Gabriel Garzón-Montano became famous when Drake sampled his voice for “Jungle,” but his debut album stands on its own, heavy on pearly funk and pop, live instrumentation and harmony.

Jardín

Odds are good that you’ve heard Gabriel Garzón-Montano before, whether or not you realize it: it’s a tantalizing, slow-drip sample of his vocals underpinning Drake’s “Jungle,” which appeared on the superstar’s 2015 mixtape If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. Faced with a wave of interrogation after being pressed into Drake’s service, Montano has zigzagged between gratitude—“I think it’s remarkable that the guy who’s been singing everyone’s hooks for the last five years chose me to sing a hook for him”—and an approximation of “enough already:” “I don’t want to be the guy that got sampled on ‘Jungle.’ I don’t want that to give me my value.”
His poised, adamantly musical major-label debut, Jardín, should banish those concerns. Montano settles on an unusual and fertile combination of sounds, knitting together the burnished, languorous acts of the late ’60s and early ’70s—the Association, Todd Rundgren—with lean, hair-trigger grooves. The result is heavy on pearly funk and pop, live instrumentation and harmony. But Montano mostly avoids sounding like a tasteful throwback, pulling off his merger with zippy grace, in the manner of a prime Pharrell production.
Like Pharrell, Montano has an everyman voice that he's adept at rescuing with exquisitely layered arrangements. But this is not immediately apparent on Jardín: early on, Montano seems intent on showcasing his lone voice in multiple settings—a slice of buzzing hip-hop soul, and then a pivot into piano balladry. The record blooms on “The Game,” the fourth track, which is filled with wonderfully multi-tracked iterations of Montano, each intoxicated on melody. Behind the lead vocal, he sings both a descending, calligraphic line and an unfussy alternative that moves with the beamed focus of a weary sigh. Just as these threaten to bottom out, he adds an onomatopoeic two-note interjection that climbs upward, like the small, immensely gratifying plop that rises after you toss a pebble into a pond.
Similarly heaped vocal passages, teeming with good ideas, are everywhere on the second half of Jardín. Montano especially enjoys contrasting blocky, beeline melodies from A to B with more scenic paths, as if to gently chide ruthless, shortest-route-best-route songwriters. (Montano wrote or co-wrote every song here, played almost every lick, and served as his own producer.) "Long Ears" includes held notes that move with the easily identifiable logic of a staircase as well as loopy, horn-like vocal sequences, jumpy collations of lunging jabs and luxurious glides. It's like someone overlaid a men's choir doing simple warm-ups on top of the backing vocals from D’Angelo’s “Send It On.”
That suggests a dangerous level of self-seriousness, but Jardín stays light on its feet, serving up these vocal feasts with nifty, shifting rhythmic beds: odd click-boom combinations, agitated, slap-happy pitter patter, studio-ace, Bee Gees-level punch. On “My Balloon,” Montano even designs something that could catch the ear of an adventurous radio programmer, soldering a thick synth whirl and light drum programming onto a pop-funk lattice. It’s detail-rich, but the curlicues can't hide the hook's brick-through-a-window bid for your attention.
Refreshingly, there are no whiffs of Drake-indebted R&B here, none of the mixture of hard-bitten programming and bathetic singing that permeates the airwaves and continues to entrance many young singers. This divergence is not necessarily surprising—after all, “Jungle” was an outlier even within the confines of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. Montano's presence on the track helped create a resoundingly ambivalent moment on an album otherwise characterized by chest-thumping standoffishness.
Still, Montano's album marks him as part of a current of rising singers pointedly and successfully ignoring the latest wave of hip-hop/R&B hodgepodge. This varied group includes Guordan Banks, who landed a No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult R&B chart in 2016; Yuna, whose album Chapters spawned a pair of radio hits; and KING, who recently earned a Grammy nomination for last year’s We Are KING. Montano has been tactful about his tenuous connection with Drake in interviews, but Jardín represents a soft rebuke to the star—as well as a rich, buffed debut from an adept young artist.


On the first of two mixtapes to be released before her major label debut, Before I Wake finds the Oakland emcee less relaxed and laidback. It plays out like a reassertion of control.

Before I Wake

For this first time since she introduced herself on “How Does It Feel,” Kamaiyah is truly frustrated. “Yeah I fucked up this summer/I didn’t put out one damn song, but y’all hoes still ain’t did nothing/I smell my revenge coming,” she raps on “Slide (Bet),” off her new mixtape Before I Wake. Coolness and calmness have been the Oakland emcee’s calling cards, but there’s clearly a lot weighing on her mind lately. Her debut album on Interscope has been held up by sample clearance issues, causing the healthy buzz built by her breezy 2016 mixtape, A Good Night in the Ghetto, to taper off a bit. Before I Wake is the first of two mixtapes that will precede the album as an attempt to regain some momentum. The fame she’s accumulated is wearing on her, and there’s a slight strain in her voice. But despite these tensions, she’s still making things look easy.
A Good Night in the Ghetto was largely celebratory, conveying the fleeting highs of youth and West Coast nightlife as escapism. Sure, there were mentions of absentee parents, untrustworthy jump-offs, lost friends, and city violence, but those things mostly existed on the periphery, distant thoughts tucked in the back of her mind. Before I Wake is less relaxed and laidback, playing out like a reassertion of control—over her music career, her spot in the rap hierarchy, her mental health and wellness, and hell, even her lovers. She’s snappier here, more keen to defend her territory. “Which one of ya’ll gonna stop me? ‘Cause ain’t nobody standing in my way,” she sings on “The Wave,” hinting at her conquest. “Which one of y’all gon’ top me? ‘Cause ain’t nobody fucking with the wave.” When she calls herself “the coldest bitch alive,” she’s putting suitors on notice: “You can bring the world to me/It don’t matter what you provide/Cause the playa in me it ain’t gon’ never be satisfied.”
Satisfaction is something Kamaiyah has been seeking from the beginning, since she openly wondered how it felt to just live. That pursuit has made her weary. For much of Before I Wake, Kamaiyah takes on a sleepy, singsong delivery, less animated than the unflappable half-croon she rapped through on her sunnier A Good Night in the Ghetto cuts. These performances are somewhat less dynamic, but she still provides the sort of candied melodies that become earworms, sinking comfortably into glossy synth beds.
Kamaiyah has been compared to Missy Elliott, as an inventive rap artist with a clear aesthetic vision who also rocks colorful jumpsuits, which is exemplified by the tasteful “Fashion,” a song that feels retro and chic all at once. But she isn’t beholden to any one style or influence, and on Before I Wake, she blends her reference points into something distinctly hers for a project that is cohesive, sleek, lustrous, and super funky. She borrows the mack raps of Oakland legend Too $hort, plush R&B arrangements (TLC, Keith Sweat, S.O.S. Band), and new jack swing rhythms. Her distillation of the ’80s and ’90s never feels like cloning, or worse, nostalgia chasing. Instead, she’s emerged as something completely original—Not Missy 2.0 or TLC redux, but Kamaiyah 1.0, a visionary who respects and reflects her history.
Given the pending sample clearance delays for Don’t Ever Get It Twisted, it’s somewhat ironic that some of samples on Before I Wake seem almost tangentially related to the songs they form. “Playa in Me,” using a stripped down sample of Lil Jon’s “Play No Games,” flips the original’s script. Tha Dogg Pound’s “Some Bomb Azz (Pussy)” gets a rebrand as “Dope Bitch,” as if the woman from the former rejects that song’s premise and tells her story instead. “Leave Em,” a friendly reminder to leave that terrible boyfriend, samples TLC’s “Creep,” a song about female infidelity and sexual freedom. The samples don’t just complement each other; they tell their own stories. Kamaiyah is never overwhelmed by the burden of potentially mishandling any of them, and each moment feels like a restoration, refurbishing classics for a new generation, with new purpose.
If Kamaiyah’s style is about being approachable, about the very normal and mundane ways we distance ourselves from a violent and unfair world, Before I Wake is the first of her releases that keeps listeners at arm’s length. She’s cautious of others, analyzing their motives, and worried about her own sanity on “Me Against Myself,” rapping about how she puts on a “Hennessy smile to hide my tears.” The bassline dribbles beneath her as she lays out her distresses: “You ain’t felt pain like I have felt pain/People in my life just for self-gain/I’m going through the motions/But myself changed.” When she asks, “Who gon’ really love me and be there for me?” on “Therapy,” she’s channeling years of setbacks and letdowns. She’s learning that success doesn’t erase depression. But there’s never the slightest sense that she’ll let these lapses defeat her, or that she won’t overcome them. She’s still here to win. Doubts creep in on Before I Wake, but she just knows she’s due for another good night.


An almost wholly unrooted and original dance music, this emerging South African sound marries hyper-quick, cheap electronics with soulful vocals.

Various Artists: Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music From South Africa

Speed in music can be strange. Sometimes songs that are fast, technically speaking, don't sound fast in effect. Maybe they don't move, or don't prove fleet in any way. Whereas sometimes a slow song, with the right lean, can seem to take off, to zoom toward some distant horizon. But however the finer points play out, speed in music can be misleading-- and wondrously disorienting. Case in point is the compilation Shangaan Electro-- pretty much every track on it is ruthlessly, breathlessly, ridiculously fast. Yet the effect of so much speed is to make everything, paradoxically and more than a little psychedelically, slow down.
Opening track "Ngunyuta Dance", by an act called BBC, makes for a good primer. After beginning with a weightless drop of chintzy-sounding keyboard tones and spritzy digital drums, it eventually has like 10 different patterns running through it, each at a manic pace. And something in the ceaselessness of them all makes the rhythm seem to just keep getting faster and faster as it transpires-- until a disembodying sense of overload washes over and starts, kind of magically, to pull everything apart.
There's a lot to pull apart. Shangaan Electro collects 12 extremely dense and startling tracks of contemporary Shangaan dance music from Africa, specifically a few southern parts near Johannesburg and Mozambique. Evidently, the scene grew out of the mind of one man, named Nozinja, who works as a producer and sells music on his own, on DVDs and cassettes that fan out for use at insane dance parties. Footage from these village parties has gotten around via popular YouTube clips full of sick dance moves, which feature lots of heavily torqued wiggling and actions that look like something a man might do after just discovering a leech on his balls. (Another way to describe them, this a choice quote from the liner notes: "When you see them dance you feel like they have got no bones.")
But part of what makes Shangaan Electro so interesting is the way it seems to laugh away the notion of context altogether, or at least rush right past it. Tracks in the Shangaan style tend to run around 180 beats-per-minute, which is very fast, and the seizing effect of that is amplified by a focus on cheap high-end sounds and a near-total absence of bass, which there simply doesn't seem to be room for. Dance music in general is typically weighted and time-stamped by bass. Shangaan electro floats in ethereal space instead, with lots of speed and no friction.
In the most comprehensive terms, Shangaan electro is extremely weird. The sound sources enlisted in the mosaic tracks here range from what sounds like children's-movie traffic noise to solar flares from a plastic sun. There's beautiful human soul in the choral singing in "Nwa Pfundla" by Tshetsha Boys, but there's as much beautiful post-human soul in the highly processed chipmunk vocals of their "Uya Kwihi Ka Rose". And pretty much throughout, there's a startling range of inventiveness with electronic sounds that are constantly clipped, looped, and folded in on themselves-- like in Mancingelani's "Vana Vasesi", which sounds like someone's spotty memory of Kraftwerk's "Pocket Calculator" run at triple speed.
The liner notes, revealing but also helpfully incomplete, describe the previously very isolated Shangaan electro sound as "hyper-local music, all of it still considered traditional." But little here scans as "traditional" once you tumble in and fall under its swirling parts' spell. All the tracks compiled trace back to Nozinja's studio, where they were born between 2006 and 2009. But they've started to thrive in a zone of no context, which is where we are now. None of Shangaan Electro sounds quite like anything else we have at our disposal. Which, come to think of it, places it within a rich tradition indeed.


Thug offers up a nice summertime party record, his most cheerful, undemanding project since his early mixtapes.

Young Thug / Young Stoner Life: Slime Language

Slime Language

Nothing kills the excitement around a new rap record like learning it’s actually a label compilation. From Eminem’s grim Shady Records showcases to Lil Wayne’s sadistically Gudda Gudda-heavy We Are Young Money comp and JAY-Z’s forgotten Roc-A-Fella Records Presents: The Roc Files, Vol. 1 (there was never a Vol. 2), rappers have a long tradition of burying second-tier material on promotional efforts created to lift their imprint’s lesser talents. Even Young Thug’s team seemed to telegraph that his new release, Slime Language, should be graded on a curve. Its overcrowded tracklist is heavy on unknowns like Lil Keed, Tracy T, and Nechie, and speckled with verses from guys like Duke, who has never generated any real heat of his own despite wing-manning on Thug tracks for years. That it also features not only Thug’s sisters HiDoraah and Dolly but also his on-again, off-again partner Karlae furthers the impression the project was born of little more than blatant cronyism.
And yet any skepticism goes out the window from the first track, when Thug euphorically cowabungas his way across a tropical breeze of a beat on “Tsunami,” setting a precedent for good vibes that the record consistently lives up to. Label compilation or not, Slime Language is so generous with its star attraction that the distinction barely matters, and Thug digs in with his usual rubber-jawed zeal. He’s the kind of rapper who commits so fully that even a disposable quip like, “I’m not 2 Chainz/I got 40” feels like method acting: It’s a mere two bars, yet he inhabits the aggrieved sense so fully, selling the umbrage in the notion that somebody’s count could be so off.
From the streamlined elegance of Barter 6 to the lunatic modernism of JEFFREY and the horndog strum-and-croon of Beautiful Thugger Girls, Thug’s strongest projects have introduced completely new avenues of expression. In part because of its label obligations, Slime Language isn’t as indelible as any of those records, nor as revelatory, yet it carves out a niche in Thug’s discography: It’s a summertime party record, his most cheerful, undemanding project since the I Came From Nothing mixtapes of his less adventurous early years, before stylistic gambits took hold over simple pleasures.
For their part, Thug’s labelmates largely try their best to mirror his exuberance, and most of them hold their own. Gunna makes his mark on four solid tracks, reaffirming why he’s Thug’s buzziest protege, even though he’s upstaged by non-YSL signee Lil Baby on the crisp standout “Chanel.” The women in Thug’s life all prove they deserve the spotlight on their own merits, too, especially Dolly, whose stern, no-nonsense flow stands in cold contrast to her Animaniac brother. It’s a shame Slime Language doesn’t explore that dynamic; she appears on the one track Thug sits out entirely.
It’s only in Slime Language’s final stretch that the sheer weight of the guest features takes its toll, and by then it barely matters, since the highs have already left a lasting buzz. Among those thrills: Thug racing against drums modeled after a street busker’s plastic tub on the kinetic treat “Gain Clout”; Thug outlining his philosophy that if you’ve paid for it you might as well enjoy it on “Dirty Shoes” (“Came through Bleveland swerving/I just wiped my dick off with the Rolls Royce curtains”); and a hyped-up, hallucinatory beat from newcomer Keyyz on “Audemar.”
And so Slime Language isn’t as disposable as its somewhat muted early reception would make it seem. Young Thug has been on such a hot streak for so long, dependably mining new muses year after year, that listeners can begin to assume that he’ll always continue at this stride, but that’s not a given. Past performance is no guarantee of future success. Inspiration dries up and moments end. For now, though, Slime Language captures one of the most boundless rappers of his era operating near his peak. That it has a bill of goods to sell does little to diminish its accomplishments.


Natalie Mering’s majestic fifth record is a dispatch from the center of catastrophe—an idiosyncratic set of love songs and secular hymns with lushly orchestral arrangements.

Weyes Blood: *And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow *

And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow

“It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” starts small: just Natalie Mering’s voice and piano, and a line about feeling alone at a party. Within a verse or so, its scope has widened to encompass something like the human condition itself. Mering’s narrator wonders whether any of her fellow partygoers really know her, whether they can see her for who she truly is. As the arrangement slowly gathers layers of woodwinds and strings, she realizes that her very isolation may hold the key to the connection she seeks. Perhaps everyone feels just as alone and unseen as she does; if so, they can at least be together in their aloneness. “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody,” like the album it opens, isn’t coy about what it’s trying to convey. When Mering reaches the crux of her revelation, she doesn’t dress it up with figurative language: “Mercy is the only cure for being so lonely.”
Mering has said that And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, her fifth album as Weyes Blood, is the second chapter in a trilogy that began with 2019’s spectacular Titanic Rising. In her telling, that album was a foretelling of catastrophe, and its follow-up is a dispatch from the center of it. Titanic Rising, for all its thematic weight, had the snappy exuberance of classic pop; And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is more like a collection of secular hymns. The rhythms are stately and unsyncopated. The arrangements are lushly orchestral. The songs are mostly around six minutes long, proceeding at the unhurried pace of guided meditations. And, perhaps owing to the sense of communion-via-solitude espoused in the first track, the lyrics are concerned with “we” nearly as often as they are with “I”: “We’re all lost,” “We don’t have time anymore to be afraid,” “We are more than our disguises/We are more than just the pain.”
The album is at its best when Mering roots these universal observations in her perspective as an individual, whether via an unusual chord change or a finely textured image, like the lamplit campsite that appears in the chorus of “Grapevine,” or the boardwalk Ferris wheel that provides the setting for “Hearts Aglow.” Those are both love songs: not love in the sense of a benevolent force that binds together all living things, but love in the sense of a burning connection between two people. And though And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow more overtly concerns itself with the former kind of love, it is frank and perceptive about the latter, both its power and its limits.
In “Grapevine,” a fraught romance makes Mering distant from herself, furthering the sort of alienation she seems determined to transcend. In “Hearts Aglow,” a night out with a beloved is enough to stave off the creeping dread of a world in collapse, at least temporarily. “Might be the moon or the cotton candy/Or he might be a man who actually understands me,” she sings over a Phil Spector-ish slow-dance pulse as backing vocalists swirl behind her. But even in her bliss, she submits to uncertainty: “Rising over the tide/Oh hold me tight/But I’m scared I might fall/Just like the water below/You don’t get to know/If your love has all/It’s gonna take.”
Even when Mering is addressing humanity more broadly, her idiosyncrasies as a writer and a performer keep the music personal and alive. There is her extraordinary voice, so poised and precise that small deviations—an unexpected blue note, or a measured break into a slightly higher register—convey depths of feeling that would require much more demonstrative emoting from other singers. And there is her way of letting the shape of a composition flow from its subject matter, rather than relying on established forms to dictate what goes inside them. The album’s most striking song in this regard is “God Turn Me Into a Flower,” which extolls softness and pliability as strengths rather than weaknesses in a way that reminds me both of Sheila Heti’s novel Pure Colour, whose narrator deals with grief over her father’s death by turning into a leaf, and of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, whose protagonist asserts that “Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Flexibility and softness are the embodiment of life.” The music itself resists rigid structure, with synthesizer arpeggios, choral harmonies, and sampled birdsong all blooming along the arc of Mering’s intuition.
If a lesser artist were to attempt an album like And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, they might come up with pablum. Its central theme—the search for connection among humans in an increasingly fractured world—is extremely pressing, so much so that it’s also sort of obvious. How do you say anything new or interesting about the water that all of us are swimming in every day? Like Sheila Heti, Mering does so by looking inward and outward at once: having faith that their own perspectives, rendered vividly and honestly enough, can reveal truths that extend far beyond themselves. And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow may aspire at times to address the whole world, but it begins with one woman alone at a party.


Spencer Krug's project away from Sunset Rubdown and the on-hiatus Wolf Parade continues to obsess over the properties of specific instruments.

Moonface: Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped

Late last year, Wolf Parade announced that they were going on an "indefinite hiatus." What this actually means-- and whether or not it's a bit premature to talk of their "lifespan"-- is unclear, but fortunately, Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug do not need each other to make good music. Last month Boeckner's electro-punk duo Handsome Furs released Sound Kapital, and it was undoubtedly the most impassioned record they've made yet. The prolific Krug, on the other hand, has been churning out interesting music for years with a variety of different projects, be it the eccentric supergroup Swan Lake or the increasingly ambitious one-time side project Sunset Rubdown. In a moment when many popular independent artists value accessibility, simplicity, and beach-ready blitheness above all else, Krug's continued appeal lies in the fact that he is an anachronism: a songwriter who's trying to squeeze Byzantine grandeur into the unlikely framework of indie rock. His catalogue is dense, charged with anxiety, and-- in a trick he may have picked up from Dan Bejar-- about as self-referential as a late-series episode of "Arrested Development".
Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped, Krug's first post-Wolf Parade LP, feels like ritual music infused with 1980s nostalgia. Like his previous release as Moonface, a 20-minute marimba showcase appropriately subtitled Marimba and Shit-Drums, Organ Music springs from Krug's experiments with a particular instrument. Over *Organ Music'*s five tracks (the shortest of which clocks in at six-and-half minutes), he creates what you might call Nintendo spirituals: songs that evoke his double-manual organ's devotional vibes just as much as they do-- through the use of drum machine beats, loops, and some skittish programming-- that song that plays throughout all the underwater levels in the original Super Mario Bros. These tracks are meditative, hypnotic, and born of Krug's unmistakable infatuation with the organ's brooding drone. I saw him perform the record live, and whenever he stopped singing he looked completely lost in his own reverie. Which, ultimately, is precisely the problem with this record.
Sunset Rubdown's last album, Dragonslayer, found Krug doing something that his critics didn't think he had in him: self-editing. It remains Krug's most impressive work to date because it's as accessible and immediate as it is thematically complex. Sure, there are dragons, muses, and forays into the Icarus Rhyming Dictionary, but there are also pummeling riffs and catchy hooks galore. Perhaps Dragonslayer's greatest and most unexpected triumph, though, was how emotionally relatable it was. It was a personal record about the toll that the worlds inside someone's head takes on his relationships.
Organ Music, on the other hand, is more of an exercise in shadowboxing. Here, the music drones on without creating an inhabitable atmosphere, and most of its melodies are flat and uninviting. Even when Krug explores Organ Music's more interesting lyrical terrain, it often feels like an echo of something he's done better in the past. The opening verse of "Whale Song (Instead of a Kiss)", for example, feels like a retread of Wolf Parade's "Grounds for Divorce", but with less of a blunt impact.
Which isn't to say it's all tedium. The opener "Return to the Violence of the Ocean Floor" is absorbing and showcases a wide array of the titular instrument's moods. And the standout track is "Fast Peter", a charming tale of recreational drug use and long-distance Internet love with a frenetic tempo and a weirdly compelling 8-bit Peer Gynt vibe. These two songs combined are about as long as Marimba and Shit-Drums; they might have made a good EP.
Organ Music's press release has been floating around the Internet for some time now. It was written by Krug himself, and it is magnificently bizarre and fittingly meta. In it, he hints at knowing that this release is more than a little self-indulgent. He tells us the record was twice as long before he cut five tracks; "You're welcome," he adds. He also seems to wink at the inevitability that we will compare it to the high-water marks of his career. "Moonface will probably never sound like Wolf Parade or Sunset Rubdown," he says, and he's not wrong. Organ Music isn't reaching for any brass rings, so it's hard to fault it too hard for not being a highlight of his career when it never tries to be one. And Krug fans who can't get behind this particular side of him shouldn't get too bent out of shape; his back catalogue shows that something completely different could be around the next corner.


Annie Clark’s fifth album as St. Vincent isn’t a pop album so much as a deeply, admittedly personal communique with a pop veneer. The songs tear into the feeling of leaving and having been left alone.

Masseduction

St. Vincent gets called “the female Bowie.” Not always for her music, which has taken off from steady and skillful to expansive and gripping at exponential speed; not for her tributes and eulogies of the man, nor exactly for her gender-tweaking image. No, among the first hits for “female Bowie” is a British tabloid, sweeping her and model and ex-girlfriend Cara Delevingne into a world of “domestic bliss” and “purple loo outfit[s].” Such is the life of a woman whose artistry has been made into snackable content. But torn-from-the-headlines reductiveness aside, over the past decade there really hasn’t been a better candidate for the new anything-Bowie than Annie Clark.
Masseduction, then, is her Let’s Dance: exploding the comparatively unassuming craft of Marry Me and the comparatively tentative rhythms of her self-titled album into immediate hooks with a roaring largesse. The guitars are background squalls, compressed and oiled up with “Gary Glitter tuning.” Kendrick Lamar beatmaker Sounwave contributes. So does Jack Antonoff—who’s helped turn the stories of Lorde and Taylor Swift into technicolor memoirs—and even Delevingne herself on backing vox. All of which, in 2017, looks an awful lot like a pop album.
There’s a certain path that former cult artists, or at least non-megastars, take when inspiration or finances move their career pop-wards. The album will be meta, pop-about-pop: smart and layered at best, self-conscious or defensive at worst. The rollout will be a multi-platform extravaganza, where fake takes and alternate poppier personalities abound. Masseduction certainly has that. “We wanted pop-level intention,” said creative director Willo Peron, and Clark delivered: listening sessions styled as escape room puzzles, an art campaign in vinyl-bright pink and red, the fetish boots-and-catsuits in the style of (and on the lower half of) artist and album-cover model Carlotta Kohl; gimmicky Instagram interviews scripted by Carrie Brownstein. The interview questions were absurd placeholders standing in for the ubiquitous, rote questions musicians constantly field—the banal (“insert light banter”), the softballs (what would you tell aspiring musicians?) and the exhausting and gendered: what it’s like to play a show in heels? What it’s like being a woman in music? The punchline to this is pure undiluted acid. The acid’s seeped into the music, too; Masseduction isn’t a pop album so much as a deeply, admittedly personal communique with a pop veneer.
“Sugarboy” executes this with aplomb, via the synthy production, slinky vocals, the call-and-response “Boys! Girls!” and the Swiftian line, “Got a crush on tragedy,” but it’s all played at a deliberately-too-manic pace, too fast to strut. Clark addresses her fans through gritted teeth, guttural voice, and alarming bluntness: “I am alone like you,” less a star’s smile than a rictus grin. “Fear the Future” echoes Marry Me’s “The Apocalypse Song” in its love metaphor, “little death” at the time of the big death, except this time, plays it bigger, more cavernous, turning the restraint of “The Apocalypse Song” into Michael Bay’s Armageddon. The percussion cracks like tectonic plates, the guitars like shuddering reverberations. It almost sounds like a Sleigh Bells track, except where they’d be goofy or cutesy, Clark is deadly serious. The catchiest song, with the most rock-star title and most tabloid-baiting content, is “Young Lover”—one about an overdose, but played with complexity. She leaves in the worst thoughts, putting the most yearning love-song lyrics in the place they accomplish the least. It’s no new trick to make one’s poppiest songs one’s saddest, largely because it works: despair as a neon marquee.
Clark has achieved rockstar grandeur, as well as rock stars’ greatest musical vice: unsubtle commentary on the problems of today. Undoubtedly, there are things left to say about Los Angeles, but while Clark describes the city in great turns of phrase like “the mothers milk their young,” the verses are the same story: sun, sleaze, stars. Just by reading the title “Pills,” you’re already at the finish line, having anticipated its nursery-rhyme, advertising-jingle setting after the first few seconds. But it’s not just social commentary—she’s said as much—it’s also a snapshot of a year in a life, medicated into a blur. “Los Ageless” isn’t about the city so much as Clark’s fleeing it. The most LA thing about it may be the cinematic-noir chorus Clark inhabits—“How can anybody have you and lose you and not lose their minds, too?” On the other coast, in “New York,” she inhabits a stage ballad: the beat haunted by a muffled pulse, the kind that could burst awake at any moment but won’t, and the lyrics haunted by the ghosts of old swagger and surety. “You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can stand me,” she says, speaking in the present, talking about the past.
Masseduction often feels fragmentary, like two or three albums in the campaign of one. It’s part industry mundanity—“Slow Disco” sounds nothing like the rest of the album because it was written with and for Joy Williams of the folk-rockers the Civil Wars—but it fits the narrative: a few years unmoored in the land of sex, drugs, and pop. “Savior” is like porno-funk played by an utterly bemused band. Clark recounts the sexual un-imagination of American history as told through sexy Halloween costumes—nurses, teachers, nuns and cops in their respective ill-fitting clothes, in the garb of dominatrices and the guise of the powerful, but the mindset of the alienated. If St. Vincent was Clark’s Lorrie Moore album (“I ripped [Moore] off so much on the last album, I’m surprised she didn’t, like….” she said at a promo event), this is her Mary Gaitskill song, where she echoes her protagonists’ exhaustion at the sexual personalities and dialogue they’re given, all roles and no play.
Compare this to the title track’s hyperspecific and very un-mass figures of seduction. Clark mentions Charles Mingus’ The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call, a nihilist and a “punk rock romantic,” prodigal Christians and their “paranoid secretions fallin’ on basement rugs,” recounted gleefully, as if shining a blacklight on them. You won’t see these figures in costumes because their common threads are exploitation—(the punk is passed out on the floor, the nun’s in the torture-pose “stress position,” Lolita is herself)—and sadness. The Boatman’s Call was recorded after parts of Cave’s life collapsed, and sounds it, and Mingus’ liner notes, co-written by his psychologist, exhume its despair: “If I heard his music I'd understand.” You’d understand by hearing the chorus of “Savior,” too: one word, a simple “Please,” drawn out, syllable by syllable, every shade of longing and real connection unspoken but apparent. Even it’s a little fraught—at the end, Clark’s refrain is buried in the mix, hard to say whether it’s intimate or rueful.
This is the sadder core of Masseduction. Everyone, including Clark, has been left or is leaving and looking back at what used to be a connection. The only constant is the void—“back and unblinking,” Clark admits. On “Happy Birthday, Johnny,” the man of 2014’s “Prince Johnny” and 2007’s “Marry Me” is adrift and estranged somewhere; the ballad is both achingly personal, centering on possibly-real dialogue (“Annie, how could you do this to me?”) and painstakingly crafted—maybe, it seems, if she worded it perfectly, it wouldn’t have to be a eulogy. It all ends with a mournful cabaret titled “Smoking Section”—a little like if “Happy Together” were scraped hollower and hollower from the inside. Clark imagines increasingly baroque deaths for herself: not suicidal, exactly, more the feeling that if death were to be suddenly provided, through some freak faultless accident, it’d be fine. “It’s not the end,” Clark sings, one last ragged thread of resilience. The unspoken subtext is that for Clark it still feels like a beginning.


The Brooklyn band skewers our collective relationship with social media—as well as their own—in noisy punk thrashers that are clever, incisive, and frequently very funny.

Weeping Icon

In 1990, experimental filmmaker Jon Moritsugu released My Degeneration, a movie about an all-girl punk band called Fetish who get sponsored by Big Beef and spiral into chaos as a result of their success. Their songs become propaganda for juicy steaks and sausages, and their lead singer falls in love with a severed pig’s head named Livingston. It’s a hilarious parody of rock’n’roll excess, inflated egos, and the now-obsolete sin of “selling out.” The characters that populate Brooklyn punk band Weeping Icon’s self-titled debut are grappling with similar issues, only their patrons are lifestyle brands and their preferred platform is Instagram instead of a stage. On their sturdy first album, Weeping Icon offer a suite of detailed and coarse thrashers that pick apart our relationship with social media and #content in a way that is unpretentious and often quite funny.
In 2017, Weeping Icon released Eyeball Under, an eight-track project stocked with energetic (if sometimes generic) punk cuts that were effective individually but didn’t stitch together as a whole. In contrast, Weeping Icon feels like a complete vision, aided by a studio team of Uniform’s Ben Greenberg and Eaters’ Jonathan Schenke, as well as the precise, discordant interludes that connect each song like barbed wire. These distorted tendrils mimic Weeping Icon’s live performances. “We don’t stop between songs because we want to sustain the energy and for the sets to be immersive,” the band said in a 2017 interview. “We want people to feel very present.” Considering that most of the lyrics on Weeping Icon skewer the amount of time we spend staring into our phones, you might say the desire to be present is one of the album’s unspoken themes.
The instrumental vignettes do command presence. They cast an apocalyptic pall over the record, perpetuating a feeling of unease, but they also allow the full-length tracks to pop. “Be Anti” punches through the sickly, arrhythmic heartbeat of “(you should listen to me),” delivering a snarky sendup of counterculture fit for Portlandia. Singer and guitarist Sara Fantry spews a vague monologue about how fucked up the world is. She’s pissed off, and there is only one way to change things: “I’m gonna spit,” she snarls, before making sure the act was captured on video. “Did you get it?” She asks. “Post it on Instagram… Do you have Snapchat? Oh, Facebook Live, put it on Facebook Live. I’ll do it again.” It’s an abridged version of something we see every day: People staging their lives for an invisible audience.
Throughout, Weeping Icon poke fun at the discrepancies between the lives we live and those we post online. On “Like Envy,” Fantry takes on the persona of an Instagram influencer. “I post every day at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.,” she gushes. “My life is my brand.” By the song’s end, Weeping Icon’s instruments have been kicked into overdrive, Fantry’s buzzsaw guitar shooting off sparks while Sarah Lutkenhaus’ synthesizer howls like a wild dog. Fantry’s character, meanwhile, has completely unraveled. She sounds like she’s crouched over a pile of burning rubble, compulsively listing Instagram filters she can no longer use, because the world has ended.
It would be too easy for Weeping Icon’s critique of the social-media generation to come off as heavy-handed and out of touch—fortunately, they’re just as guilty as the rest of us. “We’ve all taken selfies,” Fantry said in a recent interview. “We’re on social media all the time.” Their participation in the phenomenon and their sense of humor (one of the songs is literally the bandmates laughing uncontrollably) are what save Weeping Icon from sounding like an album made by Abe Simpson, or worse, your dad.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The full-length debut from Sam Shepherd (aka Floating Points) is as warm and fluid an "electronic" album as you will hear all year, and it has a timeless feel: There's no reason it could not have been written and recorded 10, 20, or even 30 years ago.

Elaenia

The title track of Sam Shepherd's debut album as Floating Points was inspired by a dream: A migratory bird strays from its flock and is swallowed up by the forest, mimicking the way our atoms are absorbed into the fabric of the universe when we die (or so goes one theory, anyway). We might find ourselves "reincarnated as a SIM card in Singapore, or as a beetle in Scotland," as Shepherd told Pitchfork recently.
He recorded the song "Elaenia" the very next morning, and its improvised, fluid form mirrors the dream's holistic vision. Made with just a Fender Rhodes electric piano and a handful of arcane synthesizers, it bobs between gurgles and limpid, lyric melodies. At more than seven minutes long, it is the second-longest song on the album, and also the most spare— just a handful of chords, some rumble, and a lot of nuance. Like an ocean swell, it is simple on the surface but complex beneath, and the same could be said of Elaenia as a whole.
Though comparatively short—just seven songs totaling some 43 minutes—Elaenia is rich and welcoming, balancing Shepherd's intelligence with intuition. Flitting between strange time signatures and simple pulses, it utilizes mostly analog synthesizers, pairing them with live instrumentation: electric bass, guitar, piano, live drums, and strings. It is as warm and fluid an "electronic" album as you will hear all year, and it has a timeless feel: There's no reason it could not have been written and recorded 10, 20, or even 30 years ago.
For long-time fans of the UK producer, musician, and DJ, Elaenia feels both like a surprise and a logical extension of his previous singles and EPs. Rhythms are played, not looped or sampled; the album skirts the edges of the dancefloor, flitting between ambient miniatures and extended jams falling somewhere between post-rock and jazz fusion. But nothing here feels like a radical departure, which is a testament to Shepherd's gradual process of refinement. He is trained in neuroscience and epigenetics, but it would be just as easy to imagine him as a furniture builder who had spent the past six years working on a single desk. The underlying structure of his work has remained more or less constant for years, but with every recording, it gets a little smoother, a little more perfect, inching a little closer to its ideal form.
Shepherd has cited Talk Talk as an inspiration, and you can hear the influence of albums like Laughing Stock on the porous fabric of Elaenia. It's a record best heard loud, because the quiet parts can be very quiet, and its spirit lies less in melodies or even moods than in tiny details. With the exception of the cosmic jazz-leaning "Silhouettes (1,11,111)", you're left less with hummable themes than with small, passing moments: the burnished gleam of a lone Rhodes key hit hard, a faint scrap of radio static, soft notes that cling to each other like burrs.
In keeping with the transfiguration theme, the music seems to have no stable center at all. It moves like clouds in the sky, slowly and imperceptibly shape-shifting, and at any given moment, what's being played matters less than how we arrived at that point. The sense of an unbroken line is paramount, leading to the album's final thrill when it is suddenly yanked up at a 45-degree angle. In five minutes it goes from silence to jet-engine loud. Synthesizers snarl, the string section goes into overdrive, and the drum kit rolls on inexorably, explosion upon explosion. The song, "Peroration Six", is the only one where you feel Shepherd and company really letting loose.  It's a revelation and a rush, a full-on "Fuck yeah!" shouted into the coming storm. The last thing we hear sounds almost like a wrong note, and then it's all simply cut short. The silence is deafening; it feels like waking up from a very heavy dream.


R&B’s weirdest—and most radical—weirdo modernizes his sound on an album that uses Auto-Tune to convey the ecstasies of love, the misery of loss, and the economic desperation of life in Trumpland.

Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune

If all Swamp Dogg was was weird, would we still care? The man born Jerry Williams Jr. found LSD and Frank Zappa in the late 1960s, and these discoveries prompted his transformation into R&B’s weirdest weirdo. He planted his freak flag on 1970’s ebulliently funky Total Destruction of Your Mind and the following year’s Rat On, with its indelible cover image of the Dogg happily riding a giant rodent. On more than 20 albums in 40 years, however, those eccentricities have led his music in fascinating directions—and they've accentuated rather than obscured his radical ideas about race, politics, and sex. His outrageousness has only intensified his outrage. The anger and despair and heartbreak and loneliness that underscore his songs have helped cement his status as one of pop’s great cult acts. As recently as 2014, he was railing against America’s history of racial oppression and erasure on an album titled The White Man Made Me Do It.
Now, he’s modernized his sound with an album called Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune. Rather than adopt the austerity of the soul revival, Swamp Dogg embraces this technology as something fresh and new, another tool he can use to get his point across and sound fabulous doing it. Producer Ryan Olson lends a hand, drawing more on his all-star ensemble Gayngs’ wiseacre R&B than on his band Poliça’s moody indie rock. Justin Vernon shows up with his Messina, a recently invented instrument that allows the singer to harmonize with himself in real time. There’s a string section. Someone named Viagra plays shakers. And everything is bathed in that sudsy wash of pitch correction.
The experiment succeeds because Swamp Dogg delivers on all three aspects of his album title: the ecstasies of love, the misery of loss, and the way Auto-Tune can be used to magnify those feelings. “I’ll Pretend” is a fairly straightforward soul number, with Swamp Dogg sing-speaking sentiments that are all the more affecting for being so mundane: “I’ll pretend you’ve gone on vacation, and you’ll be back in a week or maybe two.” The music is dank and slippery, with Texas blues legend Guitar Shorty noodling somewhere off in the distance, and the Auto-Tuned self-harmonies sound like the fevered inner monologue of a man so lonely he has to invent voices in his head just to have a little company.
The album works best when the technology evokes abject isolation. A cover of “Answer Me, My Love,” made famous by Nat King Cole in the ’50s, chops and screws an orchestra to punctuate Swamp Dogg’s appeal to a lost love, while a song actually titled “Lonely” warps a tight R&B combo of piano and sax as though it’s a bleary memory from the early ’60s. “You can make your mouth say you love me, but it don’t have to mean a thing,” Swamp Dogg declares on “$$$ Huntin’,” a song about unemployment. The words are slathered in Auto-Tune, but that only heightens the painful resonance of this Trumpland blues about hard times in America, a track both boisterous in its boasts and angry at how a bad economy forces you to prioritize money over love. “This is not a joke,” he testifies.
Despite the complexity and insight it offers in its lyrics, the jumbled rhythms on “$$$ Huntin’” trip up any groove the song might otherwise achieve. Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune often loses its footing at moments like this, when the tempo picks up. “I’m Coming With Lovin’ on My Mind” will remind you that chillwave was spectacularly unfunky, and there’s nothing sexy about “Sex With Your Ex.” All that technology just gets in the way of what should’ve been a satin-sheeted slow jam, turning Swamp Dogg’s argument—that fucking is a legitimate and meaningful way of connecting with another human being—into a banal punchline.
The album concludes with what may be its most divisive track, a cover of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust.” The tune is older than 76-year-old Swamp Dogg himself, but in this version, the music sounds like a perverted Disney soundtrack, all shimmering starbursts, discordant strings, and gritty bass throbs. Yet Swamp Dogg sings it like it’s a stone R&B classic, rather than the stale standard presented on so many blah American Songbook albums. Carmichael recorded the song in 1927, when he was in his late 20s; here, it’s recast as a heavy-hearted, late-in-life reverie, the testimony of a man left only with memories. “Love is now the stardust of yesterday, the music of the years gone by,” Swamp Dogg sings. It’s an intriguing closing sentiment for an artist who has rarely sounded so rooted in the here and now.


The Danny Brown collective’s new album is a solid extension of their brand of gully Detroit music delivered with a crooked snarl.

TV62

Detroit’s Bruiser Brigade collective, led by Danny Brown, got their name from a hidden team power-up in a video game. In the 2004 title X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse, you create a four-person unit from a wide selection of characters to defeat the titular villain. The name of one of those teams—composed of mutants Wolverine, Rogue, Colossus, and Juggernaut—appealed to Brown and a handful of members, and it eventually stuck. Bruiser Brigade has since proven to be an apt name for the collective, especially in a world where Brown regularly leaks songs via the game-oriented streaming service Twitch. Their music is confrontational and challenging, obliterating the line between hard-bitten street raps and hazy abstraction until they all become points on the same Cerebro map.
TV62, the group’s latest compilation and the first to be released through the recently founded Bruiser Brigade Records, funnels this formula through the group’s first stab at a loose concept project. A fuzzy ad for WGPR-TV—a Detroit TV station that was also the first Black-owned television station in the United States—opens the album before Danny and a handful of Bruiser Brigade members are heard telling jokes and laughing in the background. The songs don’t have a narrative throughline, but the intent is clear: the Bruisers are as Detroit as Rockports and Cartiers, and they’re here to rap through any wall you put in front of them. There are a few surprises and left turns, but TV62 is a solid extension of their brand of gully Detroit music delivered with a crooked snarl.
Across the project, each member firmly establishes their purpose within the squad. J.U.S. and Fat Ray are the hard-nosed soldiers giving clear-eyed status reports. Newcomer Bruiser Wolf uses a disarming amount of punchlines to portray the drug game in vivid, cartoonish detail. ZelooperZ’s voice shapeshifts from bar to bar, keeping his songs unpredictable yet shackled to the ground. Producers Black Noi$e, SKYWLKR, Raphy, and J.U.S., among others, provide a diverse palette of boom-bap, mid-tempo dusty loops, and even a variation on the Detroit street rap someone like Babyface Ray would float on. All roads lead back to Danny, who’s the glue binding these seemingly disparate elements together.
That’s a staggering amount of voices and personalities crammed into 16 tracks, but it never become chaotic or overbearing. The baton is passed frequently enough to give the project a brisk pace. Eagle-eyed fans will notice that Dopehead and Kash The Kushman—two Bruiser Brigade members featured prominently on 2018’s Reign Supreme—are absent from TV62. Old and new members alike pick up the slack, elevating the project to more than just a pile of loosies cobbled together. ZelooperZ uses both ends of his vocal register to churn the maximum amount of personality out of his one song and one guest verse. Bruiser Wolf, J.U.S., and Fat Ray, meanwhile, each appear on four songs as either a headliner or guest. (All three have released full-length projects through the label within the last five months.)
The affect and wordplay that Bruiser Wolf sharpened on his stellar label debut, Dope Game Stupid, contrasts nicely with the weirder flourishes of Black Noi$e and Gulley’s production. Fat Ray, the group’s most traditional rapper, matches the shuffle of a downtempo beat on the standout “Superhero,” where he talks about cracking heads like Pepsi cans and says he has more bars than Maryland rapper Xanman. J.U.S.’s storytelling continues to impress, too—he compares life to a video game on the self-produced “Story Mode”; and on “Friends or Foe,” he stuffs several vignettes into roughly a minute over producer dream beach’s chirping synths. Though nearly every featured artist has at least one song that could go, the concise runtimes keep the action moving.
Naturally, Danny Brown’s songs connect all corners of TV62. He’s larger than life like Bruiser Wolf, isn’t afraid to modulate his voice like ZelooperZ, has the anecdotal eye of J.U.S., and the stoic “don’t cross me” nature of Fat Ray. He adopts styles and powers with the ease of the X-Man Rogue, attacking different beats with varying skill sets. His voice skips across the production on “Dylon” and “Welfare,” stretching to the elastic heights of Ol’ Dirty Bastard on the latter. Brown’s four tracks embrace the whiplash in tone, from manic to somber, that fueled early work like XXX and Old; but because they’re so spread out, it’s even more surprising to hear him squawking like a character from Chowder about trapping on Greyhound buses immediately after J.U.S.’s straight-faced listing of goals on “Icewood Type Beat.”
Falling in line with the album’s intro and interspersed skits of laughter, TV62 approximates the casual chaos of late-night channel surfing. Bruiser Brigade’s chemistry and skill propel the project beyond the sum of its parts, though, standing as the closest thing to a statement the group has ever released. “Everybody want us all to win. Everybody working toward the same efforts,” Bruiser Wolf recently told Dad Bod Rap Pod of the group’s endgame. The only way they intend to get to the next level is together.

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Availing himself of his formidable array of modular-synthesizer components, the Depeche Mode songwriter indulges his darkest instincts.

The Third Chimpanzee EP

Since 1989, in and around writing the bulk of the songs recorded by Depeche Mode, Martin Gore has been slowly building a solo discography. It’s a humble side hustle comprising cover versions or, as on MG, modular-synth instrumentals, some of which originated as demos for his band’s 2013 album Delta Machine. But with Gore having no one to please but himself, he’s free to make weirder and more dynamic sounds than he would dare with the day job.
The Third Chimpanzee is his darkest—and strongest—solo work yet. The five instrumentals, all of them named after different primates, have the overdriven sting of vintage industrial, with bone-shuddering bass and the nastiest synth eruptions that he has elicited since Depeche Mode’s 1997 album Ultra. The mood is feral and erotic yet curiously comfortable, as if Gore discovered his old bondage gear in the back of a closet and found that it still fits.
Gore establishes a seamy atmosphere in the EP’s first seconds. Opening track “Howler” kicks off with a shredded bass pulse and metallic groans that gradually mesh with assorted blips to build a lumbering rhythm. By the time the main melody’s blurry, four-note shuffle kicks in, it feels like a gratifying release.
Other tracks are even more agitated. “Mandrill” stomps with an ugly sensuality evocative of former Depeche Mode tourmates Nitzer Ebb, while “Capuchin” slowly rolls with a John Carpenter-like tension. The best is “Vervet,” eight and a half minutes that glisten and creak like skintight latex. Various glassy melodies and countermelodies wind around a 4/4 thump, growing in size and intensity as the song rumbles steadily ahead.
What Chimpanzee could use is simply more music. The EP works well as a compact statement, and even in its short form it’s more fulfilling and inspired than any of the last half-dozen lengthy Depeche Mode albums. But it feels incomplete. The way “Vervet” continues to build suggests an even more explosive track to follow. Instead, Gore circles back to the beginning, reprising two minutes of “Howler”’s melody and then ending the EP there. Maybe these five tracks were all that he had in him this time around; perhaps he’s got more music ready but is parceling it out in small doses. Whatever the case, on The Third Chimpanzee Gore sounds refreshingly inspired.

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Still a child during grime’s original heyday, the Edinburgh producer approaches the genre with a collagist’s appreciation for layering, juxtaposition, and hyper-referentiality.

Insula

Joe Powers grew up 300 miles and 10 years away from the epicenter of grime. The Edinburgh producer would have been more interested in plastic blocks than tower blocks back when Deja Vu FM was transmitting from the rooftops of East London. But his debut album as Proc Fiskal is one of the most original records to emerge from the genre’s current burst of afterlife, possessing an outsider spirit all its own.
As you might expect from a musician born in the late 1990s, Powers’ introduction to grime came not through pirate radio but the flattened digital vistas of YouTube, where he discovered vintage tunes by first-wavers like Wiley and Danny Weed. Grime itself is always somewhat distant in Powers’ universe—always mediated, altered by the passage of time, or seen through a screen. Insula is a dense thicket, like an ocean gyre that’s churned a ton of colorful flotsam into an ad hoc territory of its own, isolated from its original destination. Over its 16 tracks you can make out the eski clicks and plinking 8-bit melodies of classic grime; gooey synth tones lifted from ambient music; cut-up drums reaching IDM levels of anal-retentive orderliness; and random bursts of conversation captured on Powers’ phone. “If ma dad knew what was going on he’d fucken’ eat your eyes,” squeaks an adversary on “Achiltibuie,” one of several interludes that create intimate B-roll footage for his emotional narrative.
These voices, often captured unawares, lend Insula an intimacy that’s often been missing from recent instrumental grime, much of which is tooled up for the dancefloor. Powers can do rugged instrumentals too—his first EP for Hyperdub, 2017’s The Highland Mob, was a more clinical interpretation of classic 8-bar riddims, while the recent Hello Boss EP took a detour through jungle and dub. But, as its title suggests, Insula is more introspective, a scrapbook of false memories and eavesdropped emotions.
Vintage grime is broken and rebuilt to provide the album’s basic skeleton; most of the melodies are powered by sounds from old computer software and video games like “Paper Mario” and “Pikmin,” along with an arsenal of classic grime sources like the Korg Triton and the Plugsound VST. The air is thick and alive, packed with clicks, squeaks, and whirrs, as on the 8-bit sugar-rush of “Scotch Precog” and the melancholy chimes of “Future Headache”; on these tunes, the effect is strangely akin to the hyperactive collage beats of early Four Tet and Manitoba. The nod to the past is more explicit on “A Like Ye,” a Scottish spin on Dizzee Rascal’s genre-defining “I Luv U”; elsewhere, standouts “Apple Juice” and “Dish Washing” expand the concept of eski clicks to include birdsong, helium voices, and the simple sound of breathing.
Powers has said that these songs are about “girls, depression, positivity, being unemployed, being employed [and] hating it,” among other quotidian concerns; his phone addiction also features, with social-media notification sounds providing hormonal spikes at random. On “Dopamine” he addresses his addiction through a frantic beat and twinkling keys which have a distinctly “Eastern” feel—a tribute to the historical meta-genre of sinogrime, coined by Hyperdub label boss Kode9 to describe a seam of grime tunes with vaguely Chinese-influenced melodies.
Those pretty keys appear throughout Insula in a style that also nods to the tranquil beauty of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s piano melodies. The Japanese composer has been a key influence on the current generation of grime artists, including Mr. Mitch and Yamaneko—the former taking grime into the zone of minimalist R&B and pop, the latter making connections with ambient and video-game music. Their introspective deconstructions of grime machismo are obvious forebears to Insula, but Powers has forged a sound of his own, too: scattershot and emotional, attention deficient and frantically detailed. As its filigree twists expand into every available space, Insula suggests there are still acres left to explore in this increasingly virtual territory.


Ryan Pollie's self-titled debut as Los Angeles Police Department is a pleasingly rumpled yawn of California pop, ambitious in arrangement and melody and narrow in scope, recalling the sleepy melancholia of Grizzly Bear's Yellow House in its halo-effect ambience.

Los Angeles Police Department: Los Angeles Police Department

Los Angeles Police Department

Los Angeles Police Department is a blank sign of a name, a Walmart smiley face, and Ryan Pollie, the 25-year-old who records under it, doesn't provide any hints as to how to read it—there is no detectable whiff of irony in his gorgeous, sleepy songs. If anything, he seems to be hiding behind the moniker, recalling the brief moment, three or four years ago, when indie bands stumbled upon a brief obsession with un-googleable names (Girls, Tennis, Real Estate)—that, or he just finds the name hilarious.
Pollie grew up in Philadelphia but now lives and records in Los Angeles, and his music has the sort of dreamy air that would entertain these sorts of idle fancies. His self-titled debut is a pleasingly rumpled yawn of California pop, ambitious in arrangement and melody and narrow in scope. Most of the richly arranged and spacious songs focus on the ache of being alone or the satisfaction of it. "I let her go and that was wrong," he sings on "She Came Through (Again)", the song title rounding out the story and letting you know that someone important to him is giving him second (or third) chances. "It's happening again, I can be so selfish/ But you're the only one I can be myself with," goes the chorus to "The Only One".
Pollie sings these pretty choruses about alone time in a quiet voice resembling Ira Kaplan's, the kind of plainspoken whisper often associated with public radio announcers. He strums casually, sometimes messily, on an acoustic or a lightly distorted electric, lending the songs on LAPD the sort of just-sitting-around energy that conjured the phrase "bedroom pop" into existence. You can practically shut your eyes and see the chord snaking messily around the bed sheets while he sings from a notebook.
But beneath its rumpled surface, Los Angeles Police Department isn't casual or tossed-off, as Pollie has layered all sorts of detail into his songs, which give away obsessions with painstaking craft. He's an off-handedly excellent musician who seems to be just messing around, even when he's racking up triple word scores. The drafty-ceiling melancholy and watercolor sound of Grizzly Bear's Yellow House is all over LAPD, and the way the song structures braid together like the wicker in an Amish rocking chair would probably impress Ed Droste and Daniel Rossen. "Go Down" is broken down into globular little sections, one of them a toy-marching-band fugue, that tells us Pollie has done some intense Smile studying.  On "August 31", where Pollie admits he's "getting tired of my friends," he layers himself into a stacked choir and harmonizes with himself gloriously.
LAPD is less than half an hour's worth of music—it slots neatly into a morning walk, and because it's murmured and low-key, it's easy music to make friends with without over-scrutinizing. It's a first-cup-of-coffee album, the cotton-wispy music played when people are still peeling back filters of consciousness and gathering the wherewithal to join the world again. Gloriously arranged with a late-summer-light country rock haze, LAPD is big shady tree we can sit beneath, shielding us from the real world the same way Pollie's curiously anonymous band name does for him.


Mark E. Smith’s meaty, swollen approach to garage rock may bristle fans of his early work, but the album’s little touches and turns makes this more than an average release for a legacy band.

New Facts Emerge

The Fall is a band that exists without precedent. For 40 years, they have remained the chief creative output for the mercurial and often combative vocalist/songwriter Mark E. Smith, and in that time, the Fall have fulfilled the promise of the post-punk movement that they emerged from. The project continues to move forward with an almost cavalier disregard for their past accomplishments. A look at recent setlists from the band’s live performances show that, in spite of a rich and varied discography, the oldest original material that Smith and the current incarnation of the Fall will deign to play are songs from their 2007 album Reformation Post TLC.
With the band’s contemporaries like Peter Hook and the Buzzcocks content to while away their careers reliving former glories, the Fall’s indifference to the sound that made them known is almost admirable. But it does put the band’s recent material—like their new album, New Facts Emerge—at something of a disadvantage, because anyone discovering the Fall through this or other recent releases might rightfully wonder what all the fuss is about.
That’s, in part, because Smith’s current bandmates—the solid trio of guitarist Peter Greenway, bassist Dave Spurr, and drummer Keiron Melling, one of the Fall’s longest tenured lineups at 10 years and counting—haven’t made a concerted effort to revert back to a classic Fall sound. Theirs is a meaty, swollen approach to garage rock that leaves ample room for diversions into exploratory psych and shredded rockabilly, and these moments turn out to be the best on Emerge. On “Couple Vs Jobless Mid 30’s,” the band cycles through an array of moods, from a slow ooze to a stiff-legged shuffle to a slinky surf number. On the album closer, “Nine Out of Ten,” Greenway plays a hypnotic, overdriven guitar pattern alone for almost five-and-a-half minutes.
Another potential sticking point for any Fall fan, new or longtime, is the current state of Mark E. Smith’s voice. Long gone is the untrained yet undeniably charming timbre that barked, squealed, and crooned through his band’s most prominent work; it’s been replaced by a bilious and phlegmy growl struck by age (he turned 60 in March) and many, many cigarettes. It’s not an easy sound to get used to, but on much of the Fall’s recent music, it’s clear that Smith is aware of how he sounds. He seems to take pleasure in drawing out the syllables in a word like “folderol” (“Fol De Rol”) because it sounds especially menacing when he does it—and on the same tune, he gives the phrase “homo sapien electric” the same chilling effect by raising the volume and letting the moisture in his throat rattle away. However, he does settle down as the mood strikes him: As his band rat-a-tats behind him on “Groundsboy” and “Gibbus Gibson,” he sounds vaguely sweet, like a liquored-up uncle trying to sing a ballad at the karaoke bar, holding out notes and words to their breaking point.
What truth remains in John Peel’s oft-repeated comment about his favorite band (“They are always different; they are always the same”) is Smith’s love of sound. Not just the noise that a great rock group can make, but the possibilities available in the recording process. As co-producer of Emerge (with Melling), he gets especially playful, sending the last few seconds of “Victoria Train Station Massacre” into reverse and muffling the entirety of “O! ZZTRRK Man” with his voice stuck in the recesses of the song. It’s those little touches and turns, and Smith’s larger unpredictability, that keep this album from becoming another average entry into the catalog of a respected legacy act.


Two years after their collaborative debut Step Brothers, Southern rappers Starlito and Don Trip present the for-retail sequel, a release that reveals two of the most honest writers in rap working together at maximum comfort and confidence.

Step Brothers 2

The first sound on Step Brothers 2 is Starlito arguing good-naturedly with Don Trip over which one of them should go first. (The track is song is called "Paper Rock, Scissors," suggesting how they settled the issue.)  The two rappers—Starlito from Nashville, Don Trip from Memphis—enjoy a bond unusual among solo artists and particularly unique among rappers. (I recommend reading some interviews with the two of them if you need to feel good today.) The two met in 2010, when they were both were fairly recent castoffs from major labels; Don Trip had a cup of coffee on Interscope, while Starlito submitted his talents to the ruthless Cash Money grinder for years. Both of them were in the throes of building the kind of midlevel regional careers that ensures you'll always have fans but might never have money. They clicked.
The mixtape they made, 2011's Step Brothers, took its title from the then-three-year-old Will Ferrell/John C. Reilly vehicle. "[I was drawn to] the concept of the camaraderie between two strangers that were so quirky in their own regard that they wouldn't gel with anyone else," Starlito told The Fader. It was the most popular thing either of them had ever released; fair or not, they learned the world paid more attention to them together than to either of them alone.
Other rappers might have rushed out a sequel within six months, to strike while the iron is hot. But Lito and Trip are shrewd and deliberate, which means that Step Brothers 2 is out now, two years later, and unlike its predecessor, it's available for retail. They spent money on beats from Drumma Boy, Sonny Digital, and other in-demand producers, and honed their songs and concepts. What you don't get this time around: the bottled-lightning sound of two rappers falling in love with each other's ideas in real time. What you do get: Two of the most honest writers in rap working together at maximum comfort and confidence.
As with the first Step Brothers, Lito and Trip largely don't bother with hooks. "No chorus but it's goin' on like four minutes," Starlito says wryly on "Paper, Rock Scissors," and many of these songs just go on and on, in the best and most exciting sense, both rappers dreaming up vivid phrasing and rapping for audiences of one. "My ink pen drip icicles," Don Trip says on "Paper, Rock, Scissors". "Servin, servin like we never heard of cops/ Prefer to handle my business personally -you want this work or not?" raps Starlito on "28th Song". They elbow out the beats, blotting out the empty spaces, rap for 32 bars or more; they have too much to say, and it's exhilarating.
For the friendly-competition purposes of Step Brothers 3, I'll observe that Lito gets Trip on this one, just barely. Trip makes his way from point A to B by stringing sometimes-dumb puns together, as in "Life is sweet, but still sucks, like a Sno Cone" ("4x4 Relay"), while Lito raps in gorgeously accumulating run-on sentences, dotted with musical phrasings and internal rhymes. Following along with the long "O" sounds in a stretch of rhyme like "On the low I been unfocused, I'm just hoping no one notices/ Trying to play my cards right, but things got wild as the Joker is/ The things I love I kill for, call my bluff with no poker chips/ got this chip on my shoulder which/ Brings me to this lick I'm about to hit" (from "Caesar and Brutus") points you toward the subtlety of Lito's writing, which never halts the force of his rapping.
Starlito has had a quietly triumphant year; Step Brothers 2 is his third stellar full-length of 2013. His musing, wry style has gathered resonance as he's developed as an artist, and this year, every off-the-cuff thought he shared cut to the bone. On Funerals & Court Dates from last winter, he talked ruefully about not finishing college, simply because "shit's expensive." On Cold Turkey from this summer, he told us to call our grandmother to "see how her day went. "This advice come with experience, you ain't gotta take it," he shrugged.
It's this unforced honesty he shares with Don Trip, whose biggest song, "Letter To My Son", was a powerful lament about struggling to visit his child that lingered over details like court-appointed visitation rights. His adlib is a high-pitched, braying cackle, the sound of someone's soused uncle laughing at his own off-color joke; he's a good foil for the subdued Starlito, who can get lost in his own mind occasionally. Step Brothers 2 was financed by the tour that the two rappers booked themselves, without a team of promoters. Hopefully, it will inch the career of both rappers a little further up the ladder.They deserve a dedicated cult fanbase in every major American city.


Spacemen 3’s newly reissued drone album—recorded in 1988 in the lobby of a movie theater—marked the start of the curious rise of one of the UK’s most influential indie rock bands.

Dreamweapon

On August 19, 1988, Spacemen 3 traveled down from their homes in Rugby—a manufacturing town 80 miles northwest of London—to play a show at the Watermans Arts Centre in the West London suburb of Brentford. It wasn’t even a show, really: The group was to play in the venue’s lobby, while patrons lined up to get into that evening’s screening of art-house auteur Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. Only 15 or so fans actually watched them play.
At that point, Spacemen 3 were so peripheral to British independent music that they were barely a curio. Without the support of the weekly music papers, the band was purely the preserve of psychedelic heads. No one had it in mind that they might one day rival the Smiths as one of the most profoundly influential British bands of their era.
The performance at Watermans Arts Centre was billed as “An Evening of Contemporary Sitar Music,” despite the complete absence of sitars. It consisted of Peter Kember (aka Sonic Boom) playing a single E chord, while guitarists Jason Pierce and Steve Evans picked notes around him, and Will Carruthers anchored everything on bass. That was the plan, at least; in practice, Carruthers forgot to turn on his amp. As he put it in his terrific memoir, Playing the Bass With Three Left Hands: “A monkey could have done what I had just done. A non-existent monkey could have done it.”
The 45-minute performance was recorded and served as the main attraction of Spacemen 3’s 1990 album, Dreamweapon. Superior Viaduct’s new edition, with “An Evening of Contemporary Sitar Music” augmented by three more drone pieces, is testimony to the live document’s continued allure, despite its oddly comical nature (around the 16-minute mark, you hear a voice in the background over a PA: “Ladies and gentlemen, the cinema is now open and you can take your seats for this evening’s showing of Wings of Desire.”).
“An Evening of Contemporary Sitar Music” is one of the most extreme pieces of music to find a fairly large audience. It’s not that it is confrontational, or difficult. It is just so completely unyielding. It offers no concessions to listeners, demanding they embrace the drone, or leave. Despite the lo-fidelity and the background noise— along with the PA announcements, there is clattering tableware, chatter, and a crying baby—it is beautiful, in the same way, that watching clouds rolling across the sky is beautiful. It offers no navigation points, no waystations. It is absolutely captivating because it refuses to expand. “An Evening of Contemporary Sitar Music” would have the same impact at 10 minutes, or 20, or 30. It lasts 45 minutes only because that’s how long Spacemen 3 had been hired to play.
The three other pieces on this new Dreamweapon reissue are variations on a theme: “Ecstasy Live Intro Theme” takes a single synth bass note, with a high, piercing, dentist’s drill tone sliding around the scale at the top end of the keyboard. Does it build and subside in volume? It’s genuinely hard to tell, yet there are places when, for no apparent reason, it suddenly feels startlingly more intense, anxious, and claustrophobic. It is, at times, verging on terrifying in its physicality. “Ecstasy in Slow Motion” is more of the same, but less intense. (Both are close cousins of “Ecstasy Symphony,” from the band’s 1987 album The Perfect Prescription.) The concluding “Spacemen Jam” is the filler here: 15 minutes of guitar doodles that are precisely as interesting as you would expect from a couple of young men messing about on their guitars with a tape recorder running.
Had the voiceless drone been the sole interest of Spacemen 3, then it’s likely that Dreamweapon would never have seen the light of day. But in November 1988, Spacemen 3 released the more traditional psych-rock explosion of “Revolution,” the song that changed everything for them. “Revolution” became UK indie’s ubiquitous theme of autumn 1988, hailed by the critics, and featured on television. The album Playing With Fire, released in February 1989, confirmed their new status. Suddenly all the mythology Spacemen 3 had built up for themselves—typified by their slogan, “Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to”—stopped being the self-aggrandizement of unknown provincials and became mission statements of a major band. They spent most of 1989 slowly unravelling, finally officially disbanding in 1991 after the release of Recurring, their fourth and final studio album. Their whirlwind trajectory only contributed to the mystique, prompting an array of live albums and unofficial and semi-official releases that started in 1990.
More than any of their contemporaries, Spacemen 3’s legacy depends on that elusiveness, the sense of them as voyagers through a psychedelic netherworld. They were a band who promised to open doors, and who did so for scores of bands who followed—John Dwyer’s Thee Oh Sees and the whole of the San Francisco psych scene, the Warlocks, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, the Black Angels, through to the War on Drugs and pretty much anyone else with a taste for hallucinogens and the drone. What Dreamweapon reveals is how quotidian the origins of that mythology were: four blokes earning a few quid playing for people who weren’t even listening. As the silent bassist Carruthers wrote of the performance: “To this day, I’m not sure if it was art or not.”


If you were trying to explain IDM to someone who had heard neither the term nor the music categorized as ...

Spokes

If you were trying to explain IDM to someone who had heard neither the term nor the music categorized as such (i.e. 99% of the populace), you could do worse than to put on a Plaid record. With a history stretching back to the formative days of post-techno, including a contribution Warp Records' seminal Artificial Intelligence compilation (the duo was then working with Ken Downie as Black Dog Productions, but their track was released under the name I.A.O.), Plaid strikes me as the prototypical IDM act. Aphex Twin and Autechre, both of whom were also featured on AI, have developed too unpredictably; their records can go anywhere. Plaid, on the other hand, continue to refine and develop their early sound.
But back to the hapless no-IDM-knowin' subject of our experiment: What would he call Plaid if we were to throw on a record? My guess is "techno." "Techno" is in its widespread usage among casual music fans is a catchall term for any danceable electronic music. Depeche Mode were called techno when I was in college, back before anyone had heard of Derrick May, and when Eminem dismissed Moby because "nobody listens to techno" only serious music heads questioned the accuracy of his label. That someone without an interest in electronic music subgenres (which, again, is almost everybody) might describe Plaid as such is ironic because, in fact, they are much closer to the ideal of sleek Detroit techno of the Belleville Three than most of their Warp roster brethren. Unlike Aphex or Ae, Plaid have never been particularly interested in texture in the micro sense; they're quite content to let their synths sound the way "futuristic" synths sounded in the late 80s and early 90s. Plaid has always been more about the rhythmic and arrangement possibilities of digital music, which puts them closer to where the music started.
In the past Plaid sprinkled their sober post-techno with playful experiments and excursions into the rhythms and sonic signifiers of cultures not usually associated with their kind of music (Latin America, the Far East); with Spokes, Plaid offers their most focused vision yet. A consistent mood is carried through most of these ten tracks, and it can be characterized with words familiar to people who listen to a lot of IDM: reflective and mysterious, with an occasional tension verging on paranoia. Beats are everywhere, but they're never danceable nor do they seem to be the focus of any specific track. Instead, percussion here mostly serves the traditional function of marking time while the swirl of synths builds and develops.
The interplay of the sounds on Spokes is occasionally striking. The rapid, overlapping sequences of "Crumax Rins" lock together to form a constantly shifting tapestry of sound, the sonic equivalent to a vibrating field of colors that transforms completely every time you blink. The acid arpeggios that mark the lead-in to "Upona" have a similar effect, introducing the world of the track as a place of speed and random twitches, where the vibrations just beneath the surface of awareness are disorienting. The opening bass throbs of "Marry" suggest a celestial scene-- some sort of deep space docking station, perhaps. But then the peppy (if malnourished) drums kick in, and the focus turns to the swirl of synths that lag behind the beat and coagulate into a bland but pretty melody that, unfortunately, doesn't seem a galaxy away from Mannheim Steamroller.
Indeed, there are some dull moments on Spokes, but plucking tracks from the record and turning them around under the magnifying glass probably misses what Plaid intended (this one seems meant to be listened to in succession). For my money, the highlights on the album come during the tracks that depart from the album's script. "Get What You Gave" has pads that sound like an electronic steel drum carrying the melody, and that combined with the polyrhythmic stop/start beat evoke a light, airy Latin feel. And then "B Born Droid" is like a cyborg waltz, with a patient, shuffling gait and a minor key synth lead. These standouts are open and full of possibility amid tracks that seem content to work within narrowly defined parameters established years ago. Plaid do both very well, mind you, but I find myself wishing the ratios were reversed.


The Faint released their debut album Sine Sierra nearly twenty years ago, and if that makes you feel old, imagine how they must’ve felt when they went on hiatus following 2008’s Fasciination. Their first album since reuniting, Doom Abuse, isn’t so much an argument for the Faint’s continued relevancy as it is for the potency of their real-time nostalgia.

Doom Abuse

When the Faint released their debut album Sine Sierra, Conor Oberst was a band member and they were known as Norman Bailer. That was nearly twenty years ago, and if that makes you feel old, imagine how the Faint must’ve felt when they went on hiatus following 2008’s Fasciination. For sullen teens who thought Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine were for jocks, the Faint's angsty, political electro-punk could've seemed like the most exciting shit imaginable, and by the time they reunited to play festivals in 2012, everyone was free to admit “Agenda Suicide” kinda kicked ass. A new album wasn’t part of the deal, but if we’re going to get one anyway, at least the title of Doom Abuse shows their heads are in the right place. They’re not here for new recruits.
Of course, that means the Faint still have to make Faint-like music, and they can’t claim any new insight to our political and socioeconomic problems. Regardless if Todd Fink has opinions on the NSA and the Crimea, as far as he’s concerned, 2014 might as well be 2004—or 1994, or 1984. During the anti-everything recitation of “Animal Needs”, Fink nasally intones, “We don’t need soap/ We don’t need straws/ We don’t need software to tell us we’re lost.” He also tells us we don’t need toilets, so...shots fired, American Standard?
The level of discourse on Doom Abuse will hit the spot for people who still think Desaparecidos’ political views are a little too nuanced. Who knows if Fink even believes half the shit he says, but his functional nihilism is an accessory not all that different than pleather pants or Commie-chic album covers: disaffection is sexy, so whether you’re batting your guyliner or rolling your eyes, it’s all part of the same outfit. As he sings at one point, “Evil voices lie when they say you’re in love!”, proving that even coupling is inextricable from shadow-government involvement.
To the Faint’s eternal credit, their sacrifice of any modicum of "cool" means the songs on Doom Abuse more fun-silly than flat-out dumb. It’s even more Faint-like than the exceedingly sui generis Fasciination, so at the least they can be forgiven for giving the people what they want. Even if they’re subject to fairly brazen ripoffs__—__there’s at least twenty different Cure riffs that are similar to the one that drives “Mental Radio”, and the XTRMNTR JR industrial agit-prop of “Animal Needs” is pretty much a verbatim copy of Primal Scream's “Swastika Eyes.”
Doom Abuse is most enjoyable when its superficial slapstick is at its most pronounced, which is most of the time__—__it’s uptempo, it’s unashamedly hooky, Fink shouts a lot, and it’s over before you can take the time to pick apart study hall manifestos like “Unseen Hand” or “Dress Code”, a 100-second shoutdown against, uh, dress codes. Doom Abuse isn’t so much an argument for the Faint’s continued relevancy as it is for the potency of their real-time nostalgia.


Australian producer Jordon Alexander threads rabble-rousing rave and late-night ruminations into a debut that purports to pay tribute to dance music history but has remarkably little to say.

What I Breathe

For an artist who came up under the dewy umbrella of lo-fi house, Australia’s Mall Grab has never been a particularly subtle producer. His early tracks were rudimentary affairs marked by blocky keys and classic Roland drum sounds squished through soupy tape-compression effects. He looked to memes for song titles; for hooks, he relied on pitched-down vocals that nodded to chopped and screwed hip-hop. One big early single, 2015’s “Guap,” invoked the dusty hip-house that Galcher Lustwerk had already been making for a couple of years.
As clubland trends have evolved, Mall Grab—aka 28-year-old Newcastle native Jordon Alexander—has moved beyond the lo-fi house template, but the haze in his music hasn’t cleared so much as congealed into a thick, oppressive murk. He’s beefed up his sound, becoming a reliable purveyor of big-room club fodder. Full of super-sized kick drums and relentless hi-hats, his drum programming packs a wallop; so do his synths, which flash back to the rave stabs of yore. His vocal samples aren’t much more nuanced. Part of a long tradition of songs sampling musicians talking about music, “Sheer Fuck-Offness” layers in an interview of a Newcastle DJ describing “the sheer fuck-offness” of a record; “Blood Flood” loops a muttered “Blood floods your eye” over apocalyptic synths and pile-driving drums.
At the same time, under his own name, Alexander has been quietly releasing music that’s less club-focused, more melancholy, and more stylistically diverse: atmospheric electro, beatless IDM, and even sad-sack bedroom pop halfway between shoegaze and Sebadoh. On What I Breathe, his debut album as Mall Grab, he brings the various sides of his musical identity together: bangers and ballads, atmospheric pads and hammering kicks, rabble-rousing rave and late-night ruminations.
He lays out his range in the first few tracks. The opening “Hand in Hand Through Wonderland” is twinkling electro, buoyant pads bristling with pitter-pat hi-hats. “I Can Remember It So Vividly” is a rollicking, 140 bpm floor-filler with a rubbery bassline and an insistent groove. And “Love Reigns” is a big, ebullient, ’90s-indebted piano-house anthem designed to elicit giddy smiles and molly-water tears at summer festivals. The first big curveball appears four tracks in, on “Understand,” where Turnstile’s Brendan Yates lends his sandpapery bark to a moody electro track that aims for pathos but ends up sounding more like Basement Jaxx’s “Where’s Your Head At” with all the fun sucked out.
Here and across the album, Alexander’s synths are the most compelling aspect of his music, telegraphing outsized emotions with a silvery flick of the waveform. But his drums come up wanting; too often, his programming feels formulaic, a way of filling in the empty space in the mix. In “Patience,” the steady hi-hats steamroll all the subtlety out of Nia Archives’ trip-hop-like vocals. In the hardstyle-influenced “Metaphysical,” flayed hi-hats and Amen breaks compete for attention with overblown bass and a shouted vocal sample that’s looped ad nauseum, as so many of his vocal samples are. Rather than compellingly heavy, it just feels leaden.
Alexander has described What I Breathe as a love letter to the dance-music legacy of London, where he’s lived for the past seven years. But beyond a handful of jungle breaks and a joint feature by grime MCs D Double E and Novelist, nothing here feels intrinsic to UK club history. Genuflecting to what Simon Reynolds has called the “hardcore continuum” is practically de rigueur in certain corners of UK-inspired dance music these days; What I Breathe doesn’t say anything new about the tradition that runs from the UK’s discovery of acid house through breakbeat hardcore, jungle, dubstep, and grime. Alexander simply gathers these sounds around him, badges of fealty to his adopted hometown.
There’s one more featured vocalist on the album: Alexander himself. He brings a mewling falsetto to “Without the Sun,” a bittersweet UK bass/house hybrid that vaguely resembles Larry Heard and Mr. White’s “The Sun Can’t Compare”; fusing the atmospheres of the Cure’s Wish with brittle grime production, the closing “Lost in Harajuku” is more unexpected, but Alexander’s understated monotone sounds reluctant to take the spotlight, and while the lyrics are hard to make out, the glimmer of Lost in Translation-like disorientation that sneaks through fails to elicit much sympathy. Taking a feature on his own album comes off as a kind of rhetorical trick, a suggestion that this, at least, is a glimpse of Jordon Alexander at his most personal. The problem is, he’s not a compelling enough presence to hold his own. Seven years into a career spent flipping familiar references into crowd-pleasing shapes, it’s still not clear who Alexander really is, beyond the sum of his influences.


The first in a trio of new mini-albums from Belle and Sebastian finds the Glaswegian indie-pop greats speaking to our times. At its best, it grows into a divine six-minute prog-disco suite.

Belle and Sebastian: How to Solve Our Human Problems, Pt. 1

How to Solve Our Human Problems, Pt. 1

This past summer at Montreal’s Osheaga Festival, I watched a 40-foot-tall Stuart Murdoch merrily play bongos on a Jumbotron—which is a collection of words that, 20 years ago, would’ve been impossible to string together, like trying to connect magnets with the same polarity. Back then, the prospect of the notoriously secretive Belle and Sebastian even performing live—let alone enthusiastically in front of thousands of people tossing around oversized corporate-branded beach balls—seemed to be as much of a soft-focus fantasy as the misty-eyed daydreams cataloged in their achingly intimate songs. But not only did Belle and Sebastian gradually blossom into one of the most generous and gregarious acts on the festival circuit, their records have become increasingly engineered to ensure the party rages on. By 2015’s Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, the band had strayed far enough from their bedsit-indie roots that they could title a single about dancefloor seduction “The Party Line” and—thanks to its synth-glossed, four-on-the-floor beat—have it work as a double entendre.
But where Belle and Sebastian have ultimately decided it’s less fun to be the new Smiths than the old Chic, they’re at least revisiting some of their early battle-plans. Between now and February, the band will release three mini-albums under the banner of How to Solve Our Human Problems, a strategy that hearkens back to the trifecta of stellar EPs they released over the course of 1997. According to Murdoch, it’s a way for the band to bust out of the typical album/tour/repeat cycle—not to mention a savvy ploy for a veteran act to linger in our newsfeeds at a time when even the most hyped new albums seem to drop out of the conversation in mere weeks. (As he recently lamented to Stereogum, “I think these days when an LP comes out, it’s kind of disappointing. Nothing seems to happen.”) Rather than hunker down in some expensive studio with a producer and crank out an album on deadline, the band worked casually on their own clock in their native Glasgow, enlisting outside help only when the mood struck. As they did with those ’97 releases, they selected three flagship singles from their cache of recordings and built discrete EPs around each.
On the first volume of How to Solve Our Human Problems, the selected showroom model is “We Were Beautiful,” a song that inherits Peacetime’s bright synth sheen, but feels infected by the anxiety and malaise that has overcome the world since that album’s release. The skittering breakbeat immediately sets a more tense tone, as Murdoch veers from general expressions of depression (“I was black as I could be”) to the very specific feeling of inadequacy that afflicts you when walking through a gentrifying neighborhood full of fashionable people. (“We were in the urban scene, where they grind the coffee bean, where the women are oblique/And the boys are paper thin, ragged beards upon their chin, we were on the outside looking in.”) But a buoyant brass fanfare can’t quite elevate an undercooked, repetitious chorus that prevents the song from joining the pantheon of B&S best singles.
And that’s okay—because you’ll still be buzzing from the preceding track, which ranks among the greatest songs the band has produced this millennium. A rare Stevie Jackson/Murdoch duet, “Sweet Dew Lee” sees the band more subtly absorb the influence of ’70s dance music in a divine six-minute prog-disco suite that bounces laser-beamed synths off its glitter-ball grooves. Its lustrous aura obscures an increasingly tense tug-of-war between Jackson’s starry-eyed romantic idealist and Murdoch’s bitter-truth realist, who cautions, “Reconcile yourself to knowing/That glamour fades as time moves on.” It’s a line that Murdoch could very well be singing to himself, given that Belle and Sebastian’s days as indie rock’s most mysterious and feverishly analyzed band are far in the rearview and they’re now lodged firmly in their steady-as-she-goes middle-age phase.
But if Sarah Martin’s country-soul serenade “Fickle Season” is precisely the sort of breather ballad we’ve come to expect in the No. 3 slot on a given Belle and Sebastian record, “The Girl Doesn’t Get It” shows they’re still masters of sly subversion, as they twist a breezy, Eno-esque motorik-pop tune into the world’s peppiest protest song. What begins as a typically Murdochian portrait of a disillusioned, lovelorn young woman gradually zooms out to reveal the omnipresent geopolitical strife weighing on her psyche: “They’ll take profits over the people/They won’t make the country great again/Just as long as it’s white and wealthy/Fear the immigrant workforce!/Fear the kids raised on the internet!” Belle and Sebastian’s music always quietly railed against the bastards—the ex-lovers, the priests, the schoolyard bullies—that keep us down. These days, the bastards are bigger and more powerful, and so Belle and Sebastian project their voices all the more vigorously.
But if “The Girl Doesn’t Get It” sees the band successfully apply its insular lyrical perspective to current affairs, the EP’s closing track betrays the pitfalls of their carefree, hermetic recording process. The textbook definition of a meandering B-side jam, “Everything Is Now,” almost shares a title with Arcade Fire’s recent album/single, but it’s actually more like this EP’s “Infinite Content”—i.e., an elaborate set-up to a simple, dispiriting pun. Over a hippy-dippy, slow-clapped ’68-Beatles groove, and no small amount of organ noodling, the band repeatedly chant in unison, “everything is now/everything is different, now” before undercutting the celebratory mood by switching that last part to “everything’s indifferent, now.” It’s an alternately cheeky and weary riposte from a band that still obviously cherishes an intimate connection with their fans (to the point of featuring them on the new EPs’ cover photos), but is all too aware of how tenuous those connections can be in the age of perpetual distraction.
Twenty years ago, the release of a new Belle and Sebastian EP would send stateside fans rushing to their local record store and hounding the clerks to order an import copy; failing that, they’d have to hassle a relative in the UK to drop a copy in the post. Now, they can just drag and drop it into a Spotify folder along with the other 50 records they’ve dragged and dropped this week. Accordingly, How to Solve Our Human Problems, Part 1 is the sound of a band deploying its full arsenal of bells and whistles to seize your attention, even when the songs themselves aren’t always strong enough to retain the grip.