After a seven-year absence, a band whose quest for rock’n’roll fame always mixed a piss-take with genuine aspiration return in charmingly humbled fashion.

Art Brut: Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out!

Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out!

On Art Brut’s 2005 debut, Bang Bang Rock & Roll, Eddie Argos made gaming the system look so easy there was almost no sport to it. These were the early years of the indie rock bubble, an era when NME was still anointing new kings every week. Argos took advantage: He formed a band, immediately wrote a song about forming the band, and became the critical favorite he never doubted they were destined to be almost overnight.
During that breakout single, the loudmouthed Argos declared his intentions to write “the song that makes Israel and Palestine get along.” But 13 years later, underground-indebted rock is no longer much of a commodity. On Art Brut’s charmingly humbled fifth album, Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out!, Argos’ ambitions are decidedly modest. He’s traded youthful delusions of grandeur for dispatches about the indignities of being a nearly middle-aged rocker with no avenue left for world conquest. “Cult band!/Cult band!/Kultfigur!/Don’t snigger/It’s not about making the audience bigger,” he sings, channeling Mark E. Smith’s agitated caw. On “She Kissed Me (and It Felt Like a Hit),” which is neither a Spiritualized cover nor another modern attempt to reckon with the weight of the Crystals landmark, he’s surprised to discover that romance scratches the itch he once assumed only rock stardom could, likening his partner’s peck to an appearance on “Top of the Pops.”
Wham! Bang! follows the Frank Black-produced Brilliant! Tragic! by seven years, a gap that Argos chalks up to circumstances beyond his control. He was hospitalized, for instance, for nearly a month with a life-threatening bout with diverticulitis, a torturous experience he jubilantly vows never to repeat on “Hospital!,” even if better health requires precautions as dull as eating greens and drinking water. The brush with death renders him unusually agreeable: “They tried to make me go to rehab,” he bellows, “and I said… That is probably a very good idea!”
In the interim, guitarist Toby Macfarlaine and the Wedding Present drummer Charlie Layton joined the band. They’re ace players who understand the band’s trick of breathing life into music that’s not nearly as one-note as they’d like you to believe. Taking advantage of the talent, Art Brut shamelessly dial up the pop, constructing hooks with a cheeriness usually reserved for songs about birthdays. Elated horns and backing bah-bahs kick off the opener “Hooray!,” while dreamy harmonies sweeten “Veronica Falls.” It’s a lovely lament about a platonic relationship that could have been something more. Argos saves his less-wholesome admission for the final reveal: “This is a song about longing, wishing I’d done wrong, and missed opportunities to be bad/It’s a song about not cheating on your girlfriend/When you wish that you had.”
On Art Brut’s last two albums, Argos’ act soured a bit, as he lashed out at a world that was buying less and less of what he was selling. Wham! Bang! is good-hearted in a way those records weren’t, and the newfound humility flatters him. On “Too Clever,” he even holds a mirror to his signature wit, conceding that being a smartass isn’t the happiest way to lead your life. As always, Argos’ speak-sing delivery lends an air of disingenuity to his lyrics, implying satire even when he’s being honest. To the extent he is joking around, though, he’s learned the joke is funniest when he’s his own the target.


The-Dream self-released this intensely personal fourth solo collection for free. It's out under his birth name and titled for his birth year, and though he's been coy about the subject, the specter of his divorce from singer Christina Milian looms over it.

1977

1977 is-- to quote Terius Nash himself-- an "Internet album." Nash (aka The-Dream) released it for free on his website on August 31, with the begrudged blessing of his bosses at Def Jam. It's his fourth solo album, but his first released in this manner, and it raises the question of whether or not we are supposed to alter our expectations. Is this a tossed-off re-packaging of demos? Is he merely trying to satiate a fanbase waiting for an album that he promised to drop this past June? We don't know the answers to those questions (although my guesses would be "no" and "maybe"), but it would seem foolish to hold 1977 to a lower standard. It's no longer unusual-- especially in the world of rap, and to a lesser extent R&B-- to put a full album on the Internet for free. If Nash had included a way for fans to pay what they wanted for the album, he would've been adopting a strategy utilized in previous years by Radiohead and Girl Talk.
And yet, Nash is asking us to adjust our expectations. Crucially though, he's not asking that we alter our notions of what we expect of him, just what we expect from him. 1977 represents not a conscious change in quality, but a conscious change in style and sound, at least for the time being. A few days before he released the album, he tweeted, "When I'm 40 ill write Myself a Pop Smash just so I can Perform on National TV. Not that hard to do. But that's not who I am right now." True to his word, 1977 often strays far from Nash's few solo pop smashes. Instead, it is a deeply personal and presumably therapeutic album. It's one that he fought with his label to release, that he's putting out under his birth name and titled for his birth year, and for which he has put the lyrics of every song up on his website. Though he was predictably coy about the subject, the specter of his divorce from singer Christina Milian looms over it.
In its sparseness and unrelenting directness, the album's most recent precedent is Kanye West's break up opus 808s & Heartbreak, and much like that record, it's already proven to be a divisive if misunderstood album. It showcases a bitter and angry Nash, and though he has previously dabbled in acidic and unflinching break-up songs, 1977 is his first album to largely focus on something other than his sexual prowess. Like West, his vitriol is mostly spewed outward, with seemingly little regard for the feelings or reputation of whoever is on the other side. There is Spanish guitar, as if Nash imagines himself readying for a duel. There is acoustic guitar, as if to accentuate his confessionals. And there is guitar feedback, as if his heart were screaming out.
As a portrayal of a broken relationship, 1977 at its best is as vivid as it is one-sided. "Wake Me When It's Over", which effectively utilizes the glacial R&B of Drake and his producer Noah "40" Shebib, opens the album with a wrenching portrait of a romance falling apart in plain view of friends and the public. As Nash coos the chorus we find him frozen in amber, unable to shake a break up for which he claims he would've taken bullets. Even tracks like "Rolex" and "Wish You Were Mine", which don't hew as close to the theme as others, have a spitefulness that hint at an intense desire to throw your recovery in your ex's face.
But of course, writing songs from this point of view presents some problems. Mainly, one has to be able to stomach the one-sided bile and Nash's likely half-truths. To that end, 1977, like West's 808s, functions best as a look inside the mind of a man wrecked by a trying relationship and a worse break up. His failings should not be excused, but the feelings exist, and have likely existed inside most of us at some point (regardless of gender), and to that end, they're understandable even if they're not completely acceptable.
There are also essential moments on the album where Nash perhaps unwittingly reveals the more aggressively resentful songs to be a sort of Pyrrhic victory. One is on "Form of Flattery", where he addresses the ex he hates and seethes, "I'm not better than that." Another is "Wedding Crasher", the absolute standout here, wherein Nash shows up at his ex's wedding and admits, once and for all, that his attempts to replace her have been futile. Sonically, it recalls the buoyant lightness of Love King's "Florida University", though it's less cloying, and this time he's basically saying, "fuck you" back at himself.
All that said, Nash still misses a huge opportunity. One of the legitimate criticisms of 808s was that West's ex had no forum to respond to the album. While it's obviously impossible to expect Nash to cede space on 1977 to Milian (or whomever), there is a critical difference between himself and West. Nash is a songwriter by trade who made his name writing from the perspective of people (mostly women) other than himself, including what may be the biggest female empowerment single of the past decade. When Nash does give the floor completely to a female voice, it's for the relatively unknown Casha to sing a cover of Deniece Williams' 1981 hit "Silly". As a tune, the song itself is fine, but framed by Nash's wrath it sadly comes off as pleading and passive. How great would it have been for Nash to use that spot on the album to turn the pen on himself, if only for one song?
Still, 1977 itself is a success, even if it doesn't stand up completely to his three previous releases. As a standalone depiction of a deteriorating relationship and miserable break up, it's engrossing and, even to a fault, extremely honest. As a piece of music, it eschews the richness and lushness of those albums, a sound that's felt on the verge of becoming stale. 1977 could be called a palate cleanser, but it's way too torn-up to be that. It's more like a shot (or three) of whisky. Sometimes that feels like exactly what you need.


Fuck Buttons came together in 2004 to create pain-inducing noise music, but soon became curious about mixing in prettier sounds, adding structure and melody to their brutal tracks. As a result, their debut LP is surprisingly welcoming-- for noise, anyway-- with a mix of dreamy melody and abrasive climax that evokes strange stylistic bedfellows from the hypnotic drones of Spacemen 3 to the chiming dissonance of Black Dice.

Street Horrrsing

Floating around the internet last fall before emerging on a 7" in November, Fuck Buttons' "Bright Tomorrow" proved surprisingly resilient. The duo's blunt repetition of simple elements-- metronomic drum-machine, chugging synth, blissful keyboard, and distorted screams-- seems like a formula for tedium. But the song somehow gets stronger with each replay. For a noise group, Fuck Buttons are surprisingly welcoming-- for noise music, anyway-- and their mix of dreamy melody and abrasive climax evokes strange stylistic bedfellows: Yo La Tengo and Ministry, My Bloody Valentine and Prurient, Spacemen 3 and Black Dice.
"Bright Tomorrow" wasn't the web's first glimpse of Fuck Buttons, or even of this album: Street Horrrsing was available for free from the band's website (under a since-forgotten alternate title) when Pitchfork first wrote about the duo in Forkcast more than a year ago. But with the record now seeing official release, anyone hoping for an LP-length version of "Bright Tomorrow" will not be disappointed. For 50 minutes spread across six tracks, Fuck Buttons craft hypnotic patterns with the same set of sonic tools (plus live-sounding drums, in tribal Boredoms-meets-Animal Collective mode). Long chords drift over oscillating tones and pounding beats. Simple figures build slowly into cresendos punctuated by fiery howls. Sounds and ideas repeat constantly, yet Street Horrrsing never feels redundant.
The key to how Fuck Buttons pull this off lies in their creative origins: Brits Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power formed the group in 2004 with the goal of creating pain-inducing noise music, but soon became curious about mixing in prettier sounds, and adding structure and melody to their brutal tracks. Still, they never lost the aggression and abstraction of their noise leanings: They're not afraid to let a beat pound forever, or let a drone wash slowly, or let a pedal loop endlessly. Where more traditional groups might worry that a part goes on too long, Fuck Buttons seem fascinated by what will happen if it does, riding it just past the point of expectation before hitting you with the next big switch-up. It's a trick that gives Street Horrrsing a sense of constant tension, with another surprise detonation always looming around the corner.
The album begins with "Sweet Love For Planet Earth", whose sparkly synths and pulsing drone bring to mind Gang Gang Dance's starry-eyed explorations. The patient power of that track courses through the rest of this seamless record. It's in the drum circles and chants of "Ribs Out", the chopping drift of "Okay, Let's Talk About Magic", and the blown-out metal vocals of "Race You To My Bedroom/Spirit Rise", which seem to make time melt away. Throughout, Fuck Buttons stick religiously to simple ideas, but mix them in surprising ways. When you expect a scream to burst forward, a synth figure slides in, or a bass rumbles up from the background. Still, the duo's signature is devout repetition. And by the time the loops of album closer "Colours Move" finally dissolve, Street Horrrsing has become one big loop itself-- an unbroken sonic circle.


The early buzz on Ashes & Fire said that this was Ryan Adams' best record since Heartbreaker. Translation: It's his first record that kind of sounds like Heartbreaker.

Ashes & Fire

The early buzz on Ashes & Fire is that it's Ryan Adams' best record since Heartbreaker. If that made you check in for the first time in years, I'll translate: it's his first record that kinda sounds like Heartbreaker. Though his artistic daring over the past decade has been greatly exaggerated, this is truly a bold move for Adams. He can no longer claim to be a victim, whether it's a victim of an untamed creative streak, substances, tone-deaf record execs, or critics who have the nerve to judge him in light of his earlier work. You didn't have to hear "Come Pick Me Up" or "Houses on the Hill" first to see 29, Love Is Hell, Rock N Roll, or Easy Tiger as proof that prolific, self-destructive artists don't always make very interesting music. Above all else, there's the romantic ideal that he's a victim of himself, an implosive genius that could make Heartbreaker II if only his pride would let him belly up to the bar with his "abundance of inherited sadness" again and let the inevitably gorgeous and truthful songs simply take care of themselves.
So, yes, Ashes & Fire is Adams getting on his "I have no act" act. And while these boundaries help make it more effortless and enjoyable than his prior works of dilettantism, the strict adherence to a platonic ideal of a Rootsy Ryan Adams Album can't help but make it feel every bit as limited, a snapshot of him as an artist rather than a full portrait. While Ashes & Fire is somewhat one-dimensional, it at least picks one of his better dimensions. Above all else, it's a showcase for Adams' vocals, and they're uniformly excellent throughout. On the chorus of opener "Dirty Rain", he evokes Willie Nelson's jazzy, note-bending approach to C&W, and whether it's the rousing performance on the title track or the no-attack Neil Young tributes on Gold Rush-style folk ("Rocks"), he shows a great deal of range without reverting to his past predilections for smarmy playacting.
The equal billing suggested by the title of Ashes & Fire is a misnomer, though: There's more of the former than the latter, so don't expect the first-take intimacy of even his 2005 trilogy. Glyn Johns' production is spare and immaculate, and you can hear every bit of empty space between Adams and the other musicians, as well as the always tasteful organ and keyboard work of Tom Petty sideman Benmont Tench. But you can also hear that Johns has some very expensive microphones: it's a warm recording, but one that still has a glossy coating that never allows it to, well, catch fire. It does smolder a bit midway through with the modestly anthemic "Do I Wait" and "Invisible Riverside", which dabbles in psychedelic blues and establishes a lyrical link to "Dirty Rain" that gives the record a bit of conceptual heft. But immediately thereafter, "Chains of Love" gets a little too deep into the cushiony adult-contemporary of Easy Tiger and while it mostly evokes his own "Firecracker", it nicks the Erasure melody just enough to be kind of a distraction.
The aspect of "ashes" also designates this as a record obsessed with aftermath, searching for truth and permanence within the wreckage of the past. Though it lacks for autobiographical detail, it's easy enough to fill in the blanks when Adams gravely intones "I'm just looking through the rubble/ Trying to find out who we were" on "Dirty Rain", or more pointedly on first single "Lucky Now", "am I really who I was?" And Adams' lyrics are every bit as based in the elemental: shadows, stones, rivers, and way more rain than should be allowed for a record made in Los Angeles. And yet, Ashes & Fire's mixed and muddled use of big symbols too often result in ballads of big nothing. A literally rendered song called "I Love You But I Don't Know What to Say" should be a self-deprecating epigram to an album that sounds like it's got so much truth to share, but here it's an M.O. It's actually more of a political work than his Love Is Hell laugher "Political Scientist" in how it asserts that saying all the right things in light of a public admonishment is to say nothing that can be held against you. While the subtly devastating line, "and the night will break your heart but only if you're lucky now," appears to welcome the ability to acknowledge and appreciate pain in light of his well-documented battles with Ménièr's Disease and alcohol, elsewhere he invokes what he sang on Whiskeytown's "Sit and Listen to the Rain": "used to feel so much, now I just feel numb."
And it's not even the sort of impressionism he tried on 29 or Love Is Hell to feign depth. Given the right emotional context, the tremble of Adams' voice and words can level easy marks-- upon hearing the distorted guitars slowly bloom during the bridge of "Do I Wait", I was anticipating a returned text message that arrived a half hour later, and during the span of those three minutes, Adams could make it feel like the onset of an incapacitating loneliness. Problem is, after a couple of spins wash out Adams' vocal color, you're left with the almost Zen-like emptiness and portent of would-be truisms like, "Everything you are to me is bigger than the spaces/ Between us and the chains of love." As a singer, he does what he can to redeem "Save Me" and "Come Home", which are every bit as trite as their titles would suggest. But while the emotions are too legibly rendered to be completely unaffecting, Adams' words fail him. I won't begrudge a man his feelings, but is the central architecture metaphor ("you built those walls to keep your fears inside") the best he can do?
While discussing Ashes & Fire with a friend, the question was raised as to what sort of reception the record would merit had it come from any number of acoustic-toting songwriters who didn't happen to be the former lead singer of Whiskeytown. That's up for debate, but the bigger problem is that Ashes & Fire could have come from the likes of Matt Nathanson or Matthew Mayfield were it not for Adams' voice. While Heartbreaker is legendary as a drinking partner, calling it merely a break-up album doesn't do it justice. Adams could be funny, he could rock, he could be bitter, he could do that all in the span of one song, while Ashes & Fire is steeped in a sober contentment that feels limiting even though it shouldn't. Adams evokes the goodwill of his masterpiece as a singer, anyway, even if the songwriting doesn't come close. Rather than equal Heartbreaker, here he might have accomplished something more difficult: making it somehow seem underrated.


These two impossibly strange, expansive psych-pop records from 1996 and 1999 are worlds unto themselves.

The Olivia Tremor Control: Music From the Unrealized Film Script: Dusk at Cubist Castle / Black Foliage: Animation Music Vol. 1

"Will Hart scored a guitar organ," Elf Power keyboardist Laura Carter recalled in an interview with PopMatters five years ago, "so of course there's a little wave where everyone's album has a guitar organ on it." A lovely idea, isn't it? Everyone always making an album, anything they'd need on hand. That-- and a profoundly abiding love of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson-- is the germ of the idea that became Elephant 6, four boyhood friends' loosely-knit Louisiana-born, Georgia-bred turn-of-the-century psychedelic society and recording concern. The sheer number of people involved in the creation of the two records Will Cullen Hart and childhood pal Bill Doss helmed under the elegant name of the Olivia Tremor Control counts in the dozens. And though other Elephant 6 records would eventually capture more imaginations, the music on 1996's Music From the Unrealized Film Script, Dusk at Cubist Castle and 1999's Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume One-- impossibly strange, omnivorously eclectic psych-pop-- are worlds unto themselves, the finest realizations of whatever sonic utopia these guys spent much of the 90s etching into a canvas a million cassettes wide.
Hart, Doss, Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum, and Apples in Stereo frontman (and Dusk producer) Robert Schneider grew up filling up Tascams with four-track nonsense in and around their Ruston, Louisiana, home, exploring genres headlong and forging bands at will. An early project called Cranberry Lifecycle eventually coalesced into Hart, Doss, and Mangum's Synthetic Flying Machine; from there, Mangum forged Neutral Milk Hotel, while Hart and Doss set about mapping out the Olivias' all-encompassing sound, some unthinkable matchup of Revolver-era Beatles or Smile-era Beach Boys, the tornado-alley skronk of 1980s Flaming Lips and Butthole Surfers, and the surreal wooze of post-Reichian tape manipulation. The singularity of Mangum's peculiar vision for In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is what makes that record such a landmark; it's the multiplicity of the Olivias' music, though, that's their great legacy, their ever-changing, borderline egoless, all-together-now notion of what a psychedelic record could be. Veering wildly between sturdy sunshine-pop and sloppy ambient noise, calamitous hooks and conversations with the godhead, the Olivias' records are driven by an impossibly expansive vision. It's like Hart sings on "A Peculiar Noise Called 'Train Director'", a song about, among other things, moving in with a sound: "in the blink of an eye, you get several meanings."
In hindsight, the decidedly strange Dusk at Cubist Castle is the straight of the pair. Stately, sumptuous, and slightly otherworldly, Dusk is brimming with immaculate hooks and queries bound for the cosmos. Dusk's first half is certainly the most immediate stretch of songcraft OTC laid to tape, big, sinewy hooks brought to life in brilliant color. "The Opera House" is a blur of fuzz guitar and harmonica, leading off with the funny notion of going to the movies just to watch the actors move their mouths. The surreality of it all is certainly worth a mention: Catchy as they are, these songs are riddled with potholes, with weird left turns, with hooks that seem to bubble out of nowhere before receding into themselves. The one-two of "Jumping Fences" and "Define a Transparent Dream", joined at the hip by a gloriously gooey transition, are a triumph of taut pop proficiency. Littered as they are with references to the atmosphere breathing with life and a lonely psychonaut too caught up inside his head for speech, though, these tunes seek to transcend both consensus reality and the constraints of the straight-outta-1966 vibe of so many of their E6 contemporaries. Though clearly besotted with the freewheeling pop of the late-1960s-- Bill Doss' eternally impressive sideburns are testament enough to that-- they cut their songs with too many intersecting ideas to ever feel too fixed in one particular place for very long.
Black Foliage's pop moments are gnarlier, more restless, their hooks arriving at odd angles; all this they weave through a tapestry of orchestral bleats and backward-running loops, five seconds of scuzz enveloping four minutes of sheer bliss. Rather than relegate its sonic tinkering to its second act, Black Foliage dunks OTC's experimental tendencies directly into their popcraft. It's a magisterial vision, a whole world rendered in sound; it is also, at first, rather overwhelming, its constantly shifting sonics more than a little tough to settle into from moment to moment. Give yourself over to it, though, and Black Foliage is among the most satisfying psychedelic albums of any decade, a carefully controlled caterwauling chaos pushing along Hart and Doss' unanswerable questions and anthropomorphisms. You're aware of the Bardo, yeah? Black Foliage seems intimately acquainted with the thing, touting as it does both individuality ("don't hide away from your intricacies") and something more inexplicable; "I have been floated to this thought this hour," Hart, Schneider, and eventually Mangum sing, "on a series of events I cannot explain." Black Foliage is not some work of accidental genius, some acid-fueled inspiration point captured as it's being created; every wriggly second reveals painstaking craft, every hint of tape hiss seems to whisper of another good idea buried somewhere in the static. Still, it's pretty clear that the relationship these guys had with non-musical psychedelia was, at the time, fairly recent, and Black Foliage seems to carry hints of something a little beyond this world.
The large-scale sonic experiments-- swaths of silence, planes flying overhead, of alarm clocks and ambient drift-- that engulf much of the second half of both of these LPs are, even for longtime E6 devotees, something of a hurdle. Even in the midst of the woollier Black Foliage songs, their contrast with the pop-minded stuff that precedes them is so great, their tunefulness next to nil, the results are certainly self-indulgent and, for many, kinda boring; I had a friend in college who'd burned himself Cubist Castle with most of the eighth (and longest) "Green Typewriters" lobbed off so he wouldn't have to keep skipping it. Again, though, this seems to be the band's attempt at wrestling the psychedelic experience-- the initial flash, followed by the inward gaze-- into sound. They're not working through McKenna or the Tibetan Book of the Dead or anything here, but they bring the trip through all its stages; at the end, you're summarily exhausted and full of questions, your synapses having wriggled themselves awake one by one over the preceding quarter-hour. And, frankly, for guys who can bang out pop songs like they could, their experimental tendencies are very nearly as impressive; their noise is lush, their silence speaks volumes, and best of all, they're in on the joke. At the end of the extra-long "Green Typewriters", Hart jumps into another with a question-as-punchline: "how much longer can I wait?"
Though Cubist Castle appears untouched, Black Foliage has been remastered from the original tapes; the bass is a bit louder, the vocals a little fuller, and there's ever-so-slightly more clarity in certain patches. But the whirr of some dust-addled four-track still sits underneath these songs, which is as it should be. Either set comes with a download card good for hours upon hours of outtakes, alternates, radio sessions, and the like, much of it unreleased, out-of-print, or otherwise unheard. Taken together, the extra stuff's longer than the albums themselves; hey, nobody ever accused these guys of being especially judicious editors. I'm still working my way through the second disc of the Smile box myself, so all this seemed a little much at first, especially when they launch into their own stoned "Do You Like Worms" medley. But, listening to the extras, you realize just how much they were capable of, just how powerful their overarching vision for these records really was; four minutes from the very good "The Sky Is a Harpsichord Canvas" were excised from Black Foliage due to time constraints, and while it's fun to hear the expanded song itself in the spirit of excavation, knowing what didn't make the cut makes the remaining bits seem that much stronger. Flecks of the recurring instrumental themes that run through Cubist Castle and (especially) Black Foliage-- a little cohesion amidst all the cacophony-- speckle the edges of the bonus stuff as well, further testament to just how much lightning these guys were bottling. But it's the records themselves-- insistent, wise, daringly imperfect-- that are really the thing here. They remain the sound of a few old friends, a few more new acquaintances, and a thousand wasted sunny days spent carving out a couple mind-bendingly complex masterpieces.


The swole Chicago hardcore band’s latest album shows their raw strength while adding shades of industrial and groove metal for character.

Posthuman

The philosophy of Harm’s Way is the best offense is as much offense as possible. The Chicago band began as a hardcore group with some powerviolence thrown in, but soon juiced it all up with beefcake breakdowns and got ready to brawl. Isolation in 2011 and Blinded in 2013 injected that hardcore with Swedish death metal while never abandoning their roots. With 2015’s Rust, they swapped the death metal for more industrial and ’90s groove metal influences, essentially creating a hardcore version of Roadrunner Records’ heyday roster like Fear Factory and Roots-era Sepultura, and they continue on that path on their fourth record, Posthuman.
There’s a beauty to how Harm’s Way throw around such weight like boulders are pillows. It’s difficult to not be in awe of how “Human Carrying Capacity” and “Sink” dispatch punches with efficiency and brawn, where asserting might is the same as breathing, effortless and necessary. Vocalist James Pligge is an imposing figure on stage—he’s a weightlifter who could easily pass for a younger, bulked up John Joseph of the Cro-Mags—and he sounds even tougher and more assured here than before. Even if you have a distaste for competition, the band’s dedication to pure athleticism really pays off. “Become a Machine” is a string of pummeling breakdowns, an especially muscular performance from a band who defines swole. Even when there’s a lot of reexamining masculinity in hardcore, in music, and across all of culture and politics broadly, there still is value in raw strength.
While still a hardcore record, Posthuman does tip the balance towards Rust’s industrial flirtations. “Temptation” takes Godflesh’s rumbling, mechanical bass and sets it to a slinking Jesus Lizard groove, then charts a course that resembles if Deftones went further in on their dream pop influences. There’s a running joke that post-punk is something you get into once you age out of hardcore, ditching your Youth of Today crewneck for an ill-fitting Unknown Pleasures shirt. By “Temptation”’s end, though, Harm’s Way avoid falling into that trap by unleashing a blistering final attack, going harder than ever.
”Last Man” asks, “What if you made Hatebreed into a trip-hop band?” which sounds like it shouldn’t work, but sandwiches their usual thrashing between hallucinatory dirges. Harm’s Way still consider themselves a straight-edge band, yet they’ve crafted a tune that captures going the feeling of going and out of consciousness. “Call My Name” has all their natural tough-guy posture, yet it broods like Posthuman’s more industrial tendencies. There are bouncy riffs that recall some of Rust’s nu-metal forays, yet their gravity is brought down by a slight depression. This shows their growth as songwriters by seamlessly merging their two sides, even if the intro is Hollywood Male War Movie ambient until the drums come in.
For all of their positive qualities and evolution, Harm’s Way still grows in increments. Sure, tracks like “Last Man” and “Temptation,” skew expectations, yet they don’t feel like super radical departures. “Unreality,” an undisciplined track with a noisy intro dead on impact, hints at a bigger issue: The final edge of this sound might be closer than they think. Normally, a mere refinement wouldn't be a cause for concern. Code Orange, however, took a similar formula and got a Grammy nomination out of it, and they might open the floodgates for even paler imitators. Harm’s Way know how to play to their strengths, yet Posthuman may be a sign they might need more of a drastic shakeup.


The Belgian singer’s second album explores her gift for imbuing joyful, self-possessed dance pop with bittersweet emotion.

Nonante-Cinq

Angèle was already one of the biggest Francophone pop stars, and then she made a song with Dua Lipa. First a bonus track on the deluxe edition of Future Nostalgia, then released as a single several months later, “Fever”—featuring Angèle—did more than bring the 26-year old Belgian singer-songwriter into the international spotlight; it encapsulated the emotional breadth possible within nu-disco. Dua Lipa’s voice dominates the track, delivering the first verse and chorus with confidence; this is her song. But the climax comes when the tropical house beat drops and Angèle whisper-sings the second verse in French. Her airy, sensitive voice provides a brief but necessary counterpoint to Dua Lipa’s boldness, driving home the anxiety-ridden love song.
This is Angèle’s superpower: imbuing the most self-possessed and otherwise joyful dance tracks with a bittersweet mood seemingly inherent to the timbre of her voice. Her second album, Nonante-Cinq, abandons some of the more superficial pop trappings of her debut, 2018’s Brol, in favor of melancholy, weaving heartbreak, nostalgia, and apprehension into house-inspired dance tracks and carefully produced piano ballads. The album oscillates between effervescent synth-pop and theatrical anguish, all with a singular emotional thread: Love hurts.
Lead single “Bruxelles je t’aime” is Angèle at her lightest and most sentimental, declaring her love for her hometown (Brussels, Belgium) atop a Daft Punk-esque disco-pop beat. But more often, she’s inconsolable. Closer “Mauvais rêves” is a nightmarish lullaby of dissonant string arrangements and ghostly synth lines, reminiscent of the grand production on Angel Olsen’s All Mirrors. And while the album has fun moments, there’s no triumphant “moving on from a breakup” anthem. Instead, there’s “Solo,” a minor-key Italo-disco cut whose driving synth line accompanies Angèle as she sings about giving up on love entirely.
“Solo” finds a perfect balance between danceable and cry-worthy, something Angèle came close to but never quite found on Brol. Whereas the singles off her debut felt buoyant, even optimistic, Nonante-Cinq’s catchiest moments pack new intensity. “Démons,” featuring Belgian-Congolese rapper Damso, sounds like Angèle mimicking something off Travis Scott’s Astroworld, with spooky, kaleidoscopic synths atop hard-hitting trap snares. Even if you don’t know a lick of French, you might find yourself pretend-singing along to “Comment faire pour tuer mes démons?” (“How do I kill my demons?”).
But she doesn’t always find that balance. “On s’habitue” and “Tempête” fall to either side of the spectrum, the former placid and uneventful, the latter melodramatic, like many of the deeper cuts from her debut. The weakest songs are as shallow lyrically as melodically, usually because Angèle is trying too hard to be either fun or dramatic, neglecting the complexity that lies between. If her emotional nuance can interrupt Dua Lipa, surely she can bridge the gap in her own music. Nonante-Cinq isn’t an improvement simply because it’s sad, but because Angèle is seeking a depth and respite that feels like hers alone.

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Mackenzie Scott’s latest is anthemic and euphoric, loaded with hooks and joyous reflections on love and self-discovery.

Thirstier

Six years ago, Mackenzie Scott sang, “I’m just trying to take this new skin for a spin.” Known by her stage name Torres, Scott was 24 then—beginning a new life in New York and still wrestling with the emotional residue of her Southern Baptist upbringing. Her music at the time flitted between a murmur and a scream, with fiercely observant songs that examined love, hate, and religious hypocrisy with unflinching intensity. Her most recent studio releases—2017’s Three Futures and last year’s Silver Tongue—were more brooding and restrained, but they still felt liable to explode if mixed with a drop of kerosene.
Her second album in 18 months, Thirstier is exuberant and unguarded—the kind of music you make when you’re no longer testing out a new skin and instead reveling in the fervent joy that it brings you. At their best, these songs ride the contact high of a love so consuming that it shifts your worldview and makes you write songs loaded with screamable choruses and conventional hooks: features that have rarely been hallmarks of Torres’ work. Scott has said she felt a desire to make energizing music at a time when life felt small. “I wanted it to sound as big as the biggest records I’ve ever heard,” the artist recently said. The result is the sleek grunge-pop album she has been inching towards, awash in opulent guitar tones and choruses that stretch out the myriad melodic possibilities of the word “bay-beee.”
Recorded last fall in England, Thirstier doesn’t dispense with the intensity of Torres’ previous work, but it channels it in a more anthemic and even euphoric direction. “Before my wild happiness, who was I if not yours?,” Scott sings on “Hug From a Dinosaur,” a mid-album highlight that augments its blissed-out fuzz-pop with call-and-response harmonies and buoyant synth lines. “Are You Sleepwalking?” toggles between a shoegaze roar and a twitchier synth-powered chorus, while “Drive Me” lights up the distortion-pedal pleasure center like a lost Breeders gem. The hooks are grand and the arrangements full of little pockets of exuberance, like the cheery handclaps in “Hug From a Dinosaur,” or the heavy guitars squealing Siamese Dream-style right before crashing into the mix on “Drive Me.” Scott sounds energized by a backing band that includes co-producers Rob Ellis and Peter Miles and Portishead member Adrian Utley.
It’s a flex to make such upbeat, joyous music during such an isolating and depressing year, but none of this lands with a smirk. In interviews circa Silver Tongue, Scott was outspoken about the romantic relationship that inspired her recent songwriting. Thirstier places this love front and center. In the video for “Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in my Head,” Scott and her partner, the visual artist Jenna Gribbon, laze around in a state of domestic bliss—cooking, laughing, brushing their teeth—while Scott sings about hoping that love lasts forever. She has described the song as her “shameless Tim McGraw cheeseball hit”; it glistens with a country-rock sheen that feels like a whole-hearted embrace of the country motif she’s flirted with since 2015’s “Cowboy Guilt.” The stadium-sized hooks and quiet-loud dynamics of the title track are even bolder. “The more of you I drink, the thirstier I get, baby,” Scott wails during the final chorus as a trilling trumpet heightens the most ecstatic chorus of her career.
Thirstier’s slicker production suits these oversized pop gestures, but it doesn’t always mesh with the more intimate moments. “Big Leap,” a muted ballad about a loved one’s near-fatal accident, could have fit on one of Torres’ early records, but its spare reflection is undermined by a cheesy pall of downcast synths and overzealous backing vocals. The electronic touches are more effective during the album’s final third, which includes the throbbing club workout “Kiss the Corners” and the wholly unexpected industrial eruptions of “Keep the Devil Out.”
With her piercing contralto voice and collaborative history with Rob Ellis, Scott has often been compared to PJ Harvey. Like Harvey, Torres delivered blistering catharsis in her first few records before pivoting to muted minimalism and icy synths. Along this trajectory, Thirstier recalls Harvey’s Stories From the City, Stories from the Sea: a lush, uncharacteristically happy set, aglow with self-discovery. Both songwriters approach the subject of love with sustained wonder that such happiness is even possible. “Things I once thought unbelievable/In my life/Have all taken place,” Harvey sang in “Good Fortune.” “What comprises all this joy I feel/And where was it before?,” Scott asks in “Hug From a Dinosaur.” It’s the question at the center of Thirstier, which vibrates with the thrill of this confusion, a rejoinder to the long-enduring myth that great songwriting only emerges from depression and torment.

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On their first album in five years, Odesza are at their most introspective, yet their production remains tailored to fill stadiums and trigger pyrotechnics.

The Last Goodbye

There was a time when Odesza were basically part of the post-J Dilla beat world. Their 2012 debut, Summer’s Gone, has all the hallmarks of late-millennial, hip-hop-literate stoner music: side-chained bass subductions, pretty harps, druggy vocal samples, percussion that drags like beaded curtains. The Seattle duo wasn’t exactly making subtle music even then, and its textures and rhythms weren’t as sophisticated as those of Flying Lotus or even Bonobo, but it seemed part of a markedly different tradition than what was then starting to cement itself as “EDM.” Then, as EDM grew gentler and Odesza’s shows grew bigger, they started to move towards each other. 10 years later, Odesza are more a stadium act than a soundtrack to a blunted bliss-out at the beach, with pyrotechnic shows and songs only occasionally perfumed by atmosphere.
The Last Goodbye is the first Odesza album in five years, though members Clayton Knight and Harrison Mills teamed with Australian producer Golden Features for a solid 2020 album as Bronson that’s much funkier and more relaxed than anything they’ve made in a while with their main project. The 27-date North American tour whose kickoff coincides with the new album’s release is a typically grandiose affair involving an estimated 11 semitrucks worth of gear and a crew of 100. Yet on record, fatigue tugs at the music from beneath: The Last Goodbye is as much a weary, COVID-era self-reflection album as a homecoming parade.
Dance music is often at its most powerful when it tells you to keep your head up high, which is why so many people find solace in the likes of “I Will Survive” and “Call Your Girlfriend.” The most encouraging sentiment we find here, though, is relegated to opener “This Version of You,” with a one-woman choir by Julianna Barwick. It plays like a Malickian voiceover—cue pale light shining through swaying branches as Mills’ therapist imagines a “version of you” “welcoming you” and “saying yes.” It’s the most assured presence on an album filled with lost and confused souls whose voices sound burdened with a great sadness. A lot of these songs are about fraying relationships (“Forgive Me,” “Equal”), attempting to heal (“Wide Awake”), or being satisfied with small victories rather than lasting happiness (“Better Now”). Two songs reference sleeplessness, and not the night-out kind.
This is the duo’s most inward-looking album, yet the music pumps out of the speakers to rattle the nosebleeds. Knight and Mills have found themselves at their most introspective just as they’re primed to make a bigger splash on the stage than ever before. The Last Goodbye visualizes the fight between pandemic weariness and the desire to seize the fruits of the reopened world, and there’s a cognitive dissonance between the vocalists’ introspective mind-loops and the massive beats beneath them. The constant malaise keeps these songs from generating the ridiculous, heart-swelling feeling of transcendence that the best big-room dance music can achieve, while the duo’s relentless approach keeps the music from feeling particularly intimate.
The best moments on The Last Goodbye most often come when Odesza dial down the bluster and give themselves room to breathe. “Better Now,” with Portuguese singer MARO, slows the tempo to a skip, and its sing-song melody echoes Alanis Morissette or 1989-era Taylor Swift: both great role models for brash but emotionally complicated pop. The Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds is a good match for Odesza’s starry-eyed sensibilities, and they create the album’s most sustained stretch of quietude on the concluding “Light of Day,” slathering the record’s final seven minutes in strings and building slowly and organically to a climax rather than rushing heedlessly towards it.
The album’s title track—also its centerpiece and highlight—works because the two have found a vocalist who can hold her own against their sound at its most overwhelming, albeit one beamed in from nearly six decades ago. Bettye LaVette is credited as a featured artist, but her voice is sampled from 1965’s “Let Me Down Easy,” and Knight and Mills set to work creating a throne for it, a grand and filigreed thing that acts as confirmation of the greatness of its sample’s source. Whenever the duo threatens to use LaVette as just another soulful house sample, they do something new and different with her voice, and the track picks up surprising emotional steam as it sprawls across six minutes.
It’s similar in form and sentiment to “Pick Up,” by the German producer DJ Koze, which likewise used Gladys Knight’s voice secondhand. Like Odesza, Koze makes melodic, sentimental music versed in both house and left-field hip-hop, often based on samples, features, and samples-as-features. But on Koze’s best productions, the music and the emotions expressed by his singers are inextricable. On “Pick Up,” the beat hangs in thin air, pumping madly towards nowhere, as Koze reveals the vocal sample a few words at a time. When Knight finishes her sentence, it never fails to move me, and that’s before the beat kicks in seconds later. It’s the kind of moment that creates fireworks in the brain. Too often, The Last Goodbye only evokes the onstage kind.


The Okkervil River frontman has long taken a sledgehammer to the fourth wall; on his self-aware solo debut, he takes stock of the troubled state of the industry and delivers a eulogy for his band.

Nothing Special

R.I.P. Okkervil River. Maybe? Even if the band returns to making albums, it’s never too early to call time of death for one of the defining bands of late-2000s mid-level indie rock. Frontman Will Sheff did it himself on 2016’s Away, which opened with an obituary, even though two years later the band released another album. Metaphorical and literal death has always figured prominently in his lyrics, and he’s always been tortured in his self-awareness: an artist knowingly taking a sledgehammer to the fourth wall to directly address you, the listener and fan, whether that meant offering you a chance to add your own lyrics to “The Latest Toughs” or declaring the band had met its maker on a song called “R.I.P. Okkervil River.”
Okkervil River were always dying and Sheff was always writing their obituary, but Nothing Special, his first solo record, signals a very different, very real, and not especially meta kind of death. You can bet that the singer-songwriter who sang a song called “Singer Songwriter” knows the importance of releasing a solo album, especially this deep into his career. In that regard, it’s remarkable how easy and unforced Nothing Special sounds, both musically and lyrically, and it’s ironic how much it sounds like the work of a band, even more than his last few band albums. Working with a small crew he dubbed the Dirty Shitty Dirt Boys—including Will Graefe (Okkervil’s guitarist during its final years), Benjamin Lazar Davis, and Christian Lee Hutson—Sheff settles his voice a little deeper in the mix rather than keeping it out in front of the music.
As a result, it sounds live, even spontaneous, as though they’re not always sure where the song is taking them. Along the way they add careful flourishes to these downcast tunes, like the abrasive guitar solo on “Estrangement Zone” and the sympathetic piano chords on “The Spiral Season.” They build “Like the Last Time” to its immensely satisfying climax, but allow “Holy Man” to float and shimmer for eight long minutes. Nothing sounds belabored, nothing overthought. Sheff even allows himself to understate like never before. He sells the big, rousing moments with a cracked croon rather than a caterwaul. His voice sounds battered and weary, yet he remains charismatic, with new bits of Bowie in his delivery. He’s still singing about big ideas, but for the first time in a while, the songs don’t bend or buckle under the weight of them.
This is a solo album that knows it’s a solo album, by an artist taking stock of his more than 20 years in the industry and gesturing toward the dystopia that the current music scene has become. While it’s often dire and occasionally humorous, it’s always more than clever. That this solo album is so good, so immersive, and so thoughtful only makes Okkervil River seem even deader. Back in 2007 Sheff mockingly called the group a “mid-level band,” but in retrospect that lyric sounds like hollow self-denigration from an artist on an upward trajectory. Fifteen years later, however, his self-assessments sound truly bleak. “You give me a dollar, I’ll do some or all of my perfectly middlebrow blues,” he sings on “In the Thick of It”: “I’m painting my album in ivory hues.” It’s a sobering portrayal of the transactional relationship between artist and audience, but “middlebrow blues” hits especially hard, less like a moment of self-flagellation and more like he’s come to realize that indie rock is a promise unfulfilled, a paradise corrupted.
Okkervil River’s breakout album imagined a black-sheep boy’s picaresque through a knotted landscape, but Nothing Special doesn’t have to imagine anything. Instead, Sheff draws from experience: from triumphs as well as failures, arrogance as well as comeuppance. The title track is a remembrance of his friendship with Okkervil River’s late drummer Travis Nelsen, detailing how it turned the band, in its final years, into a folie à deux. (“We fed off each other with this self-deprecation thing,” he told Stereogum. “I gave him the sort of hoity-toity seal of approval I think he craved, he gave me ‘sweat of the brow.’”) The song is a sad, spectral waltz, as Sheff reflects on their relationship and tries to break free: “It’s time to say it’s done, I’m not getting what I want,” he sings. “When I’ve lost it, I’m finally free to be nothing special.” Nelsen died in 2020.
Lots of artists eulogize fallen friends and bandmates, but the song hits a little harder coming from such a self-reflexive songwriter. That’s part of what made Sheff such an interesting presence in the aughts: Just as the National reminded us we were new adults in the world, and the Decemberists urged us to make room for whimsy in our grown-up lives, Okkervil River showed us that we were all still music fans at heart. Sheff spoke to us in his role as a working musician, which affirmed our role as audience, and he spoke to us often in the language of pop songs. He knew we’d know all the songs he mentions on “Plus Ones” and he trusted us to catch the significance of “John Allyn Smith Sails” mutating into “Sloop John B.” This was a language worth speaking, he told us, but now he’s not so sure. He’s got his doubts, but rather than cynicism, Nothing Special finds reassurance in those uncertainties.
Nothing Special surveys all that’s come before—a long and fruitful career, but he’ll still lose money touring—and decides that “Listening to Otis Redding at Home During Christmas” and “Westfall” and “No Hidden Track” and “Black” and “To Love Somebody” were nothing special. He’s nothing special, and neither are we. What’s remarkable is that Sheff makes that realization sound freeing. It’s a relief to shed those expectations, to escape the weight of great import, and these songs make relief sound like a legitimate creative engine. So when he closes the album by declaring, “When you do it all for free, it doesn’t feel like work,” he condemns an industry that’s dead set on bankrupting its artists. But maybe there’s a little hope in those lines, too, as we all let go of the way things were and try to imagine the way things might be.


Detroit's Bonny Doon recline deep in the kind of alternative folk music that gives off its own warmth, wise enough to sit back with some guitars and watch the world crumble.

Bonny Doon

With their debut self-titled full-length, Bonny Doon make it seem like Detroit is due for an alt-country revival. Bonny Doon is at once jagged and unfinished, languid and detail-oriented, restless and at peace. Perhaps songwriters Bill Lennox and Bobby Colombo, bassist Joshua Brooks, and drummer Jake Kmiecik’s time in local acts like Tyvek and Growwing Pains are to attribute for the streamlining of genres, though even that passes off the kismet their sound stirs up.
Bonny Doon recline deep in the kind of folk music that gives off its own warmth, where a drunken evening filled with texts from his mom on “I See You” offers a laugh or the confident piano chords in “Evening All Day Long” suggest resilience. But underneath their blues-tinged instrumentals is abject loneliness. “(Crowded)” is five minutes of Neil Young-style apathy. “Relieved” channels Smog and Kurt Vile shrugs. “What Time Is It in Portland?” sees Colombo pining after a lost love, detailing friendships he let dissolve and a willful ignorance of how to fix it all. Like any successful singer, he’s introspective even when he sings like there’s no point in carrying on.
A sliver of their punk roots slip into Bonny Doon to give their beezy country some rock bite, though it varies in form. There’s cuts like “Summertime Friends,” where half-spoken lyrics about mindless relationships recall the deadpan delivery of Parquet Courts. Elsewhere are distorted guitar chases speeding alongside lively drumming, like on “Lost My Way.” So when a song like “Never Been to California”—which employs a honky-tonk bass part and shaky organ—plays, the tone change feels like a payoff instead of a downshift.
Their best mode is when Bonny Doon take a step back, brush their hands, and accept a role as an observer. The only way to counter a crumbling world with their surroundings moving at full tilt is to create stability. Much of this tone comes from the album’s construction: each member passed the songs around to flesh out instrumentals. Part of Bonny Doon was recorded in Russell Industrial Center, one of the city’s biggest arts redevelopment projects, and over the three years it took to release the full-length, outsiders snatched up cheap real estate across the city, placing capitalism's ethics at the forefront of their minds. Bonny Doon aren’t singing about Detroit specifically, but they bear witness to the city’s evolution—or lack thereof—whether they want to or not, and the ways in which it sours their mood is evident. When Lennox sings “You’re right/Yeah, I gotta grow up,” on “You Can’t Hide,” it’s not charged with motivation or promise. It’s empty. He agrees to change but the energy to do so was long ago stripped, hence why he sees himself reflected in the bottom of a wine bottle and fading neon signs. They know change will happen, but they also know they have so little to do with the course it takes. Why not watch the madness unfold and shrug its worst parts off?
That hopeless undertone to their otherwise easygoing country rock gives them a distinguished voice. Should they continue to hone it, they can carve their own distinctions, stepping away from the Bill Callahan and David Berman similarities to become an RIYL descriptor themselves. An album of sunlit melodies with the shadows of Detroit looming over it delivers more than expected; it’s not easy creating a doleful aftertaste that never quite dampens spirits, but Bonny Doon pull it off. By the time that complexity in their songwriting reveals itself, you’re already on the next listen, fully aware of humanity’s cessation and the band’s decision to cozy up on the porch to watch. Nothing articulates the warmth of their nonchalant despair like the line: “I was staring at the setting sun and I realized my time had run out/And I was relieved.” Maybe we should be doing the same.


Like Octavia Butler’s Afro-futurist science fiction, which inspired the piece, this experimental septet performance can seduce, challenge, and unnerve in the span of a few measures.

Nicole Mitchell / Lisa E. Harris: EarthSeed

EarthSeed

Afro-futurist author Octavia Butler served as a touchstone for flautist and composer Nicole Mitchell well before she considered herself an artist. Found on her mother’s bookshelf when Mitchell was a teenager, Butler’s work “[was] equally fascinating and disturbing to me,” the composer told one interviewer. An African American woman who was the first science-fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, Butler tackled ecology, theology, racism, corporate greed, violence, empathy, and more in her novels and short stories. Works such as The EarthSeed Series could be apocalyptic and optimistic at once. The same dichotomy figures into Mitchell’s own compositions, which can seduce, challenge, and unnerve in the span of a few measures. Butler’s example has stayed with Mitchell, a former chair of Chicago’s vaunted jazz collective the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, in her own large-scale works. Soon after Butler’s death in 2006, Mitchell premiered her ambitious Xenogenesis Suite, scored for nonet and based on Butler’s trilogy of the same name, and she drew on the author’s writing again for 2014’s Intergalactic Beings.
Mitchell returns to Butler’s work once more—specifically, the 1993 novel Parable of the Sower and its sequel, 1998’s Parable of the Talents—with EarthSeed, a collaborative performance with the singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Lisa E. Harris. The two women bonded over Butler at the New Quorum Composers’ Residency in New Orleans, and the Art Institute of Chicago commissioned the work for performance on June 22, 2017, Butler’s birthday. Mitchell and Harris collaborated on new lyrics based on concepts in the Parables, in which climate change has ravaged the planet. Arranged for a septet featuring Chicago luminaries like cellist Tomeka Reid and trumpeter Ben LaMar Gay, in conjunction with Harris’ theremin and Mitchell’s flute, EarthSeed tends towards that “disturbing” nature of Butler’s work, blurring the line between the present moment and an imaginary dystopian future. At times visceral and discordant, even agitating, the piece favors turbulence and accentuates the queasy timbres of its instruments.
Drawing on the fusion of improvisation and composition that marks the works of the AACM and Art Ensemble of Chicago (a long-lived collective that counts Reid and Mitchell as current participants), EarthSeed’s music is challenging and bracing, often deploying an array of small sounds that confront and befuddle. Opener “Evernascence / Evanescence” features Mitchell’s spare flute and Harris’ wordless exhales and whistles—a rare instance of the main participants in duet, and a brief oasis before the others enter. When the full ensembles emerge on “Whispering Flame,” Reid’s bowed cello and Gay’s queasy tones act as destabilizing forces. As Harris harmonizes with another vocalist, Julian Otis, her operatic training comes to the fore. But before you can be seduced by their interplay, it sours. Otis and Harris wring out guttural gasps and wretching noises, Gay’s muted trumpet screeches, and Reid’s cello strings squeak like sawed wood.
In “Moving Mirror,” which highlights Reid’s quicksilver work, her cello serves as bass, melodic lead, and frightening noise generator, veering between bow and pizzicato. She can be nuanced and hushed one moment, skin-prickling the next, accompanied by a battery of electronics from Mitchell, Harris, and Gay. “Whole Black Collision” juxtaposes white-noise rumbles with Harris’ sustained notes. She scales higher and higher until she’s at a piercing register where Gay’s shrill horn joins in. And the heights she hits on the climactic “Purify Me With the Power to Self Transform” are dizzying and awe-inspiring.
EarthSeed’s sometimes bewildering array of disassociated texts, ululations, and rhetorical questions (“If you become ‘other’ then who becomes the mirror?”) all play into notions of disturbance and disruption from Butler’s writing, but on record, it discomfits. The babbling and vocal noises that introduce “Phallus and Chalice” turn enervating after four very long minutes, wince-inducing rather than whimsical. In “Biotic Seeds,” which draws inspiration from Parable of the Sower’s theory of life force, their voices veer from exaggerated dramatic enunciation to matter-of-fact recitation, the accompaniment reduced to mere punctuation: “Crisis is our teacher. What is its message? Embrace crisis. Lean into chaos!” The same philosophy could be said to guide EarthSeed: The album itself often feels as uncomfortable as the chaotic world depicted in Butler’s books.

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The latest album from the oblique strategist of New York rap is an urgent attempt to give order, in small increments, to an orderless time.

Shit Don’t Rhyme No More

The textures of Elucid’s music—the sandpaper grate, the demons groaning to life on the low end, the stabs at spiritualism, the stabs of Björk’s sampled voice—are more varied, and layered more densely, than those that bubble on rap radio today. In fact, you would probably have to go back nearly three decades to find a precedent in the genre’s mainstream for the New York rapper’s sound. The closest analog might be Fear of a Black Planet, one of Public Enemy’s twin masterpieces. That record, released in 1990, was manic, cacophonous. The Bomb Squad, who produced the album in its entirety, shifted moods and tempo with a striking clarity of vision; they also sampled nearly 150 songs, according to best estimates. In the years that followed, that labyrinthine style not only fell out of creative vogue, but became vastly more difficult after a New York district court ruled against Warner Bros. and Biz Markie, codifying new rules around sampling.
Elucid does not exist in rap’s mainstream. He’s also not sanding down his messaging for megaphones the way Chuck D often did. His writing is full of cryptic asides and rhetorical double-backs, closed loops and dead ends. In 1990, the idea of rap as reportage was novel to much of white America; in 2018, Elucid is making music that seems to have internalized and processed not only hundreds of years of American history and racism, but the collapse of both into bad-faith, contextless internet squabbles.
His music isn’t about the internet in any obvious way, but it could only be the product of a world where East New York real estate and Nazi recruiters and lupus fundraisers slip past you, one after another on an infinite scroll. On a song called “Obama Incense,” from his remarkable 2016 LP Save Yourself, he details a yard littered with “crack stems and scratch-off tickets,” blows dust off a kalimba, watches pimps kill time by writing Yelp reviews of diners, sees “babies wave guns out in plain view,” then gets to the vein: “You want it all, but it can’t save you.” Where that album took aim at the small- and capital-G Gods who claimed to see through that postmodern fog, his latest, Shit Don’t Rhyme No More, comes across as an urgent attempt to give order, in small increments, to an orderless time. It often addresses its subjects obliquely, but that’s when Elucid, as a writer, is at his best; as he raps on “RZA Taught Me”: “If I can make you really feel it, I won’t have to explain shit.”
Mostly self-produced (with assists from Messiah Musik, August Fanon, and Ohbliv), Shit Don’t Rhyme No More is at turns languid (“RZA”) or fevered (“1010 Wins”). In his rhymes, Elucid similarly flits back and forth between things you can touch, taste and smell, and the vaguely metaphysical—the pronunciation tics his elders might have had, the shoes that speak Cantonese. The songwriting eludes most conventional structure, and is rich with style and detail. Take “Bad Credit Is Better Than No Credit,” where he throws you into a scene on I-95 South; he’s the “so-called poet negro motorist” who’s “lifted up in spirit by praying black mothers.” Or see the sex scene on “Lambskin”: “You could ride my face with your bonnet on/I wanna fuck you in a durag, let the cape fly/I want my scalp greased while the fish fry.” The song itself, though, sounds like a nightmare, like hell is just below a frameless mattress somewhere.
In addition to his solo work, Elucid raps with Billy Woods as Armand Hammer. Last year, the duo put out an excellent record called ROME, which functions largely as an examination of how power works at the tiniest and most macro levels, from police investigations to parking garage shootouts to white nationalist Facebook groups. By contrast, Shit Don’t Rhyme No More skews slightly more internal: “Rick Ross Moonwalk,” for example, plays like a prayer, a humble request for support and loyalty. It’s a shrewd way to round out the record—poise is one of Elucid’s defining traits, and a lapse into such vulnerability gives the I-95 trips different stakes. And so you can loop back, like Elucid does so fluidly in his writing, and take another look at Fear of a Black Planet. There’s nothing on Shit Don’t Rhyme as plain as, say, “Day to day, America eats its young.” What there is instead is that same idea refracted in a thousand different directions.


Oozing Wound capture the energy of classic Slayer, Entombed, and punk-metal like Suicidal Tendencies, but it's hard to escape the feeling they are making fun of these guys as much as celebrating them.

Whatever Forever

The third album from Chicago trio Oozing Wound begins with a backwards guitar wail that puts a fresh twist on the technique Metallica used in the iconic intro to their ...And Justice for All leadoff track “Blackened.” True to form, of course, the prelude gives way to a muscular, uptempo chug as the song, “Rambo 5 (Pre-Emptive Strike)” achieves liftoff, announcing that “okay, now we’re really getting shit started” in stereotypical metal fashion. More importantly, on “Rambo 5” Oozing Wound manage to recapture the energy of classic Slayer, Left Hand Path-era Entombed, and skate punk-rooted metal like Suicidal Tendencies and Excel all in the same riff.
In purely musical terms, Whatever Forever is bound to attract thrash, stoner rock, doom, and punk loyalists as well as people arriving at those particular strains of heaviness for the first time. Metalheads will no doubt recognize how frontman/guitarist Zack Weil howls like a cross between Exodus vocalist Steve “Zetro” Souza and Kreator’s Mille Petrozza. Likewise, now-departed drummer Kyle Reynolds’ fills and thumpa-thumpa-thumpa beats recall genre luminaries like Dave Lombardo and Charlie Benante. By the same token, though, Oozing Wound exude an attitude that immediately distinguishes them from the music they reference—and update—with such convincing skill.
Oozing Wound play with undeniable passion. They also shift gears between tempos with uncanny ease, and their ability to incorporate slower sections gives the faster material an explosiveness it wouldn't otherwise have. As the lava-like churn of “Eruptor” bubbles to a boil and segues into “Tachycardia,” for example, Oozing Wound not only channel High on Fire at their most infernal but also manage to sustain the buildup over both songs. Additionally, engineer Matt Russell’s rendering of bassist Kevin Cribbin’s tone should serve as the ultimate reference for how to capture low end that’s Godzilla-huge—full and imposing, but most of all clear.
All that said, it’s hard to listen to this album and not get the feeling that these guys are making fun of their influences while also honoring them. Despondency, hopelessness, and even outright nihilism can certainly make for engaging music. But when those emotions are worn on the sleeve as affectations, they ring hollow. With Oozing Wound, it’s hard to tell. On their own, the lyrics on Whatever Forever contain vague but nevertheless thought-provoking undercurrents. When Weil sings that “peace is a lie” and that “tonight we will track, and identify spies” on “Rambo 5,” one gets the distinct sense he might be talking about more than the outward silliness that the song title lets on.
The same goes for Weil’s lyrics on “Mercury in Retrograde Virus,” where he sings “Conscious killing keeps the planet spinning.../Can’t fight that kind of breeding/The facts a mask revealing.” But Weil also plays up a fuck-it-all malaise that comes off as a posture and begs you not to care about what he’s saying. As he sneers his way through self-defeatist headbanger anthems like “Diver” and “Everything Sucks, and My Life Is a Lie,” the band’s raucous delivery sounds better suited for the upbeat mood of keg party. On paper, the contrast should make for rich juxtaposition. Instead, Weil and company end up looking like they lack the courage of their convictions.
Oozing Wound deserve credit for standing apart from purist thrash revivalists like Bonded by Blood and Mantic Ritual. Clearly, they intend for their music to serve as a beefier, decidedly modern take on classic forms. But by hiding behind detachment, the music's underlying power ends up getting smothered by its bluster. As engaging as that bluster is at first, over the course of ten songs Whatever Forever begins to grate not unlike a person who tries too hard to look nonchalant when they would hold your attention longer if they just opened up a bit more.


The cryptic compositions of California-born, Japan-based composer Carl Stone are collected on this hefty compilation. Its eight extended pieces showcase drastically different sides of his work.

Carl Stone: Electronic Music From the Seventies and Eighties

To get an idea of the cryptic compositions made by California-born, now Japan-based composer Carl Stone, consider the three folks who give appreciations on this hefty compilation, Electronic Music From the Seventies and Eighties. One comes from respected world music critic Richard Gehr; another from the author of the 33 1/3 book on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol. II; a third from the guy who conveys ethnic dish profundity throughout Greater Los Angeles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold. Stone has had an equally un-slottable career since studying electronic music composition at CalArts with the likes of Morton Subotnick and James Tenney in the 1970s and performing with Japanese noisy improvisers like Otomo Yoshihide. Gold, for one, recalled seeing Stone perform around L.A. at upper-crust concert halls, nightclubs, punk venues, and art galleries.
By turns lovely, prickly, meditative, and maddening, these eight extended compositions (some two and a half hours of music) showcase drastically different sides of Stone’s work, which previously was relegated to small-batch cassette releases in the ’80s and early ’90s. An early adopter of the computer, which he used to create his pieces, Stone’s also worked with turntables and manically manipulated samples. He has electronically elongated source sounds until they take on entirely new topographies. These techniques anticipated later trends of all sorts, from the dense slivers of samples informing the Bomb Squad’s productions to Plunderphonic’s trash-compacting of pop music to Justin Bieber 800% Slower.
The earliest pieces here, “Lim” and “Chao Praya” date to the early ’70s when Stone was still a student at CalArts, utilizing a Buchla 200 series synthesizer to seek out the purest, most transportive of tones. These two pieces are stunning indeed, full of purring drones that at first appear to hardly be moving, only to have them slowly slide and reveal infinite amounts of overtones. It’s evocative of some of my favorite minimal music from this era, be it Charlemagne Palestine’s Four Manifestations on Six Elements or Folke Rabe’s Was??.
The stately “Sukothai” and ethereal “Shing Kee” come from 1977 and 1986, respectively, and both find Stone mincing a single musical ingredient into myriad dishes (the Gold connection becomes apparent in that Stone titled many of his pieces after his favorite L.A. restaurants). On “Sukothai,” he takes a sliver of harpsichord from Benjamin Britten’s already playful “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” and—in a process similar to Steve Reich’s Come Out—teases it into two loops and then four. Stone exponentially increases them across a dizzying 14 minutes, until that dainty harpsichord line turns into a canon of a hefty 1024 loops. A similar process informs “Shing Kee,” as a five-second snippet of Schubert’s “The Linden Tree” gets distended in two directions. Small slivers of Akiko Yano’s voice are stretched into abstract yowls, but ever so slowly it tightens until the syllables become audible and the fully-sung line becomes clear. Then the piece retreats, with Stone stretching everything back from word to clouds, these small filaments spun into a blanket of abstract sound once again.
By the ’80s, Stone’s methods and focus began to shift. “Dong Il Jang,” from 1982, starts off as if it will be a droning soundscape, only to have it strobe and fragment. A sample of “testing one, two, three” and snatches of Asian folk music get worried into a maddening hiccup. If only the resultant 21 minutes sounded like something other than simply holding the fast-forward button on a CD player.
The massive “Kuk Il Kwan” strikes a balance between the two poles of Stone’s sound, moving from droning to churning, while “Shibucho” is another long piece of a finely diced sample. This time, Stone renders one of the dreamiest Temptations’ songs into an irritant like a severely scratched disc stuck in a six-disc changer. In the years since, this sound has been taken up by the likes of Japanese artist Yasunao Tone’s Solo for Wounded CD and Oval. But there’s something about the immense serving portions of Stone’s glitching pieces that—unlike some of the stunning other work to be found here—ultimately makes them hard to swallow.


True Will, the debut album from White Widows Pact, allows us to imagine a world where the division between metal and hardcore never existed. While this isn't a new move, the band has a seamless approach that allows the two genres to darken and inflect the other.

True Will

It's hard to imagine a time when hardcore and metal were separated by fierce, mutually exclusive tribal codes. At an early point in the development of hardcore, to have long hair and a leather jacket at certain shows came with a genuine risk of physical injury. But even hardcore flagships like Sick of It All, Agnostic Front, the Crumbsuckers, and the Cro-Mags put out albums that leaned towards metal, while other hardcore pioneers like D.R.I., Suicidal Tendencies, Corrosion of Conformity, and Prong all eventually transitioned fully into metal bands.
Despite these intertwined histories, though, it's easy to see why the division persists between these two camps: in general, metal encourages you to get carried away—be it by "Dungeons & Dragons" fantasy, exaggerated horror, Satan, or intellectual musing—while hardcore calls for you to keep your feet planted firmly on the ground. Hardcore bands also tend to fixate on their street credibility, to the point that their music functions as an incessant pledge of allegiance, which can be oppressive if you have no interest in relating to dogma of the lifestyle.
True Will, the debut album from White Widows Pact, allows us to imagine a world where this division never existed. Citing Madball, Obituary, and Crowbar as its three primary influences, the Brooklyn quintet consciously tips its cap to the mid-'80s/early-'90s heyday of three different scenes—New York hardcore, Florida death metal, and southern sludge, respectively. In so doing, White Widows Pact reminds us that metal and hardcore were always perfectly suited for mating with each other and that, in fact, the two forms share the same DNA.
Of course, it's not like this is revelation in 2015. It's been over 25 years since Brutal Truth strode into the same tangle of sub-genres, eventually taking an Edward Scissorhands approach and carving them into new shapes. Countless bands have done the same, with varying degrees of creative innovation. Take even a quick glance at the Victory Records or Century Media catalog and you'll never run out of mosh breakdowns from bands fusing death metal with hardcore. Listening to True Will, though, it's obvious that White Widows Pact isn't trying to invent anything new. It's more like the band took scoops of three different ice cream varieties, let them melt in the same dish for a bit, and stirred them up into one uniform flavor.
Toward the beginning of the track "Thirteen Years of War", for example, White Widows Pact is able to infuse a palm-muted, death metal-style chug with the intangible—but unmistakable—urban swagger of hardcore. It's a subtle coloration, and it's hard to pinpoint how White Widows Pact does it, but every musical element on this album bears the distinct mark of a contrasting style. On the other hand, White Widows Pact's guitar solos hint at an awareness of scales gleaned from listening to King Diamond records, a musicality that most hardcore bands shun.
In blending these styles together until the lumps are smoothed out, the band gives True Will a seamless quality. And because the album presents itself without pretense, frontman David Castillo's lyrics cut that much deeper. On opening track "Landlord", Castillo (the co-owner of Brooklyn venue Saint Vitus Bar) rails against the owner of his tenement-slum apartment—a conventional enough target for hardcore-grade retaliation, but Castillo adds considerable dimension by casting the villain of the song as a clergyman.
Where Castillo follows the aggrieved, me-against-the-world hardcore model, he leans towards ambiguity where the majority of his peers would spell things out in the most obvious ways. The veteran narrator of "Thirteen Years of War", for example, harbors anger at a man in a suit. Castillo never elaborates on who that man is, or how literal he's being when he sings that the man "lives next door." With the music clanging away at full force, the songs become that much more powerful for what Castillo doesn't say.


Newly reissued on vinyl, Common’s 2002 album is a massive group effort: Prince, Erykah Badu, Pharrell, Jill Scott, and many more built a sound that helped change the limits of rap, soul, and R&B.

Electric Circus

During a run of years in the mid-late ’90s and early ’00s, hip-hop found a comfortable recording home in the iconic Electric Lady studios. The Roots were there for Things Fall Apart, D’Angelo was there for Voodoo, Black Star’s album was mixed there, and Common had found his way there for part of 2000’s Like Water for Chocolate, and found his way back two years later to work on Electric Circus, an album that, even now, reads as an ambitious outlier, a classic that stands distant from all of Common’s classics that came before it and the couple that came after it.
The album cover of Electric Circus is—at least it would seem—an homage to the Beatles’ album art for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a work that was also, at the time, seen as a departure. Common’s face is front and center on the cover, but backed by the faces of those pivotal to the making of the album, in actual tangible work or in spirit. This list reads like a holy scroll of talent in several fields, spanning generations: Prince, Tye Tribbett, Louis Farrakhan, Jill Scott, Chris Webber, Larenz Tate, Big Daddy Kane, Richard Pryor, and of course Jimi Hendrix himself, just to name a few. It could be said that Electric Circus—newly reissued on vinyl for the first time—is an album concerned with chasing the aesthetics of risk, but there is a heavy payoff there: Common found a small freedom in the experiment of bringing people into a room and letting the sound build itself from there.
Because it isn’t necessarily a touchable album for its time—and because only one single, “Come Close,” was released—the album was poorly promoted and fell off of the charts. It is possible, though, to imagine this as a small sacrifice for Common, whose artistic clout in 2002 afforded him the ability to put out an album that didn’t need to use sales as a measure of success. The groundwork for what we see black popular music as now has a direct lineage that, of course, didn’t begin in the late ’90s and early ’00s, but was pushed forward by albums like Electric Circus, released at a time in rap that needed a dose of experimentation in the mainstream. It was another small permission in a sea of permissions granted to black artists who, perhaps, wanted to wrestle free from the constraints of the genres assigned to them.
There are moments in which the experiment feels uneasy, presenting mixed results, sometimes on the same song: “Star *69 (PS With Love)” has an infectious chorus and guest turns from both Bilal and Prince, but the song’s somewhat juvenile, clumsy and predictable phone sex narrative distracts from its brilliance, making the experience feel like adolescents walking into the Louvre with finger paint. The aforementioned “Come Close,” featuring Mary J. Blige, was definitely the album’s only radio-ready song, but it sounds as if it was trying intently to be radio-ready. It's a somewhat cheesy duet dripping in basic rap-r&b crossover tropes that plods slowly through an uninspiring Neptunes beat and half-asleep Blige chorus.
But the misses end there, which is notable considering not only the breadth of sound the album covers, but also how many guest spots Common makes room for on the album—playing nice with them on all but one of the album’s thirteen tracks. Jill Scott drops in on “I Am Music,” which is punctuated by small kisses of swelling horns nestled in between a retro-fitted juke joint piano melody. P.O.D. singer Sonny Sandoval lends background vocals to “Electric Wire Hustler Flower,” a song built on a distorted guitar and Common’s equally distorted vocals. The album closes with two songs spanning almost nineteen total minutes: “Jimi Was a Rock Star,” an ambitious tribute to Jimi Hendrix that is sonically messy in a delightful way, with heavy drums that sound as if they are being hit by eager hands and Common finding a pocket to mesh with Erykah Badu’s vocals, waxing poetic about the mythology of Hendrix, as if they lived through it with him (“Jimi lives in a purple haze/In a psychedelic maze/Play the streets like an instrument”).
The final song is the ten-minute epic “Heaven Somewhere” which brings back Badu, Blige, Scott, and Bilal, adds Cee-Lo Green, Omar Lye-Fook, and Common’s father, Lonnie “Pops” Lynn, known for contributing spoken outros to Common’s album. The song is a winding mini-suite that—at least seemingly—attempts to get all of the album’s sounds condensed into one moment. There is the slow-dripping electric guitar, the rush of rapid-heartbeat percussion, the juke joint keys, and the funk horns whispering underneath vocals. It serves as a flawed but perfect ending to a flawed but classic album, one that finds its hero reaching backwards and trying to find enough soul to keep an entire generation unafraid to take risks.


North Carolina songwriter Benji Hughes has penned annoyingly infectious jingles for brands like Honey Nut Cheerios, and much of his new double album sounds exactly like the work of somebody who once ghostwrote a jam for a cartoon bee.

Benji Hughes: Songs in the Key of Animals

Songs in the Key of Animals

Benji Hughes has a knack for making the kinds of songs that people don’t want in their heads. As a jingle writer, the North Carolina musician set Captain Morgan’s skeezy "Got a Little Captain in You" slogan to music, penned tunes for Verizon and GE, and assisted in giving Nelly’s "Ride Wit Me" a cereal-themed makeover for a Honey Nut Cheerios commercial ("ay, must be the honey!"). For some artists, this advertising work might serve as an interesting bit of trivia—no more relevant to their music than any other day job. But Hughes’ frequently silly Songs in the Key of Animals really does sound like the work of somebody who ghostwrote a jam for a cartoon bee.
Animals is Hughes’ follow-up to 2008’s A Love Extreme, a double album packed tight with Beck-esque party rock, wry AM pop, and piano-based love songs of varying degrees of sincerity. That record was a labor of love, and for those who could get on board with Hughes’ detached sense of humor—a big qualifier, to be sure—it was generous with its charms, proof that beyond his bearded-goofball shtick, this guy could actually write a song. Animals doesn't have nearly so much to prove, and it shows. Hughes wrote the album on the spot in the studio, and he makes no qualms about the fact he’s just fucking around for much of it.
A parade of animal puns, "Peacockin' Party" starts the record with a *Midnite Vultures-*on-a-budget strut and introduces some of the many giggly backup singers who shadow Hughes throughout the record. "Why are we here?" they sing, before answering their own question: "For a good time." Especially in its opening stretch, the record is paced like an episode of vintage sketch show "Laugh-In"—a succession of zany conversational snippets and surrealist injections that often seem to amuse the performers more than the audience. It's fun if you're on its wavelength and obnoxious if you aren't.
On the electro-pop farce "Girls Love Shoes," Hughes’ chorus of women offer the preface that they aren’t only into shoes—they’re also into boys, yoga, dancing, and the beach—but the track mostly just riffs off its title. And like a lot of Hughes’ songs, it’s hard to pinpoint precisely what the joke is. Is he mocking women for their vanity? Presumably not, because Meshell Ndegeocello is one of the women singing on the track, and that's not something she would get behind. Yet for listeners less privy to Hughes’ intentions, it’s easy to walk away with that impression. In general, the women that populate Hughes’ world aren’t very complicated. "Sometimes I just want a cupcake," one professes on "Fall Me in Love." "I'm always looking for a good time," another responds dryly. So, yes, Animals technically passes the Bechdel test—but it takes some shortcuts.
Though the album runs just 41 minutes, Hughes split it into two CDs for its physical release. On its mellower second half, Hughes dials down the funk, reins in his backing singers, and starts crooning in a low, Stephin Merritt register as he turns toward matters of the heart. Even in this less jocular mode, though, the songs feel more like early sketches than finished works. The instrumental "Song for Nancy" is six minutes of pleasant piano and not much else, a solid foundation for a track that’s never built on. The old cliché about double albums is that most could be greatly improved if edited down to one disc, but that doesn’t hold true here. Animals is an anomaly: a two-disc set without enough solid material for even a single LP.


U2 have aligned with their old friends Apple to insert Songs of Innocence into all of our libraries without consent. This indisputably queasy approach to the "surprise release" gambit might be the most interesting element about the band's latest album.

Songs of Innocence

Time was, the recipe for a superstar artist to create a Big Event Album was well known—a few teaser ads in the music mags, a lead single for radio, some late-night talk show appearances, then sit back and watch the fans line up at the record store on release day. But now that basically every entity in that sentence has been culturally marginalized, and the propeller churn of social media refuses to tolerate slow-burn marketing, the best—and, perhaps, only—way to get everyone talking about your record at once is to release it with no warning. U2 being U2, they’ve taken that strategy one step over the line into indisputably queasy territory, aligning with their old friends Apple to insert their new album, Songs of Innocence, into all of our libraries without consent. By updating the old Columbia House Record Club scam to the digital age, U2 and their Cupertino buddies have created a new avenue of opt-out cultural transmission, removing even the miniscule effort it takes to go to a website and click “Download.”
That U2 would willingly play corporate house band at a watch announcement to achieve this rollout in 2014 surprises exactly nobody; the album release was even framed by Bono himself as the 10th-anniversary celebration of a commercial. But the insistent mode of distribution says a lot about the band’s addiction to attention in their 38th year. “Part of the DNA of this band has always been the desire to get our music to as many people as possible,” Bono wrote, and after the commercial squib of 2009’s gloomy No Line on the Horizon, everything about Songs of Innocence seems desperate to be the global, cultural “experience” fix U2 needs to survive, even if it means giving away the album for “free.”
Accordingly, the music itself aims for a one-size-fits-all, vaguely inspirational tone, with a lean approach to details despite the press kit assertion that it’s all “very, very personal.” So a song about Bono meeting his wife is given the non-committal title of “Song for Someone”, and a song called “The Troubles” isn’t a callback to the prolonged Northern Ireland conflict that inspired their first great song, but a bunch of self-pitying platitudes (which uses guest Lykke Li to mimic adult-contempo Duran Duran hit “Come Undone”). Even Bono’s opening love letter to Joey Ramone is only given specificity by the title’s parenthetical, a generic “last night a [fill-in-the-blank] changed my life” tale that could be adapted to the idol of your choosing. It’s all emotional content left intentionally formless, vaingloriously hoping to fit around the experiences of millions.
Songs of Innocence also continues a decade-long trend of U2 showing little interest in re-examining themselves as a band or as pop stars, the approach that sustained them artistically throughout the '90s. Despite jettisoning their Eno/Lanois/Lillywhite comfort zone in favor of Danger Mouse, Paul Epworth, and a host of other moderately intriguing producers, Songs of Innocence is perhaps the album where U2 most self-consciously plays itself—or more distressingly, risk causing a temporal paradox by swiping moves from mantle-carriers Arcade Fire and Coldplay, akin to time traveling to the future and sleeping with your own grandchild.
A few promisingly weird moments, such as the eerily synthetic Beach Boys chant at the start of “California (There Is No End to Love)” or the breathy rhythms of “Raised By Wolves”, are quickly diluted by stock verse/chorus structures. The watery disco-punk beats of “This Is Where You Can Reach Me Now” and “Volcano” are thin gruel for a band that once seemed aware of current pop trends, however ill-advised the attempts were to engage with them. Only “Sleep Like a Baby Tonight” manages to feel fresh from start to finish, with burbling synths and pillowy strings occasionally disrupted by the Edge at his fuzziest-sounding. Elsewhere, there seems to be barely any resistance to the gravity of doing what a U2 song is supposed to do and little else.
That gravity has a name, and it’s four letters long, and at this point even those letters are wearing sunglasses. The two brief moments where Bono drops his global-rock-ambassador persona—the deranged, filtered first note of the “Raised by Wolves” chorus, the brief return of the “Lemon” falsetto on “Sleep Like a Baby Tonight”—are jarring enough to expose just how overblown his crooning is on Songs of Innocence. While the album’s liner notes contain a moving, train-of-thought reflection on a childhood made up of witnessing car bombings and sneaking into Ramones shows, almost none of that insight makes it into the actual songs, which are a celebration of self-absorption: “You are rock and roll” quickly amended to “You and I are rock and roll.”
Perhaps the upcoming companion album, inevitably named Songs of Experience, will contain all the darker, cynical stuff from these sessions. Regardless, U2 have already squandered any remaining integrity to invent this needy, invasive breed of the Big Event Album, an Album that lacks any kind of artistic statement to deter from the overwhelming Brandiness. Where Beyoncé used her iTunes sneak attack late last year to make a bold pop proclamation of sexuality and feminism, U2 have used an even more audacious release platform to wave their arms and simply say, “Hey! Everybody! We’re still here!” Bono may have self-deprecatingly described Songs of Innocence as “the blood, sweat and tears of some Irish guys...in your junk mail,” but it’s not even that interesting—it’s just a blank message.


The Estonian composer's ecclesiastical music is masterfully produced, bolstered by a powerful interpretation from the vocal ensemble Vox Clamantis.

Vox Clamantis: Arvo Pärt: The Deer's Cry

Arvo Pärt: The Deer's Cry

Producer Manfred Eicher first heard the music of Arvo Pärt on the radio, while driving down the highway. The dramatic string writing and bell-like piano of Tabula Rasa made him pull over and think about expanding his offerings. Until then, Eicher’s ECM imprint had focused mostly on jazz. While his label’s discography included a few modern classical composers like Steve Reich, it didn’t feature a wide range of contemporary notated music. But after Eicher’s conversion on the Autobahn, ECM’s “New Series” was born.
The first release from Eicher’s expanded classical lineup was a collection of Pärt’s instrumental works, issued in 1984. That album assumed a delicate profile during quieter passages and projected resonant lushness in its more grave sections. Those interpretations have never been bested, and Pärt has worked closely with ECM ever since. While Eicher’s airy production can occasionally tread close to a “new age” aesthetic, this has served Pärt well. After a youthful run that saw the composer mixing religious music with wild-eyed modernism, Pärt’s mature writing tends to employ a blend of centuries-old chant styles and contemplative, minimalist orchestration.
This lower-key approach to experimentalism benefits from the clarity of Eicher’s mastering. In the early going of The Deer’s Cry , “the ECM sound” allows Pärt’s strangeness to hit with a paradoxical serenity. The opening moments of “Von Angesicht zu Angesicht”—a setting of the “through a glass, darkly” portion of 1 Corinthians—are pensive but also gorgeous, as string lines and a doleful clarinet wind around supple choral writing. During the soprano vocalist’s solo, however, a soft dissonance is held at the end of one line. What once seemed an attractive bauble now appears more unsettling (and in tune with its source text).
It’s these moves that keep Pärt’s attractive music from relaxing into any “easy listening” format. The desperate nature of his search for the beautiful is rarely far from view. The title track’s words attest to the presence of Christ on all sides of the singers. But the lamentation of Pärt’s harmonies is so extreme, it’s natural to wonder about our ease of access to the divine. Because he turned to Christianity during the Soviet era, Pärt suffered censure for his choice of devotional texts—and it’s difficult to miss the hard-won toughness that resides in his spiritual music.
The Estonian vocal ensemble Vox Clamantis displays admirable command of the composer’s art. The pieces are mostly miniatures, drawn from multiple decades of Pärt’s output. Several have been recorded before. But the takes by Vox Clamantis always tease out something new. In the finale from Kanon Pokajanen, they offer a brighter sound than previously heard on ECM. And their renditions of more popular Pärt fare (such as “Da pacem Domine”) are dependably excellent.
Fans of the composer may have heard as much as half of this program in other interpretations. Yet the performances and engineering here argue persuasively for new experiences of this music. The same way that Eicher’s first album of Pärt’s music offered a sampling of his instrumental pieces, The Deer’s Cry is a useful entry point to the composer’s vocal music. Its overall effect is not quite as potent as those of long-form compositions such as Miserere or Litany, but there are still plenty of moments that can stop you in your tracks.