Twenty-five years after 1989's career-spanning Sound + Vision box set, David Bowie has assembled a new retrospective, Nothing Has Changed, which comes in three different versions, each with a cover image of Bowie regarding himself in a mirror. This is Bowie as he wants us to encounter him, as a practitioner of fine art whose interests have occasionally, improbably, marvelously intersected with pop of the moment.

Nothing Has Changed

To pick a few selected works from an artist's career is to construct an argument about that artist. Every curator knows that, and David Bowie is nothing if not a curator. The first great Bowie best-of was 1976's Changesonebowie LP, whose argument was that he was a mamapapa comin' for you, a rocker too strong and too glittery to be pinned down. (The 1981 Changestwobowie LP and the 1990 Changesbowie CD, stabbed in its gut by the dreadful remix "Fame '90", tried to extend that premise.) Bowie's initial attempt at a full-career assessment was the 1989 Sound + Vision box set, revised and updated in 2003. In both forms, it's a bunch of hits and album tracks and rarities clumped together, an impressive show of range whose failure is that it assumes, rather than argues, that he's a rock god and that therefore anything he does is interesting.
Twenty-five years later, coinciding with an actual touring museum exhibition of the apparatus around his music, Bowie has assembled a new retrospective. Nothing Has Changed—a very sly title, as a riposte to Changesonebowie and "Changes", especially since it's also a lyric lifted from his 2002 song "Sunday"—comes in three different versions, each with a cover image of Bowie regarding himself in a mirror. That's a sharp gesture too: he's never been shy about his fascination with his own mercurial self, shedding his skin again and again and then carefully preserving it to wriggle into again later. (This is not the first time he's done the "multiple versions of a greatest-hits set" trick, either: 2002's Best of Bowie had twenty different track lineups, depending on which country you bought it in.)
The weakest of the three versions of Nothing Has Changed is the chronologically sequenced 2xCD version. It's basically just a slight revision of Best of Bowie, compressed to throw in five later songs including the newly recorded oddity "Sue (or In a Season of Crime)". The first disc starts with his commercial breakthrough "Space Oddity" and ends with its sequel/repudiation "Ashes to Ashes", which is a nice bit of symmetry. Mostly, what we get is Bowie as he's understood by oldies radio, although we're seven tracks in before he really starts to toughen up (with "Ziggy Stardust").
But the second half of the 2xCD version covers three times as many years as the first, and suggests that Bowie was a temporarily interesting trend-follower whose fade-out has been slowed by his being repeatedly propped up and dragged into modernity by big-name collaborators: Queen, Pat Metheny, Pet Shop Boys, Trent Reznor, James Murphy. This Bowie's sense of tune eventually abandons him and never returns. After the look back in sorrow of "Absolute Beginners", halfway through the second disc, he's coasting on his rep; it's just one decent comeback attempt after another, with "Sue" at the end as a sort of I-give-up-but-here's-something-new-anyway gesture. That's a reasonable case to make; it also misses most of what's magical about this particular artist.
The 2xLP version of Nothing Has Changed makes a simpler and happier argument, that this is a dude with a lot of big hits and a peculiar arty streak. It's a non-chronological set, mostly songs that you might want to play if you were DJing a party—three out of 20 are the singles from Let's Dance. The sides have something like thematic unity: Bowie the dancefloor-filler and lighter-waver, Ziggy/Aladdin the glam spaceman, David the magisterial vocalist and pop experimentalist (this is where "Sue" lands), and You-Know-Who the introspective eminence grise (concluding with last year's "Where Are We Now?"). You could do worse.
The 3xCD Nothing Has Changed, though, is the jewel among the three variations on the same core material. Its masterstroke is that its 59 tracks appear in reverse chronological order. To end a greatest-hits with "Sue" is to remind listeners that there's a good moment to hit the stop button. To begin it with "Sue"—the longest track on the whole thing—smacks us to attention. This is Bowie as he wants us to encounter him, as a practitioner of fine art whose interests have occasionally, improbably, marvelously intersected with pop of the moment. "Sue", written and recorded with Maria Schneider and her jazz orchestra, announces its intentions from the moment Bowie's actorly baritone warbles in: it's the latest in his line of homages to Scott Walker, the double whose guise is the one role he's never been able to play. (The artistic relationship between Bowie and Walker—so similar, so different—is a complicated topic on its own; the comprehensive Bowie blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame includes a pair of brilliant posts about it.)
For at least the rest of its first disc, the 3xCD version reframes latter-day Bowie as an alternate-universe version of Walker, a solemn avant-gardist who keeps trying to rocket out beyond pop and keeps being drawn back into its gravity well. That makes his later work a lot more interesting, it turns out. This is a Bowie who never runs out of fresh ways to gaze back at himself in the mirror. There are three tracks here from his never-released 2001 album Toy: reworked versions of a pair of songs from his youth, and the lovely obscurity "Your Turn to Drive", which is as close as he's ever come to dreampop. And it's hard to miss the science fiction that's never totally left his lyrics when James Murphy's remix of "Love Is Lost" (with its quotation from "Ashes to Ashes") appears next to "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)" and "New Killer Star", and just down the hall from Pet Shop Boys' reworking of "Hallo Spaceboy" (which itself incorporates a William S. Burroughs-style cut-up of lines from "Space Oddity").
The edited and remixed versions of Bowie's post-1995 singles that populate the first disc are all distinct improvements on their original versions; you'd be forgiven for wondering if 1999's dismal Hours... was as good as it seems here. Single mixes are the meat of the rest of Nothing Has Changed too, because the metric for inclusion even on the longest version is, more or less, which songs were some kind of hit. (Although it's worth noting that a collection of Bowie's U.S. Top 40 singles would be 10 songs long and end with 1987's "Day-In Day-Out" and "Never Let Me Down", neither of which appear here. We do get "The Man Who Sold the World"—which was never a single and didn't appear on a major Bowie compilation until 1997—and "All the Young Dudes", a hit for Mott the Hoople whose studio recording Bowie didn't even release until the mid-90s.)
Nonetheless, there's some curation going on here. Nothing Has Changed is a version of Bowie's career in which his circa-1990 hard rock quartet Tin Machine never happened (that's just fine, actually). Cultural currency and UK chart success are no guarantee of inclusion: there's no "D.J.", no "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)", no "Suffragette City", no "John, I'm Only Dancing", no "Queen Bitch", and don't even ask about "The Laughing Gnome". Undignified moments like the Labyrinth soundtrack and "Real Cool World" have been expunged from this particular record (although somehow "Dancing in the Street" wasn't—the musicless version of that one is preferable.). The "Berlin trilogy" of albums is represented by one quick blast apiece ("Boys Keep Swinging" into "'Heroes'" into "Sound and Vision", shoulder to shoulder in glory). But its swift, forceful backward flow through Bowie's waves of reinvention and discovery is worth more than any kind of completeness would be.
What the 3xCD museum tour of Nothing offers instead is a treat in its final chamber. It keeps on zooming past "Space Oddity" to Bowie's juvenilia, the five years' worth of grasps at the brass ring that preceded Major Tom's rocket to the stars. (David Bowie Is, the actual museum show, also includes his youthful presentiments of what would come later.) Here, again, the reverse chronology works marvelously. "Silly Boy Blue" anticipates the voice we've been hearing all the way from "Sue" on back; "Liza Jane" (the recorded debut of "Davie Jones") and "You've Got a Habit of Leaving" are the work of a teenager learning to play a more complicated version of dress-up. And "Can't Help Thinking About Me", the first single for which he tried on the David Bowie name, becomes a key to the whole exhibition: a beautiful young Narcissus, shedding his identity for the first time, and already looking back on what he's left behind himself.


The Chicago-based band sounds more consistent—but also more risk-averse—than ever on a guitar-driven album that’s as peaceful and unchallenging as its title suggests.

At Your Leisure

A wave of textural innovation is sweeping the indie guitar realm, as bands vying to get ahead of a pack led by Tame Impala and the War on Drugs stack effects in pursuit of novel sounds. But Clearance are sitting out this race. As far as the Chicago-based band is concerned, no newfangled gimmick can beat two electric guitars backed by a little inspiration and the support of a skilled rhythm section. They proudly stand ‘neath the marquee moon, come alive at animal midnight, and abide by forces at work.
Clearance certainly have the chops for this unadorned yet deceptively difficult style of composition: “Walking Papers,” from their first 7", 2013’s Dixie Motel Two-Step, applied a light touch to cloudy chords. “Total Closeout,” the centerpiece of their 2015 debut LP, Rapid Rewards, was a long, ascendant swirl of riffs whipped up by frontman Mike Bellis and guitarist Kevin Fairbairn, with bassist Greg Obis and drummer Arthur Velez confidently spotting them as they climbed. But on their second proper LP, At Your Leisure, Clearance avoid such epic instrumental journeys to focus on the fundamentals of songwriting: Every track is short, sweet, and complete. It’s their most consistent record to date, if also their most risk-averse.
Lead single “Destination Wedding” opens in sheepish, shuffling fashion, then finds confidence midway through in a series of ringing, sustained notes. Rather than luxuriate in this comfortable arrangement, the band cuts off the song before it can wander into extended-jam-outro territory. “Another Arrow” is the only track that messes around with tempo, playing a game of red-light-green-light with Bellis and Fairbairn’s guitars. The standout “Haven’t You Got the Time?” sparkles with the clarity of a Mediterranean lagoon. Bellis finds his gold note, takes the opportunity to open his throat wider, and enters Liam Gallagher territory with some long “i” sounds that he happily stretches for an extra second.
Like Doug Martsch of Built to Spill, Bellis tends to subjugate his vocals to the guitars, letting the instruments capture each song’s shifts in emotion. He doesn’t raise, push, or twist his voice. Instead, he confines it to a single mood: mild and patient, as if he’s working through complex feelings but has all the time in the world to do so. Bellis’ musings meander and get sidetracked, like reflections in the mind of a zoned-out dreamer, and his metaphors don’t always cohere; the album’s lyrics are so swathed in an ambiguity that they can come off as both impersonal and overly safe. Lines like “Was my invitation lost to your destination wedding?” and “I had a fantastic dream about the coastline” certainly don’t compete with the interplay of the guitars. This lyrical blandness keeps a well-deserved spotlight on the music, but it also limits the payoff of the band’s strongest compositions.
Not that Clearance ever promised to change our lives. At Your Leisure is exactly what its title advertises: a collection of pared-down songs that sound peaceful and welcoming, like a room full of humble yet comfortable furniture. As a testament to the electric guitar’s capacity for communicating when words fail us, the album is persuasive, even if it never crosses over into transcendence.


On his sixth release, lo-fi techno producer Florian Kupfer creates music as airy and pleasantly rudimentary as a papier-mâché sculpture.

Unfinished

Florian Kupfer was once a choir boy. He was a soprano. For over six years, he practiced Gregorian chorals everyday and was surrounded by the aroma of frankincense. These rituals—mixed with an early introduction to ’90s techno from his mother—formed Kupfer’s anachronistic foundation. His brand of thoroughly low-fidelity techno evolved after meeting Ron Morelli of the label L.I.E.S., also known for his own very murky sounds. Since the release of his 2013 debut, Lifetrax, Kupfer has developed a style that flits between rhythmic industrial soundscapes (not unlike his onetime labelmate, Eric Copeland) and romantic ambient techno with a handmade feel. In his sixth release, Unfinished, he creates music as airy and pleasantly rudimentary as a papier-mâché sculpture.
*Unfinished *runs barely over 25 minutes. Composed of four tracks, it can feel much longer. Sonically speaking, Unfinished is a compromise between two of Kupfer’s best-known songs: the melancholic, R&B-inflected house hit of 2013’s “Feelin” (itself reminiscent of Galcher Lustwerk or DJ Richard) and his sublime 2015 flip of Sade’s “Couldn't Love You More.” In *Unfinished, *he’s more atmospheric than the industrial menace of 2015’s Explora, with its sharply exposed edges. *Unfinished *is, if anything, defined by a meandering and cleverly unfocused pace, allowing Kupfer to explore all the odd angles of a sound.
In the album’s opener, “Elle,” Kupfer showcases this album as strangely and pleasantly nostalgic. The song’s six minutes seem sourced from arcade-era video games, with computer approximations of guitar jangle and uneven drum machines. This continues into “Erika,” like a Huerco S track with its slithering but open progression. It’s the album’s longest track (over eight minutes) and it slinks slowly towards any kind of change, slathering on hissing and unravelling tape loop distortions for almost four minutes. It’s more ambient than anything else, even when it arrives at its modest crescendo—a chopped and screwed vocal sample of Monifah’s “Fairytales.” He adds bursts of bated and sometimes goofy percussion along with synth loops, but somehow these parts act independently of each other. The song is like a conglomerate of rough drafts, or a découpé of misshapen parts artfully put together.
What unites many of the song’s in *Unfinished *is the quality of something still being constructed, or figuring itself out. A sense of cohesion arises from the songs’ handmade and purposefully asymmetrical minimalism. Listening to some of the songs on *Unfinished *made me think of certain Clyfford Still paintings, with their organization of angles and colors that are off-kilter, distorted, but arranged with a sense of overwhelming texture rather than compositional logic. This is most present in “Being Me,” allowing its twinkling synth arpeggios and aggressive kick drums to float in space and crash into each other. *Unfinished *finds Kupfer gathering all the materials from his last three years of music-making to land on electronic music that is mercurial and flexible. Moving from ambient to house to techno to pure noise on a dime, Kupfer’s aesthetic is perfectly imperfect.


The prolific saxophonist recorded this stark, searching album at 1:30 a.m. in an underground parking garage; it is both an exploration of negative space and an exorcism of ghosts.

Patrick Shiroishi: I was too young to hear silence

I was too young to hear silence

The wellspring of Patrick Shiroishi’s torrential output—last year his name appeared on 32 albums, and there is every indication that he will break that record this year—is a conversation he had with his grandmother. When Shiroishi was young, he asked her about the Japanese internment camp at Tule Lake, California, where the U.S. government incarcerated nearly 30,000 people during World War II and where she met his grandfather. Normally chatty and amiable, she suddenly went stonily silent. Shiroishi has since used his saxophone to excavate his family’s history and grapple with Japanese Americans’ collective trauma. His first solo album was dedicated to his grandmother, others to his parents and his aunt. Shiroishi’s breakout solo effort, 2021’s Hidemi, narrated his grandfather’s life after Tule Lake through beautifully dense, multilayered compositions. Even Shiroishi’s collaborations with others—in his own bands Fuubutsushi, SSWAN, and Oort Smog and in countless duos, trios, and quartets—are modeled after his grandfather’s life: specifically, the sense of community that Patrick Hidemi Shiroishi helped build, as a deacon and small businessman, in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo neighborhood.
I was too young to hear silence is the sparsest of Shiroishi’s releases, but its fragile improvisations also carry the weight of his family’s story. Recorded at 1:30 a.m. in a parking garage under a Japanese restaurant near his hometown of Rosemead, California, Shiroishi’s lone saxophone emanates from underground like the buried past crying out for remembrance. In the massive, empty building, trembling melodic lines are buttressed by long stretches of ambience, and sharp bursts of noise are met by reverberant echoes. Shiroishi cites the work of saxophonist Masayoshi Urabe, whose albums A Brute and Sōingyokusaiseyo are more silence than sound, as an influence on his minimalist approach. But just as important are location-dependent works like Pauline Oliveros’ recordings with the Deep Listening Band in an underground cistern or Akio Suzuki’s “o to da te” project, which maps points of strong echoes across urban areas. This isn’t the first time that Shiroishi has played in this garage—last year’s empty vessels, with Marta Tiesenga, was recorded there during the lockdown—but here he responds to the space as if it were the other half of a duo, an integral part of the unfurling composition.
The album was recorded in one take with a saxophone, glockenspiel, two microphones, and portable recorder. As a document of a live performance, it combines the tension of an improv set with the petty thrill of trespassing. “stand still like a hummingbird” opens with several seconds of silence before short saxophone blasts reveal the garage’s cavernous resonance. Running water, perhaps from a custodian or shopkeeper washing up late at night, can be heard in the background. As Shiroishi’s improv progresses, he develops a language of piercingly high notes, fluttering runs, and breathy puffs of air, all of which cascade through the concrete passages of the garage and return slightly delayed and diminished.
The centerpiece of I was too young to hear silence, the seven-minute “tule lake blues,” is a memorial for his grandparents that transitions from soulful melodies into keening metallic screeches, as if Shiroishi is finally voicing his grandmother’s wordless despair at the mention of the eponymous camp. Two songs after that cathartic moment, some of his loveliest playing appears on on “is it possible to send promises backwards?,” a joyfully acrobatic display that seems to glory in movement itself. Finally, “if only heaven would give me another ten years” closes the album with celebratory lines that arc brightly through the air before resting again in the silence of the Los Angeles night.
Shiroishi’s productivity is due in part to his versatility. Through a multitude of guest appearances, he has found a space for his saxophone in the Armed’s muscular hardcore, Agriculture’s ecstatic black metal, and Quicksails’ fractured electronica, among scores of others. But I was too young to hear silence showcases Shiroishi’s music at its purest. The raw, impromptu output of a player uniquely attuned to his instrument and purpose, it amounts to an exorcism of the generational trauma that informed this searching night underground.


The third album from the Bristol singer-songwriter furnishes complex storytelling in cozy, lived-in atmospheres.

Big Picture

Fenne Lily wrote her latest album amid a creative slump whose timing is no doubt familiar to many. Her work stalled out during a post-2020 malaise that The New York Times summed up in an unsurprisingly viral piece as “languishing,” a word that suggests an indulgence in the act of doing nothing. Writing about forgettable days runs the risk of being forgettable, but on Big Picture, Lily lets herself surrender to that compromised comfort. Her voice has a warmth and a quaver that can wring pathos from even the most conversational lines, and the production by Brad Cook (Hurray for the Riff Raff, The War on Drugs) furnishes her with warm, lived-in atmospheres. Every track has something to sink into, like the pinging, playful background vocals throughout “Pick,” or the airy, breathy coda of “2+2.”
Most of the bitter, early-Laura-Marling humor of BREACH is gone here; nothing on Big Picture approaches the fuck-off stance of “To Be a Woman Pt. 1,” the pitiless gaze upon male red flags that was “I, Nietzsche,” or the wackiness of “Birthday”’s introductory severed head. Lily seems to be aiming for a more universal, classically sedate writing voice, and sometimes she overreaches and produces songs that sound as labored-over as she says they were. “Dawncolored Horse,” while competent, is a bit too obviously made of set pieces and conceits and a shelf that exists solely to be rhymed with “herself.” “2+2” begins with a faux-casual anecdote about how maybe she’ll look into “some guy called Jesus”—you know, just that dude—though Lily’s baleful vocal does the emotional lifting in the lyrics’ stead, and the song recovers in its lovely second verse.
Lily began writing Big Picture just before she met her then-partner and finished writing its last song just after they’d broken up. But there's no simple narrative to the album, no clean line from beginning to heartbreak. Every song is written from a place of indefinite stasis, of having an epiphany you didn’t want to have and don’t want to act on. “Lights Light Up,” with its disinfectant-bright guitar line and ending-credits pace, is very nearly a love song: Lily sings much of the first few verses, especially asides like “well,” like they’re little adoring looks. Then, without changing her affect, she punctures it with the unspoken, fatal truth that the relationship was held together by, “though we don’t really talk about it often, the fear of this getting old.”
Lily leans on these twists often, but impressively the returns never diminish. On “Half Finished,” she answers a companion’s offhand question with “sometimes I can’t help but picture a whole different life”; immediately the vocals drop away, as icebreaker becomes weepy. The melody of “Superglued” is bleak and deceptively layered: Every time Lily raises her voice or a sudden chord lets some light in, the whole thing just slumps farther down. Like “Lights Light Up,” there’s a love song in there somewhere, too, but not one you’d sing when you were in it. Likewise, the two most obvious breakup songs are also the most hopeful. On “Red Deer Day,” the song Lily wrote last, her vocals move through lines like “For the longest time I’ve imagined I am alone and now it’s real” without dwelling for emphasis or drama. It doesn’t fully register that the track is a breakup song until Lily has already moved on to the reassuring chorus; perhaps all those love songs were her pre-processing it, in her own time. “Map of Japan,” the album’s standout, is about another quietly decaying relationship and deferred realization. Cook and Lily’s arrangement is likewise restrained, except for the periodic interruptions of muscly guitar chords, placed loud in the mix. Each appearance feels a little defiant. They sound like reminders to oneself: Nothing has atrophied. Everything will be there where you left it.


The Ship, Eno's sixth album for Warp, is one of his best solo albums in a while, walking the line between pure ambiance and vocal-driven pop.

The Ship

There aren't many artists who, with 40-plus years of record-making under their belts, still see each record as a way to challenge their own paradigms with something new and different. For Brian Eno, however, this kind of challenge is core to his identity as a musician. The Ship, Eno’s newest release and his sixth on Warp, somehow manages to feel distinct from all the work he’s done. He describes this divergence as a desire “to make a record of songs that didn’t rely on the normal underpinnings of rhythmic structure and chord progressions but which allowed voices to exist in their own space and time, like events in a landscape.” The Ship is broken into four tracks that more or less flow into one fluid 48-minute suite of music.
On his website Eno describes his inspiration for The Ship as coming from, among other things, a fascination with the sinking of the Titanic and humankind’s balance “between hubris and paranoia.” That Eno should go here now is an interesting way of coming around full circle, because four decades ago he kicked off his non-pop career by issuing The Sinking of the Titanic by his friend and peer Gavin Bryars. That release, which featured not only Bryars but also Michael Nyman and Derek Bailey, was the very first on Eno’s then-new Obscure label in 1975, and served as one more footnote in the annals of Eno’s history in serving as a nexus for the “scenius.” (a term he coined to describe his belief that “it’s not individuals who create things, it’s scenes.”) The Bryars opus is also a double-edged sword as reference points go, because it has claimed ownership on Titanic-related musical storytelling, and it’s also incredibly good.
Thankfully, the comparisons end there. While Bryars’s piece, with its beautiful, looping melody and gentle, nagging insistence, conjures a feeling of an auspicious capital-M Moment whirlpooling slowly downward, Eno’s opening track “The Ship” tells a story not of submerging into sea but of floating listlessly across windless water and forever fog, waves nibbling at the bow and starboard. With a minimalist structure and languid pace, this is not music meant to be experienced or appreciated by those in a hurry, or to be played in the background; it demands your attention in a way that quiet music often doesn’t.
For those willing to stick it out for 21 minutes, “The Ship” unfolds with a kind of majesty that can make one feel like they’re getting their body re-calibrated. Slowly shifting synths establish both gait and mood, before eventually giving way to poem-like vocals by Eno, intoned in a sort of Gregorian chant that only serves to strengthen the feeling that you are being induced into a meditative state. They continue for several minutes before subsiding and the track’s gentle voyage continues, with pitch-shifted voice returning with the refrain “Wave, after wave, after wave.” While not ambient music, the sounds at times resemble moments from Eno’s past, including especially the burbling sounds around 5:50 that recall his work with Bowie on Heroes’ "Neuköln."
From here, The Ship gives way to the album’s second longest composition, “Fickle Sun (i),” clocking in at 18 minutes. Though the pace is a similar speed to “The Ship,” the feel is quite different, with a bass somewhere between “bounce” and “plod” and trebly, rising synths that give the track a menacing oomph. A later section seems to call upon the ’00s work of Fennesz, David Sylvian, and Scott Walker, which are good reference points for this record in general. While “The Ship” is remarkable for sustaining a specific tone for 21 minutes, all the while telling a clear story, “Fickle Sun (i)” is just as impressive, going in more directions musically and challenging the listener’s sense of understanding.
After these two behemoths conclude, the storm clears and we are left with two brief cuts that function more as appendices, both of which are technically parts of “(ii)” and “(iii)” of “Fickle Sun” and each of which present issues for different reasons. “(ii)”, subtitled “The Hour Is Thin,” carries the same emotional tone, but stripped down only to plaintively struck piano notes and with a spoken-word piece by Peter Serafinowicz. While the music itself fits very well here, it would have been preferable to hear Eno’s honeyed baritone instead of Serafinowicz's clinical recitation. And “Fickle Sun (iii)” is a luxurious, jaw-dropping cover of the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Set Free” emerging unexpectedly from the last twinkled notes of “The Hour is Thin.” It’s incongruous to the rest of the record, but is so painfully perfect it can make you nearly let go of everything you’ve just heard to imagine, for a second, that Eno hadn’t stopped making pop music all those years ago.
The Ship is a great, unexpected record. The title track and “Fickle Sun (i)” on their own and as a connected piece of music are marvelous accomplishments, distinctive in Eno’s catalog. And “I’m Set Free” immediately ranks among the most perfect-sounding pop songs Eno has ever had a hand in making. It is a little tough to process the disparity between the minimalist front and the melodic hanging chad of “I’m Set Free” at the end—and the latter is just so damned good that Eno’s pop fans may weep over being denied a full record’s worth of it. But in the end it’s easy to feel grateful that it all exists, and enthusiastic that Eno is an artist who still sees new techniques to learn and new landscapes to paint.


Playing remarkably tuneful pop-rock at sludgy tempos, the Flint, Mich. trio Greet Death benefit from isolation. Their debut album is full of bludgeoning tones and diamond-cut production.

Dixieland

Greet Death’s debut album is a useful tool in parsing the difference between originality and innovation. It takes only 30 seconds of the first proper track “Bow” to spot just about every major influence on Dixieland, where the Flint, Mich. trio exist in a bloodline that runs from Failure to Hum to Deftones—bands that once tried to smuggle in sludgier, slower, and stonier forms of rock into alternative radio like joints at Coachella. But innovation, particularly in rock music, isn’t often the invention of something entirely new; it’s more likely a small and extremely significant tweak of an existing product. Most vocalists either mutter or mumble through this kind of music, buried in the mix and rendering any sense of “pop” theoretical or relative. Greet Death are pretty much the exact opposite of that. This is a remarkably tuneful, forthright pop-rock band that just so happens to play six-minute songs at bradycardic tempos.
No matter how loud or feedback-scarred the guitars get on Dixieland, it would never be enough to hide the vocals of Sam Boyhtari. His are a nasal glam-geek variant, something along the lines of Brian Molko or even Dan Bejar. And if the latter seems unfathomable in the context of a band that could either be described as slowcore or doomgaze, Boyhtari’s released another striking album a few weeks ago as War War War that’s virtually Destroyer fanfic. It’s an acquired taste for certain, a splash of sriracha with a bright, almost chemical heat that fundamentally alters everything around it. Though “Bow” and “The Waste” make compelling use of bludgeoning guitar tones and mesmeric repetition, Boyhtari’s sprightly melodies and unorthodox enunciation take this way outside the realm of stoner rock. The compact surge of “Valediction” sounds like Siamese Dream without the solos. This is active listening, abetted by the diamond-cut production of Nick Diener, who’s quickly becoming Michigan’s answer to Will Yip.
Yet, the greatest attribute of Dixieland is that all of the above is still applicable even when Boyhtari isn’t singing. With the exception of the interlude “Again,” guitarist Logan Gaval carries the more versatile and expository Side B. Gaval can get gauzy enough to go with the aqueous flow of “Black Hole Jesus Christ,” though Greet Death’s geographical roots are exposed by the denim-rough grain he takes on “Dragged to Hell” and the monolithic, perpetual crescendo of “Cumbersome,” which clinches it with a Silver Bullet Band blues-bend solo.
As with similarly slow and stoic Midwestern bands Cloakroom and Thunder Dreamer, there’s the sense that the big, coherent sound of Dixieland is a product of isolation, of being able to develop at one’s own pace, play loudly, and remain impervious to trends. It’s all compounded by the sense that newer rock bands of this sort are marooned in 2017—without a scene or narrative or a revamp of MTV2 to give them a signal boost. And the title of Dixieland is daringly loaded at a time when both the downtrodden parts of the Midwest and the South are jointly being held responsible for the inflammation of American discourse, viewed with either detachment or disdain by the media. But Dixieland is a political album only in the sense that personal exchanges are framed as unequal power struggles; the title is actually taken from a flea market in Flint. Greet Death survey their surroundings and see mostly junk, death, and decay. But like its titular inspiration, Dixieland allows the beholder to find their own beauty and meaning in forgotten treasures.


The Alabama rapper’s debut offers few worthwhile insights into him as a person and ends up stalling on its own ambition.

VISIONLAND

The YBN collective’s origin story is part of internet rap lore: The group first met in the depths of Xbox Live in the early 2010s and would freestyle during Grand Theft Auto V sessions. It was the hi-octane trap of YBN Nahmir’s 2017 single “Rubbin Off the Paint” that initially put Nahmir on the map—the song grew so popular that the then-17-year-old had to be pulled out of school. He and fellow members Almighty Jay and Cordae gained steam the quickest and formed the triforce of power, pushing the group toward a record deal with Atlantic. As their respective profiles grew, the YBN unit splintered, and Nahmir officially declared its death on amicable terms with his brothers last August.
Though he was the collective’s first member to make a national impression, Nahmir never capitalized on it with a solo project. His long-awaited debut album VISIONLAND—named after an amusement park in his home state of Alabama—is an attempt to regain control of his narrative, to reorient himself with his first statement of intent. His drive to take care of his family is admirable, but VISIONLAND offers few other worthwhile insights into Nahmir as a person or as an artist. Four years removed from his breakout single, his music feels as anonymous and inert as a stock player character in a video game.
It’s a shame because the album’s opening song “Still (Family)” is one of Nahmir’s best. On it, he bares all about brushes with death, lost loved ones, and redistributing his gains as his career’s taken off: “New cars and they start up without keys/My cousin graduated, gave her fifty/That’s what real niggas do, so they envy/So I keep a fat forty and it’s crispy,” he says over a wailing vocal sample. The song is plainspoken, clever, and backed by the kind of easygoing beat Nahmir typically avoids. It’s a risk that starts the album on a high note before it plummets.
Bright spots like “Still” are the exception on VISIONLAND, which is generic to its core. Whether it’s shootouts, sex, or money, Nahmir sets up the most hi-octane events in the blandest ways possible, barely switching up his phrasings. Across 20 songs, he gets his dick sucked (“Get It Crackin,” “LAMB TRUCK”), gets high (“Fast Car Music [STAIN]”), and shuns haters (“Wake Up”), wasting several decent beats in the process. Even the mixing and his vocal punch-ins on tracks like “Homework” are uninspired; for a major label album, VISIONLAND often sounds incredibly cheap.
Nearly every guest steals their respective song from under Nahmir, who proves to be out of his depth. G Herbo and DaBoii bring a flavor and urgency otherwise missing from “Politics.” 21 Savage effortlessly drops one-liners (“Opps wants promotion; we put ’em on a poster”) with a bored sigh on the “Opp Stoppa” remix, while Nahmir rhymes “rocket” and “pocket” with ”pocket rocket.” When Nahmir does attempt to switch it up, it makes things worse. “Soul Train” is a slice of retro funk somewhere between Chic and The Free Nationals, complete with Auto-Tuned warbles about love that sound sourced from the gift card section of a pharmacy. Its inclusion here is embarrassing, to say the least.
In a recent GQ interview, Nahmir positioned himself as one of the highest-profile rappers to ever emerge from Alabama. That may be true in sheer numbers, but the majority of VISIONLAND is severely lacking in personality compared to his fellow Alabamians. He’s missing the punchy enthusiasm of Flo Milli, the melodic sharpness of NoCap, or the vivid stoicism of OMB Peezy and brings little else to the table. A few uplifting moments can’t prevent VISIONLAND from stalling on its own ambition.

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Andrew Bird's latest album, which includes a duet with St. Vincent, finds the multi-instrumentalist working more collaboratively with a band than he has in a long time.

Break It Yourself

Lyricists write about the world we live in, and most of them choose a layer or two and stick with them. The human, religious, and geopolitical layers are the ones that get the most play in popular music, for obvious reasons. They're immediate to our everyday existence-- we're more likely to think about the role love plays in our day than the role of cell division. Over the course of his career, Andrew Bird has gradually added more layers to his songwriting, very often intertwining the political with the microscopic, the humdrum with the fantastical, the made-up word with the pointed phrase. Pop music is steeped in a certain kind of language-- it's largely informed by a spiritual and emotional understanding of the universe. Rational understandings of the way things work and the hidden worlds behind the world we experience simply haven't established much of a foothold in our emotional vocabulary, but Bird has probably made more strides toward developing this kind of vocabulary than any other prominent songwriter.
Break It Yourself, his latest album, opens with a song that jumps right into these kinds of concerns. "Desperation Breeds" wrings more than a little haunt out of the precipitous loss of bee populations, and from there, we're off to the races, winding through ruminations on the way death's promised end point can inject meaning into life's mundane moments ("Near Death Experience Experience"), to "Sifters", whose point that the "moon plays the ocean like a violin" works both metaphorically and literally. Certain themes recur. One is the slipperiness of truth and memory-- "Lazy Projector" throws itself straight into wondering how much of our memory is our own, while "Lusitania", a duet with St. Vincent, transposes the thought to collective memory, capping a verse that touches on events from World War I and the Spanish-American War with the line, "We don't study these wars no more."
Another recurring theme is perhaps more germane to the sound of the album. There are several moments where Bird seems to grapple with his own decision to distance himself from the world on his farm. He's working much more collaboratively with a band on some songs here than he has in a long time. Lead single "Eyeoneye" is a pretty straightforward indie rock track by his standards, though honestly its bashing straightforwardness makes it one of the least captivating songs here. Still, though, when on "Danse Carribe" he sings, "Then one day you'd had it/ Exiled your closest advisors," it sounds like he's talking to himself, even as his band builds around him. The song is one of his best, picking up a completely unexpected Afro-Caribbean groove halfway through, then mixing it with the type of fairly traditional fiddling he hasn't done much of since he went off on his own and rebuilt his tonal vocabulary around his layered violin, whistling, and glockenspiel.
The fact that he has his own sound is essential to making all this work. A lot of people I know find Bird's lyrical flights unpalatable, and many feel the same about the whistling, but for me, it all amounts to a constructed world that sounds outré at first but winds up being a startlingly astute reflection of our own as you settle into it. The world is so much stranger than we commonly assume, and I like that Bird points his lights into the quantum corners to gain a different perspective, and does it while committing to the quirks of his own strange sound. That strange sound becomes positively majestic on "Hole in the Ocean Floor", an eight-minute fever dream that caps the album with just a few words scattered through the soundscape of looped and layered violins. It's a piece of music no one else could have made, on an album no one else could have made. And it's a little like the world-- the longer you live with it, the more the details become apparent and the more you can feel it all working together.


Self-produced and recorded, Heartworms is the most hermetic LP James Mercer has released since 2001’s Oh, Inverted World. His gift for making fussy arrangements seem effortless remains unparalleled.

Heartworms

Dismantling the old Shins lineup must have been a bittersweet trade-off for James Mercer. On one hand, it freed him from the interpersonal conflicts inherent in running a band like a democracy, which surely was a relief to a songwriter who never prided himself on his people skills. But it also placed a weight on his shoulders. The sole burden of the band’s music and image now falls squarely on Mercer, including formalities that never seemed to come to him as easy to him as the songs did. During the band’s mid-’00s peak, for instance, Mercer often positioned himself toward the side of stage in concert, happily outsourcing traditional frontman duties like joking and bantering to his gregarious sideman Marty Crandall.
We can’t know whether Mercer laid off his bandmates for creative reasons, as he’s judiciously insisted, or if Crandall’s arrest for domestic assault left him no choice. Either way, he no longer has a real band to help him carry the load, and it takes a toll on him. While the Shins’ music hasn’t changed markedly since that purge in 2008, its image has. The press photos tell the whole story. Remember those old pics of colorful indie dudes horsing around? They’ve been replaced by shots of a lone, forlorn middle-aged guy, trying and utterly failing to look like he’s enjoying himself. The songwriters Mercer most looks up to—icons like Morrissey, Ian McCulloch, Lennon and McCartney—were stars born for the stage, but Mercer never shared their comfort with the limelight. In an interview with NME this winter, he relayed these pressures. “It comes at weird moments in life,” he explained. “Like we went for this big meal the other night because the Shins are releasing a new record, and then I realized that it’s just me in the Shins so all those people were there for me.”
That may be why, for his 2012 Shins reboot Port of Morrow, he created a sort of shadow band, inviting guests like Janet Weiss, Joe Plummer, and Eric Johnson to help carry the weight. As if to suggest that the Shins were still a band, Mercer posed in promo photos with his touring lineup. Heartworms, however, is the first album where he fully embraces the reality that he is the Shins. Self-produced and recorded with a smaller cast than its predecessor, it’s the most hermetic LP he’s released since 2001’s Oh, Inverted World, the last album he recorded himself. At times it overtly calls back to that debut. With its psychedelic patter, “Dead Alive” is an almost direct sequel to “One by One All Day,” drawing out that song’s reverb-soaked outro into its own romp, like some kind of self-written fan fiction.
For as openly as Mercer discusses his anxiety (he dedicates Heartworms’s final song, “The Fear,” to it), he still adheres to a disciplined, “never let them see you sweat” approach in the studio. He creates the illusion that songs come to him quickly, as if pulled from thin air, even if the five year gaps between the last few Shins albums argue otherwise. His gift for making fussy arrangements seem effortless remains unparalleled. Heartworms’ chipper title track is all weightless wonder, as free and euphoric as anything on Inverted World. Opener “Name for You,” a sweetly encouraging piece written for his three daughters, plays as if he raced to the studio to record it while it was still fresh in his mind. And the most Chutes Too Narrow-esque number, “Mildenhall,” shares the same live looseness as that album’s country tunes. An unabashedly autobiographical origin story, it details Mercer’s evolution from military brat to indie rocker: A classmate passes him a Jesus and Mary Chain cassette; he starts fiddling with his dad’s guitar; his dad teaches him some simple chords and, yada yada yada, “that’s how we get to where we are now.”
There’s often been a tension, albeit only a mild one, between Mercer’s classicist pop impulses and his more progressive leanings, and some of that creeps in here, too. The nervy, acid-washed “Painting a Hole” plays like something Kevin Barnes might concoct after several sunless days sequestered in a studio—its groove is heavier and nastier than any Danger Mouse has cooked up for him in Broken Bells. “Cherry Hearts” and “Fantasy Island” each call attention to themselves with grimy keyboard tones and deep, almost 808-esque low ends. In the past, Mercer has tripped over these kinds of experiments (“Sea Legs” doesn’t feel any less clumsy today than it did a decade ago), but here he lands them with the confidence of an old pro aware of his limitations.
Like many of the indie bands from his era, including fellow pop true believers the New Pornographers and Death Cab for Cutie—one of the few other acts from the mid-’00s indie boom still on a major label—Mercer has survived by staying the course. He has largely resisted trends or any temptation to drift too far from his established sweet spot. The thrill of discovery may be gone—really, it disappeared with Wincing the Night Away—yet it’s remarkable how little rust he’s showing. And although Heartworms never quite conjures the magic of those first couple Shins albums, it’s further proof that they weren’t a fluke. This guy always did, and still does, know how to write a song that sticks.


The St. Louis band’s third album is big, beautiful, and audacious, an artful leap toward creating the new sound of rafter-shaking indie rock.

Nearer My God

Throughout history, “Nearer My God to Thee” have become infamous last words. The traditional Christian hymn retells Jacob’s dream of a ladder reaching all the way to heaven, but it’s gotten a reputation for inserting itself into parables of tragic ambition. The Battle of Gettysburg culminated with a disastrous infantry assault by the Confederacy, and its band played the hymn as surviving troops retreated from Pickett's Charge. It's disputed whether the band on the Titanic actually did the same while the ship sank nearly 50 years later, but that’s how the movie tells it. It is also the soundtrack for the “Doomsday Video,” created by Ted Turner so CNN can be the last thing people watch before the world ends.
Foxing knew exactly what they were getting into by interpolating “Nearer My God to Thee” as the title of their third album, which was already tempting fate—there are few things that indie rock artists are less willing to publicly admit than the desire to make a classic album, but this is exactly the challenge producer Chris Walla placed before them and the one they go to every possible length to meet.
The band’s previous albums, The Albatross and Dealer, were bookended by muted introductions and finales, hand-crafted keepsakes meant to be dog-eared and footnoted. Nearer My God is likewise a closed system bound with melodic and lyrical leitmotifs, but designed more like a multimedia extravaganza. About two minutes into the opener “Grand Paradise,” Murphy is “shock-collared at the gates of heaven” when the drums finally come in and it’s a legit drop for light shows they’ll never afford at festivals that have never considered booking them. Nearly an hour later, he cries, “Heaven won’t take me in” on the closing “Lambert,” a “Mr. November”-style victory lap where Murphy could walk into the crowd to be mobbed during the final surge. In between, “Five Cups” anchors Nearer My God with a nine-minute montage for Murphy’s dead friends. They brought in a guy to play bagpipes. There are songs that swap out bass guitars for Volca sequencers, immaculately recorded drums for 8-bit synth triggers, guitars for string samples and Murphy’s clean vocals for mutated and pitch-shifted versions of itself.
There are the aspects to Foxing’s third record that are objectively ambitious. But ambition alone isn’t transformative. It works best in tandem with audacity, something that chafes against the preordained dominance that accompanies the reception of albums from our most celebrated pop artists. Whatever the case, Nearer My God provides the incapacitating rush of watching a broken play develop into a Hail Mary, a half-court buzzer beater, a double steal that actually works—the thrill of its success amplified by palpable risk and an alternate, disastrous outcome that was narrowly avoided.
“Five Cups” could’ve stood accused of being nine minutes just so Foxing can say they did it, spending nearly half its length with Murphy paying intoxicated tribute to lost souls, drifting through backmasked bass, detuned vocals, and aqueous reverb. But Foxing’s free-form ambience is just as well-crafted as a chorus—brass occasionally blares through the mist like a foghorn until a final, regal swell announces its arrival on the mainland. It’s immediately followed by “Heartbeats,” where the friction between their typically knotty, math-rock rhythms and a delirious, disco-diva chorus completely unrecognizable as the work of Foxing creates suspense appropriate for a song where a life literally hangs in the balance. “Gameshark” is intentionally a splatter of organized noise, edging dangerously close enough to KROQ-core just to become its evil clone—something like Hail to the Thief played at 45 RPM or “Feel it Still” in a hall of broken mirrors. It’s also the first time Foxing’s crackling live energy is duplicated on tape.
The daredevil approach of Nearer My God is a rare one that I also got from the Hotelier’s Goodness and The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die’s Harmlessness, albums that likewise came at a similar career points. Perhaps it’s easier for these bands to internalize the condescension often heaped upon their scene and use it as rocket fuel to cross the lacunal distance between themselves and mainstream recognition. Whatever the case, at a moment when even the most promising indie rock bands are shuffling familiar tropes from the ’90s and long-canonized influences, bands like Foxing that derive inspiration from emo, the electronic leaders of early 2000s indie, and alt-pop are adding new cards to the deck by default.
An extension of Murphy’s drugged and bugged-out solo album as Smidley, the electronic production on “Slapstick” is tinted by both codeine highs and cocaine hangovers. Murphy’s vocals conflate emo hysteria and R&B ecstasy on “Won’t Drown,” set to pummeling rhythms that reimagine MewithoutYou and Sung Tongs nonchalantly coexisting on CD racks in 2004. Foxing had already been the most sonically curious band to emerge from the dad-hats-and-capos wave of ’10s emo—both The Albatross and Dealer touched on free-form R&B, contemporary classical, post-rock, and ambient. But they were just that: touches that never felt like a full embrace. The stylistic density of Nearer My God produces its own gravitational pull that slams incompatible parts into intriguing new forms: There’s swirling death-disco that takes Murphy to the edge of a bridge, soaring Bowie-esque anthems about coked-out sexting, a sultry, bass-heavy lurch inspired by playing D&D on ecstasy, and an impossibly sad, glitch-pop ballad scented by “celebrity colognes” called “Trapped in Dillard’s.”
It’s an album of complicated, often elusive views on the illusion of control, an apocalypse that always feels impending but never arrives. But the best evidence of Foxing’s boldness is the thing that makes Nearer My God their most accessible work, their ability to distill the emotional core of each song into an instantly memorable tagline that can draw in new listeners not already predisposed to this brand of emotional brinksmanship: “You think I must not remember/but I do,” “You are not in love/so stop playing along,” “I just want a real love for you,” “I want to drive with my eyes closed,” “Is there anyone who wants me at all?”
The latter comes from the title track, where Murphy confesses that he’d sell his soul to be “America’s pool boy,” opting out of the financially and emotionally demoralizing gig life of indie rock to be rich, dumb, beautiful, and told what to do. But “Nearer My God” doesn’t come off like an endorsement or even a celebration of these desires. It’s more of a commiseration over their enduring appeal in our shittiest moments—“all that stupid old shit, like letters and sodas”—for this year’s struggling creatives. It just so happens to be framed in a fearlessly ascendant synth-rock song that could be used over Super Bowl highlights if it caught the right set of ears.
The band admitted that “Nearer My God” was originally headed to the scrap heap for being too streamlined, too rock until Walla intervened on its behalf. He has a good track record of knowing when modesty no longer is serving a band. It's an extremely immodest song that serves as the emotional core of an extremely immodest album: “I want it all,” Murphy wails on its truest lyric, one that struck so close to home, they nearly left it off the album. This mindset alone sets Nearer My God apart from nearly anything else in its sphere. Plenty of artists put their every fiber of being into a record, but there’s rarely the overt drive to exceed one’s greatness that’s so insistent, it threatens to earn indie rock's most unintentionally revealing slight: try-hard. For most bands, it's an epithet. On Nearer My God, Foxing flaunt it like an Olympic gold medal.


The idiosyncratic singer mixes R&B, ambient, and acoustic soul on her most accessible and fully-formed record, one that still feels like an open mic.

As If It Were Forever

When you hear the name Anna Wise, you might think first of Kendrick Lamar—but before she sang on his music, Wise was the eccentric half (or one-third, depending on who was in the group) of Sonnymoon, a New York-based alt-soul and bedroom pop outfit. You never knew what you’d get from her: On a song like “The Fear,” she sounded playful, almost cartoonish; on “Things to Come,” she faded to the background, her piercing falsetto reduced to background noise amid clattering bass drums. Sonnymoon made waves in underground music circles, and around 2016, Wise’s light began to shine brighter, magnified by star turns on songs like “Real” and the Grammy Award-winning “These Walls.” Yet Wise kept churning out the same esoteric soul she always had: She released a solo project, 2016’s The Feminine: Act I, a pop-focused set with electro-soul and hip-hop on the fringes, followed less than a year later by The Feminine: Act II. Then, in 2018, Wise and Jon Bap—a noted vocalist/producer and Wise’s significant other—quietly released a collaborative LP called geovariance, an abstract collage of fuzzy vocal loops and tape glitches that foreshadowed Wise’s proper solo debut album.
As If It Were Forever isn’t so wonky, though. Mixing quiet storm R&B, ambient, and acoustic soul, Forever is Wise’s most accessible and fully-formed record, the clearest entry point to her catalog. The peculiar tweaks are still there: “Worm’s Playground” opens with a jumble of loop-pedal vocals, and “Coming Home” is just ambient hums coiled into a quick meditative interlude. The guest features come and go, breezing in and out as Wise’s protagonist holds court. Appearances by rapper Little Simz on the self-loving ode “Abracadabra” and rapper/singer Pink Siifu on the sugary, folk-centric “One of These Changes Is You” give the impression of a collaborative effort between musicians who share a love of cryptic artistry and aren’t defined by arbitrary definitions of hip-hop and soul. Forever is like an open mic in that way: The tracks fade into each other, maintaining a sense of continuity that makes the record feel like a 38-minute suite. It’s a head-in-the-clouds LP where the singer dips between reality and surrealism, exploring the fleeting moments—laughing with friends, relaxing with a lover at home—that she wishes could last an eternity. Forever is about breathing in the good times before they dissolve, and understanding that the only constant in life is change.
Lyrically, the songs on Forever read like jotted-down missives in an old diary, ink bleeding through its yellow pages. “Abracadabra” runs through the should I or shouldn’t I of new love, basking in the glow of romance and the tension of maintaining desire. But like everything else, the adoration fades. On “Vivre d’Amour et d’Eau Fraîche,” a sultry duet with Bap near album’s end, the two lean into each other, their voices melded into one. Where “Abracadabra” ends on a somber note, “Vivre d’Amour” is an after-hours slow burner, applying sex and tenderness in equal measure. “Your skin on my skin,” Bap sings over warped guitar chords and barely-there drums. “Your path met my path, several doors are open and all of them divine.” Forever isn’t entirely sentimental; “Nerve” is a chest-thumping proclamation of independence. “I’m not gonna play the safe side,” she declares over scant marching drums and background studio chatter. “I don’t wanna live a simple life when I’m not a simple woman.” On a record wrestling with self-doubt and faded memories of the past, Wise is taking life as it comes and on her own terms.


As Cigarettes After Sex, Greg Gonzalez writes modern love songs set to downbeat dream pop. Much like relationships themselves, the songs on his self-titled debut LP are full of contradictions.

Cigarettes After Sex: Cigarettes After Sex

Cigarettes After Sex

The opening track on Cigarettes After Sex’s self-titled debut album is a slow-as-molasses alt-rock ballad simply titled “K.” It chronicles lead singer Greg Gonzalez’s infatuation with a girl named Kristen, and pinpoints the very moment their relationship shifts from strictly casual to something more substantial. “We had made love earlier that day, with no strings attached/But I could tell that something had changed,” Gonzalez croons in a voice close to a whisper. And while he seems to have cinched the deal with the girl in question, the song ends on an elusive note: “Stay with me/I don’t want you to leave...”
Kristen’s initial is also the death knell of modern romantic communication, the wretched abbreviation for “OK,” the text message equivalent of rejection by indifference. Without a doubt, Cigarettes After Sex is an album of love songs, but it’s tempered with a millennial ennui that gives the songs an extra layer of relevance in 2017. Instead of relying on lovey-dovey, pastoral lyrics to tell stories of budding relationships, each song is set to a backdrop of ultra-downbeat dream pop, its somber moods leaking into fleeting vignettes of sexy iPhone videos and bittersweet hookups. The record plays like a cryptic guidebook to navigating the world of contemporary love affairs, or the slightly depressing diary of some 21st century Don Juan.
Sonically, Cigarettes After Sex is an impressively even-keeled, slowcore collection—so even-keeled that it borders on ambient. It’s easy to write a bunch of slow songs with similar chords, but it’s an altogether different feat to produce, mix, and compile them in a way that their similarities become their strengths, gradually setting an unshakable mood. At first the repetition of certain elements—echoing guitars, soft hi-hats, elastic basslines—seems overbearing. But after multiple listens, Cigarettes After Sex’s less-is-more ethos is clear, and their heady melange of several genres of subdued indie rock begins to make more sense.
The album possesses strong aspects of alt-country in its reverberated, plucked guitars and shuffling snares, immediately bringing to mind groups like Cowboy Junkies and Mojave 3. But then you encounter a track like “Sunsetz,” whose dreamy intro owes a considerable debt to mid-era Cocteau Twins, before dropping almost all instrumentation in its verse to showcase Gonzalez’s boyish vocals. “Sunsetz” is so loose, and with so much space, that it should be boring; instead, it’s electric, the emptiness forcing you to focus on Gonzalez’s stark lyrics and clever composition. “So you open your dress and show me your tits/On the swing set at the old playground,” he sings, not really as a command, but almost as a general observation.
The theme of sexual encounters as fodder for quiet introspection continues throughout Cigarettes After Sex, but it’s delivered in such a nonchalant way that it avoids corniness. “Sweet” opens with the line “Watching the video that you sent me/The one where you’re showering with wet hair dripping,” before turning into a song about longing to touch a loved one’s skin through a screen. A catchy late-album highlight, “Truly”’s chorus goes, “Truly, know that you really don’t need/To be in love to make love to me.”
Much like relationships themselves, these songs are full of contradictions. The objects of Gonzalez’s desire are both achingly close and tantalizingly far, in his phone and in his bed, on his couch and in his head. Through wallowing in its own mire and coming out the other side, Cigarettes After Sex becomes one of those restrained, low-boil albums where tempo, repetition, and muted composition construct an entire story within the pauses between the notes and the ideas between the lines.


After tiring of the patterns he sensed himself settling into as a guitar player, Ben Chasny designed a theoretical framework that forced his hands into different positions. February's loud, aggressive Hexadic, his public debut with the system, felt like an attempt to declare its formidable nature. For Hexadic II, he's used the same results of the system to create gentler solo versions of the songs.

Hexadic II

Several years ago, after tiring of the predictable patterns he sensed himself settling into as a guitar player, Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance decided to design a theoretical framework that would force his hands into different positions. Chasny distributed a deck of poker cards in a circular array of sets of six, corresponding to the notes of the guitar. The relative positions of the cards gave Chasny a "tonal field" in which to operate, as well as a set of notes from which to pick, some indication of time and tempo, and lyrical rules for the songs themselves.
Though Chasny describes it as a "caveman" appropriation of similar constructs by Anthony Braxton and John Cage, it is involved and elaborate enough to prompt a book, The Hexadic System, published by Drag City this year. And February's Hexadic, his public debut with the system, felt like an attempt to declare its formidable nature. Showcasing the scope of the system felt as important as the songs. Unapologetically loud and aggressive, with more than a whiff of hardline Japanese psych, it was an extreme indoctrination into a new approach. Recorded with a fully loaded quartet, the largely instrumental Hexadic was not for the faint of heart or those accustomed to Chasny’s softer side.
For Hexadic II, though, Chasny used the same results of the system to create new solo versions of the songs. He swapped the electric for the acoustic, added soft murmurs of harmonium and electronics and strings, and sang on almost all of the songs. The output gives the Hexadic System a new patina of accessibility. On the penultimate track "Vile Hell", Chasny jumps between notes at unexpected angles, sounding like Derek Bailey in a windstorm, before he stops playing altogether. He lets a faint, luminous drone linger until it spills over into "Poor Guild", the record’s gorgeous finale. Violinist Jen Gelineau matches the drone’s tone, and Chasny picks his way through it. In a keening falsetto, he offers a series of elliptical, evocative phrases—"tiny excess/ eye maligned/ depict, transfix." It is the most purely pretty moment in Chasny’s enormous catalogue, the sight of an early bloom, opening slowly after an arduous winter.
The nine tracks on Hexadic II follow the same order as their Hexadic counterparts, and careful, comparative listening does reveal analogous aspects. It’s more rewarding, though, to consider the differences, or to take the sets as entirely separate products of the same process. The disparity shows just how far Chasny may be able to take an idea still in its early stages of execution. Where "Wax Chance" was a diabolical, noise-soaked dirge, "Exultation Wave" is an exquisite gallop, with multiple guitar lines and multi-tracked vocals suggesting the density of the earlier work without trying to match it. Likewise, the two-minutes of no-wave roar from "Maximum Hexadic" unfurl here into eight minutes of circular picking and ghastly vocals for "Anyone’s Dawn". Chasny’s playing invokes the same Middle Eastern influences that Sir Richard Bishop has often conjured, while his singing recalls the fragile coo of Richard Youngs. What was shocking is now sublime.
In that way, the Hexadic System feels like a prism for Chasny, able to draw different elements of his influences and approach based on the input and circumstances. The results are novel and approachable, a combination that enables Chasny to transcend the examples of Cage and Braxton, at least in execution. Despite the complexity of the system that produced Hexadic II, the songs and sounds measure up to the setup itself.


Syd Nathan never wanted this record made. The King Records founder had a long history of working with black performers ...

James Brown: Live at the Apollo [Expanded Edition]

Live at the Apollo [Expanded Edition]

Syd Nathan never wanted this record made. The King Records founder had a long history of working with black performers, ever since the late 40s when he decided to get into "the race business" after initially only concentrating on "hillbilly accounts." This is a man who had not only started his own independent label, but also bankrolled his own recording studios, pressing plant and distribution network. He was keenly aware of talent, using A&R; reps (who would later be his scapegoats when pressed by the FCC during the payola hearings of the 50s) to snatch up big band singers and bandleaders, in the hopes of transforming them into viable sensations for what would one day be called "crossover" appeal. He tried country, blues, doo-wop and R&B--; he might not have capitalized on every opportunity (most notably letting The Platters go to Mercury in 1953, only to witness them become the most successful vocal group of the decade), but he was certainly willing to try.
Nathan signed Macon, Georgia performer James Brown in 1956 to his King subsidiary, Federal, despite a less than favorable view of the "Please, Please, Please" demo (in short, "That's the worst piece of crap I've heard in my life"). Brown and his band, The Famous Flames, had already toured the South when he was signed for $200 to Federal, but he had yet to convince Nathan and Federal to allow him to record with the band. It wouldn't happen until Brown and the Flames scored a hit called "Mashed Potatoes" under the pseudonym Nat Kendrick & The Swans for another label. After Brown hit regionally with "Please, Please, Please" in 1956 for Federal, Nathan's original appraisal appeared to have been off the mark. That is, until Brown's next nine singles in a row flopped. Badly.
Brown and the Flames finally scored a national hit with their eleventh single for Federal, "Try Me", which granted him further stay on the label. Nathan was rewarded, too, as over the next four years, the band earned its reputation as the best in the biz, performing as The James Brown Revue ("Star Time"), and saddling its frontman with several well-applied titles: "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business," "Mr. Dynamite" and ultimately, "The Godfather of Soul." By 1962, Brown intended to showcase his act with a live album, especially after seeing Ray Charles hit with In Person in 1959. He'd played Harlem's Apollo Theater several times, but when Nathan refused to pay for a live recording on the basis that he wouldn't have a single to promote it, Mr. Dynamite had to take matters into his own hands.
Brown personally funded the recording of his Wednesday night show at The Apollo on October 24th, 1962. He and the Flames had been there all week already, and Brown was counting on the raucous crowds who showed for amateur night to give him the kind of support he knew Nathan couldn't ignore. For his part, Nathan had reluctantly sent one of his people to supervise the recording, but could hardly have expected it to result in this album. It's more than a little strange to think King had originally issued Live at the Apollo with canned applause and screams because not only were the Apollo faithful in full "support" of Brown's revue, that night has gone down in rock and soul history as arguably the finest live performance ever captured on record. Not bad for a guy who'd been one flop away from failure only a few years earlier.
Live at the Apollo was issued in 1963 and became an instant hit. Not only did it satisfy Brown's small legion of diehard fans-- to the tune of being played in its entirety during the evenings on some R&B; radio stations-- for the first time, it brought the undeniably intense celebration of his live show to young audiences throughout the country. This might not have been very important in another era, but just as Live at the Apollo can be seen as a symbolic transformation of R&B; into Soul, for a myriad of events, 1963 marked the dawn of a decade when sharing experiences and points of view across an entire culture meant more than just crossover success. It was the true beginning of the 60s, and Brown's half-hour Wednesday night set figures no less prominently than Dylan bringing protest music to the masses or The Beatles arriving in America the following year as musical signposts for A New Day.
Emcee Fats Gonder's introduction to the show is as fine a setup as a performer could ask for: "So now, ladies and gentlemen, it is Star Time. Are you ready for Star Time?!" The Flames give hits upon each Brown hit that Gonder lists, and the eager crowd responds with due enthusiasm (i.e., screams, lots and lots of screams). The band then drops a cutting version of Brown's "The Scratch" to urge the Man onstage. And what do you think Brown should announce as soon as he arrives? Two years before "I Got You", and he lets us have it: "You know, I feel alright!"
The band launches "I'll Go Crazy" with the slash of Les Buie's guitar and the sting of horns. "If you leave me, I'll go crazy," sings the leader, and the audience can already barely stand themselves. Horn punches accentuate the message Brown has taken with him to this day: "You gotta live for yourself, and nobody else." Just as soon as he's delivered the advice, Brown pleas to "Try Me! SCREAM! Try Me!" His trio of background singers, Bobby Byrd, Bobby Bennett and "Baby" Lloyd Stallworth, echo the sentiments, while the band locks the bluesy shuffle in tighter than the tension on Clay Fillyau's snare head. And again, before you can catch your breath, the band is already into the post-jump intro to "Think". Star Time was a lesson in speed, endurance and shared inspiration: If you gave the band everything you had, they'd return the favor tenfold.
Then, things get really good with a dit-dit-dit-DOOO and the ultra-cool, slow burning blues seduction of "I Don't Mind". With each beat, falling just behind where you expect it to land, Brown and his angelic backing choir deliver a fatal blow to any woman within earshot: "I don't mind, and I know you're gonna miss me." Jesus. Just in case you didn't think he was serious, good luck surviving "Lost Someone", ten minutes of gospel-tinged balladry somehow slower and lower than the preceding number. The Flames horns (led by trumpeter Lewis Hamlin) maintain a faint bond to Count Basie while at the same time handing Brown the razor-sharp precision he demanded. Between each declaration of passion, the horns serve an upturned figure, just enough to hold the audience in their place lest they faint from what must by then have been a steamy auditorium. And can I get a medic to those two girls JB was singing to at the end?
The Flames were masters of pacing, and roll out a six-minute medley of their hits to keep the show rolling, including "Please, Please, Please" (twice!), "You've Got the Power" and "Why Do You Do Me". The audience doesn't miss a beat, of course, and the only thing more powerful than Fillyau's bass drum kicks are their shrieks. And then things get REALLY REALLY good: "All aboard!" "Yeah!" "All aboard!" "Yeah!" "For NIGHT TRAIN!" Brown ends the show with his then latest hit, running down a list of cities in which he was quickly becoming a household name. He even gets his band excited when name checking New York City. "Night Train" is full of complex polyrhythms and demands total precision from the musicians, but you can hardly blame them for getting swept up in this show.
The original Live at the Apollo ended after "Night Train", but the newly expanded and remastered version contains four mono single-edits of songs from the show that Brown issued to tide over fans unable to catch one of his 300 yearly shows. 40 years later, the few remaining folks either unaware or somehow unconvinced of the power of the record have little excuse not to put down the bucks for this budget-priced edition. Beyond its significance in rock and soul history, and for Brown as an artist, this music translates so far beyond barriers of style or taste, it's one of the few albums that could accurately be described as essential. Fats Gonder said it best: "It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you at this particular time... James Brown & The Famous Flames." Amen.


Four years after “Feel It All Around” defined chillwave, Paracosm presents Ernest Greene as a man without a movement, someone whose music can no longer be used to project opinions about a larger trend. Produced again by Ben H. Allen, the album's instrumentation sloshes around in lush, warm reverb and palpable bass frequencies.

Paracosm

The titles of Washed Out’s breakthrough song and the first single from Paracosm share the two most important words in Ernest Greene’s musical language: feel it. It’s a simple request, as well as the dividing line between those who think of Washed Out as an evocative catalyst of warm nostalgia and those who hear Greene as someone fumbling around for a tune like he's trying to find the snooze button. Four years after “Feel It All Around” defined chillwave, and two since Within and Without stood against the backlash, Paracosm presents Greene as a man without a movement, someone whose music can no longer be used to project opinions about a larger trend. Due to the attrition of his peers and imitators, as well as his own artistic refinement, this sound is all his now. While Paracosm isn’t going out of its way to convert anyone, it’s a modest display of staying power*,* proof that Greene is a niche artist who hasn't yet suffered from redundancy.
Greene’s referred to Paracosm as “daytime psychedelia,” a response to its predecessor’s nocturnal amorousness. Once again working with producer/engineer Ben H. Allen, the album's instrumentation sloshes around in lush, warm reverb and palpable bass frequencies. As such, each song is sensual and immersive, indulgent and often feeling shorter than their average five minute length would suggest. While Paracosm never rocks, it always knocks, as few producers are better than Allen at ensuring indie artists stress the low end. Under his hand, the tactility of Washed Out’s studio albums have stood out in comparison to any drizzly replicas that have followed.
Elsewhere, Paracosm finds Greene doing subtle and effective troubleshooting. Though Within and Without wasn't a huge change for Washed Out's aesthetic, it was understandable why people who enjoyed his earliest work might’ve been turned off: “Feel It All Around” had an organic, homemade ingenuity, but Within blended nearly every known variant of makeout music-- shoegaze, Balearic, trip-hop, chillwave, R&B-- into a silken, sweet whole.
Paracosm possesses more texture, which can be partially attributed to the presence of a live rhythm section. “Entrance” begins with chirping birds, and elsewhere there's snippets of laughter, harps, house parties, bongos, and slight swings of human imperfection in the rhythm section. “It All Feels Right” bumps with light reggae upticks before momentarily collapsing into a sunstroke, while “Great Escape” leans off the beat just enough to generate a little bit of Southern soul.
The range of Paracosm helps Greene present himself as more of a singer/songwriter than a producer, though the former part of that dynamic still lags. His voice is an effective and imperfect apparatus that suggests rather than commands; his enunciation is still slack, as hard consonants and most vowel sounds dissolve into a semipermeable gauze. Maybe it’s for the best, though, since the lyrics of “It All Feels Right” are indicative of how much of Paracosm boils down to “Have a nice day” and not much more. However, Greene is growing in terms of melodic construct, as the chorus of “Don’t Give Up” is the strongest and trickiest he’s ever written. The way he manages the song's nimble rhythm suggests Washed Out’s future depends more on the development of Greene’s internal instruments rather than the external ones.
That said, Paracosm’s diversity leaves its individual songs subject to more scrutiny than they were on its overly cohesive predecessor. “Weightless” is equal parts Cocteau Twins and Calgon, but its soapy texture wants for Elizabeth Fraser’s fierce elocution and command of syllabic nonsense. And whether or not “Great Escape” is an intentional homage to “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”, it’s probably in Greene’s best interest not to remind listeners of the difference between his vocals and those of Marvin Gaye.
When Greene misses the mark, it’s a demonstration of his musical limitations as well as a counter to the misconception that Washed Out is unambitious or complacent. It’s not unthinkable for Greene to take notes from M83’s Anthony Gonzalez, another innovator in electro-pop ambience who learned to transcend the mumbly vocals of his early work by gradually embracing the role of a true frontman while working with powerhouse guest vocalists as well. But Paracosm is a document of someone who sounds satisfied with his place in life, and that can understandably drive people nuts. There’s plenty of art responsible for describing and inducing vertiginous highs and lows, and Paracosm is more than happy to soundtrack the satisfying moments that seek you out instead of the other way around, effectively triggering the kind of subtle joys that course through you without warning – manageable contentment, sustainable romance.
Those moods are easy to dismiss when they're captured in a lyric like "Call your friends, I'll call mine/ We'll head out for a long ride/ Sun is coming out now, it all feels right." There's a cognitive dissonance, and maybe some embarrassment, in recognizing that emotional state and hearing it expressed back to you in such naïve, plainspoken language.  You can call it a guilty pleasure in action-- or, you can just take this accessible escapism at face value and just, you know, feel it.


Two artists from opposite sides of the ambient spectrum find common cause in a 132-year-old pipe organ.

Loscil / Lawrence English: Colours of Air

Colours of Air

Since the late 1990s, Loscil—Vancouver’s Scott Morgan—has amassed a sprawling discography numbering dozens of ambient releases. Brisbane, Australia sound artist and Room40 founder Lawrence English is an equally prolific creator of musique concrete that typically falls on the fringes of ambient. On Colours of Air, their first album together, Morgan’s naturalistic nuance coaxes out English’s elusive ethereal side, often glimpsed in passing but rarely explored at length. Across 49 minutes of muted soundscapes peppered with warm energy, the two musicians use manipulated organ tones to patient, meditative ends.
A conversation about the nature of “rich sources” inspired Colours of Air and its verdant palette, which is unlike the jagged, minimalist toolkit that defines much of English’s work. The two recorded material on a 132-year-old pipe organ housed at the Old Museum in English’s hometown and then warped those recordings into these cuts, all named for a different color. “Yellow” commands patience, built around chirruping melodies peeking out from behind vast chords that dominate the mid frequencies. Opener “Cyan” is metallic yet cozy, thanks to airy, filtered leads that ride atop an elongated drone. “Black” is hypnotic and shimmering, less sinister than the darkness that its name implies. While the Colours of Air tracklist evokes a diverse range of hues, all the pieces seem to rest on individual shelves in the same soft-lit, jasmine-scented room.
English’s distorted experimentation is fairly subdued on Colours of Air, which favors the overcast trappings of the classic Loscil sound. But the Australian musician makes his penchant for graininess and intensity felt in intriguingly offbeat ways. Closer “Magenta” is brooding and cinematic, centered on bassy tremolo pulses and a descending lead that wouldn’t sound out of place on a tasteful club banger. “Pink” ebbs and flows, contrasting challenging, silvery swells with balmy moments of serenity.
This isn’t English’s first foray into the pipe organ; he’s toyed with its textures on a few albums. Most recently, on 2021’s Observation of Breath, he used the same instrument heard here to create floor-shaking noise. But more than any other installment in English’s unpredictable body of work, Colours of Air plays like a spiritual companion to his 2018 record Selva Oscura, with William Basinski. Both albums put English’s austere signature to an uncharacteristically harmonious backdrop.
In recent years, the organ has become a tool for modernist soundscaping in the hands of artists like Kali Malone and Sarah Davachi. Loscil and English’s album is in a similar vein, and it reinforces how rewarding it can be to hear centuries-old tones and timbres in new contexts. “That which lies beyond our comprehension—a bird call, an animal whimpering, a mountain whispering as wind licks its edges—this is the stuff that has fuelled our mythologies,” English once said, contemplating the link between sound, perception, and meaning. On Colours of Air, the off-putting noisiness of his formula is cast in the gentle glow of Morgan’s hospitable quietude. The album is lush and oblique—an approachable standout in two daunting catalogs.


They may have found fame through Beavis and Butt-Head, but in their early days, White Zombie operated in the same NYC underground as Swans and Sonic Youth. This Numero Group box set tells the story.

It Came From N.Y.C.

“Shut up, Beavis, you’re ruining it.” That’s Butt-Head telling Beavis to stop interrupting White Zombie’s “Thunder Kiss ‘65” video. The cartoon duo treated Rob Zombie and Sean Yseult’s band with deep reverence, and ironically enough, the clip is widely credited as the reason for White Zombie’s initial leap to multi-platinum success. It’s easy to see why the band captured the imaginations of millions of Butt-Heads: Their aesthetic was fully realized—horror and grindhouse-nodding videos and lyrics, Zombie’s booming voice skulking at the front (not to mention his dreads and goggles). It was metal that rode grooves and featured tons of samples. The mid-'90s run of White Zombie that produced their final two albums—their final single, appropriately enough, being their Beavis & Butt-Head Do America soundtrack contribution—was easily the most popular.
But by the time they were playing arenas and getting frequent airplay on TV, they’d been making music for a decade, and their earliest work arguably holds up better than the stuff that made them famous. Yes, it's a total surprise that Numero Group are giving an extremely successful rock band fronted by Rob Zombie the box set treatment—an honor usually reserved for forgotten funk and soul gems. But it also makes total sense. It Came From N.Y.C. unearths records both unreleased and out-of-print while exhaustively telling the band's lesser-known origin story. The box comes with rare photos, archival flyers, a complete archive of their shirts, reproductions of Rob Zombie’s illustrated liner notes, and a detailed account of the band’s history from (full disclosure!) Pitchfork contributor Grayson Haver Currin. Interviews with the band, logged in a beautiful hardcover tome, offer crucial context for this music.
In the beginning, they were a band of art school kids living amid New York City crime and filth. Sean Yseult and Rob Cummings were both attending Parsons in 1984. Yseult switched from ballet to photography after she broke her foot, discovering hardcore and picking up instruments in the process. Cummings moved to New York from small town Massachusetts where he’d been dreaming of the city described by the Ramones and Velvet Underground. The two met in a cafeteria. She had blue-black hair; he wore a Misfits motorcycle jacket. They became a couple and were inseparable for years. They kicked around the idea of starting a band together and ultimately named themselves after a 1932 Bela Lugosi-starring horror film.
What’s quickly apparent from the almost three hours of music on It Came From N.Y.C. is that Cummings and Yseult were the creative and aesthetic anchors behind White Zombie. Guitarists never stuck around long in the band’s early incarnations, which means every one of their first records had an entirely different vibe. Ena Kostabi’s solos on their debut 1985 EP Gods on Voodoo Moon, for example, are a little more flashy than seems sonically appropriate for the band’s ominous, minimal, and occasionally trippy noise-punk underpinnings.
There are great moments on that first 7”—the uneasy melodic sway of “Tales From the Scare Crow Man” and point-perfect opening chug of “Gentleman Junkie”—but the songs themselves show more potential than prowess. Cummings’ growling, raspy screams are perfectly suited to his early horror-aping lyrics, but the frontman billing himself as “Rob Straker” hadn’t found his eventual authoritative Rob Zombie howl. Still, the essentials that would remain throughout the band’s tenure are present on their first recordings: hooks led by Yseult’s bass while Straker shouts nihilistic lyrics about holy mountains, demon clowns, Nazis, butchers, and scarecrows.
The band’s sound was pushed forward on their 1986 “Pig Heaven” single—presented in the box as an EP with four more unearthed tracks from the same session. Their new drummer Ivan de Prume, who would stay with White Zombie throughout the 1980s, emboldened their rhythm section tenfold. They sounded stronger and tighter than ever, and Straker’s psychedelic horror lyrics were becoming narratively connected stories. In their new attempts to make songs trippy or disorienting, they didn’t rely on thin effects pedals—they shoved more details into the margins. (Later in their discography, they proved to be adept with a “more is more” approach.)
The record is bookended by the tinny recording of a ragtime piano—a simple device that both emphasizes their power and shows their interest in painting a more elaborate picture beyond just screams and spilled blood. But while new guitarist Tim Jeffs was an excellent player, his blues-heavy riffs felt out of place in White Zombie. The nearly eight-minute blues groove of “Rain Insane” is one of the most significant departures in the band’s discography, and while it’s definitely an impressive Straker-fronted blues rock jam, White Zombie were much better when they veered toward chaos.
It’s important to note that while White Zombie were making records and playing shows, they were operating in the same New York underground as Swans and Sonic Youth. After they dumped Jeffs, they looked for a guitarist with more specific influences—their ad asked for someone who was into the Butthole Surfers, X, and the Birthday Party. They found Tom Guay, who ran in the same circles as Pussy Galore and was clearly more ready to convey dissonance than prowess. On 1987’s Psycho-Head Blowout EP, Straker was becoming a more confident frontman, Yseult’s low-end was becoming beefier and more authoritative, and on songs like “Gun Crazy,” de Prume would bring rapidfire discord. They were becoming more abrasive and unpredictable, Yseult unafraid to dive headlong into sludge while Guay tried on a variety of anxious, frenetic grooves.
Their next record was written, recorded, and released soon after Psycho-Head Blowout. It was hammered out in a practice space that shared walls with people who screamed in the hallways, jumped out windows, and kept pet raccoons. “It was a fucking nuthouse to say the least,” remembers Straker. Those were the conditions behind their debut album—their most bleak and noise-centric outing yet. With no-wave producer Wharton Tiers (Sonic Youth, Glenn Branca), they made their debut album Soul-Crusher, one of the best of their career.
Early on in White Zombie’s recordings, they tried for intimidation, but could never rise above pastiche. With Soul-Crusher, they create a sound that’s fully unsettling, Straker’s multi-tracked voice becoming a one-man cackling, shrieking chorus. There are several moments throughout where saliva seems to be palpably sticking to his lips, making his uncomfortable lyrics borderline unbearable. Guay, again, is essential. Any impressive on-point solos are buried in the mix beneath Yseult’s massive, overpowering sludge. When he’s prominently featured, he’s playing in the wrong key or doing some incredible work with feedback. Several times, de Prume full-on switches time signatures while the band slip in and out of key. The album features spoken-word samples from old horror movies, but by this point the band was its own B-movie soundtrack.
Despite hitting their target squarely, Straker decided to move on. Guay was fired from the band; Straker started crediting himself as Rob Zombie and became enamored with Metallica’s Ride the Lightning. As a result, White Zombie made the abrupt, full transition to metal on Make Them Die Slowly. Everything about the album is more crisp: The lyrics in the liner notes were no longer hand-scrawled with illustrations littering the margins. Guitarist John Ricci, who could rip through galloping riffs and nail precise high-speed solos, was practically the stylistic opposite of Guay. Producer Bill Laswell placed a huge emphasis on Ricci’s guitar and Zombie’s voice while neutering the rhythm section. Yseult’s bass wasn’t the overpowering beast it was on the previous two records, which means White Zombie were deprived of one of their most crucial ingredients. The drums sounded smaller, thin and hollow. The overall effect is especially draining when taken in the box set’s chronological order: the noise dominance of Soul-Crusher followed by the sluggish, monotonous Make Them Die Slowly.
Once again, White Zombie would ditch their guitarist and move on to the next one. Jay Yuenger is the one that stuck—he stayed with the band until they eventually called it quits. Their final record before signing to the majors and moving out to L.A. was 1989’s God of Thunder. On the cover, Zombie holds the severed head of Gene Simmons. The record opens with their cover of the Destroyer classic “God of Thunder,” and White Zombie introduce their version by jacking Kiss' legendary introduction: “You wanted the best? You got the best! Introducing the hottest band in the world!” Their sense of humor and a slam-dunk performance of a Kiss classic bring some much-needed levity to their aesthetic.
In their final stop before “Thunder Kiss ‘65,” God of Thunder shows the band utilizing samples more successfully than ever. (The best one: Between Zombie verses, a blasé voice chimes in to say, “Listen, you fuckers.”) Yuenger’s style in his White Zombie debut offers the midpoint between Ricci’s and Guay’s—he’s impressive, but not overpowering; heavy, but precise. By God of Thunder, they found footing after some thrilling moments in the underground and a couple of creative missteps. But the missteps come with experimentation, and experimentation is mandatory if you want to escape the 1990s as maximalist weirdo rock stars.
Listening back to White Zombie, it's interesting to consider how their music holds up in 2016. Obviously, they're a crucial part of Rob Zombie's horror legacy, introducing the nihilistic hellscape language he would follow in his solo albums and literal horror films. In an era where Michael Gira is making some of the best records of his life while early works by Sonic Youth and Lydia Lunch are getting reappraised, White Zombie's early presence as a New York underground institution is, on their first 7", intriguing, and on Soul-Crusher, enthralling. Even their later hits, entrenched in 1990s culture as they were (again, thanks in large part to "Beavis & Butt-Head"), stands the test of time thanks to riffs like the slide guitar of “More Human Than Human.” This music pummels, and better still, it escapes the trap of self-seriousness that so many metal and noise bands seem to fall into. They had a sense of humor, which came through in their use of samples and in Zombie's deranged carnival barker performances. But even more engaging than the music's heft, humor, or chaos is the narrative that forms across It Came From N.Y.C.—one of a band that played by their own rules, bucking genre conventions and cutting ties with bandmates in an effort to continuously move forward.


Crosswiring ’80s-Springsteen valor with contemporaneous synth pop, the second album from Dan Boeckner’s disco power trio channels the crushing fear of imminent collapse.

Radiant Dawn

Everything and nothing about Dan Boeckner’s career has changed in the past 15 years. Though he’s best known as the wiry yin to Spencer Krug’s whimsical yang in Montreal indie-rock institution Wolf Parade, Boeckner’s extracurricular activities have taken him further and further from that band’s blue-collar prog, through the skeletal electro-punk of Handsome Furs and, now, the strobe-lit DIY disco of Operators. And yet when he takes to the mic, he’s still very much the same guy we first met on Wolf Parade’s Apologies to the Queen Mary—the bleary-eyed, raspy-voiced underdog with no love for the modern world. His second album with Operators makes it immediately apparent that, this time, Boeckner’s got far greater stressors on his mind than a boring job.
Radiant Dawn ticks all the boxes for a proper dystopian concept album: an overarching theme, recurring lyrical references, brief instrumental interludes, not to mention an album cover that appears salvaged from Storm Thorgerson’s rough drafts for Dark Side of the Moon. But Radiant Dawn differs from the template in one significant respect: Where most bands use concept albums as an excuse to go over the top, Operators want to get under your skin. On their debut 2014 EP, Operators sounded like they were trying to claim the dancefloor vacated by a then-dormant LCD Soundsystem; much of their 2016 full-length, Blue Wave, could’ve passed for Wolf Parade songs with less Krug and more Korg. Radiant Dawn, by contrast, is defined by motorik minimalism and an austere, foreboding atmosphere that allows the band to stretch out musically while encouraging Boeckner to burrow deeper inward lyrically.
In an interview last year, Boeckner admitted that Operators is essentially a power-trio remount of Handsome Furs, the project he formed in 2006 with Alexei Perry and which terminated in 2012 when their marriage dissolved. While recording Radiant Dawn, Boeckner, fellow synth-tweaker Devojka, and drummer Sam Brown actually performed a handful of one-off shows showcasing Handsome Furs material—partly because its politicized intent resonated through the songs they were writing for the new record. While Boeckner continues to crosswire ’80s-Springsteen valor with contemporaneous synth-pop sounds, Radiant Dawn looks to the Cold War era less for musical inspiration than psychological. To accurately gauge the unsettled state of our world today, Operators transport us back to the last time in modern history when it seemed life on Earth was coming to an end.
Not a moment goes by on Radiant Dawn when Boeckner isn’t feeling crushed by the weight of modern life and the fear of imminent ecological collapse. He opens the record with a lyric that seems to plummet to new depths of despair with each line, like stops on a descending elevator: “Staring down the void/At the bottom of the glass/In a public parking lot/I woke up in the woods.” From there, the album moves on to paralyzing ennui (“It’s impossible to live today”), mental deterioration (“Put poison in your hollow skull and overload until you just can’t feel”), and fuck-it-all nihilism (“I want to watch the flood come and wash it all away”).
But you’d be forgiven for not noticing that Radiant Dawn is one of the bleakest records of the year, because it’s also among the most effervescent. On “I Feel Emotion,” Boeckner isn’t just cataloging his blues, he’s giving himself the heart-pounding aerobics soundtrack that will motivate him to shake them off. And while Neu!-wave anthem “Faithless” may speak of spiritual emptiness, the song steps up to fill the void with an urgent rhythmic pulse and surprisingly psychedelic textural freakery.
At six and a half minutes, “Faithless” is both the longest and most arresting track—and given its early placement, it threatens to overshadow everything that follows. But as the album’s tropical digi-dub interludes become more frequent, they seem less like random sketches and more like necessary narcotizing devices that allow Operators to reveal their vulnerabilities. The album hits its emotional peak with “Come and See,” a slo-mo electro ballad that disintegrates into an oddly moving ambient coda haunted by a corroded sample of “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,” like a faded Polaroid of a more innocent time. And with the neon-tinted knockout “Strange,” Boeckner crafts a “Dancing on My Own” to call his own, albeit one that celebrates a different kind of perseverance. “The feeling’s gone, gone,” he laments, before revealing the silver lining to Radiant Dawn’s black-cloud forecast: “I’m on the wire/Holding on.”