Zombi get their name from the Italian title of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, but keyboardist/multi-instrumentalist Steve Moore has said he considers his group a post-rock band that just happens to use the vocabulary of soundtracks. On their fifth album, Shape Shift, he and drummer Anthony Paterra play with a fire most soundtrack music lacks.

Shape Shift

For decades, the theme from the film Halloween has been about as well-known as a piece of music can get, but it's only lately that iconic horror filmmaker John Carpenter has embraced the spotlight as an electronic musician and quote-unquote composer. Listen to any record by the one-time Pittsburgh-based duo Zombi, though, and it's obvious that keyboardist/multi-instrumentalist Steve Moore and drummer A.E. Paterra wear their film-geek affinities on their sleeve. The band's name is, in fact, derived from the Italian title of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which was filmed at Moore's hometown shopping mall and scored by Italian prog rock outfit Goblin, a huge influence on Zombi along with Carpenter and other film composers such as Fabio Frizzi and Riz Ortolani.
Paterra and British documentary/video game composer Paul Lawler recently collaborated under the moniker Contact, while Moore has embarked on a side career scoring films on his own, most recently supplying the score for Belgian director Jonas Govaerts' 2014 horror movie Cub. Relapse Records is, in fact, releasing Zombi's fifth full-length Shape Shift and the Cub soundtrack on the same day. It's impossible to ignore the common thread between the two albums, and since the Cub score doesn't do enough to re-contextualize Moore's approach to harmony, it only serves to reveal his limitations in Zombi. But, as Moore has made clear in recent press, he and Paterra have always considered Zombi a post-rock outfit that happens to use the vocabulary of soundtracks. In their view, their work has more in common with, say, Battles or Trans Am than it does with those aforementioned cinematic influences.
Indeed, Zombi's third album, 2009's Spirit Animal, combined the stately gesturing of Genesis' 1974 prog epic The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway with the ominous intonation of film music. Somehow, Moore and Paterra managed to evoke the murky synthesizer ambience of the 1970s while also infusing their music with a decidedly modern aura. Though Shape Shift marks the first time since 2006's Surface to Air that Moore and Paterra made music in the same room with one another, the throbbing analog synth pulse of album opener "Pillars of the Dawn" suggests that the pair might have lost their ability to draw on their influences without getting stuck in the past. Paterra's drums very precisely recall the tone and feel of drummer Neil Peart's performance circa Signals, Rush's 1982 head-first dive into synth-driven rock. From a purely sonic standpoint, it's an impressive feat to recapture the acoustic fingerprint of Peart's drums without using sample triggers, but you can't shake the sensation that you've just stepped out of a time machine and landed in the wrong year.
In that way, Shape Shift initially comes across as pandering to retrophilia when Moore and Paterra have already demonstrated that they're clever enough to not have to resort to that kind of thing. That said, it doesn't take long for the band's underlying attitude to breathe life into this material. Two tracks in and it becomes clear that Moore and Paterra play with a fire that their musical forbears lacked. Paterra in particular—the way his drumming both drives the music and makes room for it to breathe, the nuanced variations in the way he strikes the snare, hi-hat, and the bell of his ride cymbal—gives Shape Shift a gritty, utterly human quality that complements Moore's synthetic palette. In general, Zombi favor mid-tempo grooves that require a lot of reserve, but Paterra reminds you at all times that you're listening to a rock band with an underlying sense of millennial angst, even if that angst is never explicitly articulated.
We are, after all, talking about long-winded mathy instrumental music here. But that's the thing: at some point while listening to Shape Shif**t, it dawns on you that you can actually hum all of these tunes. Sure, there are times when Moore and Paterra let their instincts to impose changes for their own sake get the better of them. Not far into the 8-minute-plus "Interstellar Package", a groove built out of an oscillating low-pitched synth throb grows to a majestic crescendo that prematurely gives way to six minutes' worth of undifferentiated drone, a move that short-circuits the tune's potential payoff. Nevertheless, in their own way Moore and Paterra write catchy music. That their tastes position them as soundtrack-buff outsiders at the fringes makes the cohesion, listenability, and passion of Shape Shift that much more of a triumph.


The Wu-Tang Clan member's long-awaited sequel to his 1995 classic is finally here, and yes, it's as good as fans have been hoping for.

Raekwon: Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II

Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II

Yes, it exists, and yes, it's as good as fans have been hoping for. We'll get more in depth on that shortly, but with the two most important questions surrounding this album finally answered after four years of anticipation, that leaves a third one: why a sequel? The easy conclusion is that Raekwon needed a benchmark-- that he couldn't just put together any slapdash collection of skits and weedcarrier features and b-grade beats, then slap the words Cuban Linx on the cover. So while some people might read this album's title as a gimmicky hook to lure in bring-NYC-back nostalgists, it actually acts more as a reassuring seal of quality from an MC who some people think lost his way the moment he released Immobilarity without a single RZA beat.
The connections to Cuban Linx's roots of grimy, Mafioso opulence run deep here, starting with a partial reprise of the original album's closer "North Star (Jewels)" as Pt. II's opening track. In 1995, Popa Wu admired the way Raekwon was growing and coming up in the world in the same way a master teacher regards his star pupil; 14 years later he's simultaneously marveling at Raekwon's success and warning him of the treachery that elevated status brings. From there we get not so much a single narrative as a vivid overview of a criminal empire that's grown in scope since the first Cuban Linx. Raekwon's gift for deep focus-- homing in on an adversary's apparel one moment, zooming out to take in an entire hood's social system the next-- is at its sharpest, and in running the gamut of criminology rap from kitchen stove to prison yard, he reinforces his reputation as a lyricist with a supreme ability to simultaneously set an evocative scene and turn a slick phrase.
Two early detail-oriented highlights come back-to-back: "Sonny's Missing", a compact, Pete Rock-produced narrative concerning the grotesque interrogation of a rival segues into the strangely calm crack-cooking setpiece "Pyrex Vision", where Rae simmers his voice down to a murmur and gives a tactile snapshot of the crack-cooking process. That mixture of tightly knit procedural storytelling and lyrical virtuosity carries through on the other solo showpieces, the business plan/inventory rundown "Surgical Gloves" and the confrontation with a kiss-blowing, shit-talking Jamaican dealer in "Fat Lady Sings" chief amongst them.
But it's the guest spots that make the album widescreen, particularly with the involvement of every remaining Wu-Tang member (except for U-God, possibly as a canonical continuation of his being "killed off" on the first Cuban Linx). Inspectah Deck, Masta Killa, and GZA bolster the narrative, Method Man provides a couple respites from the criminal theme with some flat-out vintage lyrical boasting on early-leak highlights "New Wu" and "House of Flying Daggers", and the the RZA has a memorably unhinged cameo at the end of "Black Mozart". Even ODB's there in spirit, with the Dilla-utilizing "Ason Jones" cutting through all the mythologized goofball eccentricity to depict him as a wise man with real love in his heart. All that, and you get Jadakiss and Styles P waxing grimy on "Broken Safety", Beanie Sigel at his remorseful best on "Have Mercy", Slick Rick pulling diabolical Queen-mocking hook duty on "We Will Rob You", and Busta Rhymes dialing down his characteristic bellow to growl on "About Me".
And then there's Ghost. Maybe the biggest strength of the original Cuban Linx was how well Ghostface and Raekwon complemented each other, with Tony Starks' rampaging wail underscoring Chef's calculating intensity, and Ghost's appearances here hold that same power. He opens his verse on "Cold Outside" with one of his most evocatively disturbing lines ever-- "They found a two-year-old strangled to death/ With a 'Love Daddy' shirt on/ In a bag on the top of the steps"-- and expands that into a ball-of-confusion breakdown of friends' betrayals, AIDS mothers, "swastikas on the church," being broke during Christmas, and the need for troop withdrawal from Iraq. Later on, he has a sharp back-and-forth dialogue-style prison-hustle account with Rae in "Penitentiary", castigates a street soldier after being caught getting a blowjob from the man's girlfriend in "Gihad", and has a classic outrageous-swagger line in "10 Bricks": "the currency rushes like poppin' a wheelie/ Holdin' a bike with one hand, the other countin' the billies". Listening to him going R&B on Wizard of Poetry's gonna be weird after this.
That said, there's one crucial difference between the two Cuban Linx records that could've tripped this album up: The switch from an all-RZA palette of beats to an all-star roster of production names. RZA does contribute three of the best tracks-- the fuzzed-out cinema funk of "Black Mozart", the choral headknock sway of "New Wu", and the lavish, orchestral mid-70s soul of "Fat Lady Sings"-- which fall between his classic first-wave style and a less out-there strain of the experimentation that alienated Ghost and Raekwon circa 8 Diagrams. But aside from Dr. Dre getting a bit too polished and joylessly glossy on the faux-Latin cheese of "Catalina" and the plodding "About Me", the rest of the production proves to be an eclectic yet fitting take on the classic Wu-Tang aesthetic. "House of Flying Daggers", "Ason Jones", and "10 Bricks" benefit from a trip to the Dilla vaults that brought back three of his most RZA-esque beats. The Alchemist's chopped-up chimes and woozy guitars give "Surgical Gloves" a hypnotic edge. Pete Rock maintains the integrity of his style with the flute and horn-driven bounce on "Sonny's Missing" (repurposed from NY's Finest track "Questions" and an even better fit here). And Marley Marl gets a lot of atmospheric mileage out of the subdued yet gripping guitar loop that comprises the 55 seconds of "Pyrex Vision".
Between the hype, the anticipation and the attachment of a legendary album's legacy, anything less than a classic would have proven to be a major disappointment. Few albums have gone through this much turmoil and delay in the planning stages yet turned out so cohesive and tight. The last time a Wu-Tang record came together with this kind of personnel and succeeded under a grand conceptual vision, we got Fishscale, and calling Cuban Linx II Raekwon's equivalent to it isn't out of the question. Like Ghostface's modern classic, this album defies hip-hop's current atmosphere of youthful cockiness and aging complacency: instead, it's driven by the sometimes celebratory, sometimes traumatized sense of stubborn survival and perseverance, a veteran mindset that can no longer picture success without having to defend it. Consider this a triumphant defense.


Across a relatively lean, stakes-free mixtape, Wiz Khalifa riffs on his only meaningful muse, weed, with a level of buy-in that he rarely grants his commercial projects.

Laugh Now, Fly Later

Though laughter has always been part of Wiz Khalifa’s image, it doesn’t come naturally to him. His catchphrase is a forced “a-ha-ha-ha”—not an actual laugh but the phonetic pronunciation of one, recited like an actor confusing a script’s cue to chuckle for the word “chuckle.” Like so much about Khalifa’s rapping, it signifies fun without delivering it, or even demonstrating any real understanding of what it’s like to experience fun. He laughs not out of joy but obligation.
Khalifa’s wooden laugh might be less conspicuous coming from a rapper who at least attempted a punchline from time to time, but on his recent studio albums, especially, Khalifa hasn’t been in a joking mood, nor has he felt the slightest obligation to disguise how little he’s enjoying himself. There are worse rappers on the charts, but none who take so little pleasure in their own music: Between his nagging voice, rote rhymes, and the grueling, clock-punching nature of their delivery, he exudes all the enthusiasm of a DMV clerk. Each of his albums, then, has been an elaborate workaround, a cover-up for the vacuum of charisma somehow cast, despite his apparent resentment, as their star attraction, with the industry’s best-paid songwriters, producers, and ringers propping up the lethargic rapper like the corpse from Weekend at Bernie’s, hoping the party disguises its lifeless host.
Given Khalifa’s dismal track record with official albums, the best thing Laugh Now, Fly Later has going for it is that it isn’t one. It’s a label-sanctioned mixtape, a stopgap to tide fans over until his upcoming Rolling Papers 2, so it’s freed from any commercial expectations. That means no cringingly unromantic R&B songs, no shameless Fast and the Furious tie-ins, and no illusions of revealing the “real” Wiz Khalifa (a construct that, to judge from 2016’s Khalifa, is somehow even duller than his one-dimensional stoner persona). Instead, for a relatively lean, stakes-free 10 songs, Khalifa simply riffs on his only meaningful muse, weed, with a level of buy-in that he rarely grants his commercial projects.
He displays flashes of the old, effortless charm that he long ago began to conflate with plain apathy, spitting a pair of showy verses over the bottom-heavy G-funk of “Long Way to Go” and generating actual heat on “City of Steel,” one of several sumptuous 1970s soul homages. On “Letterman” he even holds his own over a trap beat, usually one of the weakest of his many weak spots, revving himself up over some flatteringly cavernous production from 808 Mafia. This is the Wiz Khalifa the world assumed it was signing up for after Kush & OJ, a performer who raps without sounding like he’s struggling to decipher whatever sweat-blurred lyrics he jotted on his palm in a smoky haze the night before.
As much of a relief as it is to hear it again, however, Khalifa’s A-game isn’t elite enough to carry an entire project on its own, and while Laugh Now is relatively misstep-free, its highs are modest. At times the project begs for a little label interference: a few undeniable hooks, or at least a couple of cameos to keep things interesting (Casey Veggies is Laugh Now’s lone guest, and although his leadoff verse on the opener “Royal Highness” sends off the mixtape on a running start, it also sets a bar the rest of the tape rarely lives up to). Wiz Khalifa albums are tradeoffs: We tolerate the low energy and transparent cynicism in exchange for an occasional “Black and Yellow” or “We Dem Boyz.” Laugh Now, doesn’t have one.
Midway through “City of Steel,” Khalifa stops rapping and shares one of those state-of-myself fireside chats rappers often include on mixtapes previewing big albums, trying to drum up excitement for Rolling Papers 2. “Been working on that motherfucker for three years now,” Khalifa says. “It’s finally done, and it’s gonna be worth it, too.” If Khalifa can muster this mixtape’s caliber of rapping on that album’s blockbuster material, maybe it could be. Considering his history of delivering only when it doesn’t count, though, smart money says otherwise.


On the 25th anniversary of their debut, Throwing Muses release the 2xCD retrospective Anthology. It's more a mixtape compiled by the band than an exhaustive box set or greatest-hits collection, but it's still an accessible entry point to the band’s formidably deep catalogue.

Anthology

In 1983, at age 16, Kristin Hersh was hit by a car. She landed on her head and lost a lot of blood. When she was recovering in the hospital she started, for the first time, to hear songs-- "sonic hauntings," as she called them in her 2010 memoir, Rat Girl. Initially humming, mechanical tones, they quickly organized themselves into the familiar grammar of guitar chords, drum beats, basslines, and surreal melodies. She didn't feel quite right until she got them out of her head: "As soon as I give a song a body in the real world, it stops playing and I breathe a sigh of relief, in precious silence." She played the chords herself and taught the other parts to her friends Dave Narcizo and Leslie Langston and her stepsister Tanya Donelly, and they became the earliest material recorded by their band, Throwing Muses.
It's a hell of a creation myth, but an easy one to believe: pretty much every song Throwing Muses ever recorded sounds like an exorcism. Though indebted to punk's passion, fury, and occasional goofiness, the Muses were punks only in the spiritual sense of the word: Even by their teens, the original four were all accomplished musicians well-versed enough in music theory to create the weird, irregular chords and erratic time signatures that would become hallmarks of their sound. There was something almost Zen-like about the band's approach: Dump the contents of your busy brain out onto the street, and see what sounds they make on impact. The offspring of hippie idealism (Hersh grew up living on a commune and calling her dad "Dude") and post-punk disillusionment, the Muses' rhetoric was not about breaking the rules so much as transcending them completely. In a recent interview, Hersh said of her earliest days in the band, "I realized that in order to play with the voice you would have if you grew up on a desert island without a radio you need to forget rules."
Anthology, the first retrospective collection of Throwing Muses material, comes to us on the 25th anniversary of their (first) self-titled record, a stammering, brutal masterpiece that managed to capture both late adolescent angst and feelings well beyond its years. Producer Gil Norton made Hersh's most intimate moments of near-delirium sound epic: like portions of someone's diary blown up to billboard size. Ever wary of commercial appeal, the band said it didn’t want to make anthems, so before its next record its label 4AD passed Norton onto the opening act on the Muses' European tour, fellow Bostonian scenesters Pixies, who were looking for someone to record their next album, Doolittle. Though the histories of the two bands are deeply, famously entwined, the Muses have enjoyed a fate harder to identify than the burden of being hugely influential (even though they were in certain corners: It's almost impossible to imagine the visceral bleats of singers like Corin Tucker or Marissa Paternoster without Kristin Hersh). This moment of reunions, reissues, and boundless nostalgia seems a good time to ask: where did Throwing Muses fit in?
Anthology doesn't quite answer this question. Neither an exhaustive box set nor a greatest-hits collection, Anthology is more like mixtape personally compiled by the band, making a very characteristically Muses argument for the personal over the canonical, for a song’s appeal as something that's more subjective than objective. Though it eschews chronology and omits some of their most popular tracks (there’s only one song on here from 1991’s The Real Ramona-- and it’s the deep cut "Two Step"), Anthology is still an accessible entry point to the band’s formidably deep catalogue-- for the already initiated, it’s a relatively taut refresher.
The first disc is 21 tracks culled from major Muses releases, skewing heaviest on their late-80s output-- over half of the material comes from a three-year run that spanned the exquisitely dank Chains Changed EP to the somewhat brighter Hunkpapa in 1989. There are classics ("Fish", "Hate My Way", "Marriage Tree", "Bright Yellow Gun") and a few surprises ("Mr. Bones", "Two Step", "Pretty or Not"), but there’s a remarkable cohesion to the collection’s flow. When the band released its 2003 self-titled album after a long absence, even its biggest fans were kind of astonished at how well the group had been able to capture the sound and spirit of its earliest recordings. Two songs from that "reunion" album made the cut here: I'd bet anything that Anthology listeners coming to the band for the first time wouldn't be able to pick them out of the bunch without peeking at the liner notes.
Naturally, the B-sides and rarities disc is spottier-- I could live comfortably in a world without the tepid version of "Amazing Grace" or the instrumental "Manic Depression", which could pass for the interstitial music on an old Ken Griffey baseball video game. But once you get to the material from the Firepile EPs, it offers a killer middle stretch: "Snailhead" (featuring one of the most blistering Hersh vocals on the whole collection) segues into the smoldering slow-burner "City of the Dead". I’ve actually found myself spinning Disc 2 more than Disc 1, probably just because most of the material is fresher to my ears. It's not the most essential entry in their discography, but it's solid.
To some people, the word Anthology might promise something bigger or more definitive than what the Muses have given us here, but most fans will appreciate the personal flourishes all over this collection (especially Hersh's always poetic liner notes). Anthology isn't exactly a totemic bookend to Throwing Muses' long and lively career, but as the band’s 2003 record and upcoming reunion tour suggest, maybe there’s still too much life in them for a definitive ending.


The dream-pop legends breathe new life into old songs on a slight, unsurprising, but reliably lovely EP of dreamy desert blues.

Still

For a band that moves at Mazzy Star’s glacial pace, progress must be measured in steps and inches rather than leaps and bounds. Still may be their first release in four years, but its four songs include an alternate version of the title track of their 1993 classic So Tonight That I Might See and two compositions that appear to have been kicking around since at least 2000. Nothing on the EP would sound out of place amid the dreamy desert blues of the band’s 28-year-old debut album, She Hangs Brightly.
That’s not to say that the Still is simply a retread of old ground. Opener “Quiet, the Winter Harbor” uses piano as its lead instrument, with David Roback’s guitar making its bow in the song’s second minute. This isn’t entirely without precedent. Uncut has reported that they performed the track live as early as 2000. In an audio clip apparently recorded at a London show the same year, the band plays a gorgeous, piano-based arrangement of “Look on Down From the Bridge” from 1996’s Among My Swan. But the EP’s lead single does mark a new and enchanting chapter in Mazzy Star’s recorded output.
The piano gives “Quiet” the feel of a muted torch song, its irresistible melody dampened by Hope Sandoval’s hushed delivery and Roback’s pointed restraint. In other hands—Adele’s, say—its straight-from-the-heart vocals might have ramped up to the kind of overwrought climax that sucks every last nuance into its emotional vortex. But Sandoval is as understated as ever. Her soft power precludes raising her voice, and it makes “Quiet” sound like a private plea to an absent-hearted lover. Roback adds twinkling touches of guitar, his simple melodic lines complementing rather than overpowering Sandoval’s words.
The only apparently new track on the EP, “Still,” marks another first for Mazzy Star: It is the least melodic piece they’ve ever committed to tape. Throughout their career, Sandoval has sporadically employed the same vocal style that’s present on the song, walking the line between spoken word and the drawl of a more ethereal Jim Morrison. Usually, this minimal approach is backed by enough instrumental dramatics to carry the song. But on “Still,” Sandoval’s vocal plays over a one-chord acoustic guitar thrash and overlapping violin drones, creating a fever-dream atmosphere that, while novel, sounds a bit like being laid up with the flu feels.
At just two minutes long, the song works best as an extended intro to the EP’s last track, the eight-minute “Ascension Version” of “So Tonight That I Might See.” This alternate take is one of the most savage listens in the Mazzy Star catalog, led by ominous organ notes and guitar feedback and ending in the kind of fuzzy guitar freakout a band might indulge in at the last show of an arduous tour. You can imagine this all working well in a live setting, where the audience could feel the crackle of the guitar pulse through the air. On record, though, it fails to deliver the transcendent experience a word like “ascension” promises.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that the best track on Still is also the least groundbreaking. “That Way Again,” with its bluesy, country-rock feel, is classic Mazzy Star. Live recordings of the song from the band’s 2000 tour document a simple yet affecting acoustic lament that gently picks through the ashes of a failed romance. The new recording remains faithful to those early performances, adding only plaintive guitar lines that bring to mind the Rolling Stones circa Sticky Fingers.The result is a luscious late-night tearjerker that’s sure to earn a spot on cathartic breakup mixes. Mazzy Star’s pace may be slow—and Still may feel slight—but “That Way Again” is proof that their hearts still burn brightly.


13 years after the death of his Go-Betweens partner Grant McLennan, Forster offers reflections with a spring in his step.

Inferno

A singer-songwriter with strong affinities for the boho life, Robert Forster has followed few of the dictates of what others might call a career. In the ’80s. he wrote an essay explaining what products to use on hair as boring as his. He titled a tune “I Love Myself (And I Always Have).” He records when he has enough songs to fill an album, which these days takes a while. About the only rock star thing he’s done in recent years is release a memoir, the most literate of the dozens by artists, boho ancestors included, who have also entered the memoir stage; Forster’s is written, not assembled.
Thirteen years after the death of his musical partner and best friend Grant McLennan put an end to the triumphant second-act return of the Go-Betweens, Inferno finds Robert Forster in a typically reflective mode, but one with a spring in his step. The man who often sang as if he were a library quiet room in human form finally gets caught out. Thanks to Victor Van Vugt (Nick Cave, Beth Orton),  Forster’s seventh solo album has a presence and warmth missing from 2015’s emaciated Songs to Play; it’s as if he thought his tunes then were so strong that they required no embellishment. From his wife Karin Bãumler’s violin in “One Bird in the Sky” to Earl Havin’s muted kick drum on manifesto “I’m Gonna Tell It,” Inferno tests Forster’s commitment to rock and roll: he wants it punchy but with folk and classical filigrees too. That’s fine—the Go-Betweens also made a career out of an ambivalent relationship to rock. Inferno won’t sell in the millions. Forster knows it. He sounds chipper anyway, as if saying, “Eh, fuck it.”
If Inferno should become his last record, then he’s circled back to his first: the Go-Betweens’ 1978 “Lee Remick”/“Karen” single, which praised a librarian for introducing him to Genet and Brecht. In those days, Forster came off as a virgin whose songs fashioned the images of the women he sought—the classic learning curve of the heterosexual poet. In Bãumler he’s found a musical and intellectual equal. He opens the record with William Butler Yeats’ poem “Crazy Jane on the Day of Judgement,” set to a shuffling beat and piano lines that lighten an exchange between a woman who desires a love that takes “the whole body and soul” and a would-be male lover who would “scoff and lour” at her demands. Saving all this from preciousness are Bãumler’s keening background vocals: she plays a woman imprisoned by a poetic dude’s presumptions. Her violin also coaxes “Remain,” about Forster’s resolution and independence, into bloom.
Inevitable, really, that this Velvet Underground fan would find a simpatico partner in a musician who scratched welcome dissonances out of a string instrument. He thanked Bãumler as early as 1990’s “I’ve Been Looking for Somebody,” a passing angel jonesing for a smoke. “The party’s over, then she came,” he sang, atremble with gratitude. The rest of the band, dubbed by Forster the Magic Five, go tight or loose as the material requires, a marriage adapting to the times. Havin’s bongos and Scott Bromiley’s low sustained organ chords give  “Life Has Turned a Page” a goofiness often missing in Forster’s work, equivalent at least to “that striped sunlight sound” description to which the Go-Betweens often aspired.
In 2008 Forster released The Evangelist, an album that wasn’t haunted by the ghost of Grant McLennan so much as Forster had made McLennan’s words into flesh, or, rather, his melodies. Forster’s partner wasn’t dead; he was right here, buoying “It Ain’t Easy” and “Demon Days.”   Offering itself as a coda if, say, his non-fiction becomes more than a sideline, Inferno shimmies with the vigor of a man who can keep this up so long as the tunes, one a year if necessary, keep coming. Just don’t press him. As “One Bird in the Sky” reminds listeners, “I eat only when I eat.”


The former Gil Scott-Heron collaborator’s first solo album in over 20 years is forged in the vein of his work with the late poet, and rewrites some unfair narratives.

This Is Brian Jackson

It’s been over five decades since teenage piano protégé Brian Jackson first crossed paths with a thin bohemian beatnik named Gil Scott-Heron at Lincoln University, where the man who would go on to become a counterculture icon had a collection of poems to his name, but no record deal. Recognizing a kindred spirit, Scott-Heron had the prescience to invite Jackson to perform and co-write large sections of his first studio album, Pieces of a Man. That stone-cold classic was the first of nine LPs the two recorded together over the next nine years. Jackson received joint billing on the majority of these albums, but the credit didn’t make him one-tenth as beloved. Too often, public perception of their work has always been in line with the cover of their brilliant 1977 record Bridges: Scott-Heron, the star, in the foreground; Jackson in the back, a facilitator of Gil’s troubled genius.
The partnership fractured in the early 1980s: Scott-Heron eventually slipped into a creative wilderness and struggled with addiction, by which time he had taken Jackson’s name off their publishing rights, denying him years of royalties. They would eventually reconcile, but when Scott-Heron died in 2011, Jackson had spent much of the intervening years working as an information technology specialist at New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services. For a time, Jackson was angry. But leaving his day job has helped bring him back to his first love. “I had all this music in my head,” he recently told The New York Times. “I tried everything. And the only thing that worked was actually retiring.” This Is Brian Jackson is his first solo effort in over 20 years, a piece forged in the vein of his output with Scott-Heron that seeks to rewrite some unfair narratives.
This time, it’s Jackson who required a trusted collaborator. He found one in Daniel Collás, of the New York psychedelic soul collective Phenomenal Handclap Band, who serves as a producer and co-writer of five songs. On first listen, it’s difficult to determine the direct input Collás had on the sound of This Is Brian Jackson, which most closely resembles Jackson’s Bridges era: thick keyboards, analog synthesizers, funky guitars, jazz flutes. Hear how heavy the band squawks on the instrumental “C’est Cette Cométe,” or the satisfying funk of “Little Orphan Boy,” one of two songs here (alongside “Hold On”) that incorporate parts recorded in the 1970s on the revolutionary, room-sized TONTO synth. But easy to perceive are Collás’s bongos, congas, and timpani that underpin Jackson’s play and help propel the arrangements.
Opener “All Talk” stirs into life with the sound of Collás rapping the rawhide of his percussion instrument in a Latin rhythm. From there, Jackson’s Fender Rhodes ushers in some slick grooves and, in a wonderful voice—smaller than Scott-Heron’s beckoning baritone, but with no less conviction—delivers an exciting melody as he preaches social justice, peace, and love as the great healer. Similarly, “Force of Will” is dedicated to the inextinguishable human spirit in the face of adversity. Jackson may be speaking in broad generalities rather than directly engaging in specific modern political and social movements, but the nostalgic sound and undimmed energy evokes the activism of his youth: The heart of a radical still beats inside his chest.
The wingspan of This Is Brian Jackson stretches across history and continents. “Mami Wata,” a traditional composition that honors African water spirits, opens with chants indigenous to West Africa before sounds reminiscent of the Afro blues of 1960s and ’70s Nigeria and Ghana emerge. “Path to Macondo / Those Kind of Blues” is Jackson in conversation as he speaks directly to his listeners to redefine the relationship between slave songs and 20th-century blues music. “So don’t tell me that all the slave songs were about being sad and dejected and depressed, you know, and that’s where the blues came from, because that was just part of it,” says the 69 year old, the casual nature of the chat not dissimilar to parts of his late collaborator’s performance on I’m New Here. Like Scott-Heron’s last classic, This Is Brian Jackson is a salient reminder that great artists, no matter where they are on their journey, can rediscover themselves.


On his Fools Gold debut, the anxious and acerbic rapper knows he’s rounded a corner in his career, but remains on edge, his eyes glued to the rearview mirror.

Might Delete Later

Chris Crack has adapted to the streaming era like a runner to a hill. Seemingly emboldened by the demand for shorter songs, he’s turned the inhospitable dynamics of the attention economy into a personal challenge to be more visible, more fleet. Even when his songs are short they never feel breathless; they are filled with personality and purpose. Might Delete Later, his sixth album in 10 months, continues down this path and deviates from it, to mixed results.
There’s a victory-lap feeling to the record. Released by Fool’s Gold, Might Delete Later is Chris’ label debut, a fact that’s more a backdrop than a selling point. While the songs here are notably longer, and he works with artists and producers beyond his usual tight circle of Cutta and Jimi Wingate, Chris remains on edge. For every celebratory line like, “I ain’t going back to my villain ways/Shit, I’m stomping in Gucci, spilling this lemonade,” off “Poisonous Paragraphs,” there’s a sobering rejoinder like, “Our lives decided by them white mouths and shaded boxes,” from the same song. Chris knows he’s rounded a corner in his career, but his eyes remain glued to the rearview mirror.
That swing between relief and anxiety powers his stream-of-conscious raps, which are full of sharp turns that range from absurd to consoling. “Fapping Ruined My Life,” a hookless song reminiscent of Danny Brown’s J Dilla-influenced Detroit State of Mind mixtapes, bounces from insults to personal disclosures. “Said that it was jammin’ with your sister and your mama, and they sandwiched me/I handled it/Let me speak to management, that’s damagin’/Fuck this rap shit/Man, I’d rather be a good dad,” he raps, breaking the rhyme scheme for the last line. His verses are constantly splitting off and opening up, giving his songs a sense of propulsion and surprise.
The production is just as quicksilver, ranging from the silky soul loops Chris favors (“Jesus Dropped the Charges”) to horny R&B (“Creampies are Consensual”) to tinny G-funk (“Keisha Cole Slaw”). The album turns rudderless when Chris cedes the spotlight to guests, none of whom match his sense of economy or knack for color, but the varying production suits Chris well, especially in such quick succession. The three-song suite from “King of the Living Room” to “Raw Sex as Friends” showcases the elasticity of his voice, a quality that could be muted in his past albums, which would often inhabit a single mood or style for their entire runtime.
Though lively, the record’s shapeshifting isn’t always rewarding. From empty couplets like “10 bad bitches dancing ’round my house with pimp canes/Piccolo or Dende” and duds like “She a bird like Hitchcock” to the middling features, Might Delete Later misfires more than usual. And even when Chris’ focused, Might Delete Later lacks the self-discovery and introspection that’s powered Chris’ previous albums, especially 2020’s charmingly twee Cute Boys and pimp-inspired Washed Rappers Ain’t Legends. Where the record’s title implies vulnerability so risky it’s immediately regrettable, in practice Chris is often distant and mechanical, never quite baring his soul. Chris has found his footing in the algorithm, but he’s always been more interesting when he’s hellbent on hacking it.

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In the wake of the 2012 breakthrough LP Lucifer, Peaking Lights are now at the point where their humble recording project has become a full-fledged career, one that requires regularly breaking out of their cocoon. Cosmic Logic heralds a dramatic aesthetic shift where a once-mystical entity emerged as an extroverted force, as the band hardens their liquefied sound into more modular shapes and promotes vocals from textural detail to featured attraction.

Cosmic Logic

Psychedelia is traditionally a means of escape and out-of-body transcendence, but in the case L.A.-via-Wisconsin duo Peaking Lights, its function is more insular and grounding. For creative and life partners Aaron Coyes and Indra Dunis, bliss really is a product of hugs, not drugs: their dubwise, synth-smudged psychedelic pop is as lyrically sentimental as it is musically ethereal, and offers proof that the hot-blooded rush of romance and the dizzying delirium of new parenthood are as potent as any chemical supplement. But in the wake of their 2012 breakthrough LP Lucifer, Peaking Lights are now at the point where their humble recording project has become a full-fledged career, one that requires regularly breaking out of their cocoon. Given that Coyes and Dunis’ music has always pointed a kaleidoscopic lens on their personal lives, it’s only natural that their sound has changed to reflect their new reality—both the joy of interacting with larger audiences, and the anxieties that result when domestic bliss is disrupted by the demands of making a living on the road.
For Peaking Lights, Cosmic Logic heralds a dramatic aesthetic shift similar to that undertaken by Animal Collective on Strawberry Jam or Beach House on Teen Dream, where a once-mystical entity emerged as an extroverted force, hardening their liquefied sound into more modular shapes, and promoting vocals from textural detail to featured attraction. And from a sonic standpoint at least, Cosmic Logic is a triumph, retaining the heady allure of the band’s earlier records but infusing it with enough rhythmic intricacy and fidgety energy to warrant a band-name change to Tweaking Lights. Within the album’s first three seconds, we’ve already been catapulted several galaxies beyond Lucifer’s subaquatic serenity: Where the beats on previous Peaking Lights albums rarely rose above a tick-tock titter, Cosmic Logic opener “Infinite Trips” surges forth with a thundering drum break that provides the bedrock on which Dunis’ calm coo squares off against space-bound synth oscillations and a Daydream Nation-esque guitar pattern.
The songs on Cosmic Logic are half as long as the ones on Lucifer, but equally stuffed with wondrous detail, giving these compact tracks the compressing effect of a squeezed-out toothpaste tube: “Little Light” craftily invokes both slow-motion dub drowsiness and peak-hour piano-house elation; the seemingly slumberous “Dreamquest” intensifies into a twitchy tropical funk; and “Eyes to Sea” piles on acid-house freakery until its titular incantation starts to sound like “ecstasy.” But even with the punchier, dancefloor-friendly presentation, there remains something comfortably cozy about the sound of Cosmic Logic—Peaking Lights may sound more eager to get crowds moving this time around, but they’d still sooner DJ a rager in your apartment living room than a superclub.
It’s too bad then that Cosmic Logic’s entrancing, otherworldly effects are diminished by some nursery-rhyme-naïve lyrics. Of course, Peaking Lights’ lyrics have never been especially deep (unless you’re referring to their traditional position in the mix). But Cosmic Logic forcefully flips their traditional script, placing Dunis’ voice high above the percolating productions where they were once deeply embedded within them. And, unfortunately, this can place undue emphasis on the inflexible quality of her voice and the rote, reductive nature of her words. She may be singing louder, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s become more emotionally expressive: “Telephone Call” (chorus: Telephone call, telephone call from space/ Calling all, calling all the human race”) feels less like a comment on our modern-day addiction to constant connectivity than the dumbstruck observations of someone who’s just awoken from a 20-year deep sleep and handed their first iPhone. The YACHT-rockin’ “Hypnotic Hustle” and digi-reggae groover “Breakdown”, meanwhile, render the manic rhythm of daily life as a strobe-lit ballet, but Dunis’ anodyne delivery feels oddly disconnected from the tension/release described within; even when she’s issuing explicit directives for us to get down, Dunis seems to be dancing like somebody’s watching.
But on the late-game electro-disco workout “New Grrrls”, Dunis fully acclimatizes to her new home in spotlight, and opens up to convey something more resonant than the simple, nondescript sloganeering proffered throughout much of Cosmic Logic. On the surface, the song is a roll call of trailblazing female heroes—from Kim Gordon and Yoko Ono to black-power activist Angela Davis and sex educator Betty Dodson—that feels like a shout-out to another song that was itself a series of shout-outs. But it’s a necessary update, wherein Dunis tries to reconcile her radicalized riot grrl past with her seemingly more prosaic present as a parent, and finds the two are fuelled by the same ire: “Can’t stop to be just a mom/ The choice to stay at home is gone/ Worker, lover, mother, wife/ Gotta do it all in this life.” And with that line, this album’s equilibrium-upsetting aural eclecticism comes into sharp focus: even if you’re not a working mom trying to function on four hours of sleep per night, the buzzing busyness and hallucinatory disorientation of Cosmic Logic are liable to make you feel like one.


Julianna Barwick's Will is a looser, less polished album than Nepenthe, and that rough-around-the-edges intimacy turns out to be a great part of its charm.

Will

The voice may be the original instrument, as the groundbreaking experimental singer Joan La Barbara put it, but in Julianna Barwick's music, the voice itself isn't necessarily a point of origin. Layering and looping her often-wordless singing into hypnotic and otherworldly configurations, she enters her songs as though slipping into a stream. The music, she seems to say, precedes us, and it will outlast us; we don't so much carry songs as allow ourselves to be carried along by them, swept up in their current for a little while.
From the beginning, the Louisiana-raised, Brooklyn-based singer has used her voice as a means of stressing a sense of union with forces greater than oneself. It's something she learned growing up singing in church, but also singing alone, "so lost in it that I would cry," as she told Pitchfork. Her music joins the massing voices of the congregation with the wordless reverie of aloneness, and that union of togetherness and solitude is a big part of the unique emotional register she achieves. Collapsing oppositions like interior and exterior, self and other, her songs convey the sublimity of being immersed in an unfathomable vastness, of being part of an indivisible whole. Her music is deeply, powerfully emotive, but it doesn't so much express emotions as conjure them; it feels not so much like soaring through clouds as being made one with them.
Her last album, 2013's Nepenthe, marked a shift from working largely in solitude to collaborating with others: She traveled to Iceland and recorded with the Sigur Rós producer Alex Somers, along with members of Múm and the string quartet Amiina. But Will moves in the opposite direction. Recorded in a variety of different places—upstate New York, North Carolina, Lisbon—it highlights Barwick's own voice in simpler configurations. It is a looser, less polished album than Nepenthe, and that rough-around-the-edges intimacy turns out to be a great part of its charm.
If her last album was a journey to the furthest edges of alien realms of sound, the opening song on the new album, "St. Apolonia," grounds us firmly in the here and now, with the distant hum of traffic wreathing her quavering vocal loops. The sumptuous reverb, a regular feature of her work, comes in this instance from architecture, rather than any trick of circuitry or silicon. That's no effects pedal, our ears tell us; that's an overpass. Where once she sang in the hollow of a tree trunk (the magic place referenced on 2011's The Magic Place), here she's wringing music from the hollows of the city, and throughout the album, the reverb around her voice suggests physical space rather than infinity; it's just one of the ways that Will scans as humble and homespun in comparison to Nepenthe's effortless opulence.
Beyond voice and natural reverb, the most frequently used instruments are reedy, inexpensive-sounding synthesizers and watery piano, the kind you might encounter at a distant relative's beach house—its strings gone faintly out of tune over the long, boarded-up winter. Melodies often feel like they're folding back in upon themselves: Her piano playing ruminates on repeated sequences, lingering on the same few notes and small, simple chords. On "Wist," heavy reverb pulls at her descending lines, blurring her words and tugging them back into the folds of the earth. You can tell that there are words in many of these songs, but the difficulty of teasing out their contours reinforces the impression that this is private music. She doesn't entirely turn her back on those grand, windswept vistas: "Same," with its wailing vocal harmonies and vibrating strings, has a real arms-thrown-wide-open, standing-before-the-void quality to it that contrasts nicely with the muted vibe of the rest of the album. And the closing "See, Know" is built around a delightfully incongruous synth lead, easily the most hi-def sound ever to grace one of Barwick's recordings.
Between the piano and the omnipresent hush, the record that Will most resembles is probably Grouper's Ruins (which, coincidentally, was also recorded in Portugal; the effects of saudade upon visiting musicians are apparently very real). But where Grouper's album was isolationist to the extreme, Barwick's never stops letting in the wider world. The swirling synthesizer loop of "Nebula," almost indistinguishable from a humming voice, recalls the gracefully spinning arpeggios of Meredith Monk's Book of Days; the simplicity of "Big Hollow" suggests Low at their most demure; the weightless ecstasy of "Same" fires up the same pain-and-pleasure centers as This Mortal Coil's version of "Song to the Siren." And something about the melody and atmosphere of "Wist" even brings to mind Swans' ethereal "Blackmail," as though heard resonating through a cistern. It's not that Barwick is imitating these songs, but it's impossible to shake the sense that she is picking up on fragments of a greater melody, a harmonic continuum, a song that belongs to all of us. Will may at first seem small, private, and modestly appointed—just a room with a piano, a synthesizer, and a looping pedal—but once you settle in, it feels as vast as the universe in there.


In the ’90s, Blige prophesied a future in which hip-hop would be baked directly into pop music. The hits on this collection show her just getting started.

HERstory Vol. 1

As a singer, Mary J. Blige didn’t have the church-choir precision of a Whitney Houston or the range of a Mariah Carey. What she did have was a bottomless well of soul and swagger. When she signed to Uptown Records in 1989, she began working with a guy named Sean Combs, then an employee at Uptown Records and still years away from being known as Puff Daddy. Together with the upstart producer, she prophesied a future in which hip-hop would be baked directly into pop music.
With her 1992 debut What’s The 411?, Blige folded the nascent sounds of hip-hop into her music and its aesthetic into her style. HERstory Vol.1, a box set available in 7-inch, LP, CD, and digital formats, reflects on that era and on Blige’s emergence as the “queen of hip-hop soul.” The collection, spanning singles, collaborations, and remixes, maps her early trajectory from “Real Love” all the way to 1997’s “Love Is All We Need.” Even alongside some of the most acclaimed rappers of all time—Jay-Z, Method Man, Nas, and Biggie—Blige pierces through.
To someone listening for the first time in 2019, her style might even sound dated. But even when they extracted influences from her sound, few singers could access her desperate yearning. Blige’s “Real Love” would serve as something of a blueprint for hip-hop soul—powerful hooks, smoky singing, slang-informed writing, and textured, sample-based beats that could easily be rapped over. “If I stay strong, maybe I’ll find my real love”—this ability to evoke pain, desire, and an iron will would characterize much of the rest of her career, elevating her as an icon of triumph and transformation. HERstory Vol.1 offers the reminder that she had that power as young as 18 or 19.
Long before it was the norm, Blige was forthcoming about the difficult circumstances that shaped her world. She’d endured childhood sexual abuse and a drug and alcohol addiction that began when she was 16. In her music, she imagined an escape from that misery, even if she couldn’t quite see it at the time. With her second album, 1994’s My Life, Blige grew from singer to songwriter, crafting some of the biggest hits of her career. Songs like “Be Happy” and her cover of Rose Royce’s 1976 soul single “I’m Goin’ Down,” steeped in the darkness of her own experiences, offered the mingling of agony and hope that became her signature. “All I really want is to be happy,” she begs on the hook of “Be Happy,” stretching a simple statement into something pained and profound.
She would soon realize that wish, escaping an abusive relationship, finding sobriety, and transforming into the anti-drama crusader we know her as today. “I am the living proof that any person going through any tragic situation in their lives, you can get out,” she said in a 2011 episode of VH1’s Behind The Music. Today, Blige enjoys “beloved auntie” cultural status; in recent years, she has been both a meme and a record-breaking Oscar nominee. When she made the music of HERstory’s first volume, she was just getting started.

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The Chicago R&B upstart pairs with producer Steve Lacy for five tracks of inventive modernist soul.

Crush EP

When Steve Lacy, known for his work as part of the Internet and for composing one of the best beats on Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. using only his iPhone, was offered an opportunity to produce an EP for Chicago R&B upstart Ravyn Lenae, he went for it. “She’s so young and she’s not locked into a certain style or vocal range, so anything I’d give her, she’s like, ‘I got you.’” he told Beats 1 late last year. He looks at his relationship with Lenae as his Pharrell-Kelis or Timbaland-Aaliyah moment.
Those are bold comparisons, but Lenae and Lacy’s alchemy on Crush bears them out. When Lacy works with artists like Kendrick or Tyler, the Creator, he often pushes them to change their style to adapt to his own delicate style of soul and funk. With Lenae, they’re exploring together, and “Sticky,” the EP’s irresistibly catchy single, makes it clear they’ve found something special. On the song, Lenae’s not just proffering lyrics about a crummy relationship—she slips and slides through cadences over Lacy’s unconventional riffs, and her “woo-hoo-hoo”-ing is as muscular as the bass. She’s got the range to take on Lacy’s contemporary SoCal soul.
The 19-year-old singer’s past work—including stints touring with Noname and SZA—suggested an artist who doesn’t just want to be famous, but who wants to build herself a new musical world. Her first two EPs, produced by Chicago’s Monte Booker in 2016 and 2017, paired her soul-inspired vocals with his signature off-kilter beats. Their artistic success hinged on Lenae’s ability to find herself in the music, adapting her supple and versatile voice to the producer’s idiosyncratic palette.
The same ability makes her an ideal partner for Lacy. He gives Lenae a psychedelic guitar backdrop to coo and sing falsetto over on “Closer.” “Computer Luv” is a buoyant duet sung from in front of screens on separate sides of the world. Lenae and Lacy sing the hook in unison: “I shed a tear down/My face, drip and drown/My feelings into this one text/I wonder what is next/Will I catch real feelings for you?” People have been falling in love on the internet since it came on a free AOL diskette, and in 2018, meeting online is mundane. Even so, the pining is still real, and “Computer Luv” captures that longing in the interplay between Lenae’s and Lacy’s vocals.
That strikingly personal tone persists throughout Crush, which makes sense: If you spend your summer vacation on tour with SZA, the current queen of expressing the many shades of heartache, you might well come home a more detailed lyricist. Even when Lenae is singing about something as ordinary as getting ready to go out on “The Night Song,” it’s not about looking hot, it’s about loving yourself: “I wanna be no one but me/I give a thang ‘bout what you say or think.” She makes pre-party primping sound more meditative than superficial—and as with nearly every song on this remarkable EP, she sounds utterly self-assured as she does it. It’s the sound of a promising young talent maturing into her own signature style.


Echo and the Bunnymen: Crocodiles / Heaven Up Here / Porcupine / Ocean Rain / Echo & The Bunnymen

So what kind of drugs do you think it was? I only ask because it seems fairly obvious that Echo & The Bunnymen were a band christened during a period of impaired judgment. I can see it sounding funny on a drunk Saturday evening, but to seriously go through with it and start releasing albums under the name The Bunnymen (Echo was their drum machine) is just beyond reason, not only because it's a silly name, but because it's a name that engenders skepticism immediately when you say it. I can't count the number of times I've found myself saying, "No, seriously, they're really quite good once you get past the name," to someone unfamiliar with their work. And the fact is, they really were a good band in their day (and actually still are in their reconstituted form today), but it's hard to find anyone who really takes them all that seriously.
Granted, there are reasons aside from their moniker that people might shy away from Echo & The Bunnymen. Ian McCulloch's (melo)dramatic, psychedelic crooner vocals and frequent forays into quasi-religious lyrical imagery are something you just have to accept without overthinking it, but the fact is that this band made that kind of stuff sound great. The Liverpool quartet created an absolutely huge sound on record to match their frontman's flair for grandiosity, and they bore it to you on the backs of bassist Les Pattinson and drummer Pete DeFreitas, a rhythm section whose sheer power and imagination is chronically overlooked.
Listening back to the band's five original albums on Rhino's excellently remastered reissue series in an age when rhythm is returning to the fore of the underground, it's hard not to notice just how charged and visceral some of these records were. The epitome is "Back of Love", from 1983's Porcupine, an album that initially wasn't even released stateside, but in hindsight proves to be the band's definitive statement. "Back of Love" is simply the astonishing highlight of the group's career, featuring frenetic drumming, laser-focused basswork and Will Sergeant's choppy, heavily delayed guitar chords. The way the music drops out of the treble range and yields to a deep, miles-thick synthesizer groan behind McCulloch's frantically shouted chorus is disorienting and breathtaking-- it's an anthem for adrenal glands.
Porcupine was loaded with songs like that, unfolding with the cascading stomp of "The Cutter", one of the band's best singles with its weird, elastic synthesizer melodies. While it showcases some of The Bunnymen's most aggressively rhythmic material, though, Porcupine also houses its share of strange, abstract material such as the title track and "My White Devil", songs that lurch on Spartan rhythms and mix disparate textures like Spanish guitar and cravenly artificial synthesizer, a fact that's led many to inaccurately characterize the album as the band's "difficult" record, something it's really not.
Of course, it's not as straightforward as its two predecessors, 1980's Crocodiles and 1981's Heaven Up Here. The Bunnymen hit the ground running, and their debut album is a stunning statement of purpose, with McCulloch already in full dramatic swing and the band at their most straightforward-- any band that uses as much reverb as this one is hard to label "raw," but "Pride" and "Do It Clean" nonetheless hit hard, and "Rescue", with Sergeant's massive opening riff, manages to turn a chorus that should sound like a plea into a rallying cry. Heaven Up Here ranges more widely, and makes motions toward the slightly funkier band that turned up on Porcupine on the aptly titled "Show of Strength" and "With a Hip", while also stretching out their theatrical side on the slow-burning, flute-laden "All My Colours" (also frequently referred to as "Zimbo" for McCulloch's weird, droning nonsense refrain).
The Bunnymen mellowed to a degree for their fourth album, the widely acclaimed Ocean Rain, but all it did was cause them to get weirder. The album is stuffed with queasy midtempo tracks and bizarre orchestration, but it's by no means impenetrable. The strangest song, "Yo Yo Man" limps through skewed verses, building to McCulloch's refrain, "I'm the yo yo man/ Always up and down," which triggers a startling interjection by vigorously bowed strings, percussion and Sergeant's spastic guitar. Most of the album is considerably less warped, but a chilly, haunted ambience settles over the whole recording like a fine dust.
The creative strain of recording Ocean Rain took a lot out of the band, and it took them three years to deliver a follow-up, in the form of their self-titled record, which is as odd a collision of commercial sensibility and inescapable weirdness as you're likely to find. The band's attempt to reach a wider audience worked out when they splattered the hook-heavy reverb bomb "Lips Like Sugar" all over American college radio, but the backward guitar solo on "Lost and Found" is more representative of the album as a whole. The sunnier production watered the band's sound down a bit, but they still managed to turn out "All in Your Mind", a throbbing beast of a pop song swimming in twitching guitar and aggressive synth bass, and god, that is so obviously Ray Manzarek of The Doors playing organ on "Bedbugs and Ballyhoo" that you don't even need the liners to clue you in-- it works almost purely on improbability.
The folks at Rhino have done an admirable job of expanding each album to include relevant bonus material, trucking out standout B-sides "Fuel" and "Angels & Devils" and some bone-crushing early live tracks, but they've also somehow managed to leave off "The Puppet" completely, and non-album singles "Never Stop" and "Bring on the Dancing Horses" are represented in atypical versions, which smacks of needless obscurantism. Still, these albums deserved another look, and the reissues offer a good one. If you've never heard The Bunnymen before, their career overview, Songs to Learn & Sing, is still the best introduction, but you can't go too wrong diving right into Porcupine. Either way, The Bunnymen are a band worth exploring-- you know, once you get past the name.


After two albums of fantastic club-pop, the versatile UK duo dial back to a pastoral, folksy indie-electronica sound.

Seventh Tree

One thing writers often don't give musicians enough credit for is the rationale for their restlessness. If a well-known pop artist alters their style-- especially if it deviates from a sound that made them a commercial success-- there's often this urge to label the musician as bored and impulsive, chasing new trends or jumping off bandwagons as if holding off stagnancy is their only motivation to test their creativity. It can be upsetting to longtime fans, but often times the only real hurdle to these new directions is unfamiliarity-- just look at Goldfrapp, who startled their earliest fans by shifting from the surrealistic elegance of their 2000 orchestral-pop debut Felt Mountain to a beat-heavy mid-decade run at the dance charts. With two hard-to-top electro-pop albums under their belts-- 2003's Black Cherry and 2005's Supernature-- it's safe to assume that Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory are perfectly happy with getting some closure on what they've accomplished in the last few years and are moving on to something else out of a feeling more substantial than impatience. It was unprecedented enough that a group which started out trafficking in cabaret eeriness and cinematic grandiosity would ease so naturally into club-pop, so it's not out of the question that dialing back to pastoral, folksy indie-electronica would unearth another side of a duo that was shaping up to be one of the decade's most versatile.
So how could a group that's already established success with slow, lush ballads-- think 2000's "Pilots", 2003's "Forever", or 2005's "You Never Know"-- release an album filled with a whole bunch of uncompelling attempts at them? It could be because Goldfrapp's best songs, regardless of how downbeat they were, at least had something to grab the ear melodically, where most of the material on Seventh Tree focuses more on subtle, slow-moving ambience. This ambience is often so subtle and slow-moving it doesn't seem to go anywhere, and it coasts on some frothy sense of pleasantness that evaporates the moment the song ends. Like the bulk of the album, there's a certain beauty in opener "Clowns", but it's an empty one-- more lullaby than pop song, it's symptomatic of what happens when you take all the grandeur out of big sweeping melodies.
Other songs attempt to use these flimsy backdrops to build up to big, epic crescendos-- the Nick Mason drums cutting into the narcoleptic Air-circa-Virgin Suicides swoon in "Little Bird"; the latter-day Moby bombast that rears its head in the second half of "A&E"'s Sarah McLachlan-isms-- and it feels false and gratuitous, as if it were the only way to maintain any actual momentum. At its best-- the desolation of "Cologne Cerrone Houdini" and "Some People", which inject the ambience with a much-needed eeriness-- this stuff's fairly soothing; at its worst it evokes that old "Mystery Science Theater 3000" bit about the two-note chords of New Age music: "Put your finger down here...now put another finger down...now hold it down for an hour...now hold it down 'til you get a record contract from Windham Hill." At least "Caravan Girl" provides a nice, upbeat Neu!-meets-ABBA distraction, but it's too little too late.
All of Gregory's codeine melodies would be a lot more salvageable, however, if Alison undercut it with the trademark strengths of her voice. It's what made the Marlene Dietrich mood of Felt Mountain so intriguingly weird, while Black Cherry and Supernature would have simply been slightly-above-par electro-glam ephemera without her Kylie-gone-sinister purr. But she's not assertive or seductive or mysterious here; what she's offering is the kind of mannered, chirpy delicacy you could get from any number of indie-folk and adult contemporary artists piped through off-brand coffeehouses everywhere. There's still some interesting dissonance in hearing this fragile version of Goldfrapp's voice wrap around lyrics that occasionally match the ominous nature of her older songs; "A&E", shallow as it sounds, hints at a pill overdose.
But with all the excitement and decadence drained out of the music and the voice, the trite themes stand out a bit more clearly: you can be happy if you give money to people who promise to make your life better ("Happiness"); birds have wings and are free ("Little Bird"). That's assuming you can understand Goldfrapp's lyrics in the first place, since she mumbles incoherently and is muffled under a swampy mix through half the record, which only highlights the feeling of sleepy halfheartedness. Even if Seventh Tree is sonic dishwater, I'll give Goldfrapp enough credit to assume that this isn't change for its own sake, that the motivation for this album's tone wasn't simply a fatigued boredom with their old sound. It's just too bad most listeners won't be able to say the same about their own reactions to this new one.


The New York-based composer’s newest project with the Attacca Quartet highlights the significance of language while exploring the narrative potential of contemporary classical music.

Caroline Shaw / Attacca Quartet: Evergreen

Evergreen

Caroline Shaw has demonstrated time and again that her Pulitzer Prize-winning Partita for 8 Voices was no fluke. In the nine years since the achievement, Shaw has continued to prove her compositional prowess, creating imaginative works for solo instruments, orchestra, percussion, and various chamber arrangements. In 2019, the New York-based composer teamed up with the Attacca Quartet for their first collaborative record, the wild and wide-reaching Orange. Their second project together, Evergreen, expands this partnership by exploring the relationship that contemporary classical music has with language, narrative, and nature.
Evergreen unfolds in distinct parts. It begins with Shaw’s composition “Three Essays,” a 2018 work inspired by language, in particular the lilting prose style of novelist Marilynne Robinson. Each “Essay” has its own unique topography defined by varying string techniques, deliberate pacing, and vibrant dynamics brought to life by the Attacca Quartet’s interpretation. Highlight “Second Essay: Echo” begins with the gritty crunching of the bow against strings, as if bark is slowly breaking underneath heavy footsteps. Shared breath is audible from the musicians, each sniff or light gasp signaling the quartet’s performance as a singular, unified force. The capricious “Third Essay: Ruby” foregrounds puckish pizzicato and longing Romantic lines that give way to explosive non-resolutions. Shaw makes strategic use of pizzicato throughout Evergreen, employing the articulation to build suspense like many composers before her (Johannes Brahms, for example, notably did this in the third movement of his piano quintet).
While “Three Essays” directly references language and the written word, Evergreen also highlights the physical voice. Shaw sings throughout the record; its closing piece, for example, is a 5/4 vocal setting of the French poem “Cant voi l’aube.” Her vocal standout is the angelic “And So,” a reimagining of the immortal Shakespearean “What’s in a name?” monologue from Romeo and Juliet. Originally composed for the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale, “And So” feels more personal and intimate on Evergreen, given the smaller size of the ensemble. Above the quartet’s tentative and smoky strokes, Shaw wonders: “Would a song by any other name sound as sweet and true?” The contour of the composition follows each question she poses; her voice rises in volume and pitch with the line, “If you were gone/Would I still know [...] how to grow?” And when Shaw asks “Would scansion cease to mark the beats if I went away?” the strings pulse methodically, as if marking stresses above each word of a handwritten poem; when she mentions the word “time,” pizzicato plucks mirror a ticking clock. This tone painting also occurs in “Other Song,” a modest, reflective reinterpretation of a track from Shaw’s 2021 album Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, with Sō Percussion. Here, her voice slides upward on the word “higher,” glazing through several notes to eventually land on its target, an effect the strings first explored in “First Essay: Nimrod.”
The focal point of the record, “The Evergreen,” encompasses the imagery central to each of its four movements. Take the first, “Moss.” Moss is a plant that lies on the exterior of other natural structures; its tendrils exist without roots and only become solid when they are compressed together. Shaw’s composition parallels this property: The strings’ fluttering harmonics float above the head throughout; they rarely dip below the surface to a wider, more settled sound, and when they do it is only transitory. By contrast, the last movement, “Root,” feels immediately grounded, opening with the lowest instrument in the quartet, the cello, digging itself into the ground with a rocking, anchored melody. Shaw begins Evergreen by establishing a connection between contemporary classical music and narrative style; by the end, she has shown that in the right hands, music can be just as descriptive as literature.


The Singaporean indie pop trio’s second album sparkles, but under all the glitter, there are somber truths about love’s uncertainties.

Air Guitar

Sobs are a sunny oasis in the melancholy landscape of Singapore’s indie scene. The trio’s debut album, Telltale Signs, exuded defeatist languor and ended with an exasperated sigh, capturing the frustration that emerges when a relationship lacks direction. While their scuzzy guitar-pop was reminiscent of Frankie Cosmos and Jay Som, underneath their lush dream pop arrangements were snappy hooks and danceable sensibilities. Even then, Sobs’ pop ambitions felt larger than anything their bedroom stylings could ever hold.
Sobs’ second album, Air Guitar (and their first for U.S. indie rock label Topshelf Records), is a full-fledged realization of those pop aspirations. During a period of burnout in the four years since Telltale Signs, vocalist Celine Autumn briefly stepped away from her guitar and instead embraced the effervescence of hyperpop. Although guitarists Jared Lim and Raphael Ong had brought some sheen to Sobs’ music in the past, Autumn’s self-titled solo EP as Cayenne was pure pop gloss. Co-produced with Lim, Cayenne was a sugar rush, replete with carbonated synths, glitchy distortion, and magnetic hooks. Sobs blend that same fizzy pop production with their summery indie rock on Air Guitar—the album glitters without blunting the trio’s sharp edge.
Sobs don’t just offer a snapshot of Singapore’s indie rock scene on this record; they also sketch a history of guitar-driven indie pop. The narrator comes smartly prepared for inevitable rejection on “Last Resort,” but the ‘80s new wave shimmer evokes the teenage nostalgia of obsessing over a kiss in your bedroom. The song is a rosy fantasy, even as its protagonist anxiously awaits abandonment. Elsewhere, frustrations on “Lucked Out” are masked in the sweetness of compact, jangly arrangements that recall acclaimed Japanese indie pop group Advantage Lucy. The fuzzy static of “Burn Book” evokes Singaporean shoegaze band Cosmic Child—whose frontman Zhang Bo plays bass and guitar on a few tracks here—but adds a spark with a twinkling riff straight out of Midwest emo.
Bedroom pop’s intimate sensibilities still inform Sobs’ lyrics. Across the record, Autumn plays a passive character, trapped in a relationship that should have ended long ago. On the bright bubble-grunge of the title track, she comes to grips with the romance’s shortcomings: “Your lips don’t taste the same, you’re no longer mine/You’re not worthy of the fight,” she professes. Gutless to properly end things, the song buries its remaining sheepish confessions like whispers under a distorted guitar. The spirited guitar line at the end of the song makes Autumn’s last attempt at escape feel even more momentous, despite her resignation. “Friday Night” recounts a similar predicament: Autumn drifts through a cramped house party, her nervousness fading to disappointment as she laments yet another emotionally unavailable partner. In a flash, “Friday Night” conceals her despair as the saccharine power pop transforms into an electric drum’n’bass breakdown.
One painful realization after another, Air Guitar is candy-coated without dulling the pain of heartbreak. If Autumn isn’t surrendering to the reality of an absent and thoughtless partner, then she’s helplessly pleading for someone more reliable. “Please don’t call me back, ‘cause I don’t want to hurt you,” she begs on “LOML,” exhausted from the fatigue and uncertainty. But there are also clear moments that disavow that pessimism, like the earnest and tender power pop of “World Implode.” Sobs translate the cyclical feeling of falling and out of love into gleaming, guitar-led confections across Air Guitar, exuberantly delivering on the promise of going big.


A Sunny Day in Glasgow's latest and best album has an atmospheric, bleeding-watercolor quality that makes it sound a bit like a My Bloody Valentine record if the moodiness and pensiveness were replaced with a feeling of almost violently explosive joy.

Sea When Absent

What would shoegaze sound like if it had its eyes on the sky? Over the course of several albums, the intercontinental six-piece A Sunny Day in Glasgow have been toying with an answer to that riddle. Their latest and best record, Sea When Absent, has an atmospheric, bleeding-watercolor quality that makes it sound a little bit like a My Bloody Valentine record if the moodiness and pensiveness were replaced with a feeling of almost violently explosive joy. Beneath dense textures, melodies pop like fireworks. Like their previous albums, Sea When Absent doesn't sound like much else out there; genre tags are only worth mentioning to show how they don't quite fit. It sometimes sounds like a psych record, made not by the kids smoking up behind the bleachers but the most devoted members of the glee club.
Since their freewheeling 2007 debut Scribble Mural Comic Journal, A Sunny Day in Glasgow have flown under the radar, apart from any discernible trends. Until now, their greatest achievement has been their criminally under-heard 2009 album Ashes Grammar, a panoramic collection of pastel-soft dream-pop that moved fluidly between ambient passages and hazy but immaculately structured pop songs like "Failure" and "Passionate Introverts (Dinosaurs)". Actually, "passionate introverts" is a pretty good way to describe at least one member of the band: the guitarist and ostensible leader Ben Daniels, a biostatistician who moved in 2009 from Philadelphia to Australia. "I am pretty antisocial," he said recently, when asked if he still felt connected to the Philadelphia scene. "I know that if I were in Philly I'd still mostly be hanging out in my apartment reading books and playing with synthesizers." That makes sense: Even in its most ambitiously full-screen moments, A Sunny Day in Glasgow's music has a certain bedroom-pop feel. Community often makes for great art, but music as unique and unclassifiable as ASDIG's usually springs from somebody shutting himself in his room and trusting his own weird way of seeing the world.
Ashes Grammar was a sprawling and occasionally drifting record, but Sea When Absent finds the band tightening up their sound just enough, bringing the interlocking vocals of their two singers, Jen Goma and Annie Fredrickson, to the forefront of the mix. For the first time, they've brought on an outside producer, Jeff Zeigler (War on Drugs, Kurt Vile), and though he's helped clarify their sound, that doesn't come at the expense of complexity. Each song on Sea When Absent structured like a maze: it's easy—and dizzying in the best way—to get lost in its twists and turns. "The Things They Do to Me" begins as weightless, space-rock reverie and then abruptly makes a hard left into a more pastoral earth-bound soundscape; "The Body, It Bends" pivots between an unassuming acoustic folk tune and a song that ought to have its own laser light show at a planetarium; a towering riff crashes down in the middle of "Boys Turn Into Girls (Initiation Rites)", sudden as a summer storm. These tonal shifts are so dynamic that they sound fresh on every listen; you could hear these songs 100 times and they'd still find ways to catch by surprise.
Music that overflows with so many ideas runs the risk of sounding cluttered, but Sea When Absent manages to avoid that pitfall. And that's pretty impressive, given the disjointed way it was recorded: The six members of the band (Daniels, Goma, Fredrickson, drummer Adam Herndon, bassist Ryan Newmyer, and multi-instrumentalist Josh Meakim) are now scattered across Australia, New York, and Philadelphia, and the album came together as they sent each other snippets of songs, with creative decisions made via lengthy group email chains. The result is an album structured in layers with many overlapping ideas, as fragmentary and luminous as light through a prism. The sweetly singsong-y "MTLOV (Minor Keys)" has the feel of a round, with Goma and Fredrickson's voices braided into rich harmonies. Then there's the stone-cold gorgeous "In Love With Useless (The Timeless Geometry in the Tradition of Passing)", which flirts with moments of dissonance and glitchiness (the pre-chorus sounds like nothing so much as a poorly connected Skype call) only to make the moments of sudden clarity feel that much more satisfying.
When A Sunny Day in Glasgow put out "In Love With Useless" as a single, they also released a lyric video for it—which is kind of funny, because they're not exactly a "lyrics band." Granted, they've pushed the vocals higher into the mix this time around, but it's usually next to impossible to understand what Goma and Fredrickson are singing. Not that it matters; ASDIG's music is more about the experience of getting blissfully lost in a feeling, and if their music were too literal or word-based it might take you out of that odd, dreamlike state.
"When Ashes Grammar came out," Daniels recently recalled, "I thought it was a really loud rock record for a year, and then a friend was like, 'This is really chilled-out and ambient.'" With Sea When Absent, A Sunny Day in Glasgow have finally made that loud rock record—full of crashing percussion and screaming guitars—but without abandoning the ambiance that makes them so distinct. Sea When Absent has the quality of one of those spectacularly bright summer days when they color in everything seems a little over-saturated, and it induces the same dizzy, woozy feeling you get after staring directly at the sun. Play it loud enough to see spots.


Vancouver’s atmospheric noisemakers team up with Norwegian dream-pop artist Tuvaband, whose luminous voice brings focus to the group’s sprawling avant-prog.

New Age Doom / Tuvaband: There Is No End

There Is No End

Bands that peg their name to their sound risk painting themselves into a corner, but on their earliest DIY recordings, Vancouver duo New Age Doom embraced truth in advertising. If not quite as gimmicky as their moniker might suggest—what if Laraaji made a Sunn0))) record, lol—releases like 2019’s self-titled anthology and 2020’s Himalayan Dream Techno staked out the middle ground between the cathedral and the commune, filtering heavy metal’s black-mass grandeur and percussive thunder through the free-flowing serenity and found-sound ingenuity of ’70s private-press ambient recordings. But since then, the New Age Doom name has come to represent less a cheeky genre mash-up than a guiding philosophy, a means to manifest the balance of natural beauty and apocalyptic chaos that governs life on Earth. Sure, New Age Doom are the sort of act who will set up shop on the street to startle unsuspecting passersby, but they also just might be the only noise band with their own brand of plant-based cashew dip.
Though centered on the core duo of guitarist Greg Valou and drummer Eric J. Breitenbach, New Age Doom have broadened their horizons on every album, often with help from collaborators. The most notable of these was 2021’s Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Guide to the Universe, where New Age Doom and a team of guest players backed up the dub legend on the final album he recorded in his lifetime. Their new release enlists many of the same musicians—including Blackstar bassist Tim Lefebvre and trumpet player Daniel Rosenboom—to support another vocalist, but the lead-role casting and musical approach couldn’t be more different. Where Guide to the Universe saw New Age Doom play a more subservient role to Perry, complementing their hero’s stream-of-conscious poetry with suitably zoned-out soundscapes, There Is No End has them constructing more concrete arrangements around the Norwegian dream-pop artist Tuva Hellum Marschhäuser, aka Tuvaband, whose luminous voice functions as the beacon that guides them through the stormiest passages.
There Is No End builds a bridge between the two projects’ respective worlds. Its opening track, “In the Beginning,” expands upon an idea introduced on Tuvaband’s “By the Time You Hear This,” the centerpiece of her 2023 album New Orders, where Marschhäuser asks, “Is this the end of the start of the end of the start of the end/Or is it the start of the end of the start of the end of the start?” In their original context, those words seemed to address the uncertain status of a relationship, but on “In the Beginning,” she weaves a similarly cyclical sentiment into something more like a Zen koan: “In the beginning, I’m just beginning,” she states matter-of-factly, “and in the end there is no end.” New Age Doom put that doctrine into action with a track that slowly whips itself into a towering inferno of tambura melodies, transcendental trumpet flourishes, and surging percussive grooves, before everything comes crashing down at the six-minute mark. But what initially sounds like a dramatic, drum-set-toppling finale is actually a gateway to the song’s extended coda, where the expanded ensemble smashes and thrashes with furious intensity for five more minutes until the clamor gives way to clarity.
The greater melodic definition and more purposeful song structures of There Is No End aren’t a complete surprise. For all the group’s avant-drone acumen, New Age Doom’s roots are in power pop: Breitenbach is also a member of Canadian alt-rock hitmakers Limblifter, a band that’s shared membership with the New Pornographers and whose lead singer, Ryan Dahle, serves as the mixing and mastering engineer here. The New Age Doom crew also includes Cola Wars, better known as Sloan’s longtime keyboardist, Gregory MacDonald. There Is No End is hardly a wellspring of jangly guitars and sun-kissed harmonies, but it does belong to a venerable lineage of adventurous, worldly rock music that connects the mid-’70s Middle Eastern fascinations of Led Zeppelin, the klezmer-powered crescendos of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and the recent microtonal explorations of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, making this the sort of experimental album that could still be embraced by people who think Bandcamp is a place you go to learn the cello in the summer.
But on a record that features such eclectic noisemakers as gongs, saz, and marxophone, Marschhäuser’s voice remains the most captivating and commanding instrument, whether it’s the focal point of a song or a subliminal texture within it. “Fearless Talisman” is essentially seven minutes of Breitenbach bashing out a ricocheting backbeat while the brass section unloads the psych-jazz firepower, but the emergence of Marschhäuser’s wordless choral incantations reframe this manic jam as a mournful elegy for a world gone mad. And with There Is No End’s closing title track, she’s given the space to showcase the mercurial qualities of her voice. Like the album’s opener, it riffs on a circular end-is-the-beginning logic, but where the joyful noise of “In the Beginning” signified rebirth, “There Is the End” is imbued with regret. For its first four minutes, the song resembles the sort of tranquil, sax-sweetened indie-pop ballad that wouldn’t sound out of place on Tuvaband’s own records. But after shifting into a Portishead-like dub-noir groove, her words suddenly seem less vulnerable than vindictive, transforming the most heartfelt track on the record into its most haunting. When they released their anarchic first recordings four years ago, there was little to suggest Valou and Breitenbach would ever steer the project toward music as sophisticated, dramatic, and emotionally layered as this. But with There Is No End, they’ve successfully updated their doom for a new age.


The UK band stakes out even more ground on their glorious second album. The chord changes are more elaborate, the rhythms more twisted, the pretty parts prettier, the heavy parts heavier.

Cavalcade

Let’s start with the ending, an orchestral finale so grand it might as well come with a title card attached: That’s all, folks! The last two chords of Cavalcade, black midi’s second album, form a harmonic exclamation point that would have been recognizable to listeners even centuries ago, indicating that it was time to pack up their opera glasses and head home. After the previous 40 minutes of Cavalcade, an avant-rock labyrinth of maddening intricacy, navigated without any such conventional signposts, this is a perverse way to wrap things up. Arriving with an abrupt cut from the full band’s pummelling and caterwauling, the gesture’s familiarity makes it unsettling, surreal, like the punchline to an obscure joke. How could a record so full of noise and contradiction ever end on such a fine point?
black midi became a sensation among adventurous rock listeners almost immediately after releasing their first single in 2018, and with good reason. They were just out of high school but played like they’d been woodshedding for decades. There was something almost obscene about their early performance videos, that those gawky kids were playing like this. The giddiness you felt upon watching was not unlike that of seeing a particularly outrageous internet meme. They seemed to have completed multiple lifetimes worth of left-field listening by the time they made Schlagenheim, their debut album—The Fall, Touch and Go post-hardcore, Miles Davis in the ‘70s, King Crimson in the ‘80s—and channeled those touchstones in songs that were exuberant and alive rather than fussy and reverent.
The excitement had something to do with their dazzling instrumental expressiveness; drummer Morgan Simpson, especially, was like a free-jazz virtuoso going undercover in a punk band. It also involved guitarist and de facto frontman Geordie Greep, whose hectoring anti-charisma may be the band’s most distinctive element, whether you love his free-associative rants or wish he’d dial them back just a hair. (For me, and I suspect plenty of other fans, it’s a little of both.) Finally, there was the sense that black midi were discovering their powers in real time as you listened, an impression they heightened with frequent onstage improvisation. For all the hours they’d evidently spent doing their homework, the music never felt charmlessly studied or proficient. It was raw.
If there was any pressure to flatten out their idiosyncrasies for Cavalcade, they clearly rejected it. The album is a good deal more ambitious and more difficult than its predecessor, stretching even further in almost every direction that Schlagenheim staked out. The chord changes are more elaborate, the rhythms more twisted, the pretty parts prettier, the heavy parts heavier. Schlagenheim aspired toward jazz fusion and 20th-century classical; Cavalcade has passages that sound like Mahavishnu Orchestra and Olivier Messiaen. Schlagenheim had its fair share of dopey-awesome metallic grooves and guitar parts; Cavalcade comes thrillingly close, a handful of times, to Primus or System of a Down. Greep, who handles vocals on six of the eight songs, has upped his flair for the theatrical, abetted by new contributors on sax, violin, and keyboards. Listening to Schlagenheim, it was easy to imagine black midi kicking out the jams in a basement somewhere. Now, the imagined setting is more like a Hieronymous Bosch painting, or a three-ring circus. There is a vague but persistent feeling that someone involved might be wearing a monocle.
“John L,” the album’s first song, is also its most broadly representative. The central theme creaks and lurches like a see-saw in need of WD-40 and Greep slurs out a portrait of a cultish political leader at the end of his rope. When the singer takes on the voice of John L himself, offering his followers a blend of nationalist fear and capitalist wish fulfillment, a grotesque vocal effect enters the mix to underscore the message’s dark familiarity: “A man is his country, your country is you/All bad is forewarned, all good will come true.” When there’s simply too much going on, the band creates powerful tension by paring things away: deconstructing their own groove in the song’s electrifying middle section, or plunging into cavernous silence between outbursts of drums and violin.
In building so elaborately atop the black midi framework, Cavalcade loses a bit of Schlagenheim’s spartan urgency; there’s nothing like “Near DT, MI,” the Flint water crisis cri de cœur that provided the debut with its most searing two-minute stretch. But the band’s willingness to indulge every impulse also leads them to wild new territory. “Slow” and “Diamond Stuff,” the two songs fronted by bassist Cameron Picton (who also led “Near DT, MI”) are among the best in the black midi catalog. The former’s manic prog-jazz pounding imagines a surprisingly fruitful middle ground between Swans and Steely Dan. The latter is eerie and spacious, transfixing without rising above a whisper.
There’s an aesthetic developing among jazz-schooled and internet-fried musicians like Louis Cole or DOMi and JD Beck, propagated on YouTube and social media more so than on proper albums, which has brought youthful new verve to wonky old virtuosity by acknowledging that there’s something a little funny about being able to play so ridiculously well. Whether intentionally or not, black midi have always had a bit of this quality—something like a joyous Are you fucking kidding me? was an appropriate reaction to those early live videos—and they bring it closer to the surface on Cavalcade. It’s there in that queasy-beautiful final cadence, and in the wink of the chord progression that underpins the verses of “Ascending Forth,” the closing song, which ascends by a fourth whenever Greep hits the titular phrase. It’s there in “Slow” and “Hogwash and Balderdash,” both of which feature variations on the same musical gag: in the middle of an intensely technical passage, the band suddenly drops out, leaving a single instrument to jitter nakedly for one measure or less before everyone barrels back in. More than any particular rock artist, it reminds me of Carl Stalling, the brilliant house composer for Looney Tunes.
When Cavalcade is at its most antic and cerebral, the “rock” part of the black midi equation becomes almost ancillary, like they could just as easily be exploring the same regions if they were free improvisers or composers for orchestra. The music’s relentless complexity, insularity, and high drama can be challenging even for a listener predisposed toward those qualities. The band seems to understand this, and they are more willing to meet you in the middle than you might think. Again and again, as a given song teeters toward lunacy, they return to primal call-and-response: one, two; a bang, then a crash; the rumble of a power chord followed by the wail of a sax. These moments are consistently among the album’s most satisfying, perhaps because of the relief they provide from an otherwise overwhelming procession of big ideas. They repeat a few times, you bang your head and catch your bearings, then the cavalcade continues.

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Memphis-based rockers crank out their third full-to-bursting LP of jarring garage-rock that transcends the genre through its deep knowledge of local and national pop and soul.

Too Much Guitar

Despite its somewhat questionable reputation as the birthplace of rock 'n' roll, Memphis is a city marked by death. In addition to Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination at the Lorraine Motel, Elvis croaked at Graceland; Al Jackson Jr. was murdered in his home; Otis Redding died in a plane crash; David Prater died in a car crash; Stax went under and was torn down; Chris Bell drove into a telephone pole off Poplar Avenue; Jeff Buckley drowned in the Wolf River. Ineluctable tragedy has seeped into Memphis' mythology and mindset, as pervasive as muddled civic government, and it bubbles out through the city's music.
Not many Memphis musicians understand this municipal obsession with mortality as well as Greg Cartwright, who fronted the 90s noise-rock trio The Oblivians until the group disbanded in 1997. Afterwards, he formed the Reigning Sound with three other local musicians, releasing Break Up Break Down and Time Bomb High School, two full-to-bursting albums of jarring garage-rock that transcended the genre through its impossibly deep knowledge of local and national pop and soul. On their new album, Too Much Guitar, the Reigning Sound make it clear that they would be playing the same songs with or without that genre's recent revival.
Not that the garage-rock trend has been especially good to the band. After Time Bomb High School, the Reigning Sound were on the verge of breaking up, held together by the power of a dozen or so new songs and the promise of studio time. Guitarist/keyboard player Alex Greene left in 2003, which left Cartwright, bassist Jeremy Scott, and drummer Greg Roberson, the latter two forming a tight-as-ever rhythm section reminiscent of their Stax forebears. Splitting time between Memphis and North Carolina and recording several tracks in Cartwright's now-closed Legba Records store, they brought in a few local musicians-- including Alicja Trout and Jay Rensley of Lost Sounds-- to create an album full of stomping backbeats, scorching guitars and soulful melodies.
On the opener, "We Repel Each Other", the band promise to live up (or down) to the album's cheekily self-critical title: Cartwright's voice is buried beneath piles of guitar noise, as if he's singing from six feet under. It's an odd tactic: Cartwright is blessed with an amazing voice for the music he plays, able to convey defeat and defiance, hangdog sadness and poisoned disdain, all in the same breath. At points on Too Much Guitar, he's barely audible-- although you hear more of him with each listen. However, the album's messy production exponentially increases its raw spontaneity and desperate urgency.
Not surprisingly, death informs much of the record, which directly equates love and loss. Songs like "If You Can't Give Me Everything" and "I'll Cry" lament the end of a relationship as if performing an exorcism. Even when a song celebrates romance-- such as the cover of Sam & Dave's "You Got Me Hummin'"-- fear always countervails happiness and contentment, making these songs seem restless and gloomily resigned to love's futility. Or, as Cartwright sings on "Funny Thing", "Love is a funny thing/ You don't know it's real 'til it's caused you pain."
Sometimes death is very literal, as on "Drowning", which begins ominously: "I went walking the other day/ Under the bridge to Arkansas." He promises to tell us what he saw, but only mentions that the sparkle in her eyes died. On one of the album's standouts, "Let Yourself Go", Cartwright sings, "Keep your feelings inside/ All your thoughts of suicide/ Oh, let yourself go." He's not promoting death, but exhorting listeners to "live your life like the end is near." Cartwright seems to be heeding that advice: Despite being so recently in the throes of their own demise, the Reigning Sound sound lively and vital as ever.