With his ever-ambitious quartet, the legendary saxophonist from many of Miles Davis’ best records again reimagines his own standards, now with the help of a graphic novel and an orchestra.

Emanon

Wayne Shorter has released just four albums since 2002, all with the quartet of relatively young hotshots he formed only a couple of years earlier. By comparison, during one particularly productive span in the mid-’60s, the saxophonist issued seven now-canonical records in three years, even as he composed and performed at a furious pace with Miles Davis’ classic second quintet. But the purpose of Shorter’s current ensemble—a fierce and finessed assemblage, with Brian Blade on drums, Danilo Pérez on piano, and John Patitucci on bass—was never to put out easy records. Shorter started this band, in large part, to deconstruct his own compositions, many of which had become standard jazz repertory. He wanted to shake his music from the weight of legacy in a highly improvised, reactive setting where each member shared equal footing. The band’s anarchic approach hasn’t always worked on stage, but the quartet has nobly pursued this high-wire act for nearly two decades, a veritable eon in this realm.
Shorter’s new Emanon—that is, “no name” backwards, a title borrowed from a Dizzy Gillespie classic—makes up for lost time by gathering three discs of stage and studio work. It’s accompanied by a space-themed graphic novel of the same name, illustrated by accomplished comic artist Randy DuBurke and with text by Shorter and the screenwriter Monica Sly. Emanon combines a four-part suite recorded with the conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra with two discs of the quartet playing those pieces and a few others live in London. The suite includes tunes that are old, recent, or altogether new—“The Three Marias,” from Shorter’s 1985 album, Atlantis, sits alongside “Lotus,” for instance, which makes its debut.
This assortment suggests a sort of circularity. Shorter is simultaneously looking back and forward, scrambling your sense of time and space. The ambitious works occasionally sound like scores, as in the opening to “Prometheus Unbound,” where snare rolls and dramatic string flourishes recall the overture to an imaginary musical.  They feel static as a unit, perhaps because the 34-piece orchestra is so dense it drowns out the quartet. The orchestra and the quartet occasionally come together, as at the beginning of “The Three Marias,” in which Blade maneuvers deftly around a skittering melody. Still, the most satisfying moments come when the orchestra stops playing, allowing the quartet to settle into its own groove, as it does often for those London sets.
Live, the pieces begin slowly and somewhat tentatively. “The Three Marias,” for example, is recast as a 28-minute abstraction, the rhythm expanding and contracting as the band darts around it. But on each tune, at some point, a pulse appears and the musicians dig in. Pérez is a master of atmosphere, delivering dark vamps and bluesy licks on “Lotus” and “Adventures Aboard the Golden Mean,” a tune from the quartet’s 2005 album, Beyond the Sound Barrier. Patitucci holds down the low end with round, resonant notes. Like Tony Williams before him, Blade is the group’s trickster. His tom rolls, rat-a-tat snare work, and explosive bass-and-cymbal hits keep the music in flux. Shorter, on tenor and soprano saxophones, slithers in and out and around, often wailing wildly but at times playing tenderly.
Shorter turned 85 last month, and the Kennedy Center will honor him later this year. But he’s still a protean force, not focused on shoring up his oeuvre for preservation. He’s now working on an opera with the jazz singer and bassist Esperanza Spalding, and, in January, his quartet will play four nights at the SFJazz Center in San Francisco, a testament to his vitality. “At this point I’m looking to express eternity in composition,” Shorter, a practicing Buddhist, says in a biography. On Emanon, it’s thrilling to hear him search for it, even when he comes up short.


The Baltimore band goes back to the well for another record of languorous, heart-on-the-sleeve synth-pop that hits all its marks but smacks of diminishing returns.

As Long As You Are

Since Future Islands entered the national spotlight on live television in 2014 while promoting their fourth album, Singles, frontman Samuel T. Herring has made an entire career out of obsessive, deliberate public vulnerability. In past iterations of Future Islands, Herring’s exploration of heartbreak felt like a bombastic release, a cut umbilical cord. People still talk about it: Singles, released over a decade into their career, was a revelation, one that launched an indie-pop band in their second act into the kind of viral stardom they could never quite follow up. In many ways, it felt like a zenith for indie rock at its most hopeful and naive.
Six years and two records later, Future Islands’ latest album, As Long As You Are, is not so different thematically or even musically from anything they’ve released in the past six years. But it’s not nearly as compelling. That one perfect moment on Letterman’s show feels impossible to repeat; a reminder of how things were. The band’s bare-it-all earnestness no longer evokes such strong emotions. The feelings here are static, rendering the booming new-wave synths and crystalline bass somehow lifeless.
What happened? It’s not that Future Islands lost the ability to write songs so fully realized they make your heart bloom and break. The dreamy “Moonlight” smolders with synthesizers that glisten like violets at night, and the bass is searching and soft. Herring’s baritone is expressive; he sings about putting his whole heart on the table in the hopes that his lover won’t break it. The production is cavernous as ever, plucked from the depths of OMD B-sides and the most blue-eyed of New Order singles. But it sounds like any other Future Islands record from the past decade: The scaffolding is the same, just slightly more polished and streamlined. Even the way Herring delivers these sentiments feels strangely anesthetic. Instead of inviting a moment of quiet introspection as Future Islands songs have in the past, it makes you want to check your email.
All of the parts are there on all of these songs, but when you piece them together something feels amiss. On the twilight ballad “City’s Face,” looking out at a skyline is all it takes to recall someone you’ve lost and the memories you once shared. The sentiment is deeply saccharine, which isn’t necessarily bad, but the song is so gratingly slow and monotonous that it is hard to focus on anything else. The textures feel hollow, lost in the retro-fetishism of a wide-eyed version of the ’80s that made more sense at the beginning of the far more optimistic last decade but now just feels dated. The lyrical content of “For Sure,” is maudlin at best and it plays as disorientingly anthemic. “Carving the wind/Dawn of your eyes/Dust off your smile,” sings Herring over crisp guitars and a barrage of synthesizers that belong in a trailer for a rom-com you’ll never watch.
There is nothing wrong with sticking to a sound. Beach House, like Future Islands, comes from a parallel legacy of Baltimore-based indie-pop bands more interested in refining a signature style than reinventing it. They make essentially the same album every few years, finding subtle ways to challenge themselves, creating music that feels comfortable, consistent, yet still melodramatic. As Long As You Are lacks those subtle—but noticeable—tweaks. The record feels like standing water, Herring is so entrenched in the past it’s hard to tell who he really is on so much of this record. There are, however, moments when the light shines in with the vibrancy of stained glass. On the lovely “Waking,” Herring demands to know his purpose is as synthesizers burn up the sky. The song is a photo from a disposable camera: ephemeral, nostalgic, perfectly tender. There’s a moment when a synthesizer is delicately arpeggiated—you want to live there. It feels like home. But “Waking” is a rare moment on a record that doesn’t say anything new about Future Islands, or about anything else.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Drain Gang collaboration is one of the best projects to come out of the rap and hyperpop-adjacent Swedish collective. It’s a softly textured and sweetly spiritual quest for something bigger than ourselves.

Crest

Though sustained by a fanbase that’s fluent in memes and irony, Sweden’s Drain Gang is propelled by a rare kind of sincerity. At once, their music possesses a childlike sense of wonder, an adolescent infatuation, and a grown-up fear of the future. Whereas so much of the rap internet is steeped in ideation and a nihilistic rage, and so much of the hyperpop they’re also linked to is honed to an ironic edge, Drain Gang most embodies the smiley-face positivity of turn-of-the-millennium rave culture, an influence that’s been obvious in their music for years, but has become even more apparent in their worldview and their communal live shows.
Drain Gang’s deep connection with their audience mirrors the deep connection between the collective themselves. Above their creative kinship or shared taste is friendship, which you can feel in how effortlessly the voices of group members Bladee and Ecco2k blend together on their new project, Crest. The collaborative album has been steeping for several years now—its first single, “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” is almost a time capsule, a track released to a very different pre-pandemic world in February 2020. Crest was recorded together with producer Whitearmor while stowed away in a cabin on the beaches of Sweden, not too far from where Ingmar Bergman filmed the famous scene where a knight plays chess with Death in The Seventh Seal.
That kind of existentialism associated with Ingmar Bergman, whether informed by Lutheran guilt or a more layered Zen understanding, seeps through every beat and bar of Crest. Though not quite religious, Crest plays with the iconography of heaven, angels, and ectoplasmic intelligence, building a spirit world that exists beyond dogmas or deities. In almost every song, there is a yearning for some greater beauty beyond the self, a kind of connection that can only be found within the convocation of a rave or the transcendence of the afterlife; on “Faust,” Ecco cries, “I want to live in heaven/I wanna reach closer to you.” Straight-up pop is nothing new for Drain Gang, but songs like “White Meadow” reach new heights, a kind of euphoria that can best be described as movie-climax music.
While the conception of a seraphic realm feels Christian, the philosophical approach taken is more Buddhist. Bladee and Ecco are all-too-aware of the pitfalls on the road to self-improvement, falling into traps of materiality and vanity; as one track bluntly puts it, “Desire Is a Trap.” At the core of the quest for ascension, there’s still an emptiness, a desire for beauty and perfection that can evolve into covetousness—the group’s hesitancy to foreground their own faces makes sense given the frequent lyrical yearning for a different life and self. Mantras are central to Bladee and Ecco’s approach to songwriting, as words shift and transform into one another through a kind of spiritual looping; “Yeses (Red Cross)” begins with Bladee repeating the words “Literal Christ, literal Crest” and ends with Ecco’s tongue-twister refrain of “Sex sells/Success/Yes, yes.”
And where most Drain Gang songs are short subliminal blips, “5 Star Crest (4 Vattenrum)” is an odyssey that stretches out over nine minutes. Whitearmor sprinkles in an audio tag of the word “Perfect”—a voice that sounds when you finish a game in Street Fighter 2 without taking any damage, but likely more familiar at this point from the Charlie Heat remix of Kanye’s “Facts.” What might just be a DJ drop in another context here becomes another mantra, a single word that encapsulates Drain Gang’s desire for wholeness and completion. The beat switches multiple times, a living and fluid pop organism that’s constantly mutating—at each segment, Ecco and Bladee lead us in a series of refrains that reach its climax with a flurry of jingle bells as Bladee intones, “Death is beautiful, give it to me raw,” before rhetorically inquiring, “We think we exist, that’s why we suffer, do we not?”
Bladee and Ecco find beauty in the gateways, not just in their tendency to exist between genres, but a belief expressed in their lyrics that loss and uncertainty offer the potential for radical transformation and change. The sentiments are stunningly direct, almost universalized in a way that’s not entirely dissimilar from Carly Rae Jepsen’s infinitely relatable crushing, even if the image Drain Gang has developed is intentionally obscured and distant: blurry photos with faces obscured by hair, their on-stage presence silhouette by fog and flashing lights, and their elusive and infrequent media profiles.
In their own style and presentation, Bladee and Ecco foster an image that’s androgynous and almost cherubic, and at times even outright feminine—perhaps most blatantly in a song like “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” which obviously nods to Cyndi Lauper’s anthem about the existential femme condition. Bladee and Ecco’s twin falsettos twist and wrap together, gently Auto-Tuned and cooing, a chorus of angels over a driving synth-pop firmament. Drain Gang’s sound and lyrics alike frequently channel the spirit realm, summoning ghosts and angels, transporting the listener to a place where there are no bodies, only voices. Maybe heaven is a place where no one has a gender, where we are free of the confines of identity or genre, finally able to exist as fluidly and endlessly as the beams of light at a rave.


The Traditional Fools, Ty Segall's trashy surf punk LP from 2008, and Reverse Shark Attack, his 2009 collaboration with Mikal Cronin, are an interesting pair of albums to release at the same time. One's a collection of dumb-but-fun rock'n'roll, the other's a spotty series of tracks that owe more to Beefheart than garage*.*

The Traditional Fools / Ty Segall / Mikal Cronin: The Traditional Fools / Reverse Shark Attack

As 2013 began, Ty Segall quietly released a 7"-- "This Time I Got a Reason" came out on Trouble in Mind under the band name Fuzz. It's his sludgy stoner metal studio project with his friend and frequent collaborator Charles Mootheart, and while the song isn't exactly deep, it's a wholly satisfying nugget of 1970s hard rock. Aside from being yet another notch in his famous prolific streak, it's a natural step for Segall to start the year with a new project. As he explained to Spin, he thrives in the studio. "I've been on tour for three years straight, basically. It's not my favorite thing; recording is. It's so fun," he said, adding, "You can get weird." And throughout his recording career, he's gotten weird time and time again with a revolving door of collaborators: Thee Oh Sees, Sic Alps, White Fence, and most frequently, his old friend Mikal Cronin.
Around 2006, Segall and Cronin started the Laguna Beach garage punk band Epsilons, and since then, they've worked together several times. The duo were both in the short-lived hardcore band Party Fowl, and Cronin has been a member of Segall's touring band for quite a while. Most recently, Cronin's harmonies and bass were an essential contribution to Slaughterhouse. And unsurprisingly, Segall was in the studio to help with Cronin's excellent self-titled debut LP. But as one man comes off his 2012 three-album hot streak while the other just signed to Merge for his second solo record, the weirdness of their 2009 collaborative album Reverse Shark Attack doesn't hold up.
The album's first six tracks are garage songs washed in acid-soaked sonics, and they're ultimately unremarkable when stacked next to the rest of either man's discography. Throughout the album, Segall and Cronin tap into John Dwyer-ian psychedelics, and with pitched-down throaty vocals, the effects feel like a gimmick and cheapens the material. Their more straightforward readings of "I Wear Black", for example, are immediately more interesting than the markedly slower studio version. (Evidence: the Daytrotter version.) But when they stick the landing on their more psychedelic tendencies, the results are extremely satisfying. Easily, the best tracks on the album are the final two: Their muddy-but-faithful cover of Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of Dawn cut "Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk" and their 10-minute opus "Reverse Shark Attack". The title track switches gears several times, incorporating bubbly psych pop, soft acoustic guitars, a Dick Dale fast-surf outro, and the same sort of slow-burning melodrama you could hear in the Pallbearer album. For a song that jumps around to a few different melodic devices, they're strung together beautifully.
Reverse Shark Attack is a fine example of the downsides to getting weird in the studio. Sometimes, you strike gold. Sometimes, veering into psychedelic territory makes your songs sound unnecessarily cheap. It stands in contrast to Ty's work with the Traditional Fools, who shy away from additional effects and stick to drunken, lo-fi budget rock. In 2008, the trio-- Segall, David Fox, and Andrew Luttrell-- bashed out a series of trashy surf punk songs, four of which are just over one minute long. (That proved to be a troglodyte year for Segall-- he also released his raucous one-man-band debut solo album on Castle Face.) And really, if the sunglasses-clad cheeseburgers on the cover don't already give you a sense of the album's overall vibe, the track titles should: "Snot Rag", "Shredstick", "Get Off My Back", "Party at My House".
But here's the thing-- while it's not an ambitious album, every song is solid. Their intention was to create a rock'n'roll party album (from "Party at My House": "Parents comin' home,/ Won't you get the fuck out?"), and with that mission in their sights, they recorded 12 earworm-laden tracks that wouldn't sound out of place at a deranged Frankie and Annette beach party. There's a sped up version of Billy Childish's Thee Headcoats song "Davey Crockett" and a fuzzed out version of Redd Kross' "Kill Someone You Hate". With speed, volume, great riffs, and a sloppy delivery, they breathe punk rock life into surf.
These two albums are an interesting pair to release at the same time. One's a collection of dumb-but-fun rock'n'roll, the other's a spotty series of tracks that owe more to Beefheart than garage*.* On their own, these albums could imply that Segall's strengths rest in the loud and fast material. As Hair, Goodbye Bread, and Twins have all proved, that's not the case at all-- he can slow jam with the best of 'em. But early on, he was a master of trash rock, and The Traditional Fools is 20 minutes of some of his most fun material to date.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the KLF’s sample-heavy dreamscape, one of the most influential records in ambient house music.

Chill Out

In 1959, a young composer named James Tenney enrolled at the University of Illinois, one of the few places in the United States where an aspiring iconoclast could study electronic music. The form was still in its infancy; oscillators and magnetic tape promised a doorway to new worlds. When Tenney sat down to compose with these unfamiliar materials, he was stymied. It wasn’t until 1961, in an act of sheer desperation, that Tenney started futzing around with a piece of music that was a world away from his classical upbringing: a recording of Elvis Presley’s “Blue Suede Shoes,” which had come out just five years before. He sped it up, slowed it down, cut it to ribbons. One “feverish” week later, he had completed a landmark work of appropriation art: “Collage #1,” an alien stew of chirps and gurgles in which Presley’s voice floats in dreamlike fragments, barely discernible.
Decades later, in 1985, when John Oswald took the stage at a Toronto conference of electro-acoustic musicians to deliver a provocative lecture titled “Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative,” a tremor was shaking the music industry—the sustained aftershock of DJ Kool Herc’s invention of breakbeat DJing at Bronx block parties. As scratching and its digital cousin, sampling, had migrated from community rec centers to recording studios, it had become clear that copyright laws were ill-equipped to answer the question implicit in these new technologies: What if commercial recordings were not just products to be owned, but also the raw materials, anarchic and free, for new creative works?
“A phonograph in the hands of a hip hop/scratch artist… becomes a musical instrument,” declared Oswald, who saw in the turntable and the sampler the birth of a new folk music. Oswald believed that creative sampling does not eclipse prior works; it builds upon them. He cited the English poet John Milton’s view that borrowing becomes plagiarism only if the object “is not bettered by the borrower,” and quoted Stravinsky’s oft-repeated epigram, “A good composer does not imitate; he steals.” Tenney’s “Collage #1,” Oswald said, was an example of that “better borrowing,” precisely for the way it expanded upon the original recording while preserving its essence: “Tenney took an everyday music and allowed us to hear it differently. At the same time, all that was inherently Elvis radically influenced our perception of Jim’s piece.” What was the point of copyright law in a world that could produce such profound results? Why police creation? Art, like people, yearned to be free, to go forth and multiply.
Two years later, in 1987, as the sun came up over a remote Swedish field at the end of a long dirt road, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty watched—maybe ruefully, maybe gleefully—as a small bonfire turned the remaining copies of their debut album into a column of acrid smoke. It was not the last time the two would incinerate what they made. In 1994, flush with cash from becoming one of the best-selling bands in the UK, their band known as the KLF would set fire to £1 million—just torch it, hidden away in a deserted boathouse on the Scottish island of Jura, tossing bundle after bundle of £50 notes into the fireplace, until the suitcase they’d brought it in was empty. Episodes like that made the pair as famous for their hijinks as for the music they recorded—maybe more so. Today, they’re best known as the band that set fire to a small fortune, shortly after giving up music for good. But before they called it quits, in between the provocations, court injunctions, and unexpected hits, they snuck out Chill Out: a strange, idiosyncratic album that would alter the course of ambient music for decades to come—and prove that even their quietest, most cryptic statements could be as powerful as their most anarchic stunts.
Formed on New Year’s Day, 1987, the KLF had quickly become one of the most audacious acts in British pop music. Before they became the KLF, they started out using a name they borrowed—something they would do a lot of in the coming years—from Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy, a series of sci-fi novels about a group of shadowy agents of chaos: the Justified Ancients of Mummu, or the JAMs.
Drummond and Cauty’s Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (the misspelling was unintentional) released their first single, “All You Need Is Love,” just three months after forming. It began with an extensive, unauthorized excerpt of the Beatles’ song of the same name, then cut abruptly to the MC5’s infamous “Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!”—a sly reference to the Illuminatus! books. The rest of the song was similarly loaded with uncleared samples. “Touch me, touch me,” chirped Samantha Fox, best known to British audiences as a tabloid pin-up model; “Sexual intercourse/No known cure,” warned the actor John Hurt, whose voice had been lifted from newly implemented government AIDS-prevention PSAs. Its jagged scratching and anvil-drop guitars were a clumsy pastiche of Run-D.M.C. and Beastie Boys; it was, frankly, kind of a mess. Sounds magazine declared it “the first single to capture realistically the musical and social climate of 1987.”
The DJs at the BBC refused to touch the single, but “All You Need Is Love” nevertheless attracted scads of attention, from the press and lawyers alike. A court ordered that all remaining copies of the record be destroyed; lucky for the JAMs, the single-sided pressing of 500 had already sold out. Undeterred, they rushed out their debut album, 1987 What the Fuck’s Going On?, which was similarly chock-a-block with pilfered sounds—bits from ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,” Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.,” etc.—over rudimentary hip-hop beats. They flaunted their stolen goods, making no attempt to hide the samples’ sources. (The title of the Dave Brubeck song: “Don’t Take Five (Take What You Want).”) That same year, underground rockers Negativland and the one-off dance-pop project M/A/R/R/S both put out career-defining records that shared with the KLF’s output one central tenet: It’s easier to ask forgiveness than get permission.
Another court ordered that all remaining copies of 1987 What the Fuck’s Going On? be destroyed. This time it was an unlicensed ABBA sample that got Drummond and Cauty into trouble—which is how they found themselves in Stockholm, hoping to convince the Swedish superstars to reconsider their demand. After failing to get a meeting, the duo kept the letter of the law, dutifully if somewhat petulantly, and burned most of the records in that Swedish field; the rest they dumped overboard on the ferry ride home. Presumably, a mass of black wax discs lies there still, smoothed by the waves and covered in mollusks, a misshapen mile-marker on that North Sea whale-road, an underwater monument to artistic stubbornness.
Drummond and Cauty went on like that for another year or so, releasing trouble-making records, taunting the industry, and nurturing a reputation for perpetual reinvention. In 1988, they killed off the JAMs and adopted various new aliases. As the Timelords, they stumbled into a No. 1 hit, “Doctorin’ the Tardis,” by shamelessly mashing up the Doctor Who theme song with glam-rock stomps from Sweet and Gary Glitter. A month later, they reached No. 5 with “What Time Is Love,” a sinister seven-minute techno anthem that marked their arrival to the nascent rave scene. The alias they used for that record was the KLF—a name rumored, though never confirmed, to stand for “Kopyright Liberation Front.”
The musical thread that had defined the duo’s work up to this point was its abrasiveness. Yet in February 1990, they set aside the jarring edits and jagged rave stabs and released Chill Out: an unbroken 44-minute collage of synthesizer, steel guitar, railway noises, bleating sheep, found sounds, and samples—some half-buried, some plain as day—of Fleetwood Mac, jazz clarinetist Acker Bilk, and even James Tenney’s old muse, Elvis Presley.
Chill Out offered a whole new way of thinking about ambient music. Brian Eno had codified the idea of ambient with his 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports, and there was a long tradition of dreamy, psychedelic synthesizer music in bands like Tangerine Dream, but that stuff was the province of beard-stroking hippies, while the new-age-adjacent drones of Steve Roach and Robert Rich were found mainly in the cassette racks of crystal emporiums. After the explosion of rave, old-school ambient didn’t just belong to another generation; it might as well have come from a different planet. The canonical albums of ambient’s next generation, meanwhile—artists like Aphex Twin, Pete Namlook, and Global Communication—lay several years in the future.
In a press release, the KLF announced Chill Out as the birth of a new subgenre: ambient house. At the time, its name sounded like a paradox: House music is about rhythm, movement, bodies in motion; ambient is amorphous, atmospheric, fundamentally disembodied. In fact, they said, the fusion was a natural response to the physiological and chemical stresses of rave culture, a format grown “out of spending 12 hours at a rave, dancing nonstop all night, and then needing something to ease back into the reality of Sunday morning.” As the first generation of ravers was still discovering the effects (and aftereffects) of watching the sun come up over muddy fields, the idea of music tailor-made to soothe fragile synapses was still a novel concept.
In typical KLF fashion, it was hard to know to what extent they were actually serious about any of this; half the press release was unabashedly tongue-in-cheek, a none-too-subtle sendup of new-age woo (“Ambient house makes love with the wind and talks to the stars”). And then there were those sheep on the album’s cover art—inspired by the cow on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother, according to Drummond. The sleeve, he said, captured the feeling of daybreak in a grassy field full of sleepy-eyed ruminants; there was something deeply English and deeply rural about the whole raving phenomenon. The sheep, the KLF explained, represented “spiritually highly-evolved creatures who are totally at one with their universe. If you doubt this, just gaze at the cover of Chill Out whilst listening to it and share the serenity.”
Far from the gonzo antics and heavy-handed satire of the KLF’s early work, Chill Out is subtle, hypnotic, and mysterious, with nary a shred of smugness or snark. The baaing sheep might once have been purely farcical, but here their purpose is more ambiguous—a subliminally pastoral chorus barely perceptible within the overall mix. From Chill Out’s very opening moments, the listener descends into an unfamiliar swirl of sensations—by turns lulling, lyrical, and deeply unsettling—and doesn’t come up for air until nearly 45 minutes later.
The album begins with the sounds of crickets and rushing water, then sinewave bleeps and a momentary snatch of Spanish-language radio, all run through a pleasantly disorienting wash of dub delay. The chorus of what will later be released as the KLF’s 1991 single “Justified and Ancient” floats dreamily through the mix and quickly dissipates, a fleeting (and cheekily meta) point of reference in a landscape where the compass needle mostly spins willy-nilly. After a minute, a freight train’s rumble rises and falls, followed by the liquid peal of pedal-steel guitar. Both are deeply coded sounds, inextricable from the idea of rural America, which seemed to fascinate the KLF as much as the pastures of their own country did. They provide crucial scene-setting for the album’s road-trip theme, which plays out in its sound effects and freeform radio-dial spin. The track titles, which loosely organize Chill Out’s continuous stream of music, reinforce the impression that this is an all-night drive along secondary highways: “Brownsville Turnaround on the Tex-Mex Border,” “Pulling Out of Ricardo and the Dusk Is Falling Fast,” and “Six Hours to Louisiana, Black Coffee Going Cold.”
Beneath its tranquil surface, the album teems with activity. There are jangling cowbells, car engines, honking horns, the chop of what might be an outboard motor. Car doors slam, birds chirp, dogs bark, sirens wail. The principal through line, along with that pedal steel, is a handful of drawn-out synthesizer chords—otherworldly echoes of a high, lonesome train whistle. All these sounds glide by so swiftly and softly that you don’t realize how many discrete elements are in play; they proceed like a stream of down feathers gushing from a firehose.
But it’s the voices that really bring this virtual world to life. A Long Island news announcer reports the death of a 17-year-old boy, killed in a drag-racing accident after finishing work at his father’s diner. A boisterous man, frequently identified by fans as one Dr. Williams, serves as a kind of Greek chorus, peppering track after track with gravelly running commentary: “Come get your mojo, hey! Go down to Atlantic City, come back fat as a rat!” Invoking the Christian broadcasts found all over the American airwaves, the KLF sample a jubilant pastor raving about Matthew 9. One wonders if Drummond and Cauty simply liked the sound of his evangelical bellow, or if they were also familiar with the contents of Matthew 9:36: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
The interwoven pieces play out like a radio broadcast heard while half asleep, tapping into the same surreal aesthetic that David Lynch would explore in Twin Peaks’ debut just a few months later. Call it the American uncanny, in which familiar tropes are turned strange, and tantalizing snippets suggest hidden narratives—root systems of stories burrowing deep underground. Like the Swiss heritage of photographer Robert Frank, another eagle-eyed traveler of America’s backroads, the KLF’s foreignness gave them special purchase on American myths. It was all a product of the duo’s imagination; Drummond had never even been to the places they were evoking, and they only settled on the titles after recording. “We thought that it had the feeling of that sort of trip,” Drummond told X Magazine in 1991. “I love maps and atlases and I love place names, and I just sat down with the atlas and picked, you know, and saw the journey that it was and it all seemed to fit.”
The KLF’s sensibilities might have softened since the days of “All You Need Is Love,” but their Plunderphonic instincts had not waned. A compendium of songs sampled by the KLF, posted in 1994 to the Trancentral listserv, cites Pink Floyd’s “On the Run” and “Echoes,” Brian Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land, Fleetwood Mac’s “Albatross,” and the Boy George group Jesus Loves You’s “After the Love Has Gone,” among other borrowings. (The fact that so much of their source material was British in origin only underscores the purely imaginary nature of their Deep South sojourn.) The shimmering overtones of Tuvan throat singing offer an eerie pre-echo of acid house’s TB-303. Peppy chamber music, the kind once encountered in all-night grocery stores, lends a whiff of air-freshened kitsch. The most unexpected detour, shortly before the end, is a mercilessly garbled edit of Eddie Van Halen’s pyrotechnic guitar solo from “Eruption”: a veritable tornado of pick slides and whammy bar that probably scared the hell out of the loved-up clubbers who had come to the album in search of nothing more than a landing pad after a long night out.
For what was supposed to be an ambient house record, there was precious little house at all—just an E’d-up preview of their 1991 single “Last Train to Trancentral” in the pumping keyboards of “Trancentral Lost in My Mind,” and then, barely audible, amphetamine-laced hi-hats set against a drowsy clarinet in “A Melody From a Past Life Keeps Pulling Me Back.” Every time that melancholy refrain appears, I think of the scene from Terry Gilliam’s 1995 film 12 Monkeys where Bruce Willis’ time-traveling character encounters Fats Domino’s hit “Blueberry Hill” intermingled with a beach-resort ad on a car radio. Accidentally or otherwise, that scene distills the feeling of Chill Out: an overwhelming mix of sounds, voices, and emotions that seems to move simultaneously backward and forward in time.
Even in the absence of beats, the album blurs the line between composition and DJ mix. Drummond and Cauty assembled it using two DAT players, a turntable, a couple of cassette decks, and a mixer; they started off by jamming out 20 minutes of synth pads and began building from there, bouncing from DAT to DAT, pulling variously from records and tapes as they went, sampling in real time. The final mix was recorded live, and followed a handful of aborted takes where they screwed something up just as they reached the end and had to start over.
“It’s not just bits and pieces thrown in, every bit is exactly how we wanted it to be,” Drummond told i-D in 1990, shortly after the record’s release. But the recording session was nevertheless guided by a characteristically anarchic spirit. One morning, Drummond’s clock radio awakened him to the sound of Elvis Presley; he promptly ran out and bought the King’s greatest hits, which he and Cauty sampled that very day, working 1969’s “In the Ghetto” into “Elvis on the Radio, Steel Guitar in My Soul.” The genius of Plunderphonics reveals itself here. It’s perfectly easy to imagine Chill Out without the sample, but once you’ve heard it—the way Elvis’ voice intermingles with the chugging of the railway and the dubbed-out curlicues of pedal steel, perfectly in key—it’s impossible to un-hear it. It completes the album, becomes an essential part.
The KLF’s slapstick early singles represented a kind of culture jamming—Negativland’s term—that used hip-hop’s techniques to lampoon pop music and, by extension, pop culture. Chill Out turned those same techniques toward different ends: gentler, stranger, more psychedelic—a nebulous fog in which the source material flickered like a lenticular image. Where the JAMs would have highlighted Elvis’ thrusting hips, his gaudy outfits, his drug use—all the things that made the King a garish, larger-than-life pop spectacle—Chill Out homes in on his voice, his pathos, the otherworldly quality that haunted his music. The KLF’s idea of chilling out isn’t a passive stupor—it’s a kind of heightened awareness, the clarity that comes from fixing one’s gaze on the center line as it bobs in the headlights, throwing up phantom shapes.
It’s hard to overstate the impact of Chill Out. Ambient music has gone from being a niche concern to a widespread way of interacting with the world through sound, from sleep playlists to sound baths. And the idea of chill is even more widespread, though it’s a good bet that neither Drummond nor Cauty would be particularly enamored of its passivity, its packaging of mood as lifestyle. (A few years ago, Drummond said that the era of recorded music had itself worn out its welcome.) It is, of course, entirely possible that ambient house and techno would have happened without the KLF—the idea was in the air, and Cauty's onetime DJ partner Alex Patterson and his group the Orb would have taken up the torch. But the KLF set the tone for a particular fusion of texture, tone, and attitude. They may not have invented ambient house, but they channeled it, midwifed it, dowsed it: They felt something coursing through pop culture and brought it to the surface, gave it a name and a shape.
Chill Out isn’t available on any streaming service (except YouTube), and you can’t purchase a download of it. The KLF took their album off the market, along with the rest of their back catalog, when they called it quits in 1992, yet another immolation of sorts. But it feels fitting that this definitive album from the most lawless of groups wouldn’t circulate within established channels.
Whatever copyright law might have to say about it, Chill Out is an idea that can’t be stopped. Its essence lives on in artworks like this tribute mix—an element-for-element cover version, essentially, of the entire album, swapping in all-new samples that capture the mood and feel of the original pieces. It belongs to anyone who has ever stared at the vanishing point driving down an unfamiliar stretch of highway, the thrumming motor an accidental techno counterpart to Elvis’ voice as it comes warbling across the years and through the speakers, a shepherd leading his flock toward the dawn.


Dear Diary:

Wake up, slightly dazed and out of it, and just like every other morning for the last eight months of unemployment, it begins the same way. Tie on the robe, fumble for the coffee mug, the ketchup-y Bloody Mary, and the initial pipe pull, and clumsily drop the needle onto the crackly, burnt first side of the record that remains glued on my turntable, waiting for those same "Chopsticks"-esque piano notes that bang singer Harry Nilsson out of his slumber for "Gotta Get Up", the opening song on 1971's *Schmilsson*. He's still in his robe too, out of focus,

Nilsson Schmilsson

Dear Diary:
Wake up, slightly dazed and out of it, and just like every other morning for the last eight months of unemployment, it begins the same way. Tie on the robe, fumble for the coffee mug, the ketchup-y Bloody Mary, and the initial pipe pull, and clumsily drop the needle onto the crackly, burnt first side of the record that remains glued on my turntable, waiting for those same "Chopsticks"-esque piano notes that bang singer Harry Nilsson out of his slumber for "Gotta Get Up", the opening song on 1971's Schmilsson. He's still in his robe too, out of focus, unshaven, a hash pipe in his fingers. Harry wakes up, weary, but rouses quickly, showers, resigned to being late for the day's meetings. He's already mourning the salad days and wasted nights slowly slipping away to the high-fiber diet and working late. As the music hall accordion and tuba breathe in the evening's hiccupy bubbles and the bass bumps along with lines about a sailor's conjugal visits, we're back in the swing times of the early 70s, where the 60s' residual good times hid, trying to stay high and jovial even as the highs got slightly more complicated and expensive.
Long considered the "American Beatle" by The Beatles themselves (and John Lennon's drinking buddy during his year-long "Lost Weekend"), Harry Nilsson originally reflected them in his quirky, knowledgeable pop (and was a rumored Paul McCartney replacement) before scoring a Grammy for his delirious version of folkie Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talking" that loped throughout Midnight Cowboy. As the clime of pop hardened into rock, and groups like The Beatles dissolved, Nilsson teamed up with producer Richard Perry to bolster both of their careers. Moving the party over to London, and drawing on a pool of players that would have hands on rock landmarks of the era like All Things Must Pass, Layla and Assorted Love Songs, Tumbleweed Connection, Sticky Fingers, Plastic Ono Band, and Transformer, Nilsson's rock record Schmilsson is easily the most loveable scamp of the bunch. Its success was the watershed (and all the subsequent washing out that word implies) of his career.
As spins run into the thousands for me now, new little sonorities appear in the song craft. I'll always love the way he paved over the sub-Lennon scream of Badfinger's chorus on "Without You", beyond the simplistic resignation of the original and into a cathartic, climactic release. (The Spanish version included "Si No Estas Tu" as a bonus track-- the song's more Romantic lingua showcases the true force of Nilsson's operatic reading as he tremors and holds the notes.) The pounding, detuned-bass rocker "Jump into the Fire" and the similarly belted and horn-blasted "Down" define Nilsson's harder take on this particular album (the former could still burn up dancefloors), although his stab at the golden oldie "Let the Good Times Roll" humorously weaves about, drunk on its own Bacchanalian clank of keys.
My new favorites took awhile to come to the fore. One is the incredibly human-- if somewhat George Harrison-esque-- commuter meditation on "Driving Along". "The Moonbeam Song" is succinctly perfect, with a visual aesthetic worthy of Taoist poets: moonbeams light on train tracks, windowpanes, weather vanes, and the eye of the beholder himself. Its sweetest line is about "a fence with bits of crap along its bottom, blown by a windbeam," and as Herbie Flowers' bass slides between the luminescent clouds of mellotron, Harry catches all of the Beach Boys in his Brandy Alexander'd croon. Closer "I'll Never Leave" is sumptuous and bittersweet: a farewell to Harry Nilsson's baroque pop past with producer George Tipton. Over an aching vocal performance, Tipton swaddles Nilsson all in bells, oboes, glockenspiels, blurted brass, pizzicato'd violins, and xylophones, bidding an elongated adieu to pop's previously ornate design.
Tipton also provides the orchestration for the added demo of "Gotta Get Up", a shiny remainder of baroque tendencies that has our man keeping the song at a bubblegum level, sidestepping the album's more "blue" themes. The soap opera twinkling of the demo version of "The Moonbeam Song" reveals its beauty from the start. Weirdest of the bunch is the throwaway, "Lamaze". Banged out on piano and with a grandiose burst of Franco-babble about contractions and moving the left and right leg, Nilsson's joker smile flashes for an instant, a goofy, eclectic streak that riddled other parts of his catalog, like the follow-up, Son of Schmilsson. Aiming for the heart and the top of the pops, though, Nilsson's Schmilsson, in its shuffling, slightly askew, and idiosyncratic way, hit it all perfectly, and this ridiculously overdue reissue still makes my day.


Channeling the sound and spirit of 2000s indie rock, the Chicago duo’s debut album feels like a generational passing of the torch.

Friko: Where we’ve been, Where we go from here

Where we’ve been, Where we go from here

As you might expect from a scene named after a Neu! song, the young bands emerging from Chicago’s Hallogallo collective see themselves as torchbearers for previous generations of cutting-edge rock. Friko fit the mold, as a precocious pair namechecking ’90s indie rock, post-punk, Leonard Cohen, and, why not, Chopin. Someone who came of age in the early 2000s might also hear Saddle Creek’s all-hands, band-camp blowouts in Friko’s surging drama—or the blog-rock bands that made guitars and drums exciting again in the age of mashups, or maybe the buzziest act at a late-aughts CMJ showcase or Empty Bottle afterparty. But even if Friko recall the sound of those days, their debut album, Where we’ve been, Where we go from here isn’t just a throwback. It carries the spirit forward, reaffirming that indie rock, as a style and ethos, can still feel like the most exciting thing a young person could be into.
Despite its bullish title, Where we’ve been doesn’t scan as a monolithic statement of purpose, but rather a presumptive greatest-hits compilation. It’s no slight to say that it could be just as enjoyable on shuffle; nearly every song feels designed to either begin or end a live set, whether at SXSW, Schubas, or even Bonnaroo. Only the finale, “Cardinal,” is locked into sequence as an acoustic comedown. Friko’s songs open grandly and gather intensity all the way through their equally grand closings; these aren’t just anthems in the abstract sense, they’re theme songs. And even when the lyrics turn desperate (“It doesn’t get better, it just gets twice as bad,” from the bittersweet, tightly wound “Get Numb to It!”), Niko Kapetan’s swashbuckling trill recasts the subject matter as a hero’s journey.
“Twenty years spent above this place/You could smell the iron from the room,” Kapetan sings as the album’s preamble, a curious image that conjures the smell of blood, of trains, of something that should be in motion. From that point forward, Where we’ve been might as well be a blues album, given how much time Friko spend at a crossroads, forced to choose between struggle or complacency, life or death, going big or going home.
Twin peaks “Where We’ve Been” and “Crimson to Chrome” cleverly reenact the pervasive drive to get out of a rut and into the groove, hammering at remarkably similar melodies until the arrangements crack open. “Chemical” sounds like it learned its riff from the Walkmen’s “The Rat”—and also, more importantly, that a song can be all tension for four minutes. When Kapetan yells the title over and over, the band shifts into what sounds like a truncated time signature, as if they need to knock out the chorus as quickly as possible before their studio time runs out. Even a song as blatantly bleak as “Get Numb to It!” can double as celebration rock, its a cappella finale sounding like a gang of drunken football fans chanting their school’s fight song hours after the home team has left the field in triumph.
There are ballads, too. But most of the time, Kapetan operates at a similar emotional pitch to a Japandroids song, as if it’s the last song he’s ever going to write. In “Crimson to Chrome,” he wails, “I’m sitting here writing the same sad song/With the cogs on fire/Spinning on and on/ Till I’m old and tired/Even then I’m on fire.” But whichever direction they take—pensive piano etudes or rave-ups that channel the feeling of being burned alive—Friko’s goal is the same: to make the same sad songs sound like the bonfire for a new generation to rally around.


New Orleans band follows in the shimmery, usually electronics-led footsteps of JAMC, Fennesz, and Tim Hecker.

October Language

Mark Richardson, in a rare show of hand, once admitted in a review that he had a crippling soft spot for this specific shimmery wet electric sound, as championed by everyone from Jesus and Mary Chain and MBV to Fennesz and Tim Hecker to Wolfgang Voigt and Radian to Yume Bitsu and Polmo Polpo. I'm prone to the same critical shortcircuiting; if you make a record with that sound, I will probably like it; if you do it well, I will abuse it.
Recorded in pre-ravaged New Orleans, this processed guitar noise record might get tagged "Disintegration Loops for Hurricane Katrina." But the album is much more nuanced emotionally, less conceptual, better edited, and songy in the way Black Dice or Isolée can be songy. Some tracks, like "Remove the Inside", sound like Belong may have written them out on staff: simple melodies stretched out so we feel the jumps in tone from note to note, and hear the color changes as those perfect pitch adverts tell us.
Glee Club kids, there's a song here called "Who Told You This Room Exists" that sounds like Josquin's "Tu solus" slowed down, burnt vinyl caught on the lock track, the guitars swelling like bass men right before the progression resolves and breathes in again. The nylon is more audible on "I'm Too Sleepy...Shall We Swim", guitar strums blowing over crackly, pitch-black silence like fingers brushing skin-- nerve-wracking, romantic, intense, and hardly there at all.
Of course, the second I mention the title track's slide guitar siren or the breathy static, how it drapes waves of rolling white noise that inch closer and closer until it swallows us loud and whole... I mean if October Language isn't about Katrina, it's at least about hardship, big or small or personal, and music's curious power to help us deal.


Batida, the umbrella term for the variant strains of dance music coming from the ghettos surrounding Lisbon proper, roughly translates to "my beat" in Portuguese. Alma Do Meu Pai is an EP from DJ Firmeza, a producer and DJ born in Portugal but of Angolan descent. At 20, he is one of the batida scene's younger members, but his first solo release is refined and mature.

Alma Do Meu Pai EP

Batida, the umbrella term for the variant strains of dance music coming from the ghettos perched in the hills surrounding Lisbon proper, roughly translates to "my beat" in Portuguese. As DJ Marfox, the scene's unofficial current figurehead, explained earlier this year, it's also "the same word for when your heart beats when you have a car crash." It's perfect sensory context for the heavily percussive polyrhythms streaming from these isolated projects, mostly filled with emigrants from Angola, São Tomé E Príncipe, and other former Portuguese colonies: jarring, frantic, but alive.
But for years, there was no platform for batida producers to release any of this stuff; it existed communally—in the Quinta do Mocho and Quinta da Vitória and other remote housing projects, built hastily after Portugal's 1974 revolution brought a sea of immigrants from former colonies to the crowded city—or not at all. Then came Príncipe Discos, a tight-knit local label fiercely devoted to "100% real contemporary dance music coming out of this city, its suburbs, projects and slums." Since their first release in 2011, DJ Marfox's Eu Sei Quem Sou EP (or "I Know Who I Am"), the label has been committed to respectfully representing and propagating these singular, community-driven sounds.
The label's latest is Alma Do Meu Pai, a six-track EP from DJ Firmeza, a producer and DJ born in Portugal but of Angolan descent. At 20, he is one of the batida scene's younger members, but his first solo release on the label is refined and mature. Within the Príncipe catalog, Firmeza is more of a minimalist than peers like DJ Nigga Fox. Melody is almost never a factor on Alma Do Meu Pai, which translates to "Soul of My Father" in honor of his recently deceased dad. His focus is percussion above all else—sparse, efficient, streamlined. Closing track "Suposto" evokes a soca rhythm whittled down and deconstructed; a lilting flute traipses through the remains, head-faking towards melody before it becomes a percussive element itself. You don't see it coming.
Most batida tracks are short, two-minute bursts, suited for dancers' wandering attention spans. But the title track "Alma Do Meu Pai" clocks in at over six minutes, churning and lurching at a breathless 143 BPM. At a glance, it's repetitive; it's easy to let it all blur together and submit to its current. But with focus, you notice subtle deviations in rhythm, the layers, the way the percussive components move in connection with one another. But instead of cold metallics, this stuff feels warm, organic, very much human, as though each element of a track is part of a larger conversation.
It's tempting to explore Alma Do Meu Pai in parallel with underground dance genres like footwork or grime. The movements function in socially similar ways, forging stunningly unique sounds and dances from urban tensions. But batida is different. As Pedro Gomes, one of Príncipe's four label heads, emphasized: "This is not techno, this is not house, this is not dubstep, this is not grime—this is this, it's not anything else, so if you want this... present this for what it is." Alma Do Meu Pai, then, is a calm, strange, and deceptively simple study in what can be wrung out of rhythm. It is music for dancing, and for contemplation. And though it is not an explicitly political record, the fact that we are hearing it at all, from the remote projects of Lisbon the city itself forgot, is a political act in itself.


The debut album by American alt-R&B singer/songwriter Jillian Banks often feels far too cultivated; it's all trendy misery assisted by equally fashionable producers, without any substance to hold it all up. Shlohmo, Jamie Woon, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, and others contribute.

Goddess

The worst crime wrought by this decade's wave of woozy, trip-hop-influenced R&B has been inciting boredom. Dreary, midtempo music often triggers that feeling, and those are two adjectives that could describe Goddess, the debut album by Jillian Banks, at both its best and worst. Banks is an American singer/songwriter in her mid-twenties who made it big after Zane Lowe played her single "Before I Ever Met You"on his BBC Radio 1 show; with its dull greyscale backing track, the tune put all the emphasis on her voice, husky and rough around the edges. Banks' vocals carried an ambiguous and perpetual fatigue that might have been personal, or just a response to the crush of the world around her. As embryonic as it was, "Before I Ever Met You," showed real promise, like a Martina Topley-Bird for the Weeknd generation.
In the year that followed, she hooked up with a number of fashionable, bubbling-under producers: Shlohmo, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Lil Silva, and Sohn have all put their magic on her vocal tracks, and she's built a coherent catalog by sucking the color out of their work, like some ravenous musical Marceline. When it works, the effect is mezmerising, with an atmosphere that hangs thick in the room like incense. But as with any scent so strong, it can just as easily linger and turn stale. Compare the Shlohmo-assisted "Brain" with last year's "Waiting Game", produced by Sohn. The former seems like a match made in heaven, but Banks ends up duetting with Shlohmo's distorted squalls, and the two lock step into one blandly weary march. "Waiting Game", on the other hand, is a naked ballad where Banks' voice floats high and reedy, and the only flourish is some wafting gospel vocals in the background.
"Waiting Game" is Banks' best moment, a tortured torch song directed at another performer: "What if I never even see you 'cause we're both on a stage/ But don't tell me listen to your song because it isn't the same." It originally appeared on London, a 2013 EP that saw her backed up by UK artists Lil Silva, Jamie Woon, and Tim Anderson. They're also responsible for "This Is What It Feels Like", a should-be-smoulderer that can't quite ignite—imagine the writhing bassline from Ginuwine's "Pony" turned limp and lifeless. The tender "Change" comes from the same EP, while "Warm Water" is a holdover from last year as well. Goddess ends up with the hodgepodge feel of a music industry product that was forced to exist, rather than an album that came together naturally.
If London caught Banks at an especially vulnerable moment, showing off her range and raw emotion, then Goddess tries too hard to push in either direction, alternately shrouding her in smoke ("Stick") or hammily over-emoting ("You Should Know Where I'm Coming From"). Opener "Alibi", another Sohn-produced cut, has an impassioned chorus, but her multi-tracked voice dissipates on impact, too wispy and rehearsed. On "Goddess", her run-on mushmouth obscures an otherwise fiery scorned lover narrative, and the same goes for the jaunty "Fuck 'Em Only We Know", where she practically whispers the chorus as if she were afraid to let a profanity slip.
Buried deep in the album is "Beggin for Thread", a brief respite of (relative) sunshine with perky drums and a lilting chorus. Catchy in spite of its desperate lyrics, there are moments where she sounds unpretentious and charming, which is more than you can say for the rest of Goddess. Banks' aesthetic often feels far too cultivated; it's all trendy misery assisted by equally fashionable producers, without any substance to hold it all up. Whenever she does try to get personal, the phrasing and lyrics come off stilted and awkward, the hallmark of a novice songwriter ("What if I said I was built on bricks of carelessness and crumbs?"). Armed with a voice that can go from brooding and low to spine-tingly icy in the span of one musical measure, Banks could certainly go places—but Goddess doesn't, and instead seems content to wallow in the same depressive rut for an exhausting 59 minutes.


At last out of prison, the Louisiana rapper returns with his hard-hitting verses and endearing croon—and lots of new stories to share.

Luca Brasi 3

As Luca Brasi 3 begins, Kevin Gates has even more to dish than usual. The new mixtape is the gabby Louisiana rapper’s first major project since he was released early this year from a longer-than-expected prison stint. He’d finished serving 180 days for kicking a fan in the face from the stage when authorities discovered an outstanding weapons warrant against him, costing him another nine months.
True to his reputation for candor, Gates gets right into it with “Discussion,” which documents the ins-and-outs of his negotiations with the D.A., the respectful glances of his fellow inmates, and his long hours in the weight room. But what he lingers on the most is the frustration of the sidelines. “Got some niggas who love me, they outta reach,” he raps. “Got some children who coming up, gotta teach/Got some family who mad ’cause they tryna leach.” Then there’s the toll on his marriage, which he captures with emotion on “Find You Again”: “This is a burden that none of us want/The judge broke us up when I went back to court/Sentenced the time, and it tore us apart.” Gates’ storytelling is never entirely linear, as he writes in impressions, not scenes. But the crumbs he allows here frame an admission that the two nearly didn’t make it.
Before his incarceration, Gates’ career had been playing out like a dream. He followed a run of outstanding mixtapes with 2016’s Islah, his Atlantic debut and the rare major-label effort that did blockbuster numbers without making obvious commercial concessions. It quietly became one of the best-selling rap records of that year, behind only Drake. Gates’ subsequent projects have been strong, too. Even last year’s stopgap prison release, By Any Means 2, felt mighty given the circumstances.
Gates doesn’t let his time away knock him off his stride. Luca Brasi 3’s subject matter trends heavier, but Gates is such a gregarious presence that he instinctively makes room for levity. On “Kung Fu,” he brags that he’s “a great example, great sex-haver/In shape for the Met Gala.” During “Shakin Back,” he somehow turns a urine test into a flex: “I’m pissing clean for my P.O./I’m a living legend.” His hearty warble remains a thing of wonder, too. He croons like a guy on the bus singing over his headphones, fully aware that everybody can hear him. Gates is like a pitcher with just two pitches, his hard verses and that chesty singing. But he mixes them so effectively that he can carry an hour-long project by himself.
If Luca Brasi 3 feels less necessary than its predecessors, though, that’s mostly because the hooks aren’t quite as titanic. Few linger in the head like his best; some that actually stick do so for all the wrong reasons. Even without its unfortunate title, “Me Too” (decidedly not a #MeToo statement) crosses the line into snickering silliness. The song exhausts its conceit in its first chorus: “I like fucking you in public, she say ‘Me too’/She don’t like using no rubber, I say ‘Me too.’” And “M.A.T.A.”—short for, as you feared, “Make America Trap Again”—should be the mantra for a far lazier, lamer rapper than Gates.
He is much better when he’s painting with shades of grey. On “Shoulda,” he offers a more mature spin on the trendy you-missed-your-chance takedown of an ex-girlfriend, epitomized by Post Malone’s “Better Now” and Juice WRLD’s “Lucid Dreams.” Those hits have a petty, juvenile posture, where the ex is always the villain. Gates’ spin on the subject matter spares us the indignation and animosity. He wishes his ex happiness and even admits his stubbornness denied them a second chance. As always, on Luca Brasi 3, Gates serves as a corrective to a rap landscape that favors absolutes. In his world, everything is always a little less clear-cut.


Mutual Benefit's Skip a Sinking Stone, a gorgeous collection of orchestral folk, focuses on the carefully plotted tours of a newly successful band and frontman Jordan Lee's adopted home of New York.

Skip a Sinking Stone

Jordan Lee had quietly released *six *albums prior to 2013, so Mutual Benefit didn’t exactly come out of nowhere three years ago. But Love’s Crushing Diamond sounded like it did: a document of emotional and physical displacement during Lee’s “year of notable absences,” its florid, orchestral folk was an anachronism compared to the slick, extroverted, and heavily-hyped pop that defined that year's indie breakthroughs. Much about Mutual Benefit remains in 2016: Lee’s still a wandering spirit surrounding himself with an orchestra of friends, recording in “forests, attics and hotel rooms” and it still sounds completely out of step with prevailing trends. But *Skip a Sinking Stone *is the first Mutual Benefit album to come from a very identifiable somewhere; the first half follows a newly successful band through carefully plotted tours and the second takes place in Lee’s adopted home of New York City.
In addition to Lee’s itinerary, the autumnal color scheme and loping cowboy strum of first single “Not For Nothing” evoked Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning: another clutch of traveling songs from a collectivist, indie-folk vagabond who settled into NYC. And like that record, *Skip a Sinking Stone *doesn’t sound or even *feel *like New York City. Nonetheless, the mere invocation of the city provides a kind of metaphysical importance and universality to Lee’s concerns, that he’s not just another dude in his late 20s trying to come to grips with personal success, lessons in love, and the sense that America is slowly, irreversibly headed towards self-destruction because people like him are never in charge and never want to be.
The similarities end there: Lee’s never been given nor has he sought out “voice of a generation” plaudits. Skip a Sinking Stone is invariably gentle, speaking for Lee and maybe those around him. Lee surrounds himself with people as equally curious, lovestruck, and positive as himself. As a result, *Skip a Sinking Stone *is probably the most chipper album about gig life ever recorded.
“Let’s take the long way home, let’s throw away our phones,” Lee sings moony-eyed during the very literal “Lost Dreamers,” a song which establishes Mutual Benefit as a natural convergence point between Neil Young’s Harvest* *and early 2000s freak-folk; this is the prevailing theme of *Skip a Sinking Stone’s *first half, where touring is just a mind-expanding road trip that happens to be interrupted by occasional load-ins, blog interviews, and stints at the merch table. “And if we get lost in a dream, wasn’t it worth all we’ve seen?,” he asks. It can all seem at odds with reality, but *Skip a Sinking Stone *is just at odds with the harried, hassled perspective that voluntarily serves as reality for most; Mutual Benefit never tries to force its viewpoint or really much of anything on the listener.
Besides, Lee’s POV is wholly embedded in Mutual Benefit’s music, so if you want to take his sentiments to task for being a little cloying, you might as well criticize the string parts for being too pretty. But even if this is a *gorgeous *album, fantastically so, that quality is occasionally to its detriment. “I’m so afraid to fall in love again, I know how it ends,” Lee sings on “Skipping Stones,” and that’s about as dark as things can get here. When “City Sirens” alludes to police brutality and Eric Garner’s death, the problem isn’t that the tonal shift is too jarring; it’s that there’s barely any at all. Though heartfelt and honest as everything else, a very specifically rendered line like “killers exposed through broken windows/there’s oaths they swore but what’s it all for?” hits with the same impact as “If there’s one thing I know, it’s that all the good times go, and the hard times too.”
After Love’s Crushing Diamond, Lee admitted he was wary of attaching any kind of story to his music, let alone his radical politics. And it seems like even stories as commonplace as “the road” and “New York” can moderate the ineffable magic of his previous work. Likewise, the mindset of *Skip a Sinking Stone *is best entered with the intent of total immersion and allotting a similar amount of Mutual Benefit music to more conventional song structures and interludes can feel like a vision quest stopped too frequently for bathroom breaks. But the enduring sadness in *Love’s Crushing Diamond *was drawn from Lee witnessing the destructive force of escapism in others. So if the newfound pragmatism and stability of *Skip a Sinking Stone *seems inevitable for Lee after Mutual Benefit’s success, an inveterate dreamer can’t help but make it sound transitional.


After challenging himself to make music without kick drums, the Berlin-based producer reverses course on an innovative, high-contrast new EP.

Unfixed EP

Sam Barker possesses the kind of restless intelligence that’s best expressed within a set of parameters. The Berlin-based producer and Leisure System boss is fond of approaching music through the lens of behavioral science, both to reevaluate our collective cognitive biases and to locate his own blind spots. ”We’ve developed a lot of rules for how to make people dance,” he observed in an interview. “I don’t want to dance just because there’s a kick-drum telling me to.” His creative breakthrough as Barker came about by eliminating that seemingly core component of techno on his 2019 debut, Utility, resulting in a set of shimmering, ultra-propulsive tracks.
In the immediate wake of Utility’s release, Barker made pains to stress that he wasn’t entirely opposed to the kick drum; in fact, he had privately begun making tracks exclusively from the instrument. His latest EP, Unfixed, began as an inverse of his original standpoint, before abandoning the strict confines of that trial. Almost all of its tracks are allusions to the idea of “functional fixedness,” the mental block of only using a tool for its traditional function. If these concepts sound lofty and foreboding, Barker handles them with a casual, funny immediacy. He makes a motto of philosopher Abraham Kaplan’s Law of the Instrument: “Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”
The EP can be roughly divided into two camps, ones that seamlessly weave kick drums into Barker’s weightless sound and ones that make controlled cacophony. The same glassy textures and vaporous synth washes that Barker perfected on Utility appear on “Wick and Wax,” which sprawls for nine minutes and establishes such an atmospheric, well-integrated groove that the kick-drum is barely perceptible at first. “Golden Hammer” and “Percussive Maintenance” hinge on a more dramatic contrast, as Barker’s shifting, uneasy rhythms are pierced without warning by jagged synth shards.
Lead single “Birmingham Screwdriver” is the most brutal track on the album, and possibly Barker’s back catalog. A fistfight of sour acid house breaks out as the atomized parts of a sampled bass drum ricochet through the track. It’s an incredibly unstable piece of music and an incredibly inventive one too, reminiscent of Autechre’s defiantly varying “Flutter.” The artist noted in the press release that in the process of working on the record, “tracks were started and then left unfinished, only to be approached again and again over lengthy intervals.” One’s left to wonder if the song’s build-up of caustic energy indicates a merciless new direction for the artist, the start of a brand new experiment.


Culled from the band’s sessions at Maida Vale Studios in 1994 and 2004, this double-LP that captures, in great fidelity, the acerbic personality and power of Steve Albini’s trio.

The End of Radio

Steve Albini’s convictions about music production and distribution paint him as nearly a mythic figure in the already esoteric world of analog audio engineering. But underneath his impenetrable, iconoclastic facade, Albini practices a sort of radical humility, charging market rate for his engineering services and constantly taking chances on obscure, burgeoning groups in his Electrical Audio studios. This approach to the industry likely came from the rapacious work ethic of the late John Peel: “He listened religiously to every single record he received in the mail, devoting hours of every day to the task,” Albini once noted of the British DJ. Coming from the man whose screeds against popular music make it onto massive billboards, the comment practically reads like hero worship.
And the admiration was apparently mutual—when Peel was asked to list his top 20 albums of all time, he placed Albini’s first band Big Black’s Songs About Fucking at 15. And there is a palpable level of trust in these recordings, collected and newly reissued on a double LP. With only an unofficial EP to their name at the time, Albini’s new band Shellac kicked off their 1994 session at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios with “Spoke,” a track that wouldn’t appear fully formed for another 13 years. After Albini’s screeching directive—”Radio 1, play the drums!”—drummer Todd Trainer plays a straight-ahead rock groove and bassist Bob Weston opens with a thick, chugging bassline. Then, as if to poke fun at the inscrutability of his absurdist, often violent lyricism, Albini and Weston exchange some indecipherable gibberish, sounding like an unhinged political debate. Within 15 seconds, the entire dynamic of Shellac is fully formed in real time, months before they’d put out their debut LP.
Playing live is a quintessential element of Shellac’s legacy; bootlegged copies of live performances circulate among fans, desperate to hear unreleased material or even riffs on studio versions of tracks (the Peel sessions themselves have been circulating in a lower quality since their broadcasts). Albini has said that the band improvises “40 percent” of their material in any given performance. “Canada,” recorded in the 1994 session and again in 2004, manifests these changes as a kind of loosening of their proverbial neckties. There‘s a hypnotic melodicism in Albini’s singing, but where the 1994 version is all business, wound tightly around the rhythmic crunch of Weston’s low bass, the 2004 version features the band singing the theme song from the Canadian SCTV sketch “Great White North,” as they’ve done live, and a markedly slower pacing to the tinny riffs that lurch the song forward.
The 2004 session at Maida Vale favors songs from 2007’s Excellent Italian Greyhound; there are hints at that record’s more extemporaneous approach here—the strumming intros to “Paco” and “Billiard Player Song” sound like the band tuning its guitars; closer “Il Porno Star,” from 1994’s At Action Park, finds Trainer and Weston darting between time signatures while Albini rambles semi-audibly about the titular adult film actor.
The second session, recorded with a live studio audience shortly after Peel’s untimely death, feels like a funeral procession cut with an air of irony. “The End of Radio” features Albini narrating from the perspective of the last DJ on earth. Years before its studio release, it carries an eerie “War of the Worlds” realism; one can imagine an innocent listener hearing “This is the BBC World Service. Is this thing on? Can you hear me now?” and thinking their dial had been hijacked by a particularly irate hacker.
As far as Shellac songs go, “The End of Radio” is a postmodern masterwork, balancing Albini’s nihilism with an evergreen critique of the centrality of mass media. In a music industry filled with nameless and countless boogiemen, its genius lies in its constant relevancy. To Albini and plenty of other fans at the time, a post-Peel radio landscape clearly felt like the end of something. “The BBC is a miracle, but John Peel was one of the things that kept it human,” Albini later said. On that day, the man who saw potential in Albini’s earliest works was dead, and Shellac had a message for listeners at home: “John Peel was a hell of a man. This session tonight, it’s the end of radio!”

Buy: Rough Trade
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The criminally slept-on Chicago rapper and singer Tink got a big break when Timbaland announced he was executive-producing her album. Winter's Diary 3, the latest in the Chicago rapper and singer's mixtape series, sees her stepping back from the Aaliyah karaoke to return to what initially made her so compelling: intimate, writerly, and improbably mature R&B, never oversold by her lithe, iridescent voice.

Winter’s Diary 3

It seemed like it could only be a good thing when Timbaland announced he'd taken on Tink as his new protégé last year, signing her to his Mosley Music imprint and revealing that he'd be executive producing her forthcoming debut album. Finally—the big break for Chicago's most criminally slept-on talent (though she hails from south suburb Calumet City), a double threat who'd dropped five good-to-great mixtapes before she'd turned 20. But things got weird quick: specifically, during the Breakfast Club interview where Timbaland recounted a dream in which Aaliyah's ghost told him Tink was "the one." Then came "Million", the capable-yet-creepy single centered around a prominent "One in a Million" sample. The whole thing felt perverse: Timbo dressing up his new muse in his dead muse's clothes. It was hard to ignore the nagging fear that the super-producer was going to smother her.
Tink is not the next Aaliyah; most likely, nobody is. But she doesn't need to be, and in fact, attempting to mold her into Baby Girl the Sequel undersells her extraordinary talents. Despite her girl-next-door demeanor, there was always something mysterious about Aaliyah. At her core, Tink's appeal is that she is very much of this world. She bares her soul completely, putting her most private hopes, fears, and fantasies on paper in hopes of making things a little easier for someone else. Her Winter's Diary series—spanning from her 2012 debut to her latest, Winter's Diary 3—hinges around the loose concept of journaling about a boy that's fucked her entire world up. And as far as Tink's come since that first project, she's very much still that girl in her room, staying up too late stuck in her own head; the tape opens, as the first Winter's Diary did, with the sound of her pen scribbling furiously as she narrates: "It's December 1st, and I met this guy…" (No matter she's dropped it in the height of summer; the Gregorian calendar is irrelevant in Tink's universe, where cuffing season is year-round.)
With WD3, any concerns about her impending debut album should be at least temporarily assuaged. It's a slighter work than last year's Winter's Diary 2, still her best project to date. But it shows her stepping back from the Aaliyah karaoke and the fun but slightly forced single "Ratchet Commandments" to return to what initially made her so compelling: intimate, writerly, and improbably mature R&B, never oversold by her lithe, iridescent voice. Though she's an excellent rapper, her tough, straightforward rap songs on Alter Ego and Boss Up often tended towards the generic. WD3 is the best example yet of her fusing her rapping and singing. On the brief but powerful "Medicine Interlude", she lapses almost imperceptibly between the two. "Look at the flicka the wrist/ I look at the way that you gotta regret every day waking up to your bitch," she seethes, rapid-fire, before slipping into deceptively sweet-sounding song: "Baby you took that L." Her bars give her ballads an essential edge, and her dense, nimble rap delivery often informs the patterns of her sung vocals: on "Jupiter", a slow-burner with a current of Zapp-style space funk, she switches up her flow more frequently than a Young Thug verse.
There's only one Timbaland production here, and it's better than any of their previous collaborations: "L.E.A.S.H.", a quick-and-dirty bad-bitch anthem in the vein of early hit "Bad Girl" that subtly hints at a bass-heavy update of "Indian Flute". "I'ma turn this boy into a man," Tink purrs, and though she's still not old enough to legally drink, I can't help but believe her. But elsewhere, her mentor gets out of her way, giving her space to strengthen her old habits and branch out into new territory. "Very Very Special" is a quintessential Tink sex jam, dirty but subtle, with a Cookin Soul beat that lets its juke-referencing hook ride out into a slow bounce. "Stripclub" is a showcase for Tink's singular knack for empathetic, reality-grounded narrative (and a prime example of why only women should make songs about the plight of sex workers), telling the story of a single-mother stripper without moralizing or patronizing: "Can't nobody judge you/ Make that money, don't let that money make you." But the tape's most promising moment is its closer, "Afterparty", which ends the tape's arc from infatuation to breakup on an optimistic note. It's a weightless, '80s-nodding dance number—practically a freestyle track—and completely unlike anything Tink's released before. If her album's anything like this, we're in good hands.


As tense and exploratory as a sci-fi epic, the Los Angeles musician’s new album meanders through eerie, desolate prog rock and synth-pop.

End of Everything

What use is beautiful language in a crisis? On her previous album as Mega Bog, 2021’s Life, and Another, Erin Birgy found breathtaking ways to describe the world around her and the one inside her head. On “Station to Station,” she hoped her memory would one day “dissolve like an artichoke being gutted around its spine”; a character on “Before a Black Tea” was “30 and scrutinized, the blimp of a moth.” Verdant, intricate arrangements grew around Birgy’s lyrics, like vines from a jasmine bush, blossoming into jazz, avant-folk, funk, and twitchy indie rock. On her seventh album, End of Everything, things have changed: Instead of intricacy and whimsy, the Los Angeles-based musician uses plain, emphatic images to capture the blunt-force horror of the world outside her door. “City skies turn black in the daytime,” she sings on the sparse “Anthropocene.” “I see a burnt-up alligator/What the fuck?”
On End of Everything, a newly sober Birgy is working with far more intensity. The vast, open world of Life, and Another has been replaced with harsher terrain: Environments built with brittle coldwave synths, funereal piano lines, and howling saxophones. End of Everything begins with a suite of propulsive, exhilarating synth-pop tracks, but it soon settles into an eerie, claustrophobic take on prog, its second half devoted almost entirely to tense, exploratory passages. Across these desolate and distended tracks, Birgy comes across a little like a sci-fi heroine, trekking across the surface of some gloomy and unnerving planet. These songs are dogged, searching for some kind of brightness amid universal dejection. “It’s something I’m trying to commit to/The all and everything,” Birgy sings at one point. It feels hopeful, until moments later, when she lets out a chilling, mournful howl.
Birgy has said that End of Everything was inspired by both personal tragedy—a home invasion and subsequent assault she experienced—and the ecological terror of the 21st century. Before the album slips into existential dread and malaise, she makes room for a handful of songs that seem to find at least a little solace in the idea of human connection. On the soaring “Cactus People,” she begs someone not to “leave tonight,” as the taut pulse of drum machines and live drums, both by Big Thief’s James Krivchenia, rattle underneath. On the neon-lit “Love Is,” the kind of pulsating Italo anthem that maybe only the disco divas on an After Dark compilation can really pull off, she tells a lover she’ll “leave my door unlocked/Just in case you want to stop by and let me get lost in your eyes.”
These songs are booming and vivid and catchy, but they almost underserve Birgy; the nuances and intricacies of her music are what make it feel so precious and self-contained. The album still possesses tiny pearls: There’s an aqueous, almost imperceptible whisper beneath Birgy’s vocals on “Cactus People” that’s cool and deeply discomfiting, as if recorded by her own shadow; Birgy’s description of freaking out a potential boyfriend (“I really scared him/Because all I talk about with him is/Beheading young men”) is one of her most casually hilarious lyrics ever. For the most part, though, these details are obliterated by the barnstorming synths that coat the early tracks; squint, and they could resemble old songs by Future Islands or Lower Dens. Life, and Another felt like the musical equivalent of overturning a log to see the insect life teeming beneath; these bullish, ambitious, chunkily melodic songs crush some of that nuance.
When not in this mode, Birgy still captures the beautiful, occasionally petrifying vastness of her earlier music. “Complete Book of Roses” is a universe unto itself, Birgy singing over a tinny drum machine and serrated guitars about a painful, never-ending restlessness: “I’ve got every book out,” she sings, “And the warmth of the words is unnerving.” A guitar solos in the background like a phantom limb, as the beat blooms into a kind of frenetic, moorless samba; Birgy’s voice builds and crumbles, more guttural yelp and exclamation than concrete words. On this song and on “Anthropocene,” she recalls Julia Holter, making formless chamber music that echoes out into a wide, empty universe.
End of Everything’s synth-pop singles were a feint; it’s these longer, more ambling, more psychically tortured songs that define the new epoch of Mega Bog. This album is far more challenging than the lush, sprightly Life, and Another; although a good deal shorter, it’s more dense, and it can feel overwhelming. For that reason, it can sometimes feel more rewarding, too. The title track is a twinkling sermon that casts a breakup and the apocalypse as the same thing. Over a wash of pianos and synths, Birgy sings, plaintively: “What then, I feel shaken?/What then, I feel small?/It’s like Part I: The Punishment/For ever being brave at all.” The rich fantasies of past Mega Bog records have evaporated; all that’s left is harsh, uncompromising reality.


In 2013, the composer Ben Frost and librettist David Pountney devised an unconventional opera piece inspired by the 1984 psychological horror novel The Wasp Factory. Its music is shockingly beautiful.

The Wasp Factory

How do you stage an opera that mostly takes places inside a child’s murderous mind? That was one problem facing composer Ben Frost and librettist David Pountney when they set out to make a musical theater piece—Frost’s first ever—of Iain Banks’ 1984 psychological horror novel, The Wasp Factory. The book tells the tale of a psychopathic teen named Frank, who devises bizarre, violent rituals on a desolate Scottish island. Another problem: Frank is a misogynist, and this is no time for the glorification of misogynistic antiheroes.
Frost solved both problems in one stroke by asking Pountney to split Frank’s phantasmagoric monologue into a trialogue. Then he assigned the three roles to powerful women, entirely omitting Frank as a character. On this newly-released Bedroom Community recording—the opera premiered in 2013—they are sung with wicked charisma by Lieselot De Wilde, Jördis Richter, and Mariam Wallentin. Not merely aspects of Frank’s psyche, they’re like the Furies, bearers of divine retribution. With justified ferocity, they chew and spit Frank’s infernal confession, and Frost’s music, played by the Reykjavík Sinfonia, coldly stokes the flames.
The Australia-born, Iceland-based Frost is popularly known for his electro-acoustic hybrids of classical music and heavy metal. He combines post-minimal finesse with modernist severity and Wagnerian daring, charging into the deepest abysses of quiet and storming up the fieriest peaks of noise. Though the focus is now live sound and the human voice, The Wasp Factory should still resonate with fans of his ambient music. It’s By the Throat inverted, foregrounding classical and recessing electronics, with no entropy in Frost’s signature blend of concussive brawn, delicate tissue, and intricate logic.
A small string ensemble pulses in tight swarms, slashing out parallelograms in a holographic medium of bass and distortion. As always, Frost’s hyperreal acoustical shapes don’t seem symbolic—they just uncannily exist, deforming spacetime. This is captured in a recording of rapt, intrusive closeness, the singers lunging into your face, unlike the polite remove typical of classical music.
It’s not the only way The Wasp Factory bucks operatic convention. Don’t expect Italianate phrasing or proper coloratura. The vocal lines are lean and soulful, more like jazz, blues, cabaret, and pop. The belling timbre on “Blyth” is very Björk, while the indecorous bellow of “Wrong!” on “I See You’ve Washed Your Hands Again” is midway between Benjamin Britten, composer of Peter Grimes, and Nicki Minaj on “Monster.” If you’ve been looking for an accessible way into contemporary opera, this could very well be it. (If you’ve been listening to art music by the likes of Jenny Hval, let alone Shara Worden’s chamber operas, you’re almost there.)
Frost is well suited to a narrative form like opera because his music is dense with acoustical narratives, interlocked from the atomic to the cosmic level. A single bass drop on “I See You’ve Washed Your Hands Again” tells a whole story in seconds. It’s nested in the shape of the song, an inexorable grip and release. “My Greatest Enemies Are Women and the Sea” rises to a vertex right in the middle, as the title line is sung, flooding it with climactic power. And these well shaped songs are also absorbed in an album-long struggle from dark to light, as a pearly shimmer gradually emerges from the dark, lush crags of the early reaches.
The Wasp Factory is mad but serene, vile but alluring. The plot is strictly nightmarish. Frank’s brother has escaped from the hospital, and the exact length of a certain knife must be ascertained; he murders his cousin Blyth, with an artificial leg, using a venomous snake. Stark vignettes divulge Frank’s brutality to animals (and worse), his obsession with what it means to exist. “To be mastered,” we learn, “the world must be named.” Frank can find mastery only in violence, which infests his language. The opera’s title refers to a maze he makes from a clock where wasps meet various gruesome ends. To Frank, it’s a divination device; to us, it’s a searing illustration of a worldview in which time and life are machines that manufacture doom. Frost winds this bleak psychology with shockingly beautiful music, and finds in opera an exciting new form of expression for his profoundly psychological sonic abstractions.


Paw Tracks issues its first non-Animal Collective release. The debut full-length from Hollywood freak Ariel Pink is a part idiot, part idiot savant trip into Gary Wilson and R. Stevie Moore territory.

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: The Doldrums

The Doldrums

It seems as though Ariel Pink has beaten "Weird Al" Yankovic to a 69 Love Songs parody. Instead of "Asleep and Dreaming", Pink's debut album, The Doldrums, offers "Among Dreams"; instead of "Strange Eyes" we get "Strange Fires"; instead of "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure" we get "The Ballad of Bobby Pyn"; instead of "Bitter Tears" we get "Crying"-- there's a list and it goes on, and the musical side of this hilarious send-up is even more masterful.
Maybe that claim is absolutely cuckoo. I mean, it has to be. There's no way this Hollywood hillbilly called Ariel Pink knows who Stephen Merritt is, and if asked, Pink would surely play Peter and deny the man three times. Either way, I've been trying for weeks now to figure out if Ariel Pink is a genius, an idiot, an idiot savant, or some combination of the three. Everybody's new favorite Collective-- Animal (not Nortec or Soul, though each group had its day)-- clearly seems to think highly of him. So much so, in fact, that Pink's crude and crooked pop affair is Paw Tracks' first non-Animal Collective release. That's quite a vote of confidence.
Everybody's heard these songs before-- they sound straight out of 60s pop radio, 80s shampoo commercials, and 90s soap operas. The melodies themselves are great but worn from overexposure. Yet the songs are secondary to Ariel Pink himself, the oddball who understands these melodies in vastly different terms than the rest of us do and, consciously or not, is dead-set on resurrecting them. The Doldrums isn't a collection of songs so much as an excessive human spectacle-- violently personal and necessarily confrontational. Think autistic kids covering Brian Wilson or Tom Waits singing a nursery rhyme or Shakespeare eating shit in an alley or Jesus giving birth to a pack of bear cubs.
The key to all of these spectacles, of course, is sincerity, and on The Doldrums, Ariel Pink seems pretty goddamn sincere. It's a shtick record, but the self-engrossed Pink probably doesn't think so. Its ultra lo-fi creepiness doesn't feel like a "trick" so much as an unfortunate necessity, as if an eight-track was all Pink could afford. The man is free as a bird with a rocketpack. He shoots off in falsetto with a smile, not a smirk. He pens lyrics that would put Rodd Keith's clientele to hippy-happy shame. He explores keyboard presets that should never make their way outside of the Sam Ash piano room. To be honest, it's all sort of beautiful.
My biggest gripe with The Doldrums is that most of these tracks are twice as long as they should be. Yet, criticizing the songs for their excess completely misses the point. This album can't contain Ariel Pink, and wasn't supposed to, and his next 500 CD-Rs will have the same problem. The songs are secondary to Pink's bourgeoning cult of personality-- the album turns its imperfections into selling points, its pigheadedness into firm resolve.
After opener "Good Kids Make Bad Grown Ups", we understand the supposed appeal of The Doldrums: These are normal songs, except a "crazy" guy is singing them, and he has "crazy" lo-fi production. The rest of the album functions as half endurance test and half a chance for us to find reasons to say, "Oh my god, this guy's a genius!" in that self-congratulatory "it takes a genius to realize genius" sort of way. I'm on the "he's not a genius" side-- Pink just happens to have a traditional pop sensibility but a bleak budget. Then again, maybe it is all shtick. It's a debate that invites endless speculation, further putting the emphasis on Pink while taking it away from the songs themselves.
It follows, then, that the best Ariel Pink songs are the ones that do the least to shape his mystique. "Haunted Graffiti" has the Bee Gees playing a frat party but its warbles and hisses turn the song into a high-stakes peep show. The song's melody succeeds here without being tied down to Pink's off-kilter delivery. "Let's Build a Campfire There" drops the Magnetic Fields parody and cuts straight to mimicry, and it works out nicely. Closer "Young Pilot Astray" follows that same Merritt line, with a fantastically whimsical melody and loads and loads of vocal overdubs for the refrain. Yet, there's something wrong about recommending any of these songs as starting points for Haunted Graffiti virgins: They're the most self-reliant, but they're also the least Pink.
And that's the trouble with The Doldrums, and the reasoning behind this conflicted rating. The album is not so much Ariel Pink's creation as it is Ariel Pink himself, a real-time observation of his brain synapses at work. His nerves are either firing at Einstein levels or misfiring like harlequin babies, and in fairness, I'm hardly the staff brain surgeon.