Arrested development and affectation continues to define Regina Spektor's quirky music-making. An all-star roll of producers are on hand, including Jeff Lynne.

Far

Regina Spektor is 29 years old. I point this out because on her newest album, Far, Spektor alternately imitates dolphin noises, talks about making a computer out of macaroni pieces, and fashions a refrain out of repetitions of the non-word "eet." And that's just within the first four songs.
Over the course of three proper studio albums and various other tangential releases, Regina Spektor has demonstrated a solid sense of popcraft and an occasional ability to capture slices of life in charmingly non-conventional ways. More to the point, however, she's displayed an unstinting weakness for intensely self-regarding cuteness and overplayed naïveté. Despite being closer to her 40th birthday than her Sweet 16, Spektor continues to romp wide-eyed through her compositions like Sally Hawkins' perennially cheery Poppy character from the Mike Leigh film Happy-Go-Lucky.
Spektor is buoyed on Far by the assistance of four top-flight producers, including Mike Elizondo (Dr. Dre, Eminem), Jacknife Lee (Bloc Party, Snow Patrol) and, oh yeah, Jeff Freaking Lynne. As you'd expect from such an impressive roll call, the album's sonics are exceptionally clean and tastefully tailored, from Lynne's moving string swells on "Blue Lips" to the eminently radio-friendly hook on the Elizondo-helmed "The Calculation" to the Beatles-y brass touches on "Two Birds" (courtesy, surprisingly enough, not of Lynne but of Lee).
Unfortunately, all this talent behind the boards often feels like a waste because of Spektor's inability to let her songs stand on their own merits without the persistent interjection of vocal curlicues or verbal flights of fancy. Notice how she ladles awful oversinging onto "Blue Lips" and "Human of the Year", or tries to put on some kind of robo-Germanic accent for the refrain to the horribly lumbering "Machine". I have no doubt these little whimsical flourishes go over like gangbusters in concert, but on a fifth or 10th or 20th listen to a studio album, how many people are really not going to cringe at these affectations?
Certainly it's easy to chalk up these eccentricities to Spektor's quirky "personality" (which belongs in scare quotes because god knows being quirky doesn't guarantee you have an interesting personality), but frequently they feel like a defense mechanism as well. After all, cuteness is a terrific tool for allowing anyone to get away with being trite, which probably goes a long way towards explaining why a song like the first single, "Laughing With", seems almost trenchant at first blush, yet upon closer scrutiny unravels into pure meaningless mush, a nattering scold that woefully misreads atheism and agnosticism, ticking off a list of boilerplate crises (war, poverty, a missing child) and reminding us that no one laughs at God in these situations, as though non-believers spend the majority of their tragedy-free time busting on the Almighty.
"Dance Anthem of the 80's" is emblematic of Spektor flashing genuine wit and emotional power yet being unable to get out of her own way. At one point Spektor almost off-handedly intones, "And it's been a long time since before I've been touched/ Now I'm getting touched all the time," and it's an undeniably stirring moment, yet it never has a chance to thrive, not when it's contending with Spektor mawkishly cooing, "you are so sweet," while stretching and trilling the word "sleep" at the end of each refrain to an almost unbelievably obnoxious degree. I like to imagine that somewhere 19-year-old Taylor Swift hears this song and shakes her head, wondering when Regina Spektor is ever going to grow up.


The Godspeed You! Black Emperor co-founder’s second album searches for love in the middle of a hellscape, with surprising shades of Springsteen.

Pissing Stars

The music of Efrim Manuel Menuck has rarely, if ever, evoked Bruce Springsteen. Over the last quarter-century, the cofounder of Montreal’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Thee Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra has droned or groaned his way through barbed anarchist diatribes, feedback pitted, and screams pitched against the impending apocalypse he painted. There’s been little of the hope or warmth found in even Springsteen’s darkest moments. That’s why “A Lamb in the Land of Payday Loans”—the stunning pop song that starts the second half of Pissing Stars, Menuck’s second-ever solo album—is such a revelation: Despite the aggressive political face of Menuck’s work, he arrives here as a fellow romantic, looking for the complex redemption of love in the middle of a hellscape.
When “Lamb” begins, Menuck, who recorded all of Pissing Stars alone in several spells of self-imposed solitude during the last two years, stretches a scrim of noise against a simple rhythmic loop. Its major-key piano melody pounds through the din, a triumph beckoning from the distance. In first person, Menuck sings about being insignificant in a system of weaponized capitalism, of fighting “the hand of the man [who] holds stolen land.” He draws a slanting but savvy line between our culture of Wal-Marts and our militarized police, then asks for mercy at the hands of that machine. Speaking now for the layperson, he even borrows The Boss’ Nebraska yip.
At last, Menuck makes his getaway plea: “Put the kids in the car... O darlin’, let’s try to run,” he harmonizes with himself. It may be the most poignant moment of Menuck’s career, a line you want to shout back in concert alongside a crowd because you, too, know the feeling. It is his “State Trooper” or “Atlantic City,” his escape anthem for a world gone against him. If Springsteen had turned left at Tunnel of Love and followed through on his Suicide love with a drum machine and an army of effects (or, alternately, had he started the War on Drugs 20 years early), it might sound like this—sincere romanticism beset by the realities of existence, with the sound bent and blown out to match the mess around him.
Pissing Stars reveals Menuck trying to understand exactly what it is we get out of love and relationships, a bothered soul in search of any balm. Decades ago, Menuck read about a brief, unlikely romance between Mary Hart, the South Dakota beauty queen who worked for a quarter-century as the effervescent host of “Entertainment Tonight,” and Mohammed Khashoggi, a socialite best known as the son of the Saudi billionaire implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal. That is, the wholesome television host piped nightly into the homes of millions of Americans was in love with the scion of a notorious arms dealer—that moment’s domestic personification of overseas evil. The absurdity and beauty of it all stuck with Menuck for 30 years, providing a loose prompt for one of our collective questions: What is love trying to do for us, anyway?
The first half of Pissing Stars is bleak, even by Menuck’s standards. Its invocation, “Black Flags Ov Thee Holy Sonne,” scans as a nine-minute meditation on Donald J. Trump and global warming, spoken and chanted and shouted inside a mile-wide canyon of jagged noise and crumbling guitars. Then, over a foreboding industrial throb, Menuck delivers a fragile falsetto lament on the strong arm of the state. Against a luminous drone, he cuts clips from an infamous 1975 interview with Manson Family true believer Sandra Good, where she warned of impending assassinations for politicians who didn’t prioritize environmental protections. Here, it is the echo of an empty threat. This is a 23-minute suite of defeat, the music and mood as damaged as anything Menuck has ever made.
But “A Lamb in the Land of Payday Loans,” that shot of Springsteen, suddenly offers an escape route as everything else collapses. Indeed, Pissing Stars’ entire second half documents how, together, we cope with torment, or, as Menuck sings over a gorgeous hum, “how to breathe through pain.” During a mutated piano hymn, he serializes images of quiet despair—a county jail, an overflowing trash can, an ant drowning in a coffee mug—only to realize they are as temporary as his own feelings. “Soon we’ll all be empty,” he sings, his tired whimper lifting momentarily toward a smile. “Soon we’ll all be free.”
Pissing Stars ends with its title track, a corroded lullaby that directs the slow-motion stateliness of Low through a nightmarish gauntlet of noise. It’s an apt juxtaposition for any relationship that prompts, in Menuck’s words, both “misery” and “divinity.” These are lovely but wounded songs, as mixed up as the singer’s own ideas about life and love and how something that’s sometimes so ugly allows for something so good. Menuck pulls you into his abiding confusion, into the surreal place where the bubbly star and the son of an arms dealer help one another get through the night, if only for a little while.
In the seven years since his solo debut, 2011’s Plays “High Gospel,” Menuck has relaunched Godspeed You! Black Emperor for three records and for big tours that have sometimes taken them to arenas. Thee Silver Mt. Zion returned, too. But Pissing Stars feels purposefully small, a personal retreat from full-band compromise by someone who is trying to understand the world and his role in it. The result is indulgent, neurotic, and harrowing, a reminder of the complete mess we’ve made. But it’s oddly reassuring, too: a Springsteen-like reminder that the romantic has the heart that the system never will.


Sam Shepherd and his ensemble incorporate the vast, rocky landscape of the California desert into the very fabric of their ambient post-rock.

Floating Points: Reflections - Mojave Desert

Reflections - Mojave Desert

At one point in Reflections - Mojave Desert, a short film released in conjunction with Floating Points’ soundtrack, director Anna Diaz Ortuño films Sam Shepherd swinging what looks like a satellite dish in circles in the middle of the arid California landscape. It’s for the recording of the interstitial track “Kites,” wherein Shepherd rotates a parabolic Telinga microphone, generally used for field recordings, to capture the sound of an EMS Synthi as it bounces off a constellation of rock structures. A curious thing happens across the track’s brief three minutes: It’s when the mic is turned away from the source that it sounds most natural, rather than when it faces the clear signal.
It’s precisely the kind of inversion of sound and expectations that Floating Points has mastered in a few short years. In the midst of dubstep’s rapid expansion in the late 2000s, the UK electronic musician first emerged with an emphasis on wiggly boogie, but just as listeners became accustomed to his sound, Shepherd began testing the limits of his own style, peaking with 2015’s cosmic jazz-infused Elaenia. Reflections - Mojave Desert is arguably his most ambitious recording to date, if only because he availed himself of the Mojave Desert itself as his recording studio.
Clocking in at under half an hour, the soundtrack shows Floating Points in a transitional phase, moving from the larger ensembles he took out on the road to support Elaenia to a more streamlined five-piece that fleshes out Shepherd’s vintage keyboards  with two guitarists, bassist, and drummer. “Silurian Blue” shows just what an expansive sound the new lineup is capable of. It opens with Shepherd playing a dulcet chiming melody as guitarists Matthew Kirkis and Alex Reeve sidle alongside him with long, sustained tones. Gathering momentum, the piece moves from placid to soaring in two minutes, with Leo Taylor’s drums briefly holding it all together before the sounds drift apart again like dust, as Shepherd's keys settle into a rich, church-like organ tone. It's a far cry from the house and garage with which he made his name: When he swoops back in for the track’s climax, certain heads may find themselves waiting for “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” to burst forth at any moment.
Watching the band move between ambient and anthemic instrumental rock against the otherwise de-peopled backdrop of the Mojave Desert, it’s hard not to have your mind drift to Pink Floyd’s own iconic concert film, 1972’s Live at Pompeii. (Floyd-ting Points, anyone?) And while neither guitarist approaches David Gilmour’s ability to electrify such spacy music with emotional intensity, Floyd never had a drummer to match the speed and fury of Taylor, who seems almost tireless in his incessant, ever-evolving rhythms.
Floating Points has always been especially attentive to the way sound exists in space; many of his most electrifying moments take place along the periphery of silence. Here, the painstaking way he details the psychoacoustic properties of the landscape is remarkable. While “Kites” might at first seem like a mere interlude, playback on headphones situates you in the remarkable headspace of the desert, evoking the kind of calm most modern urban listeners rarely experience. As Shepherd swings the mic, distant echo and miles-off reverb color the distant arpeggios of that synth situated on the rocks. Listen deeper and the smallest of sounds also arise, like the crunching of rocks under Shepherd’s feet as he moves through the space; the very breath of the desert is made audible. The result is transportive and supremely psychedelic.
Only two tracks arise from brief moments of desert ambience to become fully fleshed-out pieces. The soundtrack’s longest track, “Kelso Dunes,” is built up from the arpeggios that “Kites” put into relief, now incorporated into the full band setting. Susumu Mukai’s restrained bass is the first to engage Shepherd’s shimmering theme, giving just enough space for Taylor’s motoric drums to push through. Shepherd’s synthesized swirls widen and the guitars pick up velocity. At seven minutes, Shepherd eases off the pedal and the sound is suddenly infused with crisp desert air. You can almost hear the group draw a breath before lighting out on another flight. The intensity that Floating Points attains at the peak of “Kelso Dunes” is exhilarating: You almost hear the small group achieving liftoff and floating a few feet off the desert ground.


On his second album as a bandleader, the jazz trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson finds an exciting meeting ground of exploration and approachability. It’s the work of a composer on the rise.

Jonathan Finlayson & Sicilian Defense: Moving Still

Moving Still

Among other qualities, jazz has often provided a meeting ground for complexity and catchiness. In the 1920s and ’30s, “Harlem Stride” pianists held down chairs in the experimental music vanguard, while also becoming some of America’s first dance-music hitmakers. Ever since, experts have debated the “ideal” mixture of exploration and approachability. But both attributes are understood as crucial in the genre—and it’s always a thrill to encounter an artist who can balance the imperatives.
Trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson’s second album as a bandleader provides plenty of this excitement. Where his debut recording was an accomplished set, it also bore a strong resemblance to the work of saxophonist-composer Steve Coleman. That stylistic debt was come by honestly, as Finlayson has played his mentor’s complex, rhythmically cycling compositions for over a decade. But Moving Still hits in a more distinct way. While Finlayson is already held in high regard for his work with players like Henry Threadgill and Mary Halvorson, this album shows that the trumpeter is every bit as much a composer on the rise.
His counterpoint writing is still dense and active, but the tunes on top flow with greater ease. On the pulsing “Flank and Center,” members of Finlayson’s band have to navigate quick handoffs, passing the melodic line from one instrument to the next in quick succession. This is a common trick in contemporary jazz, meant to show off the dexterity of a group—though the melodic line itself can sometimes feels like an afterthought. No so here. Pianist Matt Mitchell and guitarist Miles Okazaki hit their notes with nervy energy, while Finlayson’s turns on trumpet often result in smooth and attractive completions of a phrase. The trumpeter’s subtlety extends to his own solo, where he flips an expected script: turning his tone even mellower, rather than becoming flashier.
Similar expressions of drive and lyricism are achieved with consistency on other tracks. The introduction to lengthy album opener “All of the Pieces” presents some of Okazaki’s most sublime playing, before the guitarist steers the full band into a swinging mood. Bassist John Hébert shows off a range of strummed and bowed techniques during “Between Moves”—a ruminative piece that turns hot in its final minutes. Mitchell’s piano is required to be both graceful (“Cap vs. Nim”) and clattering (“Space And”). At different points, Craig Weinrib’s percussion reveals his affinity for funk and ballad-style accompaniment. (Considered alongside his appearance on Henry Threadgill’s most recent album, it’s clear Weinrib has had a good 2016.)
Aside from all the fine soloistic moments, the band members excel in mixing these stylistic paints. The guitarist and rhythm section may suggest fusions with rock and soul, even while engaging with long, tricky lines composed by Finlayson. The ensemble’s sound can have the “cooking” feel much admired in hard-bop, even as the harmonic language stretches into modernist realms. The result is an overarching mood of delightful invention. Finlayson finds inspiration in chess, titling songs and even this group after aspects of the game. And though there are flashes of schematic obsessiveness in his work, he can also channel the gracefulness that’s apparent in any well-played contest. It’s not easy to create an original sound that “makes it new” and “keeps it traditional” at once, but at age 34—and after years of work alongside icons like AACM co-founder Muhal Richard Abrams—this trumpeter is there.


The UK pop upcomer put her former record label on blast, then scored her first No. 1 hit. Her debut full-length makes an ambitious but uneven bid for independent stardom.

My 21st Century Blues

In the UK, even those who have never heard of RAYE have undoubtedly heard her songs. Signed to Polydor at 17, RAYE (real name Rachel Keen) spent several years writing topline after topline with EDM producers like David Guetta and Joel Corry, achieving six Top 20 hits that have soundtracked the oiled-up abs of many a Love Island pool party scene. Behind the scenes, she lent her songwriting skills to Charli XCX, Little Mix, and even Beyoncé (for “Bigger,” from The Lion King: The Gift). But Keen grew fed up writing songs that didn’t reflect her as a person. Her label refused to fund her full-length debut until she hit their benchmark for success, and she had become obsessed with tracking streaming data and chart positions, trapped in a cycle of one-off collaborations and EP releases. In June 2021, she decided to blow it all up. “I have been on a 4 ALBUM RECORD DEAL since 2014,” she tweeted, “and haven’t been allowed to put out one album.” Shortly afterwards, RAYE and Polydor went their separate ways.
My 21st Century Blues is both Keen’s long-awaited debut and her first project as an independent artist. In places, it’s a defiant riposte to an unequal industry, reintroducing RAYE as a solo star full of rage and candor, as on the strident and soulful lead single “Hard Out Here,” where she warns white male music executives to take their “pink chubby hands” off her. In others, it’s a patchwork of Keen’s influences as a jazz singer reared on Nina Simone and Jill Scott, and trained at the prestigious BRIT School (also attended by Amy Winehouse and Adele). Keen has said that the album is a compilation of songs that she’s waited years to release. That gives it a cut-and-paste collage feeling, and while it showcases the breadth and the peaks of her capabilities, My 21st Century Blues lacks a clear thematic throughline.
The album’s highlight is its biggest hit, the 070 Shake-featuring “Escapism,” which unexpectedly became RAYE’s first UK No. 1 and first Billboard Hot 100 entry in January 2023. It’s a slurred, snaking song about alcoholism and drugs, its protagonist trapped in a seemingly endless tripped-out Uber journey, snarling about the revengeful drunk sex she’s going to have with a stranger tonight. The structural weirdness recalls the twisted R&B stylings of Keen’s earliest EPs, rather than her floor-filling pop; the song’s sped-up version, which went viral on TikTok, only adds to its relentless anxiety. Addiction is taboo for female pop stars to sing about in general—“Look what they done to Amy,” Keen darkly noted in a recent profile—but it feels particularly charged in the hands of an artist best known for penning carefree hits about tequila shots and nightclub dancefloors.
Against these sprawling, innovative pop songs, the old-school sheen of tracks like “Thrill Is Gone” and “Worth It” looks dull. Keen’s powerhouse voice sounds robust paired with soft harmonies, a brass section, and funk guitars, but these retro stylings feel like her comfort zone. She’s far more thrilling when she steps outside it, as on the low-riding, semi-rapped “Flip a Switch” and “Five Star Hotels” (featuring fellow British R&B singer Mahalia). These songs have a seductive, sinister energy, and show how strong a lyricist Keen is when she zeroes in on scene-setting and storytelling. Elsewhere, Keen tackles huge topics with a broad brush: the restless “Environmental Anxiety” tries to cover so much lyrical ground—climate crisis, social media, Boris Johnson—that it occasionally feels glib.
Perhaps the album’s most interesting track is “Black Mascara,” which flips the script on the Ibiza-adjacent sound with which Keen first found success. It’s still a dance track, but with a hallucinogenic fluidity; lyrically, it takes a “selfish man” to task, and refuses to glamorize drinking to numb heartbreak. This feels like a real reclamation for an artist who once felt she was losing herself in writing impersonal, party-loving dance-pop. The problem with fighting back, however, is that you can get stuck in defense mode. Keen has refused to be molded by an industry that wants her to be something that she isn’t; on My 21st Century Blues, she’s still working out exactly what she wants to say instead.


Assisted by players like Sam Gendel and André 3000, the ambient-jazz bandleader explores the spiritual and psychedelic aspects of human birth.

Placenta

As a potentially psychedelic experience that often transcends description, new-age music finds an unexpected analog in human birth. There’s nothing trippier or more ineffable than generating new life, deploying cellular tools to create something more than the sum of its parts. With tracks like “Generous Pelvis” and “Placenta, Nourishment, New Home, The Galaxy,” Carlos Niño & Friends’ Placenta makes explicit the connection between the genre’s fascination with womb-like sounds and the physical odyssey of labor. Assembling a who’s-who of the L.A. ambient-jazz scene—including tourmate André 3000, who plays flute on “Birthworkers Magic, and how we get hear…”—and a heady concoction of bells, chimes, synths, whistles, leaves, plants, and shakers, Niño and his far-out compatriots develop an LP with a life of its own—a gestalt marvel.
Opening track “Love to all Doulas!” sets the tone for this mystical instrumental odyssey, Nate Mercereau’s horns punctuating a drone that builds like something (or someone) crowning. “Some rest for the Midwives…” locks us into the groove, an itinerant shuffle that was recorded live with drummer Jamire Williams and saxophonist Sam Gendel in the historically spiritual SoCal town of Ojai. Later, the sound of breathwork and an accordion expand and contract like two sets of ribs on “Placenta, Nourishment, New Home, The Galaxy.”
Thematic breaks, like the compact and propulsive “In Appreciation of Chico Hamilton’s Vast Influence on the West Coast Sound,” provide a welcome respite from feet-in-the-stirrups embodiment. They also keep the record from becoming too conceptually on the nose, flexing Niño & Friends’ range and dynamism. “This ‘I’ was not” takes French composer Ariel Kalma’s spoken-word meditation on ego and lifts it out of the yoga studio with shimmering cymbals and warbling organ. “Either you is, or not. Not more. Nevertheless, life is—always,” he intones, teasing a Seussian riddle stage-set with celestial sounds. “Bi-Location,” another (undetectably) live recording named after the concept of inhabiting two different places in the same physical body at the same time, showcases Andres Renteria’s nimble hand drumming underneath a layer of hazy synthesizer, a sound like something crawling towards the surface and then panting in the aftermath against Aaron Shaw’s dreamy tenor sax.
Like much of Carlos Niño & Friends’ work, the record straddles the boundary between structure and improvisation, jazzy riffs and spasms that return to the gravitational pull of a central motif. “Surges, Expansions” feels the most in progress and least finished, a little unsure of itself (albeit aptly titled). “Moonlight Watsu in Dub” is the record’s most conventional attempt at a groove, groomed enough to play in the lobby of a chic hotel, and all the less interesting because of it.
But where much of Placenta could have been corny and try-hard, its redemption lies in its earnestness. “The baby’s whole universe: the placenta,” breathes Haize Hawke, a meditation teacher and doula herself, on “Placenta, Nourishment, New Home, The Galaxy,” and a baby’s murmurs a few bars later only underscore the reverence. Maybe life is a miracle; maybe birth, something commonplace, is as far as many of us get from the mundane. Jazz breathes new life into new age’s platitudinous tropes, taking us to weirder and more interesting terrain than memefied truisms. The record’s best songs, like birth, feel hard-won and revelatory—journeys that might take place on a single physical plane, but expand psychically outward, broadening the spectrum of beauty, personhood, and existence.


The UK dance producer delivers an effervescent blend of rattling garage, glitzy disco, and thumping house that invokes the idea of nightlife as an endless fantasy.

Jam City Presents EFM

Jam City’s debut album, 2012’s Classical Curves, rewired grime textures and electro-funk chords through sleek, off-kilter sound design and blistering rhythms. The English electronic producer born Jack Latham cited both Philly club and Laurie Anderson—indicators of his omnivorous, high-concept style from the start. In the decade since releasing the album, a keystone of London’s influential Night Slugs label, he’s contributed writing and production to a new class of pop stars (Olivia Rodrigo, Troye Sivan), electronic experimentalists (Kelela), and genre-blurring rappers (Lil Yachty) with equal flexibility. On his latest album, Jam City Presents EFM, Latham returns with an effervescent blend of rattling garage, glitzy disco, and thumping house. The guiding principle behind the album, the best Jam City LP to date, is simple: getting blasted at your favorite club with familiar faces, “looking for fun and hedonism and all that good stuff,” as he put it in a recent interview. (He has said that “EFM” is short for, among other things, “Every Freak Moves” and “Endless Fantasy Music.”)
Latham’s tactile production is key to EFM’s spell. A pan flute darts through opener “Touch Me,” giving the song a bright, playful rush that matches lyrics about an intoxicating lover’s healing touch. Latham sounds similarly buoyant throughout: His hooks are uniformly euphoric, and the guest artists meet his uptempo energy. On the shimmering standout “Wild N Sweet,” Empress Of is a perfect foil for Latham’s bright keys and delirious chorus, her voice warped into light-headed, oscillating ribbons over throbbing bass. Latham’s chosen features complement his smooth sound well. South West London singer Aidan sings on multiple songs, finding an especially supple groove on “Do It” over a slinky guitar melody and an assertive, chopped-up vocal sample lifted from the sexploitation classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Latham strikes an easy balance between straight-ahead club tracks and blissed-out pop exercises, and pleasures that could be fleeting linger into the next song.
Some of EFM’s most memorable tracks unearth a deeper melancholy within Latham’s percussive, chest-rattling textures. “LLTB” submerges a yearning piano melody beneath crashing garage drums; topped with Kelly Zutrau’s gentle vocals, it brings to mind the bleary-eyed haziness that hits at the club in the early hours of the morning. He achieves the same effect on a few of EFM’s harder tracks: The insistent, rubbery beat that powers “Reface” bursts open into a sunshower of airy synth squiggles at its climax, while “Times Square” finds a sweet spot over a bounding Omar S sample and joyful, surging melodies. The back-and-forth between exuberance and spiraling angst—best typified by “Tears at Midnight,” an impressionistic, swaying power ballad—gives the album tension, deftly switching between modes.
The palpable sense of delight that radiates across EFM feels like a distillation of Latham’s sharply honed instincts as a producer. He’s fully in control here, even when he delivers a curveball like “Redd St. Turbulence,” an agitated late-album highlight on which he teams up with hardcore band Show Me the Body’s Julian Cashwan-Pratt. The singer’s mumbled vocals give way to agitated snarls, like a careening update of a Prodigy song, while Latham unleashes rapid-fire, rave-ready drums. Like EFM’s best songs, it’s a jolt of energy that cuts bone deep.


Bringing together players from across Chicago’s improv community, Joshua Abrams’ ensemble folds elements of jazz and North African music into mesmerizing pieces that hint at eternity.

Natural Information Society: Since Time Is Gravity

Since Time Is Gravity

When an interviewer asked Joshua Abrams how he tends to start writing a new song, he demurred: “Our process is one of continuance.” The Chicago composer and bandleader’s music, through the conduit of his ever-expanding ensemble Natural Information Society, feels as if it exists in a state of perpetual evolution, just beyond the range of human perception. Performances can take on the air of a ritualistic summoning. When Abrams convenes his band, the first notes glint like light in the crack between our world, with its strict laws of temporal-spatial continuity, and the one in which the music has existed, ceaselessly unspooling, for centuries.
While there is nothing explicitly spiritual about Natural Information Society’s output, the group draws on practices from around the world that facilitate transcendent experiences: Gnawa from North Africa, Hindustani classical, ecstatic jazz. The music of these traditions is frequently longform  and often uses improvisation to expand upon a central scale or motif. Abrams threads together these sounds and structures, which have been reaffirmed and renewed by their tradition-bearers across hundreds of years, with the postmodern sensibilities of minimalist composition. The music’s timelessness is twofold: The techniques it employs to suspend time for the listener—mesmerizing repetition, nimble rhythmic interplay, buzzing drones—have unfathomably deep lineages themselves.
Natural Information Society’s latest album, Since Time Is Gravity, is a suite of vivid snapshots of eternity, a concept that should be oxymoronic but which feels completely natural in Abrams’ hands. He brings together players from across Chicago’s multifaceted improv community, including drummer and longtime collaborator Hamid Drake, multi-instrumentalist Ben LaMar Gay on cornet, saxophonist Nick Mazzarella, and elder statesman Ari Brown. Brown has played tenor sax alongside Coltrane sidemen McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, as well as AACM pioneers Malachi Thompson, Famoudou Don Moye, and Kahil El’Zabar; his improvisations on bookending pieces “Moontide Chorus,” “Is,” and “Gravity” are informed by that lineage while maintaining a deeply individualistic sensibility, and his modal melodies walk a fine line between mystical ambiguity and conversational familiarity. These players are all steeped in jazz, but they are also students of the global histories that led to its development in the early 20th century.
Abrams’ guimbri provides the rhythmic and tonal center for each composition, including two solo pieces for the instrument, “Wane” and “Wax.” The guimbri is a three-stringed bass lute played by the Gnawa people of Morocco that Abrams first heard on The Trance of Seven Colors, by Maleem Mahmoud Ghania and Pharoah Sanders, key influences on his own work. Compared to Steve Reich, who invoked African styles within a Western classical context while claiming much of the credit, Abrams is more attuned to the traditions that have inspired him—and to the nature of his own borrowing. “I wondered if it was right to take it up,” he once admitted of the guimbri, but Drake, who recorded with Ghania, encouraged him to continue. Using the instrument’s unique tone, a bulbous snap of gut strings against stretched hide and buzzing metallic rings, Abrams traces concentric circles around ostinato figures, forming the frame onto which the tapestry of drums, percussion, horns, and strings is hung.
Since Time Is Gravity features more players than any other NIS album—as many as 10, on some tracks. Rather than compete for space, the musicians patiently riff on interlocking patterns or assemble their parts into lavishly textured drones. “Immemorial” glows with restrained intensity, the group’s Indian influences filtered through the lens of Tony Conrad and Faust’s Outside the Dream Syndicate. Drake’s tabla takes center stage as Lisa Alvarado’s harmonium envelops the winds. Elsewhere, on “Is,” the ensemble swirls and swings around an implied drone, an amorphous mass of sound that bulges and recedes at odd intervals. It’s easy to get lost in the tangled web.
Abrams’ compositions specify certain patterns and modalities, melodies and moods, but much of the music remains undefined until the players assemble. Last year at Retreat at Currency Exchange, a Chicago coffee shop, NIS performed nearly all of Since Time Is Gravity, each piece spreading out according to the parameters set by the soloists, with horns leading several segues—an entirely different approach from the LP. Abrams’ music moves through time gracefully, adjusting to the demands of when and where it is performed, and who’s involved. The awe that his music channels lies in its grasp of mutability, tracking subtle changes in repeating patterns—whether from moment to moment or year to year.


The album-length collaboration between Mark Kozelek and Justin Broaderick is an appealing change-up in Kozelek's recent work; Kozelek hasn't necessarily "gone metal" here, but he's definitely using his voice in different ways.

Jesu/Sun Kil Moon

Mark Kozelek opens his newest Sun Kil Moon album, a collaboration with Justin Broadrick working as Jesu, by saying "good morning" before taking us through a number of his days and nights. It's a romantic collection of songs, as well as a tender and sad one, but this time around Kozelek sounds less alone. Even when he has a full band, it can feel like he's playing a guitar by himself in a room, but Jesu/Sun Kil Moon comes off like a true collaboration. Broadrick and Kozelek are in fact longtime friends and admirers of each other’s work: Jesu’s 2009 album Opiate Sun was released on Kozelek’s Caldo Verde imprint; in 2013, Kozelek covered Godflesh’s "Like Rats" and a year later he mentioned Broadrick by name in his song, "The Possum."
Kozelek hasn't necessarily "gone metal" here, but he's definitely using his voice in different ways—he yells, he howls, he screams. The gentle guitar crunch and cymbal crashes seem to wake Kozelek up a bit, shaking him from the more soporific spoken patterns of his last couple of releases. And sometimes Broadrick's backdrop drowns out Kozelek, which offers a nice dynamic shift. His gorgeous arrangements of crunchy guitars, tender synthesizers, and soft drums are dotted by the voices of Will Oldham, Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock, the members of Low, and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell, among others. And while the arrangements could stand alone on their own, there's still plenty of focus on Kozelek's lyrics. The words remain stream-of-consciousness, moving from the profound to the mundane and back, and Kozelek's still in the same emotional mode: He's facing mortality, and the mortality of everyone around him.
On the record, his songs often find him returning to the park outside his home, singing how hearing the children that play there makes him happy, and that he often writes his sad songs to those sounds. The references to these children become a kind of Greek chorus. There's the child he invites up on stage with him on "America's Most Wanted Mark Kozelek and John Dillinger." He tells us he sang while he "held her little hand," told her to stop eating sweets, and then chewed the gum he took from her ("it was sweet"). He sings, too, of kids shot at school and brings up the death of Nick Cave's son more than once ("The news hit me like a bus into a hill," he says, and at another time says it's something he thinks about daily). He also names an almost unbearably sad song about grieving parents after Mike Tyson's daughter, Exodus.
In that almost 10-minute track he reflects again on his cousin Carissa, his father's older brother Lenny who died young ("My dad looks down at the ground and gets quiet whenever I mention his name"), and author Danielle Steel losing her son at 19 to an overdose on heroin ("On his bedroom window still remains the sticker he put there/ The Misfits/ Every time I walk past her home on Washington Street/ I look up and I glance at it.") He talks, too, about watching the Mike Tyson documentary The Undisputed Truth, which inspires the song's chorus ("For all bereaved parents/ I send you my love"): "He spoke about the passing of his daughter Exodus and how he joined the bereaved parents group/ He knew when he arrived at her bed that he was not alone/ Because the parents of the other children embraced him and they cried together in the hospital room." It all adds up to the most painful song I've heard this year.
Other kids grow old and then die, and he sings about them, too. We get "Father's Day," in part about his 81-year-old father (he mentions, with a relief, that both he and his mother are still alive) and "Fragile," a song about Yes’ Chris Squire, who died of leukemia, which reminds Kozelek of a long-ago friend named Christopher, who also died of leukemia and is buried in the same graveyard where he and Kozelek used to drink Bud Light all day.
Kozelek's more recent output has obviously been vulnerable, but he feels especially open here—he’s not just making fun of himself, but also deeply dissecting why he makes fun of himself, and the sadness that’s hidden within a punchline. You almost forget what an asshole he’s been on stage and in interviews until, yes, he brings up those things, too. He turns the meta into the everyday.
The excellent eight-minute opener "Good Morning My Love" is based on someone telling their partner that they need to rekindle their love, and that person not knowing what that word "rekindle" means, but wanting/needing to find out. So much of Jesu/Sun Kil Moon has that kind of unexpected profundity. In an interview with Rainn Wilson that Kozelek did in conjunction with the record, he talked about shifting to his newer Sun Kil Moon mode after running out of metaphors. This is on full display here. (After all, the default chorus of "America's Most Wanted..." is "this is an account of the last few days," and there's truth in that advertising.)
The thing you realize listening to these songs, though, is that intimate details quickly take on the feel of metaphor. There's a profound weight, whether it's a middle-aged Kozelek telling his girlfriend how thankful he is to have her (which he does a few times), remembering listening to Hüsker Dü's Candy Apple Grey with a girl a long time ago, or talking about buying a bottle of water. In those water bottle moments, you wonder if he's thinking about spiritual or physical thirst, and realize that, for all of us, it's always a bit of both.


With DJ Drama in tow, Tyler thrives in the realm of the rap mixtape, which allows him great freedom to explore every facet of his talent as a producer, writer, and vocalist.

Tyler, the Creator: Call Me If You Get Lost

Call Me If You Get Lost

In the 2000s, mixtapes became the most effective and popular medium for aspiring rappers to build fanbases, seduce critics, and serve as commercial proof-of-concept to major labels. Even established rappers used the format to work out new ideas or to circumvent those labels entirely. As file sharing turned what was once a regional enterprise into a global one, rappers who would have previously given a song here and there to the DJs who issued compilation-style mixtapes began headlining their own. And so instead of cutting a hundred demos that might never be heard, or rapping a capella to starchy executives in boardrooms, many artists who broke during the W. Bush years did so by jacking industry beats and rapping underneath those DJs’ excited yelps, their formative work rewound and doubled back until it settled in your brain just so.
When digital streaming platforms made it easy to profit off of online-only releases, provided the artist or label owns the rights to what’s uploaded, “mixtape” became a nominal term used cynically to signal which rap records were meant to be taken more seriously than others. (Think of how many times you’ve seen advertising for an artist’s “debut album” only to think, “Don’t they have three albums already?”) Call Me If You Get Lost—which is either Tyler, the Creator’s sixth or seventh album, depending on whether or not you count 2009’s Bastard—argues for the mixtape not as a tidy bit of careerist maneuvering, but as an aesthetic tradition. It’s an inspired choice, nostalgic but irreverent, and suited perfectly to his strengths: It grants him the freedom to play with tone, to write personally or use his gravelly voice as texture, to treat the harshest raps and the most delicate hooks as mad experiments gone wrong.
Call Me is hosted by DJ Drama, the animated Philly native whose Gangsta Grillz series includes some of the most essential rap records of the century so far. There are times when the album evokes the grittiest of those tapes—its single reimagines a Gravediggaz song—but it breaks up the heavier cuts with shards of bright pop. (At times Call Me recalls In My Mind: The Prequel, the 2006 Gangsta Grillz tape by Tyler’s hero, Pharrell.) Drama is at his comedic best, goading on verses or underlining Tyler’s monologues about jet-setting (“A young lady just fed me French vanilla ice cream!”). He’s irresistible even when he’s fucking up the album’s title, as he does on the excellent “Hot Wind Blows,” which reunites him with Lil Wayne.
While DJ Drama’s presence is indispensable, it is not the only thing that recalls those old .zip files. Of Call Me’s 16 songs, only five make it to the three-minute mark—and that includes the two marathon affairs, “Wilshire” and “Sweet/I Thought You Wanted to Dance,” which run eight and a half and 10 minutes, respectively. Even within those shorter records are sharp breaks and jagged connections: see the way both “Corso” and “Lemonhead” open with menace before moving to more Technicolor sounds, or the way “Massa” inverts that progression, seeming at first to be brighter only to quickly get dulled out again. When Tyler’s old Odd Future comrade Domo Genesis rappels into “Manifesto,” he does so under cover of a drastic beat switch that throws the song into chaos.
The Gangsta Grillz conceit allows Tyler some latitude to meander—the platonic-ideal mixtape includes freestyles, original songs, radio singles, snippets of unreleased material—but he gives Call Me enough motifs that they eventually fuse into a spine. There are near-constant references to travel (the smartest of these is the beginning of “Massa,” where he cuts off an earnest-seeming monologue about his passport mid-sentence, as if he knows how it sounds) and to Rolls Royces: the way the new models’ doors open; the fact that Tyler now owns a pair; the detailing on their ceilings and the cookie crumbs he litters on their floors; the fact that their signature umbrellas are superfluous in Los Angeles. He returns to both these things the way rappers might circle back to an anchor word or phrase while freestyling. This has an intoxicating effect: Over the course of Call Me, it becomes unclear whether these material flexes are his focus, and the more wrenching personal revelations bleed in and take over, or if it’s the other way around. It’s probably a little of both.
As for the personal: Those bloodlettings come in a couple of different forms. There is “Manifesto,” where he meditates on the impact of his past shock-rap provocations and vents about the way he scans to both Black and white audiences; there is his revelation, on “Massa,” that his mother was living in a shelter when his breakout 2011 single “Yonkers” dropped. But the matter he dedicates the most time to is (what sounds like) a single fractured affair between himself and a friend’s lover. This is rendered in prosaic detail on the sprawling and anxious “Wilshire”: one minute he coolly concludes that the affair is worth ruining a friendship over, the next he finds the idea unthinkable. He is deeply, passionately in love, then nervously analytical. It has already inspired swaths of gossip and speculation as to the identity of the woman (and, consequently, the friend). But you picture Tyler alone in a hotel room somewhere, refreshing his phone, hoping it will inspire a single email.
There are plenty of moments on Call Me If You Get Lost that are playful, sometimes joyous. “Wusyaname,” which makes smart use of YoungBoy Never Broke Again and Ty Dolla $ign, is a sweaty flip of H-Town’s “Back Seat (Wit No Sheets)”; the anecdote about Tyler’s mother is paid off with her own, almost unbelievably colorful monologue. Yet even these have a pall cast over them. In the middle of “Massa,” Tyler raps in a low register and a deliberate flow: “Everyone I ever loved had to be loved in the shadows.” This maps onto the affair from “Wilshire,” and maybe onto his past relationships with men, but it is tragic—the notion that a feeling so pure could be swallowed by the secrecy it requires. At moments like this, Tyler seems uniquely in touch with himself, ready to be naked on record. But later in the same verse, he raps about being so paranoid he has to sleep with a gun—now in a voice so affected it’s unclear whether it’s a cry for help, a joke, or both. These things do not move linearly; the willingness to be sincere does not mean it’s easy to do so. If Tyler feels his true life happens in the shadows and crevices—the gaps between what everyone else is meant to see—it’s only appropriate he revived a mixtape format that pushes once-hidden ideas and asides to the center of the frame.

Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music.


The music from Elton John’s life sinks into the uncanny valley with a studio band, a substitute singer, and a silver-screen production that misses the finer points of the legendary performer’s career.

Various Artists: Rocketman (Music From the Motion Picture)

Records are the constant in Elton John’s life. Records gave the young Reginald Dwight refuge during an unhappy childhood, records delivered him to stardom, records were his indulgence during the height of his 1970s stardom—Tower Records on the Sunset Strip used to shut down so Elton could ransack the racks in private—and records were his sustenance during his recovery from his myriad addictions, providing him a path into a stable, sustainable life and career in middle age and beyond.
Which is why it’s odd that Rocketman (Music From The Motion Picture), by many respects the record of Elton John’s life—at least his life as it is depicted in Dexter Fletcher’s fantastical film of the rock star’s journey—is such a stilted affair. Much of the blame can be laid at the feet of Fletcher and producer Matthew Vaughn, who decided the music be sculpted to fit the contours of the silver screen, reworking and re-creating John’s original hits so they matched the emotional tenor of the stylized story being told. To that end, the production team hired the right music supervisor for the job: Giles Martin.
Known now as the man overseeing reissues of the prime jewels in the Beatles’ catalog, Martin cut his teeth bringing the Fab Four to Vegas, creating the mashups that fueled Cirque Du Soleil’s extravaganza Love. Rocketman doesn’t take nearly as many risks as Love—at no point on the soundtrack are digital drum beats grafted upon the melodies—but Martin doesn’t quite treat the original recordings as sacred gospel. Sometimes, Martin slyly opens up a familiar tune so it feels slightly left of center: “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)” begins with a blast of guitars before dabbling in both mock-reggae and diluted psychedelia. But more often he favors productions that carefully tease out nostalgic memories without succumbing to rote replications. “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” swaps out melancholy majesty for pomp and circumstance and “Take Me To The Pilot” submerges Paul Buckmaster’s gorgeous strings in aggressive R&B rhythms. The alterations aren’t as much reimaginations as they are a play upon our collective subconscious.
By design, Martin’s new arrangements are made for the big screen, so every gesture is oversized and aimed at the cheap seats. This is a subtle but notable difference from John’s original records, evident in thick layers of choirs and strings, but also the studio band, who sound considerably stiffer on the rowdy early rockers (“Rock & Roll Madonna,” “Hercules,” “Honky Cat”) than Elton’s loose original crew. This is a problem that plagues Rocketman: The professional players can hit the marks but not with the same aplomb as the musicians who created the recordings in the first place.
Such stuffiness was perhaps inevitable. During the 1970s, Elton John led a rock’n’roll band—and they were a band, not a collection of session musicians; he kept bassist Dee Murray, drummer Nigel Olsson and guitarist Davey Johnstone with him through the years, with the latter two still playing with Elton to this day—so his original recordings have a certain intangible raw soulfulness underneath Gus Dudgeon’s supple productions. Here, the music is intentionally buttoned up, meant to evoke memories instead of creating them.
To that end, this precision is preferable for the actors who populate the cast of Rocketman, but their vocals are the ultimate undoing of the original soundtrack. Where the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody relied on original Freddie Mercury vocals, Rocketman features Taron Egerton—a veteran of the Matthew Vaughn Kingsman film franchise—as Elton John, with occasional contributions from co-stars Jamie Bell, Kit Connor, and Bryce Dallas Howard. Egerton possesses a vocal timbre that’s reasonably similar to Elton John’s and he’s an adept enough vocalist, but he sings like an actor: He’s intent on playing a part instead of inhabiting a song. While this approach may be well-suited for a film, when his performance is heard as strictly a recording, his thinness as a vocalist becomes apparent. Egerton never digs into the meaning of the lyric—granted, Bernie Taupin’s obtuse words have been known to stump the best singers—preferring to glide by on cozy melodies and exacting replications of phrasing, a choice that undoes the ballads “Your Song” and “Amoreena” and keeps the wilder moments tame.
The gap between Egerton and Elton comes into sharp relief on “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again,” the triumphant number that closes the film and soundtrack alike. A seemingly effortless evocation of John’s buoyant mid-’70s peak, “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” is as autobiographical as Captain Fantastic & The Brown Dirt Cowboy—it prefers myth-making to soul-baring—but the revelation is how the duet finds John towering over Egerton. Older but still spry, Elton John commands attention on this newly-written number, a track that works because it’s as much a record as it is a song: the colors pop, the beat bounces, horns punctuate each hook, and the interaction between the singer and actor feels like an intentional act of dominance. And, in that sense, “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” illustrates once again that records are Elton John’s salvation, since even this single overshadows the mediocrity of Rocketman (Music From The Motion Picture), proving that even if somebody else is playing Elton John, the role still belongs to Reginald Dwight.


After four albums that were driven by overriding concepts, the mighty Mastodon return with a record that heads in the opposite direction: The Hunter sometimes feels more like a mixtape, with almost every track tackling a different sound and style.

The Hunter

Mastodon chose the right time to scale back the concepts. For 2002's Remission, they focused on fire; 2004's Leviathan, water (and Moby Dick); 2006's Blood Mountain, earth (plus a vision quest up the side of the title's mountain); and 2009's Crack the Skye, aether, linking astral travel, wormholes, Rasputin, possession, and the suicide of drummer Brann Dailor's sister Skye. There's no way to follow that, so for their fifth album, The Hunter, they offer 13 stylistically and lyrically varied tracks. The title references the death of guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds' brother, who suffered a heart attack while hunting last December, but there's no overarching thread. Despite the heaviness of that kind of information, the record works best as a catchy guilty-pleasure party album-- there's a song about sex in zero gravity, another about the Swamp Thing, one titled "Bedazzled Finger Nails".
Instead of worrying about a storyline they can barely explain in interviews, Mastodon put the complexities into the songwriting and vocal harmonies. The Hunter is longer than Crack the Skye by a couple of minutes, but it feels briefer. As the band itself noted early on, it comes over like a Mastodon mixtape. The Atlanta sludge veterans have never taken the easy way out, sure, but they've also never cycled between so many styles: We get crusty snarling dotted with spaced-out moments ("Black Tongue" and its "I burned out my eyes/ I cut off my tongue" welcome), funky, psychedelic heavy rock ("Curl of the Burl"), crazy keyboard noodles ("Bedazzled Finger Nails"), meditative, progressive Milky Way excursions ("Stargasm"), hammering tech-psych anthems with crazy-climber riffs ("Octopus Has No Friends"). Outside that, "Blasteroid" could almost pass as Torche. Really, it's like pressing buttons at random on a jukebox.
Mastodon 2011 are largely about restless experimentation. The Hunter is the quartet's first collection with cover art by someone other than Paul Romano. They recorded it with hip-hop and Maroon 5 producer Mike Elizondo, the guy who co-wrote 50 Cent's "In Da Club", and the Game's "Higher".  It also features the first track sung entirely by Dailor. They use a Theremin. The sound is certainly chewier and, at times, more pop than usual. Two of the best songs-- the fuzzed sing-along "All the Heavy Lifting" and the slowly unfurling title track-- deliver memorable, vaguely radio-friendly choruses. But there's also the tech-heavy weirdness of "Bedazzled Finger Nails", a pretty, stumbling track that offers mathy psychedelia with a variety of vocal approaches (though I could do without the synth squiggles).
As you might expect from a record this jumbled, there are parts that lag. Here, they sequenced three duds together, the generic classic rock of "Dry Bone Valley", the mid-tempo "The Thickening", with its sexy oohs and ahhs, and Brann Dailor's Syd Barrett-like "The Creature Lives", a song that opens with more than a minute of Moog and laughter. (Note: It's not a great idea to follow one of your throwaway tracks with more than a minute of Moog and laughter.) They come back strong with "Spectrelight", a burnt offering sung by  regular guest Neurosis' Scott Kelly, and the pretty finale, "The Sparrow", a track dedicated to the band's accountant's wife, who died of stomach cancer. Lyrically, they simply, rather beautifully, repeat her supposed life motto: "Pursue happiness with diligence."
It feels like The Hunter's motto, too. I do miss the grit, heavy-lifting, and larger excavations of their earlier work-- nothing merits tossing around the word "epic" here-- but what they do, and what they've become, is fascinating. I ended my review of Blood Mountain by jokingly referring to the guys as the new "Monsters of Rock." They went on to play the festival of the same name the next year, but I was more talking about the ascension of a new brand of mainstream heavy metal, one that would sit beside Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, and others of their ilk. What I hadn't expected was that, a few years later, it would make more sense to pair them with Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, and other guys not afraid to spend an entire set smiling.


A rapper, singer, producer, visual artist, and activist, the Philly native puts all of his diverse talents to work on a debut album that is equal parts political manifesto and bold artistic statement.

Where There’s Smoke

As a musician, DonChristian is a triple threat: He can rap, sing, and produce, with an ear for experimental sounds. Off wax, the Philly native is a Wesleyan-educated visual artist and activist whose murals adorn buildings all over New York, where he is currently based, as well as Chicago and Los Angeles. His debut album, Where There’s Smoke, is the culmination of all of these talents—equal parts political manifesto and bold artistic statement.
From the outset, DonChristian presents a portrait of duality. His “Intro (Overture)” positions expressions of bravado (sexual and otherwise) beside one-off lines aimed at affirming and validating marginalized groups. He raps at a low growl, his delivery deadpan but still kinetic. The approach is well suited to his production style, which tends toward the sort of futuristic minimalism that could soundtrack a sci-fi film and allows ample room for all of his divergent interests. The title track finds DonChristian playing his own feature, seamlessly switching between flowing through the verses and crooning on the hook. It's one of few songs that follow a somewhat conventional structure, on an album that doesn’t put much stock in normalcy.
DonChristian stands out most when he lets himself drift further away from tradition, on highlights like the sprawling “Unfolding” and the glitchy “Reeling.” Both use sound and space in a way that makes the songs seem to grow, evolve, and die. Elsewhere, “Savings” is a sensual come-on delivered by the artist’s late uncle, legendary loverman Teddy Pendergrass, interrupted at the end by an aggressive stretch of rapping—once again, DonChristian plays up the duality. Though the album favors rap, there's magic in his singing. It peaks with “Gravity (Stretch Break),” a tease of an interlude that features some of his strongest vocal work. “Say you don’t dream no more, baby let me dream for you,” he wails against a pulsing orchestra of horns and drums.
Despite his ability to move between edgy flows and sentimental croons, he isn’t always a one-man band. A mainstay of New York’s LGBTQ art community, he’s recruited guests that are a statement unto themselves. The druggy haze of “Been Sleep” is accented by a feature from trans rapper Ms. Boogie, who lifts the song with a steamy, self-affirming verse. Bbymutha, the eternally charismatic rhymer from Tennessee, appears on the spacey “Crash,” infusing the hook with attitude. On “Unfolding,” shapeshifting artist Eartheater chills the track with her icy falsetto.
Another trans rapper, Chae Buttuh, appears on standout “Black Quaker,” a war cry set to dreamlike synths and double-time percussion. A menacing DonChristian aims darts at those who would cross him—including the law. “You can't make me no object, it's kings in these projects/School hallways built up by the same housing convicts,” he chants on the hook. Chae Buttuh reiterates the need for agency with a demand that people mind their own business when it comes to her body and general existence. The album’s most powerful statement, it comes together like a summary of DonChristian’s experiences, from his Quaker schooling and later work on Rikers to his allyship and the middle finger he raises at all oppressive institutions.
When he unveiled the album, DonChristian wrote that he had to lose himself to find himself in it—but that statement is far bleaker than the music. He sounds confident as he carves out a lane that is unique but firmly of the present, when proud weirdos are creating the blueprint. In doing so, Where There’s Smoke reveals an innovator who knows what it means to be progressive without being pretentious.


The Berlin-based composer Nils Frahm's Spaces is a live album patchworked together from various recordings, containing songs both old and new, some shortened, some lengthened, some radically different in approach. It's a mesmerizing and beautiful work.

Spaces

Tight restrictions are a fundamental component of the music made by Berlin-based composer Nils Frahm. When he plays piano it sometimes feels like his hands are pulling rigid machine-based structures into a lighter, airier place. Frahm is a musician clearly enamored with benchmark figures from the minimalist tradition (Steve Reich, Philip Glass), artists who cross the jazz and classical worlds (Keith Jarrett), film composers that lean toward the tropes of early music (Michael Nyman), and electronic musicians with the lightest of touches (Thomas Fehlmann). Spaces is a live album patchworked together from various recordings, containing songs both old and new, some shortened, some lengthened, some radically different in approach. Some even stay just as they were.
This is an absorbing work, full of pensive moments cut together by music that thrives on dovetailing melodies that can be simultaneously mesmerizing and beautiful. "Said and Done" is the most impressive of these, with a hammering piano motif looping for most of its 10-minute duration as Frahm filters it through textures both light and dark. It's giddy at times, the sound of a creator utterly lost to his work. The occasional burst of applause or audience noise is a startling reminder that these aren't studio works, although it's easy to forget that fact, so meticulous are the arrangements. Moments of humor work as a neat buffer throughout, stopping everything from becoming too internalized—the Jarrett-referencing "Improvisation for Coughs and a Cell Phone" is a piece bent around the interruptions suggested in its title.
What's fascinating about Frahm's work here is how he plays with time, working strictly within its limits through tiny repeating motifs, but blowing the overall picture up over such a wide canvas that it's easy to forget how long it's taken to get to where he’s going. The almost 17-minute long medley "For - Peter - Toilet Brushes - More" is an example of that idea. Plates of coiling synth sound indebted to the new age markers set down by Jean Michel Jarre open up the track, before Frahm glides through bursts of rim-shot percussion, arpeggiated synths, and a return to the strident piano of "Said and Done". All the component parts work in miniature, based around fragments of sound and ideas that gradually merge into one despite their wildly different roots. The huge burst of applause at the end is deserved, to say the least.
Something that emerges over time spent with Spaces is a subtly shifting dynamic triggered by the way these tracks are recorded. "Over There, It's Raining" ostensibly plays out as a pretty low-key piece of neo-romantic yearning. But a large part of its feeling is derived from the tape hiss that muffles at its corners, giving the sentiment a lack of crispness, lending a sense of love and hope gone stale. Even the most forward-thinking track here, the stunning crisscrossing circuitry of "Says", is far from what it seems at first glance. In a recent interview, Frahm outlines it as an example of "what can you do with one delay and an old synthesizer, no computers." It's hard to picture that basic working method when lost in its complex tangle of glossy electronics, underpinned by myriad counter-melodies that stretch out to unfathomable depths.
For someone as technically accomplished as Frahm surely is, and with so many unique and divisive ideas in mind, Spaces never succumbs to being a set of exercises set to tape. Part of the beauty is in trying to figure out what he's doing and not quite getting there, but mostly it's easy to forget about the way his music is put together and just lose yourself in it instead. Often the charm is, as the title suggests, in the spaces Frahm so artfully leaves between notes. That's an impressive achievement for any live recording—a place where the sweat and sawdust of real life often impinges a little too heavily on otherworldly material, where a layer of fantasy is often shorn away in a manner that can be crude and disillusioning. On Spaces there's a power that Frahm hasn't always been able to capture in his recorded work. But the overriding feel is one of joy at listening to a performer demonstrating the infinite elasticity of sound.


Working alongside pop songwriter Simon Wilcox, the Strokes guitarist delivers a cheerfully sprawling double album that feels less like a cohesive statement than a clearinghouse of ideas.

Melodies On Hiatus

Melodies on Hiatus is a title that sounds better suited to Julian Casablancas, the Stroke who spends his spare time peddling noise skronk with the Voidz. Is Albert Hammond Jr really trying to tell us that he’s turned his back on hooks? The tongue-in-cheek framing of this tuneful solo album underscores the guitarist’s sense of humor, a quality often obscured by his day job in a band that prizes affectless cool.
There’s not much conventional cool to be found on Melodies on Hiatus. The extended release strategy—the first nine tracks dropped digitally last month—may be a calculated response to an oversaturated market, but it also aids in digesting this amorphous double album, whose leisurely sprawl reflects its long period of creation. Hammond Jr began work on the material not long after releasing Francis Trouble in 2018.
Compulsive writing has been his constant state for years, his productivity hindered only by the fact that lyrics come as slowly as chords come quickly. Hammond Jr admitted to The Guardian, “I don’t always hear the words in a song,” a problem he solved this time by collaborating with Simon Wilcox, a Canadian singer-songwriter who has written for Carly Rae Jepsen, Selena Gomez, and Nick Jonas. The pair engaged in a series of lengthy phone conversations which Wilcox used as inspiration for lyrics. The process yielded 19 songs for a double album that feels less like a coherent statement than a clearinghouse of ideas.
Hammond Jr’s decision to hire Wilcox is evidence that he’s loosening the reins without quite letting them go. Wilcox’s words often mimic the cadences of the Strokes’ early years, filtering the guitarist’s thoughts, dreams, and impressions into the band’s trademark conversational sing-song. When he sings, “Cocktails to the drunken crowd/He wants to talk but it’s too loud/So he just stands and stares at her/Like she’s some exotic bird,” on “I Got You,” it feels like a conscious evocation of the insouciant decadence of the Strokes circa Y2K, yet the times have changed. Today, Hammond Jr comes across as an observer, not a participant. Maybe that's why he buries his vocals in the mix, or perhaps it’s because he’s a music guy and not a words guy: The voice is just another instrument, the melody the engine of a pop song.
Melodies on Hiatus is essentially a pop album, a collection of brightly alluring confections that’s full of gilded arena-rock guitars, retro synth sounds, and high-gloss effects. Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders lays down a sprightly new-wave groove on “Thoughtful Distress”; rapper GoldLink wanders into “100-99” to deliver a verse only tenuously connected to the song around it. But such seemingly superfluous flourishes are the point: What happens in the margins gives Melodies on Hiatus its shape.
Usually, that flair is enough to keep Melodies on Hiatus engaging, as it never sits still. It’s fun to hear Hammond Jr tip his hat to Spoon on the nocturnal “Downtown Fred,”; “Dead Air” is a spiky neon-lit throwback; and “Never Stop” swaggers like an AOR hit pining for a MTV that’s yet to be invented. Some tracks are more compelling than others, but that’s to be expected when an artist writes by throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. The melodies on Hammond Jr’s album are in ample supply; it’s the urge to self-edit that’s taken a breather.


Peaches may be the only female pop musician working today who sings about sex while firmly and intentionally diverting the objectifying male gaze. While it may not always be pretty or elegant, it's damn necessary, and Rub does an excellent job of it.

Rub

Back at the turn of the century, Peaches' big and brash "Fuck the Pain Away" was a tsunami. Electroclash was at its peak, such as it was, and when the sultry, leering opening line of “sucking on my titties like you wanted me” would spit out of a club PA, crowds of all orientations turned their heads. Sometimes a first impression that arresting can be an albatross, and while Peaches has carved out a substantial career for herself in both the music and art world, the straight press largely moved on.With Rub, Peaches' sixth studio album, she extends and builds upon the body of work she's accumulated in the past 15 years.
The overarching themes of Peaches' work—gender identity and expression, queer sex, leftist politics—are now more than ever at the forefront of our culture, which means her lyrics sound less transgressive than they might have even five years ago: "Can't talk right now/ This chick's dick is in my mouth" she deadpans on the album's title track. But Peaches has always been able to use her outré, sometimes downright silly, personality to shed light on real issues, like society's patriarchal disgust at the natural state of a woman's body. In the same song, when she sets up a scene of "circle jerk girls who spray/ we've got a male in the middle and we bukkake", she may be the only female pop musician working today who sings about sex while firmly and intentionally diverting the objectifying male gaze. While it may not always be pretty or elegant, it's damn necessary, and Rub does an excellent job of it.
But is Peaches' music secondary to her politics? Interestingly, the first voice you hear on Rub isn't Peaches', but the distinctive whisper-moan of Kim Gordon. On album opener "Close Up", Gordon purrs for Peaches to get closer to the camera as she raps/speaks about her sexual exploits (the song's video features Gordon coaching Peaches through a shit-smearing wrestling match). The track's catchy, powerful bass drum beat threads throughout Rub, which benefits from a driving dance element, much like a sonic sequel to 2009's electro-heavy I Feel Cream. R**ub is the first album in her career where the music feels as foregrounded as Peaches' persona, which makes sense, as she co-produced it with Vice Cooler.
Rub's centerpiece is "Free Drink Ticket", an altogether strange offering that doesn't quite mesh with the rest of the album. With her voice downpitched to sound more masculine, Peaches delivers an almost stream-of-consciousness diatribe against a pretentious club promoter. It sounds jarringly personal, and lyrically is strikingly different from every other track. It's a misstep that is corrected by "Dumb Fuck", the closest thing Rub has to a straightforward pop song (even though it contains about 35 F-bombs). With it's Robyn-esque disco synths and biting lyrics, "Dumb Fuck" is a call for feminists everywhere to ditch their boyfriends for Roland MC-505s.
"I Mean Something", the album's closer and duet with fellow Canadian/frequent collaborator/ex-roommate Feist, sees Peaches defiantly state Rub's most telling line: "No matter how old, how young, how sick/ I mean something." Is that a hint of desperation? Aggression? Bravado? Perhaps, realistically, a mixture of all three, both an assertion of Peaches' rightful place in the trenches of the culture wars and an artistic plea for attention.


After a mixtape staking his claim to the Woah, a viral dance, the Dallas rapper looks to present himself as a bona fide pop artist with an aesthetic universe of his own.

Planet Swajjur

In a recent profile of his hometown scene, the rapper Mel (of duo The Outfit, TX) describes Dallas as the Bay Area of Texas rap: Both regions are the weirder, more undersung counterparts of their respective states’ dominant hip-hop metropolises. The comparison with California offers a useful paradigm for thinking about the differing sounds of the Lone Star State’s first and third-largest cities. L.A. and Houston rappers have, historically speaking, made music for car speakers: Houston is laid-back and poured up, recorded with your Cadillac in mind. But in the Bay and Dallas, hip-hop is dance music—it’s made for the club. The so-called Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex pumps out more viral dance moves than oil barrels; the DFW is home to the Dougie, popularized by Lil Wil’s “My Dougie” before L.A.’s Cali Swag District taught the whole country how to do it, and the Stanky Legg, as made famous by GS Boyz. Though the area has produced superstars like Erykah Badu and regional legends like Dirty South Rydaz and Big Tuck, its biggest breakthroughs have been relatively short-lived.
Dallas today offers an entire spectrum of styles: the strip-club trippiness of The Outfit, TX; the chart-ready soulfulness of Yella Beezy and Boosie affiliate Mo3; the made-for-the-mosh-pit bars of SPLURGE and Emotional Xan. But on a national scale, it’s still most influential as a source of novelty dances. The latest descendant of the Dougie is the Woah. After a boost from Lil Uzi Vert, the Woah was picked up by the likes of Drake and Travis Scott, but Dallas is making sure to take credit for its latest creation. Though its origins are contested, Def Jam signee 10k.Caash established himself as the authority on all things Woah with last year’s mixtape The Creator.
As its cover art suggests, The Creator was largely educational in nature, staking 10k’s claim as the authentic originator of the Woah. Planet Swajjur (which takes its name from 10k’s intentional mispronunciation of the word “swagger”) attempts to prove that 10k.Caash is more than his most famous creation: not just a viral phenomenon, but a bona fide pop artist with a viable aesthetic universe of his own. Yet memes and other forms of online currency remain his stock in trade. His songs are bite-sized, accompanied on Spotify by looping cell-phone footage—mostly edited on the app Triller—of 10k and friends doing various dance moves. The project’s 10 tracks are designed with virality in mind: not much longer than your average TikTok, with repetitive basslines built for looping. Former Raider Klan affiliate and prolific beatsmith Ronny J lends his producer tag to songs like “Flip Flop” and “Hop Out,” but it’s hardly his most cutting-edge work. 10k’s beats often feel like they’re built from digital Lego bricks: loads of crunchy and compressed bass, colorful synth lines, and a few loops that sound like GarageBand presets.
The Creator showcased co-signs from a menagerie of very online rappers—Rico Nasty, RiFF RAFF, Famous Dex, Lil Yachty, Matt Ox—but 10k.Caash is now using his newfound clout to raise the profiles of other emerging artists. In addition to Dallas comrades GUN40 and DSmooth66, Planet Swajjur features appearances from L.A.’s Sexton, Maryland’s TyFontaine, and upstate New York’s Young Jordan, as well as more established guests like Zoey Dollaz and fellow Texan TikTok star TisaKorean. It’s a lineup that’s as regionally diverse as it is stylistically varied, from Sexton’s half-sung, trilling raps to TyFontaine’s bright and exuberant choruses. But these contributions are so brief as to be rendered largely unmemorable. The only real heavyweight this time around is Chance the Rapper, with a guest verse on “Me And My Friends” that’s the hip-hop equivalent of a Cameo shout-out.
In both sound and presentation, 10k’s most formative influence is Soulja Boy, the original internet rapper. DeAndre Way might still be considered a novelty by some, but there’s no denying the untouchable effect he’s had on the last decade of hip-hop: an early pioneer of FruityLoops and digital production, one of the first to figure out how to use social media to his advantage, and the original otaku rapper before everybody and their mother was name-dropping One Punch Man. Like his stylistic forefather, 10k has the signature trend, but he’s got a bit further to go if he wants to reach Soulja Boy levels of saturation. 10k has proved his musical planet is worth visiting; whether or not he’s more than the sum of his viral dance videos remains to be seen.


Roberto Carlos Lange’s sixth and best album as Helado Negro deepens and expands upon the imagistic nature of Lange’s lyrics and cosmic synth-folk. It is a sublime, masterful piece of music.

This Is How You Smile

The Antiguan-American author Jamaica Kincaid first published the short story “Girl” in The New Yorker in 1978. In what is essentially one long run-on sentence, “Girl” takes the form of a stern mother’s list of instructions to her daughter on how to become a skilled, self-possessed woman (“this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like at all”). The litany is imbued with both intense maternal love and unsparing criticism, an imbalance that reflects a colonialist structure that Kincaid sharply excoriates in writing. “I’ve come to see that I’ve worked through the relationship of the mother and the girl to a relationship between Europe and the place that I’m from,” Kincaid explained to Mississippi Review in 1996. “Which is to say, a relationship between the powerful and the powerless.”
That metaphorical relationship, between a powerful forebear and powerless descendants, colors much of This Is How You Smile, Roberto Carlos Lange’s sixth and best album under his Helado Negro moniker. Following 2016’s Private Energy, an album that wrestled with violence against people of color through electronic-pop meditations on identity and connection, Smile takes Kincaid’s weary passion and wanders through soothing, ambling soundscapes, framed as a stroll with Lange’s older brother down the sun-baked streets of South Florida, where they grew up. The album deepens and expands upon the imagistic nature of Lange’s lyrics and cosmic synth-folk, using found sound and his own sonorous, humming voice to tease out the complicated harmony of love and power at the heart of Kincaid’s short story.
These sublime confessions are fixated on perseverance, of embracing joy and laughter while facing the everyday difficulties of growing up in an immigrant household. “Blush now/They can’t know/Lifelong history shows,” Lange sings over gently chiming vibraphone on the opener “Please Won’t Please,” “That brown won’t go/Brown just glows.” The song picks up the thread of Private Energy’s “Young, Latin and Proud” and “It’s My Brown Skin,” centering Lange’s experience of living as a Latinx person with plain-spoken lyrics of support and encouragement. That tender intention paves the way for the rest of This Is How You Smile’s open-hearted solicitude.
Synths glow like footlights on “País Nublado,” a bilingual exploration of uncertainty and the persistence of spirit: “Laughing longer/Smiling harder/Makes me feel/Feeling stronger,” he lists in a soothing croon. The gray, overcast imagery of a “país nublado” (“cloudy country”) represents a precarious future, addressing a widespread present-day fear and choosing to offer a blanket of relief rather than resignation.
Lange employs stretches of fuzzy cellphone recordings and ambient meditations to temper other encroaching anxieties. “Fantasma Vaga” sinks comfortably into a spectral, twitchy pool of echoed synths. “Modulaciónes en tú sonrisa/Desplazamiento que no puedo imitar (Modulation in your smile/Displacement that I can’t imitate),” Lange sings placidly over watery cassette synthesizers, speaking to several experiences of displacement—deportation and gentrification among them—at once. “Y tú cambias todo,” he repeats at the song’s end, the music clearing around him like a receding fog. Highlight “Running” is of the same cloth, incorporating a hazy, recursive song structure that pivots around Lange’s chanting of the title. He is adept at suggesting an optimistic form of escapism from worry, distinct in its uplift.
This Is How You Smile’s finely drawn intimacy can be attributed to Lange’s familial sense of collaboration. A crew of Latinx artists breathes life into the album’s corners: members of the loungey Puerto Rican duo Buscabulla and Providence punk group Downtown Boys appear on backing vocals, as well as Xenia Rubinos and rising Colombian electronic artist Ela Minus. Longtime collaborator Sufjan Stevens adds to the brief “November 7,” transmuting sampled piano into the sounds of a quavering, peaceful grotto, while Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner threads hypnotic electric guitar through the lithe, bounding “Seen My Aura.” Yet none of This Is How You Smile sounds cluttered or overwrought; each appearance is in service of Lange’s cocooning vision, like a cast of supporting characters fleshing out the broader theme of forging closeness with yourself and others within a politically and socially tumultuous time.
The list of how-tos in Kincaid’s “Girl” invokes a mother’s wisdom, regardless of how flawed or mistaken it may be. Lange, however, seems to be taking on the role of both the parent and the child receiving instruction across This Is How You Smile. The relationship between the powerful and the powerless is revealed here in the gentle and generous refutation of mandates we’ve been told to abide by to succeed in life, whether as Latinx people, as American citizens, or as human beings. He reassures listeners that both power and potential exist as guiding voices within each of us, if we take the time to slow down and listen.


Against dry, plucked guitar and minimal piano, the Texas songwriter creates moments of intimacy that always seem to suggest more than he’s willing to say outright.

Gestalt

If you saw Ryan Sambol live, you might at first wonder if he was putting you on. The Texas-raised songwriter is fond of large white cowboy hats. He mutters odd little jokes; he appears either slightly boozed or just a bit too shy for showbiz. But spend some time with his records and you’ll understand that his distinctive observations and skewed wit are essential to his work. A decade ago, Sambol was cutting his teeth in Austin garage rock band the Strange Boys, which he’d formed as a teenager. In the years since their final LP—2011’s Live Music—Sambol has rambled through a solo career, issuing Now Ritual in 2013 as well as albums with Living Grateful and the Interstate Group. Though his live shows are intimate affairs, Sambol’s recorded music has usually involved a full band. On his latest album, Gestalt, he’s all alone, and the solitude serves him well. Over 22 minutes, Sambol crafts quiet, intriguing country-folk songs that are specific and lean.
Gestalt is a small record in the best sense. Sambol’s voice is thin and delicate, his instrumentation stripped back. Dry, plucked guitar and minimal piano suit his wavering voice, which in his Strange Boys days was often compared to a young Bob Dylan. Though spare, Gestalt sounds spontaneous rather than unfinished—hearing it feels like eavesdropping on a neighbor who’s winding down with his six-string after work. It’s one-way intimacy, the kind that comes with peeking in on someone’s most vulnerable moments.
On Gestalt, Sambol sifts through half-formed memories. Their shapes are subtle, but sometimes a faint impression of the past can communicate more than a detailed rendering. On “Just Like Golden Hours,” he recalls a modern meet-cute: “We met in the comments of one of our favorite singer’s songs. We felt we had accomplished something new and young.” Sambol’s voice is more processed than on any other track, warbling as if transmitted through an aquatic dream, and his layered, repetitive guitar work deepens the effect. This is one of Sambol’s key devices—the ability to spin banal scenarios into moments of magical realism. An encounter in the comments section could indicate two loners on a YouTube binge, but Sambol makes it sound like the stuff of a certain romance column.
Sambol doesn’t say a whole lot, but the words he utters tend to linger, inviting interpretation. On “There Are Things to Be Doing,” Sambol mumbles along to his drowsy guitar: “I was holding a plank/On soft carpet in the apartment of a friend/Who finds all our troubles funny.” It’s a simple but loaded image. You get the sense that this friend with plush flooring makes a lot more money than our protagonist—a man who’d rather tense up on a rug than relax across it. It can’t be an accident that at least two kinds of “plank” are made of wood: the kind you can’t comfortably sleep on, and the kind you walk off. In a single snapshot, Sambol hints at the stark yet silent contrast between struggle and a life of leisure. His opening line on “Big Text” is just as crammed with potential meaning: “What a mess I want to make with you.” He almost whispers it. The phrase might refer to sex, an unhealthy relationship, a couples’ pottery class, or a night of eating ribs. It could mean all of those things, or none, but the fact that such a simple expression sparks so much imagery is a testament to Sambol’s skill as a writer.
Sambol’s ability to compress big ideas into compact visuals might stem from his years writing poetry. On loping closer “His Aim,” he marvels at broken flower pots, and how “the soil and shape remain the same” after they’ve shattered. On the plucky cowboy number “Round the House,” he directs his gratitude to a nurturing woman. “I feel strong from the breakfast she made like I may never have to eat again,” he drawls. “Humbled, full, and safe.” These are familiar things we often take for granted: the accidental beauty of a busted pot, the warmth of a home-cooked meal. But his observations forego schmaltz and defamiliarize everyday scenes.
Some of Sambol’s scenery is less familiar, even surreal. Opener “You’re Still Loveable to Someone” is filled with funny little sketches, like a 400-million-year-old stone that screams cryptic advice and an unusual offer of camaraderie: “Let’s raise money for each other sometime/If the need arose it’d be good to know.” It is the album’s strangest yet most beautiful song, built on a sweet string melody and anchored by Sambol’s forlorn sense of humor. Even at its most peculiar, there is an unexpected comfort in this music. As a narrator, Sambol isn’t begging us to tag along. His voice is uneasy and hushed, like he’s worried we might hear him. But if you can sneak into these songs and sit with them, their small moments of intrigue may surprise you.

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Delving deeper into their lead singer’s Iranian-American roots, the band melds Farsi lyrics with shades of the Beach Boys and the Shangri-Las.

Cardamom Garden EP

Cardamom has the rare ability to transcend culinary classification, adding a rounded depth to savory curries and roasts while also floating to the forefront of sugary desserts. The Brooklyn-based quintet Habibi’s new EP has a similar malleability: It’s full of music that blends cultures, languages, and genres, with charming and intriguing results. Their 2013 self-titled debut was marked by carefree surf-rock songs about dance parties, blissful romances, and other light-hearted subjects. On Cardamom Garden, their first release in more than four years, they delve deeper into lead singer Rahill Jamalifard’s Iranian-American roots, melding Farsi lyrics and Middle Eastern minor scales with the optimistic Americana of Best Coast and the Beach Boys and the vocal harmonization of the Shangri-Las. With this new amalgamation, they suggest a set of contrasts that is deeply familiar to anyone who grew up immersed in a tug of war between two or more cultures.
The four-track EP is bookended by two songs sung predominantly in Farsi. The first, “Khodaya,” sets a quick, fervent tone, reminiscent of the pace of their debut. Jamalifard spends the whole song repeating the titular phrase, which means “God.” Rather than sounding repetitive, though, the song is propelled forward by a high-pitched guitar and rhythmic tambourine. “Green Fuz”—an accelerated, reworked cover of Randy Alvey and the Green Fuz’s 1969 garage-rock nugget of the same name—is similarly thrilling, opening with a line that translates to “Here we come, we’re coming fast.” Again, the winding guitars and vocal harmonies carry the song more than the abstract lyrical content.
Jamalifard has resisted simple political readings of her music. “I get it, I’m writing songs in Farsi,” she said earlier this year. “But that doesn’t mean that I’m an Iranian nationalist or loyal Muslim.” Fittingly, the band seems more interested in exploring multiple influences than expressing a singular identity on this EP. The major exception is “Gypsy Love,” which is also the only song that doesn’t contain any Farsi. The lyrics concern an alluring, mysterious woman (a common conceit in Habibi’s music), describing an “Eastern love” from her almond-shaped eyes to the “desert heat” she evokes. The choice of English lyrics is effective here: It’s easy to imagine a white man saying these same words about a woman, reducing her to her cultural difference.  The song’s reductive lyricism mirrors a Western notion of brown and black people as merely exotic stereotypes devoid of their own desires and interests. When surrounded by songs that establish Habibi’s intimate familiarity with Persian culture, the meaning shifts, suggesting instead that the band is playing off those flattened intricacies.
The EP’s strongest song is lead single “Nedayeh Bahar” (“Song of Spring”), which uses nature imagery and enigmatic wisdom—“Where we go we’ll always be”—to convey a sense of yearning that surpasses the beauty of “tall trees” and “gentle flowers.” Jamalifard’s lilting vocals skip gracefully over bubbly guitars, like a buoy bobbing over waves. It is the only song here that is significantly longer than two minutes, and the added length allows it to properly unfurl.
The rest of Cardamom Garden might have benefited from the same treatment. As it stands, these songs are generally caught between the extremes of expansive, dreamy wistfulness and pulse-quickening excitement. The short track lengths also mean that they don’t have room to differentiate themselves: As lush and pleasing as they are, the instrumentals often bleed into one another. At its best, Cardamom Garden feels like an experiment in ambiguity, shedding rigid definitions of what constitutes American music on the way to the band’s future.


Jeremy Greenspan and Ryan Smith’s hardware experiment EP is fundamentally a dance album, but the intelligent tracks skew more subtle and heady than their solo work.

Jeremy Greenspan / Taraval: Greenspan and Taraval EP

Greenspan and Taraval

This past winter, Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys and Ryan Smith (aka Taraval, and also a touring member of Caribou) returned to their shared hometown of Hamilton, Ontario to record a series of hardware experiments that would become this collaborative EP. After toying with an extensive list of synthesizers that includes, but is not limited to, a Yamaha CS50, a Roland Jupiter 6 and JX8P, and an Arp Odyssey, the pair cut the results down into relatively concise pieces whose exploratory tendencies are counterbalanced by compositional precision. Indebted to process and the materials from which it’s built, Greenspan and Taraval skews more subtle and heady than either artist’s solo work.
Though the backbone of this EP is a particular kind of hardware obsessiveness, it’s still fundamentally a dance album. It just requests attentive listening for reasons more formal than conceptual. Their techno is constructed on sturdy ground, but builds itself up in intricate ways. Opener “Earthly Delights” is painted over with hazy swaths of ambient melody, gradually thickening through the addition of barely-perceptible bassy rumbles; the terse “Hold Time for a Day” shifts its focus from acid phrases into anxious interlocking percussion. “Be Last” is the least decorated but most club-ready track here, a mesh of sticky beats driven forward by persistent hi-hats.
Greenspan and Smith cite a group of synth pioneers including Cluster, JD Emmanuel, and John Carpenter, though their own take on this experimental classicism is packaged within clubbier tracks. These influences are blended so that no moment feels like an homage; rather, it’s when the pair lock into a groove that some weirdness comes to the fore. On standout “Follow the Moonlight” which is built around dull-edged rattling, its near-soporific landscape is pierced here and there by irregular laser blips. And “Daff” produces sonic terrain through what feels like a deliberate process of subtraction or withholding, its occasional cushions of synthesizer melody receding to leave a metallic skeleton.
Though it reaches out in directions both historical and futuristic, this EP feels neither vintage nor particularly innovative. However, despite an evident wide-eyed appreciation for their instruments, Greenspan and Smith avoid the trap of maximalism or sinking too deep into the worlds they open up; the artists maintain a well-drawn sense of these tracks’ larger picture, which keeps their experiments wholly digestible. Studied and meticulously designed, it’s intelligent music that does most of the legwork for the listener.


On his second album, the Québécois pop provocateur scales down the lavish glam rock of his debut for funky experiments with inconsistent results.

Hubert Lenoir: PICTURA DE IPSE: Musique directe

PICTURA DE IPSE: Musique directe

Hubert Lenoir’s career was kickstarted in the moment when he flashed his butt to reveal a fleur-de-lis tattoo. As a guest performer on La Voix (Quebec’s answer to The Voice), the impish provocateur in eyeshadow and lipstick earned controversy from the program’s conservative viewers. This backlash combined with his charismatic talent rapidly reversed into a meteoric rise in Lenoir’s home province and even rarer success beyond, resulting in a Polaris Prize shortlist nomination, international infamy, and a spot opening for The Strokes at the Barclays Center on New Year’s Eve 2019. Responding to the surreality of the past three years of his life, Lenoir’s sophomore album scales down the lavish glam rock and conceptual lyrics of his debut for a strangely funky new sound with himself in the lead role.
The concept behind PICTURA DE IPSE (Picture of Myself): Musique Directe is compelling. Beginning in the late 1950s, Québécois filmmakers such as Pierre Perrault and Michel Brault developed a style of observational documentaries known as cinéma direct. Inspired by its intimacy, Lenoir used an iPhone to capture conversations and field recordings of sounds from his day-to-day life, weaving these samples throughout the album to create his own form of Musique Directe. As its 20 songs bleed together, the overall effect is like listening to a nearly hour-long audio montage with spoken word fragments illuminating the 25-year-old artist’s inner thoughts. The brief “418 wOo” sets a tone with its frenetic Thundercat-style breakbeat before Lenoir admits that the bullying he experienced in his childhood has since become a source of motivation.
The French Canadian rabble-rouser opens up just as readily in his lyrics. Over a patiently unfolding musical backdrop, “HULA HOOP” shares how his busy schedule stopped him from properly grieving the death of his dog Brownie: “I want to take the time to heal/But it’s already time to go again.” On the laid-back groove of “OCTEMBRE,” a duet with Bonnie Banane, Lenoir describes how kids at school used to mock him as “Hubert Pippi Longstocking.” With a voice pitched up like Quasimoto, “MTL STYLE LIBRE” reveals his bisexual insecurities at their base level: “How many girls do I have to fuck for my friends to admire me? How many dicks do I have to suck to be queer enough?”
“DIMANCHE SOIR,” produced by hip-hop beatmaker High Klassified, continues the humblebrags as Lenoir says he forgot to deposit “$50,000 in cheques,” then states that “even though I’m not straight, I’m still a straight shooter.” His sexuality rises to the forefront on “BOI,” a queer love song with G-funk synths and a squawking falsetto like Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes. Yet “SECRET,” featuring frequent collaborator Kirin J. Callinan on guitar and Mac DeMarco on drums, is the album’s most moving confessional. In its video, Lenoir takes on the character of a skunk trying to connect with a popular boy in his high school. Propelled by chiming 808s, billowing sax, and squelching synths straight out of Orange Juice’s “Rip It Up,” Lenoir admits he’s been struggling in therapy, offering his “condolences to everyone that is like me.”
Some of the album’s more immediate melodies are buried deep in its back half, like the English-language chorus of “GOLDEN DAYS” or the way “SUCRE + SEL” is oddly reminiscent of “Lady Marmalade.” After the previous 19 songs, “f.p.b.” brings the record to a tender conclusion as Lenoir sings while strumming the guitar with the soft touch of a lullaby. In the past, he has openly shared his idolization of Kanye West. The way both artists operate without creative filters is admirable, but they could also benefit from a bit more quality control. PICTURA DE IPSE is a fascinating project, but it suffers from being overstuffed, undercooked, and inconsistent in comparison to the bombastic pop of his debut. Thankfully, Lenoir has no shortage of ideas, and even his half-baked experiments are devilishly fun.
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