The rapper’s new mixtape is a jewel of DC street rap, recounting hood epics and hustler origin stories with a potent sense of realism.

Southside Sopranos

Decades of neglect and slashed funding have pushed the United States’ public housing system into crisis. Increased privatization, mass renovations, and sweeping demolitions have displaced longtime tenants while fattening the pockets of corporations and landlords, whose agendas treat locals as an afterthought. Nearly every major city in the US has their own horror stories as a result—including Washington, DC, where Paco Panama was raised. He grew up in a project in the southeastern part of town, which he says was torn down around 2020. Paco was rapping before that, but with nothing left to do after it was razed, he started spending more time in the studio. His hustler rap is an unglamorous, morally complex firsthand account of an ecosystem full of drug dealers, addicts, lookout boys, and cops. It’s political even if it’s not heavy-handed.
Paco Panama’s first mixtape of the year, Southside Sopranos, drops him directly into that unrelenting world. Southside Sopranos isn’t quite as weighty as last year’s breakout mixtape The Wire Vol. 1, named after the Baltimore-set HBO show. That’s mostly because of The Sopranos theme, which is showcased in the form of goofy, grating Italian gangster skits by hometown comedian Chico Bean that are headscratchingly more Don Corleone than Tony Soprano. (He wishes he was as funny as Master P’s Black Italian character in the MP Da Last Don movie.) But Paco is a colorful and evocative rapper, stuffing tracks with vignettes of neighborhood dealings and hard-earned life lessons that only sometimes veer into empty clichés. All of these tales are related with the worn-down voice of a longtime bruiser just shootin’ the shit on a stoop; the breezy, soulful tint on the doomsday bounce of DMV street rap helps emphasize that mood.
His stories are vivid and unfurl gradually, making them feel as dramatic as movie clips. Whether he’s lining the interior of his whip with bricks before a long out-of-state drive on “Contraband,” or detailing the intricacies of traphouse shifts on “DC House,” the scenes feel complete instead of blurry. Sometimes he evokes the weathered Detroit duo Los and Nutty, whose dope dealing epics are no doubt a heavy inspiration. But Paco branches out by focusing on the consequences of the lifestyle, one that he’s remorseful about when he’s not hypnotized by hood glory. (It makes sense that one of the first rap songs he knew was Scarface’s psychologically conflicted “Born Killer.”) Occasionally he’s cold-blooded about it all, like when he raps “Fuck yo’ problems, see a therapist” on “Supreme Clientele.” Yet more often than not, you can feel the weight on his shoulders: “Life will fuck you up, you gotta adapt to it/Everyday struggles I had to trap through it,” he says a few bars into “Time Will Tell.” The mixtape runs nearly an hour; the moral complexity of what he has to do to survive rears its head again and again.
His writing has range, too: He can pen a melancholy tribute to his grandmother (“Letter to Granny”) just as well as he can team up with his crew for some small-time flexing (“A-Team”). There are even a few bars that will make you laugh, like on “Evil Genius.” Paco follows up a rhyme about how much “powder” he has with a long breath—as if he’s about to spit something momentous—but actually ends up saying, “Like a nigga got on a pamper.” That range doesn’t extend to love songs; I’m skeptical that he actually cares about any of the relationship issues he gripes about on “Major.”
What takes no convincing is how alive his stomping grounds feel. His depiction is raw and grueling, one with not a lot of hope or ways out, but he raps about it with warmth. On “Extortion,” there’s the spit-shined Benz and the park where he used to get into trouble with the guys. On “Soul Food,” both disturbing and sweet memories are rehashed with the nostalgia of family dinners. In a revolving door of DC street rappers whose city feels as dark and dangerous as Gotham, Paco stands out as the grounded man on the block who takes in the details that are usually glossed over.


Spencer Krug takes a detour under a new alias, constructing a suprisingly affecting and dreamlike 20-minute track using the instruments in the EP's subtitle.

Moonface: Dreamland EP: Marimba and Shit-Drums

Dreamland EP: Marimba and Shit-Drums

Depending on where you conduct your Internet research, the marimba, a wooden-block percussion device with West African origins, may be one of the world's oldest instruments. After migrating to South America with African slaves, it caught on big, gaining its Latin name and becoming the national instrument of Guatemala. When it reached the United States in the early 20th century, the marimba was welcomed into symphony orchestras and jazz ensembles, who appreciate the instrument's deep, resonant sound.
So leave it to Spencer Krug to put an idiosyncratic spin on the instrument on his Dreamland EP, helpfully and truthfully subtitled Marimba and Shit-Drums. As a love letter, Krug's EP, a single 20-minute track, is closer to a novella than a valentine. The result could have been idle indie rock tourism, but Krug clearly spent some time learning his way around the marimba's blocks, making an instrument rarely encountered in rock into an appropriate vehicle for the REM sleep journey the song narrates.
As Krug plays it, the marimba is versatile. At low tones, it sounds like someone dribbling a ceramic basketball around an empty gym. Run a rapid tempo on the high tones, and it sounds like a wind chime caught in a hurricane, or a slot machine symphony. Through the instrumental segments the blocks' woodier vibrations start bleeding together into a gamelan-style pointillist drone. But Krug escapes strictly avant-garde territory, layering melodies until they take on the busy, crowded quality of an 8-bit RPG's dream sequence music.
Still, thank goodness for the shit-drums, which are appropriately named in terms of their fidelity. Every time the marimba waves threaten to engulf Krug, the drums splash in like a life preserver, adding a welcome sonic backbone. The song's most radio-friendly segment is just such a moment-- eight minutes in, where Krug's hazy beach visions are suddenly made urgent by a clattering drum part and geysers of spiraling melodies.
The sloppiness of those shit-drums may be what keeps Krug's composition from being a stripped-down version of a Tortoise epic-- the back half of "Djed" isn't too distant of a cousin. But I'm also reminded, more recently, of Destroyer's "Bay of Pigs", last year's example of an indie icon working with elongated song length and unfamiliar instruments. There's a dream logic to both songs, a sense of progression and narrative despite cut-and-paste lyrics, and each has a slowly unspooling structure that brings to mind a palindrome. There's even a satisfying resolution, where Krug drums the listener back to wakefulness while meta-commentating on the instrumentation by concluding in double-track, "I am making hissing sounds with my mouth."
Those are the moments that make Marimba and Shit-Drums more than just a gimmicky stylistic constraint. Thanks to the contradictions of the marimba-- soft, delicate tones generated through mallet thwacks-- Krug is able to hit just the right emotional note, conjuring an otherworldly and anxious dream-filled night. Like anyone recapping their dreams for you, it's sometimes uncomfortably voyeuristic, but the unusual arrangements make it much easier to take.


After their longest break in a decade, the acoustic-and-drums duo return with hopes of reorienting their singular sound through the help of more electronics.

Certainty Waves

After a three-year absence, the Dodos singer and guitarist Meric Long has now released two albums in 2018. But the solo project where he swapped acoustic guitars for his late father’s synthesizers is, somehow, not what he calls his “midlife-crisis record.” Instead, that is Certainty Waves, the Dodos’ seventh album. Before Certainty Waves, Long’s midlife crisis was actually having no new record at all. The Dodos took their longest break in a decade after 2015’s Individ and became true 30-somethings almost instantly—day jobs, marriage, fatherhood, getting really into electronic music. Though the usually prolific Long had plenty of ideas for a new Dodos record, he had no unifying direction or theme until the duo revisited their breakthrough second album, 2008’s Visiter, for a 10th-anniversary gig. Like most modern folks suffering through a midlife crisis, he found both solace and inspiration in a younger version of himself that wasn’t so self-actualized but wasn’t subject to so many expectations, either.
This time, the Dodos set out to challenge their stereotype as that acoustic-and-drums duo, so apologies to anyone expecting a new “Fools.” They’re not completely ditching that configuration or simply giving the electronic experiments from Long’s overlooked solo album, Barton’s Den, the second chance of a more familiar setting. At Certainty Waves’ best, the Dodos find new ground between those two poles by thrashing on organic instruments that imitate electro analogs like samplers, drum pads, and keytars. The guitars on “Forum” replicate strings and horns, maximalist signifiers that are otherwise unavailable to a hard-touring minimalist duo. “IF” invokes metal through proggy seizures and Long’s ability to conjure both a saxophone and aluminum siding with his guitar. While Long has previously used loops to mesmerize, he exploits the minute gaps and flaws inherent in the looping process, turning split-second disruptions on “Coughing” and “SW3” into surprising hooks.
But this focus on sound manipulation and contrary motion ends up reinforcing the fussiness that has increasingly tempered the Dodos, even at their most explosive. Midway through the oceanic crest of “SW3,” drummer Logan Kroeber suddenly switches the beat and can’t stop toying with it; it’s interesting if you like counting competing mixed meters, but it needlessly distracts from the biggest chorus here. Certainty Waves stalls thereafter: filled with interesting tones and nifty rhythmic tricks, the album’s second half reflects Long’s period of writer’s block, effectively becoming the longest stretch of any Dodos album without a memorable melody.
Long’s mild-mannered vocals and Kroeber’s jittery rhythms are a constant, so everything remains immediately identifiable as the Dodos despite the synthetic textures interwoven into these nine songs. Ever since Visiter, they’ve absorbed shocks to the system again and again but remained steadfast. The sudden death of Women guitarist and temporary bandmate Chris Reimer informed the muted Carrier, while Long attributes the crackling urgency of Individ to the death of his father. Still, Visiter stands out within their consistently enjoyable catalog for being the least consistent and most surprising—an unalloyed mix of timely African polyrhythms and freak-folk wooliness, bowl-passing ruminations on the existence of God and one-minute shrugs about getting dumped.
Of course, the Dodos could no more replicate the innocent thrills of Visiter than they could will indie rock’s return to a time when nearly all buzz traced to Animal Collective. But Certainty Waves is most rewarding in the rare times it accesses the same plaintive directness that allowed them to risk looking silly on charming trifles like “Park Song” or “Undeclared.” “Now I forget all of the things I tried to remember” would be an accurate assessment of Long’s uneasy relationship with the Dodos’ past if it didn’t show up on “Center Of,” the truest Visiter throwback here—just a casually strummed acoustic guitar, a couple of chirping loops, and a rush of mounting drums, leaving nothing to obscure the light of Long’s soul-searching.


The London producer’s second EP of the year is a nebulous collage of lo-fi R&B, hip-hop, and electronic. It feels like a sketchbook of ideas in search of their final forms.

Arm’s Length EP

Leo Bhanji prefers to keep his options open. On “Sea Demon,” a typically ruminative track from his new EP Arm’s Length, the London singer and producer preemptively shuts down the idea of a serious relationship: “I’m getting crushes out here but I’m too young,” he insists. The noncommittal attitude carries through his music, a lo-fi collage of R&B, hip-hop, and electronic he produces in his bedroom. He’s blending styles, yes. But it’s also possible he just hasn’t decided on one yet. “I literally just turned 20,” he sang on last year’s “Blade of Hope.” The last thing anybody wants to do at that age is settle.
Arm’s Length is Bhanji’s second EP of 2021, and even more so than its predecessor, Birth Videos, it plays like a sketchbook, early drafts of songs that could be dressed up in so many different ways that he found it easier to leave them mostly naked. Bhanji’s music doesn’t shy from the usual alt-R&B touchstones: He sings with the plainspokenness of Frank Ocean, produces with the tasteful restraint of James Blake, and packages it all with the vaporous ephemerality and purposeful unfinished edges of How to Dress Well.
Yet he folds in enough unexpected influences that his music never feels like a retread. There’s a good bit of Future in both his flow and his capacity for spinning lyrics that might otherwise read as a flex into solemn words of self-contemplation (“Sometimes, I make people feel they picked the wrong side,” he sings on “Polaroid,” his voice offering no clues as to how he feels about that). There’s some debt to King Krule, too, in his rumpled delivery and the occasionally hallucinatory bend of his lyrics, which becomes apparent when he starts rapping about Area 51 on “Nevada.” “UFO searchlights pierce through my closed eyes/Ride on my shoulders/Periscope in the corn/City like a bad dream,” he free-associates.
Throughout Arm’s Length’s bleary 12-minute run, Bhanji tests lanes and tries on identities, unsure of whether he’d rather be a villain or a wounded soul, a playboy or a romantic. Even the lo-fi trappings, so fundamental to his current musical identity, seem as if they might be a placeholder until he figures out his next play. With its bright strummed guitar, the tender closer “Window Up” teases the kind of unabashed pop song he could surely make if he wanted to.
The noncommittal nature of Bhanji’s music simultaneously cuts against it and works in its favor. He’s an impactful enough producer to sustain something truly substantial, but like its predecessors, Arm’s Length feels more like a tease than a statement. Still, as teases go, it’s an enticing one. There’s an intrigue that comes with spending time in the headspace of a musician who writes so candidly about themself yet still feels vaguely unknowable.

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Culled from last year’s Marauder sessions with Dave Fridmann, there’s still a sense that the production actively tries to disrupt what Interpol does well.

A Fine Mess EP

Interpol’s brilliance comes in sparks these days. Every album after 2007’s Our Love to Admire, when they stopped being a fascination of indie culture writ large, does have a couple of straightforward thrillers on them. Even their self-titled record’s “Barricade” might stick if you let it. “The Rover” was fine, too, although the album it was on, last year’s Marauder—a loose concept album about saying goodbye to the band’s heyday in the early aughts—was less so.
You can reason with many of Interpol’s misses; every band loses steam at some point. But in a way, Marauder’s failings were more frustrating because they can’t be compartmentalized as the trio simply tripping over themselves. It sounds like producer Dave Fridmann was working against the band’s interest. Paul Banks’ voice sounded gargled when he opened his throat on the hooks, and sometimes Daniel Kessler’s guitar notes puttered out as if it’s him who doesn’t realize he has to really press those guitar strings against the fretboard. Making an album sound waterlogged is not an aesthetic.
On A Fine Mess, there’s a sense that the production actively tries to disrupt what Interpol does well. The most elegant Kessler/Banks compositions play like they’re sizing each other up until they converse and reckon for the climax. On the EP’s opening title track, however, they clash in ugly drunken fisticuffs, sounding like amateurish punk from dudes who are not amateur punks. There are also some blaring keys in the song’s back half that might’ve been a nice psychedelic touch if there was an effort to give them some color.
The stated intentions behind collaborating with Fridmann for the Marauder sessions was the hope of bringing in an intense energy. Fridmann has the resumé, but some things aren’t a good fit. The EP’s five songs were recorded at the same time as the Marauder sessions and his maximalist production approach continues to clash with Interpol’s sleek, compressed tension in their songwriting. “Real Life” has that signature single note riff that’s a staple in most of Interpol’s bangers, but the mix isn’t even aware of the formula. Instead of making sure that guitar line reverberates, the instruments sloppily smoosh into each other. It feels like a work in progress and sounds like a true demo.
Tradition dictates that there be a few lines working through the take-it-or-leave-it nature of Banks lyrics. They straddle the line between poetic quips on interpersonal relationships or emo mad-libbing—that tightrope broadens depending on who you ask. The opener’s “My life is pro-creation/So I make time to rewind those memories and play” has a nice tragicomic ring to it on paper. Maybe the lines, “Falling ashes at my feet/Wasted up in shadows in between/The faces I know, I would die to keep them from harm” on the closer “Thrones” storm through with too much-unwarranted gravitas. But his voice is too distorted and buried under the sonic detritus to bother to give them too much thought. Interpol might still be an exceptional act, but it’s a chore to have to squint this hard to see it.


Mixing electro, funk, world music, and early hip-hop, Javelin made waves with mixtapes and singles; now, via Luaka Bop, they offer their scrubbed-up debut LP.

No Mas

Even blog bands need an iconic image, and Javelin hit the interwebs with an especially effective one-- a mountain of painted boomboxes, fronting the Brooklyn duo's table of samplers, turntables, drumpads, and various other misfit musical toys. Not only did it look pretty boss as a jpeg, it also was pretty accurate visual shorthand for their sound: Less turntablism, more an FM tuner shoulder-jostling between low-watt stations playing electro, funk, world music, and early hip-hop.
Javelin first parceled out that unique approach with a series of mixes and singles, most of which were hazy and fidelity-challenged enough for people to lump them in with chillwave. But Javelin's genetic code seemed more early-80s than late-60s, and the sound quality seemed like more of a mood-setter than a slapdash affectation. On Jamz n Jemz, Tom van Buskirk and George Langford crafted a cohesive sound collage more in step with the dense travelogues of the Avalanches than any of their basement-electronic peers.
So it actually made sense when musical travel agency Luaka Bop signed them up for their proper debut, No Mas. By the sound of the record, Luaka Bop also gave Javelin a good, long bath, exfoliating away the crackles and hiss and distilling the songs from their interstitial surroundings. The fully groomed result is a segmented hybrid of semi-revised previously released tracks and new music that reveals the duo as a far less exotic product than early scouting may have suggested. "Vibrationz" is still a killer single, but other familiar tunes sound adrift when isolated from a broader mix, such as the 70s montage sequence "The Merkin Jerk", or the glitch-hop of "Susie Cues". Attempts to makeover old tracks are a mixed bag, as the sunny "Intervales Theme" holds up at double the length, while adding vocals to previously instrumental "Mossy Woodland" is an awkward move.
Meanwhile, Javelin's new material fits in well alongside older tracks without doing much to expand the duo's palate. "Tell Me What Will I Be?" is a funk period piece that would turn the Dap-Kings green, "On It on It" summons up all the right robot-leg flashbacks, and "Shadow Heart" has a cinematic, psychedelic sweep that evades being pinned down as just one particular homage. If songs like the overdone retro of "Moscow 1980" and the directionless soul jam "Dep" are less memorable, well, at least they might have a second life as puzzle pieces in a future Javelin collage.
In the end No Mas can't top those longer mixes, which remain van Buskirk and Langford at their sample-heavy, genre-trotting finest. Dressed up and chopped into discrete chunks, Javelin suddenly bear a close resemblance to the Go! Team-- skilled peddlers of vintage party jams, but with a narrow range. Javelin's best tracks may hold up under professional production in a year where many a group's cassette-tape flaws will likely sabotage similar leaps, but trading in their boombox for a proper stereo isn't necessarily an upgrade.


The UK singer’s earthy, sumptuous new album explores her ambivalent relationship to fame. It soars when it lets loose.

Falling or Flying

Earlier this year, Jorja Smith showed up unannounced to a Birmingham club to perform her new song “Little Things” shoulder-to-shoulder with the crowd, radiating effortless joy in her Juicy Couture tracksuit and sunglasses. The song is a career highlight for Smith, who glides breezily over its early-2000s UK funky bounce. As you watch the rowdy clip of her singing it, you almost forget she is one of the UK’s biggest homegrown pop stars. On her unhurried, self-possessed second album, Falling or Flying, she shines in the moments where she exudes this same loose-limbed confidence.
Smith’s 2018 debut Lost & Found was a collection of stylish, socially-conscious R&B and soul that showed off her silky voice, though its pristinely produced ballads could feel a little safe. She found an international audience through her work with Drake, who featured her on his 2017 mixtape More Life. But Smith, who releases all her music on her own independent label FAMM, has often shown reluctance to follow the expected path for a pop upstart, stripping down her sound further on her 2021 EP Be Right Back instead of attempting to repeat the success of her surprise garage hit with Preditah or dancefloor-heating collaboration with Burna Boy. Recently, she moved away from the music industry hub of London back to her childhood town of Walsall, living quietly in a farmhouse.
In Walsall, she’s teamed up with local production duo Edith Nelson and Barbara Boko-Hyouyhat, collectively known as DameDame*, for Falling or Flying. The result is a sumptuous, earthy album that experiments more freely with genre than Smith’s music has before. The first half of the record propels from the springy alternative R&B of “She Feels” and the Afrobeats of “Feelings” to the pop punk of “GO GO GO.” The spaciousness of the production makes it all feel considered rather than overwhelming: Guitars lick at the edges of melodies, ghostly layered vocals soar in the middle distance, and basslines shudder. Smith’s voice is assured and grounded: She reaches far less frequently for belting high notes and runs than she did on Lost & Found, instead sitting back comfortably.
Much of the record explores her ambivalent relationship to fame, though Smith keeps her cards close to her chest. “Ask me about me again,” Smith dares you at the outset, over strident production buoyed by the ring of bicycle bells and clattering percussion. Her cagey lyrics dance around the pressure of being a public figure, imploring you to read her, while refusing to be easy to read. Elsewhere, on the world-weary ballad “Too Many Times,” she contemplates the people who only see her worth now that she's famous, plumbing the smoky depths of her lower register.
Understated moments like this one can be powerful, but more often than not, they take the wind out of the album’s sails. There are a handful of ballads that could have been taken from the Lost & Found sessions, including the sleepy “Try and Fit In,” which slips by prettily without making much of an impact. Smith is a little too comfortable when she leans back in this downtempo mode. The closing piano ballad "What If My Heart Beats Faster?" is the longest song on the record, and feels that way.
As with the bruised defiance of “Try Me,” Smith spends the majority of the album circling vulnerability like a boxer in the ring, by turns acting tough and sweet. (As J Hus puts it on his guest turn, “Badman, but sometimes I want a cuddle”). It's in this tension that she finds magic: See the push-pull of the sultry title track, “Falling or Flying,” where she invites a lover over in the middle of the night while also reminding him that she doesn’t know how she feels about him. Over the chorus's swell of airy handclaps and guitar riffs, Smith sounds carefree as she accepts that after all, ecstasy and panic can feel like the same thing. When she leans into these moments of abandon, it hits like a rush of air to the face.


The Italian rock band has become a global sensation. Their new album is absolutely terrible at every conceivable level.

Rush!

There is a listener who has been pulled into the world of Måneskin. I can sense their excitement, their carefree spirit, their urge to bite their bottom lip and pantomime bending a guitar string as an affirmative gesture. I know that, in this massively popular Italian band, this listener has discovered a rare and powerful thing. Måneskin are not just three men and a woman who play traditional rock music and—if you can believe it—all wear eyeliner. To this listener, Måneskin are something far more important: an alternative.
An alternative to what, exactly, is the question. The unlikely global ascent of Måneskin—the word is Danish for moonlight, pronounced MOAN-eh-skin—comes off as a collective unconscious need for something else, a retro, lascivious attitude that feels neither cool nor popular, and therefore stands in opposition to what is cool or popular. Their music may sound like it’s made for introducing the all-new Ford F-150, yet they won the campy, poppy Eurovision contest in 2021. The same year, they went mega-viral on TikTok with their version of “Beggin’,” a song originally written by the midcentury pop group the Four Seasons. Måneskin are from Rome, a city famous for a thousand things before you get to good rock music. “Can they conquer the world?” asked The New York Times. And Rush!, their first album recorded mainly in English, is absolutely terrible at every conceivable level: vocally grating, lyrically unimaginative, and musically one-dimensional. It is a rock album that sounds worse the louder you play it.
Måneskin now find themselves in a position where Rush! must present the questions that justify their popularity: With everything going on in the world, don’t you wish rock music was horny again? Don’t you wish more albums featured Tom Morello phoning in one of his octave-pedal guitar solos? What if we were the first band to sing the words “kiss my butt”? Don’t you wish cologne commercials were longer? Don’t you wish Guitar Center could win a Grammy? What if Max Martin worked with Wolfmother? Remember the band Foxy Shazam? Why is no one talking about how fake and phony Hollywood is? Don’t you think lyrics like “Oh, mamma mia, spit your love on me, I’m on my knees, and I can’t wait to drink your rain” are the kind of thing people are just too afraid to sing nowadays?
It makes for a sweaty and effortful album that always seeks attention and never commands it. The wildest attempt to justify their status as the alternative to something is “Kool Kids,” where frontman Damiano David adopts a faux British accent to deliver a satirical broadside against “cool kids” that sounds like a Tory version of Mark E. Smith shouting over the Vines. “We’re not punk, we’re not pop, we’re just music freaks,” yelps David. “Cool kids, they do not like rock/They only listen to trap and pop,” he continues, hoping for more upvotes on his comment. This is an interesting social grievance from a band who are not just dressed in Gucci, they are dressed by Gucci.
But this is the strange allure of Måneskin, a band so bad that you can’t listen to their music without thinking that, finally, as a culture, we’ve arrived at some inevitable mass Måneskin event. This must mean something. In theory, Måneskin—in their politely iconoclastic, youthful, inscrutably European, anti-mainstream guise—might fit under that rubric Americans once knew as “alternative rock.” It was a genre that conferred—in accordance with the social bylaws of the ’80s and ’90s—that what you liked signaled what you did not like: By owning a Sonic Youth album, you displaced the energy that otherwise would have been consumed by a Spin Doctors album. It was physics, sort of, and you built your identity around it. Maybe Måneskin’s global popularity signals a return to the oppositional force that once rallied the alternative against the monocultural mainstream? Maybe Måneskin’s 6.5 billion streams and counting presages the dawn of a new rock revival?
The issue is that, about a decade ago, around the dawn of the streaming era, “alternative” as we knew it went extinct. Consuming music on streaming services made music a multiversal event, a mass conversion of listening to everything, everywhere, all at once. Genres became siloed, withering on the outside and thriving on the inside. Måneskin’s “Beggin’” ascending the upper reaches of the Billboard charts was not a cultural reaction to anything, it was just an anomaly. It is content without meaning. They weren’t Nirvana here to wipe hair metal off the map. Their success was fuelled by European reality show competitions, algorithms, and cumulative advantage. They are chaos in a vacuum, and we’re left to make sense of a band that sounds like a parody of an early aughts NME cover and whose whole vibe could best be described as Cirque du Soleil: Buckcherry.
Even if you accept the premise that Måneskin are “music freaks” who love “rock,” you’ll be disappointed to learn that nothing else on Rush! gives off that impression. Their primary influence seems to be “Seven Nation Army” chants at a soccer game, followed closely by late-era Red Hot Chili Peppers, followed extensively by nothing. On the unbelievable “Mammamia,” the bass, guitar, and vocals are performed almost entirely in martial unison. It’s a fascinating choice that brings to mind fourth-grade band practice, or migraines. Contrast that with “Read Your Diary,” one of a few somewhat dynamic tracks on Rush! whose enjoyable barroom shuffle nevertheless demands we hear lines about pouring champagne onto your panties and “using my left hand because it feels like you.”
Beginning with the cover art featuring the band’s mixed reactions as they peer up a schoolgirl’s skirt, Måneskin’s libido never achieves that leery, pansexual, transgressive quality they aim for. Every line about orgasms and fluids and oral sex feels like it was suddenly AirDropped to you on the subway. This is not a puritanical sex-negative reaction to songs about fucking so much as a design problem: Rush! was produced by the band along with megawatt pop songwriter Max Martin and a long list of radio hitmakers whose glossy work is insoluble with Måneskin’s uninhibited, over-torqued dick rock. The production sounds so cramped, digitized, and swagless that it seems to be optimized for getting busy in a Buffalo Wild Wings bathroom.
Who is this for? Where is that rapt Måneskin listener? It strains credulity to imagine Rush! will rally the aging nostalgia crowd pining for the days of real music the same way Black Keys or Greta Van Fleet or any other Grammy-core rock act did. Sex-idiot rock—a storied and wonderful genre that bounces around from T. Rex to AC/DC to Van Halen to Jane’s Addiction to the 1975—deserves better than this. But Måneskin arrived, and they are here for you, wherever you are: a band to build your identity around and say, I’m not with the cool kids, I’m with Måneskin.


The Osaka DJ favors long, gradual mixes and careful pairings. His new mix album for Singapore’s Midnight Shift is a hypnotic descent into ambient, drone, and noise.

Midnight Is Comin’

Some DJs are party starters; some are storytellers; some are historians, keepers of dance music’s flame. ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U can be all of these, but he is also something like a combination of shaman, warrior, and trickster. Often shirtless, sweat-slicked, and enviably ripped, the Osaka native (aka Yousuke Yukimatsu) brings an unusually furious versatility to the decks. Or is it an unusually versatile fury? In the first 13 minutes of a special Boiler Room Tokyo session in late 2020, he kicked off with Moby’s 1993 hardcore anthem “Thousand,” whose apocalyptic stabs and accelerating rhythm—its 1,000-plus beats per minute once landed it in the Guinness Book of World Records—suggest the earth is about to swallow the dancefloor whole. From there Yukimatsu feinted sideways into a stretch of squelchy, insouciant bass music, before diving headfirst into the extreme-noise hellscape of Nairobi metal duo Duma’s “Lionsblood.” Over the full hour and a half, he switchbacked across vintage breakbeat hardcore, cutting-edge Tanzanian singeli, the Weeknd’s Daft Punk collab “I Feel It Coming,” and the theme from Rocky before closing with Jamie xx’s dreamily optimistic “Good Times,” the polar opposite of Moby’s hymn for the end of days.
But for all the seismic instability of the terrain, the aura Yukimatsu conjures in his wide-ranging sets is as enveloping as the most linear techno. Done wrong, self-conscious eclecticism can have a way of jolting listeners out of their trance, but Yukimatsu lowers you right down inside the fault line and leaves you vibrating. On his new mix album for Singapore’s Midnight Shift label, Yukimatsu tightens his focus and burrows into his contemplative side. A hypnotic descent into ambient, drone, and noise, Midnight Is Comin’ is one of the most immersive DJ mixes in recent memory. There are no breakbeats, no rave stabs, no pop curveballs. All but one of the tracks, most by relatively obscure Japanese experimental musicians, are exclusive to the mix. The mood throughout is shadowy and pensive; sounds range from dentist-drill buzz to acoustic guitar and angel choir, but they share a slow-burning intensity.
There are hints of Yukimatsu’s noise inclinations in the opening track, “Nagel,” by Orhythmo, a duo with punk and grindcore roots: Ominous clanking and shuffling footsteps lead us into a chamber of rapidly oscillating frequencies, and deep in the mix, a terrifying voice emerges through white-hot distortion, half whisper and half scream. But the mood gradually mellows as the cello-like tones of Ryo Murakami’s “Reminiscence” bleed into the frame, establishing what will become the dominant themes and textures of the mix: long, held tones; graceful, arpeggiated counterpoints; and a foggy, almost mystical air. At any moment, you sense that some fantastical shape might materialize from the murk, yet by and large, there are no major events, no sudden revelations. The atmosphere simply thickens and churns.
Yukimatsu’s blends are almost imperceptible, but they’re also deeply satisfying: When the doleful tones of “Reminiscence” come oozing into earshot, tempering the metallic harshness all around, you can practically feel your pulse slowing. He favors long, gradual mixes and careful pairings where it’s difficult to tease out where one track ends and the next begins. Much of that comes down to his sleight of hand. Outside the fabric of the mix, the rippling noises of Compuna’s “Flowmotion,” like a duet for cicada and helicopter, would seem to have little in common with the gothic ambient folk of French musician Coni’s “Ängelsbäcksstrand,” which even quotes a few lines from Bob Dylan’s “In My Time of Dying.” Yet the way they’re mixed, they feel like two parts of one process, overlapping legs of a single journey.
The switchbacks become more pronounced toward the end. That gently incongruous Coni song, which resembles a doomier This Mortal Coil, melts into Indonesian duo Gabber Modus Operandi’s “Kisah,” which sounds like a strange mashup of religious singing and needle-nosed rave stabs; that track abruptly slips into Osaka producer SPINNUTS’ “Zweimal schlafen atmosphere,” a pitch-perfect evocation of the minimalist dub techno practiced by artists like Pole and Thomas Brinkmann around the turn of the millennium. It is the lone beat on the album, and it is rendered in such chilly, skeletal black and white, it’s more like a techno X-ray than a living groove. Given Yukimatsu’s hell-for-leather club tendencies, this slow, skulking rhythm is a striking display of restraint. From here, he might have gone anywhere; instead, he concludes the mix with a gorgeous unfurling of soft piano chords and gently colored synthesizers. Just like the conclusion to his Boiler Room set, it is the perfect inverse of his opening selection—the kink in the moebius strip that brings us full circle in Yukimatsu’s exquisitely twisted world.


This 155-minute, three-disc live album documents Kate Bush’s spectacular 2014 live shows, her first in 35 years. She reckons with her legacy through what might seem like an obscure setlist.

Before the Dawn

Kate Bush always exploited technological advancement. In 1979, from just coathangers and Blu-Tack, the trailblazing British pop auteur pioneered the head mic for her vanguard Tour of Life. Her subsequent albums made her one of the earliest adopters of the Fairlight synthesizer that would define the ’80s. Before the Dawn, then, is a surprising throwback: the unexpurgated live album, a document of her 2014 live shows, her first in 35 years. There are no retakes or overdubs bar a few atmospheric FX. No apps, no virtual reality, no interactivity. She’s also said there won’t be a DVD, which is surprising given the show’s spectacular theatrics, conceived by the former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and a host of designers, puppeteers, and illusionists. The show, and this release, aren’t credited to Kate Bush but the KT Fellowship, in recognition of the vast ensemble effort. Yet in shucking off half the production, this hefty 155-minute, three-disc set (one per “act”) is also the best way that Before the Dawn could have been preserved, allowing it to tell its own story uninhibited by the busy staging.
I went to a show towards the end of the 22-date run, and was overwhelmed by how physically moving it was to see Bush in real life, since for most of mine she’s only existed in videos and BBC clip-show documentaries. The staging didn’t always have the same impact. The sublime Act One, as close to a greatest hits as we got, was stripped back—just Bush at the piano backed by her crack band.
In Act Two, Bush realized her long-held desire to dramatize “The Ninth Wave,” the conceptual B-side of 1985’s Hounds of Love, which documents a woman’s dark night of the soul as she fights for life while lost at sea. While her “husband” and real-life son Bertie McIntosh blithely carried on with domestic life inside a tiny, sloping living room set, a video depicted Bush stranded in dark, choppy waters (now released as the “And Dream of Sheep” video). Moments later, the real Bush reappeared on stage to fight sinister “fish people” who carried her body off through the aisles. The whirring blades and desperate search lights of a rescue helicopter descended from the Hammersmith Apollo’s ceiling, illuminating and buffeting the crowd. Despite some hammy dialogue, it was staggering, and in sharp contrast to Act Three, which focused on Aerial’s second side, “A Sky of Honey.” McIntosh played a landscape painter from ye olden times while a life-size marionette of a jointed-doll simpered around the stage, embracing Bush, who looked on in raptures. At 75 minutes long, it was a sickly, trying accompaniment to one of the subtler achievements in her catalogue.
With the visuals stripped away, some confusing vestiges of the live show remain on the record—mostly the stilted dialogue (McIntosh’s lines as the painter are cringeworthy). But otherwise it flows remarkably well: the prog grooves and piano ballads of the first act setting up the gothic tumult of “The Ninth Wave,” which comes down into the sun-dappled ambience of “A Sky of Honey.” The sound is rich and warm, but rough, too: imperfectly mic’d and properly live-sounding. The arrangements are largely faithful, even down to the synth presets, though sometimes the veteran session musicians form an overwhelming battalion. “Lily” comes out sounding a bit like Christian goth rock, and “King of the Mountain” is a victim of breadth over depth, its dynamics drowned out by every band member playing at once. It’s a shame that the terror of “Hounds of Love” gets swapped for sentimental optimism, but the band recreate that album’s second half to sound as avant-garde and bracing as any current young outsider.
Live albums are meant to capture performers at their rawest and least inhibited, which doesn’t really apply to Before the Dawn. Bush is a noted perfectionist best known for her synthesizer experiments and love of obscure Bulgarian choirs, but her recent work has skewed towards traditional setups that reunite her with the prog community that fostered her early career. With marks to hit and tableaux to paint, the 2014 shows were more War of the Worlds (or an extension of 2011’s Director’s Cut) than Live at Leeds. But never mind balls-out revamps of Bush’s best known songs; with the exception of tracks from Hounds of Love, none of the rest of the setlist had ever been done live—not even on TV, which became Bush’s primary stage after she initially retired from touring. These songs weren’t written to be performed, but internalized. Occupying Bush’s imagination for an hour, and letting it fuse with your own, formed the entirety of the experience. Hearing this aspic-preserved material come to life feels like going to sleep and waking up decades later to see how the world has changed.
“Jig of Life” is the midpoint of Before the Dawn, and its crux. It forms the part in “The Ninth Wave” where Bush’s character is exhausted of fighting against drowning, and decides to succumb to death. A vision of her future self appears, and convinces her to stay alive. “Now is the place where the crossroads meet,” she chants, just as her (then) 56-year-old voice channels her 27-year-old one. Despite her alleged taste for burning one, Bush’s voice has gained in power rather than faded with age. It’s deeper now, and some of the songs’ keys shift to match, but it’s alive and incalculably moving, still capable of agile whoops and tender eroticism, and possesses a newfound authority. When she roars lustily through opener “Lily” and its declaration that “life has blown a great big hole through me,” she sets up the stakes of Before the Dawn’s quest for peace. In Act One, she’s running from the prospect of love on “Hounds of Love” and “Never Be Mine,” and from fame on “King of the Mountain,” where she searches for Elvis with sensual anticipation. She asks for Joan of Arc’s protection on “Joanni,” matching the French visionary’s fearlessness with her own funky diva roar, and sounds as if she could raze the world as she looks down from “Top of the City.”
Rather than deliver a copper-bottomed greatest hits set, Bush reckons with her legacy through what might initially seem like an obscure choice of material. Both Acts Two and Three take place in transcendent thresholds: “The Ninth Wave”’s drowning woman is beset by anxiety and untold pressures, with no idea of where to turn, mirroring the limbo that Bush experienced after 1982’s The Dreaming. That suite’s last song, the cheery “The Morning Fog,” transitions into Aerial’s “Prelude,” all beatific bird call and dawn-light piano. The euphoric, tender “A Sky of Honey” is meant to represent a perfect day from start to finish, filled with family and beautiful imperfections. “Somewhere in Between” finds them atop “the highest hill,” looking out onto a stilling view, and Bush’s eerie jazz ensemble anticipates the liminal peace of Bowie’s Blackstar. “Not one of us would dare to break the silence,” she sings. “Oh how we have longed for something that would make us feel so… somewhere in between.”
Purgatory has become heaven, and in the narrative Bush constructs through her setlist, “A Sky of Honey” represents the grown-up, domestic happiness that staves off the youthful fears explored on Hounds of Love. For her final song, she closes with a rendition of “Cloudbusting,” a song about living with the memory of a forbidden love, which is even more glorious for all the hope that it’s accumulated in the past 30-odd years. Bush’s recent life as a “reclusive” mother is often used to undermine her, to “prove” she was the kook that sexist critics had pegged her as all along. These performances and this record are a generous reveal of why she’s chosen to retreat, where Bush shows she won’t disturb her hard-won peace to sustain the myth of the troubled artistic genius. Between the dangerous waters of “The Ninth Wave” and the celestial heavens of “A Sky of Honey,” Before the Dawn demystifies what we’ve fetishized in her absence. Without draining her magic, it lets Bush exist back down on Earth.


Little Brother emcee Phonte and Dutch beatmaker Nicolay team up via internet to create one of this year's finest underground hip-hop releases.

Connected

Until early this year, North Carolina emcee Phonte (Little Brother) and Dutch beatmaking sensation Nicolay had never met, or even spoke on the phone. Making their acquaintance on the webboards at Okayplayer, the two took The Postal Service's album-by-correspondence technique to heart: Nicolay instant messaged beats to Phonte, who dropped verses, and then the Holland native mastered the product. The result, Connected, is a sweltering, improbable 14-track symphony teeming with potent lyricism and subtle, lustrous rhythmatics.
In today's hip-hop landscape, the organic and emotive qualities of classic soul are often bastardized (cf. Jagged Edge) but rarely duplicated. To wit: In its Hit Factory days, Motown churned out classics faster than Beanie Sigel garners arrest warrants. So either Nicolay is a musical genius who simply understands the language of classic R&B; better than most stateside producers, or a Stax Records jetliner crashed in the Netherlands, spilling thousands of LPs on his thatched abode when he was a toe-tapping toddler.
"The Foreign Exchange Title Theme" kicks Connected off with a syncopated harmony, while the welcoming voice of D.C.'s YahZarah wafts, "Thank you for the music, thank you for right now." That "right now" bit is telling, too, as the record revels in the glory of the moment: Urgent, immediate, instant gratification is one of Connected's calling cards. "Nic's Groove", for example, is equipped with sleepy brass, delicious harmonies and a booming bassline. It's like standing in the street during 5 minutes of the dopest house party you weren't invited to-- and when you dare to peek in the window, Nicolay hits his apex on "The Answer", bowling the crowd over with an ephemeral thunder while Oddisee, Ken Starr, and Phonte rock the crowd, the latter claiming, "I applied for the job of rap nigga, but I was overqualified."
But Connected is more than fluid construction and a unique backstory. Embedded in the layered vocal arrangements and popping rhythms are the seeds of a quiet rebellion. While crews like Mash Out Posse or Cocoa Brovaz may alienate newcomers with the furious intensity of their experiences, The Foreign Exchange delivers their triumphs and tragedies with silky surreptitiousness. Connected reads like the diary of the young, black hip-hop hopeful, as Phonte reminds us of the thousands of struggling MCs who sit in the shadow of The Source. He walks us through his money woes on "Happiness" ("Writing mad checks that might as well have 'Spalding' on them"), his girlfriend's pregnancy on "Be Alright" ("My girl was throwing up this morning/ I pray it was something she ate"), and his parents' disapproval of his life on "All That You Are" ("They can't understand how I feel when I'm on the track board turning the knob switch/ My moms keep talking like get a real job shit").
Despite The Foreign Exchange's transatlantic relationship, the record's stripped-down approach is reminiscent of the days when kids hijacked streetlamps to power their block party turntables. Amazingly, this album seamlessly flows without not only that street-level intimacy but without even the assistance of a shared studio. The result is enough to make the most heartbroken cynics fall in love with independent hip-hop all over again.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Ryan Leslie’s breezy and lovestruck 2009 solo debut, a set of virtuoso R&B productions that emerged in a new era of online music culture.

Ryan Leslie

Ryan Leslie seemed determined to document every second of his life in 2008. It was the era of a trillion rap blogs, and R&B’s Truman Burbank was shrewd enough to recognize a voyeuristic platform like YouTube as the next star-making frontier. Whether there was anything that interesting about him as an on-screen personality was beside the point: He wanted music fans to see the nuts and bolts of how a multi-talented singer, songwriter, and producer makes hits, so he recorded himself daily on a Canon GL2 and edited endless hours of footage into webisodes for his YouTube channel, Ryan Leslie TV.
He noticed the clips that got the biggest reactions were his dramatic beat-making sessions, where he bounced like Tigger around a recording studio. In the most talked-about video, with 5.6 million views to date, Leslie wears shades and zips from one instrument to the next, drums to keyboard to Mac, layering the beat for his slinky single “Addiction” until it sounds like a beeper having an identity crisis. The scene is lighthearted, but in Leslie’s eyes, it carries a certain gravitas. “You’re watching and viewing the moment of creation,” he said in a 2019 interview. It’s “the closest we can get to God.”
By the time his self-titled debut album dropped in February 2009, Leslie had meticulously digitized two-plus years of his life on three one-terabyte hard drives. Hip-hop was becoming extremely online, allowing upstarts like him to broadcast their personal lives and creative process in a new way. The nature of celebrity was about to change forever.
Meanwhile, mid-aughts R&B was in a critical transitional stage, with rougher-edged singers like Trey Songz and Jeremih seizing control from smooth-talking traditionalists like Ne-Yo and John Legend. But despite his best efforts to come across as a playboy in his music, Leslie’s artistic persona always fell somewhere between sweet and pretentious. In a world of over-the-top vocalists in constant heat, the former Harvard a cappella singer brought giddy band-virgin energy. So while R&B’s most flamboyant artist-producer, The-Dream, had established himself as a smash hitmaker with a gift for being spiritually crass, Leslie positioned himself as a digital-minded hybrid mogul: a singing, rapping producer with ambitions to be the next Diddy or Tommy Mottola. His ingenuity lay more in his musicianship and marketing than any semblance of edge.
Harmonizing rappers were suddenly everywhere, but Leslie’s entirely self-produced debut coincided with one in particular, arriving three days before Drake’s soft-era-launching So Far Gone—a mixtape inspired partly by the Toronto rap star’s revelation about how brazenly he and his friends spoke about women in private. Leslie’s boastful talk-rap style was inoffensive by comparison. His lead single and album opener, “Diamond Girl,” a blustery club track, casts him as a casanova searching for a leading lady to help him settle down. It’s a splashy introduction for Leslie, presenting him as a capable rapper and one-person band. But when Kanye West and G-Unit each dropped unofficial remixes, it highlighted the difference between their effortless cockiness and Leslie’s more bookish bravado.
Better than some peers, though, Leslie grasped R&B’s conventional ideals of pleading emotion and sincere desire for companionship. Over 12 tracks, he’s drawn to women with an intoxicating presence, excited about how that infatuation might either grow or rip his heart to pieces. On “You’re Fly,” a carefree, flute-driven serenade about graduating to friends with benefits, he’s optimistic, while the jumpy, mid-tempo “Quicksand” and the warm lullaby “Valentine” anticipate new love. The latter and its sister track, “Just Right,” are the closest to ballads on a mostly buoyant album that’s enticing even if it’s notably impersonal. Though eager to share his creative process in his videos, Leslie wasn’t interested in being that transparent about his feelings.
Instead, he leaned into his music-geek impulses and succeeded in creating a signature sound. His production has a breeziness, marked by synth tones programmed to feel like callbacks to the innocent days of pagers and dial-up. You hear it on records like New Edition’s 2004 single “Hot 2Nite” (a beat Leslie originally made for himself) and Cheri Dennis’ 2007 gem “I Love You,” relics of R&B’s evolution to clubby electronic rhythms. While the spaciness of predecessors like Timbaland and the Neptunes inform Leslie’s production style, he has a knack for calibrating his own earworms to sound like Jetsons gadgets coming to life. His trademark glitzy R&B, just downstream of pop radio hitmakers, is charmingly frivolous in a way that Leslie himself isn’t. He told the Washington Post in 2009, “Show me another artist that, without any engineers, without any famous friends, without any famous instrumentalists, without any famous songwriter, without any famous rapper, is just gonna lock himself in the studio with nothing else but a bunch of equipment, walk in there with thin air and within a couple of hours have something that ignites him to the point that it’s visibly infectious.”
Leslie had the confidence of an Ivy Leaguer who’d been called a prodigy most of his life. Born in Washington, D.C., to parents who were both Salvation Army officers and moonlighting musicians, he learned to play piano by ear. Once, when Leslie was about four, he encountered a soda vending machine. “He put his ear against the box and he listened very intently,” his father later told The Harvard Crimson, “and then he started to snap his fingers and bop his head to the rhythm of the Coke box.” Leslie entered Harvard at 15 with a perfect SAT score, majoring in politics while singing and touring with the university’s a cappella group, the Krokodiloes. But already it was clear he’d rather be making beats. At one point, he spent 30 hours a week in the studio while gigging around Boston. In that same Crimson profile in 1998—Leslie’s senior year—he told the paper that he aspired to be “the hardest working man in entertainment.”
After college, Leslie moved back in with his parents and convinced his dad to buy him $15,000 worth of recording equipment on credit. He scored one of his first placements, New Edition’s “Hot 2Nite,” while interning with a producer who worked for Diddy. He landed more high-profile gigs after signing to Tommy Mottola’s Universal imprint, Casablanca, in 2003, producing filler cuts for mega-stars like Britney Spears, Beyoncé, and LL Cool J.  His own planned first album got shelved, but Leslie had already found the artist who’d help him fulfill his mogul dreams. He met Cassie, then an 18-year-old model, at a nightclub in 2004, and they struck up both a working and personal relationship, which was initially kept under wraps.
As the music industry scrambled to understand social media’s potential, Leslie adapted. He used MySpace as a digital billboard, attracting followers with photos and videos of Cassie—and, eventually, a song. That online popularity helped catapult her bubbly 2006 breakout “Me & U” (which Leslie produced) to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, creating a new blueprint. Artists like Cassie and, later, Soulja Boy (whose 2007 sensation “Crank That” broke on YouTube) proved how quickly an unknown musician could turn internet notoriety into offline fame. “Ryan launched and promoted a completely unknown artist who went to No. 1 for seven weeks as a result of a viral experience. Normally, I would think that would be a mountain too high to climb,” Mottola told The Boston Globe in 2008, citing the U.S. Airplay chart. Leslie, he said, was “very plugged into the new technology that’s going to be a critical piece of how music is made and distributed.”
“I’m at 100,000 friends on MySpace and 14,000 plays a day on my little music player,” Leslie told the Globe in the same article, months before his debut’s release. His digital-first approach signaled where the music business was headed, with social media as a primary metric. “I’d love to be at 60,000 plays and half a million friends,” he continued. “In the meantime I can be making records, continuing to be really strongly entrenched in the online video community, releasing behind-the-scenes stuff. And when there’s an insane, incredible demand for my album that cannot be contained anymore, I can put it out tomorrow.”
Diddy noticed the success of “Me & U,” too. He signed Cassie to Bad Boy, calling Leslie the “new-age Teddy Riley.” It was the partnership that nourished a thousand gossip blogs, fueled by rumors that Cassie had dropped Leslie as both a producer and boyfriend and entered a relationship with Diddy. Unlike Usher, who’d drawn on his own messy celebrity dating life for 2004’s career-making Confessions, Leslie didn’t attempt to capitalize on the ensuing love triangle in his music. But he has said his split with Cassie quietly inspired records like “Diamond Girl” and “Out of the Blue,” where he reflexively blames both parties for a breakup over a spiraling ringtone of a beat. “I should’ve been a better friend,” Leslie suggests, then wonders, “What would you do?/If I left you out of the blue?/Would you fight back tears while your heart gets torn to pieces?”
The upbeat mid-album track “How It Was Supposed to Be” explores a similarly tense feeling of abandonment, and on the pulsing “Shouldn’t Have to Wait,” Leslie is guilty of making a woman wait on him to settle down. Then he recovers optimism on odes like “Wanna Be Good” and the fanciful “Irina,” where he falls victim to love at first sight. Alluringly shallow, the album is zippy and playful, an effusive pitch from an artist whose plainest objective as a singer and sometime rapper is to go get the girl.
In June 2009, four months after the release of Ryan Leslie, PC Mag reported that Facebook had surpassed MySpace in popularity for the first time. Twitter and Instagram soon emerged as the next permanent fixtures for artists looking to build a fanbase. Leslie, naturally, maintains a presence on all of them. Coming up in the cosmic stew of social media and streaming has allowed Leslie to, years later, maintain a following and embark on a career as an entrepreneurial spokesperson. In the influencer era, an internet-savvy self-starter no longer needed Diddy-level music fame to operate like a mogul.
The same year as his debut, Leslie released a subtly thrilling follow-up, Transition, inspired by a summer rendezvous, and later recorded a full-on rap album, 2012’s Les Is More. Clips of his old studio sessions still circulate on social media, passed along by a faithful subset of fans like treasure maps leading to a lost gem of an album. Posted in June 2008, a low-resolution video for the making of closing track “Gibberish” shows him taking what looks like a piccolo trumpet out of its case. The song’s concept is ridiculous—Leslie mumbling sweet nothings to convey speechlessness. But it’s also oddly the album’s most sensual moment and one of R&B’s most inventive uses of Auto-Tune’s warbling effects. In the video, Leslie plays his trumpet into the mic in a recording booth and later procedurally returns it to its case. As much as he loved creating, he also seemed to enjoy performing the part of being an artist—no matter how extra it sometimes appeared on camera. Any musician with an online presence now does the same; behind-the-scenes content is de rigueur. But there’s still something endearing about a beatmaker with an ego and a bunch of instruments who cared about showing the work.

NextSelection / Casablanca / Universal Motown


The wiry Atlanta, Ga. rock trio Omni sells its nervous energy as a logical way of dealing with the world. Where other bands might smooth things out, Omni finds angles and sharp turns.

Multi-task

Halfway through “Southbound Station,” the opening song on Omni’s second album Multi-task, bassist Philip Frobos sings, “I’m just waiting on the vibration.” He’s talking about a text message he’s expecting—definitely not about his group’s music. This Atlanta, Ga. trio never hesitates to get things moving. Their sound is all quivers and shakes and spasms, filled with wiry guitar chords, nervy basslines, and jolting beats. Every track is pithy and pointed to a nearly obsessive-compulsive degree. Only one of the album’s 11 songs lasts longer than three minutes, and the band always starts in high gear, revving hard before quickly reloading.
This brand of restless kinetics could induce listener fatigue, but, much like the best purveyors of musical caffeination—Wire, Devo, Talking Heads—Omni avoid tedium by never forcing the action. They sell their nervous energy not as affectation or aesthetic statement, but simply as a logical way of dealing with the world. That was true on their 2016 debut, Deluxe, but on Multi-task they’ve honed their sound to the point where it’s hard to imagine them playing anything that doesn’t take sharp turns or hit abrupt stops.
Omni’s sonic signature is aided by Frobos’ subdued vocals. Compared to the high-strung yelps of Mark Mothersbaugh or the geeky tremble of David Byrne, Frobos’ voice is decidedly deadpan, delivered in a semi-monotone as if he’s the calm center of a musical storm. At times it seems he views the music swirling around him as a surreal dream, and the only way to handle it is to stay cool and go with his band’s jagged flow.
Frobos’ vocal chill is matched by his lyrics, which share Byrne’s knack for treating daily life like an alien puzzle. Many of Multi-task’s songs are about people meeting and relating, and Frobos often sounds perplexed that anyone ever manages to connect. During “Tuxedo Blues,” he begs a comrade to “speak out, say what you mean, without parting the sea”; in “Calling Direct,” his attempts to reach out are so frustrated that he decides he has to “stage a coup to get to you.” Eventually, in the skeptical “Date Night,” he questions the whole concept of shared experience: “When I’m looking are you seeing/Someone in a different light, another being?” All these laments fit music that’s aptly off-kilter, finding angles and divots where other bands might smooth things out.
Many of those angles are the sum of Omni’s parts, as Frobos’ rubbery bass meshes with Frankie Broyles’ guitar playing and drumming (the group were between drummers when recording Multi-task, and have since enlisted Doug Bleichner of Warehouse in the role). But Broyles, a former member of Deerhunter, is often the star, slashing across the songs like a spark plug firing an engine. He’s particularly adept at chopping chords and chiming notes simultaneously, so his complex leads have a visceral thrust. On the herky-jerky “Choke,” his guitar sounds both threatening and joyous, while during the escalating “Supermoon,” he keeps his foot on the riff pedal while also weaving detailed lines. His synergy with Frobos comes to a head on closer “Type,” which displays the strengths of Omni in miniature: dodging momentum, confident swing, rough precision. But then miniatures are what this band does best, building small choices into an exhilarating whole.


Surprising and delighting its fans over the course of a fascinating career, this Jagjaguwar band again delivers a successful detour-- a record that consists of one three-part, nearly all-instrumental track.

Preteen Weaponry

Ever since their epic 2002 song "Sheets of Easter", Oneida seem to evoke something wild and transcendent in the press and the minds of their fans. Eager listeners await each release, ready to have their minds expanded and bodies exhausted, but the band has spent the past few years subtly changing course. After nearly perfecting their distinctive groove on 2004's Secret Wars, the following year's The Wedding was concise, diverse, and often gorgeous, while 2006's Happy New Year felt tentative and even somber (save for a few monster tracks like "Up With People"). Time has proven these records all fascinating and rewarding in their own right, and this year brings another surprise from the band: an album that's not only nearly all-instrumental, but all one track.
Or so they claim. It's not quite one long song, as it's divided into three distinctly different ones with track breaks, though they do flow together fairly gracefully. Whatever fans expected, Preteen Weaponry is neither a definitive statement nor some sort of a Herculean display of ability. It's simply another example of a band that never tires of challenging itself, and nearly always rises to the occasion.
As the first track begins, the drums play loose fills around the edges of the beat, a faraway pulse of guitar keeps the time, and garbled wah-addled noise fills the mid-ground. But as the track comes into focus, the instruments start to discern themselves, the drums take hold of a sophisticated but primal groove, and Oneida start to jam. The layering of sound in this first segment, and how subtly it shifts, is striking: Primal grooves evaporate into faint whispers, inscrutable noise becomes a foundation for sparse and clean guitar notes, then acoustic guitars and incidental organ tones lighten the atmosphere. Divert your attention for more than a minute and you'll forget where the song had just been, and how it got to its present state.
In the second segment, guitars squeal over bowel-shaking bass with sluggish, almost ceremonial drumming. Its one chord is stretched and teased until high and lilting vocals finally kick in, almost chanting, and the guitars scrape and squiggle like a pickup's engine in its last throes. All that fades into the background once the third track kicks off when a few laser-like tones come in and the song shifts to a major key.
Oneida's love of repetition gets them saddled with more than a few krautrock tags, and drummer Kid Millions' work on the final track could actually fit in on a Can or Neu! record. That said, the rhythm is still irregular and askew, with Millions nonchalantly dropping beats as the melody whizzes around him. Soon, all the members intermittently drop in and out of the mix, almost dub-like in the segment's final minutes, as the band begins to use the studio as another instrument. Even if Preteen Weaponry is one more left turn out of many in the band's catalog, it nonetheless reaffirms what makes Oneida stand out: How they take something so endlessly parroted and tempered as psychedelic rock and stretch it, with equal parts discipline and abandon, into something more artistic and, more importantly, unique.


Post-punk quartet Pop. 1280's new album, Imps of Perversion, showcases a more polished approach. But compared to the apocalyptic clamor of 2012's The Horror, that same crispness and clarity works against the band’s attempts to dredge up the dread.

Imps of Perversion

The front cover of Pop. 1280’s new album features a shot of the Manhattan skyline at night and, thanks to the wonders of Photoshop, some multi-headed mutant monster rising from the waters before it. The scene is apropos on many levels: in both sound and intent, Pop. 1280 very much seem like the product of the notoriously seedy New York City that was eventually washed away by the dual forces of Giuliani and gentrification. Their future-shocked art-punk brutalism hearkens back to the time when Sonic Youth namedropping Philip K. Dick rather than Marc Jacobs, and when Richard Kern’s muse was Lydia Lunch instead of Sasha Grey. And yet more so than any specific aesthetic reference points from that era, what Pop. 1280 most vividly evoke is a bygone 1980s when an after-hours stroll through the Lower East Side could prove more dangerous anything you see on "Fear Factor." But after burrowing toward new depths of depravity on last year’s still-startling The Horror, even these miscreants need to come up for air. And like vampires stepping into the sun, Pop. 1280’s tentative crawl toward the light can be a little unflattering.
That’s not to say Imps of Pervision constitutes a major cosmetic change, or that Pop. 1280’s music now sounds anything like the first half of their name; as far as clean-up jobs go, this one was administered with a crumbling piece of wet toilet paper rather than a hydraulic hose. But compared to the apocalyptic clamor of The Horror, there’s a greater crispness and clarity here that, at times, works against the band’s attempts to dredge up the dread. On Horror highlights like “Bodies in the Dunes” and “New Electronix", Pop. 1280 pillaged forth in unison with a creeping intensity, like a street gang encircling its victim in a swarm attack; by contrast, the clearer separation of Ivan Lip’s spidery guitar lines and Zach Ziemann’s shifting rhythms on Imps’ “Lights Out” and “The Control Freak” defuses their imposing mystique, leaving frontman Chris Bug oddly overexposed-- all the bark without enough bite to back it up. (Furthermore, the latter song’s attempt at examining the more mundane sort of monstrous beings we encounter on a daily basis doesn’t pack the same absurdist panache as their cubicle-bound peers in Pissed Jeans.)
It’s not that Pop. 1280 necessarily need scuzzed-out production to feel convincingly caustic; the corrosively vocoderized “Population Control” is the most aggressively lo-fi song here, but also the most unformed and ineffectual, too. Pop. 1280’s potency is really a function of proper pacing, of allowing sufficient time for the players’ competing parts to cohere into a punishing squall and for Bug to undergo a gradual transformation from simmering unease to strait-jacketed psychosis. And to that end, Imps of Pervision peaks with its torrid middle stretch. “Nailhouse” pounds the deviant groove of The Stooges’ “Little Doll” into submission, with Bug’s increasingly violent fantasias eerily evocative of the current vogue for homemade pressure-cooker bombs; “Human Probe II” and “Do the Anglerfish” are exceptional showcases of Lip’s six-string savagery, unleashing a deep arsenal of caterwauling tones that can drill holes through skulls. Pop. 1280 sustain just enough of that gonzo energy to elevate the more conventionally rendered mid-tempo rockers that make up the album’s back half, however, the morosely monotone closing ballad “Riding Shotgun” suggests they have the aspirations-- if not yet the artistry-- to rise above their sewage-smeared station. Given all the blood, jism, and other bodily secretions the dot Bug’s lyric sheet here, Pop. 1280 are still very much the sort of band that demand a post-listen shower-- this time, though, you just won't need as much soap.


A new three-disc set surveys the trumpeter’s most critically reviled era. The unreleased studio material is a mixed bag, but a 1983 live recording is revelatory.

Miles Davis: That’s What Happened 1982-1985: The Bootleg Series Vol. 7

Death, taxes, and “’80s Miles sucks”—as it was, and ever shall be.
For an artist whose discography has inspired so much critical debate, consensus on Miles Davis’ final era is remarkably unified—even the liner notes for That’s What Happened 1982-1985, Legacy’s latest entry in the excellent Bootleg Series, mention the “elephant in the room.” For years, many fans and critics cringed at the thought of Miles trying to update his sound using the slickest, gaudiest aspects of a decade that saw mainstream jazz marginalized even more than it had been the first time Miles tried to fuse a new generation’s music into his own (during the hallowed Bitches Brew era). Was everyone wrong? Was there something of value there? Let’s start from the beginning of the end.
In the summer of 1975, after 30-plus years of performing, Miles retired from music. Ailing health and general burnout meant that he didn’t pick up his horn again until sometime in 1980. In the interim, by his own admission, he kept himself busy with: women, cocaine, cognac, sometimes going out to see shows, women, beer, sleeping pills, the occasional speedball, Percodan, Seconal, a little jail time for failing to pay child support, and a few more women. But even jazz legends come down to earth sometimes. When he decided he’d had enough of the high/low-life (and after some cajoling by Columbia exec George Butler), he pulled together a band, booked some studio time, and proceeded to make up for lost time.
The initial results of the “comeback” yielded mixed results. His first album out of the gate was 1981’s The Man With the Horn, made with two different bands—one featuring keyboardist Robert “Bobby” Irving III and Miles’ nephew Vince Wilburn on drums, and another with guitarist Mike Stern, bassist Marcus Miller, saxophonist Bill “not that Bill” Evans, and drummer Al Foster (the only holdover from Miles’ ’70s groups). As such, the record is caught between Miles’ desire to update his funk-fusion sound of the preceding decade and trying something totally new—in that case, adding snappy funk-pop to his arsenal, even including a track with soul vocals.
Fans were generally happy he was back, but there were chinks in the armor. For anyone who’d followed Miles’ path to that point, two things were obvious: He had some catching up to do in regards to incorporating the sound of the ’80s into his music, and his chops weren’t quite back yet. By his own admission, he hadn’t totally kicked drugs or booze, so it would take the better part of a year playing shows and eventually cleaning up his act before he started sounding like himself again. And, perhaps more importantly, he found Prince.
Miles’ love of contemporary R&B and funk is well documented, as evidenced by his integration of the sounds of James Brown and Sly Stone into his music in the ’70s, but it wasn’t until he discovered the music of Minneapolis’ finest in 1982 that his ’80s comeback truly came alive. The music on the three-disc That’s What Happened 1982-1985 collection captures a period when Miles had found both his chops and his muse, and dove headfirst into the sound of a new era. Gone were the multi-guitar, wah-wah and conga freakouts of the previous decade’s bands, to make room for shorter songs, tighter beats, slappier bass, and even a reclaimed love of the blues. As ever, Miles aimed straight for (what he perceived as) the ears of Black youth, and this time he had the right sound.
Most of the set’s first disc comprises recordings made during sessions for 1983’s Star People, my pick for Miles’ best comeback-era record. However, all the studio tracks presented here are previously unreleased, so fans have plenty of incentive to investigate. “Santana” is a lengthy, mid-tempo funk tune whose snaky, childlike melody is classic Miles (and would later show up in “Hopscotch” on the second and third discs). It begins with the splash of Miles’ bright, discordant synth chord, and though the first half gallops along without much direction, the second (beginning with Miles’ solo) ups the energy, ending with an inspired Stern solo and some great ensemble figures based on the initial melody. At one point the guitar and sax drop out, leaving Miles alone to take short jabs at the melody over a bass and drums drone—it’s both ominous and head-bobbing, and doesn’t really sound like anything else I’ve heard from him. Teo Macero produced these sessions (the last time he ever would for Miles), and it’s easy to imagine him concocting an edit which might have improved Star People.
The two-part “Minor Ninths” features only Miles on electric piano and trombonist J.J. Johnson, an old friend, playing bluesy solo figures. It’s moody and interesting, if something of a non-sequitur. The three-part “Celestial Blues” tracks continue this vibe but lighten the mood by integrating the full band, playing variations on chilled-out, after-hours funk under muted Miles blowing. The two-part “Remake of OBX Ballad” pieces are less interesting, as Miles only plays synth under very smooth, if admittedly tasteful sax soloing from Evans. The first disc ends with two takes on “Freaky Deaky,” done during sessions for 1984’s Decoy, and the only tracks representing that album in the set. They’re fine (if actually less interesting than the bizarre, synth-laden version that eventually appeared on Decoy), but I might have wished for more from those sessions.
Moving chronologically, disc three contains a July 1983 live show that occurred during a break in the Decoy sessions and is the highlight of the collection. By that time, Miles had added guitarist John Scofield, percussionist Mino Cinelu, and bassist Darryl Jones (future Sting, Madonna, and Rolling Stones collaborator) to the mix, and anyone underwhelmed by the trumpeter’s studio offerings of the decade should find a lot to love. There’s nothing slick or malformed here: Straight bangers “Speak (That’s What Happened),” “What It Is,” and “Hopscotch” are right out of his mid-’70s playbook, with frantic tempos, percussion, and, best of all, Miles kicking the shit out of his solos. He’d developed a technique of playing trumpet with one hand, using the other to accentuate his jabbing figures on synth, approximating both Prince’s synths circa Dirty Mind and the brass sections Gil Evans used to arrange for him. That’s fitting, because the melody on “Speak” was itself arranged by Evans, based on an improvised Scofield figure from an earlier session. The set ebbs and flows organically like all the best Miles shows, and as it’s currently his only officially released ’83 performance, fans need to hear it.
Disc two contains tracks recorded during the sessions for 1985’s You’re Under Arrest. Miles planned to do an entire album of pop covers, but ultimately settled on Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” and Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature.” Just as on the Under Arrest versions, the alternate mixes and full studio session versions on this set are solid, if not particularly revealing. The only real draw is hearing Miles blow over the songs, but I wouldn’t say his versions add much to their legacies. (Drummer Foster actually walked out of the “Human Nature” sessions because he was tired of playing the same old pop-powered backbeat, so Miles brought back his nephew Wilburn.) The previously unreleased cover of Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It” fares a little better, if only because its slinky, noir-ish vibe already suited Miles to a tee. Elsewhere, the remake of “Theme From Jack Johnson (Right Off)/Intro” is fun (and actually a variation on “Speak”), but the two takes of “Hopscotch” don’t come close to matching the energy of the live version, and even old cohort John McLaughlin can’t quite save the ’80s-chase-scene feel of “Katia.”
Funnily enough, the peaks and valleys of That’s What Happened 1982-1985 perfectly capture the overall trajectory of Miles’ late discography. The live shows never stopped being awesome, while your mileage will likely vary with the studio stuff. By the same token, anyone writing off his whole decade as a wash is missing out. Whatever you think of Miles’ aesthetic choices, they were always choices made by a vibrant, ever-curious artist.


The latest mixtape from the young Detroit rapper takes scamming to the next level.

Fraudulent Activity

Teejayx6 is a passionate rapper. It just so happens that his passion is not so much rapping, but scamming, and making money so that he can scam more, and maybe, if he has some money leftover, fund a rap career. The Detroit teenager will do anything to ensure his passions flourish, like illegal purchases of iPhones in his nephew’s name and convincing his younger cousin to sell weed from her lemonade stand. In Detroit, scammer rap is nothing new (see: Bossman Rich and BandGang Lonnie Bands), but Teejayx6’s approach is more direct. Sometimes he’s nervous that he’s gone too far and will be caught, a tension that’s amplified by his anxious, offbeat delivery and fast-paced instrumentals. Teejay always gets away, though, and when he does, he takes the time to reflect on the finer things in life: the strength of his IP address, the VPN that leaves him untraceable, and the social security numbers he’s purchased, like one that belongs to retired NBA player Tony Parker.
Last month, Teejayx6 achieved modest virality through his jaw-dropping collaboration with fellow Detroit rapper Kasher Quon. Since that success, Teejayx6 has been releasing music nearly every day, some better than others, like his surreal scamming tutorial “Swipe Lesson” and the birth of his “Swipe Story” series that’s quickly evolving into a street Ten Commandments. But not much has changed for Teejay: He’s still on Instagram trying to convince his followers to DM their bank accounts and uploads music to YouTube on a whim, like his latest mixtape, Fraudulent Activity.
On Wednesday, Teejayx6 didn’t even wait for the files to finish uploading before posting a screenshot—not even a link—of his mixtape with the caption, “Out now on my YouTube uploading the rest of the songs right now.” Fraudulent Activity itself is simple, seven tracks of Teejay’s crime-riddled tales and punchlines, all hovering around the two-minute mark.
Throughout Fraudulent Activity, Teejayx6 constantly crosses the line, like on the face-palming “Allah,” but when he reels himself in a smidge, his Walmart and Wells Fargo anecdotes are captivating. “Scammed a white lady and she look like Helen Keller,” and “Stole my grandma money I can’t wait to see that preacher,” he says in a deadpan on “Cheat Codes.” And while it’s hard to say, “Yes, I love to hear Teejay rap about finessing old ladies,” I do love to hear Teejay rap about finessing old ladies.
The mixtape’s best track, by far, is “SilkRoad,” an ode to the illicit, now-shuttered, deep web marketplace. Teejay rambles on in a somber tone like he’s lost a loved one: “The feds shut the site down, but I miss Silk Road/They sold illegal shit and that’s the reason I got my first gun.” He uses this opportunity to reflect, like a flashback episode of a sitcom, on the scams that hold a special place in his heart: the time he copied someone’s ID, but was delighted to find out he looks just like them and when he catfished and convinced a boy on Tinder to send him $6,000. Maybe, months from now, we look back at Teejayx6 and Fraudulent Activity and scratch our heads. But, for now, just keep him from within arms reach of your grandmother’s social security check and enjoy the daily ride.


The London singer-songwriter's Danger Mouse and Inflo-produced latest feels like an easy listen at first, but eventually reveals its mournful and even despairing heart.

Kiwanuka

“All I want is to talk to you,” Michael Kiwanuka sings on “Piano Joint (This Kind of Love),” as if the “you” had heard otherwise. Intimacy, for him, is fraught, full of potential traps. Anxiety pervades the London singer-songwriter’s third album, but he emerges a stronger artist, thanks to panoramic production by collaborators Danger Mouse and Inflo. What on first or even third spin unfolds as an easy listen eventually reveals itself as a mournful and often despairing work: an album by an artist willing himself to believe people will offer the hope that institutions can’t but steeling himself for disappointment just in case. Doubt is his muse—and burden.
In the three years since Love & Hate, Kiwanuka’s popularity has only grown— the HBO miniseries Big Little Lies picked up that album’s “Cold Little Heart” as its theme song. His take on soul proceeds from the fuzzed-out serrated explorations of the Temptations’ psychedelic era and Terence Trent D’Arby at his most communal. Better still is his voice, which mixes Solomon Burke’s slow-burn urgency with John Hiatt’s gulp.
Kiwanuka mirrors Markeidric Walker’s cover art: grand, regal in its confidence, faintly androgynous. Its best songs are as direct as Kiwanuka’s gaze. The synth-anchored “Solid Ground” almost chokes on its anguish until the strings offer solace. “Piano Joint (This Kind of Love)” presents itself as a prayer in an empty room. “Living in Denial,” change tempos and chords after a couple of exploratory minutes; Kiwanuka treats songs like ecosystems that stretch and flower after sunlight and soil tilling.
Perhaps to keep things from skewing too “retro,” Danger Mouse and Inflo overdo the modernizing touches: the clinkety-clanks and distorted samples that sandwich “Final Days” distract from a chiming lament whose refrain marks Kiwanuka’s peak as a vocalist. They love these ideas so much that its follow-up “Interlude (Loving the People)” give them to you again, all three instrumental minutes of them. But the album offers compensatory pleasures, like “Hard to Say Goodbye,” in which Kiwanuka pledges fealty through and space time to a vague someone he has dared to love—an example of the album’s faint queer undertones. A studio-created ripple sound effect creates a sense of immensity. Always, though, doubt chews away at him: “And if I had a dream/Love would be sunshine for me.”
Offering no blandishments, no expressions of we’ll-get-through-this, Kiwanuka is a nerve-wracked, sustained act of whistling in the dark. Absent, though, is any hint of reveling: a tendency that often leads to soul rot. When Kiwanuka sings, “The young and dumb will always need/One of their own to lead,” he doesn’t volunteer.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Rastafari: The Dreads Enter Babylon 1955-83*,* Soul Jazz’s most recent in a line of high-quality compilations, provides a window into Kingston’s past, drawing a line directly from Rastafari to the rise of reggae as an internationally recognized type of music.

Various Artists: Rastafari: The Dreads Enter Babylon, 1955-83

The historic-yet-sadly-dilapidated Ward Theatre in the middle of downtown Kingston, Jamaica is normally closed to the public. But it played host to a unique performance this past June, one that closed the week-long Kingston on the Edge art festival. Bandleader and legendary reggae artist Earl "Chinna" Smith, alongside more than a dozen singers, drummers, members of the Jamaican Philharmonic, and a local opera singer, made up the "Binghistra", providing a combination of Rastafari nyabinghi drumming and classical music.
This concert was hardly the first time the historic Ward had showcased the nyabinghi style. The 4/4 shuffle of its rhythm, which stems from three specific drum sounds (akete, funde, and bass) was first heard in the theatre back in the 1950s, when bandleader Count Ossie, hailing from a Rastafari camp in the hills of East Kingston, was first invited to perform as part of a Christmas variety show. Rastafari: The Dreads Enter Babylon 1955-83, Soul Jazz's most recent in a line of high-quality compilations, provides a window into Kingston's past, acting as a soundtrack to this narrative that reaches back to Count Ossie's first and subsequent performances at the legendary Ward to draw a line directly from Rastafari to the rise of reggae as an internationally recognized type of music.
It is nyabinghi drumming that provides the foundation for reggae, and Soul Jazz makes this argument explicit by kicking off the compilation with Count Ossie and the Rasta Family's "Africa We Want Fe Go", taking the traditional Rastafari nyabinghi chant and drumming and adding electrified reggae bass. This sets the tone for all selections: to demonstrate that link between the spirituality of Rastafari and the development of the unique sound of Jamaican music. Reggae may have developed into genres other than Rastafari music, as any listener to dancehall or lovers' rock reggae can attest, but none of these types of music would exist if it weren't for those origins in Rastafari.
Cementing this fact, a quarter of the tracks feature Count Ossie alongside various drummers and musicians. Tracks with the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari and the Rasta Family provide more traditional approaches, with the "Tales of Mozambique" and "Narration" pairing historical recounting with rich, percussive background. Organist Leslie Butler and vibraphonist Ronald Downer accompany Count Ossie's drum group on two separate tracks that place soulful reggae and jazz sounds alongside the Rastafari rhythms. These were both produced in the early 1960s by Sonia Pottinger, who went on to become a successful reggae hitmaker throughout the 1970s, producing classics such as Ken Boothe's "Lady with the Starlight" and the Melodians "Swing and Dine". Further focusing on the importance of the drum, the compilation contains two tracks with Bongo Herman, a man whose name reveals exactly the talent for which he is known. The bongo complements snippets of harmonized chorus and praises to Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie.
The telltale layered drums of nyabinghi are deceptively simple, with their foundational bass hitting on the 1 and 3, but there are improvisational opportunities everywhere, from the creativity of the akete player to the endless variety of chants and songs, spoken word and harmonizations, that can all find accompaniment. And this compilation is full of this rhythmic storytelling, reaching back to the roots of African drumming while demonstrating the innovations of Rastafari.
The mid-'50s mento-sounding "Ethiopia" of Lord Lebby and the Jamaican Calypsonians pairs banjo and bongo bounce with lyrics about the centrality of the East African nation to Rastafari belief. Though there are about 10 years between the late-'60s ska of "Haile Selassie" by Laurel Aitken and the 1970s roots reggae "His Imperial Majesty" by Rod Taylor, both point to the importance of Ethiopia's last Emperor to the Rastafari movement. "Hail the Words of Jah" is a hagiography of Haile Selassie presented in soothing falsetto by Congos member Ashanti Roy and an early drum-accompanied Mutabaruka poem, "Say".
The interesting addition of the youthful voices found on child star QQ's "Betta Must Come", raises some questions about the time range of the title, given that it was recorded in 2005. But it demonstrates how the nyabinghi sound extends into a new generation. The inclusion begs the question of other pertinent additions: Recent reggae revivalists like Chronixx, Kabaka Pyramid, and Jah9, to name but a few, have also kept the sound current. There are artists who gained fame in the 1990s and have claimed affiliation to the Rastafari movement, such as Buju Banton, Capleton, and Sizzla—all who make use of Rastafari rhythms as well as themes. Their absence feels like a missed opportunity.
However, the 40-page-plus accompanying booklet touches on the music post-1983, suggesting that this might be part one of a series of compilations—given the power of the music, one can only hope. The extent of the information provided in the liner notes is as good as can be when the goal is to encapsulate over a century of spiritual, socio-economic, and cultural history, not just of Rastafari, but of both colonial and independent Jamaica and Jamaican music as well. Yes, it's a reasonable introduction, but it might have been an idea to point to some of the many, many additional sources on Rastafari. This would reflect the reality that Rastafari, much like the music of this compilation, is dynamic and varied, consistently resisting any efforts to pigeonhole.
And although the tracklisting jumps around a little between decades, making it difficult to get a sense of chronology, it's clear that Rastafari consciousness has found its way into just about every type of Jamaican music, from drum compositions to calypso, mento, ska, reggae, and beyond. As the title says, "the dreads enter Babylon"—and they leave no stone (or style) unturned.


The capstone to Portland synthesizer musician Daryl Groetsch’s wildly productive year, Dusk runs the gamut of his sound, evoking early ambient classics as it flits between beauty and terror.

Dusk

Daryl Groetsch is on a streak. In the first five months of 2022, the Portland ambient musician who usually records as Pulse Emitter quietly put out an incredible run of synthesizer albums under his birth name. The long, sighing compositions on these six albums were placid even by Groetsch’s standards, but they engaged the listener rather than simply enveloping them. Groetsch’s classical training informed rich harmonic structures that constantly shifted rather than just hovering in place. And the sounds he used—especially a low moan on the best of the series, January’s Home Again—had a chilly edge that was lonelier and less reassuring than most new-age synthesizer music.
Dusk, Groetsch’s new Pulse Emitter album for Hausu Mountain and the capstone to his enviable 2022 run, leans into this prickliness while rocketing far beyond those albums’ deliberately limited palette. Across the record’s 41-minute run, the sun seems to set as the music transitions from sparkling synth bouquets (“Cloudside Dwellings,” “Chrome Sky”) into darker long-tone pieces with more in common with the Daryl Groetsch Bandcamp releases (“Darkening Forest,” “Snow Diamonds”). This structure gives him the opportunity to flex his full range. Each track does its own distinct thing, which is usually alluded to in the titles—“Snow Diamonds,” for instance, vaporizes crystalline synth shards into an aerosol, while “Fireflies” sparkles with wonder. Yet each contributes to the album’s thrilling, frightening journey from day to night.
A rich evocation of an alien landscape, Dusk is filled with beauty and danger. There are no discernible voices across its eight tracks, but it still feels alive with chatter. The yearning puffs of electric piano on “Temple in the Mountains” are occasionally interrupted by an effect that sounds like a pterodactyl screaming across the sky. “The Road to Thrax” is full of low growling sounds that suggest fellow Portland producer Strategy’s vocal-distortion fantasias. Everything leads to “Mulch,” which closes the album out with six minutes of subterranean noise; its arrival feels inevitable, like the whole album has disappeared into pitch darkness.
Dusk is less emotionally stirring than 2020’s Swirlings, the previous Pulse Emitter album on Hausu Mountain, and only “Chrome Sky” comes close to duplicating the deep longing and sadness of Home Again and its sonorous title track. Yet maintaining a slight remove allows the album to achieve its effect of dwarfing the listener against the overwhelming vastness of its landscape. Groetsch’s blocky synth palette, reminiscent of early new-age masters like Iasos and Suzanne Ciani, helps in this regard. While a sound-design scientist like GAS might attempt a literal transposition of the sound of a darkening wood, Dusk’s limited tool kit posits an abstract idea of such a landscape and then lets the listener’s imagination fill in the blanks.
It’s a bit like an old monster movie whose shoddy effects are somehow more evocative than hyper-realistic CG, and indeed there’s something fundamentally old-fashioned about Dusk. Though it’s only being released on CD and cassette, its brisk runtime brings to mind early, vinyl-era ambient albums like Eno’s Apollo and On Land, as does its ease in transitioning between the prettiest and darkest poles of the artist’s sound. While many latter-day ambient albums sustain a single mood, those earliest entries in the genre were so charged with the possibilities of this new way of listening that they seemed unbound in the sensations they could evoke, flitting between incredible beauty and terror in the span of a few tracks. Dusk is alive with the same feeling of freedom.