Jenny Lee Lindberg (aka jennylee) is the bassist for Warpaint. More focused than the last Warpaint record, her debut solo album is subtle, with the softness and density of cashmere. It owes quite a bit to '80s and '90s goth-leaning college rock, but never feels like a direct tracing.

right on!

Her inventive bass playing grounds Warpaint’s lush, painterly compositions, so it’s little wonder that Jenny Lee Lindberg (aka jennylee)’s first solo album, right on!, is both spacious and intimate. More focused than the last Warpaint record, right on*!* is subtle, with the softness and density of cashmere. It owes quite a bit to '80s and '90s goth-leaning college rock but thankfully never feels like a direct tracing thereof. It’s a good record for the winter, reflecting long nights, and the search for comfort and safety, the desire to wrap ourselves in layers.
Where right on! sticks its landings—which it does more often than it falters—it’s in the moments where Lindberg’s bass work drives her songwriting. "boom boom" is a constant, tense pulse, a stutter in the chest; "never" has a classic goth club-floor feel. "bully", with its central, just-vague-enough threat of "I’m not playing around", moves like a shadow behind a theater scrim. "riot" has noise and discord at its core, with Lindberg’s howl buried in the mix and played to perfectly disturbing effect. It’s easy to overplay your hand with horror, the line between terror and corniness divided by camp, but that watery scream is genuinely scary.
The couple of tracks that meander, though, are frustrating. "blind" is a bleak highway drive to nowhere. "long lonely winter" begins with promise, articulating the flatness of isolating depression with remarkable accuracy, but trails off in layers of synth and desert haze. "he fresh" feels more like sketch than song. But right on! is an immaculately produced record—again, not a surprise from a member of a relatively technical band known for their attention to detail. It’s rare to hear a solo album by a bass player that highlights that instrument’s primacy but doesn’t feel overly filigreed. The bass is the butt of jokes; the bass is the instrument people pick in movies when the other rock instruments are taken, and so bassists often feel like they have to overcompensate. Lindberg, thankfully, never falls into that trap. Her voice as an artist, as brought to highlight via production decisions, feels uncluttered and distinct.


Addressing faith, young love, and nostalgia, the songwriter’s autobiographical third album is empathetic yet unsparing, catchy and finely crafted.

Home Video

Lucy Dacus’ third album, Home Video, explores a slice of 2000s Christian youth culture from the perspective of a girl who lived through it. It was a time when kids had newfound access to prurient websites, movies, and music through the internet. Church leaders enforced rigid rules about anything a young girl might read, watch, or listen to. In a recent interview with Esquire, Dacus recalls a pastor who forced her to delete every secular song on her iPod. She mostly complied, but did fight to keep Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars.”
In the past, Dacus wrote songs that took their time, sometimes approaching their destinations only elliptically. The lyrics of Home Video are sharper and more direct. She employs tight rhyme schemes (“You used to be so sweet/Now you’re a firecracker on a crowded street”) and shortens the average length of her tracks. The result is a set of finely crafted—and very catchy—pop songs. The bouncy gem “Brando,” with its witty, winking verses, could sound right at home alongside the diaristic hits on Taylor Swift’s Red. That Dacus has reached this milestone without sacrificing the subtlety at the heart of 2018’s Historian is a testament to her talent. The newfound focus on sexuality and spirituality is like a ribbon that wraps around the songs and binds them close.
Home Video is an autobiographical return to the streets of her hometown in Richmond, Virginia. The centerpiece, “VBS,” is a deceptively bouncy ode to the sorts of teen summer camps where archery and canoeing jostle for scheduling space with bible study. It’s unclear if God was ever truly real for Dacus; she’s after tangible rewards more than spiritual ones. “A preacher in a t-shirt told me I could be a leader,” she sings, in the manner of someone who’s folded up a compliment and tucked it away for years of safekeeping. She’s enamored of a fellow camper in need of salvation, who blasts Slayer and recites bad poetry while she struggles not to laugh. When her friend tells her, “You showed me the light,” she’s not sure if she believes them: “All it did, in the end, was make the dark feel darker than before.”
In these songs, we hear Dacus, who would come out as bisexual in early adulthood, struggling to square her queerness with her faith. She’s worried that she doesn’t even need to say the words—that something in her demeanor, her bearing, the lines of her palms, will give her away. After a judgmental parent bars her from spending time with a crush, she stares at her own hands, wondering, “How did they betray me? What did I do?/I never touched you how I wanted to.” Her desire is pulsing, alive, and limited entirely to fantasy. She imagines traveling to the future to disrupt a friend’s wedding: “If you get married, I’d object/Throw my shoe at the altar and lose your respect.” Even her relationships with boys are defined by what doesn’t happen more than what does. A schoolyard flirtation culminates with a meeting on a park bench, the two afraid to even look at one another.
In the climactic “Thumbs,” Dacus imagines murdering a friend’s deadbeat father. The words are delivered not as a shocking aside but a calm insistence, repeated in each chorus, with virtually no instrumentation behind her voice. She makes this threat even as it’s clear that she is terrified. After meeting him, she and her friend “walk a mile in the wrong direction,” worried that he’s watching, that he might follow them home. These two young people are butterflies trapped under glass, and in this song, Dacus enacts a survivor’s fantasy of retribution: pulling the pins out of their abdomens, wielding the metal against the man who trapped them.
Though Dacus returns to places of isolation and despondency, it’s comforting to know she’s not making her journey alone. Her boygenius bandmates Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker make welcome contributions, providing gentle backing vocals in two songs. If the long list of collaborators credited on Home Video is any indication, Dacus belongs to a strong, supportive community of artists who’ve sharpened her arrows and strengthened her storytelling. The record’s only real misstep is Dacus’ decision to alter her voice with Auto-Tune on “Partner in Crime.” She says that she intended to channel the older man’s deceit with a sonic deception of her own, but in the otherwise cozy, acoustic world of this album, the effect is simply jarring.
Still, Home Video is a bold statement, a powerful post-adolescent text in its own right. Dacus looks to her past without judgment of her younger self, exploring years of rigidity and repression with empathy and care. Though she’s unsparing in her depiction of disturbing memories, she’s never caught in cycles of sorrow and regret. She gives her listeners permission to shake loose the beliefs they held as children and dive headfirst into the clean, cool waters of the future. Write your own moral code, she suggests; write your own worldly music.

Buy: Rough Trade
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It's easy to take an artist like Kyle Bobby Dunn for granted; he’s made music for 12 years, and it’s all been ambient drone. Despite his consistency, Dunn's latest release is an especially notable release in its catalog, especially in how it's more focused, more laser-like in the way it hits its marks.

Kyle Bobby Dunn: Kyle Bobby Dunn and the Infinite Sadness

Consistency in art is a laudable goal, but also a risky one. Do the same thing over and over, no matter how well, and some will file you away as easily understood, even predictable. This is a bigger hazard when your chosen style itself relies on consistency. Take ambient drone: it’s all about held tones, sounds that change slowly (if at all) and demand patient focus. It’s easy to let ambient drone drift into the background, presumably safe in the assumption that it won’t suprise you.
So it's easy to take an artist like Kyle Bobby Dunn for granted. He’s made music for 12 years, and it’s all been ambient drone. It could be assumed that listening to just one of his albums is all you need to understand his art; he’s even encouraged that assumption by naming one of his stronger albums A Young Person’s Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn. But all of his releases are worthwhile, and even if his consistency isn’t flashy or surprising, it’s rare. He’s continually found new ideas using the same sturdy M.O.
This doesn’t mean his records are all of equal quality: a few transcend his standard level, pushing his sound up to a singular plane, and *Kyle Bobby Dunn and the Infinite Sadness *is one of those records. There are a lot of reasons why, one of them simple to comprehend: the songs are pretty short. Though the album lasts two hours, most of its 19 tracks hover in the range of five minutes, and only two are longer than ten, which gives the music extra urgency. Often Dunn gets right to the point, setting each piece’s structure quickly and succinctly, rarely messing with extended intros or sitting on a single idea for long. It’s not that his work here is more “song-like” than before—it’s just more focused, more laser-like in the way it hits its marks.
This focus has the added benefit of making the album’s few long pieces more effective. By carefully picking his spots, Dunn earns the right to stretch out when his ideas deserve it. The nine-minute “Variation on a Theme by St. Dipshit” (Dunn has a healthy knack for piss-taking titles) feels grand in a subtle, almost humble way, its high-pitched waves unfurling with patience but no stasis. The album’s best piece, the ten-minute “Where Circles Never Become Circles”, offers an elongated crescendo that grows at exactly the right pace; it would sound gratuitous if it reached its heights more rapidly.
Gratuitousness is always a danger with ambient drone; it’s easy, and often tempting, to go for a dramatic chord or a soundtrack-ready swell without the setup needed for a true payoff. But it’s just as easy to hold back and let the music become mechanical and bloodless, more conceptually admirable than emotionally engaging. Dunn knows how to find a range between those two poles, and here never loses sight of that rareified middle ground. Often he gets there through simplicity: take the binary rhythm of “Duck-Faced Fantasy”, the small variances of “Boring Foothills of Foot Fetishville”, or the gradual crest of “On Top of Timeless Hour.” At their best, those tracks suggest moods and images, but also offer open shapes for the listener to fill in.
The fact that Dunn can keep his sound so open after honing it for so long isn't really surprising, but it’s still impresssive. You may know what got him to this point, you may be able to guess what this record sounds like, at least on the surface, and you may even have a line on what he’ll do in the future—but Kyle Bobby Dunn & the Infinite Sadness is proof that even the most consistent artists can still impress.


The erstwhile Doobie Brothers leader and Steely Dan associate’s first album in 20 years is more of an urbane R&B labor of love than an attempt to capitalize on his resurgent popularity.

Wide Open

Were I listening to Michael McDonald’s “Hail Mary” for the first time as a 7” single, I’d have double-checked the speed setting to ensure it wasn’t playing at 33 rpm instead of 45. Clocking in at just shy of seven minutes, the opening song on McDonald’s first album of original material since 2000’s Blue Obsession takes its sweet time to get where it’s going. But I’m not complaining. At 65 years old, McDonald’s sui generis voice has grown thicker (and less dynamic) than the instrument that made him famous in the 1970s and early ’80s, and the track’s sedate pace allows him to burrow it into a syrupy bed of Hammond B-3 and jazz guitar, with his wife Amy Holland adding vocal harmonies. As the introduction to Wide Open, “Hail Mary” is by default a statement, and it’s easy to assume that McDonald would foreground the patina that his voice has acquired over the years. When he sings “Does the sound of my voice still carry/Any kind of message still important to you?” one wonders how much he’s addressing a fictive lover, and how much he’s questioning his own relevance.
Not that anyone really needs an introduction to the silver-haired erstwhile Doobie Brothers leader and Steely Dan affiliate anymore. This past January, McDonald and longtime collaborator Kenny Loggins featured on “Show You the Way,” the lead single from Thundercat’s marvelous third LP, Drunk, which the “What A Fool Believes” co-authors co-wrote with the Brainfeeder bassist after he mentioned his desire to work with the duo in an interview. Much more than a simple novelty gag, “Show” is a belated millennial coronation for McDonald, who, unlike any of his musical peers, has watched his public image re-emerge over the past couple decades to public and private reactions that oscillate between comedic hatred, ironic acceptance, and earnest appreciation. At the same time, R&B itself has morphed countless times, leading to Solange Knowles and Frank Ocean transfixing the music world in 2016 with albums that were as arty as they were soft and lathered with ambience—a kind of urbane smoothness that McDonald himself codified at his popular peak with “I Keep Forgettin’” and the Patti LaBelle duet “On My Own.” A month before he performed “Show” and “Fool” at Coachella, McDonald was, yup, joined by self-professed fan Knowles at another festival.
McDonald could have easily cashed in his cachet with the current titans of millennial R&B and released an album with Solange and Thundercat guesting, perhaps Raphael Saadiq or Mark Ronson brought in for production, and maybe even coaxed Frank Ocean into the studio for a feature. Maybe next time. Instead, Wide Open is more a labor of love than an attempt by McDonald to capitalize on his resurgent popularity. He’d been stashing away demos of new material for a decade, and harboring dreams of maybe earning some Nashville songwriting gigs. Shannon Forrest, a Nashville-based producer, current Toto drummer, and longtime friend of McDonald’s, started tinkering with his tunes, and the pair eventually recruited a handful of session pros to flesh them out. And out, and out: only one song on the 71-minute long Wide Open comes in under five minutes, and the first two tracks nearly crack the 15-minute mark between them. If the album has a flaw, it’s not its lack of hipness, but its need for some editing.
While Wide Open isn’t a masterclass in songcraft or production, it’s a well-executed attempt to show McDonald’s capacity to stretch into different styles that works best when his collaborators shine. Bassist Marcus Miller contributes a Sade-style funk groove to “Find It In Your Heart” and shreds on the R&B rocker “If You Wanted to Hurt Me,” both of which echo McDonald’s 1980s solo peak better than anything else here. Branford Marsalis’ saxophone threads throughout “Blessing in Disguise,” culminating in a two-minute solo that’s worth the wait. On the string-laden, nearly eight-minute B.B. King-style slow-burn “Just Strong Enough,” Gov’t Mule’s Warren Haynes and L.A. session vet Robben Ford, along with former Randy Newman and George Harrison bassist Willie Weeks, provide an elegant backdrop for McDonald’s scenery-chewing vocal. And the string section showing up halfway through the searching power-ballad “Dark Side” makes for Wide Open’s most satisfying surprise.
When Wide Open misses its marks, though, it’s the kind of drag that McDonald’s otherwise off-the-mark critics often pinpoint about his earlier work: it’s just kind of dorky. The middle of the album, in particular, sags quite a bit under the weight of McDonald’s attempts at rock: the country/modern-rock crossover attempt “Half Truth,” and the limp ballads “Ain’t No Good” and “Honest Emotion.” As it winds down, Wide Open expands geographically and politically, with mixed results. “Too Short” is a breezy, light piece of West African-inspired pop, while the uptempo “Free A Man,” despite McDonald’s best intentions, falls flat as social commentary. The refrain, “Free a man/And love will follow,” is a wan echo of Funkadelic, and it’s not clear what rhetorical point lyrics like, “For the sake of perspective we look back/On what it’s meant in this country to be black,” and, “Religion has not failed man/No, it’s the other way around” are supposed to have, because “inspiration” isn’t what comes across.
It’s laudable that McDonald stuck to his guns on this album after expressing his desire to work with his current favorites, like Ocean, or Alabama Shakes belter Brittany Howard. It’s worth holding out hope, though, that McDonald could pair up with a producer/co-writer who can better emphasize his inimitable vocal grain as it nears the 70-year mark, like Dan Auerbach did with Dr. John, Jeff Tweedy with Mavis Staples, and Richard Russell with Gil Scott-Heron. For now, when Wide Open works, it mostly functions to suggest what McDonald and the right collaborators could do in the future.


Miranda Lambert’s double album arrives in the wake of her high-profile divorce from Blake Shelton, but it is refreshingly devoid of spite or anger—more “Shelter From the Storm” than “Idiot Wind.”

Miranda Lambert: The Weight of These Wings

The Weight of These Wings

Miranda Lambert’s music has always existed in extremes. Throughout the Texan’s previous five albums, she has established herself as a no-nonsense country-pop troubadour whose response to emotional turmoil could be separated neatly into kerosene-fueled revenge fantasies and “American Idol”-ready torch ballads. Right from the start, however, it’s clear that The Weight of These Wings is a different type of album for Lambert. “I’m looking for a lighter, I already bought the cigarettes,” she sings in “Runnin’ Just in Case,” the album’s majestic opening track. It’s a subtle lyric, but it’s indicative of her change in perspective: to put it simply, finding the fire has never been the problem for Lambert. Alas, things have changed.
Although it arrives in the wake of her high-profile divorce from Blake Shelton, The Weight of These Wings is a breakup album refreshingly devoid of spite or anger. Instead, it’s a thoughtful concept record, more focused on moving on and growing up than lashing out or telling all. Throughout its twenty-four songs, Lambert analyzes herself and her choices, often while on the road: It’s more Hejira than Blue, more “Shelter From the Storm” than “Idiot Wind.” The pensive tone of the lyrics is reflected in the album’s stark, unglamorous production. Despite coming from one of the highest-paid, most successful country artists on the planet, Wings makes precious few ploys for pop radio. There are no millennial whoops or 1989 synths. Instead, the album is distinguished by a rootsy stomp akin to Tom Petty’s Wildflowers—another long, post-divorce statement that used its sprawl to mimic the messy mental state of its creator.
While Wings is a double album in the traditional sense (it’s a good seventeen minutes longer than Metallica’s recent one), it does away with the clutter usually associated with the form. The album’s most experimental track is also its most traditional—the pitch-perfect classic country of “To Learn Her”—and it’s most throwaway moment, an easily editable false start to the groovy “Bad Boy,” is charming and self-aware. The mood throughout the album is staggeringly consistent, and its separate halves (titled “The Nerve” and “The Heart,” respectively) feel like less a means of distinguishing their sounds than identifying their subtle shift in tone. While “The Nerve” finds Lambert losing herself in travel (“Highway Vagabond”), drinking (“Ugly Lights”), and a pair of cheap sunglasses (“Pink Sunglasses”), “The Heart” is less hell-bent on escape. In “Six Degrees of Separation,” Lambert flees to New York City only to be haunted by an ad for a litigation attorney, plastered across a bus stop bench. Such is the narrative of The Weight of These Wings: the landscape of America starts to resemble your mental geography the more closely you identify what you’re looking for.
Even with the tremendous growth Lambert shows as a songwriter, she remains true to herself and her past work. The choruses still arrive precisely when you want them to. The references are cozily predictable (getting “on the road again” requires a Willie Nelson namedrop, naturally). “Kitchen sink” still rhymes with “diesel tank.” And Lambert maintains her trademark style of country-girl self-mythologizing in a way that feels both fresh and funny. In the boozy garage rock of “Ugly Lights,” she’s “the one who doesn’t need another one,” begrudgingly bumming smokes to folks younger and more sober than her. In “Vice,” one of at least five tracks on the album that feels like its show-stopping centerpiece, she leaves town simultaneously spitting in its face and winking at the camera: “If you need me/I’ll be where my reputation don’t precede me.”
While Wings is hardly a showcase for any kind of vocal gymnastics, Lambert’s voice remains the star throughout. She can switch from a soulful vibrato in “To Learn Her” to a scratchy howl in “Pink Sunglasses” with equal confidence. She drawls with eerie detachment in the snappy “Highway Vagabond,” which sounds a little like “Send My Love (To Your New Lover),” if Adele was less interested in letting go of her ghosts and more in letting them ride shotgun. “Get off one and get on the other highway,” she sings in the chorus, “Well if we ain’t broke down then we ain’t doing something right.” It’s a sentiment that’s echoed in the album’s closing song “I’ve Got Wheels,” when Lambert’s endless driving sounds like self-empowerment: an excuse to move forward. Alone at the wheel, she sounds steady and weightless, like she finally knows where she’s going.


Soundtrack to Zach Braff's directorial debut is an indie-friendly pastiche of heartstring- tugging pop, with an occasional dab of dated electronica. Features Nick Drake, Coldplay, The Shins (twice!), Simon & Garfunkel, Bonnie Somerville, and Iron & Wine covering The Postal Service's "Such Great Heights".

Garden State

Garden State is a movie very suspicious of drugs, whether recreational or medicinal. Its protagonist, Andrew Largeman, has popped Prozac, Zoloft, and a whole smorgasbord of mood-altering and -enhancing medicines for most of his life, all prescribed by his well-meaning psychiatrist father. These drugs allow both men to overlook the central tragedy in their family-- the accident that left Andrew's mother paralyzed-- but as a consequence, Andrew is never able to experience the emotions that he comes to realize comprise an identity. When he takes ecstasy at a party, it only disconnects him further from himself and others.
Scoring this trip is "In the Waiting Line" by Zero 7, which sounds exactly how Hollywood thinks a drug trip sounds: languid, midtempo beat; sampled sitar; vaguely psychedelic atmosphere; and what sounds like a bong hit during the bridge. As partygoers try to talk to Andrew and he begins to question his experience, Sophie Barker sings, "Everyone's saying different things to me.../ Do you believe what you see?" It's an overly obviously choice, as is much of this soundtrack. On one hand, these 13 tracks, all of which are available on other albums or compilations, seem genuinely to be music the characters would pick to soundtrack their lives. On the other, the songs all tend to comment too directly and too blatantly on their situations and motivations. For a movie that manages to locate subtle humor and pathos in its visuals (all those shots of Braff standing square in the center of the frame, as if looking into a mirror), Garden State lets the music do too much work.
Coldplay's "Don't Panic", with its universal chorus ("We live in a beautiful world"), scores an early scene in which Andrew is driving to work amid all the maddening traffic of Los Angeles. This use is plainly ironic, but still work better here than it did in Igby Goes Down, where its earnestness was overkill. Nick Drake's "One of These Things First", however, speaks all too clearly to Andrew's identity problems: "I could have been a sailor/ I could have been a cook/ A real live lover/ Could have been a book." And the film's final song, Frou Frou's "Let Go", buzzes trippily to its chorus, "There's beauty in the breakdown," but its title and lyrics could have been written expressly for the movie's anti-drug message.
For Garden State, drugs are clearly not the key to a better life; Natalie Portman is. Barring that, try music. "They'll change your life," Portman's character, Sam, remarks of The Shins as she passes Andrew a pair of headphones playing "New Slang". She's almost right. The Shins' two tracks on Garden State (including "Caring Is Creepy") are both recreational and medicinal: Drawing on 20 years of college, alternative, and indie rock, they are musically playful and subtle enough to be emotional Rorschach tests-- each listener will draw a slightly different shade of meaning from them.
Similarly, the soundtrack's best songs are those that don't have such a direct connection to the story, that could have come randomly on the radio and just happen to fit the scene. Braff makes good use of tracks by Remy Zero, Thievery Corporation, and former Men at Work singer Colin Hay, whose song "I Just Don't Think I'll Ever Get Over You" is a surprisingly effective barroom lament.
When Andrew and Samantha have their first kiss (after literally screaming into the abyss, another testament to the movie's lack of subtlety), Simon & Garfunkel's "The Only Living Boy in New York" blares out of nowhere. It could be a sly nod to The Graduate, to which Garden State has been compared, but the song communicates a few very particular ideas about loneliness and connection without ever overstating them. Later, Iron & Wine's cover of The Postal Service's "Such Great Heights" plays as the camera pans slowly up the length of a bed to show Andrew spooning post-coitally with Sam. Sam Beam slows down the tempo and substitutes only his guitar for Jimmy Tamborello's beats, in the process turning Ben Gibbard's whimsical, sometimes saccharine lyrics into soft-focus images that unfold patiently and tenderly. Because its lyrics have little do with the action on the screen and its music supports the mood, Braff has created through character and image, "Such Great Heights" may be the most evocative song on the soundtrack-- refurbishing an upbeat song that sounds like a public declaration of love's exclusivity, this version sounds more like a whispered, consoling promise.
Perhaps due to the movie's basis in Braff's New Jersey childhood, or to some kind of film debut jitters, Garden State the movie tends to overexplain its characters' motivations, as if they're not already apparent in the images and performances. The final 10 minutes, for example, could have been shot with no dialogue at all, and not only would the meaning have still come across, it might have even had more impact. Garden State the soundtrack similarly spells out its intentions all too clearly, leaving little to the viewer/listener's imagination. The songs may be memorable-- some of them may even change your life-- but as a soundtrack for a movie that barely needs any music to convey its message, they end up being something less than their sum.


Channeling Old Testament themes of righteous fury and justice, the indie-folk singer embraces a pared-back sound that only amplifies the drama.

The King

When Anjimile was a senior in high school, their conservative Presbyterian parents caught them emptying the household liquor cabinet. In response, they took Anjimile to church every week, even sent them to Christian counseling, hoping that the rebellious teenager would catch some religion and see the error of their ways. It didn’t take. But in that process, Anjimile discovered a newfound love for the words in the King James Bible, particularly its invocations of divine love. 2020’s Giver Taker—written in the early days of their recovery from alcohol addiction and at a time when they were still coming to terms with their gender identity—is littered with liturgical references and hymnal harmonies, as Anjimile draws on the vocabulary of their former faith to tell their story of survival, resilience, and spiritual rebirth.
Anjimile turns to the Bible again for follow-up The King, but this time they’re channeling the righteous fury and fire-and-brimstone vengeance of Old Testament apocalyptica. Written during times of intense persecution, Jewish and early Christian apocalyptic writings represented a “literature of the oppressed,” their message of divine retribution particularly appealing to those who saw no hope for redemption in earthly politics. Anjimile taps into similar feelings of hopelessness and despondency—and a yearning for catastrophic justice—on The King, offering up an unflinching portrait of the anger and grief that comes with being Black and trans in an America that remains lethally dangerous for both.
The opening title track sets the tone with needle-sharp arpeggios strobing in the sky like a celestial sword fight. Anjimile invokes the Old Testament story of King Belshazzar and Daniel in a stinging indictment of the arrogance of American white supremacy. “Your silence a stain/The marking of Cain,” they hiss, throwing Biblical condemnation back in the faces of those who used religion to justify the enslavement of Black people. “Judge and Genesis/Make an end of this,” they plead on the grief-stricken “Genesis,” written in the wake of George Floyd’s lynching by four Minneapolis cops. It’s hard to tell whether they’re asking for personal deliverance or millenarian Armageddon. The raw, stinging guitar solo that closes out the track is heartbroken enough to suggest either possibility.
Anjimile plumbed depths of personal and generational trauma on Giver Taker—hitting rock bottom in a hospital bed, grappling with the homophobia and transphobia they’d faced from family—but that record was buoyed by gratitude for their newfound stability, for the simple fact of their survival. The King, not so much. Working with producer Shawn Everett, Anjimile strips away all that was bright and airy in their sound—the sunlit piano chords, the shimmering synths, the bouncy African polyrhythms. In its stead, there’s just Anjimile’s voice and some modified acoustic guitars. They use these two building blocks, and an array of innovative effects, to create an entire cosmos of sound, maintaining an atmosphere suffused with dread even as the individual compositions move between post-rock grandeur, sepulchral dirge, and sepia-tinged folk.
“Harley” drenches Anjimile’s finger-plucked guitar in layers of reverb, each note ringing out as a lonely echo in the murky darkness. The bit-crushed guitar lead of “Black Hole” sounds like an acoustic wave disintegrating under the pull of interstellar gravity. The jagged, marching chords of the scorching police-brutality protest anthem “Animal” sound like something Pretty Hate Machine-era Trent Reznor would have dreamt up, if forced to trade his synths for an acoustic guitar. The meaty menace of those chords throws in stark relief the hard-fought restraint of Anjimile’s vocals, as they sing of the dehumanizing rhetoric of white supremacy and its corrosive effect on Black consciousness (“If you treat me like an animal/ I’ll be an animal”).
There are a handful of moments of grace and gratitude, like the soothing croon and intricate finger-plucked guitar of “Father,” a song about the support Anjimile received from their parents when they entered rehab. But even parental love does not remain untouched by the darkness. “Am I your son? Could I be one?” they tenderly inquire on the expansive, post-rockish “Mother,” a gut-wrenching portrayal of the bewildering sense of rejection caused by their parents’ transphobia.
The King offers no light at the end of the tunnel, no promises of inevitable redemption. Grief and anger only give way to more grief and anger. What it does offer though, is an invitation to feel deeply, even—especially—the heartbreak, fear, and anger familiar to not just American Black and trans youth, but anyone whose identity has made them a target, left them feeling hopeless and powerless. Anjimile tells you to accept your suffering, not run away from it, lest your unattended wounds drag you into the abyss.


A posthumous release from the experimental musician and Editions Mego label founder includes two live performances that function as scale models of his singular sound world.

at GRM

As the founder of Editions Mego, the record label that he ran from 2006 until his death last year at the age of 53, Peter Rehberg mapped hitherto unknown dimensions in electronic music. A reincarnation of Mego, an underground Viennese label that had existed on the border between rave, computer music, and the avant-garde, Editions Mego was proudly unpredictable, allergic to anything as reductive as a stylistic signature. Fennesz’s sentimental feedback fugues, Emeralds’ psychedelic synth churn, Hecker’s mind-bending text-sound pieces, and Tujiko Noriko’s kaleidoscopic pop all fit comfortably beneath eMego’s infinitely extensible umbrella, along with scores of other styles, approaches, and emotional registers. Rehberg could be just as catholic in his collaborations: There was the ambient doom of KTL, with Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley; the gut-rumbling noise of his duo with Ramon Bauer; the free-spirited play of Fenn O’Berg, an improvising trio with Fennesz and Jim O’Rourke. (Let us not forget the conceptual hijinks of his Fridge Trax project alongside the duo General Magic, sourcing technoid pulses from the hum of the titular kitchen appliance.)
But on his own, usually recording under the name Pita, Rehberg displayed a determined sense of focus. Listen to any of his solo albums, from 1996’s Seven Tons for Free up through 2019’s Get On, and you’ll recognize a consistent set of sounds and ideas across the decades. Piercing digital feedback sputters in incidental rhythmic formations; gravelly tones vibrate like thwacked door springs; layers of fuzz fuse into intimidating beehive drones. On the surface, his work could vary, at times quite drastically, from track to track, but at the heart of it was a determination to reconcile opposing sensations: harsh blasts and soothing breezes, struck metal and weightless dust motes.
Rehberg harbored a contrarian, countercultural streak—he proudly described the original Mego as “punk-rock disco”—yet he was just at home in institutional contexts; in the last decade of his life he dedicated a significant amount of effort to preserving the legacy of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), the Parisian research center for experimental electronic music that electro-acoustic pioneer Pierre Schaeffer founded in 1958. In 2012, Editions Mego partnered with GRM on a new sub-label, Recollection GRM, intended as a home for archival work from electronic-music titans like Schaeffer, Bernard Parmegiani, and Iannis Xenakis. In 2020, they launched Portraits GRM, dedicated to contemporary commissions from artists like Jim O’Rourke, Lucy Railton, and Kali Malone. (Following Rehberg’s death, Félicia Atkinson and Bartholome Sanson’s Rennes-based Shelter Press has taken both labels under its wing.) Marking Rehberg’s first appearance on his own Portraits GRM label, at GRM collects two of Rehberg’s performances at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, both of which function as scale models of his singular sound world.
Rehberg was an early proponent of the computer as a musical instrument in its own right; regularly appearing with nothing but his laptop, he helped revolutionize live performance in the 21st century, indirectly setting the stage for everyone from Radiohead to Skrillex. Yet “at GRM (2009),” a solo laptop performance at the Présences Électronique festival in March 2009, betrays little about its tools. The 21-minute piece begins in understated fashion, with a subaquatic array of hard-panned pops and pings—a flashback to the ear-prickling pulses of the “clicks + cuts” era around the turn of the millennium. After three minutes, industrial-strength buzz suddenly and unceremoniously floods the speakers, capped with a brain-scouring screech; briefly, we glimpse a reflection of Mego’s long engagement with noise musicians like Merzbow and the late Zbigniew Karkowski. Yet out of this aggressive rumble comes something gentle, as the scorched-earth low end gradually yields to soft, suggestive bell tones. Surging like seafoam, the piece’s penultimate stretch sounds like a more volatile take on Fennesz’s sandblasted distortion; a three-minute organ denouement drops us smack in the center of a medieval cathedral. It’s a journey.
Seven years later, Rehberg returned to Présences Électronique, but this time he swapped his habitual laptop for a modular synthesizer. “at GRM (2016)” is the harsher of the two pieces here: Where the ghostly frequencies of his 2009 performance recalled the tenderness and vulnerability of fan favorites like Get Out’s untitled track 3, there’s little grace to be found in the metallic clang and crunch of the 2016 piece. While it’s impossible to say just what Rehberg is doing with his machines, there’s a sense of audio sources being mangled and distended, strewn like radioactive mulch over barren ground. Blinding iridescence meets violent force, like a fistful of prisms tossed into a wood chipper. You can hear Rehberg’s debt to the spectral investigations of the tape-music pioneers of GRM’s early years, like Xenakis or Jean-Claude Risset, but you can also detect Rehberg’s signature in the careful balance between overload and restraint; as bewildering as it gets, it never quite tips over into full chaos. What’s ironic is that “at GRM (2016)” could easily be mistaken for a computer performance; brittle and disorienting, it displays all the hallmarks of Rehberg’s laptop work from two decades prior. Perhaps that is the most enduring lesson of his first posthumous release: No matter the tools, Rehberg’s distinct point of view is unmistakable.


The songwriter and producer team for a loving, referential collection of new age music that doesn’t always color inside the lines.

Devendra Banhart / Noah Georgeson: Refuge

Refuge

Just recently, the avant-garde composer William Basinski let his Twitter followers know that “some jackass has put up a lame new-age piano track” on Spotify under his name. Note the adjective he chose to distance himself from the imposter: “new age,” a neutral description or an implicit insult, depending on who’s playing and who’s listening. At best, it’s an experimental genre with respected practitioners like Tony Scott and Suzanne Ciani; at worst, it’s ambient music’s foil—a kind of spiritual muzak for yogis and masseuses.
Devendra Banhart’s unexpected turn to ambient piano and chamber drone with longtime collaborator Noah Georgeson falls somewhere in the middle of these two poles. Alongside guests like harpist Mary Lattimore and Vetiver’s Jeremy Harris, Refuge also features heavyweights from the worlds of mindfulness and Buddhism, which Banhart practices; two songs are available exclusively on the sleep and meditation app Calm. Though the album is staid and formulaic by design, it doesn’t always color inside the lines: It feels more like background music failing up than ambient music failing down.
It might be conventional to recap Banhart’s past as an inadvertent freak-folk progenitor whose fusion of rural American folk and Latin American rhythms grew from whispery acoustic origins into a broader psych-pop sound, but Refuge has little to do with any of that. It doesn’t even feature Banhart’s distinctively pinched voice, which sounds like that of a small, sweet, wizened goblin. The only through line to his past work is his reverence for Indian, Indigenous American, and West Coast spirituality: Banhart, a Venezuelan American who grew up in California, comes by these interests honestly enough, and it shows more tastefully here than in some of his pop music.
Georgeson, also a Californian, has worked closely with Banhart as a producer since 2005’s Cripple Crow. The pair initially bonded over childhood memories of the images of the Whole Earth Catalog, the smells of health-food stores, and the pastoral acoustic sounds of new age label Windham Hill, an often-overlooked influence on Banhart’s music. Georgeson has also cited as lodestars the new-age-adjacent composers Lou Harrison and Pauline Oliveros. “Coming from an academically rigorous world, I rejected this kind of music because it’s simple, gestural music,” he said. “It took me a while to come to a place where I was OK with that.” The coronavirus pandemic seemed like the perfect time to finally let their new age music flag fly.
Though Banhart’s strong artistic personality is inevitably suppressed here, he can’t keep it down entirely, and Refuge provides expressive takes on a variety of well-worn templates. “Book of Bringhi” has a gracefully falling piano figure torn from Harold Budd’s music stand. “A Cat” follows the infinity-sign drift of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, and on “Rise From Your Wave,” mournful Ólafur Arnalds-style harmonies peal on and on, with some worrisome minor chords wrinkling the mostly smooth waters.
It’s not the only time when the gentle waves of harmony part to reveal more substance. “Peloponnese Lament,” a songful piano-and-woodwind performance, features some of the pair’s strongest compositional work. “In a Cistern,” meanwhile, covers a shadowy acoustic arpeggio with squealing pedal steel and an interesting, ambiguous piano part that contrasts with the other songs’ gallant twinkle. On “Into Clouds,” big harmonics and basses roll around like boulders in a dry arroyo, perfect for tripping in Joshua Tree. Sharon Salzberg, who helped introduce the concept of “mindfulness” to the West, adds a guided meditation to “Sky Burial,” and sometimes her voice blends so cunningly with the drifting plucks and shivery strings that it draws your attention to what the music is doing. That’s a fault in meditation music and a feature in art music, but Refuge’s pedigree and history reveal just how shaky the boundary between those assumptions can be.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Memphis post-punk band’s third album wages guerrilla warfare against the patriarchal surveillance state.

3

We’re constantly being monitored. If you have a smartphone, this is as true as if you lived under the grip of a Communist regime. The Memphis post-punk band Nots aren’t alone in feeling suffocated by this—an omnipresent eye doesn’t usually cause a welcoming feeling. Even the gods can be vengeful. It’s been three years since their sophomore album, Cosmetic, which was influenced by both the Chilean leftist poet Pablo Neruda and the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet’s Human Landscapes, written while Hikmet was a political prisoner. Even after downsizing to three members, their third album, 3, continues their brawny, subversive, and self-assured stride.
Throughout 3, Nots remind us that no minor action or thought goes unnoticed. “Safety illusion/A neon net/A surveillance veil,” shouts Natalie Hoffman on “Surveillance Veil,” authoritatively but far away, as if through a long PVC pipe. She comes closer at the end of the song, yelling to wake us up: “Watching them, watching the rain, watching everything mundane.” Hoffmann’s guitar rings like a siren and Charlotte Watson’s drums keep an anxious, accelerated pace.
Under watchful eyes, our behavior changes, our personality changes, our reality changes. On album highlight “Rational Actor,” Hoffmann coldly sings about the power surrendered to technology: “Everything handed to an empty screen/A distracted sea/An elusive dream.” Images of vastness are conjured over wild-west percussion and bassist Meredith Lones’ roaming plucks. Intergalactic synths scatter in search of escape from the hollow glare of a computer. Nots remind us that omnipresent monitoring, whether by security cameras or online audiences, affects even our free will. Surveillance technologies and the institutions behind them not only track us; they influence our behavior and our choices, whether we want to admit it or not.
Psychedelic embellishments contribute to the uneasy mood. On “In Glass,” there are eerie, warping syths. Their trippy punk hybrid has a brilliant, hallucinatory effect. There are things lurking, looking over Nots’ shoulder. The trio thrashes and contorts in rebellion against their threatened agency.
At times, the intense feedback and warping synths weaken the frightening lyrics. The most striking song is the surreal and poignant “Woman Alone.” Women are taught to travel in packs: Whether walking home late at night or going on a blind date, we live in a world where women are cornered. A woman alone is a radical and vulnerable concept. “Woman in a landscape/Where eyes line the frame,” hollers Hoffmann, in an ominously vivid rendering of the male gaze. Guitar distortion wails in the background against a racing bassline that charges the song with urgency. “What’s that like?” Hoffmann spits. “What’s that like to be a subject analyzed?”
It’s been nearly fifty years since Roe v. Wade, and the battle for control over a woman’s body is still ongoing. There’s an anonymous quote that’s been circulating in recent years about how the United States might look if we were as strict with young men who buy guns as we are with women who seek abortions. In this light, the fight against surveillance is inherently feminist; Nots’ third album is a guerilla campaign against surveillance in the service of systemic control. With 3, Nots make fierce rock music equally apt for moshing in solidarity or smashing an Alexa—all forms of control in chaos.


The French producer Ludovic Navarre released his multiplatinum album Tourist 15 years ago, and became synonymous with "French Touch." To revitalize his sound, he has turned to the music of Mali.

St Germain

A lot has changed since French producer Ludovic Navarre released his multi-platinum album Tourist in 2000 under the name St Germain. A wildly successful hybrid of dance music and jazz, it put St Germain on tour for over two years, sharing stages with the likes of Herbie Hancock and playing the likes of Glastonbury and Royal Albert Hall. Trend pieces lumped St Germain in with Cassius and Daft Punk as purveyors of "the French Touch." In the intervening 15 years, there have been three French presidents, and trends in dance music have moved far beyond the realms of nu-jazz and downtempo, Navarre's métier at the turn of the century. Consider that Navarre's closest peers, Daft Punk, released Discovery, Human After All, the Tron: Legacy OST and Random Access Memories in that same time period, and it's a drastically different world that St Germain returns to with this self-titled album.
Fans of St Germain's old work might find little that's instantly recognizable from Tourist, which was part of Navarre's strategy. "I had to stop completely, I just had to take a break from music," he told The Independent. "I realised that I didn't want to do something like Tourist again – I needed to do something new." And so he disappeared for most of the '00s until this past June, when the single "Real Blues" was released, built around a vocal sample of Texas bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins and balafon. It turns out that even in his reinvention, much remains from St Germain's previous work; now, rather than dig for rare groove jazz for his source material, he's dug into the music of Mali.
He is landing on well-trod territory: Since 2000, any number of western musicians have traveled to Mali, to the sub-Sahara, or elsewhere in western Africa to collaborate with artists like Tinariwen and Amadou & Mariam. Musicians like Damon Albarn, Brian Eno, Santigold, Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, Wilco's Nels Cline, TV on the Radio, Amp Fiddler, and more have already sought this fusion. Navarre did well to draw on the talents of kora player Mamadou Cherif Soumano and the fleet-fingered guitarist Guimba Kouyate, as well as Brazilian percussionist Jorge Bezerra, whose polyrhythms at the end of "Voila" make for a subtle blend of the two continents. Bezerra also helps move "Family Tree" out of the sluggish piano opening to something far more enticing by song's end.
But the most interesting results on the album seem as if they could easily exist without Navarre's so-called "French Touch." Perhaps if Navarre had returned circa 2007, these hybrids would sound revelatory. But much like his fellow countrymen Daft Punk did in RAM, he has dismissed loops and sampling out of hand for something more "organic" and "real", and in the process he has turned his back on his greatest strength. The result sounds like something that's already been comp'ed to death by Putumayo.


The Toronto singer’s writing lacks the specificity that animates his best music this time around.

PARTYMOBILE

There’s a running joke that PARTYNEXTDOOR only gets to release music once Drake passes on his records. If that’s true, Drake is doing him a favor by standing in his way, because almost every PARTYNEXTDOOR song would sound better if he weren’t the one singing. To PARTY’s credit, the appeal of his music has never been his bland and monotone vocals; he’s a writer. The Toronto-bred 26-year-old penned Rihanna’s “Work” and “Sex With Me”; his fingerprints are all over Drake’s arguable opus If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, and his early albums P1 and P2 are loaded with the hyper-specific writing that made him a breakout star.
PARTY’s best music is all about the details. On  2014’s “Recognize,” PARTY’s signature record to this day, he doesn’t just tell us he’s obsessively in love, he shows it: he drives by his girlfriend’s condominium complex late at night to make sure she’s home safely. He even has conversations with the concierge about how she looks like a celebrity. He might seem like a great boyfriend checking in, but actually he’s paranoid she’s sleeping around just like he is. It’s like a good dark comedy—I’m sure Future has cracked a devilish smile to it at least once or twice.
On PARTY’S new album, PARTYMOBILE, he’s no longer the writer he once was. His songs are impersonal and shallow, which is a bad pairing with his sleepy, robotic coos. “My girl’s bad like a kid that just eat candy,” he sings weakly on “Eye On It,” which will probably rack up streams at an Applebees looking for white noise. “Split Decision” has the makings of a classic PARTY track—a voicemail interlude and production that wouldn’t be out of place on So Far Gone—but PARTY’s writing has no color. “Just got back from a trip, caught me with another bitch,” he croons. We don’t learn where he went, how he got caught—none of the melodrama that would bring the track to life.
“Savage Anthem” is a reminder of how great PARTY’s songwriting can be. Here, he gets caught cheating, not once, but three times—in a coupe, in his living room, in the VIP section of a strip club. But PARTY doesn’t apologize; instead he tries to manipulate his girl into thinking he’s a tortured soul that deserves pity. “I put the dirt into dirt bag/Still got your jacket in my bag/I stood you up, that was my bad/Gave me your heart, watch me break that,” he sings, as if enumerating his own flaws should equal forgiveness. He sounds like an over-dramatic slimeball, which is where he shines, but PARTYMOBILE doesn’t have nearly enough moments like this.
Instead, most of the time PARTY sounds soulless. He rips the heart out of the light and bouncy island rhythm of “Touch Me.” Rihanna gets dragged into the mess on “Believe It.” She turned in her hook four days before the release of PARTYMOBILE and I’m surprised she did, given the formulaic acoustic guitar pop production made to die on the back half of a Khalid album. But once Rihanna settles into her pineapple-sweet melody the lyrics don’t sound so dry anymore and the beat suddenly becomes tolerable. Then PARTY starts to sing again and you realize how much better the songs on PARTYMOBILE would be in someone else’s hands.


Comeback album from the Ninja Tune success story/90s museum pieces.

Sound Mirrors

Coldcut were incredibly overrated. Past tense is critical here because the moment in which Coldcut were feted feels like a hundred million years ago now. Concepts like trip-hop, turntablism, etc., aren't quite past tense enough to stir warm feelings of nostalgia. They're "what the fuck were we thinking?" ideas in 2006, and no one wants to listen to records that give them the feeling of looking at old photos of themselves with bad haircuts and stupid clothes. Sure, no genre is completely devoid of good ideas-- or even, more importantly, good records-- but there's a landfill full of "abstract beats" out there that no one's stepped up to reclaim. If you want a real laugh, read the second half of the Rough Guide to Drum and Bass devoted to big beat/downtempo. What the fuck were we thinking?
So, while, yes, better than the bulk of their Ninja Tune-affiliated peers, Coldcut were not as good as we once believed. That Eric B and Rakim remix that Eric B and Rakim hated-- it's really not that great, is it? I'd rather listen to "Pump Up the Volume" than "Beats and Pieces" for my kitschy sampladelic single fix. And while concepts like multimedia and chopping up the history of recorded music seemed like not just a good idea at the time but the very future itself, information overload isn't an exciting concept in 2006, it just is. (Plus their Journeys by DJ record is the most overrated DJ mix of all time.) So credit them for getting there first, but don't flog pioneer status to tell me why I should listen to the records.
Sound Mirrors isn't a cut-and-paste DJ record per se, but it's constructed in the same way. Instead of slamming chunks of disparate records together via sampler or turntable, they wrangle a few albums' worth of guest stars and hop from genre to genre like Q*Bert. (The video game sprite, not the Skratch Pikl. At least I think so.) "Walk a Mile" tries on the shimmering fabric of smooth, gauzy deep house, complete with vocals from the original voice of post-coital, outerspace ennui, Robert Owens. Saul Williams hectors "Mr. Nichols" from an era where we thought poetry slams and poetry slams on rap records were a good idea, and "This Island Earth" reminds you just how hard people worked the thin concept of a female singer over a mid-tempo rap beat in the late-90s. If you've ever wanted to hear Jon Spencer and Mike Ladd on the same track, Sound Mirrors is for you, and the pairing, or even just the concept of the pairing, will tell you whether or not you need to hear it. Coldcut acquit themselves well, in the sense that they pull off all of their various generic sleights of hand. But, as per usual, whatever off-hand virtuosity Sound Mirrors displays, there's no center here. No one likes a show-off.


Though the Norwegian duo Röyksopp aren't calling it quits, Torbjørn Brundtland and Svein Berge have billed their new album as their last in the "traditional album format." The Inevitable End is devoted to glossy, bittersweet electronic drifts featuring guest vocals from the likes of Robyn and others.

The Inevitable End

For Röyksopp, the end was contained in the beginning. Though the Norwegian duo aren't calling it quits, Torbjørn Brundtland and Svein Berge have billed their new album as their last in the "traditional album format." Still, the downtempo house of Röyksopp's slickly pleasurable 2001 debut, Melody A.M., with its countless licensing opportunities and compilation appearances, already foreshadowed the post-album era. Across subsequent releases, Röyksopp have evolved with the rest of Scandinavian electronic pop, but overall their best work has tended to be other than LP length, whether a remix for the Streets, a remix by Trentemøller, or a robot-romancing Robyn team-up.
Röyksopp's opulent, exploratory mini-album with Robyn earlier this year represented a possible way forward; by dropping the Swedish pop singer's singularly expressive vocals into a mixture of radio-ready directness and silky, groove-chasing breadth, Do It Again achieved a 35-minute whole just about equal to the sum of its parts. The Inevitable End, on the other hand, is a reminder of why the album is commercially moribund for the vast majority of artists in the first place. Despite capable guest vocalists, including Robyn herself, it's generally devoted to glossy, bittersweet electronic drifts that are too slow, too long, or too bland to hold interest for 60 minutes, though often unobjectionable in smaller servings. This, too, is a post-album album.
As such, The Inevitable End easily lends itself to other types of listening experiences. With a baleful filter-disco gallop and vocoderized call to "ride with us tonight," Daft Punk-like opener "Skulls" could, given the right speakers and onstage visuals, serve as a striking kickoff for a live set. The chiming, midtempo melancholia of "Sordid Affair", with a tender, electronics-kissed lead vocal by Ryan James, of Welsh duo Man Without Country, would neatly set a mood for a commercial, film, or TV show; for some reason I imagine it playing on an airplane as the passengers board. It should be added that Norwegian singer-songwriter Susanne Sundfør—who appeared on another disappointing 2014 album by a Robyn collaborator, Kleerup's As If We Never Won—acquits herself well enough again here, lending crystalline grace to the percolating "Save Me" and (especially) the credits-ready beat ballad "Running to the Sea", which dates back to 2012.
However, Röyksopp have said The Inevitable End is "headphones music" for "home listening," and with apologies to Brundtland and Berge, I must report that repeated, attentive listens at home, on headphones, have been at times all but maddening for me. Jamie McDermott of London's the Irrepressibles has a creamy, mannered voice that could lock down a concise dance-pop song by, say, Disclosure, but on each of his four guest appearances here, he's stuck intoning uncatchy magnetic poetry atop lugubrious, slow-motion expanses. He has to go and there's nothing left to say, he says more than once; his guilt is "just like a razor to my soul." As for the lover he hurt, the "rain" in her sorrowful mind falls mainly where it rhymes with "sane." Though the repetitive pulse of "Compulsion" convincingly evokes a monomaniacal desire for a place with "no anxiety or fear," it's as numbing as that sounds.
Robyn embodies both how The Inevitable End went off track and how it still goes right. On "Rong", a glacial synth arpeggio takes on an orchestral glaze; she does nothing but repeatedly ask, "What the fuck is wrong with you?," which could work but here comes off as no better than B-side material compared with her 2010 album Body Talk's Röyksopp-produced "None of Dem". The LP standout is a punched-up, streamlined rework of Do It Again's "Monument", a song that despite its monolithic theme actually demonstrates how all human accomplishment eventually crumbles into history. Also remixed recently to excellent effect by Kindness, it's a monument that exists without a single definitive version. That might've been an intriguing conceptual starting point for an album. What if The Inevitable End had been, instead of a form of closure, a new opening—a rebirth or reinvention? All good things must come to a smell ya later, sure, but Röyksopp didn't have to leave it quite like this.


Eighteen years into its existence, the Swedish band continues to find ways to make a familiar fusion of melodic death metal, crust punk, and d-beat sound fresh.

Hexhammaren

It’s hard to think of another band besides Martyrdöd that has ticked quite so many boxes on the “Swedish metal/punk” checklist during its 18 years of existence. Debut album recorded at underground metal hub Necromorbus Studios? Check. Round two (and, after a brief dip into DIY recording for album number three, rounds four through seven) recorded at Gothenburg’s iconic Studio Fredman, arguably the birthplace of Swedish melodic death metal? Check. Bulletproof scene bona fides via members who have done time in a number of other local metal/punk luminaries like Skitsystem, Agrimonia, Miasmal, and Iron Lamb (and, in the case of bassist Daniel Ekeroth, quite literally wrote the book on Swedish death metal)? Double check. An evolving sound that’s perpetually described as “crust punk” or “d-beat” (“kängpunk” for the diehards) yet often shares more sonic similarities with melodic death-metal gods At the Gates’ mid-1990s output than crust legends Anti Cimex? Big honking check.
On their seventh album, Hexhammaren, Martyrdöd have doubled down on the melodic pattern they’ve been drawing from since the band was just a shared twinkle in guitarist Mikael Kjellman’s and drummer Jens Bäckelin’s eyes. The album opens with the title track (which almost-but-not-quite translates to “witch hammer”), whose dashing twin guitars, hoarse vocals, punchy d-beats, and appealingly warm, grimy production provide a strong indicator for how the rest of the album is going to unfold.
It can be difficult to keep this style of music from getting monotonous over the course of an album, and it’s true that Martyrdöd tend to stick to the blueprints they’ve laid out. When they push themselves harder and venture outside that comfort zone, though, the rewards are great. The guitar solos in particular deserve mention; their insertion never feels forced, but draws out the nuances of each song. That level of care really makes the end result sing, and Hexhammaren is liberally flavored with this kind of savvy, dynamic songwriting.
Their general approach has remained remarkably consistent over their nearly 20 years in the game, but that’s not to say they’re a one-trick pony; Hexhammaren does have its surprises. “War on Peace” is a straightforward punk banger with Disfear written all over it, while “In the Dead of the Night” is drenched in atmosphere from its onset, when a lone guitar calls the listener forward into the void. The vocals on “Helveteslarm” jump out, and for a moment, are nearly scrubbed clean during a spooky midsong break.
“Bait and Switch” features some truly lovely melodic guitar work, and the unexpectedly lysergic album closer “Sthlm Syndrome” interchanges furious d-beats with drips of threnodial doom and bouncy solos. That crusty intent is still there, particularly in the production, which is thick and fuzzy enough to withstand an onslaught of three-chord fury, but could just as easily have graced an early Entombed joint.
By now, these Scandinavian jawbreakers have settled into a groove, and that they’re still willing to experiment a bit with what is fundamentally a rather standardized genre just shows how seriously they take their craft. Martyrdöd are living proof that old punks never die—they just start metal bands instead.


On their newest EP, The Strokes continue to perform “The Strokes” for a new generation of younger and casual listeners.

Future Present Past EP

Although the Strokes are of the same era as once-flashpoint NYC guitar bands like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, the National, and the Walkmen, they’ve become something their peers haven’t: classic rock. Tumble down enough comment threads, or check out the audience demographics at their infrequent shows—there are many listeners who idolize the Strokes as an actual first-generation 21st century NYC cool band, something like the aging, disheveled downtown '70s and '80s hipsters the band idolized in their youth. Becoming classic rock means a band can recycle their iconography without losing their edge, as far as casual and younger listeners are concerned. (Officially, the Strokes began their slow journey toward oldies stations when Shia LaBeouf wore their shirt in Transformers.)
It also means, weirdly, that they’re no longer expected to be good. A bad record wouldn’t diminish the enduring power of singles like “Last Nite.” In 2014, I met a person who said the Strokes were their favorite band. When I asked how they liked 2013’s Comedown Machine, the answer was “What’s that?” So it ends up being sort of nice that Future Present Past, their first new release in three years and first EP since 2001’s scene-starting The Modern Age, is only so long as an EP. On 2011's Angles and Comedown Machine, there was too much going on—and, quite simply, too much. Here, there’s just enough to think about without getting fatigued, as the Strokes continue to toy with the sound of their late period. The concept is present in the title: Here’s what the Strokes do sound like, here’s what they did sound like, and here’s what they will sound like.
The signposts of that classic “Strokes” sound are visible on “OBLIVIUS,” the EP’s immediate stand out: a guitar that sounds like a synth (but isn’t), intertwined with a guitar that sounds like a guitar (and is), backed by precise percussion and knitted together by Julian Casablancas’ bleary, strained voice. There are lyrics about alienation, a maybe semi-intentional, faux-deep *Wolf of Wall Street *ad lib, and a straining chorus vocal that cannot possibly have been delivered by someone who’s smoked as many cigarettes as Casablancas. (There’s also a remix from the band’s Fab Moretti, which is totally listenable.) “What side are you standing on?” Casablancas sings, which sounds like a challenge to anyone who might pretend the band hasn’t earned its right to screw around.
The benefits of screwing around, of course, could be challenged. “Drag Queen” is the so-called “future”—a more self-consciously “mature” song that opens with a ominous, decayed smear of guitars and continues with the high-concept of Casablancas singing to himself in dueling voices, sort of sounding like a hungover Phantom of the Opera. Halfway through, a Strokes-sian guitar refrain is copy-and-pasted into the flow. It’s a mess, but it’s an interesting mess. “Threat of Joy,” meanwhile, stretches all the way to their pre-fame days, when they sounded just bored and arrogant enough to be sexy. It’s an alternative universe take on what “The Modern Age” might have sounded like if they’d taken a record executive’s advice to slow it down, get a better studio, and play it straight. It’s not as good, of course, but it’s still charming, and has Casablancas’ most charismatic vocal performance.
At the very least, all three songs will fit seamlessly into their live show. In 2015, I saw the Strokes play a headlining set at Primavera Sound for a rabid crowd who ate up every song, even “Machu Picchu.” The band was just as well-dressed than they’d been in the early ’00s (except for Casablancas, who was cosplaying as a Planeteer, but hey, it’s a look), and they didn’t miss a note, even as I don’t think a single member came within ten feet of another during the entire set. They didn’t play “12:51” at 12:51 a.m., because fuck coincidences. A credible source told me their fee for the 90-minute set was more than the cost of your dad’s mortgage.
If their solo dalliances in the last half-decade have given weight to the idea that the Strokes are more of a business than a living, breathing band, it's still been fascinating to watch them shed their skin and become whatever it is they'll be for the rest of their career. And with the pivot of Casablancas’ Cult Records to functioning as a gatekeeper for the living, breathing culture that helped birth the band, they seem like a band that’s very aware of their legacy… as well as how easy it would be for that to stop mattering, should the context no longer exist. Maybe they didn’t mean to become iconic, but it happened, and there are still people who want to see what happens next.


To celebrate its 30th anniversary, Rhino reissues the classic soundtrack, the most popular document of the disco era.

Saturday Night Fever

Disco's most popular document was, at the time of its release, also one of its least representative: Saturday Night Fever is disco for straight, white males. A phenomenon 30 years ago, John Badham's B-movie and its accompanying 2xLP soundtrack not only made John Travolta a star, but escorted the music out of gay discotheques and black nightclubs and into the glare of the mainstream. However, it did so by diluting disco's more extreme elements to create a safer, more marketable package. Even then, conservative audiences saw disco culture as a Sodom and Gomorrah rather than an alternative Eden. The recent surge of interest in the era-- specifically in Peter Shapiro's excellent history Turn the Beat Around, but also demonstrated by groups like Scissor Sisters and Franz Ferdinand-- only sets disco's outsider nature, as well as this collection's shortcomings, in sharper relief.
The movie itself is seedy in a different way (rape, bigotry, death), but as film critic David Thompson writes, "Children ignored its...sordid suburban context. That film only existed when Travolta danced." In addition to his extraordinary dance moves, the actor's edgy, preening presence holds the camera's attention as it juxtaposes him with the lifeless neighborhood around him. Similarly, the soundtrack, which Rhino is reissuing on its 30th anniversary, is a showcase for hetero heartthrobs the Bee Gees, who contribute a third of the tracklist, get a writing credit for Yvonne Elliman's "If I Can't Have You", and even grace the cover as some sort of mirrorball Holy Trinity. It makes cynical sense: The Bee Gees played their own instruments; had a dubious history in sub-Beatles pop; and were white and handsome-- all of which made them more marketable to new audiences than their black, female, or homosexual peers. As such, they should be critical pariahs on par with Stone Temple Pilots or the Killers, but their six tracks on Saturday Night Fever are frequently brilliant and redemptively fun. With its snaking instrumental melody and sneaking beat, opener "Stayin' Alive" is all cocksure strut, even separated from Travolta's stroll through the credits, and "Night Fever" and "You Should Be Dancin'" have an urgency that makes dancin' seem like a life-or-death imperative. Their portion of the soundtrack forms a condensed hits package that few bands of the era can rival.
Saturday Night Fever is by no means the definitive compilation of disco-- Rhino's 4xCD Disco Box, for example, is obviously more comprehensive, and Strut's Disco (Not Disco) comps and Tommy Boy's The Perfect Beats help capture proto-, post-, and underground disco-- but even beyond the contributions of the Bee Gees, it does have the potential to be a gateway comp, exposing listeners to a small range of disco subgenres. There's funk: "Open Sesame" doesn't rank among Kool & the Gang's absolute best cuts, but its silly vocals and breakneck horns are nevertheless impressive. There's soul: The Trammps' 10-story "Disco Inferno"-- the extended cut, no less-- provides both the soundtrack's climax and its denouement. And of course there's novelty: Walter Murphy's "Fifth of Beethoven" is not just the height of disco-geek cheese, but also the precursor to "serious" undertakings by contemporary artists like Mirwais and Moby. Surprisingly, there are even Latin rhythms on Saturday Night Fever, most notably on M.F.S.B.'s "K-Jee" but also consigned to the souped-up incidental music by David Shire and Ralph McDonald.
Ultimately, Saturday Night Fever doesn't disregard disco's underground origins so much as it simply sublimates them to the mainstream white experience. As a soundtrack, it works perfectly well, immersing listeners in the music (and therefore the spirit) of the film while selling more tickets. But as a pop-cultural document, it is significantly flawed, not only linked to a midlevel movie but also unable to fully capture the movement with which it has been so strongly identified. Thirty years later, after the ugly DISCO SUCKS trend and countless revivals both sincere and ironic, the appeal of Saturday Night Fever seems squarely nostalgic, but whatever its impact then or now, there is some amazing music on here-- and even more beyond.


On her 15th album, the R&B singer celebrates her ultimate-diva status by sticking to her core pop-soul aesthetic, despite collaborators like Poo Bear, Dev Hynes, and Skrillex.

Caution

Mariah Carey is synonymous with grandiosity, whether she’s showing off her five-octave vocal range, arriving on the stage of Caesar’s Palace via Jet Ski, strenuously denying her knowledge of Jennifer Lopez, or simply sighing “dah-ling” in a way that only a diva could. That penchant for over-the-topness can be a blessing or a curse, but it’s always been there, whether it was used to propel “All I Want for Christmas Is You” to holiday-season ubiquity or to drag the 12th season of “American Idol” into a morass of Nicki Minaj-directed snippiness.
But Caution, Carey’s 15th album and first in four years, takes a different tack; instead, it derives its power from its central figure’s chilled-out attitude. It opens with plush synth tones before Mariah’s purr floats in from the heavens, ready to scratch out a former “knight in shining armor” using poison-pen lyrics. It’s the sweetest-sounding “please take your things and go” track since Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable,” using Carey’s breathy head voice and robust belt in tandem as a way of underscoring the lyrics’ take-no-shit stance—a no-nonsense attitude that gives much of Caution its lightness.
The roster of producers on Caution is varied, and at times surprising—“Hold On, We’re Going Home” producer Nineteen85 helps make “GTFO” sound similarly plush; Timbaland assists behind the boards and at the end of the sparkling “8th Grade,” engaging in a playful back-and-forth that recalls a gentler version of his “Promiscuous” parrying; and Skrillex and Poo Bear, who collaborated on tracks for Justin Bieber, are partially behind the calmly celebratory Ty Dolla $ign feature “The Distance,” a gorgeous addition to the anniversary-celebration canon that isn’t even dinged by Ty’s call-out of online commenters.
Of course, Carey has a producer credit on every track. Those credits on pop albums can feel like the music-business equivalent of vanity license plates, but the Caution’s cohesion does speak to an overall guiding ideal. It’s so strong that it persists through the closing ballad, “Portrait,” which frames Carey’s passionate description of her inner struggles in emphatic piano and glossy strings, as well as the dreamy, guitar-god coda appended to the simmering “Giving Me Life,” a bittersweet look back that glides through Barbra Streisand references and an extended face-off between Carey and hip-hop demigod Slick Rick before entering its final phase. Devonté Hynes (aka Blood Orange), a student of slow jams, is Carey’s co-producer here, and his ability to sustain a sumptuous groove then explode it into something completely unexpected clashes with Carey’s controlled charm in a spectacular way.
Moments like that help Caution, despite its relatively downtempo vibe, sound like Carey’s celebration of her ultimate-diva status—and of R&B coming back around to her aesthetic. Pop-R&B has rebounded from the commercial trough it fell into during the turn of the decade, which Carey experienced firsthand when the later singles from E=MC2, the 2008 follow-up to her 2005 career rebirth, The Emancipation of Mimi, flailed at radio. (She hasn’t had a new top-10 single since 2009’s “Obsessed,” despite the quality of releases like the sun-dappled Miguel collaboration “#Beautiful” and the sparkling yet regimented ballad “You’re Mine (Eternal)”; other singers straddling the line between pop and soul, like Beyoncé, have experienced similar discrepancies between their superstardom and their pop-chart fortunes.) Carey is 48 now, and her self-titled debut turns 30 in less than two years. She’s seen generations of singers follow in her stiletto steps as they attempt to reach her level of pop megastardom; the first “American Idol” era showcased her early career’s influence on 21st-century up-and-comers, while 2018 hits like Ella Mai’s fizzy “Boo’d Up” and Camila Cabello’s breathy “Never Be the Same” cribbed their breathy vocals and burbling beats from pages of Emancipation’s playbook.
Because of the hard youth focus of the Hot 100 in the streaming era, Carey may not add another chart-topping single to her entries in the record books. But Caution seems to signal that she’s okay with that fact—her music will find a healthy audience, chart positions be damned. She’ll employ of-the-moment producers to add current touches to her tracks, but the way she uses them on Caution results in her fine-tuning her aesthetic, not bending to current playlist-friendly trends; she’ll wink at her public persona during interviews, but approach her vocals on tracks like “The Distance” and “Portrait” with the same steely-eyed seriousness that fueled her meteoric rise nearly three decades ago. Those who don’t want to listen? They can, as she coos on Caution’s opener, “get the fuck out.”


On two LPs from the mid 1990s, members of Oval and Mouse on Mars ask what lies beyond music’s borders. Their sonic abstractions are as bewitching as the most tightly composed song.

init ding + _snd

The two men of Microstoria, Oval’s Markus Popp and Mouse on Mars’ Jan St. Werner, don’t particularly like to refer to their music as “music.” Popp prefers the term “audio,” as might be expected from someone who has scribbled on CDs as part of his creative process, while St. Werner copped in a 2018 interview to being uncomfortable with the mantle of musician. The sounds on their first two albums, 1995’s init ding and 1996’s _snd, initially seem to gel with that stance. They resemble something you might find lying under a rock or lurking beneath the surface of a tidepool: You don’t so much try to comprehend them as admire their contours and movements, marveling at their very existence. Yet there’s a thrilling tension between the Germans’ desire to remove human impulses from their art and their obvious delight in making it.
The two were in their mid-twenties when they made these recordings, and their stars in the electronic underground were rising. init ding came a year after Oval’s pioneering Systemisch, which placed Popp’s arsenal of CD skips and interference blats within the context of chord progressions that sounded almost like pop; the masterpiece 94diskont was just a week away. Meanwhile, Mouse on Mars were moving from the ambient techno of their 1994 debut, Vulvaland, toward something far less categorizable. October 1995 brought Iaora Tahiti, which took sharp-edged electronics and drowned them in the same ’60s space-age cheese that was enthralling artists all over the world, from Jim O’Rourke in Chicago to Stereolab in London to the Shibuya-kei scene in Tokyo. Small wonder O’Rourke and David Grubbs would enlist Popp to work on Gastr Del Sol’s post-rock classic Camoufleur—nor that both O’Rourke and Stereolab would appear on the 1997 Microstoria remix comp Reprovisers, a fantastic summation of this zeitgeist.
For all of Popp’s and Werner’s efforts to stand apart from their work, a spirit of possibility courses through init ding. The duo made much of this music by toggling between synth patches while playing, something anyone who’s ever owned an electronic instrument has done at one point, though rarely with results this spectacular. The underlying drones and chords seem continually to turn over on themselves, refusing to simply hang in the air. Meanwhile, Popp and Werner layer all manner of strange sounds, not least the whoops on opener “16:9” that sound like the carnivorous kin of the chintziest tropical bird effects from the exotica bin. There are sounds with analogues in the real world, like an organ on “Fund” or a creaky old upright on “Dokumint,” but they blend into the music’s overall tenor of alien sponginess. It’s all coated in a patina of noise and static—not the tactile crackles of Burial or the Caretaker but a sort of ferric crust that makes everything sound old and weathered.
If init ding sounds reasonably “played,” that’s not at all the case with _snd, one of the most beguiling albums of the glitch era. Here, the madcap experimentation of the init ding sessions gives way to a total control of timbre. The interference that once lay on top of their tracks has become completely absorbed into the music; everything appears smudged, damaged or otherwise corroded, threaded between massive sub-bass subductions and high-end scrapes that test both listening habits and the limits of perception. Listen to _snd at low volume and the gentler elements of the music might disappear. Listen to it through blaring speakers and the full force of _snd’s dynamic range emerges. But this is not an “ambient” experience, and those looking for one may come out of this album disappointed if not infuriated. _snd works less like Oval’s dulcet 24-minute ambient classic “Do While” than the drones of the late Phill Niblock, which lose something when treated as casual listening and which the composer himself demanded be played at deafening volume.
The two records have been packaged together as a 2xLP reissue from Thrill Jockey, with a crisp new remaster from Rashad Becker. On Bandcamp and most streaming services, the two albums segue into each other with no clear division between them, and they flow into each other easily, with the last strains of “Dokumint” dissolving into the flickers and howls of _snd opener “Sleepy People / Network Down.” The two work together as a classic-rock-style double album, with init ding as the more playful A/B sides and _snd as the moodier C/D where the artists get down to business. This is the type of vestige from vinyl-era orthodoxy the two professed non-musicians would undoubtedly scoff at. But if Microstoria set out to separate themselves from the world of music, they’ve failed: These records instead affirm great music’s ability to confound and enthrall.


Released when she was just 19, and including songs begun four years earlier, Bush’s landmark debut is playful, experimental, and defiant: the sound of a young woman getting what she wants.

The Kick Inside

That Kate Bush named her debut album The Kick Inside might make it seem like her music is the product of a maternal wellspring. Women artists likening their work to their children is one culturally accepted way for them to discuss creativity; it implies a reassuring process of nurture. Another is as a bolt from the blue, a divine phenomenon which they just happened to catch and transmit to a deserving audience; no need for fear of a female genius here. But Bush’s debut, released when she was 19, says “Up yours” to all that.
Yes, the song “The Kick Inside” is about childbearing, but the young woman is pregnant by her brother and on the cusp of suicide to spare their family from shame. Subverting the folk song “Lucy Wan” (the brother kills his sister in the original), it shows the depths of Bush’s studies and her everlasting curiosity for how far desire can drive a person. She was signed at 16 but her debut took four years to make, during which she engaged multiple teachers in a process of spiritual and physical transformation. She pays tribute to their lessons alongside rhapsodies on unexplained phenomena, delirious expressions of lust, and declarations of earthbound defiance. Rather than feminine function or freak accident, these are the cornerstones of creativity, she suggested: mentorship and openness, but also the self-assurance to withstand those forces. Her purpose was as strong as any of them.
Besides, Bush had always felt that she had male musical urges, drawing distinctions between herself and the female songwriters of the 1960s. “That sort of stuff is sweet and lyrical,” Bush said of Carole King and co. in 1978, “but it doesn’t push it on you, and most male music—not all of it, but the good stuff—really lays it on you. It’s like an interrogation. It really puts you against the wall and that’s what I’d like my music to do. I’d like my music to intrude.” (Evidently, she had not been listening to enough Laura Nyro.) That reasoning underpinned Bush’s first battle with EMI, who wanted to release the romp “James and the Cold Gun” as her first single. Bush knew it had to be the randy metaphysical torch song “Wuthering Heights,” and she was right: It knocked ABBA off the UK No. 1 spot. She soon intruded on British life to the degree that she was subject to unkind TV parodies.
But provocation for its own sake wasn’t Bush’s project. EMI not pushing her to make an album at 15 was a blessing: The Kick Inside arrived the year after punk broke, which Bush knew served her well. “People were waiting for something new to come out—something with feeling,” she said in 1978. For anyone who scoffed at her punk affiliation—given her teenage mentorship at the hands of Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour and her taste for the baroque—she indisputably subverted wanky prog with her explicit desire and sexuality: Here was how she might intrude. The limited presence of women in prog tended to orgasmic moaning that amplified the supposed sexual potency of the group’s playing. Bush demanded pleasure, grew impatient when she had to wait for it, and ignored the issue of male climax—rock’s founding pleasure principle—to focus on how sex might transform her. “I won’t pull away,” she sings almost as a threat on “Feel It,” alone with the piano. “My passion always wins.”
The louche “L’Amour Looks Something Like You” treads similarly brazen territory though lands less soundly. She fantasizes about “that feeling of sticky love inside” as if anticipating a treacle pudding, and there is an unctuous gloop to the arrangement that makes it one of the album’s least distinctive songs. More complex desires tended to elicit her more inherently sensual and accomplished writing. “Moving,” her tribute to dance teacher Lindsay Kemp, is so absurdly elegant and lavish that its beauty seems to move Bush to laughter: There is deep respect in her admiration for him, in concert with piercing operatic notes and impish backing vocal harmonies that sound like they should have been handled by a chorus of Jim Henson creations. “You crush the lily in my soul” as an awed metaphor for the timidity of girlhood gone away is unimpeachable.
What made Bush’s writing truly radical was the angles she could take on female desire without ever resorting to submissiveness. “Wuthering Heights” is menacing melodrama and ectoplasmic empowerment; “The Saxophone Song”—one of two recordings made when she was 15—finds her fantasizing about sitting in a Berlin bar, enjoying a saxophonist’s playing and the effect it has on her. But she is hardly there to praise him: “Of all the stars I’ve seen that shine so brightly/I’ve never known or felt in myself so rightly,” she sings of her reverie, with deep seriousness. We hear his playing, and it isn’t conventionally romantic but stuttering, coarse, telling us something about the unconventional spirits that stir her.
And if there is trepidation in the arrangement of “The Man With the Child in His Eyes,” it reflects other people’s anxieties about its depicted relationship with an older man: Will he take advantage, let her down? This is the other teenage recording, her voice a little higher, less powerfully exuberant, but disarmingly confident. Her serene, steady note in the chorus—“Oooooh, he’s here again”—lays waste to the faithless. And whether he is real, and whether he loves her, is immaterial: “I just took a trip on my love for him,” she sings, empowered, again, by her desire. There’s not a fearful note on The Kick Inside, and yet there is still room for childish wonder: Just because Bush appeared emotionally and musically sophisticated beyond her years didn’t mean denying them.
“Kite” unravels like a children’s story: First she wants to fly up high, away from cruel period pains (“Beelzebub is aching in my belly-o”) and teenage self-consciousness (“all these mirror windows”) but no sooner is she up than she wants to return to real life. It is a wacky hormone bomb of a song, prancing along on toybox cod reggae and the enervating rat-a-tat-tat energy that sustained parodies of Bush’s uninhibited style; still, more fool anyone who sneers instead of reveling in the pure, piercing sensation of her crowing “dia-ia-ia-ia-ia-ia-ia-mond!” as if giving every facet its own gleaming syllable.
“Strange Phenomena” is equally awed, Bush celebrating the menstrual cycle as a secret lunar power and wondering what other powers might arrive if we were only attuned to them. She lurches from faux-operatic vocal to reedy shriek, marches confidently in tandem with the strident chorus and unleashes a big, spooky “Woo!,” exactly as silly as a 19-year-old should be. As is “Oh to Be in Love,” a baroque, glittering harpsichord romp about a romance that brightens the colors and defeats time.
She only fails to make a virtue of her naivety on “Room for the Life,” where she scolds a weeping woman for thinking any man would care about her tears. The sweet calypso reverie is elegant, and good relief from the brawnier, propulsive arrangements that stood staunchly alongside Steely Dan. But Bush shifts inconsistently between reminding the woman that she can have babies and insisting, more effectively, that changing one’s life is up to you alone. The latter is clearly where her own sensibilities lie: “Them Heavy People,” another ode to her teachers, has a Woolf-like interiority (“I must work on my mind”) and a distinctly un-Woolf-like exuberance, capering along like a pink elephant on parade. “You don’t need no crystal ball,” she concludes, “Don’t fall for a magic wand/We humans got it all/We perform the miracles.”
The Kick Inside was Bush’s first, the sound of a young woman getting what she wants. Despite her links to the 1970s’ ancien régime, she recognized the potential to pounce on synapses shocked into action by punk, and eschewed its nihilism to begin building something longer lasting. It is ornate music made in austere times, but unlike the pop sybarites to follow in the next decade, flaunting their wealth while Britain crumbled, Bush spun hers not from material trappings but the infinitely renewable resources of intellect and instinct: Her joyous debut measures the fullness of a woman’s life by what’s in her head.


Okkervil River write dreamy songs with slumber-blurred stories and play them with a drifting, somnambulant gait. The band-- named for ...

Okkervil River: Sleep and Wake Up Songs EP

Sleep and Wake Up Songs EP

Okkervil River write dreamy songs with slumber-blurred stories and play them with a drifting, somnambulant gait. The band-- named for a river outside St. Petersburg, Russia-- filled last year's eye-opening Down the River of Golden Dreams with gentle ballads about beds and war criminals and forgiveness, but the songs on their follow-up EP, Sleep and Wake Up Songs, are more brittle and fragile, like a light sleeper's snooze. The EP condenses the album's best qualities and discards most of its weaknesses, and its brevity makes it all the more emotionally forceful.
"Rapt, in Star Wars sheets/ With my hand across your belly/ We waded through the watercolor," Will Sheff sings on opener "A Favor". The song hints at a life of sexual confusion and parental abandonment, hinging on a chorus that alludes to the impossibility of true human connection: "I would be anything that you wanted me to be...but how can I change my body?"
Plumbing the disappointment of unrealized dreams, these songs are bleak and often desperate. They traffic in deliberately nebulous narratives-- unnamed characters, unspecified relationships, vague actions, undisclosed emotions-- anchored by concrete details. The result is a dreamlike atmosphere, simultaneously blurred and lucid. "You're Untied Again" turns the adage "if you love something, set it free" on its head, but Sheff is more interested in evoking the chill of an unreachable beach or the darkness of a diamond mine-- both of which become potent metaphors for the confinement of a relationship.
With an acoustic guitar melody as prismatic as melting icicles, "Just Give Me Time" plumbs the tension at the heart of a relationship, but the lyrics are so opaque as to be coded: "I shut my eyes, ripped the train off the line/ But a sudden gust of snow blew through a hole in my girl's clothes." This is not necessarily a criticism: refusing to provide much context for their narratives, these songs are guardedly confessional, eager to elicit emotions but hesitant to reveal too much.
To compliment this mood, the instruments sound sleepily languid, lolling around the beat rather than hitting it precisely. "A Favor" builds gradually to a climax reminiscent of "The War Criminal Rises and Speaks" from Down the River of Golden Dreams, but only the vocals crescendo. The other instruments maintain the same volume, as if nonplussed by Sheff's display of emotion. As a result, the song's climax becomes airily anticlimactic, further emphasizing the sense of lonely futility described in the lyrics.
Closing the EP, "The Hidden Track" sets up an intriguing musical metaphor: Life itself is an album, but the afterlife is the unlisted bonus song. After questioning and doubting himself throughout the song-- and suffering through what sounds like tremendous uncertainty-- Sheff admits, "I think that there's a hidden track." The song provides an upbeat coda to match his hopefulness, then the EP abruptly and unceremoniously ends.