts as neatly as he can conjure them up. But his fans are loyal. Radio Silence will comfortably shore up the base.
If the album is in any way shocking, it’s because of the topics that Kweli does not directly engage with. He’s long been one of rap’s most prominent social activists, using interviews and a super-prolific Twitter feed to advocate for the Black Lives Matter movement, address the escalation of white supremacy, and criticize the current presidency. On Radio Silence, Kweli only circles the topics, occasionally throwing out jabs—“Every problem can’t be solved at the ballot box,” he raps on “All of Us,” in perhaps the album’s most obvious reference to the administration—but stopping short of launching the big, direct haymakers. This is not a record distinctly of its era like, say, Common’s Black America Again or A Tribe Called Quest’s We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service—contemporary albums from artists that qualify as Kweli’s direct stylistic forefathers. Instead, these are mostly songs that could have been pulled from any era of his career.
There are, though, some very good Talib Kweli numbers. Radio Silence is a mostly a fresh tonic of brightness and positivity. “I live my life in the sunshine,” he raps on the lush, triumphant opener, “The Magic Hour,” without any sense of triteness; “I’m praying for a better tomorrow.” But over the bluster, Kweli still delivers his short sermons. “All of Us” slashes away with loquacious one-liners that cut deep: “The common myth is we’re savages with no history or accomplishments/Or knowledge of ourselves, they did a job on us.” There’s even room for a verse from the elusive Jay Electronica, who takes police brutality head on by evoking the image of cops beating an elderly woman. “Officer Friendly is an enemy now,” Electronica sighs, reminding everyone that his inability to sign off on an album qualifies as hip-hop’s own Greek tragedy.
The most focused effort is “She’s My Hero,” a song inspired by Bresha Meadows, the teenager who last year shot and killed her allegedly abusive father as he slept. Over a beat produced by Oh No, Kweli runs through the narrative with the storytelling elegance and human understanding of a skilled documentary maker. There’s more deep-thinking as Kweli drills into masculinity and the corrosive effects of negative male role models on “ Knockturnal.” But this is comfortable territory. We’ve seen him thrive on cuts like these dozens of times before.
A change of pace does come with “Chips,” where Waka Flocka Flame tempts Kweli onto some rattling hi-hats and brash brass. It’s a weird experiment likely to pique the interest only of those who are into weird hip-hop experiments—the muscular, anti-lyrical Waka teaming up with the new-age philosopher. But Kweli sounds less at home on the blustering beat, and the results are as mixed as you might expect.
“The One I Love” is the kind of rap-R&B hybrid number that was slid onto every commercial hip-hop release about 15 years ago and is totally fine. In fact, the album only occasionally slips out of “sounds pretty nice” territory. When it really hits its stride—like on the soulful production and funky flows of “Let it Roll”—it sure is good to have Kweli around. But a decade and a half deep, I’d rather hear him testing himself more. Risking defeat to go for the win is infinitely more interesting than always playing for the draw.


Songs From the Shoebox is a rough-around-the-edges record that bursts at the seams with excitement. Two of the band's members, bassist William Cashion and frontman Sam Herring, have higher profiles with their band Future Islands, but the Snails puts a greater emphasis on pure fun.

Songs From the Shoebox

In April 2013, a little band out of Baltimore called the Snails put out a double 7'' EP called Worth the Wait. Two of the band’s members, bassist William Cashion and frontman Sam Herring, had higher profiles with their band Future Islands, but that outfit had yet to take off, and the Snails were just another venture with a different pack of pals. All of the Snails’ personnel committed to the group’s big bit: Onstage in Raleigh, N.C., band members donned colorful headpieces that looked like snails’ eye stalks, and Herring thanked a friend of the band for making sure the Snails got to the venue safely from Baltimore in a shoebox stashed under the passenger seat. Later, the Snails would lay down a full LP, but Future Islands’ sudden wave of success in 2014 meant the Snails and their Songs From the Shoebox were more or less shelved—until now, that is.
Songs From the Shoebox is a rough-around-the-edges record that bursts at the seams with excitement. The record feels like it could fall apart at any moment, but it somehow never does: Everything sounds a little fried, from the fuzz-caked guitar and bass riffs that dominate to the slick, squealy saxophone parts that work their way in. Herring doesn’t so much sing as he shouts, with his vocals sometimes bordering on outright screeching. Where Future Islands has always done well at delivering sad songs you can kind of dance to, the Snails mostly focus on fun. "Tight Side of Life" is a thick, rollicking opener, with Herring bellowing, "We’re on the tight side of life, everything is going to be all right." The song is so forceful that you feel like you have no choice to believe it’s the truth.
The tracklisting is loopy, but in a way that suits the project. "Flames" makes for an appropriately named scorcher late in the record before sliding into the droopy instrumental "Do Like You Do." The downer tune feels out of step with the rest of the album, but the band picks back up again with "Snails Christmas (I Want a New Shell)." It’s a non sequitur, but then again, the band’s over-arching concept is songs by and about snails—so, sure, why not a Christmas song, too?
Though Songs From the Shoebox’s completion was delayed by Future Islands’ massive touring schedule in 2014, the timing of its release is perfect. We’re in the agonizing home stretch of winter, and the album carries the promise that summertime’s carefree, sunburnt Saturday afternoons are right around the corner. With Songs From the Shoebox, then, the Snails offer a brief opportunity to escape to that happiest place.


The Brooklyn-based rapper’s latest sports heady lyricism and honest self-exploration. Her words are raw, wise, and immediate as they blaze across the dusty, sun-faded production.

With the Shifts

Maassai loves jazz. It comes through in the amber-toned, free-flowing production that unfurls leisurely throughout her music, leaving ample room for her dense lyrics. When rappers like Earl Sweatshirt and Mavi write similarly philosophical raps, their delivery generally matches the dreaminess of the production. Maassai’s voice carries an unrelenting urgency and clarity that allows her to relay complex ideas with stunning efficiency. Her poetry is creative and immediate, teeming with wisdom and raw emotion in equal measure.
Producer and collaborator JWords has said Maassai always chooses to rap over the most adventurous beats, and that spirit of experimentation defines her recent work. In addition to releasing three EPs in the past two years, Maassai has collaborated with like-minded rappers including Mavi and Pink Siifu, bringing complex, polished wordplay to their glimmering, soul-sampling production. Last year, she and JWords released ve·loc·i·ty, an eclectic, vivacious rap and dance music collaboration. Her latest album, With the Shifts, is another remarkably compact avant-garde rap offering. It burns and blossoms, encompassing, in just over 17 minutes, the pain, pleasure, and lucidity of journeying inwards.
Album closer “to no end” is a prime example. It’s only 28 seconds long, but combing over its 16 lines will leave the mind and the pulse racing. As Maassai simultaneously articulates her desire and celebrates her strength, her words weave around a prickly drum beat. The last six words of the final verse are delivered with unwavering confidence and precision: “Everything they never pictured/Watch when I frame it different.”
At its core, this album documents Maassai’s resilience. The searing imagery of opener “Next Chapter” relays her struggle not to get buried in the heaviness of her childhood. “Born to break the cycle for whoever’s after me/Started channeling my rage/I knew I didn’t have to be a product of my pain,” she raps, acknowledging her hurt while also making space to grow around and beyond it. “Nine Lives” is an affirmation that celebrates rebirth and grace in the face of hate. “We all been enslaved to our traumas/You brave if you honest with yourself,” she says, showing the work that goes into this spiritual growth.
She contextualizes her emotional journey in a broader framework of intergenerational Black liberation. Her healing is for herself but also the people who come after her, and for the people who are listening now. On “Grace Jones,” she looks to the iconic, gender-bending and genre-defying artist as inspiration to “redefine the model.” Maassai questions a world where people posing as radical get credit without doing much work while “We innately magical/And they hate to see it/And we hate the status quo.” Speaking in the second person, she encourages the listener to treat the fire in their soul as sacred, to not lose their faith in themselves.
With the Shifts defies easy categorization. Every time it feels like you’ve understood the emotional trajectory of a song, Maassai shifts direction, never allowing any one sentiment or sound to define her for long. She describes herself as having flames on her tongue, and her words blaze across the dusty, sun-faded production. It’s not easy to weave together such conflicting emotional states, to access the pain in her past while celebrating more recent triumphs, but Maassai’s understanding of self is vast and complex enough to hold it all. She also keeps one eye looking ahead: “Saving up all of my magic/Can’t imagine what I’m about to be/All of my aims is up in the sky,” she says on “to fly.” The tough combined work of remaking the self and remaking the system pays off in this idyllic future she generously allows us to preview with her.

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Even as the Floridian crooner becomes a breakout star, his music remains bleak and filled with pain.

Pray 4 Love

In the months since Rod Wave’s breakout album Ghetto Gospel, the St. Petersburg-born rapper’s life has changed. He went on tour with Kevin Gates; Meek Mill called him his therapist; and he released a Cole Bennett-directed music video. But even as his profile grows, his music remains drenched in misery; Pray 4 Love, his new album, is more bleak than anything he’s made before. In an interview discussing the recording process of the project, Rod Wave said he laid down the vocals in a dark hotel room with nobody else but his engineer.
If you didn’t listen closely enough to his 2019 debut LP, you might think it was recorded in the piano room of a church. It’s a soulful record with constant mentions of faith, but it’s not exactly religious. Instead, he makes songs about pain, heartbreak, trauma, and turning to religion as a last resort, made digestible with catchy songwriting and choir-ready vocals that separate him from others in the South and Midwest making similarly hopeless music.
But sometimes Pray 4 Love can be overwhelming. At its worst, it’s like reading someone’s college admission essay, where all of their life struggles are squeezed into a couple hundred words: On “I Remember,” his father goes to prison; he confesses his love to someone; he cries when it goes unreciprocated; he goes to prison; his mother cries; his friend stabs him in the back over money, and so on. It’s a running list of traumatic events with the goal of making you feel sorry for him, but pity is not what makes Rod Wave’s songs work. At their most effective, they have the raw immediacy of someone going to confession for the first time.
Notably, at three and a half minutes, “I Remember” is the album’s longest song. Rod Wave’s best tracks rarely cross the three-minute mark, typically a single pain-filled verse bookended by an agonized chorus. “Fuck the World” follows that blueprint here, with Rod Wave biting off the ends of his consonants and sounding on the brink of a breakdown: “Said you wouldn’t leave, but you left like I expected/I opened up ’bout my pain, now I regret it,” he belts. If it weren’t for the trap drums, the melancholy pianos and gloomy electric riffs would land squarely in country-ballad territory.
Rod Wave’s songwriting has its flaws. Occasionally it’s unnecessarily melodramatic: he acts like he’s scarred from having to wake up early to catch the school bus and working at a donut shop as a teenager. But when the writing is sharp, and often it is, his lyrics hit hard enough to bring your own buried pain right to the surface. “I need some happiness again, this life done beat on me/I caught a flight to ease the pain, I switched the scenery,” he sings bluntly on “Ribbon in the Sky.” It’s straightforward and complicated; unpolished and imperfect; all of which makes the painful emotion on Pray 4 Love feel genuine even as his life changes.


The drone and minimalim pioneer recorded this solo pump-organ improvisation-- created to accompany a Piero Heliczer film-- in 1968 at the home of John Vaccaro, director of New York's notorious Playhouse of the Ridiculous.

Joan of Arc

To anyone familiar with Tony Conrad's best-known works, Outside the Dream Syndicate and Four Violins, mention of his name conjures a vivid sound: The drone of a bow slowly sawing across violin strings. Not that his other achievements-- vital roles in the early minimalism of the Dream Syndicate, the early incarnations of the Velvet Underground, and the early experiments of American cinema-- aren't equally memorable. But it's hard to picture him without a violin in his hands.
Recent archival releases on Table of the Elements are changing that perception, offering examples of Conrad's work with sine-wave oscillation (Fantastic Glissando) and audio vérité (Bryant Park Moratorium Rally). Joan of Arc is the most exciting recovery yet, a solo pump-organ improvisation created to accompany Piero Heliczer's film of the same name. Conrad recorded the piece in 1968 at the home of John Vaccaro, director of New York's notorious Playhouse of the Ridiculous. Not knowing how much music Heliczer would need, Conrad played Vaccaro's aging instrument for the entire length of a one-hour reel-to-reel tape. (Heliczer ultimately used an excerpt for his 11-minute film.)
As a display of energy and focus over an hour of unscripted time, Joan of Arc is simply impressive. Even more striking is how recognizable the piece turns out to be. On the surface, the pump-organ's low, moaning timbres, blurred by Conrad's lo-fi recording, share little with his violin's attacking treble. Rather than aggressive or sharp, his tone here is plaintive and often hymn-like. But the distinctive way he builds a drone, patiently layering and shifting it like wind and gravity shaping ocean waves, is unmistakable.
The result is an entrancing meditation that rivals the work of latter-day masters Charlemagne Palestine and Phill Niblock, as well as the post-rock ambience of Stars of the Lid and Flying Saucer Attack and the metal dirges of Sunn0))) and Earth. What sets Joan of Arc apart is its all-alone aura. Drones often engulf their surroundings like a blinding snowstorm, but instead of evoking cold, dark landscapes, Joan of Arc feels warmly intimate, like crackling wood in a fireplace.
Among all the sounds one might expect here-- church-organ hums, cinematic chords, woozy groans-- lies a surprise: an odd kind of percussion. Conrad's mic registers his foot tapping on pedals and his fingers clicking keys, creating rhythmic sparks and ripples beneath his cycling drone. As the organ swells and shrinks, these tactile sounds keep the piece grounded. Conrad's long chords may blow your mind, but his tangible effort makes Joan of Arc a dream come to life.
As fascinating as it is, Joan of Arc doesn't rank with Conrad's violin classics. It's more snapshot than masterwork, a private moment made with little expectation of an audience beyond the few who would see Heliczer's film. But Conrad's willingness to pour so much thought and vigor into something so small makes Joan of Arc much more than a footnote to his storied career.


This new box documents a pair of late-’50s albums in which the New York saxophonist left an indelible mark on West Coast jazz.

Sonny Rollins: Go West!: The Contemporary Records Albums

While touring America as part of Max Roach’s group in early 1957, New York saxophonist Sonny Rollins found himself in California, where he settled into a three-week stint at Los Angeles’ Central Avenue club Jazz City. A week into the run, Lester Koenig—a blacklisted screenwriter turned record producer—approached him with an offer to cut a record for his Contemporary Records. Studio time was swiftly booked with two of the top players of the time, drummer Shelly Manne and bassist Ray Brown, and the three musicians knocked out Way Out West in a marathon session starting at 3 in the morning.
Way Out West provides the anchor in Go West: The Contemporary Records Albums, a triple-disc box—available either as a handsome vinyl set or on CD—whose name suggests that Rollins spent a considerable amount of time at Koenig’s label. That’s not the case. The saxophonist cut just one other record for the imprint, Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders, a 1958 LP where he was paired with a combination of six different musicians who had previously led records at the label. In this set, the two records are supplemented by a disc of alternate takes from both sessions, all but two of which appeared on previous reissues, including an expanded version of Way Out West released in 2018.
Sonny Rollins recorded Way Out West as a trio, introducing a format that has become so commonplace it can be hard to hear how revolutionary it was in the 1950s. Rollins’ combo with no piano or trumpet possibly has its roots in the loss of pianist Richie Powell and trumpeter Clifford Brown, members of the Max Roach Quintet who died in a car accident in June 1956.The tragedy affected Rollins deeply. By the time he cut Way Out West, he tested out the trio format with Roach—the group was obligated to meet the concert dates on their calendar—and Rollins biographer Aidan Levy suggests that “the pianoless trio carries the ache of a phantom limb” on the album. That’s true to an extent. It’s possible to hear where the music could have been filled out with the addition of a piano or trumpet, yet the passage of time has dispersed any ghosts lingering over the session. Rollins seems alive to the possibilities of this freeing format. He later explained that without a pianist dictating chords, he could go anywhere: “A pianist by definition leads the horn players, because of the chords and the volume and everything… I always loved the idea that if I could get a rhythm section—a drummer for the rhythm and the bass player for the basic harmony—then I had the freedom to do what I wanted to do. Which was perfect for me.”
That freedom manifests on Way Out West in fascinating ways. Rollins isn’t above indulging in a little cinematic flair, such as when drummer Shelly Manne mimics the sound of horse hoofs on the opening “I’m an Old Cowhand.” There are nods to Hollywood Westerns throughout, such as a cover of the old 1930s screen hit “Wagon Wheels,” and Rollins’ extended improvisations gesture toward wide vistas. Using the rhythm section as rock-solid support, he roams far from suggested chords—a process he dubbed “strolling”—playing solos that are invigorating and adventurous; the sauntering stride of their version of Duke Ellington’s “Solitude” suggests a cowboy roaming the wide open plain. It’s remarkable how picturesque a combo featuring only Rollins, Manne, and bassist Brown can be. In the musicians’ sparing touch and careful interplay—just listen to the ample room they leave for each other in “Solitude”—they positively luxuriate in evocatively wide-open spaces.
Way Out West is such a titanic effort that it overshadows its companion Contemporary album. Jazz Review critic Amiri Baraka, in fact, called Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders “shallow and superfluous” upon its release in 1959. Ever since, the record has been treated like a footnote, yet the subdued quality of Contemporary Leaders seems intentional. Hunkering down for three days of recording on Melrose Avenue, Rollins was paired with a set of musicians who all had led sessions for Contemporary, including Manne, guitarist Barney Kessell, pianist Hampton Hawes, and bassist Leroy Vinnegar. He brought them a selection of standards, pairing songs like “The Song Is You,” from the Frank Sinatra songbook, with “Rock a Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” an old minstrel tune sung by Al Jolson.
Where there was a distinct edge to Rollins’ 1956 breakthrough album Saxophone Colossus, the performances on Contemporary Leaders are breezier. Koenig may have claimed that he coined the phrase “West Coast jazz” as a marketing device, but the records on Contemporary did seem to run a few degrees cooler than their East Coast counterparts. They may have shared the same post-bop vernacular, but they operated with a smooth reserve. Barney Kessel’s elegant, swinging guitar on Contemporary Leaders steers the record toward familiar West Coast territory, a place that Rollins enlivens with his robust tone but doesn’t quite challenge. The session is easy to enjoy, but it doesn’t linger in the imagination the way Way Out West does.
Go West: The Contemporary Records Albums doesn’t offer much in the way of previously unreleased material. Almost all of the alternate takes on the bonus third disc—there are three outtakes from each album session—have shown up on earlier reissues, and while there are slight variations in tempo and emphasis, the execution remains the same; the outtakes don’t significantly alter our perceptions of the original records. That doesn’t mean this box is lacking in insights. Pairing Way Out West with the relatively conventional Contemporary Leaders serves to underscore just how innovative Rollins’ first album for the label was. Way Out West ranks among the elite jazz albums of its era, as innovative as it is compulsively listenable. This box set offers a reminder of how fresh it can still sound—and how Rollins made his mark on West Coast jazz in two very different ways.


A new archival box set collecting Blondie’s first six albums and assorted rarities and outtakes makes the case for their singular presence in American music.

Against the Odds: 1974 - 1982

The group Blondie—vocalist and songwriter Debbie Harry, guitarist and co-conspirator Chris Stein, drummer Clem Burke, keyboardist Jimmy Destri, bassists Gary Valentine and Nigel Harrison, and guitarist Frank Infante—were one of the success stories of American punk rock, the only member of the 1975 CBGB’s class with No. 1 hit singles and Top 10 albums. They wrote pop hits that were still unquestionably rock’n’roll; Harry’s lyrics were direct and funny while maintaining an air of mystery. The band embraced disco before the days of Disco Demolition and befriended early rap pioneers when very few people outside of the South Bronx cared about this new musical form. They also deliberately cultivated their visual presentation, teaching a generation of kids how to thrift and look good doing it.
Harry grew up in New Jersey and crossed the Hudson to NYC when she was old enough to escape: “I didn’t have a career motivation; I had a personal motivation,” is how she described it. She held a variety of odd jobs while trying to figure things out—a waitress at Max’s Kansas City, a stint as a Playboy Bunny—and briefly sang in a folk group called the Wind and the Willows, though her heart was more aligned with the new, glammy guard down at the Mercer Arts Center. She formed a band called the Stilettos, and it was at one of their gigs that Harry met Chris Stein. They soon split off from the Stilettos to form Blondie and the Banzai Babies, eventually shortened to the moniker Harry heard when she walked her newly peroxide-blonde self past construction sites: “Hey, Blondie!”
Against the Odds is Blondie’s first archival presentation of their essential years, available in a variety of formats. The super deluxe collector’s edition contains their first six studio albums, four records of outtakes and rarities, a book of liner notes featuring new interviews with every band member, a 120-page annotated discography, and some bonus extras. If you already have the albums and just want the rarities, Numero offers that option on either vinyl or CD, both of which still come with a smaller version of the same liner notes. This shouldn’t be noteworthy but it is; it’s the difference between a detailed and respectful chronicle of a band’s legacy versus a label that sees dollar signs. It’s also not surprising given that the first “thank you” in the acknowledgements is to “Blondie Nation.”
Back in the day, the band handed out promotional badges that read BLONDIE IS A GROUP!—a clever but futile attempt to get radio DJs and music consumers to understand that this wasn’t the kind of joint where a svengali plucked an attractive woman out of obscurity and stood her in front of a bunch of hired hands. They were a project, a collective of like-minded folks who shared a specific love for Brill Building-era girl groups and 1960s pop songs, but not with the worshipful approach of nostalgia acolytes. Blondie weren’t trying to duplicate what had been done before, but instead cherry-picked the musical bits and pieces that they liked and refashioned them to meet their particular specifications, which was punk rock’s DIY ethos in action.
All of the elements are there in their eponymous 1976 debut: the nods to ’60s pop, the vivid lyrical imagery, the Blondie attitude, the visual presentation, the wry humor, the musical chops. Every record after that built on this solid foundation, which becomes obvious when working your way through a comprehensive collection of the band’s output. The outtakes and rarities within the box set reinforce that. “Heart of Glass,” the hit from 1978’s Parallel Lines, began life as a wannabe reggae tune that couldn’t quite get off the ground. The demo included here has less reggae and more rock, but doesn’t yet have the magic of the final version. But the presence of the demo compared to the album reinforces that despite the disco-fication of the track, it’s still very much a rock song with disco influences. The same can be said for “Call Me,” the 1980 megahit recorded with producer Giorgio Moroder—whose work with Donna Summer directly inspired “Heart of Glass”—on the American Gigolo soundtrack. This was about the time that the band was accused of “selling out,” though there wasn’t a band at CBGB’s who didn’t want a record deal and the success that came with it.
1979’s Eat to the Beat, which got overshadowed by “Call Me,” holds three solid hits (“Dreaming,” “Atomic,” and “Union City Blue”) and “The Hardest Part,” an underrated funk number that should have been massive. The band (and the producer) are open about the effects of drugs and egos and other intra-band drama on the recording, which isn’t obvious from the outside, even with the benefit of hindsight. 1980’s Autoamerican was far more experimental in nature than its predecessors, but still built on the band’s formative core. “The Tide Is High” is ’60s pop from Jamaica, reinforced by the demo; “Rapture,” despite the dashed-off rapping outro (the liner notes tell how Harry wrote it on the spot in the studio, in about five minutes), was more new wave and pop than hip-hop. The Hunter, the band’s final release before a long hiatus, stays true to their loves and their influences, but pales in comparison to its predecessors, something the band notes was a casualty of all the usual band strife, as well as plain old burnout. That, too, is more visible from the 30,000-foot view of Against the Odds: “We put the lid on the coffin with this one,” Harry comments.
“I can make a long list of things I would do differently,” Harry says in the beginning of the liner notes. “But if I were actually thrown back there, I’d probably do it all the same.” Against the Odds perfectly captures the band’s legacy precisely because it presents the history, music, and memories with an admirable degree of honesty and doesn’t try to make the story into something it wasn’t. It’s easier to do that when the music can stand on its own merits, because all you have to do is hear it for yourself.


On their first new album since 2011, Vivian Girls jump back into fried guitar, loose percussion, and fast and easy repetition, as if they’d simply woken up from an eight-year nap.

Memory

Even in their rebirth, Vivian Girls have death on the brain. “I live in New York City/And all my friends are dead,” Cassie Ramone sings flatly on “I’m Far Away,” a creeping, paranoid track off of Memory, Vivian Girls’ first album in eight years. That sentiment also serves as a general consensus about the state of indie rock in the half-decade since the band’s official breakup: Vivian Girls, along with the North Brooklyn DIY scene they came to represent, have died.
But even after their demise, it was hard not to hear Vivian Girls everywhere. Their spirit existed, in their absence, in the school-choir harmonies of Girlpool and Ovlov, the electric fuzz that burns after a Deli Girls track or a Priests riff, the hesitant confidence of Frankie Cosmos’ lyrics. That’s not to suggest the band only touched the lives of female and nonbinary musicians—look no further than Wavves, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, or the entire Orchid Tapes catalog for their stoned ennui. But perhaps these groups could thrive, both critically and in the harsh spotlight of the internet, because Vivian Girls forged a brave new world of punk rock that wasn’t afraid of a beautiful vocal harmony, one that could exist in between the uncompromising politics of riot grrrl and the soft hues of twee-pop.
Ramone, bassist Katy Goodman, and drummer Ali Koehler could have cleaned up their sound and shaken off their harsher edges. Instead, from the first chord of opener “Most of All,” the band jumps back into fried guitar, loose percussion, and fast and easy repetition, as if they’d simply woken up from an eight-year nap in the middle of a set. If anything, the group leans into their garage rock roots a bit more, letting songs spiral out, as on “I’m Far Away”’s scorched guitar solo or the prolonged, slowcore-indebted outro to “Something to Do.”
The band stretches their blend of punk and ethereal pop the farthest on the uncharacteristically slow-building “Lonely Girl,” where a muted kick drum hits like a resting heartbeat as layers build around it. And then, after two minutes of long vowels and drawn-out sentences, the song picks up steam, as if the band chugs a Red Bull each time Cassie repeats the titular phrase. By the end, they sound like a train running out of track: “No you can’t come here,” Ramone sings, louder and gnarlier, before putting her foot down—“No! Cuz I’m a lonely girl.” It sounds like a breakdown, a tantrum, a moment of clarity—and then, as if nothing had happened, it fades into washed vocal melodies, and then into silence.
There are missteps, a risk on most punk albums that run north of 10 songs. The seesaw vocals that open “Mistake” are a bit too short of breath, like a child fervently reciting a playground rhyme. The longest song on the record, “All Your Promises,” pushes the band’s capacity for extended psych-rock jams to its limit with a four-minute, free-wheeling outro. But those indulgences are forgivable, even understandable, on an album that feels like a triumphant return. And seen through the frame of the critics they’ve outlived, who often interpreted their use of distortion pedals as amateur musicianship, the extra time spent on riffs seems like an abrasive “fuck you.”
On their last pre-breakup album, 2011’s Share the Joy, Vivian Girls’ lyrics seemed mired in the heightened politics of blog-rock, with long spoken-word intros mocking their “girl group” status. On Memory, there’s a clarity and intensity to Ramone’s songwriting that leaves little room for gimmicks, employing the earnestness that made the Brooklyn DIY scene such a refreshing break from the coy art rock of early 2000s Manhattan. Despondency is a running theme, but more specifically, the album homes in on the quiet despair that comes with the passage of time—an ex-lover remarking that Ramone looks different, old wrongs that can’t be righted, driving drunk because God gets us all in the end. The anxiety that plagues Ramone runs deep—she’s itching to crawl out of her skin, screaming that nobody loves her; coming from a musician who admittedly agonized over harsh criticism in the past, it’s almost daring to admit to the level of self-hatred she does here. But wrapped in Vivian Girls’ dusty, rose-colored melodies, the anxiety goes down easy.
Up until the release of Memory, the band’s arc followed that of their namesake: The Story of the Vivian Girls, the magnum opus of reclusive outsider artist Henry Darger. His stories and illustrations were completed at night; no one knew of his prolific output until they were discovered by his landlord shortly before his death. And while the Vivian Girls of certainly received recognition during their active years, it was only after their breakup that fans started to see their work as something greater, more representative of big questions about the state of rock music. After everything they’ve been through, Vivian Girls prefer to live on the outside.

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The veteran improviser creates a virtual quartet indebted to classical minimalism and avant-garde guitar ensembles, sculpting multitracked figures into complex systems.

Music for Four Guitars

Bill Orcutt’s career has been as winding as his approach to the guitar. Formerly of the Miami noise group Harry Pussy, he has played free improv with musicians like percussionist Chris Corsano, recorded a string of solo guitar records, and even coded open-source software. On Music for Four Guitars, he takes another new direction. It’s a rigidly structured quartet for multitracked electric guitars that weaves tiny rhythmic phrases into expansive tapestries, drawing on the tenets of early minimalism and New York guitar groups like Glenn Branca Ensemble, and adding bluesy riffs and taut, distorted tones to the mix.
Orcutt was inspired to create a guitar quartet a few years ago after a conversation with guitarist Larry Manotta. While that project never manifested in its original form, Orcutt held on to the thought of one day writing for an ensemble, an idea that eventually became Music for Four Guitars. Orcutt plays all four parts on each song, and while all 14 tracks are relatively short—just two or three minutes apiece—they grow into intricate, brightly hued lattices that feel much more expansive than their relative brevity might suggest.
The songs unfold in similar ways: Short melodic fragments accrue in layers to form a web of earworms. Each track grows from a single phrase into an interwoven network in which each motif is in conversation with the others. Orcutt’s structures are indebted to minimalism’s interest in the way that repeated figures, when echoed and entwined, can transform over time. In its relentless drive and emphasis on repetition, it’s reminiscent of pieces like Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint or Philip Glass’ Two Pages. But while this general pattern reappears throughout Music for Four Guitars, it doesn’t become monotonous—instead, Orcutt brings a kinetic, improvisatory spirit to his pieces.
Despite the music’s meticulousness, it’s the moments where Orcutt throws in twists and turns—and leans into sharp distortion—that make it feel alive. Tracks like “In profile” begin with a simple, oscillating melody and grow into a maze of tangled dissonance. Here, instead of letting pieces snap together like a jigsaw puzzle, Orcutt leans into tension, letting lines collide and harmonies crunch. Elsewhere, his pursuit of the drone takes him to some far-flung places: The clanging “Only at Dusk” recalls the hypnotic expanses of no wave, while the trills of “On the Horizon” might suggest Tuareg desert blues.
While stern, pummeling loops serve as the album’s backbone, it still takes some unexpected turns. “In the rain” beams like a ray of sunshine with its bouncy, folksy air, while closer “Or head on” sends the album off in a rainbow of colors with radiant strums. The rigorous patterning of early minimalist composition is just a starting point for the snakelike paths Orcutt ends up taking. At its heart, this music might be all about structure, but it’s also about listening to patterns evolve, celebrating the journey that leads wherever the music wants to go.


On his best mixtape yet, the Southern rapper offers introspective street rap, free-flowing punchlines, and youthful swagger, moving beyond the Gucci and Boosie comparisons to find a voice of his own.

Lil B.I.G. Pac

Nineteen-year-old Florida rapper Kodak Black has always been blessed with a slurred, frog-like croak—though he’s had trouble differentiating himself from similarly drawling Southern forefathers like Boosie Badazz and Gucci Mane. After making a splash with two viral hits, “No Flockin” and “SKRT,” he released three good-not-great mixtapes, all of them overlong and generally indistinguishable from many of his contemporaries. His latest tape, Lil B.I.G. Pac—recently released on his birthday as the young rapper sits behind bars—fixes this. It's punchier; the themes are weightier; the emotional range is more dynamic. And it finds Kodak Black sounding like nobody but himself.
On the tape, Kodak offers a highly pleasurable mix of introspective, gripping street rap, free-flowing punchlines, youthful swagger, and even hints of an old soul. Though Gucci Mane and Boosie appear as guests, their presence does not lead to shallow comparisons; rather than being a copycat, Kodak is now living up to their legacies. His flow snakes its way through Southern-fried productions with a sleepy effervescence, where he drops punchlines and subtle turns of phrase with a Gucci-like sensibility: “Grinding for a mil’ and I ain’t talking ‘bout a combo/My mama need a crib, I been thinking ‘bout a condo,” he offers on mission statement “Everything 1K.” Oftentimes, food-based imagery lands the hardest: “Drop two ounces of codeine in my Minute Maid,” or “I be on that Little Ceasars shit, hot and ready,” or, on the buoyant, bristling “Today,” he raps, “I might lace the birthday cake with molly.”
But it’s the thoughtful, throwback street raps that linger after the party has ended. On crawling summer anthem “Can I,” Kodak oozes pathos over a gorgeous beat co-produced by Honorable C.N.O.T.E. and Derelle Rideout: “Can I ball, can I chill? Can I stunt? Will I live long enough to raise my son?” Though he’s rapped like this before, the potent combo of his laconic delivery and his natural voice has never sounded so affecting.
Penultimate track “Letter” twists a few new wrinkles into the idea of a hip-hop song written from the perspective of someone in prison: The first verse finds Kodak reflecting on a letter he receives while in jail, while the second sounds like the note itself. It’s a nuanced portrait of camaraderie, and by voicing his own feelings against the backdrop of what his friend is writing to him, the track illustrates the wistfulness and uncertainty of two young people living their lives apart. Kodak says fondly, “He remember them times going on them missions/Say he for real, he reminiscing.” Then later, from the other perspective: “You my lil nigga forever, just keep your head up.” In just about two and a half minutes, Kodak weaves the story, and you gain the full picture of friends struggling to stay afloat, drifting from jail to a tempestuous street life. It’s a disarming emotional display from someone so young.
However, much like his stellar collaboration with French Montana earlier this year, “Lock Jaw,” it’s Kodak’s ability to keep up on any beat while flexing his lyricism and unique flow that makes him a compelling artist. This is evident on single “Vibin in this Bih,” where he handily floats atop a frisky instrumental. “Hittin’ licks, now I’m dropping hits, mouthpiece cost a brick,” he raps on the track, before Gucci responds, “Walk around the club like I walked around the yard.” It’s telling that Kodak is one of a handful of rappers Gucci has worked with following his recent release from prison; he sees the talent and vision in this kid. And with Lil B.I.G. Pac, that vision is clearer than ever.