Manage your expectations: This record may combine the electronic music giants Richard D. James and Mike Paradinas, but it's really just a playful, occasionally inspired time capsule of the 1990s.

Expert Knob Twiddlers

Richard D. James is like the Miles Davis of electronic music: Both started young and had inventive, deeply personal styles. Both created a few genres and perfected others that were already well-trod. Both were wildly prolific, then took long breaks and basically disappeared when they were functioning at exceptionally high levels. And both made very little music that was less than good.
So you might consider Expert Knob Twiddlers to be James’ version of Quiet Nights. A collaboration between James and his friend Mike Paradinas, who has worked as μ-Ziq (and many other names) and founded the Planet Mu label, it’s the rare James-related release that is just OK. It’s also one of the less interesting things Paradinas made during his excellent ’90s run. The fact that it wasn’t all that common in shops and was a rare collaborative release from James gave it a bit of an aura that, two decades later, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It sounds like two friends who enjoy making music together having some fun and entertaining themselves, without much thought for quality control.
Though it’s a low-key record that doesn’t pretend to be about innovation, Expert Knob Twiddlers is interesting as a time capsule. It was recorded on relatively crude equipment in 1994, when both James and Paradinas were working at an early peak and releasing massive amounts of music under a variety of names, and it was released in ’96, when James was basically a superstar as Aphex Twin. In every gesture, it feels tied to the mid-’90s, offering Mike and Rich’s version of the Gen X nostalgia that was everywhere at the time. (Just look at that album cover.) Many of these tracks either sample from or are the creators’ versions of ephemera like ’60s spy film soundtracks, easy listening records, off-kilter funk, advertising jingles, and the like—a jumble of kitschy loops that could have come from Keyboard Money Mark, Sukia, or any number of lesser artists making music in that decade with cheap gear and samples. There’s very little to distinguish these playful genre exercises, well constructed as they are.
Not to say it’s a bad record, just one of little depth. Expert Knob Twiddlers is marginally improved in this reissue, complete with additional unreleased tracks from the initial sessions, a fuller-sounding remastering, and a new sequence that suggests a bit more variety than is actually here. There are occasional moments of inspiration, like the tense and jittery “Vodka”—which appears a second time in a new, less interesting mix—or “Bu Bu Bu Ba,” a slow and dreamy number with a pleasant melody. But too many tracks are along the lines of “Winner Takes All” and “Giant Deflating Football”—essentially, just a single string loop and occasionally a breakbeat, repeating for almost six minutes with small accents placed here and there. Listening to the album is a matter of expectations. Set aside that it pairs two giants of electronic music and enjoy it for what it is: a collection of well-rendered DJ tools for your next lounge music night.


There's a case to be made for Tangerine Dream as being among the most\n\ historically important experimental German ...

Tangerine Dream: Journey Through a Burning Brain (Anthology)

There's a case to be made for Tangerine Dream as being among the most historically important experimental German bands from the early 70s. Beyond the fact that their mastery of all manner of synthesizer technology predated the digital boom in the 80s, they're arguably the grandfathers of ambient music (despite what the church of Eno may preach). Edgar Froese's outfit began as one of many rambunctious noisemakers in Berlin in the late 60s, but has survived as one of the most long-lived groups in rock. Of course, the group has tweaked their sound considerably over the years, and this curious set, containing one disc of early 70s pieces, and two of mid-80s live tracks, makes clear that not every chapter in Froese's manual is required reading.
The first disc in the box contains the most interesting music, by a considerable margin. Covering the underrated early period of the band on Ohr Records (1970-73), the sounds are spacey, spacious and determinedly sprawling. "Genesis" and "Cold Smoke" are both taken from the band's first release, Electronic Meditation, the only record to feature future kosmiche icons Klaus Schultz and Conrad Schnitzler (later of Kluster). Similar to their peers Guru Guru, Ash Ra Tempel (also featuring Shultz) and Amon Düül II, Tangerine Dream were, at this point, about freeform mind-expansion, and that alone: "Cold Smoke" rumbles and skirts via heavily reverbed crashing drums, maniacal violin, post-Hendrix guitar ejaculation and even an excitable vagrant shouting cosmic obscenities in the distance. "Fly and Collision of Comas Sola" and "Sunrise in the Third System" are taken from the group's second album, Alpha Centauri, with Chris Franke and Steve Schroyder replacing Schultz and Schnitzler. Keyboards began to play a greater part in the arrangements (as well as flute here), but the general ticket was still an acid-laced blur.
In 1972, Tangerine Dream released their early masterpiece, Zeit (featuring Peter Baumann, and completing one of the most longstanding of the band's lineups), and because Castle Music felt the need to whip me into submission with two discs of live meh from the 80s, only one track from that double LP is included. That's too bad, because "Origin of Supernatural Probabilities" represents a command of sound on par with the greatest studio masters. The opening guitar chords sound as if they were recorded under two feet of water, and when the synth begins to babble and whales begin to cry, I'd as soon sport gills as leave my stereo. Simply put, 70s electronic music does not get better than this-- unless you count their follow-up, 1973's Atem, of which two pieces are included on this set: The Mellotron-soaked nature hymn "Fauni Gena" and an atypical vocal (of sorts) track "Wahn", also featuring primal percussion akin to that on the first record.
Now, skip forward about 10 or 12 years to the mid-80s, when Tangerine Dream had become quite a different beast. Gone were the psychedelic trance-outs and echo chambers, replaced by big light shows and Jan Hammer's drum machine. In fact, Froese and company were still playing psychedelic music, but what that meant 20 years removed from the era was much different; they were providing escapists soundtracks for the overstressed and nostalgic alike, far from the boundless "mind-expansion" of a bygone time. And yes, I absolutely abhor those crystalline, programmed 80s beats-- Mannheim Steamroller at Christmas is one thing, but I will not stand idly by and listen to men who once tripped like kings through the nether regions of consciousness play crowd-control for yuppies.
That said, if you don't pay attention-- and that's the real difference: early Tangerine Dream was good for escapism and repeated, detail-obsessed listening-- some of this works as decent background pitter-patter. Not surprisingly, the better tracks are the longest: the 22-minute "Poland" begins as a practically unlistenable exercise in new age pep, but does have scattered moments of old-fashioned krautrock whim, particularly during the parts that forgo dance beats for drone. And it's not as if Tangerine Dream + dance music is a necessarily bad concept (why hasn't there been a movement to remix these guys, a la Kraftwerk's The Mix or Can's Sacrilege?), but this stuff is perilously close to skincare instructional video soundtracks. Just when I thought it couldn't get worse, disc three drops "Song of the Whale", parts one and two! Wow. In summary, skip this set and check out the early Tangerine Dream records instead-- they're all being remastered (with bonus tracks!), hopefully making Journey Through a Burning Brain obsolete sooner rather than later.


The Beach Boys come up sometimes in discussions of Animal Collective, which would seem very strange if you caught the group on the wrong record. When they get noisy and decide to experiment, they're more Bryn Jones than Brian Wilson, but both this year's exceptional *Sung Tongs* and the less-heard 2003 live-in-the-woods document *Campfire Songs* had those familiar high-pitched and intertwined harmonies. Animal Collective's relationship to the Beach Boys is unusual, though, as they don't seem particularly inspired by Wilson's compositional sense. More than anything, Animal Collective taps directly into the thing that made the Beach Boys a 20th Century

Young Prayer

The Beach Boys come up sometimes in discussions of Animal Collective, which would seem very strange if you caught the group on the wrong record. When they get noisy and decide to experiment, they're more Bryn Jones than Brian Wilson, but both this year's exceptional Sung Tongs and the less-heard 2003 live-in-the-woods document Campfire Songs had those familiar high-pitched and intertwined harmonies. Animal Collective's relationship to the Beach Boys is unusual, though, as they don't seem particularly inspired by Wilson's compositional sense. More than anything, Animal Collective taps directly into the thing that made the Beach Boys a 20th Century American version of sacred music. It's an approach in which voices say more with music than they ever could with words, and it's why the Beach Boys transcended their dorky lyrics as easily as Animal Collective transcend unintelligibility.
Key Collective member Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) conceived Young Prayer, his first widely available solo album, in response to the death of his father, in the very house where the man passed away. Though it's Panda solo, Young Prayer is easily identifiable as an Animal Collective release in the Campfire Songs and Sung Tongs mode, and other Collective members contribute here and there. I asked Lennox once if any particular Animal Collective member was the "pop guy," prone to push the band to a more tuneful and accessible direction, and he denied the existence of such a creature. Comparing Young Prayer side-by-side with the Avey Tare split EP on Leaf, however, Panda fits the profile.
There are no song titles on Young Prayer, but it seems destined to be the kind of cult record, like Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, for which listeners will make up their own. Actually, everything about it suggests cult; it's the kind of record that will have a profound impact on a small number of people, be ridiculed by a few more, and never be heard at all by almost everybody. Young Prayer is incredibly personal and naked, but it's also unique, and it will doubtless disappear and be rediscovered periodically as years pass.
Though Young Prayer is extremely accessible and consists mostly of voice, guitar, and piano, the "tunes" are hard to source. No folk or pop music I can name is structured quite like this. In an odd way, Young Prayer seems inspired by Gregorian chant, as notes seem bent in accordance to a mysterious logic recorded in some dusty scroll. The inspiration of the mass is most prevalent on Track 7, where the deep, aquatic echo seems as if it were achieved by having Lennox sing on one end of the Sistine Chapel into a microphone posted at the other. The final track, in which Lennox sings at the bottom end of his range, sounds even more like a monk channeling a biblical precept in Latin, and augmented by two overlapping piano lines inspired by classical minimalism (the Reich homage is reminiscent of the piano line from Stereolab's "Blue Milk"). It's hard to imagine a more lovely or appropriate closer.
The arrangements are simple as can be, with the majority of the nine tracks (it's a perfectly short album at just under 30 minutes) consisting of acoustic guitar and voice, and the sequencing is superb. As the second track ends at an emotional peak with the word "rejoice," the minute-long guitar and piano interlude lightly carried the listener to the next, more emotionally exhausting song. And after the fourth track, which is the most evocative of Campfire Songs of anything here, with its unsteady acoustic banging and singing that seems design to disappear quietly into the night sky, a summer camp chant-and-clap canon follows to bring us back down to earth.
Where Campfire Songs was filled with odd overlapping harmonies, Young Prayer finds Lennox typically using a single track for vocals, alternating between a quavering tenor and an even more unsteady falsetto. The fearlessness of his singing here, as Lennox navigates odd runs and subjects his melodies to unusual effects, is the heart of Young Prayer. He's a good singer, no question, but fortunately, he refuses to compose within his limitations. Moments such as the tail end of the first track, when he jumps up an octave to finish the phrase "how you will know me" (my best guess-- the diction makes precise lyric decoding exceedingly difficult) at a point a note above his falsetto range, lends a layer of incredible poignancy.
If Brian Wilson's ultimate goal was to create a "teenage symphony to god," Panda Bear and the rest of Animal Collective realize that the liturgical part of that equation was most important. Lyrics may be hard to make out and budgets are far too low for symphonies, but the god part they have down, and those moments in life we get close to but can never quite explain inspire every note of Young Prayer.


The clarinetist and saxophonist Ken Thomson, whose roving works include covers of Björk and Meshuggah, records an album of minimalist chamber music full of feints and surprising paths.

Restless

Like plenty of ambitious musicians in New York’s classical community, the clarinetist and saxophonist Ken Thomson has multiple artistic guises. He’s part of Asphalt Orchestra, a puckish street marching band that dances its covers of Björk and Meshuggah through the heart of the Lincoln Center complex. Slow/Fast is a vehicle for Thomson’s proggy approach to jazz writing and improvisation. Most recently, Thomson was inducted into the Bang on a Can All-Stars, a modern classical group that has recorded a Pulitzer-winning piece by Julia Wolfe, and commissioned new works by Tyondai Braxton and Christian Marclay.
Given those varied commitments, it’s impressive that Thomson has time to develop his chamber music on the side. In these pieces, you can tell that he’s firmly a member of the contemporary post-minimalist scene. Though there are also traces of his other interests. Thaw, Thomson’s 2013 album for the string quartet known as JACK, balanced sections of instrumental aggression alongside a movement flush with lyricism (and a hat-tip to jazz pianist Don Pullen).
That album presented two longer-form, multi-movement works. And on the first composition, Thomson sat in with the string quartet as a bass clarinetist—thereby suggesting a link to the rest of his discography. But Restless represents a full and complete break from Thomson’s identity as a performer. The four-movement composition that gives the album its title was written for cello and piano; the three-movement “Me Vs.” is for piano solo. One mark of the album’s success is that it’s still recognizable as one of Thomson’s projects, despite the fact that he never plays a note himself.
The opening section of “Restless” starts with slowly mutating piano arpeggios that whip up a grim mood, along with some vibrato-heavy writing for the cello. Fairly standard textures, when it comes to minimalist-influenced music. But by the track’s midpoint, Thomson’s harmonies are full of feints and surprising paths away from the opening material. The way some piano chords syncopate with the cello part provides an unsettling bounce, right at the moment when Thomson gives a long, brooding line to the latter instrument. (Cellist Ashley Bathgate and pianist Karl Larson give powerful performances here.)
The piece’s second movement, “Forge,” initially indulges in the harder-riffing attacks that Thomson has proved adept with in other contexts. Though instead of letting the punkish grind carry this whole section, the composer quickly softens the dynamic level. When used well, restraint can also shock.
“Me Vs.” likewise navigates between stormy realms and zones of prettiness, as gentle phrases gradually emerge from dense, atonal chord clusters in the first movement (subtitled “Turn of Phrase”). When the pounding dynamics return—as a listener has ever right to expect will happen—elegant use of the sustain pedal is there to remind us of the emotional distance traveled. The second movement (“Another Second Try”) offers a gently discordant, pensive quality, before the finale combines all the work’s diverse approaches. (The last movement also adds some technically arduous runs that Larson pulls off marvelously). Overall, the unique synthesis of dissonance and consonance makes the music feel personal—and like a worthy expression of Thomson’s core concerns as a musician, whether he’s holding an instrument in his hands or not.


Ariana Grande’s third album finds the 22-year-old pop star embracing a Sasha Fierce-like alter ego, with the help of Future, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Macy Gray, and others.

Dangerous Woman

“You need a bad girl to blow your mind,” Ariana Grande taunted us in 2014 on “Bang Bang,” her smash-hit collaboration with Jessie J and Nicki Minaj. In that crowd, Grande didn't really seem like the bad girl; maybe she knew one she could fix you up with? As she told Complex the year before,“I don’t see myself as sexy and I’m not comfortable being sexy and dressing sexy. I don’t see myself ever becoming a sex symbol.” But she seems to have taken the “Bang Bang” lyric as a mood-board inspiration for her third album Dangerous Woman, which finds the 22-year-old trading in the mini-skirts, go-go boots, and cat ears for a Sasha Fierce-like alter ego. As a result, Grande spends most of Dangerous Woman coyly flirting with desire, “bad decisions,” and independence. “Something about you makes me feel like a dangerous woman,” she sings on the chorus to the slow-burning title track, which is a few qualifications away from actual danger. There's something about the whole album that feels a bit like Sandy in her skintight leather outfit at the end of Grease, only in Ari’s case, it’s a latex bunny mask.
At this point, there’s no question that Grande is a powerhouse vocalist, having earned her comparisons to Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, and Christina Aguilera circa *Back to Basics. (*Among her spot-on impersonations of those singers, Grande does an absolutely insane Aguilera impression, solidifying her spot as the diva’s millennial incarnation.) Grande’s four-octave range, impeccable control, and penchant for belting assures that no matter the lyrics or production, her music will always be strong in that regard. And as in her previous album My Everything, which was chock-full of bangers like the Zedd-produced “Break Free,” the production on her new Dangerous Woman is enormous, full of flirty pop eruptions and slinky dancefloor seductions. "Into You," produced and co-written by Max Martin and Alexander Kronlund, who helped pen some of Robyn’s best songs, might be Grande's best single since “Love Me Harder.”
So then where does Dangerous Woman struggle? In a rather forthcoming interview with Billboard, Grande described the album as “a 22-year-old girl comes into her own trying to balance growing up, love, and a lot of other bullshit along the way.” However, the listener comes away from Dangerous Woman feeling like they still don’t know much about the ponytailed lady peeping out from behind the mask. Grande has never touted herself as a Swiftian friend to all fans, but her slight reserve means that Dangerous Woman, paradoxically, feels safe, which acts in contradiction to the at least 19 times she sings a variation of “danger” or “dangerous” on the record.
*Dangerous Woman *opens with “Moonlight,” which was originally the title of the record and thusly should perhaps be viewed as a prologue. “Moonlight” offers the album’s closest thing to a ballad, all celestial romance and melismas. But its serenity is quickly steamrolled over by “Dangerous Woman,” the real introduction to the record. “Dangerous Woman” is a slinky, empowered, Bond theme of a belter; you can practically picture her sauntering down a grand staircase in a floor-length gown and fur on the way to seduce and destroy a lover. After the quake of “Dangerous Woman,” “Be Alright” and “Into You” are appropriately both cool, snappy little thumpers.
In the middle of this 15-track record, Dangerous Woman’s guest features feel underused and lackluster. Nicki Minaj’s verse on “Side to Side” is a far cry from the duo’s Pinkprint collaboration “Get on Your Knees” which found both women returning to the personalities of “Bang Bang,” Ariana as a doe-eyed vixen, Nicki as the tough-as-nails Queen. That chemistry is absent here and instead Minaj’s bored, reggae-tinged verse compliments neither women. Although Minaj once again relies on the sexual wordplay her last name provides, the verse feels rather PG. Lil Wayne’s appearance on “Let Me Love You” was one of Dangerous Woman’s more surprising features, yet perhaps predictably, Weezy seems sleepy. He manages to throw out the cringe-worthy line “She grinding on this Grande, oh lord,” and not even the obligatory “moolah baby!” saves him from sounding half-hearted.
Perhaps the most unsatisfying collaborator is Future. A majority of his contribution is repeating the song’s title, “Everyday,” making him Dangerous Woman’s more minimalist version of Big Sean on “Problem.” If Future’s sexual-devotion-filled verse was taken away, it would be immediately obvious that “Everyday” is constructed atop a pile of hot fluff. The only exception to this is Macy Gray’s “Leave Me Lonely,” which sets Gray’s raspy pipes against Grande’s flawless vocals, adding a welcome change of consistency. Smack in the middle of all these features is “Greedy,” a romp that announces that Grande truly shines when she is given center stage.
The second half of the record lacks the energy of the first. She continues to sing of growth and maturity from a former self (“I used to let some people tell me how to live and what to be but if I can’t be me then fucks the point?”) with the point being that she is now free in thought and action. As Minaj says on “Side to Side,” “young Ariana run pop.” This is indeed evident on Dangerous Woman, even if the results are uneven at times. Grande does not need to force any sort of spirit, she is full of it already. She just needs to find the Dangerous Woman within herself and let her break free.


Nominally a metal act, Inter Arma have anchored their full-length albums to itinerant bristling guitars and doubled-down drums, with sections that plunged alternately into doom’s lurch and death’s leaps. Their excellent new EP, featuring vocals from Windhand’s Dorthia Cottrell, consists of a single 46-minute piece that feels like a condensed and uncompromising version of the Richmond, Virginia quintet’s prevailing vision.

The Cavern EP

The long-form, one-track EP always seemed like a requisite step for Richmond, Virginia’s Inter Arma. Nominally a metal act, they’ve anchored both of their full-length albums to itinerant bristling guitars and doubled-down drums, with sections that plunged alternately into doom’s lurch and death’s leaps. At their best, though, Inter Arma function more as a gyre of genres than a unilateral machine; on last year’s standout Sky Burial, they integrated electric psych sprawl and acoustic pastoral interludes, working as five surly dudes not ashamed to admit that Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd were more lifelines than mere gateways. Inter Arma, however, have never been all-inclusive. They plucked from the musical multiverse with an unapologetic ear for the grand, where valleys implied multiple peaks and any sense of quiet only served to amplify the power to come. Despite its more staid moments, Sky Burial aimed for overall ascent. On that eight-piece album, where themes dissolved only to reappear, the divisions between tracks sometimes felt like commercial concessions for the group’s big Relapse Records debut. It’s not hard to imagine its hour-plus runtime moving uninterrupted, a direct line toward the heavens.
They finally do that on The Cavern, Inter Arma’s first single-song EP. Though the track lasts for 46 minutes, it feels like a condensed and uncompromising version of the quintet’s prevailing vision. The band climbs a slope of increasing momentum, where every step seems to find the action growing bigger and bolder. Though these kind of hour-long escapades can often suggest stunts by an act eager for a convenient concept and quick adulation, The Cavern feels like what Inter Arma should have done all along—fade into a piece, rip through an idea without hesitation, fade out of the piece, repeat. Written in 2009, The Cavern predates both Inter Arma LPs, but it was discarded until an employee at Relapse learned of its existence and urged the band to revisit it. After refining the composition, they finally captured it during a long session last year in Tennessee before gilding it with violin from former U.S. Christmas member Meg Mulhearn and vocals from Windhand singer Dorthia Cottrell. It’s the kind of commanding performance that both Inter Arma albums have implied, delivered now without hesitation or penance.
The Cavern centers around a story of epic death: The protagonist wakes in a desert and lingers at the precipice of mortality until, when the sun sets, a light emerges from a cave tucked inside a solitary mountain peak. He crawls toward the luminescent oasis, climbs inside and, as he falls asleep, realizes this will become his final resting place. As the song ends, he gives over to darkness, which takes the shape of a Persephone-like beauty “whose long hair veils her face.” Cottrell supplies the god voice during a gorgeous, kaleidoscope-sky midsection, her echoing vocals stretched between a nightmare and a daydream.
The narrative prevents the ever-fluid Cavern from becoming too formless, from shifting between moods or motifs without warning or reason. Sure, parts emerge wholly unexpected, such as an electrifying and Allman-like guitar turnaround that the band likes to revisit, or Cottrell’s sudden and august arrival. But even those aberrations fit into the meticulously framed whole, part of a comprehensive system. During the first 15 minutes, for instance, the band volleys between two sections—a slow, swollen trudge and a quickened, belligerent half-thrash; that’s when the subject first realizes he’s in peril, stranded in an inhospitable clime. The same surroundings return for the finale, when the hero realizes what he hoped was his salvation actually will be his downfall. The drums press harder, and the once-sharp riffs of the guitar fray at their ends, adding death’s door urgency. It’s a musical inclusio, the signposts pointing to how things have gone from pragmatically bad to existentially black.
The timing of The Cavern is fortuitous. Had Inter Arma released it ahead of both of their albums, especially before the Relapse deal, it’s easy to imagine the audacity being overlooked as a gimmick from a young, anonymous act. But Sundown and Sky Burial broadcasted the range of Inter Arma, or the limits to which they were willing to go to conjure an air of triumph. This reconfigured take on The Cavern, which arrives after the band has had a chance to mature on the road and in the studio, condenses and cements those elements, never allowing for any sign of an easy exit. It’s their most riveting release to date, a simple story charged by a complicated sound.


Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d city is fearless and brilliant, an unvarnished and nuanced peek into the rapper's inner life that ties straightforward rap thrills directly to its narrative.

good kid, m.A.A.d city

The first sound we hear on good kid, m.A.A.d. city is a prayer: "Thank you, Lord Jesus, for saving us with your precious blood," voices murmur, evoking a family dinner gathering. The album's cover art, a grubby Polaroid, provides a visual prompt for the scene: Baby Kendrick dangles off an uncle's knee in front of a squat kitchen table displaying a 40-ounce and Lamar's baby bottle. The snapshot is such an unvarnished peek into the rapper's inner life that staring at it for too long feels almost invasive. This autobiographical intensity is the album's calling card. Listening to it feels like walking directly into Lamar's childhood home and, for the next hour, growing up alongside him.
Lamar has subtitled the record "A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar", and the comparison rings true: You could take the album's outline and build a set for a three-act play. It opens on a 17-year-old Kendrick "with nothing but pussy stuck on my mental," driving his mother's van to see a girl named Sherane. As his voice darts and halts in a rhythm that mimics his over-eager commute, Lamar explores the furtiveness of young lust: "It's deep-rooted, the music of being young and dumb," he raps. The song is interrupted by the first of several voice mail recordings that delineate the album's structure: Kendrick's mother, rambling into his phone and pleading for him to return her car. These voicemails appear through the record, reinforcing that good kid, m.A.A.d city is partly a love letter to the grounding power of family. In this album's world, family and faith are not abstract concepts: They are the fraying tethers holding Lamar back from the chasm of gang violence that threatens to consume him.
All this weighty material might make good kid, m.A.A.d city sound like a bit of a drag. But the miracle of this album is how it ties straightforward rap thrills-- dazzling lyrical virtuosity, slick quotables, pulverizing beats, star turns from guest rappers-- directly to its narrative. For example, when "Backseat Freestyle" leaked last week, its uncharacteristic subject matter ("All my life I want money and power/ Respect my mind or die from lead shower") took some fans by surprise. But on the album, it marks the moment in the narrative when young Kendrick's character first begins rapping, egged on by a friend who plugs in a beat CD. Framed this way, his "damn, I got bitches" chant gets turned inside out: This isn't an alpha male's boast. It's a pipsqueak's first pass at a chest-puff. It's also a monster of a radio-ready single, with Kendrick rapping in three voices (in double- and triple-time, no less) over an insane Hit-Boy beat.
Lamar grew up in Compton, and ghosts of West Coast gangsta-rap haunt this album's edges, casting shadows on Kendrick's complicated relationship with his hometown. When "The Art of Peer Pressure" brings Kendrick and his friends to Rosecrans Ave., the music downshifts into menacing G-funk mode as a salute to hallowed ground. Ice Cube’s “Bird in the Hand” is invoked to set up “m.A.A.d city” (“Fresh of out school, 'cause I was a high-school grad..."), which appropriately marks the moment when real violence erupts. Here, Kendrick sounds like a terrified kid: "I made a promise to see you bleeding," he raps, his voice pitched at a pleading, near-hysterical sob. In response, the voice of Compton's Most Wanted rapper MC Eiht leers, "Wake yo' punk ass up," like a father figure of the Darth Vader variety.
Which brings us to the album's most visible benefactor and most unsettled presence: Dr. Dre. In recent months, Dre has availed himself of the fresh-career oxygen Kendrick's rise has pumped into his atmosphere, lumbering out of his corporate airlock to stand with Lamar on magazine covers. But the role he plays in Lamar's story feels muddled and unresolved. On an album that manages to seamlessly work a smirking Drake and a highly recognizable Janet Jackson sample ("Poetic Justice") into the fabric of a larger narrative, it is only Dre's appearance, on the final track "Compton", that feels like an uneasy outlier.
"Compton" is the victory lap, the coronation. Coming after the stunning 12-minute denouement "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst", in which Lamar delivers a verse from a peripheral character that is the album's most dazzling stroke of empathy, it can't help but be a small deflation. The moment of arrival in any artist's story is always less interesting than their journey, and there's a disconnect in hearing Lamar and Dre stunt over Just Blaze's blaring orchestral-soul beat. Dre's music is part of the landscape that Kendrick grew up in but his actual appearance has a certain Truman Show feel to it.
But the true ending of good kid, m.A.A.d. city takes place at the end of the previous song, "Real", which represents the spiritual victory that the album's story has thrashed its way towards. Finally grasping that "none of that shit"-- money, power, respect, loving your block-- "make me real," Lamar embraces what does, as his parents put the album's central concerns to bed: "Any nigga can kill a man," his father admonishes. "That don't make you a real nigga. Real is responsibility. Real is taking care of your motherfucking family." And his mother: "If I don't hear from you by tomorrow, I hope you come back and learn from your mistakes. Come back a man... Tell your story to these black and brown kids in Compton... When you do make it, give back with your words of encouragement. And that's the best way to give back to your city. And I love you, Kendrick."

Interscope / Aftermath / Top Dawg Entertainment


At a fraught time for young women in pop, the UK trio’s 2000 debut elevated candid songs about teenage girls’ hunger for experience by the mining sounds they might actually like.

Sugababes: One Touch (20th Anniversary Edition)

One Touch (20th Anniversary Edition)

In the rabble-rousing pantheon of UK girl groups, only the Spice Girls have had more domestic No. 1 singles (nine) than the Sugababes (six). The mutable British trio were a defining band of the 2000s—and yet this 20th anniversary reissue of One Touch, the debut album by the original line-up (held a year due to the pandemic), honors the potential future that founding members Keisha Buchanan, Mutya Buena, and Siobhán Donaghy were denied the chance to live out.
Their story is UK pop lore. Their debut single “Overload” arrived in September 2000, a “Starman”-on-Top-of-the-Pops moment for pre-teens fatted on the nation’s surfeit of trite post-Spice kid-pop and awed by their slick U.S. counterparts. It sounded like nothing else—perhaps the All Seeing I or Cornershop, not that we 11-year-olds knew that—with a bassline that skipped like a stuck record, a scrawl of a guitar solo, and an air raid siren climax in lieu of a middle eight. Its relentless tempo explained the seductive nihilism of the girls’ lyrics about hormonal overwhelm: There was no escaping its undertow.
And they were girls—Buena and Buchanan 15, Donaghy 16—lending the song an extra shade of unease. “Strange fear I ain’t felt for years/The boy’s coming and I’m close to tears,” Donaghy sings, her intimations of worldliness undercut by the sudden realization that she could very well be referencing playground games of kiss-chase. “Train comes/I don’t know its destination,” they sing in blithe harmony during the chorus, with a disquieting hint of sourness; “I’ll sleep with any man,” Buena exclaims between lines, deserted by reason.
In the video, the camera pans past their faces on a white background: aloof, unshowy, often conspiratorially cheek to cheek, staring out pityingly. Theirs was evidently a lower-budget operation than Destiny’s Child and TLC, their closest peers, and lightyears more laissez-faire than cheerful UK peers S Club 7, who pulled double duty playing themselves in a kids’ TV show. Their harmonies were understated, their UKG-tinged R&B off-kilter, their demeanor unruffled. In an interview for the irreverent TV show Popworld (another dearly departed UK pop cornerstone), Buchanan comments that they really should nail their choreography someday: “We can’t bother to remember it.” Sugababes were cool—to fans, critics, and members of Arab Strap alike.
Then less than a year later—four decreasingly successful singles, one album in like a bullet at No. 77—they were over, at least as we knew them. Said to be unhappy, Donaghy left and Buena and Buchanan were accused of bullying, a tenacious narrative with clear racist undertones that the group’s management did nothing to challenge. They were dropped from London Records owing to low sales of their debut but then signed to Island and bolstered by a new member: The video for the refreshed trio’s comeback single, “Freak Like Me” (itself a mash-up, a meta wink), depicted the original two subjecting blonde Heidi Range to a hazing ritual in a club. The lineup remained steady through 2005, providing the bulk of their commercial success, and then Buena was replaced; four years later, Buchanan was kicked out (her final album with the band was 2008’s tackily titled Catfights and Spotlights), leaving a full lineup of new brooms. Their distinctiveness waned accordingly.
The tumult made the band into a cruel punchline. As with so many pop women of their era, it took more than a decade for the original Sugababes to publicly reckon with forces way beyond their control as teenage girls, whose sometimes standoffish image clearly concealed no small amount of nervousness. Buchanan and Buena were childhood friends; the band was created by managers (despite being told to say they all met at a party), and the career hot-housing didn’t leave much room for bonding with Donaghy, who was also a school year older and studied separately from her bandmates. As they became commercially viable, their management team inflated from two to eight. (“We were like: Who are these people?” Donaghy said.) They played the trio off against one another, Buchanan recalled: “They’d whisper to one of us: ‘You should go solo.’ And to another of us: ‘So-and-so doesn’t like you.’” Child labor laws meant they were legally only allowed to promote their debut album 72 days a year, to the label’s disappointment. One Touch eventually peaked at No. 26, and that was it. Buchanan and Buena claimed that management made them hold auditions for Donaghy’s replacement when, unbeknown to them, Range had already been hired. The shifting sands told a bleak story about the precariousness of a girl’s status.
Despite the difficult circumstances surrounding their debut, One Touch remains the clearest place to hear the original Sugababes’ voices as young artists. One person the trio said really did listen to them was the album’s primary producer, Cameron McVey (husband of Neneh Cherry; dad of R&B singer Mabel, who slept through Sugababes studio sessions as a little kid). He sent them home with tracks and encouraged them to write, leaving them with credits on nine out of 12 songs. It feels symbolic to their fate that most of their lyrics negotiate a moment that’s slipping away, one where desire exceeds maturity (as well as their parents’ curfew). “I’ve got time and you can have it all,” they sing on the flinty, suspicious “One Foot In.” “As long as I’m not home too late.” Their contributions are self-evident: The three songs they didn’t write, “Soul Sound,” “Lush Life,” and the title track, lean towards bland aspiration.
The millennium was a complete shitshow when it came to public mores about young women’s sexuality: professionally sexualized by older men, yet pilloried for exploring it on their own terms. Sugababes’ songwriting explored a more truthful paradox, candid about the realities of a teenage girl’s hunger for experience, and the conflict between confidence and naivety. “Look at Me,” the first song they wrote together, is an icy plea for their parents to let them make their own mistakes. Some of the singing is barely in tune; added to the chorus, a glacially slow, direct appeal drenched in minor-key harmonies, the song becomes a stark confrontation, insisting to be accepted on one’s own terms.
They demand clarity from flaky guys and assert their worth (“I’m not your fashion accessory,” they sing on “One Foot In”) but later question whether they can trust their own feelings on “Real Thing,” a dreamy Janet Jackson echo in which the chorus melody rises in parallel with their hope that this might just be true love. Sometimes the friction occurs within a single song: “Just Let It Go” is a Destiny’s Child-lite debate over whether Buena should leave her bad boyfriend; her verses about needing this wastrel are notably more convincing than Donaghy and Buchanan’s rebuttals advising her to get over him and “find the sweetest rainbow,” which sound ripped from a teen magazine advice column. The tension, about not yet knowing enough to know what you might be missing out on, feels arrestingly true.
That beguiling awkwardness distinguishes One Touch musically, too. Sugababes’ prickly R&B wasn’t as boundary-pushing as anything by Aaliyah, a breakout artist in the UK that year, nor Destiny’s Child, but it revelled in introversion, discomfort, and intensity in a way that their fully neutered, jazz-handsy UK pop peers couldn’t. (Its closest spiritual predecessor in that sense might be Robyn’s 1995 debut, Robyn Is Here.) The album thrived on mining sounds that teenage girls from northwest London might actually like—UK garage, boom-bap, lilting West Coast pop—and rarely hewed to neatly resolving pop conventions. Sometimes that leaves it undercooked, and a few tracks are too self-consciously street—it’s peppered with wiki-wiki record scratching—which undermines the trio’s innate ability to sound worldly and terrifying.
Although they’re capable of beauty—the lovely, almost a capella “New Year” and “Soul Sound”—their harmonies are best suited to wraithlike taunting, often embodying a nagging conscience. Buchanan flits nimbly around the two-stepping “Same Old Story,” then the trio come together for one of their distinctively tapered and intimidating choruses. The synth tones of “Promises” shift uneasily between keys, the girls’ layered, downward-spiralling vocals assuring some fiend that their treachery is “coming back to haunt you.”
They reveal the weight of withstanding these pressures too: “Overload” and “Run for Cover,” both about feeling overwhelmed, bookend the album. The latter’s nervy piano, grave strings, and distorted drums are dramatic and isolated, grounding another discomfiting, unblinking chorus about shutting down in the face of emotional intensity. The album ends with a warning and a strike of self-protection: “You never seem to wonder/How much you make me suffer/I speak it from the inside,” they sing in severe harmony. It establishes a distance, making them tantalizingly unreachable.
That’s where they would remain. The swift dissolution of the original trio left them with a mythic status in UK pop: What might have been? Buchanan once said she had to stop listening to their “adorable” demos because it became too painful: “I would think, ‘Oh, if we were just left to it, we could have done so much.’” Maybe she’s referring to the songs that come with this expanded edition: Several are generically poppy, filled with banal lyrics about partying and devotion (and strangely affecting samples of era-specific mobile phone chimes). If anything, the fact that they didn’t make the original album makes its weird audacity that much more impressive. A couple push that strangeness further: “This Is What You Need,” with its Daft Punk-style vocal processing, post-Missy energy, and blurting production, could be a proto-Danny L Harle track.
True to that spirit, a (fairly unilluminating) disc of remixes and alternative versions features MNEK, Metronomy, and Blood Orange, the progressive, artist-first UK pop producers who worked with the trio when they reformed as MKS in 2012. Getting back together was a personal decision, Buchanan said: “People didn’t allow us to enjoy the experience the first time round.” Despite a few singles, a promised second album hasn’t materialized: Various songs were leaked online and then filleted for use by other artists, including Bananarama and James Arthur. Donaghy also cited “major legal complications,” and admitted that it had taken time for the trio to reckon with their relationships to one another.
The ongoing saga can feel somewhat like history repeating itself, ambitious women caught in an unwinnable system. The One Touch reissue isn’t so much a chance to revisit a classic album—it isn’t one—but an overdue gesture of respect for a group of girls whose long shadow defies any abiding idea that they were disposable.

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It's always great to hear a band known for their so-so records suddenly make one where everything clicks. Rilo ...

The Execution of All Things

It's always great to hear a band known for their so-so records suddenly make one where everything clicks. Rilo Kiley's self-titled debut was catchy and smart, but erratic; the follow-up, last year's Take Offs and Landings, came off as languid and lazily paced, with undistinguished writing. Now the L.A. quartet has recorded an album for Omaha, Nebraska's Saddle Creek-- home to Bright Eyes and The Faint, among countless others-- and it surpasses all of their earlier work: it's a dynamic album with intriguing lyrics, a country/folk shimmer, and explosive pop moments.
Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennett-- singers, guitarists, and incidentally, both grown-up child actors-- front the band and write the material. They're joined by Pierre de Reeder and Jason Boesel on bass and drums, and some eclectic guest musicians (some pedal steel, but also accordion, strings, and even a little vibraphone for color). Almost all of this stuff is used tastefully on the diverse material, and though this is their most complicated production so far, it stays loose enough for sudden explosions and guitar solo outbursts.
Lewis, singing lead on almost every song, is more restrained but more effective than on the earlier albums. She switches between two styles: at times she's blunt and plain-spoken, taking no shit and saying "fuck" a lot, which gets her compared to Liz Phair, everyone's favorite empowered indie rocker; at others, she takes on a quieter, melodic voice, marked by a bit of twang and a twinge of something doubtful-- an emotional edge that can be interpreted a dozen ways; it could hint that she doesn't believe herself, but more likely, that she doesn't think you believe her. This edge enriches her bitter lyrics and helps the ecstatic ones soar.
The words here are descriptive and articulate, but gracefully rendered. Perfect images and phrases litter the verses, some of them upbeat but more of them conflicted, like the scattered confrontations in "Paint's Peeling". Lewis also gets autobiographical in her almost stilted poetry on "And That's How I Choose to Remember It", a calliope-sounding song about her parents that's been cut in three pieces and (somewhat obtrusively) slipped between the main tracks.
Around these frequently bleak lyrics, Lewis and Sennett wrote catchy and energetic music, with perfect hooks and choruses that knock down the walls. "Paint's Peeling" and the title track have both entered "repeat" mode on my disc player, and the lilting strings on "Capturing Moods" are plain addictive. Blake Sennett's turn on the loping "So Long" and the anthemic "Three Hopeful Thoughts" are effective, as well; he isn't a striking singer or, let's face it, as charismatic as Lewis, but he's genuine enough to sell lines like, "I hope that I drive tonight/ Into the last of the great sunrises."
You could call The Execution of All Things a feel-good album, but there's enough going on that it rarely sounds like froth. Aside from a couple of twee missteps-- like the hyper-bouncy keyboards on "My Slumbering Heart"-- the band almost always hits the right tone: they do Americana without the alt-country cliches and cowpoke pacing, and the undercurrent of environmental concern is rich rather than blunt. So when they reach the last track, "Spectacular Views", they've earned a giddily big, vibrant California pop anthem, on which they completely let go and allow Lewis to take in the coast and the stars, screaming, "It's so fucking beautiful!" Who's gonna argue?


79-year-old samba icon and Brazilian national hero Elza Soares offers a searing, surging fusion that combines Afro-Brazilian styles with wiry, dissonant strands of punk and noise-rock.

Elza Soares: A Mulher do Fim do Mundo (The Woman at the End of the World)

There’s a story, often repeated, about Elza Soares’ big break. The future samba icon was just a teenager when she went on Rio de Janeiro’s “Calouros em Desfile,” a talent show whose name translates as something like “Freshmen on Parade.” The daughter of a washerwoman and a laborer, she cut a strange figure for a talent show, wearing an ill-fitting dress she had pilfered from her mother’s laundry, gathering and pinning its billowing extra fabric. The audience cackled as the show’s host, Ary Barroso, incredulously asked her, “What planet are you from?”
Soares didn’t bat an eye: “Planet Hunger.”
She wasn’t kidding. Soares, born in 1937 (by most accounts, anyway) in one of Rio’s favelas, grew up poor and desperate. At 12, her father had forced her into an abusive marriage with the neighborhood teen he believed was raping her. She had given birth to her first son at 13; by the time she was widowed at 21, she would have four more children. She gave up one for adoption; another died of malnutrition. It’s often said that she appeared on “Calouros em Desfile” in order to win the money she needed to buy medicine for her sick child.
It goes without saying that she won the show. Afterward, Soares would go on to develop one of the most distinctive voices in música popular brasileira, or MPB, adopting elements of scat singing and New Orleans jazz and making the most of her richly expressive rasp. Today she is fêted as a national hero: Her biographer José Louzeiro has declared her contributions to Brazil’s folk music analogous to Bessie Smith’s and Ella Fitzgerald’s to the blues.
Black, working class, and self-taught, Soares is the literal embodiment of the classic rags-to-riches story. But hardship has never loosened its grip upon her. She has endured exile, scandal, and racist opprobrium. She watched the love of her life, the legendary Brazilian soccer star Garrincha, spiral into alcoholism; he was drunk at the wheel in the accident that killed her mother. They split after he beat her, knocking out her teeth shortly before she was scheduled to appear for a television interview. Not long after he died of cirrhosis of the liver, penniless and forgotten, her son from that union died in another car wreck. All in all, she has lost five of her sons and daughters.
Soares is 79 now, and her latest album, A Mulher do Fim do Mundo (The Woman at the End of the World) marks the kind of record few artists ever make, much less iconic figures who could be reasonably expected to live out their remaining years resting comfortably on their laurels. The album is part autobiography, part reinvention, and all provocation, channeling both her life’s pain and her incredible resilience into an alloy that is by turns jagged and molten. Written by and recorded with a group of young experimental musicians from São Paulo’s “samba sujo” (or “dirty samba”) scene, including artistic directors Guilherme Kastrup and Rômulo Fróes and members of the bands Passo Torto and Metá Metá, it is a searing, surging work of fusion that combines Afro-Brazilian styles with wiry, dissonant strands of punk and noise-rock, where the Ex mingles freely with Tom Zé.
This is not morbid music; it is full of life, of spit and grit. This is an album in which a 79-year-old woman barks a snarling ode to the joys of fucking, “Pra Fuder”; it is an album in which a battered woman threatens to douse her abusive husband with boiling water, to parade him before the neighbors, to humiliate him in front of his mother (“Maria da Vila Matilde”). “Get him!” she shouts as the dog tears off after him, her voice ricocheting down a dizzy chain of dub delay. The combination of sounds and textures is nothing short of astonishing: the hardscrabble guitar-and-drum interplay; the horns, betraying the faintest hint of two-tone ska; and above all, her impossibly malleable voice, like a scrap of sandpaper turning into a tsunami. I don’t know of any other records that sound quite like this one: by turns wiry, warm, playful, and elegiac, it evokes twisting vines and cracked cement, with guitars that snake like the pichação graffiti of São Paulo and Rio.
The album doubles as a portrait of contemporary Brazil—a country beset by crises, including corruption scandals, the worst recession in over a century, a wave of police brutality, and a rising tide of anti-gay violence. The opening song, “Coração do Mar,” is a musical setting of a poem by the modernist writer Oswald de Andrade—a melancholy, imagistic meditation upon loss and slavery that becomes, in her weary recitation, something like an inverse national anthem. In the stirring title track, over bright cavaquinho and swelling strings, she sings a heart-rending ode to samba, carnival, and the lifesaving qualities of music itself. “I go on singing ’til the end,” she promises, and you can tell that she means it, her voice bristling like the hair on a dog’s back.
Soares has long advocated for the downtrodden (“I’m always singing to remind you that blacks exist,” she once said; “gays and prostitutes” too), and in “Benedita,” she pays tribute to a crack-addicted trans woman with a slug lodged in her flesh and a silver bullet in her pocket, “to kill the careless cop.” But Soares and her co-writers take more abstracted paths, too: The breezy “Firmeza” turns a brief encounter on the street into a wry, dissonant tone poem. “Dança,” a song about a dancing corpse, channels Tom Waits’ junkyard fantasias. And the cryptic, mournful “O Canal” sings of death and exodus in “the gleam of Alexander the Great’s lighthouse.” (The album’s excellent lyric sheet, including Portuguese and English translations and even footnotes for select cultural cues, goes a long way toward unlocking its intricacies.)
It all adds up to one of the year’s most original and exhilarating listens; that is equally true of its raucous, unorthodox fusions and its quietest, contemplative moments. Just as it opens with an a cappella, the better to highlight Soares’ inimitable voice—soft as a spring lawn, coarse as ground coffee—it closes with another, “Comigo.” The song begins with dark, droning tape loops, swollen as rain clouds, but they abruptly cease, ceding the stage to Soares alone. The song is about her mother; her voice wears the scars of a lifetime of grief. “I carry my mother with me/Even though she’s gone,” she sings, a hoarse, funereal lament. “I carry my mother with me/Because she gave me her own self.” You don’t need to understand the Portuguese to feel the weight of her words: It might be the saddest song you ever heard. She sounds exhausted, worn out, run into the ground by sorrow. But in every click in her voice, in every catch in her throat, there is also defiance. All these years later, the girl from Planet Hunger refuses to back down.


More namechecked than heard, Carey Mercer, Spencer Krug, and the rest of this B.C. band follow a series of small-scale studies with one of their best full-lengths to date.

Tears of the Valedictorian

Why is this valedictorian crying? For the classmates he's leaving behind? For that van full of kids who drove drunk into the storm ditch after prom? No, if the speaker is Carey Mercer, who fronts Victoria, B.C.'s Frog Eyes, he's bawling because he's supposed to be an adult now and what's more a man, but there are no men around, only military blowhards, craven merchants, and drunken dads.
Frog Eyes have been a band more namechecked than listened to, thanks to now-and-then keyboardist Spencer Krug's other groups (Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown), and Mercer's collaboration last year with Krug and Dan Bejar of Destroyer under the guise of Swan Lake. While Mercer shares his friends' elliptical and bombastic rhetoric, he's at once more of an orator and more of a synesthesist, working with smears and splatters more than melodies, and bringing his own fixations.
Tears of the Valedictorian is Frog Eyes' first substantial advance since 2003's The Golden River, which was a fanciful songcycle on a backdrop of ecological anxiety. The Folded Palm (2004) approximated the frenzy of their shows, but at the expense of the songs. The intervening mini-albums were pleasant small-scale studies. Valedictorian again mobilizes the band's full palette-- Mercer's wife Melanie Campbell's stomping drums and flat stutter cymbals, Krug's keyboards switching from crosshatch shadows to radiant showers, Michael Rak's grounding bass, Mercer's and McCloud Zicmuse's light-seeking insect guitars and, always, Mercer's gibbering, his croon, his grumbles, his yodeling yip.
Mercer stands in the lineage of rock frontman as half-carnival-barker, half-gnostic-preacher that Greil Marcus describes as the "crank prophet," from Screamin' Jay Hawkins through Arthur Lee of Love, Captain Beefheart, David Thomas of Pere Ubu, Tom Waits, and the Pixies' Frank Black. But Frog Eyes' sound owes more to early Roxy Music-- music that filtered out blues in favor of high modernism-- as well as advertising jingles and John Philip Sousa. In keeping with Victoria's Brit-dominated demographics, it also recalls English music hall, though the hall is on a riverboat and the river on fire.
Mercer's preoccupation here seems to be masculinity, as it often has been in rock, the music of boys coming of age. But unlike Mick Jagger or Bruce Springsteen (whose trace, as so often these days, shows up here in some surprising runs of piano fills and exhortations), Mercer is stalking the heath of manhood's ruination. He turns over artifacts of Romanticism like an anthropologist on a dig, sketching out the landscape and puzzling over how these dick-swinging ancients survived. His yowls are the cry of somebody waking up from history with a hangover-- "he was what the Poor call the Maimed," he sings-- as its dreams disperse over the horizon of legibility.
I don't mean to make Mercer sound like a nostalgist. His voice is nothing if not urgently present, struggling to pull his warring selves into some workable here and now. He invokes patriarchs just to dispose of them, from the "Roman ambassador" who is "torn apart by plaster and reassembled after" in the opener, "Idle Songs," to the "druken and besotted father figure" who's pushed out to sea on an ice floe in "Evil Energy, the Ill Twin of..." They stand between Mercer and a longed-for future in which the masculine spirit somehow gets sane and whole. Meanwhile, touchingly, that bad dad out on the ice "trembles and he trembles and he puts his heart on tremble."
Mercer breaks from the crank-prophet line in that he wants to defeat his solipsism, to hack his way out of the thicket of male ghosts and build relationships-- with nature, lovers, family, his band and the listener. This album is peppered with references to himself as singer, from the epic second track "Caravan Breakers, They Prey on the Weak and the Old" ("I bet you are sick of hearing songs about the trail") to the entrancing near-closer "Bushels", which assures "there's a colony in song" and ends on the simple statement, "I was a singer and I sang in your home." In between comes "The Policy Merchant, the Silver Bay", an acoustic, falsetto-sung ballad in which he teases, "Mercer is a merchant, a policy merchant/ He calls himself urgent!/ He gathers all of the urchins up in their tearaways/ He gathers them into his palm and then he sings 'Another Day.'"
These wry acknowledgments feel especially gracious from a singer who is so under siege by sound and by the unending, unpredictable demands of all the voices of past and future birthing and dying in his gullet. But that's what Frog Eyes achieves here, not just in the songwriting but in the band's new dynamic range and precision-- for the first time, there's space in their hermetic universe for the rest of us. It's graduation day.


The Boston hardcore band Converge are nearing the 25-year mark, though you might not guess it from the manic energy crammed into it their excellent eighth album, All We Love We Leave Behind. If you go beyond the amped, break-neck intensity and listen to the compositions, it becomes clearer: You don't just show up and write songs like this.

All We Love We Leave Behind

The brilliant hardcore band Converge have been around a long time, though you might not guess it from the manic energy crammed into their eighth album, All We Love We Leave Behind. If you go beyond the amped, break-neck intensity and listen to the compositions, it becomes clear the Boston band is nearing the 25-year mark: You don't just show up and write songs like this.
One of the quartet's not-so-secret weapons is Kurt Ballou, the guitarist (and backing vocalist, bassist, keyboardist, etc.), who happens to be one of the most well-regarded engineers in heavy music and an endless tinkerer who'd build a snare from scratch if it meant getting the sound he needed. The central core of vocalist/in-house artist Jacob Bannon and Ballou-- along with bassist Nate Newton and drummer Ben Koller, who both joined in 1999-- have been together long enough to know each other very well, and to play almost entirely to their own strengths. As such, there's never a dull moment across AWLWLB's 38 minutes. It's all peaks.
The record is the logical followup to 2009's Axe to Fall, my favorite record that year. Axe included a large supporting cast of friends and fellow travelers from Cave In, Disfear, Genghis Tron, the Red Chord, and Neurosis. It ended with a seven-minute song that seemed to include them all. When I spoke with Converge frontman Jacob Bannon a few weeks ago about AWLWLB, he said Axe to Fall had been the "collaborative concept taken to the extreme." This time, it's just the band and the watchful ear of Ballou. As Bannon put it, "There's no artificial distortion, triggers, or Auto-Tune on this album. It's all organic, it's real sounds that capture the way the band performs live."
From opener (and first single) "Aimless Arrow" onward, the music here is mostly fast, compact, and coiled. That's Converge in general, but they've distilled the elements to even tauter extremes this time. The technical mastery is mind-blowing, as is the way they manage to squeeze in brutal melodies and hooks. The vocal lines seem to be woven into the guitars, to which they've also added a bluesier feel, a detail that reminds me of the classic post-Negative Approach Touch and Go band Laughing Hyenas-- or even the Jesus Lizard. It's a streamlined, live-sounding collection that can feel like one giant kick to the head. But they know when to give, take, and plop in a slow-grind blues riff. Tracks overlap and echo. When they slow things down to a momentary crawl with the album's longest song, the five-minute doom ballad "Coral Blue", it's like a chair's been pulled out from behind you. You get that in the middle of the two-minute "Empty on the Inside" as well as the instrumental "Precipice", an interstitial piece with piano, clean guitars, psychedelic soloing guitars, and deep-factory/chain-gang percussion. "All We Love We Leave Behind" picks all of that up gorgeously.
As overwhelming as AWLWLB may be on first listen, it's really not all speed. There's a thing people say about young professional quarterbacks, about how they need experience before the game "slows down." You get that on this album, too. In my interview with Bannon, he said: "I feel that the current generation of listeners of heavy music are progressing a bit past their gateway bands and are digging deeper than they used to and understanding more abrasive and complex music and art. It's like being around an unfamiliar language long enough that it eventually begins to make sense." I agree with this, and it's the reason why Converge are a band with plenty of fans who weren't close to being born when the band formed in 1990.
Of course, there's plenty for older audiences, too-- aging, death, decisions, punk as a way of life, and the way these things preoccupy you when you go past 30 are largely what this album is about. (It all opens with "Aimless Arrow"'s "To live the life you want/ You've abandoned those in need"). Bannon describes the grizzled two-minute anthem "Shame in the Way" as a song about "feeling fragmented from the traditional concept of family." He adds, "As I've gotten older, I've worked on mending the things I can, while being conscious of the things I can't repair." You get this on the genuinely moving title track, too. Bannon calls it "an open letter to the things that I feel I've left behind in order to pursue an artistic and musical direction in my life." He says it was inspired in part by the death of his beloved dog, Anna Belle, but there's a lot more than that here: It's a classic hardcore anthem, one that looks at the decision to live a life in a particular way, and it might bring you to tears if you hear it right. Really, more than the past couple of Converge albums, AWLWLB feels like a hardcore record.
We live in a period of compression, where there's more stimulation and less time for reflection-- but we're also continually presented with a repackaged, slightly off past. Nostalgia is music's biggest seller, it seems. The thing is, underground bands that formed in 1990 are often getting back together in 2012 for reunion tours, not eighth albums. The irony of the title, of course, is that Converge are also a lesson in not leaving behind what matters. "Predatory Glow" ends the record with the lines: "Let the future know/ I won't be there tomorrow/ Let the past know/ I gave them my all/ I'm aching for an end/ Grown thinner every day/ I bow down to you/ Extinguished youth." When I asked about the song, Bannon explained: "I am far from an 'old' person in human terms, however I've spent over half my life immersed in the punk rock and hardcore community. I am not wholly defined by that as a person, but it is something that has been part of me for a long time."
And it will be, until he dies. AWLWLB is an example of building on and mastering the music you loved when you were younger-- something that became more than music, ultimately-- so that it has a chance to grow old with you without becoming any less vital.


The surprise release of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, a retail mixtape arriving on the six-year anniversary of Drake's star-making So Far Gone, has inspired much speculation: Is it a ruse to close out his Cash Money deal? But the music itself gives Drake room to breathe outside the lumbering commercialism of his studio albums.

Drake: If You're Reading This It's Too Late

If You're Reading This It's Too Late

Death is the only certainty for rap dynasties. One year it’s "All About the Benjamins" and the next it’s Lincolns and Washingtons. Cash Money Records has escaped the fate of the Roc-A-Fellas and Bad Boys thanks to the enduring genius of Bryan "Baby" Williams, AKA Birdman. Birdman’s business acumen and A&R smarts carried Cash Money through three distinct eras, from the late '90s Hot Boys heyday through Lil Wayne’s mid- to late-2000s bid for "Best Rapper Alive" to the current YMCMB incarnation featuring Drake and Nicki Minaj. (With Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan he seems to be training still another army.) The wheels appeared to come off of the Cash Money machine for good, however, on a random December afternoon when Wayne gave a curt Twitter update on his long-gestating Tha Carter V album, blaming Birdman and Cash Money for the holdup and demanding an exit from the label he’s called home most of his life. He’s since initiated an audacious $51 million lawsuit requesting not only his own exit but that of Drake and Nicki Minaj as well.
Drake and Nicki have been smartly mum on the split (well, word around town is Birdman was barred from Minaj’s Grammy party earlier this month), but years of whispers about Drake being owed substantial back royalties were publicly validated with the surprise release of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, a retail mixtape arriving on the six year anniversary of Drake’s star-making So Far Gone. If You’re Reading This is littered with pith for Drake’s label situation ("No Tellin’": "Envelopes coming in the mail, let her open ‘em/ Hoping for a check again, ain’t no telling," "Star67": "Brand new Beretta, can’t wait to let it go/ Walk up in my label like ‘Where the check, though?’"), and all of this surfacing weeks after Wayne’s lawsuit bombshell raises a few questions. Is this release a ruse to close out Drake’s Cash Money deal? Is the absence of Birdman from the mixtape’s lengthy thank you's an oversight or an intentional slight? Is the title a dig?
If You’re Reading This arouses many unanswered questions on a business front, but where it truly delivers is giving Drake room to breathe outside of the lumbering commercialism of his retail albums. There’s little in the way of obvious singles here, (though the Ibiza bop "Preach" might find a chart by accident). Instead we get a spectral late-night longing not unlike that of So Far Gone touchstones "Lust for Life" and "Successful". The pre-fame queasiness of early Drake is now the loneliness of a distrustful despot. On "10 Bands" he’s holed up in a home studio for weeks pushing himself to create ("Drapes closed, I don’t know what time it is/ I’m still awake, I gotta shine this year"). "Know Yourself" celebrates the thrill of mobbing through a city that’s his for the taking, but even in joy there’s a note of tension and the ever-present possibility of actual danger. ("I ain’t rock my jewelry, and that’s on purpose/ Niggas want my spot and don’t deserve it.") Success creates as many problems as it solves.
Music is the real joy for Drake, and If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late is best enjoyed as an exercise in the casual excellence of the artist as rhymer and purveyor of hooks. The vocals are often just vampy flow experiments, but at their best these verses exhibit the weightless exhilaration of a technician at work. Drake’s never more formidable than when he’s shadowboxing, and at its flashiest, If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late feels like his Rocky run. Inspired by gauntlet tosses from adversaries high and low, Drake uses the mixtape to toast and taunt a rogue’s gallery of industry frenemies. For Diddy, who reportedly punched him over ownership of the beat for "0 to 100/The Catch Up": "Real quick, man, you couldn’t’ve hated that/ Let’s be real, nigga, you couldn’t’ve made it that." For disgruntled labelmate Tyga, who insulted Drake in a Vibe magazine feature: "You need to act your age and not your girl’s age." For friend-turned-rival Kendrick Lamar: "They gon’ say your name on them airwaves/ They gon hit you after like it’s only rap."
On If You’re Reading This, all of this chest beating is delivered over the most darkly hypnotic beats Drake’s graced since So Far Gone. Much of the mixtape foregoes the supervision of his producer-in-residence Noah "40" Shebib, but 40’s codeine-soul aesthetic is the ghost in the machine. The PARTYNEXTDOOR showcase "Wednesday Night Interlude" matches the OVO signee’s pleading vocal to a chunk of Canadian producer Ekali’s ethereal "Unfaith", itself an interpolation of Ciara and Future’s "Body Party". Ginuwine and Timbaland’s 2000 classic "So Anxious" is sampled twice, soundtracking the slow-cooking opener "Legend" and the 40 contribution "Madonna". Where R&B sounds aren’t incorporated directly, their thick sensuality is frequently hinted at. The pace of the mixtape rarely elevates past a crawl, reveling in the moody, winding instrumentals and hooky sentimentality of Boi-1da, PARTYNEXTDOOR and newcomers Wondagurl, SykSense, and Sevn Thomas without worrying about posting upbeat knockers to Top 40 radio.
In the days to come you’ll read that Drake "pulled a Beyoncé" with the stealth drop of If You’re Reading This, and yes, both are surprise releases from A-list artists topping the charts without a rollout or much in the way of an advance warning. But Radiohead’s In Rainbows is the better comparison: Both records found the artists revisiting the mood of a highly regarded early work as they transition into new methods of delivering music to fans. Whether the Drake tape is a clever track dump disguised as an album with the intent of worming out of his Cash Money deal, a deliberately planned gesture to tide fans over until the upcoming Views from the 6, or just an exercise in shirking the protracted waits and missed dates of the retail rap game, If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late winningly employs the occasion of the So Far Gone anniversary to revisit the twilight consternation of Drake’s breakout release, perhaps to close out a chapter of his career on the same note on which it began.


It could be said that Liz Phair's greatest asset has always been her inability to write a perfect pop ...

Liz Phair

It could be said that Liz Phair's greatest asset has always been her inability to write a perfect pop song. On her 1993 debut, Exile in Guyville, Phair's gruff voice wrapped awkward non-hooks around flimsy, transparent chord progressions, resulting in (to everyone's surprise) a certifiable indie roadtrip classic. It still stands as a powerfully confrontational album, skirting convention yet marked by Phair's striking awareness of her own limitations.
Unfortunately, it seems that Phair has spent the better part of her post-Exile career trying to gloss over the very limitations that made her original statement so profound. Though her second album, Whip-Smart, had a few choice moments which recalled the insight and complexity of Exile, it ultimately seemed like a much more calculated affair. Things didn't start to go horribly awry, of course, until Phair's next album, Whitechocolatespaceegg. That record's attempts to radio-ize her sound only dismantled the depth of her music-- if not the awkwardness-- resulting in an odd batch of songs that perhaps encapsulated Phair's faulty view of what constitutes a radio-friendly album.
Ten years on from Exile, Liz has finally managed to achieve what seems to have been her goal ever since the possibility of commercial success first presented itself to her: to release an album that could have just as easily been made by anybody else. Even the songs on Liz Phair that could be considered "shocking" or "profound" are gratuitous and overdetermined, eschewing the stark and accusatory insights of Exile in favor of pointless f-bombs, manipulative ballads, and foul-mouthed shmeminism.
Liz Phair has always been known for her vulgarity, but on Exile and parts of Whip-Smart, she put that trait to good use. On "Fuck and Run", a standout from Exile, Phair used the word's negative connotations as a means of pointed self-deprecation and lamented, "Whatever happened to a boyfriend/ The kind of guy who makes love cause he's in it/ I want a boyfriend/ I want all that stupid old shit/ Letters and sodas." "Flower", Phair's most notorious track to date, reads like a laundry list of graphic sexual desires, but rather than paint a uniformly flattering portrait of her love interest, he's immature, he's obnoxious, and despite it all, she still wants to fuck his brains out-- a simple, necessarily crude semi-contradiction that speaks volumes.
"Flower" would seem to have a descendent in "H.W.C." ("Hot White Cum"), in which Phair extols the virtue of semen as a beauty aid ("...Dear Cosmo: Splooge, The New Rouge!"). But, unlike the complex, alternatingly cocky and self-effacing sexuality of "Flower," "H.W.C."'s unqualified sperm-praise is entirely vain and degrading. Even more degrading is the constipated donkeyfuck harmonica solo towards the track's end, a hilarious sideshow that only magnifies the triteness of the song's glycerin-slick production.
Though "H.W.C." is without question the best water-cooler conversation piece on Liz Phair, "Rock Me" makes for a close second. Here, Phair sings exuberantly about the benefits of an affair with a younger guy including-- I shit you not-- "[playing] Xbox on [his] floor." In between choruses of, "Baby baby baby if it's alright/ Want you to rock me all night," Phair declares, "I'm starting to think that young guys rule!" without a trace of self-doubt or reflection. It's hard to imagine that the Liz Phair of ten years ago wouldn't have had something profound and devastating to say about older women who shack up with clueless college kids, but on "Rock Me"-- as on the rest of Liz Phair-- vapid, cliché-filled rhyme couplets dominate.
Take, for example, the album's first single, "Why Can't I", "co"-written by Avril Lavigne songwriting team The Matrix. With a chorus of, "Why can't I breathe whenever I think about you?" and a cookie-cutter rock/pop background, the song could easily pass for Michelle Branch. The lyric, "We haven't fucked yet/ But my head's still spinning," seemingly seeks to set Phair apart from the teen-pop crowd, but the use of the word is completely gratuitous-- change it to "kissed" and stick a 16-year-old girl in front of the mic and no one could tell the difference.
Only on "Little Digger" does Phair attempt to tackle subject matter unique to the circumstances of her own life as a 36-year-old single mother. The song has received positive press for addressing a difficult issue, as Phair sings to her son about his absent father and the new men she's dating. But the fact that anything positive could be said about this track speaks only to the overwhelming lack of substance on this record. From its cloying synthstring arrangements to its ballad-in-a-box drumbeat to its infuriatingly manipulative chorus of, "My mother is mine," "Little Digger" offers up all the insight and emotion of a UPN sitcom.
In recent interviews, Phair has been upfront about her hopes of mainstream success, and claims full awareness that Liz Phair is likely to alienate many of her original fans. What she doesn't seem to realize is that a collection of utterly generic rocked-out pop songs isn't likely to win her many new ones. It's sad that an artist as groundbreaking as Phair would be reduced to cheap publicity stunts and hyper-commercialized teen-pop. But then, this is "the album she has always wanted to make"-- one in which all of her quirks and limitations are absorbed into well-tested clichés, and ultimately, one that may as well not even exist.


Six years after Vol. 2, the latest label compilation obliterates the notion that there’s any one PC Music sound. It’s the work of producers interested in self-expression and the shifting grounds of pop music.

PC Music, Vol. 3

Despite PC Music’s high-concept visuals, shapeshifting production, and ambitious collaborations with multinational beverage corporations, the aims of the label are modest. For founder A. G. Cook, running the boundary-pushing record label has always been about releasing music that feels honest and intimate, first and foremost. He told Interview Magazine that when he makes tracks, it’s as if his computer is an extension of himself. “My brain is just operating on a different level,” he said. “[My computer] feels like a part of me.” Over the years, he’s made it clear that if he and his collaborators are making “personal computer music,” the emphasis is first and foremost on the “personal.”
PC Music Volume 3—a mix of new tracks and songs released since 2016’s Volume 2—is the first of the label’s compilations to fully deliver on that promise. In the label’s earliest days, it could feel like there was a house style of sorts—especially since Cook had his hands in so many of the label’s most memorable plasticine productions—but Volume 3 obliterates the notion that there’s any one PC Music sound. No matter the genre—from cyborg radio refractions to acid-burned rave memories—each track feels intensely detailed and emotionally rich, the work of producers as interested in self-expression as they are focused on shifting notions of what pop music can sound like.
In the case of some of the artists collected on Volume 3, that means edging ever closer to music that’d genuinely be fit for the Billboard charts. A. G. Cook’s “Xcxoplex,” for example, welcomes Charli XCX for a euphoric rework of one of his solo songs, and it sounds, in places, like the sort of euphoric EDM track that would have once soundtracked kids grinding their teeth at Electric Zoo. But Cook’s never been the sort of artist to embrace pure pleasure; the most ecstatic moments are cut with digital noise, rhythmic contortions, and pitch-shifted harmonies. Even as the timbre of pop music shifts toward more outré sounds—the head-spinning sonics of hyperpop, digicore, and plugg have emerged from the internet underground since the last PC Music compilation—Cook’s productions are still wonderfully jarring. Other dreamy efforts like caro♡’s “over u” and Namasenda’s “☆” (which features French singer-producer Oklou) are a little less complicated. This approach can be a virtue for pop music, but some of these moments feel a bit weightless in the context of a PC Music compilation that’s full of complex, rich takes on otherwise recognizable sounds.
Still, other familiar faces from the PC Music catalog show up to turn in some of their most memorable melodies. Hannah Diamond offers up a hyperreal love song on “Invisible.” Felicita teams with Caroline Polachek for the dramatic piano ballad “marzipan.” Danny L Harle offers a dreamy dance track with Clairo on “Blue Angel.” Many of these tracks were previously released, so Volume 3 feels a little like a Greatest Hits of the last half-decade of PC Music—a celebration of how far they’ve come since their last compilation. They’re working with stars now, but they still feel like pop iconoclasts, pushing their collaborators to try out new and strange sounds.
They’ve established the outer limits of pop and dance music over the better part of the last decade, and they still sound at their best when they’re diving into the unknown. A pair of tracks from the Brooklyn-based producer umru represent some of the compilation’s most futuristic sounds. “Check1,” featuring Tommy Cash and glitch-rap mutant 645AR, is powered by a menacing yet minimal beat that sounds like a UK drill track caved in upon itself. “Popular,” a 2018 single featuring 100 gecs’ Laura Les, is full of warped electronics and smeared technicolor melodies. But unlike a lot of digitalist pop released in its wake, it’s focused and straightforward, clearly the work of a producer who understands careful songcraft, yet decided to disregard it altogether.
It’s in these moments that PC Music Volume 3 feels the most singular. When Lil Data torches the edges of acid techno on “Burnnn” or when Planet 1999 sends shoegaze beyond the stratosphere on “Party,” there’s a sense that PC Music aren’t done yet. Even as some of the label’s efforts edge closer to the mainstream, there will always be room on PC Music for producers who want to uncover new worlds altogether.


Fury’s debut LP is a proud revival of the Orange County youth crew hardcore tradition. It is a devastating work of emotional and philosophical inquisitiveness that, yes, you can totally punch shit to.

Paramount

“Are these shouts in bravery/Or announced recklessness?” So screams Jeremy Stith at the start of “Death Yellows Life and Reason,” a high point of Fury’s debut full-length, Paramount. It’s one of the most powerful and passionate hardcore records of the year so far. Stith is raging, sure, but he’s just as apt to lash inward as outward. Bravery or recklessness? It’s not only a question to ask oneself as the frontman of a hardcore band—it’s a conundrum leveled at the hardcore subculture as a whole. But the beauty of Paramount is that it transcends the scene entirely. It is a devastating work of emotional, even philosophical inquisitiveness that, yes, you can totally punch shit to.
Fury hails from California’s Orange County, and there’s weight to that. In the ’80s, youth crew hardcore had a stronghold in the area, thanks to the label Wishingwell and straightedge bands like Unity, Uniform Choice, Insted, and No for an Answer. Fury draw a lot from their geographic forebears: Paramount is built around the youth crew infrastructure of hoarse vocals, chunky riffs, and whiplash breakdowns, with trickles of melody bleeding through. On “Thin Line,” fluid chords flow into palm-muted tension; “In Extremis” slows the aggression to simmer. But as tight, tuneful, dynamic, and immaculately crafted as the music is, it’s Stith’s lyrics that elevate them. “Unworthy sculptors/Poor young knives/They’ll do what they’re told/Lost, unwanting,” goes the opening line of “In Extremis,” meshing cryptic symbolism with the howling, accusatory tone of vintage youth crew—a finger that stabs both ways.
Paramount is a proud revival of that Orange County tradition, but oddly enough, the album more closely resembles two legendary East Coast bands from the ’80s: Youth of Today (who released their debut album on Wishingwell) and Bold (who almost released their debut album on Wishingwell). The lunging intro to Paramount’s “Duality of Man” calls to mind Youth of Today’s anthem “Break Down the Walls;” the unrelenting turmoil, pinpoint riffage, and dark undercurrent of Bold’s Speak Out infuses “Damage Is Done.” The youth crew paradox—pissed off and cathartic yet introspective and inspirational—is where Fury’s real reverence comes into play, though. They’re not going through the motions. They’re reimagining one of hardcore’s most vital, specific subgenres as something bigger and more universal, an exploration of what motivates us and holds us back, and what that costs us, as both members of tribes and as individuals. Or in the words of “Duality of Man:” “Lost and aweless/I paid to be free/Found solace in what’s ahead of me.”
As progressive as the album is, “The Feeling” yanks it into another dimension entirely. The four-minute-plus closing track seem to pound along for 10 times that, and it still ends too soon. Churning and metallic—with a dive-bombing dogfight between guitarists Madison Woodward and Alfredo Gutierrez that ventures into early-Fugazi territory—it parallels the turn toward longer compositions, broader influences, and more intricate dynamics that hardcore took in the late ’80s, just before post-hardcore came into its own. The song simply seethes—a nest of exposed nerves clenched in check and spit out through some savage force of will. As always, though, Stith is on a quest. In a voice as big as oblivion, he ponders how open-heartedness can coexist with the pain it inevitably brings.
Ultimately, it’s not the pain that wins. On the caustically euphoric “The Fury”— which might as well be the band’s theme—Stith urges, “Take the fury/Turn it into something positive,” chewing each syllable like it’s made of glass. He isn’t just tapping into the rich legacy of youth crew optimism, from Unity’s “Positive Mental Attitude” to Youth of Today’s “Positive Outlook;” he and the rest of Fury are walking it like they talk it, plunging headfirst into hardcore’s nihilism and clawing out a raw new hope for the future.


The two rappers and producer strike a devious, almost perfect balance on their mixtape released on Halloween, where supernatural frights are replaced by guns and goons.

21 Savage / Offset / Metro Boomin: Without Warning

Without Warning

Without Warning is obviously rap music as horror film expressionism. Released on Halloween by buzzing Atlanta trap rappers 21 Savage and Migos’ Offset with super-producer Metro Boomin, the mixtape carries all the signifiers in its lyrics, allusions, and sonic cues: eerie cackling, howling winds, jump-scares, skeletons, goblins, bloody Phantoms, Grim Reapers, Jason, and Nightmare on Elm Street. 21 Savage and Metro Boomin know a thing or two about turning murder to bloodsport, as they showed on their 2016 mixtape Savage Mode, which serves as a gory precedent for Without Warning. Now with Offset—one of the most outstanding rappers of 2017—along for the ride, the trio have produced a punishing mixtape where supernatural frights are replaced by guns and goons. The bad guys win.
In the run-up to Without Warning, Metro Boomin has had several run-ins with the project’s billed co-stars. After Savage Mode, he played full-time producer on Gucci Mane’s Droptopwop and Nav’s Perfect Timing. Both of those mixtapes had standout features from Offset—on “Met Gala” and “Minute,” respectively. Soon after, Metro produced the majority of 21 Savage’s debut, Issa Album, which had its own sleeper hit, “Bank Account.” 21 and Offset crossed paths—albeit with Offset as a part of the Migos Ghidorah—on Mike WiLL Made-It’s “Gucci On My,” and the pair teamed-up with Metro as a threesome for the first time on DJ Khaled’s “Iced Out My Arms.” These collaborations mostly yielded mixed results, but Without Warning maximizes the potential of this unholy trinity.
In some sense, 21 Savage and Offset seemed like an odd couple coming into this. They have decidedly different methods: 21 is hostile and inhuman, rapping with the wooden, lifeless delivery of someone numb to violence; Offset is adrenalized and fun-loving, constantly in motion with tightly-wound, precisely-measured, fiercely-performed meters. But they weirdly complement each other here. They each get solo showings but they work mostly in tandem. Offset helps to fill the gaps in 21’s affectless, foreboding execution, keeping those disinterested murmurs from flatlining. Wherever 21’s performances are lacking, Offset adds a touch of showmanship; wherever Offset’s raps become too dense, 2l presents simplicity, concision, and clarity. On “Darth Vader,” Offset raps, “Runnin’ from the demons, angels in my dream when I’m leanin’/Tec-9 wit’ the beam/Don’t nobody move before the shit start ringing.” 21 makes the ideas much more direct: “My dog lost his life and it changed me/I’m poppin’ Percocets ’cause the pain deep/Peel a hot box then we did a drive-by/Get your kids out the street we finna slide by.” One amplifies the other.
The spooks and scares on Without Warning are so contrived and so exaggerated that they just make for big fun. 21 Savage and Offset aren’t undead stalkers or masked slayers but they might as well be. “Wear a hoodie man, I’m the boogie man,” 21 snarls, like a gleeful serial killer taking great pleasure in his conquest: “Another nigga dead, another family scared/Tryna duck the feds.../Paint the city red...” Offset turns pop-up horror fixations into the cornerstone of his cloaked persona. “Come in the middle of the night, like it’s a nightmare/You open your eyes, not dreamin’, nigga we right there,” he raps on “Nightmare.” They dare to reimagine real-life gangland terrors as torture porn. This is Halloween if Michael Myers was Menace II Society’s O-Dog.
Sound design is key to a release like this, and Metro constantly finds the right balance between ghostly and ghastly, striking a tone dark enough for a shudder yet bracing enough for an adrenaline rush. Even counting the gory shriekers on Savage Mode, Metro’s productions have never been this sinister or blood-splattered, dripping bright reds and cloudy carmines. Songs like “Mad Stalkers” and “Run Up the Racks” trade on the pulse-raising booms of 808 drums and minor-key notes. The flourishes are subtle but impactful: the seamless segue from 21’s “My Choppa Hates Niggas” to Offset’s “Nightmare,” the understated tectonic shift beneath the Offset verse on “Rap Saved Me,” the drum programming on “Still Serving,” which bottoms out every few stanzas. Each drop a death rattle ringing out through a deserted town. A campy fiendishness hangs over proceedings like a fog.
The solo songs are as strong as the duets (Offset gets his chance to explode and go full showman on “Ric Flair Drip,” and 21 gets his chance to mutter threats on “Run Up the Racks”), and the tape never loses sight of what it is: a Halloween treat. It’s short and cohesive, an enjoyable and uncomplicated 33 minutes of sheer exhilaration, filled with stings, itches, and cold chills. In one form or another, the collaboration comes as a surprise to all of us, arriving suddenly and carrying within the electricity and satisfaction of a good scare.


Sturgill Simpson’s outstanding album under a new stage name expertly balances cosmic and outlaw country and reintroduces himself as the premier Nashville outsider.

Johnny Blue Skies / Sturgill Simpson: Passage du Desir

Passage du Desir

Who the fuck is Sturgill Simpson? Folks have been asking that question ever since A Sailor’s Guide to Earth was surprise-nominated for the 2016 Grammy for Album of the Year alongside Beyoncé, Drake, Justin Bieber, and eventual winner Adele. It became a meme for a few months, with Sturgill even selling T-shirts and sporting a new one at Bonnaroo that read, “Who the fuck is asking?” It all seemed like a good joke at the time, maybe even a pointed commentary on how talent goes unrecognized in Nashville, but the question sums up Simpson’s career; nobody has been asking more than the man himself. He posed it repeatedly on his first three albums, which, in retrospect, form a loose trilogy about losing and finding himself—in Nashville (2013’s High Top Mountain), in the cosmos (2014’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music), and on the high seas (Sailor’s Guide).
Since that Grammy nomination, however, Sturgill has become much harder to pin down, for himself and for us. He seemed to get lost in different roles: first the guitar shredder on the 2019 manga soundtrack SOUND & FURY, then the bluegrass auteur on not one but two acoustic albums, and finally an outlaw troubadour on the song cycle The Ballad of Dood & Juanita. After rupturing his vocal cords in 2021, he announced his retirement from touring, then unretired for a short tour earlier this year. But he is still making good on his promise to record no more than five albums of new material, which represent “the traditional Christian narrative of the journey of the human soul.” The bluegrass records don’t count because they’re almost entirely retreads of older songs. And his latest is not technically a Sturgill Simpson album.
Credited to Johnny Blue Skies, Passage du Desir is simultaneously two things that seem completely contradictory. It’s the first album Simpson has released under a pseudonym, and it’s also the true follow-up to A Sailor’s Guide to Earth. In addition to ditching his given name, he chucks most of the R&B horns and Bakersfield riffs that punctuate his previous songs in favor of percolating percussion, cosmic string arrangements, and bluesier guitars. This is country music caught between earthiness and spaciness, and it reintroduces him as one of Nashville’s oddest artists, who understands and subverts both the square mainstream and the outlaw fringes of country music. It’s been only three years since Dood & Juanita, but Passage still feels like a comeback.
The album opens on the high seas, the same longitude where Sailor’s Guide left off. The Navy enabled him to see the world and find himself, but on “Swamp of Sadness,” the ocean is a place of confusion, peril, and suffering. Passage is wracked with tribulation, full of death and disconnection and dreams of escape. On the yacht-country “Scooter Blues,” ostensibly the album’s most upbeat song, Sturgill fantasizes about leaving Nashville and self-exiling to some unnamed island. The accumulation of details—rhyming “chocolate milk and Eggos” with “steppin’ on Legos,” taking up kickboxing to stay in shape—suggests that this is no idle reverie but a path to freedom: a way to lose one self and gain another. “Gonna hop on my scooter and go down to the store. When people say are you him, I’ll say not anymore.”
If his lyrics address various strains of alienation, the music on Passage du Desir engages with all sorts of sounds and styles and scenes. He may be the only major Nashville artist who has Can and Amon Düül in his collection, who hears in ’70s country a kind of avant-garde impulse. Sturgill is at his most cosmic on “Jupiter’s Faerie,” which raises a glass to an old friend who died before they could make amends. The story is bound to Earth, but the music imagines an afterlife in the vacuum of space: a peaceful vision of heaven, at least for seven and a half minutes. On closer “One for the Road,” he indulges some of his shredding but without the aggression and ostentation of SOUND & FURY. That’s fitting for what sounds like a breakup song, especially one where he tries to remain stoic in the face of the pain he’s causing and feeling.
All of this heartache is filtered through the persona of Sturgill the Grammy-nominated country artist, as though he can’t quite escape that particular identity. Songs about the glare of the spotlight can risk sounding hermetic at best and whiny at worst, especially when so many deserving artists would love to have their lives changed by a hit album. Wisely, Sturgill plays up alienation over celebrity, which makes these songs more relatable. Essentially, he’s echoing a very different Johnny: Take this job and shove it. Who hasn’t wondered who they are separate from what they do? Who hasn’t dreamed of shedding their responsibilities to play checkers on the beach? You might roll your eyes when Sturgill sings, “That old radio still won’t play me,” on “Who I Am,” especially considering he’s done a lot to ensure they don’t. But generally, for an artist so guarded and so prickly, Passage is focused outward rather than inward.
Maybe you’ve noticed that I’m not referring to him here as Johnny Blue Skies. That’s not an act of catty defiance. I’m not dismissing his need to adopt a new name to make this album or get comfortable in his skin again, but there’s more Sturgill on Passage du Desir than there was on his past four full-lengths. So this isn’t his Camille and it likely won’t be his Chris Gaines either. Mr. Blue Skies sounds more like a conduit back to himself, a means of maintaining a consistent identity when the world insists on twisting and contorting him into someone else. “I’ve lost everything I am, even my name,” he laments on “Who I Am.” “They don’t ask you what your name is when you get up to heaven. And thank God, I couldn’t tell Her if I had to who I am.” He may go to his grave still wondering just who the fuck he is, but on Passage du Desire, he sounds more like himself than he has in ages.