Active since the 1990s, the Japanese producer is enjoying a rising profile in the West. His dreamy new album celebrates the synergy between humans and machines.

Deep Soundscapes

The Japanese house producer Takeshi Fukushima’s understated beats are as unassuming as the producer himself. During the week, Fukushima works in a factory near Shiga, Japan, his lifelong hometown. But on weekends he powers up his studio, sculpting house beats that bear traces of the music he grew up with: Kraftwerk, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono. But Fukushima’s tunes on his new album Deep Soundscapes, released under his Takecha alias, are far more stripped down than the electro pop of his youth, favoring a glitchy, loop-driven style of house music that draws from Mark Fell’s minimal grooves as SND, Jan Jelinek’s scratchy IDM, and Ron Trent’s warm deep house.
Fukushima has been active since the 1990s, though his tunes have mostly flown under the radar outside of Japan. But that started to change at the end of 2015 when his “Deep Loop” was re-released on the ハウス Once Upon A Time In Japan… compilation. Then, in 2017, Fukushima reissued several of his ’90s productions, original copies of which had become virtually impossible to find. Fukushima’s profile continued to rise in the wake of other Japanese producers who had been re-discovered in the West, like Soichi Terada and So Inagawa.
Unlike Terada’s jovial, party-starting house music, Takecha’s mellow grooves won’t catapult the producer onto the global festival circuit, but his deep, head-nodding productions are no less captivating. Deep Soundscapes is filled with gentle house and glitchy ambient tracks that explore a deep synergy between humans and machines. Fukushima’s interest in this connection runs through his whole catalog. The record label he’s run since 1995, GWM (also one of his production aliases), is an anagram for “Groove With Machine,” and across his productions, Takecha seems to be searching for the soul inside his synthesizers and samplers, bringing their organic potential to the surface. Take “Factory 141,” where he re-pitches and rearranges the clanking sounds of a factory into a mechanical lullaby. The grinding samples are dark and heavy, but a gentle, elegiac synth melody offsets those stark sounds, perhaps reflecting the relief and exhaustion Fukushima feels when he clocks out of his factory job at the end of the day.
Even the more upbeat tracks on Deep Soundscapes, like “Gradual Atmosphere” and “Warm Rondo,” are submerged in a gentle mist, their burrowing bass lines keeping the tracks from drifting too far above ground. When Takecha slows the tempo down, on “Rhodes Detox,” “Calm Imagination,” and “Low Sentiment,” he harks back to the golden-era IDM of Boards of Canada. On each of his tracks, mellow synth chords hang in the air like floating dandelion tufts, enveloping his clicking, mechanical beats with a weightless air.
Deep Soundscapes’ warmth is evidenced in the music’s gently weathered patina: Each track feels layered with love and attention, pored over and reduced for hours before reaching its final form. Takecha’s supremely relaxed vibe is reflected in his track titles, which are full of words like “Calm,” “Warm,” “Tender,” and “Innocence.” It makes for a fitting soundtrack for daydreaming and cloud watching, late nights and early mornings. Although Fukushima has kept a low profile in the press, his music doesn’t feel steeped in mystery or ego—there’s a directness to his approach that resonates as heartfelt and genuine. In Deep Soundscapes’ thoughtful layering, you don’t get the sense that Takecha is trying to one-up anybody—he’s just being himself.


El Conejo Malo’s fifth solo LP is a rap homecoming. It doesn’t possess the magic or sophistication of his best work, but it’s just as horny and cavalier.

Bad Bunny: nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana

nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana

Once upon a time, Bad Bunny was the king of a movement called Latin trap. Seven years ago, before the Rolling Stone covers and the Gucci ads with Kendall Jenner, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio was an audacious newcomer with labyrinthine graphics on his scalp and a closet full of neon short-shorts. When his 2022 album Un Verano Sin Ti—a pop masterwork immersed in Caribbean humidity and dreamy glitz—arrived, it catapulted him into the public eye like never before. If you weren’t already following Benito’s journey, UVST’s gushing sentimentality and commercial polish made it seem like the Puerto Rican artist had always been the kind of pop star who sells out stadiums. But acolytes know that Benito has long been an elite rapper—even if he’s sometimes sidelined that skill on his jaunt to the top.
Nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana, Bad Bunny’s fifth solo studio LP, functions like a rap homecoming. The album is bloated but thematically focused, centered on some of Benito’s favorite topics: fucking, counting racks, his love of Puerto Rico. As he embraces the insouciant recklessness and unabashed horniness that enamored the globe, some might rejoice that El Conejo Malo has returned to his roots. Though he’s preternaturally funny and frequently debonair, only a portion of these songs approach the vim and vigor of his generation-defining anthems.
Nadie sabe comes to life when Benito is intentionally provocative or artfully humorous. His smutty wisecracks produce laugh-out-loud gems: On the salacious “Baticano,” he invokes Teletubby characters in a rhyme about putting his pinky in a woman’s ass and making love to her where she “pees” and “poops.” On “Fina,” he brags about his dick being bald and big-headed, like the four-year-old cartoon character Caillou. “Thunder y Lightning” is a gritty drill howl, with Benito and guest Eladio Carrión going bar for bar as they stunt through deep-cut Puerto Rican sports references. When the song ends, Benito takes a jab at former creative partner J Balvin for being too infatuated with success, noting that he’s “friends with everybody.”
The antics are entertaining, and embody the cavalier goofiness that has set Bad Bunny apart in an industry full of high-gloss acts with little to say. But many songs lack the sophistication and structural complexity of his trap epics. Opener “Nadie Sabe” is a Drake-adjacent lament on celebrity insecurity, while “Hibiki,” “Gracias Por Nada,” and “Baby Nueva” are marred by unimaginative flexing and empty kiss-offs. Benito usually does everything with a peerless sense of panache and individuality—and a thoughtful eye for the issues affecting his homeland—so it feels uncharacteristic for him to be preoccupied with such prosaic concerns. Even Benito himself seems to recognize this: On the highlight “Los Pits,” which recalls Jay-Z’s realization in “Moment of Clarity,” he claims that he could be “rapping about more profound issues, but the checks arrive and confuse me.”
There are sublime exceptions. “Monaco” and “Vou 787” construct a fantasia of luxury—a life filled with Cuban cigars, million-dollar Bugattis, and diamond-encrusted glassware. Sumptuous samples augment the aura of opulence: MAG and La Paciencia loop the romantic strings of Charles Aznavour’s “Hier Encore” on “Monaco,” while “Vou 787” lifts the silken synth line that opens Madonna’s “Vogue.” The production is consistently impressive, as on “Teléfono Nuevo,” which begins with the type of moonstruck, synth-driven glimmer that reflects Benito’s gift for amplifying wistful emotion into small moments of triumph. When a disconnect tone cuts off the beat, it’s like your brain just dropped the call. Halfway through the first verse of the macabre standout “Vuelve Candy B,” he hushes his voice, delivering the rest of his bars in a susurrous, theatrical flurry. It’s an exciting flow switch that reprises Benito’s indelible magnetism.
At 22 tracks and 81 minutes, nadie sabe is the type of overlong streaming-era album that could use a meticulous edit to help its treasures sparkle. Too frequently, it feels like a regression from the star-making highs of Bad Bunny’s rap past. Consider 2016’s “Tu No Vive Así,” where Benito nimbly folded in obscure references to Taíno chieftains and catechism courses. Or return to 2020’s “Booker T,” in which he growled through his teeth, flipped a children’s folk song into a boast, and paused dramatically to sip water and catch his breath. Both of these songs avoided inane stunting, instead cultivating Bad Bunny’s mythos through inventive and unexpected flourishes. And while the man has built a reputation for making party and political anthems alike, it’s not that nadie sabe would be better if it were more explicitly radical; those kinds of expectations place unrealistic demands on pop stars and usually lead to disappointment. Bad Bunny can rap about sex and money all he wants, but he’s capable of doing so with much more intricacy and magic. To use Benito’s own words, you can’t just say you’re the best. You also have to prove it.


While retaining the eerie, claustrophobic atmosphere of its predecessor, the second LP from Portishead mastermind Geoff Barrow's krautrock project boasts a brisker, more purposeful sequence.

Geoff Barrow doesn't do anything half-assed. His primary band, Portishead, are notorious for taking an average of seven years between albums to acheive that perfect shade of noir. But each of the items in Barrow's bursting dossier of extracurricular assignments bears his meticulous touch. When he feels like making a hip-hop record, he assembles one with 41 tracks and 30-plus guest MCs. When he wants to sign a rock band to his Invada imprint, he goes for one built from a Paul’s Boutique-level of sample-based bricolage. When he scores a production gig for an NME-endorsed group of garage-punk pin-ups, he refashions them as widescreen-visioned psychedelic goths. And when he's in the mood to hear some Krautrock, rather than just dust off his well-worn copy of Tago Mago, he makes a BEAK> record.
Krautrock, of course, has become as much of a default mode for experimental indie bands as the blues was for a previous generation of classic-rockers. And in BEAK>'s case, the sonic resemblances to their 70s forbears can be, well, unCanny: even more so than the band's self-titled 2009 debut, >> sounds like it was recorded inside of Jaki Liebezeit's kick drum, all hypno-bass throb, heavy percussive grooves, and buzzing analog synths. Krautrock is synonymous with a certain rhythmic precision and propulsion, but BEAK> don't just lock into a motorik beat and activate the cruise control. Rather, they see the music as part of a broader continuum, digging up its roots in the frazzled psychedelia of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, funk, and musique concrete, while emphasizing its influence on everything from electro and post-punk to Italian horror-movie soundtracks and stoner-metal.
As the lone keystroke difference between the first and second album titles suggest, this is a band that progresses in increments. BEAK>> retains the same eerie, claustrophobic atmosphere as its predecessor-- after all, its opening track is a sludgy, slow-motion swirl of police-siren effects called "The Gaol"-- and the ominously indecipherable vocals sound like they were recorded by the mouth-less dummies seen in their press shots. But the new album also boasts a brisker pace-- spurred by the excitable synth-rock thrust of "Yatton" and "Elevator", and the mushroom-heady funk of "Spinning Top"-- tauter arrangements, and a more purposeful sequence: All roads lead to side two's seven-minute colossus "Wulfstan II", an Earth-quaking jolt of brown-acid rock whose unrelenting, fuzz-bomb stomp is periodically interrupted by well-timed, organ-guided breakdowns, only to reemerge more nasty and unforgiving than before. (Though its Richter-scale reading is almost matched by the slow-creeping closer "Kidney", which begins as a Young Marble Giants murmur before erupting into a Slintian roar.) Barrow recently quipped to Rolling Stone that it could be another "fucking 10 years" before we see a new Portishead record; whether he was joking or not, the wait will feel a little less interminable so long as this band continues to put their best > forward.


On softCORE, the New Jersey native mashes pop punk grit and airy R&B. It’s a commendable undertaking, but the execution is rough.

softCORE

Fousheé’s voice sounds like the sentient form of nails scratching against a chalkboard, but it’s so sharp, so memorable, that you absolutely want to hear it again. That coveted commodity has made her a go-to featured guest; on a 2021 collab with Lil Wayne, she makes sorrow sound enticing. On Ravyn Lenae’s vibrant HYPNOS, she makes a rough breakup feel celestial. And on Steve Lacy’s “Sunshine,” she encapsulates the bliss of love’s unexpected turns. But the textures that make the singer’s vivid songwriting and piercing falsetto so commanding are difficult to decipher on softCORE, her official debut album. Instead, the record lands as a faulty attempt at meshing punk grit with her folk-tinged R&B.
On the New Jersey native’s 2021 project time machine, a record anchored by stunning vocal delivery and guitar-laced soul, the singer embraced her relationship insecurities. This time around, she relies on punk and R&B to sift through her fears. But the album oscillates too frantically between the two genres, making softCORE feel like an ill-conceived experiment.
Across 12 tracks, Fousheé confronts a catharsis filled with unyielding rage, sass, lust, and anguish. softCORE’s punk tracks are bold and mesmerizing, almost imposing, and it often makes the album’s R&B songs feel obsolete. “simmer down,” the behemoth opener, is an angsty track backed by thrashing basslines and lush guitar chords. Fousheé reveals just how searing she can be when someone dares to threaten her: “And you haven’t seen crazy till you pissed off a Jamaican,” she warns in the first verse. On “bored” and “die,” Fousheé proves that she can transform her soft wails into the kind of caustic dexterity needed to carry a punk song. And when the soft guitar-picking on “i’m fine” mutates into flashes of screamo, Fousheé shows she can masterfully camouflage her inner turmoil with a false sense of tranquility.
softCORE’s pure R&B tracks pale in comparison to its grand punk displays. “unexplainable” is a dull track about a toxic romance that lacks the intensity that permeates the first part of the album. Similarly, on the blissful “smile,” Fousheé treads into familiar territory with airy vocal patterns that don’t sufficiently fortify the singer’s adventure into new styles. The breadth of softCORE’s punk tracks could have positioned the singer-songwriter as a luminous addition to the current pop-punk revival, joining peers like WILLOW and Machine Gun Kelly. But infusing anticlimactic R&B songs that dilute the album’s punk-inspired momentum makes Fousheé’s arrival into that arena seem less convincing.
Still, the raw, descriptive storytelling across softCORE invigorates the album in its placid moments. Take the Lil Uzi Vert-assisted track “spend the money,” in which Fousheé drops cutting barbs about how she’s with a partner only for what they can financially provide. And on “supernova,” she makes the euphoria of lust sound like a top tourist destination: “Supernova high like glitter in the sky/I’m faded out my mind/Let’s make a memory.”
Fousheé’s voice is liberating and her songwriting bleeds with emotion. Her pursuits on softCORE prove that it’s possible for pop-punk and R&B to exist in the same space, which adds a fresh take on the nostalgia train steering the former’s resurgence. While the endeavor is admirable and audacious, its execution isn’t as seamless as the fluidity of Fousheé’s own voice.


Though it's a solid effort, Young Jeezy's long-delayed fourth LP feels both airless and over-inflated, the sound of an artist trying to revisit something gone.

Jeezy: Thug Motivation 103: Hustlerz Ambition

Thug Motivation 103: Hustlerz Ambition

Once upon a time, Young Jeezy was invincible, a superhero. He grew famous peddling an overblown, over-simplified cartoon of machismo and violence, pumped full of dubious sociopolitical implications and adrenaline. His first three albums were some of the last decade's finest action flicks. The widescreen production, from Shawty Redd, DJ Toomp, and others, furnished the exploding tanks while Jeezy supplied the boiled-down, bumper-sticker dialogue: "I remember nights/ I didn't remember nights." "Who, me?/ I emerge from the crack smoke." He was Stallone in Cobra; he was Schwarzenegger in Commando.
But every decade has its own action heroes. Nowadays, Jeezy is just another down-on-his luck gangsta rapper being jerked around by his record company. Rick Ross is the overfed rap kingpin of the moment; the simmering feud between them has nothing to do with street credentials and everything to do with the fact that in a rap moment mired in varsity-lettered, middle-class nice guys, there's room for only one Rambo. Thug Motivation 103: Hustlerz Ambition, which has finally wheezed its way across the finish line, is a telling moment: It's a solid effort, but it's also the first time that supply for the Snowman's product has begun to outstrip demand.
Nothing much is visibly wrong with Thug Motivation 103. In fact, a lot of it is pretty great: "Trapped" opens with a verse from boho neo-soul queen Jill Scott that induces misplaced nostalgia shivers for classic Lauryn Hill. Jeezy sells the hoary details of the song's poverty lament-- no cable in the house, old milk in the empty fridge-- with gut-twisting force. On "Way Too Gone", rising Atlanta producer Mike WiLL Made It (Meek Millz's "Tupac Back", Gucci Mane's "East Atlanta 6") provides a head-spinning cross-breed of trap-rap and cloud rap. The Fabolous and Jadakiss-assisted "OJ" provides the extravagant ignorance. All of it is satisfyingly huge- and evil-sounding.
And yet Thug Motivation somehow feels both airless and over-inflated, the sound of an artist trying to revisit something gone. In the long gap between this record and 2008's The Recession, Jeezy has done almost nothing to tweak his formula-- a brief guest appearance by of-the-moment ATL star Future aside, there's not much here to suggest Jeezy has been keeping tabs on Southern rap's furiously molting trends, which means even the exciting moments have a certain "I am big; it's the pictures that got small" feel.
You can hear the lack of organic excitement most clearly on the album's curiously flat Huge High-Profile Hard-Sell collaboration: "I Do", featuring Jay-Z and André 3000. Jay-Z hasn't appeared on a Jeezy record since the remix to "Go Crazy", and André 3000 guest verses pop up about as frequently as the Northern Lights; the result, however, is shockingly unexciting for the pooled talents involved. For one, the song openly mimics the formula of "International Player's Anthem"-- ecstatic soul loop, rapturous André verse about marital love-- and baldly copying one of the best rap songs of the last decade is just a bad idea. When it leaked, it was greeted mostly with shrugs and yawns and disappeared into the same, sealed-off rap-buzz purgatory that has settled around other former gangsta-rap heavyweights like 50 Cent. Despite all indicators, and without a chart or street single, Thug Motivation 103 sold respectably, and probably beat his label's projections: 233,000, just behind Michael Buble's Christmas album and Adele. The Snowman will live to wheeze another day. But his aura of invincibility has been punctured.


Mountain Moves is one of Deerhoof’s widest-ranging and most melodic sets, with hints of chamber music, hip-hop, and avant-garde jazz, plus more legible lyrics than usual. It’s a purposeful mosaic.

Mountain Moves

Deerhoof has enjoyed one of the most vibrant careers of any ensemble with roots in the world of 1990s indie rock. One of the group’s rewards for this achievement has been the fact that it can be easy to take its consistent creativity for granted. Around the time a band makes a dozen quite-good albums, parsing the development from recording-to-recording tends to become the duty of the hardcore coterie. That’s natural. Though there is always a chance that a band will fashion some late-career statement that marks a new stage of development—a high every bit as notable as that of the “early breakthrough.”
Mountain Moves is one of Deerhoof’s widest-ranging albums. It’s also one of the band’s most melodic sets. In 15 songs that speed by in 40 minutes, there are hints of chamber music, hip-hop, and avant-garde jazz—as well as this band’s trademark combination of brightly sweet vocal lines and churning instrumental parts, joyfully descended from earlier punk styles. The album boasts three cover tunes, and over half a dozen guest stars. Yet it’s not a crazy quilt. It’s a mosaic with a purpose, right down to lyrics that seem more pointed and legible than is typical for a group with a surrealistic bent.
On the mid-tempo opener “Slow Motion Detonation,” singer-bassist-composer Satomi Matsuzaki calls on the listener to “celebrate the future that you could have saved.” This strange idea takes on a new emotional profile when Matsuzaki encourages her audience to “Get up, get up/We’re on fire.” The arrangement behind the singer changes, too—the band’s performance sounding less somber, if still far short of celebratory. The song’s final question may sound like a non-sequitur: “And why would I want to watch it on TV?” Though as the album progresses, the band’s purpose in distinguishing between valuable action and the unproductive mediascape becomes clearer.
“I Will Spite Survive” introduces itself with a sunnier guitar riff, indebted to new wave. But the lyrics are still addressing a lost opportunity: “You could outlive your executioners, but you’re on TV.” Even when the idea of effective opposition becomes a more organized presence on the album, during the dance-punk strains of “Come Down Here & Say That,” Deerhoof makes clear that the activity is coming too late, and only in response to something dangerous: “We will take over the heavy burden …/We dance merrily, for we are sad.”
The band’s approach to writing and recording Mountain Moves was directly inspired by the outcome of the 2016 election. Notes accompanying the album reference the recent “women’s march,” timed for the presidential inauguration, as well as “pro-science rallies” and the “maniacal, mainstream monoculture hell-bent on driving humankind into extinction.” This punk-inspired reaction to a right-wing electoral success might seem rote: an act of opposition, conceived in collaborative fashion, with early proceeds going to a liberal charity. And Mountain Moves does make all these gestures. Though it is not at the level of concept that the album makes its real stand. That all happens in the execution.
After a faux-operatic take on Violeta Parra’s “Gracias a la Vida,” Deerhoof throttles into a dreamy, carefree theme, “Begin Countdown”—a track that culminates in the album’s heaviest riff. From there, the angst of the lyrics tends to sound more cathartic. “Palace of the Governors” has just a single lyric: “You won’t live in this house forever.” Despite being addressed to an occupier of some elected office, it reminds us that as long as elections are held fairly, no political outcome is permanent.
The dour nature of the album’s first few tracks is gradually overwhelmed by the variety of what follows. Singer-songwriter Xenia Rubinos possesses one of the most awe-inspiring voices in all of the genres she tackles—a suite of forms that includes rock, jazz, as well as R&B. Her vocals bring a fresh form of release during the song “Singalong Junk” (an original composition, not the McCartney tune).
Next up is the sound of saxophonist Matana Roberts, who guests on the title track. In the space of the same breath, her tone can jump from a traditionally soulful cast to one that is experimentally intense—which makes her a perfect fit for the jump-cut sound aesthetic favored by Deerhoof drummer-vocalist-composer Greg Saunier. Covers of the Staple Singers’ “Freedom Highway” and Bob Marley’s “Small Axe” come during the album’s last stretch, too, ratifying the album’s steadily improving outlook.
During 2016, Deerhoof split its energies between releases. They put out an entertaining, back-to-basics stomper and a bold collaboration with a contemporary classical outfit in the same season. With Mountain Moves, the group has pooled these interests without diluting them. This doesn’t seem like a casual or random choice. Given the album’s way of sequencing its many voices and moods, Deerhoof suggests that the real work of joyful opposition can begin only after members of a coalition have spent time contemplating a worsening national climate (and perhaps taken some responsibility for this turn). Once that’s occurred, Mountain Moves indicates that something better—something made by diverse but like-minded collaborators—might be able to come next.


The Australian musician chooses herself over the bullshit on a cheeky, colorful album that flexes greater musical confidence.

Sweet Justice

Tkay Maidza’s three-part Last Year Was Weird EP series was a hairpin turn for an artist looking for a new direction. Moving on from stadium-ready EDM-pop-rap, the Australian musician flaunted a more eclectic range while giving herself space to own the mess of being in the spotlight. She dove into lush digital funk, explosive SOPHIE-style bangers, and cheeky hip-hop with the unrestrained zeal of a kid in a ball pit while also sharpening her confidence. One second she’d be slithering through chest-thumping industrial hip-hop; the next, she’d be cooing over jaunty guitars and whistles.
Sweet Justice, Maidza’s sophomore album and her first full-length in seven years, expands on that growing musical confidence, the whiplash between funk, dance, and industrial styles more intense than ever. With fiery lyrics and sharper bravado, it’s an album largely about karma: “Eat your heart out on a silver plate/They been fishy so I’m eating steak/On the hook I catch ‘em with the bait/Get up out my face is si vous plait,” she boasts on “WUACV,” named after the meme used when someone’s feeling particularly chaotic. She’s flippant toward her detractors, thoughtful as she navigates life and love. Sweet and sing-songy on highlight “Out of Luck,” she asserts her self-worth against people who demand her time but couldn’t give two shits about her. Generally, Maidza’s vision of justice isn’t based in direct retribution—she knows that choosing herself over the bullshit is the best revenge. “I should buy my bag a bag,” she says, an elite and hilarious flex.
This time producer Dan Farber, who had a heavy hand in the sound of the Weird EPs, cedes space to bigger names, who bring grandeur to her songs. Take the Flume-assisted “Silent Assassin,” which turns sirens, 808s, and video game sound effects into a laser tag field for Maidza to charge at haters. Or the Kaytranada-produced “Our Way,” a smooth dance funk number where Maidza demands a lover to step their game: “Never needed all them roses/I just wanna know I’m chosen.” Like her idols Missy Elliott and Santigold, she can bend her airy voice to any beat, and that’s half the fun.
With Sweet Justice, Maidza is walking the path of artists like Tinashe, who had an easier time finding themselves the further away from the mainstream machine they got. And despite a few stumbles—”WASP” and closing track “Walking On Air” are the album’s most generic offerings—her frenetic fire-and-ice routine is impressive. She’s grown up without losing her freshness, refining the skill and intensity that got her here in the first place. This is the swagger and range that’s appealed her to artists from Billie Eilish to Kari Faux: Maidza makes the act of taking what’s yours sound like a multicolored daydream.


Smoky and ominous, Australian singer/songwriter Carla dal Forno's You Know What It's Like simmers, both musically and thematically, while she inhabits the gloom of her arrangements like a ghost.

Carla dal Forno: You Know What It’s Like

You Know What It’s Like

Technically speaking, Australian musician Carla dal Forno is a singer-songwriter, but her solo debut album shows her mindset is closer to that of a lighting director or set designer. Where even experimental singer-songwriters privilege vocals and chord progressions, dal Forno emphasizes the marginal details,  to the extent that what we might think of as the “song” at the core of each track either dissolves outright or lingers in the background as a set of out-of-focus shapes.
Dal Forno’s approach falls closer in spirit to ambient music. Only one song on You Know What It’s Like emphasizes her voice to the point where you’d consider it the “lead” vocal, and she doesn’t even sing on half the tracks. She obviously takes after Grouper in the way she occupies the sumptuous gloom of her songs like a ghost, but her grandiosity and shamanic presence suggest a subdued modern answer to an outsider-art icon like Moondog.
Intro track “Italian Cinema” starts things off on an extravagantly strange note, with layers of sounds resembling the cyclic, serrated rotation of helicopter blades. At times, dal Forno uses found sounds—water pouring from a teapot to introduce “The Same Reply,” a crack of distant lightning at the beginning of “Fast Moving Cars”—to provide hints of setting. But she never lets the sounds eclipse the music's intensive focus on mood. Smoky and ominous, You Know What It’s Like simmers, both musically and thematically, with powerful undercurrents that dal Forno never quite spells out.
On “Fast Moving Cars,” the album’s first vocal tune, dal Forno navigates that thorny zone of longing where she’s prodding the object of her affections not to be so passive. “It’s safe to assume that I like you best, so don’t be so frightened,” she sings. Her unassuming place in the mix actually serves the resolve in her voice—once you pick up on it, the album’s gravity becomes hard to deny. Even when dal Forno tips her hat to Nico on “What You Gonna Do Now?,” she still manages to stake out her own territory. Much like other singer-songwriters who march unequivocally to their own drummer, Carla dal Forno is willing to provoke listeners on a number of levels without spoon-feeding them. With You Know What It’s Like, she manages to do so on her own terms, in a way that feels both distant and inviting and rewards the listener’s willingness to sit with the ambiguity in between.


Looks like Beyond was not a fluke: The latest from the reunited original line-up is jammed with well-crafted songs that never feel overly polished.

Farm

Beyond, the first album to feature the original Dinosaur Jr. lineup since their 1980s heyday, was so surprisingly good it was tempting to call it a fluke. Tempting, but wrong—two years after its release, it still sounds great, on par with the early, hallowed triumvirate of Dinosaur, You’re Living All Over Me, and Bug. For any cynics still chalking Beyond up to luck, Farm should blast the scales from your jaded eyes. Energetic, confident, and catchy, it's even more compelling than Beyond.
It certainly boasts more stick-in-your-head tunes than Beyond, or virtually any other Dinosaur Jr. album. Who knows why J Mascis writes better songs when Lou Barlow and Murph are around—maybe there’s something to the old cliche of “chemistry,” maybe the pair just know how to push his tunes from solid up to stellar. But whatever creates this spark, it’s spurred Mascis to pack Farm with riff-heavy slacker classics that rival past gems like “Little Fury Things” and “Freak Scene.” Opener “Pieces” is a vintage display of Dinosaur Jr.’s knack for grafting unruly riffage to unabashedly bittersweet choruses. The lumbering “I Want You to Know” follows with chunky chords that sound both heavy and bright. As David Raposa pointed out in his recent track review, the tune is impressively assured, as if Mascis has shed the need to add an apologetic tone to his guitar anthems.
But even when Mascis is lyrically mopey, the music pulls this sad sack up off the couch. Take the caffeinated chug of slacker-self-help guide “Over It.” “Can I make it here?/Get over it,” Mascis tells himself. “I’ve been feeling weird/Get over it… I’ve been on the fence/Now it’s making sense I see.” Even better is the pity-filled “Plans.” The man who Thurston Moore imagined as Slacker President in Sonic Youth’s “Teen Age Riot” moans about pain, loss, and apathy—“I’ve got nothing left to be/Do you have some plans for me?” But the music’s adrenalized bounce makes his misery more sweet than sad. In Farm’s world, a good melody cures all ills.
As catchy and well-crafted as these songs are, they never feel restricted or overly polished. Each track is given room to grow, stretching into extended intros, impulsive solos, and oft-repeated verses. The result is both shapely and sprawling, like the mossy cartoon characters on the album cover. The aching “Said the People” seems to climax with Mascis’ crying solo in the middle, but then spreads out into another great three minutes. “I Don’t Wanna Go There” sprawls into fuzzy detonations, like a mellowed version of Bug’s noise-bomb “Don’t.” And Barlow approaches his two excellent songs with similar openness, hitting especially hard on the dark “Your Weather.”
With Farm coming out around the same time as the first installment in Neil Young’s Archives project, it’s tempting to make a grand statement about Mascis and Dinosaur Jr. as heirs to the Young and Crazy Horse throne. Young’s genius is pretty inimitable, but there is something about this band—the way they mix noisy guitar and punk-ish slam with sugared melodies and faded choruses—that’s Young-worthy. And as long as J, Lou, and Murph keep shooting as high as Farm, they’ll end up with the kind of discography worth buying over and over again.


The All Dogs leader adds a rock band behind much of her second solo album, but she somehow sounds more alone on those songs than on the record’s unflinching acoustic tunes.

Black Dog in My Path

The acoustic guitar is not a warm instrument in the hands of Yowler’s Maryn Jones. Instead, she uses it to conjure icy, barren settings, never offering the illusion that she’s playing in the same room as you. Her voice quiet but piercing, the All Dogs leader and former Saintseneca member insinuates a space around herself, as if she were shooting off a considered warning to someone at the edge of earshot. Even when Yowler’s second album, Black Dog in My Path, swaps acoustic guitars for electric ones or pads the sound with the help of a band, its chill never breaks. These songs come bearing no comfort—only stark, unflinching contemplation.
Yowler’s 2015 debut, The Offer, was a sparse, spectral collection. But several musicians from Jones’ new home of Philadelphia contribute this time, including Empath’s Catherine Elicson and Swearin’ singer Kyle Gilbride, who co-produced these dozen tunes. The contrast between Yowler as a solo project and Yowler as a full band is most striking on “Holy Fire,” which begins with Jones’ familiar mode of multitracked vocals and fingerpicked guitar. But her voice fades to a murmur as drums and a wail of distortion crash around her. Cello slashes through the noise as Jones’ voice careens away, dissolving inside the intrusion. The words she sang delicately in the song’s first act—“Holy fire from the center of the earth/Take me under back to where I’ve been”—feel like a prayer for intervention, answered by this violent interruption.
Black Dog veers between big, expressive moments and gentle retreats into hard-won intimacy, like the lovelorn “Petals” or the droning, starry-eyed “Aldebaran.” It’s these quieter, more desolate songs where she finds resolve. For her, the strength to live through the sick world comes softly, in spats of acoustic chords and tape hiss. The loudest numbers on Black Dog, like “Where Is My Light” and “WTFK,” share little with All Dogs’ pop-punk feistiness. Even on those songs, Jones rarely raises her voice above the level of her acoustic numbers, so the electric accompaniment sounds more like a threat than a bolster. Because there are more places for her to get lost, Jones seems more alone on the full-band tracks than she does on the quiet guitar numbers.
Jones’ words don’t offer a clear way out of these uneasy moments, and the loudest gestures often smuggle the most hopeless sentiments. “WTFK,” the album’s most musically accessible moment, pairs funk guitars with biting lines about a drowning planet and the evil in desire: “Sick fucking world/And where do I get off?” she asks in exasperation. On “Sorrow,” in a soft bid for self-soothing, she imagines her music resonating beyond her lifetime: “I just want to feel like there’s a point/To all these lines… I hope I can at least leave something behind.” Jones ends Black Dog with her heels dug into the ground. “Have you ever felt so bad/You cannot cry?” she asks during the closer. “I bear the mark, I am sigil/To the spirits and the sprites/But I promised not to listen/And stay in my life.” In the world she builds here, touched by magic and floating just above hell, evil is real, but so is resilience. There’s no triumph in the finale, no final burst of energy to drown out the dark. There’s just that dark and the guts it takes to sit through it.


On an album of brutalist, MIDI-driven piano fugues and a double CD of languid ambient drones, the German electronic musician shows off two distinct sides of his musical personality.

Thomas Brinkmann: A 1000 Keys / A Certain Degree of Stasis

To hear Thomas Brinkmann tell it, his childhood piano lessons were more traumatic than most. A self-described musical dyslexic, he struggled to decipher the marks on the page, while the rest of his family members took to the instrument with virtuosic skill. Brinkmann sought his escape in make-believe: He pretended that his grandfather’s harmonium was the cockpit of an airplane. Yanking knobs and stomping pedals, he imagined himself wrestling the truculent beast through the most difficult takeoffs and landings.
With A 1000 Keys, Brinkmann finally gets his revenge on the instrument. Dedicated to Conlon Nancarrow, the modernist composer who wrote extensively for the player piano, it is an ornery, brutish album that hammers like a migraine, which is the sole aspect of the piano that he emphasizes. (To underscore that point, the album opens with three minutes of what sounds like mechanized blast beats.) There are no melodies here, just a steady, MIDI-driven pummel of chord clusters: Imagine a set of pistons suspended over the keys, striking over and over until the ivory cracks and the ebony splinters. There are occasional breaks from the assault in the form of languid, atonal fantasias—played according to the same principle, basically, just with the tempo slowed way down and the sustain pedal held to the floor. The throbbing “TLV,” one of a few tracks for organ, sounds like his grandfather's harmonium has been set on fire.
This being Brinkmann, there’s method to his mashing. Whether slicing records with razor blades or sampling Continental philosophers, the German electronic musician has always been part trickster and part theoretician. To create the music, Brinkmann apparently translated the frequencies corresponding to A440 tuning, or standard concert pitch, to binary code, and then used the 1s and 0s as sequencer data. That interest in the interchangeability of rhythm and frequency extends from his last album, What You Hear (Is What You Hear), in which seemingly static pitches gradually opened up to reveal an all-encompassing throb—except where that record inscribed graceful moiré patterns in thin air, A 1000 Keys tackles the subject with the grim determination of a jackhammer operator.
Treating frequency as a kind of readymade is one way of flipping the bird at all those composers whose work he failed to learn as a boy; the album’s methods, and its skepticism of authorial genius, invoke both Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique and Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. But there's nonetheless something unmistakably expressive about these gruff, pugilistic miniatures. As if owning up to it, he even titles the tracks after the three-letter codes of various international airports: “JFK,” “SFO,” “LHR,” and so forth. The press release frames the titles in terms of sterile “non-places,” but I think it’s just the opposite: Is it a coincidence that the lurching “CGN” mimics the rhythmic signature of classic Cologne techno? Far from flattening the frequency spectrum into interchangeable strings of digits, those references to faraway places underscore the vast range of destinations made possible by Brinkmann's brutalist flights of fancy.
Where A 1000 Keys is hard, A Certain Degree of Stasis is soft; where one is percussive, the other is liquid, with a sound like Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music melted down and poured into Gastr Del Sol’s swirling organ drones. Where the former is ostensibly process music, there's no indication of how the latter was made. The double-CD set, released by Helsinki’s fledgling Frozen Reeds label, home to recordings from Julius Eastman and Morton Feldman, feels less like a musical composition than a piece of installation art—a sensation that’s reinforced both by its cover art, a detail of a piece by the visual artist Agnes Lux, and by the instructions that its two discs may be played separately, together, or along with any other Frozen Reeds release. Just for fun, I tried out both discs alongside Kevin Drumm’s Imperial Horizon, and the effect was pretty sublime.
On both discs—each comprises a single, 48-minute track—the “melody,” as it were, resembles the creak of a metal gate on rusty hinges; the atmosphere is as muggy as the heat before a summer storm. There are no discernible musical events, just lighter and darker streaks of dissonance, like smudges on battered brass. After a while, you begin hearing things that may or may not actually be in the recording. Are those wind chimes? Crickets? Is Glenn Branca leading a procession of electric guitarists through the tall, dry grass? Play both discs at once, and the sensation multiplies tenfold, leaving you wrapped in a cocoon of auditory illusions.
To those unfamiliar with the full scope of Brinkmann’s work, there’s little to suggest that both albums are by the same artist, even though they share in common a doggedness that could be exhausting to anyone in search of a simpler, more readily digestible listening experience. The excess of A Certain Degree of Stasis is almost absurd, except that it isn’t; to stop time and allow listeners to disappear into these fields of color requires painting on an enormous canvas. Even Brinkmann’s biggest fans may be surprised at how emotionally resonant and flat-out gorgeous these dissonant ambient studies are. If A 1000 Keys finds Brinkmann grappling with the controls of the imaginary airplanes of his childhood, with A Certain Degree of Stasis, he breaks through the clouds and soars.


The latest edition of Numero Group’s Wayfaring Strangers compilation series highlights forgotten artists who played a strain of country music in the early ’70s that mixed psychedelic rock with rootsy twanging.

Various Artists: Wayfaring Strangers: Cosmic American Music

Given the increasingly indulgent nature of psychedelic music at its 1960s LSD peak, a few rock artists began to pull back from the edge. Bob Dylan, the Band, the Byrds, and the Grateful Dead all unplugged and looked to their roots for a more rustic, homegrown sound. This sometimes resulted in a turn toward country music, though it wasn’t the conservative fare of Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee” or George Jones’s abject “The Poor Chinee.” Call it “cosmic country,” where the swell of a pedal steel suggests a dilation of spacetime rather than the heart swooning on a barroom floor, its practitioners sporting the shaggy locks of Gram Parsons instead of the pompadoured Conway Twitty.
This particular strain of early ’70s music is the underlying theme of Numero Group’s sixth entry in the Wayfaring Strangers series, culled from private-press gems and dollar-bin purgatory alike. Previous editions featured Joni Mitchell wannabes, heavy-metal doofuses, and sterling Tacoma-style steel-string players to varying degrees of success. Cosmic American Music’s 19-tracks document what wholly unknown folks laid to tape in-between the inaugural flight of the Flying Burrito Brothers in the late ’60s and Waylon and Willie's outlaw hijacking of Nashville a few years later. It’s a sound that’s been compiled often as of late, from Light in the Attic’s groove-rooted Country Funk sets to Orion Read’s dusty and downhome Small Town Country series, though this set doesn’t have the same drum-centered focus of the former nor the quaint, country colloquialisms of the latter.
More often than not, the music here has more kin in ’60s rock than in countrypolitan. Deerfield’s “Me Lovin’ You” still bears some Byrds harmonies and garage-rock fuzz alongside its steel guitar, while Plain Jane’s boy-girl vocals on “You Can’t Make It Alone” emulate Marty Balin and Grace Slick rather than George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Dan Pavlides’ off-key “Lily of the Valley” boasts a guitar lick that quotes the Kink’s “Big Sky,” and White Cloud’s “All Cried Out” has a shaky, cracked warble not unlike Neil Young at his most plaintive.
As is the case with most sets of forgotten songs that never quite got to be heard, idiosyncratic sounds abound. There’s a cosmic ray blast that flares up on “Lonely Entertainer,” and I don’t think anyone in country has ever done a jazz-funk odyssey about buffalo outside of Bill Madison’s eight-minute “Buffalo Skinners.” A few of the overlooked folks here have already been the subjects of reissue, and they stand out. The cool, lo-fi rockabilly chug and old rock’n’roll vocals of Kenny Knight’s “Baby’s Back” were already revived in the 21st century thanks to Paradise of Bachelors. And F.J. MacMahon, whose one loner folk album, Spirit of the Golden Juice, was briefly reissued on Sacred Bones and still goes for ludicrous sums online. But for the most part, the songs on Cosmic American Music slip into the ether without much to keep them earthbound.


Intimate yet cinematic, the Japanese musician’s new two-part album exchanges her colorful pop patchwork for soft, luminous ambient music of alien beauty and human warmth.

Crépuscule I & II

Tujiko Noriko’s music has never felt entirely of this world. From the curious tumult of early albums like Shojo Toshi and Make Me Hard, it was possible to imagine the Osaka native—since the early 2000s, a resident of the Parisian suburbs—as an intergalactic observer of earthling culture intent upon recreating the planet’s music out of radio-telescope transmissions and scraps of space junk. Tujiko professed to make pop music, yet her songs bubbled over with chaos: a hodgepodge of distorted organs, clacking typewriters, and cats’ meows, all of it suffused in digital glitches and analog grit. Her arrangements seemed governed by the logic of Saturday-morning cartoons—sticky blobs of supersaturated color unbound by gravity—and her high, breathy voice telegraphed a sense of childlike wonder. But despite her cheerful disregard for convention, there was nothing naive about her work; it was clear she knew exactly what she was doing. “I usually start out with a classic structure,” she once told an interviewer. “Melody, lyric, singing. But I almost can’t stop myself from making it a little bit strange and even uncomfortable sometimes.” Not for the sake of being difficult, she added. “I just like to experiment. I like to use a frame, but to try to shake the frame a little bit.”
More than two decades since she began recording, Tujiko’s output has slowed from the fevered pace she kept up in the 2000s; her last solo album was 2014’s My Ghost Comes Back, a cozily sentimental record wrapped in mandolin, musical saw, and other unusual acoustic timbres. Since then she has released only two titles, Kuro and Surge, both soundtracks; perhaps not coincidentally, an unmistakably cinematic influence is audible in the evocatively hushed atmospheres of her new album Crépuscule I & II. This time, Tujiko hasn’t so much shaken the frame as swapped in a whole new camera. Gone are the whimsy, the crunch, the surfeit of stimuli that once made the act of listening to her music feel like sensory overload. In their place, she has summoned an hour and 46 minutes of soft, luminous ambient music of alien beauty and human warmth.
The album is divided across two discs: roughly speaking, one of songs and another of soundscapes, although the line between those two modes is often notional. Disc 1 opens with a short, wistful instrumental that glistens like a fistful of beach glass: Tujiko’s playing is tentative, her timekeeping halting, apparently untethered to the computer’s internal clock. This ruminative mood deepens across the album as the titular twilight darkens. The next song, “The Promenade Vanishes,” prominently featuring her voice, is equally spare. Like its predecessor, it feels like a live performance, though delicate layering and other electronic effects—not to mention earth-shakingly low sub-bass—attest to digital processes carried out behind the scenes.
Tujiko’s work was once driven by its contrasts, but here, everything blends so smoothly that determining where one track ends and another begins can require careful attention. “Fossil Words,” “Cosmic Ray,” and “Flutter” flow together across the middle portion of Disc 1, comprising a three-song suite for voice, keyboard, and silence whose hushed air and lengthy reverb suggest a halfway point between Grouper and Harold Budd. Though her melodies often feel as ephemeral as a word scratched into the sand at low tide, the songwriting here is more clearly defined than in the maze-like meandering of previous albums. And her voice has never sounded better, whether front and center or drifting like a wisp of smoke.
Disc 2 consists of three long, amorphous tracks totaling nearly an hour. The vibe remains largely the same as on the first disc, just stretched and smeared, like paint beneath a squeegee. On “Golden Dusk,” she paints a picture of idyll in burnished synths and emotionally resonant field recordings: a children’s playground, backmasked bell tones, wind brushing against the grille of the microphone. The 24-minute “Roaming Over Land, Sea and Air” is a ballad in the guise of a nebulous tone poem, sketching the outline of a memory (“In the car park by your side/I laughed so hard/So hard I cried and fell… Over this ice/We were skating, skating”) over hazy chimes. “Don’t Worry, I’ll Be Here” is the most shapeless of the three, burying soft murmurs in dissonant, roiling dusk. A more cautious or exacting artist might have edited these pieces down to four or five minutes apiece, but Tujiko is content to let them sprawl. And though they don’t bring any new textures or emotions to the album, it hardly matters. As an invitation to linger indefinitely and wander at will across the expanse of Tujiko’s singular universe, the splintering of the frame is a welcome development.


Tobias Jesso Jr. has a knack for writing songs that you feel like you’ve heard before, even if you can’t quite pin down a precise antecedent. Which is another way of saying he writes songs that sound "classic" in the best sense of the word.

Goon

At some point it became clear that one of the themes for the first quarter of 2015 would be The Return of the Male Piano Balladeer. Upcoming records from Father John Misty, Matthew E. White, and new kid/not-kid Tobias Jesso Jr. (he’s 29) would all center on an archetype now associated mostly with the 1970s: the weary dude, wise beyond his years, spinning tales of love and loss from his piano bench before moving over to a barstool. It’s an image that took hold during the '60s hangover, when baby boomers traded youthful dreams and started becoming their parents, a little less certain with each new season that they were, in fact, still crazy after all these years. This highly personal, smaller-scale music was less about The World and more about the geography of a wounded heart. Jesso, Misty and White, in their own ways, are all drawn to a similar directness, a love of the well-written song composed and performed solo.
Hearing Tobias Jesso Jr.’s album, Goon, it turns out he has less in common with his peers than we thought. Father John Misty’s J. Tillman is by far the most literate and complicated of the three songwriters, using a fictional persona to plumb the depths of his own desires and self-loathing. Matthew E. White is more producer and arranger than singer-songwriter, someone who lets the horn arrangements and mic placement do the talking. And Tobias Jesso Jr. is ultimately more of a wide-eyed innocent, a songwriter with a naturally expressive voice who has a McCartney-like propensity for melody and an innate drive toward simplicity.
In the late '60s and early '70s, L.A. singer-songwriters like Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, and Tom Waits got their start by writing songs for others, playing small clubs on Sunset, and skulking around record label offices. Jesso did try writing for others, but his rise could only happen on the Internet: Some songs posted to YouTube, an exchange with an admired producer (in the case of Jesso, Girls' JR White), a debut record on a hip label, and a "The Tonight Show" appearance before the LP even comes out. This isn’t just luck, of course—Jesso already had some connections from his time living and working in music in Los Angeles and a few famous friends, and his little label is part of the indie juggernaut Beggars Group. But if his quick ascent owes a lot to living in a networked world, his music sounds as natural as breathing. Jesso has a knack for writing songs that you feel like you’ve heard before, even if you can’t quite pin down a precise antecedent. Which is another way of saying he writes songs that sound "classic" in the best sense of the word.
The highlights here sound like songs that could be covered and interpreted any number of ways by other vocalists, with a rock-solid melodic and harmonic foundation. "How Could You Babe" is among them, moving from slow, halting verses that build tension until the glorious release of the chorus. On the last refrain, Jesso pushes his voice in its upper register to the point where it cracks, a clever suggestion of desperation that speaks to his intuitive sense of phrasing. "The Wait" is a two-minute acoustic pop confection featuring Jesso on guitar, a weightless gem that floats by like a freshly blown dandelion seed. A pair of songs, "Hollywood" and "Leaving LA", hint at Jesso’s background as a journeyman musician in Los Angeles, but the main idea behind virtually every song is the precariousness of love and affection.
Fans of those YouTube demos had to wonder how Jesso’s intimate music might hold up to studio glare, but Jesso’s producers (White handled eight songs, Pat Carney of Black Keys two, and Ariel Rechtshaid one) treat his music with a simplicity that suggests utter confidence in the material. The songwriter’s voice, piano chords, and plucked acoustic are the focus, and bits of light drumming and the odd back-up vocal are often the only augmentation. The approach leads to songs that feel unusually whole. You couldn't imagine taking anything away from these songs, and it's equally hard to imagine adding anything. "Leaving LA" is a masterpiece of sonic understatement, moving between solo piano and a blissful interlude of voices and what sounds like harpsichord. "Bad Words" finds Jesso’s voice pinched and distant next to a Fender Rhodes and subtle drumming. His vocal line and piano move in unison on "For You" as a violin saws away in the background; it all bleeds together until it feels like a single, intricately textured sound.
If Jesso seems to have a Burt Bacharach-like command of how verses, choruses, and bridges can add up to more than the sum of their parts, he’s got a ways to go before giving Hal David a run for his money with the pen. The words are here to serve the music, to fit the rhythm and cadence of the tune rather than the other way around. In a couple of places ("Crocodile Tears" and "Can We Still Be Friends", which sounds disconcertingly like the theme song from "Cheers") that can lead to rhyme schemes so predictable in their girl/world obviousness as to become a distraction. But these moments are few, and Jesso overcomes them as McCartney did—with the sweetness of his voice. "There’s a thing called hate/ And a thing called love, too/ Like the love I have for your Mom/ And for you" reads awkwardly on the page, but Jesso’s smooth musical diction makes it sound almost wise. His voice couldn’t be any more suited to this kind of music if it was created in a lab, but beyond just hitting the notes he also has a great feel for inflection, how to squeeze the most out of every syllable and transition.
With its clear debt to a specific era, Goon has a meta quality, an album of music that illustrates the power of music. While the songs are almost all about heartbreak, they could be more likely to have you ruminating about the role music plays in heartbreak instead of the emotional pain itself, but this distancing effect, in which the songs unfold so patiently, doesn’t diminish the record’s pleasures. Of the trio of 2015 songwriters mentioned above, Jesso sounds the most like Nilsson, in terms of the grain of his voice and his ability to sound wounded while also floating just above his travails, but his music is very different in spirit; Jesso’s approach is to state things plainly, dress them up in a gorgeous tune, and sit down and deliver it in the most spare and economical manner possible. Goon isn’t an album of layers; what you hear is what you get, which in this case turns out to be something special.


XL founder Richard Russell’s collaborative project brings out an unfiltered, unrehearsed freshness in its guests that the album can’t quite manage for itself.

Friday Forever

The second album from XL Recordings boss Richard Russell as Everything Is Recorded is obsessed with ending from the moment it starts. Friday Forever chronologically documents a Friday night out, with track titles time-stamped to mark the journey from Uber to bathroom stall to hangover. Near the beginning of the album, drone-folk artist Maria Somerville intones, “The night won’t last forever.” Moments later, London singer and rapper Berwyn flips her ominous warning into a more upbeat refrain. The words appear again throughout the album, an effect that seeks to capture the underlying nihilism and mortality of nightlife. Russell is an expert on the subject of raving, as his time in 1990s electronic duo Kicks Like a Mule attests. But Friday Forever never quite sheds its inhibitions to achieve euphoria.
Russell’s obsession with the fleeting nature of time also influenced a new composition process, one more fluid and spontaneous than his 2018 self-titled debut. He generated percussion on “10:51PM/The Night” by banging on the floor and banister of his recording studio, and the result is loose and urgent. But as a noted crate-digger, DJ, and co-founder of the label that brought the world Adele, the Prodigy, and Dizzee Rascal, Russell’s greatest talent is his ability to spot and nurture talent in others. On Friday Forever, he doesn’t just collate voices, but brings out an unfiltered, unrehearsed freshness. On “02:56AM/I Don’t Want This Feeling to Stop,” the magnetic south London MC Flohio semi-improvises over a twisted sample of reggae singer Mikey Dread’s “Dizzy,” hyping herself with off-the-cuff ad-libs.
Friday Forever’s talent roster is younger and lesser-known than that of Everything Is Recorded, and the album is bolder and brighter for it. When Ghostface Killah shows up for a comical verse on “03:15AM/Caviar,” the effect is mildly jarring—his voice is too familiar, too weighty. Flohio and Mancunian rapper Aitch are deft and charismatic, but the record’s breakout star is Berwyn, a Trinidad-born, London-raised artist who has yet to release his own debut. At the album’s peak, “1:32AM/Walk Alone,” he weaves between Infinite Coles’ futuristic R&B stylings and Russell’s blown-out bass with lithe precision.
The sheer number of collaborators, however, can make the record feel crowded. Russell finds beauty in the dissonance between them—there’s a quiet poignancy when Ghostface appears on the same track as his son, Infinite Coles, one delivering straightforward bars, the other drifting melodically in and out of falsetto. But elsewhere, it can feel scattershot. The universality of the concept—that anyone and everyone loves a Friday night out—breeds a lack of specificity. Irish singer Kean Kavanagh’s bleary-eyed hangover song and skit are charming, thanks to his breezy and unaffected performance, but the over-conceived storytelling feels hollow.
So while wistful strings and the warm voice of Crass co-founder Penny Rimbaud on “11:59AM/Circles (Outro)” fulfill the narrative function of an album closer, as a piece of music, it feels thin. Rimbaud’s final meditation on the passage of time (“temporal... yet eternal”) doesn’t hit as hard as it could, considering how often we’ve heard that “the night won’t last forever.” There’s nothing spontaneous about a constant reminder to carpe diem. Likewise, Russell’s take on nightlife feels studied. For a man who’s lived and breathed rave culture, his album about the experience is strangely lacking in highs.

Buy: Rough Trade
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1:00am: I've gathered my supplies and I'm going to sit this one straight through. Trent's going ...

The Fragile

1:00am: I've gathered my supplies and I'm going to sit this one straight through. Trent's going to keep me up for at least another two hours with his latest bloated indulgence, The Fragile. So I've got a pot of coffee. It's black. Pitch black. As black as your fucking soul! And I'm typing on this machine. This machine is grinding me down. I feel like a fucking machine! Grrrarrrgh!
9:00pm: My first experience with The Fragile, as is the case with most new CDs, comes in my Honda. I'm sitting at a red light on Webster and Damen, waiting for a left turn. Trent Reznor is screaming, "Tear a hole exquisite red/ Fuck the rest and stab it dead" over a troop of industrial guitars and digital whining. I yawn with such stretching intensity that I miss my turn light. The entire situation strikes me as particularly humorous. Here I am-- a 24- year- old white guy with floppy bangs, wearing a tie, driving a Honda-- and all the bile Trent Reznor can must muster up from his supposedly scorched soul makes me yawn.
Sometime over the last decade, music that is intrinsically meant to be menacing (i.e. Nine Inch Nails) has become a banal syndicated- action hour soundtrack. It's easy to imagine the overproduced grind of "The Wretched" blaring through a TV screen as Nightman kicks a henchman off a roof. This stuff could be the score to "The Crow 4: In Space." And this time around, Trent has unanimously failed to shock anyone above the age of 15 and under the age of 54. I mean, have you listened to old Judas Priest lately? Now, this is not to say music must be confrontational, although the best of it typically is. However, in a pop society that has become numb to industrial sounds through ESPN2 and Surge commercials, it's no longer interesting or tolerable to base one's entire output on volume and amplified cliches.
And so "Somewhat Damaged" continues to pound out its same four notes. Systematically, layers of crust, fuzz, dirt, and whatever else Reznor can scrape off the walls in his studio are piled on top, pounding out the same four- note scale. 1-2-3-4. 1-2-3-4. 1-2-3-4. Ooh, wow, did he just say "fuck?" Trent, Holden Caulfield rubbed that out 50 years ago.
8:00pm: "Hello?" asks Ryan.
"Okay, I'm going to read you something," I say.
"Oh, hey dude. Um, sure."
"'She shines/ In a world full of ugliness/ She matters/ When everything is meaningless.'"
"Oh, man."
"'Sometimes I have everything/ Yet I wish I felt something.'"
"Are these lyrics?"
"'Underneath it all/ We feel so small/ The Heavens fall / But still we crawl.'"
"Haha. What is this?"
"Pleading and/ Needing and/ Bleeding and/ Breeding and/ Feeding/ Exceeding."
"Rhyme-y."
"Now everything is clear/ I can erase the fear/ I can disapper."
"Man, what is this. Is this some emo album?"
"I am every fucking thing and just a little more/ And when I suck you off not a drop will go to waste/ It's really not so bad, you know, once you get past the taste, yeah/ Starfuckers."
"No. Oh, no. No. It's Nine Inch Nails!"
1:49am: "Even Deeper," a track mixed by Dr. Dre, spits aluminum riffs into my headphones. The entire concept of pairing of Dr. Dre and Nine Inch Nails, a match maid in Kornboy heaven (or most likely the Interscope commissary) is laughable. Shuffling beats squirt under "Blade Runner" booms and fathoms of string samples. The end product sounds entirely similar to the rest of this 104- minute albatross. The token celebrity stroking of this studio marriage is fittingly overwrought, unnecessary and done with questionable intent. From the sound of it, Trent cares little to broaden his palate from this rap/ rock union. Without the liner notes, one would never pick this song as "the Dr. Dre track."
Ironically, a man hailed by his legion of testoster- drones as "genius" often leans heavily on the work of other, better sound wizards. Adrian Belew, Steve Albini, and Alan Moulder conspicuously leave their fingerprints all over The Fragile. In other words, whenever something sounds cool, it's most likely coming from one of these other men, who have worked on such mind- blowing classics like Talking Heads' Remain in Light, Slint's Spiderland, and My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, respectively. The constipated drone of "The Day the World Went Away" unabashedly attempts to mimic My Bloody Valentine's sculpted cacophony. Unfortunately, from the hands of an unsubtle goth, the result is strained fuzz.
2:00am: Trent Reznor is the worst, most predictable, most uninspired lyricist working today. The freshman gloom spouted throughout The Fragile are only making it easier for the Goth Lyric Generators on the web. Copy the word decay from this sentence. Paste it into a Word document. Highlight it. Press Shift-F7. Every synonym that appears on your thesaurus screen pops up in Trent Renzor's pitiful poetry. Coming from the mouth of a steadily plumping, thirtysomething recluse (who, incidentally, is bearing striking resemblance to Phil Hartman's SNL Frankenstein character these days), it's just sad. Does he collect candelabras and "Spawn" comics? I guarantee it. In the five years it's taken to complete The Fragile, Trent seemingly watched Dark City at least 40 times. It's insulting to hear Trent and his PR firm talk up the "radical departure" and pop flourishes on this record because the record sounds 100% similar to Broken and The Downward Spiral. Or more accurately, it's like combining Broken and The Downward Spiral. Clever.
2:45am: The gentle piano plunking of "La Mer" lulls me to sleep momentarily on its second time around. It's not the gentle ambience of it, though, since this loud sludge could knock out a speed addict. The Fragile is the most taxing record I've ever had to work through in my five years of reviewing CDs. I mean, even the Beatles failed to make a double album without throwing in some filler. Why does Trent Reznor thinking he can succeed? I'm actually glad Billy Corgan used up The Infinite Sadness. Reznor would jump all over a title like that.
It's difficult to decide where to even begin trimming The Fragile. It's so stunningly monotonous. Any bit of it could be lost without notice. I mean, when the instrumental interludes carry an album, it's a blaring neon sign flashing "stay away!" I pity the kids of the style- over- substance generation-- and yes, it will only be kids-- who enjoy this album. Kids, high school isn't as bad as it seems. You'll grow out of this phase. Save yourself, or your parents, the 25 bucks. The Fragile's length begins to make sense in this context. 104 minutes is the perfect duration for those post- dinner, pre- "X-Files" periods of "nobody understands me" bedroom isolation sit-ins.
3:00am: Before getting back into The Fragile, I peruse the liner notes and artwork. David Carson of "Raygun" fame laid out the artwork for The Fragile. And what a fitting look! Carson, whose design work broke new ground for typography, lost touch years ago. The originator of the 1990s' trademark "crusty look" is analogous to the fat- bottomed disco fonts of the '70s or the thin sans- serif of deco. But guess what? It's almost 2000 and the world needs a new look and a new sound. Carson and Reznor will forever be remembered as 1990s pop figures that helped create an identifiable logo for the decade, and little else. Trent, you are Flock of Seagulls. The Fragile embodies everything wrong with this decade-- hype, letdown, technological fetishism, empty rage, financial bloat, bombast, self- loathing, and indifference to anything truly important and interesting flowing underneath the surface. Trent Reznor is Chris Gaines.
3:20am: "Starfuckers, Inc." That's pretty much all I have to say in criticism of this album. That sums it right up. Do you or don't you want to own an album with a song called "Starfuckers, Inc?" Besides the snickering potty- mouthed title, it's one of the most blatantly hypocritical attacks ever put to tape. It's a widely- publicized attack on Marilyn Manson. There are several lyrical references to the gangly idiot such as "I'm one of the beautiful ones" and "My god pouts on the cover of a magazine." And how are these jabs delivered? Why, in a song which sounds exactly like Marilyn Manson (and also borrows from Carly Simon), by a man who pouts on the cover of Rolling Stone, Alternative Press, Spin, etc.
In essence, Reznor is Marilyn Manson without the makeup (which is a bit like Kiss without the makeup). The Fragile is simply Music for 'The Elder for the digital age. I take comfort knowing that the passing of another decade will make this record seem as amusingly insincere as 10CC.
And at this point, I'm angry, hungry, and frustrated. In fact, I feel like kinda like Trent Reznor. Is this the grand design? After over two hours of listening to his incessant whining and grating, I've become the very model of his audience.


On this introspective collaborative EP, the electronic artists find an uneasy symbiosis of their distinctive styles.

053

TSVI’s music is ruthlessly efficient. It wasn’t always that way; eight years ago, the Italian-born, London-based artist (Guglielmo Barzacchini, aka Anunaku) was making chrome-plated electro funk indebted to the sound of Bok Bok’s Night Slugs label, with fluorescent-hued chords swimming in humid reverb. But in recent years, his music has gotten steelier and more unforgiving. The drums have sharpened; the tone colors have leached out. His most recent solo release, last year’s Sogno EP, fused dancehall and tech-step with military precision; the drums were so dry, there might have been silica gel packs in the mix.
The British experimental electronic musician Loraine James, on the other hand, trades in barely controlled chaos: hair-trigger beats, jittery vocal samples, little twisters of white noise. Like a bull in a semiconductor factory, her drums lurch dangerously, threatening to shatter the groove with every syncopation; her chords spill over the grid like inkblots on graph paper. And on recent releases—particularly the self-titled album under her new alias Whatever the Weather—a sentimental ambient sensibility has settled in like a pastel haze. So what happens when two such diametrically opposed styles come together? Rather than matter annihilating antimatter, they establish an uneasy kind of symbiosis, with TSVI’s tough, armor-plated drums punching through James’ architecture of unpredictability.
Some tracks are more balanced than others. On “Awaiting,” it would be easy to miss Barzacchini’s fingerprints entirely. The song begins with a ruminative string of piano notes, like Harold Budd sitting absentmindedly at a waterlogged upright. It could be an outtake from Whatever the Weather, at least until a muted kick drum sullenly sidles into view, tracing circles like a hungry shark. Two opposing drum tracks compete for control: One’s a spartan snare that does little more than keep time; the other’s a periodic eruption of breakbeats that seems hellbent on obliterating it. High above, an angel choir coos wordlessly, as though mourning the destruction below. Those voices return on the EP’s final track, “Trust,” the only one without drums; again, you might easily assume its reverberant piano and gauzy pads were James’ work alone.
Other tracks offer a more integrated fusion of the two musicians’ styles. They recorded the EP while sharing a studio during London’s last lockdown period, and you can sense their presence in the room together, hands at the controls, feeling out each others’ instincts. “Gloom” molds the same basic elements from “Awaiting” into a tougher, more propulsive form. “Eternal” rises gradually, like a machine assembling itself from a scrap heap; battered, haphazard percussion is shaped into a slow, muscular groove haloed with a silvery synth melody. And “Observe” represents the apotheosis of their creative union, drawing out great, sweeping, melancholy synths over spring-loaded drum’n’bass cadences. Despite its greater rhythmic focus, no two bars sound quite the same. It flows like a conversation. At a moment when the smart money in dance music is on big, boisterous club anthems, this tangled, detuned, introspective EP is refreshing: an intimate picture of two friends shutting out the world and seeking a common language.


The first widely-released album from French-born, Montréal-based artist Joni Void is a found-sound project that reflects the anxiety of cities.

Selfless

Jean Cousin’s story to date has followed a typical 21st-century DIY-artist narrative. For the past six years, the Lille, France native has flooded his Bandcamp and Soundcloud pages with several self-produced albums. The first, soundtrack for a film that doesn’t exist, spelled out his m.o. in no uncertain terms; the second, still images & other dreams, provides a handy subtitle. And while Cousin assumed the sort of alias—Johnny Ripper—you’d expect of some bass-bin-rattling EDM deviant, his early music gently tiptoed along the porous borders separating post-rock, IDM, and modern classical, often sounding like a piano recital remixed by Boards of Canada. After moving to Montreal in 2012 to study film (a medium that informs both his music and visually enhanced live performances), he’s now found a natural home at Constellation Records. But if Constellation has given him the means to execute his first proper album release, Cousin is using the moment in the spotlight to make himself even more anonymous.
For his latest release, Johnny Ripper has been reborn as Joni Void, a nom de punk better than anything the creators of “Vinyl” could’ve come up with. But in the context of Selfless, it symbolizes absence as much as attitude. Where he once composed on piano, and even occasionally sang, Cousin approached Selfless as a purely found-sound project, with melodies and rhythms emerging from intricate editing rather than performed parts. The limited vocals we hear—spoken-word poems, guest raps, or even just breathing—were captured through field recordings or phone messages, a tactic that reinforces Cousin’s shadowy presence. At times, the malleable, corroded nature of his music yields to the crisply captured sound of Cousin manipulating his machinery, like the unseen wizard pulling levers from behind the curtain.
As he recently explained to Montreal’s CKUT: “The whole theme for the album was basically that it’s an out-of-body experience, through whatever means: music, death, psychedelics, just seeing some intense world news….” Cousin said that his intent is not to escape our troubled times, but to reflect and respect them—for him, now is not the time for introspection, but observation. After approaching his past records as soundtracks for films that didn’t exist, Cousin approaches Selfless more like a documentarian, outfitted with nothing but a dirty lens, decaying old film stock, and shaky hands to create, as one track calls it, “Cinema Without People.”
The opening “Song Siènne” serves to thrust Cousin from his hermetic, home-recording bubble into the world at large. At the outset, it’s a pretty but trembling piano piece, sounding not unlike Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th” fed through The Disintegration Loops. But nearly two minutes in, the snowglobe serenity is abruptly shattered with what sounds like a hammer striking an anvil: the piano chords turn more intensely foreboding, the background is suffused with ambient street chatter, and suddenly the track acquires all the suffocating dread and confusion of feeling lost in a crowd in a foreign city where you don’t understand the signage.
But if “Song Siènne” evokes the anxieties of urban spaces, Cousin also playfully cuts through their tensions. On “Doppler,” he takes that most omnipresent city sound—a siren—and pitch-shifts it into, if not a full-blown techno track, then at least the blueprint for one. And as the record goes on, Cousin’s meticulous edits start to fortify into more robust rhythms: the aforementioned “Cinema Without People” is the album’s pulsating centerpiece, using the sound of a spinning film projector as the bedtrack for an oscillating, hypno-house throb. On “Abjection,” doomy drones are unleashed with industrial aggression, with Cousin stretching wordless voices into tortured wails and then snapping them back into nightmarish shrieks.
And yet as much as Selfless feels suited to soundtrack your next newsticker-induced panic attack, the album also functions as Cousin’s affectionate tribute to the Montréal DIY scene that encouraged him to perform live. A handful of tracks are given over to friends: “Observer (Natalie’s Song)” sets poet Natalie Reid’s plainspoken philosophies about social interactions to a swelling surge of clicks ‘n’ cuts; “Yung Werther (Ogun’s Song)” sees Tide Jewel spitting a voice-mailed invective about capitalism and police violence over a disorienting whirr of smashed glass, gunshots, and trap beats. But of the infinite sounds at Cousin’s disposal here, the most resonant are provided by Ayuko Goto (aka Noah) on “Empathy (Ayuko’s Song),” an analog-synth-smeared reverie from the late ’90s Warp playbook that’s propelled by her hushed whispers and panting breaths. Though its vocals are indecipherable, it’s the song that most clearly speaks to Selfless’ transcendent mission, hovering between the comforting intimacy of community and the unsettled essence of the outside world. And it’s a reminder that, even its quietest, most self-effacing moments, Selfless absolutely judders with physicality and viscera.


The Chicago rapper’s debut LP is a daring and expressive album that explores the American web of love, faith, violence.

The Healing Component

Love has been the benzine in pop music’s tank since time immemorial. That’s because trying to pin down its meaning is like trying to crescent kick a waterfall—it is constantly being filtered and refiltered through a pop culture prism. Everyone from Walt Disney, to Ian Curtis, to André 3000 had their own takes. Yet here we are, in 2016, and Chicago rapper Mick Jenkins has released a concept album about love that finds fresh angles.
The cover to The Healing Component features the heart as it beats in the human chest. The organ is exposed, precious, vital—only ever a beat away from the end of a life. Jenkins’ album arrives in the backdrop of the shooting death of Terence Crutcher at the hands of police in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Not to mention black men and children killed in Ferguson, Cleveland, New York, Minnesota, and Baton Rouge. The rapper might preach love throughout—“Spread love, try to combat the sadness,” he demands on the title track—but he sounds like an optimist desperately reaching for the broken shards tearing away from his soul. This might be one of year’s best blues albums.
Jenkins broadly pitches love as humanity’s “healing component” as taught to him through scripture. “That’s what Jesus was down here to show us,” he tells an anonymous friend on one of the record’s segues. Inevitably, a record this much into religion will be stacked next to fellow Chi-Town lyricist Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book. But while Chancelor’s record came with a wave of saintly Christian sentiment, Jenkins engages with faith as a weapon to scorch America’s white patriarchy.
“How could a black man not be confused in this?/Used to hang by those trees, we abusing them now?” Jenkins asks on “Strange Love,” a slam poetry scrapbook of scattered thoughts. He’s long used water as a metaphor for knowledge (see 2014 mixtape The Water[s], in particular) but on “Drowning,” it takes on a more sinister tone: “When the real hold you down, you supposed to drown right?/Wait, wait, that don’t sound right.” The death of Eric Garner haunts the track further with chants of “I can’t breathe” as BADBADNOTGOOD’s down ‘n’ dirty instrumentation sounds like a funeral procession. Police brutality, institutionalized racism, and the disrespectful pilfering of black culture are all covered in Jenkins’ pad of rhymes. This is protest rap whose punches come from odd angles but still land the with the weight of a sledgehammer.
The Healing Component is a verbose album, like it’s caught the emcee on a savage trip through the corridors of his mind. Jenkins might drop Bible references, but his scriptures have been dipped in enough drugs to take down Hunter S. Thompson. On the spaced-out “100 Xans,” he admits to “tweaking and laughing ‘til I hurt ribs.”  The instrumentation, too, snaps with an acid-soaked psychedelia. “Strange Love” is all midnight-blue swagger, slinking forward with its cosmic keys and slide guitars. “Communicate,” produced by Kaytranada, is the closest thing the record has to a radio jam. It’s a head-down groove under the flickering strobe lights of a neon-tinted basement club after last orders—the only song where a line like, “Want to call you bae and I don’t mean San Francisco” could work.
Jenkins’ previous EP, the bouncy *Wave[s]**, *plays like the rapper burning off the lighter tracks in his chamber—the stuff that thematically falls outside this album’s concept. *The Healing Component *would have benefitted for a couple of those brighter moments to keep things moving, but it’s a small gripe. This socially-scathing, Alprazolam-laced, Jesus piece-baring work slices like a knife. He can’t successfully pin down the nuances of love over 62 minutes, but he spits plenty of good bars.


Accompanied by a like-minded troupe of intergalactic travelers, the Bitchin Bajas member brings together jazz composition with far-out electronic sound design.

Exoplanet

Rob Frye spent much of the 2010s playing in Chicago’s Bitchin Bajas, whose goofy name belies an affinity for immersive, outward-bound music more in keeping with acid trips in cathedrals than the bratty surf punk that their handle implies. If you believe that one of music’s primary goals is to transport the listener from earthly concerns, you will find no more fuel-efficient vehicle to achieve this than Bitchin Bajas. As with the work of Terry Riley, Bitchin Bajas’ music scans as both lysergic and liturgical. At their best, they make your head feel as if it’s a sky-sized sponge for transcendent tones.
While Cooper Crain initially founded Bitchin Bajas as a solo project, Frye has proven himself a key utility player—the member who can pick up flute, guitar, sax, and synthesizer and add crucial coloration to the band’s expansive creations. (He plays a similar role in Crain’s psych-rock unit Cave.) After a decade of under-the-radar solo recordings, Exoplanet is the first relatively high-profile album under Frye’s own name, and it showcases his grounding in jazz along with his proclivities for field recording and far-flung electronic sound design. Pursuing his interest in birdsong, he has gone so far as to transcribe it, a practice utilized in two pieces here. Frye is also enamored of sounds collected by NASA, which surface in the pivotal song “Jupiter Control.”
With help from Bajas’ Crain and Dan Quinlivan (synths), Nick Ciontea (synths), Ben LaMar Gay (cornet and Wurlitzer), and Tommaso Moretti and Quin Kirchner (drums), Frye sets out to travel the spaceways, madly and dutifully. (Bitchin Bajas covered Sun Ra’s “Angels and Demons at Play” on 2017’s Bajas Fresh, and Frye titled a solo LP Rafractions, to give you an idea of where he’s coming from—and where he’s going.) A woodwinds master, Frye also adds synthesized ingredients to the cauldron his mates stir up. You can hear the way they revel in experimentation on Exoplanet’s “Innercosmos,” a confusion of strange fizzing and burbling that’s akin to the beginning of Tonto’s Expanding Head Band’s “Jetsex,” but not as ominous. By contrast, “Sunset on Jgelu” offers a beatific, synth-dominated denouement.
But such rhythm-free spelunking is not Exoplanet’s only thrust. Opening track “Sunrise on Pruhina” is a spiritual-jazz fanfare that heralds a new, beneficent ritual. Its upswirl of flute, cymbal splash, muted yet ecstatic sax, and restrained drum thunder sets the album’s appropriately exploratory tenor. Similarly, “XC175020” marches purposefully into foreign territory with odd percussion tones somewhere between an unconventionally tuned xylophone and a synthesizer. Perhaps the unusual timbres derive from those aforementioned birds? It’s an avant-jazz trip that sounds simultaneously earthy and otherworldly. So is the rugged jazz peregrination “Lightship Sgr A Star,” with a synth riff that undulates and seethes mesmerizingly in the lower registers. The track comes off like a well-oiled machine that makes you feel both combat-ready and relaxed. Exoplanet abounds in such fascinating paradoxes.
The record’s most far-out track is “Jupiter Control.” Distinguished by an acidic, quasi-TB-303 chord progression and powered by militaristic beats that evoke Mani Neumeier on Zero Set, his groundbreaking 1983 album with Dieter Moebius and Conny Plank, “Jupiter Control” portends a future full of turmoil, triggering thoughts of unprecedented lifeforms. Frye created all of the synth sounds, then had Ciontea feed astronauts’ voices through his modular; finally, he blended in ionosphere emission and space weather electromagnetic pulses sampled from University of Iowa Space Audio. Frye has a long history of mesmerising listeners by means of repetition and unconventional textures. With Exoplanet, he expands his palette—and listeners’ minds.

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Harlem Dipset magnate follows a string of relentless mixtapes and the soul-infused 2004 masterpiece Purple Haze with the soundtrack to a film about a hardscrabble hustler.

Killa Season

In the film Killa Season, Cam'ron plays a thinly veiled avatar named Flea. In fact, the veil is so thin that, toward the end of the movie, characters casually refer to him as Cam, to which he responds without hesitation. Clearly, Flea is Cam's idealized version of himself-- the ultimate hustler, with the gusto to spit on a small child's forehead and shoot a man in the chest while riding a bike. Yet-- in the film and on this accompanying soundtrack-- the rapper's unswerving hardscrabble guise is becoming wearisome. With his first three albums largely devoted to charmingly skewed soft-batch rap & b, the Harlem magnate hardened up by way of relentless mixtape releases, resulting in the soul-infused 2004 masterpiece, Purple Haze. With that album, Cam cannily balanced twisted takes on rote gun'n'drug-running hip-hop tropes with sweet soul samples that gave his countless bon mots levity and bounce. On Killa Season, such levity is sorely missed.
Since Purple Haze, the whole Dipset machine seems to have fallen into a holding pattern. Aside from Juelz Santana, who actually showed some promising progression on two solo mixtapes and an impressive sophomore album last year, Cam and his cronies continue to release a relentless stream of street CDs with diminishing returns. Seemingly, the entire crew is trying to top Haze's signature banger's banger, "Get 'Em Girls", which combines operatic vocals with arch strings and back-broke bass to emit a crippling, avant-garde thump. Thing is, "Get 'Em Girls" can't be topped. Or duplicated. Yet, a large portion of Killa Season is committed to that aim with bumptious tracks like "Girls, Cash, Cars", "War", and the shamelessly-dubbed "Get 'Em Daddy" all puffing lots of hot-air bluster rather than sounding audacious.
The rapper's diminutive Flea moniker also hints at a paranoid inferiority complex that seeps into the record. Instead of showcasing his trademark never-rushed swagger, Killa Season sometimes finds Cam aggravated, yelling flustered barbs over chintzy Casio trumpets and too-busy hi-hats. Exhibit A is "You Gotta Love It", his infamous Jay-Z dis. Out of its original context, the song can now be judged as something other than a crass stunt, and Cam nails some stinging blows while battling the harsh beat (which earns a couple of pity points for sampling, of all things, the score from Basic Instinct). Still, no matter how amped Cam gets over one of Mr. Carter's fashion faux pas, it's always going to look pathetic when an opponent wins a fight by not responding.
When the stiff beats ease up and Cam (slightly) deflates his chest, Killa Season excels. The album's finest moment-- and one of the most intriguing tracks in Cam's catalogue thus far-- is "I.B.S.", an autobiographical tale chronicling the emcee's bout with the pesky, self-explanatory disease called Irritable Bowl Syndrome. Over an uncharacteristically subdued, twinkling beat from Dipset faves Heatmakerz, Cam starts off with the bold pronouncement, "This is a true story." Whether or not that makes the album's other tales less than genuine is unclear-- truth is a highly relative term in Purple City. But he follows up the sincere claim with brilliantly candid couplets, making light of his painful condition. "I can't enjoy a movie dinner," he admits, "My son growin' up, I'm lookin' like the movie Thinner." Whatever "truth" Cam's speaking of here, it's probably something he should rely on more often.
But no matter how oddly hilarious and touching "I.B.S." can be, it's likely to go down as a barefaced anomaly. A more realistic exit strategy for the current banging-head Dipset conundrum is represented by "Do Ya Thing (Remix)", on which Cam shows off a hushed delivery, gliding with easy reticence over a jazzy, Earth, Wind & Fire-sampling Chad Hamilton beat that recalls vintage Pete Rock. Although the rhymes are basically been-there Camlibs, in such smooth surroundings even the mind-numbing hook-- "More killin' killin'/ More killin' killin' for Killa Killa"-- sounds fresh.
On the limited edition version of Killa Season, there's a bonus DVD that includes portions of a press conference Cam held shortly after his Jay-Z dis first aired. The spectacle is ridiculously self-serious, showing that the rapper may be drinking too much of his own Sizzurp liqueur. When asked dead-on if the harsh dig at the best semi-retired rapper alive was a blatant publicity stunt, Cam responds, "I don't need a publicity stunt-- I'm me." If this underwhelming offering is any indication, such blind self-reference has considerably slowed down Cam'ron's once-unstoppable Dipset Movement.


The Berlin-based producer swaps his habitually trance-fueled club anthems for an unusual fusion of filmic chamber strings and emotive bass music.

Nathan Micay: The World I’m Going to Hell For

The World I’m Going to Hell For

Twitter is full of odd confessions, but the rising dance producer Nathan Micay recently let slip that when he was 19 years old, the first track he ever finished was a bootleg jungle remix of indie-folk hero Sufjan Stevens. The combination of Sufjan Stevens and rollicking Amen breaks sounds ridiculous, but in Micay’s case, perhaps it’s not so surprising. Although he’s best known these days for sidewinding, richly melodic tracks that recall the glory days of trance and progressive house, including last year’s manga-inspired Blue Spring, the Berlin-based Canadian grew up playing banjo, violin, viola, and cello, and was part of a Toronto youth orchestra for many years. More recently, his Schvitz Edits imprint—one of three different record labels he heads up—kicked off its run with club-ready reworks of famed singer-songwriters Dr. John and Gordon Lightfoot.
On The World I’m Going to Hell For, his work has come full circle. Originally issued on a limited-edition cassette late last year, the LP was slated for a proper release this autumn, but once the COVID-19 crisis turned the world upside down, Micay decided to go ahead and put the album online as part of the most recent Bandcamp Friday. Unlike his recent output, The World I’m Going to Hell For almost completely abandons the dancefloor, opting instead for a more cinematic approach that folds in elements of ambient, IDM, and the more emotive corners of bass music.
Two years in the making, most of the album was created using only cello, viola, violin, and a distortion pedal, and that stripped-back approach lends the music both a classical sensibility and widescreen dimensions; only a handful of its 13 tracks feature substantial percussion. It’s still electronic music, but strings are the dominant element, and songs like “Natey, Get on Your Horse,” “For the Hawk of the Millennium Empire,” and “Never Rhythm Game” are the sort of melancholy vignettes that might soundtrack a particularly gut-wrenching scene of a film. More uplifting is “Billing Service,” which includes an unexpected vocal turn from Micay himself; it’s the closest he’s come to having an Arthur Russell moment, although his baritone also brings to mind 69 Love Songs-era Stephin Merritt.
The World I’m Going to Hell For, which Micay describes as his most overtly political effort to date—he calls it a response to the “outdated rhetoric spoken by outdated humans in power”—is meant to build upon the dystopian narrative he laid out with Blue Spring and its accompanying comic. But the closest spiritual analog in Micay’s back catalog is probably Capsule’s Pride, the Akira-themed album he released back in 2016 under the name Bwana. (Arguably the most famous anime of all time, Akira is also a story of rising up against government oppression.) Although Capsule’s Pride is more heavily steeped in club tropes and glossy synths than The World I’m Going to Hell For, the two releases share a filmic sensibility and showcase Micay’s talent for thinking bigger than the dancefloor.
Like all good soundtracks, The World I’m Going to Hell For is best consumed as a whole, but there are some clear highlights. With its gleaming synths and luxurious strings, “Who Shaves the Barber” has a playful pomp that wouldn’t be out of place at a regal garden party, while “If the World’s Still Here on Monday” offsets its brooding swagger with sparkling tendrils of melody. Lush album closer “V” is more subdued, but there’s a sense of majesty in its billowing atmosphere. There’s also something for the DJs: “Panz,” a breezy, twinkling house cut that wouldn’t be out of place on labels like Studio Barnhus or Mule Musiq.
Though the album predates the current pandemic, its reissue now, rushed out months ahead of schedule, gives Micay’s abrupt creative left turn new resonance. In the face of an uncertain future, many artists reflexively retreat to safety or indulge in clichéd tales of impending doom, but Micay has taken a different path. The World I’m Going to Hell For is a serious record, and there are moments of mourning and thoughtful introspection, but the music never falls into despair. It’s a hopeful exercise, and during a time when the whole world feels like it’s falling apart, there’s something uniquely powerful about Micay’s choice to let optimism light the way forward.