The product of lockdown recording and late-night walks through London, the Bloc Party frontman’s fifth solo album is as low-key and eccentric as he’s ever sounded.

The Waves Pt. 1

In 1984, London’s Bronski Beat rejected the industry’s ideas about which in-your-face marketing tactics could be applied to a trio of working-class gay men. Instead, they crafted “Smalltown Boy,” a kitchen-sink drama about a bullied outsider who flees home but never gives up his dignity. Kele Okereke’s serene cover of the synth-pop classic suits him impeccably. Tucked away toward the end of the longtime Bloc Party frontman’s fifth solo album, The Waves, Pt. I, it certainly isn’t the first beatless reimagination of a dancefloor favorite, “Smalltown Boy” included. But from a Black, gay artist whose intersecting identities were once either high-mindedly downplayed or frustratingly over-emphasized (“From 2004 to 2006, in every interview I was asked what it felt like to be a black musician making indie music,” he has said), this tender rendition feels personal. It’s also exquisite and unexpectedly raw, all aching falsetto and reverberating guitar textures.
Perhaps the pandemic-era timing was just right. Although Kele’s willingness to go for grand gestures has always endeared him, over the years that ambitious approach has seemed to yield diminishing returns. The Waves, Pt. I stands apart, the product of lockdown recording and late-night walks through London as the stay-at-home father of two passed time posting guitar covers on Instagram. Half lyric-based and half instrumental, built out of only guitar, piano, and voice, it’s as low-key and eccentric as Kele has ever sounded.
On its own introspective terms, The Waves, Pt. I is audacious, even poetic—a quiet room to the blaring clubs of Kele’s early electro-pop solo albums. Informed by Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, and Glenn Branca, the instrumentals are thoughtful showcases for the fluid guitar playing Kele more typically reserves for Bloc Party albums. For the first time, that guitar is heavily treated through loops and his home collection of effects pedals, evidenced in the crystal lattices and churning undercurrents of opener “Message From the Spirit World.” Next to “Smalltown Boy,” the song-based originals are more like sketches, often blending spoken word with Kele’s plaintive moan to create a sense of solitary ambience. As the world struggles to move past the last year and a half, Kele’s reflections on relationship drama, headline fatigue, and sleeping aids feel refreshingly true-to-life.
The racial justice themes of 2019’s cluttered 2042 are more restrained here, but Kele’s rage and sadness are all the more eloquent without overt sloganeering, and even without words. “The Patriots,” a brief but potent instrumental, builds layers of guitars into gnashing convulsions that unmistakably communicate this second-generation immigrant’s dread about right-wing nationalism on the march. More often, though, the instrumental-leaning tracks offer solace from the turbulent world outside Kele’s home and headphones. “The Heart of the Wave,” his starting point for making the record, is a meditative tangle that recalls Vini Reilly’s loveliest work as the Durutti Column. “Intention” combines the sort of mindful field-recording exercise you might expect from Cassandra Jenkins and the dystopian new age calm of Oneohtrix Point Never.
Even the “proper” songs are idiosyncratic mood pieces. The half-spoken “They Didn’t See It Coming” is like a travelogue set in London during the turbulence that followed the murder of George Floyd; Kele observes broken storefronts and wild foxes as cooly as Jonathan Richman might talk about Kenmore Square. “Nineveh,” a piano-based breakup anthem that is among the album’s highlights (“You said, ‘Boys like me don’t just grow on trees’/But lately I’ve been thinking all about the evergreens,” Kele croons sweetly), gives about half its runtime to expressive guitar pyrotechnics reminiscent of a ’70s Brian Eno production. A bouncy springtime guitar on “How to Beat a Lie Detector” belies a crushing tale of grown-up romantic problems: “Just promise not to ask, it’s best that you don’t know,” he implores.
The Waves, Pt. 1’s warts-and-all looseness isn’t without the requisite warts. There are lyrical clunkers—“A deal is a deal/To take it back is to steal,” Kele intones on another melancholy reverie, “From a Place of Love”—and the instrumentals can seem slight (are the spiky arpeggios of “Dragoness” a little too ephemeral?). When Kele’s familiar voice leaps all over the limits of its range, songs like “The One Who Held You Up” take on a stagey quality. But overall, The Waves, Pt. 1 is a mid-career detour worth indulging. The left-of-center UK rock veteran sounds better here than he has at least since the best songs on 2017’s folksy Fatherland, his previous no-frills record. But this time Kele also sounds free. As he calls out at the end of the airy, vulnerable bonus track, “Cradle You,” “It’s time to rise.”

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Action Bronson's major-label debut Mr. Wonderful feels like a rejection of the idea that a major-label debut needs to be a no-nonsense statement to be remembered for decades.

Mr. Wonderful

In rap music, the album has become a hurdle. You can count on one hand the rappers who can accomplish the following two feats: getting a label to release an album, and having that album be good enough that fans aren’t imagining the ways in which it could have been more like the artist’s previous—usually more unfettered and pure—work. In the increasingly fraught journey from underground to mainstream, no time is more uncertain than when mixtapes and EPs must finally become an album. You get one or maybe two shots to prove your staying—and earning—power before your resources get shifted to the next dude with a few radio hits or a small but growing fanbase. It is a grim and unfair reality, and on his major label debut album Mr. Wonderful, Queens jester Action Bronson more or less flips his middle finger at it—an admirable response, though ultimately unsuccessful.
Consider that the first time we hear Bronson’s voice, he is singing in an exaggerated off-key warble. The song falls apart twice, with Bronson cursing that he can't get his vocals right. The moment feels like a rejection of the idea that a major-label debut needs to be a no-nonsense statement to be remembered for decades. In theory, this approach would be refreshing, and if any rapper could let the attendant album pressure roll right off his back, it’s Bronson, who inhabits a character whose reality bares little resemblance to his—or our—own. Yet those atonal vocals end up feeling like a warning sign that Bronson is not going to upend the way rappers make their debut albums. Instead, it turns out, he’s just going to derail his own.
Those nagging vocals—the kind of singing you do to momentarily piss off your significant other—not only embody the spirit of the album, but they conveniently highlight exactly when and where Mr. Wonderful falls apart. After an opening handful of tracks that sound reliably like Action Bronson songs—with a few noticeably ritzy, retro-soul productions—the album shifts into a suite introduced by "THUG LOVE STORY 2017 THE MUSICAL (Interlude)", a sketch in which an older man sings to Bronson about a lost love who disappeared from the streets.
What follows is a musical of sorts wedged into the gut of the album, with Bronson continuing the story of a runaway girl who has left the protagonist brokenhearted. On "City Boy Blues", Bronson fashions himself as a bluesman, singing and mumbling over a jazz-bar instrumental. Next is "A Light in the Addict", a maudlin and forgettable song made with longtime collaborator Party Supplies that features an unnecessary multiple-minute piano outro. It’s all wrapped up by "Baby Blue", in which Bronson kisses the woman off with those same whining vocals, over a Mark Ronson production that could have fit on an Amy Winehouse album.
This digression is conceptually ambitious, but the execution seems to purposefully undercut the exercise, as if the suite was the result of an argument between a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other about what the album should accomplish that was won by neither. When Chance the Rapper shows up at the end of "Baby Blue" with a verse of playfully inconsequential insults—"I hope every soda you drink already shaken up," "I hope the zipper on your jacket get stuck"—before admitting he hopes his heartbreaker is still happy, he pulls off in half a minute what Bronson couldn’t in fifteen: using an imagined story to reveal humanity through humor.
Bronson, it should be noted, has hit that note before. "THUG LOVE STORY 2017 THE MUSICAL (Interlude)" is a callback to "Thug Love Story 2012", a standout from his still-excellent mixtape Blue Chips. That song was connected to the multi-character track "Hookers at the Point", inspired by the HBO documentary of the same name, in which Bronson rapped in different voices from the points of view of a pimp, prostitute and john, in the process showing that he could consider and illuminate the world outside of his own head. Those two songs felt almost effortless in their construction, while the suite inside Mr. Wonderful feels at once belabored and half-assed.
From there, the album closes with a whimper. Party Supplies, Bronson’s most reliable partner, is brought back again on "Only in America", a track with a classic-rock guitar riff that feels like an inadequate sequel to the duo’s fantastic jukebox rap trifle "Contemporary Man". A few tracks later, there is a live recording of a meandering new song called "The Passage"—if you can figure out the purpose of its inclusion you will have gotten further than me.
Amidst all this are a few tracks—"Terry", "Actin Crazy", "Galactic Love"—featuring Bronson spitting fantastical bullshit over laidback beats. This is where he is at his most natural, approachable, and likeable, dotting his world-traveling fantasies with the names of gourmet foods. Instead of slicing at convention, Bronson accepts it—bringing himself back to square one, which Mr. Wonderful argues, was a pretty fine place after all.


The divisive Vampire Weekend return with LP number two, and Contra finds them embracing their eccentricities without shame or apology.

Contra

Vampire Weekend’s second album starts with “Horchata,” ostensibly a punching bag for people who didn’t like their first one. Singer Ezra Koenig rhymes “horchata” with “balaclava,” while keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij arranges the song around the polite plinks of marimbas. It’s a sweatless calypso, buttoned-up and breezy. So, of course, haters will still find plenty to hate about Contra, and they’ll hate it with vigor. Meanwhile, Vampire Weekend sound like they’ve fallen in love with what they started and are hugging it tight without shame or apology.
Considering the ferocious objections to Vampire Weekend’s self-titled debut, “Horchata,” and the rest of Contra, is brave music. It’s like they’ve spent the past two years building a bionic version of the band—not only brighter and tighter, but weirder. The group nurtures its eccentricities and the result is a record full of them: Ezra’s stretchy, dynamic voice; Rostam’s fussy but colorful arrangements, packed with lots of orchestral confetti; and a sound that spans an increasingly multicultural array of genres, from American synth-pop to reggae, ska, calypso and Afropop. By comparison, Vampire Weekend sounds monochromatic and restrained.
In terms of vanguard indie bands, this makes them more digestible than Dirty Projectors but also more exciting than the relentlessly sophisticated Grizzly Bear. But Vampire Weekend also outsold both those bands. Their music was optioned for major-motion-picture soundtracks. They played Letterman, and Letterman didn’t passively mock them. Ezra Koenig sang with Fucked Up. Later, they were in Vogue. They’re a cross-cultural, cross-generational new indie band. Contra’s most sellable song, “Giving Up the Gun,” is more polished than Vampire Weekend’s, but its many stranger ones are more imaginative than anything on their debut. Considering Contra is only their second album, they’re in an enviable position: semi-popular and sincerely idiosyncratic.
Contra works because of its juxtapositions—of natural sounds to processed ones; of manners to tantrums; of party rhythms to deadpan poetry; of Black music to white music. “Diplomat’s Son” samples M.I.A. and features an 8-bit interpolation of Toots and the Maytals’ “Pressure Drop” amidst characters getting stoned and falling asleep in unfamiliar houses. Almost every song on the album is this rich and this delirious. And for listeners with an aversion to richness or delirium, the band still plays sweet melodies with a light touch.
Vampire Weekend’s willingness to take cues from a variety of styles makes them thoughtful musicians, but it’s the styles they draw from that makes them contemporary. Ezra Koenig once said that his clean guitar tone was a reaction to being force-fed grunge as a preteen, but he was also entering puberty when No Doubt was entering the charts, and when ska—a sound that originated in Jamaica and became working-class British music in the ’80s—became a renewed phenomenon at teen centers across the New York metro area. Rostam Batmanglij’s side project, Discovery, was an R&B album made on synths and sequencers—which, by 2009, was another synonym for “indie rock.” Adopting what they adopt and rejecting what they reject might make Vampire Weekend look like pretenders, but they’re not—they’re reactionaries.
Then again, these contradictions, passions, and superficialities are what the band seems to be thinking about—and what Koenig has gotten sharper about writing into his lyrics. These lines don’t scan as being about privilege or money, but about people struggling with their social status, something that everyone—college-educated or not, rich or poor, people who hate Vampire Weekend and people who don’t—does at some point. (Though, as Pitchfork editor Scott Plagenhoef pointed out in 2008, the band’s detractors probably wouldn’t be nearly as hung up on Ezra’s lyrics if the people in Vampire Weekend’s songs—or the people in Vampire Weekend—seemed poor.)
Ezra isn’t writing about college or Northeastern geography anymore (terrific), but the loud nouns are still there. Take “California English”: “Sweet carob rice cakes, you don’t care how the sweets taste/Fake Philly cheesesteak but you use real toothpaste/’Cause if that Tom’s don’t work, if it just makes you worse/Would you still lose all of your faith in the good Earth?” In other words, what if all the products and symbols that gave your life meaning—and status—fell away? What if you replaced the organic toothpaste with Colgate? (Which still “says something” about you, namely “I don’t have the time, inclination, or money to give a shit about toothpaste.”) Would life still look as rosy? Or, roughly, “Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?”
These aren’t ad-copy platitudes about the irrelevance of image—if image didn’t exist, he’d have less to write about. His point is simple: Image is important, but don’t think yours is better than anyone else’s, especially if it’s constructed by things you buy. If Koenig has pity, it’s for people who don’t accept who they are off the runway, like the guy in “Taxi Cab”: “When the taxi door was open wide, I pretended I was horrified, by the uniform and gloves outside of the courtyard gate”—the key word being “pretended.” For a band as superficially calculating and antiseptic as Vampire Weekend, the message is a challenge to accept that these guys—these very polite young East Coasters who grew up with ska, punk, and African pop—are exactly who they say they are.
The album ends with “Diplomat’s Son” and “I Think Ur a Contra,” its two most musically scattered and lyrically opaque songs. “Diplomat's Son”—of the aforementioned M.I.A. sample and reggae breakdown—is six minutes long; “Contra” fades to the sound of hand drums and acoustic guitars. On an album marked by ambitious, knotty lyrics, Koenig ends with the lines, “Never pick sides, never choose between two, but I just wanted you, I just wanted you.” Commitment. Surprising, but it looks beautiful on them.


Balancing refined minimalism with raw takes, the Boston lo-fi songwriter’s latest project is a poetic and intensely personal rumination on selfishness, self-loathing, and self-forgiveness.

Old Blues

Most people don’t know Sean Sprecher’s name—not even his fans. The Boston-based lo-fi singer-songwriter uses fleeting pseudonyms like Sean Bean or Jeff Meff to mask his solo project Bad History Month, itself a twist on Fat History Month, his avant-folk duo. Yet his influence in the New England scene speaks for itself. Bad History Month is the one-man show that snuffs out chatter during a five-band bill. Artists like Sadie Dupuis and Krill offer eager endorsements of his music. Fans recount his lyrics like they’re quoting cult-classic TV characters, be it a sweet-toothed romantic or a guilt-ridden cowboy. His spiraling drum-and-guitar epics wring poetry from psychological breakdowns. But it’s only now, on Old Blues, his seventeenth release and the second full-length Bad History Month album, that Sprecher has revealed his real name. He’s also resigned as his own worst critic to try something new: attempting to forgive himself.
Old Blues began as a concept album about the childhood immaturities we carry into adulthood: selfishness, grudges, confusion that manifests as disapproval. Across seven songs, Bad History Month analyzes previous poor judgements to imagine healthier ones. “Low Hanging Fruit” struggles to fathom others’ lived experiences as being equally real as one’s own. “Childlike Sense of Hatred” uses war (particularly the Israel-Palestine conflict) as a metaphor to explore how anger and lack of empathy fuel arguments. It’s easy to misread Bad History Month songs as misanthropic, but Sprecher knows where and when to come up for air. As he chronicles the evolution of his personal philosophy on “Want Not,” the 15-minute closer that confronts body acceptance and capitalism-induced shame, it’s clear some wounds remain open. But if Bad History Month songs are a way of holding humanity accountable, then Old Blues is Sprecher finding motivation to follow through in his own life. “Why are people terrible?” has become, “How can we fix ourselves?” Perhaps that’s why he finally felt comfortable crediting himself.
Bad History Month’s self-reckoning succeeds because of its musical interplay. “The Road to Good Intentions” matches ruminations on life’s warped chronology with yawning keyboard ambience, a finger-plucked heartbeat, and an unstable tempo that suggest the soundtrack to a time-lapse video. “Childlike Sense of Hatred” flips moods with its lyrics: hesitant, acoustic guitar for hope; blown-out distortion for rage. Recorded with Fat History Month drummer Mark Fede and Dimples member Greg Hartunian, Old Blues is a careful balance of refined minimalism and raw takes, like Jim O’Rourke improvising with the Microphones while journaling.
Old Blues introduces Sprecher as a grounded poet, turning his usual Bad History Month quips into curt yet detailed sentiments. Each song stems from Sprecher’s low-stakes pursuit of his own aspirations, in hopes that maybe he’s not alone in them. In opener “Waste Not,” he’s a whale “beached on the shore of a backward glance,” reminiscing about being a beach ball. Soon after, he recalls he’s neither, singing, “I’d better get to work on learning to improve/And move, and make use of my new limbs.” In these moments, it’s hard not to compare him to Silver Jews’ David Berman. “Everyone looks ugly when they’re close enough to kiss,” Sprecher sings on “A Survey of Cosmic Repulsion,” a song that began as revenge against a neighbor blasting Grateful Dead records but ends up as a rosy reflection on shared love: “Luckily for me, I’m into ugliness.” Old Blues isn’t a pity party for lingering blind spots; it’s a public call to mend them.

Buy: Rough Trade
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For all its detours toward sadness and alienation, death is the real story on Bob Dylan's latest album, very much a record about The End. He's learned, at 71, that death doesn't necessarily come with a lesson, that sometimes it just comes.

Tempest

It seems redundant to apply more adjectives to Bob Dylan's singing voice-- easily the most infamous rasp in American music, a cultivated tangle of disdain and nicotine and bad love-- but it remains the defining characteristic of his work, as essential to his legacy as vowels or the acoustic guitar. Dylan's long-lauded backing band, which has helped define much of his later work, may crank out a first-rate iteration of honky-tonk bar-rock, but it's primarily a canvas. His voice is so unique (even when it's approximating other voices) that I crave it the same way I might crave, say, an apple: It's a thing unlike any other thing, a whole food, a singular expression.
Still, on Tempest, his latest album, Bob Dylan mostly sounds insane. That volatility can yield tremendous rewards-- on the ferocious "Pay in Blood", it clarifies his nihilism, his cruelty-- but it can also be distractingly unruly, inching toward self-mockery, all wild undulation and hairball-retch. Which would be okay-- embraced, even!-- if the rest of Tempest didn't feel so rote. Here it is, again: the gargle, the zinger, the rollicking blues riff. The formula that made Time Out of Mind through Modern Times such a thrilling stretch feels exhausted now, and Dylan relies on his own gruffness as a substitute for real intent; he knows he doesn't have to work very hard to sound present, and so he doesn't, and so he isn't.
Lyrically, he's sharpest when eulogizing mangled relationships ("One time, for one brief day, I was the man for you," he seethes on "Long and Wasted Years"), and the best cuts here are the ones that directly address lingering heartache. On "Soon After Midnight", he speaks to an absent lover: "It's now or never, more than ever/ When I met you, I didn't think you would do/ It's soon after midnight, and I don't want nobody but you," he sings. It's a classic Blood on the Tracks-era barb, vitriol mixed with real longing-- rage and love, rage at love. Likewise, on "Narrow Way", he admits inferiority ("I can't work up to you/ You'll surely have to work down to me someday"), then accuses his girl of certain cruelties ("You broke my heart/ I was your friend 'til now... You got too many lovers").
At just under 14 minutes, the album's epic title track is also its longest (worth noting: It outruns "Desolation Row" (11:20) and "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" (11:22), but not "Highlands" (16:31), Time Out of Mind's sprawling closer), a sober and meandering meditation on the sinking of the Titanic. In the pantheon of grand, gory tragedies, the dismembering of the Titanic via iceberg is a catastrophic entry, sure, but its legend still trumps its carnage, making it worth wondering why Bob Dylan, in particular, would suddenly revisit it a solid century on. In her essay "7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38", Joan Didion, writing both of the Titanic and of Howard Hughes, hints at the inescapable glee of schadenfreude, how we (quietly) relish the beautiful becoming the damned: "Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted," she writes. "How the mighty are fallen."
"Tempest" is based at least in part on "The Titanic" (or "When That Great Ship Went Down"), an old folk song that likely originated around 1915 in Hackleburg, Alabama, and has since been recorded by Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and others. In his notes for the 1997 reissue of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Folkways archivist Jeff Place notes that some African-Americans viewed the Titanic's dissolution as a kind of "divine retribution," given that blacks were resolutely banished from the ship (indeed, the version recorded by William and Versey Smith for the Anthology is conspicuously spirited). Here, though, Dylan is earnest, nearly deferential. It's not schadenfreude, or retribution, or even a social commentary; it's a long, sad, straightforward narrative, complete with a "little crippled child," self-sacrifice, hearts at peace, and a final glug of brandy as the ship slips under. "There is no understanding... the judgment of God's hand," Dylan announces, and I suppose that's as reasonable an explanation as any, although it's also a disappointingly pedestrian conclusion from an artist as acerbic (and populist) as Bob Dylan.
And so it's revealed that death-- mass death, helpless death, inevitable death-- is the real story here, and Tempest, for all its detours toward sadness and alienation, is very much a record about The End. Whom we loved, who failed us, and what it all means in the face of our own inevitable demise. Dylan's long been enamored with Appalachian murder ballads-- those gruesome, Celtic-born parables designed to dissuade potential sinners from indulging their darker whims-- but he's finally learned, at 71, that death doesn't necessarily come with a lesson, sometimes it just comes. Tempest's moving closing track, "Roll on John", a remembrance of John Lennon, suffers from a few flaccid clichés ("You burned so bright!"), but at least Dylan finally sounds engaged, his garbled vocals heavy with sorrow and helplessness. In that sense, it's a fitting coda for an album bogged down with resignation.


This mixtape, released after Durk’s departure from Def Jam, is a minor but effective dispatch from one of Chicago’s most compelling narrators.

Just Cause Y’all Waited

Lil Durk writes about Chicago the way Joan Didion once captured California. In a generation of drill rappers who detail life in his hometown with righteous anger, brutal narratives, and on-the-ground perspective, Durk has distinguished himself with wicked specificity and cutting turns of phrase. His style utilizes elements of memoir, journalism, and fiction to capture life in what he describes as “the trenches.” Like Didion’s, Durk’s words are a lens into a deeply American brand of chaos.
The surprise release of Just Cause Ya’ll Waited comes with the news that Durk has split with Def Jam after a five-year stint. That’s okay—he never looked particularly comfortable in major-label rap star threads, anyway. Pitched as something to tide fans over before his next marquee mixtape, Signed to the Streets 3, it’s a low-stakes affair, but Durk wins by accentuating the strengths that have set him apart from his contemporaries. This is party music that might make you weep. Durk looks backwards to his childhood, to family, and to fallen comrades. He’s a 25-year-old with more burdens than someone his age should be saddled with.
Durk’s songs rarely sketch out fully functioning narratives. Instead, his writing is loaded with rich flourishes and sobering details. On the chorus of “Public Housing” alone, he drops $50k on new clothes, calls out to Allah for guidance, and connects his come-up to past hardships (“I came from public houses to a mansion/I lost my family I was feelin’ stranded”). It’s a song about one of hip-hop’s great absolutes: staying loyal to your roots while pursuing the almighty dollar. Similarly, “Granny Crib” flickers with diamond-sharp detail as Durk gives thanks for his success while remembering childhood nights spent sleeping among cockroaches and days packing pistols to stop him from “being bullied.”
If Durk sounds reflective, it may be because mortality is on his mind. “Crossroads” offers a penetrating analysis of grief. With its caressed piano chords, the song draws instant parallels with 2pac’s “I Ain’t Mad at Cha,” T.I.’s “Live in the Sky,” and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony’s own “Crossroads,” but Durk brings his own deft perspective, saying “I don’t wanna be lonely” in the face of constant loss. Elsewhere, “Instigator” references suicide as he admits, “I feel that pain I thought I’d never feel.” The song ends with Durk trading in his gold Rolexes and trying to get a day job driving a bulldozer.
The backdrop to these musings is a set of beats that lean on rattling hi-hats, shadowy synths, and simple key riffs that the rapper sounds comfortable on, allowing him to test the limits of his voice. Though most of Durk’s delivery comes in a bled-dry, Auto-Tuned style, “Just Flow” is a reminder that he can rap with real fury too. Closing track “My Bruddas,” meanwhile, sounds like a potential single, as Durk’s synthetic voice carries a doomed sense of melody that errs towards Future’s modish sound.
If you’re looking for the mixtape’s weak spot, you’ll find it at its soft center. “Breather,” which features Ty Dolla $ign and PARTYNEXTDOOR, and “Home Body” are sleazy sex jams that are totally fine on the ear; just one would have sufficed. It’s the only wasted motion on Just Cause Ya’ll Waited, which will likely go down as a minor release in Durk’s canon. Even so, this mixtape is a reminder that he’s one of his city’s most compelling correspondents.


Girls Can Tell

Over the past week I've scrapped several quasi-amusing, only-tangentially-related-to-the-topic-at-hand anecdotes that would have served as some sort of introduction to this review. Among them: a tedious explanation about how what I'm learning in grad school about connectionism and neural networking somehow applies to Spoon's songwriting methodology (hint: it really doesn't); a comparison of Spoon to the ugly metallic monstrosities that pass for public sculpture these days; and a tired parody of VH1's "Behind the Music" ("Spoon: They had it all. And then it all came crashing down! But now they're back! Etc."). I ran out of clever metaphors to describe Spoon's music a while ago. In fact, I don't think I've ever really captured in writing what it is about Spoon that I like so much. Their music just seems to possess this attitude that's both fresh and rooted in the origins of rock 'n' roll, an anger that's at once stylish and direct, a compassionate ache that's as oblique as it is palpable. And Girls Can Tell wraps all that is great about Spoon up in a shiny new package.
It's been nearly three years since Spoon's last album, A Series of Sneaks, rocked heads and broke hearts, and even though the band was without a label for most of that time, they forged ahead with the writing and recording of Girls Can Tell anyway. They had more than enough time to get the album sounding just right, and it definitely shows in the finished product. But an open-ended recording schedule has its advantages and disadvantages: Girls Can Tell is more mature and accomplished, but at the expense of the spark of spontaneity.
Fans of Spoon's mannered sloppiness will most likely be taken aback at their new sound, one which is significantly spookier and cleaner-sounding, with more conventionally structured songs. It may be worth noting that John Croslin, who's produced most of Spoon's output to date and may be responsible for the more off-kilter ideas on previous albums, is barely present on this album. Where A Series of Sneaks was a giddy grab bag of intentional loose ends, Girls Can Tell ties those loose ends up, perhaps a bit too neatly. The irony, of course, is that this album sounds much more like a major-label release than Sneaks.
But the "maturing" of Spoon should by no means be a point of contention. No, they no longer sound like the Pixies, Gang of Four or Wire; instead, they sound like Spoon now. And initially, Girls Can Tell sort of feels like a recap of Spoon's brightest spots within their oeuvre, recast in a new light. "Believing is Art" uses the insistent eighth-note rhythm of "30 Gallon Tank"; "Lines in the Suit" recalls the stark living-room production of the "Agony of Laffitte" single; "Fitted Shirt" starts where the one-note riff of "Mountain to Sound" left off; "Anything You Want" hums with the easy melodic brilliance of "I Could See the Dude," or "Metal Detektor," or "Plastic Mylar." The one new addition to their sound is a foggy-midnight moodiness enhanced by mellotron, vibraphone and viola on tracks like "Everything Hits at Once" and "Chicago at Night"; still, this shift in sound was presaged by "Change My Life" off the recent Love Ways EP.
But any perceived straddling of the line between self-cannibalization and self-reference is rendered moot on subsequent listens; these songs not only stand strong on their own, but also complement each other in unexpected ways. The eerie tones floating throughout "Everything Hits at Once" drift into "Believing is Art," where martial rhythms, Britt Daniel's breathless stuttering, and even the jarring fuzz riffs that tear apart the chorus do nothing but build tension until it fades into nothingness. The tension is finally broken with the ringing chords that open "Me and the Bean."
"Lines in the Suit" offers the first solid indication of development within Daniel's lyrics; whereas they were once resolutely abstract and liberally peppered with odd turns of phrase, here, they point toward concrete emotions and situations. Written during the fallout from being dumped from their former label, it's the sound of Britt sitting on his couch, strumming his guitar, staring out the window and wondering, "How come I feel so washed up/ At such a tender age now?"
Daniel may regret some of the decisions he's made in life, but so does everyone else; eventually, he comes around to remembering that while being a rock musician may still be a job, it's still better than real work. Better that than the human resource clerk on her lunch break who says, "It could have been good by now/ It could have been more than a wage." "Fitted Shirt," the most recognizably Spoon-like song on the album, concerns itself with a considerably lighter subject; namely, how Britt wishes that shirts didn't always come in one-size-fits-all proportions.
Of course, there are also songs on Girls Can Tell that are just about, well, girls. And hanging out. And telling off record labels. On the heartbreakingly pretty "Anything You Want," Britt pines for the girl that he knows full well won't work out anyway; on "Take a Walk," he lashes out with a snarling, swaggering blues riff as he spits, "Now that song's been sung/ It's just the cost of what's been done/ The cost of talking a walk with you." "1020 AM" returns to the mooning about, with elegant acoustic guitar and flutelike organ imparting an almost chamber-music-like aura. "Take the Fifth" has nothing better to do than to strut down the strip on a Saturday night, handclaps and tambourine included.
Girls Can Tell slithers to a rather downbeat conclusion with "This Book is a Movie," a rather incidental instrumental number that wants to build tension as effectively as "Believing is Art," but doesn't quite get there; and "Chicago at Night," where the desolate guitar twang seems to dissolve into a cloud of smoke. It's an ending that seems to echo the uncertainty of Spoon's existence over the last few years, as if the continuation of the band is still somehow in question. While Spoon definitely shows signs of life on this album, it's also clear that their more negative experiences have changed them irrevocably. It's not necessarily a qualitatively good or bad change, it's just change.
Digging deeper into Girls Can Tell, I get the feeling that Spoon is trying to reconcile their distinctive tics with deeper traditions of rock. They've always seemed like an indie rock band with a rock 'n' roll soul, and here, they're trying to lose some of their outward quirkiness and just be a rock band. But they'll never sound like just another rock band; some of their peculiarities are so engrained in their sound that they stick out even more here: the deceptively simple-sounding drum patterns, the combinations of succinct riffs that somehow miraculously fit together just so, and of course, Britt Daniel's voice, which if were up to me would be ranked as one of the classic voices in rock. It's a great thing, hearing a band grow up without losing sight of what made them so vital in the first place; and seeing as how Girls Can Tell might not have ever seen the light of day, it makes it even better. It's worth cherishing.


Braid's first album in 16 years is suprisingly strong. This is precisely the kind of album you’d expect out of Braid if they kept going after Frame & Canvas and learned how to adjust with age.

No Coast

The first Braid album in 16 years ends with a song called “This Is Not a Revolution” and man...it’s hard to resist tweaking its title to comment on its surrounding circumstances, i.e., “this is not a revival.” Or, in the case of Braid themselves, “this is not a reunion.” It’s been called one for understandable reasons. So many of their peers have gotten the band back together recently and the excitement of seeing American Football or Mineral for the first time since the late 1990s might lead you to overlook Braid having played Fun Fun Fun Fest in 2012 or a couple of gigs in 2004. Or maybe it’s just that their 2011 EP Closer to Closed is better off being forgotten. It was a Braid release in name alone—one cover and three nondescript, tentative Braid originals made less because they wanted or needed to, but because they could. The one lyric I remember was fitting: “I want a do over.” Consider No Coast a promise kept.
No Coast doesn't pick up where Frame & Canvas left off. It doesn't sound like a band in their mid-20s, though you could hear the antsy, arms-akimbo “Put Some Wings on That Kid” and “Lux” as an effort by Braid to show they’re still capable of playing songs from their under-appreciated second album The Age of Octeen. Rather, this is precisely the kind of album you’d expect out of Braid if they kept going after Frame & Canvas and learned how to adjust with age. Unlike Closer to Closed, No Coast retains an identifiable Braid-ness, the knotty musicianship that subsequent offshoot Hey Mercedes untangled and straightened—the sudden stops and cuts, vocals in friendly competition, an active, inventive rhythm section that never calls attention to its trickery. Singer Bob Nanna was hoping people would consider Braid as a forerunner and a peer of You Blew It! and A Great Big Pile of Leaves, and you can definitely hear where their new label-mates got some of their moves.
But the new guys operate at full speed; Braid don’t have the athleticism or explosiveness of their earlier days, but in a Tim Duncan way, they’re craftier, better about picking their spots. “Bang” and the title track showcase Braid’s rhythmic double clutches, their pivots after sudden silence in more methodical, midtempo ways, patiently working towards conventionally pleasing codas. Other times, Braid just goes straight for the big, alt-rock chorus, as “East End Hollows” and “Damages!” show Chris Broach channeling his agitation into legitimate, singalong (not shout-along) hooks. His vocals have developed a high, Mark Hoppus nasality, which has the occasionally unfortunate effect of stressing some of No Coast’s too-cute lyrical puns. But it plays wells with the more measured and mature Nanna. While they maintain the exuberance of having too much to say at the same time, the two vocalists are less likely to topple over each other; check the one-man give-and-go on “Many Enemies”, or the pick-and-roll performed during the bridge of “East End Hollows”. In fact, on a song-by-song basis, No Coast is actually more consistent than Frame & Canvas, though it wants for something as scene-defining as “The New Nathan Detroits”.
But maybe they’re in a position define an entire new “scene”, or at least a demographic. With the exception of Lifetime’s 2007 self-titled return, I’m not sure if there’s much precedent for artists from this world making such a strong statement in their late-30s as the same band. And so No Coast is an inspired record for a very tangible reason that goes beyond associating with an in-demand producer (Will Yip) and a hip new label: Braid have taken stock of their own lives as unintentional elder statesmen and treat it as worthwhile subject matter.
“Light Crisis” begins with an old recording from Nanna’s grandfather, while “Put Some Wings on That Kid” obliquely references the adoptee’s recent discovery of his birth parents. But such direct, autobiographical details are less frequent that the generational resonance found in the title track’s opening line: “No coast/ Is how I feel the most/ In the middle, a little invisible, the ghost.” The title of No Coast was intended as positive reinforcement for the band, and it’s also indicative of a spiritual displacement, of being overlooked and at the same time, not quite sure if you're confident enough to be looked at. Two of the first three songs contain the line, “This is the life,” most notably in “No Coast”: “This is the life we chose”. That life being one that hasn’t gotten Nanna or Broach much separation from the scene and people who might refer to Braid as “legendary” or Frame & Canvas as a “classic”; they probably get recognized in bars, have some nice email exchanges and the occasional shout out from an up-and-coming band. But these aren’t the sort of things that would satisfy the nagging parent in “The New Nathan Detroits,” the one asking them if all of this will ever compare to a house, kids, and everything else that seemed for the taking for a band of Braid’s ilk right before emo's commercial breakthrough.
Nanna spends a lot of time in that "middle" he speaks of, not quite domesticated, but not young and untamed either; when he calls himself a "runaway train" on "Bang", it sounds like an admission of being set in one's ways rather than out of control. No Coast is very, very Chicago in both sound and spirit (specific streets are name-dropped on “Light Crisis”), though in Nanna and Broach’s lyrics, you’d think it was the world’s biggest college town and any given day can be a class reunion that allows you to feel the same twinge of warm nostalgia and cold reality of time moving forwards. “East End Hollows” initially sounds laudatory, Broach dreaming of “drunk lust and punk love” and reveling in a DIY spirit where “happiness is in the doing, in the making.” The catchiest song on No Coast is the most conflicted as well, as Broach notes the false sense that happiness is also tied up in the gossip of “who knows who and what happened” and bars where diehards balance “Another drink/ Another lifetime of regret.” The chorus “You take these dreams and throw them out the window” can sound like a command rather than a lament, of Broach try to live the ideals of “no coast” surrounded by people who aren’t doing shit besides resting on their laurels.
But there’s no bitterness in No Coast, just perspective and empathy for those who actively seek to follow in their path. Nanna understands the inherent, nostalgic pull of listening to Braid in the first place and his lyrics often follow suit; he’s wishing for his bucket of old tricks in “Damages!” and grapples with young love transitioning into suburban comfort on “Pre-Evergreen". Meanwhile Broach laments faded friendship on “Many Enemies” and marvels at the blind energy of youth of “Doing Yourself In”. Or at least that’s what I hear; Nanna and Broach are more careful about choosing their words as well and while No Coast is always emotive, it’s open-ended and serves to point out that for many, the “emo” established by Braid and their ilk and sought after by their fans constitutes a set of musical values as defined and worthwhile as “post-punk” or “house”. Nanna expressed that he wanted No Coast to be “exciting and vital for people that aren’t in their late 30s,” and those who’ll check it out simply because it’s on Topshelf won't be let down. But if you're a Frame & Canvas lifer who's made a home and put the kids in their beds, No Coast lets you know the great mistakes to make and chances to take are still out there.


Like Celtic Frost before them, Black Anvil find ways to summon profound darkness without tapping into black-metal clichés. Their latest ebbs and flows with effortless grace.

As Was

When Black Anvil covered the obscure KISS ballad “Under the Rose” as a deluxe bonus track for their last album, 2014’s Hail Death, it drove home the point that no influence was off limits. Choosing that song—which hails from the one album where the otherwise hedonistic KISS tried their hand at a weighty concept—effectively worked as a declaration of Black Anvil’s contrarian streak. Moreover, rather than give “Under the Rose” a predictably harsh makeover, Black Anvil more or less opted to preserve its original form, which alternates between delicate acoustic guitar-driven verses and a chorus that weds chunky hard-rock guitar with moody grandeur.
On paper, it was a splashy move. But the truth is that the KISS cover fits right in with the rest of Hail Death, which captures the New York black metal outfit taking risks right from the opening note. At that stage, after two albums of full-on heaviness, Black Anvil were starting to infuse their blackened thrash with influences that, by comparison, fall close to pedestrian ’80s hair metal. Somehow, though, they made all the elements on Hail Death fit together—which isn’t quite as surprising when you consider that, as New York hardcore veterans, Black Anvil hold Twisted Sister in the same esteem as Bad Brains and the Cro-Mags.
On their new album As Was, Black Anvil remain as willing as ever to stretch, but it takes more patience to see their range this time. The eight-minute opening number “On Forgotten Ways” contains plenty of twists and turns, but other than some melodic vocals, it doesn't introduce any new expressions to the band's palette. When you compare those clean vocals to similar phrasing by say, Charlie Looker of Psalm Zero, Black Anvil sound like they’re running with a pack rather than striking out on their own. And when frontman/bassist Paul Delaney screeches, he hits so close to Carcass frontman Jeff Walker you have to wonder if Delaney is doing an homage.
It isn’t until the third and title track that the album suddenly opens up. Where many black metal acts overplay their hand when it comes to mood, resulting in exaggerated, even comical, attempts at drama, Black Anvil make a genuine appeal to the emotions as the title track ebbs and flows, its heavy buildups placed ever-so-carefully in relation to serene sections where acoustic guitars function as so much more than just unplugged electrics. Songs like this usually expose bands as trying too hard, but “As Was” unfolds with effortless grace.
Going even further on “Nothing,” Black Anvil follow a smoky keyboard section worthy of Yes artist Roger Dean with a highway-bound rook groove reminiscent of shredding icon Joe Satriani’s “Summer Song.” The band even channels its inner David Lynch with the eerie twang that introduces “Two Keys: Here’s the Lock.” Such moves might carry a whiff of ironic perversion if they didn't blend in so well.
Like Celtic Frost before them, Black Anvil conjure a profound darkness that isn't necessarily rooted in hatefulness or negativity. It’s been a long, long time since Satan became for black metal what cars and sex are to rock’n’roll, and Black Anvil don't even directly refer to the devil on As Was. Instead, they repeatedly address the presence of vaguely supernatural entities they refer to only as “he” and “she”—“She speaks to me/I can hear her faintly/She whispers, she screams/a name unspoken” Delaney sings on “May Her Wrath Be Just.”
“On Forgotten Ways” refers to a “beast” that “writhes in agony/Beside me, within me/A part of me.” The lyrics never have to get overly specific to make it clear that Black Anvil are channeling real-life struggles. In that way, As Was aims far beyond the sophomoric black-metal fare that uses Satan as a way of saying “fuck you” to world. And while the interpretation is left to the listener, Black Anvil manage to be thoroughly convincing with As Was, an album whose lyrical opacity strengthens the versatility of the music, and vice-versa.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Photek’s 1997 debut, a breathtaking, transcendent drum’n’bass album that changed the language and landscape of the genre.

Modus Operandi

The kid had been standing in the corner of the record store for a good while, soaking up the sound of the jungle 12"s spinning on the shop’s turntables, when he approached the counter with a puzzled observation. “I’ve been listening for half an hour,” he said to the shopkeeper, “and every tune’s got the same drums.”
It would have been easy to scoff at the comment, to write it off as the uninformed perspective of a newbie—it was, after all, the early 1990s—or the opinion of a cloth-eared contrarian. How many times have electronic music fans heard a similar gripe? It all sounds alike. Every song has the same beat. I’ve been listening to this DJ for half an hour and I don’t think he’s changed the record once.
Put yourself in the clerk’s shoes and you might imagine responding with a heavy sigh, If you’re looking for an Oasis record, HMV is across the street. Or maybe, more charitably: Mate, that’s the way jungle is supposed to sound. Here’s a Reinforced comp and a rave flyer—come talk to me next week.
But recalling the exchange a few years later, the man behind the counter that day—Rupert Parkes, better known as the celebrated drum’n’bass savant Photek—had a different reaction. “I couldn’t really argue with that, it was true!” he told Muzik magazine in 1996. “Everyone uses the same breaks. It’s very rare to find a new break which is really worth using. They’re drying up. It’s like oil, it’s not going to go on forever, so you’ve got to look for alternative sources.”
Parkes certainly seemed like someone who had discovered a game-changing new power supply. He had a critically acclaimed EP, The Hidden Camera, under his belt, along with a freshly signed five-album deal with Virgin that would soon take the 24-year-old producer from St Albans, 20 miles northwest of London, to a seat behind the wheels of a series of sports cars (Lotus Elan, Ferrari 348, Porsche Carrera S) in quick succession. If the ubiquitous breakbeats then clogging up record bins were the equivalent of fossil fuels—archaic, polluting, the stuff of dead dinosaurs—Photek’s 1997 debut LP, Modus Operandi, would appear to be powered by something more like cold fusion: a breathtaking, mind-bending rhythmic force that seemed to defy the laws of physics.
Jungle had reached peak breakbeat remarkably fast. The genre had only been around for a couple of years, the latest step in a rapid-fire evolution that had begun with the arrival of American house and techno upon the UK’s shores in the mid-to-late 1980s. When rave culture took off, British dance music was a hodgepodge of inputs: Black American house and techno; vintage soul, disco, and rare groove; Belgian and Italian house; Jamaican dub and reggae; and—crucially—hip-hop, both American originals and Brit imitations.
Working with rudimentary samplers and Atari computers, UK producers molded cut-up loops of funk records like the Winstons’ “Amen, Brother” and Lyn Collins and James Brown’s “Think (About It)” into the backbone of British dance music. The acid-house derivative called hardcore was a form of collage, essentially, cutting up choice bits from other sources—hip-hop records, house anthems, children’s television shows—and Frankensteining them into ragtag beasts held together by looped breakbeats. In the first few years of the ’90s, as hardcore’s riotous, anything-goes energy gradually channeled into the controlled rush of the sound known as jungle, a select few breaks got used over and over, becoming part of the genre’s lingua franca.
The limited pool of breakbeats was part of what made jungle so dynamic: Producers were forced to make do with what they had. Working against the limitations of the era’s primitive digital technology, they found novel ways of slicing and dicing up the drums. Stuttering, repeating, reversing. Kinking up the syncopation, adding filters or reverb to individual hits. Combining different breaks so that drummers in different rooms and different years were suddenly jamming together. Breakbeat science cut across the temporal and spatial planes, no more so than when Goldie’s Rufige Cru pioneered the concept of time-stretching—that is, changing the pitch of a sample without changing its tempo, or vice versa—on the 1992 single “Terminator.” The title was a reference to the Arnold Schwarzenegger film about an assassin sent from the future—the perfect conceit for a song that split open the rules of space-time with the express purpose of laying wreckage to the dancefloor.
Jungle’s early years gave way to an arms race in audio technology and studio know-how; producers vied to outdo one another as they concocted progressively more elaborate iterations of the same hoary breaks. By the middle of the ’90s, the genre was splitting in different directions. A group of artists with roots in Jamaican soundsystem culture invented ragga jungle. Another faction coalesced around the rugged aggression of the “Amen” break, with its battered and bloodied snares. (In Ben Marcus and Carl Loben’s 2021 history Renegade Snares: The Resistance and Resilience of Drum & Bass, the techstep producer Optical called 1995 “an Amen-chopping nightmare—everywhere you went, there were ten thousand Amen snares.”) Still another crew, led by the bespectacled LTJ Bukem, was moving in a mellower direction, pairing smooth, rolling rhythms with jazzy keys and new-age imagery. Goldie, one of the scene’s leading figures, was aiming outward: The eponymous opening track of his 1995 debut, Timeless, was a 21-minute suite that encompassed all the grandiose sprawl of progressive rock—part rave epic, part planetarium laser show.
Photek didn’t fall into any of these camps, even if he had allegiances across many of them. In 1997, Parkes told Muzik, “When jungle split, I was standing in the middle, so I stayed where I was.” In fact, he turned inward, directing his attention not to the broad sweep of the cosmos but the molecular makeup of his percussion, every beat a scale model of whirling subatomic particles.
Before he was an atom-smashing breakbeat physicist, Rupert Parkes was just another teenager raving in darkened warehouses. He had grown up on a mix of hip-hop, soul, funk, and reggae. But around 1989, as he listened to late-night broadcasts emanating from nearby pirate transmitters, he began hearing bits and pieces of his favorite music jumbled together into rough-hewn, hyperkinetic new forms. Gradually, the common denominator of these unruly hybrids came into focus: the breakbeat.
Parkes’ first raves—London’s Telepathy, in the industrial hinterlands of Marshgate Lane, where he witnessed Jumpin’ Jack Frost dropping blistering acid house and hardcore, and then Labyrinth in Dalston Lane—were trials by fluid: So much sweat dripped from the warehouse ceilings, he thought someone had spit on him. But the experience was addictive. After moving to the town of Ipswich, 85 miles northeast of London, in 1992, he poured his savings into a Roland W-30 sampling keyboard and spent the next six months deciphering its secrets. When he wasn’t squinting into the machine’s minuscule LED screen and saving samples onto floppy disks, he was hanging around Ipswich’s Essential Selection, a record shop whose owner, Rob Solomon, had begun banging out his own breakbeat hardcore records under the alias Origination.
Soon, Parkes was collaborating with Solomon on tracks like 1992’s “Sensation,” a slinky hardcore roller that balanced breathless snare chops, sped-up rave stabs, and ragga taunts of “Rude bwoy!” with unusually contemplative Rhodes keys. The music was evolving practically on a week-to-week basis in those days, and Parkes right along with it. Origination’s 1993 single “Make Ya Wanna Do Right” offset layered breakbeats with the dreamy synth pads that would become a hallmark of ambient jungle; “Out of This World,” which rounded out the B-side of the same record, poked into the shadows of what some were calling “darkside,” driven by dizzyingly cut-up snares and cloaked in an eerie metallic sheen.
Over the next few years, Parkes was wildly prolific, turning out scores of tracks under aliases like Studio Pressure, Synthetics, Code of Practice, Aquarius, the Truper, the Sentinel, Phaze 1, and Photek. It didn’t take long for Parkes’ signature to codify itself in the undulating layers and beckoning atmospheres of tunes like 1995’s “Drift to the Centre,” released as Aquarius. Utilizing a pile-driving “Amen” break and some dramatic gongs, it borrowed its watery keys from a recent 12" on downbeat trailblazers Mo Wax, its whispered vocal hook from a vintage Timothy Leary record, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it “Baby, baby” from a Quincy Jones-produced electro-funk track from the ’80s—a mixture of genres and eras that underscored Parkes’ resourcefulness and vision as a sampler.
Although Parkes was as influenced by techno as he was jungle—in a 1995 Muzik feature, he namechecks Berlin dub-techno pioneers Basic Channel and IDM stalwarts the Black Dog—he didn’t have access to techno’s synthesizers. Instead, he made resourceful use of his sampler, grabbing choice bits from his favorite records and using envelopes and filters to sculpt them into an approximation of the textures he was looking for. “I just thought, If I get this saw string and EQ it the right way, and put a reverb on it, then it’s going to sound like that sound on a Carl Craig record,” he told Renegade Snares’ authors. “There was a much easier way: just buy that keyboard and you’ll be able to replicate that very easily. But none of that occurred to me, because I had no formal intro to making electronic music.”
By 1995, the self-taught producer was nearing the peak of his powers. That year, Photek—which was fast becoming his principal alias—released a string of now legendary 12"s: “Seven Samurai”/“Complex” and “U.F.O.”/“Rings Around Saturn,” for his own Photek label; the Natural Born Killa EP, for scene kingpin Goldie’s Metalheadz; and, finally, “Ni - Ten - Ichi - Ryu (Two Swords Technique),” his debut for Science, a new electronic sub-label of Virgin.
Without losing an iota of soundsystem punch, Photek’s tracks were beginning to feel like movies in miniature. As a sound designer, Parkes experimented with Foley-like effects: water droplets, birdsong, atmospheres coaxed from brushed metal and rubbed glass. He could be wildly inventive: A martial arts fan, he mimicked the sound of a throwing star by whipping a bicycle chain above his head. For “Rings Around Saturn,” he recorded the sound of rainfall and wind chimes outside his house. For another track, he rubbed the record he wanted to sample on the carpet in order to build up a crackling electrostatic charge. He told The Wire, “I’m into that old, dirty sound. My album will probably come out on a CD and sound like a 78 record.” (Somewhere, a young Burial was taking notes.)
As Photek’s work became more complex, it opened up new expressive realms—like the inky, destabilizing minimalism of “Ni - Ten - Ichi - Ryu,” where the snare never seems to fall in the same place twice, or “U.F.O.,” built around audio of a notorious flying-saucer incident, where his dancing drums imitate the momentum-defying movements of extraterrestrial propulsion. On his debut album, he reached the apotheosis of his powers by stripping down his drums as never before.
Recorded back in St Albans, where he’d grown up, and released in 1997, Modus Operandi originally bore the working title Reverse Kids—a nod, perhaps, to Parkes’ fondness for switching up the direction of his beats, flipping them back and forth so often that time seemed to stand still even as it kept hurtling forward. But the name Modus Operandi was even more apropos. It came from Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat: When a sergeant asks Al Pacino’s character, a sorrowful cop with no illusions about his opponents, what the criminals’ M.O. is, Pacino shoots back in his trademark rasp, “Their M.O. is that they’re good.”
The bone-dry assessment epitomized Parkes’ desire to prove his mettle in an intensely competitive scene. That’s exactly what Modus Operandi is: a shot across the bow—a demonstration of Parkes’ virtuoso skill, as well as his determination to take drum’n’bass, as the more intricate iterations of the sound had increasingly come to be known, into unexplored territory. If Goldie’s Timeless, as many have noted over the years, was the drum’n’bass equivalent of Pink Floyd’s space-rock epic, Modus Operandi might as well have been an actual trip to the dark side of the moon, a voyage into the airless, lightless unknown.
Across 10 interrelated tracks that play out like movements of a suite, Modus Operandi plunges into a netherworld of skulking beats, viscous synths, and violent foreboding. It’s awash in seasick frequencies and bathed in the sounds of metal—scraping claws, clattering shell casings, glinting steel slicing through the penumbra. Neither strictly a club record nor, by any means, a chillout soundtrack, it suggests a mortal face-off between rhythm and atmosphere, each locked in the other’s death grip.
In a milieu that prized dexterity, audacity, and speed, the album’s opening track, “The Hidden Camera,” is a head-fake. After a sequence of Rhodes keys that sounds almost like a jazz player’s interpretation of church bells, the beat finally drops, but the song can’t really be called drum’n’bass. There’s no trace of any canonical breakbeat in the shuffling snares and cottony flams, and the herky-jerky cadence has little in common with the way jungle and drum’n’bass typically move. Most importantly, the tempo is slow—a pensive 126 beats per minute, compared to the 160-170 range that had become standard for the genre.
The world was awash in chilled grooves in 1997, but “The Hidden Camera” is hardly your typical downtempo. It bobs with a coiled intensity that telegraphs dangerous instability. The kick drum hits just before the downbeat, the snares dance around the backbeat, and all the drums in between are either rushing the beat, as though making up for lost time, or lagging behind. Unidentifiable noises, suggesting anguished dolphins, and grim sound effects, like a handgun being cocked, stoke the anxious mood. Yet for all this, the vibe is relaxed, thanks to a spare, noirish standup bassline and synth pads that swirl like the northern lights. The drum pattern plays out in two-bar phrases, but the keys and pads are drawn out in longer arcs that overlap at uneven intervals. Those overlapping phrases mean that your attention is always following the music in parallel yet contrasting paths—a hallmark of Photek’s looping sleight-of-hand.
If “Hidden Camera” initially suggested that perhaps Photek had gone soft, the album’s second track, “Smoke Rings,” proved exactly the opposite. Where the tempo of “The Hidden Camera” is hard to parse, the 170-bpm breaks in “Smoke Rings” roll out with determined force: The snares and kicks still flit around the edges of the beat, but enough of them hit their marks that the rhythm strides ahead in a practically headbanging 4/4. The atmosphere, meanwhile, intensifies the shadowy moods that Parkes had been painting in tracks like “Seven Samurai”—dark swirls of pewter and purple wafting like the smoke rings of the title.
Parkes indulges his own yen for concept-album sprawl with the next two tracks, “Minotaur” and “Aleph 1,” which are connected by an amorphous, noxious-sounding white-noise fizz, a sound that makes me think of a ghost melting through walls, or a spaceship slipping through the rings of Saturn. (In fact, he told Future Music in 2011, it was the loading-screen noise from the ZX Spectrum, an 8-bit home computer from the 1980s that he’d learned to program as a boy.) Taken together, and following “Smoke Rings,” the two tracks demonstrate Parkes’ ability to put similar-sounding drums to radically different ends, eking from each break a distinct sense of movement—an unrepeatable, irreducible feeling of glide and velocity.
Just as the ZX Spectrum sound effects connect “Minotaur” and “Aleph 1,” a handful of sounds—reversed cymbals, plangent synth pads—connect “Aleph 1” to “124,” rounding out the idea of the album’s A-side as a unified movement. “124,” titled for its BPM tag, is slow and woozy. “I felt it was a big deal to do a song at a different tempo,” Parkes said. “Everything was that militant at that time. It was like if you used the wrong bassline, you were rubbish. And you’d have to work for like a year to get your credibility back.” Like the similarly paced “The Hidden Camera,” “124” maintains a conversation with the downbeat sounds developing on Mo Wax at the time. (In fact, Parkes almost signed to the label.) But unlike the cool jazz influences of “The Hidden Camera,” “124” is a skeletal hybrid of electro’s punchy 808s and jungle’s knotted switch-ups—as severe, in its terse claps and shadowboxing kicks, as Photek’s most breakneck roller. Later, on the B-side, he pulls the tempo even lower: The title track is a 100 BPM jazz-funk opus for standup bass, crystalline rimshots, and even an entirely unexpected foray into salsa piano—deployed, as per Photek’s wont, in such a way that what feels like the downbeat of the phrase falls on the upbeat, accentuating the song’s already gravity-defying air.
The B-side plays out much like the A-side, darting and weaving between contrasting styles while sticking to a carefully reduced palette. Fast and snapping, “Axiom” turns an incidental squiggle of wah-wah guitar into the main character of a vignette that’s mischievous, cocky, and more than a little evil; the merciless, unrelenting “Trans 7” echoes the brutally reduced snare workouts that were coming into vogue in the subgenre known as techstep, though the way Parkes switches up the accents, seeming to turn the beat inside out with every Moebius-strip phrase, is classic Photek. (“Trans 7” is also cloaked in evocative vinyl hiss, but this time it wasn’t exactly on purpose; at the last minute, during the album mastering, he decided to swap the song in for “Ni – Ten – Ichi – Ryu,” and since he didn’t have the DAT on him, they mastered directly from his well-worn dubplate.)
Parkes was still using some conventional breakbeats when he recorded Modus Operandi, but he was also crafting his own, programming his rhythms out of “single-shot” drum samples—kicks, snares, shakers, hi-hats, and so on. He even hired session drummers to play individual drums at different velocities, building his own sample library out of their performances; he did the same with bassists. It was all part of his desire to get out ahead of the pack. “I’m planning to never use any breaks that have been used by anyone else,” he’d told The Wire in 1996. “Just make breaks from scratch, use them on a track and never touch them again.”
With “KJZ” he dips back into the bins, yet it’s his tour de force of drum programming: Cobbled together out of a DAT’s worth of crate-dug drum sounds that techno-jazz producer Kirk Degiorgio had passed him, it collages phrases by Elvin Jones, Max Roach, Courtney Pine’s drummer Mark Mondesir, and others into a no-holds-barred display of rhythmic prowess—a veritable cascade of jazz drumming chopped into tiny pieces, spread across the stereo field, and backlit by rosy synths and acoustic bass, like a kaleidoscope of tiny, jagged crystals. As though acknowledging that he’d said all he could on the drums, album closer “The Fifth Column” is the record’s most minimalistic track, just diamond-hard snares galloping against velvety blackness, tracing corkscrewing paths through the suffocating emptiness.
Modus Operandi made Parkes one of drum’n’bass’s most celebrated producers, a visionary on par with ambitious creators like Goldie and Roni Size. He was tapped to remix Dr. Octagon, Everything But the Girl, Björk, even David Bowie. In 2000, as though determined not to be confined by the strictures of drum’n’bass, he switched direction with Solaris, branching out into techno and house. But he never finished that five-album deal; he eventually bought himself out of his contract, and though he has spent more than two decades scoring films in Hollywood and remains intermittently active in dance music—a series of dubstep-influenced productions in the early 2010s, a DJ-Kicks mix in 2012—he’s never come close to matching the singularity of Modus Operandi.
That’s understandable; the album is one of those right-time, right-place, right-person affairs where a musician testing the limits of their talents happens to coincide with a genre primed for a quantum leap. Parkes showed that drum’n’bass, as an idea, could transcend the narrow vocabulary of its best-known breaks. His M.O. was that he was good. And on this album, dropped at a moment of maximum flux in his chosen medium, he was unstoppable.


New Zealand's Salad Boys are precisely what you'd expect from the land of Flying Nun—a jangly, cerebral, experimental pop group, a bit shambly, with understated vocals buried in the mix and the bright guitar work pushed to the front.

Metalmania

Christchurch, New Zealand's Salad Boys are precisely what you'd expect from the land of Flying Nun and Xpressway: a jangly, cerebral, experimental pop group, a bit shambly, with understated vocals buried in the mix and the bright guitar work pushed to the front. They’ve performed as David Kilgour of the Clean’s backing band, and they instantly and seamlessly fit into the legacy Kilgour helped establish; their debut album, Metalmania, feels less like an homage to New Zealand’s 1980s underground and more like a lost release from that time period ready to be unearthed by the record collectors of the future.
When Metalmania is good, it's nearly transcendent, as much as a pop album can be. The melodic kick in the last minute of opener "Here's No Use" is as bracing as sunlight slanting through dust-motes on a beautiful day, and "Dream Date", the album's first single, is driving, energetic, and charming. Later single "No Taste Bomber" is perfectly noisy, just so slightly psychedelic, one of those songs it’s impossible not to nod your head to on first listen (and it only gets further under one’s skin the more one listens). "I’m a Mountain" is crafted so tautly that the chanted lyric "I won’t let you fuck it up" takes on new dimensions with each repetition. "Hit Her and Run" takes a while to build: though it feels like initially it might grow into a Byrds-like California country song, it turns on its heel into a thick wall of distortion.
What Metalmania is slightly short on is the underlying grit present in much of the work of Salad Boys' forebears, one of the elements that kept even the poppiest of the Flying Nun bands (the Bats, the Chills, Able Tasmans) from sounding too cloying. Existential sadness haunts so much of New Zealand’s indie pop but there are three or four tracks on Metalmania that feel like dreamy filler, tracks so airy that they never quite make the emotional impact they could or should. There isn’t quite enough dissonance to them, not enough low end, not enough movement, not enough curiosity. Having similar tempos and chord structures, these filler songs bleed into one another; their grounding is too stable, too comfortable.
Since the memorable tracks on Metalmania are so good, the tracks that don’t quite rise to the occasion feel all the more frustrating. Yes, this is a debut album for a relatively young band (they’ve been around less than three years), and to hold Salad Boys to such a standard might feel a little unfair, but they’ve proven themselves capable of holding their own with the best indie pop their country has to offer. The fact that they’ve set the bar so high for themselves is, in the end, a testament to how exquisite their songwriting at its best can be.


On his chic, adventurous, hybrid-pop debut, Benjamin Lyman is a world-weary optimist and DIY maximalist with a voice fit for the mainstream yet made for the arthouse

Ten Total

The first sound you hear on Benjamin Lyman’s debut album as 1010Benja, Ten Total, is either a throat clearing or a deadpan laugh, an announcement or a provocation. A symphony of programmed horns and strings comes in and Benja begins barking and cooing, sheeshing and coughing, shouting ad-libs—“Hey, man! Hey!”—and unleashing a string of effortless vocal runs. A gunshot pops; an engine revs. Then sirens and bit-crushed battlefield FX swallow the song, leaving nothing but shrapnel. Playful, strange, and surprisingly moving, it’s the perfect introduction to Benja’s oddball brilliance: a world-weary optimist and DIY maximalist with a sinewy, astonishing voice meant for the mainstream yet made for the arthouse.
Ten Total delivers on years of anticipation and promise for a transcendent talent who’s remained mostly anonymous since the start of his career. When Pitchfork called the Kansas City singer and producer “one of 2018’s most promising artists,” he’d only put out three songs. His first EP, Two Houses, released on the heels of this acclaim, suggested a burgeoning star on the cusp of his best work. But as quickly as Benja appeared, he vanished. He’s dropped a few singles in recent years, but the initial hype, faintly redolent of House of Balloons-era the Weeknd and Nostalgia, Ultra-era Frank Ocean, has all but dissipated. It’s easy to conclude that the 34-year-old Benja missed his moment.
If Ten Total proves anything, it’s that Benja’s just fine occupying his own self-defined stratosphere. Though his sound has plenty of precedents—his voice a supercharged hybrid of Jeremih and Justin Timberlake, his rangy production pulling from ’90s Björk and early 2010s Kanye—it’s unmistakably his, unique in its agglomeration. One moment he’s rapping with kinetic ease over a slippery Acid Rap-type beat (“Peacekeeper”), the next he’s belting a glamorous hook over horns and strings and clattering cymbals (“H2HAVEYOU”). Ten Total glides between neo-soul, alt-R&B, drill, gospel, trap, and radio-ready pop while Benja obliquely circles a set of core themes: love and redemption, gratitude and faith, loss and deliverance.
His voice, pliable and precise, allows him to flit effortlessly between moods and styles. “Peacekeeper” and “Penta,” for instance, are skeletal freestyles whose nonchalance gives them a curious gravitas. In the former, he balances humor with wisdom, dashing off lines about “trusting hoes,” watching Star Trek, and reading Alan Moore before triumphantly spitting, “I had to go get it, I couldn’t fold/I had to get up, I couldn’t be told.” On “Penta” he repeats a bar about feeling stupid before groaning, scatting, and making a noise that can only be described as a chortle. It’s invigorating, and funny, to hear Benja stretch his voice to its weirdest depths, à la Playboi Carti or Tom Waits. When the album’s more robust songs materialize, like the warm electro-R&B strutter “Twin” or the searing ballad “Waterworks,” the breadth of his talent reveals itself. Benja could make a cleaner, more straightforward pop or R&B album—he certainly has the voice for it. Instead he dabbles with different forms and flows, playing with bright hues and gummy textures to create his own twisted sense of cohesion.
But when Benja uncorks his voice and goes full pop star, like on “Waterworks” or the show-stopping “I Can,” you sort of wonder why he doesn’t do it all the time. The latter is a passionate, genuinely moving guitar-pop ballad about the fallibility of commitment, about learning to love someone even when it’s hard. Though his writing isn’t exactly revelatory, Benja’s the type of vocalist who really makes you feel what he’s singing; he emotes at such a high frequency that his lyrics function less as literal directions to meaning and more like artfully constructed cairns, reminders that wherever you are is right where you need to be.
Because the moment you begin asking those big questions—what does this song mean? What is this album about?—Benja’s once again huffing and hmphing and hooing and haaing, which he does for over a minute after “I Can’s” guitar solo. He seems to be channeling something words can’t always capture: wonderment, maybe, or provenance. “I need voodoo in my life,” he chants on the album’s closer, perhaps his most direct statement of purpose. Keep the hype and bright lights, he seems to be saying. Just give me room to sing.


Instead of a blistering indictment, the Seattle bubblegum rock quartet Tacocat's NVM throws a double-handful of confetti in the face of topics—the male gaze, menstruation, seasonal affective disorder—that might otherwise induce rage blackouts.

NVM

Is misandry a growing threat to our society? Catcalling women on the street: a socially acceptable form of flattery? Do you have an allergy to certain delicious herbal tea blends? If you said yes to any of these questions, the members of Tacocat are not your friends, but you might end up liking them anyway. Though they've been around since 2007, the Seattle quartet are relatively new to a wider audience. Over the past few months, they've been expanding upon their longtime underground reputation as a gutsy bubblegum surf-rock outfit bolstered by an adorable meme, some goofy Y2K nostalgia, and—above all—an unparalleled feminist wit that's hard to hate, even if you're the target.
It's born of practice: Tacocat's Hardly Art debut, the ironically sunshiny NVM, is hardly their first foray into the satire game. Back in 2012, vocalist Emily Nokes and bassist Bree McKenna were the pair of masterminds behind "Men Who Rock," the now-legendary cover feature of local Seattle weekly The Stranger that brilliantly skewered the music media's objectification of female musicians. Two years later, NVM—an abbreviation for "nevermind" coined by the post-Nirvana AOL generation—has become an extension of that tradition, turning just the right cheerful screws on haters from all corners of their hegemonic hellscape.
Whether it's the male gaze ("Hey Girl") or menstruation ("Crimson Wave"), seasonal affective disorder ("Bridge to Hawaii") or becoming a woman ("Psychedelic Quinceañera"), or even just hometowns that have a collective aneurysm every time it snows ("Snow Day")—no vexation is safe from the sprightly melodies of Tacocat. "In my experience, making jokes about that kind of stupid stuff has made people check themselves more than when people yell at them about it," Nokes said in a recent interview. So instead of a blistering indictment, she and her friends made an album that throws a double-handful of confetti in the face of topics that might otherwise induce rage blackouts, a light-hearted reminder that sometimes the best way to defeat an enemy is to make them sheepishly laugh.
Like many of their compatriots, Tacocat draw as heavily on 60s surf rock and girl-group radio hits as they do on 90s and 00s MTV alt-rock rotation ("Quinceañera" is bolstered by horns worthy only of Cake), but where peers have settled for simple, fest-ready party rock, Tacocat use those influences to complement a musical comedy that's effortless and immediately justifies its existence: I didn't realize I needed a song about hating my bus line with an all-consuming passion, yet "FU #8" delivers like a Sky Mall patent direct from heaven. Almost every track, save the disappointing-only-by-comparison "Alien Girl" and opener "You Never Came Back", serves a highly specific, completely unromantic purpose, especially in the lives of women: they're simple theme songs, #realtalk jingles to tuck away in the personal artillery that gets you through a particularly dumb day.
And though it seems downright insane when paired with the actual sounds contained on the album, most of NVM, despite its humor, is still sincerely concerned with the bullshit inherent in power structures, as much as a Bikini Kill or a Sleater-Kinney or even a White Lung. It lacks the sonic weight that so easily matches those feminist frustrations, but it would be foolish to want such things of a band like Tacocat, because there are so few places in which to find sentiments like these in such a refreshingly sunny musical context. The only anchor the album really needs is the certainty that one day your world will treat you like utter garbage, and only the sarcastic irreverence of Tacocat can lift you out of your vortex of suckitude. Cheeky but not bratty, NVM leaves a statement behind without preaching or scolding (save perhaps on "This Is Anarchy," a satirical, natural mate to millennial eye-rollers like Bent Shapes' "Brat Poison"). It's simple and approachable, but its wit gives it longevity—at least, until a song about "communists in the summer house" is passé.


The conventional wisdom is that the Velvet Underground were at their best on stage, and the high points of The Complete Matrix Tapes bear that out. You can think of The Complete Matrix Tapes as a greatly expanded, better-mixed version of 1969 with less perfect sequencing and four songs missing.

The Velvet Underground: The Complete Matrix Tapes

The Complete Matrix Tapes

The Velvet Underground were pioneers with blazing heads, Jesus' sons and daughter, the progenitors of seemingly everything that came after them. Assessing the four studio albums they released between 1967 and 1970 on the Pitchfork scale is like measuring a yardstick. They were also a perpetually struggling touring rock group like any other, playing extended engagements at large and small clubs all over the East and West Coasts, often two shows a night, to an audience of people who mostly just wanted to dance. The Complete Matrix Tapes is a document of that side of the band: Supposedly, it's a collection of the 42 songs the band played in two nights at a 100-capacity San Francisco club, The Matrix, some of which formed the bulk of 1969: The Velvet Underground Live with Lou Reed 40 years ago.
The conventional wisdom is that the Velvet Underground were at their best on stage, and the high points of The Complete Matrix Tapes bear that out. The peculiarly thin sonics of Matrix owner Peter Abram's recordings don't do Maureen Tucker's caveman drumming any favors, but they make a serious case for Sterling Morrison as God-Emperor of Rhythm Guitarists. The first disc's magnificent "What Goes On", with Morrison and Lou Reed's guitars chattering together at breathless speed while Doug Yule hammers at an organ, is the wellspring for, among other things, the Wedding Present's entire catalogue; "Ocean" is the seed and the soil for both Low and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The version of the throwaway two-line rocker "We're Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together" on disc two is utterly thrilling, and the hushed, droning "Heroin" later in that set is a solid 20 years ahead of its time. Both "White Light/White Heat" and "I'm Set Free" are much more dramatic and vivid here than in their studio incarnations.
That said, some of the Matrix box's extended vamps get draggy, and there's a lot of song duplication here: four versions apiece of "Some Kinda Love", "Heroin", and "We're Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together", three apiece of "There She Goes Again" and "I'm Waiting for the Man", two apiece of seven others. But The Complete Matrix Tapes is useful as a way to hear how the Velvets constantly reworked their repertoire. Yule later said of Reed that "there were times when he would invent or put together songs on the fly in a performance, and he'd just turn around and say, 'Follow me'". The bizarre take on "I'm Waiting for the Man" that opens the box is slowed down to a crawling blues, extended to 13 minutes with some seemingly extemporaneous new verses; "Lisa Says", which the group had recorded in a studio just a month earlier, has almost totally rewritten lyrics and an entirely new bridge. Their most protean song, "Sister Ray", turns up in a relatively relaxed, noodly 37-minute performance that's far from its face-melting White Light/White Heat incarnation.
This box isn't exactly a grand opening of the vaults: as nice as it is to have all this stuff in one place, less than a quarter of it hasn't been officially issued before, and it's not like there's a shortage of Velvet Underground live recordings that could stand to be released for real. On the other hand, you can think of The Complete Matrix Tapes as a greatly expanded, better-mixed version of 1969 with less perfect sequencing and four songs missing, and considered that way, it's a jewel with a chip knocked off its top. Elliott Murphy's liner notes for *1969—*written in 1972, when the Velvet Underground were still a commercial nonentity with an enthusiastic but tiny cult—imagined a kid a hundred years later, in a "classical rock'n'roll class," listening to the Velvets and wondering what to make of them. We're close to halfway there now, and their place in the canon is secure, but we still haven't entirely figured them out.


Explosions in the Sky's sixth album,  their best since 2003's The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place, is a quietly masterful, emotionally rich work.

The Wilderness

Explosions in the Sky are the kind of band that you think about in terms of scale. There is the sheer size of their songs, but also of the group: They've sold out Radio City Music Hall and play larger concert halls (which is surprising for a rock band without a vocalist); they famously soundtracked "Friday Night Lights," a number of motion pictures, and their songs shows up on dozens of television shows. But their sixth album, The Wilderness, the first non-soundtrack collection since 2011's Take Care, Take Care, Take Care, feels remarkably small. Shifting inward and turning their gaze toward minutiae, the group still manages to create something that resonates in as grand a way, just via different means, and it's their best since 2003's The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place.
Like Cold Dead Place, The Wilderness gives you a sense of a landscape, but instead of a march towards a vast horizon, it feels like burrowing in to escape the cold. Those signature crescendos and climaxes are present, but just as often you find yourself contemplating near-silent electronic details or wisps of sound. On first listen The Wilderness sounds almost like a whisper; as you do dig in, the details grow and resonate. It's like taking a pause on a hike and realizing just how many sounds there are in what seemed like silence. The Austin band has been around since 1999, and you get the sense that they're searching for new paths to achieve their original goals.
For the most part, the songs feel segmented and self-contained, standalone compositions instead of pieces of an overall fabric. They return time again to distorted drums that sometimes feel like echoes in a cave, other times like a crumbling landslide, while the guitars are generally crystalline and precise, sometimes taking on the texture of strings. It resembles Inventions, guitarist Mark T. Smith's more electronic side project with Eluvium, blended with Explosions' usual dramatics.
"Disintegration Anxiety," which opens with chopped sounds, is the album's big anthem, and they take their time getting there; it's the fifth song out of nine. It's fitting that the title evokes the title  of the Cure's landmark 1989 record—there's a similar sense of longing and a beautiful darkness at work here, too. You find the same atmosphere on "Losing the Light" as well—the quietest, most subterranean song on the album, it almost resembles a classical work or something by Tim Hecker, and it feels like spelunking in the dark and coming upon cluster of diamonds that help light your way.
The music is rarely "driving" in the usual sense of the group—it's meditative and okay with staying in one place. "The Ecstatics," for instance, has clicking, slow-motion electronic drums and the same bright, clean guitar as a number of the tracks, and moves in an aqueous slow motion with cold electronics that sound like fizzing water. There are upbeat moments, like "Tangle Formations," or "Infinite Orbit," which at first feels amorphous and ambient before suddenly catching fire. When it does finally open up, the effect is stunning.
Because the group has done so much soundtracking, it's difficult when listening to The Wilderness not to think of images that could go with these songs. Instead of making music for dramatic moments in football games, we're getting sunsets you'll remember a decade later, stumbling first kisses, half-heard car alarms during a comforting dream, that horribly unreal and frozen moment when you first hear a friend has died, walks alone at dusk, laying on your back and watching the constellations with the person you want to grow old with, the calm of seeing a loved one sleep. These songs feel personal. They tug at important moments. It's a quietly masterful, emotionally rich work. Of all their records, it's ultimately the one that sounds the most like the image their band name evokes. But you're watching from a distance, and paying more attention to the person next to you than those colors smearing against the clouds overhead.


Subtitled ”60 Juvenile Delinquent Wrecks, Rock’N’Glam (And a Flavour of Bubblegum) From the ’70s,” this collection makes a fine argument for glam as punk-before-punk and speaks to the herd mentality of rock‘s heyday.

All the Young Droogs

The title of this glam rock box set is a cute twist on “All the Young Dudes,” the hit 1972 song Bowie gifted to Mott the Hoople. People, then and since, took it as an anthem for rock’s third generation—the kids who were babies when rock’n’roll first arrived, missed out on most of the ’60s, but craved a sound of their own in the ’70s. The Bowie/Mott/Roxy Music side of glam—literate and musically sophisticated—is not really what this collection is about, though. “Droog” is the true clue, a slang term for a teenage thug from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick’s movie version of the Anthony Burgess novel. Scandalous upon its 1971 release, the film was blamed for a spate of copycat “ultraviolence” and chimed with existing UK anxieties about feral youth and rising crime: soccer hooliganism, skinhead “bovver boys” in steel-capped Doc Martens brutalizing hippies and immigrants, subcultural tribes warring on the streets.
All the Young Droogs: 60 Juvenile Delinquent Wrecks, Rock’N’Glam (And a Flavour of Bubblegum) From the ’70s largely celebrates the music that sublimated and safely vented the disorderly impulses of working-class kids in the not-so-Great Britain of the early ’70s. It’s packed with the coarse, rowdy rock whose shout-along choruses and stomp-along drums shook concert halls from foundations to rafters. Compiler Phil King’s focus, though, is not the huge-selling glitter bands like Slade or the Sweet, but the nearly-made-its and the never-stood-a-chancers: “Junkshop glam,” as collectors and dealers call this stuff, a term that exudes the musty aroma of digging through cardboard boxes of dirt-cheap singles.
Glam as punk-before-punk is an argument convincingly made on the first disc of Droogs, titled “Rock Off!” Ray Owen’s Moon’s “Hey Sweety” launches things with a stinging attack and pummeling power just a notch behind the Stooges, although the oddly phrased title-chorus diminishes the menace slightly. Most Droogs inclusions are fairly frivolous affairs lyrically—anthems of lust, celebrations of rocking out—but Third World War anticipate punk themes with the proletarian plaint and Strummer-like sandpaper vocals of “Working Class Man.” Hustler forge a link between the Faces and Cockney Rejects with “Get Outta My ’Ouse,” which is like Magic’s “Rude” recast as pub boogie: the hilarious lament of a longhair hassled by his girl’s disapproving Dad. In Supernaut’s “I Like It Both Ways,” the bisexual protagonist is confused by stereophonic propositions from a girl in the left speaker and a boy in the right. Other highlights include the chrome-glistening grind of James Hogg’s “Lovely Lady Rock” and the grating lurch of Ning’s “Machine,” akin to being run over by a bulldozer driven by a caveman.
Things stay stompy and simplistic on the second disc, titled “Tubthumpers & Hellraisers,” but with a slight shift towards pop. On Harpo’s “My Teenage Queen,” a lithe, corkscrewing melody contrasts with a relentless beat, which is interrupted by an unexpected outbreak of hand-percussion like a belly-dancer abruptly jumping onstage to join the band. Frenzy’s “Poser” sneers sweetly and Simon Turner’s “Sex Appeal” is a delicious bounce of bubblegum. Compared with the ferocious first disc, though, this radio-friendly fare often feels flimsier, stirring those doubts familiar with similar archival enterprises: Is this really lost treasure? Or is it deservedly obscure?
Shrewdly, on the final disc “Elegance & Decadence,” King switches gears and zooms in on what some call “high glam”: the Bowie-besotted, Bryan Ferry-infatuated side of the genre, which appealed to older teenagers and middle-class students with its thoughtful lyrics, witty cultural references, and the exquisite styling of the clothes and record packaging. The backings favored by performers like John Howard, Paul St John, and Alastair Riddell are svelte and lissome, shunning the beefy power-chords and leaden kick drums in favor of strummed acoustic guitar and swaying rhythms. The vocal presence on these songs is likewise willowy and androgynous: sometimes an unearthly soar above the mundane, other times highly-strung and histrionic.
The most fetching specimens here in this post-Hunky Dory mode are Steve Elgin’s “Don’t Leave Your Lover Lying Around (Dear),” with its saucy asides about how “trade is looking good,” and Brian Wells’ archly enunciated “Paper Party.” Themes of fame and fantasy abound, with many owing a sizable debt to Bowie. “Criminal World,” by the debonair Metro—who described their style as “English rock music, but influenced by a hundred years of European culture… Baudelaire and Kurt Weill”—would be later covered by Bowie himself on 1983’s Let’s Dance, a well-deserved compliment. Even more genteel-sounding is “New York City Pretty,” which could be an outtake from Rocky Horror Picture Show, so closely does Clive Kennedy mirror Tim Curry’s phrasing.
Like other retroactively invented genres such as freakbeat, part of the appeal of junkshop glam is its generic-ness: the closeness with which artists conform to the rules of rock at that precise moment. In many cases, these performers were opportunists: a year or two earlier, they’d been prog or bluesy-rock artists. Some would later adopt New Wave mannerisms, swapping escapism and decadence for lyrics about unemployment and urban deprivation. Droogs does contain an example of glam juvenilia from a future prime-mover of punk: “Showbiz Kid” by Sleaze, the early band of TV Smith of the Adverts.
Although this kind of aesthetic flexibility seems suspect and unprincipled, it reveals a couple of things about rock. First, it points to a sameness persisting underneath all the style changes. From today’s remote vantage point, the differences—once so significant and divisive—between ’60s beat groups, bluesy boogie, heavy metal, glam, pub rock, and punk start to fade and a continuum of hard rock emerges. The dominant sound on Droogs is situated somewhere between the Pretty Things, Ten Years After, the Groundhogs, on one side, and the Count Bishops, Sham 69, Motörhead, on the other. I’ve picked British names but you could just as easily throw Steppenwolf, Grand Funk Railroad, and Black Flag in there, or for that matter, AC/DC.
The other thing that Droogs shows is that originality is both uncommon and overrated. Herd mentality, which is to say the willingness of the horde of proficient but not necessarily creative performers to be influenced by the rare innovators in their midst, is what actually changes the sound of the radio. It’s the arrival of the copyists that definitively establishes a new set of musical characteristics, performance gestures, and lyrical fixtures, as the defining sound of an era. Send in the clones, then, because sometimes you can’t get enough of a good thing.