Two years after the South African trumpeter’s death, this 2010 studio session with the legendary Nigerian drummer documents their unique fusion of Afrobeat and jazz.

Rejoice

Tony Allen has lived many lives as a drummer in the decades since he first got behind a trap kit. His various collaborations and genre shifts are numerous and well documented, evidence of a lifetime of curiosity. But Allen will forever be known as the virtuosic drummer in Fela Kuti’s Africa 70 band—the man whose genre-defining rhythms drove the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer’s renowned sound. He quite literally put the beat in Afrobeat.
The legacy of the late Hugh Masekela, who died in 2018, is no less majestic. As a trumpeter he made his mark on every band he played with. Exiled from South Africa during apartheid, he spent much of the 1960s in London and New York, scoring a No.1 hit with “Grazing in the Grass” and making a name for himself on the Manhattan jazz scene. By 1984 he was in West Africa, where, through Fela, his friend and contemporary, he met Allen.
Almost as soon as they connected, the two decided they should try to make music together, but it would be more than 25 years before they finally met up in London’s Livingston Studios. Those 2010 sessions flowed like a conversation, with Allen laying down a drum track, Tom Herbert or Mutale Chashi adding bass, and Masekela answering with melodies on his flugelhorn. The result is Rejoice, a collaborative record that Allen calls “a kind of South African-Nigerian swing-jazz stew,” a skeletal Afrobeat infused with the spirit of bebop, with lyrics in English, Yoruba, and Zulu reflective of the transatlantic exchange that has defined the African diaspora for centuries.
Allen has been cooking up variations of this recipe for the past few years: It’s evident in the jazz stylings of his last solo LP, The Source, and in his tribute to bebop legend Art Blakey, who he credits as a major influence to his own style. His recordings with Masekela feel like old friends catching up after years apart. Masekela’s flugelhorn is the most expressive voice on the record, bright and nimble, piercing in tone but gentle in force, bearing passport stamps from Johannesburg, London, and New York. Allen’s touch is light, but he strikes with the confidence of a player who knows he doesn’t need to attack the drum to be heard. His snare drives the grooves, occasionally sputtering into micro-rolls, and the full-kit fills occupy the negative space in Masekela’s melodies. They’re effortlessly in sync, belying their limited experience collaborating with each other.
The record’s session players are plucked from London’s contemporary jazz scene: the Ezra Collective’s Joe Armon-Jones on keys, Chashi (Kokoroko) and Herbert (Acoustic Ladyland) on bass, and Steve Williamson on tenor saxophone, among others. Each instrument is rendered in stunning detail; from a technical standpoint, Rejoice is a  remarkable feat of production from World Circuit’s Nick Gold. The record’s stereo imaging places you in Allen’s shoes, directly behind the kit. On “Coconut Jam,” as the hi-hat and snare keep time in one ear, the ride cymbal punctuates the beat in the other, and fills across the toms ripple across the soundstage from right to left, the echo of each strike as clear as if you were in the room. You’d be hard-pressed to find a cleaner, more elegantly mixed recording of Allen’s stick work.
As much as Rejoice, Masekela’s first posthumous release, is about two musicians finding common musical ground, the specter of Fela also looms large. “Never” is their tribute to the late legend, a mournful celebration of the indelible mark he left on the city in which the pair met: “Lagos never gonna be the same/Without Fela/Never!” As danceable as any Fela song, it’s one of the few tracks on the album where Masekela sings, and his voice is filled with pride and joy and sorrow. It’s the voice of a man singing for his friend, a reflection of his memory.
Similarly, Rejoice is a tribute to Allen’s friendship with Masekela, a record of their respect and admiration for one another. One can imagine Allen’s experience of combing through the sessions in the summer of 2019, not long after Masekela’s death, reliving their brief time together creating the record they had always imagined making. It’s all there in the groove: a love letter that could only be written by two masters at the peak of their powers, a fitting send-off to a friend.
It’s also a record defined by wisdom and experience. As it celebrates the end of one journey, it looks hopefully upon the start of many new ones. When Masekela sings the refrain in Yoruba on “We’ve Landed”—“Ise lori lo fii nsere,” a sentiment that loosely translates as “your work begins”—he’s speaking to the youth of today, in both an acknowledgement of their newfound maturity and an encouragement of their self-awakening. It’s a subtle message from two elder statesmen closely intertwined with the political struggles of the African continent: Our time is passing, and it’s your turn to stand up.

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With warped lyrics and a thing for repetition, Lungfish embodied the D.C. area’s post-hardcore innovations. No one else has gotten as weird since.

Sound in Time

“A ball of string/The embroidered flower/The resting place of the zero hour.” When Daniel Higgs chants these words in “X-Ray the Pharoah”—one of the standout tracks of Lungfish’s fifth album Sound in Time, newly reissued—it’s not hard to imagine he’s grasping at a metaphor for Lungfish itself. Formed in 1987 in Baltimore, the group quickly left its initial, rock-oriented, almost proto-grunge sound and settled into a cosmic groove that redefined what “cosmic groove” could mean. Sure, they dealt in the cyclical structures of krautrock and the hallucinatory poetics of psychedelia. But like their late-’80s/early-’90s brethren on Dischord Records such as Jawbox, Nation of Ulysses, and Fugazi, they also dealt in tightly coiled, post-hardcore animus. That is, until 1996, when Sound in Time saw Lungfish—like a ball of string—starting to to uncoil.
As with every album in Lungfish’s discography, Sound in Time sticks to a basic, guitar-voice-bass-drums configuration. Higgs is the gravelly, shamanic mouthpiece; Asa Osborne is the austere guitarist; Sean Meadows, making his recording debut with Lungfish on this album, is the anchoring bassist; and Mitchell Feldstein is the steadfast drummer. But unlike their excellent work elsewhere (Osbourne with Zomes, Meadows with June of 44, Higgs both solo and with the Skull Defekts), Sound in Time is part of a long, meditative conversation that Lungfish could only have with Lungfish.
Not that listening in on that conversation isn’t worth it. “I beseech your long locust leg/Lust against a cloak of organs,” sings Higgs on “Jonah,” a fiery stomp through Biblical tropes and thwarted desire. “The speech of the half-extinct/The involuntary grin/The foundation of the dimension/That we live in,” he lists on “Panic and Hysteria,” ironically the most placid and measured song on the album. Lungfish is a thing of drones, and nowhere is the band’s cascading circularity more pronounced than on “Sphere of Influence,” whose lurching, trance-inducing pulse starts out before growing eerily erratic. Osborne’s ragged guitar threatens to fly away before being yanked back into orbit. Higgs hurls his bestial howl against the spiral he’s found himself caught in, even as part of him gratefully succumbs to destiny: “You can’t change your mind/About anything anymore.”
Sound in Time is bookended by two brief instrumentals, “Constellations” and “Constellations (Part 2).” Aside from the absence of Higgs’ vocals, they don’t depart significantly from the rest of the album’s churning, self-replicating cadence. They are not, however, throwaway tracks. What seems incidental at first listen sifts a new sonic hierarchy out of rock —a reordering of fields of perspective that heightens Lungfish’s already profound emphasis on rhythm as code. Whittled down to even fewer notes and changes than Lungfish utilized before, the album completes a circuit that marks the apotheosis of the band’s post-hardcore phase, a way of phrasing distortion and aggression as incantatory loops with all the angles worn smooth.
“People will say the songs are repetitious, that there’s a pattern, a melodic pattern. That’s probably all you could say accurately,” Higgs remarks in Radio Waves for Viewing, a short documentary about Lungfish made in 2013, eight years after Lungfish went on seemingly permanent hiatus. He then adds, without clarifying anything, “The general thing or essence or whatever that people are responding to or wanting to experience is probably unnamable.” That goes not only for Lungfish’s listeners, but Lungfish themselves. Sound in Time, as its title more than implies, graphs the band’s transition from post-hardcore tension toward something more elemental, spiritual, and sublime. Tethers are being loosened. Ties are being cut. Riffs and images are set adrift, even as they snap into a fugue state. Neither the greatest nor the most momentous Lungfish album, Sound in Time remains an intriguing, mystifying stage of the group’s evolution toward Higgs’ “zero hour”—a mythic space where rest and restlessness coexist without paradox.


A New York minimalist reaches into his archives, turning up solo pieces for piano and saxophone along with shape-shifting ensemble performances featuring Arthur Russell and Julius Eastman.

Songs & Melodies, 1973-1977

Jon Gibson’s saxophone, flute, and clarinet are the connective tissue of the 20th century American minimalist canon. He appeared on a number of Philip Glass’ key recordings, including Music With Changing Parts, Einstein on the Beach, and Koyaanisqatsi, as well as Steve Reich’s Drumming and Phase Patterns; he also spent time as a member in La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music and worked with Terry Riley. Yet Gibson’s own music has been relegated to the footnotes of the period.
But, like Arthur Russell and Julius Eastman—unslottable artists whose output resisted the easy categorization of minimalism, and suffered accordingly—Gibson has belatedly begun to receive his due, although he is still alive, and able to reap the benefits of his rising profile. You can hear the influence of his distilled and detailed pattern music—like his 1977 album Two Solo Pieces—filtering down to a new generation of composers like Kali Malone, Ellen Arkbro, and Sarah Davachi.
After reissuing his 1970s albums, Superior Viaduct now goes into the archives for Songs & Melodies, filling in the gaps between 1973’s Visitations and Two Solo Pieces. What they’ve gathered ranges from Gibson’s solo recordings to minimalistic pattern music rendered with an 11-piece ensemble. The former suggest multitudes; the latter moves as a single entity. Some of the selections gathered here falter, struggling to break out of the strictures of minimalism, while other moments approach the transcendence of his better known material. Both Russell and Eastman appear, on cello and piano, respectively, and just as Gibson disappears completely in the work of others, so do his friends here. If only the release included notes of some sort to help illuminate Gibson’s thought process during this era and better situate him in the New York scene, like the excellent 1992 set In Good Company did.
“Song I” pits Gibson’s soprano saxophone against a backdrop of violin and cellos; its opening section is deeply hypnotic and evocative, firmly aligned with early New York minimalism. But when it suddenly breaks into “song”—something strangely like an Irish jig—it has the jarring effect of a car veering off into the ditch. Deliberately following repetition with moments of rupture could make for a bracing and effective strategy, if only the melody were strong enough to pull it off. By contrast, “Song II” is smoother in its transitions, adding marimba and contrabass to the strings to create a piece at once fidgety yet as enveloping as early Philip Glass. In “Melody,” a tape experiment from 1973, Gibson nudges a steady pattern of piano figures toward a more expansive view of minimalism. But unlike Gibson’s dense, percussive, gamelan-like “Visitations,” also from that year, the 15-minute “Melody” meanders rather than immerses. The live “Solo for Saxophone” sits in a similar purgatory: Gibson moves through numerous lines and figures in its concise four minutes, but it never coalesces, instead coming across more like a player warming up.
But it’s worth it all to arrive at the banks of the gorgeous “Melody IV,” scored for 11-piece ensemble. Performed in Buffalo in 1977, it’s one of Gibson’s most moving compositions, hushed and slow blooming, anticipating by a few decades the sort of assured pacing you hear in composers like Jóhann Jóhannsson or bands like Stars of the Lid and Natural Information Society. The strings—with quivering accents courtesy of the vibraphone—are drawn out, invinting listeners to luxuriate in their suspended tones, and imparting an air of wistfulness. It’s not memorable in the same way that a pop song is, yet that emotional resonance lingers in your heart long after the composition draws to a close.

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On Sunken, the newly re-released mini-LP by Chicago garage rock quartet Twin Peaks, the group has perfected the kind of songwriting that puts you in a practiced, happy headlock, drawing from acts like the Replacements and the Flamin' Groovies.

Sunken

The Chicago quartet Twin Peaks deserve a better, more imaginative name, because they have made a very good album in a style-- sloppy, Replacements-inspired rock-- where "pretty good" is an easy bar to clear and anything above that formidably harder. Power pop and bar rock bands work from a sort of creative commons of riffs and bass lines: There's the "Shake Some Action", the "Lust for Life", the "American Girl". You can hear a few of these old chestnuts echoing around in Sunken, Twin Peaks' newly re-released mini-LP. When there is so much agreeable stuff lying around, all of it worn shiny with generations' worth of love, to make someone actually pay attention to you requires real talent, and Twin Peaks have perfected the kind of songwriting that puts you in a practiced, happy headlock.
Sunken is less than twenty minutes long, but it packs a lot of color and verve into that blink of an eye. "Out of Commission" occupies a minute and 25 seconds of precious running time but it still finds a moment to burn a joyfully squalled miniature Thin Lizzy guitar solo onto the song's surface. The four of them-- lead singer and guitarist Cadien Lake James, Connor Brodnor, Clay Frankel, and Jack Dolan-- have been playing together since high school, and they've developed a sharp melodic ear, a knack that pops up in their arrangements as often as in their vocal melodies. Almost every guitar note on this album is hummable: "Baby Blue" cycles between a chiming, wintergreen riff and another squiggled lead, this one reminiscent of the Strokes' Nick Valensi. "Ocean Blue" wraps a tight little cluster of shimmery notes around the chord progression, flickering around Cadien Lake James' slow-moving vocal line.
As a singer, Cadien displays a few vaguely Julian Casablancas-like vocal affectations-- the gulp, a drunken slur. He sings some endearingly dumb things: "I never used to dig the sunshine much until I smoked some marijuana, yeah", from "Boomers". But his voice crawls up higher, and breaks more joyfully, than Casablancas's, and he has a surprising range: On the airy "Irene", he sings in a tender, fey, high register, ooh-ing wordlessly over watery guitars. It's an album highlight, and the kind of song you write when you intend to become something other than a sloppy garage-pop band someday.
An obvious touchstone for Twin Peaks, all of whom are nineteen years old, is the Smith Westerns, who hit a similar melodic guitar-rock sweet spot with 2011's Dye it Blonde and then spent the next couple of years reeling slightly, probably never having imagined themselves as elder statesmen of anything. (Cadien James' older brother dropped out of high school to be Smith Westerns' touring drummer.) And like that band's recent Soft Will, Sunken vigorously applies lo-fi sandpaper to laminate-gloss songwriting, gumming up songs that otherwise click along smoothly on multiple levels. Sunken presents itself initially as an over-enthusiastic tumble, an overgrown lab puppy licking your face. They are kid-bro Smith Westerns, figuratively and literally. But Sunken hints at more than that.


Even with help from Ty Segall and Steve Albini, the Los Angeles garage-rock trio’s second album reaches for a grand analogy its cookie-cutter post-punk can’t support.

Antarctica

Flat Worms don’t lack talent. Frontman Will Ivy is flanked by drummer Justin Sullivan (Kevin Morby, The Babies) and bassist Tim Hellman, who’s played with Ty Segall and Oh Sees. In late 2017, the Los Angeles garage rockers’ kinetic and scrappy self-titled debut delivered a fuzzed-out blitz with no real agenda. Three years on, they’ve upgraded their sound: Steve Albini and Segall co-man the desk at Electrical Audio, where the trio recorded their second album. The setup may be a rock nerd’s dream, but the cleaned-up sound doesn’t do them any favors; Antarctica is a dour proposal for a societal reset that winds up feeling distracted by hero worship.
Opener and lead single “The Aughts” makes for a promising start, melding the sneering spectre of latter-day Fall with Ivy’s pointed decrees. It’s a promise the album struggles to keep. Though Albini’s style suits the pummeling “Plastic Casts,” the shift from scorched earworms to taut, cookie-cutter post-punk becomes distracting. It’s one thing to ape a classic Albini recording like Shellac’s “Steady as She Goes” with an obvious homage like “Wet Concrete,” but on Albini’s own watch? He’d be within his rights to seek a secondary credit.
Thematically, Antarctica suggests a through-line between the chaos of modern society and the titular desolate continent. But many of these songs fumble the intent quite badly. “Market Forces” takes questionable aim at the state and mass media: “Personality cult chambers/Showcase the peacock feathers.” “Stick to the formula, turn out another/Four on the floor, the greatest night ever,” goes “Ripper One,” an admission of mediocrity as much as anything else. While Flat Worms’ punk heroes—like Mark E. Smith, or Nikki Sudden of Swell Maps—could wield ambiguity like a scythe, here empty words take center stage.
Warbly, woozed-out guitar forays help to blunt the lack of conviction. The seasick lead phrases on mid-album peak “Via” and the forcefield of feedback at the tail end of “The Aughts” ease the absence of the full-blown fuzz that made Flat Worms such a heady trip. The hand of Segall—who recorded the band’s The Apparition/Melt The Arms 7" and last year’s Into the Iris EP, and releases Antarctica via his Drag City imprint GOD? Records—surely plays a part in bringing these silver linings to light.
But to stand out in a supersaturated garage scene, Ivy and co. must command focus. The pencil-drawn analogy between Antarctica and the here-and-now isn’t exactly a reach, but the album’s perspective is blurry at best. Though Antarctica positions itself as an assessment of worldly chaos and isolation, it’s never clear whether the stance is earnest or apathetic. Even Albini-tier fidelity can’t make this formula sound fresh.

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The veteran British composer, improviser, author, and scholar assembles a dreamlike, mercurial album of sonic collage that doubles as a philosophical treatise on sound and memory.

Apparition Paintings

“Music is a memory machine,” David Toop wrote in The Quietus in May. The British composer, improviser, author, and scholar was talking about the COVID-19-related deaths of fellow experimental-music elders, but that declaration has the ring of a time-honored maxim, and it’s about as close as one could come to summarizing a 50-year career that ranges from the esoteric pages of The Wire to a pioneering book on rap, from Brian Eno’s Obscure Records to Top of the Pops.
The line echoes Roger Ebert’s famous aphorism about movies and empathy, and it shows why Toop is as distinguished in his recondite sphere as Ebert was in his popular one: They both believe their chosen art form has a specific, morally weighted, urgently human function. A veteran global field recorder, Toop is as much a conservationist as an ethnomusicologist, and the thousands of baroque intellectual inquiries he has raised might be said to rest on one burningly clear, almost instinctive question: How much of this world can be perceived and saved?
Apparition Paintings, a new album that’s great both for newcomers to Toop and to sound collage in general, is more than just canning audio preserves for the long winter. For that, turn to Field Recording and Fox Spirits, also new, from the same label. The illustrated book features dozens of pages of dizzying Toop talk with Room40 label head Lawrence English; an accompanying CD amounts to a sonic biography comprising unvarnished recordings (a Beijing street in 2005, a certain wasp in 1971), improvisations on the kinds of sculptural instruments people are always inviting Toop to play, and other raw materials that form his compositions. There are also conversations with subjects as diverse as Ornette Coleman and Toop’s grandfather, who said, as the cassette tape rolled in 1979, “My memory is not what it used to be, David,” succinctly stating the impetus behind Toop’s prodigious recording life.
If the phrase “sound collage” makes you despair of listening to someone untangling a mess of wire hangers while a kettle whistles in the next room, that’s fair. There is a lot of sound collage like that, which counts on the listener’s imaginative labor, the idea of boredom as a kind of medal, or the fear of not getting something other people claim to get. But while layer upon layer of arcane knowledge encrusts these songs—“‘Apparition painting’ is the term used to describe a certain type of ancient Chinese painting of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,” a typical Toop sentence might begin—the album is strangely accessible and well rounded, full of rich, tactile environments that evoke vivid spaces and nothing unfinished or haphazard.
Throughout Apparition Paintings, which features contributions from Elaine Mitchener, Keiko Yamamoto, Rie Nakajima, and others, Toop gathers live instrumentation, field recordings, percussive sounds, and non-English vocalizations, then pries them from their frames of reference and fuses them into mercurial, dreamlike unities. Their surfaces are scored with the eclectic elements of Toop’s background, which includes recording shamans in rainforests, cracking the U.S. and UK charts in the Flying Lizards with a skronky no-wave cover of Barrett Strong’s “Money,” releasing pioneering ambient albums on Brian Eno’s label, and writing books that trace the genre all the way back to Debussy.
The genuinely poetic titles Toop plucks from classic books and films speak of relatable emotional contents, though it’s easy to read too much or too little into them: “Maybe these titles, torn as they are from cinema screens and the pages of literature and philosophy, give a feeling of romantic or sexual love or some dark pool of nostalgia but that’s not it,” Toop ponders, unwinding the sentence for almost 300 words before coming to the heart of the matter: “All I desire is what already exists or once existed, now falling asleep outside the world.”
As for those teeming contents, where to begin? There are lustrous waves of bass and high-desert guitars in “You could touch him but he wasn’t there,” dubby warps and wobbles in “Tiny human figurines made from sand. If you held these to your ear, you heard soft sweet music,” and tuned filter snaps pelting bells on “A ghost traveling half a mile from its own shape.” There are stereo pops on eerie clouds, glimmering jazz chords, and sprays of vocal fricatives. There are bamboo flutes and snail-shell whistles, all manner of shoes and ships and sealing wax, and moments of clarifying force: Huge power chords divulge drones in “She fell asleep somewhere outside the world,” and “All I desire” is a big, glossy chillwave number that would do Toro y Moi proud.
It figures that the record’s starkest pop moment would evoke a genre chiefly concerned with memory—its sweetness, its pain, its lies, its decay. Like human minds, Toop’s music is profoundly antilinear, and the academic façade conceals a decidedly visceral impulse: “Time moving brings us closer to death and a lot of music is time moving,” Toop tells English in the book. “I love that feeling but I also love to work with temporalities of suspension and scattering, circularity and stillness.” Apparition Paintings is evidence of a journey in sound beyond the technical, theoretical, or even spiritual realm, where many a seeker fetches up, onto a rarified but primal perch where everything that falls asleep outside the world awakes. It would take too many lifetimes to figure out what it all means, but listening and remembering is meaning enough.

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Wherein Owen Ashworth fixates on doomed outlaws and comes to terms with what happens when you're not alone anymore.

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone: Vs. Children

Vs. Children

To breed or not to breed? That is the question Owen Ashworth appears to be asking with his fifth full-length outing as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, the wryly titled Vs. Children. But this is a Casiotone record, which means Ashworth won't provide direct access to his thoughts, relying instead on proxies, personae, and other distancing mechanisms. That is, until the record's third act, when a new Casiotone seems to emerge. Before that, however, Ashworth takes us on a joyride with a succession of mostly doomed outlaws and derelicts, with a couple of side excursions into familiar disaffected-slacker-ballad territory. It all adds up to easily the most mature and thematically ambitious Casiotone release to date, a further testament to the talents of a man more in tune with the lives of his generation than many of the folks actually living them.
A pair of tracks with unwieldy titles set the scene, the former an account of real-life bicycle-bound bank robber Tom Justice (an apparent one-time acquaintance of Ashworth's), and the latter a similar yarn about life on the lam, this time written in first person. The legend of Bonnie and Clyde looms large over the proceedings-- their names figure into "Tom Justice" and a stylized illustration of Faye Dunaway's Bonnie Parker (heavy with the child she'd never have) graces the record's cover. "What if we'd had the kid?/ I guess it'd be 15," Ashworth muses on "Natural Light", though it could just as well be a line shared between Barrow's and Parker's ghosts during a midnight graveyard tryst. (Foreshadowing ideas that preoccupy Vs. Children's second half.) That Ashworth can shift so readily between storytelling modes speaks to his considerable skill as a songwriter, one for whom allegory and autobiography are but two routes to the same shared truth.
But how, exactly, do we get from bank robbers to baby-making? For Ashworth, it seems that outlaws and unsettled couples are, in a sense, one and the same. Both lead lives that are fundamentally unsustainable, and both, ultimately, are on the run from reality. Yet their carefree exploits are made all the more exhilarating by the tragic inevitability of their surcease. Metaphor and reality at last come into sharp relief on Vs. Children as "Northfield, MN"-- one last outlaw saga that culminates in a car crash-- is masterfully juxtaposed with "Killers". "Oh my God/ What if we had an accident?/ Oh my God," Ashworth begins the latter song in his characteristic mumble. It would seem he's reacting to the previous song's tragedy, until you realize the "accident" in question here isn't a vehicular one. "Till you're dead/ That's how long you're a parent/ Till you're dead," he continues, a sentiment that goes straight for the gut and leaves a baby-sized hollow feeling there.
Along with subsequent tracks "Harsh the Herald Angels Sing" and "White Jetta" (and excepting the backward-looking "You Were Alone"), "Killers" suggests the emergence of a new Casiotone. Plenty of "I"s and "me"s have found their way into past Ashworth compositions-- indeed, the early Casiotone records were full of self-caricaturizing ones-- but none sound so direct and unfettered as those heard on these songs. "Harsh" adopts the perspective of an unwed young woman with child, while "Jetta" climaxes with the dying wish of Ashworth's ill mother: for him to start a family. Both should leave even the most hardened listener a bit choked up. "To stay the same, to never change," Ashworth repeatedly incants on "Jetta". Whether this is the futile plea of all would-be parents or meta-commentary on the Casiotone project's trajectory (like 2003's Etiquette, Vs. Children utilizes live instruments, though it's still unmistakably a "Casiotone record" in every formal way) doesn't matter; like truth and fiction or the personal and the public, changing and staying the same are far from mutually exclusive notions for Owen Ashworth.


Epic Jammers and Fortunate Little Ditties is a jam session—an improvisational democracy where everyone has equal footing—between Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Bitchin Bajas.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy / Bitchin Bajas: Epic Jammers and Fortunate Little Ditties

Regardless of who he's working with, Will Oldham's voice is the dominant ingredient of his collaborations. If he's singing a quiet Everly Brothers duet with Dawn McCarthy or crooning on a record with the Cairo Gang, he's the piece of the puzzle that grabs your attention most readily. Even in fleeting cameo appearances, like the moments where he sings on Sun Kil Moon's "Carissa," his presence lingers long after he's done singing. For better or worse, he's got this quality about him where other artists, regardless of their stature, are destined to become his supporting players.
That's what happened the first time Bitchin Bajas worked with Oldham. On a Record Store Day one-off, the Chicago-based avant garde trio functioned as a Bonnie "Prince" Billy backing band. While Oldham sang the traditional English folk ballad "Pretty Saro" in tribute to Shirley Collins, the Bajas provided a soft ambiance that lingered behind his voice. It's a lovely rendition of the song, but given the Bajas' discography of repetitive, spaced-out, and freeflowing improvisations, the collaboration felt conservative and brief. Oldham, a professed fan of his labelmates' records, likely realized this, too. He invited them to his house, and in a single day, they recorded an album that sounds a lot more Bajas than Billy.
Epic Jammers and Fortunate Little Ditties is absolutely a jam session—an improvisational democracy where everyone has equal footing. Oldham takes a step back here, letting himself become part of the greater stew of Gamelan instruments, organ, synthesizer, and acoustic guitars. Nobody takes a full-on solo; they meander, coming in with a prominent contribution before drifting back to the sidelines. Everything repeats multiple times for swirling, serene eight-minute stretches. Repetition is key to Bitchin Bajas' sound—they thrive when they're given maximum space, taking time to experiment and explore different pockets of a song. In photos from the recording sessions, you can see Oldham sitting cross-legged on the floor with the band, all four of them playing assorted keyboards. Dan Quinlivan and Cooper Crain twist knobs; Rob Frye's flute lies close at hand in case the right moment presents itself. (On several occasions, it does.) This is Bitchin Bajas' ideal, off-the-cuff zone. They revel in the freedom to chase a sound "based on the energy" of a given moment.
Crain has talked about the importance of making music that's "relaxing and comforting," and Oldham is also clearly right there with them. Whenever they appear, his acoustic guitar and voice land softly and peacefully. At the beginning of the album, he sings, "may life throw you a pleasant curve," which is a pretty solid indication of his presence here. He's not a storyteller because there's no narrative to work with. He's much closer to being a spirit guide, quietly singing fragmented mantras and bits of advice that he found in fortune cookies. (Epic Jammers and Fortunate Little Ditties, as it turns out, is a very literal title.) Repetition, again, is key. By singing each phrase multiple times, he teases out meaning in easily disposable phrases. There's something genuinely comforting about having Oldham directing you to "find release from your cares, have a good time" or ensuring you that "your whole family are well."
If there's emotional utility to be found in Epic Jammers, it's in how meditative, trancelike, and overwhelmingly positive this hour of music is. It's unlikely that any of Oldham's post-buffet bits of wisdom will blow minds (because, well, actual fortune cookies are never all that prescient in the first place), but his spliced-together positive affirmations are perfect for Bitchin Bajas' aesthetic. His presence adds even more authority and heft to Cooper Crain & co.'s spiritual spaciness. "When your heart is pure, your mind is clear," repeats Oldham at one point, and you're inclined to believe him.


Darkstar's full-length debut for Hyperdub finds them working more heavily with vocals and taking a turn toward synth-pop.

North

North is a synth-pop album, and not synth-pop like general concept but synth-pop like historical formality. It's faithful to OMD, Kraftwerk, and a lot of other technocratic future-music made mostly in England and Western Europe during the 1970s and 80s. Here, Darkstar's beauty is the cold kind. They walk the empty streets in military rhythms and luxuriate in solitude. They cover the Human League.
This development will surprise anyone who followed the singles Darkstar released between 2007 and 2009, when they were another dubstep production group trying hard to develop a signature sound in the context of a genre that changes every month. By last October's "Aidy's Girl's a Computer" (included here), they'd arrived at something refined, melancholy, and lighter than most of the other singles on Hyperdub, a label responsible for some of dubstep's most rigorous and forward-thinking downers (Burial, King Midas Sound, Kode9, etc.). "Aidy's" has a simple backdrop: A skipping drum loop borrowed from British two-step, a synthesized glockenspiel or xylophone repeating a subtle, shifting pattern, and some minimal, surface-level synth-bass. The innovation was in the song's narrators: A series of buzzing synth lines that flicker in and out like their connection to the rest of the song doesn't quite work, and a heavily processed vocal that cuts itself off halfway into each word it tries to say. The track's conceptual elegance was that it invoked the same kind of existential anxieties synth-pop was basically built to-- like how to exist as a human being in a computer world-- in ways that sounded contemporary and eerie, which is part of what makes North a little disappointing: In a way, Darkstar were already on their way to making a record that would've made North feel obsolete.
For most of North, James Young and Aiden Whalley, Darkstar's principals, worked with a more traditionally human-sounding vocalist, James Buttery. There's a little vocal surgery, a little rearranging, but Buttery would never pass for a computer, and that's obviously by design-- in this setting, he's the stunted soul just trying to salvage a little humanity in the post-industrial darkness. His environment-- tapestries of two-dimensional synthesizers humming in minor keys, drum machines chirping and clicking away in mid tempos-- is more familiar than "Aidy's". It's beautiful, too, and barely budges.
Obviously there's no fault in returning to synth-pop templates or ideas in the 00s-- the Junior Boys have done it well, and the Knife have done it even better. But the problem with this music is that the longer it's left out to blend into the general culture, the harder bands have to work to keep it sounding inventive. I've been this kind of sad before, so when I hear it now-- on an album like North-- it's almost as nostalgia for a certain familiar feeling than the feeling itself.
North is definitely Hyperdub's most pop-friendly release, but it's also one of its most conservative-- not a bad thing, just an interesting one given the importance label integrity plays in the electronic dance music world. And while North doesn't compromise that integrity, it's the first time that a label so concerned with the future ended up with a record so committed to the past.


The Oakland band’s darkly psychedelic country folk suggests things on the verge of collapse. In March 2020, as singer Sawyer Gebauer unwittingly contracted COVID-19, that was truer than anyone knew.

Catch Prichard: I Still Miss Theresa Benoit

I Still Miss Theresa Benoit

Plenty of people sing baritone; few sound as tortured by it as Sawyer Gebauer does on I Still Miss Theresa Benoit. In the best of circumstances, the Catch Prichard singer’s voice seems as though it’s been cooked down until it’s thick, rich, and a little acrid, like coffee reducing on a burner. There is a perpetual flutter in his throat, a mild instability that makes him sound sometimes like ANOHNI and sometimes like Nico, but usually like he’s working hard to keep himself composed. That little gap between what Gebauer is singing and how he’s singing it allows pathos to pour into Catch Prichard’s darkly psychedelic country music in a way that makes it feel appealingly overwrought, its sweetness curdling into menace like Twin Peaks gone spaghetti western.
But this album was not made in the best of circumstances. The quartet recorded I Still Miss Theresa Benoit in the first week of March 2020, just as COVID–19 was beginning to pick up steam on the West Coast. Though he didn’t know it at the time, Gebauer was infected with the virus, which left his brain foggy and his voice ragged. The band considered re-tracking his vocals but ultimately decided to leave them in as a testament to a unique moment in history. As a result, I Still Miss Theresa Benoit is possibly the first album to be sung by someone suffering the effects of COVID–19, and the effect is obvious. Though Gebauer’s voice still contains many mansions, they sound as though they’re all infected with dry rot. You expect things to collapse at any moment.
This sense of high drama suits Catch Prichard’s music perfectly. I Still Miss Theresa Benoit is structured in an arc, its beginning and ending rooted in swampy, abstracted songs while its middle section rises into the more traditionally structured country folk of the band’s earlier work. The haziness of the bookending tracks works to the album’s advantage. “I don’t love no one the way that I love you,” Gebauer sings in the chorus of “Lipstick and Fur.” Like Dickens’ Miss Havisham, he’s become musty and overgrown, and he sings the words like he’s recalling an unfortunate fact; you can practically see the wedding cake molding nearby.
Elsewhere, he luxuriates in the lush settings his band provides. Gebauer treats opener “Cherry Bomb” like a confessional cabaret, his threadbare voice stretched over a mistily arpeggiating Beach House synth. “What a shame/That our shame ain’t enough/For you and I and you and us,” he sings as the song rolls through one of its many dramatic surges. Despite, or perhaps because of, the ways Gebauer reaches for the highest limits of his range, it’s impossible to tell if he’s putting his subject on. The dangled possibility that it’s all for show—the nagging sense that he doesn’t mean any of the things he’s singing—makes it a darkly compelling introduction.
The band seems to know they can’t play it straight around their singer’s voice. Like the Bad Seeds, they operate in a cloud of incense, favoring suggestive gestures over clear articulation. While Gebauer’s narrator sits alone at home tracing his anxieties in “Worried Man,” the soft, juicy tones of synthesizer surrounding him give the song a strange glow that undercuts his fears; as Andy Wilke’s trumpet bathes the song in dawn light, drummer Tim DeCillis practically marches Gebauer out of the house to show him how unfounded his fears are. Even when they shy away from experimentation, they manipulate these songs effortlessly, calmly shifting “Seatbelts” from a haunted cowboy lope into Sonoran dub and back again. The nature of Gebauer’s voice is such that the band could easily allow it to carry the weight of these songs; instead, they consistently find ways to lengthen the shadows it casts.
There’s a fine line between self-awareness and self-parody, though, and Gebauer occasionally strays across it in his pursuit of drama. The narrator of “A Reef of Dead Metaphors” lingers in the shame of his failings, contrasting his experience with that of a vague “they” who “say life is easy.” We’re meant to sympathize, but the idea is so baffling it strains credulity; not even Jimmy Buffett says life is easy. At the peak of the album’s dramatic arc, Gebauer works his way around the line, “I don’t regret no woman yet,” the tension in his voice loosening with every repetition. The song palpably softens as he repeats the lyric, but the word “yet” hangs there ominously; whether intentional or not, it makes it seem like he’s got a wolf on a chain and he wants you to pet it.
The album’s most powerful moment comes when Gebauer abandons artifice entirely. As “A Reef of Dead Metaphors” builds, he worries about the ways love can erase one’s sense of self: “I can’t see the changes,” he practically shouts, “so I’ve written over the pages.” He sounds terrible, frankly, as he pushes his voice far beyond its limitations, and it breaks apart in midair; the song behind him melts into another key, knocking him out of tune. It’s a strange thrill to hear Gebauer relinquish control of his voice in the album’s final moments. And yet, as the song is given over to beautifully droning synths and strings, it feels like in this last gasp and long exhale, Catch Prichard are speaking at their most eloquently.

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Thirteen years after her landmark album Pink Friday, the pop-rap superstar aims to conjure and build on that moment with an ambitious 22-song statement that is a very mixed bag.

Pink Friday 2

Nicki Minaj’s superpower is her ability to adapt. In her 16-year career, she’s been a for-the-streets mixtape queen, a chrome-pink pop star, an empowered groundbreaker, and—using her formidable theater skills—a chameleonic character rapper, morphing into personas like Harajuku Barbie, Tyrone, Chun Li, and the beloved Roman Zolanski, all with the wittiest wordplay this side of Lil Wayne.
The original Pink Friday—her first album after a string of phenomenal mixtapes in the late 2000s—shifted the industry upon its release in 2010, proving that she could weave a tapestry with her characters, sing her face off, and that sexist rap purism would be left in her dust. Nicki the Boss set records, became a global superstar, and casually shattered the male-rapper stronghold on the mainstream in a way that hadn’t been done since the heyday of Lil Kim and Foxy Brown. For all the belated recognition and chart dominance of women rappers today, it’s undeniable that Minaj was the beginning of a sea change. She was the blueprint for women rappers who didn’t have to be feminine mirrors of their male patrons, but could stand on their own.
Pink Friday 2 aims to conjure and build on that moment in time, and to remind us—her fans, her haters, her mortal enemies—what she’s done for rap, especially women in rap. Like the original, Nicki masters the art of the quick change, jumping from persona to persona, genre to genre, putting her signature cadences on drill, pop, dancehall, afrobeats, R&B, Jersey club, and trap. Yet except for a few excellent tracks and verses peeking through, this 22-song album—unlike 2018’s Queen or even 2014’s bar-setting The Pinkprint—falls apart pretty quickly. While Minaj is still rapping valiantly—especially as Red Ruby Da Sleeze, a new persona introduced on the Diwali riddim-sampling single of the same name—the album’s intention is muddled through its scattershot production, which sounds less like genre innovation and more like an insidious ploy to worm its way into as many crevices on TikTok as possible.
It didn’t have to be this way! Pink Friday 2 includes tracks about her emotional fortitude, her Trini and Caribbean pride, her unfuckwithable armor, and intimate reflections on her life. On the affecting album opener, “Are You Gone Already,” a Finneas production that samples Billie Eilish’s “when the party’s over,” she grapples with the pain of learning her father was killed by a hit-and-run driver in 2021, and reflects on her responsibility and love as a mother. She flexes her agility on tracks like “Beep Beep” and “Barbie Dangerous,” which conjure the much beloved Mixtape Nicki: the latter interpolates Biggie’s “Notorious Thugs” and includes the line, “Name a rapper that can channel Big Poppa and push out Papa Bear/Ho, I’m mother of the year.” Or on “RNB,” an otherwise middling track with Tate Kobang and Lil Wayne where she raps, “I keep his secrets/I let him beast it/Kissin’ on my thighs and my breast/He two-pieced it.” Yet on the same song, when Wayne raps, “’Bout to buy a fake booty for a real-ass bitch,” it’s an odious reminder that Minaj felt pressured to get ass shots at the beginning of her Young Money career—an example of context seeping into, and souring, the music.
One of the key problems here began with 2022’s post-“Anaconda” single “Super Freaky Girl.” The chimera of a Rick James song that was famously sampled by MC Hammer and newly manipulated by Dr. Luke and Hipgnosis was proof that mining several generations of nostalgia was a big financial win—no matter that the well-known chorus threatened to drown out Minaj’s playful sex-kitten verses. Though such a path is inevitable for many artists as mining IP becomes an increasingly big business, the choice to include clips from well-worn songs like Junior Senior’s “Move Your Feet” (on the club track “Everybody,” which is at least a grower), Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” (on “My Life”) and, least forgivably, Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” a song so widely sampled it’s essentially wallpaper, paradoxically suggests a shaky belief in her own ability to create hits by her talent alone. Even the most cynical read here—profit maximization—doesn’t exactly answer why one of the most creative rappers alive would draw up such a hollow plan.
The other specter haunting the background of Pink Friday 2 is Minaj’s ostensible rivals—Cardi B, as well as all the other rap girlies who don’t properly bend the knee. Minaj is a deft and prickly battle rapper, but her sense of fun can curdle into resentment, as on “Fallin 4 U,” a shiv of a Latto diss track that includes the curiously sneering line, “These bitches gotta shake they ass to show sex appeal.” Minaj should be taking a victory lap—she is one of the most important rappers of this century—and yet she seems to feel like she has to keep reiterating her position and punching down, hitting a low point on the Waka Flocka-sampling “FTCU” when she raps, “Stay in your Tory lane, bitch, I’m not Iggy.”
It feels oddly retrograde and beneath her, particularly when, on that same track, she fires up a bar like, “Come on bitch, I just put a milli on my Richie—minus like fifty, mine was nine-fifty, sissy.” Flashes of her notorious humor emerge (“Poppin’ out like a cork/Duckin ’em like Björk” on “Needle”), but her quirkiness feels blunted across the album, like her heart isn’t in it in the same way it used to be. Perhaps it’s just a career crossroads—grief and frustration can fuel a creative plateau as frequently as it produces classic albums—but one wonders if, somehow, ascending the throne has complicated her ability to scrap. As she sings earnestly in the first few minutes of the album: “Rich, yes, but are you happy?”


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Nigerian superstar King Sunny Adé’s 1982 international breakthrough, an album whose complex fusion of musical traditions produced a singularly captivating groove.

Juju Music

African music has been part of America’s cultural DNA since roughly 1619. But in 1982—the year Michael Jackson’s seismic “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” interpolated “Soul Makossa,” the unlikely 1972 global hit by Cameroon’s Manu Dibango—actual African music LPs were thin on U.S. ground. Cratediggers might’ve found the Soul Makossa LP, or albums by South African cultural emissaries Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela; perhaps they lucked upon Fela Kuti’s magnificently excoriating Zombie, issued by Mercury in 1977 in a failed attempt to break the artist stateside. Otherwise, the sounds on offer were less pop than ethnographic: field recordings on the Folkways and Nonesuch Explorer labels, or the handsome one-off Missa Luba LP, an independence-era snapshot of a Congolese boys choir that became a favorite among ’60s hi-fi aficionados—as did Babatunde Olatunji’s Drums of Passion, the percussion-driven firestorm that functioned as a home-study course for the Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker, who played along to it in her suburban Long Island bedroom.
This was the backdrop—pre-internet, pre-Graceland—for King Sunny Adé’s Juju Music, a masterpiece of sublime dance music and chill-out grooves that rang the opening bell for the fruitful-if-problematic “world music” marketplace, with Adé leading a vanguard of artists who would introduce a wealth of new sounds and conversations into the American pop biosphere. Juju Music was even a relative commercial success, spending 29 weeks in the bottom half of the Billboard 200, remarkable for a record sung mainly in Yorùbá. Its creative triumph was self-evident: a radiant vortex of melodic ouroboros rhythms, dubby yet dazzling, its gentle flow so irresistible that the chiming first chords of “Ja Funmi,” the dance-trigger lead track, remains for many a musculoskeletal call-to-prayer—what, say, the paired four-note opening of “Dark Star” is for Deadheads.
West African highlife, soukous, Afrobeat, and jùjú were hardly news to local fans, expat communities, or anyone else with access to the music. (Tastemaking British DJ John Peel shopped for African LPs at Stern’s, London’s legendary music import shop, and began playing Adé’s records on his BBC Radio 1 show in the ’70s.) These styles were ongoing dialogues with the (African) American music marketed in Africa, be it rock, blues, jazz, R&B, or country, so the echoes were no accident. Sunday Adeniyi Adegeye, the son of a church organist who left high school to earn money as a drummer, was an avid listener of U.S. soul and country who started his first group, the Green Spot Band, at age 20 in 1966. Like many artists at the time, he took up the electric guitar, and by the mid-’70s, he was self-releasing modern jùjú records on his own Sunny Alade label and distributing them with Decca. When he signed with Island, he was already a wealthy, established Nigerian bandleader, with a mature fanbase buoyed by the country’s oil boom and an elegant, cosmopolitan style—a Yorùbá Philly Soul to the roughneck Afrobeat James Brown of his countryman, Fela. The sound seemed a perfect candidate for export.
Measured against Island’s ambitions, Juju Music was perhaps a letdown. Having turned reggae in general, and Bob Marley in particular, into global commodities, the label assumed they might do the same with the brilliant pop styles of a whole continent. In fact, Marley money got things started: When producer Martin Meissonier sought funding to record Juju Music, Island sent him to CBS Nigeria to collect royalties from Marley’s recordings. (Legend has it that he was presented with bags of cash.)
Island tested Anglo-American waters in 1981 with Sound D’Afrique, a well-curated compilation of motherland gems released on its subsidiary label Mango, usually home to Jamaican and Caribbean releases. With tracks by Senegal’s Étoile de Dakar (fronted by soon-to-be global star Youssou N’Dour) and Congolese guitar hero Pablo Lubadika Porthos, but no liner notes or photos, the LP didn’t register widely. Still, its cascading guitar lines, chortling horns, and polyrhythmic beat webs—which brightened further on 1982’s follow-up Sound D’Afrique II—were revelatory for many newcomers. DJs at my upstate New York college radio station were immediate converts; the spiraling leads and stop-motion arpeggios were guitar-fiend lingua franca, however removed they were from the blues roots of American funk and rock.
Where the Sound D’Afrique material was cherry-picked for English and American audiences from tracks recorded for the African market, Juju Music was tailored differently. Island had experience retooling regional sounds: The original Wailers recordings produced in Jamaica by Lee “Scratch” Perry (“Small Axe,” “Kaya”) were the aesthetic gold standard, but it was the polished remakes that made Marley an international superstar. Juju Music adopted the playbook used for Catch a Fire, the Wailers’ Island debut: Adé recorded at the well-appointed Studio de la Nouvelle Marche, aka Otodi Studio, in Lomé, Togo, and an Island engineer remixed the tracks in London.
The outcome is a subtle shift in Adé’s sound: tighter, brighter, lusher, and more detailed. His Nigerian releases extend songs to fill entire LP sides, or segue them into long medleys. King Sunny Adé G.M.A., a self-released 1980 set on his Sunny Alade label, presented the original “Ja Funmi” (titled “Ori Mi Ja Fun Mi”) as an 18-minute suite. But at the request of Island’s Chris Blackwell, Juju Music featured individuated tracks, fresh recordings of catalog songs ranging from three to eight minutes long. Tempos were scooched up slightly, mixes more layered and filigreed, while dub effects (by reggae vet Godwin Logie) added extra buoyancy and stoner ambiance.
The change is most noticeable in the beat mix, particularly the Yorùbá talking drums, the heartbeat of jùjú. Where the pitch-shifting instruments pop like firecrackers on King Sunny Adé G.M.A., they’re often dialed back on Juju Music into a more uniform, near-ambient swarm. Jùjú traditionalists already felt that Adé was cluttering up the music with too many elements, and Juju Music—recorded with his ’80s band, the 20-plus-member-strong African Beats—pushed that effect to the hilt: six electric guitars, counting steel and bass; keyboards; and a battery of percussionists and singers. The album splits the difference between clubbing and couch-lock, honoring in its way the cool urban spirit of jùjú, a decades-old style rooted as much in listening music (the acoustic barroom “palm-wine” style of the 1920s) as in drum-driven dance parties.
Another Westernized touch is the spotlight on steel guitarist Demola Adepoju, who gets nearly a minute of soloing on “Ja Funmi,” a display missing from the earlier Nigerian version, which keeps his phrases pithier and gives more room to grouped Yorùbá vocals. Adepoju’s silvery skywriting is an invitation for rock and funk fans to hear electric guitar playing in a different way: more as a weave than as strictly demarcated rhythm and leads.
The vocals function in a similarly textural way, at least for non-Yorùbá speakers, with Adé’s buttery tenor triangulating Curtis Mayfield, Brook Benton, and country crooner Jim Reeves (the latter hugely popular in Nigeria) as he unspools fluid call-and-responses with a half-dozen co-vocalists. Perhaps unsurprisingly for music born in the massive port city of a former British colony, the sound is tinged by the swell of Anglican church choirs, as well as the keen of Koranic recitation. Jùjú was melting-pot music from the get-go (the out-of-print 1985 LP Juju Roots 1930s-1950s is a great primer) which mutated just like blues and old-time American music did when electric guitars landed. But it also became music that expressed Yorùbá identity—its very name adopted, by some etymologies, from a disparaging Western term for traditional African religion (others trace the name to a phonaesthetic word for a characteristic beat).
All this made jùjú, like reggae, a supremely inviting export with myriad cross-cultural access points. Juju Music is an object lesson in fusion, beginning with the mellow, churchy uplift of “Ja Funmi,” its unfurling steel-solo phrases bursting through drum layers near the five-minute mark like sun through clouds. The melody has a flicker of American country music; steel guitar struck Adé as a novel way to echo the traditional licks of African fiddle. On “Eje Nlo Gba Ara Mi,” the steel is like the ornamentation of a Kehinde Wiley portrait, both filigree and melody, trading off with the synthesizer. A similar dynamic propels “Sunny Ti De Ariya,” a talking drum workout with a “What’s Going On”-style backdrop of chattering musicians. On “Ma Jaiye Oni,” which gets a distinct tempo boost from the Nigerian version, steel takes center stage with riffs that sound distinctly Hawaiian—music that seeded early jùjú via 78 rpm discs during the international Hawaiian guitar band craze of the 1920s, the ur-“world music” explosion. (Hawaiian music fed the roots of American country music steel the same way.) Given the likely African origin of what country and blues fans know as slide guitar, it’s a marvelously full-circle moment.
Island must have figured the message in Ade’s songs would do little to sell him abroad, because the LP included no lyric sheet. Translations aren’t widely available, which is unfortunate, since Adé, like most good lyricists, seems to operate on multiple levels, alternately seducing, praying, and philosophizing. “Ja Funmi,” which translates as “Fight for Me,” riffs on proverbial warthogs, baobab trees, and the great blue turaco, but Adé also rues life’s hard knocks and gives himself a fame-related pep talk familiar to any modern hip-hop fan. The medley “365 Is My Number/The Message” ratchets up the tempo on a fragment of one of Adé’s rare English-language songs, the side-long “365 Is My Number – Dial,” a pitch to a reluctant lover from 1978’s Private Line, then veers into a hall-of-mirrors dub workout without losing the groove. Steel runs and sci-fi synth squiggles function like the lowing cows and roaring lions on a Lee Perry session, dancefloor punchlines amid echoing rhythm guitar salvos.
Shortly after Juju Music’s release, I saw Adé make his New York debut at the Savoy, a short-lived rock club in Times Square. A streamlined version of the African Beats—only 18 musicians—kept things lit for over two hours, a small taste of the all-night jams they regularly played back home. Melodic phrases and drum grooves flickered, dropped out, then reappeared in the lead-up to another song; multiple guitars and steel spun against twin talking drums and a percussion battery not so far off from the snakey-sneaky vernacular of American jam bands. Adé sang beautifully; experienced fans lined up to praise him with bills, per tradition, pasting currency to his sweaty brow. Adé grinned with gratitude, and the sold-out crowd (unsurprisingly including David Byrne) shimmied into a single pulsing organism, like bees drunk on honey.
The success and sheer gorgeousness of Juju Music led to a windfall of Nigerian releases in the West, including LPs by Adé’s main jùjú competitor, Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey. More Fela Kuti recordings appeared in the States, as well as compilations from other African scenes; Paul Simon came across one from South Africa, got inspired, and violated the United Nations cultural boycott of the country to record Graceland, which sold roughly 15 million copies worldwide. “World Music” was launched as a marketing concept in a north London pub, creating a pipeline for all sorts of dazzling and vital traditions while simultaneously marginalizing them.
Adé benefitted from all this, but he never became the Bob Marley-caliber star some thought he might. After two more records for Island, 1983’s Synchro System and 1984’s Aura, which were more polished production-wise and less compelling musically, he parted ways with the label and, without abandoning periodic tours and export LPs, settled back into being a homeland hero. He remains royalty: At a 2013 performance for the pan-African media network EbonyLife, Nigerian pop ambassador Wizkid got down prostrate before the King during a cameo with Adé’s band, which sounded as supple and seductive as ever.
While contemporary Afrobeats isn’t averse to spotlighting its roots—Burna Boy’s 2018 song “Koni Baje” is a straight-up jùjú tribute—these days jùjú itself is a throwback, the kind of music your parents like. But its sweetly swarming melodies and rhythmic webs are infused in the genre-blurred pop sound of young Nigeria, where an ever-growing constellation of stars has proved potent enough to attract comers like Justin Bieber and Brent Faiyaz, trailing Drake, Beyoncé, and others who are building bridges that feel more pan-African than colonial. Wizkid has taken a song sung partly in Yorùbá into the Billboard Top 10; indie labels like the Kampala-based Nyege Nyege Tapes are growing scenes on the ground; and Universal and Sony have opened regional offices in West and South Africa to develop the new wave of music internationally. The doors are open wide, and everyone passing through walks in Adé’s footsteps.

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The Salt Lake City metallic hardcore band Cult Leader features three members of the defunct progressive grindcore group Gaza. Last year they released an EP that included a cover of Mark Kozelek & Desertshore’s "You Are Not My Blood". Their intense debut full-length doesn’t contain any left-field covers and it doesn’t need them.

Lightless Walk

Cult Leader’s Useless Animal EP from last year included a cover of Mark Kozelek & Desertshore’s "You Are Not My Blood"—which wouldn’t be all that remarkable if Cult Leader wasn’t a metallic hardcore band. With that cover, the Salt Lake City foursome established itself as a band that wasn’t afraid to tinker, deconstruct, or simply open up and let its guts spill out. Lightless Walk is the group’s debut full-length, and while it doesn’t contain any left-field covers, it certainly doesn’t need them.
Three-quarters of Cult Leader hail from Gaza, the defunct, progressive grindcore outfit whose 2012 swansong No Absolutes in Human Suffering wound up being the most intense thing they ever produced. Lightless Walk tops it. Gaza bassist Anthony Lucero has moved up to lead vocals for Cult Leader (with new bassist Sam Richards abetting guitarist Mike Mason and drummer Casey Hansen), and his doom-soaked howl is enough to leave you wondering what took him so long to front a band. On the mutated, d-beat-meets-blastbeats jolt that is "Walking Wasteland", Lucero sings from his intestines instead of his lungs, letting Mason’s caustic riffs wash over him like an acid bath. "Great I Am" makes great use of space, hovering distortion, and needles of feedback that are somehow crosshatched into insidious melody. On the whole, Cult Leader is a more aggressive yet concise band than Gaza—and one that gets the notion of merciless self-editing. The closest that the album comes to Gaza’s savage, unrelenting excoriation of organized religion is "Gutter Gods", but even then, Lucero’s head-splitting refrain of "Our eyes are open" feels more introspective, haunted, and full of metaphysical dread than simply accusatory.
Yet Lightless Walk works just as well, if not better, when it crawls and sprawls. "A Good Life" dissolves into a drone of lurching arpeggios and Lucero’s chanted baritone; similarly, "How Deep It Runs" decelerates to a hypnotic slither. But it’s Lightless Walk’s title track that truly shows off the lessons Cult Leader learned from covering Kozelek. At over seven minutes, the song lays a tribal beats over atmospheric, minimalist guitar, a slowcore reinvention of grind that gives Lucero what seems like horrific amounts of room in which to wander, ponder, and lament—not to mention show off his chops as an apocalyptic crooner. At points, the song resembles the recent output of Swans in both ritualistic bleakness and ambition. If that’s a hint of where Cult Leader might head from here on out, even better.
There’s a backstory to Lightless Walk. Gaza’s frontman Jon Parkin was accused of rape in 2012; Gaza broke up shortly thereafter. Since then, the remaining three members have cut all ties with Parkin and spoken of him, when prodded, with a mix of bitterness and frustration. That said, Lightless Walk doesn’t feel in any way like some misguided attempt at vindication. The shadow of Gaza doesn’t hang over the album at all. Instead, the music casts its own shadows: deep, long, and teeming with the ghosts of things lost.


The debut from the prodigious singer-songwriter is a fussy and affecting album of baroque art-rock that is crowded with ideas in the best way.

Nothing New in the West

J. Mamana is a young guy who has made a big record, full of vigor and oversized ideas that don’t quite fit him yet. After graduating from Brown University in 2016, he locked himself away—in the time-honored autodidact fashion—and emerged with the kind of elaborately footnoted baroque pop album that testifies to a lot of things—talent, vision, ambition, precocity. But above all, Nothing New in the West reflects a certain urgency of post-collegiate youth, when you have, at least for a brief moment, learned everything and need to share it all.
When asked who he is channeling, Mamana namedrops Bartók, Frank Ocean, and Beethoven—you know, everything. But for the rest of us, the most readily available reference points for Mamana’s debut album will be in the over-educated-singer-songwriter canon: Van Dyke Parks in the ’70s, Kevin Barnes and Joanna Newsom in the ’00s, the Dirty Projectors circa 2012’s Swing Lo Magellan. Randy Newman makes his way in here, too, particularly in the lyrics, which brim with references to faded glories and faux-folksy couplets like, “My old man was a doctor/His allegiance was to the blood.”
What he doesn’t have yet is an original point of view, which is generally not the sort of thing you come fresh out of college sporting. You are crammed full of borrowed ideas and eagerness then, and spilling it out seems to be the most urgent thing in the world; your lungs are burning with the need for this exhalation. If Mamana is borrowing ideas liberally, he is doing so to feed the massive furnace of his prodigious musical gifts. Even when his songs get fussy—and when songs open with a line like, “One night while cursing Japheth, I noticed that I loved my lover more than she did me,” a certain fussiness is guaranteed—there is a stunning moment where you hear Mamana open up into a joyous sprint, taking each song heavenward for at least a moment or two. The stacked vocal harmonies on “Rhoticity,” for instance, or the gorgeous chorale he builds out of his own voice on “I’m Not Yr Guy.” Classical guitar, little gobs of modular synth, woodwinds, and blurts of distortion—all of it is here, and Mamana is doing most of it.
He also works bits of others’ music into his tapestry in small, cunning ways. “Tell the Truth” samples a luxurious little right-hand run from the Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam-Guèbrou and turns it into a central riff. “Buried in the Yard,” a nearly seven-minute song, sneaks an interpolation of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” into its chords. You can feel the air of quotation, both as an act and as an idea, swarming all around Nothing New, which tips its hand with its album title. The weight of inherited wisdom, unease about this wisdom’s potential fraudulence, hangs heavy: “The last time I went to the movies/I kept on shouting questions/To the characters in the movies/But these people had no answers at all,” Mamana sings dryly on “Last American.”
It’s a vivid moment of isolation that underlines what makes Nothing New so affecting. It’s a deeply wrought album that has the solipsistic and melancholy tinge of one made purely from imagination. But when all of the nouns and verbs that Mamana throws at us recede—and he throws a lot, including “the great-grandchildren of bootleggers,” the Neolithic proto-city of Catalhöyük, the word “palimpsest,” the word “rhoticity”—we are left with Mamana, alone. Loneliness, pure and sharp and non-negotiable, tends to be more profound than even our most profound thoughts.


The most substantial solo release yet from RAP’s Guy Gormley feels provocatively out of step with the broad sweep of contemporary dance music.

Mind in Camden 2

The British duo RAP’s EXPORT arrived earlier this year like a manila envelope with no return address, the intent as cryptic as the contents. The music was a mixture of stern techno and melancholy synth-pop that, depending on where you dropped the needle, might recall ’90s trance, Dutch gabber, the ambient pianist Harold Budd, or the doleful poise of Pet Shop Boys. (There was no rap in it at all.) The songs had an uncanny way of making a coherent whole out of odds and ends; the whole thing bore an outsider’s fingerprints, as though this were music made out of pieces that were never meant to fit together in the first place. And yet: It was sleek.
White Londoners making left-field dance and indie pop don’t call their outfit RAP unless they intend to raise eyebrows; the musicians’ art-world ties suggested a knowing approach to their references and juxtapositions. (Not necessarily an ironic one, however; the music was too genuine, too affecting, for that.) Meanwhile, members Guy Gormley and Thomas Bush’s many extracurriculars—a welter of spinoffs and side projects, via the Jolly Discs label and elsewhere—hinted at a garden of forking paths that lay hidden from view. The whole thing was seductively inscrutable.
Enchante is Gormley’s solo project, and Mind in Camden 2, his most substantial release under the alias so far, is similar in spirit and vibe to EXPORT. Traversing nine tracks in 33 minutes, it weaves together field recordings, ambient sketches, and club beats in a way that flows intuitively, if not always logically. The album’s sonics aren’t all that far from what you might find on a label like Dial, Hivern, or even L.I.E.S.—the production is rooted in the no-frills sound of hardware synths and classic drum machines—but Enchante nevertheless feels provocatively out of step with the broad sweep of contemporary dance music.
The album’s materials can seem unusually spartan, the repetition particularly mind-numbing. Gormley’s got a way of making a stretch of kick drums feel like walking on hard pavement in cheap, thin-soled shoes. And on several tracks, he seems to delight in outright wrong-footing listeners, programming drum sequences of unusual lengths and then dropping or adding beats seemingly at random. These aren’t the mind-bending time signatures of Autechre; they’re beats that seem conventional until you try to count them, and you’ll wonder how math so simple could go so wrong. Sometimes, for good measure, he’ll fuck up a groove entirely, mimicking a turntable stylus as it bounces across a rutted record.
Gormley released his first EP under the Enchante alias in 2011, on Joe Goddard’s Greco-Roman label. The record was bursting with ideas—vintage house, old-school rave, grime, dancehall, dub—but its playful approach was still recognizable as belonging to the UK’s dance-music tradition. His music has gradually gotten more idiosyncratic over time. Mind in Camden 2 is nominally the sequel to Mind in Camden, a 2017 EP of minimalist house and oddball ambient, but the new record is exponentially stranger.
Like RAP, Enchante has become a medium for private obsessions, oblique snapshots of everyday life. Just after “St. Michael,” a lovely sketch for quivering organ and the kind of wordless soul-diva wail you might have once found on a 4Hero record, a fellow with a heavy London accent barks: “I want to see some more lighters, see it, come on! Come on! That gas ain’t expensive. It’s very cheap!” It’s not just what he says that’s so disorienting, it’s the way he says it, his voice dripping with derision. What the hell is he on about? The song that unfolds around him is a sad, meandering meditation for acoustic guitar and folky faux-flutes. Over a dirge-like syn-drum beat, a computer-generated voice recites a poem: “On the cold streets I find what I’m looking for/… /To scream in pleasure and in pain/To walk in the open when I choose/And to die in no one’s arms but my own.” Then the shouting man returns, still shouting. “Come on, come on, we’re holding a vigil!” Who is he and where are we? We are left in the middle of this matrix of connections, feverishly trying to make sense of it all.
For all its backward glances, EXPORT didn’t seem nostalgic, exactly—more that it was evocative of a sense of place. Mind in Camden 2, named for the London neighborhood where Gormley grew up, is too. In fact, the album is structured to take the form of a journey. The opening “Enter” sets the scene: footsteps on gravel, a steady downpour, the sound of a car door closing. Suddenly we are in the driver’s seat, rain drumming on the windshield as a navigation voice chirps, “Destination set. Planning route: To Hackney Downs Station, Hackney, London.” The car conceit returns throughout the album, as tracks abruptly break off into the sound of rainfall or freeway noise, sometimes narrated by the eerie, almost-human voice of the GPS. “Turn right,” she says at the end of the title track, and we hear the turn signal clicking; the pounding beat of the song that follows picks up the blinkers’ nervous cadence. Later, “Cleanzing Interlude” is almost certainly a recording from inside an automatic car wash—fifty seconds of whir and chug, suburban noise repackaged as a sound-art readymade.
It all comes to a head with “Vigil,” one of the few tracks that could easily hold its own in any context. That most of these tracks wouldn’t make sense outside the context of the album hardly matters; the pleasure comes from being immersed in them, carried along by the twists and turns of Gormley’s mini epic. “Vigil,” though, is a small ambient masterpiece, as moving as it is unassuming—six minutes’ worth of a single synthesizer spun through a delicate web of delay. When he’s got you fully hypnotized, Gormley brings in a contrapuntal synth melody, soft and sad. It’s as fine an encapsulation of rainy-day melancholy as I can imagine. And then, almost as though embarrassed by this moment of unabashed sentimentalism, he takes us through the car wash and finishes with “Rise to Infinity,” a hypnotic, eight-minute minimal-house jam. It feels like an epilogue to the record: our final destination, and also a reminder that, despite all the trickery and intrigue, Gormley is no stranger to purest and most enveloping of dancefloor vibes.


When Appleseed Cast released The End of the Ring Wars three years ago,\n\ they were the embodiment of late ...

The Appleseed Cast: Low Level Owl Vol. I & II

Low Level Owl Vol. I & II

When Appleseed Cast released The End of the Ring Wars three years ago, they were the embodiment of late 90s emo-rock, playing with an intense abandon that displayed the extent of their ambition. The problem was, the ambition seemed uncontrolled, and the album came off like an emotional effigy of the band's aspirations which their experience wasn't quite capable of making fully palpable. Last year's Mare Vitalis found them reigning in their sound and softening the edges while simultaneously beginning to experiment with new textures. The album ended with an extended untitled track of feedback and guitar loops that no one could have predicted was the fuse to what was coming next.
Low Level Owl is a supernova and a full redefinition of the band, a sprawling two-disc monster that redirects their ambition from the emotional release of their earlier albums into the meticulous conceptions crafted through endless hours of studio time. Overhauling their sound and incorporating a wide mélange of styles, Low Level Owl goes a long way towards emasculating any of their previous hardcore influences by injecting a thoughtful, gentler Britpop jangle and winsome vocals and harmonies. The result is a mix of elements combining the enterprising studio conceptions of Radiohead with touches of shimmering Stone Roses psychedelia knitted together with the conviction and energetic drumming of the early U2, all draped over a monolithic prog-rock conceptual framework.
The technical execution throughout the album is flawless. The rock tracks are spread evenly across both Low Level Owl discs (which are available separately-- Use Your Illusion-style-- presumably so as to not overwhelm listeners) and are interspersed with instrumental and ambient tracks that act as connective tissue. Josh Baruth's fantastic drumming is placed in the front of the mix and propels all of the traditional songs. Each of the tracks are awash in keyboards with the vocals generally lying low in the mix, making the lyrics difficult to decipher. These are the only constants through the entire work as Appleseed Cast takes you on a tour through most of the highlights of 90s pop and rock.
Both albums are balanced, each beginning and ending with instrumentals and connected in the middle by the droning "View of a Burning City" that ends the first disc and picks back up on the second. The combination of "The Walking of Pertelotte" and "On Reflection" clocks in at 8\xBD minutes, and bookends the front of the project. Over an hour and forty-five minutes later, "Confession," a nine-minute ambient head-trip closes the second disc. Both albums last fifty three minutes. Just the arrangement of the music alone shows the amount of thought that goes into an album of this size.
Hints of other bands occur throughout-- from the Stone Roses in "Mile Marker," to My Bloody Valentine in "The Argument," to Built to Spill in "Reaction"-- all embedded a lush wave of production reminiscent of the Flaming Lips, Spiritualized or Mogwai. There are also elements of Brian Eno and Aphex Twin that pop up during the ambient sections, and tracks like "Flowers Falling from Dying Hands" which remind me of Sonic Youth's "Providence."
Needless to say, Appleseed Cast have come a long way since that 1998 debut of frail failure. With Low Level Owl, they establish their own unique vision for the future of rock, offering hope and brighter possibilities for the genre-- or rather, creating their own. These two albums have generated an incredible amount of hype in small sects of the indie rock population, while most who haven't been privy to the band's peerless new sounds still associate the band with their sensitive suburban roots. It's time to look past the stereotype and herald Appleseed Cast for what they are now, and what they're about to become: groundbreaking.


On her first commercial mix album, the producer crafts an unbroken stretch of shapeshifting grooves and psychedelic fireworks.

DJ-Kicks

Laurel Halo has spent much of her career warily circling the dancefloor. For a few years in the middle of this decade, she threw herself into club music with gusto, to thrilling effect: 2013’s Chance of Rain remains an underrated slab of avant-techno, while the broken beats and rumbling sub-bass of 2015’s In Situ still sound ahead of their time. But Dust and Raw Silk Uncut Wood favored more abstracted rhythms and diffuse atmospheres, poised somewhere between ambient music, microtonal composition, and free improv, with pop-adjacent vocals draped loosely over the top.
What those who haven’t caught one of her club sets might not know is that Halo is also a top-notch DJ, with a facility for the sorts of forceful rhythms absent from her recent albums. Chief among her skills: A nonstop negotiation between peak-time thrills and the thorniest rhythmic thickets—an on-again, off-again détente as gripping as any geopolitical drama. That’s precisely what she does on DJ-Kicks, her first commercial mix album. The atonal pianos that open the session—Halo’s own “Public Art,” exclusive to this set—are a fakeout, the equivalent of dry-ice fog wafting over an empty floor as the club’s doors open. Not a minute in, she plunges headfirst into a chugging, EBM-inspired beat, kicking off an unbroken stretch of shapeshifting grooves that won’t let up, save for one brief breather, for the next hour.
But seamless isn’t the same as predictable, and one of the great pleasures of Halo’s mix is its switchbacking path. An early stretch of dank electro, clammy as catacomb walls, swiftly gives way to warm, flickering chords and spiraling synth arpeggios, sleek as a brand-new corkscrew. A long, gauzy passage erupts into gut-punching bass music; an extended foray into Detroit-inspired techno, all trepanation-drill precision, flips into a beatless, Stockhausen-does-Looney-Tunes interlude, which then paves the way for a newly focused son clave rhythm hurtling through the murk. That overarching ebb-and-flow holds sway throughout. Halo toys with the momentum of the mix as though periodically tugging at a Möbius strip, wadding it into a ball, and then smoothing it out again.
If I haven’t named many individual songs here, that’s in part because Halo’s style of mixing has a way of blurring the differences between tracks, of deemphasizing their uniqueness and folding them into an aesthetic that’s hers alone. That’s the case for many great DJs, but it seems especially true of Halo. Her own productions are distinguished by a certain smeariness, like a charcoal drawing smudged by an elbow, and the same hazy qualities distinguish DJ-Kicks. She tends to choose tunes that brim with shakers, brittle hi-hats, 808 cowbells, and other shimmery, trebly sounds; her kick drums are sturdy but slippery, with a tendency to stagger around the downbeat or hurtle forward, as though drunkenly determined.
One exception: Final Cut’s “Temptation,” a 1989 track from an early project of Detroit techno icon Jeff Mills, which pummels away with almost industrial relentlessness. But that, much like fellow Detroit veteran Blake Baxter’s 1991 cut “Funky World,” is an exception, present largely to set up everything that happens around it: a back-to-basics detonator for the ensuing psychedelic fireworks. (For what it’s worth, Mills’ and Baxter’s songs are among the very few tracks here that aren’t of recent vintage.)
It’s probably not a coincidence that one of Halo’s own songs, the Hodge collaboration “The Light Within You,” is built around a sample of what sounds like a self-help audiobook, delivered in mellifluous tones that verge on ASMR—“All good things come to me,” a woman’s voice repeats in a dulcet whisper; then, haltingly, she intones, “Pulling out of a bad mood.” These samples are pure Halo, wryly sardonic but also slyly effective, and they encapsulate what’s so great about the mix. Body music for heady dancers, this is a triumph of dance music at its trippiest, and in its controlled weirdness lies real liberation.


On her first album in a decade, the Dominican iconoclast delivers an explosive comeback full of horror scenes, metal sounds, and post-colonial politics.

Mandinga Times

In her decade away from music, Rita Indiana returned to writing novels. Her prose, when dealing in speculative and science fiction, often operates at the end of worlds large and small in the wake of personal and political destruction. Her latest album, Mandinga Times, follows suit. Produced by Eduardo Cabra (formerly of the Puerto Rican band Calle 13), Mandinga Times hangs heavier than the flash of 2010’s El Juidero, this time with inflections of the metal scenes and horror movies that gave her a language for queer identity.
And every horror movie has its monster. The dembow-meets-metal friction of “Como un Dragón” introduces the album’s protagonist, Mandinga, the soothsayer of an apocalypse atrocious and banal unfolding in real time. (As Pitchfork editor Isabelia Herrera also noted, the word “mandinga” is derived from the name of the Mandinka ethnic group of West Africa, a word whose Caribbean history began in the transatlantic slave trade and still carries racist overtones.) With a face painted in black and white, Mandinga shapeshifts in subterfuge against colonial frameworks of power, spirituality, and storytelling with traditional Afro-Caribbean genres woven in with Indiana’s metal instincts.
But it’s on “Mandinga Times” that Mandinga looks outward with apocalyptic clarity: impending climate disaster, the progression of consumerism and late capitalism, violence, persecution, and children in cages. “Tick-tock,” she counts down over a rapid alí-babá beat used in regional Dominican carnavales. She’s joined by an unlikely collaborator, the incredibly popular Dominican dembow artist Kiko El Crazy, whose echoes of the axiom “no te dejes” and “la pámpara” float over the track like a Vincent Price narration in a haunted house.
“Power is like a horror movie,” Indiana recently told Pitchfork. It corrupts the body, it feeds on fear. Throughout the record, Mandinga observes this tension from a precarious ledge. “Miedo” is a reggaeton romántico about the intimacy of intense passion and the inseparable threat of violence that targets queer love around the world. On “El Zahir,” named after the 1947 Jorge Luis Borges short story and its titular coin, Indiana illustrates the power on one side of capital and the death on the other. A post-punk riff churns over gagá, an Afro-Dominican rhythm descended from Haiti’s rara, with a deathly interlude from Norwegian musician Sakari Jäntti.
In her writing and music, Indiana has scrutinized the Dominican Republic’s legacies of anti-Black and anti-Haitian violence and government corruption, the ways that these hegemonies exert power across the Caribbean and Latin America, and how marginalized peoples resist violence throughout history. Mandinga witnesses the lasting fallout. On Mandinga Times, she frequently references Puerto Rico—where she’s lived for the last decade—and its legacy of anti-colonial resistance. On “The Heist,” Indiana partners with boricua singer MIMA in a Western tale that recounts the $7 million robbery of a Wells Fargo in Hartford, Connecticut in 1983 by Los Macheteros in the name of the movement for Puerto Rican independence. “El Flaco de la Mancha” subverts the quixotic hero’s delusions of grandeur and chivalry, guided instead by art, beauty, and the watch of the Afro-Cuban orisha Yemayá. And on the penultimate track, “Pa’ Ayotzinapa,” Indiana departs musically and geographically from the Caribbean for a rock-en-español bolero with Café Tacvba’s Rubén Albarrán, a story of a pilgrimage to Ayotzinapa, Mexico to honor the 43 disappeared teaching student activists that went missing in Iguala in 2014.
Mandinga Times closes on an atypical end for monsters with “Claroscuro”; Mandinga isn’t destroyed and doesn’t evolve out of their monstrosity. By contrast, the reality Mandinga observes is grotesque, a system run by those in power who drape oppression in the myth of normalcy and order. Nothing and no one in Mandinga’s time are free of the responsibility to dismantle systems of oppression. She does not automatically absolve Mandinga either, but she allows them to change, offering something of a final consolation: “Rosas y espinas son parte de una deslumbrante criatura,” or, “Roses and thorns are part of a dazzling creature.”

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Paying tribute to an idealized era of hip-hop that predated his birth, the 18-year-old Detroit musician proves himself a gifted rapper who’s overinvested in ideas past their sell-by date.

Highly Caffeinated

Detroit’s Curtis Roach was born in 1999. It was a jiggy time in America. The dot-com bubble was still furiously inflating, our sense of square-jawed adventurism hadn’t yet begotten the Forever War in the Middle East, and rap was flamboyant, wasteful, and extravagant—and in a period of transition. With the aid of Scott Storch’s keyboard and energized by a resurgent Snoop Dogg and an ascendant Eminem, Dr. Dre had emerged from his post-Death Row slumber with a lean, cold take on G-funk. André 3000, once adamant that the South had something to say, was proven correct: Second-tier No Limit artists were going gold and platinum and Cash Money was taking over for the ’99 and the 2000. A Tribe Called Quest had disbanded the year prior to Roach’s birth, and, with J Dilla behind the boards, Q-Tip was transitioning toward a glossier sound. To a lesser extent, De La Soul were, too. Nas, once New York rap’s Golden Child, a boy king of immeasurable potential, had partnered with Puff Daddy, the mortal enemy of every young man with a spray paint-stained Jansport. It’s kind of weird that Roach raps like 1999 never happened.
On Highly Caffeinated, Roach’s musical touchstone is the early-mid-1990s flowering of thoughtful, spiritually unfettered rap. He’s high-pitched like the Pharcyde’s Bootie Brown, conscious and self-aware like Common, and dreadlocked like a young Busta Rhymes. Like his open-minded predecessors, he has a purple, starry-eyed streak; he’s romantic, optimistic, and prematurely nostalgic. These can be grating qualities. On “Colored Shirts,” reminiscing about the good ol’ days of the late aughts, Roach raps, “I miss the days being simple/Before we was popping pimples/We’d sit and giggle/Just clowning in class and breaking pencils/As time trickled, friendships became brittle.” The conceit of the seemingly earnest “Luvofmylife” is—you guessed it—that hip-hop is the love of his life. The bean he’s on isn’t a prescription drug, he says, but coffee.
Roach’s nostalgia for the 1990s, a decade he never really experienced, is understandable; rap history’s dominant narrative is that the early and mid ’90s were an unencumbered, purer, more brilliant time. Even if that were true, it was also a period of wildly overpriced CDs, overinflated label rosters, and a centralized music press unwilling to seriously engage with rap from outside New York City. (For example, The Source gave the California rapper Suga Free’s Street Gospel a paltry, laughable 2.5 mics.) Nostalgia is dangerously easy, particularly if you’ve never spent $20 on a Quad City DJs album.
Still, when Roach’s music lands, it has a comforting warmth and familiarity. A mid-album suite that samples bossa nova and tropicalia is particularly strong, despite the dubious comparison of his paramour—whom Roach calls a “snack,” “treat,” and a “dessert”—with Frida Kahlo (“Frida”). (If he hasn’t yet, Roach might listen to the original, unreleased version of Ghostface Killah’s “Charlie Brown,” which samples Caetano Veloso’s “Alfomega.” It has careening momentum and immediacy without sacrificing the sophistication of its source material.) Roach sounds like an actualized rapper when he questions the normalcy of his parents’ smoking habits (“Carcinogen”) and when, addressing his deceased father, he refers to himself as “your little cub” (“22,” so named for his father’s football number). It’s this kind of specificity—not heavy doses of generalized, universal emotions—that makes for truly engaging art.
Roach’s work is brimming with confidence, but his surety cuts both ways: He’s a legitimately gifted rapper who’s overinvested in ideas a decade-plus expired. A good number of Highly Caffeinated’s shortcomings are the inevitable result of his being 18 and precocious. He’s thoughtful, nattily dressed, and, with a few more years of lived experience, the wide swaths of emotion he cuts will become narrower. Even with its occasional losing bouts with naiveté, Highly Caffeinated compares favorably to a reverent, backwards-looking mixtape that launched a career: Joey Bada$$’s 1999.


The Toronto singer’s latest is a time capsule of moody 2010s R&B, distinguished by its introspection and near-claustrophobic melancholy.

Play With the Changes

You’ve heard Rochelle Jordan’s sound, even if you can’t place her songs. Throughout the early 2010s she released several mixtapes leading up to 2014’s 1021: all solid, all lost amid a flood of similarly moody Torontonian R&B. As her new album implies, afterward came changes: a move to Los Angeles, a few years lost to health complications and a stagnating record deal. What didn’t change was her core group of collaborators—producers KLSH, Machinedrum, and Jimmy Edgar—with whom she slowly crafted Play With the Changes, out on L.A. DJ Tokimonsta’s label Young Art.
The album is a 2010s time capsule of introspective R&B, Jordan’s diaphanous vocals floating over tracks inflected with quiet storm and UK garage. This is still very well-trod territory, but Jordan’s music distinguishes itself with an almost-claustrophobic melancholy. “Love U Good” begins the album, as Jordan sings, “a little closed off,” and while the song unfurls—a few blue chords, a skittering beat—the effect remains hushed, less open space than inner headspace.
What’s remarkable is how Jordan maintains the vibe even as she whirls through genres. “All Along” is lush, loud, unabashed New Jack Swing, featuring Jordan’s most acrobatic vocals on the breakdown. “Situation” advances a couple of years, to the turn of the century and its bounty of UK garage. “Something” is Jordan’s most explicit Aaliyah homage yet, featuring her inimitable stop-start, nimble-slow vocal style and a melodic near-quote of “Are You That Somebody.” Each of these tracks, though, rest upon moody chords and break apart into a cloud of sighs: There is a palpable, inescapable vulnerability throughout.
As the tracks become more restrained, Jordan’s vulnerability becomes more explicit. “Count It” is a prickly ode to the importance of having a “fuck off fund,” in which she reassures herself that a breakup might leave her lonely, but not destitute. “Broken Steel” describes, literally, the instrumental—it’s a track of mechanical-sounding clanking, with an occasional faint metallic buzz in the background—and figuratively, as she and rapper Farrah Fawx lament expectations of superhuman strength because of their demeanor and race. Jordan goes deeper on prayerlike “Lay,” which depicts anxiety over the possibility that a Black friend or partner might not make it home. Over a somber chord progression that repeats and ruminates, Jordan gives her partner a plea, vocals heavy with care: “Drive safely, text me when you get there, keep me up to date if you’re running late.”
Best encapsulating the mood is the penultimate track “Dancing Elephants”—as in, the kind in the room. Structurally it’s a by-the-book house track, from the timing of the buildup and breakdown, to the contours of the hook. But the beat’s a little too rigid to be carefree, the vocals blank and cool. Like the rest of the album, it’s not quite meant for dancing away the pain. It’s music for dancing through it.

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