Popular Problems is Cohen's second album in the past two years. As with 2012's Old Ideas, its best songs feel naked and hymn-like but are restrained by an underlying mystery—he sounds like he's telling you everything but he never actually tips his hand. The flat airhorn of a voice he used throughout the '70s has become eerily bottomless, the husk of another voice now gone.

Popular Problems

The story of latter-day Leonard Cohen is one of wry acceptance. Fleeced by a manager of his retirement savings between the mid-1990s and mid-'00s, he returned to the stage in 2008, 73 years old and nearly broke after four decades of hard work. The shows he played were better than they needed to be in order to get people to pay for them. At one that I saw in late 2012, he reminded me of a cat, drawing the audience in by pulling away, rolling over and showing his softer, playful side only to snap back into cool focus. It was the first time I had ever seen anyone over 70 skip, and in dress pants, no less.
Come to think of it, it's the kind of story you might hear in a Leonard Cohen song: the aging entertainer forced into the spotlight one last time just to make they money he's already earned, a cog in the same machine that once made him a star. "It's their ways to detain, their ways to disgrace," goes a line from 1974's "A Singer Must Die". "Their knee in your balls and their fist in your face/ Yes, and long live the state, by whoever it's made/ Sir, I didn't see nothing, I was just getting home late." In other words, "broke" is all the thanks most singers get.
Popular Problems is Cohen's second album in the past two years. As with the 2012 LP Old Ideas, its best songs feel naked and hymn-like but are restrained by an underlying mystery—he sounds like he's telling you everything but he never actually tips his hand. The flat airhorn of a voice he used throughout the '70s has become eerily bottomless, the husk of another voice now gone.
Cohen is still an impossibly cool figure, singing about states of yearning and distress with the confidence of someone who knows that they—like everything—will pass. Even when he sings in the first person, he is heatless, as though watching his own failures from a distant star. "Did I ever love you?" he asks at one point. "Does it really matter?" The music behind him is a strange, sterile take on country—a form known for its certainty and wisdom, repurposed for a meditation on doubt.
Like all of Cohen's albums, Popular Problems sounds slick but slightly off-kilter, like someone trying to imitate music they've read about but never actually heard. Where an artist like Bob Dylan seemed to use music primarily as an excuse for words and Van Morrison seemed distinctly to be the leader of a band, Cohen occupies a stranger space. His music over the years has been even more exploratory than his writing, changing style with the detached irreverence of a teenager breezing through her closet, from folk to lounge to ersatz disco and cabaret. The reminder here is that no matter how close Cohen seems to the truth, what he does is just another cheap show to keep the crowd entertained. Even in its starkest, most naturalistic moments, Popular Problems cannot—and does not want to—spare you its arsenal of perfect background singers and trumpets made of computer sounds.
Cohen has always had a remarkable way of making sadness sound triumphant and triumph sound sad. In a 2002 interview with Spin, he related a lesson he learned during his years studying Zen. "Roshi said something nice to me one time," he started. "He said that the older you get, the lonelier you become, and the deeper the love you need. Which means that this hero that you're trying to maintain as the central figure in the drama of your life—this hero is not enjoying the life of a hero. You're exerting a tremendous maintenance to keep this heroic stance available to you, and the hero is suffering defeat after defeat. And they're not heroic defeats; they're ignoble defeats. Finally, one day you say, 'Let him die—I can't invest any more in this heroic position.'" The best songs here—"Samson in New Orleans," "Born in Chains"—occupy that space: weary but optimistic, suffering but renewed.
Because Cohen is a thoughtful person on the edge of his 80th birthday, everyone seems to want to ask him about dying. "Naturally those questions arise," he said in a 2012 press conference. "But, you know, I like to do it with a beat." Which implies that his answers might be simple, but they aren't. "There is no God in heaven/ And there is no Hell below" goes the last verse of a song on Popular Problems called "Almost Like the Blues". "So says the great professor of all there is to know/ But I've had the invitation that a sinner can't refuse/ And it's almost like salvation; it's almost like the blues."
The idea being that heaven and hell are the same thing and you don't even have to leave earth to get there. A compelling thought, but nothing to pray on. And yet the performance is so contemplative and so certain. Maybe it's the Zen, which posits that change is permanent and our only choice is to accept the moment or become just another tragedy trying to force our way uphill. Half the time, it doesn't even feel like Cohen is singing songs—he's too busy with notes.


The Australian dream-pop artist’s second album widens her sparkly shoegaze into a brasher, more ambitious sound, locating the edge between noise and melody.

Giving the World Away

Harriette Pilbeam, who records under the name Hatchie, wants to make something clear: She writes more than just love songs. Don’t be fooled by the Australian dream-pop artist’s past work, which drifted in a gauzy haze of guitar and synths and relied on a revolving door of lyrical clichés—kissing the stars, staying true to your heart, etc. The pandemic caused Pilbeam to confront long-buried anxieties and insecurities, a process that made her question her future in music. Her second full-length album, Giving the World Away, explores these afflictions with an exacting, if not heavy-handed, touch, mushrooming her once sparkly shoegaze into a brasher, more ambitious sound.
With help from Dan Nigro (Olivia Rodrigo, Caroline Polachek), Jorge Elbrecht (Sky Ferreira, Japanese Breakfast), and Beach House drummer James Barone, Giving the World Away is a maze of fuzz and reverb, chugging guitars, airy synths, and delightfully weird percussion. The strongest moments on the album balance restraint and exaltation, like on “This Enchanted,” which takes house piano and slithering bass and builds it into a shoegaze anthem, its chorus drowning in distorted guitar and drums. Another standout, “Quicksand,” begins with a low-slung guitar riff that explodes into an ebullient electro pop hook. At its best, Giving the World Away locates the edge between noise and melody, carving out a pop core amid seemingly structureless arrangements.
The songwriting here is a stark improvement from past Hatchie projects, and compellingly surveys some of early adulthood’s most disorienting challenges: dependency issues, fear of commitment, the pain of seeing but not being seen. “Quicksand” offers a devastating insight into the loss of hope and optimism that comes with aging: “I used to think that this was something I could die for/I hate admitting to myself that I was never sure.” The giddy innocence of Pilbeam’s previous work feels like a distant dream; she’s nearing 30, staring at life with a more discerning eye, searching for meaning beyond a belief in soulmates and destiny.
Occasionally, the deluge of instrumentation grates. “Twin” ambles in sleepy melodies without release, while the album’s title track remains static from start to finish. The production is impressive, but it’s also a lot, and Pilbeam’s voice can get lost within the spacious set designs. And though the emotions are sophisticated, the lyrics tend toward on-the-nose observations that attenuate the tension: “Lost sight of who I’m supposed to be/But within the chaos I can see I’m not me,” she sings on “The Key.” The album hits harder when Pilbeam lets you feel the weight of her anxiety, but often she opts for a definitive tone that leaves little to the imagination.
Near the album’s end, on “Sunday Song,” Pilbeam’s gifts coalesce. The song breathes in a way few others on Giving the World Away do, a cathartic experience for a record obsessed with stuffing as many riffs and rhythms atop each other as possible. But here the production pares back and Pilbeam lands on a deftly complicated sentiment: “All the things you wish you hadn’t said/Sick of waiting for something heaven sent/Can’t you see all that I see in you?” Despite its flaws, Giving the World Away marks an exciting evolution for Hatchie—she still wants love, but now she also wants to dance, to feel, to find balance within life’s unending madness.


Thirty years after alt rock reshaped the mainstream, Evan Dando and co.’s major-label debut feels like the product of a bygone era—a snapshot of rock regionalism on its last legs.

Lovey

Just as Evan Dando’s long relationship with substance abuse began in earnest, the Lemonheads were swept up in the major-label slog to distill and globalize grunge music en masse. Atlantic Records took a chance signing the frenetic Boston punk band with 1990’s Lovey, a risk predicated on some local buzz and the beguiling allure of Dando’s cleft chin. The album set the mold for the group’s jangly, hard-edged sound through the 1990s and beyond, but when weighed against the blitzed hardcore of their three preceding LPs, Lovey feels tentative, like a prototype alt-rock aggregate targeted at drunk BU kids unhip to the burgeoning sound of Seattle.
Lovey arrived at the precipice of Dando’s celebrity bullshit, preceding his entanglements with Kate Moss and Johnny Depp and a well-documented drug habit. For that reason, it occupies a unique position in the Lemonheads’ catalog as their most notable pivot. Falling at the crossroads of rowdy college rock and commercial slacker rock, the album is a vapid vessel null of concept or premise, the tempered segue between the rabid chaos of their first three releases and the polished radio rock yet to come. When you look at the tracklist and see a song called “Stove,” guess what? It’s about a stove. Dig into the album’s Bleach-esque opener, “Ballarat,” and you’ll find a teenager’s fascination with Charles Manson. The wah-pedal grunge of “Lil Seed” is a callow ode to weed. There’s no greater point to be gleaned from these songs, but their indifference is familiar and endearing, a testament to alternative rock at its most blithely inconsequential.
Fire Records’ 30th anniversary 2xLP/CD reissue supplements the remastered album with a collection of interviews, unseen photos, and an additional disc with a scrappy live performance from Live at the Wireless, recorded in Sydney and broadcast by Triple J in July 1991. The accompanying book weaves an oral history documenting the Lemonheads’ gradual emergence in Boston through the late ’80s and includes accounts from ex-bandmates Jesse Peretz, drummer David Ryan, guitarist Corey “Loog” Brennan, and producer Paul Q. Kolderie. Spliced with Dando’s press-circuit interviews, these insights offer a strikingly candid look into his ascent to fame: the lost chapters of an irresistibly problematic man ambling down a path of reckless abandon.
There are only two unifying themes, the more pungent of which is the olfactory nuance of Budweiser and half-smoked Marlboro Reds; the second is the gruff, unadulterated presence of its author, his gravelly croon at his most melodic yet. The absence of co-songwriter and second lead singer Ben Deily following 1989’s Lick permitted Dando the space to diversify, which he does by name-checking Jesus on the crawling “Ride With Me,” a master template for every post-grunge band sniffing out a slot on Buzz Ballads. Even with a hammy guitar-hero performance on the protracted album closer “[The] Door,” the band feels closer to the Pacific Northwest melodrama of Dirt than to fellow Boston scensters Bullet LaVolta and Big Dipper.
As gleaned from the book’s narrative, Dando’s split influences present themselves unadorned. Back-end songs like “Left for Dead”' and “Come Downstairs” stem from the Bob Mould school of three-minute songs with 50 chord changes. He showcases his reverence for California drug guys with an amiable cover of Gram Parsons’ “Brass Buttons”; Live at the Wireless yields a similarly warmhearted performance of Big Star’s “Nighttime.”
Most people don’t know this, but Boston was the best city to start a rock band in the 1980s, back before its soaring real estate market relegated punk rock to the catacombs of Jamaica Plain and Allston, a time when the dissolution of Mission of Burma inspired a generation of kids to fill the gaping void. As is true with many of their contemporaries at that time, the Lemonheads were a guileless snapshot of rock regionalism on its last legs. At heart, the deluxe reissue of Lovey is a spiffy vestige of a bygone era, and if Dando managed to make any sort of statement with it, it’s how beneficial it can be to fuck around in your hometown before selling out.

Buy: Rough Trade
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California Nights layers the fuzz back on top of Bethany Cosentino's distinct voice for a radio-friendly take on '90s alt-rock—an attempt to stay part of the establishment as natural questions arise over the diminishing returns of the band’s core formula.

California Nights

As Voltaire said, if a Best Coast album named California Nights didn’t exist, it would be necessary to create one. This is the band’s third LP, following the Fade Away mini-album that aborted the attempt at repositioning Bethany Cosentino as a stripped-down singer-songwriter, as on 2012's The Only Place. Instead, California Nights layers the fuzz back on top of her distinct voice for a radio-friendly take on '90s alt-rock—an attempt to stay part of the establishment as natural questions arise over the diminishing returns of the band’s core formula.
Much was initially made about Cosentino's penchant for pot, even as much of the music on Crazy for You sounded relentlessly sunny in ways that being stoned often is not. Here, the tone is thicker. Producer Wally Gagel also helmed Fade Away, and California Nights is a natural extension; there are the familiar reference points of surf rock and garage rock, and the band occasionally heads in heavier directions. The title track and "Feeling Ok" find a midpoint between shoegaze and Sheryl Crow, the strangled reverb of "Sun Was High (So Was I)" taken to its well-produced conclusion. When she sings "I stay high all the time just to get by" on the former, the music envelops her thoughts like a bad trip. Meanwhile, she’s added faint notes of sophistication: There’s what passes for a bridge on the aggressively catchy "Heaven Sent", which is only one line repeated a few times as the music drops in and out in classic pop-punk stop-time, but enough to change up the verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure so ardently followed on previous records.
California Nights is a professional album: heavy-ish, filled with hooks, somewhere between "fast enough to dance" and "slow enough to sigh to while looking out of a window." There’s nothing with the ubiquitous charm of Crazy for You—no "Boyfriend" or "Our Deal"—but Cosentino's voice is bright, clear, and full of emotive sentimentality. As a lyricist, she remains a devout student of what Lester Bangs dubbed the Lou Reed "I walked to the chair/ Then I sat in it" school of lyrics; she expresses herself clearly. The nadir comes during "So Unaware", when she literally sings "What is life?/ What is love?"—the core question of many works of art, true, but usually they're explored rather than just stated. As usual with Cosentino, you'll either be infuriated by the simplicity or endeared by its earnestness.
Anyways, it's not like "She loves you, yeah yeah yeah" is featured on any AP English exams. It's easier to be annoyed when Cosentino lapses into rote sentiments, especially since her voice seems so sure of its rightness. "Jealousy" is addressed to those amorphous "haters," the bane of any successful person's existence, and offers the deeply uncomplicated observation that "girls will be girls and boys will be boys/ It's just the way it is." A warning sign goes up when you consider Cosentino is no longer a broke-ish slacker sitting on the couch with her cat and her bong. She's achieved a level of success that allows her to appear in whiskey ads and design her own Urban Outfitters clothing line, while ignoring the obvious political implications. And why shouldn't she? Anyone with a problem is only a hater.
At times, it seems her insistence on affectless slackerism is less a genuine expression than a cynical pose, aimed at ensuring she stays part of the establishment. As Drake will tell you, there's a lot of money in being fashionably moody. And yet for all the formal or ideological complaints, Cosentino remains remarkably capable of riffing on heartbreak, and the concomitant yearning. On "When Will I Change", she sings openly about what some would see as her self-absorption: "It's not that bad, and I have no reason to be sad/ But I find a way almost every day to stay this way." Well, it’s honest. If this is what Best Coast continues to give us after six years and three albums, you can either shrug it off or let the vibes carry you away.


On her second album, the Los Angeles singer uses her bluesy, soulful contralto to express a deep, almost ecstatic sense of loneliness.

Through and Through

What does it mean to say that a piece of music sounds like it came from another time? That a ghost or an ancient soul created it? That it favors tradition over modernity? That it sounds not algorithmic but somehow authentic (whatever that might mean)?
All of these statements are true of Baby Rose’s psychedelic soul album Through and Through. Yet the Los Angeles-based musician’s second album doesn’t merely sound like a holdover from another time; it might have come from another timeline altogether. It lives in the swimmy non-existence of lost futures: lifetimes lived only in hope and projection, crushes that never manifested into relationships, loves that never materialized into babies.
The album’s opulent production and heard-through-the-wall thump—as doctored alongside co-producer Tim Maxey—is reminiscent of that dream of the 2010s when the fantasy of wandering an empty mall alone, the sound of a popular song from one’s childhood reverberating through the dead space, was considered the most sublime aesthetic experience imaginable.
On Through and Through, Rose reimagines those empty malls as empty hearts, revisiting past relationships as a solitary figure, willing them into evergreen survival from a place of deep, ecstatic loneliness. “Dance with me like the very first time,” she sings with pleading vibrato on the downtempo “Dance With Me,” her voice beginning front and center in the mix, before Maxey pans her to the left, adding a heavy layer of reverb and creating an effect of distance as she begs her lost lover: “Don’t look behind you.”
Rose’s throaty, bluesy contralto is obviously influenced by Nina Simone’s—an artist she has covered alongside Robert Glasper and the Roots—though there’s some airiness and buoyancy to Rose’s graveness. If Simone’s voice could be likened to the rumbling of an engine, Rose’s is more like the flapping of a propeller. And unlike Simone, who tends to summon doleful gravitas, Rose always seems to land on a lighter note. She lingers over the words as though humbled by the lessons embedded within them. At the end of each line, she seems to come to a place of newfound wisdom and clarity. “Only love can revive us,” she sings on “Go,” the words hanging in the air like an unmanned parachute, dancing in the sky before landing in a field of fluffy bulrush.
It’s a feat for any instrument to compete with a voice like that, one so lived in and prodigiously ancient. The relationship between voice and music on Through and Through manifests as a kind of battle. Light, psychedelic embellishments grounded by deep grooves threaten to wash Rose away, but her oar of a voice pushes against the tide. It’s a dynamic that endows greater urgency to Rose’s fight to live out a lost future—a struggle she eventually loses.
On “Stop the Bleeding”, the album’s outlier and singular moment of total groundedness, Rose sounds at one with the piano—this time sounding up close, and not a room away—as she cries out a series of self-directed questions: “How do I stop? Stop the bleeding? … Stop repeating/The cycle?” The ballad functions as a real-time lesson, a moment of naked self-confrontation before the cycle repeats itself.
Only on “Water,” the penultimate song, do Rose’s voice and the songs’ arrangements reach a kind of détente. Rose slowly loses her presence, the gravel of her voice carried away in the haze of chorused guitar and giddy bass. She relaxes into a peaceful state of acceptance, relinquishing her sense of control, giving her oar to the tide. “Let’s be water,” she sings, the sound of waves pushing her towards the future, and dragging her into another time.


The Weather Station’s splendid six-song EP finds Tamara Lindeman moving from abject loneliness to impending marriage without ever becoming loud, fast or bothered. She possesses the unwavering patience of Bill Callahan’s later records, delivering every word and worry like she’s pondered it all into acceptance.

The Weather Station: What Am I Going to Do With Everything I Know

The climax comes so quickly and so quietly that you may never detect it at all. In the final minute of “Almost Careless”, the near-whispered lilt that closes The Weather Station’s splendid six-song EP, What Am I Going to Do with Everything I Know, Tamara Lindeman stumbles upon one of the most important questions she may ever ask, simply while walking to the park. During a momentary break in the gentle supporting rhythm, she remembers what she posed to the boy whose gloved hand she held: “‘What if we get married?’” she sings, her voice cracking into an audible smile as she climbs the final word’s syllabic slope. “I said it almost careless, as though it was nothing to me.” Lindeman, her sudden fiancé and the band behind her treat the peak with equitable nonchalance. He blushes and nods, she narrates, and they turn and walk, the pedal steel between her voice and the drums guiding the pair like a soft flashlight. Instead of Hallmark strings, Lindeman gives her tremendous moment the deference of restraint.
That same subtle and balanced approach defines all of What Am I Going to Do, a 17-minute record that finds Lindeman moving from abject loneliness to impending marriage without ever becoming loud, fast or bothered. The Weather Station’s terrific 2011 LP, *All of it Was Mine, *used similar understatement to offer an elliptical picture of love fracturing, with the changing seasons turning innocent sweetness into hard-won self-sovereignty. But these short and intertwined tunes portray the stepwise process into love. They seem, however, written and played from a distance, so that the butterflies and doubts have settled into a graceful, logical arc. Lindeman’s voice flits and cracks, peaks and valleys, comforts and cries, not unlike that of Joni Mitchell. But she possesses the unwavering patience of Bill Callahan’s later records, delivering every word and worry like she’s pondered it all into acceptance.
On opener “Don’t Understand”, she worries that she’s “irreversibly free,” or forever alone, as she tries to sleep on a stranger’s couch. But over drums brushed so softly and organ played so faintly you might mistake them for a ghost in the studio’s machines, she states the scene without mourning it—it’s only her reality. Only four tracks later, when things turn serious with the quiet boy who’s just moved in, Lindeman lists the worries that most young lovers encounter: Will it get boring? Will it get tough? Will it survive? Her perennially soft voice flirts with hardness here, a whiff of irritation coming through as he makes jokes when she wonders this stuff aloud. But still, she seems mollified by the relative stranger’s presence, her mind eased by his casual calm. In the last verse, two backup singers rise to meet Lindeman with country-soul harmonies, as if to say "everyone’s been here." Assured again, Lindeman lets the song fade into the resolve of a final, firm piano chord.
What Am I Going to Do actually stems from two sessions in separate countries, a testament to Lindeman’s consistent vision for these songs and her material at large. She cut “Don’t Understand” and “Seemed True,” the album’s romantic centerpiece, in North Carolina, with a crew that included members of Megafaun and Hiss Golden Messenger. The rest was made back in Ontario with Daniel Romano, the songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer who helmed All of it was Mine, too. But these tracks all feel uniform and effortless, like first takes captured in real-time by a band that has lived the story just like Lindeman. For songs so intimate, and performances so inward, such careful singularity feels like a remarkable feat.
Lindeman first came into the public eye as an actress, a biographical note that may help explain why her songs have always felt so filled with detail, like a perfectly planned shot in a meticulous production. On All of it was Mine, for instance, she surveyed her domain with a botanist’s eye—“muddy white petunias, lobelia trails blue-eyed”—and immortalized her grandmother’s virtues with one line: “It was good to sit together, on her couch of seafoam green.” But Lindeman’s earlier work felt like a life seen from some art-house distance, where questions about motivations and meanings remained in the spaces between shots. While What Am I Going to Do isn’t so obvious as to be pedantic or cloying, it embraces the familiar and linear in a way that Lindeman’s work never has. This time, she asks the questions for us, like why she’s fallen in love, if it’s moving too fast, or if this might end with rings and legal documents. And then she commits, for the first time on tape, to the unknown and ends the album with at least one answer—an accepted marriage proposal. “Then we turned across the park’s expanse, open fields of last year’s grass,” her voice confides, tracing her private joy, “heading back with one question less than we started out with.” It is, for now, The Weather Station’s very subtle peak.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 1995 album by the incalculably influential Florida death metal band, the most melodic and refined album of their career.

Symbolic

Like the horror section at the local video store, or the spot outside the mall where kids would cut class to smoke cigarettes, the music recorded by Chuck Schuldiner with Death between 1987 and 1998 exists as a safe haven. For those drawn to these seven studio albums by the pioneering death metal band, the music became a fortress to guard against the mainstream, a place where a lot of outcasts gathered to find their identity.
Because no two records featured the same lineup, and because each one built so steadily on the sound of the last, every era in Schuldiner’s brief career attracts its own set of devotees. There are those who stand by the early material, like 1987’s Scream Bloody Gore, with its weed- and beer-scented basement atmosphere. These were the songs Schuldiner wrote at his mother’s house in Florida after hearing the UK extreme metal band Venom and feeling “scared, blown away, amazed”—in that order. The music is bludgeoning and immediate. And the lyrics, from the moment they escaped his teenage mind, inspired death metal bands for eternity to summarize zombie attacks and the plots of slasher flicks in the goriest ways imaginable.
Others came on board with mid-era material like 1991’s Human, which traded violent thrills and thrashy riffs for more sophisticated interests. In these songs, Schuldiner, then in his mid-20s, took his first stabs at imagining what adulthood might look like beyond your general torture and zombie apocalypse. His lyrics explored more existential horrors, the everyday evil of emotional betrayal and misuse of power; he began playing with musicians like Cynic’s Sean Reinert and Paul Masvidal who took inspiration from jazz and progressive rock, accompanying the songs with spacier textures, in dazzling time signatures.
As the provocative, blunt-force metal that Death helped popularize in the ’80s was gaining an audience outside its loyal scene—with heavy bands signing to bigger labels, getting rotation on MTV, and, in the case of Cannibal Corpse, appearing in a blockbuster comedy—Schuldiner quickly lost interest. He was sensitive and soft-spoken, with a slight lisp and gentle Southern drawl, but he was also intense, impulsive, and unafraid to speak his mind—the kind of person you’d want on your side in an argument. He cycled through bandmates and bailed on tours, rallied against the media and burned bridges. Occasionally, his rebellion was more lighthearted. When he appeared at MTV’s Headbangers Ball in 1993 alongside peers donned in tees with pentagrams and illegible logos, he can be seen wearing a shirt with no text, just a few adorable kittens.
At the time of its release in 1995, it would have been difficult to predict the enduring, unifying appeal of Symbolic. To some fans, this melodic turn was a disappointment—neither as brutal as the early material nor as outwardly progressive as the recent stuff. To the world at large, it came and went, dwarfed by post-grunge and the oncoming wave of nu-metal, overshadowed by bigger sellers on Death’s new label, Roadrunner, like Machine Head and Sepultura. (Roadrunner attempted to promote the album alongside their other death metal releases in a blanket advertisement, which resulted in an angry phone call from Schuldiner, doing everything possible to avoid blending in with the scene.)
Schuldiner might have seemed confident, but he too struggled with what exactly this catchy, complicated music was supposed to be. Despite the tight structure and memorable refrain of a song like “Crystal Mountain,” the sound was too hard-edged to feel like straight rock music; and despite the dissonant riffs and vivid aggression of a song like “Misanthrope,” the band never stays in one place long enough to let you find the groove.
At this time, Schuldiner was growing frustrated with his singing voice—the element that bound together the disparate phases of his career and connects Symbolic most directly to other death metal bands at the time. Less guttural than what death metal vocals would become and more abrasive than the thrash metal that inspired him, Schuldiner’s instinctive voice is an inimitable texture against his music, with a whipping momentum, like fire tearing through piles of leaves. “I don’t know that he ever consciously thought to sing that way,” his mother, Jane Schuldiner, recalled of those early rehearsals in her basement after her son had dropped out of high school to pursue his dream of playing guitar in a metal band. “It just came naturally when he started singing and playing that kind of music.”
Schuldiner’s career is defined by the relationship between his ever-increasing skill as a musician and his unwavering vision. By Symbolic, he had become one of metal’s finest guitarists—someone whose playing summons a singular response, a feeling you can only get from hearing his records. So many of his riffs, like the one that arrives 45 seconds into the opening title track of Symbolic, seem to hurl themselves against the speakers, like someone backing up and repeatedly trying to kick down a door. He sought the same attack with his voice, and he often felt disappointed. “All the music is done,” he would announce to his bandmates, “now I have to ruin it with my vocals.”
Schuldiner spoke often about enlisting an actual singer for the band. His dream was Ronnie James Dio, whose operatic tenor helped elevate Black Sabbath and Dio classics into nightmarish hymnals. Schuldiner, in comparison, seemed to bark the lyrics, relying on repetition, echoing effects, and dramatic flourishes to mirror the growing dynamics of his writing. On Symbolic, he sometimes sounds more like the singer of a hardcore band, shouting through gritted teeth so you can register every word from deep within the thrashing crowd: “I don’t mean to dwell,” he screams in the opening lines, “but I can’t help myself.”
With Schuldiner’s vocals sanded down to skeletal bursts, the music on Symbolic was newly sprawling and surprising. He incorporates classical guitar into the ghostly outros of “Crystal Mountain” and “Perennial Quest,” giving the sense of a quiet, vulnerable landscape on the outer edges of these epics. Passing melodies from “Sacred Serenity” and “1,000 Eyes” have a sentimental pull like the score from an action film set in space. Without the clear verse-chorus structure of more traditional heavy music, even the most palatable death metal songs can feel like an amorphous revolving door of riffs: Schuldiner always took pleasure in finding new ways for his compositions to evolve, catching you off guard when you think you have them figured out.
His guitar solos often do what his vocals could not, acting as an extended hand to pull you into the complex thoughts and mixed emotions behind the words. In “1,000 Eyes” he describes “a newfound age of advanced observeillance” that sounds a little like life online in the 21st century, but his scorching leads are what makes you feel it: the paranoia, the instinct to burrow inside yourself, the dream of breaking free.
With every album, Schuldiner found a different group of musicians to complement his latest direction, and you can’t talk about Symbolic without talking about drummer Gene Hoglan. The Dark Angel virtuoso has jokingly credited himself with playing “lead drums” on the record, but it’s a testament to his gift as an accompanist that his playing—sometimes sounding as if he’s written a different part for each 15-second segment—never feels distracting or showy. Alongside bassist Kelly Conlon and guitarist Bobby Koelble, he finds a balance between technical skill and pure instinct that fits right within the world of Schuldiner’s songwriting.
“My hands are jazz, but my feet are metal,” Hoglan said at the time, speaking both to the thought behind his performances and the layers in Schuldiner’s songwriting. What Hoglan was literally referring to is the contrast between the blastbeats—a staple of extreme metal, with constant, undeterrable motion against the kick drum—and the cymbal work, which is lighter and trickier than what you might typically encounter in the genre. But you can also attribute his concept to Schuldiner’s songs themselves: an eruption below, a calm on the surface.
The concentration on this aspect of Schuldiner’s songwriting helps distinguish Symbolic from the rest of Death’s catalog and most death metal of its era. Plenty of bands have aspired to write riffs like the ones in “Zero Tolerance,” but few could dream of replicating the delicate, visceral thread connecting one part to the next. While classics from the era like Cannibal Corpse’s The Bleeding or Deicide’s Once Upon the Cross seem intentionally claustrophobic—relentless records that fill a small space with as much sound as possible—these songs constantly find ways to open themselves up. “I like to look my audience in the eyes,” Schuldiner once said of his live performances, how he tended to avoid the customary hair-in-the-face headbanging. On Symbolic, you can hear him gazing toward the crowd, trying, at every turn, to make a connection.
The sense of humanity is partially why Symbolic has endured as a death metal classic, an evergreen gateway to the genre Schuldiner was consciously trying to abandon. It is neither his most groundbreaking album nor his most technically impressive, but it is the one that makes the most room for newcomers, whose mysteries offer the most depth for repeated listens. In some ways, these songs trace a journey from the classic rock that Schuldiner grew up on toward the niche community he found himself leading as a young adult. When asked about the use of acoustic guitar throughout the record, he proudly cited inspiration from his childhood heroes Kiss—the band that first made him fall in love with the instrument.
Back then, music was a sanctuary for Schuldiner. His parents bought him a guitar as a coping mechanism after the death of his older brother, Frank, who was killed in a car accident. Chuck was 9 years old at the time, and, bored to tears at lessons trying to learn “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” found new inspiration once he plugged in. “The first time he played the electric guitar, it was as if a switch was turned on in him,” his mother recalled. “And it never turned off.” For much of his life, this intimate connection made the roadblocks he faced—bandmates who didn’t share his devotion, journalists who fed into rumors about his personal life, industry people glomming onto trends—feel unbearable, a grim corruption of something pure.
Schuldiner intended Symbolic to be the final album he released under the Death banner. He felt fed up with the genre, confined by its boundaries, and he saw this album as the culmination of his work to that point. The first step was to lose the band name, which now felt like an unfortunate tattoo from his youth. His next project would be called Control Denied, and he would finally enlist a vocalist who could sing melodic leads. Instead of following his instinct, however, Schuldiner was roped into making another Death album—the label was concerned it wouldn’t be able to market his music without the brand name—and his dream was put off a few years.
Before his death from brain cancer in 2002 at the age of 34, Schuldiner’s final releases were one last Death album—1998’s proggy, brilliant The Sound of Perseverance—and one album as Control Denied—1999’s underrated The Fragile Art of Existence. Each project built on aspects from Symbolic—its nuanced lyrics, sharper melodies, and refusal to be boxed in—and continued widening a path for other artists in the genre. To this day, Schuldiner remains a figurehead for heavy bands known for shapeshifting—from the totemic death metal of Philadelphia’s Horrendous to the astral projections of Denver’s Blood Incantation—while staying true to the genre’s initial mission of lawlessness, constantly challenging perceptions.
In the 2016 documentary Death by Metal, producer Jim Morris reveals that Schuldiner considered an alternate way forward during the sessions for Symbolic, which were longer and more elaborate than any of their previous albums. It was the first time they demoed material with an 8-track recorder, allowing the band to perfect their parts before heading to the studio. The goal was to refine each song, zeroing in on the most immediate qualities of Schuldiner’s writing. “How do you put more melody into his music? Well, you can’t do it with the guitars, he’s already really, really melodic,” Morris says. In response, Schuldiner tried a cleaner style with his vocals: “I’m like, ‘Oh my god, you can sing,’” Morris recalls. “You’re great!’”
With the timid excitement of brushing upon a friend’s secret, Morris suggests the two briefly imagined a different version of the album with Schuldiner singing in a more traditional style, but they never recorded any of it. It’s tantalizing food for thought, but in the end, their instinct was right. If Death’s previous work offered a blueprint for what the genre of death metal can be, then Symbolic offered a way to exist and evolve gracefully within its borders. There are plenty of albums where a band crosses the threshold: reaching for a wider audience and finding them, firing on all cylinders and ascending to the next level. Symbolic is something rarer: a visionary artist desperate to push forward, raging against his limitations until it sounds a little like celebration.


The Atlanta icon releases another hour of music rendering tortured hedonism with painterly detail, meticulous production, and melancholy melody.

High Off Life

Future’s legacy is secure: as one of the most influential artists of the past decade, he’s managed to conquer the streets and the charts, crafting a sound that reshaped not just rap but pop music. All the while, he’s maintained a pace that few of his peers could match—depending on how you count, he’s released somewhere between two and three dozen full-lengths in the decade since he first started calling himself Future. In the years since his creative hot streak peaked with DS2, he’s continued releasing music at a steady clip. But where Future spent the first half of the 2010s relentlessly innovating, he’s been content to spend the latter half tinkering with his signature sound.
High Off Life doesn’t buck this trend in any significant way. It’s another hour of music that renders tortured hedonism with painterly detail, meticulous production, and melancholy melody. There are exotic cars painted in candy-colored hues, designer sandals worn casually, women treated as if they were disposable, drugs sold and consumed. There are songs that glitter like a suitcase full of diamonds, songs that could soundtrack a crime procedural, and songs that will sound great when reduced to basslines blaring out of passing cars. Except for the previously released singles that pad the end of the record in keeping with industry norms, High Off Life is better-paced and sequenced than most of Future’s recent releases—the whole thing seems to glide by frictionlessly.
In interviews, Future spoke about his previous album, The Wizrd, as a capstone for his career up to that point, setting the stage for a coming pivot. Sadly, High Off Life does not represent this major shift, though we do get a few new ideas. The errant guitar strums and saloon piano on “Too Comfortable” draw out Future’s inner bluesman, while on the Bezos-baiting “Trillionaire,” he goes bar-for-bar with YoungBoy Never Broke Again, discovering the sort of chemistry with his offspring that normally eludes him. On “All Bad,” Future visits the cartoony world of Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake, and it’s genuinely refreshing hearing the normally morose rapper have this much fun.
That said, Future is still at his best when mining the depths of inner turmoil. On the Travis Scott-featuring “Solitaires,” Future adopts an unhinged flow and jokes about needing a psychiatrist. On “Ridin Strikers,” he owns up to his reputation as a dirtbag, admitting he “won’t enjoy life if it ain’t toxic.” But at the album’s end, we finally hear what sounds like a breakthrough. “Accepting My Flaws” comes spilling out of Future in one long verse, like a confession. Over a spectral choir sample, he acknowledges struggles with addiction, tries to shake off a worldview shaped by the streets, and stands in awe of a partner willing to accept him, flaws and all. "I’ve been suffering withdrawals, missing out on real love,” he admits. It sounds like he’s done running from himself.
During a deadly pandemic that has much of the world on lockdown, the title High Off Life can feel a bit flippant. It could have been worse: Future apparently scrapped plans to title the album “Life Is Good,” after the Drake collaboration that finds a home here as a tacked-on single. To his credit, Future has provided some context around the title (“So many tragedies and catastrophes and everything is going on in the world. And you want to enjoy life, as long as you have it,” he recently told XXL) but even so, his tone-deafness is unsurprising. His appeal has always lay in an ability to craft a world that’s not just self-contained, but airtight. Might Future still dramatically reinvent himself? He’s certainly pulled it off before. But as High Off Life suggests, perhaps the more impressive feat would be reckoning with what he’s already become.


The Pittsburgh noise-pop experimentalists come into their own on a short yet richly textured album full of fuzzy melodic hooks and beguiling left turns.

Girl With Fish

Half a decade or so ago, the electric guitar received a wellness check. As sales plummeted and legacy manufacturers slogged through financial straits, concerned parties blamed the popularity of pop, hip-hop, and electronic music, genres more often built from synthesizers and drum machines. Even Paul McCartney chimed in, telling The Washington Post in 2017 that young people lacked “guitar heroes.”
Safe to say that the four members of Feeble Little Horse, most of whom were still in high school at that point, were not tuned into this conversation. The Pittsburgh noise-pop band’s second record, Girl With Fish, speaks to the idea that a younger generation of musicians would recognize the confluence of guitar music and digital sounds as a doorway rather than a death knell. It’s a familiar story, but Feeble Little Horse’s wall of influences—textured shoegaze guitars, exacting pop hooks, idiosyncratic production flourishes—has been wheat-pasted with such vim that it feels fresh and, just as importantly, emotionally resonant.
Feeble Little Horse began as a collaboration between guitarists Ryan Walchonski and Sebastian Kinsler while both were students at the University of Pittsburgh. Jake Kelley joined on drums for 2021’s Modern Tourism EP and Lydia Slocum rounded out the band later that year, signing on as a bassist and lyricist during the hasty recording sessions for the band’s full-length debut, Hayday. Built around sticky melodies and samples both homemade and borrowed—though many of these have since been removed for copyright reasons—the record gleefully jumped from idea to idea.
Hayday’s nimble shapeshifting was prompted in part by a shrinking window of opportunity: With graduation day looming for some of its members, the band imagined there wouldn’t be another chance. But instead of becoming a brief blip in the annals of equine rock, Feeble Little Horse acquired word-of-mouth buzz that encouraged them to stick together. (A deal with Saddle Creek, home to experimentally ambitious contemporaries like Palm and Spirit of the Beehive, couldn’t have hurt either.) Girl With Fish solidifies the notion that Feeble Little Horse’s creative alchemy, born in college dorm rooms and nurtured at DIY basement shows, is a force deserving of further exploration. Remotely self-recorded and produced across various Pittsburgh apartments, its 11 songs are oddball bursts of imagination, whimsy, and discord.
The early minutes of Girl With Fish work overtime to establish the band’s flair for fuzzy pop hooks. The spiky adrenaline of “Tin Man” is especially satisfying, a poetic takedown of emotionally impaired manipulators driven by Kelley’s metallic percussion and a freaky little riff. “I gotta go ’cause you flash sadness,” Slocum sings, a guttural “huh” punctuating the breath between verses. “I found you all rusted and leaky/Took him apart and I found nobody.” The tight opening gallop spotlights the lyrics, abstract fragments from which the band launches equally beguiling arrangements. One of her most delicious lines arrives early on “Freak,” a fuzzy appeal to a crush’s physique: “How can you be satisfied/She’s 5'1" and you’re 6'5".”
While Slocum’s lyrical contributions to Hayday arrived at the eleventh hour, on Girl With Fish she now writes with greater confidence, pondering depression, lust, and most strikingly, religion. “Wet bed sheets she bled from the pressure/Plastic Catholic priest watched from the dresser,” goes one haunting verse of “Steamroller.” There’s a grungy charm to her scenes, complemented by the deadpan sweetness of her singing voice. The contrast works particularly well on “Station,” an eloquent, if simplistic, snapshot of loneliness that unfolds atop delicate harmonies and a sound that begins as if cranked out of a haunted music box and expands into a lush revelation. Similarly intriguing is “Sweet,” which opens with a roundhouse kick of blown-out guitars and crashing drums before recoiling into a tightly interlocking riff. Alternating lines, Kinsler and Slocum sketch out a scene that walks the line between innocent and ominous: “I’m only down the street/Can’t keep him out of me/Inviting me to leave/See it in everything.”
At just under a half-hour, Girl With Fish goes for the sprint without ever feeling rushed or overstuffed. Part of this balance is due to Kinsler’s deft digital finagling, which ties together the band’s more eccentric impulses with their melodic foundations. One highlight is “Heaven,” which begins as a downcast lullaby before mutating into avant-alien, as if the band were slurped up mid-song by a psychedelic toad. “Paces” takes the opposite approach, opening with jagged pitched-and-chopped guitars that gradually loosen into dreamy bliss with shades of Duster. Kinsler has cited “overproduced indie rock” artists like Sorry and Spirit of the Beehive as influences, but his style is equally indebted to pie-in-the-sky producers like Pi’erre Bourne, whose tag was sampled in the original version of Hayday’s “Termites.”
But whatever wizardry is happening with the electronics is secondary to the collective intuition that guides Feeble Little Horse’s most mischievous instincts. Girl With Fish hits its apex on “Pocket,” a dynamic late-album highlight that recalls the freewheeling jangle of Swirlies. “All my kisses and hugs/Are burning a hole/In my pocket,” Slocum sings with a brittle sweetness. “Do I make you cringe?” But just as the twee insinuations suggested by the band’s name—that of a dopey, knock-kneed pony—appear to come to fruition, “Pocket” slips into delicate psychedelia and warped tape experimentation. Midway through, around where Slocum sings about using her “imagination to sin” and being metaphorically fucked by “a dead man,” “Pocket” does a 180. Suddenly, Slocum is screaming, the band pulls the pin out of the grenade, and just like that it’s gone: one of many magic tricks on an album that leaves you mesmerized and wanting more.


A new comp from a band whose stature has only grown in its absence finds Blur reshaping their identity and favoring the artier end of their catalog.

Blur: Midlife: A Beginner's Guide to Blur

Midlife: A Beginner's Guide to Blur

At first glance, Midlife seems like one of those hilariously ambitious compilation titles that bands use when they don't want to admit the game is up-- think every group in its commercial and/or creative decline that calls a best-of "volume one." In Blur's case, the band's four original members have recorded exactly three new songs together this decade, and despite a recent run of successful reunion shows in the UK, they announced last week that they'd not be making new music as a quartet anytime soon.
And judging by the tracklisting, they could have called this Midlife Crisis, as the compilation-- which eschews many of the group's biggest hits and best-known songs for album tracks-- finds them attempting to reshape their identity, reaching for the dronier, artier end of their catalog. As a bonus then, this comp actually serves a pair of actual purposes: To give new listeners interested in the group as an artistic rather than commercial force a nice, career-spanning entry point, and to give those only familiar with the band through its hits (as collected on 2000's Best of Blur or, if you're in Europe, heard on the radio throughout the 1990s) a deeper and wider look at its work.
Still, the first thing any fan will notice is what's missing: Eight of the 18 songs from Best Of have been axed, including key singles "Country House", "There's No Other Way", "On Your Own", "End of a Century", and "To the End"-- the latter two most likely so the 25-song set doesn't repeat too much of Blur's biggest album, Parklife. Chirpy third-tier singles "Charmless Man", "Bang", and "Sunday Sunday" are also absent but unmissed.
So this compilation can be seen as a more Americentric look at Blur's career, which makes some sense as they still have a lot of fanbase growth potential in the States. Few bands from the 90s increased their stature this decade among America's self-identifying indie set as much as Blur-- and this at a time when, thanks to globalization and the internet, the caché of romanticizing other nations as exotic or different largely dwindled. Anglophilia in the States was once the province of those willing to take the time and effort to look outside their immediate surroundings, and with that came the attendant feelings of acting or thinking differently from one's peers that often fuels cultural choices, especially in indie circles. Nowadays, the UK feels and acts a hell of a lot more like, well, the U.S., and the internet has made the practice of looking in on a band from Britain the same as checking out one from Brooklyn. So while it's no surprise that Blur have become more central to American indie listeners' lives this decade, it's not due to intensifying their position wthin niches and subcultures but simply drawing in larger numbers of people.
Blur leader Damon Albarn certainly embraced his Anglo nature at a few junctures in his career-- particularly after a 44-date, morale-sapping 1992 trek around America supporting the warmed-over Madchester of their debut LP, Leisure. The tour left the group frayed and, above all, determined to reject the dour earnestness of grunge. At the same time, Suede became the darlings of London indie by exaggerating many of the basic tenants of British guitar pop-- wit, glamour, artifice. In short, everything grunge wasn't.
With their distaste for America sharpened, Blur played along, going all in on what was soon to be called Britpop, starting with their second full-length, Modern Life Is Rubbish-- the first of three albums in a so-called British trilogy that also included 1994's Parklife and 1995's The Great Escape. Fully embracing the UK's art-pop history, Blur's London- and UK-centric records made them superstars. Less celebratory than they at first seem, these records are teeming with despair and dripping with disdain. From Phil Daniels' title-track monologue to discouraging traffic reports to suicidal thoughts on the Cliffs of Dover, all was not well.
Parklife's low point is also the band's artistic peak: The tempestuous, atmospheric "This Is a Low", with Albarn's reading of the English shipping report over Coxon's backward guitar was an admission that this once-dominant island nation was increasingly sheltered and inward. There is a sort of spectral finisterre quality to the song's tracing the outline of England by boat, and because those shipping reports-- news from the end of the world-- used to sign off the BBC's nightly radio broadcasts, the song almost sounds as if it could be the nation's lullaby. The sun once never set on the British Empire; this song seems to indicate that it now did so nightly-- in a haze of depression and doubt.
It's fitting then that Midlife includes not only the celebratory ("For Tomorrow"), the heavily Anglo-coded ("Parklife"), and the snarky ("Girls & Boys"), but also "This Is a Low" and other nods to the diversity of these albums, chief among them The Great Escape's "He Thought of Cars" (arguably their most underrated song), Modern Life's "Blue Jeans" (a paean to mundanity) and "Advert" (like "Girls & Boys", a riff on consumer and leisure culture), and Parklife's "Badhead" (an odd substitute here for the record's more well-known relationship-splitting soundtrack, "To the End").
Despite the cravenness with which it seemed Blur-- Albarn and bassist Alex James, in particular-- sought and reveled in fame, this portion of their career is dominated by songs about pre-millennial tension, the dangers of conspicuous consumption, and social changes regarding shifts in technology and communication. In retrospect these prescient sentiments are the strongest and most compelling threads of their mid-90s work; rather than celebrate Britain with knees-up Mockneyisms, they often painted real warnings about a nation quickly being engulfed in obsessions with consumer and celebrity culture. In the years after World War II, America's exportation of such culture was seen as powerful, endearing, the sign of an emergent nation that would dominate the second half of the century as Britain once did. By the 90s, however, Blur had correctly identified the U.S./UK axis as perpetually spoiled and distracted and these themes often dominated their songs. But without the moaning and brooding of peers like Radiohead, Tricky, or Pulp, the messages were often glossed over.
Stardom, it turned out, left Blur fractured, with Coxon-- a riot grrrl devotee and dyed-in-the-wool indie kid-- particularly adrift. His torment was poked at by his more jovial bandmate Alex James, who offered jokes like, "What's 50 ft. long and has no pubic hair? The front row of a Blur concert." By the time the group needed to film a video for late 1995 single "The Universal" (also included here), the promo couldn't even hide Coxon's dissatisfaction-- in almost every shot he is absent, sitting on the ground, or barely participating.
Rather than split the group, Coxon's sensibilities instead found root in the band's music, and their next two albums-- 1997's Blur and 1999's 13-- ironically displayed an increased interest in lo-fi and other strands of American indie music, as well as totems of 1970s art-pop such as dub, krautrock, even free jazz and prog. And it was during these years that Blur's fame and reputation in the U.S. swelled, thanks to the endearing "Coffee & TV" video and the arena sports-ready "Song 2". (Mythbuster: Despite Blur being commonly called U.S. one-hit wonders, "Song 2" was the third-highest charting single of their career here, behind "There's No Other Way" and "Girls & Boys".)

Those LPs are sparsely represented here, however. The two big moments listed above, the gospel-tinged global hit "Tender", and UK No. 1 "Beetlebum" are present as expected, but beyond that group only two additional songs from each album are included-- the best of which are "Trimm Trabb", an excellent example of 13's engaging sprawl, and Blur's "Death of a Party", which now sounds like a proto-Gorillaz song.
Early in the recording of 2003 LP Think Tank, Coxon finally left the band. The resulting record finds Blur in a strange space-- neutered without their primary instrumental force, caught between their pop impulses and Albarn's growing embrace of non-Western sounds, and generally disturbed over the Bush/Blair administrations' failures. Three songs here make the cut, highlighted-- not surprisingly-- by Coxon's sole contribution, "Battery in Your Leg".
With hindsight, it's no surprise that Blur's star has shone so brightly again this decade in their absence. Despite the cries about careerism, they rarely settled into one spot for long, and even when they were correctly perceived to have done so-- about one half of The Great Escape really is a Parklife retread-- they were still spreading their collective wings on album tracks and B-sides. (Indeed, the great irony of Blur's second decade is that Albarn, once the prince of Britpop, has spent the past 10 years becoming a 21st century David Byrne, a sharp, respectful pan-global figure through which many U.S. and UK listeners have stepped into multiple strains of African music, Arabic music, Jamaican music-- even Chinese opera.) Whether or not they continue to tour, record again, or really are calling it quits this time, the distance between their years of tabloid fame (and sometimes punchable ubiquity in the UK) and today has stripped away a lot of preening and the press and left their legacy enriched only by their music. Unlike a lot of rock's image-conscious genre-hoppers that music is sturdy, sometimes whipsmart, and endowed with more cracks and crevices and corners in which listeners can become lost than they're often given credit.


One of indie's best post-Animal Collective bands enlists the Field, Justin Broadrick, High Places, and others to remix the songs from their 2009 LP.

Bear in Heaven: Beast Rest Forth Mouth Remixed

Beast Rest Forth Mouth Remixed

Of all the bajillions of post-Animal Collective Brooklyn synth-rock bands, Bear in Heaven are maybe the simplest, the most economical. Like all the other bands in that scene, they traffic in hazy, faraway memories and languid longing. Unlike all those other bands, they do it in as few notes as possible, getting in and getting out, leaving you with their basslines reverberating around in your head. Melodically, they keep things as direct as possible: big choruses, propulsive beats, very few wasted moments. In a way, they belong to this whole zoned-out landscape the same way the Cars were a new-wave band. They're classic-pop types happy to dress their shameless, timeless hooks up in the flavor of the day. And in a lot of ways, that makes them ideal remix material.
At this point, we almost don't have to mention how ridiculous it is for these indie rock remix albums to exist. When you round up 10 remixers to play around with one band's output, you're putting together a full-length that, by nature, is going to lack a sense of flow or cohesion. And when you insist that these remixers take on every song on the original album, you're further ensuring a mediocre product. Not every song on Bear in Heaven's great 2009 album Beast Rest Forth Mouth, after all, is on that "Lovesick Teenagers" level; virtually every album ever made has a filler track or five. The best we can hope for from these records is a reasonable, well-curated dance-music compilation with a few unifying threads, and that's basically what we have here.
This particular remix album can claim better existence-justification than most, since it's being sold as a bonus disc on a Beast Rest Forth Mouth reissue rather than as a standalone. It's also a curious little artifact: The rare remix album where the net result is, by and large, less dancefloor-ready than the original album being remixed. Beast Rest isn't exactly a dance album, but it does boast some big, physical grooves; the band has enough disco pedigree that its been covering Lindstrøm and Christabelle's "Lovesick" live lately. But on this remix album, they've recruited a roster of remixers who don't seem particularly interested in housing these tracks up much. Arty club types like the Field and the Hundred in the Hands do show up, but they share equal time with leftfield picks like diffuse exoticists High Places and space-metal mind-expander Justin K. Broadrick. So while it's as spotty as any other remix record, it's at least spotty in interesting ways.
There are some severe lowlights here, like Epstein's smudgy, aimless ruination of "Casual Goodbye" and Brahms' obnoxiously blippy, unimaginative pillage of "Fake Out". But the better remixers here seem to realize that they're dealing with something special. Bear frontman Jon Philpot's voice is a keening, otherworldly tenor that reminds me of Barry Gibb at times, and only the shittiest remixers here bury that voice in effects. Most of them know better. Even the Field, who loves to chop his samples up into unrecognizeable shards only to reveal them at track's end, leaves Philpot relatively intact, letting him flit through the usual slow pulse and keyboard fogbanks. It was bold of Bear to entrust "Dust Cloud", one of their prettiest songs, to a denizen of darkness like Broadrick, but his take works because he treats it like the tenderest moment of a Jesu track, piling on the layers of stretched-out guitars without obscuring the central melody.
But the best remix here is the one that might be even more straightforward than the original track. Pink Skull build on the wounded-kid romanticism of "Wholehearted Mess" by creating a towering synth-disco jam underneath it. The thudding bassline and rippling keyboards and relentless hi-hats interlock perfectly, building and building into a moment of catharsis that disappears too soon. Nine more like this and we'd have a real album on our hands.


The Hotelier's debut, written when the band members were between the age of 16 and 18, proves that even in their earliest days, they were an unusually theatrical and ambitious punk rock band—these are songs you want to act out while singing.

It Never Goes Out

When Christian Holden sang, "My younger years were something, but that isn’t my life" on the Hotelier’s Home Like NoPlace Is There, most listeners had little reason to think that the line was autobiography. By the time Holden arrives to that line on "Housebroken", he’s shifted perspectives from a quizzical, concerned narrator to a dog that’s actually a person that’s actually a metaphor for the part of ourselves that legitimizes societal complacency. More importantly, a good number of people who heard the Hotelier’s breakthrough LP had no idea its predecessor, It Never Goes Out, even existed. And, "My younger years were something, but that isn’t my life" more or less sums up the fraught relationship the Hotelier have with their debut—while it’s a strong record whose songs are still included in their live sets, they’re just barely able to recognize the people who made it.
In a literal sense, the Hotelier did not make It Never Goes Out. The Hotel Year did. Moreover, the record was written when the band members were between the age of 16 and 18, living at home and struggling to be heard. After digitally self-releasing the record, the band signed to Mightier Than Sword, a punk label which Holden has maligned as predatory and underhanded at worst and defunct at best. While it’s reasonable to see the reissue of a four-year old album as a victory lap after HLNPIT’s out-of-nowhere success, Tiny Engines is also ensuring that people can actually own a physical copy of It Never Goes Out for the first time.
Heard again, It Never Goes Out does sound like the product of its environment, and those arriving to this record in 2015 will likely be startled by the youth of its creators—the word "buttface" is used in two different songs. Thematically, It Never Goes Out is guided by the most teenaged, punk perspective in existence: rejecting the expectations of middle-class suburbia and realizing the capacity for your own disillusion and disapproval. Holden’s tools are rudimentary here: not just Beatles ("Lonely Hearts Club") and the Smiths ("Title Track (There is a Light)") references, but some of the most common ones. Walmart and Hallmark are castigated for co-opting love. Volumes of Nietszche and Thoreau are namechecked. Holden sneers, "We’re all actors" and the opener states "Our Lives Would Make A Sad, Boring Movie". Earnest, blowtorch-intense convictions like these are something of an occupational hazard for a young punk band, and when It Never Goes Out isn't skirting cliche, it's embracing it with a bear hug.
But these songs power through any sophomoric tendencies because even in their earliest days, the Hotelier were an unusually theatrical and ambitious punk rock band—these are songs you want to act out while singing. "An Ode to the Nite Ratz Club" and "Title Track (There Is a Light)" in particular are fully-formed Hotelier compositions that allow Holden’s rangy, expressive vocals free rein. They have already figured out how group chants and guitar solos can help "anti-bro" sentiments play well in a gym, a trait that distinguishes the band as the only mosh-pit/group-hug facilitators to rival Titus Andronicus and Japandroids over the last few years.
That said, It Never Goes Out is a debut that registers more deeply in retrospect knowing what it leads to, particularly when it hints at what might have inspired HLPNIT’s most cathartic moments. During "An Ode to the Nite Ratz Club", Holden and a friend bond while committing petty, destructive acts around a construction site, "Until the night when it got way too serious/ And you showed me your damaged wrists...And if I had only known that it would be the last time we'd be on that level with one another/ I would have never let you go." It was a startling revelation then; three years later, it’s a possible connection to the suicides explored on "Dendron" and "Your Deep Rest". The album rides out on a glorious, call-and-response blaze, and it conveys a sweetness the Hotelier may never recapture. Four years later, it will always stand as the best album of the Hotel Year, the promising, awkward and strident band who labeled their music the work of "devotional kids".


Five albums in, Future Islands are beyond reinvention. Instead, they tap into the emotion that runs deep under their synth-pop, and the results are more cathartic and devastating than ever.

The Far Field

Three years later, everyone is still talking about Samuel T. Herring’s dancing. If the details of indie rock’s most beloved fairytale have somehow escaped you, in March 2014, Future Islands performed their song “Seasons (Waiting on You)” on “Letterman.” Vibrating with intensity, Herring beat his chest, growled, and bobbed like the sneakiest featherweight in a heartfelt display that went viral and minted the Baltimore trio’s fortunes. The cult band became a fiercely in-demand live act—they played their 1000th show while on the Singles tour, and recently said that they could still be touring that record if they wanted to. The accidental origins of Herring’s dance came in 2004, when a car ran over his foot before a show. By taking this glorious accident primetime, you can’t help but wonder if he’s slightly shot himself in it, too.
Becoming public property on your fifth album is a tricky proposition—harder, possibly, than the so-called difficult second album after a breakthrough debut. By Singles, much of Future Islands’ fundamental development was behind them. The jittery mania of their 2008 debut Wave Like Home had smoothed into starry-eyed synth-pop melodrama, where New Order’s bass lines met the pop fantasias of OMD and A-Ha. As Future Islands reached maturity, their fanbase ballooned on the back of a caricature and a single. How do you move on from that? Do you stay warm in the relatively secure spotlight? Or do you twist away and risk losing the more fair-weather elements? How many bands even take creative leaps 14 years after hopping in a van together, as they first did as Art Lord & the Self - Portraits? The Far Field, Future Islands’ fifth album, skews towards the former.
If Singles stepped up to meet the world, The Far Field mostly shrinks at its gaze. Future Islands have talked about the exhaustion and doubts that arose on their long tour, and this record’s insular focus plays like a protective shield. The scaffolding remains, but the upholstery is threadbare. Though the sound is familiar, the structures are less bombastic and their former gleam is somewhat muted. And as he agonizes over the legacy of two failed relationships—one recent, one canonical—Herring sounds utterly defeated. Although their circumstances are different, his forlorn performance recalls that of Nick Cave on Skeleton Tree and the unbearable sadness of diminished titans. While it doesn’t break much new musical ground, and plays against Future Islands’ reputation for excess, The Far Field’s breathtaking sorrow is transformative.
The album takes more than its name from a poem by American writer Theodore Roethke. (Future Islands’ 2010 record In Evening Air is also named after one of his works.) Herring has replaced his simple lyrical scheme—sun/moon, day/night—with knottier, more poetic lines. Sometimes they’re too much. “No lack of ‘wouldn’t’ could be my undoing/No lack of trying/No lack of sighing, ‘loo,’” he rasps on the despondent “Aladdin,” kind of proving his point. Yet his grandiose phrasing conveys the desperation he feels as he grapples with lost relationships—and more so, with what it means to live with longing and regret at his core. “Is this a desperate wish for dying, or a wish that dying cease?” he asks no one in particular on “Cave,” letting Gerrit Welmers’ synth wash over his question. “The fear that keeps me going and going and going/Is the same fear that brings me to my knees.” Simply put, on the hurtling “Ran,” “What’s a song without you/When every song I write is about you?”
Herring grieves, loses faith, and flounders across The Far Field, and nowhere more so than on “Through the Roses,” the album’s emotional peak. He has candidly referred to it as “a suicide song,” written on a long drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains. “It just hit me in that moment,” he told Mojo, “this great sense of loneliness. I’d reached all my goals but all I found was the same loneliness.” He plots the distance between his joyous public persona and private sorrow, and exposes the sadness behind the spectacle: “I’m scared,” he sings, his voice cracking. “That I can’t pull through.” As “the clutch of nothing, the curse of wanting takes me whole,” he contemplates cutting his wrists. Herring has always lucidly understood the band’s appeal—that his unabashed exuberance allows their audiences to let out their repressed emotions, too. The naked pain of “Through the Roses” is both a beautiful song, and a profound gesture of trust and generosity from Herring. “But we can pull through together, together, together,” he insists at the end, and you believe him.
The mood lightens in The Far Field’s second half as Herring does his best to move on. A impish, glassy rhythm peps up “North Star,” and on “Candles,” Future Islands try something totally different—a dubby yacht rock number that sounds almost comically seductive, but finds Herring serving up one of his quintessentially moony tributes. It works perfectly. “Baby I know,” he croons like a regular lounge lizard, “a little candle like you don’t deserve the hurt you’re going through.” And while it’s sort of a shame that Future Islands didn’t fill The Far Field with 12 songs as gorgeous and immediate as “Shadows,” the sadness that came before only makes Herring’s duet with Debbie Harry all the more wonderful. Hearing his voice age and tremble throughout the record gives it gravitas. Hearing Harry, at 71, sound wise and saucy and full of promise makes its hopefulness seem real. “These old shadows parade you like a fool!” she exclaims, trying to lure him back into the light.
Future Islands could easily have become single-trick jesters after “Seasons,” but The Far Field finds salvation in tragedy. Speaking with The New York Times recently, Herring said that he hadn’t yet worked out dance moves for this album. “It’s been difficult,” he said. “Hopefully people aren’t bummed out, like, ‘Where’s the new thing?’” You’d hope, for an album this tender, that this time their presence alone will be enough.


On II, the Toronto band Metz still draw most of their inspiration from turn-of-the-'90s post-hardcore and the Nirvana albums on either side of Nevermind, and they still believe three-and-a-half minutes is about as long as any song has the right to be.

II

In the run-up to II—the sophomore set from Toronto noisemakers Metz—frontman Alex Edkins promised three things: "We are not going to clean up our sound, we are not going to hire a big producer, we are not going to try to write a radio song." True to his word, II is another snarling beast of a record, 10 more all-lunging, all-screaming anti-anthems crammed into another chaotic, cloistered half-hour, every inch as grotty and combustible and unfriendly as its predecessor. Once again produced by Holy Fuck's Graham Walsh and engineered by Alex Bonefant, II is a refinement, not a reinvention: if you liked Metz, well, have another.
Metz spent five years honing their considerable strengths—Edkins' caustic fretwork and vocal agita, Hayden Menzies and Chris Slorach's stampeding low-end—before unleashing their self-titled debut. And, on II, they seem to feel no particular need to tinker around with what got them here. They still draw most of their inspiration from turn-of-the-'90s post-hardcore and the Nirvana albums on either side of Nevermind, and they still believe three-and-a-half minutes is about as long as any song has the right to be. The terse II comes in a smidge less rigid than its predecessor, a shade or two darker, a touch more physical. Not that you'll notice; once the bassline of opener "Acetate" takes hold, for 30 short minutes, your thoughts become a smear of white. These songs are not "catchy" by any traditional metric; they don't so much get stuck in your head as get lodged in your skin.
Metz take great pains to avoid your standard verse-chorus-verse structures, and II, even more than the debut, downplays the traditionally "songier" aspects of these songs for a series of weaponized strikes. Still, beyond a few drop-outs and punch-ins, these songs all seem to gnash about in a fairly similar fashion. Hayden Menzies' bull-in-a-China-shop drums are unrelenting, but they rarely push too far past their original tempo; Edkins talks his way through a few of these verses, but he's every bit as likely to start off in a full-on wail, and his riffs, while bludgeoning from the get-go, never seem quite sure how to up their own antes.
All of this makes the first 20 or so seconds of any Metz song roughly as thrilling as the last 20, which gives II the feeling of falling down the same set of stairs ten times in a row. There is not, as Edkins promised, anything for the radio on II, but neither is there much attempt to chart new territory, no ambitious gambits or radical tempo-shifts, nothing they haven't already proven themselves capable of in the past. These songs barely give themselves space to meander or develop; they pull the cord, and off they go. By and large, they perform their seethe-pummel-repeat routine with an almost mechanized precision. This one thing, they do incredibly well. Then they do it nine more times.
In fact, II is often more compelling on the rare occasions when Metz pulls back on the brontosaurus riffage and focuses on the connective tissue, the strands of sinew that surround many of these songs. The windchime-scrape at the tail end of "Spit You Out", the frizzy intro lick to "I.O.U.", the whinnying strum at the top of "Kicking a Can of Worms": all these strange, static-y interludes, brief though they may be, build the kind of tension Metz are all too game to release. It's a shame they couldn't find a little more space for it. Fleeting though they are, these little interstitials provide a few much-needed valleys to II's overabundance of peaks.
Throughout II, just about anything is prone to set Edkins off: crass commercialism, self-loathing, painkillers and—horror of horror—waiting in lines. These are angry-sounding songs, no question there. But when a typical chorus goes something like "painkiller, painkiller/ that's why I feel unreal/ painkiller, painkiller/ that's one hell of a deal," you start to wonder if Edkins is really screaming out of some deep-seated passion, or if this is just the kind of music you scream over.
In interviews, Metz claim to be a punk band largely because it's the one genre the three of them could agree on. They're not claiming to be anything they're not, but—after two records far more similar than different—one can't help but wonder what else they could be. Were they willing to risk more, to stretch out further, to try a few more new things on for size, II might've sailed right past its beloved predecessor. But by sticking so closely to the script laid out by their debut, II is the one thing punk rock should never be: careful.


The Los Angeles ambient musician returns to the new-age sounds of last year’s Music for Living Spaces, but some of the richness and whimsy of past releases is missing.

Solar Editions

New-age music has practically gone through a complete life cycle since re-entering the cultural conversation a little over a decade ago. First came the reclamatory noise acts of the late 2000s, like Emeralds, James Ferraro, and Oneohtrix Point Never, who twisted new-age tropes into darkly transcendental walls of sound. Then followed Light in the Attic’s popular I Am the Center compilation, which investigated artists like Iasos and Laraaji, who spent years making hypnotic, heavenly works long before new age was considered a punchline. Ever since that reappraisal of more overtly peaceful new-age music, a whole cottage industry has sprouted up around it—especially in Los Angeles. Labels like Leaving Records have cultivated an entire scene around reframing new age for the modern experimental world, smoothing the music’s edges out even further.
Out of this new wave of sage-toting zoners, Olive Ardizoni’s music as Green-House has stood out. Inspired by ’80s Japanese environmental music and ’70s lounge records, Ardizoni’s music plays like an ethereal update on Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia—organic-seeming, swelling patches of sound meant to sit in the background of living rooms, making everything just a little more colorful. On their Six Songs for Invisible Gardens debut, they blended lilting synthesizers and field recordings to radiant effect, bathing the listener in a gradual, lucid glow. Music for Living Spaces followed this up with a more childlike turn, with Ardizoni trading out their lush soundscapes for a delightfully quirky palette, like something a garden gnome might listen to while sweeping up leaves in their mushroom house. On both of these releases, Ardizoni maintained a refreshing playfulness in their work, embracing the lighter, cheesier side of ambient and drone music without sacrificing the melodic inventiveness to pull it off.
But on their Solar Editions EP, Ardizoni demonstrates the limits of new-age music designed purely for comfort. Its four tracks lack both the deep richness of Six Songs for Invisible Gardens and the silly whimsicality of Music for Living Spaces. In its wafting haze, Solar Editions feels closer to that original incarnation of mainstream new age that drew so much critical ire, now coated in just enough analog sheen to justify its inclusion on credible experimental-electronic playlists. Ardizoni shows flashes of their typical textural cleverness, but more often than not, these songs are overtaken by an encroaching numbness, their aesthetic gestures masking how simplistic this approach to synth music has become.
Where Ardizoni’s previous releases demonstrated careful attention to detail, here their approach rarely adds up to much more than casual knob twiddling. “Mycorrhizae Dreams” drifts along on gentle krautrock-y arpeggios that, while soothing, never find a real sense of place or direction. Rather than homing in on one perfectly executed tonal mood, Ardizoni piles breathy flutes and kitschy sci-fi synths on top of one another, even throwing in some of their usual running-water sounds for good measure. The results may be easy on the ears, but that doesn’t make them any less tame. Worse is “Flora Urbana Absumpto,” whose flat pianos literally feel like a balmy waiting room soundtrack purely meant to be ignored. Even late in the track when Ardizoni’s cloudy synths seem like they might finally come into focus, they merely resign to floating about in an anesthetic middle zone until the song ends as inconspicuously as it began.
There has always been an undercurrent of elevator-music easiness to Green-House’s output, but as the songs become less exciting, one wonders what ostensibly makes Solar Editions more profound than actual elevator music. Take “Produce Aisle,” whose tongue-in-cheek title alludes to the fact that the song sounds like something that would play in the corporate shopping mall in Stardew Valley. The chintzy pianos and vaporwavey sway are pleasant, but they don’t really go anywhere, and none of it pushes the concept far enough to be particularly mind-opening. It begs the question that haunts the current new-age scene: If the effect of the art is the same as that which it claims to critically reinvent (placating, bougie lifestyle music), why should we attribute so much experimental importance to it?
If there’s one moment on Solar Editions that serves as a reminder of why Green-House has emerged at the forefront of the new-age revival, it’s in the wonderfully whirling sonata of “Morning Glory Waltz.” With its winkingly baroque melody, the song gracefully layers one unfurling idea upon another, building to a bouncing chorus of Isao Tomita-esque synths that dance about like fanciful guests at an interstellar ball. It proves how creative and fun Ardizoni’s music can be when they nurture their sounds to their fullest potential. Sadly, most of Solar Editions comes off like a return toward a more arid era of new age, only now with tasteful reference points. These songs, as agreeably inoffensive as they may be, end up feeling like wellness fodder, more sedentary than spurring. For a project dedicated to the beauty of sprawling vegetation, the worst thing about Solar Editions is that it just feels a bit lifeless.


Part of the appeal of Melbourne bedroom-pop artist Katie Dey’s latest is the voyeuristic thrill of hearing knotty music made to satisfy nobody but its author, sometimes at the audience’s exclusion.

Flood Network

Depending on the listener, the tone of asdfasdf—the debut EP from Melbourne bedroom-pop artist Katie Dey—could be described as anarchic joy, or blissful insanity, or uncontainable anxiety. Broadly speaking, you could make do with “uncontainable.” While formally indie-pop, asdfasdf loosened the genre with inquisitive psychedelia and fidgety freak-folk. The result was an emotional canvas of unusual breadth. The brushstrokes were Dey’s startling vocal contortions: She sang fast, throttled melodies way up in the nosebleed frequencies, as if to avoid contamination by the music. The record had a complicated beauty—nervy and messy, but intricately so. On “don’t be scared,” the ambient detail was practically molecular, suggesting a desire to craft a perfect microcosm of a faulty universe. In the eyes of Dey’s quiet, enraptured cult, she may have succeeded.
Flood Network, the name of asdfasdf’s follow-up and Dey’s debut album, refers to a formative set of personal crises: “flash floods,” she calls them here, in a tetchy song called “Fleas.” Inverted to “network flood,” the title could also suggest a type of cyberattack, an idea present in the the digital commotion behind songs like “Fleas” and “Only to Trip and Fall Down Again.” What defines Flood Network is the manic energy of both interpretations. Helpfully, the 17-song record includes eight interstitials to ease the intensity, though admittedly they’re more useful in the first half, which is frantic and sparkly, than the sleepier second. Part of the appeal is the voyeuristic thrill of hearing emotionally knotty music made to satisfy nobody but its author, sometimes at the audience’s exclusion.
One quality Dey shares with her comrades at Orchid Tapes, the Toronto/New York label that reissued asdfasdf—as well as at her new home, Joy Void—is a penchant for solipsism. It’s the kind of record that properly justifies the “bedroom-pop” tag, not just in the sense of where it’s made but the conflicted serenity to be found there, where our identities reconfigure in private, away from the distorting outside world. On “Fake Health,” as acoustic guitar stabs leak into stereo, Dey’s production captures the warm embrace of a sudden synaptic overload—the network floods that carry you away—while pouring out her heart: “I hate what I can’t make attainable,” she sings mournfully, not with indie-pop petulance but resignation. “I’ll scrape my wooden rake in the pits of hell,” she sighs later in the song.
The obvious change from asdfasdf is Dey’s voice. On the EP, she sang with sweet grotesquerie, like an asphyxiated mother desperately cooing lullabies, despite having had her mouth filled with glue. Now, on songs like “Fleas,” her deformed, wistful croak creeps into legibility, an alien sound that blends of Montreal’s playful sincerity with Xiu Xiu’s wounded nudity, even a little Karen Dalton. “You have my soul/You gained it when I gave up on me,” Dey sings on “Fear o’ the Light,” to which she adds an epilogue: “So I sit around/Making animal sounds out of cutlery.” A deliciously bizarre image, loaded with inexplicable melancholy, it’s Katie Dey in a nutshell.


In self-imposed exile from the international club scene, Marie Davidson teams with two close collaborators for a self-consciously odd collection of Lynchian lounge music and digitized funk.

Marie Davidson & L’Œil Nu: Renegade Breakdown

Renegade Breakdown

Always ahead of a trend, Montreal musician and producer Marie Davidson quit touring in September 2019, six months before everyone else did. Years of vigorous, largely solo travel behind 2016’s Adieux au Dancefloor and 2018’s Working Class Woman left her depleted and addicted to the sleeping pills she used to cope with insomnia, she told the CBC. Plus, she was tired of club music. “I want to make chansons, you know?” she said. “I want to tell stories and sing.”
Marie Davidson & L’Œil Nu, Davidson’s first project since stepping back, features her vocals and synth against backdrops she constructed with two close collaborators: Pierre Guerineau, her husband and partner in the synth-pop duo Essaie Pas, and Asaël Robitaille, who helped to produce songs on Working Class Woman and Essaie Pas’s 2018 album New Path. Renegade Breakdown, their debut release, is a self-consciously odd and varied collection of classical pop songwriting, lounge music, ’80s-inspired synth-funk, and moody chanson.
Not that you’d know it from the opener, where a heavy four-on-the-floor beat animates one of Davidson’s signature, biting, voiceover-like spoken performances. “By the way, there are no money makers on this record/This time I’m exploring the loser’s point of view,” she quips. “The uglier I feel, the better my lyrics get.” Think of this as the “old” Marie Davidson—the one we’re used to—introducing a new version, who rejects aesthetic posturing and thinks the dance music industry can keep it, all of it: “Your science is a poison I can no longer ingest/Take your prescription and shove it up your ass…Your party sucks anyway.”
Guerineau and Robitaille match her commitment to being unfashionable. They fill the album with rhythms and textures that feel dated and chintzy to contemporary ears, like the digital MIDI-funk and cheaply gated drums of “C’est parce que j’m’en fous,” or else dated and spooky, as on “La Ronde,” where a tuneful, saccharine chanson is overtaken by screeches and tolling bells. As Renegade Breakdown cycles through styles, the only constant lies in lyrical nods to the anxiety and dislocation of solo travel and the effort required to steady oneself. “I keep my fingers crossed as the plane is taking off/I’m feeling kind of lost/Today I’m back to rock,” Davidson intones on “Back to Rock,” the album’s second track: seven and a half dirge-like minutes of AC/DC guitars and “Mad World” interpolation beneath thick synthetic smog. While the title and placement imply a formal disavowal of electronic music, the sheer unearned indulgence presents its own critique. “Drive me somewhere nice/Give me loads of ice/I love my drink real cool,” Davidson demands in the intro, as if riffing on a tour rider. In classic Marie Davidson style, the outright criticism of one thing is also a silent, tacit criticism of everything not mentioned.
Renegade Breakdown isn’t the sound of solitary days and nights on the road; it’s the noises and voices filling the empty space, a reckoning with the ironies and tragedies of life as a musician. “Just in My Head” confronts the dissociative feeling of showing up to the club and hating every minute: “Sitting in a corner waiting for the show to be over … Is it that something is changed? Why the music feels lame? Why do I feel so blue?/Or am I going strange?” The song itself sounds more like the forlorn jazz of a vacant hotel lounge, or Angelo Baldamenti’s skulking “Audrey’s Dance” from the Twin Peaks score. On “Lead Sister,” Davidson laments Karen Carpenter’s fatal struggle with anorexia, singing ominously in French about an “angel voice” who becomes “overexposed” and then consumed by the “somber idea of perfection.”
As a downcast lounge performer with an edge of sing-talk in her voice, Davidson is remarkably convincing, and as a series of experiments, Renegade Breakdown never fails to be interesting. What it lacks is the urgency and stylishness of Davidson’s past albums, which is almost certainly the point. Not every fan of her dedicated club output will appreciate a song like “Sentiment,” the twinkling French-language closer that evokes the overture to a ’60s art film, complete with the gentle whirr of a projector. Nor, I suspect, does she want them to. Even as its musical forms and source material remain familiar, Renegade Breakdown is a work of knowing misdirection, a way of staking out new creative territory that’s challenging, idiosyncratic, and proudly uncool.

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