On Trap or Die 3, Jeezy stops pretending to give a damn what listeners under 25 might be into, offering a back-to-basics statement despite never straying that far from the basics to begin with.

Trap or Die 3

Eventually every rapper hits the point where they stop keeping up with the trends, either because they’ve lost interest in them or they’ve been left behind by them. It’s hard to tell which is the case for Jeezy. Perhaps he felt burned by the commercial failure of last year’s hitless Church in These Streets, a kinda-sorta attempt to engage with the modernist sounds of new Atlanta, or perhaps his heart was never in it, but on Trap or Die 3 Jeezy stops pretending to give even the slightest damn what listeners under 25 might be into. An album in title but mixtape in spirit, it’s a back-to-basics statement from a rapper who, even at his most commercial, never really strayed all that far from the basics to begin with.
“Let’s take these bitches back to ’05,” Jeezy rapped on “Way Too Gone,” from 2011’s TM 103: Hustlerz Ambition. That was three albums and five years ago, so it’s not like he’s ever been one to put the past behind him. It used to be that all that distinguished a Jeezy album from a mixtape was the potential that from time to time you might hear his authoritative groan over something other than the same default synth presets and trap snares, but with a tracklist dominated by Jeezy’s old-guard producers Shawty Redd and D. Rich, Trap or Die 3 promises from the outset that won’t happen. Amid the barrage of battle-cry adlibs and synthesized clatter, opener “In the Air” ends with a rant about “this watered-down shit I keep hearing on radio,” affirming the old truism that rappers only complain about the radio when they aren’t on it.
So Trap or Die 3 casts Jeezy as a true defender of trap, a music style that isn’t remotely endangered, in his own way every bit as evangelical about the craft as Jurassic 5 used to be about conscious hip-hop. A less charitable read is that he’s just trying to take an easy W after a couple of under-performing projects. That’s not the worst strategy at this stage in Jeezy’s career—by playing it so safe, the project often can’t help but hit its mark. “So What” moves with the ruthless efficiency of a slasher movie score, and “Goldmine” is similarly pared down to just the essentials: taut pianos, a few stray string stabs, and a ruthless snap of a beat. Jeezy seems reinvigorated by the familiar terrain. “Run a Fortune 500 from a pre-paid,” he boasts on the trim Yo Gotti feature “Where It at.” “Like That” nonchalantly lands the album’s most random punchline: “Have a threesome with the money: just me, you and Oprah.” And on the kinetic “Let Em Know,” the old T. Rex moves with velociraptor dexterity, matching a twitchy club tempo with a springy, hooky flow. There’s always a thrill in hearing that colossal voice move with that kind of speed; it's like witnessing somebody dunk an anvil.
Trap or Die 3 offers real reminders of Jeezy’s greatness, then, something Church in These Streets couldn’t claim. But some of these songs just sound terrible. “It Is What It Is” suffocates under a trash heap of gaudy, circa-2006 modulated horn noises, and its drum machines hit with all the tact of firecrackers going off in a tin can. “Recipe” continues Jeezy’s trend of inheriting the dullest beats Mike WiLL Made-It will sign his name to. And though courtship has never been Jeezy’s most fruitful muse, “Sexé” finds him putting even less effort into his come-ons than usual (“Bitch you know you sexy with your sexy ass…girl you know you flexing with your flexing ass.”) That track also features the record’s most flabbergasting inclusion, a partially inaudible verse from Plies that, to judge from its helpless mastering, he apparently recorded into an iPhone 4 from a bathroom stall.
How does something like that even make it onto a major-label album? Def Jam couldn’t have shelled out a few bucks to have a Plies verse re-recorded? It’s clear that in the streaming age labels have begun rubber-stamping releases that they previously would have intervened with, figuring there’s little to lose if the budget’s low enough. That’s good news for rappers who used to struggle just to get an album released. But for all the flak that label A&R teams get, at their best they incentivize innovation, pushing rappers to become something greater than themselves and providing them the resources to make it happen. Jeezy is nearing 40, and the window to promote him not just as a trap star but an actual star is closing. Nobody’s giving him that push anymore.


Thom Yorke's solo album, his first since The Eraser, was released last Friday as a paid BitTorrent download. Here, the line between man and machine has blurred to the point of disappearing, as Yorke’s vocals blend seamlessly with glitchy textures and stuttering beats.

Tomorrow's Modern Boxes

“As an experiment…” began last week’s letter from Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich, announcing Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, Yorke’s first solo album in eight years. The “experiment” was designed to solve the same problem the music industry has been grappling with since the heyday of Shawn Fanning—how to convince the digital world to pay for music. And the means were, if not exactly original, unique for an artist of Yorke’s size: a payment system managed by a version of the file-sharing software BitTorrent, which relies on users sharing small pieces of a file in order to circulate a shared whole. “If it works well it could be an effective way of handing some control of internet commerce back to people who are creating the work,” Yorke and Godrich explained; it’s a very different sentiment from the one expressed by Radiohead’s management following In Rainbows in 2007, when they described the pay-what-you-want approach for that album as “a solution for Radiohead, not the industry.”
BitTorrent involvement aside, Yorke and Godrich have essentially released music for sale on short notice, something Radiohead did already with their 2011 album The King of Limbs. In 2013, Beyoncé’s surprise self-titled album-cum-multimedia extravaganza represented a generational shift six years after In Rainbows: the catchphrase "Pulling a Radiohead” was summarily replaced by “pulling a Beyoncé”. On the other end of the spectrum, recent model-busting approaches by Jay-Z and U2 were met with cynicism and disdain. Compared to these high-profile campaigns, the reception to Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes’ distribution gambit has been unremarkable, a collective shoulder-shrug.
Indeed, for a solo release from a member of one of the world’s biggest rock bands, nearly everything about the album feels slight: the title, which is ostensibly a commentary on digital commerce but sounds more like a corporate slogan for a shipping company; the sparse, forgettable artwork; the video for lead track “A Brain in a Bottle”, itself a herky-jerky update of the clip for The King of Limbs’ blooming “Lotus Flower” single; the price, a scant $6 for an eight-track album that would typically go for at least $3 more at most digital retailers; and the runtime, which just barely cracks a half-hour, the shortest non-Radiohead album the singer has been involved with. Yorke—and, by extension, Radiohead—has spent the last two decades making a virtue of evading celebrity, but even by that measure, the presentation of Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes comes across as quaint.
The same goes for the music, which represent Yorke’s strongest embrace of electronics to date. Radiohead once shattered the notion of what a rock band could be sonically, but even their most experimental albums had a beating heart, (not to mention a guitar or two); Yorke’s first solo album, 2006’s The Eraser, was chilly in its electronic explorations but it retained a sense of melody and pathos, while AMOK, last year’s forgettable debut effort from the Yorke-led Atoms for Peace supergroup, contrasted bleep-bloop tendencies with a distinct live-band feel. On Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, the line between man and machine has blurred to the point of disappearing, with Yorke’s vocals blending seamlessly with glitchy textures and stuttering beats. The result is in one sense the most challenging high-profile release of Yorke’s career—there’s precious little to grab on to in terms of melody and feeling, and you won’t find yourself humming along to anything here.
That said, certain elements of Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, if given the right amount of attention, can be enjoyable to luxuriate in. “Guess Again!” is possibly the most Radiohead-like track on the album, a mid-tempo traipse of decaying pianos and crunchy backbeats that anyone who’s listened to “Pyramid Song” on loop will find instantly recognizable; the six-minute sorta-centerpiece “The Mother Lode” unfurls with layered vocal-abstracted samples and a skipping rhythmic gait that congeals with Yorke’s delicate high register, climaxing mid-track with a beautiful wordless digression. “Pink Section” brings more deconstructed piano—the most notable non-synthetic sound that appears frequently on Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes—to the forefront amidst a low, whistling howl, and the track nicely segues into closer “Nose Grows Some”, a mix of winding tones and subtly forceful rhythmic backbone with Yorke projecting an exquisite vocal presence at the forefront.
Elsewhere, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes slips into tedium. The wavering motifs and squelchy low end of “A Brain in a Bottle”, along with the seven-minute rabbit-hole excursion “There Is No Ice (For My Drink)”, present rough, unappealing approaches to beat-building that call to mind Yorke’s dicey attempts at dance music; the piping tones of “Truth Ray” stand in place instead of building to any sort of resolution, and the largely beatless “Interference” represents a similar stasis. “I don’t have the right/ To interfere,” he sings in the song’s anti-chorus, underscoring the album’s general sense of passivity. As Yorke’s least satisfying work to date, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes can’t help but build anticipation for whatever Radiohead plans to do next—his need for a creative foil has never been more apparent.


Since disbanding his seminal post-metal act Isis, Aaron Turner has broadened the scope of his work with groups like Old Man Gloom and Mamiffer. The debut from his latest project, Sumac, which also features contributions from Russian Circles bassist Brian Cook, finds him at his most sonically aggressive in years.

The Deal

In the five years since disbanding the seminal post-metal act Isis, Aaron Turner has broadened the scope of his work, offering a variety of sounds in numerous projects that range from the sludge punk weirdness of Old Man Gloom to the more pensive ambience of Mamiffer. Amid this kind of experimentation, his tendency to manipulate the spaces his music inhabits has remained a given, and for all that the multi-instrumentalist has produced in the world of heavy music, his most profound contribution has been an innate sense of the balance between elegance and ugliness. While The Deal isn’t a reinvention of that formula, the debut from his latest project, Sumac, offers a new perspective, one that finds Turner at his most sonically aggressive in years.
The Deal capitalizes on an energy of unease, building from moments of fractured disquiet into a tumult of guitar tones and the disjointed rhythmic patterns of drummer Nick Yacyshyn (of Baptists). It’s not unfamiliar territory for Turner: much of what provided Isis with its distinctive sound came from the same move from dissonant ambience into volatile culminations. But The Deal isn’t an exercise in self-involved nostalgia; where his other projects largely homed in on carefully constructed frameworks, Sumac takes its strengths from a powerful fragmentation.
Though listed as an "auxiliary" member, bassist Brian Cook provides a point of reference for the music’s hollowed-out qualities. Cook’s playing with Russian Circles, in addition to his past work with These Arms Are Snakes and Botch, has seen him at his most commanding when manipulating the lower end of the sound’s spectrum. That bone-rattling distinction for Cook works so well with the other two members here that it’s almost surprising Sumac is a new band and hasn’t been around for years.
The music here employs both hardcore and post-metal with careful, but unhinged abandon. The outstanding "Hollow King", for instance, is a 12-minute rendering of Turner’s former ornate proclivities turned into something unpredictable and ruptured. That bellicosity is The Deal’s underpinning, giving the album a common thread to ground its otherwise improvisational focus.
Venturing into free form is a bold move, especially given that with few exceptions, the other projects for the band's members are built around directed compositional frameworks. There are certainly moments where the music struggles under the weight of its own improvised technique. But by and large, the risk pays off, the approach offering a sound familiar enough to speak to the individual members’ strengths, and vulnerable enough to see those singular characteristics take on something darker and more ferocious.


Founding member of avant-rock band Peeesseye recalls everything from Crazy Horse to Glenn Branca to jam bands on this exploratory LP.

Paranoid Cat

"I want to tour with Phish because the kind of music we make is more in tune with their aesthetic," said Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore in 1998. "We deserve each other." Moore might've been kidding, but he was onto something. If "jam band" means what Wikipedia says-- "extended musical improvisation over rhythmic grooves and chord patterns"-- then it's not a stretch to say Sonic Youth belong to a lineage of underground jam bands. Start with the guitar forays of Velvet Underground and Television, move through the krautrock of Can and Faust, then dive into droners Spacemen 3 and Acid Mothers Temple and feedback hounds Bardo Pond and Dead Meadow. All are more inclined toward punk edge and avant-garde dissonance than Phish, of course. But it's undeniable that they all like to jam.
If you buy this idea even a little, you'll probably dig Chris Forsyth's Paranoid Cat. It begins with a title track that's essentially 21 minutes of jamming, albeit a thoughtful, well-planned kind. Forsyth has always put care into even the most chaotic music by his other band, the unclassifiable Peeesseye, and he maintains that approach here. Interlocking his roaming guitar with the pedal steel of Marc Orleans and piano of Hans Chew, Forsyth unfurls the winding three-part opener in ways that evoke all the acts mentioned above. But there's also a folk twang that brings to mind early-1970s Neil Young, and a symphonic repetition that recalls Glenn Branca's Lesson No. 1. Imagine Branca's ensemble covering "Down by the River", and you have some idea of this track's particular magic.
The rest of Paranoid Cat maintains that vibe pretty well. "New Pharmacist Boogie" is garage rock with the drums erased, evoking a beat-less take on jammy Velvet Underground tracks like "Booker T." and "Melody Laughter". Closer "Anniversary Day" starts out like Galaxie 500 covering "Heroin", then floats into more Young-style pastoral drift. But don't let all these comparisons mislead you-- Paranoid Cat is by no means derivative. It's more like historical musical commentary, an amalgam of time-tested sounds that adds new insights to what it echoes. Besides, even if Paranoid Cat belongs to some underground jam-band canon, it's rather unparalleled today. Jim O'Rourke's longer-form pieces swim in the same water; some of what MV & EE do when chasing Neil Young comes close; and Bardo Pond are still valiantly taking hits off of this kind of loose expansion. But as tempting as it is to keep searching for influences in Paranoid Cat's stretched-out essays, zoning out to its thoughtful strains is even more fun.


The former One Direction member’s solo debut is just another pop star flailing to find his identity amid trend-hopping production and half-baked lyrics.

LP1

One Direction was famously assembled because Simon Cowell and his fellow X-Factor judges didn’t have much faith in the boys’ potential as solo artists. If Liam Payne’s debut, released more than a decade after the band’s televised genesis, is any indication, Cowell was right. Payne is, at best, competent. His voice is pleasant but not especially charismatic. His choices are safe but uninspired. A couple of years after launching his career, his musical identity remains wholly unremarkable. (Cowell has since criticized Payne in the press for signing with Capitol, and not his own pop-pipeline label.) LP1’s 17 songs, including a 2018 Rita Ora collab from the 50 Shades Freed soundtrack and a Christmas number tacked on at the end, have the ambiance and trend-scraping of a Zara fitting room.
The journey from boy band to solo act has broken many aspiring pop stars. But what it requires most—gesturing at a distinct, compelling identity—is Payne’s biggest question mark. Despite being a UK tabloid fixture, he’s been unable to convey a discernible personality—or any personality at all. Even with a built-in global audience of millions, it’s unclear who this collection of middling songs could possibly resonate with. Former Directioners clamoring for a solo Liam album? New fans seeking nondescript, paint-by-numbers pop? And yet, improbably, Payne has been among the band’s most successful solo members, metrics-wise.
“Strip That Down,” a 2017 love song premised on his freedom from One Direction and featuring a bloodless verse from Quavo, has amassed billions of plays. Other singles, like “Familiar” with J Balvin and “Get Low” with Zedd, despite being completely unmemorable, have proved adequate enough to satisfy the low bar of a generic pop playlist. Throwing spaghetti at a Spotify algorithm and seeing what sticks appears to be Payne’s strategy with the rest of LP1. The single “Stack It Up,” featuring A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, further betrays his ambition of an Ed Sheeran-style metabolism of the current pop sounds. There are layered R&B harmonies, vaguely Latin rhythms, and compressed synths as melody, but even with two songs written by Sheeran himself, Payne only gasps at his radio-ready effectiveness.
In recent press, Payne has hinted at the complexity of his life post-One Direction, including fatherhood, brushes with substance abuse, and frustration with accepting his role as the band’s most-boring member. But he draws little inspiration from that wealth of real-life experience. Instead, he relies on inane songwriting concepts, rote misogyny, and feelingless flexing. The lyrics are puerile and half-baked. It’s hardly worth laying them all out on the page, but the worst offender must be from (the nerve!) “Hips Don’t Lie”: “Don’t be giving me the eye/Unless you got what I need/I hope your hips don’t lie/Unless they’re lying with me,” he sings.
One song, “Both Ways,” takes the trope of hetero objectification of bisexual women to gross new lows: “No, no, I don’t discriminate/Bring it back to my place/Yeah, she like it both ways.” In addition to being offensive, it’s not even convincing as an expression of desire. If you can’t effectively use a pop song to communicate horniness, the most basic of human emotions, then what do you have? Listening to LP1, you almost feel sorry for Payne. It’s maybe more pathetic to have failed not for risking too much, but after seeming to have tried so little.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Born of impromptu DJ sets broadcast from a forest clearing in New Hampshire, Drew’s latest album distills decades of dance-music history into an hour of joyous new standards.

Quivering in Time

Last year, when COVID-19 shut down the record stores and clubs and raves, along with the rest of the Western world, Eris Drew went to the woods. The past few years had been an epic come-up. In the 1990s, Drew found her footing in the vast DIY network of Midwestern raves, which amalgamated the West Coast scene’s psychedelia and the East Coast’s need for speed into a hearty, industrious underground. She began mixing records as a teenager, eventually developing an ecstatic style full of turntable tricks and fueled by the pleasure principle. An occult encounter driving home after a rave gave her access to the “motherbeat,” a feminine pressure which her exuberant DJ skills translated into blends of breaks, hardcore, house, and techno for the ravers.
In 2012, at Chicago’s legendary Smart Bar, Drew and some friends started Hugo Ball, a party she later called a “polysexual, oppositional surrealist happening.” It was a hit. She transitioned and renamed herself Eris, after the Greek goddess of chaos, and met her partner in love and life and work, Octo Octa. The two began DJing B2B sets around the world, turntables up on cinder blocks, testing the limits of themselves and their soundsystems. They started a label, T4T LUV NRG, to control their own destiny. Drew put out 2019’s gloriously self-explanatory Raving Disco Breaks Vol. 1 and 2020’s Fluids of Emotion EP, a demonstration of breaks as emotional breakthroughs. The pair offered a jubilant mix for the Fabric series that freshened up styles of progressive house and hardcore the techno intelligencia had long dismissed as passé but dancers knew still worked. And then the pandemic arrived. Drew and Octo Octa and their loving partner Q found a cabin in New Hampshire, rigged up a studio in it, and built a life of love and occasional DJ sets transmitted in a clearing via YouTube. Quivering in Time came from those forest moments. Anticipated for decades, apparently made in just a few months, the album is an instant party-starter and a statement of intent. It threads together the last 40 years of dance music into a solid hour of new standards.
“Time to Move Close” kicks things off like an affectionate pat on the back that pushes you onto the floor. The beat shuffles, the bass thumps, and as it settles into itself, Drew begins lacing in samples of cut-up vocals and sound effects that glint like confetti caught in strobe lights. “Loving Clav” deepens the hypnotism with runs on the titular keyboard tumbling over fat acid basslines and clarion melodies like trumpets on arrival. And from there, Quivering really takes off, blurring genres and bringing delight with each backspin, each breakdown, each moment where a track almost trainwrecks upon itself and, instead, takes flight. The decades Drew spent deep in the mix inform the breadth of samples she deploys: Moments of “Pick ‘Em Up” suggest that she’s queued up a dozen amazing record stores’ stock and is cutting like a maniac between it all. The music sounds like it was as much fun to make as it is to dance to. But it’s really about showing up, not showing off. Album highlight “Show U Love” is also chockablock with sampled classics, but the feeling is like bumping into one old friend after the other in the club—and the ones you don’t recognize become treasured, too. The title track is similarly, consciously amiable, too, an invocation of tenuous bliss.
Other tracks feel especially present through a kind of time travel. “Sensation” begins as a rosy, mid-tempo chugger; after a quick swell that teases the onset of a piano-house banger, Drew instead drops the tempo as if drawing back a record from 45 to 33 rpm to reveal a foggy, after-hours chiller. Seconds later, the track is back up and running for another funky minute or two. It’s an entire set, a full night in four and half minutes, and it ends with a triumphant holler.
Drew’s most audacious move might be recasting one of the most beloved bits of dialogue in rave history: Frank Maxwell and Peter Fonda’s hedonistic vow, “We wanna be free to do what we want to do… and we wanna get loaded!,” from the film The Wild Angels, immortalized by Primal Scream and the late, great Andrew Weatherall for their anthem “Loaded.” Her “Ride Free” distills the festival-sized Madchester classic into something human-scaled, powered by simple, church-y organ and a faithful drum loop or two. It’s a reminder that rave, like any world-changing movement, is rooted in just being in a room together at the same time. Drew tempers Fonda’s infectious, macho bluster with a female voice that spells out a mission: “Somehow, individually we have to reclaim our experience… the primacy of direct experience, that as people the real universe is within your reach always.” For Eris Drew, the time is now.

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On its debut EP, the Los Angeles duo pulls from favorite sounds of the 1990s to create effortless, widescreen dream pop that’s serene without being sentimental.

extra life EP

crushed make music as cliché as that first morning when you wake up next to someone new. Stupid. Excited. Hungover. Phone battery at 10 percent. But then the light hits your face. Was the sun always this bright? Did you always look this good wearing someone else’s sweater? Yes! You’re so lucky! You have a reason to exist. crushed’s debut EP, extra life, is like this: sexy, woozy, familiar yet alive with fresh possibility.
crushed is the brainchild of Shaun Durkan and Bre Morell. Both are seasoned musicians: Durkan is a producer and member of San Francisco shoegaze band Weekend, while Morell is the vocalist in Temple of Angels. They started collaborating long distance—Morell in Los Angeles, Durkan in Portland—thanks to a mutual affinity for trip hop and Natalie Imbruglia. On their first release as crushed, that shared taste manifests as effortless, widescreen dream pop with all the right touches. extra life is not particularly ambitious—crushed are more interested in faithfully replicating their favorite sounds than subverting them—but it’s a really nice way to spend 26 minutes. On opener “waterlily,” drum machines and a loop of distorted vocals flow into a rush of guitar reverb, the sound of a crackling fire, and a slack-jawed synth line. It’s a little Boards of Canada, a little Souvlaki, a little of that one Clams Casino song with Imogen Heap.
The EP’s fluid architecture means that individual songs don’t always feel especially distinct. But they don’t really have to: extra life is more about cruising on a vibe. On “bedside,” Morell sings about “the best days of our life,” sounding melancholy over big guitars and a bright bubble of synth. It collapses into “respawn,” full of sunny, radiant bass, the lilt of a drum machine, and field recordings of passing cars. Morell’s vocals are languid, moody, lovely as she sings about what’s going on outside of her window, the excitement of a new romance, and the pain of separation.
extra life is serene without being remotely sentimental. It’s refreshing. Where the vague emotional haze of dream pop can become monotonous, extra life is full of moving parts. The EP feels propulsive, even if the basic template behind each song is pretty straightforward. Much of this has to do with the production bricolage: subtle field recordings and samples (the duo counts nearly 200 across the record), a drum machine that switches on at just the right time, reverb that’s turned all the way up. It’s cavernous, and Morell’s vocals sound huge. extra life does what the best dream pop should, and crushed wisely understand that anything beyond that could overcomplicate this brief moment of bliss.


The native Kentuckian shows a flair for rough-hewn honky-tonk and piercing details on his latest release, produced by Sturgill Simpson.

Country Squire

If you’ve ever caught a whiff of a paper mill, you know it’s a sticky, acrid smell, mostly chemical with a bit of death mixed in, like sour milk churned with ammonia. And you know it’s inescapable, seeping into your car or house. So when Tyler Childers sings about being downwind from a paper mill on the first line of the first song on his new album, you know he’s in a woeful spot. Country music thrives on down-and-out characters in tough situations, and Childers, a native Kentuckian who sings with a scuffed-up twang, takes what might sound like a mundane detail and finds a new and wholly unromanticized way to sound hard up. The song, “Country Squire,” is about playing gigs and saving money to refurbish a trailer for himself and his wife, and the introductory detail adds a desperate dimension to his mission: Childers wants his country version of a castle, but also some walls and a roof to try to keep the stench of the world out.
He has a remarkable facility with telling details, which pepper Country Squire as vividly they did his 2017 breakout Purgatory. When he remembers getting forcefully rejected by a classmate on “Bus Route,” he ends up lying “face down in the gum on the floor,” and there’s a smirk in his voice, as though he’s relishing the tactile quality of the memory. And who else would start a song about touring and missing home with a line like, “They got my favorite lotion here, something in a hotel I admire.” On the jumpy, jangly “Everlovin’ Hand”—which may be the most bittersweet song about masturbation ever written—Childers takes you right to that Red Roof Inn.
Perhaps that’s why he’s become such a prominent figure in roots country in such a short time. Not two years ago, he was another unknown, one of a wave of excellent country artists coming out of the hollers of Kentucky. Born in Lawrence County and raised in Paintsville, he gigged around the area for years, eventually roping Johnny Cash’s engineer David Ferguson and friend/fellow Kentuckian Sturgill Simpson to produce Purgatory. That album found an immediate fanbase, racked up startling streaming numbers, and soon Childers was opening for John Prine on the road and Margo Price at the Ryman.
Country Squire doesn’t stray too far from the modified honky-tonk sound (or the butt-ugly cover art) of Purgatory. In fact, he’s been road-testing most of these nine songs for a few years now, sharpening their hooks with each performance. Again he rustles up Ferguson and Simpson to produce, and again he leads a rough-and-tumble band of veteran session players, most of whom are schooled in bluegrass. Rather than going for a high lonesome sound, they sound more like a grizzled house band at a cinderblock bar off some county road. They give “All Your’n” a ramshackle majesty and “Creeker” a wary tension, and Stuart Duncan’s fiddle reinforces the small-town details of “Matthew,” about simply trying to make ends meet while enjoying a little bit of joy in between the trials. That’s a theme common to country and folk music, yet on Country Squire Childers invests it with enough insight and immediacy to make those hardships sound perfectly present tense.

Buy: Rough Trade
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A newly discovered live document from 1973 finds the bassist emerging from a hiatus and negotiating a tradition he helped build with the “new thing” he helped inspire but often doubted.

Charles Mingus: Jazz in Detroit / Strata Concert Gallery / 46 Selden

By all accounts, including his own, Charles Mingus was a difficult man. Over a four-decade career that tracked and helped precipitate jazz’s evolution from swing through bebop and the avant-garde toward a broadly defined and omnivorous form, the virtuoso bassist and legendary bandleader talked a volatile game, played it like he walked it, and composed with an emotional immediacy that reflected no one else. Mingus transcended the simplistic timelines of popular jazz history, not only because their definitions of his role are restrictive but also because his rhetoric and sound often contradicted one another. Of all the storylines that Jazz in Detroit, a newly discovered document of a February 1973 gig, offers, how Mingus’ internal creative conflicts produced gloriously oversized music is the mightiest.
The context of this multi-set evening—recorded by Detroit’s public-radio station WDET at Strata Gallery, a short-lived and artist-owned Mecca—is essential. The club date happened a year after the pair of star-studded Lincoln Center gigs that ended Mingus’ six-year near-disappearance from the stage, illustrious affairs that mostly presented his music in a traditional big-band setting. Influenced by the death of collaborator Eric Dolphy and a decline in his mental, physical, and financial wellbeing, Mingus stayed away from making music during that span. His withdrawal coincided with (and, some say, was partly caused by) the change in jazz’s place in American society. The music’s traditional lineage was declining in commercial draw and artistic influence, making the kind of big bands Mingus often required fiscally impossible.
A more extreme modernism was overtaking the music, with its latest cutting edge—the avant-garde “new thing” epitomized by Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane’s post-1964 explorations—creating a schism. Mingus was almost always of two minds about Coleman’s innovations, saying as early as 1960 that Ornette’s music was “like organized disorganization, or playing wrong right… [but] it gets to you emotionally.” Around the time of this Detroit show, he questioned the emotionally charged improvisations of Albert Ayler: “[He] can’t enjoy that,” he told John Goodman. “It’s impossible to enjoy that.”
Yet this was the Mingus who never tired of citing Dolphy’s genius despite his involvement in seminal “out” Coleman sessions, the Mingus whose compositions had been integrating the “organized disorganization” of dissonant collective improvisation since at least 1956, and the Mingus who consistently employed young musicians like Dolphy or Paul Bley who pushed jazz away from simplicity and melodicism. After the Lincoln Center concerts and the comeback of Let My Children Hear Music, Mingus integrated jazz’s rebel faction more and more into his outlook.
Jazz in Detroit exposes this process of integration. Mingus and the members of his young, focused, experimental quintet are relatively unfamiliar with one another, adding an interpretive dimension to works that span his career. Trumpeter Joe Gardner gigged with Mingus throughout this period; tenor saxophonist John Stubblefield did not last long in the group but soon popped up on Miles Davis’ volcanic Get Up With It before becoming central to the Mingus Big Band two decades later. The sidemen who find the most possibilities in this chaos are Detroit drummer Roy Brooks and pianist Don Pullen, who’d done his share of deep “bullshitting” (the bandleader’s occasional description of avant-garde habits) with drummer Milford Graves in the late 1960s and was now launching a wildly successful stint with Mingus. They bring the juxtapositions of tradition and vanguard to life in breathtaking fashion.
All the musicians stretch for meaningful periods here, both in lead roles and combinations. Part of Mingus’ grand design was to create moments where the melodic beauty of the composition turns into a set of reference chords, so the unchained energy of re-atomization becomes the main thrill. These are certainly the instants likeliest to attract one kind of contemporary listener.
Take the set-opening, 25-minute take on “Pithecanthropus Erectus,” a classic 1956 tone poem that’s an early hallmark of Mingus writing. In this interpretation, there are explosive sections where all the musicians interlock their lines into a culmination before a more customary hard-bop lead appears. Brooks and Pullen pull each other in all directions, the pianist moving directly from Ellingtonian elegance to Cecil Taylor clusters. An exhilarating rhythm-section-only passage encompasses an entire conversation between jazz’s different directions, with Stubblefield and Gardner only resurfacing as a grounding force. This is not late-period Coltrane using “My Favorite Things” as a shell for sonic structures, so much as a whole new reading of “Erectus” by individuals who attack the piece on their own terms. Such moments appear throughout Jazz in Detroit, though one during an extended reading of Duke’s “C Jam Blues” feels especially poignant. Brooks adds sound effects and Mingus bows his bass as Pullen takes a solo piano turn, reducing the Mount Rushmore of swinging blue instrumentals into a minimalist statue, updating the classic form for current needs without destroying the original.
If there’s one canonical performance on Jazz in Detroit, it is “Noddin’ Ya Head Blues,” a 26-minute mournful number that resembles its studio-recorded version only in form. There’s a wonderful opening fanfare by Gardner before Pullen takes the piano for a ride out toward Otis Spann’s purview. Stubblefield’s circular, eminently likable lines push the register higher as the choruses pile up. When Mingus finally takes over, with only Pullen left to accompany him softly, the bass and piano fade to the background for Brooks and his musical saw. The crowd becomes alive to the moment. The saw’s melodic, breath-drawn sound is eerie when it’s playing the blues, but as Brooks enters a call-and-response with Pullen, the instrument transcends the context, invoking the circus tent and graveyard in equal measure. The ethereal moment evokes Ayler, a free jazz totem who began his career as a teenager backing the blues harmonica legend Little Walter before pushing untethered freedom and timeless folk melodies toward one another. When the band reconvenes for a free-for-all ending, with Brooks back on drums, the energy is in a different place. Or in many places at once, a decent epigraph for Mingus’ work.
“I feel sorry about jazz. The truth has been lost in the music,” Mingus told the New Yorker in 1971 during another anti-avant-garde aside. “All the different styles and factions went to war with each other, and it hasn’t done any good.” After Detroit, when Stubblefield was replaced by full-fledged avant-garde member Hamiet Bluiett, the ways that Mingus looked to affect jazz continued to stretch and recede. He even got over his intense dislike of electric instruments long enough to record with them. Jazz in Detroit feels like a document where you start hearing the lion push winter back, not just acknowledging the “war” and his part in it but imagining what peace may sound like.


The Detroit producer and Slum Village alum makes house music that’s true to his hometown’s diverse, deeply rooted legacy, with elements of R&B, funk, and soul informing its four-to-the-floor bounce.

From the Dirt

Hip-hop and house are the Gallagher brothers of club music: They share the same roots, are both hugely successful, yet find themselves largely at odds in 2018, despite many years in which they got along famously. Detroit producer Waajeed might just be the person to broker a truce. His resumé reads like a Hands-Across-America-style initiative to ease the discord between these two musical descendants of funk and disco: He DJed and produced for legendary Detroit hip-hop crew Slum Village in their early years before pivoting towards house and techno in the 2010s, notably working with Motor City house icon Theo Parrish on 2016’s “Warrior Code.”
From the Dirt, which follows a recent run of 12”s for Waajeed’s own Dirt Tech Reck, is similarly primed to bridge the divide. The album’s 10 tracks borrow liberally from R&B, hip-hop, funk, disco, and soul, the elements jostling for attention under the watchful eye of house music’s four-to-the-floor pulse. The drums on “My Father's Rhythm” have the shuffling hip-hop swing that fellow Slum Village alumnus J Dilla brought to his beats, while the P-funk synth and corporeal bass throb on “I Ain’t Safe” bring R&B’s musical palette to house.
The spirit of crossover is also apparent in the album’s vocal tracks. The deliciously  laconic vocal lines of “I Ain’t Safe” and “Things About You” (courtesy featured singers Ideeyah and Asante and Zo!, respectively) would sit well on a zoned-out R&B jam but also work at house tempo. The results are so elegantly lush you can almost smell the sandalwood wafting from their grooves. It helps that Waajeed writes cultivated, jazz-influenced chord sequences, which elevate the album’s simpler songs, like the title track, into something altogether more beguiling.
Elsewhere you can see the footprints of producers like Theo Parrish and Moodymann loping across From the Dirt. “After You Left” borrows the Moodymann tactic (admittedly, one he borrowed from Marvin Gaye) of looping excited party chatter in the background, making it sound like you’re privy to the greatest night out ever, while “Power in Numbers” uses a rumbling acidic riff to drive the song forward, a little like Parrish’s own “Synthetic Flemm.” “Power in Numbers” is particularly noteworthy as a showcase for the type of propulsive rhythmic collage that Waajeed does so well. There’s very little to the song beyond the central riff—just shuffling house beat and brief vocal samples—but Waajeed manipulates these elements like a master builder working on a stone wall, setting each component in precisely the right place for the song’s greater good.
Where From the Dirt differs from its antecedents—and, indeed, from the album title—is in its exceptionally clean sound, with nothing of Moodymann’s textured fuzz or the dank, Auto-Tuned smoke that envelops much modern hip-hop. It makes the album sound almost anachronistically bright in these darkened days, the record’s pristine surface contributing—perhaps unfairly—to a feeling of slightness on a run of under-realized tracks towards the album’s end.
From the Dirt may not be the home-run smash that would inspire the next generation of rappers to pick up the 3 Chairs discography to file alongside their Gucci Mane records. But at a time when house music is largely defined in the public imagination by V-necked Swedes, Waajeed’s album feels important: a reminder of house music’s African-American roots in the face of its EDM-saturated present—and, perhaps, the beginnings of a bridge away from dance-music monoculture back toward the hip-hop and R&B that share so much of house music’s DNA.


On her debut album, the Brooklyn folk singer writes vividly detailed songs about the peculiarities of human emotion, turning existential questions into playful country romps and homey campfire songs.

Pearla: *Oh Glistening Onion, the Nighttime Is Coming *

Nicole Rodriguez is a detective of uncertainty. The Brooklyn-based folk singer who records as Pearla says that although she may write music in order to “solve a mystery,” after completing a song, questions typically outweigh answers: “The mystery remains, no matter how many words are dancing around it.” On her full-length debut, Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming, Rodriguez folds together boundless curiosity with heady reflection; her record is as captivated by modern life’s intricacies as it is curious about what exists beyond them.
Produced by Tyler Postiglione—who also worked on Rodriguez’ 2019 EP Quilting & Other Activities—Oh Glistening Onion spins the peculiarities of our emotions into playful country romps and homey campfire songs. Rodriguez details the world around her with sharp clarity, and her lyrics sometimes sound taken from a children’s book or an old, forgotten fable, her hearty voice a guide to existential questions about death, doubt, and dreams. Album opener “Strong” begins with an air of whimsy—Rodriguez sings offhandedly of the theft of a credit card with a laid-back country twang—but quickly turns into a lonely cry for help: “Suddenly I feel like I don’t have time left,” she yells as a brass section accents her fear of death. Likewise, on “Ming the Clam,” she uses the real-life tale of a centuries-old mollusk to question a loved one’s mortality and her own role in a relationship. She ponders “the mystery of the sea who lived beyond her time,” backed by a toy piano and a small yet vibrant-sounding orchestra to create a mystical, even naive soundscape. But the questions she asks are charged with gravitas: “Reminder of the grand creation/How did she keep on fighting? How do you keep on fighting?”
Rodriguez’ introspective lyrics occasionally resemble journal entries from someone intent upon finding her inner child, but just as often she pokes gentle fun at such therapy-speak. In “Effort,” she runs down a bullet-pointed list of coping strategies— “Watch dumb TV/Go for a walk/Write in a journal”—before finally confessing, “I am spent/I am spent/I am spent,” over swelling strings. It’s an admission of defeat set to a paradoxically climactic finale. She does her best to balance the record’s self-help themes with a welcome levity in sound and structure, though it doesn’t always work: On “With,” her picture of a calm, unbothered life sounds a little too lullaby-like to take seriously. But for the most part, she keeps the mawkishness at bay. A song like the lackadaisical “Funny in Dreams” could scan as too facile—who’d have thought that strange things happen in our dreams!—but she deftly uses it as an opportunity for vivid introspection.  Reflecting on the appearance of a previous bandmate in her dream, Rodriguez recalls, “I let him touch me with his hand/There are parts of me that I will never really understand,” her voice turning to a breathy, bewildered sigh.
Throughout, dreamy synths, Rhodes and Wurlitzer keys, and a robust brass and string section balance out the folk and country textures, joyously filling out the imaginative spaces of Pearla’s songs and mirroring the emotional terrain mapped in her lyrics. In the early standout “Effort,” an antsy guitar follows Rodriguez as she quietly doubts herself: “I’m small and I feel that way in the morning.” As the song builds, lush strings and brass paint a picture of all-consuming despair. In “The Glistening Onion,” she puts the fullness of her arrangements to opposite ends: First waltzing alone and gradually encircled by her band’s Stax-like soul, she sounds as if she’s twirling under the moonlight, arms outstretched. In the spare, hushed “Flicker,” she makes do with just an acoustic guitar, a knowing voice, and a simple melody: “Every life is a flicker, every body a bridge/Every song like a morning sun/It’s not the old train leaving/Or the new coming in/It’s the promise of getting on one.” Even at her most elemental, Rodriguez is more interested in questions than answers.


The unconventional rap group Young Fathers have always counfounded categories, and their newest effort is a rock record, almost a pop record. It’s raucous, messy, and marked by a profound sense of urgency, intended to uplift and discomfit.

Young Fathers: White Men Are Black Men Too

White Men Are Black Men Too

The Edinburgh trio Young Fathers have always confounded categories—Tape One and Tape Two, the EPs they released in 2011 and 2013, were often called rap, but always trailing qualifiers—"alt-," "art-," "psych-". Then, as their Shabazz-on-uppers verses ("I Heard") and grimy Yeezus shrieks ("Effigy") faded, they shifted again: their Mercury Prize-winning debut full-length Dead landed somewhere close to what people thought of as "hip-hop," if similarly prefaced—"experimental," "alternative," or just "Scottish."
You don’t call your record White Men Are Black Men Too unless you’re looking to stir up some questions about classification, and with their new album, Young Fathers double down on the confusion they inspired with their earliest releases. Their label bio even leads with the statement that the group has "no ancestors," which is a funny thing to say about three men calling themselves Young Fathers because they all inherited their dads’ names. But their lineage is important, and audible: Graham "G" Hastings was born in Edinburgh; Alloysious Massaquoi hails from Liberia via Ghana, and Kayus Bankole was raised in the US by Nigerian parents. Young Fathers not only have ancestors but draw an enormous amount of energy from them, as White Men Are Black Men Too makes obvious: The record is a direct descendent of TV on the Radio, a grandson of krautrock, a distant relative of the earnest Streets, a grungy nephew of Arcade Fire. And, though it might change by the next time around, they’ve hit an unqualified category, for the first time: this is a rock record, almost a pop record. It’s raucous, messy, marked by a profound sense of urgency, intended to uplift and discomfit.
Remarkably, White Men Are Black Men Too also addresses the questions posed by its name. The lyrics begin the conversation, but only get so far:  "Old Rock N Roll" starts with "I’m tired of playing the good black/ I’m tired of having to hold back/ I’m tired of wearing this hallmark for some evils that happened way back." Then, the speaker flips his loyalty—"I’m tired of blaming the white men/ His indiscretion don’t betray him"-—and reverses the album title: "A black man can play him." Then it flips back: "Some white men are black men too, nigga to them, a gentleman to you."
The idea is jumbled, a little hollow, mostly a venting of frustration. More to the point is this simple line on "Rain or Shine": "I ain’t strange enough." And the most honest moment on the album, the moment where Young Fathers delineate their worldview the most clearly, is on the album’s standout (and most overtly TV on the Radio-soundalike) single "Shame", which begins with a dusty, drum-machine twinkle and rises up into a big, ragged, radio-ready melody. The chorus, self-flagellating and triumphant, switches between cries of "It ain’t right, baby" and "What you do to feel better! What you do to feel good!"
But at any rate, the words are just the address on the envelope; the music is the letter itself. There is an appealing coherence in the album’s composition. Most of the tracks are built on juxtaposition between the low and high register: a vamping bass riff against a shrill glockenspiel, a dark guitar loop beneath a top cacophony of horns, synths, vocal wails. It’s a simple framework and a strong mirror to Young Fathers’ submerged cultural project: delineating a foundational reality (race, genre) and then mounting a tantrum against it. And, in the midst of this dissonance, the album’s sound is all tied together by shreds of surefooted, strong pop melody: "27" sounds almost like pitch-warped Passion Pit by way of the Avalanches, and "Dare Me" seems like a sweet little organ-backed ballad until it throws up a middle finger and breaks into an atonal, menacing shuffle.
It’s not all coherent or wholly successful. Young Fathers’ people’s-mic earnestness can combine with their penchant for major-chord toplines to produce a funky but unmistakable cheese, as in "Sirens". Their fractious energy slants unfocused at times, too, and though the group does answer the question provoked by their album title, they do so by throwing their hands up—compacting the past like so much garbage and charging ahead. The sound of White Men Are Black Men Too is telling enough. It’s triumphant music for the hyperactive, plural city; it’s confrontational as a means to achieving communality, with no particular loyalties except to an anonymous, shifting collective of people who all want the same thing as Young Fathers—to be one thing, then the next, then the next.


Josh Tillman is still self-absorbed. But his fourth full-length as Father John Misty exhibits a new sense of empathy and vulnerability while losing none of his wit.

Father John Misty: God’s Favorite Customer

God’s Favorite Customer

The magnificent ego of Father John Misty makes his music seem really important. The music is not really that important, of course, but when you hear that smooth and gentle soft-rock with his olden croon centered so perfectly on every pitch, it seems like it is, in the way that narcissists or the canon of classic rock seem important. This outsized persona bursting forth from singer-songwriter Josh Tillman is full of self-mythology descended straight from Bob Dylan, dripping with a painted-on significance: His greatest passion is his thoughts. The autofiction of his songwriting imparts its own patina of truth, something that seems unassailable if you subscribe to the man, the voice, the facial hair. He strolls through his own songs like a melancholy king finding every opportunity to catch his reflection.
His ego may keep some folks at arm’s length, but it is also precisely what makes his music fascinating. If the maxim is “write what you know,” then it is certain that Tillman knows himself a little too well. All this helps build a kind of lore around him, the Misty mythos: He is the former drummer for the sylvan Fleet Foxes, the rogue at house parties, the online satirist, the ham at live shows, the scamp who writes generic pop songs as a lark or as a hired gun, the ingester of mushrooms, the beefer with Ryan Adams, and of course the husband to his wife, Emma, to whom his cosmic romance was detailed with great overture on his 2015 album I Love You, Honeybear. This is only part of the vast Father John Misty universe Tillman has created, with its many footnotes and appendices. His fourth album, God’s Favorite Customer, is Tillman trying to destroy it all.
The record is comparatively small and vulnerable, as hook-filled as it is heartrending, the kind of back-to-basics turn that almost seems a bit too calculated after the density of last year’s Pure Comedy. Written over a period of two emotionally fraught months holed up in a New York hotel room, Tillman sounds more wise than clever. Instead of the romantic bombast of I Love You, Honeybear, now it’s love songs without ornaments, written from the perspective of someone looking up at the world, not down on it. Finally, the real lessons of his psychedelic trips of the past are taking hold: Father John Misty wants to destroy his ego, get out of his head, and be here for someone else.
Which is not easily done. Tillman sometimes handles naked sentiment as if holding a screaming infant, but witnessing his arduous journey from a louche cynic to a man stripped absolutely bare makes for rapt listening. It’s his own modern-day Orpheus myth, where hell is a lonely penthouse strewn with empty bottles and unremembered evenings. Lead single “Mr. Tillman” imagines as much, a genuinely hilarious back-and-forth between a blacked-out Tillman and an incredibly patient hotel concierge. Still in the darkness of the hotel, the bathrobed piano ballad “Palace” contains a line delivered with such melodrama that it still makes me laugh dozens of times in: “Last night I wrote a poem/Man, I must’ve been in the poem zone.”
Outside of his hotel room, the snide commentary slowly melts away. Part of Tillman’s humble quest is guided by the record’s charmingly lysergic California studio sound. Sometimes there’s a flourish of sax or glockenspiel, sometimes they swell into a big glam-pop sound, and sometimes they feature Mark Ronson playing bass. But mostly, Tillman uses simple arrangements and a muted drum kit sound which could only be described as “tasteful,” keeping things to a lean and tuneful 38 minutes. It’s a risky move because, now more than ever, the songs rely heavily on Tillman’s voice and narrative to see them through.
Present within these songs are grace and generosity—two words I could not imagine summoning to describe Father John Misty’s music a year ago. It knocks you off balance. He has the ear of Jeff Lynne and the vowels of Elton John as he casts his words into the sky and lets them hang there to be marveled at, plainspoken and myth-free. There are no Misty prerequisites required in order to be shot through the heart with the ballads of “Please Don’t Die” and closer “We’re Only People (And There’s Not Much Anyone Can Do About That).” They are lonesome songs, honest because of their nature not because of their pretext.
Tillman used to write what he knew; now it’s as though he’s writing what he’s just learned, racing to capture a newborn emotion before it curdles into self-conscious drek. And while God’s Favorite Customer tips slightly into self-pity at times, it’s a passing feeling on an album that peeks behind the many cynical shields of Josh Tillman. Through the wringer and reborn on the other side, the world he sketches seems brighter now, bigger, and more sensitive to the touch. It brings his songs forward out of the warrens of his head and into the sacred space between listener and writer. He’s still writing about himself, but now his songs are interrogations, apologies, and discoveries: On the gorgeous and spacious track called “The Songwriter,” he sings slowly to his wife Emma, something incorrigibly selfish and selfless at the same time:

What would it sound like if you were the songwriter
And you made your living off of me?
Would you detail your near constant consternation
With the way my very presence makes your muses up and flee?

That is the crux of Father John Misty, this tension, between believing in himself and believing in others. God’s Favorite Customer is ultimately about trust, what you can afford to lose to be fully there for someone else—and just how difficult and terrifying that can be. You wonder, though, whether or not this too will all be folded into part of the Misty universe. The Hotel Album. The One Where He Got Real. Can you really trust someone like this? Retreating to a hotel room to write an album assisted by a cocktail of drugs and heartbreak is not exactly an original rock’n’roll proposition. But even that cliché seems to be part of his desire to forego a too-clever concept. Instead, he basks in something more universal, trying to seek that one marble of truth about love we all process as individuals but possess as a collective. As Brian Wilson once advised: “Hang on to your ego... but I know that you’re going to lose the fight.” It’s a joy to watch Tillman get in the ring for a bit.


Pals from Vampire Weekend's Class of '08, the similarly preppy band returns with a sophomore album that pushes their stylistic range at the cost of hooks.

The Orchard

Being friends with Vampire Weekend would've helped any band in 2008, but it was particularly beneficial to Ra Ra Riot and their relentlessly charming debut, The Rhumb Line, whose college rock came in similarly preppy tailoring. Plenty of this genre's practitioners have attended ritzy private schools, but these two bands sounded like it: melodically nimble and compact songs bedecked with chamber-pop sweetener and nods to 1980s art-rock. Of course, Ra Ra Riot never faced the same accusations of cultural appropriation or privilege (maybe because Syracuse isn't in the Ivy League?), but oddly enough, their detractors denounced them as even less edgy and more buttoned-up. Perhaps The Orchard is a reaction to that criticism; it pushes their stylistic range at the cost of hooks.
The record's up-tempo singles rehash the band's previous sound to slighter effect. The intentionally offbeat bass on "Boy" distracts, while "Too Dramatic" is anything but, its awkward rhymes sounding like parts of a melodic chain that's missing a couple of links. The Orchard is best when Ra Ra Riot integrate plusher production into more natural arrangements. While the rangy, chugging motorik of "Massachusetts" and "You and I Know"'s dusky balladry (sung by cellist Alexandra Lawn) meander, they at least try something new, hinting that The Orchard might be something of a grower. But as soon as they build momentum with The Orchard's most typically triumphant hook ("Shadowcasting"), the ironically titled "Do You Remember" kicks off a final third that fails to leave any impression.
Any band with a successful debut is tempted to make its next album reactionary, but if Ra Ra Riot were set on doing so, they could've learned something from VW's Contra, a sonically rich and fearless comeback that sounded like the work of a band who, as our Mike Powell said, had "fallen in love with what they started and are hugging it tight without shame or apology." Instead, Ra Ra Riot sound overly self-conscious, the rural environs of their recording space failing to provide the warmth, empathy, or exuberance of The Rhumb Line. They've survived worse things than a bum album (between their self-titled EP and The Rhumb Line, drummer John Pike passed away), so it would be foolish to write them off, but The Orchard at the very least can prove that making something as effortlessly amiable as The Rhumb Line isn't as easy at it seems.


The Detroit rapper tears into his creative partner’s thick beats like beef jerky, but a few self-righteous complaints taint some of his fiercest verses yet.

Heavy Vibrato

For Elzhi, every new song is an opportunity to prove just how much sharper his pen is than yours. The Detroit emcee means it in the true-school sense—after all, he comes from an era where the terms “pen” and “emcee” were sacred totems. Whether he’s rhyming about failed relationships or paying tribute to Nas’ Illmatic in the form of an entire LP, he relishes his status as a hypertechnical rapper with conceptual albums and a knack for cerebral storytelling.
Elzhi’s style is rich and rigid, but its effectiveness hinges upon the beats he’s working with. Over the last five years, he’s gravitated toward albums helmed by a single producer. On 2018’s Jericho Jackson, Jamla Records producer Khrysis offered up stately boom-bap that shrouded Elzhi’s raps in a muted sepia tone; Brooklyn producer JR Swiftz gave 2020’s Seven Times Down Eight Times Up a lush, pulpy feel; and the soulful live embellishments on 2022’s Zhigeist recast the Detroit rapper and collaborator Georgia Anne Muldrow as Afrofuturistic jetsetters. With Heavy Vibrato, he joins forces with Oxnard producer Oh No, who offers up a feast of thick beats that Elzhi tears into like beef jerky.
Oh No—best known as Madlib’s brother and half of the duo Gangrene with the Alchemist—is cut from the same traditionalist cloth as Elzhi. His love for sampling pulls him in strange directions; to keep his grimy sound fresh, he culls from obscure Swedish psychedelic rock records and Nintendo 64 video games. There’s a hazy ambience to his work, as if every beat emerged from the cracks of a sauna bench, but Heavy Vibrato cuts through the fog with sharp, jazzy arrangements. On “Say It Don’t Spray It,” the snare drums are enveloping, almost dubby next to clanging bells and synths; they softly rattle behind swirling piano and xylophone tones on “RIP (Radio International Programming)” and snap with a live player’s feel on “Fireballs.” These are among the eeriest—and cleanest—beats Oh No has ever created, throbbing and lurching with cartoonish flair.
Vibrato is colorful and vibrant, and Elzhi matches that aura with nimble bars that don’t stray far from his lyrical comfort zone. There’s still concepts at play here, but the album-length theme of 2016’s Lead Poison has fizzled out; since then, he’s leaned on vignettes and looser motifs. Proper opening track “Trick Dice” is classic rap calisthenics, a space for Elzhi to shame lesser rappers and unfurl intricate bars for kicks: “Those who put they money where they chief were/Pushed outta Mother Earth before Father Time could bury them beneath her.” He goes a step further on late-album highlight “Fireballs,” offering haters nuclear-missile levels of wordplay over an expansive swirl of scuzzy bass and keys. There’s a buzz to the way his words connect and flow into each other when he’s just searching for a way to figuratively clear his throat—he could make even a run-on sentence sound good.
Although he’s usually cool and collected, Elzhi sounds angrier than he’s ever been on Vibrato. The emotion occasionally trips him up: “RIP (Radio International Programming)” is nearly four-and-a-half minutes of Real Hip-Hop grousing, filled with valid points about cultural literacy, changing consumer habits, and the rapper death toll—only they’re buried under thinly veiled misogyny and bad OnlyFans jokes. It’s the one moment where Vibrato grinds to a halt, a little too high off its own exhaust fumes (Fellow Detroiter Guilty Simpson’s guest verse is more tactful but no less potent). Closer “Last Nerve” widens the scope to everyday issues that aggravate Elzhi: from racism to stubbing his toe after hearing a shooting outside his window to not being able to afford studio time. It’s not as theatrical a display as the way he chronicled a tragic teenage love story on “Two 16s,” but he’s never sounded this aggrieved before. Oh No’s cacophony of organs, cymbals, and chunky bass only adds to the chaos. In this instance, the duo’s frustration gels into something tactile: two talented everymen going beyond mere rap props by splitting the difference between pointed critique and deeper human connection.


The solo debut from the xx vocalist is a quiet work of personal exploration. Rife with growing pains, it occasionally hints at real beauty.

Hideous Bastard

Oliver Sim has never been known for his vocal range. Expressionless, and clad in all-black, the xx vocalist swapped soft-spoken, deadpan lyrics about “words unspoken” and “silent devotion” with Romy Madley Croft, an equally laconic singer who has proven to be slightly more versatile. Accordingly, it may not be a coincidence that Sim is the last member of the group to go solo, and his debut album, Hideous Bastard, is produced entirely by bandmate Jamie xx. For the first time, Sim’s voice is front and center, lending the music a subtle, and sometimes frustrating, emotional palette.
Compared to his work in the xx, where the group foregrounds the textures of the songs ahead of the lyrics, Hideous Bastard takes a more personal approach. Upon announcing the album, the 33-year-old songwriter shared a statement revealing he has been living with HIV since 17. The project, as stated by Sim, was an explicit attempt to, as he wrote, “free myself of some of the shame and fear that I’ve felt for a long time.” These themes, compounded by the helplessness of youth, appear starkly throughout Hideous Bastard: navigating queer relationships, the expectations of his family and peers, a love so strong it’s debilitating. “I thought I could survive without letting anyone near... The moment I got that taste I felt naked and afraid,” he sings on “Saccharine,” meditating on a love more complicated than any featured on an xx track.
Hideous Bastard is at its best when Sim raises his voice and leaves his comfort zone, ditching impressionistic lyrics for something more concrete. Standout track “Never Here” features a chugging bassline, toe-tapping drum programming, and a propulsive synth. Sim’s vocal, beginning in a sleepy lower register, grows increasingly desperate as the music reaches its apex, transforming an otherwise imaginative lyric—“I was never really here”—into a rallying cry for anyone who’s ever felt like they could disappear at a party without anybody noticing. “Fruit” harnesses a similar intensity, marrying the album’s catchiest hook with one of its most explicitly queer and conflicted lyrics: “What would my father do?/Do I take a bite of the fruit? I’ve heard other people say it can’t be right if it causes you shame.” During the second chorus, Jamie xx ups the ante, harmonizing a siren synth with Bronski Beat’s Jimmy Sommerville’s gorgeous, wordless backing vocals.
Too often, the album is marred by a sense of vagueness. At worst, it feels underdeveloped: Sim’s lyrics end at confession, just short of an actual message or direction. These songs are full of deeply human feelings, but they lack identifiable human moments. The album as therapy is a tricky concept—one that lives and dies in the details, and as of yet, Sim’s songwriting is not up to the challenge. “Run the Credits,” which caps off the album, makes a swing for a radio single but comes up thematically short. “Psycho killer in a romantic comedy/Closing scenes of a decade-long trilogy,” Sim pines over soft piano on the hooky pre-chorus, setting the scene for the song’s big takeaway: Real love is nothing like it is in Disney movies. We’ve heard this before.
Sonically, the album also mines familiar territory. For the most part, it’s all stylish, dour synth presets and moody piano set to gentle electronic beats: You could easily mistake these for outtakes from a Thom Yorke solo album. Occasionally, Jamie xx interjects something that feels new, like the breakbeats on “Sensitive Child” or the choral arrangement in “GMT.” Like his work with the xx, these touches elevate, complicate, and refine the material, and Hideous Bastard’s middle section—made up of “Confident Man,” “Saccharine,” and “Unreliable Narrator,” all written by Sim without a co-lyricist—noticeably drags. As is typical in periods of self-discovery, Hideous Bastard is rife with growing pains. But surrounded by a trusted community, and in a few sparing moments of clarity, it hints at real beauty.


More than a dozen years after breaking up following the departure of bassist G.C. Green, Justin Broadrick's Godflesh returns. The Decline and Fall EP finds them picking up where they left off, alternating crudely recorded blasts of noise with the crunchy industrial rock of their prime.

Decline and Fall EP

If Trent Reznor can win an Oscar for scoring a movie about Facebook and Ministry’s Al Jourgensen can read the five-day Los Angeles forecast for thousands of perplexed viewers in El Paso, there’s no reason to be surprised by the rebirth of Godflesh. When the band broke up in 2002 following the departure of bassist G.C. Green, its death seemed final. Justin Broadrick fell into a depression, canceling their tour and rarely leaving the house, ultimately solidifying the group's passing in a promotional poster for his next project that proclaimed : “Godflesh is dead. Long live Jesu.” But here comes Broadrick more than a dozen years later, wizened by his years spent making post-rock and, with Green back in tow, promising an LP and an EP from Godflesh in 2014. They return with Decline and Fall, a four-track show of force that laughs off any notions that they've fallen off.
Godflesh’s metal machine music resurfaces at a time where satellites and fiber optics networks muffle the once-unchallenged roars of factory machines. The production of Decline and Fall could be heard as band’s protest against the sanitization of these industrial sounds. Godflesh remain fiercely loyal to lo-fi, treating songs like as caustic exercises in overstimulation. “Ringer” stirs up shivers by way of a direct confrontation with mechanical chaos: the drums lock into a dull, arrythmic throb picked up by the grizzled bass, leaving Broadrick to embellish the din with a combination of throaty growls and slightly soured singing. In turn, “Playing With Fire” welds these rotting melodies together into grating harmonies that attract and repel in equal measure.
Elsewhere, Godflesh reach for the crunchy industrial rock of their prime: half of the EP remains entrenched in rhythmic, bass-heavy metal that some listeners have preemptively dubbed “Kornflesh.” This pejorative, of course, ignores the appropriation of the band’s hybridized sound by more palatable commercial artists such as Faith No More (whose invitation to join Broadrick turned down), Fear Factory, and yes, Korn. At the same time, it captures what makes gnarled jams like “Dogbite” so compelling: namely, that Godflesh can return from a 12-year absence—long after the demise of nu-metal, for that matter—having perfected and refined the style of their co-opters. Such a reclamation manifests itself in “Dog Bite” in the form of a thick, sludgy guitar hook that stomps along to form a rowdy groove, an approach they take again on the title track, this time with a greater emphasis on the drum machine for an unexpected hit of hip-hop.
Avant and yet strangely accessible, industrially-minded but all-embracing, Decline and Fall confirms that a decade-plus-long absence has dulled neither Godflesh’s industrial spirit, nor their devotion to experimentation. Will they be able to sustain that line of energy for an entire album? That question must go unanswered until the release of A World Lit Only By Fire, the band's first full-length since 2001.


L.A. punk band completes the transformation into goth and cold wave, with an emotive, dramatic record that still unmistakably sounds like their work.

Crush

If you dug Abe Vigoda's last album, Skeleton, but slept on the follow-up EP Reviver, Crush might come as a bit of a shock. Where Skeleton solidified their rep as "tropical-punk" workaholics, spitting out blasts of chiming guitar and gnarled beats, Crush indulges their love of goth and coldwave, with synths often louder than guitars. Reviver nudged things in that direction, sounding more emotive and less claustrophobic (there was even a maudlin remake of Skeleton's "Endless Sleeper" that did away drums entirely), but here they go full-bore, evoking the drama of Psychedelic Furs or Echo and the Bunnymen.
It was a big risk to take, and it's paid off: The songs may sound more conventional, but they're no less complex. The music is hard-wired and overflowing with activity, even in the record's sparsest moments. For me, Abe Vigoda's trademark is tightly-wound songs that spill into chaos, and that's here in spades-- the heightened accessibility never comes at a compromise. Being into Abe Vigoda still means being an adrenaline-junkie, and much of Crush is as frenetic and engagingly exhausting as anything on Skeleton.
Where the latter slammed quickly into that frenzy, Crush takes more time to crest into its darker waves. Early tracks are marked more by Dane Chadwick's sharp drumming and Michael Vidal's smoldering voice (recalling Richard Butler and Peter Murphy) than any of the sounds in between. But midway through, Crush really flames up. "November", "Pure Violence", and the title track all weave spiraling structures that constantly ride curves and turn corners. It's easy to hear echoes of Skeleton in the cascading guitars, but the increased prominence of Vidal's singing gives it all an aching, moody edge, as if the band's tropical locale has become shrouded in sun-blocking clouds.
At times those clouds can be oppressive. Vidal's moan on the Simple Minds-ish "Repeating Angel" becomes a bit of a mope, and closer "We Have to Mask" feels slightly lethargic, its canned beats and strained emoting bearing the feel of an outtake. But even if those tracks aren't great on their own, they don't nearly break the spell of Crush, whose combination of hard-charging energy and world-weary moods is less an unexpected curveball than a well-earned step forward.


The Brooklyn electronic musician’s punch-drunk and disquieting debut subverts genre tropes to laugh in your face.

Clam Day

At the turn of the century, around the same time as the rise of the Shibuya-kei movement, Japanese producer Nobukazu Takemura was spearheading the development of a style that writer and musician Nick Currie (Momus) would later dub “cute formalism:” an aesthetic that adheres to the prescribed notions of a subgenre while imbuing it with a sense of lightness and playfulness. Clam Day, the debut album from Brooklyn native Otto Benson a.k.a. OTTO, fits neatly into this lineage, offering a chipper take on electronica that is exhilarating and disquieting all at once.
Clam Day’s palette is well-defined: Digital filters garble voices while vintage drum machines push up against bright squiggles and chirps to provide a pulse. There’s a distinct “island of misfit toys” approach to the way Benson flings around samples. The cheekily titled “Sprained My Ankle in Gristedes Juice Aisle” feels like Aphex Twin’s manic “Afx237 v.7” on mood stabilizers, while early highlight “Crystal Hole” imagines Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs as digested by a lo-fi house producer.
In addition to Benson, two friends—credited only as Max B and Ronnie P—sang and co-wrote songs for the album. Each of the vocal tracks were inspired by “corporate sprites,” Benson’s term for the colorful cartoon mascots deployed by big brands to interface with consumers. As he brings their world to life, he imbues his songs with a subtle unease. “Waiting to pay all the medical bills for you and me and everyone we know,” Max B sings on the chorus of “Guess My Crush,” his voice made child-like with pitch-shifting. The result is something akin to the wickedly funny web series Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, with its brightly colored cloth puppets pondering the myriad horrors of existence under the guise of children’s television programming.
Benson’s arrangements flip back and forth between minimalism and maximalism—simple pads and shuffling drums in one moment, blown-out percussion sequences the next. By the end of the record, he’s dreaming up music for fictional characters (“Kwop Kwop Theme”) and dabbling with murky ambient synth textures (“Microplastics In My Bloodstream”). Still, some of the tracks run out of ideas after establishing an initial vibe; the aptly named “Forest Ritual” would make great incidental music for a video game, but quickly becomes set dressing in an album context.
The most memorable songs on Clam Day take advantage of genre tropes to subvert your expectations and laugh in your face. “Valentino Couture Crusty Crayon” turns indie rock jangles and Boards of Canada synths into a cacophony of tape distortion. It’s immediately followed by “Wash Your Hands,” which is both a public health announcement and a heartfelt song about being peed on. This punch-drunk atmosphere is the most endearing charm of OTTO’s debut; it evokes an uncanny other world, where simple melodies and unrefined sounds can collide with the intricacy of IDM with reckless abandon.

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The latest convoluted concept album from Cursive is based on "twin brothers separated at birth" and "a classic struggle for the soul," but the real struggle is trying to make it all the way through.

I Am Gemini

Credit where due: I Am Gemini is Cursive's weakest record by a disheartening margin, but its lyrics sheet sets a remarkably high standard for anti-piracy measures. I'm sorry, lyric sheet is something of a misnomer, this is a full-on libretto. Knowing the concept behind I Am Gemini is the easy part-- by now, you should know that every Cursive record is organized by some conceptual framework, and Tim Kasher has been more than happy to do the heavy lifting for us. Here, it's "twin brothers separated at birth, one good and one evil, their unexpected reunion in a house that is not a home ignites a classic struggle for the soul." Got all that? Now just try to imagine some misguided fool who downloaded this without the 13-page booklet laying out all the characters (which include twin sisters conjoined at the head), indicating "stage direction," and generally letting you know what the hell is going on. But if that sounds a little too Mars Volta for comfort, there's good reason. Kasher similarly leaves you impressed by his dedication to this project even as you have no way to meaningfully interact with it.
And that inability to connect is troubling. Because even while Cursive's Domestica and The Ugly Organ remain some of the most purposefully narcissistic albums to ever bear the emo tag, their lyrical acts of emotional martyrdom understandably inspired an intense cult. The feelings behind "The Recluse" and "The Night I Lost the Will to Fight" aren't exactly healthy, but they're human and worthy of being expressed where they could be related to rather than projected outwards. But lest you think Kasher was simply a breakup opportunist, the Good Life's Album of the Year proved he could make a compelling, fictional couples record. And though uneven, Happy Hollow and Mama, I'm Swollen had plenty of expressive moments where Kasher got outside of himself in order to make the same withering points about religion and consumerism as he did about relationships.
But here, Kasher's intent is less clear. Is it some sort of morality play, a grotesquerie exposing greed, ambition, and exploitation? You get some clues in songs that hint at underlying substance abuse, sibling rivalry, and schizophrenia, but the themes are cruelly underdeveloped, hinting at a prequel Kasher forgot to inform us about. If you zoom out far enough, you can ascertain the major plot points easily enough, and Kasher pads things out with references to homemade elixirs, amateur surgery, avian metaphors, Greek mythology, the book of Genesis, Frankenstein, and Freaks. But none of it's in service of establishing any sort of wider resonance or universality of the story, instead just spiking the punch with false potency as cadences bulge with overripe penmanship.
Conceptual tomfoolery aside, the music aligns with Kasher's increasing tendency to sand off the edges of his prickly attitude and serrated vocals, and I Am Gemini is by far Cursive's most playful record and almost fun at points. But it isn't necessarily catchier than their previous work, lacking the abrasion and unnerving over-sharing. Cursive were never the place to go for hooks, so how are Kasher's strengths transferrable? While Gemini gets off to an auspicious start with "This House Alive" and the new wave-ish "The Sun and Moon", unlike the "singles" from a similarly linear record like the Streets' A Grand Don't Come For Free, they're all but meaningless as vignettes. And soon thereafter, Gemini loses itself in its plot turns with an undifferentiated mash of rambling, almost randomly pitched vocal melodies, goofy keyboards, buzzing riffs, sarcastic harmonies, and a mocking delivery that sees its subject material as beneath him.
At one point on "Wowowow", Kasher sings in puns taken from Cursive titles, and this kind of meta exercise makes a sad kind of sense within the context of I Am Gemini's impenetrability. After all, main characters like Cassius, Pollock, Young Cassius, Young Pollock, and the Narrator are all voiced by the same guy the same exact way, a more concrete way of essentially pointing out that the whole of I Am Gemini is Kasher talking to himself.


The 19-year-old singer’s debut exudes confidence and experience. Her style of R&B is mystical and moody, lavishing in wonky, washed-out guitar, sticky basslines, and fuzzy background vocals.

Garden of Lucid

Ambar Lucid is 19, but she’s already lived through her father’s deportation, the naysayer who told her no one would listen to her music if it was in Spanish, and the move to Los Angeles to pursue that music anyway. Garden of Lucid, her defiant debut album, exudes confidence and experience. Her style of R&B is mystical and moody, a supernatural dream for anyone seeking to better understand the world and their place in it. It all builds to an image of a young woman who understands who she is and wants everyone else to understand, too.
Because it’s tricky being a teenage girl. You’re either too much like a woman or too much like a child, always making other people uncomfortable or feeling uncomfortable yourself. As a teen in charge of her own art, Lucid shares her life without shame. “I belong to the universe/I don’t belong to anyone else,” she sings on “Universe,” a glittery, groovy song with a bassline like Tame Impala for girls who own tarot cards. Such trite lyrical moments serve as reminders that Lucid is a new adult—or put differently, they’re testaments to her earnestness. On “Story to Tell,” she sings plainly, “My art was awkward for you to tell,” and then, “Farewell.”
On “Garden,” she adopts the same kind of droopy guitar loop you might hear in emo rap, with an indulgent, sinister vocal delivery to match. “Welcome to the garden,” Lucid sings, like she’s the ringleader of a weird dreamland circus. But then she says something unexpectedly sympathetic: “Please don’t be disheartened/Once you perceive insincerity,” dipping in and out of Spanish from there. Her voice is decadent, forming crystalline falsettos on “Cuando” and cutting through piano on “Shades of Blue.” She goes low and high, a vocal acrobat.
It’s easy to hear the imprint of Odd Future associates like Kali Uchis and Steve Lacy on this album; Lucid has named both as influences. She shares their sense of darkness, lavishing in wonky, washed-out guitar, sticky basslines, and fuzzy background vocals. It’s alternative R&B with a wink, something always left a little strange. Yet Lucid’s lush, sweeping vocal performances and the assertive, spiritual self-compassion in her lyrics stand out from the rest of Odd Future’s disciples. She translates the anxious beauty of an artist like Lil Peep into a focused pain. You don’t often hear Spanish in the lyrics of an American artist making this sort of grungy R&B, which reaffirms that Lucid is no one’s token anything.
For a generation of immigrants’ children, hearing Lucid, a 19-year-old girl with a Dominican mother and Mexican father, so easily integrate her culture with her musical identity feels like a personal homecoming. When I was younger, I never knew exactly how I felt about my own immigrant parents. I envied other neighborhood kids, the ones whose families were all-white, all-American, and uncomplicated. High school friends told me that I was white, even though my dad was from Bangladesh. Eventually, I stopped protesting—sure, I was white, too. Not until I was older did I realize how much denying my background severed me from my identity.
On Garden of Lucid, the multifaceted teenage girl has control of her own narrative. Lucid is a burgeoning Latinx American pop star; her music is strange and luminous, sometimes in English and sometimes in Spanish, and almost always about herself. It tells everyone that immigrant kids are complicated and idiosyncratic, never conforming to the image that others (our parents, our neighbors) want to project on us. There’s no attempt to pander, to sing the kind of story about the tragedy or triumph of immigration that white Americans love to hear. Everyone is always telling teenagers what to do, but Lucid isn’t looking for help. She’s just waiting for everyone else to catch up.


Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel's quietest and most austere offering could be one of the year's best-sounding records, but it'll also keep many of the band's pop fans at arm's length.

Pocket Symphony

Air like to let you know what kind of album you're in for with the first couple of bars of their opening tracks. Moon Safari faded up with bongos on "La Femme D'Argent", setting the stage for a loose and hep journey into space-age atmospherics. The "do-do-thWACK" S&M whip of the drum machine opening to "Electronic Performers", on the other hand, thrust us into the stiffer, shinier, more adventurous world of 10,000 Hz Legend, wherein Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel sounded as if they'd been inhaling some of Dean and Gene Ween's Scotchgard. Talkie Walkie broke the percussion-only trend by pairing its opening beat with a strummed acoustic guitar and a stately piano refrain, introducing their warmest, brightest, and most song-oriented album. And on Pocket Symphony, the opening message is equally clear: The fluttering percussion on "Space Maker", hovering all alone, sounds like it's bouncing off hard, cold surfaces. Which would seem to suggest that this will be Air's quietest and most austere offering.
And so it is. There's a remarkable confidence on display here, that Air would choose to have their first album in three years be so spacious and moody, and so much less pop. They must know that they'll lose a few come-lately fans with music this relaxed and, well, sleepy. But the more you listen to Pocket Symphony, the more it becomes clear that it's remote by design. As they demonstrated throughout Talkie Walkie and on a few tracks per record on the previous two, Air can very capably write terrifically catchy songs when so inclined; here, they'd rather create finely-wrought furniture music. And they're good at it. Working again with Nigel Godrich, they've crafted what might be one of the year's best-sounding records, every lone piano note hanging improbably long in space and aloud to decay in what must be some unimaginably beautiful room.
My first instinct was that Pocket Symphony was the return to Moon Safari territory fans wanted so desperately when 10,000 Hz Legend first hit the shelves, but upon returning to their debut for the first time in a good while, that seems off. Yes, there's a quality to Godin's heavenly basslines that occasionally puts this record in a similar groovy headspace, but Air are light years from the earlier work's cheeky retro-futurisms. In the formal world of Pocket Symphony, a squelchy Moog would be considered vulgar, the unpredictability of its aged circuits no substitute for the absolute control of a grand piano, a finely brushed acoustic guitar, or the Japanese koto. Air are ready to unplug here at a moment's notice, and the space in which these acoustic instruments was recorded counts as an instrument in itself.
Four of these dozen tracks are purely instrumental, but the ratio feels higher-- many of the poppier songs seem to be about arrangement and shading first. Jarvis Cocker chips in on "One Hell of a Party", his husky, downcast voice suiting the song's metaphor (relationship as hedonistic soiree to be reckoned with the morning after), and yet the frame of the song is so skeletal that the sentiment never gathers weight. This might seem to mirror the bombed-out nature of the lyric, but that's an intellectualization; it's ultimately just an OK, verging-on-dull song. Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy sings lead on "Somewhere Between Walking and Sleeping" and the result-- muted, vaguely bland-- is again just serviceable.
The pop songs that Dunckel sings are better suited to the album's frame of mind, serving more as sketches, the sort of half-written catchphrases that exist, in the "Kelly Watch the Stars" sense, mostly to build a chord structure around. The creamy layers of voice during the "without you" chorus in "Left Bank", along with the upbeat "Mer du Japon"-- one of the best songs they've written and the album's best track-- are as close as Air get to Talkie Walkie-level hooks. Elsewhere, it's more subtle hints and raised eyebrows than fleshed-out songs, whether the prickly synth and robotic swing of "Napalm Love" with its three-note melody or the crisp, lightly echoed spaciousness of "Photograph", which clicks along like patent leather boots down a dark marble hallway.
On every pass through the record, it seems clearer that the sound of Pocket Symphony is the album's real content. And that sound, no question, is exquisite. But it's also hard to hold in your head after the record stops playing, so Pocket Symphony winds up feeling strangely transient, accomplished and genuinely likeable but also forgettable.


Newcastle singer-songwriter Richard Dawson twists his compositions into gruesome shapes at the exact moment you start to get comfortable—but Peasant contains his most accessible music to date.

Peasant

Richard Dawson’s records are not easy listens. His nightmarish spin on British folk music has spanned six heady LPs, somewhere between John Frusciante’s whacked-out guitar work on Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt and Scott Walker’s brutal avant-garde epics on Bish Bosch. Dawson’s last album, 2014’s Nothing Important, consisted of two lengthy compositions bookended by two noisy instrumentals. While his guitar playing is a fascinating thing—precise and chaotic, strings plucked with a dangerous physicality—the real power of the album was in Dawson’s writing. The title track seamlessly slipped between autobiography and eulogy, and “The Vile Stuff” wrung apocalyptic drama from a drunken adolescent field trip. These were songs designed to be scoured for meaning, with enough plot development and cosmic payoff to earn spoiler alerts. If he would have included more than two of them on the album, it would have been impenetrable.
On Peasant, Dawson refines that album’s scope into his most accessible and elusive music to date, focussing on more conventional song structures while further developing his voice as a storyteller. According to Dawson, Peasant is a concept album, taking place “somewhere between [the years] 500 and 700, after the slow withdrawal of the Roman Empire from the north east.” Over 11 tracks that are mostly named after the profession of their narrators, Peasant presents the most primal and hideous aspects of the distant past. There are “houses cast with clay and sheepdung”; there are “pummelled gall-nuts afloat in urine.” There are miscreants, malingerers, dastards, and knaves. In “Weaver,” the narrator notices a crab caught in a woman’s hair as he holds a newborn baby, “still dangling from a string.” Discussing his medieval inspiration, Dawson has said, “Certainly, I don’t have an interest in writing a ‘Game of Thrones’ album,” and he’s succeeded in avoiding that categorization. The images here are far too graphic to appear on HBO.
Yet this is also the most beautiful music Dawson has ever recorded. The arrangements are period-appropriate, all Renaissance Faire flutes and choirs chanting in unison like an angry mob. The production is both visceral and lush, its gentle instrumentation punctuated with jarring bursts of percussion and horns. In “Soldier,” Dawson plays acoustic guitar with a deft musicality, akin to Dave Longstreth’s knotty riffs in Bitte Orca’s “Temecula Sunrise.” As the melody evolves into something smoother and simpler, Dawson’s lyrics also find a sense of peace. On an album that features enough archaic diction to warrant a glossary, “Soldier”’s plainspoken lyrics are its most effective ones. It’s heartbreaking when Dawson simplifies the narrator’s anxiety into an artless phrase: “I’m really scared of going.” It’s equally stirring when, upon imagining a future with his family, Dawson bellows the closing lyric, “My heart is full of hope,” his voice rising to a triumphant howl.
Dawson grows as a singer throughout these songs, sometimes with humorous results. He finds his lowest reaches in the chorus of “Weaver” and strains for his highest falsetto in “Beggar.” Right before the rousing finale of “Ogre,” he stretches out the syllables of the word “morning,” groaning in pain like a goose kicked in the gut. Other moments illustrate how pleasant a musician Dawson has become. The sprightly melody in “Beggar” is downright gorgeous, accompanying a tragic story of a homeless man and his beloved collie. But Dawson knows when his music approaches anything resembling convention; he twists his compositions into gruesome shapes at the exact moment you start getting comfortable. This quality helps maintain Peasant’s masterful pace and keeps things invigorating when his tales of toadsong and dogshide start erring on the side of parody.
In a deeply moving track called “Prostitute,” the titular character ponders her existence and dreams of a better life for her hypothetical children. It ends with her standing over a man as he chokes on vomit, when she decides to steal his horse and flee “this country of demons made flesh.” Like all of Dawson’s best work, there’s a glint of horror to it (are these demons literal or figurative?) and a shocking sense of real-world application. “It’s hard to explain, but it happens again and again,” Dawson sings, hinting that these songs are as much ancient archetypes as they are modern cautionary tales. In moments like these, Peasant becomes a breakthrough for Dawson: an overwhelming, vulgar, and deeply rewarding record. His only limitation is the world he lives in. Here, he begins to transcend it.