On an ambitious three-disc project, the violinist collaborates with a wide array of bright, younger composers, crystallizing a new vision for American classical music.

This Is America

What is American classical music? Long before there was a United States of America, classical music took shape in the courts and cathedrals of Europe, where its role became like that of religion: setting the weave of history and myth that bound a people together and stirred their highest feelings. This was as strange a fit for a 17th century land with no perimeter and no past as it is for a 21st century one with no center and, we fear, no future. We might as well ask what America is. Yet the new album by Brooklyn Rider violinist Johnny Gandelsman, with original music by a cornucopia of younger composers in the United States, sounds like one clarion answer to both riddles.
Set in the European mold, American classical came into its own by the 19th century, mineralized by folk. In the 20th, as the U.S. became a more cosmopolitan haven for modernists fleeing fascism—imagine that—American classical fatted itself on homegrown vernaculars like blues, jazz, and rock, producing innovations like minimalism and its long postmodern tail. Meanwhile, technology was changing it, filling it with electronic sounds and global influences and shattering it through electronic conduits. Culture was also changing it, exposing its colonial underpinnings and sapping its white male ramparts. This, circa 2008, is where Brooklyn Rider entered the scene. The 21st-century inheritors of Kronos Quartet, they’re celebrated for commissioning and collaborating almost rampantly, around the world, with classical, jazz, folk, and pop musicians. The string quartet’s internationalist perspective also shines in Gandelsman’s American saga.
For the three-disc album This Is America, Gandelsman sought new works from more than two dozen composers, most of whom picked up institutional funding in their regions. While all of them live in the U.S., they represent a global commonwealth of trained but unbound traditions. The marquee name is Terry Riley, the soul of American minimalism, whose piece for five-string violin is playful and chatty, as is his priceless composer’s note. (“Having nothing particular in mind I began.”) But, surprisingly for a record from this milieu, the churning minimalism of Riley and Philip Glass is hardly the default mode. Instead, a sterner, more sculptural modernism is the baseline, though much of the standout fare departs from it.
The opening disc is bookended by its most striking moments. The first, by the Brazilian American composer-pianist Clarice Assad, is called “O,” which stands for “oxygen.” The music was composed in response to the early pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, events that lend many of the pieces tones of mourning or healing. The titular vowel hangs in gauzy swags of reverb and delay as Gandelsman’s tremolos burrow up, his bow darting and scurrying in the dark. Compare that to the clear, sorrowing style of Rhiannon Giddens, the classical-folk crossover star who revived Black string band music with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Her “New to the Session” closes the disc, which has traversed a sort of experimental operetta by Rhea Fowler and Micaela Tobin and an atonal noise piece by Nick Dunston, with a hint of Irish fiddling.
The second disc includes two songs—one by the storied New York cellist and singer Marika Hughes, and one by the Diné poet and scholar Bojan Louis—in which Gandelsman sings and plays tenor guitar, and he’s got a solid Andrew Bird thing going on, including whistling. This clears the way for the likes of Tomeka Reid, a cellist-composer who’s deep in the Chicago scene, who wrote an arresting one-sided conversation in “Rhapsody.” And Angélica Negrón’s “A través del manto luminoso” is the most ravishing piece in the project. A Puerto Rican-born electro-acoustic composer who also fuses dream pop and dembow in the Brooklyn indie band Balún, Negrón set out to sonically translate a certain photo of stars reflected on the ocean; Gandelsman’s violin and her brilliant, beating electronic tones seem to meld into one resonant body, like an inky, starry singing bowl.
There are more peaks on the third disc, especially Tyshawn Sorey’s crumbling harmonic corridors and the four blissful movements of Anjna Swaminathan’s “Surrender to the Adventure,” which warms the violin with tape manipulation and cozy narration, and would make a fine standalone EP. While This Is America’s extreme variety might outstrip even the most adventurous taste, the coexistence of all these points of view seems like part of the point. So does the fact that the artistry of Gandelsman, a guide through this sprawling labyrinth of tonal systems and difficult techniques, almost washes away in the collective clamor.
The 21st-century canon, unwritten and maybe unwritable, already seems characterized by its multiplicity, its razing of toxic roots, and its anxieties about whether they run too deep for anything but technique to be saved. Yet a new paradigm, at once productively modern and elementally historical, may be coming into view. In Brooklyn Rider’s times, classical music would still look to America’s past for inspiration, but with a more critical eye and a fuller chorus of voices, revealing what others had missed or ignored, seeking unity in individuality. This is the insight and vision that Gandelsman crystallizes, and This Is America stirs feelings about our country that are almost hard to recognize: pride, hope, and the simple relief of consensus reality. The violin strings can never touch, but the drawn bow makes them vibrate as one.


Yves Tumor’s latest album is a benchmark in experimental music. It is searing and borderless, music that is aware of oppressive confinement, and music with an intoxicating urge to be free.

Safe in the Hands of Love

You can ask to be known and you can resist being defined all in the same breath. This is the demand at the center of Yves Tumor’s primal, beautiful, and beseeching new album, Safe in the Hands of Love. At no point in its duration do you have a clear sense of where, exactly, you are. Tumor has been identified as a noise artist but has released ambient tracks and made grooving songs that could pass for R&B and pop. Safe in the Hands of Love embraces it all. Few albums that feel this big wander so freely between genres and fewer still manage to invoke such intense emotions while remaining so inviting. It’s Tumor’s first project since signing to Warp, and it dwarfs everything the artist has released by several orders of magnitude. The leap is so audacious it’s disorienting.
Tumor seems to savor invoking disorientation. “A lot of people are confused about my actual whereabouts, but that’s OK,” Tumor once said when asked a simple question: “Where do you live?” But there is no apparent desire to trick anyone: If anything, Tumor’s evasiveness stems from something more like self-preservation. There is implied violence, after all, in the language of definition, in “boxing in” and “pinning down.” Definition can be something that happens to you, a way of robbing you of selfhood. Incipient violence, symbolic and literal, both as a lure and threat, seethes in Tumor’s music. There is palpable menace in the mix—the drum hits on “Economy of Freedom” feel like something already dead hitting the floor. The noise collage of “Hope in Suffering (Escaping Oblivion & Overcoming Powerlessness)” buzzes at the edges with what sounds like the sampled sounds of carrion flies. When pure moments of beauty arise, like the cello solo in “Recognizing the Enemy,” you almost fear for them.
Everywhere on Safe, violence mingles uneasily with delicacy—Tumor’s own voice switches from a wraithlike falsetto to a yell to a menacing chant. All of it feels too close—mixed too close in our headphones, clipping into distortion, but also too close for comfort, the massive sounds looming over the delicate ones. “Have you looked outside? I’m scared for my life,” Tumor pleads on “Noid.” This is music aware of oppressive confinement, and music with an intoxicating urge to be free.
Tumor’s music sounds freer to move than most, and it prowls fearlessly around every corner of the record store. There are moments here with the brooding tang of ’90s alt-rock. “Hope in Suffering” feels like the first half of a Prurient album submerged in the first half of Loveless. “Honesty” suggests a Boyz II Men vocal trapped beneath a frozen lake. The only real thread linking all the disparate genres is Tumor’s sensuous approach to sound: Tumor produces sounds from equipment that feel like individual human lives. Each one has a story, a reason to exist. The “psssh” of the snare on “Honesty,” the way it is echoed by a deep-dub ping—those two sounds alone, and the loving way Tumor frames and surrounds them, suggests a drama worth pursuing all by itself.
The lyrics are full of references to ripping, cracking, screaming, breaking, gouging; pain and torture. But they also brim with references to love—love lost, love held for a time, love that sounds like a threat (“I wanna wrap around you”), love that renders the narrators unrecognizable to themselves. Transcendent feelings are forever one hairsbreadth from annihilating ones—“Some call it torture, baby I enjoy it,” goes a line on “Licking an Orchid.”
These words feel searingly personal, but in a way that cannot be tracked to a person: Tumor has arranged them a bit like confessions dropped into a box, untethered to a central character. “I’m trying not to lose my only baby girl to a toxic world/I crawled back in our mother’s womb to find a piece of you,” guest vocalist James K wails on “Licking an Orchid.” The overpowering “Lifetime,” driven by rolling live-tracked drums, is pinned in place by the admission: “I miss the good old days out in Biscayne, I miss my brothers.” The specificity is almost overwhelming. Whose brothers, and what happened in Biscayne? You get the sense, maybe, that Tumor is carrying around other people’s secrets, and that Safe in the Hands of Love is so cavernous-sounding, in part, to accommodate them.
Holding all of this together is a stew of feelings—dread, sensuousness, ecstasy, terror—that melt into a mood so pungent and pervasive that people who grew up inside all kinds of different music will be beckoned towards it. Ambient electronic, dream-pop, experimental noise, ’90s R&B, even late-’90s alt-rock—Tumor’s music is fluid and generous enough to contain it all. “It means so much to me when I can’t recognize myself,” Tumor sings on “Recognizing the Enemy.” This could be the voice of someone depersonalized by trauma, unable to piece together their identity from the wreckage. Or it could be the cry of liberation of someone who has finally slipped free of selfhood's constrictions. Genre, Tumor seems to say, is a body; if you feel imprisoned inside one, you can seek freedom.


Now 84, the celebrated novelist, poet, and playwright presents his first collection of original songs. These sweetly earnest and stirringly beautiful pieces reflect a life immersed in jazz.

The Hands of Grace

Ishmael Reed has been renowned as a novelist, poet, and playwright for more than half a century, yet his progress in the music world came more slowly. Introduced to jazz music in the front room of a bootlegger’s house at age four, Reed has been immersed in the genre his whole life. He would later tell Max Roach that bebop kept him and his friends out of reform school because they were too busy listening to records to get into trouble. Reed first recorded in the early 1980s, performing vocals and recitations alongside Conjure, a supergroup of jazz musicians—including Allen Toussaint, Olu Dara, Taj Mahal, and David Murray, among others—that Kip Hanrahan, of American Clavé Records, had assembled to arrange music for Reed’s poetry. “But I wanted to apply my ‘sensibility’ to more than songwriting,” Reed later said. “I found that lyrics ranked second to music, and though I had written the songs and poetry, the famous performers had a higher status than the writers.” And so, at the age of 60, he began to study jazz piano seriously. In 2007, a cancer diagnosis motivated him to assemble an ad hoc group and record a collection of jazz standards, For All We Know. Fifteen years later, he finally steps out as a composer on The Hands of Grace, a sweetly earnest and stirringly beautiful collection of jazz tunes for piano and ensemble.
Reed began composing out of necessity when his recent play The Slave Who Loved Caviar was short on funds. The titular slave is Jean-Michel Basquiat; Andy Warhol is the man who supplied the caviar. Rather than the usual story that casts Warhol as Basquiat’s mentor, here the Pop Art icon vampirically feeds off young Basquiat’s growing fame to prop up his own faltering career. For Reed, Basquiat is a Black genius killed by the art world and blamed for his own murder. Four of the tracks here are elegiac piano compositions that soften his characters’ angry polemics on Warhol’s complicity in Basquiat’s early death, while the rest of the album consists of occasional pieces written for Reed’s friends and family.
In a text accompanying the album, the poet Fred Moten compares Reed to Charles Mingus, another musician who came late to the piano; Reed’s approach is as refreshing as Mingus’ on Mingus Plays Piano, with a playfulness that demonstrates a deep fondness for the instrument. Reed’s style is casual and unpolished as he adds his own twists to carefully studied jazz techniques. “Bells of Basquiat” slowly teeters back and forth between two notes that are supported by sparse chords, while “When Beautiful Boys Drown in the Nile They Become Gods” is grounded in a straightforward exploration of the pentatonic scale. “What I Hear When I View Basquiats” works itself up into a ragtime rhythm before faltering again and again, as if each painting generates a joy that quickly dissipates as Reed draws his eyes across a museum wall. In the play, these compositions color the plot of Basquiat’s life in the 1980s, but on record they work wonderfully as a series of simple, expressive vignettes.
Elsewhere, Reed’s daughter Tennessee and his partner, Carla Blank, make the album a family affair. “How High the Moon” features Tennessee reciting her poem of the same name. In a wry play on the jazz standard, she describes the moon in scientific detail over Reed’s piano and Roger Glenn’s flute, calculating the moon’s altitude—238,900 miles—like an uncommonly didactic Beat poet. Blank’s violin on “Steve Cannon Blues” is among the highlights, riffing on Reed’s piano in a way that suggests an ongoing household conversation. Two of the most moving pieces, “Anniversary Song for Carla” and “Timothy,” are respectively dedicated to Blank and to Reed’s late daughter Timothy. Again by himself at the piano for “Anniversary Song,” Reed plays a brief and bittersweet composition whose melody is tentative but determined, as if we’re hearing him rehearse for the anniversary party through the walls. “Timothy” is a slow, stately memorial to Reed’s daughter that fades out in a series of dissonant left-hand chords. The last words on the album are a voicemail from Timothy: “It’s beautiful outside today, and that’s all I wanted to say.”
The Hands of Grace is a uniquely personal glimpse into Reed’s world. Throughout, we can hear chairs squeak, papers rustle, and a slight static pervade, as if we’re listening to an audio diary meant only for Reed and his family. Far more than a theatrical soundtrack filled out by stray pieces, this is a rare, private document of a lifetime investment in jazz coming to fruition. For Reed to pick up composition so late in life is remarkable; that his debut is this intimate and assured is a gift.


Moonlighting from their gig in the National, the Dessner brothers deftly transpose their rock acumen to a subtle and detailed film score.

Bryce Dessner / Aaron Dessner: Transpecos OST

Transpecos OST

Bryce Dessner is, if only to those attuned to the new-classical world, no longer just a rock’n’roll tourist in the world of major orchestral commissions. For the past five or so years, Dessner has premiered a few major works every year and demonstrated a breadth of musical vision that goes well beyond the expected post-minimalist gambits of the “crossover classical” composer. To the art-music world, a Deutsche Grammaphon recording of a multi-movement orchestral suite might have signalled that Dessner meant business. To a larger chunk of music fans, it might have been his involvement with the Ryuichi Sakamoto-helmed soundtrack for Oscar shoe-in The Revenant* *that singled that this classical stuff wasn’t just a dalliance.
In collaboration with his brother and bandmate Aaron, Bryce has now created intimate and modest music for an even more intimate and modest movie. There are similarities between Transpecos and The Revenant: like Alejandro Iñárritu’s unsparing epic, director Greg Kwedar’s feature film debut—a tale of three border patrol agents in Texas whose lives are derailed forever by the illicit contents in the trunk of car—traces a few men’s battle against cruel fate and crueller nature. A festival favorite this year and another among the ever-widening ranks of straight-to-VOD critically lauded indie films, Transpecos is a testament to what a filmmaker can do with the bare minimum in terms of set pieces, climactic action, and performance forces.
The Dessner brothers, in turn, limit their resources as well. Their interplay on the soundtrack (released by indie soundtrack label Milan Records) often resembles their dynamic in the National: an effects-laden rhythm-and-lead relationship, often between a precisely fingerpicked acoustic and sighing, slightly blurry electric guitar figures. It’s much less intricate than Bryce’s recent work, but the musical vocabulary and emotional scope is just as diverse. It’s also a big step forward from the brothers’ themes for the 2013 Kerouac adaptation of *Big Sur. *Chord-organ synth surges and controlled feedback overwhelm the muted guitar rhythms, lending colossal weight to Kwedar’s wide shots of endless desert.
At moments, the Dessners’ response to the source text is a bit knee-jerky. The tracks are heavy on guitar effects (whammy bars, heavy tremolo, weeping slide guitar figures) that conjure a distinctly Western patois (look no further than the track “Cowboys”). But then again, this is a genre film that asks for such things, a Border *noir. *These are semi-winking diversions along the way, not the lifeblood of the soundscape.
Like the film, the soundtrack slows and softens in the third act, becoming all pointillistic guitar, violin notes, and gritty, seething ambience. Hints of folksiness and pop harmony disappear as the three officers accept their grim lot and contemplate the eternal. The spare music mirrors their desolation—sometimes the ruthless phantoms they are hobbling frantically away from, sometimes a vain twinge of hope. Moments like these show that the Dessners as a composing/performing unit have built their reputation not only from developing melodic and rhythmic interchanges, but for finding unexpected ways to shade them.
Though they make for the most interesting cues in the film, these more glacial compositions (the lengthy “Chase” and “Man Down,” in particular) don’t work as well apart from the images, as many are choreographed fairly specifically to beats in the script. But they pay tribute to the Dessners’ real gift as programmatic composers: their ability to play both to and against the dramatic moment when the time feels right. The true power of this music can only be fully felt in context, but that is, after all, what it was designed for. The Dessners understand their relatively slight role. In the context of ethereal modern film scores, they create something both familiar and, in its deployment, unexpected.


Matt Martians is the founding member and a driving force behind the band the Internet. His new solo record is full of slack, indolent funk.

The Drum Chord Theory

As a founding member and driving force behind the band the Internet, Matt Martians got better the old-fashioned way: album by album, the group tinkered and tightened and scraped away dust, gradually revealing their identity as an adept lite-funk outfit. Their third full-length, 2015’s Ego Death, twinkled softly, but with enough clarity to earn a Grammy nomination and radio play. After all that hard work, Martians unwinds on his new solo record, The Drum Chord Theory, slackening the traditionally taut lines of funk and rap to make a droopy, indolent album.
This is music judiciously leached of urgency. Martians keeps verses short or excises them completely, so there isn’t much of an opportunity to upshift into refrains, which mostly come in the form of repetitive chants or near-whispers. Sometimes the drums and bass are overlaid at odd angles, hinting at a ’90s hip-hop groove but splaying sideways rather than cohering into something clipped and commanding. After a few minutes of a vamp—keys and rhythm section, maybe hand percussion and a stray guitar line—the band tires and moves on to a new one, frequently within the same song.
The recumbent funk comes paired mostly with stories of romantic woe; a central riff may change, but the male-female disconnect remains paramount. “We can’t read minds,” Martians laments, addressing any potential future partners who might be listening on “What Love Is.” “We just want to know what the fuck you want—is that hard?” “Every time I think I found the one, something always goes wrong,” he sings a couple tracks later. But he continues his search, assuring a woman on the album’s final bonus cut, “Elevators,” “that girl from the dream was you.”
These feelings don't bloom into anguish; The Drum Chord Theory is dillydallying on lazy Sunday, with stormy Monday kept at safe remove. Martians lightens the mood by flying into a synthetic, “Alvin and the Chipmunks” register to undercut a possible commitment—“if you were my girlfriend, I'd make you feel good”—and peppers songs with asides like the enthusiastic Internet endorsement that closes “Where Are Yo Friends?”: “Syd, Chris, Steve, Pat, Jameel, I love y’all niggas man,” he says, name checking bandmates. Then he adds happily, “But everyone else man, if we ain’t cool, then I’m sorry.” There’s meta-commentary, too: after a couple tunes reorganize around a different vamp at the halfway point, on “BabyGirl,” Martians quips “Ain’t no hidden track back here—next song.” Cue a track change.
If you won’t come to The Drum Chord Theory for a bracing shot of adrenaline, supine doesn’t mean unenjoyable. The more Martians sinks into his funk hammock, the better. On “Southern Isolation,” the bass squirms up and down the scale, evoking Caetano Veloso’s great “Olha O Menino,” while the singing washes back and forth, unhurried and opulent, like a sloop bobbing on the tide. Elsewhere, the band keeps sketching outlines and leaving them behind, dangling one riff, teasing it a bit, discarding it. Martians doesn’t return to the rapturous, near nod-off state of “Southern Isolation.” The Drum Chord Theory is never unpleasant, but it’s also never very distinct.


The latest from Melodies International, the reissues label by Floating Points’ Sam Shepherd, is the 1976 LP from Chicago soul-disco band Tomorrow’s People—featuring an audacious 20-minute title track.

Open Soul

When he’s not touring as Floating Points, Sam Shepherd also DJs a funk and soul party, called You’re a Melody. His selections skew ludicrously rare, and for most DJs, just flashing them before the trainspotters is enough. But Shepherd’s love of the music led him to start up Melodies International, a reissues label run in tandem with DJ Love on the Run, Mafalda, and Javybz. They suss out, lovingly remaster, and (legitimately) reissue long-lost singles for a new generation of fans, from a $500 7” to the complete recorded works of the woefully obscure Detroit band Aged in Harmony, housed in a picture sleeve with an accompanying newsprint fanzine. This level of care and dedication towards the physical artifact is rare in an increasingly streaming-only world. And while such speculation over old records typically benefits only the seller, the profits from these reissues wind up going back to the original artist themselves.
For the third release on the imprint, Shepherd went beyond, reissuing the lone full-length from Chicago soul-disco group Tomorrow’s People. Comprised of four brothers (Kevin, Maurice, Gerald, and Timothy Burton), their 1976 album Open Soul may not have sold many copies on the short-lived Stage Productions label, but since then it’s become a true “holy grail,” with copies in the last year changing hands for over $1,500. With the master tapes lost 20 years ago, the label set about reissuing the LP sourced from multiple copies of the original album. Alas, the foxy cover of the original is now replaced with a drawing of the four brothers.
For those not taken with the rarefied stratosphere of private press funk and soul albums, the first half of Open Soul might leave you wondering what the fuss is all about. “Lovers to Friends” is a slow-burner featuring the brothers’ effortless harmonies, but there’s not too much that would have made it stand out during that decade. “It Ain’t Fair” continues along at nearly the same tempo, with a bit more eerie analog synth and a saxophone line drifting across as the brothers coo “ooooh, don’t take your love away.” It’s a soulful plea, but unless you’ve worn out the Gamble & Huff discography, there’s more immediately rewarding fare to be had there. More upbeat is “Let’s Get Down With the Beat,” which features the kind of proto-disco beat and cymbal work that Earl Young pioneered during those years. The fidgety instrumental “Hurt Perversion” puts the keyboards front and center—but it’s contemporaneous of Bernie Worrell and his key work with Funkadelic, and not nearly as wigged out.
No matter how rare the album might be, no one is paying a month of New York City rent for the first five songs of Open Soul. And no one pleaded during a You’re a Melody DJ set for this album to be made available again (based on the A-side). But flip it over and you’re presented with the stunning 20-minute title track. Brother Timothy’s spare organ work and Brother Gerald’s guitar cast a spell, and for the first minute, you might think you’re in for a beatless cosmic soul trip. Just as the two-minute mark approaches, though, that guitar tightens up, a conga drum flares to life, and “Open Soul” bursts into full flame. “Soul.../Everybody’s asking me what it is,” the brothers chant as the drums and hand percussion run at double time.
Like any good writer, in providing an answer, they show rather than tell. “Open Soul” soon moves into a psychedelic break, with each successive electric guitar solo and sax squall nudging the temperature up a few more degrees. Seven minutes in, the brothers’ harmonies return, and it seems that surely the song will begin to lose steam or focus. But the Burtons keep that momentum going (and going). And while the song never veers off the path of funk, in its tirelessness and doggedness it starts to mutate and resemble a motorik groove, seeming like it might forever run to the horizon.
There’s examples of such audacity in African-American music of that time—Funkadelic’s double-digit explorations, the unreleased J.B.’s album, and Norman Whitfield’s ambitious productions for the Temptations immediately spring to mind—but none are as determined and downright exhaustive as “Open Soul.” By the time that final drum roll comes around some 17 minutes in, it feels like a marathon runner collapsing at the end of a race and the song recedes back to its soul ambient opening. The song no doubt wore down even the most fervent of dancers during Shepherd’s DJ sets. And thanks to his due diligence, now it can perform a similar feat in your living room.


Husband-wife duo-- he's from Animal Collective, she was in Múm-- record an album, then release it with all the songs running backward. Seriously.

Avey Tare / Kría Brekkan: Pullhair Rubeye

Pullhair Rubeye

It's possible to listen to and discuss this album by married couple Avey Tare (real name: David Portner; main gig: Animal Collective) and Kria Brekkan (aka Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir, formerly of Múm, lots of guest appearances since) on a conceptual plane. As has been widely disseminated in the online community, Pullhair Rubeye was essentially complete last December when, prompted in part by a viewing of director David Lynch's Inland Empire, Portner and Valtýsdóttir decided to reverse the tapes and release the album with all the songs running backward.
There's plenty of experimental music out there-- long drones, say-- where such a move might have gone unnoticed; this isn't one of them. The original tapes consisted of earthy, folky songs of simple construction consisting of mostly acoustic guitar, piano, and voice. Some potentially interesting questions crop up. Portner and Valtýsdóttir knew lots of people would re-reverse the record to hear its source; indeed, plenty of computer-savvy fans have already "fixed" Pullhair Rubeye, and-- what do you know-- in its original form, it's a damn nice album.
Though Portner and Valtýsdóttir's main projects have little in common, here they are aesthetically simpatico. Relative to the dark material Portner released on his half of a 2003 split EP, these tracks show him with an interest in singsong melody and childlike simplicity as pronounced as that of his partner-in-crime Panda Bear. And while I am no fan of Valtýsdóttir's infantilized coo of a voice, I like it in this context better than anywhere outside the first Múm record. So I highly recommend that Animal Collective fans seek out the re-reversed copies of Pullhair Rubeye. They are enjoyable. And the computer-savvy downloaders helped make them.
Another point of interest: there is something compelling about how "acoustic" music can become "electronic" merely by running the tape backward. In their original form, these are "songs;" reversed, if they are going to be appreciated at all, these "songs" are heard as "ambient pieces." So yeah, conceptually, Pullhair Rubeye might have something on the ball, and I'm always a fan of playful gestures. But then there's, you know, the thing that sits on store shelves and costs money. And that version of Pullhair Rubeye is remarkably dull.
For me personally, the irony is that I've long considered myself the biggest sucker ever born for the simple backward effect. In reviews I've praised passages for their "disorientation" and "peculiar sense of longing" that were no more than a couple of notes tapped out on a piano and flipped over in Pro Tools. I admit it; it's easy to pull off, but backward instruments can still get to me. Probably all that time as a kid spent listening for Satanic back-masking when I should have been outside playing kick the can (or maybe it was those Beatles records).
A whole album of this one effect, however, the reverse piano and reverse guitar and reverse voices going from decay to attack over and over and over again for 31 minutes... man, it's not just boring, it actually becomes depressing. It all kind of bleeds together into one bland and undifferentiated sonic blob that I never need to hear again. That's one nice thing about living when we do, though: Unlike Lou Reed fans with Metal Machine Music or Flaming Lips fans with Zaireeka, no one is going to pick this up on a whim without knowing what they're getting into. The information is out there. Everyone who knows and cares about the Animal Collective, everyone who follows the doings of Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir, all these folks also spend time online and so know Pullhair Rubeye's story. So it's not a rip-off, at least, we have to give them that. It's also no fun whatsoever to listen to.


Michelle Zauner is the guitarist and singer for the underrated Philadelphia indie rock band Little Big League. After her mother was diagnosed with cancer, she returned home to Oregon; while she was there, she revamped songs from her previous lo-fi releases under the name Japanese Breakfast.

Psychopomp

Halfway through Little Big League's "Year of the Sunhouse," some dope asks Michelle Zauner whether she's still "playing basement shows with the band—doing the music thing?" She roars back, "Well yes I fuckin' a-a-am!" Her pride was justified. The underrated Philadelphia four-piece were among the best of their kind, playing knotty, effervescent indie rock that confronted darker themes like sexual violence and infidelity. Shortly before that single's release in late 2014, Zauner's mother was diagnosed with cancer. The frontwoman/guitarist stopped playing basement shows with the band, and moved back to small-town Oregon to be with her mom, and later comfort her widowed father. Psychopomp came together that year in rural Eugene, where Zauner revamped songs from her previous lo-fi releases under the name Japanese Breakfast. In collaboration with musician Ned Eisenberg, she pushed them beyond their original scrappy basement confines into shimmering gems.
If Zauner's palette has largely softened, her subject matter hasn't, even though only two songs here deal specifically with the death of her mother. "In Heaven" welds the billowing, shoegazy coo of peak Asobi Seksu to distinct songwriting fit for the Sundays. The heartbreaking lyrics measure the distance between a mother's love and the effect of its loss, but Zauner sings in a forceful celebration of life. When she belts, "Oh, do you believe in heaven like you believed in me?/ Oh, it could be such heaven if you believed it was real," her heart sounds like it might burst.
It sets the tone for a record that loosely explores issues of dependency. The disco-tinged "The Woman That Loves You" and intimate closer "Triple 7" find Zauner playing "the other woman" involved with a married man. The latter is one of her characteristically blunt depictions of sex. "I love a man in uniform," she admits, before wrinkling the cliche: "'Cause he loves me like a slot machine from the valley of loose women in the cruel light of morning." Similarly, "Everybody Wants to Love You," a driving duet with Radiator Hospital's Sam Cook-Parrott, leaps swiftly from a one-night stand to marriage through varying emotional and physical demands—most notably, "When we wake up in the morning, will you give me lots of head?" These songs are never as clear-cut as dominance versus submission, and Zauner doesn't apologize or rationalize her desires, which is refreshing.
Nevertheless, Psychopomp bites harder when Zauner lets you feel the weight of her pain. She turns the lens on herself on "Jane Cum," the record's most hopeless, cathartic moment, where the starry shimmer slips away, and heavy, staticky storms envelop her yearning voice. "Heft" is the other song about her mother's death, updated from its original appearance on 2014's Where is My Great Big Feeling to sound like the kind of eerie, creeping indie rock that the teens in "Twin Peaks" would have listened to if the show had its own Bronze or Bait Shop. Staring down the barrel of her mother's impending diagnosis, Zauner panics about whether "it's the same dark coming," a reprisal of the cancer that also took her aunt. "Oh fuck it all," she sings, wringing out the last word.
It's as good a response as any other. Playing shows in basement bands may not offer adult security, just as writing songs about one of life's worst losses doesn't necessarily offer any resolutions, but survival is its own reward. And Psychopomp offers much more than that: at once cosmically huge and acutely personal, Zauner captures grief for the perversely intimate yet overwhelming pain it is. Long may she keep at this music thing.


On this strong return after a tough year, Nathan Williams enlists Jay Reatard's backing band, polishes his sound, and embraces pop-punk clarity.

King of the Beach

In the world of independent music, learning on the job is frowned upon. It's easier than ever for kids to make professional-grade records and have them heard, but any sign of weakness-- a lackluster stage show, a questionable interview, a dud follow-up-- and listeners will let you know how duped they feel. Few people know this better than Nathan Williams, who made his buzzy second album Wavvves at his parents' house and spent the rest of 2009 on a badwill tour (live disaster, canceled tour, fistfight) that earned him Lohan/Hilton-levels of derision in certain circles.
But some stuck with him, like Best Coast best bud Bethany Cosentino, the late Jay Reatard's backing band, and esteemed producer Dennis Herring. If you include yourself in that group, new album King of the Beach rewards your belief. The album's title may be something of an ego-fueled joke on indie's ongoing infatuation with seaside fantasy, but Williams is still very much a part of the world he pokes fun at. Though the scorched-earth production of Wavvves was pretty much the opposite of chillwave, it did share themes, embracing weed, nostalgia, and both music-making and the outdoors as ideal escapes from early-20s boredom and a depressed job market.
In its quest for an endless summer, King of the Beach wears its California lineage with pride. It's major-key and resplendently colored, owing as much to Orange County skate-punk as it does to the Beach Boys. In the past, Williams' 1960s fixation mostly manifested in some falsetto Brian Wilson oohs and ahs, and that's still his go-to hook. But the references here are drawn from an exponentially wider palette: The twinkly, lovelorn "When Will You Come" uses the evergreen "Be My Baby" beat, while "Mickey Mouse" cops from "Da Doo Ron Ron" and distills Person Pitch to a three-minute essence. The charm is hearing Williams going directly to the sources of his inspiration, whether it's the warped synth lope of "Baseball Cards" or the jingle-like facility of "Convertible Balloon".
Yeah, "variety" and "well-produced" are new concepts for Wavves, but even when Williams recalls his high-voltage past, the growth in songwriting is unmistakable. Catchy as they were, the melodies of "So Bored" and "No Hope Kids" weren't hooks so much as battering rams that broke through with sheer repetition. The bright production here allows the songs to go places. The title track is built on a chassis of four-chord power-pop, but it opens up enough to be filled in with oddball percussion, whammy bar damage, and a surprising key change. Even though the double-time slamdancer "Post Acid" reminds me of everything that was good about Lookout! or Epitaph, Williams lets us in on his sense of a good time before an impassioned delivery of one of 2010's most anthemic choruses: "Misery, won't you comfort me in my time of need?"
While King of the Beach manifests a quantum leap in Williams' confidence as a musician, from a lyrical standpoint, he's pretty much the same downbeat loner who made Wavvves. It's very much a punk record in attitude, but one that eschews its artier iterations and reps for the marginalized, snotty mid-90s heads like Green Day, MxPx, or even Blink-182, bands who were wrongly conflated with jock culture despite predominant themes of isolation, boredom, and sexual inadequacy. Though Williams never specifically addresses his real-life beefs, it's hard not to read into the self-loathing as real time commentary. His old friends hate him, girls won't listen, and he's fucked up. The mood never becomes oppressive, though. "I'm not supposed to be a kid/ But I'm an idiot/ I'd say I'm sorry but it wouldn't mean shit," isn't the most artful mea culpa, but like most of King of the Beach, there is power in its directness.
Williams has boasted that he wants King of the Beach to be his Nevermind, and while I'll go out on a limb and speculate that it won't change the music industry as we know it, it serves a somewhat similar function in introducing a talent who benefits from a pop polish. More pointedly, it might be derided because it owes more to Dookie than Doolittle and many might choose this as a soundtrack to drinking beer or starting a mosh pit. Some may see King of the Beach as a story of redemption or even an argument that a public shaming might do good for some of these younger bands. Either way, it's' a fantastic record, and you can't say Williams didn't earn it this time. Don't blow it, dude.


Dreams Worth Than More Money takes a few more risks than Meek Mill's debut. With high-profile guest spots from Future, Drake, Nicki Minaj, and others, it has more breathing room and clears space for Meek Mill's unrelenting intensity. It also reinforces the impression that a brief blast is the best way to experience Meek.

Dreams Worth More Than Money

Meek Mill's signature song remains "Dreams and Nightmares", the title track and first song from his first album. The rest of the album has more or less dropped from public consciousness, but the intro remains a resonant classic: When the song suddenly shifts tempo and mood, and Meek jumps into an urgent, bleating rap cadence (complete with lines like "all I know is murder" shouted with guttural intensity), he's introducing himself as the only rapper that matters for five minutes.
The "for five minutes" qualifier is an important distinction: Meek's intensity is both the key to his appeal and his Achilles Heel. His mixtapes are often long and scattershot, while still containing at least a half dozen keepers, and his first album, and now the second, suffer a similar fate. Every few months, Meek drops an incredible single, or an eyebrow-raising feature, reinforcing the idea that his music works best in short blasts, harnessing his energy and expending it all at will. Recent non-album single "Monster" is an incredible song, but I can't imagine it being on this album; it's too concentrated. And I'm not even sure if 14 "Monster"s is sustainable or desirable.
However, Dreams Worth Than More Money is still a few clicks better than his debut, because it feels like Meek Mill is taking risks. Opener "Lord Knows" lays a Tory Lanez hook and a typically fraught Meek vocal performance atop sample from Mozart's Lacrimosa movement from his Requiem in D, a tip of the hat to how epic "Dreams and Nightmares" remains but also as a hedging of bets: Nothing could realistically top his first intro, so they reached all the way back to Mozart for a fitting backdrop. He's still rapping hard-hitting lines like "Shout-out the judge that denied me my bail/it made me smarter and it made me go harder." It's a great song, even if it can't match the bar set by "Dreams and Nightmares."
"Classic," a typically nimble, bouncy, Bangladesh track, is an atypical Meek move: he's rarely if ever sounded so airy, clean, fun, bright, and it's a good look. In fact, the album's biggest highlights are its biggest departures, from the druggy "Jump Out the Face" with Future (which would fit nicely onto 56 Nights), to "R.I.C.O." featuring Drake, and even "Bad For You" with Nicki Minaj. Meek has allowed these artists to "take the lead" on these tracks, and the album is better for it, because it opens the record up and gives Meek breathing room. It also keeps in line with the idea that a brief blast of Meek is the best way to experience Meek.
The  '70s exploitation flick vibe of "Stand Up," featuring an indelible two-line cameo from DJ Khaled, is another stylistic switch-up on the album's back end. And "Cold Hearted" is a surprisingly touching closer. Ostensibly riffing on a familiar rap trope—rebuking family and friends who turn on you once you taste success—it gains depth through little details, and ends up feelin more like an introspective testament to youth. Diddy, his voice sounding destroyed, offers a weirdly unguarded monologue, and Meek sneaks gut-check details like "we started off as kids, stomach touching our ribs" in a sing-song patter. It reminds you why you loved the guy in the first place: He accomplishes more with the sound of his rapping than other rappers do with entire albums. His understanding of rap as a vocal performance; his ability to summon powerful emotions; his combination of vulnerability, bravado, and a storyteller's sense of character and time—well, shit, those are all the hallmarks of a great rapper. Maybe it only all coheres in flashes, but if Meek Mill works best in bursts, then so be it.


The second album written, produced, and performed by Georgia Barnes is the work of a budding pop mind finding her own space on the dancefloor.

Seeking Thrills

From behind a set of cherry-red drum pads, Georgia opened a small show in Brooklyn this past October with the announcement that, just that day, she’d met a personal hero: Sheila E., the iconic drummer, singer, and Prince collaborator. There are famous women drummers, but few who are songwriters, producers, headlining performers, and pop stars, too. Perhaps that’s why Seeking Thrills, the new album from 29-year-old British musician Georgia Barnes, sounds so fresh and exploratory: She’s not working from any real blueprint. Though it’s her second record, Seeking Thrills has the ascendent energy of an audition tape; brighter and less tentative than her self-titled 2015 debut, even its awkward moments convey earnest, self-taught sincerity.
As the daughter of Neil Barnes from the ’90s UK electronic duo Leftfield, Georgia grew up surrounded by her father’s collection of electronic and international records and developed an early love of pop and hip-hop, particularly Missy Elliott. She later became a London session drummer, performing alongside acts like Kate Tempest and Kwes. Seeking Thrills builds from all these interests simultaneously, foregrounding Georgia’s voice and fusing the rattling beats of her debut with the familiar neon warmth of Chicago and Detroit house. On opening track “Started Out,” a slinky house-pop firestarter with the enigmatic hook, “We are wicked young fools who behave now,” the combination is magnetic.
To write the new album, Georgia holed up in her home studio, studying a personal pantheon of great songwriters: Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Kate Bush. She’s estimated that it took a year and a half worth of study to unlock her own abilities. A finished version of Seeking Thrills was ready in spring 2019, but early last year, after “Started Out” landed in rotation at BBC Radio 1, she happily delayed it. Fully half of the album’s songs were released as singles, from “Feel It” in 2017 to the most recent, “24 Hours,” just this week. The promotional advantages are self-evident, though the outcome is frustrating: The album front-loads its two best songs, “Started Out” and the twisty “About Work the Dancefloor,” and nothing thereafter packs quite the same punch.
In this way, some of the same things that allow Seeking Thrills to feel like an edition-of-one discovery can also come across choppy or scattered. “Ray Guns” still sounds like castoff M.I.A., a frequent point of comparison for Georgia’s debut. It’s not that her time in the studio didn’t pay off—the new album has better hooks, bigger personality, and a radiant optimism that her older material can’t match. But learning to write isn’t the kind of job you finish. Some of these lyrics are paper-thin, and Georgia doesn’t always have the range to give them more dimension. “Mellow” makes the disparity clear: South London singer Shygirl’s verse is sultry and stylish, but Georgia dominates the song with reference-track stiltedness. Lines that ought to sound effortless—“Keepin’ real/Never spill/And I’m gonna get it/From the spigot”—instead land with a thud.
Yet Georgia is coming into her own as a singer: She handles the deep-water affirmation grooves “Till I Own It” and “Ultimate Sailor,” two of the most rewarding album cuts, with a husky pop style indebted to Robyn. “Started Out” is still the strongest song here, but this wasn’t supposed to be an album of floor-fillers. It’s better suited to a house party, or as the soundtrack to a private “Dancing on My Own” moment (the very Girls scene Georgia watched just before writing “About Work the Dancefloor”). Even when it’s clumsy, Seeking Thrills never feels manufactured. It’s a passion project, a result of trial and error, the singular product of someone learning to write for her own voice.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Baltimore synth-romantics' third album is invested in wide-open spaces. Though less intent on bringing drama or fury than last year's In Evening Air, its reflections on aging and memory accumulate into something moving.

On the Water

Samuel T. Herring, lyricist and lion-throated singer of Baltimore synth-romantics Future Islands, has written a lot of break-up songs. He penned some pretty vitriolic ones on the band's 2008 debut, Wave Like Home, and then he wrote an entire record's worth on their terrific 2010 release, In Evening Air. About four songs into their latest-- which contains such boldfaced melodrama as "I loved you and I still do"-- you get the idea that this guy might be something of a Sisyphus, relieved at last of the whole boulder-up-the-hill business but doomed to sit on the receiving end of an "It's not you, it's me" conversation ad infinitum.
Future Islands initially came out of Baltimore's Wham City scene; their first, rather unexceptional record was built from electro-punk and day-glo squiggles. Over the past few years, though, they've become more aesthetically disciplined. The thing that made In Evening Air such a bruiser was how seriously it took its job as a break-up album: Its gaze was singularly affixed on hurt. Herring's lyrics were simplistic and conversational, yet pointed: "You couldn't possibly know how much you meant to me," "You hurt me so bad," etc. Amidst a steady, drum-machine heartbeat and uncommonly sentient-sounding synths, he repeated these lines-- the banal poetry of relationship-speak-- until they started to sound downright sinister. His refrain on "Long Flight" builds from a quietly mounting frenzy into, by song's end, a full blown, grown-man temper tantrum. Listening to the part when he finally breaks evokes the skin-prickling claustrophobia of watching a mild-mannered airplane seatmate start to freak out 30,000 feet above an exit route.
Their third and latest LP, On the Water, is more invested in wide-open spaces. The opening (and title) track gives all the elements of the band's sound more leg room: Herring's unhurried vocals, epic, smoldering synths, and the steady churn of a not-too-choppy tide on a sample that begins the song. Recorded in a friend's house in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, overlooking the Pasquotank River, On the Water draws from the imagery and movement of the sea. It's less intent on bringing the drama or the fury than In Evening Air was, but its reflections on aging and memory accumulate into something surprisingly moving.
With the songs' energy scaled back, the efforts of the other two band members come to the fore. Gerrit Welmers handles the keyboards and programming, bringing an evocative, setting-sun vibe to slowburners like "The Great Fire" (a soulful duet with Jenn Wasner of fellow Marylanders Wye Oak), while William Cashion's guitars have the same low-end lurch of early-New Order riffs. Though treading familiar sonic and thematic waters at the start, On the Water really comes alive midway through, beginning with the mournful "Where I Found You" and building to "Close to None", the record's most buoyant track.
Though some of Herring's more temperate moments make me miss his snarling freakouts of yore, one of On the Water's most striking moments is decidedly minimal: "Tybee Island" pairs the sound of crashing waves with a warm synth tone, both of which overpower the presence of their frontman. For most people, Herring's hyper-theatrical vocals are the make-or-break point of Future Islands: He sings every line like Meat Loaf serenading Yorick's skull. It's an acquired taste for sure, one that's much easier to be unequivocally swept up in when you're watching him on stage (doing grand hand gestures, grinning like a maniac, and occasionally slapping himself across the face), but even on the record, Herring's signature affect communicates something about the operatic sadness of life's everyday banalities. "Tybee Island" finds him, for once, barely audible. It's a powerful moment to hear a voice usually so big made to sound-- in contrast with the natural world-- so human and small. It's the polar opposite of the tension-building repetitions of In Evening Air: With each utterance of this coda, he seems more and more to loosen his grip on the past.


With Why Make Sense?, Hot Chip continue to capture pure joy while acknowledging the limits of such a quest. They've always been traditionalists at heart, making pop songs that utilize the vocabularies of house, R&B, and hip-hop rather than the other way around.

Why Make Sense?

"Let's fuck shit up," suggests Alexis Taylor on a bonus track from Hot Chip’s sixth album. "Let's go for a rollercoaster ride—even a shit rollercoaster ride." The lines are pure punk while everything around them is anything but: Taylor sounds like the universe's loneliest astronaut as synth pulses blink in blackness behind him. The song is called "Burning Up" and it's vintage Hot Chip: funny where it might be wistful; wistful where it might be funny. It also serves as a mini-history of the London quintet, who first formed 15 years ago. As the song moves along, youthful abandon gives way to consequence, weight, blame. Co-leader Joe Goddard arrives to split the difference in the final verse. "My age says I'm an adult but some days my heart will not be told," he hums as the track evaporates behind him. "Hearing teenage symphonies dancing through my head."
With Why Make Sense?, Hot Chip continue to capture pure joy while acknowledging the limits of such a quest. It's an adult album made by a group of guys in their mid-thirties who know all of the trappings of an "adult album." These ahead-of-their-time pop omnivores—remember the bewilderment that surrounded the bedroom Prince and Stevie-isms of their debut album in 2004?—are now, remarkably, something of an institution, their eclecticism the new normal. They used to be LCD Soundsystem’s brainy British counterparts (the two bands even shared a member in guitarist Al Doyle), but now LCD are gone, and James Murphy is opening wine bars, and Hot Chip are still here, still looking for spontaneity, still hopelessly bittersweet, still trying to get better, still romantic, still funkier than a bunch of pasty dudes from Putney have any right to be, still making it cool to dance even if you can’t dance for shit.
This is the smoothest Hot Chip album, and they’ve never sounded more professional. It's a mixed blessing: For a band healthily obsessed with not making sense, the refined sound can seem a bit commonplace after more than a decade of spikes, jump-cuts, and curveballs. Then again, Hot Chip have always been traditionalists at heart, making pop songs that utilize the vocabularies of house, R&B, and hip-hop rather than the other way around. They've stacked up plenty of bridges worthy of the Brill Building, a phenomenon that continues on the lovingly nostalgic "Need You Now", which is about as close as they've come to matching the melancholy perfection of "Boy from School". The wafting "White Wine and Fried Chicken" takes the band's high/low culture expertise into the realm of gastronomy, and feels like a soul standard for our century. The three-minute song sounds about as straightforward as anything Hot Chip have made, though there are big knots in Taylor's words; whereas much of the band's last two albums dealt with the wonders of stability and contentment, Why Make Sense? seems more conflicted. Existential crises abound, creating discord with the album's glossy finish.
Taylor and Goddard ask themselves questions that many almost-middle-aged musicians—especially in the pop and dance worlds—are too scared to broach. They try to find some clarity within the ambiguities of committed relationships (romantic or musical), exposing vulnerabilities in the name of emotional honesty. "Out of happiness can come a bitterness," admits Taylor—the son of a Shakespeare scholar and psychoanalyst—on the booming title track, before mixing in confrontational politics that spin around ideas of personal freedom: "Why be tough when strength is just for losers/ Be what you are at the mercy of your rulers." Meanwhile, the mildly anti-machine-music "Huarache Lights" has Taylor trying to find a heartbeat between ones and zeroes, but he’s too savvy (or neurotic) to construct any bold lines. "Am I so truthful, or in truth, is the youth just getting old?" he sings, putting his own perspective into question. On a self-critical bonus track, Goddard suggests, "I need to separate the head from the body," but he knows that can be hard to do—a fact that this album, with its bulbous grooves and anxious themes, makes clear again and again.
Why Make Sense? is probably the fourth-best Hot Chip album. But that’s not necessarily a knock, because their fourth-best album is still a very good album. At this point, they seem too smart and talented to really fail. They will always be underdogs that you root for to make songs that highlight the complexity of human experience while also helping you to put those complexities in the back of your mind for a minute. They are confident in their abilities, even when those abilities are aimed at throwing their own confidence into doubt. They are beloved. They are trustworthy. Their senselessness now makes a lot of sense to a lot of people.


After scoring a #1 hit with 2014's "Rude,"  the Canadian Rastatryhardians return with an album that posits them as "Magic! The Career Artists."

Primary Colours

2014 was the time of conscious uncoupling, of Macklemore apologizing to Kendrick, of “Happy” ruling the charts from winter’s thaw to spring’s bloom. In this congenial milieu, four Canadians put on their best suit, took their favorite Police record and Bob Marley poster into the studio, and emerged with the most probing philosophical inquiry of the 21st century. It was less a mantra than a beaming admission of defeat. *They *knew that *we *knew that they suck. And yet we were invited to accept this sucking—to acknowledge that what reeks to one may be gold to another, whether it was a shotgun marriage to a patchouli-reeking transient, or Kidz Bop Sings Legend.
If Magic! had left us with their message of peace and absconded back into the Canadian wilderness, nobody would’ve noticed. But two years after “Rude” went to #1 in seven countries, they’ve returned with a new record called Primary Colours, which comes with a sparkling narrative: Magic! As Career Artists. “‘Rude’ was just the introduction,” singer Nasri Atweh told Rolling Stone. It presents them as feel-good slacker spiritualists: guys who know how to have a good time around a bonfire, but can put the guitar down and get thoughtful when it matters. Though they were, in essence, a studio creation—birthed by the meeting of professional songwriters who’d made their career recording for other artists, and who got together after collaborating on a Chris Brown song—Magic! have seen gold in the nearly one billion YouTube hits for the “Rude” video. When your first hit gets you on tour with Maroon 5, it would be silly not to go for it.
Nothing on *Primary Colours *captures the unguent hippie-dippie charm of “Rude,” which might be by unconscious design. Atweh was fond of talking in interviews about how the expectation of singing their mega-smash over and over again made him feel like “a dancing monkey,” and lo, Primary Colours has a song called “Dance Monkey,” which is sung from the perspective of a literal monkey who learns how to sing and play guitar before being sold into captivity, though his musical heart remains strong. Many of the songs are pop takes on basic reggae rhythms—such as “Red Dress,” an ode to nightwear that sounds close enough to “Rude” to remind you that Magic! can’t deviate from their form *too *hard.
Then there are the songs that sound like the band was ripping gravity bongs before putting pen to paper and melody to reel. Consider “Gloria,” a lament about getting cuckolded that begins a slinky riddim before speeding to a romp as Nasri belts “Did you have sex all day / Just to tease me all night” at a woman who, we’re told, went on a cruise with the narrator only to stage a threesome with two sailors in their room. Or “Lay You Down Easy,” the Sean Paul-featuring single that flows as smoothly as diarrhea as Nasri coos, “Baby, this is human nature, let’s turn our gadgets off / Smoke a little vapor and stay up till the sun.”
You don’t need to get into the nitty gritty of how they don’t *make *non-mechanical vaporizers, or how you don’t smoke vapor, to get where they’re coming from. Details are for pedants; details are rude. But the conceptual sloppiness ties in with something incomplete about the whole deal. They say they want to sound like reggae, but their pop ideas—so many horns!—are too agitated to sink into a righteous groove; they say they want to sound like the Police, but they lack the mystic, mysterious vibe that elevated Sting and friends above low-stakes breeziness. And if you didn’t like “Rude” at all, Magic!’s aesthetic transgressions seem even more objectionable. There’s something off-brand and Disney-fied to their whole approach, like a band thrown together for a soundtrack. Imagine that Primary Colours is the OST for a movie about an albino penguin who learns to love himself, and the album almost makes sense.
You might say that even by the mandate of this website, poking fun at the second Magic! album is like criticizing the camerawork in Air Bud 2. Soulless snob I may be, even I wince a smidgen when imagining Nasri’s pained hang dog face as he slams his fist against the door. If you take their word for it, Magic! are huge in Jamaica, and anyone who quibbles with them is just a jerk. As the Rastatryhardians themselves might put it: Why do we have to be so rude? Don’t we know they’re human too?
It’s a great point. Who doesn’t want to live in a wholly permissive society, where all criticism is dismissed as the bleating of the endlessly jealous haters and losers? But a sour smell settles in when the band talks about showing their serious side despite having "Dance Monkey" to show for it, and complains about having to sing their #1 hit over and over. The acid reflux begins to flow outright when Nasri bleats lines like “I feel like Robert Marley” like the world’s most misunderstood college student. Listen: Peace, love, and understanding are worthwhile philosophies, but when combined with cynical refrains about their existence like “Everything is a shtick, man,” it begins to sound less like gentle mantra and more like path of least resistance in a challenging world. Why do we have to be so rude? Because there’s only so much magic in the world, and this isn’t it.


The producer and guitarist D33J has long been an integral behind-the-scenes member of L.A. beat collective WEDIDIT. His immersive debut full-length contains the surreal lushness its title suggests.

Death Valley Oasis

The Los Angeles beat collective and label WEDIDIT’s music runs the gamut of modern electronic production, but its affiliates all seem to mine a singular sense of weirdness. Artists like Shlohmo and Ryan Hemsworth have meandered around cerebral electronic and R&B, while RL Grime hits the festival circuit and fills larger rooms with more aggressive, conventional EDM. D33J, née Djavan Santos, has long been an integral behind-the-scenes member of the well-branded WEDIDIT crew, but he’s just now stepping fully out on his own with a full-length debut, Death Valley Oasis. It’s a well-timed introduction given that, together with Shlohmo, Santos has produced the entirety of the high-profile debut from Corbin—the divisive and haunted, sad-boy R&B sensation who used to go by Spooky Black. In his collaborations with Corbin and Shlomo, Santos rarely produces cold club tracks and instead leans into dance-infused R&B that sounds densely overgrown.
For his part, Santos, a guitarist and electronic producer, is a formally-schooled sound maker—he studied experimental audio at the San Francisco Art Institute—and his productions are immersive. Like the surreal lushness the title suggests, Death Valley Oasis frequently plunges underwater. Texturally, the synths ripple and gurgle outright; compositionally, the sounds pool and swirl together. On elegant synth tracks like “Endless Fall” and “Black Ice,” delicate new sounds seem to rise unseen and then envelope the mix completely. It’s an effect that feels like swimming through a warm patch in a cold ocean, where the edge of the change is indiscernible and porous. Like they are on most of the songs Santos sings himself, the lyrics are an afterthought and his voice is often rendered as a murmuring atmospheric element.
The album’s guest vocalists fare better as leads. “Spark,” which features the nimbly experimental vocalist Deradoorian, is the fizziest of the bunch. With her variously soaring and whispering vocals, Deradoorian gives the electronic power pop song a peculiar effervescence. Santos’ fellow Anticon signee Baths turns up on “Wisp,” his single voice manipulated into a Gothic choir-like effect over a punchy, sentimental dance track. If not for their pinging melody, the percolating synths that poke through the surface might sound glitchy, but D33J almost never lets his sounds turn frigid, imbuing even his sharpest percussion with a mellow warmth.
Shlohmo and Corbin both appear on “Rot,” a guitar-based floater that hints at the dramatic, maximalist electronic emo the latter artist has been circling around. “When all is gone/Flesh and bone, rot until the weeds are grown,” Corbin coos, his voice an almost pure legato due to his barely-there, always hushed consonants. It’s the most serene and spacey song on the album, but it almost threatens to lull following the pep of “Dead Sea.” That one is the most direct club attack, still woozy but thumping, propelled by clashing percussion.
Dissecting one of D33J’s tracks can lay bare the lush simplicity that he traffics, and also the distance he covers. Tracks never sounds quantized and there’s never the sense that he’s rotely stacking bricks to frame out a drop. Instead, there’s an almost feverish quality to the way the songs swell and intensify and then wither away. It doesn’t always make for easy listening, but because D33J has such an epicurean touch, you never have to strain to hear something interesting. He has a way of flooding his tracks; it’s just a matter of letting them wash over you.


The harp innovator experiments with an arsenal of new instruments—including her voice—on an album of ambient music as complex and meditative as the work of Pauline Oliveros.

Hundreds of Days

There’s a striking photograph of Mary Lattimore that tells you more than any sentence could about the vibe of her music. It’s a dusty, black-and-white image, in the style of Walker Evans, that shows Lattimore holding her enormous, 47-string Lyon & Healy harp in the middle of an arid-looking plain. Behind her there is dirt, bushland, and, in the distance, a mountain range. The harp is best known as a devotional instrument, its connotations of holiness and delicacy etched into the collective imagination by wedding processions and artists’ renderings of Christian paradise. But Lattimore doesn’t seem interested in the heavens. Her harp sounds crunchier, stranger, and more rooted to the earth.
On her first two solo albums, At the Dam and Collected Pieces, she devised a new way to experience the harp. Permeated by memory and endowed with a sense of place, Lattimore’s wordless songs managed to evoke the Hoover Dam, Wawa convenience stores on the Jersey Shore, and her family’s dearly departed dog. Her secret weapon was a Line 6 looping pedal, which allowed her to create deep sounds that imparted these instrumentals with a dizzying emotionality. On her new album, Hundreds of Days, Lattimore looks beyond the harp and proves she’s capable of composing ambient music that is every bit as complex and meditative as the work of Pauline Oliveros and Harold Budd.
The record began its life in a redwood barn on a hill overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. During a two-month residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, California, Lattimore experimented with electric guitar, piano, theremin, a semi-modular synthesizer, and, most importantly, her voice. By adding these new sounds to her trusty harp and looping pedals, she’s expanded the possibilities of her music. The six songs on Hundreds of Days are the best she’s recorded so far.
The 12-minute opener, “It Feels Like Floating,” is a showcase for the progress she’s made. If Lattimore’s earlier songs were redolent of places she’d visited, this track is proof that she has the skill to build new landscapes with her instruments. Inhabiting the song is like being placed in some alien terrarium: She conjures the organic buzzes and clicks of everyday life with the reverb bouncing off her harp strings, but gaseous synthesizer hiss and a groaning theremin mutate that naturalism into something freakier. That wet and weird noise surrounds her beatific harp melody and peaceful hums and sighs. The combined effect of all these sounds is pastoral, spacey, and even a bit spiritual.
“It Feels Like Floating” sets the scene for the album’s best track, “Never Saw Him Again,” which foregrounds Lattimore’s fluttering, wordless singing as soupy synthesizer noise gives the composition depth and weight. Hardly the main attraction, her harp notes just float around in amniotic sound. At first, the song recalls the murky calm of Oval. But, halfway through, it starts to skip and distort, as if it were made of corroded magnetic tape. Then the tape gets stuck on fast-forward, catching the harp in its slipstream until Lattimore is plucking more quickly than any human could possibly play. For what is ostensibly an ambient song, “Never Saw Him Again” feels pretty thrilling.
Lattimore shows a darker side of the harp on “Baltic Birch,” mixing melancholic strumming with dramatic electric guitar flourishes. She even reaches for uncharacteristically heavenly, classical harp heights on the soothing “Hello From the Edge of the Earth.” What makes Hundreds of Days so special, though, is how often it hits ambient music’s sweetest spot—a place where the world slows down and the performer’s free-floating noise makes you appreciate everything around it.
Listening to the album’s closing track, “On the Day You Saw the Dead Whale,” while jogging in the park one morning, the piano chords and harp notes activated the sounds of the forest around me. The thump in my chest, the whistle of the wind blowing through the leaves, and my footfalls on asphalt all danced around her notes. In that moment, it was impossible to tell where Lattimore’s song ended and the world began.


On their debut as a trio, Phantom Posse singer-songwriter Nadia Hulett and members of Ava Luna play with open-ended questions and experimental pop zest.

Oh My

Nadia Hulett has spent years searching for the best environment for her minimalist lyrics to thrive. Many first heard her waxing hazily poetic as a member of chillwave group Phantom Posse; in 2015, she released a solo EP, i’m your protector now, where strong storytelling got lost in dream-pop swirls. Now, after forming the experimental art-pop group NADINE with Julian Fader and Carlos Hernandez of Ava Luna, she’s found the backing momentum needed to highlight her songwriting voice. On the trio’s debut full-length, Oh My, they forgo personal anecdotes in favor of discussing broad emotions—indecision, love, forgiveness. While the collaboration is very much a work in progress, Hulett herself remains a constant highlight as she and her new bandmates explore what funk, jazz and lounge-inspired pop can do to illuminate her ideas.
Even as a child, she was interested in how words sound out loud. “My mom says she has memories of me in the back of the car with a marker and paper asking her to spell out word by word lyrics to a song I was scheming up,” Hulett says in a recent press release. She brings a similar spirit of worry-free inquiry to Oh My. And while there are plenty of questions to be found on the album—the slinky R&B single “Not My Kinda Movie” asks how social media complicates desire—her curiosity goes well beyond lyrics. Keenly aware of how delivery can alter the interpretation of a word or phrase, she often plays with her voice to see how it changes the mood. On the playful highlight “Ultra Pink,” Hulett alternates between whispers and bravado, exploring, in real time with polyphonic lines, the song’s idea of knowing you can do something before you do it. Elsewhere, she uses clear, unbothered vocal tones to shape her lyrics into liberating moments of realization. “See, I’ve been tied up inside of old ideas/And haven’t seen the light for a while ‘till I got here,” she sings on “That Neon Sign,” her voice somehow sounding nervous and confident at once.
Some of this album’s joys come from the ways NADINE’s three musicians push one another. Hulett is the band’s boss—according to Fader and Hernandez, she defines the “parameters of the sandbox” that they play in—but their contributions can take her songs in unexpected directions. On the breezy standout “Pews,” she sings about “chaos before integration” in a voice that echoes Feist’s low, honeyed gusto. Simultaneously, Fader and Hernandez expand on that feeling by chasing a sneaky bass line with acoustic percussion, creating what’s essentially a whistle-free follow-up to Peter Bjorn and John’s “Young Folks.” The two create an underhanded calm on “Little Self in the Garden” and “Contigo,” the latter of which turns Hulett’s words into double-edged taunts guarded by rough guitar and manipulated saxophone. While she sings, they find a way to create a poetic rhythm of their own.
Yet the same music that gives Hulett room to breathe can also take the attention off of her and onto nothing in particular. At times, the rhythm section on this album sounds like Fader and Hernandez are staring at a wall, lost in thought. On “Peace in the Valley,” which drones on without offering a memorable melody, it’s hard not to join them. Though they try to salvage dull moments with spontaneous interjections, like the drum fills and keyboard loops that pop up near the end of the sleepy ballad “Can’t Be Helped,” the mismatched parts can end up feeling grating. In that, Oh My feels like a pocket-sized chapbook set to music: some songs inspire, some feel thin. When NADINE’s strange poetry does convince you to dog-ear a song, though, returning to it feels as creatively refreshing as when you heard it for the first time.


Chaz Bear (of Toro y Moi) teams up with New York club producer AceMo for a fun, spirited, spontaneous debut EP.

C’mon Les’ Go EP

For Chaz Bear and Adrian Mojica, rhythm is a bridge capable of spanning geography, styles, and even generations. Oakland’s Bear, an indie veteran and chillwave pioneer best known as Toro y Moi, has been making music since the mid ’00s; club aesthetics play a crucial role in his music (particularly in the dancefloor-oriented cuts of his alias Les Sins), but he has never been known as a club producer per se. New York’s Mojica, aka AceMo, came along roughly a decade later (in fact, the year of AceMo’s debut release, 2014, was also the year of Les Sins’ last recording until now); his raw, hardware-driven house, techno, and jungle productions throb with an upstart’s determination. Fun, spirited, and spontaneous, their debut EP together plays to their shared strengths.
Where Bear’s music is often woozy and a little bit whimsical, Mojica’s productions typically favor overdriven sonics and hard-charging rhythms. But on these five tracks, they seek a middle path, wrapping quick-stepping drum programming in heady, ruminative tones. The opening track, “C’Mon Les’ Go,” is the deepest of the bunch, punctuating an aquamarine swirl of synths with bare-bones drum machine, mostly just rimshots and hi-hats, and whispered come-ons. But the smoothness of the groove is offset by bursts of boisterous energy, and a layer of sampled hoots and yelps rides roughshod over the top of it all.
That sense of tension defines all the EP’s tracks. At its core, “Can’t Take It Anymore” is a psychedelic party cut that invites dancers to get lost in the play of textures like glassy synth tones and silvery electronic squiggles. Despite the innumerable little details at play, it doesn’t feel busy; it moves with a frictionless glide. But that sleekness is the foil for the artists’ nonstop stream of off-the-cuff vocals, the kind of energy-stoking rhymes a house-party DJ might shout through headphones plugged into the mixer’s mic jack (“Yo, I can’t take it anymore/Can you take me out on the floor”; “Dance, dance, dance, dance/Do the resistance”).
“Holy Cow” slips between moments of barely controlled chaos and effortless cool, bouncing pitch-shifted variations of the titular phrase over a TR-909 groove splashed with staccato organ chords. With a bumptious, ’90s-inspired sense of swing, it marks the record’s most extroverted moment. (“Hello?” is essentially a remix of “Holy Cow,” doubling down on the gonzo elements and throwing extra ad-libbed vocals into the pot.)
That playful spirit is a big part of the EP’s charm. Though the two musicians produced the bulk of the record remotely, they laid down its foundations when Mojica traveled to the Bay Area to DJ one of Bear’s Snap to Grid parties last fall, and all those whoops and hollers bear the unmistakable trace of real, in-person connection, of shared laughs in a shared space. The inaugural record on Mojica’s new Sonic Messengers label, a co-release with Bear’s own Company, the EP is a tribute to connections forged in dance music, as well as to the spontaneity that happens outside the actual club—a celebration of happy accidents and new creative directions. That might be why this bumping EP, split between heads-down energy and hands-up thrills, is tempered in places by a distinctly wistful air. The pandemic has been hell on dance music, and with C’mon Les’Go, it’s clear that Bear and Mojica can’t wait to get back out on the floor.

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On his second solo EP, the Seattle producer weaves together samples, field recordings, and original instrumentation to craft tactile electronic music that’s beat-oriented yet meditative.

Fall in Love EP

Seattle producer Matt Lucas isn’t one to rush. His wistful, atmospheric songs are noticeably slower than most club music, often clocking in at 90 bpm or less. And in an era of constantly updated SoundCloud feeds, Lucas, who records under his last name, releases his work at a measured pace. Since emerging in 2014, he’s put out just one solo EP, Clearing, and a collaborative EP with Canadian producer Ryan Hemsworth. But, despite his small catalog, he’s slowly finding his voice as a songwriter.
That voice is clearer than it's ever been on Lucas’ second EP, Fall in Love, which explores an impressive range of ideas in just 20 minutes and four tracks. He approaches songwriting the way a DJ might, stitching together distinct movements into a patchwork whole and creating texture through juxtaposition, drawing from disparate genres (he cites post-rock and lo-fi indie as influences, while his drum programming is rooted in contemporary rap) and leveraging a variety of sources: samples, field recordings, original instrumentation. On Fall in Love, this style starts to feel truly purposeful: Melodies build momentum and collide forcefully, the seams that unite them smooth but visible. For the first time, Lucas’ songs demand more attention than the methods he used to make them.
Although his work often feels sun-streaked, opener “Beacon” is a bouncy, late-night club banger that still finds space for plaintive keys and a stargazing crescendo. “Baptist” evokes a Buddhist monastery as much as a church: Lucas layers echoing bells and chimes atop record scratches and a hip-hop break, like Kid Koala blending a Four Tet record with a dusty rap 12". True to its title, “Fall in Love” is the EP’s most nakedly sentimental track. Over the course of five minutes, the song builds from a swirling pool of sepia-toned R&B into a trap instrumental, then washes away in a sea of reverb-soaked guitar notes that could have been plucked from an emo record.
“Corsica,” the EP’s stunning closer, is a showcase for the dynamic shifts that animate Lucas’ music. Portions of the song wouldn’t feel out of place on one of Kompakt’s Pop Ambient compilations, save for the expressive drum beats that form the track’s bones—little bursts of noise that punctuate a chorus of exhaling voices. Once that groundwork has been laid, the beat pushes to the fore, in the form of a half-drunk fill that nods toward the precise but human production of J. Dilla. When a racing, arpeggiated synth and a pounding 4/4 beat nudge the rhythm aside, the song hurtles into straight-faced trance territory. But then a window opens, the air clears, and all of its many disparate elements reach an equilibrium.
With a palette this varied and individual tracks that cover so much stylistic ground, Lucas continues to blur the line between DJ and composer. But, as his music evolves, he’s starting to find his niche as a creative force (rather than simply an eclectic curator) in electronic music. Fall in Love often recalls the fractured warmth of Fennesz, the warped nostalgia of Boards of Canada, and the glimmering intracracy of Four Tet. While Lucas still has a long way to go if he wants to achieve the compositional sophistication for which those acts are known, he’s steadily refining his craft with each bite-sized release. Just give him some time.


Second album from this Japanese artist is more song-based and less evocative than his intriguing debut.

L.S.T.

The original review I wrote for Shugo Tokumaru's 2004 debut, that spritely guitar-pop mini-album called Night Piece, got shot back to me. A Tokyo twentysomething whisking through his own soundscapes, losing himself in the cinema, shooting guns at wild west bad guys, battle rapping-- apparently it wasn't criticism. Fair enough, but as I work through this follow-up jam L.S.T., what jumps out most is how un-evocative it is by comparison. Shugo's really pulled back. In just a half-hour, Night Piece covered impossible ground stylistically, flirted with genre pastiche but still came unassuming. It was clever, making something cohesive of all that j-pop video game and film scoring and straight-up, unequivocal pop stuff-- maybe not as lovable immediately, but certainly more memorable. L.S.T. has one-speed-- Raffi Plays the Shins-- and while Shugo's clearly settling into being "one of those guys who just writes good songs, man," he's also not come up with anything special here, or memorable, or anything more than pleasant.
Still, as far as inoffensive acoustic guitar pop goes, this ain't bad. Give Shugo a chance to snap "Mist" out its woozy lullablahs; his sudden, close-mic'd guitar strums grit forcefully like the opening moments of Microphones' It Was Hot. The whistling on "Mushina" beats Andrew Bird's for most dulcimer, and "Vista" has something of a less-collective Broken Social Scene sound to it, with heavy reverb, disembodied vocals, and big dumb horn melodies. The first 100 seconds or so of "Yukinohaka" promise to sour L.S.T.'s unfazable grin, something along the lines of Ben Chasny's rolling drone figures, but then Shugo starts singing. And oh that voice-- it's as if nothing could possibly go wrong when that unintelligible full-bodied whisper of his courses these headphones. This time Shugo's pushed it into the instrument mix further, sometimes even pitting it against the intermittent noisemaking that normally stays beneath the guitar lines.
But then I hear something like "Karte". It's by far the least pleasant song here-- super-cartoonish silent movie chase music, no vocal melody to rally behind, occasionally showy guitar-playing, some weird squeaky wheel sound I can imagine is torture for some. To be honest I hated it at first, because the short, nimble track has more energy than the rest of the album combined, more smarts too-- the only track Shugo didn't dumb himself down for. It doesn't go down easy, and some spots do prick at first, but that's pittance for smart and lovable-- maybe we could stand to meet him halfway.


Nine Inch Nails’ second EP in a year is as perplexing and immediate as their first. Trent Reznor has lost none of his power to discomfit and intimidate.

Add Violence EP

It’s a scary time for Nine Inch Nails. Not that the band or its founder/leader Trent Reznor seems at risk of getting sucked back into the substance abuse, label shenanigans, and self-destructive personal demons that characterized their first turbulent decade of existence. In fact, Add Violence and the matching EP that preceded it, Not the Actual Events, are the first NIN releases to include an official band member other than Reznor, Atticus Ross. The very presence of Reznor’s long-time partner for film-soundtrack work implies a creative and interpersonal stability unprecedented in the group’s history.
It’s external circumstances rather than internal dynamics that account for NIN’s fear factor today. Their ferocious performance of "She’s Gone Away" on episode eight of the “Twin Peaks” revival—rather uncontroversially viewed as the most artistically ambitious hour of television ever aired—revealed that Reznor has lost none of his power to discomfit and intimidate. Placed alongside David Lynch and Mark Frost’s visions of atomic fire, indestructible doppelgangers, skull-crushing demons, and slithering insectoids, Nine Inch Nails fit right in.
Back in the real but no less frightening world, the depredations of the Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress make Reznor’s most excoriating anti-authoritarian anthems—the breakout single “Head Like a Hole,” the Bush-era agitprop of “The Hand That Feeds,” the dystopian entirety of 2007’s Year Zero—sound understated. And as the singer-songwriter continues to wrestle with the same feelings of stasis, hopelessness, and despair his lyrics have chronicled for nearly three decades, his heroes (David Bowie, Prince), contemporaries (Chris Cornell), and acolytes (Chester Bennington) are dying at an alarming rate. In retrospect, the clingy black powder that served as Not the Actual Events’ prankish “physical component” seems less like a cheap gag and more like scattered ashes.
Into this morass, Reznor and Ross have dropped Add Violence, their second EP in a year and only the third (discounting remix efforts) in Nine Inch Nails’ history. At first listen, it’s as perplexing as its immediate antecedent Not the Actual Events. Both five-track records are elliptical, following roughly the same pattern: a banger to open; a bloopy, spooky, spoken-word-heavy follow-up; a centerpiece dirge; a penultimate screamer; and a lengthy, distortion-heavy comedown to close.
Add Violence kicks things off with its lead single, “Less Than”—as close to an outrun/synthwave song as Reznor has gotten since the birth of those micro-genres in the first place. The structure of the chorus echoes “Copy of a,” the proper kickoff for NIN’s last full-length Hesitation Marks (the line “Look what you’ve gone done” is repeated almost verbatim), while the direct-address of rhetorical questions to an unnamed, politically antagonistic “you” recalls “The Hand That Feeds.” But when interpreted as a reproach of Trump voters, the song’s liberal borrowing from Reznor’s lyrical grab-bag can be forgiven: “Did it fix what was wrong inside? Are you less than?” is as close as any recent rock act has come to nailing the right wing’s “You think you’re better than me?!” ressentiment.
From this opening assault, Reznor and Ross scale down. “The Lovers” blends murmured dialogue and bubbly programming, then builds to a disarming, romantic chorus sung in Trent’s warbly falsetto, followed by the ethereal, slow-and-low ballad “This Isn’t the Place.” And if Nine Inch Nails had to pick a song to follow “She’s Gone Away” during their set at “Twin Peaks”’ Bang Bang Bar, Add Violence’s fourth track “Not Anymore” would be the logical choice. Its verses sway back and forth drunkenly, satirically mocking America’s not-in-my-backyard approach to atrocities (“Mouth taped shut, crippled and frozen with fear/That maybe happens to somebody else/No no, that doesn’t happen ’round here”) before lurching into a faster, louder chorus that seems designed to punish doubt and dissent. “I can’t seem to wake up,” Reznor repeats at the end of the song, a brand of paralysis no stranger to residents of David Lynch’s nightmare.
The EP’s final track is both the strongest and strangest. “The Background World” appears to be a slinky electronic groove that might conclude a big-budget Hollywood thriller, serving the same function as Moby’s “Extreme Ways” in the Bourne movies, or Reznor and Ross’ cover of Bryan Ferry’s “Is Your Love Strong Enough?” with their frequent collaborator (and Reznor’s wife) Mariqueen Maandig in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Yet the lyrics are bluntly bereft of sequel-ready optimism: “There is no moving past/There is no better place/There is no future point in time/We will not get away.” Reznor’s detractors tend to mock this sort of sentiment, but in the year of our Lord 2017, who’s laughing now?
The song’s formal moments are even more intimidating. It repeats the same awkwardly edited instrumental snippet—a brief empty hiccup separating each iteration—over fifty times. Seven minutes and thirty-nine seconds of the song’s eleven minute, forty-four-second runtime are eaten up as the segment plays out over and over, each new version a degraded facsimile of the last, until only static remains of the original riff and rhythm. Like an image run through a Xerox machine until it’s no longer recognizable, this makes Reznor’s Hesitation Marks–era worry that he’s just “a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a” legitimate entity real and audible. Its audaciousness would make David Lynch himself proud. As Reznor promises additional work to come in the near future, it gives his listeners reason to hope, no matter how hopeless he himself becomes.


The Monterrey-based experimental musician abandons the outward trappings of electronic music on his latest album, a hushed collection of cryptic etudes that flicker in the margin between the played and the programmed.

Antiguo Autómata Mexicano: 20+ Piano Improvisations

20+ Piano Improvisations

The pianola—better known as the player piano, an instrument that appears to play itself, as though a ghost were seated at the keyboard—has been obsolete for a century, yet its DNA lives on in the form of the piano roll. Originally, the piano roll was a scroll of paper perforated with tiny holes that dictated the pitch, tempo, and dynamics to be reproduced by a player piano. Today, the piano roll is a common term for the graphical interface used to program MIDI notes on a computer screen. These two technologies, one archaic and the other contemporary, collapse together on 20+ Piano Improvisations, a collection of cryptic etudes that flicker in the margin between the played and the programmed.
The Monterrey-based musician Ángel Sánchez Borges, aka Antiguo Autómata Mexicano, has been active in the Mexican experimental-music scene since 1985. On previous releases like 2005’s Microhate and 2007’s Kraut Slut, Borges explored the spring-loaded rhythms and brushed-metal textures of millennial glitch techno. With 20+ Piano Improvisations, he abandons the outward trappings of electronic music, turning his attention to the piano—and, in the process, emphasizing the automaton in his alias. Dating back millennia, automata are machines programmed to perform basic tasks or execute certain movements, often in ways that appear deceptively lifelike. The player piano was an automaton common to many middle-class living rooms in the early 20th century; an early (albeit expensive) model of music player that brought virtuoso performance techniques to the mass market.
An album of electronic commands masquerading as acoustic music and vice versa, 20+ Piano Improvisations is part of a tradition stretching from Conlon Nancarrow’s pianola studies to Aphex Twin’s Disklavier experiments. But in Borges’ blend of hands-on performance and MIDI programming, there is little evidence of the ghost in the machine. Unlike Nancarrow’s formidably difficult pieces, with their runaway-train rhythms and impenetrable blocks of notes—antecedents to the punishing cascades of black MIDI—Borges’ two- and three-minute preludes are slim, almost wistful things. Tentative right-hand melodies tease out their counterparts on the left, nudging repeated figures both forward and outward, like rainwater finding its path. The pacing is a kind of mechanistic rubato, as though a robot were feeling out its limbs. The mood is tentative, quiet, inquisitive—unafraid to be sentimental, yet never maudlin. It’s even playful, at times, albeit in a hushed, hangdog way.
Borges never goes out of the way to hide the irreality of his pieces; the very first song sounds like something that could be plausibly executed by 10 fingers in real time, yet it is trailed by a faint, unobtrusive shadow of synthesizer, almost as though the computer were humming along—like Keith Jarrett, lost in his reverie. In the closing piece, a long reverb tail detunes as it curls, lending the piano an eerie, waterlogged air.
The album’s early pieces tend to proceed naturalistically, as cautiously graceful counterpoints map out the melodic and harmonic terrain with the precision of county surveyors. Even at its most unadorned, his instrument sounds unusually rich and embodied, with the shuffling of felted hammers lending a percussive feel to his denser passages. A piece might start out simply but gradually accrue extra voices—in “Piano Improvisation No. 5,” faint echoes, almost like traces of dub delay, creep into the frame; in “Piano Improvisation No. 14,” left- and right-hand parts seem to branch into several hands’ worth of counterpoints as the music speeds and slows. Often, by the end, the melodic line of any given piece has been fogged with stray accidentals and extra layers, like an Etch A Sketch that hasn’t been thoroughly erased. And occasionally Borges abandons the solo-piano conceit altogether; with its dissonant sheets of string synth, “Piano Improvisation No. 16” sounds like his answer to Paul Hindemith’s sonatas for piano and violin.
But the pleasure of this wonderfully moving album does not lie in the search for the wizard behind the curtain. How the music was created is ultimately unimportant; what matters is the depth of feeling he achieves. Borges’ concerns are musical, not technological: Channeling the bristly high Modernism of Erik Satie’s “Vexations” and John Cage’s “In a Landscape” alongside the warm-blooded neo-Romanticism of Harold Budd’s La Bella Vista and Perhaps, Borges lays out 20 gentle musical riddles that feel at once nostalgic, curious, and whimsical—like well-worn bar puzzles, delightful to the touch.
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