The singular experimentalist’s first official solo compilation traverses the universes that make up his discography, rejecting genre and attribution in an album-length argument for mongrel pop.

Roaches 2012-2019

Dean Blunt started the decade challenging small audiences and ended it collaborating with A$AP Rocky and Panda Bear. At the same time, he created a body of work as distinct as it is varied, inventing a niche somewhere between post-punk provocation and dub experiment. As a semi-public figure, Blunt is restless and acerbic, willing to change allegiances at the drop of a hat and pull stunts that are simultaneously thrilling and idiotic. He sent an impostor to collect his NME Award, sold a weed-filled toy car on eBay, and released unlistenable noise as Babyfather. His propensity for gags can make it easy to dismiss the rigorous craftsmanship of his work. Yet Blunt sculpts infinite soundscapes littered with indecipherable messages; his songs are simultaneously archives of past genres and transmissions from the future. This ecumenical approach and DIY prankster spirit animates his latest release, Roaches 2012-2019, a collection of solo and collaborative pieces from the past decade. Blunt’s first official solo compilation rejects genre and attribution in favor of nuance and theme in an album-length argument for mongrel pop.
The YouTube one-offs and previously unreleased tracks collected here traverse the universes that make up Dean Blunt’s discography. Unlike fan-made compilations or those Blunt has leaked via WeTransfer, this compilation, released through his World Music label, serves as an official archive and survey of the work he’s made in the past seven years. Album opener “Felony” and the bristling “Acts of Faith” take their cues from the cinematic string and beat structure of solo releases like 2014’s Black Metal and 2013’s The Redeemer. The smoldering duet “Neva,” which pairs Blunt with singer Poison Anna, recalls Blunt and Inga Copeland’s broken ballad “The Narcissist.” The tragic street narrative and thudding goth-rock sample in “Trident 2” wouldn’t sound out of place on Babyfather’s 2016 album BBF Hosted by DJ Escrow. The numbered “Benidorm” tracks are short, experimental sound samples that bring to mind the interstitials on 2012’s Black Is Beautiful, while the “Nitro Girls” songs with Joanne Robertson mimic the stripped-back acoustics of the pair’s recent collaborations. Taken together, they form a miniature history of Blunt’s development, a survey of the many ad-hoc genres he’s created over time.
Steeped in post-punk and reggae, Blunt uses both genres to convey his particular desperation. “Prayer 2015” is post-punk taken back to its reggae roots; Blunt creates a dub version of Shellac’s “Prayer to God” by muting Steve Albini’s vocals and keeping the propulsive rhythm section of the original song. Adapting the technique of a Jamaican dub producer like Big Joe, he strips the song to its essentials, using the remaining foundation as a backdrop against which to modulate and delay his voice. Limited by his vocal range and distorted by reverb, lines like, “Here is my prayer to the one true God” gain added urgency as they fall in time with the militaristic march of the drums. In his monotone ad-libs, Blunt acknowledges the song’s debts to previous genres: “Here is my prayer… Jah!”
When a speaker on “Sicko freestyle” says, “We made a culture, niggas,” it could be the manifesto for Blunt’s approach: If black music underlies all pop music, then is any part of pop off-limits to the black artist? If all cultural gradations are artificial, then why maintain any separation? It’s this sense of possibility that frees Blunt to fragment Prefab Sprout’s “Cue Fanfare” into the mumbled “Lit freestyle,” which sounds as though it were taken from the same Babyfather recording session that produced “Skywalker Freestyle” out of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights.”
Blunt’s fascination with reimagining the past has been present since the start. You can hear it on “The Throning,” a 2010 single by Hype Williams (a group then composed of Blunt and Copeland). It starts out as a vaporwave cover of Sade’s “The Sweetest Taboo,” then morphs into hazy techno reminiscent of Carl Craig’s More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art in its final 30 seconds; it’s both pop parody and pop devotional. Depending on your viewpoint, Blunt is a charlatan or a perpetually dissatisfied perfectionist. Roaches offers a map of the roads he’s taken and a peek at those he didn’t: On “N Then She Said I Need to Tell U Somethin N Dont Hate Me for It...,” a seven-minute dirge filled with MIDI harmonica, we get a glimpse of Dean Blunt the prog-rock frontman. Steeped in personal and musical history, the collection is as conflicted as its creator. It’s simultaneously political and apolitical, conscious yet contemptuous of race, focused and impatient. Roaches 2012-2019’s series of artifacts contains Blunt’s vision for the future.


Nicolas Jaar's tight, three-song EP as Darkside, a collaboration with guitarist and bassist Dave Harrington, is at once sexy and frigid, cavernous and cramped.

Darkside EP

Nicolas Jaar creates slow, strange, cloistered songs with keyboards and field recordings, breath, and drums. He makes synthesizers feel like natural elements, mingled with running waters, murmuring voices, and sighing winds. Jaar called his breakthrough record Space Is Only Noise, expanded on a key track to "Space Is Only Noise if You Can See". Titles are often red herrings, but this is the rare case where we might pause and come to understand something essential about Jaar's perspective. No one has found a good box for him yet, likely because he doesn't make a kind of music, but a way of music. (In purely diagnostic terms, our own Mike Powell's "downtempo minimalism" is the best shorthand I've read, though it wisely doesn't even venture to address the music's sense.) Jaar's new EP as Darkside, a collaboration with guitarist and bassist Dave Harrington, clarifies things further, but we've got to unpack a little before we come to it.
Listen again: Space is only noise if you can see. The nouns and verbs are flashier, but the devil's in the adverbs and conjunctions. I kind of hate that rogue "only," that innocent-faced little "if." Does it mean that if you can see, you discover space is merely noise? Or that space becomes noise only upon being seen? And what the hell would either of those things mean? Jaar doesn't make it that easy for us. His assertive yet ambiguous phrasing has no solvable outcome, so it sticks in your mind-- or rather, your mind sticks up against it. And this may be the key to how Jaar's music works too. He applies a chilly, commanding logic to disassociated quantities until they fall into a restive equilibrium. He creates biospheres and then adds one extra, destabilizing element, or leaves out something crucial. His songs pose enigmatic questions disguised as bold assertions. Meaning leaks out of the substance to pool in the cracks, and things that shouldn't relate, do.
That Jaar is more about means than ends explains why he's able to transition so seamlessly from dreamy electronic music inflected with impressionist piano, gently digitized French singing, lobby-jazz, and cave sounds to the terse, rugged dub-funk of Darkside, all while still sounding totally Jaar: nocturnal, cerebral, sensuous, paradoxical, and intuitive. (And sounding totally Jaar is a remarkable thing for a young producer with one major album under his belt to be able to do in any case.) The tight, three-song EP, released on Jaar's own Clown and Sunset label, is at once sexy and frigid, cavernous and cramped. Much closer to idiomatic pop than Space, with Harrington's falsetto clenching Jaar's own loose, Matthew Dear-like croak, the EP brings Jaar's highly personalized values to the quality of time, rather than space: because what is funk, if not the creative, slantwise division of metrical time? As Harrington holds down long, deep, calmly needling grooves, Jaar colors the atmosphere around them to give them different senses of brave momentum or back-winding reticence, earthbound heft or atmospheric suspension. On "A1", he sets glimmering whorls below the loping guitar and a cushion of static above, holding them in check until the very end, when they burst forth in a high-desert mirage that carries over into the Morricone-tipping "A2". It's icy-hot stuff. The importance of Harrington's ace fretwork can't be overstated, but the frosty austerity could only be a product of the curious mind of Jaar.


Danish band takes fairly normal indie reference points-- Radiohead, My Bloody Valentine-- and turns them into lavish, stratospheric, fairy-tale prog.

And the Glass-Handed Kites

This rock band, Mew: They might not be “cool.” I mean, they’re Danish, and they’re pretty, and they wear natty blazers and scarves, and they play great music, all of which is pretty cool. But if you see them perform, there will come a point when Bo Madsen is playing metal-style power chords, while the long-haired 1970s-prog keyboard player unleashes his “epic” wash settings, and singer Jonas Bjerre soars up into his sappiest, most atmospheric register, and you’ll notice that they’re good with hair gel and look like soap stars, and it’ll all come clear. These guys are not “cool”-- these guys are like Queensryche. Queensryche meets Sigur Rós, but still.
And maybe that’s the pinnacle of style in Denmark (what do I know), but over here it’s uncool, and that uncoolness is part of what makes And the Glass-Handed Kites, now released in the U.S., one of the better rock records of the year. The band’s reference points are normal enough in the indie world-- Radiohead, My Bloody Valentine-- but the ambitions they draw out of them are not: These are some of the only guys around who still believe in hard-rock Valhalla, the kind of lavish, stratospheric, fairy-tale prog that’s less about making aging boys geek out and more about making young girls swoon. Who else does this-- would Stars ever rock out like this? Even a grandiose pop band like Coldplay wants to act down-to-earth, and here are these guys with their dreamy thunderstorm pop.
The payoff, of course, is that they really are nearly as magnificent as they’re hoping to be. For one thing, they’re not actually throwbacks, and their rock is cutting-edge elegant: Madsen’s rhythm guitar scratches through odd chord voicings like Radiohead, his lead lines match the dreamy buzz of any shoegazer act, and the keyboard and piano lead both through epic builds and breakdowns with only the slightest winks at “cheesy”; on first listen, they sound more like a better-funded Swirlies than a laser-light show. These grand songs-- the whole record is technically one continuous piece, but whatever-- are complicated in a way that’s theirs: Bjerre’s doe-eyed vocal melodies come in strange, lilting figures, and the band switches through tricky half-measures, endless changeups, and sly, slick rhythms to wrap around them.
This stuff might even be considered “difficult,” if it didn’t always come back to the starry-eyed soaring. Like “The Zookeeper’s Boy”, which acts like it might be a great knotty rock song for approximately 30 muscular seconds. Then the keyboards start sparkling, and then Bjerre teases you with the most unapologetically glorious chorus here-- a heart-clutching, soaring-through-clouds, upper-register plaint: “Are you/ My lady, are you.” All 53 minutes are packed full of ideas like that, often to the point of over-egging things: oceanic dream-pop on “Chinaberry Tree”, interstellar hard rock on “Apocalypso” (seriously: how prog is that?), or geologically huge melodies on “Saviours of Jazz Ballet” (which sounds like Yes album covers look). They have song titles like “The Seething Rain Weeps for You” and lyrics about girls with “meringue-colored hair.”
It’s a terrific accomplishment, and it’s tempting to imagine one reason why-- that these guys are playing not out of fashion, but out of pure belief. What’s stranger is to imagine how this fashion-bucking record could pull fans from so many different classes of listener: arty cloud-buster for Coldplay fans, sensitive hard-rock opus for Guitar Center techies and Dream Theater devotees, a masterpiece for people who haven’t smoked weed yet but are thinking about it, Bambi-faced European dreamers to match the unicorn poster on the wall. For our readers-- at a time when indie rock is enamored of scratchy post-punk minimalism, and even a grand-ambition pop act like Bloc Party pretends to be bristly-- this could be the escape of the year, a curve off into the lush, ambitious stargazing that used to happen all the time. No matter which direction listeners come from on this one, they’ll find the same thing: If you’re up for that fairy-tale rock glory, these guys have it down.


Being a teenager is all about testing out different personalities to figure out who you really are. This kind of personality development, for better or worse, defines Sunflower Bean’s full-length debut, Human Ceremony.

Human Ceremony

Being a teenager is all about testing out different personalities to figure out who you really are. This kind of development is all over Sunflower Bean’s full-length debut, Human Ceremony. It's most evident in the frenetic variety of the album, as the Brooklyn trio—singer/bassist Julia Cumming, singer/guitarist Nick Kivlen, and drummer Jacob Faber, all in their teens when they recorded it—try on genres throughout 11 tracks.
There are bits of psych, moments of metal, and lots of guitar sounds from an era when major labels threw lots of money at alternative rock. The Cure, Lush, Sonic Youth, and even the Sundays are somewhere in their record collection. And you can practically hear the practice space discussion of the band composing the songs: "Okay, we'll do the Pumpkins part eight times and then go into the Sabbath part."
But even if they're doing things that have been done before, it sounds like they're discovering these things for the first time, and that excitement is palpable on Human Ceremony. Sure, the excitement occasionally results in childlike naiveté, but that's also part of the fun. A seasoned songwriter would probably be too self-conscious to title a song "Space Exploration Disaster," and if Sunflower Bean had somebody with a heavier hand advising them, we might not be treated to such a decodable album cover. (Is that a Frida Kahlo button near the Dalí melting clock? What do the 12 clocks even mean? Kivlen's look is totally Bringing It All Back Home Dylan!)
The band’s diverse influences sound best when Kivlen's voice serves as a darker echo of Cumming’s angelic optimism, especially in a call and response. But the band's hodgepodge approach doesn't always work. Kivlen occasionally feels out of place adding a second vocal to some of the songs, especially when he's delivering clunky quasi-mystical lyrics like "in your right hand is the magic potion/ You can drink the elixir now/ Don't forget the notion" on the title track. The band especially fall flat when they try to do both dreamy and nightmarish within the same song. It just sounds silly when after a few minutes of prettiness during "Creation Myth" they delve into one of those aforementioned Sabbath bits. Sunflower Bean rock out and they can also be trusted to handle more fragile material, but it's best to keep these traits separate from song to song. The band may find their identity by mixing these contrasting elements, which, it must be said, is the reason that being a teenager is so interesting. It's the time in your life when mixing it up like this can actually work.


The former Fifth Harmony member’s debut solo album is largely successful at capturing her charismatic flair. Anchored by the wonderful “Havana,” it shines especially when it's light and breezy.

Camila

When an enterprising member of a pop group dares to dream about solo success, they have to reintroduce themselves to the world. If they have the vision, chops, and nerve to survive beyond their hit-making machine, they can blaze a new trail for themselves on their own terms; if they come up short, they’re relegated to history’s dustbin. Camila Cabello’s sultry, salsa-inflected “Havana” is a keystone for a superstar origin story: Striking out on her own after a bitter split with her bandmates in Fifth Harmony, Cabello realized her creative ambitions with a smash that celebrated her Cuban heritage and helped define a year in which Latin music was ascendant.
Of course, pop careers rarely come into being with that kind of elegance, and Cabello’s own rise to the top of the charts was a little more complicated. “Havana” began its run as a humble summer promotional single, one lacking the support of label execs and radio personnel alike. It was tossed onto streaming services a few months after her first attempt at a grand debut, “Crying in the Club,” fizzled out just inside the Top 50. And “Crying in the Club” failed to meet expectations because it sounded like Cabello was tracking, note-for-note, a demo pulled from between Sia’s couch cushions. It lacked the qualities that gush out of “Havana” like steam: history, personality, charisma. The tension between Cabello’s two potential futures—a spot in pop’s upper echelon or a decade spent churning out anonymous EDM collaborations and thankless soundtrack work—is what animates Camila, her debut solo album.
Cabello’s flair for the dramatic has always been her greatest strength. It was never difficult to pick her out within Fifth Harmony and when given the chance, she chewed scenery like an overeager character actor. (Listen to her rip through the bridge of weightless trop-house ditty “Write on Me.”) Her performances on the duets that first flagged her as a breakout candidate—the Shawn Mendes sleeper “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and Machine Gun Kelly’s soggy “Bad Things”—verge on histrionic, and that isn’t a bad thing; the emotional intensity of her singing makes up for the volume and density her voice lacks.
Camila shines when it’s light and breezy, giving Cabello the space she needs to cook. “All These Years” and “Real Friends” are gentle and largely acoustic with a hint of Jai Paul’s liquid zip, and Cabello sings with real delicacy about lost love and loneliness. (The fluttering vocal runs she unspools midway through “All These Years” are stunning.) “She Loves Control” is an apt mission statement for a star who soured on girl group life because she couldn’t “explore [her] individuality,” and it shows Cabello can navigate a reggaeton rhythm with the same ease that characterized “Havana.” She effortlessly toggles between English and Spanish on the sun-kissed, steel drum-flecked “Inside Out.” It’s on these songs that Camila makes its strongest argument for Cabello as a unique force, one who can churn out pop hybrids that perfectly suit a shifting pop climate and a changing country.
When the album falters, it’s because it loses sight of this compelling identity. She growls and hiccups her way through new single “Never Be the Same,” but its reliance on a love-drug conceit suggests a novice writer who has room to expand her range. (Cabello worked with a production team led by veteran Frank Dukes, but her writing credit on every song suggests a fertile Notes app.) The overwrought one-two punch of “Consequences”—which sounds a little like her attempt at something like Rihanna’s “Stay”—and “Something’s Gotta Give” slow the album to a crawl. And when Camila interfaces with trends in the larger world of pop, the results are varied. The frothy, flirty “Into It” finds a delightful sweet spot within a Lorde-Carly Rae Jepsen-Ariana Grande Venn diagram, but “In the Dark” is the kind of generic trap-pop you’d expect from any number of B- and C-grade stars. It’s a Bebe Rexha deep cut.
None of these songs are abject failures; a half-decade in a group like Fifth Harmony is an extended pop boot camp, one that can’t help but equip you with basic proficiency. If they’re frustrating, it’s because they’re juxtaposed with tantalizing glimpses of a next-generation star, the kind of artist with the presence and charm to carry pop forward into a new decade. Perhaps that’s the greatest compliment you can pay Camila: It throws off enough sparks to justify expecting more.


Young UK band influenced by modern R&B lands on the scene with a terrific debut, filled with seductive songs set to spare but effective arrangements.

xx

The xx are four 20-year-olds from South London who make predominantly slow, furtive pop music, mostly about sex. They are also one of the stranger recipients of UK hype in recent memory. They have no calling-card song; members of the Pitchfork staff have ID'd no fewer than four songs ("Basic Space", "Crystalised", "Islands", "Infinity") as "the one." They are not fashion plates, nor likely to be. Their list of influences is potent but imperfect: Young Marble Giants (too shaggy and heavy-lidded); Japan (too robust and theatric); Glass Candy (too quick and glammy). Without one gimmick song they'll never be able to reproduce, without an alternate agenda, without a set-in-stone hip influence, the xx start to sound like a real actual band, even if, after dozens of listens, it's nearly incomprehensible to think that a group so fresh-faced produced xx.
Strongly influenced by modern R&B-- the group made hay with an early cover of Womack & Womack's "Teardrops", while UK copies of xx come packed with their version of Aaliyah's "Hot Like Fire"-- the xx use a drum machine to complement their copiously tidy compositions. Unlike contemporary R&B fetishists Hot Chip or Discovery, who have clearly spent long hours internalizing Timbaland, the Neptunes, and other radio cognoscenti, the xx incorporate more abstract elements of the genre: a liberal use of bass tones and an unwavering focus on sex and interpersonal relationships.
Singer-guitarist Romy Madley Croft in particular seems all but incapable of uttering a line that isn't a come-on, a post-coital musing, or a longing apology for a lack of one of the former. During "Islands" or "Basic Space", her voice takes on a pleasant soft-pop vibe, like Stevie Nicks'. When Madley Croft sings, during "Shelter", "Maybe I had said/ Something that was wrong/ Can I make it better/ With the lights turned on," it's unclear whether lights-turned-on activity is sex or... something besides sex. She's not some purring kitten, though, merely reflective about a subject we don't often associate with teenagers and self-awareness.
Croft's sparring partner, bassist Oliver Sim, usually fills in the other spaces via either his responsive vocals or ever-present bass. (His best trick: momentarily interrupting the divine verses of "Islands" with four short thumbings). Sim's voice, papery and affectless, is a sticking point for some, but pop music has plenty of room for ugly male voices, especially those with such pleasant friends. Importantly, both Croft and Sim seem like they're singing not because they have the best voices but because they have the most to say (and, purely speculatively, possibly to one another), something that would align them with an indie rock tradition as long as the genre is old, (and folk and blues long before that).
Their voices provide plenty of friction, however, in the context of the xx's slight, expert compositions. Working without a live drummer, the xx manipulate airy, lingering negative space as well as any band going. Initially hospital-tile sterile, xx rewards volume and repetition like few other albums this year. Nudge the knob clockwise to hear sparse guitars decay, bass notes wobble. Amid these delicate environs, Croft and Sim can seem like they're working on different agendas, but the cagey back-and-forth on "Basic Space" is exquisitely timed, and the lovers' mumbles of "Heart Skipped a Beat", over a clacking drum machine, acquire their own weird logic. Jamie Smith (he of the "Basic Space" remix) and Baria Qureshi are responsible for most of the drums/loops/keyboards (and some of the guitars), and they're adept at knowing when to jump in, picking up "Stars" just as Sim seems to get bored with it, spicing "VCR", the band's quaintest, simplest pop song ("You/ You just know/ You just do"), with small xylophone melodies.
That all said, the record is not a complete break with recent sounds: tune in during certain moments of "Crystalised", and you'll hear the flecked, staccato guitars of Interpol. "Infinity"'s slow-strummed electric chords feel like late-period Radiohead. But xx is nervy and self-contained, the product of a new band thinking a lot harder about topics-- sex, composition, volume-- than we are accustomed to new bands thinking. It is so fully formed and thoughtful that it feels like three or four lesser, noisier records should have preceded it. The xx didn't need a gestation period, though xx is nuanced, quiet, and surprising enough that you might.


Considering Sunn O))) and dark Norwegian post-metal experimentalists Ulver's résumés, the relatively bright sounds, open-ended structures, and medium volume of Terrestrials might come as a surprise.

Terrestrials

Despite the heavy-metal solemnity that the names and the pasts of Sunn O))) and Ulver might suggest, their three-track collaboration Terrestrials actually started as a celebration. In 2008, Sunn O))) played its 200th set in a park in Oslo, Norway, to a few thousand ear-burned listeners at the Øya festival. For the auspicious occasion, the band expanded into a transcontinental quintet, with the core of bassist Greg Anderson, guitarist Stephen O’Malley, ritualistic showman Attila Csihar, and an accompanying militia of amplifiers abutted by two guests, Norwegian electronics aggressor Lasse Marhaug and British multi-instrumentalist Daniel O’ Sullivan. “This is Sunn O)))’s 200th concert!” exclaimed their stage plot for the big night in one of metal’s motherlands. “We are very, very happy to be playing it in Norway! Thank you! Hail to Norway!”
To consecrate the event, two days later Ulver invited Anderson and O’Malley to Crystal Canyon, their longtime Oslo studio, to stay up late and improvise until the sun rose—two supposed pillars of darkness, creating a collective morning love song. The pairing made sense: Sunn O))) and Ulver have emerged sporadically but surely as “searching musicians,” the phrase that Robert Levin coined to describe John Coltrane’s essential artistic unrest in 1957. (O'Sullivan, Rygg, and O'Malley also play in the highly collaborative art-metal ensemble Aethenor.) Sure, Sunn O))) earned their initial cachet by dressing in robes and playing long, loud riffs through a macabre veil of fog. But their records are deeply experimental odysseys where choirs, orchestras, and harsh-noise masters enrich their typical amplifier worship. And during the last two decades, Ulver have moved from a black metal powerhouse into an outfit that have used electronica and theatrics to forge their own cutting edge. To wit, O’Sullivan, who joined these sessions after supporting Sunn O))) at Øya, has since become Ulver’s fourth member. His other projects include Grumbling Fur and Guapo, associations that reinforce Ulver’s beyond-metal charge.
Despite those résumés, the relatively bright sounds, open-ended structures and medium volume of the pleasant Terrestrials might still come as a surprise. After that initial session, O’Malley and Ulver frontman Kristoffer Rygg finessed the recordings, editing and assembling the jams into three sympathetic pieces, aided by strings and trumpet. The results step far afield of Sunn O)))’s generally infinite desolation and pull Ulver’s own stylistic wandering toward a center of static gravity.
The opener takes the name “Let There Be Light”, a de facto mantra for the tune and overall effort. These first 11 minutes, for instance, cycle through a dense bed of guitar sustains, trumpet curlicues, and violin trills until a drum roll introduces a marching-band-sized fanfare. With its plunging bass and vaulting melodies, the moment suggests the sun pictured on the album’s cover, at last climbing from the blanketing dark. On “Western Horn”, the shortest and most essential piece here, the ensemble builds patiently, with sinister guitars and torpid tones accreting during the first several minutes. But there’s a luminous undercurrent to this unlikely rendezvous of Miles Davis’ electric jazz surrealism and Sunn O)))’s fathom-deep drones. O’Sullivan’s coruscant keyboards and a trumpet extend vivid lines from beneath the din. It’s like staring into darkness so long that you imagine new flickers of light, a mirage of impending triumph. The 14-minute closer “Eternal Return” fully indulges this radiance, with soporific vibraphone loosely marking the meters through distended lines of guitar and violin. Think Earth 2.0, allowing Dylan Carlson’s guitar leads to bleed outside the pocket. At the midpoint, an organ introduces a repetitive piano-and-synthesizer figure. It’s practically danceable. Kristoffer Rygg falls into this rhythm, delivering a poem of mixed mythologies (Hades collides with the Wilderness of Sin, and so on) in his melodramatic croon. It’s offered as a culmination.
Sunn O))) and Ulver have collaborated before for “CUTWOODeD”, an obscure, abstruse track appended to a version of White1 issued through a very limited box set several years after the original’s release. That sidelong span was darker and more menacing than anything on Terrestrials, with death-of-machines wheezes and layered, low-lying drones tracing a bleak landscape. But in retrospect, that decade-old collaboration shares the same aversion to momentum—rising, falling, climaxing, moving toward much of anything—that handicaps Terrestrials. On “CUTWOODed”, only a distant electronic thud urged the listener onward, a beacon providing a semblance of forward motion.
These three tracks are much more sculpted and finessed than that very deep cut, but the same feeling of lingering and waiting presides. These are introductions to something that never really arrives. When Rygg’s stentorian voices vanishes during “Eternal Return”, the music limps into the void for another four minutes, an anti-climax that gives even the biggest moment here the elliptical feeling of a preamble. Despite some rather majestic sheets of sound and many moments of instrumental interplay that suggest giants from Ennio Morricone to Philip Glass and from Jon Hassell to the Necks, Terrestrials is a slight musical drift, a soundtrack unattached to a significant story.
Ultimately, Terrestrials works as a likable listen, a liminal play concerning the push and pull between dusk and dawn. But it serves as a mere footnote or, at beast, an appealing redundancy for Sunn O))) and Ulver, two acts whose power has long stemmed from their willingness and ability to push past the parameters of genre. Together, they redouble one another’s outsider inclinations, but they push until they become all but unmoored to the thrall endemic to their best work. After the sun rises on these meditations, then, you can simply go about your daily routine, somewhat elevated but mostly unaltered.


With whispery beats and spectral vocals, erstwhile dubstep DJ Jon Gooch seeks a quieter, more intimate sound.

seventh stitch: murmuring chasms of nostalgia

murmuring chasms of nostalgia

Listening to the shadowy, crepuscular compositions on Jon Gooch’s murmuring chasms of nostalgia, it’s hard to fathom this is the same guy behind a screeching dance hit called “I Do Coke.” After developing a reputation for brain-splattering drum’n’bass under the moniker Spor, the British producer migrated to the realm of commercial EDM in the late 2000s as Feed Me, releasing big, garish dubstep through deadmau5’s mau5trap label and remixing AWOLNATION and Gorillaz. But nonstop raging takes an emotional toll, so Gooch came up with a project that’d serve as a personal diary: “Music is always a release for me but with seventh stitch it’s a world I can breathe in,” he said in January.
Teased for years, the resulting EP by seventh stitch attempts to reveal a sensitive, ruminative side of Gooch. More consciously tasteful than his bass-wobbling bangers, it’s a collection of eerie downtempo songs with wispy titles that gesture to what’s hidden in the recesses of memory: “the last day you stayed” and “the sound of tennis shoes on concrete.” One reference is the phantom rave-pop of Everything But the Girl, with their yearning, world-wearied vocals and sputtering beats; another is the crackly, greyscale ruminations of Burial. Opener “who are you waiting for” is like a tormented, after-hours sprint through barren streets, cold wind blowing you into a dark unknown.
Though ostensibly a more intimate project, murmuring chasms of nostalgia can still feel impersonal; the billowing light-up synths at the end of “tin pear” conjure a generic sense of alienation, the reeling thoughts of a drunk person in a festival crowd who still feels alone. Sometimes Gooch tries to shortcut to depth, like on the closer, where a muffled voicemail from an unknown woman plays over muted piano and whispery beats for a full minute. This scrapbook approach has been deployed to the point of cliché in popular music; here, as in many instances, the sampled material lacks the specificity or context to seem significant.
But midpoint highlight “idle thumbs” disrupts the EP’s moody haze, snapping you awake with bright, chiming tones and a syncopated rhythm. The most interesting parts of murmuring chasms of nostalgia are its spooky and tactile details, as in the case of “the red book,” where hospital monitor beeps, mechanized whirring, and serpentine wails evoke a subterranean lab experiment gone awry; on “hearts beat for,” insect flutters meet trickling liquid that sounds disturbingly like snot. While the EP is not without moments of triteness, it still occasionally manages to be spectral and enveloping.


The Italian synthesizer composer explores new dimensions of her algorithmic, arpeggiated sound, playing with tempo, duration, and pacing to toy with listeners’ sense of perception.

Ecstatic Computation

Caterina Barbieri uses music to bend time and space around her. The Italian-born, Berlin-based electronic composer’s 2017 breakthrough, Patterns of Consciousness, utilized whirling synth oscillations over marathon run times to create something akin to a dreamachine for the ears. Like the device conceived by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs to create hallucinatory visuals with alpha-wave-inducing flickers of light, Barbieri’s cumulatively building patterns made each track a mind-altering journey. She didn’t so much reach mesmerizing climaxes as induce them right in the listener’s brain. Last year’s Born Again in the Voltage scrambled her musical timeline even further: Functioning as a single, fluid piece, the album sounded like an evolution, but it had actually been recorded in 2014. With Ecstatic Computation, Barbieri’s proper follow-up and debut for Editions Mego, she has folded her sonic universe in on itself once again, delivering a series of tracks that break new ground individually while flowing seamlessly as a whole.
Barbieri opens Ecstatic Computation with its longest and most definitive statement, the 10-minute “Fantas.” Though that might be shorter than her earliest tracks, it condenses an arc worthy of an entire album. She’s grown so skilled at programming hypnotic webs of sound that listeners are already put under by the halfway point, but Barbieri doesn’t stop there. After building the tense melodic progression to its logical peak, the track softens and stretches but never stops gaining momentum. It’s a warp-speed jump where everything seems to move slower and faster all at once. The brilliance of “Fantas” is hearing her use that sensory state not as an end, but a foundation to build even further. After Barbieri weaves the central theme back in near the end, it feels as if she could take us anywhere. Instead she shatters everything, distorting the sequence into a crashing electrical storm that’s all the more bracing for how methodically she’s set it up. It’s a breathtaking moment, one that cements her mastery of entrancing listeners by virtue of how dramatically she takes it away.
From there, the previously rigid structures of Barbieri’s music melt away like never before. “Fantas” is followed by “Spine of Desire”, an effervescent 94-second rush of endlessly climbing Shepard tones. The shortest piece of music she’s ever released, “Spine” builds a bridge towards club music, bringing to mind the pointillistic trance of fellow Milanese producer Lorenzo Senni. On “Arrow of Time” Barbieri moves into a more classical mode, methodically spacing an 18th-century harpsichord around operatic vocals from singers Annie Gårlid and Evelyn Saylor. The two recently appeared among many voices on Holly Herndon’s album PROTO, where they play a crucial role during one of the “live training” pieces, teaching an A.I. collaborator how to sing. Though Barbieri has used vocals in her music before, Gårlid and Saylor’s gorgeous passages provide an exciting counterpoint to the algorithmic structure of her music: a newly introduced element of the divine in her expanding universe.
For every track where Barbieri pushes her sound in new directions, there are others where she simply refines it. Tracks like “Closest Approach to Your Orbit” and “Pinnacles of You” deliver waves of euphoria-inducing synths similar to Patterns of Consciousness highlights like “Scratches in the Readable Surface.” But while Patterns’ sprawling journey was anchored by an emotional return-to-Earth moment in its profound final track, “Gravity That Binds,” the closing “Bow of Perception” avoids catharsis by design. Barbieri builds a spacious atmosphere before delivering a final fakeout: The track unexpectedly speeds into a dizzying new form and abruptly cuts out. If the thrill of her work has always been in its meticulously charted journeys and perfect landings, Ecstatic Computation ends with Barbieri shooting off the map completely, the transmission breaking apart like an out-of-range radio signal. The destination feels completely unknown from here, but rest assured, she knows where she’s going.


Daedalus, the most famous inventor in ancient Greece, is probably best known for fathering a dipshit. Daedalus' son Icarus reckoned ...

Invention

Daedalus, the most famous inventor in ancient Greece, is probably best known for fathering a dipshit. Daedalus' son Icarus reckoned himself such a player when he decided that flying higher than anywhere else on flimsy wings held together with wax (the Scotch tape of ancient Greece) was a good thing. Icarus was killed when he plummeted into the sea after the heat of the Aegean sun melted away the wax on his wings. It wasn't for another two thousand years or so that Leonardo Da Vinci thought about winged flight-- Icarus' stupidity put everyone but the Renaissance genius off the idea of becoming birdy.
Daedalus, though, was a shrewd man. He constructed one or two questionable things, and chief amongst them was a cow. Yes, Daedalus fulfilled a request from King Minos' wife Pasiphae to make her a cow costume so that she could fuck a bull that the sea god Poseidon had sent for Minos to sacrifice in order to confirm his right to rule over Crete. I suppose he looked at the project as more of an engineering challenge than as some kinky request from a sovereign's wife who could have him decapitated if he didn't comply. Despite his successful completion of the task and Pasiphae's successful impregnation by Poseidon's bull, Daedalus still ended up in the chokey. I guess Minos wasn't too pleased when his wife gave birth to the half-human, half-bull chimera, the Minotaur. But before throwing him in the clink, Minos did order Daedalus to construct the labyrinth in which Minos imprisoned the Minotaur. All in all, a pretty remarkable figure, this Daedalus bloke.
As you'd expect, anyone adopting Daedalus' name (albeit with a tiny alteration in spelling) takes on a slew of pre-conceived notions. Fortunately, the gorgeous and nigh-on-unique Invention is more than worthy of assuming the name of its ancient Greek forbearer. Daedelus takes downtempo IDM and adds the naivety of childhood and the poignancy of Tin Pan Alley ballad arrangements. Just as Dntel's Life Is Full of Possibilities charmed me out of my IDM ennui last year, so too has Invention.
Daedelus' combination of Mush-style beats with the dew-eyed nostalgia of 1940s and 1950s string arrangements may seem awkward on paper, but nowhere does the combination of avant electronics and strings jar or sound forced. Daedelus has realized what the downtempo elite Broadway Project and Bonobo have known for a while now: contrast need not disturb. Throughout Invention, I'm amazed at how complementary the opposites sound. During "Playing Parties," a low frequency sawtooth sound emerges from the skirts of a stately, stomping concert grand piano into a glitched-up clockwork world of nursery toys. Daedelus presents a sound picture of gentle chimes and bells and whirs, then ushers in the star attraction-- a synthetic melody line every bit as romantic as the one Jega used on his stand-out "Geometry."
The opening string ensemble sample that begins "Pursed Lips Reply" recalls the wistful poignancy of the Hollywood String Quartet's accompaniment to Frank Sinatra's 1957 album Close to You, a sentiment builds throughout the track. Daedelus recasts that 50s nostalgia with "Astroboy," a complexly arranged tune with segmented spoken word narration. It's like Brian Aldiss' short story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" (the foundation for Kubrick/Spielberg's A.I.) retold for first-graders. Remarkably, the chopped story of a robot wondering about its identity is never cloying or even, in fact, resolved.
For "Adventress," Daedelus pulls a woodwind ensemble out of retirement and gives them wistful melodies of their forgotten youth to dwell upon. "Quiet Now" is as close to conventional downtempo as Invention gets. Over a lolloping EQ'd rhythm track a processed guitar works counter-rhythms. By contrast, "Perchance a Bit" is John Surman's bass clarinet soundclashing with Jega's electronics. "Soulful of Child" recalls some of Squarepusher's least spastic jazz-n-bass, a style that Daedelus taps more frenetically for "Thus the Whirligig."
Two bonus cuts chart Invention's progression from childhood naivety to savvy maturity. Daedelus invites guest MCs Busdriver and Sach to rhyme over "Quiet Now" and "Pursed Lips Reply." Busdriver's and Sach's stagy delivery and avant-poetry message locate them squarely in Mush/cLOUDDED territory. However, while I appreciate these rhymes on their own, they do squelch the overall mood of the record in this context.
Still, Daedelus' debut album manages to find common ground between 21st century electronics and the string arrangements of yesteryear. He never obscures one with the other, nor allows one to shine through at the other's expense. The disparate elements are in harmony and at the command of Daedelus' personality. It could have gone so horribly wrong. Daedelus could have ventured too far into the mawkish, or equally astray in search of David Lynchian oddity. Invention has very few peers, in my opinion. Though Schlammpeitzinger's Collected Simple Songs of My Temporary Past and Andrew Coleman's Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt come close, I'm firmly resigned that I'll not hear a more effortlessly charming album this year.


On this elaborate concept album, initially released in monthly installments, the hardcore collective reclaims its status as the most fearless prog-punk band of them all.

Year of the Horse

This month, Fucked Up celebrated the 10th anniversary of David Comes to Life, an 18-song rock opera that arrived with a promotional blitz featuring a movie-style poster campaign and a companion compilation of fictional bands who inhabited the album’s narrative universe. At the time, David seemed to signify the apotheosis of the band’s transformation from hardcore scrappers to art-punk dignitaries. But for all its extravagant packaging, David was also a triumph of economy, harnessing Fucked Up’s power in service of melodic, anthemic tunes that continue to goose their streaming stats to this day. In hindsight, the album was a warm-up exercise for a group that has continued to pursue their ambitions in thrillingly unpredictable ways. And their latest song cycle, Year of the Horse, counts as their most audacious move yet in a career full of them.
Compared to David Comes to Life, Year of the Horse arrived with almost zero fanfare. The music was quietly unveiled in four instalments on Bandcamp, while the lyrics and liner notes were provided via a WeTransfer link. Technically, the release is part of Fucked Up’s long-running Zodiac series, the limited-edition, parallel-universe discography where they’ve entertained their most experimental impulses. But this 94-minute concept album is no mere sideshow curio. In a climate where the Armed have obliterated hardcore’s horizons, Iceage are making gospel records, and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have revived the batshit-bonkers medieval concept album, this is the sound of Fucked Up forcefully reclaiming their status as the most fearless prog-punk band of them all.
Unlike David Comes to Life and 2018’s Dose Your Dreams, Year of the Horse isn’t merely a collection of narratively linked songs. Each of its four epic movements is an intricate and overwhelming assemblage of recurring motifs, lyrical callbacks, and spoken-word scene-setting. The band’s chief architect, Mike Haliechuk, collaborated with Toronto playwright David James Brock to craft a dramatic tale involving a mythical horse named Perceval on the run from an evil wizard king named Sour, en route to her rightful home among the moon and stars. We see much of the action through the eyes of a young girl named Blanche, whose abusive, alcoholic mother belongs to a posse of hunters sent to track down the wayward mare. For all its Games of Thrones cosplay, the album’s underlying themes—animal protection, environmental devastation, dysfunctional families, and the craven, destructive desires of powerful men—root us in a world that feels all too familiar. (And if lines like “vipers waiting in the sand/under the spell of Zazamanc” are liable to fly over your head, you can always follow along with this handy Tweet-by-Tweet plot synopsis.)
There’s another story playing out on Year of the Horse, however, and its main characters are Fucked Up themselves. The saga of the band can seem like one of perpetual conflict, namely between the unrelenting, punx-not-dead growl of frontman Damian Abraham and the high-art aspirations of Haliechuk and drummer/fellow musical director Jonah Falco, while bassist Sandy Miranda and guitarists Josh Zucker and Ben Cook (who sat this one out) dutifully play both sides like kids caught in a custody battle. That tension seemed to reach its breaking point on Dose Your Dreams, where an eclectic musical palette and myriad guest-vocalist cameos threatened to crowd out Abraham, who admitted to questioning his future in the band at the time.
Year of the Horse showcases Fucked Up’s dynamic writ large, with Abraham’s attack routinely disrupted by Haliechuk and Falco’s flights of fancy, which take the form of Godspeed-level overtures, Renaissance Faire folk, spaghetti-western cavalry charges, Tubular Bells-style soundscapes, Bad Seeds-indebted goth pageantry, and wah-wah-drenched psychedelic funk. But the remarkable thing about Year of the Horse is that it continues to push Fucked Up into uncharted territory while deploying Abraham’s blood-curdling roar to its strategic advantage. Like most stories about flying horses, Year of the Horse’s narrative is particularly well-suited to metal, and when Abraham seizes the reins, Fucked Up don’t so much resemble a conflicted punk band as an omnipotent thrash act. (The album is dedicated to two metal gurus lost in the past year—Iron Age guitarist Wade Allison and Power Trip singer Riley Gale—and their influence feels both musical and spiritual.) But Abraham’s eternally ravaged voice bleeds pathos and poignancy as he delivers the recurring motivational mantra that guides Perceval throughout her journey: “Look up at the moon!/Child, you will be home soon!”
Fucked Up were wise to release Year of the Horse in monthly intervals. There is a lot to digest here, and listening in one sitting practically demands an app to track your endurance. But in a sense, the complicated structure actually makes the action easier to follow. Its many shifts propel the narrative, introducing new characters, announcing changes in scenery, or advancing the plot. In between, Haliechuk and Falco give themselves space to refine the sharp songcraft they brought to their electro-mod side project Jade Hairpins, especially on Act One’s dreamy disco-folk odyssey in the “River Suite,” the woozy psych-soul workout in the middle portion of Act Three, and the gorgeous, ‘70s-soft-rock tune that emerges eight minutes into Act Four.
After 90-plus minutes of head-spinning theatrics, Year of the Horse concludes with a celestial ambient symphony guided by Falco’s sunrise-summoning trumpet and the wordless vocals of Julien Baker. The National’s Matt Berninger also checks in toward the end of Act Three with his signature, cigarette-stained monotone. But these indie A-listers ultimately take a backseat to lesser known guest vocalists like Chubby and the Gang bassist Maegan Brooks Mills and the soulful, London-based singer Tuka Mohammed. Their presence is a reminder that Fucked Up isn’t only a means for Haliechuk and Falco to pursue their ever-expanding vision but also a long-standing platform for raising unsung voices. Just as this band once broke the rules of hardcore, they have also reinvented the concept album, transforming the most indulgent exercise in the classic-rock playbook into an egalitarian, community endeavor.

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Guitarist Matt Kivel's debut Double Exposure was a deeply solitary record. On his follow-up, Days of Being Wild, he's still troubled by mortality, but on Days he is pushing away from it, towards life and contact.

Days of Being Wild

Matt Kivel's Double Exposure was a deeply solitary record. The lyrics brimmed with death, stillness, pale horses, and Kivel recorded it largely alone, away from his other projects, Gap Dream and Princeton. It was initially difficult to tell if anyone else even noticed this stark, beautiful little gem--it came out in late 2013, a tough time for indie records, especially ones by new, unproven names. I often wondered, living with it, if I was the only one listening.
Someone else must have been, because Kivel was picked up from Olde English Spelling Bee by Woodsist, and his follow-up, Days of Being Wild, arrives less than one year later. Kivel is touring with Steve Gunn and the Clientele now, and his new record reflects a modest new warmth. If the mood of Double Exposure was frozen and desolate, Days is rainy and melancholy. "Little Girls" even feels like a Clientele song, with its drizzly mix of acoustic and clean reverb'ed guitars. Kivel's lyrics are still whispered , but this time they are addressed to an intimate crowd rather than the corner wall.
The switch from acoustic to electric has a lovely lamplit effect on the songs. The chords and riffs make pleasant, friendly college-rock shapes, like the riff on "Insignificance", which feels like a watercolor made out of a Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain song, or the overdrive on "Open Road," which fizzes like a classic Yo La Tengo drone rocker. The power chords of "Blonde Boy", which Kivel barely articulates with the edge of his pick, feels like a Bachman-Turner Overdrive or Cars song creeping through a library on tiptoes.
Kivel seems to be making his muted version of a radio rock record, which is something you can hear in the lyrics as well. On "Insignificance," he whispers fragmented FM rock signifiers—"Black is night/ The highway/ Her nails so red and wild/ Green and slip/ The oceanside"—like Bob Seger via William Carlos Williams. On "Little Girls," he sings "Honey I ain't got forever/ You take me now or never/ Just step into the night/ There I'll be gone." On the title track, Kivel quotes the melody of Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy", of all things. As with everything else, it's handled gently, cradled like a robin's egg. No one is actually being wild here per the album title, but the album is full of feeling for the memory of such days, the imprint they leave in the mind.
Kivel's voice is as much a warm shape and the guitars: As on Double Exposure, he's barely intelligible save for isolated phrases. Pieced together, these little snatches of clear communication convey almost as much, in their evocative settings, as the full lyric sheet does. One of them, from "Only With the Wine," is "She fucks with other guys/ But why?", and another, from "End of Adventure," is "Slapped on your ass." One of the welcome surprises of spending prolonged time with Kivel's music is discovering how quietly libidinous it is. Of course, another clear, ringing lyric piercing the haze is "I don't wanna die/ But I will." But compared with *Double Exposure'*s central confession "I want to kill myself" (from "Whip"), the line feels positively life-affirming. Kivel is still troubled by mortality, but on Days he is pushing away from it, towards life and contact.


Lady Gaga's second record, containing "Bad Romance" and "Speechless", finds her coming into her own as both a songwriter and a pop star.

The Fame Monster

Remember that "Simpsons" Treehouse of Horror where the Krusty the Clown doll was trying to murder Homer? Turned out the problem was the doll had a switch on its back set to "evil" and with a flick of the wrist, it could be reset to "good." It feels like sometime late last summer, someone flicked a similar switch on Lady Gaga. For about a year, she was nothing but a lot of talk and a badge-- only without the badge. She filled her résumé and interviews with style icon namedrops-- Andy Warhol and his notions on celebrity, the denizens of New York's downtown arts scene, and avant couture designers like Thierry Mugler-- but her singles betrayed none of the artistry that she insisted was part of her package. "Poker Face" had about three big hooks, but next to her other singles-- which ran the gamut from forgettable fluff ("Just Dance") to "Muffin Top" ("LoveGame")-- it seemed like a fluke. Then, between the VMAs and "Paparazzi", she came into her own. And on "Bad Romance", the lead single from The Fame Monster, she became kind of awesome.
The rest of The Fame Monster-- out late last year, while we at Pitchfork were wrapping up our 2009 content-- isn't as strong as its lead single (although the Queen-like "Speechless" comes close), but it at least stakes a claim that Gaga is a potential new Madonna rather than simply a new Katy Perry. If I had to guess, I'd say once she became hideously popular Gaga was able to take more control of her career, the early result being "Bad Romance", arguably the best pop single and best pop video of 2009. And the video is part of the package: Like Madonna or Prince, it's impossible to separate the song from the performer. But unlike those artists, Lady Gaga isn't particularly attractive, and she uses this to her advantage by suppressing her vanity and making herself a slippery figure. She's still largely unknowable and also almost unrecognizable from moment to moment, as she contorts, disguises, masks and maims her face and body like a Matthew Barney or David Cronenberg creation.
Gaga comments on fame as she becomes more famous: It's in her record titles-- The Fame, The Fame Monster, "Paparazzi", "Beautiful, Dirty, Rich", "Starstruck". It's also in her wearable art, and the way she deconstructs her own look-- rigid, robotic dance moves as if she's a puppet on a string, moving in crutches after being damaged by her outsized fictional celebrity in the "Paparazzi" clip. In "Bad Romance" she alters whoever Lady Gaga the Pop Star might be into any number of female types-- at times recalling Britney Spears, Madonna, an Anime character, Angelique, Christina Aguilera, and Amy Winehouse. In that sense, she's a perfect 21st century pop icon-- a regular person willing to manipulate herself into whatever it takes at any given moment to be a star.
And yet, unlike the empty famewhores climbing atop the shoulders of reality TV and tabloid journalism to notoriety, we know next to nothing about her personal life. In that sense, she's the anti-Kanye, the anti-Eminem, and the anti-Winehouse-- the twists and turns of her private life don't inform her art. Rather, she is whoever she wants to be at any time, and her art is as much the manipulation of that image and notions of modern celebrity as it is music or fashion. And it's refreshing to have a big pop star communicating to us from afar, like pop stars used to.
Everything about "Bad Romance" is big but oddly clean and direct-- whooshing synths, jarring rhythms, and stratospheric choruses. It's not an earworm so much as something designed to just take over a listener, to force them to pay attention the way Gaga's image seems to have done to people in recent months. Sure, the choruses were also skybound on "Poker Face" and "Paparazzi", but they seemed bigger by working as a counterpoint to other elements of the song-- the odd way Gaga makes her voice go deep and guttural, the terrible sing-speaking she has ideally abandoned. "Bad Romance", on the other hand, has two volumes: 10 and 11. In that sense, it's almost template breaking-- reminiscent of stadium house with Gaga as a new KLF, fucking with us from the inside. (No surprise that it sounds so European either-- it comes across like futurist pop music without any hints of hip-hop's influence.)
Elsewhere on The Fame Monster, she morphs into other stars-- Freddie Mercury on "Speechless", ABBA on "Alejandro", Madonna on "Dance in the Dark", Britney Spears on "Telephone", Kylie Minogue on "Monster", and Christina Aguilera on "Teeth". Yet instead of hopelessly retro, it comes off very modern, in part because U.S. pop and hip-hop is currently drawing heavily from Europop, hi-NRG, and dance music. It's almost as if we're experiencing a sonic present that's whitewashed most of the influence of backbeat sample-based hip-hop-- from Kanye and Cudi to Jason Derülo and the Black Eyed Peas, it's all presets and synths and dance. All of a sudden, Eminem's claim that "nobody listens to techno" seems like a hell of a long time ago.
Where a lot of The Fame felt like rote pop with overt "comments" on fame, Gaga's recently acquired actual fame allows her interactions with an audience to become a theatrical experience. Her music, meanwhile, has become subtler, more playful, and more well-rounded, extending the electro-pop bubble she lived in on her debut. And instead of shoehorning references to celebrity into some tracks, she's borrowing elements and templates and simply focusing on quality control. The weird result is that, despite her flitting between personalities and personas, her music feels more like her own here than it did on her debut LP. The songs feel like they were written for Lady Gaga rather than simply for any modern pop star.
Whether Gaga can keep up the streak is another matter. Maybe she'll get chewed up and spat out in the end, or maybe her chameleonic image changes are just Madonna's career at the speed of the Internet era and we're seeing all of her ideas at once. But all of a sudden, for a brief time at least, she's the only real pop star around.


Annie Clark brings the glammy sounds of the ’70s to an album about mothers and daughters, fathers and prison. It’s an audacious and deeply personal record occasionally beset by clunky choices.

Daddy’s Home

When St. Vincent announced Daddy’s Home by wheat-pasting Who’s Your Daddy? onto a concrete wall, she wasn’t just launching an ad campaign. She was revealing a brand new self. She’s done this before, as the delicate butterfly of Sufjan’s touring band, a self-styled “near-future cult leader,” and the leather-and-latex domme of 2017’s Masseduction. Annie Clark is no stranger to being a stranger. An immense talent with an impeccable track record, her meticulous craft is matched by a Bowian gift for shapeshifting. Every world-building detail on Daddy’s Home, her album-length tribute to ’70s rock’n’roll, is executed with chameleonic precision; not a note or a hair on her Candy Darling wig is out of place. It is her most personal record to date, telling the story of her father’s incarceration and her own fear of parenthood. It is delivered entirely in costume.
The best and truest moments on Daddy’s Home are when Clark refuses to play wife or mother. “I went to the park just to watch the little children,” she sings, on “Pay Your Way in Pain.” “The mothers saw my heels and they said I wasn’t welcome.” Her character exists as a hairline fracture apart from the women who watch over their children like helicopters. On “Somebody Like Me,” she bristles at strolling “straight down the aisle”—and pointedly makes a meal out of “straight,” turning the word into a slippery vocal run.
These are time-honored themes for St. Vincent. Her 2007 debut was titled Marry Me; back then, she invited her lover to “do what Mary and Joseph did/Without the kid.” On Daddy’s Home, she’s even more adamant. Stand-out “My Baby Wants a Baby” is laden with worry that having offspring—or failing to do so—will obliterate her own identity. “No one will scream that song I made,” she sings, “won’t throw no roses on my grave,” as her voice, and her back-up singers’ voices, rush frantically toward the climax: “They’ll just look at me and say: Where’s your baby?”
In the work of writers like Elena Ferrante, Joanne Ramos, and Sheila Heti, alternatives to motherhood are presented as aspirational: an education, a fulfilling career, a loving (and childless) partnership. Daddy’s Home bucks this trend. The album’s protagonist is no budding girlboss; she wants a kind of dangerous freedom. The breathtaking ballad “Live in the Dream” narrates someone reviving after an overdose only to succumb in a milky fog of sitar. The singer of “Down and Out Downtown” chases highs and crashes, again and again, between kisses. She’s found love, but it, too, is the dangerous kind. (“911? I’m in love.”) Her partner changes the locks, “drops the scene,” drives her to “suicidal ideation”—unrequited love on the level of the queen of Carthage.
But Clark remains steadfast: “I wanna play guitar all day,” she sings, “make all my meals in microwaves.” She’d rather be a child than bear one. Men embrace this wish without apology; she’s forced to justify it at length. She worries that her yearning for absolute freedom makes her wicked, irredeemable, that she’s got something of her wayward father in her. If she had a baby, she tells her lover, “I couldn’t leave like my daddy.” She resents him for his departure; she yearns for the same careless abandon that he had.
This brings us, finally, to the album’s title track, “Daddy’s Home.” Clark says the song refers to her father’s 12-year incarceration for his role in a $43 million stock manipulation scheme. The indignity of her father’s imprisonment was, no doubt, doubled by the whole world learning about it. She’s been candid about the experience while doing press for Daddy’s Home and to her credit, Clark has clearly done her research on mass incarceration. She’s cited statistics about the effects of the prison-industrial complex on Black Americans. During visitation in her father’s prison, she says, families were invited to pose against a backdrop of a plantation veranda. It seems clear that she wishes to empathize with the Black community and critique the prison system.
But dissonance appears on Daddy’s Home whenever Clark’s louche time-traveling character collides with the political tensions of the present day. It’s odd, for example, that two songs on the album refer to calling “the cops,” or 911, in light of the past year’s uprisings against police brutality. A reference to Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” in “The Melting of the Sun” is similarly ill-considered. Like Hozier before her, Clark dilutes Simone’s fierce and intentional anti-racist activism by listing her alongside white celebrities. The album’s title track deploys a sticky bassline, a syncopated funk groove, and the voices of seasoned Black back-up singers Kenya Hathaway and Lynne Fiddmont to tell the story of Clark and her father, a white man who committed a white-collar crime. Why deploy the conventions of Black music to reckon with his sins? Why wear a mask at all?
In 2011, long before it broke in tabloids and became public knowledge, St. Vincent wrote “Strange Mercy,” a plaintive song about her father’s incarceration. The imagery of the song is simple, evocative. “Our father in exile,” she sings. “When you see him, wave through double pane.” It’s hard to forget, once you’ve heard it, her delivery of the song’s bridge, through gritted teeth: “If I ever meet the dirty policeman who roughed you up, no, I… I don’t know what.” She is alone at the microphone. She sounds like nobody but herself.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit an essential greatest hits album, one that brought ABBA indefinite fame.

Gold: Greatest Hits

What, exactly, is the use of a “greatest hits” album in 2019? The full catalogs of almost every artist popular enough to merit such a collection are available through any streaming service, organized by algorithms, and easily sorted by play count, which means labels have little reason to waste time and energy on a task the machines have already mastered. Even when the indie rock band Spoon released a greatest hits record earlier this year, the band acknowledged that its fondness for the form outweighed what was a near-certain losing proposition businesswise.
That fondness exists because of the real power greatest hits albums once had: They threw open doors for curious new listeners, solidified artists’ place in the canon, and transformed reputations that had fallen into disrepair. In his 2016 eulogy for greatest hits, anthologies, and other, similar reissues, Stephen Thomas Erlewine noted that Bob Marley could have languished in relative obscurity were it not for the release of Legend in 1984. “By focusing on the hits, they crystallize the essence of each star,” wrote Erlewine, touching on compilations of work by Elton John, Billy Joel, and Tom Petty. “Over time, those greatest hits albums—purchased as a package, repeated incessantly on the radio—formalized each act’s conventionally-accepted canon and, in turn, cemented their enduring public personas.”
If the ideal greatest hits collection captures the fundamental truth about an artist, stitches them into an enduring place in our cultural fabric, and sells enough copies to fund the purchase of a minor island, then ABBA Gold—a 79-minute buffet of schlocky ballads, elegant pop delicacies, and disco heat rocks—is the definitive example of the format. The 1992 compilation rounded up all of the Swedish pop band’s international smashes into a refined package with surprising emotional range. It capitalized on a simmering, subcultural interest in ABBA’s work and sparked a full-blown revival, one that culminated in Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan belting and grunting their way through “S.O.S.” in the movie version of Mamma Mia! And it became one of the best-selling albums of all time, with copies continuing to trickle out of stores in shocking numbers to this day. Because of Gold, ABBA has become an integral part of the world around us, their music floating through common spaces around the world like a music fan’s lingua franca; without it, the band might have remained a curio, the kind of half-forgotten treasure you have to seek out rather than stumble upon.
Little more than a decade separated Gold’s release from the unceremonious end of the band’s recording career. After a delirious rise to global superstardom in the second half of the ’70s, ABBA was finally starting to lose steam. Its two constituent couples—Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Faltskog, and Benny Andersson and Frida Lyngstad—were either separated or divorced by the release of their final album, The Visitors, in 1981. And while all four members continued working together with an impressive level of professionalism, the fact remained that Ulvaeus and Andersson were writing music and lyrics, including post-breakup ballads and wounded domestic dramas, for their ex-wives to sing.
The band had soured on touring and promoting themselves after enduring some of the most frenzied appearances this side of Beatlemania, and the fatigue was showing up in their music: “I was sick and tired of everything/When I called you last night from Glasgow,” sighed Lyngstad on the title track of 1980’s Super Trouper. “All I do is eat and sleep and sing/Wishing every show was the last show.” And after conquering the pop charts in dozens of countries around the world, everyone was ready for a new challenge: Andersson and Ulvaeus were dreaming of a detour into musical theater, and Faltskog and Lyngstad were curious about reviving their dormant solo careers.
Boredom aside, ABBA’s commercial peak was clearly in the rear-view mirror by the early ’80s. The Visitors was their least successful album since the beginning of their career, and the band’s generation-spanning core audience was starting to wander into new spaces. The children who grew up with ABBA omnipresent on the radio were maturing into punk, rap, and new wave; the adults who enjoyed their lighthearted, melodic hits were less interested in minimally arranged character studies. Studio sessions in the spring of 1982 yielded little more than a few singles, and by the end of that year, it was clear ABBA’s time had come. Andersson and Ulvaeus collaborated with Tim Rice on Chess, a musical about a chess tournament (and love triangle) set against the backdrop of the Cold War; Lyngstad made an album with Phil Collins; Faltskog scored a few solo hits and duets before largely retreating from public life.
From a distance, it must have seemed unlikely that ABBA would explode back into the popular consciousness and stay there indefinitely. Yet Gold was perfectly positioned to take advantage of shifts in technology, music business, and the culture at large, all of which crested alongside the compilation’s release in 1992. In the decade since ABBA’s collapse, CDs had become the dominant form of physical media and were accelerating toward their turn-of-the-century peak. While the CD market had been steadily growing since the end of the ’80s, reissues covering the ABBA catalogue had become conspicuously absent from record store shelves around the world, a consequence of business decisions made near the beginning of the band’s career—all handled by the group’s famously unscrupulous manager, Stig Anderson—and an ensuing string of contracts, renegotiations, and acquisitions.
“Many in the music business raised their eyebrows when Stig signed with different record companies all over the world, instead of letting one major label handle the group globally,” wrote Carl Magnus Palm in his essential ABBA biography Bright Lights, Dark Shadows: The Real Story of ABBA. “That, however, was the whole point. Stig’s theory was that no company could be strong in every territory around the world and ABBA’s interests would be better served by working with the label that had the most impressive sales presence in each market.” Anderson’s decision to establish a network of international distributors meant that by the band’s demise, ABBA’s catalog could be handled differently according to each country’s needs; the compilation slapped onto shelves in Madrid wouldn’t necessarily be the same as the one stocked in Melbourne.
When Anderson’s Polar Music Group (and, consequently, ABBA’s songs and masters) were acquired by Polygram (now part of Universal Music Group) in 1989, the label had to wait for Polar’s patchwork of licensing deals to expire before devising a coherent strategy with which to approach ABBA’s library of hits. Plans for a box set were pared back to a single disc, a conservative play intended to gauge the market for the band’s catalog before investing any more resources. The label polled its offices around the world regarding song selection, market tested the album’s cover art—its classy, minimal black-on-gold a far from the kitsch of ABBA’s studio album artwork—with potential British buyers, and made sequencing decisions based on fan feedback rather than chronology.
Even though Polygram was dedicating reasonable amounts of time and money to ABBA’s revitalization, they still underestimated the amount of latent interest in the band’s music by the early ’90s, in part because that enthusiasm was rooted in marginalized communities. For gay men around the world, ABBA’s blend of naïve camp—consider the outfits they wore on stage, which ran the gamut from High Elven couture to sets of matching white silk kimonos—indelible melodies, and genuinely wrenching melodrama proved captivating. They wrote anthems for dancing queens and men after midnight, inadvertently adopting language that would become essential to gay life. And as much as the gay community loved ABBA, the band returned the favor: “In the ’80s, especially the first half, [it] was like ABBA was forgotten,” said Ulvaeus in a 2019 interview with Gay Times. “We thought that was it, we go on and do other stuff and ABBA will be forgotten. Then it was the gay community who underpinned the comeback… we felt that we had the full support, and it made a lot of difference.”
Goofy cover bands like Australian outfit Björn Again built on this enthusiasm for ABBA’s music and became genuine sensations at clubs around the world, dialing up the kitsch with even more outlandish attire and between-song banter delivered in Swedish accents. And if the commercial potential of ABBA’s music wasn’t already evident, it became impossible to ignore in mid-1992 when Erasure’s cover EP Abba-esque topped the charts across the UK and continental Europe.
So came the perfect storm surrounding Gold’s release: assembled at an ascendant moment in the music business by a label that approached the ABBA catalog with an unprecedented level of coordination and thoughtfulness, delivered to a public desperate for a convenient way to hear the band’s hits. It’s a fascinating story, yet it still doesn’t explain why millions of people around the world were ready to embrace ABBA once more with feeling. What is it about this band’s music that spoke, and continues to speak, to listeners across languages, cultures, and borders?
Unlike the great majority of contemporary hits, ABBA’s version of pop music is completely divorced from the influence of R&B, hip-hop, soul, funk, and Latin music—in short, from non-white musical traditions. Ulvaeus summed up their approach rather neatly in a 1981 interview: “Our musical roots are European—we like French and Italian songs,” said Ulvaeus. “This is probably why our songs work well in the countries of Latin America… in the United States, pop music is heavily influenced by the blues, soul, and gospel—which isn’t in ABBA’s heritage.”
Ulvaeus and Andersson grew up on traditional Swedish folk music and schlager music, a sappy, simple strain of pop with a distinctly continental European flair. And when their tastes began to develop as teenagers, they developed a network of influences that remained almost exclusively white: the Beach Boys’ golden teenage hymns, Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, Lennon and McCartney circa Rubber Soul, classical music, and musical theater. It’s no surprise that as mature composers and lyricists, they came to favor crystalline melodies, dizzying arrangements and counterpoints, and over-the-top emotional gestures.
This mix of influences helped create the band’s reputation as purveyors of unrefined schmaltz. The songs on Gold that have aged most poorly are the cuts that bear the greatest schlager influences, songs like “Chiquitita” and “Fernando” and “I Have a Dream.” Even gorgeous hooks wilt up against inelegant English lyrics, martial Germanic pomp, and faux-Italian balladry.
Rare misses aside, hearing Faltskog and Lyngstad’s impeccable voices weave through a battalion’s worth of riffs, bells, and whistles is an indefatigable source of ecstasy. Listening to “S.O.S.” or “Dancing Queen” or “Super Trouper” for the first time can feel like hearing “Good Vibrations” or “Born to Run” in the same fashion: Your pleasure centers are overwhelmed until they blow up like the Grinch’s tiny heart, expanding beyond their old size and becoming something new.
Listening to Gold with fresh, focused ears, I was struck by the sheer variety of sounds beneath its blinding polish. The ABBA ground-zero that’s anchored in my head lies somewhere between “Lay All Your Love on Me” and “The Winner Takes It All”: cavernous, sprightly, desperate dance-pop confections built for crying in the club. (Robyn became one of this decade’s great pop heroes by pinning down this same sad-ecstatic balance and welding it to modern, muscular production.) And while this might have become their most distinctive mode, it was far from their only one.
“Take a Chance on Me” is best remembered for its a cappella opening buoyant chorus, but its verses are pure Swedish honky-tonk; I hear them and think of Daft Punk’s “Fragments of Time,” a hidden jam on Random Access Memories that’s built on a warm country boogie. (Speaking of Random Access Memories: while that album’s connection to Giorgio Moroder may have been more explicit, its primary sound—expensive, theatrical, continental European pop—is pure ABBA.) “Money, Money, Money” is the most successful of Ulvaeus and Andersson’s early forays into musical theater, a gold-digging fantasy that’s given real edge through Lyngstad’s dramatic interpretation. Late-period hit “One of Us” is heartbroken, lilting reggae, and it boasts one of Faltskog’s most delicate vocal takes for good measure; glammy stomper “Does Your Mother Know” is dumb, clean fun, even if hearing Ulvaeus take the lead makes you wish they’d called in Elton John for the supremely bitchy guest spot the song deserves. The magnificent “Knowing Me, Knowing You” finds the band at its best and its silliest in the span of 60 seconds: An elegant chorus with a male countermelody leads into a second verse spoiled by vaguely, unintentionally pornographic backing whispers.
Skeptics pointed to the watch-like precision of every new ABBA hit as evidence of the band’s soullessness. In a 1993 essay in TIME after Gold’s American release, critic Richard Lacayo wrote that the band “was always easy to enjoy, if you could just put aside the unnerving sense that they were hastening the decline of pop music into commercial calculation and mindless buoyancy.” But the level of quality represented on Gold sprung from more than just studio scheming or bald ambition. By the time ABBA won the 1974 Eurovision contest with “Waterloo,” Andersson and Ulvaeus had each enjoyed a decade of domestic success as musicians, and Faltskog and Lyngstad were working solo artists in their own right. They had collectively played thousands of tour dates across Sweden, produced music for dozens of other artists, and spent untold hours working as a songwriting and performing team. Their mastery and enthusiasm for their craft was indisputable.
Calling ABBA icy or passionless also conveniently elides the intricate balance between their craftsmanship and mournful writing. Take it from no less an authority than Max Martin: “I’m a sucker for the melancholy,” admitted the legendary pop producer in a 2001 interview with TIME Europe. “I guess that’s one of the things, coming from [Sweden]. If you listen to ABBA… it’s always sort of melancholy.” Ulvaeus and Andersson had figured out the balance as early as “S.O.S.,” ABBA’s first major international hit after “Waterloo.” It sounds like Faltskog is singing the first verse from the bottom of a well; her loneliness and desperation are so thick, you can almost reach out and touch them. When the chorus finally arrives, its warmth is palpable until, all of a sudden, it’s not: “When you’re gone,” Faltskog chirps, “How can I even try to go on?” The contrast is stark, and it’s irresistible.
As the division of labor between Andersson and Ulvaeus became clearer later in the band’s discography—the former handled most of the music, the latter wrote the bulk of the lyrics—the divide between subject matter and sound became even more pronounced. The tumult of the band’s personal lives began to subtly leak into their art: “Knowing Me, Knowing You” and “The Winner Takes It All” are crushing glimpses at marriages in disrepair, sung by adults who know they can’t help but carry on with their lives. Relatively silly cuts like future booty-call anthem “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” are marked by quiet urgency: “Half-past 12/And I’m watchin’ the late show in my flat all alone/How I hate to spend the evening on my own,” Faltskog moans. Even “Dancing Queen,” the band’s most purely joyous moment, can’t fully give itself over to pleasure. It’s a celebration of impermanence. You may be young and sweet now, but you won’t be 17 forever.
Erlewine wrote that greatest hits have a way of “sand[ing] away the artists’ quirks,” and the same is true for Gold. Polygram’s decision to detach the album’s sequencing from the arc of ABBA’s career makes it harder to appreciate the band’s gradual transformation. The silly, glammy Swedes who galloped onto the stage at Eurovision took over the world, stormed the disco, and finished their career making their saddest, strangest music yet. (The new ABBA music reportedly recorded as part of a 2018 reunion has yet to materialize). And yet Gold still conveys the one thing you absolutely need to know about the band: For about a decade, these four Swedes cracked the code on pop music.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Pink's second album furthers his cult-baiting mystique.

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: Worn Copy

Worn Copy

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti's official debut, The Doldrums, won praise for having the Animal Collective's graces and for being an uncanny perversion of the Me Decade pop-radio that worshipped the golden calves of Dylan, McCartney, Carpenter, and Orlando. Pink's second album, Worn Copy, furthers his cult-baiting mystique as a bedroom hermit from suburban L.A. who conjures up ghosts by burning a roll of avocado-green shag carpet un-vacuumed for 30 years.
To his credit, Pink has sharpened his songwriting and studio touches-- he has several 1970s AOR-pop Muzak formulas nailed, making his freakitude compelling and digestible. That's a quality Ween and Redd Kross sometimes failed to capture-- quotation marks were clearly and fashionably marked on their odes to that decade's trash culture. But the problem remains that if the fashionably shoddy production values are removed from the sound, Pink's music would melt into the air.
Still, Worn Copy's first half is a gas. Opener "Trepanated Earth" begins with a hazy, synth and flanged guitar. Pink then mumbles something romantic before one of his split personalities interrupts, "The human race is a pile of dogshit!" and "Mankind is a Nazi!" After a few false starts and jumbled rickets, he then becomes a charming easy-listening opening act for the Wings 75 tour. "Immune to Emotion" is nasally congested "I'm OK, You're OK" pop that could serve as country club luncheon entertainment. "Jules Lost His Jewels" is a 33rpm power-pop raveup cranked or "Alvin-ized" (as composer John Oswald might put it) to 45 with bloodlines that can be traced to the Mothers of Invention's "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance".
Pink's most poignant moments come when his low-fi smoke screen dissipates. "Credit" is a clever, disco-spiced lament that smokes its second pack of cigarettes over credit card policies and bills-- the mundane subject matter made so bizarre yet sensible for the inflation-addled 70s. "Life in L.A." is a fine downer-rock number with a languid mood that mimics the exhaustion of watching the sunset over a beach while you're trapped in a traffic jam on a freeway bridge.
The rest of Worn Copy indulges in too many half-realized noise experiments and ideas. "Bloody! (Bagonia's)" is Pink amusing himself with Tourette's syndrome, while the quasi-rap number "Cable Access Follies" earns a silver star for imitating Beck at his most confusing.
By the way, did you know that this year marks the 10th anniversary of Mike Watt's sleeper-hit "Against the 70s"? It's the tune where the legendary postpunk bassist has Eddie "Crazy Horse disciple" Vedder sing, "The kids of today must defend themselves against the 70's!" The key lyric goes: "It's not reality/ It's someone else's sentimentality."


Cass McCombs’ sprawling seventh full-length takes root in the history and mythos of the American West. Across its 85 minutes, he crafts a cosmology out of Western characters from the past two centuries and covers most of the musical themes and narrative fixations he's drawn upon since his 2003 debut.

Big Wheel and Others

Few things are as quintessentially American as the mythos surrounding the West. Manifest destiny, the romance of wide open plains and broken landscapes, get rich quick schemes, and old-fashioned wandering. Cass McCombs’ seventh full-length album, Big Wheel and Others, takes root in this fertile soil of Americana, crafting a sprawling cosmology out of its characters from the past two centuries. When I interviewed McCombs in 2011 around the time of Wit’s End, he confessed a fixation on northern California’s history of “drugs, gunslingers, and gold.” Where he took this fixation two years later reveals all one needs to know about the wry, reclusive singer-songwriter.
Wheel opens with a child’s voice, blithely talking about his drug use. This turns out to be an audio clip from Sean, a 1969 documentary about a 4-year-old raised by Haight-Ashbury hippies. In McCombs’ mind Sean isn’t a tragic figure, however, but a stand-in for the unregulated San Francisco of the acid-testing 1960s. For McCombs, Sean’s creepily unregulated upbringing aligns with a broader history of the Wild West, like the Gold Rush’s ruthless Barbary Coast district from a century earlier, and the shiftless drifters populating highway on-ramps and truck stops to this day.
An eight-minute run on Side 2 encapsulates much of Wheel’s own mythology. In another edited movie clip, after solidly affirming that “there’s no God around,” because “the whole world is the Indians’ world,” Sean is prompted for his thoughts on America. “You know America,” he replies. “Half of the world.” For McCombs, such a naïve assertion isn’t cause to rail against patriotic chauvinism, but a perfect segue into the languid Roger McGuinn-style folk-rock of “Home on the Range”. An original composition, “Range” references the 19th century ode to life in Kansas, rumbling with cattle and surrounded by the infinite horizons of what at the time was the American West—and for residents, the entire world. The idea that Sean in 1969 shares a shrunken worldview with a Romantic 1870s rancher is not lost on McCombs. Much of Wheel emanates from this notion: the size of one’s world, and the shape of one’s belief system, equates to imagination plus experience.
Appropriately for an album with such broad aims, Wheel itself is sprawling. With an 85-minute runtime, it covers most most of the musical themes and narrative fixations McCombs has drawn upon since his 2003 debut*.* Since that time, he’s quietly become one of America’s finest chroniclers of fringe characters, a writer of heart-rending love songs and psychedelic odes to the natural world, a teller of tall-tales with a sense of humor dry as desert wood, and that rare folksinger who actually sings about the folk. Over the last decade, McCombs has been a remarkably consistent, if not publicity-averse, singer-songwriter, comparable to Bill Callahan and Will Oldham as our foremost translators of Old, Weird America into modern terms (and vice-versa). Appropriately, then, the lead character of “Range” is not taken with the beauty of his surroundings, but in a milder form of lawnessness. “I believe in littering,” he croons to open the song. “Waste should not be hidden, but seen.”
Musically, McCombs mixes light and dark in a similar way. His songs are often cast with an eerie serenity, emanating both from his soft vocals and fondness for guitar-led arrangements that glide between sections. His songs are often very pretty, though always invested with a palpable, if not quite visible, sense of foreboding. This  befits the characters of Wheel, most of whom are alone—some desperately so—and seeking redemption, if not simply trying to prove something to themselves. A sweet, loping love song is set between a couple “broken down for days at a free motel/ under the Oregon ridge.” On the brooding lament “My Name Written in Water”, McCombs trails a character escaping the suburbs for time spent amongst the ancient majesty of Utah mesas. Quoting Hamlet’s time-worn soliloquy on mortality, he’s concerned not with where to get gas, but with how the words he’s writing will represent him after he’s gone.
Elsewhere, McCombs packs the album full of outsize, masculine characters in the mold of “Lionkiller”. Early along the tracklist is the swaggering trucker of “Big Wheel” who bags lot lizards and spouts idioms like bumper stickers (“A man is bolts, a man is rust/ For a little while, then the man is dust”). There’s “Joe Murder”, a Coen Brothers-style telling of “Cortez the Killer”, on which McCombs uncoils a sinister guitar lead grumbling with intensity, while shaping the titular drug-runner through his personality quirks. Joe Murder “cut with milk sugar, to eliminate cost,” to which McCombs adds: “such a frugal drifter.” Then there’s the shit-talking narrator of “Satan is My Toy”, letting loose a series of randy, schoolyard-quality couplets, eliding curse word punchlines and relying on the listener to fill in the blanks. It’s McCombs in Nick Cave drag, and the kind of song you’d expect to hear pour out of a biker bar when a fight erupts into the alley through the front doors.
These songs have more muscle than the typical McCombs song, with “Wheel” chugging like V-12 pistons, and “Satan” smoldering with sticky saxophone smears. This befits their subject matter as well as the vibe of the album, on which McCombs plays with genre more explicitly than usual. This wide-ranging approach seems to be one of Wheel’s guiding principles, only once resulting in an eyebrow-raising inclusion, when halfway through the album he drops a fairly inexplicable three-and-a-half minute jazz-rock instrumental. Coming from McCombs, who ended PREfection with six-plus minutes of ambient car-alarm and then opened Dropping the Writ two years later with the same sound fading out, such a move should be expected, if not honored. Likely he’s giving us an intermission.
As taken as he is with the American West as a stark, limitless canvas for his characters to make their own, it’s likely McCombs has an affinity for Bobby Dupea, the volatile, shiftless oil-well rigger from 1970’s Five Easy Pieces. Dupea has everything he could want, but discards it all in fits of selfishness and unacknowledged confusion as he drives from California to Washington. Foremost among those left behind is Dupea’s girlfriend Rayette Dipesto, a Tammy Wynette-worshipping waitress and the film’s saddest character. Karen Black was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of Rayette, though it’s likely that a generation discovered her 40 years later, through her haunting vocals on Catacombs’ “Dreams-Come-True-Girl”.
Black died this past August, and McCombs not only dedicated Wheel to her memory, but gave her the lead on the second of the album’s two versions of “Brighter!” Musically, the song bears mid-tempo similarities to the Orbisonian theater of “Dreams-Come-True-Girl”, though it differs thematically. At once, “Brighter!” is a spiritual invocation and a melancholy tale of a directionless life. “I stopped in for a little while, and learned a host of sins,” Black sings in her highest register. “I wandered off a little while, because you can never win.” Somewhere within the 74-year-old Black’s delivery on this couplet lies a strong hint as to McCombs’ complex moral universe: if you stop moving too long, you won’t like what you learn.


The more relaxed, country-adjacent follow-up to 2017’s Enjoy the Great Outdoors pairs pastoral modes with surreal meditations on a warming world.

Spencer Radcliffe & Everyone Else: Hot Spring

Hot Spring

Observational humor is a nice way to come to terms with anxiety, a good means by which to develop a gentler relationship with your environs. Spencer Radcliffe’s last full-band album, 2017’s Enjoy the Great Outdoors, was a treat for apocalyptically minded worrywarts, using dusty indie rock to frame an ill-fated attempt to escape a burning city that ended with the getaway car hitting a deer. The world evoked in that album’s sequel, Hot Spring, is just as fraught, but the songs are notably more relaxed. And it might be that by relaxing—by looking out and taking in instead projecting landscapes of nervous ideation from within—Radcliffe the songwriter can access and conjure a fraught world in richer detail. Great songs can come from both places, but Hot Spring taps something special with its wry experiential poetics.
Among what Radcliffe sees around him: birds, bugs, dirt, neighbors, love. Ever attentive to the relentless passage of time, his lyrics place the listener in seasons, even if, per the album’s title, spring’s gotten so hot it might as well be summer. The scenery activated in his songs edges into the territory of some new American pastoral, and so it fits that the music itself takes on a rootsy sound. In the early moments of album opener “The Birds,” cello and pedal steel (a new addition to the Everyone Else band, by Pat Lyons) hum beneath bright acoustic-guitar chords, soon joined by padding drums and a sweet whisper of piano. Simple structures are thickened into full-scale landscapes. If the country-music thing does occasionally slide into the realm of winking pastiche, in general the instrumentation builds a stable ground that wasn’t there in the looser, more guitar-driven sound of Radcliffe’s earlier work.
That sonic fullness translates into a kind of humidity, a persistent and sometimes dread-tinged sense of the buzz of living things. A handful of Radcliffe’s lyrical narratives hinge on journeys interrupted, which in turn become transformations of consciousness or self. On the slow-burning, sing-song “Clocktower,” he’s looking for a solitary walk when the person next door stops to chat. Their conversation shifts to an interior monologue about labor, time, and presence, and the song ends in two and a half minutes of the phrase “tick-tock” sung as a cheerful dirge over noodling guitar. In “Walking Back,” the album’s airiest and most wistful folk micro-anthem, Radcliffe realizes, mid-nostalgic stroll, the accidental violence of his movement:

Ah, you could feel the heat
Of a thousand breaths
A thousand tiny cries rising up begging for mercy sweet
Though I’d been gentle in my step
To the bugs below, I was a giant
I meant certain death
The unplanned violence of a quest laid bare

Bugs are everywhere in this album, an oddity that drifts Radcliffe’s plainspoken observations into something charmingly weird, even posthuman. “True Love’s Territory” trades environmental specificity for folk-song classicism; a chance meeting with a beau upends the narrator, who goes from a happily directionless flea to an explorer carving a path into the unknown.
I could dig into Hot Spring’s latent themes—so delicately yet ironically tucked into all-American musical stylings—of climate change, of the (multispecies!) relationships that might guide our survival. It is, however incidentally, one of the better nature-in-a-post-natural-world albums I can think of. Still, there’s nothing lofty or terribly conceptual in the way these things emerge in Radcliffe’s breezy and mature songs, nor does the album push for anything more specific than looking closely and curiously at what’s around you.
Hot Spring is of the everyday, and so even when it opens itself to deeper, darker places, it does so in a way that’s admirably comfortable and composed. I think of the lyrical ambivalence of the single “Here Comes the Snow,” one of my favorite songs from the album, which I listened to compulsively riding my bike around my North Carolina town during the tail end of our own literal hot spring. In one verse, darkness “dull[s] out the brightest things and cut[s] right to the core” so that “they don’t shine no more”; in another, a “new kind of light” is seen “lighting up the darkest parts/Melting the snow beneath your feet.” In lightness or in dark, the weather comes to pass, but I’m glad to have my senses widened by the detail with which Radcliffe renders the changing modes of its arrival.