Latest from these Glaswegian indie-poppers blends 1950s beach music, country, and bubbly orch-pop to complement their alternately romantic and cynical lyrics.

My Maudlin Career

On the title track of Camera Obscura's fourth album, My Maudlin Career, Tracyanne Campbell sings, "This maudlin career has come to an end/ I don't want to be sad again." As usual, she's being sincerely ironic. Camera Obscura fans will be pleased to know that she's still turning out maudlin torch songs with apparent ease. It is a record of the most immoderate sentiment: Thirty seconds in, on "French Navy", you've already got a dusty library, a French sailor, and the moon on the silvery lake. By the second track, "The Sweetest Thing", Campbell's ready to trade her mother for a compliment from a certain someone. She might not want to be sad again, but judging from the kind of tangled romantic assignations she confesses to here? Album number five already lurks in the inevitable fallout.
The sonic similarities and early connections between Camera Obscura and fellow Glaswegians Belle and Sebastian have already been flogged to death; what's less often mentioned is that they're also growing up parallel. Both began as lo-fi indie-pop bands with heads full of classic pop radio. Over time, both shifted their emphasis toward crafting classic-sounding songs in various Western pop idioms while retaining traces of their button-badge origins. More timid incarnations of Camera Obscura dissolved their genre exercises into a sort of equalizing cuddliness; on My Maudlin Career, the band's confidence draws them into sharper relief. You'll hear traces of 1950s beach music on "The Sweetest Thing", country on "Forest and Sands", and bubbly orch-pop all over the place. The album feels as if it could have been released any time in the last 50-odd years, but the inspired arrangements-- and, of course, Campbell's indelible voice-- make it sound fresh, too.
"Refinement" is the watchword on My Maudlin Career, and there are two particular developments of note. One is the string arrangements, which are kinda out of control. They buffet the verses relentlessly, taking over entirely whenever the jubilation reaches such a feverish pitch that words can no longer express it-- check out the deliriously up-swirling end of "Careless Love". It's as if George Gershwin stormed the studio. A weaker band might have floundered under the weight, which brings us to the second notable development: Campbell's singing retains its vulnerable-but-tough naiveté, but it sounds more assertive and agile, with increased swing and soul, than ever before. There are still melodies of heart-wrenching simplicity that stick in your head to an almost irritating degree (beware of the dangerously catchy "James"), balanced by songs with longer, more complex and limber melodic phrases. It's a singing style one wants to call "mature."
And maturity is a central concept to Camera Obscura-- Campbell's found it in her singing, but in her lyrics, the search continues. The asymmetries in her personality give her songs their distinct character. She still has that bitingly sarcastic, even cynical side, which lends a flinty edge to the sentimentality. Even in an adoring ode to a sailor boyfriend, she takes a moment to derisively mention his "dietary restrictions." And on the rollicking "Swans", you can practically hear her rolling her eyes when she sings, "So you want to be a writer? Fantastic idea!" Sarcasm seems to be a defense mechanism for Campbell, one that's necessary because of two very pronounced and conflicting personality traits. On one hand, she's a hopeless romantic. On the other, she's very cautious, and somewhat pessimistic. These contrary impulses create the tragically beautiful situations in her songs.
The fear of getting lost crops up frequently-- at least twice on this album. So does the fear of public opinion, which rears its head on "French Navy": "I'll be criticized for lending out my art/ I was criticized for letting you break my heart." Campbell is striving for equilibrium in adult relationships but keeps falling back into teenage predicaments. Her meditations on maturity, responsibility, and healthy love give the record its darker, more serious overtones. On "Away with Murder", over sullen minor-key organs, she contemplates the point where support shades into enabling: "How many times have you told me you want to die?" The question of what we owe the people we love, and what we can reasonably expect from them in return, is the backdrop for all the romance and depression. People are always showing up at Campbell's door when she doesn't want them to, or not showing up when she does. Being beholden in this way seems to frustrate and attract her in equal measure. Luckily for us, until this schism is resolved, her maudlin career should continue to play out apace.


Dâm-Funk has always been one of the spacier of funk’s new prophets, which, considering how far-out that whole scene is, is a major accomplishment. On his new album he's leveled up on both sides of the equation–the pop stuff’s poppier, and the weird stuff’s more intriguingly weird.

Invite the Light

If history has taught us anything about the funk, it’s that the funk is a cyclical thing. Its powers and influence ebb and flow in waves; over the years, funk has ridden out these changes with an easygoing grace, confident in the fact that any low period will be inevitably followed by a swing back up. Right now we’re living in an especially strong time for funk–in fact, it should go down as one of the highest points in funk history. And like the other times like this in the past, we have California to thank for it.
Funk’s current comeback has been rumbling out of L.A. since the end of the last decade. There was the Brainfeeder crew breaking hip-hop’s increasingly mechanized mold in order to reconnect it with the cosmic slop that helped birth it. A generation of young rappers that grew up during the city’s gangsta-rap heyday (many of them aligned with Black Hippy and TDE) began preparing for the return of g-funk 20 years after it first developed. Somewhere off to the side, Dâm-Funk began creating massive beats whose invocations of past masters like Roger Troutman and Egyptian Lover underlined Cali’s prominent place in funk’s lineage.
Only in the past year or so has it become entirely clear that these aren’t isolated cases, but one immense upswell, as artists from across these different scenes released a string of records that reflected a new level of skill, including Flying Lotus’ You’re Dead!, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, and Thundercat’s The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam. With Invite the Light, Dâm-Funk’s joined them.
Dâm’s always been one of the spacier of funk’s new prophets, which, considering how far-out that whole scene is, is a major accomplishment. He’s always seemed uninterested in making his creative impulses fit in any kind of box, so his records tend to range from relatively straightforward, pop-compatible stuff into more abstract territory hovering in an ambiguous space between funk, electro, and experimental electronic music.
Invite the Light is proof that Dâm-Funk’s leveled up on both sides of the equation–the pop stuff’s poppier, and the weird stuff’s more intriguingly weird. On the opening track, former Ohio Player Junie Morrison delivers a staticky distress call from some dystopian time where the funk’s been extinguished and humanity suffers because of it. What follows is a megaton funk bomb that would be more than sufficient to set this alternate universe straight.
In his intro, Morrison says that he "cannot tell you the exact time, day, or year" that he’s broadcasting from, because humankind’s given up keeping track. Invite the Light’s got the same kind of temporal ambiguity running through it. Dâm-Funk has a particular soft spot for the peak of funk’s analog electronic era (bookended roughly by "More Bounce to the Ounce" and "Egypt, Egypt"), but he seems to be drawing his inspiration here from funk in its entirety.
Some of these songs are the catchiest and most direct Dâm’s ever produced, and they all go about it in distinctly different ways. "We Continue" has a Zapp-ish electro bass bump, but the synth pads, twinkling pianos, and multitracked vocals layered on top impart a breezy disco buoyancy that suggests matching satin outfits and choreographed dance moves. "Somewhere, Someday", meanwhile, has the same sparkle as the soulful midtempo bubblegum Prince makes when he’s not feeling tortured.
Even when Dâm gets further out, the album holds together. "The Hunt and Murder of Lucifer", as the title suggests, is a deeply tripped out, bloody-sounding instrumental with leads shared by a nastily buzzing bass part and an icier, pitch-bent synth that throws off all kinds of unsettling discordant frequencies when the two combine. And his Ariel Pink collaboration "Acting" is such potently blissed-out psychedelia that you’re likely to catch a contact high just listening to it.
At its best, Invite the Light manages to bring together Dâm-Funk’s wilder, more experimental side with his newly refined pop side to produce not just some of the strongest material he’s ever made, but some of the strongest material to arise out of the current funk boom. "HowUGonFu*kAroundAndChooseABusta'?" comes near the middle of the album, and it feels like the track that everything else revolves around. From different angles, it resembles Snoop when he was trying to sound like George Clinton, or Prince when he was trying to sound like a rapper, or Outkast when they were trying to sound like Prince. Taken as a whole, though, it’s unmistakably new and unique, and it'll make you thankful that we get to live in a world where funk exists.


Morrissey's first album in five years is as musically rich and worldly as he gets, and it proves he can be as hilarious and multi-dimensional as ever. But it's also a deeply sour record, and this album's expressions of wide-ranging contempt are at times unbecomingly convincing.

Morrissey: World Peace Is None of Your Business

World Peace Is None of Your Business

"We were paralyzed by the dumbness of the times. So we did our best to change them." That's Morrissey, on how clueless gatekeepers blocked the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" from bigger commercial success, in the new book Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s. His comments here are striking partly for how little has changed—in Morrissey's telling, everyone else was wrong: the other Smiths, who were "embarrassed" by the lyrics; producer John Porter, who downplayed them; Rough Trade head Geoff Travis, who relegated the song to a UK B-side; and the American chartkeepers and TV producers, who failed to recognize the track's genius. Morrissey's remarks also stand out, though, for their optimism. All his hope might've been gone, as he sang, but he still left a scrap for the rest of us.
Though World Peace Is None of Your Business, Morrissey's first album in five years, comes in times that are undoubtedly just as dumb in their own way, the Smiths' place within them is secure. Defunct for almost three decades, the band is a perennial subject of Coachella reunion whispers. Morrissey elicits tributes in "Parks and Recreation" dialogue and Peanuts-themed Tumblr mashups alike. The gap between albums is his longest since virtually disappearing between 1997's misunderstood Maladjusted and 2004's tommy gun-blazing You Are the Quarry, but nowadays Morrissey is rarely far from the public eye, whether publishing a sometimes-brilliant memoir, canceling tour dates (while blaming the opener), or getting into it over animal rights with Jimmy Kimmel and Los Angeles' Staples Center. Remember when he appeared to start using Twitter? Then denied using Twitter? Post-financial crisis, he's as ubiquitous as global protest movements.
Tour and Twitter drama aside, the rollout of World Peace has still managed only to raise Morrissey's profile, from the album's priceless album cover and tracklist to unconventional spoken-word videos guest-starring past musical collaborator Nancy Sinatra and fellow PETA activist Pamela Anderson. The full-length itself, though—in a characteristic Morrissey twist—is hardly welcoming to newcomers. It's musically as rich and worldly as Morrissey gets, and the 55-year-old who early last year addressed another round of health concerns by quipping that "the reports of my death have been greatly understated" proves he can be as hilarious and multi-dimensional as ever. But it's also a deeply sour record, even for Morrissey. He's always had it both ways, singing his life but with a wink that resists literal interpretations; even so, this album's expressions of wide-ranging contempt are at times unbecomingly convincing.
Ever since You Are the Quarry weathered criticism for Jerry Finn's unsubtle production, Morrissey's albums have flourished sonically, and that growth is its furthest-reaching to date on World Peace. Boz Boorer, on guitar since 1992's Your Arsenal, brings a muscular continuity and sense of comfort—but keyboard/synthesizer newcomer Gustavo Manzur and producer Joe Chiccarelli (the White Stripes, Beck) go beyond the Ennio Morricone orchestral cameo from 2006's Ringleader of the Tormentors and the unpredictable luxuriance of 2009's Years of Refusal. Recorded in France, the album makes the world its business, encompassing meditative drones along with flamenco guitars and mariachi horns. It's as meticulously detailed as it is cosmopolitan, and marks the second straight Morrissey album that rewards listening without paying attention to the lyrics.
Morrissey's golden vibrato also sounds gloriously undamaged by his recent medical woes. As ever, it's most evident in his nonverbal tics—the way he stretches out the word "ways" into umpteen syllables on "Staircase at the University", an "Ask"-jaunty number about a student whose academic imperfections lead to suicide, and how he melismatically unfurls "cries" on "The Bullfighter Dies", another cheerfully morbid song cheering the perfectly Morrissey-esque subject of the title ("because we all want the bull to survive"). "Neal Cassady Drops Dead" is as jagged and punchy as its bleakly funny, faux-Beat tirade about "babies full of rabies/ Rabies full of scabies/ Scarlett has a fever.../ The little fella has got Rubella." Morrissey still knows how to be cranky with aplomb.
Still, at times the intricate arrangements come across as a means of covering up unmemorable songwriting. The murky midtempo rock of "Istanbul", about a father who identifies the body of his dead son, and the ornately textured strummer "Mountjoy", which finds grim equality in a notorious Irish prison ("We all lose/ Rich or poor"), are evidence of how these songs often tend to drag. The worst offender is nearly eight-minute centerpiece "I'm Not a Man", which grows from ambient twinkles and show-tunes crooning to gutsy modern-rock pounding and howling as Morrissey reaches new levels of self-righteousness: "I'd never kill or eat an animal/ And I never would destroy this planet I am on." All credit to Morrissey for speaking inconvenient truths, but it doesn't take joining the Koch family to possess the ability to walk out of this lecture. Forget "man"—what about "charming"?
Along with the occasional trudging bits, Morrissey's smug preachiness is the album's other off-putting point. The title track is ingeniously catchy and deeply sardonic, but dismissing protesters from Ukraine to Bahrain as "you poor little fool" and coining the mantra that "Each time you vote/ You support the process" isn't a dose of welcome realism; it's cynical and self-absorbed (Americans in Morrissey's lifetime marched and died for voting rights). The glamorous, self-mythologizing romantic melancholy that's Morrissey's stock-in-trade, meanwhile, comes up only rarely, though you can hear its echoes in the joyously "Besame Mucho"-flipping "Kiss Me a Lot," and Morrissey's exaltation of ruffians in the vaguely sexualized violence of "Smiler With Knife". The album's most miserablist songs, to use the word long applied to Morrissey's music, nevertheless zoom out for a wider view: there's the Spanish-tinged romp "Earth Is the Loneliest Planet", where "You fail as a woman/ And you lose as a man," and the pointedly dirge-like "Kick the Bride Down the Aisle", where Morrissey's scorn for institution of matrimony leaves me longing for the Hidden Cameras' more entertaining "Ban Marriage".
On finale "Oboe Concerto", which idiosyncratically leans on Boorer's sax and clarinet, Morrissey repeats, "There's a song I can't stand/ And it's stuck in my head." Beneath electronic blips and burbles, the lurching bass line is reminiscent of the Smiths' 1987 song "Death of a Disco Dancer". There, he familiarily sings: "If you think peace is a common goal/ That goes to show how little you know," adding, "Love, peace, and harmony / Oh, very nice, very nice, very nice, very nice / But maybe in the next world." Or, as he intones now, "Round, round, rhythm of life goes round." Morrissey, a wag might say, is none of our business.


The new album from the Neptunes' rock project can be backhandedly complimented as a comeback of sorts by mere virtue of not being noticeably worse than what came before it.

Seeing Sounds

Rockist habits die hard-- if you don't believe me, go to the nearest used CD store and spin a N.E.R.D. album. Trust me, they'll be there. While the Neptunes' space-age synths and bucket percussion spawned literally dozens of pop hits over the past decade, even as contemporaries like Timbaland and Kanye West were becoming muso darlings, these Tidewater gadflies were mostly denied any sort of serious credibility until they got critics back into their comfort zone by hitching their sound to Hulk Smash palm-mute riffs and live drums. At which point everyone went kinda overboard, as Brent DiCrescenzo put it in a review of 2004's Fly or Die, "limit[ing] their vocabulary to the Hall of Fame" while lauding some of the weakest material Pharrell Williams, Chad Hugo, and Shay ever came up with. At least In Search Of... had enough juice to be called uneven, but the musical priorities of Fly or Die were so out of whack, only the most determined contrarian could possibly still be listening to it. Needless to say, all those breathless "future of music" plaudits were probably anticipating a more profound result of N.E.R.D.'s influence in 2008 than kids in tight pants learning how to pull a fakie ollie.
So yeah, the bar's been set far lower for Seeing Sounds, which by default makes it a more satisfying experience-- it can even be backhandedly complimented as a comeback of sorts by mere virtue of not being noticeably worse than what came before it. But the continuing problem of N.E.R.D. is that it's nearly impossible to figure out how much you should invest in them, or really how much they're invested in it-- as the group's public voice, Pharrell has never shied away from claims of helming some sort of polyglot musical mastermind, and free of their commercial burdens, N.E.R.D. should ostensibly document their unfettered genius. And then they release songs that chop it up with Good Charlotte, compare female asses to spaceships, and on lead single "Everybody Nose (All the Girls Standing in the Line for the Bathroom)", P lampoons partygoing cokeheads by sounding like Baha Men after five too many rails. If you're looking to soundtrack scenes of "Real World: Hollywood" housemates dry-fucking each other at Geisha House ("jump around like you're ADHD! ADHD!" goes "Anti-Matter"), Seeing Sounds might be worthy of regular rotation, but for the rest of us, it's just another baffling, obnoxious mess of "serious fun" from a squad whose glory days are getting harder to remember.
It almost feels silly pointing out how brazenly they're wielding Occam's Razor here: Were Seeing Sounds just a collection of hooks or beats, it might not be half bad. I can't imagine too many people in Starboard P's Rolodex turning down the sass mouthed chorus of "Anti-Matter" or the gleaming harmonies of "Sooner or Later", but neither disparages the idea of actual songwriting being far down the list of what N.E.R.D. is actually good at. The former gets marooned from the rest of the song as they go into a rampage fueled by equal parts Red Bull and Roni Size, and as for the latter, it's ironic that P swipes the piano part from "Changes", since they repeat themselves so often over the span of nearly seven minutes of nebulous breakup malaise that you'll wonder if you got a faulty leak.
Like its unexpected stylistic kin My Morning Jacket's Evil Urges, Seeing Sounds finds its creators partaking in the subversively phallocentric narcissism of staring at their CD collections, confusing music listening with music understanding rather than enjoyment. At first blush, "Windows" nicely jerry-rigs an octave-toggling surf riff to some eerily Sting-ish backing vocals, but get past that surface pleasure and you're treated to Pharrell's typically priapic lyrics, rhyming the title with "she's a 10, yo," among other things (mostly "yo"). "Happy" is N.E.R.D.'s shoegaze moment (no, really), albeit with a complete misunderstanding of the production dynamics-- despite all those flanger sound effects, it's about as immersive as a thimble and could just as easily be coming out of a Sega Genesis. And then there's "Kill Joy", which along with Lil' Wayne's "Mrs. Officer", augurs a scary possibility that rappers are starting to rediscover deep cuts from Blood Sugar Sex Magik.
At the very least, some will feel better knowing that Pharrell and Chad are apparently speaking again, even if playing 52 pickup with genre is becoming the only fun of N.E.R.D. albums as opposed to considering every track a battle to see whether P first gets bored of his lyrics or his melodies; it's a tough call on "Yeah You", four minutes of quiet storm drizzle about being stalked via e-mail. But in an odd way, Seeing Sounds is a liberating listen-- clearly, N.E.R.D. are beholden to no one but themselves and a kind ear can at least enjoy the almost Zen-like nothingness of the Black Card Era: all withdrawal, no deposit.


In a grand move to restore liner notes to their informative zenith, the inky little paper accompanying Gallowsbird's Bark ...

Gallowsbird's Bark

In a grand move to restore liner notes to their informative zenith, the inky little paper accompanying Gallowsbird's Bark offers a handful of (supposedly) autobiographical clues to The Fiery Furnaces' raucous brother/sister gambol: "Matthew encouraged Eleanor to come down in the basement to make their first Fiery Furnaces music together. Maybe he should have hit and stabbed and smashed her. But he just swore." Despite some implied tongue-in-cheekiness (and the obvious fact that relentless sibling posturing is an awfully exhausted conceit right now, even if these kids really are related), it's a surprisingly apt and insightful peep into the bright blue heart of The Fiery Furnaces' blaze: violence, dark rooms, boy/girl handholding, and big selfless compromises all vie for attention on this debut, a feisty blues-rock barn-dance with enough pings and yelps to keep everyone's little hands curled tightly into fists.
The Furnaces' electric guitar, drums, sparingly applied bass, and freewheeling piano riffs recollect everything from Muddy Waters to the Rolling Stones, and Gallowsbird's Bark plays like a big, half-drunken romp through golden-era rock 'n' roll-- airy and thrilling and shifty as hell. Lyrics mostly consist of quasi-rambling witticisms that somehow come together in the delivery; Eleanor Friedberger's brash, oddly assured warble (the evenly hollered "I pierced my ears with a three-hole punch/ I ate three dozen donuts for lunch") is lovingly reminiscent of the kinds of semi-absurdist snickers that Dylan got away with in the late 60s (check the baffling-but-somehow-not credo, "The sun isn't yellow/ It's chicken," from "Tombstone Blues"). Likewise, the duo's spare, confrontational guitar riffing is grating only insofar as it jars; blues-driven, feral, and scribbling all over the page, Bark's sixteen tracks house a mess of weird, undulating musical bits that are hugely intriguing despite not always making a whole shitload of sense.
"South Is Only a Home" opens the record in a sloppy downhill tumble. It's a solid, foot-stomping burst, with honkytonk piano plonking out a declining scale and a wrestled guitar making a mess that's as thrilling as it is damaging. Both "Leaky Tunnel" and "Inca Rag/Name Game" channel Lennon/McCartney melody-gone-weird ("Inca Rag" has a piano opening that's awfully close to "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da") while "I'm Gonna Run" sees Eleanor's Jack White/Chrissie Hynde growl/coo suggestively noting, "Saw my brother coming up the hill/ I tied a beach towel around my wrist." It's all muted violence and esoteric observations skidding across wily guitar foundations, bouncy piano hits, and puttering percussion.
Despite just now cutting their proper debut, the Furnaces have already burned through a pile of drummers (Ryan Sawyer bravely grips the sticks here), and the duo's brother/sister throwdown seems volatile enough to ignite just about anything seated directly in its blazing path. They spew the best kinds of sparks, though: accessible, but skewed and peculiar enough to keep you peeking nervously over your shoulder every couple of minutes.


HEALTH follow their apocalyptic debut, arguably better remix album, and thrashing, industrial-disco single "Die Slow" with LP No. 2.

Get Color

On their self-titled 2007 debut, L.A. Smell alumni HEALTH were a band going for broke, throwing everything-- noise, aggression, tribalist tendencies, spastic energy-- at the wall and barely waiting around long enough to watch it splatter. It was a nihilistic sound-- post-apocalyptic, even-- and even though you could hear distinct traces of noise-rock forbears Liars and Boredoms in their approach, the sheer energy of the thing seemed to suggest the potential for the band to carve out its own style. Fast-forward two years later and HEALTH's profile has risen considerably, thanks in part to the national-media focus on their DIY homebase the Smell, a solid remix album, and a coveted opening slot for Nine Inch Nails on one of that group's final tours.
All of the pieces were in place, then, for HEALTH to blow minds and unfasten jaws with the follow-up to their first release, Get Color. And when lead single "Die Slow" dropped a few months back, it seemed like they just might pull it off. The thrashing, industrial-disco track was easily the best thing the group had done to date, and it hinted that they had zeroed in on a more neatly defined aesthetic using a heavier focus on melody and song structure. So naturally the big question now is if the rest of Get Color lives up to the promise of "Die Slow". The answer is that it does... kind of.
In terms of its stylistic shift, the album is an unqualified success. Whether the result of their mixed-genre collaborations with Crystal Castles, relentless touring or plain old musical growth, HEALTH have clearly located their sound. It hinges on a more delicate balance of noise and prettiness (think the heaviest part of a My Bloody Valentine track magnified to entire-song length) and emphasizes frontman Jake Duzsik's androgynous vocals. With this revamped style, portions of Get Color reach the high bar set by "Die Slow". One such moment is "Before Tigers", with huge walls of guitar-and-drum noise that play off its whisper-to-a-roar vocals. "Nice Girls" is meaner and more asymmetrical but succeeds with similar contrast. Here, forceful tribal drumming sets off screeching instrumental caterwauls that seem at odds with, but ultimately blend into its ethereal, almost feminine coos.
HEALTH also incorporate more electronic textures this time around, and songs like "Death+" and "Eat Flesh" find the band using intricate synth patterns as jumping-off points for brutal freakouts. These tracks rely less on melody than those mentioned above, and while usually very sonically interesting, they seem to have only one purpose-- destruction. In that sense, a number like "Eat Flesh" fascinates my ears but doesn't do much for my heart. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to feel when I listen to the song, other than that maybe everything is fucked so it's best we just rage until the sun comes up. Which is a completely legitimate sentiment (and, heck, probably accurate) but I think I was able to glean that much from HEALTH's first record.
With its machine-gun drumming and end-of-days guitar shredding, Get Color's second-to-last track, "We Are Water" also seems to be racing towards some kind of total annihilation, a violent end. But the band takes a surprising detour by following that song up with the more pensive closer "In Violet", which takes a step back to survey the scorched landscape, assess the damage done, and explore the possibilities beyond the moment. It's this sort of mature downshift that seems to suggest that if HEALTH can continue to find some deeper meaning behind their very impressive musicianship, they might be onto something great.


Since his cover of "No Diggity" and 2012's Thinking In Textures, Chet Faker has been the Australian poster boy for the nebulous intersection of R&B and soul-influenced electronic music. This is his first full-length.

Built on Glass

Given Chet Faker's profile in his homeland over the past few years, it's easy to forget the Melbourne producer had only put out a single solo EP before Built on Glass. Since his cover of "No Diggity" and 2012's Thinking In Textures, Faker has been the Australian poster boy for the nebulous intersection of R&B and soul-influenced electronic music. Either somewhere between James Blake and Tom Krell or a leader of the ignominious "Australian sound" depending on who you ask, Faker's standard-bearing might seem a little premature. Built on Glass, as his first full-length, is therefore his case to the world.
There's some premeditation to this statement of his. Faker reportedly scrapped his album twice in pursuit of refining what Chet Faker is supposed to sound like. The result is some inconsistency as Faker tries to reconcile every avenue of his interest with his existing identity, and almost certain disappointment for anyone who expected 52 minutes of Chet as soft-spoken sex facilitator. In the confusion, though, is the chance for surprise, and Faker capitalizes with a hint of just how far his horizons can expand beyond the flaccid cracker-crooning of his previous work.
The first half of the record is where Faker satisfies his obligations. Opening with his trademark Rhodes piano and soupy vocals with "Release Your Problems", he then runs through the beat- and sample-chopping singles "Talk Is Cheap" and "Melt" and the woozy R&B of "Gold". The first indication that not everything is as it seems comes on "No Advice (Airport Version)": splitting up the two singles, it occupies half its duration with electroacoustic burbling before allowing Faker to sing a few short bars over nothing but a low, vibrating hum.
It's necessary to talk about Built on Glass in sides as it makes a point of distinguishing between them. The record pivots with the interlude "/", a gravelly Southern accent speaking through vinyl pops and cracks: "That was the other side of the record. Now relax still more and drift a little deeper as you listen." This second half is where Faker becomes more adventurous, enough to venture beyond the borders set for him by his first record. With the blueprint reaffirmed by the first side, the back load feels like he's consciously leaving behind familiar ground to investigate his other influences further. Faker plays with depth, allowing each element room to move between the back and foreground. Booming drums shatter the cavernous atmosphere of "Blush", broken shards of glass tumble over each other, and Faker's pitch-shifted vocals clash from high and low, finally uniting harmoniously in the middle.
The album's climax is in the coupling of the betrayal-house of "1998" and the rhythmic textures of "Cigarettes & Loneliness". On "1998", Faker's mumblemouth drawl works in his favor, sounding too numb in parts to even motivate his lips, but at least finding the strength to croak "We used to be friends." A chattering beat leads it into "Cigarettes & Loneliness" and Faker's voice strengthens into a Van Morrison-like lilt, dancing over syllables.
Maybe it's no coincidence that between the whirring synths and the beat, like metal wheels clanking over tracks, it sounds like the siren of a level railway crossing; the kind of place desperate folks all too often wander in their final moments. The track itself conjures a similar, overbearing futility. Again, Faker explores the space, disrupting the stability of its plucked central riff with cascading elements both percussive and melodic, sucking it all up into its weeping choruses as Faker pleads helplessly for understanding.
Faker placed a keyboard on the cover of Thinking In Textures, nodding towards his greatest tool. On Built on Glass, it's replaced by a human hand; possibly a nod towards Faker's adoption of what we still anachronistically refer to as "real instruments." While the core of Built on Glass is still drum machines and synthesizers, Faker's expansion into the organic and electroacoustic has given him a wider territory to roam. And while the introduction of those elements into his work might leave some wondering what happened to the bedroom producer who took over Australia with a dashed-off Blackstreet cover, Chet Faker's first full-length album proves that the artist is eager to explore new frontiers.


Transporting the innovations of John Cage, Christian Wolff, and other avant-garde mainstays to a more melodic neo-pop context, Dusseldorf-based pianist and composer Volker Bertelmann pulls from a variety of genres not necessarily known for their accessibility to create an endlessly listenable modern classical record.

Ferndorf

The previous records I've heard from Dusseldorf-based pianist and composer Volker Bertelmann, who records as Hauschka, have revolved around the titular instrument of his 2005 release The Prepared Piano. That album seemed to crystalize certain connections between the modified piano and later developments in experimental music. Bertelmann began with an approach to piano popularized by John Cage, who in the 1930s placed screws, pieces of rubber, and other objects between strings in order to turn the instrument into a kind of miniature percussion orchestra. As with avant-garde mainstays like Christian Wolff or David Tudor, Bertelmann in concert has been known to climb inside the piano itself between pieces to modify its innards, adding treatments and monkeying with the wires in search of new textures. But unlike any of these composers, he prefers melodies with a folk-like simplicity, pieces you can hum, with the comforting repetition of Glass/Reich-style minimalism serving as a rhythmic underpinning. So Bertelmann transports these innovations into a more melodic neo-pop context, while also adding some light electronic processing as a tip of the hat to the possibilities of computers. He's showed how familiar music can be transformed and made new by manipulations in the physical and virtual realms, but his music is easily enjoyed by listeners with no time for classical music.
While previous records focused on piano, Ferndorf, while keeping that instrument at its center, finds Bertelmann expanding his palette further. He's joined here by various combinations of a violin (by Sabine Baron), cello (by Insa Schirmer and Donja Djember), and trombone (by Bernhard Voelz). Sometimes the short pieces-- most are between two and five minutes-- are fleshed out the way you might expect from a small chamber ensemble, with the strings adding counterpoint or extending melodic ideas. And sometimes, like on "Barfuss Durch Gras", which incorporates about eight or nine different textures-- buzzes, trills, scrapes, and drones-- it's hard to tell who might be playing what.
While the latter is abstract enough to remind me of the electro-acoustic experimentation of Ekkehard Ehlers, Joseph Suchy, and Franz Hautzinger on their 2004 album Soundchambers, "Barfuss Durch Gras" is an anomaly; the bulk of Ferndorf reflects the vibrant, cheerful pastoralism of the record's title (it translates as "distant village," a reference to Bertelmann's childhood in rural Germany). For example, deadened bass strings form a pulse that could almost be described as "groovy" on "Rode Null", and when the strings fall in and the melody begins, it has the charming, easy swing of a Vince Guaraldi number. "Neuschnee" is more lyrical, with an underpinning of yearning, as it moves from big swells of sounds to hushed contemplation. And then the closing "Weeks of Rain", which finds Bertelmann alone at the piano, is as romantically melancholy as its title, bringing to mind a half-drunk Bill Evans in a sentimental mood playing a Chopin nocturne.
Ferndorf as a record isn't something to get you hearing music in a new way or an open up a new world, but it does succeed very nicely for what it is. Bertelmann takes an approach to piano founded in mid-20th century avant-garde, brings along a few other instruments form the classical world, and pushes the whole in the direction of simplicity, remaining unapologetically musical and getting over on chords, melody, and a little bit of texture. How appropriate that the record comes to us from the Fat Cat label, home of Max Richter and Mice Parade. Like these artists, Bertelmann has a way of pulling aspects of several genres not necessarily known for their accessibility into an instantly likable whole. Ferndorf is the sort of record that can brighten any room.


The Men's follow-up to 2011’s Leave Home and last year’s Open Your Heart is a deeper and more mature record steeped in rock signifers; it shows the difference between respecting tradition and being boring, between quieting down and going soft, between being earnest and being sappy.

New Moon

It's the first law of indie-rock: Every grungy, guitar-powered act-- from Dinosaur Jr. to Titus Andronicus-- eventually goes a little Crazy Horse, gradually easing their squalling sludgefeasts into a classic-rock comfort zone. I just didn't expect it to happen so soon for the Men. Over the course of two quick-succession albums, 2011's Leave Home and last year's Open Your Heart, the Brooklyn bruisers' primordial post-hardcore roar had exploded into a constellation of possibilities, exploring everything from krautrock to country to shoegazed psychedelia. But the Men that hit the road in early 2012 to promote Open Your Heart were already a different band than the one documented on that record. Their once-unwieldy noise was being harnessed into a more economical drive and harmonicas were being blown. A band that less than two years ago sounded like descendents of Big Black had already found their way to Big Pink.
This is the Men that greet us on New Moon-- recorded, natch, in a cabin in the Catskills. And what gracious hosts they've become, welcoming us in with the gentle, piano-tapped lullaby "Open the Door". Even when you take the band's rapid-fire maturation into account, the song still startles with its angelic harmonies, peaceful images of "trees swaying," and general air of bonhomie. But if the opener seemingly announces a break from the band's formative inspirations, New Moon as a whole reinforces their spiritual connection to them. In hindsight, 1980s indie rock wasn't so much an antidote to the preceding generation's dinosaur rock as a tough-love corrective measure to revitalize it, from the Minutmen’s CCR/BOC boosterism to Hüsker Dü's sand-blasted take on the Byrds. What the Men ultimately share with their SST forbears isn't a sound but a work ethic, with a record-release output that can barely keep pace with their artistic progression, fuelled by a blatant disregard for the punks they're bound to piss off along the way.
But as New Moon proves, there's a big difference between respecting tradition and being boring, between quieting down and going soft, between being earnest and being sappy.  The album's more rustic first side may exhibit their newly professed fondness for Tom Petty, but the spirit is still a lot closer to Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers. Acoustic guitars are front and center, but they slash and scrape rather than soothe; the early double shot of "Half Angel Half Light" and "Without a Face" suggests Full Moon Fever had Jeff Lynne been ousted from the producer's chair and replaced by Spot. What initially impresses about the record is not just that the Men have reconciled their growing affinity for delicate, confessional songcraft with their usual raw frayed-nerve energy, but how easy they make it look.
That's not to say there weren’t some growing pains along the way: Shortly after the release of Open Your Heart, the band excommunicated bassist Chris Hansell, the guy responsible for the most unforgivably caustic, phlegm-splatterd songs in the repertoire. A recent Village Voice cover story claims Hansell was shown the door because he couldn’t afford to keep up with the band's growing tour commitments, however, his scuzz-punk regressions were increasingly at odds with the Men's ever-evolving aesthetic. And playing a big hand in that development was the band's go-to producer Ben Greenberg, who was not just promoted to replace Hansell, but immediately placed on equal singing and songwriting footing with founding members Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi. To say he fits right in would be an understatement; his two standout turns-- "The Brass" and the urgent "Repulsion" redux "I See No One"-- respectively push the paint-peeling power-pop of Open Your Heart further into the red and into the rough. (The band's ranks have also expanded to include new fifth member Kevin Faulker, to satisfy their surging demand for lap-steel.)
In contrast to Open Your Heart's exploratory eclecticism, New Moon unabashedly plays to the extremities of the Men's sound. But the album counts as the band's most cohesive statement yet, thanks to savvy sequencing that gradually amps up the volume and ramps up the velocity. You can even hear the precise moment the band snaps in the middle of "I Saw Her Face", when the song suddenly up-shifts from a sad-eyed, "Cortez"-killing dirge into a ferocious, full-torque rave-up, blazing the trail for the album's decidedly more raucous second act.
But where Open Your Heart's stylstic diversity sometimes felt like genre tourism for the sake of it (the country song was actually called "Country Song", after all), New Moon's sonic dichotomies are emblematic of a deeper emotional distress. No matter which of the band's three frontmen are singing them, the Men's songs are pretty simple: someone's usually missing someone who's far away, or dreaming of a better place, and there's often alcohol involved. But over the whole of New Moon, you get the sense the Men are coming to grips with the men they want to be (loving, upstanding, domesticated) and the kind of men they have to be-- i.e., the sort of hardened souls that must spend most of their year in vans and dives in order to survive. As the album flames out in the psych-punk apocalypse of "Supermoon", the moment as is as poignant as it potent: Like the retired hitman in countless gangster movies who gets pulled in for one last hit, New Moon bristles with all the internal tension of a dormant beast that, try as it may, can't ever be fully tamed. Open Your Heart was the sound of the Men issuing themselves a challenge-- "I wanna see you write a love song!" Perro exclaimed on the opening track. New Moon follows through on that promise but inevitably discovers that, when you do open your heart, blood gets spilled.


Overjoyed is the legendary art-punk band’s first new studio album since 2001’s Hello, and in those intervening thirteen years, the seemingly ageless duo of Jad Fair and brother David haven’t lost their knack for the fine art of the charm offensive. The album shows just how much Half Japanese, despite their reserved seat in the indie continuum, still exist in a hermetic dimension of its own.

Overjoyed

“Let’s put apples in the lemon pie!” exclaims Jad Fair on “The Time Is Now”, one of the least-hinged songs on Half Japanese’s Overjoyed. It’s the legendary art-punk band’s first new studio album since 2001’s Hello, and in those intervening 13 years, he hasn't lost his knack for the charm offensive. “The Time Is Now” wobbles and wanders like a tranquilized tiger cub, with a meandering jangle threatening to tug Jad’s string of greeting-card pleasantries alarmingly off center. “I’m so glad you’re you,” he sings through his nose, sounding more like the punk-rock Mister Rogers than Jonathan Richman ever did.
Richman is one of the few antecedents that went into Half Japanese’s protean stew of primitivist punk when the band formed in the '70s; avowedly amateurish and autodidactic, Jad and his brother David spun the blistering, shambolic rawness of their early singles into tooth-fracturing sweetness of their first masterpiece, 1980’s Half Gentlemen/Not Beasts (which featured, not so coincidentally, a Modern Lovers cover). Half Japanese is more infamous for the bands they’ve influenced, most notably Nirvana, although there’s a whole universe of lo-fi disciples tucked away in Jad’s back pocket. Overjoyed shows just how much Half Japanese, despite their reserved seat in the indie continuum, still exist in a hermetic dimension of its own. From the spiky, Voidoids-like jerkiness of “In Its Pull” to the slashing, sidelong surf riffs of “Shining Star”, the album views the rest of the musical world through a kaleidoscope and hears it through a tin can.
That said, Overjoyed isn’t anywhere near as tinny as Half Japanese is known for. Produced by Deerhoof’s John Dieterich, it’s one of the most full-blooded and competently tracked albums in the band’s catalog. Even when “Meant to Be That Way” lurches off its axis thanks to an onslaught of wiggly, reverberating overdubs, the rhythm section is rock solid; barely a trace of lo-fi glory can be heard on “Do It Nation”, the album’s most distorted and self-destructive track. “Do it, do it, do it,” Jad chants like a bratty version of Malcolm Mooney over a droning, drool-inducing monochord. With maturity comes assuredness, but there’s a lack of desperate vulnerability to Overjoyed that renders it far less fetchingly fragile than its predecessors.
There’s a scene in Jeff Feuerzeig’s 1993 documentary Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King in which the band is performing on a makeshift stage for the residents of Duplex Nursing Home in Boston (made famous by David Greenberger’s long-running zine Duplex Planet). While hatcheting their way through a version of Wilson Pickett’s “In The Midnight Hour”, one of the old men in the audience pulls a harmonica out of his shirt pocket and starts honking along, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do. Not to paint them as ancient or anything, but the brothers Fair are now closer in age to that old man than they are to the strapping young versions of themselves who forged milestones like Half Gentlemen/Not Beasts. In essence, Overjoyed is the sound of the Fairs playing along with themselves, or at least the sweet, weird boys they used to be—not always with as much spark or chaos, but mashing up the fruits just as gleefully.


French Montana has spent most of his career as the weakest rapper in the room. On Wave Gods, he imagines a woozier, wavier alternate world, one in which he takes center stage for the first time.

Wave Gods

The first thing you need to know about French Montana is that back-to-back subsections on his otherwise disorganized Wikipedia page are "Shooting Attempts" and "Exotic Pets." At the beginning of this decade, the Bronx-bred rapper was drifting somewhere between "budding star" and "also-ran," hawking DVDs and mixtapes anchored by his more-famous friends. By the end of 2014, he was living a parallel life as Fitzgeraldian social climber stuck in a real-life safari of leopards and Kardashians. (Here's a video called "2 Chainz and French Montana Feed a $40K Giraffe.")
Last May, Chinx, a Far Rockaway native who was a close friend to and collaborator with French, was killed in a still-unsolved shooting. (The NYPD has said that they believe his murder might be tied to the 2007 killing of Stack Bundles, another collaborator.) It's in the shadow of that tragedy that French's new mixtape, Wave Gods, begins: "They threw me in the black hole, I had to climb up/ Once Chinx passed, I took some time off." On the tape's cover, French is joined by Max B, his kindred creative spirit who isn't up for parole until 2042. He's finally at the top—or at least adjacent to it—but he had to come alone.
Wave Gods hears French bring moments of tragedy and Technicolor excess to life frequently and in equal measure. "Holy Moly" is all joy ("My bitch from Cuba and my lawyer Jewish"); on the "Sanctuary" remix, he borrows the Weeknd's "Bring the drugs, baby, I'ma bring my pain." Sometimes, they're shoehorned into the same verse: on the Kanye West- and Nas-featuring "Figure It Out," French considers Chinx and Max, Eazy E, Allen Iverson, and Bill Cosby, but also slips in "Why I fucked them both when they said they're sisters?" and you can practically hear him grinning at the camera.
Until now, French had spent much of his career as the weakest, or at least most anonymous rapper in the room. Most fans push both Coke Wave installments into the Max B canon. His introduction to pop audiences came on "Stay Schemin," which was more noted for Drake's shots at Common and Vanessa Bryant. His 2013 Bad Boy/Maybach Music Group debut, Excuse My French, had more guests (Drake, Nicki, Wayne, Snoop) than tracks, suffered dismal reviews, and failed to sell 100,000 copies. Worse still, his detractors—many of whom were presumably unfamiliar with his earlier work—wrote him off as a relic from a dead era, a last gasp for old New York heads who couldn't or wouldn't get with the times.
In reality, French was never a classicist in any sense, and certainly not a '90s revivalist. His golden age was the mid- and late-2000s, when Wayne and T-Pain dominated radio, and when Max was turning Harlem into a grim, funhouse mirror version of that sound. On Wave Gods, French has improved his writing, sure, but more importantly has imagined a world where that sound became the dominant commercial mode, where the precision of trap or the maximalism of drill never took over, where we're left with something more stripped down, woozier, wavier.
And so this time, the guests bend into his orbit. Quavo's staccato triplets on "Groupie Love" are blunted by the Auto-Tune. Kodak Black is 13 years younger and from 1,200 miles south, but on "Lock Jaw" sounds like he's been locked in a give-and-go for years. On "Jackson 5," he puts an original stamp on the same sort of soul loops that have been dominating the city's mixtape circuit since the early W. Bush years. The prevailing atmosphere on Wave Gods is so strong that the one time French does yield home court, to Future on "Miley Cyrus," it's jarring, despite being an excellent song in its own right.
Wave Gods ends with two appearances from Chinx—"All Over" and yet another remix of "Off the Rip." It's a touching tribute from an artist who was eager to share the spotlight when it was a necessity, and remains so now that he can carry songs on his own. "Rip" in particular is moving in this new context, at its strange intersection of celebration and memorial. A$AP Rocky, the song's latest guest, implores the audience to "pay attention, I'm the main event." That might have been true before, but it isn't anymore.


After three mixtapes-- highlighted by 2008's triumphant and savvy The Mixtape About Nothing-- Wale finally issues his debut LP.

Attention Deficit

It's no secret that the Internet is hurting rappers. Hurting their record sales. Hurting their ability to control narrative. And, perhaps most crucially, hurting their ability to self-edit. Flip cam freestyles, track-a-day mixtapes, local radio interviews delivered worldwide. Reining it in has never been more difficult. To his credit, Wale has appeared to be in clear control of his output. In the space of three years he's released three proper mixtapes: 2007's giddy grab bag 100 Miles & Running, 2008's triumphant and savvy The Mixtape About Nothing, and this year's modest Back to the Feature. But even that tempered rollout may have been too much. Wale's proper solo debut, Attention Deficit, feels like a mishmash of those three tapes, flashing greatness but almost never transcending, and always sounding effortful. Has he said too much already?
Initially positioned as a refreshing rejoinder in a new generation of rappers, Wale was never fit for savior-dom. He's said the Roots' Black Thought is his favorite MC. That's about right: technically gifted, occasionally thrilling, mostly destined to be a cog in a machine. Attention Deficit seems to ignore that, especially on the front end. What's made so many rap debuts successful is a fluidity, a connectivity from moment to moment. Wale's been slapped with the dreaded "no personality" tag in recent months. The opposite is true: Wale seems to jump constantly from persona to persona.
Opener "Triumph", a terrific, Afro-beat-inspired production by TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek, indicates this will be a sonic adventure. It's not particularly. "Mama Told Me" is a sort of post-Kanye reflection on how difficult it is coming up in the game, namedropping people in his life whose names you will not recognize. It's been done before and better. "Mirrors" is sonically consistent-- squealing horns and down-low bass-- but also features that tried-and-true rap trope: the Bun B feature. It's negligible. "Pretty Girls" is an ode to women via his native Washington D.C. sound, produced by longtime partner Best Kept Secret, sampling legendary Go-Go crew the Backyard Band, and featuring that group's Weensey. It's a classic hip-hop raveup, loose and fun. And then Atlanta's Gucci Mane shows up. Wasn't this supposed to be a D.C. anthem? "World Tour" is typically bland, R&B diva-led (in this case Jazmine Sullivan) nostalgia-stroking patter. "Let It Loose" is the Pharrell record. Six songs in and we're hitting all the bases, without any sense of what it means to be Wale.
The second half reveals a bit more: Wale is obsessed with women, whether recounting the story of a coke-addicted fameball on Mark Ronson's delicate "90210", or emotionally thrashing over an ex on the loping, gorgeous "Diary". He is distinctly interested in the female experience, even if the subject is launching him into paranoia by refusing to pick up the phone at 4 a.m. on a Saturday night. This is a unique gift-- I can't recall the last time an MC seemed so tapped into a woman's perspective while still feeling the chill of romantic strain. Sitek returns with the astounding "TV in the Radio", a song that both convinced me of K'Naan as a serious rapper (debatable until now) and positioned Wale properly in the mix, rapidly firing syllables like a semi-automatic. It's a bravura performance.
"Contemplate", produced by Syience, samples Rihanna's "Question Existing" and transforms it into a dark, brooding piece about the difficulties of love. That it arrives amidst Rihanna's troubling trauma-as-promotional run is sad and fitting. Alas, there won't be much to gain from "Chillin'", the much-maligned Lady Gaga collaboration and botched first single. This was the first step in Wale's multiple personality debacle and he seems to know as much-- nothing else on Attention Deficit resembles the goofy sneakers-shouting writing here. Ironically, it's the song that directly precedes "Chillin'" that feels most truthful. "Shades", featuring Chrisette Michele, is a resilient look at being a dark-skinned African-American (Wale is first generation Nigerian-American). On the song he raps, "They napped and slept on me/ Man, I hate black/ Skin tone, I wish I could take it back/ But rearrange my status, maybe if I was khaki/ Associating light-skinned with classy/ The minstrel show showed a me that was not me." Internal rhyme schemes, halting phrasing, thoughtful self-exploration; this is Wale at his best. Not as a preening star filling in the gaps for a king-making debut. A regular person, with doubts and sadness, joy and confidence. There's just not enough of it on Attention Deficit.


The Canadian songwriter blends into the atmosphere of her piano and acoustic guitar, presenting her exceedingly intimate music as an inventive and subtly visceral experience.

Monarch Season

There is nowhere to hide on Monarch Season. The latest album from Canadian songwriter Jennifer Castle is as open-ended and unfurnished as folk music can get. Each of its songs was recorded at Castle’s Ontario home, the windows open to let in sounds from Lake Erie just outside. The lyrics are bound by a focus on the moon, but you would be hard-pressed to find anything resembling a narrative in her writing. “I see the wings in everything,” Castle sings in the title track, offering a key into the imagistic worldview that spans her music.
In an interview with Kreative Kontrol, Castle described the recording process for this album, a solitary exercise featuring just a few appearances from long-time collaborator Jeff McMurrich, as being somewhat improvised. Instead of complete thoughts, she favored the feeling of uncertainty. When she takes a long pause between her words, as she does throughout the slow-motion highlight “Moonbeam or Ray,” she lets you linger in that space with her. The goal is to present her songs like fireflies in a jar: glowing, alive, and waiting to be released back into the night.
The quiet of this record is particularly effective in response to 2018’s Angels of Death, a lush full-band album that accompanied Castle’s writing on grief with the most sweeping music of her career: One of its best songs, “Rose Waterfalls,” sounded like the theme to an imaginary ’70s film about a country singer living on a commune. It was a record that framed her voice, a distinctive instrument pitched between the melodic depth of Emmylou Harris and the outsider charm of Kath Bloom, as a leading force: a vessel for storytelling, high drama, and big questions.
On Monarch Season, she subverts this authority, blending into the atmosphere of her piano and acoustic guitar. Sometimes, her voice disappears completely. Castle bookends the record with the wordless acoustic opener, “Theory Rest,” and a coda of field recordings, giving it the aura of a live set broadcast from her home (although it was completed before lockdown this year). She aids this intuitive structure by including “Veins,” a song she first recorded for her 2006 debut. Accompanying herself on acoustic guitar, she punctuates her words with a wheezy motif on harmonica that comes out slightly glitched, like the recording had been warped by the time that’s passed.
These psychedelic effects are a way for Castle to toy with the mechanics of her songwriting, to keep her music from resembling anything that feels traditional or reverent to the past. The most old-school sounding moment is “I’ll Never Walk Alone,” with melodic fingerpicking that seems transported from an old British folk song. But instead of singing along, Castle uses her warbling, hushed voice to play against its catharsis. In the lyrics, she alludes to the draining quality of performing live, trying to please an audience of more than just herself: “I birthed from the mouth of a cave/And I walked to the front of the stage,” she sings. “I labored all night for them/Labored all day.”
In these words, Castle implies a distance between the two poles of her career—the solitary spark of creation and the presentation of her completed work to the world. The thrill of Monarch Season is in how she collapses these roles, offering her music as something both thoughtful and unfinished. (The physical edition of the record comes with a songbook, allowing listeners to recreate her process and rebuild these songs from scratch.) The result is an inventive and subtly visceral record. On any given listen, we are invited to travel its distance along with her: to quiet our thoughts, take a deep breath, and linger in the strange, uneasy space between where we started and where we’re going next.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Though there are tracks featuring Cyndi Lauper, the National, and St. Vincent, this exhaustive 112-song soundtrack is chiefly a profound testament to humanity’s endless fascination with butts.

Various Artists: The Bob’s Burgers Music Album

The Bob’s Burgers Music Album

Music, we are told, is important. Our cultural heritage of classic symphonies, soaring pop singles, and inscrutable jazz albums can grasp the human soul and move us to experience emotions we didn’t think were even possible. Music was born alongside the human race, it is woven into our evolution, and, we are led to understand, is one of the most crucial most widely revered art forms in the world. But if music is so great, why did it take this long for someone to make an album where Cyndi Lauper sings a song called “Taffy Butt”?
Thankfully, The Bob’s Burgers Music Album is here to save us. “Taffy Butt” is one of 112 tracks that make up the two-hour soundtrack album, collecting music from the FOX animated sitcom about the Belcher family (parents Bob and Linda; kids Tina, Gene, and Louise) and their struggling burger joint. The full extent of the Bob’s music collection is kind of a lot. It’s pitched almost entirely at “Bob’s” die-hards and listening to this album without being a fan of “Bob’s Burgers” is a fool’s errand. Even for fanatics, the two hours still feels like an ill-advised trek. Almost every song is under two minutes long, there’s lots of dialogue, and the singing is mostly endearingly awkward. Listening to The Bob’s Burgers Music Album condenses six seasons and over 100 episodes of the show into two hours—but where else are you supposed to turn if you want to hear Kevin Kline sing about wanting to fuck an elephant?
However, let's first talk about butts. Even a cursory glance at the tracklist will confirm that 10% of the songs on The Bob’s Burgers Music Album reference butts in some fashion in their titles alone. (Including lyrical content, it’s probably well over a third.) Over the span of the show, “Bob’s Burgers”’ characters have experienced every possible emotional reaction to butts, from fear (“Butts, Butts, Butts”) to a fascination with what comes out of them (“The Diarrhea Song,” “Mad Pooper,” “The Fart Song,” “BM in the PM”) to mystification at different things they could form or be formed by (“Taffy Butt,” “Butt Phone”). More than anything, The Bob’s Burgers Music Album is a profound testament to humanity’s endless fascination with its own ass.
It’s only natural the soundtrack album is focused on butts: collecting all of “Bob’s Burgers’” music only highlights how much that music is fueled by the show’s blithely positive, delightfully weird attitude toward sex. There’s a vibrator jingle (“Sneaky Pete”), the show’s so-drippy-it’s-wet ’70s porn parody (included as a 20-second song called “Sex Music”), and of course, the show’s best-known song, aspirational bestiality anthem “Electric Love.” But even ignoring Megan Mullally crooning about Thomas Edison’s “electric junk,” most of these songs are doting love letters to various styles and genres.
TV shows are produced with a tight enough turnaround that it’s hard for any series to consistently do original songs without pastiching pre-existing genres, something “Bob’s Burgers” has done with relish. The songs of fictional boy band Boyz 4 Now are note-perfect riffs on the kind of metaphors boy bands have been using for decades, with Max Greenfield playing young heartthrob Boo Boo asking girls to let him “whisper in [her] eyes.” John Roberts’ ode to grimy bathrooms “Lifting Up the Skirt of the Night” practically oozes with love for Michael McDonald. The ease with which the soundtrack switches between novelty ditties and riot grrrl homage—a genre the show is most cozy with—is part of its draw.
As the show and the album go on, the music team becomes more and more ambitious, culminating with songs like “Work Hard or Die Trying, Girl,” which simultaneously adapts and parodies Die Hard and Working Girl while also fitting them into the odd genre of musical theater. These are the “Bob’s” gems refined and extracted by the album, even without the show’s visual component. As a collection of funny, sweet homages to the music the “Bob’s Burgers” team loves, the soundtrack album is a pretty clear triumph.
The comedy of forcing lyrics about butts and farts and diarrhea into popular song formats comes all the way around at the end, where the Bob’s team stashes the “Bob’s Buskers” series. Here, professional musicians cover songs from the show, which is mostly an excuse for St. Vincent or the National to do hilariously grim covers of songs like holiday jams “Sailors in Your Mouth” and “Christmas Magic.” “Bob’s Burgers” is a successful sitcom precisely because it grounds these contrasts in a deep well of horny earnestness, which is why The Bob’s Burgers Music Album could only end with the National and Låpsley covering the show’s pooping anthem, “Bad Stuff Happens in the Bathroom.” Bad stuff only happens in the bathroom if you’ve eaten too many burgers. For the rest of us, it’s a place of musical glory.


When Woods released 2012’s Bend Beyond, they’d released five proper LPs in as many years, all just about equally good. The result of a relatively lengthy two-year process, their new album With Light and With Love might not be a bold reinvention, but there's an unmistakable focus and determination that can serve as a proper substitute for overt, bar-raising ambition.

With Light and With Love

Combine their rustic, throwback image and prodigious work ethic and Woods is about as literal as the term “cottage industry” gets in indie rock*—*not only do they run a label, they also throw an annual get-together in Big Sur consisting of “two days of mellow music and celebration.” And it's possible that attending the Woodsist Festival is the only way to find people who engage in heated debate about how one would rank Woods’ discography. By 2012’s Bend Beyond, they’d released five proper LPs in as many years, all just about equally good. Their impeccable consistency can make you wonder if Woods have the impulses or incentive to truly go for it. The result of a relatively lengthy two-year process, their new album With Light and With Love might not be a bold reinvention, but there's an unmistakable focus and determination that can serve as a proper substitute for overt, bar-raising ambition.
Similar to the Men’s Tomorrow’s Hits and Future Islands’ Singles, other 2014 albums by respected "lo-fi" bands recording in a “real studio”, With Light and With Love is a reminder that while Woods' hard-touring, road-dog reputation has solidifed their fanbase, people show up in the first place because the band can write great songs. This isn’t a jamband who occasionally stumbles onto golden tunes: Jeremy Earl’s high, distinct voice is predisposed to melodies that quickly corkscrew their way into your memory*.* The differences between the classicist pop-rock of “Only the Lonely” and early Shins mostly come down to the vocal effects being used.
"Only the Lonely" is one of the many times where the relatively sparkly production of With Light and With Love shortens the distance between Woods and quasi-indie acts that fill much bigger festival bills. “Moving to the Left” isn’t their first shot at a crossover, but it's their best; they emphasize their rhythm section with caricatured, bulging bass and a snappy, near-synthetic drum track that typifies Yoshimi-era Flaming Lips. Earl sings, “It feels strange/ It feels the same”, and that’s really With Light and With Love summed up, since nothing Woods do here will alienate anyone other than the most hardcore 4-track enthusiasts. “Moving to the Left” still slowly unravels into a coda filled with wah-wah guitars, and it’s preceded by the requisite Woods woodshedder that takes up an inordinate amount of the LP’s space. The title track is over 9 minutes, yet it never feels improvisatory or exploratory or tacked on*—*the wigged-out soloing isn’t meant to show Woods’ considerable chops, only to serve the masterful return to its forceful chorus.
Still, With Light and With Lovenever makes much of a fuss about its aims. Earl’s lyrics are inquisitive in nature without giving you much to chew on, taking on the form of homilies about self-discovery and existential doubt. No matter how many times I’ve heard him sing “Are we floating by and by/ Are we moving to the left?”, the question never sounds particularly answerable, let alone urgent. And towards the back half, Woods occasionally revert to a genial folk-rock band that can anonymously blend into "indie BBQ" playlists.
But the versatility of Woods becomes more evident throughout the album, as they spread outwards rather than building upward: you get B3-infused soul (“Leaves Like Glass”), breezy psychedelia (“New Light”) and darker shades of American Beauty (“Shining”), giving jamband types, roots fans, folkies, indie kids and DIY fetishists a place to link up. “Breakthrough”, “masterpiece”, “bold leap”*—*those aren’t words that really seem applicable to With Light and With Love, or Woods for that matter, but they’re allowing themselves to be extremely likable for a larger crowd.


Structured around a grid of 121 minor chords, the English experimental musician’s 121st release injects process music with a welcome dose of beauty, chaos, and emotion.

CXXI

On the surface, CXXI seems like English experimental musician Richard Youngs’ tongue-in-cheek parody of computerized, algorithm-aided process music. The album’s stark title is simply “121” in Roman numerals, reflecting the fact that this is his 121st release, and the album is structured around a grid of exactly 121 minor chords. However, contra appearances, the music itself—consisting primarily of sine waves, tape-echoed trombone, ear-tickling field recordings and electronics, and Youngs’ plaintive voice—flows with a spontaneous, meandering logic, and Youngs’ chosen chords, far from being robotic, carry a deep melancholy reminiscent of Robert Wyatt’s most intimate work. This tension between structure and sprawl, control and feeling, drives CXXI: While his sound recalls the ramshackle experiments of computer music pioneers like David Behrman, Youngs’ unique emphasis on tonality and emotion results in simultaneously rigorous and accessible music that not only dissolves into the fabric of its immediate physical environment, like the most immersive ambient, but also distills and heightens the overwhelming beauty, chaos, and complexity of life in the way that only the most devastating pop can.
“Tokyo Photograph” lays the groundwork for the album, with Youngs’ voice and guest Sophie Cooper’s trombone tactically darting above and below a thrumming bed of randomly cycling sine-wave chords. Youngs limits himself to wordless utterances, the first line of a verse constantly interrupted: It’s as if he’s repeatedly trying to force meaning onto the music, but the music simply swallows his words whole. Cooper’s trombone steps in to finish Youngs’ sentences, while a wavering tape echo smudges her chiming, crystalline notes across time and soundstage. The decision to feature a delay effect so prominently is far from incidental: Delay is simultaneously mathematical—a certain number of repeats in a certain amount of time—and intuitive, unpredictable, prone to chaotic feedback loops that quickly spin out of the player’s control. It is the perfect embodiment of the tension between structure and sprawl that animates CXXI as a whole.
“The Unlearning” takes the formula laid down in “Tokyo Photograph” and stretches it even further, diving deeper into the fabric of chords that structures the music and eliminating the comforting, if still cryptic, human presence of Youngs and Cooper entirely. In this more abstract sound world, Youngs’ sine waves come to the foreground. The sine wave, like the tape delay that propels much of CXXI, is a perfect unity of structure and fluidity: a building block with which to build more complex sonic architectures, but also a limitless oscillation—the endless, ever-present hum of everyday life embodied in a signal. While the intense, meditative focus of “The Unlearning” highlights the unexpected emotion hidden in Youngs’ algorithmic process, it ultimately strips away too much of the human element that makes “Tokyo Photograph” so compelling—most notably the latter’s manipulated field recordings, which grant it that key, delightful sense of spontaneity.
Adam Butcher’s video for “Tokyo Photograph” explicitly links CXXI to the physical world, rapidly superimposing fragments of Youngs’ grid of chords onto images of abandoned structures made of concrete, brick, and corrugated iron—including a striking sound mirror located at Abbott’s Cliff, near Kent in the UK. Sound mirrors are able to pick up sound from great distances, and were even used as experimental defense systems against air raids before the invention of radar. In a sense, CXXI is a sound mirror in musical form: on the one hand a rigid, fixed object with clearly defined, almost hermetic rules; on the other, a mysterious, oddly beautiful monument to humanity that is inseparable from the physical world around it and the particular, peculiar social relations that both called it into being and grant it power and significance. CXXI’s 121 chords not only dissolve into Youngs’ 121 works—a kind of abstract, algorithmic autobiography—but also, as seen in Butcher’s video, into the world itself, the world outside the music. CXXI’s physical release is packaged with a “chord chart” for each piece; Youngs is inviting the listener to play along.

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London-based producer the Bug knows bass, and on London Zoo, it hits at machine-gun intervals, leaving deep, tube-station echoes disintegrating in its wake. A manifestation of how London has mutated the sounds of Jamaica to its own ends, this monster dubstep/dancehall hybrid makes Burial's Untrue sound like Music for Airports.

London Zoo

Kevin Martin, under a dozen-or-so aliases and across numerous genres, has been screwing around with deep bass for well over a decade. 1997's Tapping the Conversation-- a concept album conceived as a surrogate soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation-- was his first release as the Bug, and in retrospect, it sounds like an alternate-universe prototype of dubstep, based on instrumental hip-hop rather than UK garage rhythms. By the time he issued his 2003 follow-up Pressure, he'd already charged headlong into heavy digital ragga, building a repertoire of grimy, distorted beats that mutated dancehall into a glitchy, blown-out commotion.
Martin's latest Bug album, London Zoo, is very much in keeping with that permutation, which stands out amidst the recent wave of dubstep in a way that makes Burial's Untrue sound like Music for Airports. But it also takes the Bug's work into a somewhat cleaner, less abrasive area-- it streamlines the sound, shaves away the distortion, and draws most of its impact from the rhythms themselves. Of course, "less abrasive" doesn't necessarily mean it hit any less hard: Martin knows how and when to drop a heavy beat directly on top of you, and there's a carefully crafted tension throughout this record, no matter how sparse or dense that beat actually is.
Sparseness and density tend to work in tandem on London Zoo's strongest tracks: Bass hits at machine-gun intervals, leaving deep, tube-station echoes disintegrating in its wake and giving a number of these tracks a simultaneous sensation of freeness and claustrophobia. Reverberating, distorted voices and spare synth melodies close in on you even as they recede into the distance, and the rhythms are so pervasive and locked in that after a while you start hearing the spaces in between as much as you're hearing the beats themselves.
Martin has also enlisted an army of top-notch singers and toasters for the record, ranging from dancehall veterans like Tippa Irie to Burial and Kode9 collaborator Spaceape. However, three names in particular stand out. First, there's Roll Deep member Flowdan, whose grumbling, elastic baritone contributions to the chaingun-rhythm "Jah War" (heard on the fantastic 2006 Planet Mu comp Mary Anne Hobbs Presents the Warrior Dubz) and last year's sinster, headknock single "Skeng" show up again here. Flowdan is also at the center of the manic "Warning", which features one of the album's best hooks and a hell of a rampaging performance; there's one cool bit about halfway through where he ratchets the intensity in his voice down to a conversational rumble to match a moment in the song where the bass draws back, then resumes shouting right when it drops back in.
Singer/toaster Ricky Ranking shows up on three tracks as well, and his vocal range-- switching from sweet melodies to foreboding chants-- is impressive, even if he's best suited to the slower numbers (especially the dirgelike closer "Judgement"). And the two appearances from Warrior Queen are knockouts: "Poison Dart", originally released as a single last year, is ruffneck feminism ("Though me na sling no gun, a boy think sey me soft/ But me a real poison dart") delivered with a sharp, wailing sneer over more low end than most MCs could contend with, and "Insane", which augments a chirpier, more buoyant flow with a smoothly-sung chorus and a few out-there adlibs, including a funny little riff on Tears for Fears' "Mad World".
The only caveat concerning London Zoo is how far it might skew away from your traditional notions of dancehall-- and even then, it helps to recognize that, if anything, this record is another manifestation of how London has transformed the sounds of Jamaica to its own ends, from 2-tone to jungle to dubstep. It's a tense record, sure, but that tension is palpable in a crossover-friendly way, invoking Babylon and fire while avoiding the more problematic aspects of "slack" lyrics. It's angry and ferocious, but always triumphant: When it threatens to bust out your windows and rip holes in your speakers, it crackles with the kind of force that makes you want to punch the air as hard as your subwoofers do.


Rhino reissues the 1979 post-punk classic, adding the Yellow EP and four previously unreleased tracks.

Entertainment!

Gang of Four were a pop band. Their funk was no less stark or forbidding than, say, the more astringent Timbaland productions. They certainly weren't as twitchy, speedy, or noisy as James Brown at his most energized. Their great innovation-- Andy Gill's morse code guitar, as if playing a riff for more than a few bars caused him physical pain-- is post-punk's most ripped-off idea after badly played disco drums. They had attitude, energy, the big beat, skilled players funneling their virtuosity into the necessary notes, a handy way with a catch phrase, and sweaty live performances. Sounds like pop to me.
They formed in 1977 as part of a scene surrounding Leeds University's fine arts department that also included the Mekons and the Au Pairs. They were art students who named themselves after the Maoists that ran China until the leader's death in 1976. But they bonded over pub rockers Dr. Feelgood and 70s British blues band Free, exactly the sort of dinosaur hard rock post-punk was supposed to have purged in its own Cultural Revolution. The seeming contradiction, at least in terms of the Good Music Society the music press was constructing at the time, might have explained their sound, which critic Simon Reynolds described as a "checked and inhibited hard rock: cock rock [with] the cock lopped off."
Andy Gill kept his guitar chilly, without the blanket of fuzz provided by effects pedals and the agreeable tone of valve amps. Blues riffs do crop up, but it's almost as if Gill is playing against his technique, scattering them like fishes in a pond with a scrabble of notes. He rarely engages in anything like a solo, the ejaculation part of cock rock. Gill's playing approaches rock drama through dynamics. On "Return the Gift" he's a shrill S-O-S pattern underneath the weight of Dave Allen's bass on the choruses, a flinty, almost Derek Bailey-like anti-solo. On "(Love Like) Anthrax", he sounds like he's trying to split concrete with a garden spade on a congested street. The guitars on "Natural's Not In It" are actually kind of sexy, in an uncomfortable frottage sort of way.
The band says they were trying to get Allen to play a "quarter of the notes he was actually capable of playing," which must be a pretty alarming number given his busyness on tracks like "Damaged Goods". The bass is the only fluid part of Go4's sound, and even that's more croaky than bubbling. On "Ether" there's no bassline to speak of, just big bullfrog gulps as the guitar clangs, bell-like, and a sinister high-noon melodica whistles in the distance. Drummer Hugo Burnham played funk beats and disco snare crashes but with all the reverb stripped off so that they splashed like alcohol. He's the band's secret weapon, and stuff like the hard snare crack that sounds like a handclap on "Not Great Men" is often what makes a song. When they all locked in, as on "I Found That Essence Rare", the effect is like stuffing 10 pounds of funk into a five-pound bag.
Emotionally, however, Entertainment! is a brick. Like a black hole, no romanticism escapes it. Hints of black humor (especially in the artwork) creep into their aesthetic without overwhelming it. Relationships are reduced to "contract[s] in our mutual interest." Jon King often sings in the first person, implicating himself before anyone else: "I can't work/ I can't achieve"; "how can I sit and eat my tea with all that blood flowing from the television?" Out of one speaker, Gill drones the production details of the love song like a bored copywriter on "Anthrax", concluding "we just don't think what goes on between two people should be shrouded in mystery." Out of the other speaker, King moans that he "feel[s] like a beetle on its back/ And there's no way for me to get up."
Hardly head over heels, Go4 continually recast "I Want To Hold Your Hand" as a death grip dragging you under. Go4 interrogated everything, including the band itself, with the kind of rigor only middle-class white art students can afford. But then they were a very English band, very much of a moment where being politically active precluded any sort of irony. (And besides, Bush/Blair may be as scary as Reagan/Thatcher, but Bloc Party aren't scrapping with Nazis at every other show.) Not for nothing was the band that really took their sound into the mainstream the Red Hot Chili Peppers, hardly models of good Marxist propriety. Even the recent, more stylistically faithful post-punk revival bands wouldn't poo-poo a love song.
It would have been interesting to imagine Gang of Four as not just a pop band but as proper pop stars, because they would have been the driest pop stars ever. But instead, they refused to change a lyric the BBC found offensive for a planned "Top of the Pops" appearance, which effectively sunk their chart hopes. By the time they were ready to insert tongue-in-ass, no one wanted to hear their too slick take on what constituted "pop." Sometimes the people really do want it raw. Though they once might have looked askance at becoming an institution (of sorts), at least you can once again easily buy one of the great rock albums, now expanded with eight additional tracks. Anyone who says it's played out is a douchebag who deserves his Medium Medium records and willful obscurity. And that's one thing that I don't want to catch.


On a new double album, the experimental collective continues its journey from vaporwave toward fractured, maximalist pop music.

Darklife

death’s dynamic shroud began with a Sega Dreamcast and a case of the flu. During Christmas 2013, James Webster attempted to persuade his friend and fellow Dayton, Ohio musician Tech Honors that the open-world game Shenmue could be experienced as “an interactive vaporwave album.” Sick at home on New Year’s Eve, he then created a woozy collection of songs called シェンムーONLINE entirely out of samples from the game. Honors responded with his own vaporwave album, and the NUWRLD mixtape series was born under the shared alias death’s dynamic shroud.wmv. Their work soon attracted the attention of Orange Milk Records co-founder Keith Rankin, also a veteran of the Dayton experimental music scene, who went on to release Honors’s 世界大戦 OLYMPICS and to collaborate with Webster on 신세기 EVANGELIS in 2014. Since then, death’s dynamic shroud has been the umbrella name under which Webster, Honors, and Rankin release music, solo or in collaboration.
While the NUWRLD mixtape series now comprises over 30 installments, the official death’s dynamic shroud albums tend to be major statements. Webster and Rankin’s 2015 release I’ll Try Living Like This upped their production value substantially by trading washed-out tape warble for CD-quality sheen, while 2017’s Heavy Black Heart was the first release to feature all three artists. Their latest LP, Darklife, a double album again featuring the complete trio, represents a concerted effort toward greater accessibility, backed by a months-long, four-single campaign from their new label 100% Electronica—a dramatic change for a band accustomed to the quick-drop approach of vaporwave. It also represents a significant artistic evolution, completing their journey away from vaporwave and toward complexly fractured, maximalist pop.
Darklife documents DDS’s humanity emerging from their once purely digital world. While it still features the internet-damaged sample manipulation that has become their trademark, it also incorporates more original production, instrumentation, and vocals than previous releases. Often this approach leads to effective juxtapositions, as in “Neon Memories,” when Honors’ vocals meld with a screaming synth until a glitch reintroduces the candy-pop chorus. Lyrically, the album also explores this transition from robotic to human. Album opener “Stay” features a computerized voice intoning, “Where consciousness makes no difference at all/The apartment and the garden/They might as well have never even happened.” In closing track “Dark Matter,” Tech Honors repeats these lyrics in a very human tenor, giving the same words a raw emotional resonance.
death’s dynamic shroud is at their best when indulging in crowd-pleasing excess. The outsized “Judgment Bolt,” with its blown-out bass, super-chopped vocals, and wall of synths, exemplifies what makes the project exciting, both live and in studio. The more subdued moments are just as compelling, like “Light Left the Garden,” a carefully composed ballad whose tentative build climaxes in the unsettlingly romantic line, “When I talked to you/If you’d asked me to/I would have killed the president.” Elsewhere, “I Just Wanted to Know Love” forgoes percussion entirely except for a brief flutter, gaining momentum from gradually layered synths and weepy samples from a soap opera. These smaller-scale tracks have the effect of zooming in from a neon cityscape to focus on the human dramas taking place at street level.
Across 15 songs totaling over an hour, death’s dynamic shroud attempt to include a full spectrum of atmospheres and styles created through the alchemy of their collaboration. Sometimes this density detracts from the cohesiveness of the album: The nightmare clatter and bang of “After Third Heaven” sits uneasily among the syrupy sweetness of its surrounding tracks, while the fourth side of the album lags with the six-minute “Rare Angel,” which feels like an obstacle to the finale. This is a problem of too many ideas competing for space—but then again, we shouldn’t expect anything else from these musicians’ hyper-frenetic, supersized world.


The iconic stoner metal band’s first studio album in almost two decades is a twin ode to volume and weed. It makes everything that was originally great about Sleep even better.

The Sciences

When Sleep reconvened for two high-profile sets at All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2009, it looked as if they were simply rubber-stamping the Articles of Reunion. The icons of stoner metal played their great 1992 album Sleep’s Holy Mountain in full, along with a rare excerpt from the monolithic Dopesmoker, the record whose legal woes partially caused the band to splinter in 1995. Years later, the trio gave Dopesmoker the deluxe-reissue treatment, excavated archival songs that were never released, and issued a decent single through Adult Swim. All the while, Sleep nabbed pay-dirt slots on festival bills and toured big clubs, teasing the arrival of a new album—someday. Even when they posed dinner plates of weed atop mixing consoles, those promises felt like self-signing permission slips, allowing Sleep to continue making new money with old songs. That, after all, is the typical ’90s reunion ritual.
But on the Weedians’ holiest of holidays, April 20, Sleep actually released their fourth full-length, The Sciences, through Jack White’s Third Man Records. And even more unexpectedly, it’s substantive enough to warrant its extended genesis and boost Sleep’s legacy, not just reaffirm it. The essential trick of The Sciences—and the reason it feels like more than an overdue cash-in—is these 40something dudes have managed to grow up without growing old. Their minds are still focused on weed and the escape that it offers, but that’s just the gag; these riffs, rhythms, and the mantra-like singing of Al Cisneros are a drug unto themselves, evidence of a band that’s improved upon their animating idea. It is a twin ode to volume and weed that makes everything that was originally great about Sleep even better.
In their own bands, Cisneros and guitarist Matt Pike have progressed to more adult concerns. High on Fire’s Luminiferous was a political diatribe, its conspiracy theories and apocalyptic scenarios laced with twin senses of fantasy and fable. And since the start, Cisneros and his band OM have been a sort of spiritual search-craft, navigating a tangle of religious iconography and mystical koans. During the last decade, though, they have allowed themselves to slip fully back into Sleep, like old college buddies escaping to a cabin for a weekend retreat of booze, joints, and limited responsibilities. These songs are funny, loaded with the sort of pot portmanteaus (“rifftuals” goes into the lexicon immediately) and puns (as does “The CBDeacon,” their amazing nickname for Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler) you’d expect from a band that once recast weed smoke as the Star of Bethlehem. They celebrate the “indica field” and talk about space travel through the “Iommisphere.” There’s a song that turns the universe of Dune into a land of bud and bongs, another that urges melting icebergs to fight back against the cities that are killing them. (Feeling stoned yet?)
But Sleep have never played so audaciously or so well as they do here. Cisneros has always been an interesting singer, but he’s never sounded so powerful or resolved as he does on The Sciences. During “Sonic Titan,” he is practically messianic, his see-sawing monotone dispatching you to Zion; for “Marijuanaut’s Theme,” he pushes and pulls the melody horizontally and vertically, bending it in time and in harmony. He’s no longer only intoning directions toward Nazareth, he’s leading you there. Pike practically wrestles his guitar during the solo for “Antarcticans Thawed,” which slips so far out of time and tune that it feels like free jazz. Elsewhere, his riffs are lean and elegant, curved like the chrome fenders of a classic motorcycle.
And since joining the band after those initial ATP comebacks, drummer Jason Roeder has become an essential influence. He splits the difference between Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham and the jazz-rock legend Billy Cobham, a seismic shift for Sleep’s past atavism. On “Antarcticans Thawed,” he plays with a sense of narrative, steadily arcing from a restrained military march to a lumbering groove to, at the song’s peak, fills that amplify the melody itself. This subtlety is a testament to his time in Neurosis, doom’s most sophisticated and nuanced storytellers. This is a revelatory new philosophy for Sleep.
Reunions don’t often go like this. The Pixies and Pavement, the Smashing Pumpkins and Neutral Milk Hotel: At their best, those restarts allowed young fans to witness a band they assumed they’d always missed. At their worst, they turned into embarrassing reminders that our heroes can be greedy misanthropes. But Sleep’s return on The Sciences recalls the joyful revival of Dinosaur Jr., another trio who applied new skills to old attitudes on 2007’s Beyond. That record, of course, launched a stunning second phase for Dinosaur Jr., arguably better than their first. Sleep may move too slowly for that to happen, but for now, these six new rifftuals burn perfectly.


The second album by Sweden's Lust for Youth has the same M.O. as his debut-- Casio keyboard melodies collide, drum machines thump, Hannes Norrvide hollers into the void-- but the cleaner, warmer production makes Perfect View a lusher, prettier listen.

Perfect View

This is what Hannes Norrvide does as Lust for Youth: He sets up two simple melody lines on his Casio keyboard. He lets them ram ceaselessly into each other like abandoned go-karts. And then, over a muted thump of a drum machine, he hollers into the void. That's his entire M.O., and on paper it sounds about as appetizing as sucking stale air from an open freezer. But Norrvide makes surprisingly tactile, even sensual music this way, and on Perfect View, his second full length in only six months, he rides his own modestly cresting wave. He is still making the exact same sound, and it remains narrowly captivating in the exact same way.
The production on Perfect View is marginally cleaner and warmer than last fall's Growing Seeds, making it a lusher and prettier listen. But these are relative terms-- “unnerving” and “lonely” probably suit Lust for Youth better. Growing Seeds’ particular unnerving loneliness came not just from its sonic murk but from the traces of unease the murk failed to cover, and Perfect View, with its richer, mellower synths and deeper sound, brings Norrvide closer into focus. But his thick Swedish accent, muffled by reverb, still keeps us at an arms-length from his message: When he repeatedly chants the title of “I Found Love”, it sounds more like, “I’ve fallen off.”
Norrvide has insisted in interviews that his songs are about love, relationships, and morality. They probably are, but you'll find very little in this music to tell you so. What you'll hear, above all, is a firm belief in the comfort of synthesizers-- the wide, lonely bands of sound they make, the cottony feeling they leave in your mind. The song titles function like blank, terse placards-- "Another Day", "End", "Image"-- and the hum of the music acts similarly, as a mild anaesthetic, a small tonic for the times you'd rather erase your feelings for a few minutes than think about them.
Sifting through Perfect View to find highlightable moments proves surprisingly difficult: there's the nearly-funky bongo break on “Another Day”, the little bits of sampled speech that pop up on "Barcelona" and elsewhere; “Kirsten” and closer “I Found Love in a Different Place” turn the drum hits way up, and hint at what Lust for Youth might eventually sound like if Norrvide cleared his throat and demanded our undivided attention. But these details melt the minute you stop focusing on them, and I think Norrvide means them to. Listening normally, the songs blur together like fan blades, and it's hard to tell how long you've been listening to Perfect View. His is the ambient music of someone else's party, happening far away from where you are, and the distance is part of the allure.